The Guardians (42 page)

    The
kid finds the whole bandages-and-IV business pretty interesting, and I can feel
my stock rising in his estimation, my banged- up condition helping him to see
me as an aging but furious warrior from one of his video games, rather than a
middle-aged guy who used to date his mom in the unimaginable depths of history

    "I
still owe you that car you lent me," I tell him when his mom has stepped
out of the room. "The Ferrari."

    "You
remember that?"

    "A
promise is a promise."

    Kieran
nods his mother's nod. Tells me I can keep it.

    Carl
is here the whole time, of course. We don't talk in detail about the big
questions, about Randy and how he'd fallen prey to the boy's invitations. I tell
him about finding Roy DeLisle's bones in the crawlspace, how they were likely
turned to ash in the fire, which would leave us the only holders of the last
chapter of his regrettable biography. I also share my theory that it was Paul
Schantz who put him there, and his quiet is answer enough.

    Believe
it or not, we spend most of the time laughing. Not gales of barroom hilarity,
but the chuckles that come from old jokes retold, stories of childhood
embarrassments and foolishness.

    The
doctors say Carl and I will be out of here soon. I offer Carl the use of my
condo, tell him he can stay as long as he wants. Which is when he tells me that
his boyfriend, Adam, is arriving in Toronto in a couple of days. That they're
planning to get a place of their own in the city.

    "Boyfriend?"

    "It's
been twenty-four years, Trev."

    "I
guess people change over that much time."

    "No,
they don't," Carl says, and rises onto an elbow to whip his pillow at my
head. "They just become more of what they always were."

    I
have to believe that we weren't alone.

    I
have to believe that some of the things all of us did when we were young were strange.
So strange that in recollection they strike us as the products of distorted
dreams. Later, we may work to untangle these dreams, dismiss them, grapple with
their meanings so that we might "move on." Or, more usually, we do
our best to ignore them, to discount them as that-which-never-
actually-happened. But they
did.
The bullying and being bullied, the
greater or lesser perversities, the violence done to others and to us—all of it
real.

    And
why did they happen at all? The imagination, The boundless possibility that
goes with being a child, the brief period of ignorance before coming to
understand that everything we do comes with a coat.

    This
will be my final entry. Not only because my memory of what happened to us over
the winter of 1984 has found its end but because I will soon be unable to
manage what I am doing now: sitting alone in a room, turning a recorder on and
off, speaking aloud in a voice that anyone other than me might understand.

    Right
now, for instance, I'm in Sarah's room, sitting on the edge of her bed. It's
where I slept last night, huddled against her warmth, my limbs calmed by the
happy exertions of our keep-it-simple lovemaking. Why would I ever leave?
Because there are only so many more days of my being capable of returning
another's embrace, of being a man as most of us understand it. Soon I will be
reduced to a human to-do list and little more. Sarah says that I'm welcome to
stay, that Kieran would be thrilled if I did, that the three of us can face
whatever's coming our way together if we're honest enough about it. She's a
tough nut, as my mother used to say. Yet toughness might not be enough in my
case. I'm losing myself, piece by piece, and there's no getting it back. It's
likely to be the kind of process best left to me and professionals and Carl
visiting now and again.

    But
you never know. You really don't.

    I
should stop now. Such considerations are getting close to overstepping the
bounds of a memory diary, and I should colour within the lines I started out
with.

    So
what's left to remember? Everything and nothing, if you know what I mean (and
if you have piled on enough years to feel like your life is coming in for a
landing rather than taking off, then I'm willing to bet you do). Anyway, I'm
done with all that now. If the keeping of this diary has taught me anything,
it's that the past is an anvil, or maybe a grand piano, the kind of thing that,
in the cartoons of my youth, drops from the sky to flatten you into a pancake.
And I'm too tired to try to stand up again after it does.

    Except
for this:

    I
seem to recall saying, sometime back near the beginning, that every town has a
haunted house. But what do I know of every town? What I really meant, I think,
is that there is a haunted house in every boy's life. A place where all the
wants he is not yet old enough to act upon or even understand can be rehearsed
or hidden away. A place he fears because he can sense its endlessness, how it
reaches back into the pasts of other boys before him, as well as his own.

    When
I started this I thought I was recording a secret history, or maybe a kind of
ghost story. I was wrong. It is a confession. I entered the Thurman house each
time believing I was trying to do good, whether it was rescuing Heather
Langham, or finding Tracey Flanagan, or saving Grimshaw from the darkest aspect
of itself. But like the fireman who runs into the burning building upon hearing
a baby's cry within, I really entered the red-brick shell on Caledonia Street
not because of Heather or Tracey, or to protect future innocents from the likes
of the boy, but because if it wasn't me, it would be one of the men next to me,
my friends. I did it for love, in other words.

    But
if this remains a story of hauntings, has it ended, as such stories are
supposed to end, with the restless spirits at peace? What lesson is to be drawn
from a cautionary tale where the maimed survivor wouldn't alter any of the
steps that led him into the one place he was forbidden to go? What kind of confession
does this make when, even as I'm sorry for so much of what I've done, I still
feel lucky to have been with my brothers in the doing of it?

    Maya
Mavjee, Kristin Cochrane, Susan Burns, Nita Pronovost, Nicola Makoway, Shaun
Oakey, Anne McDermid, Monica Pacheco, Martha Magor, Sally Riley, Dan Levine,
Peter Robinson, Kate Mills, Chris Herschdorfer—

    Thank
you.