The Guardians (7 page)

    "She's
not just sick or something?"

    "That's
what I'm hearing. The cops. Asking if anyone's seen her."

    "The
police think she's a missing person after one day? Don't they usually wait
seventy-two hours or something?"

    "They've
got information. Suspicions." My father raised his hands, palms out. A
gesture to signal the limits of his insider's knowledge.

    "Do
they think she's all right?"

    My
father lowered his fork.
Pretty.
That's what his eyes said to me, man to
man across the table.
I don't blame you.

    "My
guess?" he said. "She found some fella and got the hell out of here.
Struck me as a sensible sort of girl."

    Then he
told my mother this might be her best shepherd's pie ever.

    After
hockey practice that night, we gathered at Ben's house. Sitting on the mouldy
pillows and atop the books that towered around his bed. And on it,
cross-legged, was Ben himself. I remember he wasn't wearing shoes or socks. His
feet oversized, patchy with hair. Nasty feet for such a slight, dream-prone
boy.

    I had
told them earlier what my dad had said. We were lacing our skates in the
dressing room, and I had to whisper to keep from being overheard by any of the
other players. Once I finished, there wasn't a chance to hear their reactions,
as the coach poked his head around the corner and told us to hustle out there,
that holding on to the lead up our asses wasn't going to help us beat the Sugar
Kings on the weekend. But even as he said this—in the same way he would have at
any other evening practice—I thought his eyes lingered on us for a moment. An
unreadable expression contained only in the look itself, as the rest of his face
was kindly as usual. Yet in his eyes there was sadness, or distress, something
he couldn't wholly contain. Or maybe something he
wanted
us to see. A
feeling he shared. Was protecting us from.

    Up in
Ben's room, I learned that I wasn't the only one to have heard Heather Langham
rumours. On the bus rides home from school, in our kitchens, whispered between
our parents, we heard versions of a story—or pieces of a handful of
stories—beginning to circulate around town.

    First,
there was Miss Langham running off with a student.

    Nobody
had seen Brad Wickenheiser today, had they? There was an absurd but persistent
rumour that he'd done it with Mrs. Avery, the vice-principal, on a school trip
to see
Othello
in Stratford. And he was in Heather's grade twelve music
class. French horn.
(French horny,
as he called it, idiotically, to the
girls on either side of him.) According to Randy's source, Brad Wickenheiser
and Miss Langham were doing it right now out at the Swiss Cottage Motel on the
edge of town. He was in love with her. But she was just in it for the sex with
a young stud. I remember that phrase in particular:
young stud.
The way
it made me uncomfortable, and a little jealous, like standing in the showers
with the older boys after a game.

    "Really?"
I asked when Randy was done with his breathless telling.
"Really?"

    "Bullshit,"
Carl said.

    "It's
what I heard."

    "Carl's
right," I said. "Brad
Wickenheiser
? No way. He's a
moron."

    "She's
not screwing his
brain,
Trev."

    "Still.
I'm not buying it."

    "Neither
am I. And I'll tell you why," Carl said, jabbing a finger into Randy's
chest. "It's bullshit because it's my bullshit. Told Andy Pucinik in gym.
Born-again Jesus Saves wanker. I
knew
he'd like it."

    Then
Carl told his own story, a more fanciful version of my father's dinner-table
suggestion that Miss Langham had simply left town. But this time it wasn't her
tiring of Grimshaw that prompted her to take off without warning—it was an
identical twin sister. A Langham girl just as beautiful as Heather, but without
the winning manners. The
bad
Heather.

    "Aha!"
Randy said. "Maybe it's the
twin
who's banging Brad Wickenheiser at
the Swiss Cottage."

    And
then came the horror story. All the more horrific for being the most believable.
And for me being the one to tell it.

    An
anonymous tip had been called in to the police. Male, gravel-voiced. Telling
the cops he'd had "some kinda fun" the night before, taunting them to
go see "where that bitch used to sleep." When they got to the nurses'
residence the police found sticky boot prints on the carpet outside Heather's
room. They kicked the door down. Inside, walls sprayed with blood. Obscene
messages fingerpainted in gore over her Leonard Bernstein and Mozart posters.
But no body. Only a necklace laid over her pillow, the heart-shaped locket we
had seen her wear in class some days, and wondered whose image might be
contained within, impossibly wishing it might be ours.

    According
to this version, her murderer was a mysterious lover-turned-stalker, an
attractive sociopath who gave her the locket (he gave
all
his
girlfriends lockets). She had come to Grimshaw after he started to show signs
of being unstable. But he'd found her.

    It
was only when I finished that we noticed the snow. The first squall of the
season dropping heavy flakes over town, whitening and silencing.

    "That's
not it."

    Ben's
voice surprised us. For the past while, it seemed like he wasn't even
listening, and we had come to nearly forget he was here. But now we were all
looking at him. Watching his head slowly shake from side to side.

    "It
didn't happen that way," he said. "Or not exactly that way."

    "How
would you know?"

    "Because
when I saw her, she was alive."

    That's
when we all went ape shit. Demanding to know why he hadn't told us this sooner,
how he could know anything from a dream.

    "You
never said it was Heather when you told me in music class," I said.

    "I
didn't know then."

    "When
I know something, I know it."

    "I'm
happy for you, Trev."

    "Okay.
Back up. This monster—"

    "I
never called it that."

    "Fine.
This not-a-tree-but-looks-like-one has someone in its arms. Heather. And she's
trying to get away."

    "I
just said I could tell she was alive."

    "For
fuck's sake," Carl said.

    "I'll
second that," Randy said.

    "Ben?
Ben
?" I moved from where I was sitting to stick my face in his line of
sight. "Just tell us what you saw."

    Ben's
nasty feet. The toes curled up, trying to hide.

    "A
man—what I suppose could
only
be a man—had Miss Langham in his arms last
night," Ben said. "Her eyes were open. Like she couldn't believe
whatever was happening was actually happening."

    He
took in a breath, and we thought he was readying for more. But he just exhaled it
all wordlessly out again.

    "That
it?"

    "Pretty
much."

    "Is
it or isn't it?"

    "None
of this matters."

    "Why
not?"

    "Because
if she's still alive, I'm not sure how much longer she's going to be."

    I
came in even closer to him. "Where is she?"

    Ben
pointed out the window. Not up into the sky where the snow was illuminated by
the orange streetlight but down, at what stood across the street. We knew what
was there without looking. We looked anyway.

    For a
long time, none of us said anything.

    Not
true. Ben was murmuring something, the same thing, the whole time.

    "I
don't know ... I don't know ... I don't know ..."

    
"What
don't you know, oh wise one? Oh great seer of visions?" I said, hoping it
might come out funny. It didn't.

    "I
don't know," he said for the last time. "But I think it was the
coach."

    Randy
pushes open the door to Jake's Pool 'n' Sports. Though I've never been in the
place before, I immediately know I'm home. My grey overcoat and polished
Oxfords might mark me as an outsider among the early-bird clientele, the
hockey-jerseyed, puffy-faced men who line the bar, frowning up at the
flatscreens showing highlights from last night's game, but that's who I would
have been had I stayed. Who I am still, even after all the time away.

    We
remain marked, we small-towners dressed in what, as Randy and I walk into
Jake's, feels instantly like borrowed city- slicker duds. Beneath the
camouflage, all of us in this room are branded by shared experience and ritual
as indelibly as members of a religion who are alone in understanding its rules
and expectations. I've noticed over the years how we recognize each other among
strangers: something draws me to those who have grown up in a Grimshaw, despite
our efforts to hide every embarrassing hickdom, every clue that might give away
our corn-fed, tranquilized youths.

    Part
of what we share is the knowledge that every small town has a second heart,
smaller and darker than the one that pumps the blood of good intentions. We
alone know that the picture of home cooking and oak trees and harmlessness is
false.

    This
is the secret that binds us. Along with the friends who share its weight.

    We
take a table in the corner and order a pitcher from a pretty girl wearing the
referee's stripes they make all the servers wear. She reminds me of someone. Or
a composite of someones. There is a quality to her movements, the intelligent
smile and playfully serious eyes, that I've seen before.

    "She
looks like Heather," Randy says.

    "Oh
yeah?"

    "Not
exactly
looks
like her. More like she
reminds
me of her. Don't
you think?"

    "Don't
see it myself," I lie.

    The
truth is, the waitress doesn't look like Heather Langham all that much, though they
share some general characteristics— height, age, style of hair. But the girl in
the referee outfit who now comes our way with a tray balanced on the flat of
her hand has the same rare brand of charm as Heather had. An aura, I suppose. A
goodness that doesn't disqualify desire, as goodness alone can often do.

    She
returns with the frosted mugs, pours draft from the pitcher. It's Randy who
chats with her. His goofy, going-nowhere banter that waitresses are happy to
play along with. He's firing off queries regarding what's good on the menu
("All I can say is the kitchen passed inspection last time around,"
she says), what she's studying ("I took a year off backpacking in Europe
last year, so now I'm chained to this place to save up for tuition") and
if she grew up in town ("Grimshaw bored and raised!"). Then Randy
notices the ring on her finger. A platinum band with an emerald shard embedded
in it.

    "Now
that's a lovely stone. Matches your eyes," he says, taking her hand in his
to inspect it more closely. "Don't tell me it's an engagement ring? You'd
kill
me."

    "I
don't know. Pre-engagement, I guess."

    "No
worries, then," Randy says with a laugh. "
Everything
is
pre-engagement when you think about it, darlin'."

    As
Randy and she tease, he turns to give me a wink both the waitress and I are
meant to see, a shared pleasure in the moment. It's the first bloom of alcohol,
the comfort of being with a friend you know well and who asks nothing of you.
As for the waitress, she doesn't seem in any particular rush to leave our side,
though she shows no special interest in us either. She is simply, generously,
unselfconsciously making our day and nothing more.

    As
the afternoon turns to evening, the pitchers come and go in steady succession.
The sudden emotion that had gripped us earlier is replaced with easy talk,
catching up. He takes me on a comic tour of the low points of his acting career
("I've got nothing
but
low points!"), the cattle calls and
megalomaniac furniture-commercial directors and gigs as an extra on a handful
of Hollywood blockbusters, most notably as "a bartender who slides a
Manhattan over to George Clooney . . . which apparently I was doing wrong
somehow, because they cut me out and spliced in somebody else's hand." I
tell him about my Parkinson's. How I sold Retox and was doing little but
waiting for things to get worse. Somehow, though, I felt I related all this
misfortune in the same tone Randy related his: plainly and without self- pity,
each of us acknowledging that we had been visited by our measure of failure and
regret, as everyone has at our stage of the game.