Twenty Miles (22 page)

Pelly forgot the last notes of the song, we could all tell. Momentary panic chased across her face, fingers still moving on the keys, and then she pulled out those last hesitant notes, an improvised offering leading in the wrong direction – a kind of downward slope when the song should have gone up – as though it just fell away from her. And then the amplified silence following it, the hush edged with sharp sniffles, coughs choked into hands.

I looked at Sig across the aisle, sitting next to Eileen. Big Mo cried, shoulders heaving, eyes clenched. Eileen held his hand. Sig clutched the peach purse on her lap, her funeral purse, and it looked old.

Toad leaned her head slightly toward me, her hair bent at awkward angles against her head, untethered from the usual ponytail, her eyes bloodshot and antsy. She leaned against the silence as Pelly found unsure steps off the platform, and said, voice husky, ‘Pell fucked up, eh? Shitty. I can’t believe it.’

As though this mistake outweighed the bad coincidence of all of us there, serious for once, the too-white casket at the front. As though it outweighed the fact that Hal hadn’t looked up, not once – I knew this because I hadn’t been watching the piano either, I’d been watching her. It was the small mistake of Pelly’s fingers, instead, that sent a frustrated tear reeling close to Toad’s nose. She’d been holding it back the whole time, her face twitching in almost comic
spasms with this restraint. She shoved the tear across her cheek with the back of her hand, pissed off in all her misplaced grief.

‘Jesus, of all the times to fuck it up. Of all times.’

P
arts of Kristjan’s funeral had been filmed by a teammate’s parents and given to Sig and Buck afterward.

The footage bore a vague indigo tint – eye sockets sunken in the blue air outside the church, concrete swallowed by shadow. Close to the camera, a woman stood in profile. When she raised a Kleenex to her face, it was Easter egg blue. The pall bearers shouldered Kristjan’s coffin out of the church, blue flood of shadows beneath their eyes. They would be teammates, maybe. Although there was nothing athletic about their jerking movements, legs under the coffin awkward, the film speeding slightly. They eased the coffin down the stairs, passing between two rows of young men in black-blue suits who raised hockey sticks in the air to form a bridge. The young man closest to the camera squeezed his eyes shut, mouth jumping, hair waving across his forehead in a girlish cowlick. Thinking back: those wincing eyes. It was Ed. Sticks swayed lightly as the coffin passed beneath.

Sig and Buck followed, less grey, less stooped, but the same. My grandparents, younger and moving across the screen, Buck with his barrel chest and slow amble, hands dangling helplessly below his cuffs, jacket arms too short; Sig, curly hair and sharp face. They both looked bewildered as they stepped into the indigo sunlight – probably the sun was just too much after being in the church, but their squinting seemed confused, as though neither knew how they’d gotten to that church on that day.

Sig and Buck moved under the bridge of sticks, a few feet apart, Sig slightly ahead. As they reached the end, Buck seemed to stumble slightly. Head bowed, as though guiding his feet with his eyes, he grabbed Sig’s arm. She didn’t flinch. Face clenched like a fist, Buck held on to Sig’s arm as though he was walking a tightrope, and he might fall if he let go. The camera followed them and then Ed was gone.

Sig told me that Kristjan looked like an old man when he was born, his hair so blond it appeared white, face lined. His eyes were set into pockets, wrinkled and deep, she said. She told me this as though it were a beginning, the part of a story that followed once upon a time. But I knew this beginning was wrong. Kristjan’s story was born there, in that indigo afternoon, somewhere in the sign language of grief.

E
ven when he was quite young, Kristjan’s hockey equipment had always given him an air of bravery, of fierceness – that hefty bulk of shoulders, the muscular glove fingers, the boxy shins under the hockey socks, the thick, fast feet. Layering on that equipment, dressed for a game, he distilled to the essence of who he was as a boy. And so Sig had kept him in that equipment. She’d left his skates on, handed him down to Iz in this package. It was Sig’s duty and so she made damn sure the boy was given a legacy and that it was passed to his daughter and then she’d given Iz hockey itself, put her in the equipment, in the skates, dressed the girl with her own hands.

Iz went through a period as a kid when she was obsessed with Kristjan. It seemed to be some sort of a hobby, like the godawful sticker collection she arranged and rearranged.

‘I’m going to write a letter to Kristjan,’ she said one morning, sprawled across the living-room floor on her stomach, skinny toes burrowing into the carpet. Shards of blue construction paper were strewn everywhere, the massacre of paper her latest craft.

‘What?’ Sig’s attention torn from the news flickering on the small set above Iz’s head. ‘What did you say?’

‘I’m going to write a letter to him. For Father’s Day. Everyone’s writing letters in my class.’

Iz was compiling scraps of Kristjan now, mounting them in haphazard order. Sig could only imagine what she saw.

‘What are you going to say to him?’ Sig croaked, her mouth dry.

‘I want to ask him about hockey – like how to do a slapshot and stuff.’

‘Can’t you ask your coaches that?’

‘They don’t know how. And Kristjan was better than them at hockey anyways – you said.’

Sig could pretend she didn’t hear the girl, leave the room, make a pot of tea. But she felt in this flight instinct a trigger of selfishness, the familiar click, and she knew about duty. ‘Why don’t you write a letter to, uh – Walter Gretzky?’

‘Who’s that?’ Iz looked at Sig over her shoulder, eyebrows furrowed.

‘That’s Wayne Gretzky’s dad.’

‘Why?’

‘Because – ’ Sig stammered, grasped. ‘Because he’d be able to answer you back, kiddo. You know Kristjan can’t answer your questions, right?’

‘I know.’ Iz turned back to the construction paper, considered a toothy hole.

Sig’s philosophy from the beginning had been that the girl should know Kristjan, she should know him well, and that this knowledge would keep her healthy. She wasn’t prepared, though, for the questions.

‘And if anyone’s a hockey dad, it’s Walter. He’s
the
hockey dad, Iz.’

‘Okay,’ Iz said.

‘I
’m sick,’ Sig said on the phone. ‘There. I said it.’

I thought a cold. I thought the flu.

‘You don’t sound it,’ I said. She sounded the usual.

‘Well, it’s not cancer, not the big C, so don’t you worry about that,’ she said, an embarrassed laugh. I laughed too because I was thinking a cold, the flu. Sig was silent.

‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

‘I’m sorry about the phone and all,’ she said. ‘I just – I didn’t want you to hear it from – I didn’t want anyone else to say and – ’

I saw a white casket. The back of Hal’s head. Hands falling over the ice like snow. A bridge of hockey sticks. I heard a whistle. A slamming gate.

I
sank down into the couch draped with an orange and green afghan. Hal’s eyes skated my face, then slipped off around the living room, with a kind of embarrassed confusion, as though noticing for the first time the pictures of her on the mantel, baseball bats propped gigantic on her shoulder, ringette team photos with uniforms like pink and purple leisure suits, as though just noticing now that the flowers in the vases, all of the dark fistfuls, had wilted.

I twisted my hands in my lap, weighed the bruised moons under Hal’s eyes, the rash splashed across her chin and neck, the way her skin hugged her cheekbones a little tighter, shoulders diminished. Fat or muscle or both, lost.

I’d practised on the bus on the way over.
I just wanted to say,
I’d begin. I needed a beginning; the rest of it would move on the heels of those first words. But in the muffled air of Hal’s living room, that voice in my head sounded stupid. I should tell her about the basketball instead. We’d taken up playing before practice every day, because most of us were bad – and this was hilarious to us, all the clueless mistakes, the blind, mid-court collisions, the ball drops – and because we kept getting better.

‘The blind leading the fucking blind,’ Toad said, shaking her head, but I marvelled at the improvisation fumbled out by our mapless limbs. I could tell Hal that Toad had claimed her for their team.

‘She’s just
MIA
,’ Toad said, a term that, from what I understood, excused drunken wanderings, hockey injuries and other miscellaneous breaks from play. Hal might like this.

‘So,’ Hal said. I unfroze then, with that challenging lilt in her voice, smaller, but still there. I moved.

‘I just wanted to say,’ I said, and Hal flinched, as though I might hit her. ‘I just wanted to tell you that, um ... that I have this – my dad, he died. I just wanted to say that – with your mom and everything.’ I wouldn’t say Sig’s name, her sickness. This wasn’t an option.

Hal’s brow furrowed, and she looked again at the mantel, at all the girls that were her. I edged carefully around the turned curve of her face, my eyes skimming the patches of rash. What did I expect, really? I had no strategy.

Hal leaned back on the couch then, hair caught like a web on the afghan, and folded her hands over her stomach. She tilted her chin toward me.

‘Barbie,’ she said levelly. ‘I worry about you sometimes. Listen. Shit happens. This kind of thing happens and it’s shitty. But that’s it, you know. You go toe-to-toe and then you move on. That’s it.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m just tired – that’s why I’m not playing. I can’t play when I’m tired.’

Her face overly casual, a kid pretending to be bored.

‘That’s not it,’ I said quickly, quietly. Sometimes I didn’t concentrate on words, didn’t measure.

‘What?’ Hal’s neck made a sound like a twig snapping as her eyes thudded over my mouth.

‘I mean, do you even care?’ I said again, and anger came that second time, a surprising shove behind my ribs. I wouldn’t say Sig’s name.

‘Have you lost your fucking mind?’ Hal sounded as though she were dead tired of asking this question.

Lone Ranger costumes, cowboy music, girls with too-big teeth that were all her.

‘Do you?’

‘Barbie, seriously, get a grip.’ Her voice still tired, but a flicker around her mouth now, that old hunger for fireworks. Hal’s bloodshot eyes spun wildly around the room, over the pictures, all of the chubby little girls holding baseball bats and ringette sticks, trying to look tough in hockey gear but failing, with the botched perm in one, the braces in another, the sparkling eyeshadow in another, girlish girls never getting it quite right.
Choose,
I wanted to say.

‘You just – ’ I said.

‘You’re kidding me right now, Iz. I mean you come here, you come to my house, and then you ... ’ Hal drew on her thighs with her forefingers, digging furrows through the muscle, face drawn, as though trying to map the skewed trajectory of my words.

Don’t guess,
I thought,
because you’ll be wrong too much. You’ll be wrong most of the time.

Hal blinked then, hard. She sucked a breath like she’d been underwater too long, pulling up her shoulders, and turned to me.

‘Why don’t you just leave,’ she said quietly. ‘Just leave me alone. You’ve never lost your fucking
mom
– ’ She blinked again hard, jaw dropping slightly. As though this fact had been handed to her just now, and there it was, she could see it. She shook her head. A chuckle spilled from her mouth – dry bones of laughter, just the creaking intake of breath over and over – and she turned to me again, eyes cruel and beaten. ‘You have no fucking idea. Just leave. You’ve got no game here.’

A phone began to ring, shrill and hollow, in another room. Hal didn’t flinch. She closed her eyes and her face cracked into that smile again. I hadn’t recognized the larger silence in the house, the muted roar of it beyond the living-room walls, until the ringing began. It rang ten, a hundred, a million times. The silence, when it stopped, stung my ears.

‘Got rid of the answering machine,’ Hal said like she was starting a joke, eyes still closed. ‘Probably Visa again. I like to know that whatever fucker’s on the other end of the line is waiting. Waiting for me to answer like I’m waiting for them to hang up. Win-win situation for me. Visa – they call and ask for my mom, but – here’s the best part – they fuck up her
name.
Ask for Kerry.’ She began to laugh. Pushed her hands into her thighs and laughed forever. ‘“Oh,
Kerry,
” I tell them. “She’s gone to Disneyland!” Every time.
Disneyland.
They don’t even have the fucking decency to get her name right. They ask when’s a better time to call, when she’ll be back. I tell them she fell off Space Mountain, and they’re still looking for her. Or, if the guy’s a real dick about it, I tell him she only meant to go for a week, but then she met Peter Pan, and now they’re getting married. “That Kerry’s a flighty one,” I say. Hey, there’s a ghost for you, Barbie – Visa. You wanna be fucking haunted, talk to them.’ She breathed hard for a moment, then looked at me sharply like she’d just remembered something. ‘Why don’t you come back for this little chat when you’ve had to answer for your dead mother’s debts?’

I don’t often cry. I have this reflex – like a gag reflex, I suppose. It started back when the boys were outgrowing me, shooting up above me so quickly, like scrawny, pimple-faced Incredible Hulks. And I’d take this really hard hit and be down there on the ice, and
there would be the boy who hit me, looking all sorry, but there’d be something else in his face at the same time – worry, like he was just waiting for the tears. I couldn’t stand that waiting. So I’d make my eyes suck the tears back up. They never existed, hanging there in the corners of my eyes, threatening to incriminate me. Or maybe this began much earlier. With Uncle Larry.
Keep it off the ice.
Regardless, I knew how to take it like a man.

But with Hal, it happened too quickly.