Twenty Miles (24 page)

‘I have to go,’ I said.

I dangled my head over the side of the bed. Blood blushed heat toward my scalp as I scanned the floor for my shirt. Jacob was silent. I looked over at him as I pulled my head through the shirt and he raised an eyebrow, his mouth still.

‘It’s not that you – ’ I stood up. ‘It’s just that I have to go.’

His face didn’t move, eyes shrunk. I’d watched him play at Sam Hall a couple of times, and by the end of those games I’d been able to anticipate his moves: deke to the left when breaking past the defenceman, shot to the top right – the goalie’s weak glove – quick twirl against the shoulder of the other D, in for the rebound. A clinical reading, like a practice drill, its narrative laid out on the white board beforehand, this destiny of our bodies. But, still, it was so satisfying, the transparent intention of his limbs, their signal reaching to me high up there in the stands. Off the ice, though, with that distance removed – in the dining hall, wandering the cold trails through campus, in my room, his skin mapping a path against my own – his moves were impossible to anticipate.

Jacob, however, was becoming more confident in his reading of me. He had an ear for details – the names of dead pets, family members, Sig’s sayings, brief childhood memories I allowed him when he insisted. He was delighted with the scraps I threw him, a little more, a little more, nodding his head happily, as though I’d confirmed something he’d been guessing at. As though these small facts of my life occupied the bricks of a crossword puzzle he was working on. One more bridge filled, leading to the next blank bridge and the next. An organized jungle that was me.

He’d begun to guess. I didn’t set him straight when he was wrong, when he was beyond wrong. Every time he made a bad guess, I felt my skin growing another layer. But he looked at me
with disbelief, admiration, with hope, as though he’d begun to see my organs glowing dimly like underwater lights.

Jacob hopped off the bed. He plucked a shirt from the mound of laundry in the corner, then grabbed his jacket from the back of the desk chair. Quick, like he was trying to beat me. Thrust his arm through a sleeve and opened the door.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Taking a walk.’ He didn’t look at me, examined the zipper on his jacket.

‘Why?’

His eyes scraped across my face.

‘Okaaaay,’ I said, buying time. ‘What – are we breaking up? Why are you acting so...’ It kind of started as a joke, but dribbled away from me, my voice cracking a bit at the end. Scared of his face.

‘Isabel. There’s no such thing as breaking up.’ He sounded tired. He paused and looked at the door. ‘There’s this conversation, there’s me taking a walk, there’s us sleeping in our own beds tonight. And then there’s tomorrow.’ His bulldozer eyes on my face again. ‘Seems to me you look at your life, Isabel, like you’re looking through a telescope. Through one end, things are huge, they’re giant, swallowing your life. And then you flip the telescope over to the other end and everything you’re looking at’s microscopic, it’s so small you can almost pretend it doesn’t exist, you can almost convince yourself.’

I wanted to force him to stay now, close the door. I wanted to tackle him to the bed. ‘That sounds like a breakup,’ I said.

He hovered at the door. ‘Your world,’ he said finally, shrugging wearily. He shut the door quietly behind him. The surprising fact of his disappearing back, like a body spasm upon entering the May lake, cannonballing, and the ice gone out just hours before.

I wasn’t sad yet.

I told myself this: when he guessed at me like that, he was just plucking out another rib of his own, leaving spaces open like doors. Doors anyone could walk through. I told myself: he’s the one who’s going to get hurt. My skin was growing layers. It was my world. I didn’t feel any pain at all.

S
igstood in the doorway to the living room and watched the skates. They lay on their sides across a blanket of newspaper, in front of the fireplace. The boots now dry and stiff, mummified brown. She sighed and went over, ran her fingers down the rows of eyelets.

Just beyond them, next to the couch, sat Grace’s old blue duffel bag. Sig hesitated, then pulled the bag over, opened the zipper. A shaggy nose poked out, dirty grey fur and the musty, ashlike smell of a fur coat left forgotten in a trunk. A taxidermy eye, luminous brown, with a liquid, lacquered centre. Mouth open in a friendly grin and, at the back of its throat, the screen through which you looked.

Grace had dropped the bag off before she left for Thunder Bay to visit her grandkids. The wolf costume was part of her gig as mascot for a hockey league for kids on a couple of the neighbouring reserves. The kids bussed into town once a week and Grace put on the wolf costume and danced around like a fool and they ate it up. Grace thought it might be good for Sig to fill in for her while she was out of town, a reason to get out of the house, to give back to the community and all that, and Sig had given that a firm no – her exact words being ‘Hell no, woman. You’ve lost your frigging mind.’

And yet there was a kind of suppleness around the joints of the day, a pliability that made Sig feel like hockey. Throwing the duffel bag into the back of the truck was not a commitment. When she walked in the arena’s back entrance, past the closed dressing room doors, and the tiny room was wide open, she thought, what the hell, she might as well try it on. Trying it on was not a commitment.

She worked the heavy suit on with some difficulty, already beginning to sweat, her right leg refusing to slip into its place at first, pawing the air like the hoof of an agitated horse. When she pulled the costume slowly up over her shoulders and zipped the front, it cloaked her body with surprising weight. Her steps felt suddenly athletic, this flexing of forgotten muscle, every movement meeting a reckoning. Her body became deliberate.

When she put on the head and looked at herself in the mirror through the screen in its mouth, the embarrassment she’d anticipated was there, absolutely. But it felt detached somehow, this separate thing that existed outside of the costume’s layers, beyond
the small cross-hatched stitches filtering her vision through the wolf ’s mouth. And so she was able to take a few steps down the hall. She wasn’t responsible for this beast. It wasn’t her.

Nothing happened. The game went on, the players’ knock-kneed enthusiasm spilling them all over the ice, a few parents laughing and shouting in the stands. Kids in winter boots chasing each other around the periphery of the rink.

She made her way slowly to the stands, gripping the outside edge of the boards, dragging the anchored body along. As she approached the stands, glances began to accumulate. One mother bent over and said something to her kid, pointing at Sig. A little boy with a runny nose stopped running mid-stride and stood stock-still, a few feet away, staring with a furrowed brow, as though trying to make the choice between laughter or tears. Sig could have turned around then, gone back to the dressing room, but she was almost at the stands and she needed a rest. She glanced up at the scoreboard – that automatic eye stutter tattooed into the brain of a lifer hockey parent – and sat on the bottom bench. Second period. People were staring now. This was ridiculous.

After Kristjan, after Buck, she’d been suddenly, entirely visible. Her head blown up with her own gaudy grief and other people’s sympathy, swelling into cartoonlike proportions. A garish boo-hoo face that everyone could see coming from a mile away. And yet, strangely, mercifully, the trick: she was hidden. They hadn’t seen her shrink. But there she was. A kernel buried somewhere under the padded layers.

They started to trickle over, the kids. Tentative at first, fingers thrust in their mouths, eyes rolling up her body to the shaggy face. Unused to this position – the prostrate, seated mascot. A pigtailed girl with chapped, wind-burnt cheeks shuffled up, paused, then leaned over and poked Sig in the gut, an experiment in bravery. Sig felt the poke like a touch on scar tissue: not the specific touch, but the numbed idea of it.

She got to her feet then, a bit unsteady, and they giggled, all these brown-eyed kids – five, seven, eight of them. Watching her carefully, their eyes dripping fear and anticipation, looking to each other for
cues. They had her penned in on all sides. There was nothing else she could do. She raised her arms. She growled.

The kids screamed in surprise and relief. This was what they knew. Not Sig, but the wolf. She’d give them the wolf. They shrieked laughter and threw themselves at her. Sig shook her hands in the air. She shifted from foot to foot. She taunted them more and more, so they came at her harder, flinging themselves at her legs.

And there. There. She could almost feel it. Their little hands.

W
e went back the Thursday after Terry’s funeral. Moon had cancelled practice for a couple of days, her way of flying the Scarlet flag at half-mast. Plastic bags overflowed from Hal’s stall. No one mentioned the buffet’s cancerous growth since Hal had started missing practice, well before Terry died. It grew out of a sense of team duty, pack mentality, the bags marred with inadvertent competition – no one wanted to be that person, the only one who hadn’t contributed. Maybe it grew from collective confusion too. We’d been programmed to look at food mathematically, converting calories into time, distance. How long would a meal last us – how far to Regina before our fuel ran out, how many shifts into a game. One road trip, we’d arrived at the hotel restaurant to find Moon had ordered us all the Low-Cal Breakfast by accident: a minor stem of grapes, saucerful of Special K, small glass of orange juice. Outrage bristled the tables, some calling the waitress for menus – they’d pay with their own money if they had to – and Toad pounded the table with her knife and fork, bellowing, ‘Where’s the fat at, yo?’ We had a game to play that morning; the Low-Cal Breakfast wouldn’t last us even until warm-up. So, once the buffet for Hal was initiated, we didn’t know when to stop; the distance we were fuelling was unfathomable.

Smells layered our corner: cinnamon, garlic, yeast, melted cheese, broccoli, chocolate, hockey gloves, baby powder. Our hands conducted wafts as we pressed on shin pads, pulled haloes of tape around our knees and ankles, plastered Velcro straps, threaded skates – all this with awkward speed. Too much quiet, so we dodged it, ducking into our boxes, the upper shelves of our stalls. This quiet
was a dangerous brand, the kind that comes after you crash your bike, while you’re still counting the scrapes.

‘You know that fucking prof I was telling you about?’ Toad said, fingers all twitchy on her shoulder pad straps.

‘Yes?’ Boz said, her head down near her knees. She pulled a sock out from the lip of her skate.

‘He’s being a total dick again – you should see this essay I just got back. A massacre, these huge red slashes all over it – it literally looks like the pages have been stabbed to death. I’m thinking he might be asking for a flaming bag of shit to come the way of his front step.’

‘Oh, babe, maybe you should just ask – ’

‘No, I’ve had enough of this bullshit. If he’s such a fucking Einstein, he can figure out how to put out the fire without getting shit all over his urban-ghetto sneakers. I refuse to go kiss his scrawny ass – that’s probably what he wants – to see if he can get the hockey chick down on her knees. Jesus, it’s not my problem I have bigger muscles. Maybe if he fucking
extricated
himself from the library, and
supplanted
himself into the gym, we wouldn’t have this redpen
issue.
’

Boz opened her mouth and closed it again as Woo walked over and pulled a plastic bag from her backpack. The careful way she plucked the handles, pulling up and out, nestling the bag carefully into Heezer’s stall. We all made our eyes busy with our equipment, as though Woo stood there stripping for the shower. More garlic, with a hint of hot mustard.

‘Ewww,’ Pelly said, wrinkling her nose. ‘It reeks over here.’

Toad snapped a look over at her, irritation bristling on her pale face, but Pelly wasn’t looking.

‘I had piano before this?’ she said to me. ‘And my piano teacher, he had this really bad bret? Like, so bad. Like, what’s it called – heliprosis?’

‘Halitosis?’ I offered.

‘
Heliprosis
– what are you, Icelandic? Fucking Frenchie,’ Toad grumbled into her shoulder pads as she pulled them over her head.

‘Like, his bret was bad. And I was thinking, what if I had heli – you know. What if I had it too? Would I even know it? Like, can you
smell your own bad bret?’ Pelly looked at me sideways as she tugged on her laces.

‘Um, I think you’d know,’ I said.

‘Okay, but would you tell me if – ?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Pelletier! Shut up and throw me some tape!’ Toad flicked out a palm, her lips in a thin line.

‘What’s your problem?’ Pelly instinctively hid the tape behind her back, her voice quavering nasal.

‘Fuck you, that’s my problem. You’re being a totsi. Tape!’

Pelly looked like she might cry. ‘Why are you being so mean?’

‘Here.’ Boz rummaged around in her box and handed Toad a roll of tape. ‘There you go, Toady. It’s all good. Don’t worry about it, Pell.’

‘But, like!’ Pelly looked at me, the whine transferred to her eyes.

‘Jesus fucking Christ, this tape is out. Does the universe not want me to have fucking tape?’ Toad barked, spiking the empty roll onto the ground.

‘Oh, babe, maybe you should – ’ Boz put her hand out to touch Toad’s arm, but Toad slid from her reach, up off the bench.

‘And you know what? These – ’ she pointed to the mess of plastic bags ‘ – are fucking tacky. Doesn’t anyone see this?’

She pivoted sharply and began ripping containers from the bags, flinging them behind her. They fluttered drunkenly to the floor, the air folding new smells into our corner.

Toad clattered Tupperware and casserole dishes and cookie tins into Heezer’s stall. The lid of a margarine container came off and brownies tumbled into a pile of brown rubble. My mouth watered, my stomach rumbling hunger or warning. When I walked in, I hadn’t known if it was them, the external lean of grief I’d felt at Terry’s funeral, or if it was me. These boundaries were becoming harder to trace, like the garbage in the dressing room, the stalls all bleeding together – harder to tell where their mess left off and my own began.