Twenty Miles

by Cara Hedley

  ‘Looking for something?’ I said.

  Jacob looked down at the book in his hand. ‘I’m looking for the one I like best,’ he said.

  I paused. ‘Aren’t they all the same?’

  ‘No. Here.’ Jacob picked up another book, flipped through it quickly, handed it to me, and reached for another.

  ‘This one,’ he said and waved the book he held. ‘See? This one’s it.’

  He handed the book to me, and I turned it over in my hand.

  ‘It looks like someone ran over it with a car,’ I said.

  ‘Open it.’

  The name Cam Hennig sprawled across the inside of the cover in jagged lettering, three phone numbers, tagged with names, layered crooked beneath; an alligator drawn on the neighbouring page locked its jaws around the words of the title. Pages flipped lethargic, sodden with orange and yellow highlighter and the oil of fingertips.

  ‘Do you know this Cam person?’ I asked, pointing.

  Jacob tilted his head at me. ‘No.’

  ‘Does he have the answers to the exam in here or something?’ I laughed.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh.’ Silence, and we both looked down at the book, its punched-up face.

  ‘I guess it’s just more interesting this way. It’s not just you in there.’ He tapped the cover. ‘All alone.’

  We hovered for a bit, the text between us, and the books ganged up on me. All the eyes that had swam through them. This wasn’t how I’d imagined a typical, knee-weakening first date. Then again, when I imagined a knee-weakening first date, the girl I saw was never me. But then Jacob touched my elbow and my arm hairs sighed and we walked toward the cashier, a slow amble. I had no idea if this was a date.

  ‘You having some fun with the girls?’ Girls. Like he was my uncle.

  ‘The team?’

  ‘Yeah. They seem like a laugh. I hung out with some of them last year a couple times. Hal. And what do you call her – Toad?’

  ‘Toad, yeah. And Hal.’ I shrugged. ‘Yeah, they’re. Well.’ I took a deep breath, tried to sum up the essence. ‘Scary.’

  Jacob stopped walking and laughed.

  ‘They are,’ I said.

  ‘Fair enough, fair enough.’ Jacob swatted my arm lightly with the book.

  I shrugged.

  ‘You should never be scared to live the dream,’ he said in a fake grave tone, laughing again. He didn’t discriminate much, laughter-wise. It made me suspicious. Too girly.

  ‘Well.’ I considered this. ‘They asked me to play with them. So.’

  ‘So you’re saying you’re not living the dream?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘What?’

  Annoying. ‘What’s the dream?’ I said.

  ‘What?’ he said again, winked this time. I glared at him and he laughed.

  ‘Okay.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The season after that last year I played with you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘My old man’s car busted down. Just gave up one day in the summer and we didn’t get another one for months and so I couldn’t play in town any more. I cried.’ He laughed. ‘I’m sorry, but I did. Big time. For days. I mean, of all things, right? And so my dad – he’s a good guy, Merv – he set up some nets in our back lane, right, so we could play street hockey whenever we wanted. My cousins and me. We were out there every day, into the night. Merv set up some lights for us, so it was a pretty good set-up, I guess. Anyway, my Uncle Grant comes one night while we’re all asleep and crashes through it all in his truck. We’d put it off to the side in one place to get it out of the way and he steamrolled it all anyway – the nets, the lights, all our sticks. Gets out of his truck laughing his head off, like it’s this great joke. He used to play when he was younger. I guess he was pretty decent but then he found booze young and that was it. How it goes. So now he’s just busting everything up in the middle of the night and we wake up the next morning and all our shit’s completely totalled and hockey’s done.’ He shrugged. ‘It got me away from there for a bit. Hockey. The only way I was.’ Shrugged again and slid the textbook across the counter, looked at me. ‘No idea if that’s a dream.’

  I wanted to fix that car. As Jacob counted money into the cashier’s palm, I had this off-kilter, impossible desire to go back and fix his parents’ car, to put him on the ice with me that lost season. It didn’t make any sense.

  ‘We can always take this back, if you want,’ Buck had said and handed Sig the gift, a shy grin. Sig placed it on her lap.

  ‘Geez. I don’t want to ruin it by opening it,’ she said, her voice still hoarse with sleep. Her eyes were swollen, her hair tangled; it was the second Christmas of their marriage, and she’d barely slept, prodding Buck out of bed at five-thirty, their room still filled with the metallic taste of night.

  The present was exquisite, a thick, red velvet ribbon intersecting the middle of its green face, paper folded and taped under in precise angles. A fountain of curled ribbon spilled over the edges, trapping in sharp slivers the Christmas tree lights that slowly burnt away the early-morning darkness.

  Buck exposed a startling chord from time to time, an unexpected flash. Sig didn’t know what to do with the jarring intimacy, distant from anything she’d expected of this silent husband. He wrapped birthday gifts for his parents, scrutinized the boxes with an intense eye. Pink ribbons and pastel tissue paper clutched in his giant hand. He occasionally added flourishes to the dinner table when he set it: folded the serviettes into pyramids, picked some wildflowers that grew among the crevices of rock bracing the lake and placed them right there on the table, next to their knives and forks, or plucked a few petals from a daisy and sprinkled them onto Sig’s plate. He didn’t say anything when Sig sat down for dinner, his head bowed to the fingers bearing the mill’s rough calligraphy, scratches and stains, and neither did she, the petals slid off the plate and put aside without a word, hidden in the folds of her yellow serviette.

  There were some things Sig expected of this marriage. She hadn’t expected the silly romantic junk mewled by the mouths of daisies, and she didn’t believe in it either.

  ‘Don’t mind the wrapping,’ Buck said. His head dipped and he twisted his wedding ring. ‘It’s yours to open, anyways.’

  ‘Here I go,’ Sig said. She tore into the gift, putting the ribbon to the side, yelped as she lifted a skate out of the box.

  ‘If they’re not the right size, or they’re – ’ Buck watched Sig’s face.

  Leather seeped pungent into the living room, overthrowing the scent of pine. Sig, a low chuckle, examined the liquid curves of the black boot, the slow touch of lights, red and green, on the long blade.

  ‘They’re the same kind as mine,’ Buck said. ‘Figured mine have done the trick, so – But if you want something different, something –’

  ‘No,’ Sig said and laughed. ‘No. No.’

  The lake snapped and creaked beneath them. Sig moved in staccato strides, her arms swooping beside her. Her ankles caved in toward each other, echo of her blades against the ice.

  ‘Goddammit,’ she slurred through her balaclava as she snagged a blade and keeled forward.

  Buck caught her elbow, pulled her upright.

  Docks frozen in summer amnesia dotted the shoreline behind them. White rolled out in front of them, until it hit and shattered the horizon. The sky didn’t move, wind locked away. The shovel Buck used to clear the ice lay half-buried nearby. Delicate tendrils of cold snaked up Sig’s toes, toward her ankles. She moved the toes with satisfaction. They were nearly numb – the way it should be, skating on the deserted lake Christmas day.

  ‘How the hell do you do this?’ Sig said and wrenched her elbow free from Buck’s grasp. She plunged forward, mouth a straight line, and glided for a moment before her feet gave way and she tumbled to the ice.

  ‘Bloody hell sonofabitch skates!’ she spat and put her cheek against the ice for a moment before rolling onto her back. Buck loomed above her, his face red, breath steamin
g around his head. The woollen flaps on his hat lolled forward like dogs ears.

  ‘Help up?’ he said and extended his hand. Sig found the dull seep of the cold to her winter skin, lethargic through the layers of clothing – wool undershirt, Icelandic wool sweater, parka – preferable to the stuttering vertigo carved out by the skates.

  ‘No, I’m just looking at the sky,’ she said. The ice creaked in her ear. She flung her arms and legs out, made a snow angel in the sheet that covered the ice. Buck sat down next to her, arms around his knees.

  ‘You’re a natural,’ he said. Sig blew rings of frozen breath, her eyes narrowed against the raw blue of the sky.

  ‘Nope,’ she said and heaved herself up. Buck held her elbow as she got to her feet.

  ‘Here,’ he said and faced her, held both her forearms. His grip was strong, almost bruising. When he skated backwards slowly, Sig inching forward in his wake, she imagined music.

  ‘Making up for the Legion, eh?’ Sig laughed, stared down at her shuffling feet.

  Friday nights, Buck sat in a darkened corner of the Legion with Chuck and Harold and sipped beer. He watched the dance floor while Sig swooped by, feet and hands blurred under the dimmed lights. She laughed into the faces of neighbours, effortlessly balanced a gin in her hand through the dips and twirls. Bert Mulcahey, a notorious pervert but incomparable dancer, liked to inch his hand down Sig’s back, pushing his luck. It was all an act, and he set Sig off every time, her head tilted back, laughing and slapping his arm. Buck’s eyes caught sharply on these exchanges; those sitting next to him could practically hear the rip. He blinked hard, cleared his throat, tore off a strip of skin next to a stunted thumbnail. Sig never mentioned these reactions to him; he would be embarrassed, she knew, probably didn’t even realize he was doing it. He smiled, told her to go have fun when she came over to sit, with her damp band of hair, forehead glistening under the weak light cast into the hall’s outskirts.

  When Sig looked up, she saw his eyes circling her face. Her blond hair poked out around the perimeter of the balaclava, trapped her breath in stiff, white tufts. Buck’s own breath travelled in small clouds toward her face, faintly sour, the smell of morning twisted into flannel sheets. Icicles clung, heavy, to her eyelashes, and their shadows teased the rounded edges of her vision. The lake boomed under their feet.

  As the egg began its obese somersaults, a dull gonging against the sides of the pot, Sig leaned against the window frame and scanned the mess in the yard. Then she surprised herself. She leaned over and grabbed her pack of smokes from the table and lit up, right there in the middle of the kitchen. She inhaled deeply, lungs wincing with guilt. Since the girl had gone, a kind of anarchy had overtaken the house, the rooms stretching into obtuse outlines, hours billowing in and out of them like slackened sails. She snorted and smoke jerked from her nostrils – she felt like a teenager whose parents had left her alone for a weekend.

  The egg timer chimed and she threw the cigarette into the sink and turned on the tap, ushering smoke toward the open window with her hands as she crossed the kitchen floor. Near the stove, she stumbled, toe catching on the linoleum.

  ‘Goddamn!’ she gasped and grabbed on to the edge of the stove, looking behind her on the floor. Nothing. Jesus, she might as well be literally drunk if her legs were going to act like it. She glanced at the liquor cabinet, a Pavlovian tickle at the back of her tongue, and then looked at the clock. Not yet, she told the ready mouth.

  She poured the water from the pot over the cigarette in the sink and then took the egg into her hands, passing it back and forth between her palms, letting its heat leak into her skin. She rapped the egg against the edge of the counter and began to pick away at the gash of shell rubble, sharp shards falling over the garbage can. Some still clung stubbornly to the flesh of the egg, resisting the clumsy intentions of her fingers. It should not be so hard to peel a goddamn egg. She breathed around a knot of frustration and leaned against the counter, took a break.

  It was that she had too much time for the egg, this act she’d done on automatic pilot throughout her life – always while doing something else: while feeding a toddler, or reading the paper, or talking to Buck over her shoulder. Now, though, she had the leisure to plumb every motion with all her concentration, eyes weighting each fragment of shell. She was forced to throw herself headlong into the stretched, yawning minutes of peeling because she didn’t have anything better to do. And now the egg was not co-operating. Her finger tripped while trying to lever up a larger chunk of shell and instead shattered the piece into smaller shards. Her fingers were always forced to go at peeling with a kind of athletic gusto, the nubbed tips getting right down into the meat of the egg to wedge off the shell, since she had no fingernails to speak of, every one bitten to the quick, unable to perform any graceful, manicured shearing of shell. She had to rely on contortion instead, on the joint pliability of egg and skin. But now, with every piece shattering into smaller ones under these missteps, the fingers said no, no, and the egg fell into an unconquerable labyrinth of shell.

  A few years ago, Grace had dragged her to an art show. Grace knew the artist and Sig had laughed when she first told her about it. The woman had saved the garbage from each of her breakfasts over the course of a year. She dried out orange and grapefruit rinds, apple cores, banana peels and then painted them with varnish. She kept milk and orange juice cartons and oatmeal packages and coffee filters and grinds and arranged them all in glass boxes. She saved every piece of eggshell. Sig was ribbing Grace – Grace quietly trying to shut her up – when they rounded a corner of the exhibit and came upon these shells. They were glued onto a vast red canvas, arranged in no particular pattern or form, just their own small broken shapes jostling sharp against one another, and Sig stopped suddenly, halted by this landscape, the unexpected violence. She didn’t say a word.

  Sig finally gave up on the egg. Spiked it into the garbage can with a frustrated grunt. Then, turning toward the sunlight coming in from the window, she held the hand up to her face as she might a misbehaving child, peering angrily into its stubborn flesh. And there. Proof. The fluttering thumb, its movement like a butterfly wing. A rhythm-less beating, fumbled attempt at flight. She felt a strange thrust of relief: it wasn’t her after all. It was this thumb, this separate thing. Wriggling like some insect caught by her hand. Held captive by skin.

  We all got letters one day, those of us who remained. The cool white envelopes neatly containing three weeks’ worth of anxiety. Over the course of tryouts the orange plastic chairs in the dressing room had begun to disappear one by one. A couple of players didn’t make it through the first week. Tall, quiet Sandra with the wobbling slapshot, the sad eyes when the puck didn’t get off the ice, watching it dribble to the net. Christy, whose mascara ran macabre rivers down her face beneath her cage when she sweated. Her glacial stride. These two cut in the first week. Then, with what seemed like random whim, a pack of ducklings picked off by a muskie, others disappeared. There were covert meetings involved, I knew, hushed requests to visit Moon in her office. But I didn’t witness any of this, kept my head down in the halls, avoiding the crosshairs of the coaches’ eyes. Small mumbles before practice announcing the room’s latest losses: ‘Christy got cut. Sara got cut.’

  The stack of orange chairs grew higher and the team tightened, drills quicker with fewer skaters, the weaker links gone and a different friction now during scrimmages, the taut motions of teammates used to each other’s play, each other’s hands. I tried to attach names to strides, to playing posture, to ponytails. I began to get it right more often. I stayed away from Hal on the ice. The dressing room distilling slowly to its core of stalls.

  The hockey itself was the easy part: hands remembering the story, legs revising, improvising, that self-renewing drama unfolding in the white space between thought, the hard-breath moments when your brain forgets itself and the hands take over. Those seconds around the net during scrimmage when we looped a tentative sinew across the ice, the pulsi
ng geometry of the puck as we attached ourselves briefly to our linemates, willing ourselves to connect into different bodies, into moving, breathing shapes. These moments were muscle.

  There was a weight outside these seconds, though. Sabrina was cut. Theresa was cut. The suggestion of a blade hidden somewhere – behind the coaches’ eyes, buried in the bones of our own hands – and how deep this blade might go, where it would hit, how much blood. And whose blood – my own, Kristjan’s, Sig’s? I tried to keep it off the ice.

  Another possibility, a simple solution: I’d get cut, I’d go home. Freed suddenly from Sam Hall, from the thin stall walls dividing me from the Scarlets, from Rez, from books. They’d invited me but they didn’t have to keep me. Cut: rebounding off the grey edges of the city, down the highway. Home. Jamey was cut. Jana was cut. They took their bags and didn’t come back.

  Stan, the assistant coach, stood outside the dressing-room door and handed the letters to everyone as they left. He held the envelope toward me, stone-faced, but then he winked and I took the envelope and had to force myself not to run, pulse knocking around in my ears. I marched stiffly out to the ice, vaguely registering the weak-ankled circles skated by a Peewee team in orange and red practice pinnies, and sank down against the wall. Tore open the envelope. ‘We’re looking forward to having you onboard.’ Undoubtedly, a contribution of Stan’s; he had a penchant for metaphors involving cars and trains. You need to fuel up, ladies, get those wheels moving, shift gears, park it in the garage, ten minutes ten miles, running on empty, eh, running out of steam? An impersonal letter, my name written into a blank following ‘Congratulations,’ but there it was. Another season.