Twenty Miles

by Cara Hedley

  Isobel Stanley wore white, the only one, at the heart of the dark pack all lunging toward a puck just outside the photo’s frame, sticks thrown out – most of them held their sticks with only one hand (‘Two hands, two frigging hands,’ Uncle Larry screamed in my mind) – with what I read as unskilled desperation. Equating ankle-bending with the skirts and hats, I thought, was justified.

  Fair enough, Sig didn’t have much material to work with, and neither, then, did I. Giving Isobel Stanley the title of hockey player was, it seemed to me, grossly out of proportion to the evidence of this picture.

  When I was three, legend has it I pounded out a rough version of ‘Chopsticks’ during Sig and Buck’s Christmas get-together for the neighbours. Who taught me or guided me was never revealed, the event shrinking over the years to the circumference of that singular spotlight, the pinprick illuminating tiny me on the piano bench, blond-headed and determined. It was decided by the neighbours that night that I wouldn’t be a hockey player after all, I’d be a virtuoso, a black sheep glowing golden among the jocks.

  I never touched the lonely piano again. The Sawyers from next door continued to call me The Pianist well into my teens, until Sig, drunk, said, ‘For Jesus’ sake, the way you say it, you’d think a male member with legs had walked into the room whenever you see the poor girl.’

  A three-year-old does not a pianist make. So Isobel Stanley played a couple of shinny games, skirts and all. So what? Would she have wanted to be labelled a hockey player, pinned like a strange butterfly onto that gilt-edged corkboard? Would she have wanted this responsibility? And if she had, wouldn’t she have taken it a little more seriously, wouldn’t she have traded in the hat and the skirt, wouldn’t she have made herself less girly?

  There were some things I could never take back. My name was one.

  I spent an awkward few moments clasped between Marge Pernsky’s breasts – I’d played hockey with her son since we were five – in the freezer aisle at Safeway a couple months before the Scarlets.

  ‘I’m just so thrilled for you!’ she sang. ‘Finally, a team full of girls for you!’

  I’d gotten this a lot. As though I’d been held hostage by that long line of boys’ teams, as though I finally got to choose. But choice had never been part of it. I don’t remember when I first started to play. I don’t remember not knowing how to play. I must have been an ankle-burner at some point; my muscles must have made a series of corrections, found their way into the story, but I don’t know how. Playing became one of those unexamined functions, a muscle memory that came before any real memories. And so, skating like walking. Skating like breathing. This isn’t one of those destiny manifestos – the sport chose me! We were meant to be together! No. But choice was never part of it. Following Hal through the yellow door my first day with the Scarlets was the next correction.

  The bottom half of the red B trailed a wavy cowlick behind it, the top half hinging a jaw around the first part of my name – Isa – making it look like a question. I sat very still in my seat in the lecture hall, holding the essay, as though the mark might begin to seep some sort of significance into my hands, dripping past the skin, my veins absorbing it like a phosphorescent dye, travelling up, up, illuminating parts of my brain like rooms in a house. Nothing. I scanned the chicken-scratch comments at the back. I did a few things decently and needed to work on some others. No mutations or deformities to speak of. I skimmed my conclusion and it didn’t sound like me.

  All around me, students were swooping from the recesses of the lecture hall, flooding up the stairs, papers flapping in their hands. A girl in round glasses, a red smattering of eczema on her hands, sat a few seats away from me, essay flipped to the last page, reading intently. She moved her mouth slightly as she read and looked like she was about to cry. As I watched the quiver in the girl’s bottom lip, devastation welling around her eyes, my own essay developed a kind of weightlessness; it lost its sense of gravity. It could have winged up, flown from my hand, out of the room, and my world would have looked exactly the same. I pictured Dr. Spencer glancing up, finding me there in the balcony, extracting the marrow from my reaction as he did with other students’ mean-well, stammered answers.

  ‘So, what I’m ... getting from you,’ he’d say, head bent, fingers tapping the bridge of his glasses, ‘is that you don’t give a shit. Essentially. This is what you’re saying.’

  Looking at the B in my hands, pig-Latin alphabet. ‘Yes, yes. That’s it.’

  This carelessness surprised me. I’d expected some change to come with my first mark – a knowing. This lack trickled into a form of bravery that buoyed me up from my seat, down the stairs, toward Dr. Spencer of the big words, that distant character on the room’s small stage. From my perch in the nosebleeds, he spewed a Tom Hanks–ish charm. Lisping, boyish energy cut with a kind of mediating care. He had a way of joking with the entire room as though we were one person, having a tête-à-tête at a dinner party. He was hospitable, a host; students laughed when he meant them to and then he smiled modestly and slipped into lush, segued trails that lost me again. I couldn’t help it: I kept slipping off the surface of his words, I drifted. I thought about hockey instead. Sig. Jacob. Those words on the ice returning to me as I flipped through The Great Gatsby to the pages Dr. Spencer shouted out like an aerobics instructor: No. We shouldn’t. How that bony place behind his ear felt on the tip of my nose. Dr. Spencer wore plaid, button-up shirts and corduroys except for once when he wore a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey. He was far away.

  As I slunk up, he was levering an unruly stack of paper into a brown leather satchel, his furrowed brow cordoning his face into a vip lounge. Standing next to him, I initiated conversation the only way I could think of: I said, ‘Uh,’ and then I cleared my throat. His eyes drifted over and then latched weakly onto my face, distracted.

  ‘Hellooo,’ he said, the O’s dropping into ironical depths into which I didn’t possess the skills to rapel.

  ‘Hi. Dr. Spencer, um – ’ A blush burnt two distinct territories on my cheeks. There he was, bam, like happening upon a movie star at Arby’s. But it was as though, now that the show was over, his makeup had dissolved, his orangey aura had turned off like a neon sign. He was far older than I thought, the creases around his eyes that, from my seat, made his face crackle into a smile, up close, anchored the eyes into a kind of wariness.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you – ’ I winced a bit at this, the intimacy around its edges inappropriate for a person who clearly had no idea who I was. ‘I’m missing class on Friday? I play on the hockey team, so we’re out of town. I just thought.’

  Moon had told us we should do this, tell our professors when we’d be missing class. A courtesy. But Dr. Spencer seemed to get a kick out of it. A smile tugged on one side of his mouth, slowly, uncurling amusement. ‘The hockey team, eh? Well. Good for you. Well.’ He chuckled once, scratched his brow. ‘Just borrow someone’s notes when you get back.’ He gave an I dunno kind of shrug. ‘And win, of course.’ He looked back down at the papers now sprouting a bouquet from his bag, brow tenting again, slicing off the conversation. Done with me. I could miss every class and he’d never know, the mysteries of my schedule inconsequential to him. The strange hygiene of these huge classes. I could tweeze myself so cleanly from their middle.

  Students flowed through the beige hallways, streams of coloured chatter, the smell of soup weaving salty currents among us from the café by the entrance. Everyone with the burdened postures of backpack wearers, or leaning like wind-blown trees to balance messenger bags anchored with books. The girl ahead of me wove a highlighter through the air like a baton, conducting her conversation with a guy in a trenchcoat, laughter peeling off and falling behind them, over me. I looked around for Jacob. I’d seen him between classes in this hallway before, rolling to Sport Psych in his Scarlet Hockey jacket. I watched for him at the rink, in the dining hall, on the paths leading to Sam Hall, mentally mapping escape routes. The humiliation of Rookie Night could be is
olated in this way, made into some far-off island. If necessary, I was prepared to deliver a deke, a head fake, to go wheeling around him. Head on a swivel, quick feet, as Moon would say.

  Outside, I crouched beside the sidewalk and opened my backpack. Stuffed the essay inside the black cover of my Scarlets Play Book, a hefty binder crammed with hockey’s arithmetic – permutations and combinations, algebra and angles, as though a goal might start here, on a page, spilling its story onto the ice with us, its bulky heroines. Pages and pages of happily-ever-after pitches.

  The campus was built on paper, everything boiled down into books – parts of the human heart, the fall of civilizations, hockey. I’d never seen so many books in my life. But we were moving forward. We were making something happen. Weren’t we? Moon had us working on the 2–3 Press last practice and it was a good system, a smart system if we used it against the right team – the Pronghorns, maybe – and if we got it down, if we perfected it there during practice – all of us treading ice, free from the pressure of opponents – I could see it working, I could almost picture it, that shining, future game.

  As I zipped my backpack, I saw Jacob, late for class, jogging toward the Meade building doors, the collar of his hockey track jacket twisted under at the back, the front half-zipped and billowing. I crouched down farther and let another swell of students coming out through the doors crush my view. When they’d passed, Jacob had disappeared into Meade.

  Dr. Chester had a tiny smudge of peanut butter on the corner of his mouth, and Sig was supposed to listen to him say all this garbage with peanut butter on his mouth like a five-year-old? He repeated himself, slower this time. His elegiac voice and the perfectly-straight part through his black hair. As though she were hard of hearing.

  She thought of old Arnie Talbot at Bingo, his bobbing head. Sitting, yet never still. Feet battering the floor beneath the table. He, and his wife and daughter and son-in-law all arriving one Friday night at the Hall, all of them but him with ice cream cones from the Dairy Queen, his hands and tongue not stopping long enough for such meditative licking. How bereft he’d looked without an ice cream cone.

  ‘Yes, uh huh, I heard it all the first time, thank you.’ Sig plucked a Kleenex from Dr. Chester’s immaculate desk and thrust it toward him, tapped the side of her mouth. He made a surprised sound and swabbed idiotically across his lips as though she’d told him he was wearing lipstick. ‘Now, how’s your mother?’

  She began to mourn ice cream cones.

  Hal put on cowboy music while we got dressed. Limp Bizkit whining about breaking shit, then silence for a moment, Toad freezing mid head-thrash. Johnny Cash began to croon, and Toad looked accusingly at Hal, clucking her tongue.

  ‘Please, not this crap again,’ she said. Hal ignored her, head down, tying her skates.

  ‘Delia, oh Delia ... If I hadn’t have shot poor Delia, I’d have had her for my wife,’ sang Johnny Cash.

  Boz put a hand on her chest. ‘Oh, that’s awful,’ she said.

  No one changed it. Toad bellyached, but it was just for show. She’d never change it if Hal didn’t say she could. When Heezer put on Sarah McLachlan or Tori Amos, though, Toad sprinted over there, pulled the cord from the wall as though yanking a poisonous barb from a teammate’s heart. Heezer started to put on that music as a joke, tried to trip Toad mid-sprint.

  The music seemed like strange taste for Hal. I would have guessed she’d like something a little more intense, music that throbbed like a headache, not the banjo-drunk hiccups of the cowboy ballads. Above the CD player, on a bulletin board dripping pictures, their edges curled like leaves from the shower steam, hung a picture of Hal, Toad and Heezer last Halloween. Toad and Heezer, dressed as football players, winced grins as they butted heads in oversized helmets, and Hal glared grimly at the camera from behind a black mask. The Lone Ranger.

  I’d heard Toad call this expression of Hal’s the FOAD look, which stood for fuck off and die. But it was more complicated than this. Hal’s glances held a dictionary of violence, an A to Z of ways to make a person want to die. I wanted to get inside these looks, to speak their tongues. Or to find a way into that locked space surrounding her, like Boz had, the way she leaned against Hal’s knee and nodded over and over while Hal spoke gravely, quietly, eyes cast off somewhere just beyond Boz’s face, trailing back for confirmation. But my flight instinct was stronger.

  Hal shouldn’t have been the Lone Ranger. I’m not sure what costume I would have placed her in instead. You learn not to guess at these things. You take cowboy music and Lone Ranger costumes and file them away in that chameleon jumble of other stuff that you never would have guessed. You learn this after a while: you can’t guess, because you’d be wrong most of the time.

  After practice I visited with Ed. Tuesdays had become Date Night with him. When I walked toward the rink door by his office, he’d be watching TV while some team circled the ice outside his door. He was waiting for me, I could tell, but he pretended he was surprised, making a big fuss about getting a chair, grabbing me a Grape Crush from the fridge.

  We talked hockey and Kristjan and he grew younger and tougher and happier and more perverted, falling into a kind of Glory Day swoon when he really got into the stories, staring at some invisible rink beyond my head, he and Kristjan, Siamese frickin’ twins, first-line wingers, ruling the ice and keg parties and the lust of underaged girls and the streets of their borrowed suburban neighbourhood. Ed shedding skin and regret and all the layers of ice he’d made since then, since the Zamboni found him.

  He liked to get the stories straight, struggled to find the exact words Kristjan used when he woke Ed on the top bunk in their room at the Ferrys, their billets. Kristjan had punched Ed in the chest and when Ed looked up, through the darkness, Kristjan had the window open, one foot on the sill.

  ‘He said, ‘You’re snoring, buddy. I’m ready to jump.’ No, it was, ‘That snoring, brother. I’m gonna put myself out of my bloody misery.’ Bloody misery, that was it. And he kind of makes a move like he’s really going to do it and I’m half asleep, right, and I jump from the bunk and grab his arm because I actually thought. He starts laughing his head off but I really thought. Went to save his life.’

  There are people who let their ghosts swear at them with one foot on the windowsill in the middle of the night. I nodded and nodded. The patient student. I think he told himself he was doing me a favour. Like he was giving me Kristjan, which he kind of was, except the sound of Kristjan’s voice in my head was still Ed.

  When the ice time ended and all the voices and blade gasps and echoed shots drained from the office, his eyes cannonballed back to the room, to Sam Hall, to the Zamboni. I hated this moment. When he remembered that the ice had turned on him. He put on his jacket slowly, then pulled a photo from the pocket. Handed it to me.

  ‘Found this the other night, going through some pictures. Thought you might want it.’

  The photo was full of Kristjan’s head, his face tilted up, smiling peevishly at the camera, one eye half-shut. His mouth was open a bit, saying something that looked like it was probably an insult to whoever was behind the camera.

  ‘That was one of the last ones I had of him. Some Halloween party.’ Ed smiled a bit, went to the door. ‘And yeah, he’s drunk as hell, I’m willing to bet.’ Proud.

  I tacked the picture on my wall in Rez, in the middle. It was the only thing up there, and when I lay in my bed, it looked like he was sneering right at me. I wanted to tell the kid to shut up.

  Legend has it that a boyfriend Boz had the season before punched her, gave her a black eye. Drunk on rye, Hal and Toad climbed into a tree outside this boyfriend’s apartment and waited for him. When he walked up the driveway, they pelted him with stones they’d gathered. I pictured Hal selecting the ammunition, turning each stone over in her hands, testing it with a fingertip as she glared through the darkness. She would have chosen the sharpest rocks, the heaviest, the ones like arrowheads. I saw her launching them from the tree, knees bunch
ed up to her chest, and the look she had when winding up for a slapshot – you could tell that whoever got hit with that shot would hurt like hell, like she’d planned – and the muscled arc of her arm, the violent flick of her wrist.

  The boyfriend tried to see into the tree at first, shouting, but then he got a stone in the eye and ran into the house, blood on his face. When he came back out, waving a knife, Hal and Toad were halfway down the street, laughing because the knife was so small they could barely see it from that distance, it could have been a butter knife, and because the boyfriend was crying – the sobs echoing off the black pavement.

  I watched Boz on the red couch in the lodge where Team Day was being held, the fireplace throwing strands of liquid shadow over her face, and tried to picture her as a punched-up girlfriend, a bruise cloaking her eye. Responding to Question Four on the Team Bonding Questionnaire, she explained to me, right hand threading a pen through the air, how she planned to become a child psychologist: the programs she’d have to take, the schools that offered them, the exams. And why. The blunt-edged kindness cutting these reasons jolted me. I thought she was joking at first, parodying someone, and I almost laughed. But she didn’t stumble over any of these words. She didn’t flinch.