Twenty Miles

by Cara Hedley

  He leered at me from the wall, drunk as hell. A boy. He could have been my younger brother. For close to a year, I’d been outgrowing him. I hadn’t known this – that these lines could jump, blur, dissolve to static. I looked down, spread my fingers wide. The fact settled in among their small bones: I’d outgrown his hands.

  Three

  Highlight reels are a lie. A hockey game writes its own Coles Notes, this much is true. It’s like it’s manufactured in an ephemeral package, ready to be butchered and filleted into three clean chunks, then chopped further, this massacre, then strung together in highlight reels – for those who missed it, for the illegitimate fans who believe that a hockey game is a list of the goals and fights, nothing else.

  A TSN Turning Point is a different story. A book could be written about every one. The Turning Point is often shown in slow motion. It occurs when, say, the puck is stolen somewhere around centre ice, the other guy not careful enough, a little cocky, while his team is changing lines, that chance crossing of variables that leaves the offensive end gaping and bare like the toothless open mouths of your teammates. And you’re the goalie, alone, and if you had time, maybe you’d feel abandoned by your teammates, maybe you’d feel pissed off and a little scared in the manner of a kid slingshot from a tube into the middle of the lake by her grandmother’s deranged boat-driving. But you don’t have time to feel any of this because this guy, this twenty-year-old phenomenon, whom they’re calling the second coming of Christ on skates, is a sustained flash of jersey and legs and stick, but not of puck, because it’s already behind you in the net, even as you’re lunging for it.

  But, wait. Rewind. The Turning Point isn’t the puck rattling the crossbar behind you. Watch. Watch as the kid steals the puck. That play. Something will happen – he’s moving, he’s turning toward you. He’ll score, he won’t score, you’ll defy laws of whatever and open your glove and the puck will be in it, the puck will spill off his stick and the new defenceman will collect it, sheepish and grateful, the crowd will make a peeved noise at the kid like one giant parent.

  Something will happen. But in that vibrating moment as the puck swaps sticks, the ice is empty, waiting, and the kid is moving, turning. He’s opening toward you.

  Jacob and I shifted around in my bed, slipping into the routine for sleeping we’d stumbled out those nights when we’d play cribbage in my room until late. He’d just stay over instead of walking back to his room on the other side of campus. The routine was this: we’d both start on our backs, overlapping a bit like crowded teeth on my narrow mattress. I’d start to turn, Jacob would follow, and we’d both end up on our sides, facing the same direction. All this in silence, or whatever muffled thumps and music stood in for silence in my end of Rez that night.

  Sometimes we kissed. Jacob pushed my shoulders, like he did that night at the rink when he told me no. He’d kind of push me away, even while he was kissing me harder. I panicked when he did this, opened my eyes up fast, but he didn’t notice, his own eyes squeezed shut, eyebrows drawn in together like he was trying to remember something important. I moved into the space he created between us.

  Sometimes we just slept.

  I could feel his hands clasped together against my back, the small hairs on his knees brushing the damp backs of mine. Gavin was listening to Madonna – he’d been listening to Madonna all week – and ‘Like a Virgin’ buzzed through the wall, Gavin chiming in once in a while, a flat falsetto: Like a virgin ... hoo! Jacob laughed, a surprised huff that caught me just below my neck.

  Then they were there: Toad, Boz and Heezer dancing to ‘Like a Virgin,’ Heezer’s favourite song, in the dressing room after practice, wearing Jill straps and sports bras, the Jill straps doubling as chastity belts. Toad had cut a toilet paper roll in half and stuck the pieces inside her bra. The three of them leaping around the room, Toad doing Elvis pelvic thrusts and Heezer dumping baby powder into her hands and throwing it in the air like confetti, the North End getting all hazy, the sweet grit in my nose, on my tongue, and Boz collapsing on the ground beside her stall, hand on her heart, laughing her head off, ‘Oh goodness. Oh my goodness.’ Toad making hand motions around the toilet-paper-roll cones like she was focusing camera lenses, her face dead serious.

  ‘Do you think,’ Jacob said, his voice loud. ‘Do you feel like, well. You know. You and me. That we’re growing?’

  He pressed his palms against my back and I tried hard to understand this vaguely Hallmark lingo that he had a supply of. Together, we shall grow our love. Bigger it shall get, every day. Amen. I pictured our bodies oozing together, a tumour all hair and teeth and tissue, expanding like a lump of bread dough.

  ‘Well, if you’re asking me,’ I said carefully. ‘I don’t know if you ... ’

  ‘I know about me, Isabel. I’m asking about you.’

  What about me?

  We went to a movie, a chick flick he’d chosen, the audience full of middle-aged women clutching Kleenex in their laps, and I was pretty sure that was a tear on his cheek when the lights bloomed at the end, but he didn’t touch it, and so I got antsy and couldn’t look at him and raced ahead to the bathroom. Another night, he reached into the pocket of his fleece and pulled out a handful of tube jigs, little rubber lures that looked like worms. ‘Nice, I haven’t worn this since the summer – I was wondering where these all were,’ and he stuck one in both of his nostrils. I was embarrassed at first, but then there was something about the tiny wobble in the jigs as he nodded his head, frowning, that made me laugh like a five-year-old. And the next morning, the jigs scattered across the floor next to my bed, my Rez room looked more like home.

  I let his question ring through my body like a doorbell, my team-mates still dancing around to Gavin singing Hoo! Jacob’s hands on my back, but my teammates’ bones, their springing muscles, somehow closer. Right there.

  ‘We’re going to visit Terry in the hospital tomorrow,’ Sig said when she called.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Chris is a teammate of yours. This is what we do.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think I can – I’ve got tons of homework.’ The excuse pathetic even in my ears.

  Hal had been missing practice frequently. Players brought in casseroles, lasagna, muffins, and Toad and Boz dropped them off at Hal and Terry’s house.

  ‘Left them on her front step,’ Toad would say the next day, and that would be all. No one mentioned it. They just brought the food, hidden modestly in bags, Hal’s empty stall bristling with plastic, kitchen smells setting up home in our corner of the dressing room.

  ‘Isabel, you don’t have any choice in the matter. This is a teammate of yours, and a friend of mine, and you will show your support. I know it’s not an easy thing to do, but I don’t have to remind you what it’s like, do I? Isabel. You will go.’

  Hal sighed, disgusted, when players – on the other team, on her own team – went down in a game, propping her stick up dramatically on the boards, eyes rolling, as though we were in for a long haul. She was impatient with the frailties of others, dismissed them as though they were all contrived.

  So, I clung to the possibility that Hal wouldn’t even be at the hospital. I imagined her navigating the halls, steering herself full-tilt through gurneys and wheelchairs, head fakes around nurses, her eyes on a muscular pivot, ducking in on her mom’s room for a few quick words, spoken without losing momentum, then gliding out again, the door shot open with a seamless twitch of her wrist, all stealth and held breath. I could see this – Hal fleeing out the hospital doors as Sig and I arrived.

  Sig’s eyes shifted nervously over the light grey hallway. ‘I hate this bloody place,’ she muttered to me out of the corner of her mouth.

  I nodded. Skin and bones. My hospital weapon, a mantra in my head. Skin and bones. This was how I navigated the hallways. I had a knack for picturing people sick, could read the blueprint of bone structure and then go from there, an inverse architecture, knocking down flesh and muscle. Preparing myself for the
worst.

  ‘Whoops – this is her number here,’ Sig said, backpedalling stiffly to the closed door. She knocked.

  ‘Yeah?’ Hal’s voice rang quick, gruff. Sig opened the door a crack, and I stood behind her, crouched close to her back. I could still run. I’d take the stairs, beat a straight line to the revolving door at the front, the slow-motion suck of the door, and then I’d be out, I’d be gone. I’d prepared myself for Terry, but Hal – there was no way to prepare for Hal, no rules I could possibly flatten myself to in this place, that room, the door opening, and that yellow smell coming out into the hall, Hal in there with it, taking it on.

  ‘All right if we come in?’ Sig said. I was still against her back, and then Sig moved, stepped inside. I was left alone in the hallway, and I had to go in. I pictured Hal on one of those black and steel chairs by the windows, her knee jerking an impatient rhythm. By the window, Hal could look outside, she could plan her next move – even while she was in the room, she would always be on her way out. And so, that was my backup. Skin and bones, and Hal in that chair, about to leave, legs ready.

  I never pictured this: Terry so small in the bed that she barely took up a fraction, and Hal next to her, under the covers, huge, legs drawn into white mounds, dominating the bed with her wide shoulders, and Terry slumped like a sleeping child against her side, her body trailing tubes across Hal’s lap, TV flickering silent on a caged perch near the ceiling.

  I had her. I had her pinned.

  Hal glanced down at Terry’s head, the mouth gaping in drugged sleep, then looked up at us, a defensive jut to her jaw.

  ‘Hi, kiddo. We thought we’d just drop by quickly, say hi. But we don’t want to wake her up, so ... ’ Sig gave a half-wink, abandoning it in the middle.

  ‘Well, she’s been sleeping for a while, so maybe I could – ’

  ‘No, no, Chris, we’ll just stay for a quick chat, and then – just let her sleep.’ Sig, whispering now. ‘You been getting any sleep, kiddo?’

  Hal shrugged. ‘Not tons. Enough, I guess. Not as much as her.’

  She looked at me, and I combed her stare, watching for any signs of challenge. Nothing, just tiredness.

  ‘Moon bag-skated us yesterday,’ I offered.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, she was mad at Toad, I think.’

  ‘Of course. Anyone set Toad in her place?’

  ‘No. Pelly tried.’

  ‘Pell. She’ll never get it.’

  A white machine hummed an insect tune next to Hal. Terry’s chest moved under a nightgown patterned with snowmen. The smell twisted between my teeth.

  Hal didn’t move until Sig said we should go. Then she gathered the tubes carefully in her hands, slowly, as though picking up icicles, and lowered herself out of the bed, propping a pillow next to Terry where her body was. Terry’s shoulders jangled loosely. Hal followed us out into the hall.

  ‘Well, you try to get some rest, girl,’ Sig said.

  ‘Okay. I’ll tell her you stopped by.’ Hal’s face twitched, and Sig and I stepped down the hall.

  ‘You’re the only one who’s come here,’ Hal said. ‘From the team.’

  I half-turned. ‘Yeah, I didn’t know if – ’ I looked to Sig.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind us stopping by,’ Sig offered.

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ Hal said. ‘Just – the rest of them. They’re chickenshit, I guess.’ Her jaw muscle pulsed.

  I thought of the anonymous casseroles stacked in her stall.

  ‘They probably are chickenshit,’ Sig said. ‘You bet they are.’ She reached over and squeezed Hal’s forearm, her knuckles blue against Hal’s skin.

  ‘She’s a tough one,’ Sig said as the truck reeled down Pembina Highway, the fast-food fluorescents, the flower hut in the Sally Ann parking lot, the couple necking on the bus bench, all tumbling past in a reckless blur.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Mo says she’s been sick for so long, and I didn’t even guess, didn’t have a bloody clue.’

  ‘Oh, you mean Terry’s tough.’

  ‘Well – and Chris too, mind you. Of course. Jesus, of course.’

  ‘No one knows what to do.’

  ‘Well.’

  We stopped at a red light and a pack of teenaged girls in a hatchback next to us were laughing – the dulled sound of it came in through our closed windows with subdued explosions of bass. I looked over and they were all decked out for some party or the bar, all in a uniform of straight, long hair and darkened eyes. Their red, laughing mouths seemed ignorant and cruel, and then the light turned green and they sped off.

  ‘Brave,’ Sig said, her eyes twitchy, jumping from the rear-view mirror to the road to the mirror. Her thumb beating ragged percussion on the wheel. Sig had turned the radio off in the hospital’s parking lot as we were leaving, a frustrated sigh as the polished, perky tones of an announcer came barrelling out when she turned the key in the ignition. Silence tightened around our seats in the close-walled truck.

  ‘Pardon?’ I said.

  ‘Your friend. She’s damn brave. All alone like that,’ Sig said gruffly, checking the rear-view again.

  I looked at her. I thought about that word, brave. No. She didn’t know Hal. To mistake her weakness for bravery. What I saw when I walked into that hospital room: Hal giving in. The room, the smell, the indifferent hum of the machines, Terry’s hard, bald head, all seemed to exist because Hal had let them. Climbing into the bed with Terry was an act of permission, a flat-out abandonment of battle. She placed herself in that bed, climbed right into the centre of it, and so the room spun around her heavy axis, a slow orbit, and with it came the gradual shedding of light. Furious disappointment flooded my chest. Hal had given up.

  I started to take the long way back to Rez from the rink. Out the front doors of Sam Hall instead of the rink door by Ed’s office. I didn’t visit him Tuesday after practice. On Thursday, he caught me walking out of the dressing room, down the hall toward the front doors.

  ‘Heya, Iz?’ He called at my back from the opposite end of the hall. I pretended I didn’t hear him.

  ‘Norse!’ Louder now, the clatter of his footsteps on the rubber floor. I kept going. ‘I found this other picture last night, thought you’d – ’ A desperate edge to his voice. He called Kristjan his brother, but he’d only known him for a season. His best season. I couldn’t help him find it again.

  I pushed through the doors, out into the cold.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart, you can do better than that,’ Toad yapped at Pelly, the two of them in the faceoff circle. Moon faked another puck drop and Pelly squirmed against Toad’s shoulder in that unsure moment when the puck could be there, it could be in their feet, but they just didn’t see it drop.

  ‘The disc ain’t even there, honey,’ Toad said. ‘Whatchoo gettin’ all up over me for?’

  ‘Corinne, could you be serious, please?’ Moon said, hovering the puck above their sticks. On the board side of the circle, I shifted my elbow over Woo’s, impatient, my limbs all twitchy with the false starts. Woo layered hers back on top, poked me in the ribs with the butt of her stick, and giggled. Our skates stuttered gasps as we dug in, limbs poised with waiting, ready to guess.

  ‘Toad, come on,’ Hal said, crouched on the opposite side of the circle.

  ‘When am I not serious?’ Toad said, and Moon sighed. She shook the puck slightly, as though weighing it in her hand, and then dropped it. Toad’s elbow darted into Pelly’s stomach. She pivoted, bringing the puck back into her skates as she pushed Pelly off, and I watched, blocking Woo’s path to the puck with my side, Woo ramming me with her elbow, a jolt in the ribs that I vaguely registered, watching the black line of the puck to Heezer along the boards, and then Heezer going with it, around behind the net. I abandoned Woo, pushing off from her side with a half-turn, and headed toward the boards, Heezer approaching, head up, looking for someone open. Calling – ‘Heezer, here! Heez! Heez!’ – lifting my stick off the ice, up to my waist, a flag, open,
Heezer sailing the puck along the boards, and I flicked down the tip of my stick, licking up the puck as Woo heaved against me, spine-first into the boards, and I twisted, but Woo was still there, grinding me in, chest crushing, and I put a glove out on the glass to steady, kicking the puck with my feet, and – ‘Iz, Izzer, atta girl, Iz, feet, feet, Woo, Woo, here, point, feet!’ – whistle.

  ‘Christ, you guys, what’s up with the whistles?’ Hal said as we jostled around the circle again, the opposite one this time.

  ‘See, this is our problem, ladies.’ Moon held the puck up near her face like a bribe. ‘This is what we keep running into. You gotta quicken up those hands. Nat, that puck should have been out of your hands as quickly as you got it. None of this lollygagging around the net, okay?’

  Heezer nodded vigorously. ‘I just didn’t see anyone open, so – ’

  ‘Iz was open – see, there’s a window of opportunity that we keep missing with slow hands, ladies. Okay? I want you concentrating on that. We don’t need any heroes – you play around with the puck and you lose it. I see it happening over and over.’

  ‘Did yoooou ever know that you’re my heee-rro ... ’ Toad sang in the middle of the circle.

  ‘Toad, zip it,’ Pelly said, bent over, stick across her thighs.

  Toad sent her an exaggerated air kiss.

  ‘Corinne! Maybe we should get some fresh legs out here ... ’ Moon looked toward the bench. Helmets shifted along the line as players’ legs coiled, ready to jump the boards.

  ‘No way,’ Woo objected under her breath, and I looked at her in agreement, our helmets almost touching, arms locked tight again.

  ‘We just got on. Toad, shut up,’ Hal said.

  ‘I’m on mute, Mooner, I’m on mute,’ Toad said. Moon shook her head and raised the puck.

  ‘Okay, let’s go.’ And, as though trying to shatter it, she spiked the puck to the ice.