Twenty Miles

by Cara Hedley

  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.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘You’re right.’ I pushed down hard on the corners of my eyes, frustrated, digging sharp pain into the bridge of my nose, as though I might stop the flow of tears with my fingers, the way you stop blood spilling from a cut. Hal watched me cry, her unsurprised face deformed through the tears.

  ‘I haven’t lost a mom,’ I said, and then I began to laugh – I could, because she had – the sheer ridiculousness of it all hitting me, nonsense words jangling around in my mouth like loose change. ‘I have a lost mom, but I didn’t lose her myself, I guess.’ Out – the ridiculous, unsolvable riddle. My nose had begun to run; I wiped it recklessly with a sleeve, inhibitions gone, drunk on pathetic tears and on the words out there in the room now, already wilting like Hal’s sympathy bouquets, grown smaller with the plucking, with the offering. Exotic in my mind, but unremarkable in that room full of girls and petrified flowers.

  Hal watched me with guarded wonder and disgust. She reached slowly to the table beside the couch, then held out a Kleenex box, carefully, as though offering food to a wild animal.

  ‘So you know – ’ I snorted into a Kleenex. ‘Maybe she’s in Never-Never Land with Kerry.’ I hiccupped another laugh, sobering. ‘But how did we start talking about – I was talking about Kristjan.’

  Hal laid the box in her lap. She balanced fingertips on two corners, and then began to press down, skin blanching around the cardboard. She pressed until the box began to cave in, watching it carefully, chin down at her chest.

  ‘Toad was telling me the other day some bullshit story about her great-aunt Gertrude dying a couple of years ago or something.’ Monotone voice. ‘And I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, and didn’t really care, to be honest. But I think what she was trying to do was kind of join in. Like, get in on the action, the death action – everyone who knows someone who’s died join hands, and we’ll all do a square dance or something, and it’ll be okay. We’ll all live happily ever after.’ She began to push in the remaining two corners of the box, her hands slow, methodical. I had to lean in to hear her, Kleenex tourniquet pressed to my eyes. ‘But what you all don’t seem to understand is that I’m so tired. I’m tired of people talking to me. I’m tired of the phone ringing. I’m tired of the stupid dance. So, I’m thinking, Why don’t you guys leave me out of this. Go throw a pity party for each other, instead. A hugely tragic pity party, with all of your unbelievably heartbreaking, imaginary grief.’

  The box began to cave in again, and Hal’s shoulders sagged, as though lamenting this feat. She inhaled through her nose, deep, fingers frozen into the collapsed caverns. Then, in one smooth swoop, she launched the box from her lap. Out toward the mantel, toward the pictures, a perfect shot – clinical, Stan would have said – the box sailing over the stone corner of the ledge, then sliding like a curling rock against the picture frames, a grating sound, cardboard on stone, and the frames crashing into each other, all the girls plummeting, their frames shattering into crystalline shards.

  The phone began to ring again. That endless bell.

  I stood in the hallway on one foot after school, cold venting from my snowsuit, yanking at the laces of a boot. The low growl of Sig’s voice and the higher lilt of Grace’s knitted together as they slid out under the kitchen door. They hadn’t heard me come in – Sig didn’t shout at me when I closed the door.

  Stepping from my boots, I crept toward the kitchen, avoided the creaking board just outside the door. I’d stood there before, listening, and regretted it. Their raw, unpeeled voices, and the things they said – Sig employing all the swear words, in various creative forms – had given me stomachaches.

  I leaned in.

  ‘ – big old house in Virginia. But it came back again just the other day, no marking on it – like I’d sent the goddamn thing to myself. They’re cavemen down there, I hear. They’ll go their entire lives pretending she doesn’t exist, I’d bet, if they can pull it off. Stinking rich Neanderthals.’

  Grace made a clucking sound. ‘Well, how did you get the address in the first place?’

  ‘The father used to fly into the camp to fish every summer – how the little tart got the job in the first place. Father’d fly her up. Probably thought he was keeping her out of trouble.’ Sig snorted.

  ‘Which camp again?’

  ‘McNabb’s.’

  ‘Well, maybe they’ve heard from her, maybe she’s kept – ’

  ‘Jesus, no. A stupid thing, but if she hasn’t done a bloody brilliant job of falling off the face of the earth.’

  ‘Well, she was mourning, I suppose, when – ’

  ‘Oh please, Grace. Spare me the bullshit. She was already gone in her mind while she was farting out those crocodile tears. Mourning. Please.’

  ‘Well, I suppose there comes a time when you just have to, well – close the book. Wash your hands of the chase.’

  ‘Amen to that. I’m too old to be playing hide-and-go-seek with a weak-kneed kid. Amen.’ Sig sighed. ‘What a dizzy girl. What a dizzy, dizzy girl.’

  On the top shelf at the back of Sig’s closet, behind the clothes on hangers, I’d found the photo album, a pocket in the back cover of it housing hidden pictures. I knew I wasn’t supposed to see them. One was of Sig in the bathtub, a younger Sig. Her palms were raised toward the camera, fending it off half-heartedly, but she was tilting her head back, eyes closed, mouth a giant, laughing oval. Whenever Sig told stories about when she was younger, I pictured her with the laughing mouth, that tingle aching in my stomach again. The second picture was of Kristjan, hair white-blond against his tanned, squinting face, and a girl with long, dirty yellow hair that looked black in the places where it waved in closer to her body. Kristjan had his arm pulled around her tight, and her small shoulders crumpled into his chest. She was squinting as well, one hand poised tentatively at her forehead: she could have been wiping away sweat, or trying to shade her eyes, or hide her face. Kristjan was grinning with a kind of sureness that made the girl’s uncertain smile – like she wasn’t convinced her picture was being taken in that moment – wilt.

  This was the dizzy girl.

  As the purple light seeped into my skin outside the kitchen door, then past my skin, a drip of darkness into my stomach, I closed my eyes and imagined the dizzy girl on the dock, summer, that time of day when the sky is so blue you can practically see through it. She twirled around and around, arms out perfectly straight, face tilted up to the disappearing sky. The lake lay in front of her. She twirled until she was a blur, and you couldn’t see her smile through the yellow umbrella of hair. She twirled until you’d think she couldn’t go any faster, it was impossible, and then she twisted off the dock and into the lake, and afterward the lake didn’t even move, so it looked like the dizzy girl never fell in.

  As the shadow bloomed an aching tumour in my stomach, this was where I put the dizzy girl: under the lake. Everywhere and nowhere.

  Sig’s knees felt as though they’d been taken hostage, the blunt edge of a knife dug in to the bone, threatening her not to move, or else. She groaned as she lowered herself to sit on the edge of the dock, her parka and snow pants crumpling like paper in the cold. Her ankles, then knees, then hips, then the old bones of the dock, each creaking in turn.

  She brought the rod
onto her lap and opened the tackle box, the lures’ tangled silver only a small gleam in the stifled light. She sighed as she tied the lure onto her line, as though she’d been forced down from the house, forced out into the cold. But she wasn’t forced to do anything these days. She could do bloody well whatever she pleased.

  She cast stiffly out toward the open water, the lure kinking hyperactive in the air, a show of yellow feathers, before dropping with a ripe plunk. The water pleated into metallic edges around her line and then smoothed.

  She’d been fishing away boredom the past few days. The waiting involved in fishing she could stand. The other waiting was what got to her, the hours crouched at the feet of the next scheduled event: lunch, tea, dinner, cards with Grace. Even while she did nothing, sat there slack-jawed in the veranda, cigarette burning a lazy retreat between her fingers – without the girl around, she’d begun to smoke inside, each cigarette one step closer to Hell – she was waiting, her neck muscles coiled.

  With fishing, the waiting at least contained itself, held itself together in the taut thrum of the fishing line. This was sport, this drawn-out freezing of ass and nose. Sig would be an athlete, then, in the long winter hours.

  She felt a nibble, like a sneeze caught in her palms. Again. She didn’t hesitate, yanked the rod quick, up and back, its skinny head recoiling. And then: a new heaviness on the line. She chuckled to herself as she began to reel in. Such satisfaction in the Wheel of Fortune clatter of the reel. Such promise. Arousal fluttered like fingertips across her skin, beneath the layers. Greed.

  The pickerel thrashed angrily over the open water, Sig’s arms mirroring its movement with a loose-skinned wobble. Jack appeared at her shoulder and whined anxiously, fingernails dancing on the frozen wood. Sig gave him a sharp elbow.

  ‘Outta here, mongrel,’ she growled, manoeuvring the rod toward the dock like a crane. The fish flopped sluggish against the wood, mouth hinging open and closed. Its tail drummed a ragged beat. Sig looked at its grizzled face, the flat eye. The mouth opened and closed, the tail slowed until it moved with trancelike drowsiness. It would give up if she wanted it to. She felt a sudden shove of disgust for the creature.

  She unhooked its mouth and heaved it back to the water. Cast out again, and waited. Nothing. Her fingers had begun to freeze up, gloves taking in the cold like sinking boats.

  She began to reel in the line for another cast, but the line resisted. A snag.

  ‘Friggin’ Jesus.’

  She glared out at the water. Her eyes dropped below the cobalt surface, down. Followed the razor-drawn fishing line to its snagged conclusion, the yellow feathers peeking out from – what? Where the hell was she caught?

  She grunted and tried again, careful. There. A bit of give to the line. Not a rock, then. She kept going, slowly, wincing as though she were extracting the lure’s hooks from skin. Whatever the lure had found, it was heavy; the line might snap at any time, the yellow feathers fluttering defeated to the bottom of the lake, her favourite lure lost. Jack watched, ears up.

  ‘Not a fish,’ Sig said, pushing against him with her shoulder. ‘Quit breathing down my neck, you bloody slob.’

  What the hell had she caught? She’d hauled up a variety of objects in her day: sunglasses; Coke bottles; a dead turtle, its flesh dissolving like Kleenex; a woman’s old-fashioned cigarette holder. None of these objects had been as heavy as the weight tugging the end of her rod down now. She was getting close, the rod nodded this fact. Closer. A few more tugs, and then.

  A blade broke the surface first, like the fin of some cocky fish. Reared up. Then the disembodied toe of a boot, the lake still claiming the rest. It glistened in the air, a gummy brown eye. Sig choked as she pulled up. Choked as she eyed the yellow feathers cradled there in the nook between the blade and the boot, the toe-end, nestled so smugly. Will ya just lookie here, the lure seemed to be mocking. Like some prankster friend showing up on the doorstep of your own goddamn party with someone you despise.

  She yanked up on the rod, breath still webbed in her throat and, Jesus, there was the other one, trailing behind on wet umbilical laces, seaweed bleeding from them, limp. My God. She hauled them over to the dock and Jack danced backwards, then hovered behind Sig’s back, whining.

  It wasn’t until the skates were slumped crooked on the dock, leaking a slow puddle, the arrowed tips of feather peeking out from underneath, that Sig found her breath, pulled it from her throat like an afterthought. One silent howl, out. She touched the skates with her eyes, careful, there and there. The lake had soaked the leather into a deep brown, old lesions blooming into fleshy forgiveness, blades polished, dust from the shed dissolved, absolved. They looked young again. New.

  Sig began to chuckle, a slow roll out from her stomach, heat spread through her chest. She took off a glove, reached out a finger and touched the heel of the closest boot, its leather a cold, stiff musky pelt. Had she ever heard a joke as great as this?

  ‘Hello?’ Jacob said sleepily.

  ‘Hey, it’s me.’

  ‘Hello, Me,’ he mumbled. ‘My favourite Me.’

  ‘Hi. Um, I was thinking of coming over there. Okay? I’m bored.’

  ‘I’d be upset if you didn’t come over. I’d cry myself to sleep.’

  I didn’t want hockey. So when he opened the door and he was wearing a Scarlet Hockey T-shirt, I asked him to take it off. All I knew was that I didn’t want hockey. But then he thought he knew what I wanted, his eyes flashing this idea, and maybe he did know.

  We crashed and rolled against his mattress, and I wanted to laugh because we were suddenly different people, throwing each other around like wrestlers, these brawny characters with brash, grandiose names, and I wanted to laugh at this and because my shirt got hooked on my nose and my hair caught static and because we were so serious, that scowl of concentration on his face as he rubbed his cheek stubble across the skin of my chest until it burnt, but I was scared to laugh because I was travelling far away on that pinprick pain.

  He grabbed my hips and pulled me over beside him, his fingers fumbling the button on my fly, and my arm got caught, mangled underneath me. I yanked it out, caught him in the rib with my elbow, and he jumped and gave a surprised oof, our eyes cracking open.

  ‘Oh,’ I breathed, and we regarded each other warily for a second like strangers suddenly crushed together on a bus. Then he smiled.

  ‘Two minutes for elbowing,’ he said.

  I hurtled back into the room then. Slammed into the bed with the plaid comforter that smelled of scalp, next to the desk scattered with practice schedules and his teammates’ hockey cards and, above it, the signed Ted Nolan poster. My bones crunched and sighed against the mattress and my eyes fell into the gaudy bruise on my forearm, dark purple and the smeared shape of a puck. Hit by Duff’s shot in practice a few days ago while going in for a deflection, and the colour had deepened since; it had grown a nearly black heart.

  ‘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 antici
pate.

  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.