Twenty Miles

by Cara Hedley

  ‘Fuck!’ Toad yelled as her shot got away from her during warm-up, grazing the goal post and then rebounding with a high-pitched gong off the glass behind. I skated in on her heels, took my own shot, Tillsy licking out her glove hand, folding the puck quick into her catcher, then dropping it by her feet, ready for the next. I glided up beside Toad, into the lineup along the boards.

  ‘This is such bullshit,’ she grumbled, holding her stick upside down, picking slush off the tape on her blade.

  ‘Yeah, it is,’ I said and she looked at me sharply, like she’d expect this from herself but not from me, her thin eyebrows arched beneath her cage.

  ‘You okay, bud?’ she said. ‘You look kinda shitty.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I shook my head. ‘I just don’t feel like playing.’

  ‘I’m with ya,’ she said and then it was her turn again to get a pass. The Horseshoe drill, it was called.

  I’d forgotten which U of A players I was supposed to hate. Some of my teammates held a hit list, a catalogue of numbers and names and all of the sins they’d committed against us. But I’d only played against U of A once at the very beginning of the season and so I’d lost my grip on any violence I might have held in my teeth a million years ago. You play against enough girls and they begin to lose their faces, like the endless students I passed on campus every day. They become just another set of hands and legs moving toward you, forcing you to make a choice about how you’re going to tell the next part of the story. And, anyway, we all know how it will end.

  The puck dropped. We played the game. We skated to open ice, called for the puck, found new angles to invest in, but our passes wilted around the edges. Our legs weren’t in it.

  Toad and I leapt onto the bench, line change, both of us hauling breath, Toad gasping furiously.

  ‘Fuck, you guys,’ Toad said to no one in particular. ‘You’re killing me with the shitty passes. I’m fucking breaking my legs to get to your shitty passes.’

  The last bad pass had been from Duff, obvious in its shittiness. Duff leaned backwards in the D end, her face crimson.

  ‘Get in your fucking position then,’ she bellowed down to our end.

  ‘Hey!’ Moon barked behind us.

  ‘Oy,’ Pelly breathed. Wary glances exchanged down the line. We were turning on each other. I leaned on the boards, a red tickle at the bottom of my lungs, gulping air. Looked at the scoreboard. Sixteen minutes left, still in the first. It occurred to me we wouldn’t make it that far, and then that I didn’t want to make it. A simple fact, sharpened by the blade of my breath. I didn’t want this.

  Sig walked in then, along the stands across from our box. I hadn’t seen her since Terry’s funeral. I remembered, my pulse revving again. She walked past the canteen, slow, leaned on the railing for a bit like she was taking a break. Then she began to make her way again, her hand still dragging along the railing, toward our offensive end where the other Scarlet parents were clustered. She was so small. How long had she been humouring her knees like that, tottering along like an old lady? Days, weeks. Years.

  Thrown back onto the ice before I could think. We were bouncing off each other like bumper cars, our two teams, a lack of conviction in our roughness. U of A could smell our weakness maybe and decided to save their own bodies; we weren’t going to put up a fight, they’d just outskate us. And anyway I’d forgotten who to hate, skating up the far boards, looking over my shoulder, Toad clamouring for the puck Duff had rung around the boards behind our net.

  It wasn’t a hit or an elbow or a stick. I was alone along the boards, trying to get open. But my movements were becoming unglued. I tripped. I did it to myself, my right blade catching the ice, just the tip, as though I was a figure skater digging in my pick, about to launch my body into something beautiful. But, instead, I could feel the ugliness, falling out of myself, my limbs turning to liquid, boards leaping toward my head. The thunder of my helmet shook my eardrums and a spool of red light unravelled from my head down my neck. I crumpled to the ice on my side. Turned over onto my back and closed my eyes to feel it, every inch of that light, to float down its hot path.

  I heard the whistle and the approach of skates, the quick, panicked rasp of blades, and I heard Toad’s voice dropping over me.

  ‘Iz, Iz, come on, buddy, you okay? You’re okay. You okay? Come on, buddy.’

  But I kept my eyes closed. Gathering the words together in that ringing white space behind my eyes. To tell them. Because they needed to know this, that Hal was playing when Terry died and how could she? And that Sig was sick and hockey is the same story told over and over, a safe place to put your hope but what is hope and we already know how it will end. And that eventually we won’t come back to the dressing room, to that giant girl who’s fearless and brave, and we’ll skate off the ice, go to our separate houses, we’ll be as small as we are in our own beds at night and then how will we be brave? And that Hal was playing when Terry died and we couldn’t keep it off the ice and I couldn’t find Kristjan and Sig was sick and hockey was the same story.

  I opened my eyes. My legs, my arms, sinking like swamped boats, down into the ice. Tamara, the trainer, her long black hair falling over me like poured oil, thrust three fingers at my cage. The faces of Toad, Pelly and Boz crowded next to her, the curves of their helmets sharp against the fluorescent lights above them, the edges of an eclipse.

  ‘You okay, hon?’ Boz said. I let the question roam through my body. The pain had retreated. Or maybe there hadn’t been pain at all. I couldn’t remember it. Someone had opened a door in my head and fresh air had flooded in.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said. Then, ‘Three.’ And I swung myself up to the clucked objections of Tamara and got to my feet. I skated around my teammates – Pelly offering me her arm for support, confused face – and jumped through the gate, off the ice. I walked around the perimeter of the rink, past Ed in his office. He looked up and just stared, open-mouthed, quickly adjusting that thin raft of hair across his scalp once again, and I saw a wary kind of pain around his eyes; I think it had been there from the beginning. Like it was me, not Kristjan, who had broken his heart. I wanted to tell him I couldn’t pay Kristjan’s debts, I didn’t have enough, I’d run out. But I just kept going until I reached the door. Then I pulled off my skates and walked out into the indigo night.

  I didn’t have a lot to pack. In Rez, they like you to make yourself at home in the most refugee way possible. Just threw my clothes into the two suitcases, left all my books on the desk. Left the photo of Kristjan up on the wall with its Milky Way swirl of tack holes, tiny memorials for all the photos that had come here to be lost, hundreds of them over the years and none of them had lasted. Then I ripped the picture down and put it in the pocket of my jeans because I didn’t want the wall to win.

  Sig was sitting outside Rez in the truck when I walked out with the first suitcase. I peered into the truck briefly and saw the pale glow of her face in the shadows and then I hoisted up the suitcase and levered it carefully over the side of the truck bed. When I went around to the passenger door, I heard the click of the automatic lock. I pulled on the handle but the click had been Sig locking me out. The window yawned slowly down. Sig glowered at me through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  ‘None of us know what this is about. But if you aren’t broken, you aren’t getting in this truck. And all I know is that you walked out of there on two legs. Now. Are you hurt?’

  I shook my head.

  Sig gave a deep nod. ‘You finish what you started, girl. Get your bag out.’ And she rolled up the window.

  Snow began a slow descent as the Greyhound lurched toward the outskirts of the city, the snowflakes tentative, polite. Barely there in the darkness. Somewhere along the line Winnipeg had stumbled into winter.

  A hockey game is nothing if not finishing what you started, but that’s not what Sig meant: me walking out in the middle of the game. She meant the team and school and the season, this supposed holiday hockey had visited upon me. But I hadn’t st
arted any of this.

  A girl had taken the seat next to me, although entire rows of the bus were open. She had acne scars around her jaw and ragged fingernails and was maybe around my age, but with the senile, caved-in look of an addict, eyes skipping absently around the bus, out the window, over to me. She pulled a ball of red yarn from her purse and began to knit, the needles pulsing robotic. Between her wrists, a thin scarf dangled, spotted with holes like moths had already destroyed it.

  ‘You going to the States?’ she asked. I shook my head. The bus was headed east through Ontario. She shrugged like it was my loss and I turned back to the window and watched two teenagers at a bus stop, the streetlight behind them illuminating the snowflakes that were almost invisible in the darkness, so it looked like they were on a stage and the snow was fake and fell only on them. The girl leaned into the guy, who was wearing a leather jacket liver-spotted with age and, sitting there in the bus, I could smell the wet leather and knew the thick squeak his arm would make as he pulled the girl in closer and the way she’d suddenly stop feeling the snowflakes on the top of her head as the guy looked up at the sky and then moved his own head over hers.

  They call it the hockey season as though this is the natural order of things and we should time our lives to its clock, all of us, moons hung on its frozen orbit. It’s just a game, but I couldn’t remember ever leaving the ice.

  At the rest stop near Steinbach, my seatmate asked me if I had a quarter. I offered a couple, but she accepted just one, her fingertip chilled as she drew the coin from my palm. She stood for a long time at the vending machine, head cocked, the hole-filled scarf bleeding from her hand at her side. She pressed a button and a Sweet Marie chocolate bar tumbled down, a yellow flash behind the glass, and then she walked out into the snow.

  As the bus rumbled back onto the highway, I saw her walking along the gravel shoulder toward the hunched, dimly lit outlines of Steinbach. A small Mennonite town far from the States. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and stared blankly at the bus as it passed. I wondered if I’d see Pelly again. I tried to watch the news on the tiny flickering box perched five seats up. A blond meteorologist in a pink pantsuit forecasted more snow. I heard Toad say, How do you get a totsi’s eyes to sparkle? Shine a flashlight in her ear. And so I went to sleep.

  ‘Un-friggin-believable,’ Sig said when I walked into the living room. Reclined in Buck’s armchair, Peter Mansbridge mumbling on the TV. She fumbled angrily along the side of the chair for the handle, then cranked it, shooting upright. She blinked hard and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose as though I might be some sort of optical illusion. ‘I’ll be frigging damned.’

  ‘Nice greeting,’ I said.

  ‘Are you pregnant?’ she barked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Depressed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, what in the hell, girl?’

  I sat on the couch, unwound my scarf, arrows of cold released from its layers. Sig still staring like I’d just returned home with a sex change.

  ‘Well, don’t make yourself too comfortable,’ she said, wide-eyed, gesturing for me to get up. ‘It’s not like this is your place any more.’ She shook her head, examining the TV as though it might give her a hint. ‘Anyway, I’ve rented out your room, so.’

  I looked at her wearily. ‘To who?’

  ‘Vlad,’ she spat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said and headed to my room.

  I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of freezing rain on my window, a jarring sibilance, and I thought for a moment it was summer. I moved my leg carefully across the mattress, stretched it out over the side of the bed, and a flush of pain seeped down, hamstring to calf. The endless leg workouts in the Gritty Grotto. Jump squats, dead lifts, lunges, calf raises, hamstring curls, leg presses. Stan had told us our muscles were injured through exercise, the strain causing tiny tears. The way an earthquake leaves fissures in the land. Lesions, he called them too, as though the tremors of pain were a result of our own catastrophic negligence. He told us muscle grows only as it heals. Tissue paving over the wounds, layered bravado above the hurt places. The others knew this already, or didn’t seem to care, the subliminal musing of their bodies as unsurprising to them as their fast legs, their clean-angled slapshots. But I was shocked.

  Sig mumbled in her sleep on the other side of the wall, a dream translation in jibberish, then fell back into the amplified breaths that soaked the darkness around my bed, that made the air full and heavy.

  I moved my hand up under my head, clenched a fist beneath the pillow, and a small strand of pain unravelled the length of my neck to my shoulder. I thought about how long it would take for my muscles to start shedding their layers. If I’d feel myself shrinking. All the small violences playing out in our bodies as we slept.

  The silent treatment started the next day, Sig limping past me down the hall, chin down. As I stood at the fridge, she stared through me like a window. She held the phone out to me without looking when Pelly called, but I didn’t take it. Twice. Then she stopped answering.

  I ranked in my mind all of the worse things I could have done. I monitored Sig’s legs, noticed for the first time the strange jerking of her thumb and how did I not notice it before? I offered her scrambled eggs. She turned her back to them and went to the bathroom. I listened to the answering machine, my teammates’ disembodied voices floating over me – or me, disembodied, floating over their voices. I’d walked out of hockey and become a ghost. What’s the first thing a totsi does in the morning? Looks in the mirror. Introduces herself.

  Beep. ‘Oh, yeah, hello, Iz? Uh, this is Aline Pelletier? Like from hockey? (Toad in the background, laughing: ‘She knows who you are, you loser!’) Anyway, uh, sorry, that was just Toad. Anyway, I was just calling to, uh, to see, like, when you’re coming back? Because, uh, your stuff’s still here, and so, we thought – well, uh, we were hoping – I hoped – you’d be back soon? Because your stuff’s still here – in your stall, like. So we thought you’d, uh, you’d come back to play maybe. (Cleared her throat.) Uh ... okay, bye.’ Click.

  Beep. ‘Oh, hey, babe. Hey, Iz. This is Cheryl Bozzo calling. Just calling to see how you’re doing. Hope you’re okay? Um, Iz, I just wanted to say that if you ever want to talk about anything, or just hang out, or whatever, then just call me, okay? Anytime. I mean it. We miss you. Seriously. Okay, talk to you soon, babe?’ Click.

  They were descending mysteriously from their nicknames, one by one, first names outstretched. Cautious. Breathing down my neck. I was scared: that they’d never leave me alone.

  That they’d leave me alone.

  I perched on the edge of the dock, next to Sig. She looked like a man, like a miniature version of Buck wearing his old red toque with the ragged pompom, his garbage mitts stained with fish blood, the army green parka. The clothes swallowed her. She held the fishing rod in one hand resting on her thigh, and a smoke in the other. Didn’t look at me when I sat down.

  ‘Goddamn Northern Light garbage,’ she said, jutting her chin upward. I looked. Streams of green and yellow writhed back and forth, desperate banners. She watched the lake where her line went in, blowing smoke out the corner of her mouth, away from me.

  I jumped right in. ‘So, I quit.’

  Sig licked her lips very slowly. She smiled with one side of her mouth. ‘Quit what?’ She snorted. Like a thirteen-year-old boy, Sig’s signature move in uncomfortable situations was deflection.

  ‘I quit hockey. It’s fine. I’ll be fine.’ My departure had become a solid thing, all of the pieces I’d run from melded together into this sharp mass of ice and paper and skin lodged in my legs, and I thought that once I’d handed it to Sig I’d be okay. If she would just take it from me, I’d become light again.

  Sig blew out a long cloud of smoke. She looked at the cigarette as she crushed it on the dock, next to her leg, then threw it out into the hole in the ice. I’d never seen her do that before, throw a butt into the lake.

  �
��No, you’re not, girl,’ she said levelly.

  ‘Well. But I am. I’ve already decided.’

  ‘You finish what you started, Isabel.’

  The way she dismissed my words with a cool flick, like ashing her cigarette.

  ‘It’s my choice,’ I said.

  She pivoted her head toward me slowly, smiling like the Buddha statue next to our toilet that Buck’s sister had brought back from Thailand. ‘So what’re you going to do then?’ She gave the rod a forceful twitch, her lips retreating.

  ‘I’ll get a job.’

  ‘All right, then.’ Cleared her throat. ‘So, no university education to speak of and she goes and gets a job slicing meat at Wally’s Supermarket and rots away the goddamn winters with a senior citizen while all the rest of the kids are away being drunk and loose at school. Excellent plan.’ She gave the rod a bounce. I could see more sarcasm gathering in her face, a hot swarm of it around her mouth. I had no defence against this. Sig had her beaten-up flask nestled against her thigh, so I grabbed it and swigged, a diversion tactic, a smoky burn on my tongue, down my throat. I coughed and pressed on my mouth with the back of my hand. Sig looked at me, incredulous.

  ‘You’re drinking Scotch now too? Anything else?’ She gave a rough snort. ‘Anyway. You already have a goddamn job. You have the dream job, girl. Playing hockey and going to school and being a kid. There’s your job. If Kristjan’d had ... ’

  She swallowed the rest of her sentence with the Scotch. Slammed the flask down between us, a challenge. I took it again. I’d go drink for drink with her, so she knew I could. Buoyed up on the hot cloud rising in my stomach, up through my chest. I had the sudden desire to knock her off the dock.

  ‘He’d have what?’ I demanded.

  ‘I thought we did a better job on you,’ she said, resuming her watch of the fishing line.