Twenty Miles

by Cara Hedley

‘What?’ I said. ‘Kristjan – what? But he – ’

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ Sig sighed dramatically. ‘You wouldn’t listen anyways.’

  ‘I don’t – ’

  ‘If Kristjan’d had the opportunities you did, but there you go, taking it all for granted. Shitting on the team that was falling all over itself to – ’

  ‘Sig. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You have something to say on that front, do you? Well, by all means. Enlighten an ignorant old lady. Go ahead.’

  ‘Just – all those stories. I didn’t ask for. I mean, okay, he was good at playing and all that. But what people seem to forget is that he, you know. He was a kid. And he left you with his mess. But those stories you told me. I never wanted.’

  Sig had been nodding her head rapidly, mouth twitching, in some satirical imitation of a person who might agree with my scattered words. Hauling on the reel of the fishing rod like she’d caught something. But then the blue lure came up from the water and dangled above the ice for a few empty moments. Sig released it again and the lure dropped back beneath the black surface with a ripe plunk.

  ‘This is all very interesting,’ Sig said finally. ‘This is frigging fascinating. Pardon me while I just get my mind around the disaster we’ve made of your life, this war-torn country that is Isabel Norris.’

  ‘I didn’t say – ’

  ‘Drink the hooch and shut up!’ Sig barked, thrusting the flask in my direction. I jumped and took it. A huge, burning gulp, my throat clenching a fist, tears bunching clouds in the corners of my vision.

  ‘First off, don’t tell me about my goddamn son. You never knew him.’ She didn’t look at me, mouth drawn in tight. Her eyes darted quick around our dangling feet. My shoulders started to shake. ‘Secondly. You aren’t a mess. You’ve never been a mess. You’re a good girl who’s acting like a flake.’

  Sig felt the front of her jacket for her smokes, then pulled them out, rested the rod on her lap. Lit up. She blew the smoke upward, chin jutted, eyes locking on the sky, and I could see her relax, shoulders dropping in the nicotine lullabye. She held her cigarette toward me then, waggled it between her fingers.

  ‘Might as well take up smoking now too. Go all the way. Like the delinquent you are,’ she said.

  Her usual peace offering: a joke. But she had the cigarette right in my face and the slow turning of the Scotch felt like anger. I grabbed the smoke from her hand and drew my arm back to launch it on to the ice, but then I changed my mind mid-throw, shoved it deep between my lips, clamped my mouth around it, breathed it down like Sig always did, like it was her last breath, and I could feel the specific shape of the smoke as it flooded my lungs, every burning wisp, and then a larger shape, sharp-edged, and I panicked and hacked, tears streaming down my face, turning to cold.

  ‘What the hell?’ Sig said and I coughed until it felt like I was bringing up my stomach, bent double over my knees. Gasps like sandpaper dragged through my lungs. When I could breathe again, the air had become ice. I lay my cheek on my knee, facing Sig, watching the small jitter of her rod, the quaking glove. The leg of my jeans wet under my cheek.

  ‘But what will you do?’ I said. ‘How will you.’ I didn’t know the questions. ‘How.’

  Sig was quiet for a long time. Then she reeled in her line, rested the rod on the dock, inched over toward me. I could feel warmth leaking from Buck’s old jacket, the cigarette smell in its layers hardened by the cold. She reached her arm around my back then, grabbed my shoulder and pulled me toward her, a move my body remembered from when it was small. Not gentle, but like she was a wave, gathering me in on her arm’s current, that rough tug. It felt too strong to be her, she felt strong as me, and my muscles melted down. I folded across her lap.

  Sig watched Iz step carefully from a snowdrift onto the patch of ice, trailing threads of snow behind her small blades. The girl looked down at her feet, and Sig wondered if she could see a thing, the balaclava pushing her eyebrows down, the parka’s blue hood belling around her face. Without looking up, Iz put her mittened hand back behind her and moved it around, feeling for Sig. Sig chuckled and grabbed her hand. Iz took two steps on the ice as though walking.

  ‘Here,’ Sig pulled Iz’s arm into the crook of her own. ‘You hold on and we’ll glide like this.’

  Iz gave an excited shriek as Sig pulled her along. They glided toward Buck’s hockey stick that stood like a flag in the hill he built while clearing the rink.

  Buck thought that Iz should play hockey. He didn’t say why, just said she should, as though it was the natural thing for a little girl to do, and Sig didn’t question him, although she thought, We’re older now. And with Buck off at the mill all day, the ice too dark by the time he got home, the sky grown too cold – who was left to teach the girl?

  ‘Remember the last time, Iz? Remember how you push out with your leg, like this?’ Sig let go of Iz’s hand and glided slowly, one leg frozen out behind her like a figure skater, looking back at Iz.

  Iz nodded. She bent her knees, looking down at her legs, and pushed a foot out behind, jerking a small line across the ice.

  ‘You’re a natural, kiddo,’ Sig said. ‘How are your legs doing?’

  ‘Good.’

  Iz had been having growing pains. Sig, too, had felt searing fingers gripping her legs recently and believed these were shrinking pains. Cruel joke played on these bones of theirs. Sig imagined she was relinquishing her height to the girl, their pain feeding off each other like the heads of candles held together, a spiralling flame.

  Iz pushed out again with a little more force and her blades creaked against the ice.

  ‘Look how fast,’ she said. Her snow pants crackled static, then she stopped.

  ‘You’re on a roll,’ Sig said. ‘Keep going.’ She began to skate beside the shelf of snow ordering the ice, uneven strokes of Buck’s shovel still visible. The corner that he’d angled into a smooth arc. She studied the path ahead of her as she moved, cautious, over the unpredictable surface.

  Buck tried to smooth the ice down, sanding it with the shovel. He brought out watering cans and filled any holes he found. But he couldn’t beat the lake’s mazed desires – it shifted even as he covered its tracks, barking taunts under his feet as Sig watched him search.

  Iz, across the ice, lifted her leg and took a step again.

  Sig skated up. ‘Okay, bend your knees now, kiddo,’ she said and pressed lightly on Iz’s shoulders. Iz bent, leaning forward, and Sig pulled her shoulders back a bit.

  ‘Now just push like we practised before. Push your leg back with your knees bent just like that, okay?’

  Iz pushed and glided a shaky line. She looked at Sig, concentrating, face drawn in. She stuttered out again, moving faster now, head wobbling. She kept going, and Sig watched her, eyeing the ice ahead.

  ‘You’re a genius, girl,’ she said. Iz shuffled along, and then she tripped.

  Sig moved as soon as Iz’s knees jerked, small mitten swatting the air down as though closing a lid – she moved, blades cutting. Iz, falling in her direction, and Sig’s legs fast, unthinking, and then her hand grabbed Iz’s elbow, Iz still falling, and Sig’s other hand catching the shoulder as it dropped like a stone.

  Iz falling heavy – she wasn’t light any more, legs lengthening every night, ripping muscle, injuring themselves to grow like this, to grow heavy. And Iz’s shoulder falling down into Sig’s palm, and Sig dropping too, bending. They bent.

  Beep.

  ‘Izzer, this is Toad – hang on ... (a muffled, static sound) ... so that was a birthday fart going out from me to you on this most gassy–Imeanhappy–of occasions. Oh shit, shit – ow, don’t, totsi! Ow! Ow! Okay, fine! O-kay! Right – Hal appears to be somewhat perturbed that I held her phone to my ass. She finds it erotic, deep down. Anyways – okay! Like I was saying: Haaaappy – ’ Other voices chimed in. ‘ – biiiirthday to yoooou. Haaappy biiiirthday to yooou ... ’

  I’d never heard the Birthday Song slaughtered so badly an
d so deliberately before. Someone sang opera-style, Duff performing her infamous offbeat beat-box in the background. Another player deliberately made her voice crack, like a pubescent boy, while someone else – Heezer, maybe – rapped, going off on ridiculous riffs, which ignited a violent laugh attack from Boz, her throaty laughter unmistakable. Toad rang out clear, probably the closest to the phone, and her voice was surprisingly good, smooth and high, hitting every note, a jarring intimacy from her among the symphonic carnage. They finished the song spurting laughter – each other’s biggest fans, always.

  A birthday can make or break a person, Sig often said. Best just to celebrate with Jack Daniel’s and let him forget it for you.

  Then Boz came on the line: ‘Hey, babe. Hope you’re having a good one. Miss you, doll! Kay, I’ll hang up now. We love you.’

  Click.

  When I was a kid, Sig, when giving me Eskimo kisses good night, called me her favourite broad, her Girl Friday, her funniest friend – names that made me feel the way I thought a movie star must feel: heavy with the admiration and envy of millions, a huge, open-ended love. I had no need to be placed, alone, on the bull’s eye of that word, the maudlin L, violent scythe of V, carving its precise tattoo.

  But as soon as Boz spoke those words, I felt a reordering of lines. New definitions were required. Now, a flash of heat underneath my skin. I hadn’t needed to hear it. I’d never craved, never felt owed. But suddenly, inexplicably, I was lit, lying back on my bed across the tangled blankets, Jacob burning away, telescopes falling to ashes in his hands – Through one end, things are huge, they’re giant, swallowing your life. And then you flip it over...

  No such thing as telescopes, only the specific life of these eyes, these ears. Everything else a distortion.

  A birthday can make or break you, kiddo.

  I stood at the opposite end of the ice from the circling pack. They wore long skirts and hats, like the players in the Isobel Stanley picture, their uniforms all white. They skated that circle over and over, heads down, skirts billowing out behind them like sails. We were at Sam Hall – the same boards surrounding us and the yellow boxes there to the side – but the rink swelled with sunlight, buttery all over my shoulders, as though the roof had been removed. I called for a pass from Pelly, and she looked up, began to skate over. Closer. Fear solidified in my legs – Pelly’s face was gone, her features smudged like the photo of Isobel Stanley, like a burn victim. Her mouth indistinguishable. She couldn’t speak. I tried to laugh it away, Pelly’s face getting closer, and swirling, smearing, as though some invisible hand were wiping it off. She offered me a stick of cinnamon gum, and somehow I knew she was sad.

  The rest of our team circled like seagulls at the other end.

  I heard the slur of tires on gravel behind the house and then Sig came into the living room, twisting her hands together. She cleared her throat. ‘Well, Grace is here,’ she said, glancing over her shoulder. ‘We’re, uh, going to a hockey game and I figure since you are in the midst of this divorce with it you probably didn’t want to, you know.’ She laughed a bit and then coughed into her hand. ‘Leftovers for supper if you want ’em. All right, then. Toodle-oo.’

  Earlier in the afternoon, Sig had been involved in a whisper-fest with Grace on the phone. Now these over-the-shoulder glances and half-assed jokes, like a minor heading out from her parents’ place to the bar. I didn’t have anything else to do. Got in the old truck and took the long route through our neighbourhood, the roads that held hands, all leading back to each other, shoved up against the lake.

  I didn’t see Grace and Sig at first, so I climbed to the top of the stands to look for them. The kids on the ice were young, wobbly, falling all over themselves to get the puck. Parents in the stands laughing at the sloppy proceedings. A horn ended the first period and then I saw them, wandering out from the bottom row of the stands, Grace in an orange and red clown costume, her long, white hair flowing down the back, a red foam nose, pulling on the hand of a less-willing wolf. Who was undeniably Sig. Sig’s gait. Her old, cracked running shoes. Grace pulling her toward the ice. I held my breath. They took a few tentative steps onto the ice, grasping each other’s arms, heading toward the teams that had now gathered at centre ice. A shooting contest. Grace said something and gestured to the group and two of the little skaters came forward and offered Sig their arms. She went slipping along between them to the far net.

  When the contest was over, Grace produced three medals and Sig draped them over the kids’ helmets, patting each one on the shoulder in turn. The teams skated off and music flooded from the loudspeaker. Sig and Grace shuffled back toward the gate, gripping each other’s arms, as the Zamboni backed out of its bay. A small group of kids who’d been climbing the stands when I’d first arrived now clam-oured around the gate, waiting for the mascots. Grace stopped. She grabbed Sig’s arm and pointed to the kids. One of the kids squealed something and Grace broke into dance. Her signature bounce and snap, grinning wildly at the kids and then looking over to Sig, who had stopped when Grace did and now was standing very still.

  A mascot. I should have been embarrassed. I would have been before. I would have bolted. But instead, I hung there in the stands, a nest of astonishment suspended in my throat. The dizzying generosity of this person on the ice. A wolf. Some character in a story I’d never heard.

  The children giggled and shrieked. Grace threw her head back and pumped her fists in front of her. The wolf head tilted upward then. There was a hole in the depths of its grin where Sig’s eyes would be. This hole pointed at me now like the barrel of a cannon. I thought I could see the glint of Sig’s glasses. I raised a hand, unsure, down at my hip, just flashed my palm. But maybe she hadn’t seen me. The head lowered again. It angled toward Grace. Then, slowly, Sig began to move. She threw out her arms. She swayed side to side.

  They began to clear a skating trail on the lake behind our house a few years ago, always right before the winter festival. One day, the lake’s a giant pulse of snow out the window and the next there’s a ribbon winding through it, like some Zamboni had run a marathon in its dreams, an ink-blue ribbon appearing overnight, in the distance, the heads of skaters swimming down it, shouts deadened by the snow. It had appeared every year for five winters, but I’d never skated it, didn’t even know how far it went. There was no point to skating this skinny hallway of ice when I was playing hockey every day.

  I sat on the snowbank next to the trail and pulled on the old skates I’d unburied in the shed. Stepped onto the ice. Gunshot echoes scattered beneath my feet as I picked up speed, leg muscles uncoiling, the clenching creep of warmth. Needled wind wrapping around my head, eyes pricking tears. I looked back across the lake, toward our house, small and unremarkable in its lineup of other tired, weather-whipped houses on our street. As I skated, they stirred slightly in my eyes, a string of flags. Sig small as an ant behind. Faster. Muscle of winter straining, taut and lean, against my shoulders, pushing back on my knees.

  Past Clementine Beach and the blue-lipped ghosts of swimming lessons past, the chipped sign on the boardwalk daring me to swim at my own risk, the weary, shuttered canteen. Picking up speed, nothing to stop me, how cold fast could get.

  The trail ended at a boathouse, a lonely brown shack with a slip for some memory of a boat. The frozen beige and white froth of a public beach holding it in place. I sprayed to a stop inside. This slip ice, covered by the boathouse roof and so close to shore, was a different beast, a bright, translucent green, and I could see to the bottom, the sleeping sand. Huge bubbles were frozen into place across a backward glow, as though light were breaking up from the bottom, through all that oozing bottle green. Lightning cracks slashing their way down to the sand.

  My legs rang confusion now in the sudden stop, the quiet. They’d grown bigger, craved more. The ice creaked outside the boathouse, the lake’s impatient shifting. The lake and its million restless dreams. The ice changing its story. In the stillness of the boathouse, I turned.

&nbs
p; I needed to play.

  I did know the story. The one about the wolf. About how we’re lucky. That one set of hands can set the point on which a game turns. To be able to play through the static of winter. To have a safe place to put your hope. To try again and again. To know how it will end. I made it up myself.

  I skated back.

  ‘What’s this?’ Sig slid Kristjan’s picture from the counter, held it up a couple of inches from her face and squinted.

  ‘Ed gave it to me. He played Junior with Kristjan.’ Drinking coffee at the kitchen table in a patch of snow-spangled light.

  Sig frowned. ‘Boy looks friggin’ drunk.’

  ‘Probably was. Ed says it was at some party.’

  ‘Who’s this Ed person?’

  ‘He played with Kristjan. Junior. He’s the Zamboni man at Sam Hall.’

  ‘I’ve no idea who that is.’ Sig grunted and threw the photo back on the counter. ‘That’s a terrible picture. Boy was never photogenic. Always ended up looking like a troll. But there was always a little troll in him anyway, I guess.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you saying I look like a troll?’

  Sig glanced at me with surprise. ‘Not in the least.’ She paused, examined her hands on the counter. ‘You look more like your mother now that you’re older.’

  We couldn’t look at each other. I went to the answering machine, its red light blinking like a channel marker. I pressed the button and Jacob sighed. I grabbed the counter.

  ‘This is a message for Isabel. Or Iz.’ He laughed. ‘Whoever you are.’ Laughed again. ‘This is Jacob. I hear you’re back home. Say hi to the lake for me. I was just going to say. I have these two tickets. To a play. I thought of you. Thought you’d be a girl who’d like to see a play. Anyway, I’d wear a tux. We could find you a tiara or something.’ Laughed. ‘Tickets are in the nosebleeds, but we’d still be like people at a play.’ He paused here, sighed again. I saw these people then, the two of us high in the balcony in our fancy clothes, feet up on the seats in front of us, folding the program into a paper airplane, sailing it down to the front rows and the people down there would look up but never know where it came from. ‘This doesn’t make any sense, does it? See you.’