by Andrew Pyper
Her eyes weren't fully open as I would later dream them to be (the horrific clarity of marbles, twinkly and blind), but they weren't closed either. The lids empurpled, a colour of eyeshadow worn by only the sluttiest girls at school. The result was an expression I initially confused with seductiveness. It made me think that maybe this was Heather's twin, the one who liked to do all the naughty stuff Heather would never do. But then I saw the teeth knocked out of her mouth, the white, bloodless gums. The liquefied nose. I saw that she had been alone as the life emptied out of her, and that this aloneness was a thing worse than dying.
A hand came down on my shoulder. A touch that lifted me away from the particulars of Heather Langham's body to look at her again from a standing height. Now, from only the added distance of a few feet, she had lost the Heather-ness I could still find in her face as I bent over her. She was merely lifeless again. A sickening leftover of violence.
The hand left my shoulder. I turned to see it was Ben's.
"Ideas, gentlemen?"
We buried her. Right there in the cellar floor. Miss Langham, all future, being rolled by the toes of our boots into the three-foot trench we managed to axe and heave from the copper-smelling earth on which the Thurman house stood.
It's a struggle now to remember much of what must have been the hour or two we spent at this task, other than the work itself: the selection of tools found in the cellar's corners and hanging on its rusted hooks, the shifts of labour kept short enough to maintain a near- frantic pace, the space's encroaching shadows we held at bay with swings of the flashlight's beam. We did our best to keep her body in the dark.
We stopped only twice. Once when Carl started to cry. The second time when Randy ran upstairs.
Carl's tears were somehow more disturbing than the fear that Randy had rushed straight to his dad to tell him the terrible things his friends where doing over at the Thurman place. I suppose Randy's not being able to stick it out was the lesser surprise of the two. In any case, once he was gone we continued to axe and dig, waiting to hear the approach of sirens. Maybe fifteen minutes after he'd gone, though, Randy made his way back into the circle of light to pick up a shovel and take his place in the deepening trough.
When Carl started to cry, we tried our best to ignore it. Each of us had taken a break at one point—me to throw up in the corner, Ben to sit on the ground with his head between his knees—and we expected Carl to recover on his own as we had. Instead, he got louder. Curled up with his back against a support post, wailing. If it was anyone else, we probably would have stayed at it. But the alien sound of Carl's grief sapped us of our strength, so that we could only kneel around him, our hands on his elbows, the sides of his head, as though we were holding him together.
It wasn't our fault.
This would be our unspoken refrain for years to come. But how many accused have said this and convinced none, not even themselves, of their innocence?
We couldn't have murdered Miss Langham. We loved her. Yet we knew intuitively that love in such close proximity to violence made, in itself, a strong case for culpability. In the crime stories picked up off the wire in The Grimshaw Beacon, it was the ones who claimed to least wish harm upon a victim who usually turned out to be the ones who'd done it.
And there was the evidence too. Randy's blood. Ben's mother, who might have seen us slipping into the town's one forbidden place.
We may have discussed all this aloud at the time. But our decision was ultimately based not on any sober deliberation. It was a reaction we were locked into from the moment Randy's light found our music teacher's body in the darkness. Our instinct to cover up, to hide, to pretend we were never there was instant and inarguable. It was our first real summoning of the masculine talent for non-disclosure. We were becoming men. Becoming gravediggers.
* * *
[7]
He assumes it was only a side effect of grief, a Parkinson's hallucination, some aftertaste of Halloween graveyard imagery brought back from a tale told with a flashlight under one of our chins thirty years ago. Whatever it was, Randy doesn't believe I saw Carl. If I mentioned I also saw the boy from the Thurman house, a ghoul who spoke directly to my thoughts (an observation I make a point of not making), he wouldn't have believed that either. If I'd told him about the boy, he might now be taking me to be admitted to Grimshaw General's psych ward and not walking through the town's streets, dusk falling around us like tiny charcoal leaves.
"Why would he run?" Randy asks for the third time.
"I didn't get a chance to ask."
"But whoever you saw wasn't just avoiding you. He was, like, gone."
"Maybe he didn't want to see us. Maybe he's sick and he doesn't want anyone to know. Maybe he's not himself anymore."
"Or the law is after him."
"There's that too."
Randy carries on to the corner and rounds it. For a moment, it appears that he is about to slip away into nothing just as Carl—or the boy—did.
"Where you going?" I call after him.
"Where do you think?" he shouts back from the other side of what was, at one time, Brad Wickenheiser's hedgerow.
"You don't think Carl is—"
"Not there" he says, not giving me the chance to say "Caledonia Street" or "the Thurman place." "I'm going to Jake's."
"I'll get the first round."
"And an extra one for Ben."
"That's right," I say when Randy comes back to loop an arm over my shoulders. "An extra glass for the watchman."
"Ben was part Irish, wasn't he?" Randy asks as we head into Jake's Pool 'n' Sports, shaking the rain off our coats.
"I think his dad was. Or his grandfather. Or something."
"It'll do."
"For what?"
"A wake."
Tracey Flanagan is our waitress again. From across the room she gives us a comically triumphant thumbs-up as we assume our positions at what is now "our table," the two of us hopping atop the same stools as the night before. She giggles at Randy, who mimes thirst, his tongue out and hands clutched to his throat.
"I took the liberty," she says as she comes to us, pitcher in one hand, mugs in the other.
"I believe we'll be requiring the assistance of Bushmills shots as well today, Tracey," Randy says in a leprechaun accent.
"I'm sorry," Tracey says, with genuine sympathy. "Mr. McAuliffe was a friend of all yours, right? On the Guardians?"
"He was a hockey friend of your dad's," I answer. "But to us, he was a brother. Maybe even closer than that."
Tracey purses her lips, correctly reading that I'm not pulling her leg. I've just told her something intimate, and she acknowledges the honour with an eyes-closed nod.
"I'll get those whiskeys," she says.
After we toast Ben, the conversation moves to the topic of Sarah.
"She looked good," Randy observes. "Then again, she always looked good. You see a ring on her finger?"
"Like a wedding ring? As if that would stop you."
"We're not talking about me."
"I don't remember."
"Bullshit."
"Okay, she wasn't."
"It's open season, then."
"She's not an elk, Randy."
"I'm just saying you're here, she's here. Old times' sake and all that. It's sweet."
"I'm here because Ben died, not for some shag at the class- reunion weekend."
"What? You can't walk and chew gum at the same time?"
The bar is even busier tonight. A Leafs game on the flat- screens, an excuse to get out of the house in the middle of the week for some draft and half-price Burn Your Tongue Off! wings advertised on the paper pyramids on the tables.
Among the customers is Tracey's boyfriend. A good-looking, dark-haired kid who comes in wearing a Domino's Pizza jacket to give her a full kiss on the lips. Here's what you can see right away, as surely as you could see it when I kissed Sarah Mulgrave outside the Grimshaw Arena on game nights: these two are in love. And you can see that
the Domino's kid knows how special a young woman Tracey Flanagan is. That he is trying to figure a way to not blow it with her and go all the way, out of Grimshaw and beyond. A whole life with Tracey. That's what this kid wants, and is right to want.
"That yer fella?" Randy asks after the Domino's kid has left and Tracey returns to our table. He's decided to use his Irish accent again.
"Sure is," she says. "You better watch yourself."
"No need to be warned about those pizza-delivery guys. They don't mess about."
"Gary played for the Guardians too."
This declaration changes things. And it makes Randy drop the dumb accent.
"What position?"
"Right wing."
Randy slaps me on the back. "That's where Trev played! Though that was many moons ago."
"So my dad tells me."
"Your Gary, does he have a last name?"
"Pullinger."
"Rings a bell," I say.
"Bowl-More Lanes," Randy says, clicking his fingers. "Didn't the Pullingers own that place?"
"Gary's dad. But it burned down about ten years ago."
"The Bowl-More burned down?" Randy slams his fist onto the table in real outrage. "Had many a birthday party there as a youngster. You remember, Trev?"
"I remember."
Randy raises his mug. "Here's to Tracey and Gary. May you find love and happiness."
"Already have," she says.
The night goes on to gain a comfortable momentum, buoyed by Bushmills and the Leafs going into the third period with an unlikely two-goal lead over the Red Wings. They will ultimately lose, of course. But for now, Jake's is a place of hope and mild excitement and we are part of it.
I decide to quit while I'm ahead. I'm feeling pretty good, considering the grim business of the day—not to mention the strange encounter with the boy, and an observer I guessed to be Carl (though now, on the firmer ground of Jake's, I doubt either was who I thought he was). But much more of what's making me feel this way will only be pressing my luck. I'm tired. From the long day, from burying a friend, from fighting to keep the Parkinson's hidden from the world. And tomorrow I have to assume my duties as Ben's executor. A first-class hangover would make that unpleasant task only doubly so.
I head up to the bar to give Tracey my credit card.
"Wrapping up?"
"Just me," I say. "I wanted to pick up the tab before my friend and I wrestled over it. Though Randy is usually willing to lose that particular fight."
She swipes my card and taps the terminal with a pen, waiting for the printed receipt. It gives me a handful of seconds to study her profile up close. No doubt about it: something of Heather Langham lives in this girl.
She looks up at me.
"Sorry," I say. "It's rude to stare."
"Were you staring?"
"Honestly? I was thinking of someone else. Someone you remind me of."
"A girlfriend?"
"No. Just a person I looked up to."
"Are you flirting with me?" she says.
"Is that what this sounds like?"
"A little. But then, I don't really know you. And you're—"
"An old man. Old as your dad, anyway."
"So I don't know how guys like you go about things."
"Well, let me tell you. I'm not flirting. I'm confessing. A man who thinks he can see someone in someone else, but is only dreaming."
"Memory lane."
"That's it. That's where I live these days." My right hand fidgets at this, impatient at being still for the length of this exchange. "Trust me, I'm harmless."
"Trust you?"
"Or don't. Just know that a fellow doesn't get to meet a true lady too often anymore."
She considers me another moment. Then, out of nowhere, she punches me in the shoulder. Hard enough that it takes some effort on my part not to let my hand fly to the point of impact to soothe the hurt.
"Dad said you were pretty good. Back in the day." She laughs.
"Oh yeah? Good at what?"
She laughs some more before ripping the receipt from the machine and sticking her pen between my trembling fingers.
* * *
MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 8
Over the days that followed the night we found Heather Langham in the Thurman house we repeatedly reminded each other to act normal, a direction that raised questions in each of our minds as to what our normal might be. However I ended up resolving this, I considered my act a fairly accomplished performance. It certainly convinced my parents, classmates and, for stretches as long as a couple of hours at a time, even me.
Sarah, on the other hand, was a more skeptical audience. Right off she noticed something had changed. I assumed her main concern was that my feelings for her had waned, in the way Carl's did for the girls he cast aside. With the benefit of honesty, I assured her that I loved her, that I was aware of how lucky I was to have her, that nothing had come between us.
"This isn't an 'us' thing," she said. "Something's wrong with you."
I recall one lunch period when we drove out to Harmony with plans for what Sarah called, in a singing voice, an "afternoon delight." But to my astonishment, my normally enthusiastic teenage manhood offered no response to her attentions in the Buick's folded-down back seat. There were now two secrets I had to keep: I couldn't tell Sarah about finding Miss Langham, and I couldn't tell my friends about failing to get it up with a naked Sarah Mulgrave.
I don't remember us talking about it, huddled under a blanket of parkas, studying the patterns of frost our breath made over the windows. The significance of our skin against skin, dry and cool, was clear enough. Something had turned. And even though I was the one who knew what she couldn't know, I couldn't say how this knowledge had found power over us here, in our place, in Harmony.
"You guys ready?"
Her question, the first words spoken since I rolled onto my back in defeat, so clearly matched the current of my thoughts I worried I might have been speaking them aloud.
"Ready?"
"The playoffs. First game's on Friday, right?"
"Seaforth. Sure."
"Seaforth sucks."
"Shouldn't be a problem."
"I said hi to the coach today at school. It was strange."
I propped myself up on an elbow. "How do you mean?"
"I don't know. I'm standing there, and he stops and looks at me like I've grown a second head or something. Made me feel like a freak."
"Sounds like he was the one being freaky."
"It was just weird."
"He's a weird guy."
That's not true, I heard Sarah reply through her silence. He's the most not-weird grown-up we know.
I pulled my pants on. The denim hard and unyielding as wet canvas left to freeze on the clothesline.
"We should get back."
"Back to what?" she asked, and we both laughed. What was funny was how only two days ago we both would have been certain of the answer, and today we weren't sure.
I can't recollect exactly what people said over twenty years ago, even if I repeat their words into this Dictaphone as though I can. These moments are memories, and shifty ones at that, so what I'm doing is the sort of half-made-up scenes we used to watch on those That's Incredible! TV specials, shows that "investigated" the existence of UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster using dramatizations of witness accounts. It wasn't the truth, but the truth as someone remembered it, and someone else wrote into a scene. So that's me. A That's Incredible! dramatizer.
One thing I do remember, however, was Sarah's description of the coach's gaze when she stopped him to say hello. I may have made up the "grown a second head" part, but I definitely remember her saying how his look made her feel like a freak, because it was precisely the same thought I had at practice after school that day, when the coach entered the dressing room and, in looking at us, his team, wore an expression of suppressed shock, as though he had opened the wrong door and been confronted with chattering sa
squatches.
The moment passed so swiftly I don't think any of the older players noticed. They weren't looking to see if the few days since Heather Langham's disappearance had had any effect on the coach. But we were looking. And we believed we saw something in the way he had to work up an effort to scratch some plays on the blackboard, remind Chuck Hastings to stay high in the slot on the penalty kill and praise Carl for the blocked shots he took to the ribs in the season-ender against Wingham.
What was more, the coach seemed to notice our noticing. For the rest of practice I thought I caught him studying Ben or Carl or Randy or me, watching us in the same furtive way we watched him.
And then there was the coach's asking Ben how he was doing.
Was there anything odd in that? We didn't think so either. So when Ben told us that night, as we tossed twigs onto a small fire we made in the woods behind the Old Grove, passing a flask of Randy's dad's gin between us, that there was evidence to be gleaned from the coach's inquiring after him, we shot him down.
"He called me son," Ben said. "'Hey there, Ben. How're you doing, son?' It was fake. Like he was reading a line someone wrote for him."
"Are you saying he knows?" I asked.
"How would he know?" Ben answered. "Unless he was watching the place. Unless he was there."
"You think he was in the cellar?"
"Didn't it feel like somebody was?"
This stopped me for a second. It stopped all of us.
"All I'm saying," Ben said, "is if you'd done something wrong—something really, really wrong—and you didn't want that wrong thing to be found out, you might keep a pretty close eye on the business."
"Return to the scene of the crime," Randy said thoughtfully, as though he'd just coined the phrase.