The Guardians

by Andrew Pyper

  "That's right," Ben said. "And there was no better place to watch over Miss Langham than down there."

  It was strange how over the period of less than a week Ben had gone from the dreamiest of our group to the voice that carried the greatest authority. Our overnight leader.

  "If he knows it was us," Carl said, "then he knows we might talk."

  "That would also follow if he was aware that I saw him from my window."

  "Wait," I said. "Now all of a sudden you're sure it was him?"

  But Carl didn't let Ben answer. "He sure looks aware of everything to me. And if we're right about that, he's not going to want us blabbing."

  "No," Ben said.

  "He might try to stop us."

  "He might."

  Randy unzips, pees into the fire. A wet sizzle that sends up smoke, momentarily enveloping us all in shadow. "The coach wouldn't fuck with us," he said.

  "He fucked with Heather," Carl said.

  "We still don't know that," I said.

  "We don't?" Ben asked, the flames returning to life as Randy finished his nervous dribbles. "You saw the coach today. Do you really think somebody else did that to Miss Langham? Can you honestly say you think he doesn't know that we know?"

  Three faces, facing me. Even in the near dark I could see their certainty, their glitter-eyed excitement. The good news was we weren't alone. This was the comfort I could see my friends offering to me. We were in danger, the holders of terrible knowledge, but all could be borne if we stayed together. And we would.

  "You're right. He knows," I said, my conviction instantly as real as I tried to make it sound. "And we're the only ones who know what he did."

  "So what are we going to do?" Ben asked, though we could tell he knew the answer already.

  Heather Langham failed to show up for our music class on Tuesday, and we found her body at the bottom of the Thurman house on Friday. But by the time the next Tuesday arrived, and because there were no new developments to report, the story of her continued missing status in that morning's edition of The Grimshaw Beacon moved off the front page for the first time. The town's speculation over Heather Langham had already been replaced by the chances of the Guardians going all the way to the provincial championships.

  Which is not to say that people had stopped caring about the missing teacher, just that her story had nowhere to go. She had no family in Grimshaw, no one to make impatient urgings to the police or write letters to the editor. Despite the appealing photo of her that appeared with each article and TV news clip we saw, Heather Langham remained an outsider. There were no Langhams other than her in the phone book, none listed on the granite war memorial that named the local men who died overseas. She came from elsewhere, an unattached woman who lived alone in a rented room. She offered little foundation to build a mystery on.

  Perhaps it was for these reasons that most of us were forced to accept the dullest of explanations: she had quit and left town. Besides, there were no lashings of blood in Heather Langham's dormitory in the nurses' residence as was first rumoured, no suicide note, no sign of an evil twin sister stirring up trouble. Some concrete suggestion of foul play was required to get the town excited about the Langham story after the first few days of nothing to report.

  Over that first week, we—Ben, Carl, Randy and I—were kept busy perfecting our "normal" act. You might think one of us would have cracked, blabbed, broken into guilty sobs against our mother's breast. We had buried someone, after all. We carried news of murder. Wouldn't this find its way to the surface? Didn't we come from a world so cushioned and flat that the secret of what lay in the Thurman cellar would be more than we could bear?

  The answer was in the us of it. Alone, we would have run screaming from the house and told all. But together we held it in. As us, we could believe what was happening wasn't entirely, wakingly real.

  Sarah wanted to go to the movies. I remember because it was a return engagement of Flashdance, which we'd both seen when it first came out months earlier, and because I didn't really believe she was interested in seeing it again. She wanted what I wanted, something that only a couple of hours in the back rows of the Vogue could deliver: the two of us together in a warm place without any of the talk that had become so troubled between us.

  The house lights dimmed, and we were enveloped in shadow and Love's Baby Soft. As Jennifer Beals tumbled and flew across the screen, Sarah and I drew close. We weren't making out—there was no grappling with bra hooks or belts. Our hands were communicating, skin on skin. And what did our touches say? Some combination of I'm sorry and Here I am and No one could ever be closer to me than you.

  Then the movie ended, and we were forced back out into the cold. We stopped a half a block from her house, in the side lane next to Patterson's Candy & Milk that was our goodnight-kiss spot. Not that we were kissing.

  "I'm not going to ask you about it anymore," she said.

  "Ask about what?"

  "You're a terrible liar."

  Snow fell in fat clumps over our heads. It made the night feel smaller, surrounding us like the walls of an old barn, solid enough to keep out all outside sound but not the cold.

  "You think you're doing this for me," she said.

  "It's not your problem."

  "Look at me."

  It was a hard stare to meet. Partly because her hurt was so much clearer than my own. And because it made her even more beautiful.

  "I'm looking," I said.

  "And what do you see? Just another girl who can't handle the serious stuff."

  "That's not it."

  "Does Randy know what you're not telling me? Do Carl and Ben?"

  "They know because they have to know."

  "Well, maybe I do too."

  "Can't you just let it go?"

  "You think this is because I'm curious?"

  "Aren't you?"

  "I would be if I thought it was just you screwing some other girl. But it's not that. It's not something we can hide away."

  "Why not?"

  "I could if you could. But you can't. And it's killing you. You can't see that yet, but it is."

  I started away in anger, but Sarah grabbed me by the arm and spun me back to face her.

  "I had a dream the other night with you in it. In fact, there was nobody else," she said. "This old man walking along a beach wanting to say, 'Look at that sunset' or Those waves are coming in high' but never opening your mouth because there is nobody there to say it to."

  I thought she was about to cry. But it was me, already crying.

  "I know you, Trevor."

  "Yeah."

  "Then you have to trust me. And if not me, I hope you find someone else."

  I watched her walk to the street, where she paused. It was an opportunity for me to go to her. A held hand might have done it. Matched footsteps for the last hundred yards to her house, where I could have told her I'd see her tomorrow. But by the time I decided which of these felt more right she'd started off on her own, and there was no way of following.

  We lost the first game of the playoffs to Seaforth. For most in Grimshaw this was a disappointment. A handful might even have found it an outrage. But for us, it confirmed that the coach was Heather Langham's murderer.

  Most of the other players wrote off the coach's screwed-up line changes and listless pre-game talk as an off night. But we saw more than mere distraction in his struggle to remember our names, the out-of-character insults at the ref for making a tripping call on Dave Hurley (who was guiltily on his way to the penalty box anyway).

  Even more telling, he put Ben in net.

  Halfway through the third period, our team behind 3-1 but still with enough time for a chance to tie the game up, the coach summoned Vince Sproule to the bench and tapped Ben on the shoulder.

  "You want this?" he said.

  Not You're in or Shut 'em down or McAuliffe! Get in there! but a question.

  You want this?

  Spoken through the cage of Ben's mask so that he
was the one player on the bench who heard. A whisper that could be understood only as a warning or a challenge.

  Ben played well, by Ben standards. But by then the team had been thrown off by trailing a "bunch of dung- heeled inbreds" (as Carl called the Seaforth squad) and the coach's odd decision of sending our backup goalie in to finish the game, and we slowed, coughing up pucks, leaving Ben to fend for himself. He let in another two before the buzzer.

  "That's it. That's it," I remember Ben muttering as he came off the ice to the rare sound of boos echoing through the Grimshaw Arena. The others assumed he was voicing his frustration at being hung out to dry by his teammates. But we knew he'd come to a conclusion.

  There was a new clarity in Ben's eyes I saw even as he skated out from his net, a look he shot toward the bench that our fellow players saw as anger and we saw as stern resolve, but that now, in hindsight, might have been the first hint of madness.

  * * *

  [8]

  I've been up for a couple of hours when there's a knock at my door. Tap-slide, tap-slide, tap-slide. The way the boy might ask to come in.

  I'd dreamed about him all last night—dreams of me wandering through the Thurman house, sensing something just ahead or just behind, until a pair of cold hands drape over my eyes and I can smell the rancid breath of his laugh before he sinks his teeth into the back of my neck—and awakened to the threadbare sheets of my Queen's Hotel bed glued to me with sweat. A shower of brownish water helped remind me that these were only Grimshaw nightmares, and would retreat as soon as I was able to leave. Yet when the three evenly spaced knocks at the door come—tap-slide, tap-slide, tap-slide—all such comforting thoughts skitter away. And in place of my own voice in my head, there is the boy's.

  Can Trev come out and play?

  I go to the door because he will never go away if I don't, and it is the only way out. And because the answer to his question is yes. Trev has nothing better to do. He can come out and play.

  The doorknob is a ball of ice in my hand. This, I tell myself, is likely only another quirky symptom of Parkinson's I've noticed of late, the exaggerated hots and colds of things. Yet my fingers remain frozen to the brass, unwilling to turn the knob, unable to pull away.

  Open up, the boy says.

  The door swings back. So unexpected its edge slices into my shoulder, knocking me back a half-step.

  "Jesus," Randy says, slouching in the hall, his T-shirt and jeans crosshatched with wrinkles. "You look worse than I feel."

  "I'm fine."

  "Whatever you say."

  "Is that coffee?"

  Randy looks down at the two paper cups screwed into the tray in his hand as though a stranger had asked him to hold it and had yet to return.

  "It appears it is," he says, then tries to look past my shoulder. "You got company?"

  "No. Why?"

  "You look all blotchy and flustered, for one thing. And for another, you're not letting me in."

  "I thought there was someone else at the door."

  "Who?"

  "Nobody."

  "Funny. I thought there was nobody knocking at my door this morning too."

  Randy comes in, stands with his back to me as I take a seat at the desk, steadying my hands by gripping its edge. "You up for some breakfast?"

  "I'll just grab something on my way to the McAuliffes'."

  "Right. Trevor the Executor."

  "Care to join me?"

  "Me and you folding Ben's underwear and filing his Hustlers? I'm good, thanks."

  Randy notices the Dictaphone I've left on the desktop.

  "What's that?"

  "A tape recorder," I say, slipping it into my jacket pocket. "Except it doesn't use tapes. So I suppose it's not really a tape recorder. It's digital."

  "I know what it is. I'm wondering what you're using it for."

  Randy stares at my hands, white knuckled and ridged, both returned to clutching the edge of the desk.

  "I'm keeping a kind of diary," I say.

  "Really."

  "One of my doctors said they sometimes help."

  "Help what?"

  "People with diseases like mine."

  "Yeah? How's that work?"

  "It's supposed to make you feel less alone or something."

  "I'm just trying to picture you sitting here talking into that thing, counting up how many beers you had last night and the crap you took this morning and how many hairs you pulled out of the drain after your shower."

  "It's not like that."

  "No? What's it like?"

  "I'm not keeping a diary of the present, but the past."

  This loosens the teasing grin from Randy's face, so that he appears vaguely pained, as though waiting for a stomach cramp to release its hold.

  "The past," he says finally. "How far back you going?"

  "Guess."

  "The winter when we were sixteen."

  "That's not a bad title for it."

  Randy sits on the end of the bed. Rests his hands on his knees in the way of a man who thinks his body might be about to betray him in some unpredictable way.

  "You think that's a good idea?" he says.

  "In what sense?"

  "In the sense of anyone reading or listening to this diary of yours?"

  "Nobody's ever going to read it."

  "Because we promised. You too. You promised never to tell."

  "I'm not telling. It's just for me."

  "To be forgiven."

  "That's asking too much."

  "So what's it about?"

  "I just need to hear myself say what I've never let myself say."

  "Because we never talked about it even then, did we?" Randy lowers his head to be held in his cupped hands. "We never said a goddamn thing to each other."

  "We were trying to pretend it wasn't real."

  "But it was," Randy says, his freckled face the same self- doubting oval that looked out from his grade ten yearbook photo. "It was. Wasn't it?"

  I step out of the taxi in front of the McAuliffe place, pay the driver through the window and make my herky-jerky way up the steps to the front door, all without looking at the Thurman house across the street. Not as easy as it sounds. I can feel it wanting me to turn my eyes its way, to take it in now in the full noontime light. To deny it is as difficult as not surveying the damage of a car accident as you roll past, the survivors huddled in blankets, the dead being pulled from the wreck.

  And this is how the house wins. Mrs. McAuliffe takes a few seconds too long to come to the door after I ring the bell, so that, even as I see her shadow approaching through the door's curtained glass and hear the frail crackle of her "Coming! Coming!" I steal a glance. At the same instant, the sun pokes out from a hole in the clouds. Sends dark winks back at me from the second-floor windows, a dazzle of false welcome.

  "Trevor," Mrs. McAuliffe says, and though I can't see her at first when I turn back to the door, my vision burned with the yellow outline of the Thurman house, I can feel the old woman's arms stretched open for a hug, and my own arms reaching out and pulling her close.

  "I'm so sorry about Ben, Mrs. A.," I whisper into her moth-balled cardigan.

  "I'm not a Mrs. anything anymore to you. I'm just Betty."

  "Not sure I'll ever get used to that."

  "That's what you learn when you get old," she says, pushing me back to hold my jaw in the bone-nests of her hands. "There's so much you never get used to."

  The house looks more or less as I remember it. The dark wood panelling in the living room, the lace-covered dining table, the brooding landscapes of the Scottish Highlands too small for the plaster walls they hang on. Even the smell of the place is familiar. Apparently Ben and his mother carried on with their deep-fried diets well into his adulthood, judging from the diner-like aroma of hot oil and toast.

  "You look well," Betty McAuliffe tells me as I shakily replace a Royal Doulton figurine of a Pekingese to the side table where I stupidly picked it up.

  "I do?"r />
  "Tired, maybe," she says, ignoring my struggles. "But handsome as always."

  "It's just a little dark in here, that's all. Pull back the curtains and you'll see the wrinkles and bloodshot eyes."

  "Don't I know! It's why I keep them closed."

  In the kitchen, Mrs. McAuliffe shows me the neat piles of papers that are Ben's will, some of his receipts, bank statements. His death certificate.

  "It's not much, is it?" she asks. "A whole life and you could fold it into a single envelope and mail it to . . . well, where would you mail it?"

  "To me."

  "Of course. Mail it to you. Though there'd be no point in that because you're here now, which I'm glad of. Very glad of indeed."

  I turn back to find the old woman standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking to the fridge, the sink, her shoes, me, then starting over again. Her hair white and loose as dandelion fluff.

  "Mrs. McAuliffe. Betty. Are you—?"

  "Would you like a cup of tea?" she asks, and I can see that making a pot for a guest might just be enough to save her life.

  "That would be great. And a biscuit, if you have one."

  She busies herself with these tasks, and I do my best to busy myself with mine. But aside from confirming the filing of Ben's past few tax returns (he'd earned next to no income), there seems little for me to do. Then I discover the package on the chair next to mine. A brown bubble-wrapped envelope with my name on the front.

  "What's this?" I ask Mrs. McAuliffe as she places an empty mug and plate of butter cookies in front of me.

  "Ben didn't leave a note. Nothing aside from a white rose he left on my bedside table. And that."

  "You haven't opened it?"

  "Ben was sick," she starts. "But he had . . . interests. And I respected that. So no, I haven't opened it. Because whatever is in it, he felt you would understand and I would not."

  There is an edge to these last words, a buried grievance or accusation.

  She fills my mug to the brim. Stands over me, the teapot wavering in her hand, as though uncertain whether to carry it to the sink or let it drop to the floor.

  "Where are you staying?" she asks.