by Andrew Pyper
Barry Tate and his roly-poly partner step out of the car and stand on the sidewalk. For a time they stare up at the Thurman house with their hands on their hips, speaking to each other in words I can't make out, though their tone seems doubtful, as if wondering aloud if they have come to the right address.
Barry makes his way to the front door first, tries the handle and, finding it locked, starts around toward the rear, his partner following. After five minutes, they have yet to reappear.
I slip down and let my back rest against the wall. Open Ben's diary again. For another dozen pages there is his continued notation of wasted hours and days. Over time, it becomes so repetitious I play the game of scanning for the flavours of soups he heats for his lunches. A prisoner's menu of split peas, minestrones and chicken noodles.
Among the banal details, there are occasional episodes of Ben making sure that none entered the house. Shouting down at kids making bets over who had the guts to open the front door and place both feet over the threshold. Threatening to phone their parents, pretending he knew their names. Another entry told of a "half-drunk girl" being led by her boyfriend around the side of the house at night. Ben rushed downstairs, ran across the street to the back door in time to haul the girl out of the kitchen, telling her she didn't know how bad a place it was, how much danger she was in just being there. She ran away crying, whereupon the boyfriend suckerpunched Ben in the mouth.
Sometimes, when older high-schoolers had slipped inside, Ben called the cops. The diary would note how many trespassers were hustled out by the officers, who seemed to arrive later and later with each report Ben called in; the police would have let the Thurman house go unmonitored were it not for the McAuliffe head case who was conducting a permanent stakeout on it. Not that Ben cared what they thought. His duty was to keep the empty house empty.
Then there's a longer entry. June 22, 2002. The date underlined in red ink.
Something today.
Just after noon the door handle turned. I have seen it rattle before. But this time it turned: a slow circle, like the person doing the turning was figuring out how it worked. Or didn't want to be seen doing it.
Then the door swung open. It was Heather.
Blinded by the daylight, terrified. Filthy. No clothes.
Then the door slammed shut again. Slammed. If anyone had been listening—anyone other than me—they would have heard the wood cracking the frame. The click of the lock . . .
Voices from the street pull me from the page. It's Barry Tate and his partner, the former finishing up an anecdote that brings a chortle from the latter's chest. Before they reach the cruiser Barry looks up to the window. He doesn't seem surprised to see me here, my chin resting on the sill. In fact he waves. And I wave back.
"Nothing," he says, or at least shapes his mouth around the word without speaking it. Then he shrugs.
I watch the two of them take their time getting into the car, enjoying being out of the office. Even once the engine's started they linger, taking notes. Then, having run out of excuses to let the clock run on, Barry shifts into drive, rolls up Caledonia and out of sight.
I'm watching the front door by coincidence. Or I'm watching it because I was directed to, just as Ben was on the twenty- second of June, 2002. Either way, within a heartbeat of Barry Tate's cruiser rolling away, the doorknob turns.
The motion is tentative. And there is part of me even in this moment that recognizes that this is merely an echo of Ben's hallucination, my own imagining of an earlier imagining. It's why I let the doorknob turn a full circle without looking away.
A click.
And then, before I can turn away, the door swings open.
A young woman. Naked and shaking, her hair a nest of sweat- glued clumps. She tries to run, to attach the motion of pulling the door to her first step of escape into the daylight, but her limbs are too unsteady, and she wavers dizzily on the threshold.
It isn't Heather. It's the woman from the photos Randy showed me, the one I tried not to let myself see, to memorize, though I was too late in that. Just as I am too late to close my eyes against the dirt-blackened hands that come down on Tracey's shoulders and pull her back into the house before the door slams shut.
* * *
MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 11
The morning after we left the coach overnight in the Thurman house, we waited for Ben at our table in the cafeteria, drinking the watery hot chocolate spat out of a machine that made even worse tea and chicken soup. There was little talk. We were boys of an age when sleep came easy, and were new to the emptiness that followed a night spent troubled and awake.
When we saw Ben through the window making his way across the football field we knew that he had found no more sleep than the rest of us, and that his visit to the coach had not gone well. He looked like he was reprising his role as one of Grimshaw's founding fathers in the annual school play: stooped, bent at the knees, arms rigid at his sides.
"You think he's dead?" Randy asked, and for a moment I thought the question concerned Ben himself. But of course Randy was asking about the coach. Whether he had survived the night's cold.
And then, as Ben entered the cafeteria and started our way, a second interpretation of Randy's question arrived. Had Ben going alone to see the coach had a purpose other than eliciting a confession? Was he now the coach's killer, just as the coach had been Heather Langham's?
Ben sat, reached for my hot chocolate. As he swallowed, he raised his brow as though impressed by its wretchedness.
"We should bring the coach some of this," he said. "If he figures it's the only breakfast he's going to get, he'd say anything."
It took what felt like five full minutes before any of us realized Ben had just told a joke.
Eventually, Ben told us he'd gone into the house just before dawn. The coach was "okay, physically." He wasn't admitting to any crimes, though. In fact, the only things he was saying weren't making much sense at all.
"How do you mean?" I asked.
"I don't know. It might be an act."
"Is he pissed off?"
"More like he's scared."
Ben noticed some other kids, a bunch of grade niners, looking our way. He directed a stare back at them so intense it made them scuttle off to mind their own business.
"He kept saying he'd had an interesting conversation last night. Then he's looking over his shoulder, like I'm not even there."
"What else?"
Ben thought for a moment. "He said we would have to be guardians."
"We are."
"I don't think he meant the team. He kind of switched personalities again—not a scared kid anymore, but himself, more or less. He got, I don't know, fatherly on me."
"What'd he say?"
"Some bullshit."
"What bullshit?"
'"You have to keep watch.'"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You're asking me?"
"Sounds like he's losing it," Randy said.
"It's pretty cold in there," I said. "Maybe he's hypothermic."
"Or possessed," Randy said, and mock-barfed, Linda Blair-style.
Carl was the only one who laughed. A sharp snort that reminded us he was there.
"Don't you get it?" he said. "It's a warning."
"About what?"
Carl looked around the table. He's going to tell them, I thought. He's going to say there's a boy in the house who can talk inside your head if you give him half a chance.
"Us," he said. "He's saying we have to guard against ourselves."
Now it was Randy's turn to snort. "Ooooh. That's deep, Carl. You've just blown my mind."
Carl just kept grinning. Trying to look like he was still able to kid around with Randy as he always had. Sitting there, aware of our eyes on him, we saw how our hockey brawler, our square-jawed tough who was alone among us in being able to fool liquor store clerks about his age, had lost twenty pounds overnight. Chilled and frail, hugging his arms across his
chest like one of the wheelchaired ladies who lined the halls of Cedarfield Seniors Home.
I wondered if Todd Flanagan detected anything strange about us as he made his way over to our table. Todd was a Guardian too. I could only hope he was writing off our oddness to nerves about that night's game two against Seaforth.
"Morning, ladies," he said.
Todd was blue-eyed and dark-haired ("black Irish," as my father called his family, though I never knew what this meant) and essentially decent, though he fought hard to keep up his minimum obligations in the bullying and mockery departments. I always thought he'd rather have been our friend than his senior-year teammates', but such transgression between grades was unthinkable. What also set Todd apart was that he was a dad. An eighteen-year-old father to a daughter born at the beginning of the season. We envied him—not for this, but for his girlfriend, Tina. A tight-sweatered vixen whose brief career in boy-trading had been cut short with the arrival of Tracey, the drooling, howling bundle she sometimes brought to games.
"Anybody seen the coach?"
"No," Ben said, taking another gulp of my muddy hot chocolate. "Why?"
"Laura called me this morning."
"Laura?"
"His wife dickwad. Said he didn't come home last night. Wondered if he was hanging out with somebody on the team."
"All night?"
"I know. It's weird."
"He'll turn up," Carl said. "Has the coach ever missed a game?"
Todd shook his head. "Seaforth pussies," he said half-heartedly before backing away.
Over morning classes, news of Laura Evans spotted in the principal's office was circulated in different versions, from her showing up with a pair of cops to her bawling uncontrollably until the school nurse gave her a pill. We didn't believe any of these stories necessarily. But what we did know was that the coach's absence had now been officially reported. Combined with Heather Langham's disappearance, it was a story that had nowhere to go but into wilder and wilder speculations. Primary among these was that Heather and the coach had run off together. The other theory concerned a more macabre take. A monster who had crept into Grimshaw to claim its teachers, one by one.
"I hope he takes Dandruff Degan next," I remember Vince Sproule saying. "Save me asking for an extension on my cartography assignment."
Among the Guardians there was an added concern about whether that night's game could go ahead without the coach. There was a critical, morale-sapping difference between the man behind the bench being reported missing and him coming down with the flu. Nothing actually wrong was known to have happened. And yet the mystery about his absence, the foreign whiff of the uncanny that had drifted over Grimshaw's imagination, seemed to undermine the importance of a hockey game, even if it was the playoffs.
But without a coach to call it off, and without any evidence of adultery or more serious wrongdoing to bring before league officials, the game was an at once unbelievable and unstoppable event shadowing our day. For us, the four Guardians who knew where the coach was, the idea of lacing up and charging around the ice in just a few hours made us almost as sick as thinking of how he had got there.
It wasn't until I saw Sarah waiting for me at my locker that I realized I'd been running from her all day. Taking different routes between classes, avoiding the cafeteria at lunch, pretending I didn't see her on the one occasion she waved over the heads of other students at the far end of the hall. But now there was no escape. Nothing to do but try to work up a smile and taste her grape ChapStick with a kiss.
"You sick or something?" she asked. "Because you look a little on the pukey side, gotta say."
"Just nervous about tonight's game."
"Nope. Try again." She came in for another hug, which allowed her hand to cup my crotch. "So tell me," she whispered against my ear, "what's going on here?"
"There's nothing going on."
"You think I'm dumb?"
"You're the opposite of dumb."
"And what's that?"
"Smart?"
Sarah pulled back a few inches so I could see her face.
"I love you, Trevor," she said. And though I tried to say it back, it wouldn't come.
I remember this exchange so clearly now for a reason I hadn't expected when I first summoned it to mind. It wasn't the worry I had that Sarah would figure out what we had done. It was a flash of knowledge.
What was happening in the Thurman house had already drawn a line between Sarah and me, and though it didn't stop me from loving her, it was draining the idea of forever from our love. There will be others, I thought for the very first time as I kicked my locker shut, spun the lock and started away, lying that I had to get to a team meeting. She is only a girl among girls. It was cruel, however private a thought it remained. Soon, a whole day will pass when you don't think of her once. Thoughts whose meanness was all the harder to bear because their truth placed them out of reach, beyond forgiving.
My turn to visit the coach was scheduled to follow the last bell of the day, and I was late already. At that time of year, losing fifteen minutes can mean a lot when it comes to light, the after-school dusk easing ever closer to night. It made my walk to the Thurman house feel longer. And when it came into view, it was halfway to losing the vulnerable details—the bubbled paint, sagging porch—that in daylight denied it some of its power. The house preferred darkness for the same reason old whores do. It allowed for the possibility of seduction.
The between-class report from Randy, who'd gone in before me, told of a coach whose mental condition was deteriorating faster than his confinement alone should have given rise to. Ben had tried giving him a pen and piece of paper on which to write whatever he needed to say that he couldn't say aloud, and the coach had simply signed his name at the bottom and told Ben to fill in the rest any way he wanted. He hadn't eaten the food we delivered to him. He wasn't complaining of the cold, or of being falsely accused, or even of being lashed to a post in a sunless cellar. What he kept saying was that he wasn't alone in there.
This was what kept me frozen on the sidewalk. I pretended that I was making sure nobody was looking before I crept along the hedgerow, but in fact I was wondering how much money I had left in my account from a summer of pool cleaning, and if it would be enough for a train ticket to Toronto.
He's not alone in there.
As if on cue, there was the sound of a distant train whistle, beckoning me. Followed by a flash of movement in one of the side windows.
Pale skin. A blur of long, tossed hair from a head twisted from side to side. A blink of struggle.
It was the impulse to help, to save—it was a woman I'd seen—that crunched my feet onto the frozen grass. Sliding under cover of cheek-poking branches. When I drew square with the house I fell to my knees.
It was the same window where I'd noticed the hopeless fuckt the night we discovered Heather Langham's body. The word still there, a legible blue against an interior of black.
Up the hill of Caledonia Street, the streetlights were flickering to life, one by one. That's what I'd seen. Not a woman but the bulb in the streetlight behind me popping to brightness.
Yet even with this mystery solved, I stayed where I was. The twilight, the dirty panes, the lightless interior: even if something was there, anything that could be observed through the window would be obscured if it showed itself again. It made me squint. There was the sense that, above all, the house wanted me to stick around, to witness. Better yet, to come inside.
Which I wouldn't do. What difference would it make? The coach wasn't going to tell me anything if he hadn't already told Randy or Ben. And they were coming by later for another visit anyway. It needn't be me going in there now, alone.
I crawled out from under the hedgerow. Rose to my feet, started sidestepping back toward the sidewalk.
That was the right thing to do. Here's the wrong:
I looked back at the window. And saw a woman's
face come to the glass.
I fell back a
gainst the branches. If the hedge hadn't been there I would have collapsed, but it held me up, pinned to its nettles like a plastic bag blown against a fence.
When I looked at the window again, there was only an orb of streetlight. And the fuckt. Though wasn't the t slightly smudged from the moment before?
I started toward the back of the house, adding details to the face I'd seen. A woman. That was all I had to start with. Along with the idea that she was in desperate fear. And that she was naked. That she wasn't alone.
Tina Uxbridge.
I'd been thinking of her ever since Todd had come by our table in the cafeteria. In the back of my mind I'd been flipping through my (partly made-up) mental snapshots of Tina hip-swinging down the school's hallways, Tina breastfeeding, Tina and Todd and the different ways they might have gone about conceiving their daughter. The truth is, I'd pictured her, dwelled on her, before. Because she was pretty and I was sixteen. Because I was a sixteen-year-old boy.
I opened the back door.
For a time I stood in the kitchen, listening. I think I half expected to hear the coach's voice, cackling my name from the cellar or pleading for release. The house's quiet should have brought relief, but didn't. I was waiting and listening. Which meant something else was too.
And then it told me it was.
We're waiting.
The faintest whisper, no louder than a midge's wings.
I didn't go down to the cellar to check on the coach. He might have escaped, might have been dead, I didn't care. His fate meant nothing to me as I shuffled down the hall and came to stand just inside the living room. It was the woman I needed to see.
There was the fuckt on the window. The smudged t.
The house had wanted me to watch. And all there was to see was the way the shadow of the backlit tree limbs tried to nudge a beer can over the rug. Yet I stayed. Wishing for the woman or any other dead thing not to appear, and impatient for it at the same time.