The Guardians Read online

  On the bus ride home we, the youngest Guardians, were permitted to sit at the back, an acknowledgment of our success on the battlefield. I recall us looking at each other as we rolled out of the parking lot, unable to hold the giddy smiles off our faces. Which started the laughing. We laughed three-quarters of an hour through a snowstorm, and though we expected someone to tell us to shut our mouths or they'd shut them for us at any second, they never did.

  Ben:

  Our Zen mascot of a backup goalie. Because Vince Sproule, our starter, was eighteen and the best stopper in the county, Ben almost never saw ice time, which was fine with him. His proper place was at the end of the bench anyway. Mask off, hands resting in his lap, offering contemplative nods as we came and went from our shifts, as though the blessings of a vow-of-silence monk.

  Ben was the sort of gentle-featured, unpimpled kid (he made you think pretty before pushing the thought away) who would normally have invited the torment of bullies, especially on a team composed of boys old enough to coax actual beards from their chins. But they left Ben alone.

  I think he was spared because he was so plainly odd. It was the authenticity of his strangeness that worked as a shield when, in another who was merely different, it would have attracted the worst kind of attention. They liked Ben for this. But they kept their distance from him because of it too.

  Trevor (Me):

  A junk-goal god. Something of a floater, admittedly. A dipsy-doodling centre known for his soft hands (hands that now have trouble pouring milk).

  There was, at sixteen, the whisperings of scouts knowing who I was. Early in the season the coach had a talk with my parents, urging them to consider the benefits of a college scholarship in the States. Who knows? Maybe Trev had a chance of going straight to pro.

  Of course, this sort of thing was said about more than it ever happened to. Me included. Not that I wasn't good enough—we'll never know if I was or wasn't. Because after the abrupt end of my one and only season as a Guardian, I never skated again.

  I had known Randy since kindergarten, when I approached him and, offering to share my Play-Doh, asked, "Do you want to be in my gang?" I remember that: gang. And even though I was alone, Randy accepted.

  Ben joined us in early grade school, Carl a year later. That was grade three.

  My father, not known for his wisdom (though he took runs at it on the nights he hit the sauce harder than usual), once told me something that has proven consistent with my experience: while a man can accumulate any number of acquaintances over his life, his only true friends are the ones he makes in youth.

  Yet why Randy, Ben and Carl and no others? I could say it was the way we saw ourselves in each other. The recognition of my own foolishness in Randy's clowning, my imagination in Ben's trippy dreams, my rage in Carl's fisticuffs. How we had a better chance of knowing who we were together than we ever would have on our own.

  What we shared made us friends. But here's the truth of the thing: our loyalty had little to do with friendship. For that, you'd have to look elsewhere.

  You'd have to look in the house.

  We were in Ben's backyard, out behind his garden shed, the four of us passing around a set of Charlie's Angels bubble-gum cards. I remember the hushed intensity we brought to studying Farrah Fawcett. The wide Californian smile. The astonishing nipples piercing their bikini veils.

  We were eight years old.

  And then there's Mrs. McAuliffe's voice, calling Ben inside.

  "I'm not hungry," he shouted back.

  "This isn't about dinner, honey."

  She was trying not to cry. We could hear that from the other end of the McAuliffes' lot. We could hear it through the garden shed's walls.

  Ben crossed the yard and stood before his mother, listening to her as she wrung her hands on her Kiss Me, I'm Scottish! apron. He waited a moment after she finished. Then, as though at the pop of a starter's pistol, he ran.

  And we followed. Even as he crossed Caledonia Street and onto the Thurman property, we stayed after him. Ben scooted around the side of the house and we came around the corner in time to see the back door swing closed. Our feet had never touched this ground before. It was the one place we never even dared each other to go. Yet now we were running into the house, each of us fighting to be first, all calling Ben's name.

  We found him in the living room. He was leaning against the wall between the two side windows. His crumpled form looked smaller than it should have, as though the house had stolen part of him upon entry.

  "My dad's dead," he said when we gathered to stand over him. "She said it was an accident. But it wasn't."

  Randy frowned. It was the same face he made when asked to come to the blackboard to work through a long-division equation. "What do you mean?"

  "It wasn't an accident!"

  He was angry more than anything else. His father was gone and it was his weakness that had taken him. A coward. Ben had been shown to have come from shoddy stock, and it was the revelation of bad luck that held him, not grief.

  So we grieved for him.

  Without a look between us, we knelt and took Ben in our arms. Four booger-nosed yard apes with little in our heads but Wayne Gretzky and, now, Farrah daydreams. Yet we held our friend—and each other—in a spontaneous show of comradeship and love. We were experiencing a rare thing (rarer still for boys): we were feeling someone else's pain as acutely as if it were our own. Ben wasn't crying, but we were.

  More than this, the moment stopped time. No, not stopped: it stole the meaning from time. For however long we crouched together against the cracked walls of the Thurman house's living room we weren't growing older, we weren't eight, we weren't attempting another of the million awkward steps toward adulthood and its presumed freedoms. We were who we were and nothing else. A kind of revelation, as well as a promise. Ben had been the first of us to take a punch from the grown-up world. And we would be there when the other blows came our way.

  We were pulling Ben to his feet when we heard the girl.

  A moan from upstairs. A gasp, and then an exhaled cry.

  I remember the three versions of the same expression on the faces of my friends. The shame that comes not from something we'd done but from something we didn't yet understand.

  We'd heard that older kids sometimes came to the Thurman house to do stuff, and that some of this stuff concerned boys and girls and the things they could do with each other with their clothes off. Though we didn't really know our way around the mechanics, we knew that this was what was going on up there in one of the empty bedrooms.

  I'm uncertain of many details from that afternoon, but I know this: we all heard it. Not the moaning, but how it turned into something else.

  What we heard as Carl pulled the back door of the Thurman house closed was not the voice of a living thing. Human in its origin but no longer. A voice that should not have been possible, because it belonged to the dead.

  The moaning from the girl upstairs changed. A new sound that showed what we took at first to be her pleasure wasn't that at all but a whimper of fear. We knew this without comprehending it, just stupid children at least half a decade shy of tracing the perimeters of what sex or consent or hurt could mean between women and men. It was the sound the dead girl made upstairs that instantly taught us. For in the gasp of time before we stepped outside and the closed door left the backyard and the trees and the house in a vacuum of silence, we heard the beginnings of a scream.

  * * *

  [2]

  There's a train to Grimshaw leaving Union Station at noon, which gives me three hours to pack an overnight bag, hail a cab and buy a ticket. An everyday sequence of actions. Yet for me, such tasks—pack a bag, hail a cab—have become cuss-laced battles against my mutinous hands and legs, so that this morning, elbowing out of bed after a night of terrible news, I look to the hours ahead as a list of Herculean trials.

  Shave Face without Lopping Off Nose.

  Tie Shoelaces.

  Zip Up Fly.


  Among the fun facts shared by my doctors at the time I was diagnosed with Parkinson's was that I could end up living for the same number of years I would have had coming if I hadn't acquired the disease. So, I asked, over this potentially long stretch, what else could I look forward to? Some worse versions of stuff I was already experiencing—the involuntary kicks and punches—along with a slew of new symptoms that sounded like the doctor was making them up as he went along, a shaggy-dog story designed to scare the bejesus out of me before he clapped me on the shoulder with a "Hey! Just kidding, Trevor. Nothing's that bad"? But he never got around to the punchline, because there wasn't one.

  Let's try to remember what I do my best to forget:

  A face that loss of muscle control will render incapable of expression. Difficulties with problem solving, attention, memory. The sensation of feeling suffocatingly hot and clammily cold at the same time. (This one has already made a few appearances, leading to the performance of silent-movie routines worthy of Chaplin, where I desperately dial up the thermostat while opening windows to stick my head out into the twenty-below air.) Vision impairment. Depression. Mild to fierce hallucinations, often involving insects (the one before bed last night: a fresh loaf of bread seething with cockroaches). Violent rem sleep that jolts you out of bed onto the floor.

  For now, though, I'm mostly just slow.

  This morning, when my eyes opened after dreams of Ben calling for help from behind his locked bedroom door, the clock radio glowed 7:24. By the time my feet touched carpet it was 7:38. Every day now begins with me lying on my back, waiting for my brain to send out the commands that were once automatic.

  Sit up.

  Throw legs over side of bed.

  Stand.

  Another ten minutes and this is as far as I've got. On my feet, but no closer to Grimshaw than the bathroom, where I'm working a shaky blade over my skin. Little tongues of blood trickling through the lather.

  And, over my shoulder, a woman.

  A reflection as real as my own. More real, if anything, as her wounds lend her swollen skin the drama of a mask. There is the dirt too. Caked in her hair, darkening her lashes. The bits of earth that refused to shake off when she rose from it.

  That I'm alone in my apartment is certain, as I haven't had a guest since the diagnosis. And because I recognize who stands behind me in the mirror's steam. A frozen portrait of violence that, until now, has visited me only as I slept. The face at once wide-eyed and lifeless, still in the mounting readiness of all dead things.

  Except this time she moves.

  Parts her lips with the sound of a tissue pulled from the box. Dried flakes falling from her chin like black icing.

  To pull away would be to back into her touch. To go forward would be to join her in the mirror's depth. So I stay where I am.

  A blue tongue that clacks to purpose within her mouth. To whisper, to lick. To tell me a name.

  I throw my arm against the glass. Wipe her away. The mirror bending against my weight but not breaking. When she's gone I'm left in a new clarity, stunned and ancient, before the mist eases me back into vagueness so that I am as much a ghost as she.

  Impotence. Did I fail to mention that this is coming down the pike too? Though I could still do the deed if called upon (as far as I know), I have gone untested since the Bad News. I think I realized that part of my life was over even as the doc worked his lips around the P-word. No more ladies for this ladies' man.

  Is that what I was? If the shoe fits.

  And let's face it, the shoe fit pretty well for a while: an unmarried, all-night-party-hosting nightclub owner. Trevor, of Retox. Girlfriends all beautiful insomniacs with plans to move to L.A. I don't know if any of them could be said to have gotten to know me, nor did they try. I was Trevor, of Retox. Always up for a good time, fuelled by some decent drugs up in the VIP lounge of the place with the longest lineups on Friday nights. I fit. Though never for long. I hold the dubious distinction of having been in no relationship since high school that made it past the four-month mark. (I was more often the dumped than the dumper, I should add. The women I saw over my Retox years occupied the same world I did, a world where people were expected to want something other than what they had, to be elsewhere than across the restaurant table or in the bed they were in at any given time. It was a world of motion, and romance requires at least the idea of permanence.)

  Who else was there with me in Retox-land? My business partners, though they were something less than friends, all work-hard—play-hard demons, the kind of guys who were great to share a couple nights in Vegas with but who, in quieter moments, had little to say beyond tales of how they got the upper hand in a real estate flip or gleaned the "philosophies" from a billionaire's memoir. On the family side, there was only my brother left, and I spoke to him long-distance on a quarterly basis, asking after the wife and athletic brood he seemed to be constantly shuttling around to rinks and ballet classes out in Edmonton. My parents were gone. Both of major cardiac events (what heart attacks are now, apparently) and both within a year of moving out of Grimshaw and into a retirement bungalow with a partial view of Lake Huron. That's about it. I've been alone, but well entertained.

  And then the doctors stepped in to poop on the party. Within three weeks of the Bad News I sold Retox and retreated into the corners of my underfurnished condo to manage the mutual funds that will, I hope, pay for the nurses when the time comes for them to wheel, wipe and spoon. Until then, I do my best to keep my condition a secret. With full concentration I am able to punch an elevator button, hold a menu, write my signature on the credit card slip—all without giving away my status as a Man with a Serious Disease. In a way, it's only a different take on the "normal act" I've been keeping up since high school. It's likely that only my best friends from that time, my fellow Guardians, know the effort it takes.

  Then, in a small town a hundred miles away, one of them ties one end of a rope to a ceiling beam and the other around his neck and the normal act has fallen away. There is only room for the lost now. To let the dead back in.

  That's it, Trev. Keep moving. Keep it simple.

  Button Shirt.

  Find Seat on Train.

  And when the call for Grimshaw comes, do what every shaking, betraying part of you will fight doing and get off.

  * * *

  MEMORY DIARY

  Entry No. 3

  When I remember Grimshaw now, a collage of places comes to mind. The Old Grove Cemetery. The rail line that snaked through town, straightening only in front of the station, polka-dotted with bird shat. The sky: low, cottony and grey. The trail that followed the river right out of town and could, it was said, lead a runaway all the way to Lake Huron. The sort of things everyone who has grown up in a small town has their own version of.

  And like every small town, Grimshaw had a haunted house.

  321 Caledonia Street. Once the Thurman place, though who the Thurmans were, and when it was theirs, we didn't know. Although it was red-bricked and wide-porched like most of Grimshaw's older homes, it was distinct in our minds, broader and higher, set farther back from the street. We saw foreboding significance in its broken weather vane, a decapitated rooster spinning around in the most mild breezes as though panicked, a literal chicken with its head cut off. Yet other than this, it was its sameness that left it open to stories we could dream taking place in our own kitchens and bedrooms. It was a dark fixture of our imaginations precisely because it appeared as normal as the houses we lived in.

  The house was occupied only for brief stretches. Outsiders who'd been recruited to be the new bank manager or Crown attorney and thought a place of such character was worth an attempt at restoration. The money pit it inevitably turned out to be chased such dreamers away. Or, if you went with the versions we told each other, they were sent out screaming into the night by furious spirits and bleeding walls.

  Ben McAuliffe lived across from the place. It allowed us to look out from his attic bedroom and through the ma
ples that darkened its double lot, trying to catch a flash of movement—or, worse, a toothily grinning ghoul—in one of its windows. It spooked us. But no more than the werewolf and vampire comics we traded among ourselves that delivered brief, dismissible chills. Even then, we didn't think there was such a thing as a real haunted house.

  Of all the things we ended up being wrong about, that was the first.

  All of us had families. Parents, from the long-gone to the present-but-only-in-body to the few (all moms) who tried hard to make contact but didn't know, when it came to teenage boys, where to start. There were siblings too. My older brother had already left for college in Kitchener. Ben was an only child of the kind given miles of his own space by his mom, who rarely left the house after Ben's dad died. Randy, on the other hand, came from a big, red-haired Catholic brood, five kids who, viewed together throwing dinner rolls at each other or administering Indian sunburns in their rumpus room, seemed to number closer to a dozen. But with the possible exception of one, none of the other familial players in our lives figured in what was to turn out to be Our Story.

  We were boys, so you're supposed to look first to our dads in having a hand in making us the way we were, but for the most part, they were as absent as our teachers and the other elders advanced to us as "role model" candidates. My own father was an accountant at the town's utilities office. Compromised, mildly alcoholic. An essentially decent man possessed of faults some children might have chosen to be wounded by, but for me were just the marks that living the better part of his life in Grimshaw had left on him, and therefore were forgivable.

  But we had another father. One we shared between us. The coach. He had a name—David Evans—that struck us as too unutterably bland to belong to someone like him. For us he was always "the coach," a designation spoken in a tone that somehow combined affection, irony and awe.