The Guardians

The Guardians

Andrew Pyper

First published in Great Britain in 2011

by Orion Books,

an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

Orion House, 5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane

London WC2H 9EA

An Hachette UK Company

13579 10 8642

Copyright © Andrew Pyper 2011

The moral right of Andrew Pyper to be identified as the

author of this work has been asserted in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

Al rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the

above publisher of this book.

Al the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to

actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN (Hardback) 978 1 4091 2254 8

ISBN (Trade Paperback) 978 1 4091 2255 5

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Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

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For my Guardians then—

Jeff, Larry, Mike, Robin, Alan

And for my Guardians now—

Heidi, Maude and Ford

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 1

We watched them come.

A lone police cruiser at first. The officer's shirt straining against the bulge around his waist. A look of practised boredom on his face, a pantomime of seen-it-al masculinity performed without an audience. We were the only ones who saw him walk, pigeon-toed, into the house. The only ones who knew he wouldn't be bored for long.

When he came out he wasn't wearing his cap anymore. His thin hair, grey but darkened with sweat, was a greasy sculpture of indecision, pointing in several directions at once. (Later, we wondered about the cap. Had it falen off in the first jolt of shock? Had he removed it himself in a reflex of some sort? A show of respect?)

He tumbled into the car and radioed in. We tried to read his lips, but couldn't realy see his face through the wilow boughs, swaying reflections over the windshield.

Was there a numbered code for this? Or was he forced to describe what he'd seen? Did he recognize, even in the shadows that must have left him blind after entering from the bright outside, who they were? However he put it, it would have been hard for anyone to believe. We weren't wholy convinced ourselves. And we knew it was true.

Soon, two more cruisers puled up. An ambulance. A fire truck, though there was no fire. Some of the men went inside, but most did not. A scene of grimly loitering uniforms, sipping coffee from the Styrofoam cups they brought with them. The last of history's union-protected, on-the-job smokers flicking their butts into the street in undeclared competition.

There was nothing for most of them to do, but they stayed anyway. An only partly hidden excitement in the way they scuffed their shoes over the cracked sidewalk and rested their hands on their belts, knuckling the handles of holstered guns. It was a smal town. You didn't get this sort of thing too often. You didn't get it ever.

We stood together, watching. Unseen behind the curtains in the front room of the McAuliffe house across the way. Our noses grazing the diaphanous material that smeled of recently burned bacon and, deeper stil, a succession of dinners scooped out of the deep fryer. When the paramedics and bearded man in a suit who must have been the coroner finaly emerged from the house with the black bags laid out on gurneys—one, and then the smaler other—we held our breaths. A gulp of french fry, onion ring and chicken finger that, to this day, is the taste of loss.

We remember al this, though stil not everything.

And some of the things we remember may not have happened at al.

[1]

The cal comes in the middle of the night, as the worst sort do.

The phone so close I can read the numbers on its green- glowing face, see the swirled fingerprint I'd left on its message window. A simple matter of reaching and grabbing. Yet I lie stil. It is my motor-facility impairment (as one of my fussily unhelpful physicians cals it) that pins me for eighteen rings before I manage to hook the receiver onto my chest.

"I don't even know what time it is. But it's late, isn't it?"

A familiar voice, faintly slurred, helium-pitched between laughter and sobs. Randy Toler. A friend since high school—a time that even Randy, on the phone, cals "a milion years ago." And though it was only twenty-four years, his estimate feels more accurate.

As Randy apologizes for waking me, and blathers on about how strange he feels "doing this," I am trying to think of an understanding but firm way of saying no when he finaly gets around to asking for money. He has done it before, folowing the unfairly lost auditions, the furniture-stealing girlfriends, the vodka-smoothed rough patches of his past tough-luck decade. But in the end Randy surprises me when he takes a rattling, effortful breath and says, "Ben's dead, Trev."

Trev?

This is my first, not-quite-awake thought. Nobody's caled me that since high school, including Randy.

"How?"

"A rope," Randy says. "Rope?"

"Hanging. I mean, he hung himself. In his mom's house."

"He never went outside. Where else could he have done it?"

"I'm saying he did it in his room. Up in the attic where he'd sit by the window, you know, watching."

"Did his mom find him?"

"It was a kid walking by on the street. Looked up to see if that weird McAuliffe guy was in the window as usual, and saw him swinging there."

I'm quiet for a while after this. We both are. But there is our breath being traded back and forth down the line. Reminders that we aren't alone in recaling the details of Ben's room, a place we'd spent a quarter of our youth wasting our time in. Of how it would have looked with the grown-up Ben in it, attached to the oak beam that ran the length of the ceiling.

"Maybe it's for the best," Randy says finaly.

"Take that back."

"I didn't—it's just—"

"Take that stupid bulshit back.' '

"Fine. Sorry."

Randy has led the kind of life that has made him used to apologizing for saying the wrong thing, and the contrite tone he uses now is one I've heard after dozens of defaulted IOUs and nights spent sleeping on my sofa between stints in rented rooms. But then, in little more than a whisper, he says something else.

"You know it's sort of true, Trev."

He's right. It is sort of true that with the news of Ben McAuliffe's suicide there came, among a hundred other reactions, a shameful twinge of relief.

Ben was a friend of mine. Of ours. A best friend, though I hadn't seen him in years, and spoke to him only slightly more often. It's because he stayed behind, I suppose. In Grimshaw, our hometown, from which al of us but Ben had escaped the first chance we had. Or maybe it's because he was sick. Mentaly il, as even he caled himself, though sarcasticaly, as if his mind was the last thing wrong with him. This would be over the phone, on the rare occasions I caled. (Each time I did his mother would answer, and when I told her it was me caling her voice would rise an octave in the false hope that a good chat with an old friend might lift the dark spel that had been cast on her son.) When we spoke, neither Ben nor I pretended we would ever see each other again. We might as wel have been separated by an ocean, or an even greater barrier, as impossible to cross as the chasm between planets, as death. I had made a promise to never go back to Grimshaw, and Ben could never leave it. A pair of traps we had set for ourselves.

Despite this, we were stil close. There was a love between us too. A sexless, stilborn love, yet just as fierce as the other kinds. The common but largely undocumented love between men who forged their friendship in late childhood.

But this wasn't the thing that bridged the long absence that lay between our adult lives. What connected Ben and me was a secret. A whole inbred family of secrets.

Some of them so wilfuly forgotten they were unknown even to ourselves.

Only after I've hung up do I notice that, for the entire time I was on the phone with Randy, my hands were stil. I didn't even have to concentrate on it, play the increasingly unwinnable game of Mind Over Muscles.

Don't move.

It's like hypnosis. And like hypnosis, it usualy doesn't work.

Everything's okay. Just stay where you are. Relax. Be still.

Now, in the orange dust of city light that sneaks through the blinds, I watch as the tremor returns to my limbs. Delicate flutterings at first. Nervous and quick as a sparrow dunking its head in a puddle. An index finger that abruptly stiffens, points with alarm at the chair in the corner-—and then colapses, asleep. A thumb standing in a Fonzie salute before turtling back inside a fist.

You know what I need? A week in Bermuda.

These were the sort of thoughts I had when the twitches showed up.

I need to eat more whole grains.

I need a drink.

The hand-jerks and finger-flicks were just the normal flaws, the software glitches the body has to work through when first booting up after a certain age. I had just turned forty, after al. There was a price to be paid—a smal, concealable impediment to be endured for al the fun I'd had up until now. But it was nothing to worry about. It wasn't a real problem of the kind suffered by the wheelchaired souls you wish away from your line of sight in restaurants, your appetite spoiled.

But then, a few months ago, the acceptable irregularities of the body inched into something less acceptable. Something wrong.

I went to the doctor. Who sent me to another doctor. Who confirmed her diagnosis after a conversation with a third doctor. And then, once the doctors had that straightened out, al of them said there was next to nothing they could do, wished me wel and buggered off.

What I have, after al, is one of those inoperable, medicaly unsexy conditions. It has al the worst qualities of the non-fatal disease: chronic, progressive, cruely erosive of one's "quality of life." It can go fast or slow. What's certain is that it wil get worse. I could name it now but I'm not in the mood. I hate its falsely personal surnamed quality, the possessive aspect of the capital P. And I hate the way it doesn't kil you. Until it does.

I spoke to a therapist about it. Once.

She was nice— seemed nice, though this may have been only performance, an obligation included in her lawyer-like hourly fee— and was ready to see me "al the way through what's coming." But I couldn't go back. I just sat in her pleasant, fern-filed room and caught a whiff of the coconut exfoliant she'd used that morning to scrub at the liver spots on her arms and knew I would never return. She was the sort of woman in the sort of office giving off the sort of scent designed to provoke confessions. I could have trusted her. And trusting a stranger is against the rules.

(There was something else I didn't like. I didn't like how, when she asked if I had entertained any suicidal thoughts since the diagnosis and I, after a blubbery moment, admitted that I had, she offered nothing more than a businesslike smile and a tidy check mark in her notepad.) One useful suggestion came out of our meeting, nevertheless. For the purposes of recording my thoughts so that they might be figured out later, she recommended I keep a diary chronicling the progress of my disease. Not that she used that word. Instead, she referred to the unstoppable damage being done to me as an "experience,"

as if it were a trip to Paraguay or sex with twins. And it wasn't a journal of sickness I was to keep, but a "Life Diary," her affirmative nods meant to show that I wasn't dying. Yet. That was there too. Remember, Trevor: You're not quite dead yet.

"Your Life Diary is more than a document of events," she explained. "It can, for some of my clients, turn out to be your best friend."

But I already have best friends. And they don't live in my present life so much as in the past. So that's what I've ended up writing down. A recolection of the winter everything changed for us. A pocket-sized journal containing horrors that surprised even me as I returned to them. And then, after the pen refused to stand stil in my hand, it has become a story I tel into a Dictaphone. My voice. Sounding weaker than it does in my own ears, someone else's voice altogether.

I cal it my "Memory Diary."

Randy offered to cal Carl, but we both knew I would do it. Informing a friend that someone they've known al their life has died was more naturaly a Trevor kind of task. Randy would be the one to score dope for a bachelor party, or scratch his key along the side of a Porsche because he took it personaly, and hard, that his own odds of ever owning one were fading fast. But I was definitely better suited to be the bearer of bad tidings.

I try Carl at the last number I have for him, but the cracked voice that answers tels me he hasn't lived there for a while. When I ask to have Carl cal if he stops by, there is a pause of what might be silent acceptance before the line goes dead. Randy has a couple of earlier numbers, and I try those too, though Carl's former roommates don't seem to know where he is now either (and refuse to give me their own names when I ask).

"Not much more we can do," Randy says when I cal him back. "The guy is gone, Trev."

There it is again: Trev. A name not addressed to me in over twenty years, and then I get it twice within the last half-hour.

I had an idea, as soon as Randy told me Ben had died, that the past was about to spend an unwelcome visit in my present. Going from Trevor to Trev is something I don't like, but a nostalgic name change is going to be the least of it. Because if I'm getting on a train for Grimshaw in the morning, it's al coming back.

Heather.

The coach.

The boy.

The house.

The last of these most of al because it alone is waiting for us. Ready to see us stand on the presumed safety of weed-cracked sidewalk as we had as schoolchildren, daring each other to see who could look longest through its windows without blinking or running away.

For twenty-four years this had been Ben's job. Now it would be ours.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 2

There were four of us.

Ben, Carl, Randy and me. Grimshaw Guardians al. Hockey players on the high-school squad that traveled the county's gravel roads to do battle against the vilainous Cougars of Milverton, cheating Rams of Listowel, cowardly Sugar Kings of Elmira. We were just sixteen years old the one and only season we played with the seniors, but we were decent enough—and the school smal enough—to make the team. The only boys among just-turned men.

Randy:

A featherweight winger looping skilfuly—if a little pointlessly—in front of the other team's net. It always seemed that he liked to skate more than score. Sometimes, Randy would forget that there were others playing against him. Kids who wished to see him fail, to crumple to his knees and never get up again. It was usualy a look of puzzled disappointment, not pain, that I would read on his face when he limped to the bench folowing these punishments.

Why? his eyes would ask as he took his place at the end of the bench, rubbing the charley horse out of his thigh.

Why would someone do that? I was just having fun.

Carl:

Short, but solid as an elm stump. Hair he left long so that it waved, black as a pirate flag, as he skated. Carl was the Guardians' unpredictable pugilist, a rarely played fourth-liner who would skate up to a kid who had nothing to do with the play at hand—and, often, against whom no grudge was held—and commence a windmiling of fists into the poor felow's face.

Who knew if Carl would have been the fighter he was without the dark eyes and drooping smile that conveyed unintended menace? How less inclined to serve up knuckle sandwiches—and, later, less susceptible to needle and pil—if his dad had been another kind of man, one who didn't leave and never return?

Sometime late in the third period of the first game of the Guardians' season there was a bench-clearing brawl. It was an away game against the Exeter Bobcats, a team whose only real talent was for medieval hand-to-hand combat. We knew things were about to get nasty when their coach started tapping the shoulders of players on his bench and pointing at us. Then, with a colective whoop, they stormed over the boards and set upon us, their fans sending a voley of scalding coffee cups over our heads.

I mention this because, in my experience, who you first go to help in a riot is as sure a test of true alegiance as any I know.

So who did I rush to that night to prevent a Bobcat from pounding his face into the ice? I went to Randy, because he was my friend. And because he was squealing for help.

" Trev! Carl! Ben!"

And al of us came.

Once we'd thrown Randy's attacker off him we were able to form a circle and hold our own. In fact, we ended up faring better than many of our older teammates, who left Exeter that night with split cheeks and teeth in their pockets.

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 recal us looking at each other as we roled 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 tel 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 normaly have invited the torment of bulies, especialy 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 colege 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'l 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, caling 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 wals.

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 folowed. 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, al caling Ben's name.

We found him in the living room. He was leaning against the wal between the two side windows. His crumpled form looked smaler 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 stil 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 wals of the Thurman house's living room we weren't growing older, we weren't eight, we weren't attempting another of the milion awkward steps toward adulthood and its presumed freedoms. We were who we were and nothing else. A kind of revelation, as wel 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 puling 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 realy 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 al heard it. Not the moaning, but how it turned into something else.

What we heard as Carl puled 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 al 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 potentialy 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 wil 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 halucinations, 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 caling 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 swolen 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, stil in the mounting readiness of al dead things.

Except this time she moves.

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

To pul 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 tel 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 stil do the deed if caled 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 wel for a while: an unmarried, al-night-party-hosting nightclub owner. Trevor, of Retox. Girlfriends al 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, fueled 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, al 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 bilionaire'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 balet 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 wel 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 wil, 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 ful concentration I am able to punch an elevator button, hold a menu, write my signature on the credit card slip—al 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 felow Guardians, know the effort it takes.

Then, in a smal 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 falen 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 cal for Grimshaw comes, do what every shaking, betraying part of you wil fight doing and get off.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 3

When I remember Grimshaw now, a colage 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 folowed the river right out of town and could, it was said, lead a runaway al the way to Lake Huron. The sort of things everyone who has grown up in a smal town has their own version of.

And like every smal 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 wals.

Ben McAuliffe lived across from the place. It alowed us to look out from his attic bedroom and through the maples 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 chils. Even then, we didn't think there was such a thing as a real haunted house.

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

Al of us had families. Parents, from the long-gone to the present-but-only-in-body to the few (al 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 colege 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 rols 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 essentialy 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.

The coach wore wire-frame glasses, Hush Puppies, hid a receding hairline under a wool cap on game days.

He looked more like an English teacher—which he in fact was between nine and three thirty, Monday to Friday—than a leader of anything more athletic than the chess club. But his rumpled-scholar appearance was both who he realy was and a disguise. We al got him wrong at first, which was how he wanted it. We were always getting him wrong. And then, out of the blue, he would say or show something that struck us as so essential and unguarded and true we became his. We believed. We wanted more of that.

The league's other coaches considered our success a freakish series of flukes. It wasn't any tactics or motivation our coach brought to the dressing room that lifted us to the top of the standings. How could it be? He didn't look like a hockey man. He didn't even swear.

They got him wrong too.

But what was it to get him right?

We knew he was married. Childless. Moved to Grimshaw five years earlier from Toronto. There were questions we had about him. Not creepy suspicions (of the sort we had about Mr. Krueger, for instance, the knee- patting driver's ed. instructor), just a handful of missing links in what we could gather about his story-Information that might explain why, beneath the coach's calm surface, we could sense something being held down, a muffled second voice. It might have been anger. Or a sadness too unwieldy to be alowed free run within him. There was, we sensed, something he might be helped with.

But he was the one who helped us. Our guardian. It was hard to see how this could ever be the other way around.

Our school hired a new music teacher at the beginning of our grade eleven year. Mr. Asworth, the old music teacher, had left over the summer. (Yes, we had much obvious fun with his name, as in "Hey, what's his Ass-worth?" whispered between us as we filed out at the end of class, an insult he seemed to think he deserved, given the way he pretended not to hear.)

Naturaly, we'd tormented him. Makeout sessions in the drum-kit storage room, blowing cigarette smoke out of the tuba, snapping Melissa Conroy's bra until a red line was blazing across her freckled back. And as for Asworth teaching us to play music? His attempts to coax a melody out of Carl's flatulent trombone or get Randy to stop ringing the triangle and holering "Come 'n' get it!" in the middle of "The Maple Leaf Forever" met with nothing but cacophonous failure.

Asworth's replacement, Miss Langham, was a different story.

In her presence we caled her only Miss, but between us (and in our dreams) she was always Heather. At twenty-three, the youngest teacher at Grimshaw Colegiate by a decade. Long, chestnut hair we imagined slipping a hand through to touch the solitary mole on her throat. Green eyes, at once mirthful and encouraging.

Tal but unstooped, unlike some of the senior basketbal girls when they walked the hals, ashamed of their commanding physicality. Until Miss Langham arrived to teach us a surprisingly moving brass-band version of Pachelbel's Canon, we had witnessed only prettiness, tomboys, the promise of farmer-daughter curves. But Miss Langham exceeded any previous entry in our schoolboys' catalogue of feminine assets. We had no name for it then, and I hardly know what to cal it now. Grace, I suppose.

I believe I can say as wel that we were al instantly in love with her. Desire was part of it, yes. But what we realy wanted was to rescue her one day. Show her our as yet unappreciated worth. Grow into gentlemen before her very eyes.

Sometimes, after school, we would head up to Ben's bedroom, gather at his window and wait to watch her go by. She was renting a room at the nurses' residence up the hil on the hospital grounds ("No Male Visitors After 8 P.M.," a sign at the door declared). Most days she would take Caledonia Street, advancing with long strides up its slope, a leather satchel bumping against her hip. Alone.

When I think of the Thurman house now, what comes to mind isn't a horrific image or stab of guilt. Not at first. What I see before any of that is Miss Langham walking home along the sidewalk past its brooding facade. A juxtaposition of youth and poise against its clutching shadows. Her sure step, the hint of smile she wore even when no one was coming the other way to wish good day to. Heather Langham was al future. And the house possessed only the wet rot, the foul longing of the past.

This is how I try to hold her in place as long as I can, before the other pictures force their way through: Miss Langham clipping past Grimshaw's darkest place. It was, for al the moment's simplicity, an act of subtle defiance. We never saw her cross the street to pass it at a safer distance, as we ourselves did. In fact, she seemed oblivious to the house altogether. A refusal to acknowledge the rudeness of its stare.

But in this, of course, was the suggestion that she knew she was being watched. She was a woman already wel used to being looked at. Usualy, this looking inspired admiration and yearning in the observer. But we could sense that the Thurman house—or the idea of whatever inhuman thing lived in it—instead felt only bitterness. A reminder of its place in death and hers so vividly in life.

[3]

There are moments when the tremors disappear al on their own. Whole chunks of time when my body and I are reunited, warring soldiers clinking tin mugs over a Christmas ceasefire. I'l be looking out the window, and the hands that had been squeaking against the glass wil be calmed. Or now Sitting on the milk run to Grimshaw, the train starting away from the platform with a lurch, my heart giving enlarging shape to Randy's announcement of the end of things: Ben's dead, Trev. As we pick up speed, I can feel the closing distance between myself and the past, an oncoming colision my newspaper-reading and text-messaging felow passengers are unaware of.

And yet, I am stil. Silently weeping into the sleeve of my jacket but physicaly in control, my limbs awaiting their orders.

You can't help anyone, a voice suggests within me . You can't help yourself. Why not do what Ben did while you're still able?

Not my voice, though it's instantly familiar. A voice I haven't heard in twenty-four years.

The train rols out from under the covered platform and the city is there, the glass towers firing off shards of sunlight in a farewel salute. Al at once, I'm certain I wil never come back. I escaped something in Grimshaw once. But it won't let me go a second time.

Ticket, please, the voice says, laughing.

"Ticket, please," the conductor tries again.

It was thought, when they built the four lanes running west between Toronto and the border at Detroit a couple years before I was born, that the highway's proximity to Grimshaw would lend new purpose to what was before then not much other than a service town for the county's farmers. But there was no more reason to take the Grimshaw exit than there had previously been to limp in its direction on the old, rutted two-lane. Like many of the communities its size on the broad arrowhead of farmland stuck between the Great Lakes, it remained a forgotten place. Never industrial enough to be outright abandoned in the way of the ghost towns of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, but not alert enough to attempt re-invention. Grimshaw was content to merely hang on, to take a subdued pride in its century homes on tree-lined streets, the stained facades of its Victorian storefronts, its daughters or sons who met with success upon moving away. Now, entering it as a stranger, one might see a gothic charm in the wilful oldness of the place, its loyalty to the vine-covered, the paint-peeled. But for those who grew up here, it was only as it had always been.

There are times of the year when certain places seem to be themselves more than any other time. Springtime in Paris, Christmas in New York. Toronto frozen at Valentine's. Even before the bad things happened, I saw Grimshaw as a Haloween town. Sparsely streetlit, thickly treed. The houses never grand but large, built at a time that favoured rear staircases, widow's-peaked attics, so that they al had their own secret hiding places. Founded by Scots Presbyterians and consistently conservative in the backbenchers it sent to Parliament, Grimshaw had little sympathy for the mystical. Any mention of the supernatural was considered nothing more than foolishness, the side effects of too many matinees indulged at the Vogue. Ghosts? "Catholic voodoo," as my father put it.

Yet at the same time, it was its dour Protestant character that endeared its inhabitants to the everyday tragic, to the stories of broken lives and cruel, inexplicable fate. For our parents, the dead lived on, but only in dinner-table and church-tea tales of misfortune.

Grimshaw's adults could never see their home as haunted. Their children, on the other hand, had no choice.

The train slows as we approach the town limits. The hardened fields yield to weedy outskirts, the low-rent acres of half-hearted development: the trailer park, the go-kart track, the drive-in movie screen with "See U Next Summer!" on the marquee (a promise that, by the vandalized look of things, has not been kept for a dozen years or more). Then the more permanent claims. Shaggy backyards crisscrossed with laundry lines. A school with paper witches taped to the windows. Dumpsters left open- mouthed, choking on black plastic.

Within a minute, we are roling into the old part of town at a walking pace. It gives us a chance to study the Inventory Blowout! offerings at what used to be Krazy Kevin's car lot, where Randy's dad worked, to catch a whiff of the fumes rising from the Erie Burger's exhaust. There is even a welcome party of sorts. Three kids smoking against the wal of the station, giving us the finger.

When the train stops I am alone in getting to my feet, hauling my bag off the rack and stepping down onto the platform. The cars already moving again, easing into the west end of town, where they wil pass the high school, the courthouse before speeding out onto the tobacco flats. Al places I'd rather view through double-paned glass. But now I'm here. The Grimshaw air. The midday moon staring down, bug-eyed and bored.

A gust blows a Big Gulp cup against my leg. Dust devils swirl over the platform, and within them, the laughing voice again.

Welcome home.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 4

Randy was Howdy Doody-freckled, knob-elbowed and goofy-haired, but girls liked him. It was hard to know precisely what charms he possessed that got him into perfumed back seats and onto darkened basement futons more frequently than the rest of us. The easy answer would be his "sense of humour," which was how most of the girls who came and went, unblamingly, through Randy's teens would have explained it. But I'm not so sure. Yes, Randy was funny. But he was more of a joke than a comedian. Someone to be next to and feel that here was a felow who needn't be taken seriously. I think this is what girls saw in Randy, and stil do. He made the idea of two people being with each other for a time so much simpler than it was with anyone else.

Take Carl, for instance. Girls liked him too. In his case, it was a combination of good looks and a reluctance to speak that was often mistaken for an air of mystery.

But Carl was restless. For him, female affection was something to gorge on, swiftly and roughly, then leave behind without clearing his plate. His habit was to break up with his girlfriends without teling them, refusing to return their cals or meet their eyes in the school halways. Unlike Randy, Carl made girls cry.

Ben, on the other hand, mostly did without. Not that there weren't sideways opportunities offered to him. Quieter girls, too studious or artsy to attract more aggressive attention. Instead, they made themselves available to Ben (in camouflaged ways), and he went about his business. And what was Ben's business? Living in his head. Reading dragon and time-travel novels. He wrote poetry. Stranger stil, he read poetry.

But what Ben did more than anything else was watch. Our backup goalie, folowing the play from the bench like a shoulder-padded Buddha. A silhouette in his attic bedroom, staring at the house across from his.

Of the four of us, I was the "married man." Funny to think how true this was at the time. And how, for the more than twenty years since I last saw Sarah Mulgrave, I've been about as far from married as a man can get.

The obvious explanation for this would be the Thurman house. It messed al of us up in different ways.

Addiction. Professional failure. Emotional amputations. For me, it was never being able to love—or be loved by—a woman again.

Personaly, I favour an even more sentimental explanation: Sarah was meant to be mine. And the wound I am to bear is to have had her taken from me.

Even today, I whisper "Sarah Mulgrave" and she is with me. A wrinkled nose when she laughed. Hair the colour of a new penny. A mouth that articulated as much when listening as when speaking: sharply etched, blushed lips, amused creases at the corners. And green eyes. Lovely in their colour but lovelier in what they promised.

Sarah came to al the Guardians games, and though this earned her inclusion among the "puck bunnies" who fawned over Carl and the older guys on the team, the fact is she had little interest in sports. She would never have shown up to sit at the top of the stands, clutching a hot chocolate beneath the maniacal, hockey- stick-munching beaver of the Akins Lumber bilboard, were it not to shout for number 12. Me.

Afterward, if my dad wasn't using the car, I would drive her home. The last of the wood-paneled Buick wagons. Hideous but handy. Because on those evenings we would take a spin out of town. Spook ourselves by switching the headlights off and flying over the night roads. Knowing that no harm could come to us because we were young—not children anymore, but stil immune to what grimly went by the name of the Real World. The car hurtling into darkness. A foreplay of screams.

We would slow only once we passed the "Welcome to the Vilage of Harmony" sign. Park in an orchard of black walnut trees. The pulsing silence of a kiled engine.

It was often cold out. But the shared heat of our skin fought off the chil until we lay side by side, our breath visible exclamations against the windows. My dad would take measurements of the gas he left in the tank, so in heating the car, we had to weigh the risk of discovery against the fear of frostbite. The result was sporadic, short hits of warmth from the front vents. To avoid getting up and baring my ass to those who might drive by, I learned to turn the keys in the ignition with my toes.

Sarah's dad was friendly but strict. He liked me, and was even prepared to look the other way when his daughter was returned home an hour past curfew, her cheeks flushed, smeling faintly of cherry brandy. But the unspoken deal between us was that he was permitting these liberties on the condition that, sooner rather than later, I would propose to Sarah. He married Sarah's mom when they were both only a couple of years older than we were then. Teen weddings in Grimshaw were far from uncommon. Many kids knew what their professional lives were going to be by that time, the house they would one day inherit. What was the point in waiting?

It was a plan I was happy to entertain myself. I had no sense, as Carl and Randy had (and maybe Ben too, though who could tel?), that we were too young to judge who was right for us, that more sophisticated, realized women awaited us in our post-Grimshaw lives. There was nothing I could imagine wanting beyond Sarah anyway. I would marry her, just as her father wished. Why not? Sarah and I would look out for each other and let our lives, long and benign, wash over us.

And I would give my right arm (for what it's shakily worth) to know how that life would have turned out. Sarah could have waitressed, I could have found work on a construction crew or factory floor. We would have had our own apartment, something on the second floor over a shoe store or laundromat, the bedroom in the back.

Just the two of us (the three? the four?), getting along fine without a coach or Heather Langham or friends I felt I should be ready to die for. Without a Thurman house.

For that, go ahead. Take both arms.

[4]

My room smels of ammonia and wet dog.

I'm on the top floor—the third—of the Queen's Hotel. A brick cube whose one gesture toward grandeur, a tin cupola over the corner suite, had over the decades been painted with coats of blue and yelow and green that wouldn't stick, so that these days it appears psychedelicaly polka-dotted. Other than a couple of motels on the edge of town—the inexplicably international Swiss Cottage and Golden Gate—the Queen's is the only place to stay in Grimshaw. For this reason alone, it enjoyed a reputation for fanciness that was never deserved. Though there were sporadic efforts to renovate its rooms or hire a "French chef" to pour sherry and cream over the menu, eventualy the Queen's always returned to its fatigued self

I open the window that looks out over Ontario Street and breathe. Grimshaw is a farming town, and in the summer and fal there is always a breeze carrying the perfume of cow manure to remind you of the fact. Not to mention the afternoon traffic of eighteen-wheelers hauling livestock to slaughter. Pig snouts and cattle tails and chicken feathers poking through the slats of passing trailers. As a kid, I felt that only the pigs knew what was coming. Watching them now, the pink nostrils flaring, I feel the same thing.

I lie down on the bed for a time. I must have, because when there's a knock at the door, that's where I am.

"Who is it?"

"Wayne Gretzky. Team Canada needs you, son."

I open the door and Randy is standing there. And while I am almost light-headed with happiness to see him, I have, at first, an even more overwhelming thought.

Good God, you look old.

And then, after a glimpse of ourselves in the hal mirror: We both do. The indoor skin, the lines of shoulder and chin grown soft. Randy and I look as though some internal dimmer switch has been lowered, puling us into partial shadow.

What the hell happened?

The worst part is we know the answer.

The project of Being a Man had shifted with overnight suddenness, so that we awakened one morning with the hungover certainty that something was wrong. Al the things we had been working for, what we had managed to achieve, now required maintenance. For most it is a home, a family. For Randy, an acting career limited to bit parts and commercials. For me, it was Retox, the girlfriend with a bar code tattooed on her inner thigh. Whatever it was, it would prove to be too much. Some of it was bound to slip away. It had been slipping away.

But here Randy and I are together again. Overdressed and middle-aged, improbably standing in a bare room of the Queen's Hotel like actors in a Beckett play who've forgotten their lines.

You too.

That's what we see in each other's eyes, what we silently share in the pause between recognition and brotherly embrace.

I see it got you too.

"Wel," Randy says, slapping both of my shoulders. "We're here."

"Yes, we goddamn are."

"Have you been around town yet? It's like a time capsule. The world's most pointless time capsule."

"Can't wait to see al the sights."

"I guess Ben's the only one who could have brought us back."

"Ben's the only one who could have got us to do a whole lot of things."

I was referring only to harmless stuff, of how Ben could talk us into goofing around with a Ouija board or playing Dungeons & Dragons, but as soon as it was out, I heard how it could seem that I was speaking of something else.

"You know what's funny?" Randy announces finaly. "The last time I was in the Queen's, it was with Tina Uxbridge."

"Todd Flanagan's girlfriend?"

"It was her idea, swear to God. I liked Todd. But I liked Tina more."

"She had his kid, didn't she? In grade twelve or something?" And then: "Jesus, Randy. Maybe it was yours."

"Not mine. Trust me, I checked the calendar."

"Wait. I'm stil a little dizzy here. You slept with Tina Uxbridge? "

"Just down the hal."

"You amaze me, Randy."

"And she amazed me."

I look around the room, checking the corners.

"I tried," Randy says. "Folowed up again on every number Carl ever gave me. Nobody knows where he is."

"He ought to be here."

"Did you ever talk to him?"

"Not much the last few years."

"So you never saw him after things got bad."

The two of us stil standing in the room's entryway. I should move aside, give us some space. But I need to hear what Randy is now obliged to tel me.

"He was using, Trev."

"Did you—I don't know—confront him?"

"Confront Carl?"

"No. I wouldn't have either."

"He caled every once in a while. Then, maybe two years ago, even the cals stopped."

"He never caled me."

"He was ashamed," Randy says. "He looked up to you more than any of us."

"He did?"

"The best hockey player. Successful businessman. You were steady."

I'd been standing with my arms crossed over my chest. Now I release them, hold them out in front of me and let them shake. "Who's steady now?"

It's meant as a joke, but it only makes Randy uncomfortable. I step aside to let him into the room. He goes and stands at the window. Speaking against the glass.

"I visited Mrs. McAuliffe this morning," he says. "Apparently Ben had a wil. And he named you executor of his estate."

"What estate?"

"You mean aside from some hockey cards and a jar of dimes? Not much."

The room closes in on us, stifling even the idea of speech. It's not that we've so quickly run out of things to say, but that there's too much.

Randy turns to face me. "What are we going to do?" "In Grimshaw? At three-thirty on a Thursday afternoon?" I shuffle over to Randy and deliver a smart smack to the side of his face. "Let's get a drink."

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 5

We were sitting in music class on a Tuesday morning in early February, waiting for Miss Langham to walk in and give us one of her let's-get-started smiles, when Ben turned around in his chair to face me and whispered, "I had the most fucked-up dream last night."

There was nothing unusual in this. Miss Langham was often a minute or two late for us, her first class of the day. She had a gift for comic entrances. We never laughed at Miss Langham, though. We were too busy fixing her quirks into our memory: the sound of her footsteps scuffing hurriedly down the hal and— slap!— a dropped textbook on the floor, folowed by a Girl Scout cuss that we held our breath in order to hear.

Butternuts!

Frick!

Then her hand gripped on the doorframe, spinning her into the room. Her flushed apology. The wisp of hair that had come loose and she now curled her lower lip to blow out of her eyes. The later she was, the better we behaved.

As for Ben, he was always having dreams. Surreal, circular narratives he would begin relating to me as we waited for Miss Langham, laying his flute on his lap and leaning back, making sure we weren't being overheard, as though the latest clip from his subconscious was something others were eager to monitor, to use.

Ben's dreams were a little strange. What was stranger was when he saw people who weren't there: A man with goat horns, standing at the top of his attic stairs.

A boy with one arm freshly cut off and waving wildly with the other, as though to a departing ship, standing in Ben's backyard when he looked up while mowing the lawn.

An old woman who might have been his grandmother if she hadn't died the year before, looking out from his bedroom closet, red scars in place of eyes.

On this Tuesday, waiting for Miss Langham's arrival, what was a little out of the ordinary wasn't Ben teling me he'd had another weird dream the night before, but how he looked when he did. His skin showing tiny blue veins, as it did after he'd sat, unplayed, for a couple of hours in a freezing-cold ice rink.

"I'm not even sure it was a dream," he said.

"What was it about?"

"Me, looking out my bedroom window. Everything like the way it is when I'm awake. The one streetlight that works, the one that doesn't. The trees, the houses.

Nothing happening. I'm almost faling asleep—like a kind of double sleep, because it's a dream, right? And then, there's . . . something."

"Something?"

"I don't even realy see it. I just notice that something is different. Something that's moving."

"What was it?"

"I told you, I didn't realy see it."

"The thing you didn't see. What'd it look like?"

"Like the shadow of a tree, maybe. But not."

"So it had feet? This tree?"

"It wasn't a tree."

"A person, then."

"I guess."

I looked to the door. I was more than ready for Miss Langham.

"I don't think it was alone," Ben said.

"There were two people?"

"I got the idea it was holding on to someone."

"And where'd it take them?"

"Round the side of the Thurman house. It was scary, Trev. Seriously."

"Good thing it was just a dream."

"I told you. I'm not sure it was."

"What's wrong with you? You okay?"

"I... I think . . . you . . ."

"You look like you're going to puke."

I remember puling my feet out from under his chair, just in case.

Ben took a deep breath. Swalowed. "You need to hear the fucked-up part."

"Okay."

"Like I said, I couldn't realy see. But I could feel who it was. The person it was carrying into the house."

"Into the house? I thought you said it just went round—"

"Good mor- ning!"

Not Heather. A buxom lady in support hose writing her name on the blackboard. We'd seen her before, doing the same thing at the front of our math, geography, history classes.

"Where's Miss Langham?" I asked without raising my hand. Then, after not getting an answer: "Where's Heather?"

The supply teacher kept writing her name. In fact, she slowed down to buy the extra second required to come up with an answer to the question she knew was coming next. A question that came from Randy.

"Is she okay?"

The supply teacher put down her chalk. Thumbed her glasses back up the slippery bridge of her nose.

"Miss Langham is unavailable at this time," she said.

And before we could ask anything else, she was tapping her baton and teling us to open our sheet music to "The Maple Leaf Forever."

Something else was worth noting from later that afternoon. A good deed.

We went to visit Paul Schantz in the Cedarfield Seniors

Home as part of a "community outreach" program the Guardians' board of directors thought up, the idea being that team players would go to visit kids with cancer or other fans who couldn't make the games, and someone from the Beacon would be there to take a picture for the next day's paper. It didn't turn out that way. In fact, Randy, Ben, Carl and I were the only ones to sign up.

According to the scrawled letter he sent the coach, Paul Schantz was a Guardian himself "during the war" (meaning the First World War, I figured out when I did the math). When we arrived, he'd been wheeled out to meet us wearing a team jersey so big he looked like a wrinkly dwarf inside of it. Then we pushed him to his room, too smal for the five of us. We wanted to leave after two minutes.

"You have any kids?" Carl attempted at one point.

Paul pinched his chin. "I'd say we had eighteen over the years." He was recovering from a stroke, so it was hard to know exactly what he said. Then he explained that he and his wife had been foster parents.

"You ever miss them?" Ben asked.

His face clouded over. "Al of them. Except one."

"A bad apple."

"There's bad. Then there's worth."

"Worth? Worth in what?"

"Worse. Worse! " He fought to get this out, leaving his chin white with spit. "There's always something worse than you think. Closer than you think."

That was about it. One by one my friends excused themselves to visit the men's room and didn't come back. Until only I was left.

"It's been good to meet you, Mr. Schantz," I said, backing toward the door. "And I hope we can bring the cup home this year, just like—"

"There's some places you should never go."

It was a strange thing to say, if in fact he said it. But I remember the moment not for the words I thought I heard him mumble, but for the look on the old man's face.

A kind of insane clarity.

He was talking about the Thurman house. I couldn't say why I was so sure, other than the look of him. He'd been just this withered stranger, his legs painful- looking sticks on the footrests, yet now he was sitting forward, his eyes alive and searching.

Then he colapsed back into his wheelchair. I was wrong: he wasn't reading my mind. As I slipped out, I heard him mutter, "Sometimes I wet my back."

I bet, I thought as I made my way toward Ben, Randy and Carl, who stood waiting at the end of the hal. Doesn't mean I have to be there the next time you do.

But before I reached them, I heard the old man's words a different way.

Sometimes the dead come back.

I already mentioned that my father worked for the utilities commission. A union rep with his own office in the basement of Municipal Hal, back in the days when offices had ashtrays and a bottle of whisky in the bottom drawer and windowless doors that could lock shut. He didn't work too hard.

But he often brought stories home with him. Juicy stuff, as far as Grimshaw went. Battles between neighbours over the staking of property lines. The mayor owing five grand in parking tickets. Noise complaints against an apartment behind Roma Pizza, from which a woman's shrieking orgasms (or what my dad caled "the sounds of a cat in heat") awakened dozens in the night.

Because they shared a filing system, police gossip would also flow through the basement of Municipal Hal. Usualy, this side of my father's nightly news was sad more than thriling. Domestic knockabouts, drunk-driving charges, old people discovered a few days dead on their linoleum floors.

Yet that night, I could tel my father had a scoop when he took his place at the head of the kitchen table. Hands placed on either side of his dinner plate, staring down at what my mother had spooned out of the casserole dish with the sombre look of a judge reading a jury's verdict to himself before announcing it to the court.

"Langham," he said finaly. "She's a teacher of yours, right? The pretty one?"

"Music," I said.

"She wasn't at school today."

"No."

I watched him use his knife to buldoze food onto the back of his fork. Slip it into his mouth. Chew.

"What about her?" I asked once he'd swalowed.

"They're looking for her."

"They?"

"It'l be in the paper in the morning."

"She's not just sick or something?"

"That's what I'm hearing. The cops. Asking if anyone's seen her."

"The police think she's a missing person after one day? Don't they usualy wait seventy-two hours or something?"

"They've got information. Suspicions." My father raised his hands, palms out. A gesture to signal the limits of his insider's knowledge.

"Do they think she's al right?"

My father lowered his fork. Pretty. That's what his eyes said to me, man to man across the table. I don't blame you.

"My guess?" he said. "She found some fela and got the hel out of here. Struck me as a sensible sort of girl."

Then he told my mother this might be her best shepherd's pie ever.

After hockey practice that night, we gathered at Ben's house. Sitting on the mouldy pilows and atop the books that towered around his bed. And on it, cross-legged, was Ben himself. I remember he wasn't wearing shoes or socks. His feet oversized, patchy with hair. Nasty feet for such a slight, dream-prone boy.

I had told them earlier what my dad had said. We were lacing our skates in the dressing room, and I had to whisper to keep from being overheard by any of the other players. Once I finished, there wasn't a chance to hear their reactions, as the coach poked his head around the corner and told us to hustle out there, that holding on to the lead up our asses wasn't going to help us beat the Sugar Kings on the weekend. But even as he said this—in the same way he would have at any other evening practice—I thought his eyes lingered on us for a moment. An unreadable expression contained only in the look itself, as the rest of his face was kindly as usual. Yet in his eyes there was sadness, or distress, something he couldn't wholy contain. Or maybe something he wanted us to see. A feeling he shared. Was protecting us from.

Up in Ben's room, I learned that I wasn't the only one to have heard Heather Langham rumours. On the bus rides home from school, in our kitchens, whispered between our parents, we heard versions of a story—or pieces of a handful of stories—beginning to circulate around town.

First, there was Miss Langham running off with a student.

Nobody had seen Brad Wickenheiser today, had they? There was an absurd but persistent rumour that he'd done it with Mrs. Avery, the vice-principal, on a school trip to see Othello in Stratford. And he was in Heather's grade twelve music class. French horn. (French horny, as he caled it, idioticaly, to the girls on either side of him.) According to Randy's source, Brad Wickenheiser and Miss Langham were doing it right now out at the Swiss Cottage Motel on the edge of town. He was in love with her. But she was just in it for the sex with a young stud. I remember that phrase in particular: young stud. The way it made me uncomfortable, and a little jealous, like standing in the showers with the older boys after a game.

"Realy?" I asked when Randy was done with his breathless teling. "Really?"

"Bulshit," Carl said.

"It's what I heard."

"Carl's right," I said. "Brad Wickenheiser? No way. He's a moron."

"She's not screwing his brain, Trev."

"Stil. I'm not buying it."

"Neither am I. And I'l tel you why," Carl said, jabbing a finger into Randy's chest. "It's bulshit because it's my bulshit. Told Andy Pucinik in gym. Born-again Jesus Saves wanker. I knew he'd like it."

Then Carl told his own story, a more fanciful version of my father's dinner-table suggestion that Miss Langham had simply left town. But this time it wasn't her tiring of Grimshaw that prompted her to take off without warning—it was an identical twin sister. A Langham girl just as beautiful as Heather, but without the winning manners. The bad Heather.

"Aha!" Randy said. "Maybe it's the twin who's banging Brad Wickenheiser at the Swiss Cottage."

And then came the horror story. Al the more horrific for being the most believable. And for me being the one to tel it.

An anonymous tip had been caled in to the police. Male, gravel-voiced. Teling the cops he'd had "some kinda fun" the night before, taunting them to go see "where that bitch used to sleep." When they got to the nurses' residence the police found sticky boot prints on the carpet outside Heather's room. They kicked the door down.

Inside, wals sprayed with blood. Obscene messages fingerpainted in gore over her Leonard Bernstein and Mozart posters. But no body. Only a necklace laid over her pilow, the heart-shaped locket we had seen her wear in class some days, and wondered whose image might be contained within, impossibly wishing it might be ours.

According to this version, her murderer was a mysterious lover-turned-stalker, an attractive sociopath who gave her the locket (he gave all his girlfriends lockets).

She had come to Grimshaw after he started to show signs of being unstable. But he'd found her.

It was only when I finished that we noticed the snow. The first squal of the season dropping heavy flakes over town, whitening and silencing.

"That's not it."

Ben's voice surprised us. For the past while, it seemed like he wasn't even listening, and we had come to nearly forget he was here. But now we were al looking at him. Watching his head slowly shake from side to side.

"It didn't happen that way," he said. "Or not exactly that way."

"How would you know?"

"Because when I saw her, she was alive."

That's when we al went ape shit. Demanding to know why he hadn't told us this sooner, how he could know anything from a dream.

"You never said it was Heather when you told me in music class," I said.

"I didn't know then."

"When I know something, I know it."

"I'm happy for you, Trev."

"Okay. Back up. This monster—"

"I never caled it that."

"Fine. This not-a-tree-but-looks-like-one has someone in its arms. Heather. And she's trying to get away."

"I just said I could tel she was alive."

"For fuck's sake," Carl said.

"I'l second that," Randy said.

"Ben? Ben?" I moved from where I was sitting to stick my face in his line of sight. "Just tel us what you saw."

Ben's nasty feet. The toes curled up, trying to hide.

"A man—what I suppose could only be a man—had Miss Langham in his arms last night," Ben said. "Her eyes were open. Like she couldn't believe whatever was happening was actualy happening."

He took in a breath, and we thought he was readying for more. But he just exhaled it al wordlessly out again.

"That it?"

"Pretty much."

"Is it or isn't it?"

"None of this matters."

"Why not?"

"Because if she's stil alive, I'm not sure how much longer she's going to be."

I came in even closer to him. "Where is she?"

Ben pointed out the window. Not up into the sky where the snow was iluminated by the orange streetlight but down, at what stood across the street. We knew what was there without looking. We looked anyway.

For a long time, none of us said anything.

Not true. Ben was murmuring something, the same thing, the whole time.

"I don't know ... I don't know ... I don't know ..."

"What don't you know, oh wise one? Oh great seer of visions?" I said, hoping it might come out funny. It didn't.

"I don't know," he said for the last time. "But I think it was the coach."

[5]

Randy pushes open the door to Jake's Pool 'n' Sports. Though I've never been in the place before, I immediately know I'm home. My grey overcoat and polished Oxfords might mark me as an outsider among the early-bird clientele, the hockey-jerseyed, puffy-faced men who line the bar, frowning up at the flatscreens showing highlights from last night's game, but that's who I would have been had I stayed. Who I am stil, even after al the time away.

We remain marked, we smal-towners dressed in what, as Randy and I walk into Jake's, feels instantly like borrowed city- slicker duds. Beneath the camouflage, al of us in this room are branded by shared experience and ritual as indelibly as members of a religion who are alone in understanding its rules and expectations. I've noticed over the years how we recognize each other among strangers: something draws me to those who have grown up in a Grimshaw, despite our efforts to hide every embarrassing hickdom, every clue that might give away our corn-fed, tranquilized youths.

Part of what we share is the knowledge that every smal town has a second heart, smaler and darker than the one that pumps the blood of good intentions. We alone know that the picture of home cooking and oak trees and harmlessness is false.

This is the secret that binds us. Along with the friends who share its weight.

We take a table in the corner and order a pitcher from a pretty girl wearing the referee's stripes they make al the servers wear. She reminds me of someone. Or a composite of someones. There is a quality to her movements, the inteligent smile and playfuly serious eyes, that I've seen before.

"She looks like Heather," Randy says.

"Oh yeah?"

"Not exactly looks like her. More like she reminds me of her. Don't you think?"

"Don't see it myself," I lie.

The truth is, the waitress doesn't look like Heather Langham al that much, though they share some general characteristics— height, age, style of hair. But the girl in the referee outfit who now comes our way with a tray balanced on the flat of her hand has the same rare brand of charm as Heather had. An aura, I suppose. A goodness that doesn't disqualify desire, as goodness alone can often do.

She returns with the frosted mugs, pours draft from the pitcher. It's Randy who chats with her. His goofy, going-nowhere banter that waitresses are happy to play along with. He's firing off queries regarding what's good on the menu ("Al I can say is the kitchen passed inspection last time around," she says), what she's studying ("I took a year off backpacking in Europe last year, so now I'm chained to this place to save up for tuition") and if she grew up in town ("Grimshaw bored and raised!").

Then Randy notices the ring on her finger. A platinum band with an emerald shard embedded in it.

"Now that's a lovely stone. Matches your eyes," he says, taking her hand in his to inspect it more closely. "Don't tel me it's an engagement ring? You'd kill me."

"I don't know. Pre-engagement, I guess."

"No worries, then," Randy says with a laugh. " Everything is pre-engagement when you think about it, darlin'."

As Randy and she tease, he turns to give me a wink both the waitress and I are meant to see, a shared pleasure in the moment. It's the first bloom of alcohol, the comfort of being with a friend you know wel and who asks nothing of you. As for the waitress, she doesn't seem in any particular rush to leave our side, though she shows no special interest in us either. She is simply, generously, unselfconsciously making our day and nothing more.

As the afternoon turns to evening, the pitchers come and go in steady succession. The sudden emotion that had gripped us earlier is replaced with easy talk, catching up. He takes me on a comic tour of the low points of his acting career ("I've got nothing but low points!"), the cattle cals and megalomaniac furniture-commercial directors and gigs as an extra on a handful of Holywood blockbusters, most notably as "a bartender who slides a Manhattan over to George Clooney . . . which apparently I was doing wrong somehow, because they cut me out and spliced in somebody else's hand." I tel him about my Parkinson's. How I sold Retox and was doing little but waiting for things to get worse. Somehow, though, I felt I related al this misfortune in the same tone Randy related his: plainly and without self- pity, each of us acknowledging that we had been visited by our measure of failure and regret, as everyone has at our stage of the game.

And through it al, we remember Ben. How his life was wasted on a pointless obsession. And then his death, so preventable and yet unsurprising, even fated. But we quickly shift away from the outcome of Ben McAuliffe's narrative to a greatest hits of scenes from his youth, his dorky visions, his sleepy goaltending. Soon Randy and I are laughing and coughing and laughing again, which we're thankful for, seeing as it makes our anguished tears look to the rest of the room like beer-fueled hilarity.

Some time later I make my way to the men's room and see how busy the place has gotten. The work crews kicking the mud off their boots, the girls-night-outers squeezed into their finest denim. Even a clutch of suits tossing back a couple of after-work quickies before heading home to the newer streets north of the river.

And then two faces I recognize. Stepping out of the crowd and offering hands to shake. A big felow in a Canada Post parka first, folowed by his stout, patchily bearded friend.

"Trev? Holy shit! I was right. It's you!" the first one says, and claps me in a bear hug.

"Todd?"

"Glad to know the grey hair didn't throw you off too much."

" Todd Flanagan?"

"Last name too. Nice work."

"How's Tina? You two stil together?"

"Long gone," Todd reports. "Tina was not a stick-around sort of girl." Todd loops his arm around the bearded guy's neck. "Here's another test. Can you recal the name of this walking sieve right here?"

"Vince Sproule," I announce, catching in the toothy grin a glimpse of the eighteen-year-old he once was. "Grimshaw's greatest goalie ever."

"He was quick, wasn't he?"

"Not so much these days," Vince says, pretending to snatch an oncoming puck out of the air. "Three kids and too many Egg McMuffins can slow you down after a while."

Todd and Vince were Guardians too, teammates on the high- school team. And though they were only two years ahead of us at the time, they look a decade older than we do now, bloated and shambling. But content too, I'd say. The added pounds that come with snacks in front of the game-of-the-week and unrenewed gym memberships.

"A terrible thing," Todd says, his hand on my shoulder. "About Ben."

"It is."

"Guess you're here for the funeral."

"Randy too."

"No shit?"

"He's sitting over there. In the corner."

Todd and Vince squint over the heads of other patrons to find Randy waving back at us, like a long-lost cousin at airport arrivals.

"It's a goddamn team reunion," Vince says.

"Wish it could have been for better reasons," Todd adds, and I'm moved by how plainly he means it.

"We're going to miss him," I say.

"Us too," Todd says. "It's a funny thing. I probably saw him more than anyone the past while."

"You visited?"

"I'm a mailman," Todd says, pointing to the Canada Post patch on the chest of his jacket as though to offer proof. "Been delivering to Ben's neighbourhood pretty much since I took the job. I'd wave up at him in that window, Monday to Friday, before going up the steps to drop off the bils."

"Did he ever come down? To talk?"

"Not a once."

"Always was an oddbal," Vince Sproule says, shaking his head. "But then there's a point when oddbals turn just sad. You know what I mean?"

"I do."

"Never much of a goalie, either," Todd says.

"It's a good thing we had you, Vince."

"You ever wonder how far we could have gone that year, Trev?" Todd asks.

"I don't realy think about it."

"It was tragic. What happened. But maybe not just for, you know, those involved. You were a pretty good sniper yourself."

"It doesn't—"

"Who knows who would have noticed you. You could have—"

"I told you, I don't think about it. I do my best not to think about a lot of things."

"Sure. I can understand that," Todd says, nodding as though at an insight into his own condition he'd long been blind to.

Then something happens that delivers a sharp stab of jealousy: our waitress, the pretty referee, walks up and gives Todd a kiss on the cheek.

"Don't you just love this guy?" she says before slipping back into the crowd, and though it's just more waitress banter, it's obvious that she does love him. Lucky Todd Flanagan. Tina Uxbridge might have fooled around on him a few hundred times before dumping him. But if this referee is Todd's new girlfriend, he's bounced back quite nicely.

Todd is grinning like a monkey. "You remember Tracey."

"Tracey?"

"She was a lot smaler then."

Then I get it. The bundle of squawking joy Tina used to bring to the Guardians games.

"That's your daughter?"

"You fancy-suit, big-city guys. They al as sharp as you?"

"She was just a baby."

"Stil is."

"Wel, I have to thank you, Todd. You've just made me feel incredibly old."

"C'mon. You didn't need me for that, did you?"

I carry on to the men's room, and when I return Todd and Vince have joined Randy at our table, a fresh pitcher already between them. I suppose it's al the beer that helps in creating the sense that the four of us stil have so much in common, when realy al we talk about is how lousy the hockey got on TV after they started giving

"these Russian pretty boys five milion to fake a concussion every time the wind blows" (as Vince puts it), our women troubles, the body's first betrayals that attend the lapsing of its forty- year warranty.

Or maybe I'm wrong in that. Maybe we are stil friends, and I've just forgotten what they are.

Eventualy, Todd and Vince announce they have to go home and get some sleep. Todd has his mail rounds in the morning and Vince has to replace the brakes on a minivan at the garage he co-owns before they have to put on Sunday clothes for Ben's funeral in the afternoon. Yet even then we stay on for one more pitcher to add to the previous half-dozen or so, al served by Tracey Flanagan, Todd's baby girl.

When we finaly head out into the night, the air has cooled several degrees. I stand with Randy on the sidewalk, deciding which way to go. Around us, the town has been sharpened by the cold, the old storefronts grey and looming.

The two of us shake off a chil. It's the shared notion that for al the time we were inside Jake's Pool 'n' Sports, in the deceptive warmth of light and company, Grimshaw was waiting for us.

I think we were hoping to find it gone. Torn down to make way for a triplex, or finaly razed for safety reasons, leaving only an empty lot behind. We don't entertain these possibilities aloud, in any case. Once we'd paid our tab at Jake's, it was stil only nine, and Randy wanted a cigarette, so I joined him on a tipsy wander through the streets, taking the long way back to the Queen's.

Neither of us acknowledged it when we turned the corner onto Caledonia Street. We started up the long slope toward the hospital, noting how remarkably little had changed about the houses, the modest gardens, even the mailboxes lashed to the streetlight poles to thwart kids from tipping them over. When the McAuliffe house comes into view we automaticaly cross the street to be on the same side it's on. We pause in front for a moment, gazing up at Ben's window.

And then, unstoppably, we turn to folow what was his line of sight for most of his waking adult life.

It's stil unoccupied, judging from the black, uncurtained windows, the wood trim bristled with mildew, the knee-high seedlings dotting the yard. Nevertheless, given the little care paid to it over the last thirty or more years, the Thurman house looks reasonably solid, testimony to the stone foundation and brick work of its builders over a century ago. Even the headless rooster stil tops the attic gable.

"Why don't they just tear it down?" I ask.

"Can't. It's privately owned."

"How do you know?"

"Mrs. McAuliffe told me. It's been handed down and handed down. The owners are out-of-towners. Never even visit."

"Why not sel?"

"Maybe they're waiting for an upturn in the market."

"In the Grimshaw market?"

"I wonder if it misses him," Randy says, stubbing his cigarette out under the heel of his shoe. "Ben must have been its only friend."

"He wasn't its friend," I say, sharper than I expected to.

We stay there a minute longer. Staring at the Thurman house from the far side of Caledonia Street, a perspective we had returned to countless times in sleep-spoiling dreams. Watching for what Ben had been watching for. A white flash of motion. Opened eyes. A glint of teeth.

I'm first to start back to the hotel. The moon leading us on, peeping through the branches.

Randy laughs. "Guess it knows we're here now."

I do my best to join him in it, if only to prevent the sound of his forced humour from drifting unconvincingly in the night air. And to push away the thought that we had already made mistakes. Coming back to Grimshaw. Pretending that we could avoid certain topics if we simply told ourselves to. Most of al, the mistake of letting it know we're here.

We had forgotten what Ben reminded himself of every day: the Thurman house never alowed itself to be observed without a corresponding price.

Every time you looked into it, it looked into you.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 6

Most days, I'd stop to pick up Sarah so the two of us could walk the rest of the way to school together. It had become habit for me to knock at her side door on the mornings I didn't have one of the Guardians' deadly pre-dawn practices, and for her mom to offer me homemade waffles or bacon sandwiches, something that would have been a Christmas treat in my house. I would decline at first, but I always ended up snarfing down a second breakfast al the same as I waited for Sarah to come downstairs. I liked these stolen minutes, the anticipation of Sarah's face, me teling her mother something that made her laugh too loudly for a woman so petite and religious. Sarah's father had already left for work. Now that I think of it, maybe he'd planned it that way. Maybe he'd designed these moments in the kitchen to say Nice, isn't it? Make an honest woman of my daughter and al this could be yours.

But on the morning of the day after Ben told us he'd witnessed—or felt, or dreamed—the coach carrying Heather Langham into the Thurman house in the middle of the night, I walked past Sarah's place without stopping. The world that she and I inhabited together— the hand-holding walks, the drives out to Harmony, the thriled admissions of love beyond the footbal field's endzone—had been soiled by the speculations of the night before. Not irrevocably. Not yet. There was, on that February Wednesday, stil a chance for certain courses to be avoided.

But they wouldn't be. Even as I drifted by Sarah's house and realized she wasn't walking next to me only after I stepped out onto the playing field's 40-yard line, I could tel there would be choices coming my way. What they would involve I couldn't guess. Al that was clear was that Sarah would have to be shielded from their outcomes.

We had opened our minds to their darkest possibilities. There was no going back from that. But such liberties came with obligations. Like the wals of the Thurman house, we would have to try to keep the darkness inside.

Grimshaw Colegiate sits atop the highest hil within the town's limits, which isn't saying much as hils go. A pocked mound of stone and thistles just steep enough for toboggans to reach a speed that might coax a whoop out of six-year-olds. Stil, in a town free of topographic features worth mentioning, the cubist mess of the school building—brick gym from the 1890s, colour- paneled '60s wing of classrooms sticking out the rear, the cinder-block science department added on the cheap—

appeared with enhanced importance on its piebald throne, looking down over the mud playing field, the river gurgling next to it, the parking lot surrounded by trees that provided shade for the smal crimes entertained within students' cars.

One offence we frequently committed was a "hot box" before morning attendance. This involved me, Ben and Randy cramming ourselves into the two-door Ford that Carl's dad left behind, roling the windows up and sharing a joint Randy would produce from the baggie he kept hidden in the lining of his Sorels. With the four of us inhaling and passing and coughing, the cabin of Carl's sedan soon became thick with smoke, the air moist and opaque as a sauna. A hot box offered the most efficient use of a single joint, a technique that "seals in al the grassy goodness," as Randy said in his Price Is Right voice. When we were done, we would open the doors and stand around in an unsteady circle, watching the plumes escape the car's confines, rise through the pine boughs and into the sky above like a signal to another, faraway tribe.

So while I know what Randy has in mind when he waves me over and makes a toking gesture obvious enough to show he doesn't realy care who knows, there's something subdued in his expression, worried quarter moons of darkness under his eyes that tel me there's more going on in Carl's Ford than a bunch of guys getting high before chemistry.

"We're having a meeting," Randy says as we make our way through the rows of cars. "Ben has something he wants to say."

"Is this more bulshit about what he said he saw?"

"He wants us al together first."

"But you've guessed."

Randy pauses at the car, his fingers slipping under the passenger-side door handle. "I've just got a feeling I'd rather be stoned when I hear it, that's al," he says.

We pile in. Carl behind the wheel, Ben hugging the glovebox to let me and Randy slip into the back.

"Ready?" Randy asks.

"Ready," Carl answers, clicking the power window buttons, making sure we're sealed in.

As Randy puls the baggie out of his boot, Ben shifts around in the front seat, taking each of us in, one at a time. A kind of silent rol cal that would be funny if attempted by anyone else. But laughing is out of the question. It intensifies the one sound to concentrate on: Randy, who clinks his Zippo open and sucks the joint to life.

"We have to go in," Ben says.

None of us say anything. It's as though Ben had not uttered the sentence we'd al just heard. Or perhaps we were trying to pretend it was a sentence that didn't properly belong to the moment, a glitch in the soundtrack.

Then he says it again.

"We have to go into the house."

"What house?"

"Nice try, Randy," Carl says.

Randy shrugs, passing up to Carl while waving a hand to sweep the smoke that escapes his nostrils back into his mouth.

"I don't see why we have to do anything," I say. "It's not our issue."

"You're right. It's not an issue," Ben says. "It's a human being."

"You're saying Heather's stil in there? You saw something new last night?"

"I watched. Stayed up til dawn watching," Ben says. "But no. I didn't see anything."

"So how do you know she's in there?"

"I'm saying she might be. And if she is, she needs help. Our help."

Randy rubs the elbow of his shirt over the window, clearing a circle from the condensation. He stares out at a group of girls in designer jeans climbing the hil toward school, their backsides swaying with each step, before they disappear behind the returning mist of his breath.

"Here's the thing I don't get," Randy says. "What does this have to do with us? Maybe you, Ben. But I wasn't the one up in your room spooking myself shitless. I didn't see a thing. So where do I come into it? Where does anyone but you come into it?"

Ben nods. "You didn't see what I saw. But now you know what I saw. Which amounts to the same thing."

"It does?" Randy says. "Yeah, I guess it does."

"No, it doesn't," I say, taking the joint Randy offers me. "We're not involved. And that's how it should stay.

We go into that house and if—and this is a big mother of an if— if something's happened in—"

"Don't bogart that thing," Carl warns. I take a perfunctory haul and pass it on.

"What I'm saying is that if we go in there and find something bad, we're part of it. We're implicated, or whatever."

"Implicated," Carl says. "Very good, Trev."

He waves the joint by Ben. Ben only rarely partakes on these smoky mornings, so he surprises us by expertly nabbing it before it's out of reach. A quick hit and his eyes turn glassy, the whites bleached clear.

"She's missing," Ben says. "And we have a piece of information nobody else has. It's a question not of whether it would be right to act on it, but of how wrong it would be if we didn't."

"Fine," I say, exhaling a blue cloud against the windshield. "You've established that as far as you're concerned, you are duty bound to do something. So go tel the police about it."

"As if they're going to listen to me."

"Why wouldn't they? You're a witness."

"Not realy. Not in a court-of-law way."

"So if the pigs aren't going to take you seriously," Carl says, pinching the roach, "why should we?"

Ben turns al the way around to look at us in the back seat. His face shrouded in curls of smoke.

"You're my friends," he says.

And that was it. Our undoing, as the Coles Notes described what folowed from the dumb decisions of kings and princes in the Shakespeare we never read.

Why? We were good guys. Unquestioned loyalty. A soldier's duty. This is what the coach, our fathers, every hero we'd ever watched on the Vogue's screen had taught us. It was certainly the highest compliment in a dressing room, as in "Carl was a good guy out there tonight when he put that fucker on a stretcher for spearing Trev." Standing up for the felow wearing the same uniform as you, even if it made little sense, even if it meant getting hurt. This is how it was supposed to go in hockey games, anyway, and in war movies, and in the lessons handed down from our baffled, misled fathers.

But here's the thing we found out too late to make a difference: our fathers and movie heroes might have been wrong.

"When?" I asked.

"Tonight," Ben said.

[6]

In the city, churches are giving up. Dwindling congregations leaving their places of worship to be converted into condos, daycares or yoga studios. But judging from the streets Randy and I drive through in a cab on our way to St. Andrew's Presbyterian, the churches of Grimshaw are hanging on. Every third corner stil has a gloomy limestone house of God in need of new windows and a Weedwhacker. To the faithful this might seem an encouraging indication of resilience, the heartland's refusal to let the devil go about his business unimpeded. But to me, there is something chiling in al the broken-down bastions of the divine, as though it wil be here, and not in the indifferent, thrumming city, that the final wrestling of goods and evils wil take place. And it won't be as showy as Revelation promised either: no beast rising from the sea, no serpent to tel seductive lies. When the reckoning takes place it wil be quiet. And like al the bad done in Grimshaw, it wil be known by many but spoken of by none.

Randy and I shuffle up the steps at St. Andrew's, flipping up colars against the cold drizzle. We're the last ones in, and while the nave is not large, the pews are no more than a sixth ful. I suppose I was expecting more of a crowd, something along the lines of a high-school memorial assembly, as if Ben were the seventeen-year-old victim of a tragic accident and not a forty- year-old suicide.

As the minister plods through the program of murmured prayers and hymns, I try to identify some of the other mourners. There's Todd and Vince, as promised, along with a couple of other Guardians, a startlingly obese Chuck Hastings next to Brad Wickenheiser with home-dyed hair the colour of tar. Aside from Mrs.

McAuliffe (a shrunken version of herself, inanimate and colapsed as a puppet after you pul out your hand), nobody looks particularly familiar. I search the rows for Carl. Though I know he's not here, I can't help feeling that if I look hard enough I'l find him.

The minister delivers the brief eulogy. A sterile recitation of Ben's staled resume: his "lifelong commitment" to his mother, his love of fantasy books and the

"excitements of the imagination," the loss of his father. There is no reference to the surveilance he conducted from his attic roost, nor to the vacant house across the street he believed to be the devil's pied- à-terre in Grimshaw.

After the service, everyone files past Ben's mom, the old woman offering a hand to be clasped. Yet when Randy and I reach her, she blinks us into focus and touches our cheeks. I ask if I can come around to the house in the morning to look over Ben's legal papers or do whatever an executor is supposed to do.

"Come anytime, Trevor," she says, straightening my tie. "I'l make tea."

"I'l cal first."

"If you like," she says, shrugging. "But I'l be there whether you cal or not."

We take another cab down to the Old Grove. Ben's grave is next to his father's. The McAuliffe name engraved in stone at the head of both their places, their tombstones citing only their dates of birth and death, the latter events both at their own hands, whether counted as such on the official record or not. Even fewer have gathered for the burial than at the church, a clutch of shiverers shifting from foot to foot, the soft earth sucking at their shoes.

The minister is here again, though he does little more than run through a memorized "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust" before they lower the casket into the ground.

"That's it," Randy says next to me, and when I turn to him I see quiet, clear-eyed tears that mix with the spitting rain so that, from the other side of the grave, he would appear merely in need of an umbrela. "That's it."

"It makes it real, I know. Seeing him go."

"Real? It's like I'm the one at the bottom of a hole. I can hardly breathe, man."

I guide Randy a few feet away to the shelter of a maple. The two of us stand there watching the others drift back toward their cars. Some look our way as they go, perhaps recognizing us from some prehistoric geography class or peewee hockey team. Only one looks not at us but at me.

My body remembers her before I do.

A woman my age wearing a lace-colared blouse and beneath it a skirt that displays the powerful legs I have always associated with fresh-air-and-fruit-pie farmers'

wives. Almost certainly

a mom. Filing out her Sunday best with a few more pounds (welcome, to my eyes) than the day she bought it a couple of years back. A good-looking woman who belongs to a vintage I recognize (the same as mine), but not any particular person I know.

And yet, her eyes on me—friendly, but without invitation or promise—starts an immediate rush of desire. Not mere interest, either. Not any casual appraisal of a stranger's form, the kind of automatic sizing-up a man performs half a dozen times walking down a single city block. This has nothing to do with finding someone attractive. I smile uncertainly back at her and there it is: the almost forgotten clarity of lust. The only word for it. It is lust that races my breath into audible clicks, unlocks my knees and throws my hand out to Randy's shoulder to keep my balance.

"Is that Sarah?" I ask him. Randy looks over at the woman, her eyes now averted so that she stares into the dripping trees.

"I believe it is."

"Sarah. Good God."

"Look at you," Randy says. "Al moony like it's grade nine al over again."

"It is," I say, and take a deep breath. "It is grade nine al over again."

I start over to her with my hand extended, but she doesn't take it, kissing me once on each cheek instead.

"They do it twice in the city, right?" she says.

"You've got al the bases covered."

She puls back to take a ful, evaluating look at me. "So this is how my first love has turned out."

"Must make you glad I wasn't your last."

"I don't know about that. This is Grimshaw. For women over thirty, men with a pulse who don't smack you around are objects of desire."

There is a whiff of divorce about her. The leeriness that comes from wondering if every kindness is a trick, coupled with the lonely's wilingness to hear out even the most obvious lie to the end. She's tough. But it's a toughness that has been learned, a buffer against charm and premature hope.

"I'm sorry," she says, and for an absurd moment I think she's apologizing for our breaking up in grade twelve, before I realize she's speaking of Ben.

"Thank you. It's good that you're here."

She laughs. "I live three blocks from St. Andrew's. I'd say it's good that you're here."

"It's been a long time."

"Too bad it took something like this to bring you back."

"I loved the guy."

"I know you did. You al did."

"We went through ... we were best friends."

"I know."

She opens her arms and I step into them. My hands clasped around the strong trunk of her body, her hair a veil against the grey cold.

"You sure you're going to be okay?" she asks, puling away sooner than I would like.

"I must look pretty wrecked."

"Just a little lost, that's al."

"Can I tel you something, Sarah? I am a little lost."

A pained smile works at the corners of her mouth. "It's strange. Hearing you say my name."

"I can say it again if you'd like."

"No, I'l remember just fine."

I'm doing it before I can stop myself, though I don't think there's much in me that wants me to stop digging in my walet for my card.

"I have to help Ben's mom with some stuff," I say, clapping the card into Sarah's palm. "Are you in a position—that is, would you like to join me for dinner before I go? Lunch? A shot of tequila?"

Sarah looks down at my card as though it bears not a name and number but the false promise of a fortune cookie. We are paused like that—her reading and thinking, me watching her read and think—when I see the boy.

He is standing behind a tombstone at the crest of a rise maybe a couple of hundred yards away. An old maple sprouts from the hil's highest point, so that the boy is shaded from the day's already diminished light, leaving him an outline coloured in graphite. He stares at me in the fixed way of someone who has been staring for some time, and I have only now caught him at it.

"You can't be here," I whisper.

But I am, the boy whispers back.

"Trevor?" Sarah says, searching.

But I'm already starting up the rise toward him. A walk that loosens my knees into a wobbly jog. Clenched hands held in front of me as though prepared to wrap themselves around the boy's neck and start choking.

Trevor the Brave, the boy laughs .

My shoes skid out from under me on the wet sod, and for a second I pitch forward, knuckles punching off the ground to keep me up.

When I'm propped on my elbows and able to look again, the boy is gone.

I scramble up to the tombstone where he was standing. Search the descending slope on the other side for where he might be waiting for me. And instead of the boy, I find a man. Running into the scrub that borders the cemetery.

"Carl!"

I glance back to see Randy starting up the slope.

Behind him, her hand to her mouth, Sarah watches as though a parachute was failing to open. An unstoppable, fatal error taking place before her eyes.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 7

The Thurman house was no different in its construction than any of the other squat, no-nonsense residences it shared Caledonia Street with, two rows of Ontario red-brick built at the last century's turn for the town's first doctors, solicitors and engineers. So why did it stand out for us? What made it the one and only haunted house in Grimshaw for our generation? Its emptiness was part of the answer. Houses can be in poor repair, ugly and overgrown, but this makes them merely sad, not the imagined domicile of phantoms. Vacancy is an unnatural state for a stil-habitable home, a sign of disease or threat, like a pretty girl standing alone at a dance.

But it hadn't always been empty. This—knowing that real people had once occupied its cold and barren rooms—was what lent the place its sinister aura. This, and the implication that they had left. There was something wrong about a house people chose not to live in. Or something wrong about the last people who did.

Not that I recal thinking any of this as we made our way onto the Thurman property that night. Al I was thinking wasn't a thought at al but a physical aversion that had to be fought off with each step, along with a murmur in my head that would have said, if it could speak aloud, something like Turn back. Or It's wrong that you're here. Or You are about to step from the world you know into one you don't want to know.

In short, I was afraid.

I think al of us wanted to stop, to sidle no farther along the thorny hedgerow that shielded us from the pale streetlight, the wan half moon. If one of us had said, "I think we should go," or merely turned and headed back toward the street, I believe the rest would have folowed. But none of us said or did anything other than proceed along the side of the house, inching closer to the two tal windows set too close together like crossed eyes. Both fogged with dust, through which someone on the inside had long ago dragged a finger to spel fuckt against the glass.

I'm not sure we discussed the best way to get in. I suppose each of us assumed there would be a window left open or gaping celar doors that would make it obvious. We never thought to try the front door.

"This is where he went," Ben whispered, and the sound of his voice reminded us how long we had gone without saying anything. From the time we gathered at Carl's apartment and made the three-block walk to stand opposite the McAuliffe house, looking into its warm interiors from which we had so often safely peered out at the Thurman place across the way, we had traveled in silence. It was a journey that required no more than ten minutes but felt much longer than that. The whole time al of us walking in a defeated pack, as though escaped prisoners who had decided freedom was too much work and were returning to our cels.

And then, stil recovering from the sound of Ben's words, we paused to grapple with their meaning.

The coach. This is what Ben was telling us. It was over this ice-crusted grass that he carried Heather Langham the night before last.

In the dark, the backyard was impossibly enlarged, a neglected field of weeds poking through the snow and swaying in a breeze that rushed the clouds across the moon. A see-saw stood in one corner of the lot, the seat of the raised end poking up from a cluster of saplings like the head of a curious animal. Little kids used to play on that, I remember thinking. And then: What kids? When would any child have run around on this ground? Who could ever laugh into this air?

I wondered about that long enough to be surprised when Carl nudged me from behind.

"It's not locked," he said.

I folowed his pointed flashlight to see Ben standing in front of the open back door.

We folowed him inside. Al of us making our way through a mud room into the kitchen. An old gas stove stood in one corner, the face of its clock cracked, the time frozen at a quarter to twelve. An undoored fridge. The walpaper a photographic mural of a country scene: a pondside with a forest beyond, and a single deer lowering its head to drink. But then you looked again, looked closer. The forest was cloaked in shadow that seemed to darken as you watched. And the deer wasn't drinking but lifting its head, startled by a cry from the woods. Something about the composition of the picture suggested that whatever was about to emerge out of the trees meant to hunt the deer, to spil its blood on the grass. And that the deer knew this, was frozen by the knowledge that it was about to die.

We were al gazing at the walpaper now. Al of us listening. For the thing in the woods. The thing that was here.

And with our listening came a count. One, two, three, four—our lungs, our in-and-outs of air. Along with a fifth. The idea of another's breath somewhere within the house.

Ben shook his head. A gesture that signified the denial of a request, although none of us had asked anything of him. Then he walked on, and we folowed, through the archway that opened on the main-floor halway running the length of the house to the front. Ben puled open the sliding doors to the living room.

I hadn't expected al the things left behind. Not just by previous inhabitants—a sofa exploding its white stuffing, amputated dining-room chairs, a rug patterned with cypress trees—but by visitors. I must have imagined the interior of the Thurman house to have been set-decorated in the manner of a Transylvanian castle: cobwebs thick as shredded T-shirts, a candelabra set atop a grand piano, rooms the size of soundstages. Instead, it was merely filthy. A heap of brown glass shards in the fireplace where a thousand beer bottles had been smashed. You had to watch your step for the used condoms and needles on the floor.

Along with the messages on the wals. Most of it what you'd expect: the graffitied declarations ("I LUV U PENNY!!") and invitations ("Need yur cock SUCKED?

232 4467 ANY time") and pride ("Guardians Rule—Elmira Eats Poo") and slander ("Jen Yarbeck is a WHORE"). The primitive spray- painted penises and anuses, a long-haired woman with enormous breasts and a dialogue baloon shouting "Moo!" over her head.

Then the strange ones. Phrases much smaler than the others. Al in lowercase. Utterances that sought the corners and baseboards of the room, that made you, upon finding one, look for another.

stay with me

no such thing as an empty house

i walk with you

I don't know if the others read these or not. The next thing I remember, we were walking away from each other. We must have spoken, though I can't recal what was said. Or maybe we separated without discussion, knowing the quickest way to search the house, find it vacant and get out of there was to split up. In any case, I went to the staircase by the front door knowing I was on my own.

At the landing, I looked back. There was a railing over which the foyer floor lay fifteen feet below, a bulb hanging on a wire where some more elaborate fixture would once have hung. I squinted down the halway, a spine with two doorways on each side that, if configured the same way as the second floor in my house (as it probably was, this house so much like an unloved version of the one in which I lived), opened onto three bedrooms and a bathroom at the end.

I started toward the first door on the left with shuffling, elderly steps. It had been easy for me to take the stairs up, but now my body fought against moving. My shoes tearing the old newspapers strewn over the floorboards, a carpet of Falklands War headlines and ads for used-car lots, including Randy's dad's place (Kum Kwick to Krazy Kevin's!), his clown nose and lunatic grin floating over the rows of Plymouths.

A comics page got stuck to my sole. I bent to peel it off, wondering, with a turn in my stomach, what could be gummy enough to act as glue on the floor of this place, and when I raised my eyes again he was there.

A boy.

Eyes fixed on me. I recal little else about his appearance other than the impression that we were the same age, nearly men but not quite. He could have been Carl, or Randy, or Ben—there was a milisecond flash when I assumed it was one of them—but there was a threat in the way he cocked his head that I'd never seen in them, or in anyone.

The boy said nothing. I remember no detail of his face that could be described as an expression, the outline of his body stil, ungesturing. So what was it that prevented me from thinking of him as a fuly living boy? How could I tel he wanted to show me something?

I remember attempting to speak to him, though what I intended to say I have no idea now. What I do remember is the panic, the claustrophobia of being bound and hooded. Buried alive.

Oh yes, the boy said but didn't say . You're going to like this.

A wet click of breath in my throat and he was gone. Not with a puff of smoke, nothing uncanny or ghostly. Simply gone in the way a thing confirms it was never there at al.

I registered the squeak a moment later. The grind of a rusty hinge.

This was what made the boy disappear, what proved he was a misreading of reality. The bathroom door at the end of the hal had been wrenched open, a ful-length mirror screwed to the inside. And now, with a nudge of draft, the door moved an inch, shifting the angle of the mirror's reflection. Removing me from view.

There was the explanation for what I'd seen, rational, conclusive. It was me. Me, summoning a dark twin to return my gaze.

But even as I continued down the hal with calmed breaths, I didn't believe it. That wasn't me. A line of thinking I wrestled down but couldn't completely silence.

You know it wasn't.

It strikes me as strange now—and it must have then as wel—but once the boy could no longer be seen, the feelings he brought with him could no longer be felt either. I was certain that Heather Langham was not going to be discovered tied to the radiator in any of the bedrooms I leaned into, or slumped in the shower stal whose glass door I swung open to a party of skittering roaches. It smeled bad up here, but only in the way of smels I had already encountered, of piss and damp and long-discarded fast-food bags.

I had puled the bathroom door closed and was leaning against it, suddenly winded, when I saw someone standing where I had been when I noticed the boy.

Another figure of dimensions similar to my own drawn in a sharper outline of darkness.

Carl took a step closer. A dim veil of moonlight glazing his face.

"Randy found something," he said.

We descended to the main floor in silence, and I noticed that the house was silent too. Had the others already left? Carl said Randy had found something, but I remember doubting this. Not only because the house was so quiet it seemed impossible that three other breathing, heart-pounding boys could stil be within it but also because of the lingering sense of change that folowed the appearance of the boy. The world had been altered now that I'd seen him—the mirror me that wasn't me—

and the solid grip I'd had on my perceptions before tonight was something I thought might never return. I had the idea that I could no longer count on anything as true anymore, every observation from here on in holding the potential of trickery. Which included my friends. Included Carl.

He led me down the front hal into the kitchen. Only once we came to stand side by side on the bubbled linoleum, listening to the stilness as though awaiting whispered instruction, did I change my mind about the house's vacancy. There was something in here with us. Not Randy or what he'd discovered. Not even the boy.

But something else altogether. A presence that had yet to let itself be known, but was aware of us. Saw endless possibilities in our being here.

Carl nudged me closer to the top of the basement stairs. I wondered if he might push me. I could feel my skin ripping on the steps' nail heads, the crack of bones loud as feled trees. At the bottom, something sharp.

Carl turned on his flashlight, and a yelow circle spiled over the stairs to colect in a pool on the hard soil of the celar floor. I expected him to start down first but he waited, looking down the stairs with the distracted expression of someone working to recolect a half-forgotten name.

His lips moved. An inaudible gulp. He turned his head and looked at me. "It's different," he said. "What? What's different?"

He gave his head a shake. Two pouches, brown and tender as used tea bags, sweled under his eyes. "You go first," he said.

And I did. My oversized shadow looming and lurching as I made my way down the narrow steps. A plumbing pipe screwed into the wal for a handrail. One that threatened to give way any time you caled upon it.

At the bottom of the stairs, another flashlight found me. As it approached it blinded me to whoever stood behind it.

"We need to make a decision."

I could see Ben only after he pointed the light up into the pipes and frayed electrical cords running through the wood slats of the ceiling.

"You need to be a part of it, Trev," he said. "Okay. What's the question?" "What do we do now?" "How about we get out of here?" "No," he said, pursing his lips.

"I don't think that's an option."

Ben started away into the celar's broad darkness. I turned to Carl behind me, but he only waved his flashlight against his side like an usher impatient to show me to my seat before the show starts.

Ben stopped. Directed the light down to the floor. How to describe the scene it revealed in the celar's far corner? I don't think I could say what it was like to take it in whole.

The elements, then:

Randy standing with the help of one hand against the stone wal, his other hand pinching wads of red snot from his nose. Blood dripping off his chin and pushing dark dots through his Human League T-shirt.

Carl staring behind us. Terrified. Not of what lay in the corner and he'd already seen, but of what he alone saw in the dark.

Blood on the floor. Not Randy's. Older-looking smears, formless as spiled paint stirred around with bedsheets, along with more recent spits and spots. Handprints, toes. Clawed trenches in the earth.

Heather Langham. Or a life-size dol of Heather Langham, her face looking away from me, knees and elbows bent at right angles the way a child draws a running stick figure. She lay on the floor, so flat it was like she was partly buried, deflated as the long-ago poisoned mice I'd once discovered behind hockey bags in the garage.

I said something. I must have, because Ben asked me to repeat it. Whatever it was I couldn't remember, then or now. So I said something else.

"We have to go."

"I told you. We can't do that now."

"The fuck we can't."

Carl's hand was on my elbow, a grip that held me within the flashlight's circle.

"Randy moved her," he said.

What's that got to do with anything?

"Randy moved her," I repeated.

"I don't know why. But he did."

"So let's move her back."

"It's not where she is that's—"

"What are you saying? What are you saying? What are you saying?"

I believe I was shouting. And I don't know how many times I asked this before Ben stepped in front of me.

"They'l know we were here," he said.

"Who?"

"The police. After they find her. And they'l find her. Somebody wil."

"How wil they know?"

"They'l look. And dead things—they start to stink or whatever, and—"

"Not her. Us. How wil they know we were here?"

"The blood," Ben said. "Randy's blood. On her."

Past Ben's shoulder Randy was nearly doubled over, as though the mention of his name was a boot to his guts. Then I took a peek downward. Saw the new, shiny drops of crimson atop the older, brownish crust on Heather's skin.

"Our fingerprints too," Ben said, scratching his jaw. "Along with the witnesses who saw us come here."

"Nobody saw us."

"I'm not so sure about that."

"The street was empty."

"But not the houses."

I remembered us standing across from the McAuliffes' maybe a half-hour earlier and wished we were there again, outside in the night air. A wishing so strong it was a physical effort to sustain, already slipping out of my grip, like holding a medicine bal against my chest.

"Your mom," I said. "In the living-room window. Looking out between the curtains."

"I'm not sure she even saw us. But she might have."

"This is insane," I said.

"That's not stopping it from happening," Ben said.

"We have to stop it."

"How?"

"We tel."

"Tel who?"

"Our parents. The police."

"I'm not sure you're quite getting this." Ben came to stand inches from me. He looked seasick. "She was murdered."

"I can see that."

"No, you can't. Look at her."

So I did. And as I kept my eyes on Heather, Ben spoke into my ear.

"This isn't the time you threw the footbal through Mrs. Laidlaw's window. This isn't letting Randy drive your dad's car into a mailbox. She's dead. And they don't just forgive people for that. They need someone to pay. And that is going to be us, unless we make it go away."

I stepped back to get away from him, the sharp tang of his skin.

"How did Randy bleed al over her anyway?" I asked.

"I hit him," Carl said.

"You punched Randy?"

"A few times."

"Why?"

"For being so stupid. Moving her? I didn't know he'd bleed al over the place, though."

"We can clean it up."

"It's al over her," Ben said. "No matter what we do, if they look for it, they'l find it. And if they find somebody's blood other than Heather's down here—blood on her body—"

"They'l know who to look for," Carl finished.

Randy moaned. A childish, stomach-ache sound.

"Shut up," Carl told him.

Randy stood straight. I'd seen people in states of shock before, concussion cases who'd gone head first into the boards left to wander the rink's halways after the game like zombies, unable to recal their phone number or the colour of their eyes. But Randy's condition was different. He knew exactly who he was, what was happening—he knew too much, and it was crushing him.

"He told me to touch her," he said. It was something less than a whisper.

"Didn't quite catch that," Carl said, and looked as though he was about to charge at him.

"He told me to," Randy said again.

"No, I didn't! Why would I do that? Tel you to drag her over the goddamned floor?" Carl looked to us. "You think I'd be that stupid?"

"Wait. Wait," Ben said, stepping closer to Randy yet not too close, as though to avoid contagion. "Who told you to?"

Randy raised his eyes. Met mine.

"Nobody. Nothing. I'm just—everything's fucked up, that's al."

"That's true," Carl said, slapping his hands together. "Fucked up? Right on the money there, Rando."

We fel into a colective silence. Remembering to breathe and little else.

I was the first to move. Even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I found myself lowering to kneel beside Heather Langham's body. I'm not sure what drew me closer to her, but it wasn't curiosity. The physical fact of her being dead was something I could grasp only at the edges, fleetingly, before forcing my thoughts to some smaler, more manageable detail, like the papery meeting of her grey lips, or her eyes, the lids slightly parted as though caught in a fight against sleep. Perhaps I needed confirmation that this was al as it appeared to be: she was dead, there wasn't any walking away now. Perhaps I was sorry that she had become a problem of ours, that everything that made her so vibrantly human had left her in this sour- smeling celar, and now she was, for us, a logistical puzzle, a stain.

Or perhaps I had to see for myself how she had been murdered.

Part of her lay on a blanket. No, not a blanket: a canvas drop cloth of the kind used by painters. The way it was smoothed out beneath her, buffering her from the hard dirt, gave the impression of a makeshift bed. The cloth told a history of a thousand mistakes: splashes of turquoise and yelow and off-whites falen from brushes or sloshed over the side of a kicked can. Now, as close as I was, I could see the more recent colours. Randy's bright nosebleed. Beneath it, the brown-red sprays and tracks emanating from the back of Heather Langham's skul.

Only then did I notice the screw. A fiercely beveled four-inch screw that had been pounded through a plank, sharp point up, which lay an arm's length from Heather's splayed fingers. Nearly half of the wood's length had been discoloured by blood. Maybe Heather had managed to pul it from the wound herself and toss it to where it now rested. Maybe someone else dropped it after seeing the job was done.

I leaned over. Bent so far across her body I had to brace myself on palms laid on the floor on the other side of her. For a second, my finger was hooked on the gold chain around her neck, puling the heart-shaped locket she was wearing to rest like an egg in the soft dimple at the base of her throat. I shook my hand free and the chain made a smal, watery sound as it settled over her skin. Then I lowered my head to the floor to look at her face.

Her eyes weren't fuly 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 initialy confused with seductiveness. It made me think that maybe this was Heather's twin, the one who liked to do al 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 stil 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 celar floor. Miss Langham, al future, being roled by the toes of our boots into the three-foot trench we managed to axe and heave from the copper-smeling 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 celar'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 tel 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 usualy 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 al 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 halucination, some aftertaste of Haloween 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 faling 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 cal 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'l 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'l do."

"For what?"

"A wake."

Tracey Flanagan is our waitress again. From across the room she gives us a comicaly 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'l be requiring the assistance of Bushmils shots as wel today, Tracey," Randy says in a leprechaun accent.

"I'm sorry," Tracey says, with genuine sympathy. "Mr. McAuliffe was a friend of al 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 puling her leg. I've just told her something intimate, and she acknowledges the honour with an eyes-closed nod.

"I'l 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."

"Bulshit."

"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 al 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 ful 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 al 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 fela?" 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 tels me."

"Your Gary, does he have a last name?"

"Pulinger."

"Rings a bel," I say.

"Bowl-More Lanes," Randy says, clicking his fingers. "Didn't the Pulingers 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 Bushmils and the Leafs going into the third period with an unlikely two-goal lead over the Red Wings. They wil 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 wil 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 usualy wiling 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 realy 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."

"Wel, let me tel 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 stil for the length of this exchange. "Trust me, I'm harmless."

"Trust you?"

"Or don't. Just know that a felow 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 folowed 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 recal one lunch period when we drove out to Harmony with plans for what Sarah caled, in a singing voice, an "afternoon delight." But to my astonishment, my normaly 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 tel Sarah about finding Miss Langham, and I couldn't tel 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 roled 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 puled 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 recolect 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 helo. 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 sasquatches.

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 kil 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 smal 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 caled 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 celar?"

"Didn't it feel like somebody was?"

This stopped me for a second. It stopped al of us.

"Al I'm saying," Ben said, "is if you'd done something wrong—something realy, realy 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 thoughtfuly, as though he'd just coined the phrase.

"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 folow if he was aware that I saw him from my window."

"Wait," I said. "Now al 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 al in shadow. "The coach wouldn't fuck with us," he said.

"He fucked with Heather," Carl said.

"We stil 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 realy 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 al 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 tel 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 al 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 dulest 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 al. 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 celar 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 al. 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 realy 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 fel in fat clumps over our heads. It made the night feel smaler, surrounding us like the wals of an old barn, solid enough to keep out al 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 teling me? Do Carl and Ben?"

"They know because they have to know."

"Wel, 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 kiling 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 folowing.

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 cal on Dave Hurley (who was guiltily on his way to the penalty box anyway).

Even more teling, he put Ben in net.

Halfway through the third period, our team behind 3-1 but stil 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 chalenge.

Ben played wel, by Ben standards. But by then the team had been thrown off by trailing a "bunch of dung- heeled inbreds" (as Carl caled 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 felow 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 al 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 smel 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—al 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 wil 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 bal of ice in my hand. This, I tel 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, unwiling to turn the knob, unable to pul 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 hal, 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 al 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'l 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 realy 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.

"Realy."

"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 puled 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 finaly. "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 tel."

"I'm not teling. 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, al 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 ful noontime light. To deny it is as difficult as not surveying the damage of a car accident as you rol past, the survivors huddled in blankets, the dead being puled 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 bel, 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 yelow 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 puling her close.

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

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

"Not sure I'l 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 paneling in the living room, the lace-covered dining table, the brooding landscapes of the Scottish Highlands too smal for the plaster wals they hang on. Even the smel of the place is familiar. Apparently Ben and his mother carried on with their deep-fried diets wel into his adulthood, judging from the diner-like aroma of hot oil and toast.

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

"I do?"

"Tired, maybe," she says, ignoring my struggles. "But handsome as always."

"It's just a little dark in here, that's al. Pul back the curtains and you'l 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 wil, 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 . . . wel, 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 fils 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.

"The Queen's."

"Horrible place."

"In the dark, it looks like any other room."

"Perhaps you'd like to stay here?"

It takes me a second to interpret what she's just said. Stay here? The idea causes a shudder that has nothing to do with Parkinson's.

"Just for a night or two," she goes on. "Until you're finished looking through Ben's things."

"It's very kind of you. But I wouldn't—"

"Be no trouble."

"You must be very—"

"I'd like you to stay."

Mrs. McAuliffe puts the teapot down on the table. Uses her now free hand to wipe the sleeve of her sweater under her chin.

"Of course," I say. "Thanks. I'l bring my things over this evening."

"Good. Good." She breathes, a clear in and out. "You can have Ben's room."

That, Betty, is never going to happen.

This is my first thought as I push open the door to Ben's attic room and look up at the splintery beam from which he'd tied the noose.

I am never going to spend the night here.

At the same time, even as I enter with the sound of my shoes sticking to the recently waxed floorboards (was this done after Ben died? Perhaps to clean away the blood? if there was blood?), I can already feel myself sliding between the sheets of the freshly made bed against the wal and turning out the light. A moment at once unthinkable and unstoppable.

The room is clean, but preserved. Even if I didn't know of Ben and the wasted years he'd spent up here, I could discern the not-rightness of its former inhabitant through the teenage boy things that hadn't been replaced or stored away. So there was stil the Specials poster over the dresser. Stil the Batman stickers on the mirror, the neat stacks of comics and Louis L'Amour novels against the wal. Stil the Ken Dryden lamp on the bedside table.

I sit on the edge of the bed, and the wood frame barks. A sound Ben would have been so used to he'd long ago have stopped hearing it.

The package he left for me sits on my lap. His square letters speling my name. So carefuly printed it suggests the final act in a long-planned operation. The licking of the envelope's fold a taste of finality, of poison.

I tear it open in one pul.

So it was you and me both, Ben. A thick, black leather journal slips out . Diary keepers.

It's heavy. A cover worn pale through repeated openings and closings, its inner pages dense with ink.

The entries are mostly brief, al written in chicken-scratched print, as though the paper he wrote on was the last in the world. The book opens with an unintentionaly comic record of non-event:

March 19, 1992

Nothing.

March 20, 1992

Nothing.

March 21, 1992

Nothing.

March 22, 1992

Same.

Then, after several more days of this:

March 29, 1992

The front door handle.

Something on the inside. Trying to get out.

No names, hardly any mention of the neighbours' comings or goings. Just the house. And, at certain points, the apparent sightings of characters so familiar to Ben he didn't waste the letters to name them, as in "He was at the downstairs window" or "She shouted someone's name" or "They moved together across the living room like balroom dancers."

May 18, 1992

Kids coming borne from school. Stop to stare at it.

I shout down at them, "Save yourselves! Keep moving/" They tell me to go fuck myself But they don't go in, don't go any closer.

I flip ahead, scanning. Five hundred pages of lunatic surveilance and shouted warnings. I close it after reading only the first dozen pages, my mind aswirl. Why did Ben bother keeping such a record in the first place? How did he think his observation was protecting anyone? Why kil himself now, leaving his post vacant?

And the kicker: Why had he left this to me?

I attempt to read on. But a minute later, I'm struck with a rare headache. A pair of marbles growing into golf bals at the temples.

I lay the journal down on the bedside table and sit in the chair by the window. Here it is, the ful extent of Ben's world: a tar- veined Caledonia Street climbing up the hil to the right, and through the branches of the neighbour's maple, the Thurman house, colourless and unnumbered. For al the seriousness Ben brought to his role as watchdog, it doesn't look threatening from up here in the neutral daylight so much as ashamed of itself. Was there ever a day when Ben doubted himself and saw it as I see it now, weak and forsaken? Did he ever run up against the boredom of waiting to see something in a building that had nothing to show?

I suppose he had his memories of being inside it to keep certain possibilities alive. He could look down at the Thurman house from this roost and visualize the floor plan in his head. It must have been a kind of anti-love, unrequited and undying, that kept him here. Instead of a girl, he had been altered by an experience that had left him frozen, compeled to relive the past as sentimental lovers do.

Yet there was a girl. Maybe she is why Ben stayed. Someone had to honour her by carrying her memory, even as her name faded year by year. In recaling the sight of Heather Langham walking up Caledonia Street, indifferent to the leer of the house's darkened eyes, Ben was saving her from becoming nothing more than another Terrible Story.

I try to summon this very image of her now, but it's beyond my reach. There is only the moan of a car accelerating up the slope, the screech of a backyard cat fight, the house. So I wait as Ben waited. The morning unmoored from time. It might be meditative if it wasn't for the accompanying fear. The growing dread that I'm not the only one watching.

Poor Trev. First day on the job and more scared than Ben ever was.

The boy appears at the second-floor bedroom window in the time it takes my eyes to move from the attic shutters, down to the front door and up again.

But there's nothing to be afraid of. All you need is a rope. A chair.

He is looking at me with the same open-mouthed, dumbfounded expression I feel on my own face, a mimicry so expert that, for the first second, I try to see him as me somehow, a telescoped reflection, some smoke-and-mirrors tomfoolery. But in the next second, I realize the gap of years between us: the boy remains sixteen, and I am forty.

All you need to see is that none of it's worth holding on to, because it's already gone.

I was wrong. The boy cannot be me. And the persistence of him in the window confirms his reality with each passing second he remains there. He is trapped inside, but not necessarily forever. I can see that— feel that—in the strength he gains even as he charts the depths of my weakness. There are ways out by bringing others in.

And with this realization—as though hearing my thoughts just as I can hear his—the startled mask slips off, and he laughs.

"Trevor!"

Mrs. McAuliffe's voice, cheerfuly caling up the stairs. A voice that makes the face in the window pul back into shadow.

"Your friend is here!"

Randy stands on the McAuliffes' front porch, arms crossed, refusing to cross the threshold.

"Hey, Trev," he says, a little surprised to see me, even though he knew I'd be here. Maybe a part of him was expecting Ben to come down the stairs, not me, a joint-stiffened man with sweat stains the size of pie plates under his arms.

"What's wrong?"

Randy looks past me, at Mrs. McAuliffe, who remains standing in the hal.

"I'l leave you boys to your business," she says finaly and shuffles away through the kitchen door.

Randy stil says nothing. Wipes his nose in a slow sweep of the back of his hand.

"Why don't you come in?"

He glances over his shoulder. Almost turns his head far enough to take in the Thurman house, but not quite.

"It's like it's watching us," I say.

"Bricks and wood and glass. That's al it is."

"I'm talking about the inside." I take a step closer, lower my voice. "Don't you feel it?"

"No."

"It's a good thing you never got married. You're a lousy liar."

"Listen, Trev. I didn't come here to talk about an empty house." Randy shakes his head. Physicaly jostles one line of thinking out of place to make room for another. "The waitress," he says. "Todd's kid."

"What about her?"

"She's missing."

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 9

I used to think—or at least I did before the winter of 1984—that one could read the capacity for badness in a face. The mugshots of drive-by shooters and child molesters that were reprinted in the National section of The Grimshaw Beacon revealed a similar absence, the groggy complexions that told of cigarettes and nocturnal scheming. I believed that when it came to discerning between the truly evil and the rest of us everyday sinners, you can just tell.

But I've come to learn that evil's primary talent is for disguise: not letting you hear the cloven hooves scratching on the welcome mat is how the devil gets invited inside. It's how he can become your friend.

I was thinking this, or something like this, when we puled over to the curb and asked the coach if he wanted a ride home, and he stopped to look into Carl's Ford.

At us.

Carl was at the wheel and Ben in the passenger seat, with me on my own in the back. We had been driving around, arguing over the costs of doing something versus nothing in discovering the truth of the coach's role in Heather Langham's death. That is, I was arguing with Carl and Ben, and they mostly ignored me, studying the houses we cruised by as though considering buying one.

"Where is the freckly fuck?" was al Carl would say every few minutes, referring to Randy, who wasn't home when we caled.

"We can't do anything without him," I said. "We have to be together on it."

But Carl and Ben just kept looking at the houses. They made me feel like I was riding in a baby seat, watching the backs of their heads as though they were my parents.

"There he is," Carl said. He took his foot off the gas and the Ford roled on, gently as a canoe after taking the paddles in.

"Who?"

Because they could both see the answer to this on the street ahead, they ignored me. It forced me to slide over between them and peer out the windshield.

The coach. Walking along the sidewalk with his back to us, a stiffening of his stride that suggested he'd heard a car slow behind him. This was his street. A street we had driven up more than any other over the last half-hour. Carl and Ben had been hoping to come across the coach making his way home. And now that they had, they drew even with him and puled over to the curb.

He stopped. I don't know if he knew who it was before he turned to see, but it seemed there was a half second's pause as he gathered himself.

"What's up, guys?" he asked, glancing up the street toward his house a half block on.

"Need a ride?" Carl asked.

The coach squinted. We knew where he lived. Why would he need a ride? So: this was an invitation. And not necessarily a complicated one. Boys on the team came to him al the time. They told him things, sought advice. There were always Guardians wanting to hang out with him, asking if he needed a ride.

"You think I'm that out of shape?" he said.

"We're just driving around. Kiling time before practice."

"You want something to eat? My wife makes this baked spaghetti thing that's not half bad. I'l be eating it the rest of the week if I don't get some help."

"Thanks." Carl glanced around the car at Ben, back at me. "We're not too hungry, I guess."

The coach stood there. Unmoving except for his breath leaking out in feathery plumes.

"How about it?" Ben asked.

"I've got some time," the coach said, puling back the sleeve of his coat to show the watch on his wrist, though he didn't look at its face. "A little spin? Why not?"

Less than two hours before we had driven up to the coach on his walk home, we'd had another hot box meeting in the school's parking lot. It's hard to recal who said what, or the positions we started out defending (I think I changed my mind half a dozen times during each circling of Randy's joint). What was agreed on by al was that something had to be done. We alone knew Miss Langham was murdered, the where and how it was done. Maybe, if this was all we knew, we would have found a way to justify trying to forget about it. But the thing was this: along with the where and how she was kiled, we now felt sure we knew the who.

Why not go to the police? A good question. As good today as the afternoon we asked it in Carl's Ford, coughing it out through the blue haze. Why not? There were some halfway reasonable answers to this, and we voiced them at the time:

The police would never accept our slim evidence of Ben's nighttime sighting.

We had found and moved and bled on and buried her body, which meant the odds were greater that we had done it than anyone else.

Pointing a finger the coach's way too early would only alow for his escape.

But the real reason was one none of us spoke aloud.

This was our test. Heather Langham's memory had been adopted as our responsibility.

It was Ben who was the last to speak. Last, because he used words almost as powerful as his reminder of friendship that had led us into a haunted house. Words that have, in different contexts, ushered soldiers onto kiling fields.

"We need to find the truth," he said. "We have to. For Heather. For justice."

Truth. Justice. These were the opened doors through which we saw a way to save Heather Langham in death as we had longed to save her in life.

We talked about hockey at first. Or the coach did, repeating the ways we would have to exploit the weak links on Seaforth's defence. He sat next to me in the back but spoke directly to the window, as if rehearsing a speech. He reminded me of a dog who didn't like cars: sitting straight and stil, but every muscle tense as he waited for the machine to stop and the doors to open so he could leap out.

"We saw you," Ben said.

This is how the conversation turned. Ben swiveling around in the passenger seat to face the coach. And it was "we."

"You did?" the coach said. He looked at me, at Carl in the rearview mirror, at the toothpaste stain around Ben's mouth.

"Last Monday. Going into the Thurman house."

"Monday?"

The coach looked as though he was trying to remember his mother-in-law's middle name or the capital of Bolivia.

"Just over a week ago. Monday night."

"Okay. Monday night. Why would I be going in there, Ben?"

"Why would you? Why would you?"

The coach continued to look at Ben for a moment, then turned to me. "What is this?"

"Answer the question," I said.

"I don't know what you're asking me."

"Have you been inside the Thurman house at any time in the last week?"

"No. Now you tel me. What the hel is a Thurman house? "

He chuckled at this, and I was sure we'd got everything wrong. The coach's awkwardness had come not from secret knowledge but from us. He had detected a worrying turn in his youngest players and was trying to guess what was wrong. We were acting weird, not him.

"The empty place on Caledonia," Carl said. "You don't know about it?"

"Where you guys go to smoke pot or whatever? Yes, I'm aware of it."

"Have you ever been inside?"

"I just told you."

"So you haven't?"

"Hold on here. I mean, seriously, what is this shit?"

It was an understandable question. One minute he's on his way home to his wife's spaghetti casserole and the next he's being interrogated by three kids in a car. He had every right to be impatient. But what al of us heard—what dismissed my earlier impression that we'd got everything wrong—was his shit. It was the first time any of us had heard him swear, to pop his seat forward to let the coach out, and so did the coach, who gripped his hands to the back of the headrest, ready to go. Instead, Carl roled his window down. That's when I noticed Randy out front of the Erie Burger.

"Get in," Carl said.

Randy bent down to see me and the coach in the back. If he was surprised he didn't show it. When Carl leaned forward, Randy lined up to get into the back with us.

"One here, one there," Carl said.

After a second, Randy got it. He came around the other side so that the coach was sandwiched between us.

Carl drove on, making sure to stay off the main streets. For a while nobody said anything. There wasn't much room in the Ford now, and breathing was something of an issue, particularly in the back seat.

"Okay, so what are we doing?" Randy asked earnestly.

"We're just talking," Carl said.

"That's not quite true, Randy," the coach said. "Your friends want to know if I've had a hand in your music teacher's disappearance."

Randy shifted around like something was biting his bum. "No shit?"

"None at al," the coach said.

"So let's hear it, then," Ben said. "What do you know about what happened to Heather?"

"Happened? What has happened to Heather?"

"You seem to know more than that."

"This isn't about me."

"No?" the coach said. "You're the ones who've seen things going on in empty houses. You're driving around with your hockey coach and won't let him go, which is a crime in itself. I'd say it's definitely about you, Benji."

Benji. That was new too.

"We're just asking some questions," Ben said, less certain now.

"Okay. Here's an answer." He reached forward to tap Carl on the shoulder. "Pul over."

"Don't think so," Carl said.

"Give me a break! You hairless nut sacks think you're the fucking Hardy Boys or something?"

"No need to be insulting," Randy said.

"Insulting? This is insulting. Kidnapping is insulting. Being forced to waste an hour of my life with you pimply-faced cocksuckers is insulting."

"Just tel us where you were last Monday night."

"That, along with my whereabouts on any night for the last thirty-eight years, is none of your business."

"It's our business now," Ben said. "And it would have been Heather's too. But she can't speak for herself anymore, can she?"

The coach's brief show of anger slipped out of him with a sigh. Then he took a deep breath and inhaled something new. A taste that seemed to make him sick but that he swalowed anyway.

"I'm serious," he said. "You boys have to take me home now."

"You were with her that night, weren't you?"

"Stop the car, Carl."

"Tel us."

"Stop the car."

"Tel us the truth."

That's when the coach surprised us. Or surprised me, anyway, when he lifted his hand from his lap, curled the fingers into a white bal and drove it into my face.

A white flash of pain. The car swung hard, left to right and back again. Knees and elbows clashing as everyone seemed to be trying to trade seats al at once. A voice that may or may not have been my own shouting Sonofabitch! over and over.

Eventualy, Randy folded one of the coach's arms behind his back and I got hold of the other. Once settled, he faced me. Not with apology or accusation. He looked like he wanted nothing more than to knock the teeth he'd loosened clean out of my head.

"You know something?" Ben said. "I don't think any of us are making practice tonight."

Outside the Ford's windows Grimshaw floated by, dul and frostbitten. The few pedestrians scuffing over the sidewalks' skin of ice with heads down against the wind.

If they had raised their eyes to watch our car rumble past, how many years would it take them to guess that the conversation among its passengers concerned one of them pounding a four-inch screw into the back of Heather Langham's skul? Had they looked, could they even have seen the coach among his youngest players, shaking his head in denial?

I remember seeing the streetlights come on, and wondering why they bothered.

Ben asked most of the questions. Trying to lead the coach through a narrative of what happened the night Miss Langham died. Where did they meet? Had she been subdued somehow? Was it always the plan to kil her in the Thurman house? Had there been a plan at al, or, given the makeshift weapon involved, was it a spontaneous attack? If so, what brought it on?

Randy was the only other one to add a query of his own. Always the same one, asked through barely withheld tears. Why? The look on his face a contorted version of the one he wore when an opposing team's goon elbowed him into the glass. Why'd you do it?

The coach answered none of them. He merely reminded us of how far out of our hands the situation was. The trouble we'd be in if we took this any further.

Carl turned onto Caledonia Street. And there it was. Although we'd been circling the blocks around it for the past half-hour, we had yet to pass it. Now we eased by the Thurman house, slow as Heather Langham once did as she walked up the hil to the nurses' residence. It was dark by then. The blue light of televisions filing living rooms with ice water. Etchings of smoke rising from chimneys.

Al of these houses, the ones that sheltered microwaves announcing dinner with a beep, spousal debates, toddlers learning to use the potty while sitting in front of The A-Team—houses with life within them—looked inside at this hour. Everyone was home. There would be no going out again until morning, the February night left to seethe through the leafless boughs.

The Thurman house alone looked out. Looked at us.

The Ford slid around the next corner and started down the laneway that ran between the backyard fences between Caledonia and Church. Nothing to see by other than the headlights that, a few yards along, Carl extinguished. For a moment we drifted blind between the lopsided garages before stopping next to a wooden fence that leaned against a row of maples. On the other side, the dim line of the Thurman house's roof.

"What's going on here?" the coach asked.

Nobody answered. Maybe none of us knew.

After a time, Carl reached into his parka's inside pocket. This, along with the expectant, open-mouthed expression he wore, made me think he was about to pul out a Kleenex to capture a sneeze. But he didn't sneeze. And when his hand came out of his parka it held a gun.

His dad's. Al of us, including the coach, knew this without asking. It was Carl's dad's revolver, just as it was his car, his apartment, his cartons of cigarettes left in the crisper in the fridge. The gun was part of the inheritance he left to his son after being chased out of town by debts, warrants for arrest, demons of his own making found at the bottom of President's Sherry bottles. Now Carl pointed his father's departing gift at the coach's chest.

"You know something? I'm tired of you bulshitting us," he said, opening his door and gesturing for Ben to do the same. "I don't want to hear any more 'You know what trouble you're in?' You're the one in trouble. And just so there won't be any confusion later on"— Carl nodded at Ben, who produced a handheld tape recorder from his jacket pocket—"we'l make sure we know just who's doing the talking."

Ben and Carl opened their doors at the same time. They sat there, looking back at us, oblivious to the subzero air that swirled into the car.

The only one I could look at was Ben. His head fixed upon his slender neck but its features alive with half- blinks and flared sniffs. It was impossible to tel if he'd known about Carl's gun or was just going with it, his formerly zoned-out self replaced by this twitchy, miniature thug in a Maple Leafs tuque his mother had knitted for him.

We waited for Ben to speak. And when he did, he used the coach's signature cal before opening the dressing-room door. Words that, only days ago, ushered us out onto the ice to play a game.

"Shal we?"

[9]

Randy heard that Tracey Flanagan had failed to come home from work the night before from the waitress who brought him his scrambled eggs in the coffee shop of the Queen's Hotel earlier this morning. The waitress, apparently, is a neighbour of Todd's, and was among those he caled to ask if his daughter had been seen or heard on their street the night before. The police were already involved, she told Randy, treating the circumstances as suspicious on the grounds that Tracey was not one to stay out without letting her dad know her whereabouts. Volunteer search parties were being whipped together to spend the afternoon stomping through the Old Grove and sloshing around the edge of the Dale Marsh. Randy asked her why they chose those two places in particular. "Because they're just bad" was her answer.

"I forgot how smal a town this is," I tel Randy, the two of us now slumped at the McAuliffe dining table.

"Smal? It's like word got out through string tied between old soup cans. If this was Toronto, and your twenty-two-year-old didn't show up from a bar last night, they'd tel you to take a

Xanax and get in line."

"I'd worry too, if I were Todd."

Randy nods. "I guess she's about al the family he's got."

"And every cop in town knows him and Tracey. They're just puling out al the stops."

"She's probably already at home, wondering where everybody is, and they're al out in the woods with bloodhounds."

"They check with the boyfriend?"

"They're stil looking for him."

"I bet the two of them are under a sleeping bag in a parked car somewhere."

"Maybe they should look out by the walnut trees in Harmony."

"That where you used to go too?"

"I was talking about you."

"Me and Sarah."

"Anybody else I might know?"

"How'd you know we'd go out there?"

"You told us," Randy says, shaking his head. "We told each other pretty much everything back then."

Randy looks down the length of the table as though expecting to see others seated around us.

"Think we should go see him?" I ask.

"See who?"

"Todd."

"Me and you popping by after half a lifetime to say sorry for your missing only child? I don't know, Trev. Let's just wait on that one."

Randy moves to stand, but then his eyes catch on the hands I've planted on the tabletop. The hands stil, but the elbows vibrating like a pair of idling engines.

"Don't say it," Randy says.

"Say what?"

"What you're thinking."

"You're a mind reader as wel as an actor now?"

"I don't need to read minds. Not about this. And not with you."

"So tel me."

"This missing girl. Heather. The house. How it feels the same al over again."

"For the record, you were the first to say it out loud, not me."

Randy draws his sleeve over his forehead as though to wipe away sweat, but his skin is dry, the cotton rasping.

"How's the executor duties going?" he asks, both of us happy to change the subject.

"I'm not sure actualy."

"You need some help?"

"No. Thank you, though."

"It must be kind of strange. Going through Ben's things."

"He kept a diary."

"Yeah? You read it?"

"Enough to know he wasn't wel."

"I think we knew that."

"He thought there was something in the house across the street. Something he believed was trying to get out, and would get out—"

"If it wasn't for him."

"That's right."

"You said it. He wasn't wel." Randy's not looking at my elbows now, but squinting severely right at me.

"Or he was right," I say.

"About what?"

"That the Thurman place needed to have an eye kept on it."