Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

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.