Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

"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.