Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

I wondered if Todd Flanagan detected anything strange about us as he made his way over to our table. Todd was a Guardian too. I could only hope he was writing off our oddness to nerves about that night's game two against Seaforth.

"Morning, ladies," he said.

Todd was blue-eyed and dark-haired ("black Irish," as my father caled his family, though I never knew what this meant) and essentialy decent, though he fought hard to keep up his minimum obligations in the bulying and mockery departments. I always thought he'd rather have been our friend than his senior-year teammates', but such transgression between grades was unthinkable. What also set Todd apart was that he was a dad. An eighteen-year-old father to a daughter born at the beginning of the season. We envied him—not for this, but for his girlfriend, Tina. A tight-sweatered vixen whose brief career in boy-trading had been cut short with the arrival of Tracey, the drooling, howling bundle she sometimes brought to games.

"Anybody seen the coach?"

"No," Ben said, taking another gulp of my muddy hot chocolate. "Why?"

"Laura caled me this morning."

"Laura?"

"His wife dickwad. Said he didn't come home last night. Wondered if he was hanging out with somebody on the team."

"Al night ?"

"I know. It's weird."

"He'l turn up," Carl said. "Has the coach ever missed a game?"

Todd shook his head. "Seaforth pussies," he said half-heartedly before backing away.

Over morning classes, news of Laura Evans spotted in the principal's office was circulated in different versions, from her showing up with a pair of cops to her bawling uncontrolably until the school nurse gave her a pil. We didn't believe any of these stories necessarily. But what we did know was that the coach's absence had now been officialy reported. Combined with Heather Langham's disappearance, it was a story that had nowhere to go but into wilder and wilder speculations. Primary among these was that Heather and the coach had run off together. The other theory concerned a more macabre take. A monster who had crept into Grimshaw to claim its teachers, one by one.

"I hope he takes Dandruff Degan next," I remember Vince Sproule saying. "Save me asking for an extension on my cartography assignment."

Among the Guardians there was an added concern about whether that night's game could go ahead without the coach. There was a critical, morale-sapping difference between the man behind the bench being reported missing and him coming down with the flu. Nothing actualy wrong was known to have happened. And yet the mystery about his absence, the foreign whiff of the uncanny that had drifted over Grimshaw's imagination, seemed to undermine the importance of a hockey game, even if it was the playoffs.

But without a coach to cal it off, and without any evidence of adultery or more serious wrongdoing to bring before league officials, the game was an at once unbelievable and unstoppable event shadowing our day. For us, the four Guardians who knew where the coach was, the idea of lacing up and charging around the ice in just a few hours made us almost as sick as thinking of how he had got there.

It wasn't until I saw Sarah waiting for me at my locker that I realized I'd been running from her al day. Taking different routes between classes, avoiding the cafeteria at lunch, pretending I didn't see her on the one occasion she waved over the heads of other students at the far end of the hal. But now there was no escape.

Nothing to do but try to work up a smile and taste her grape ChapStick with a kiss.

"You sick or something?" she asked. "Because you look a little on the pukey side, gotta say."

"Just nervous about tonight's game."

"Nope. Try again." She came in for another hug, which alowed her hand to cup my crotch. "So tel me," she whispered against my ear, "what's going on here?"

"There's nothing going on."

"You think I'm dumb?"

"You're the opposite of dumb."

"And what's that?"

"Smart?"

Sarah puled back a few inches so I could see her face.

"I love you, Trevor," she said. And though I tried to say it back, it wouldn't come.

I remember this exchange so clearly now for a reason I hadn't expected when I first summoned it to mind. It wasn't the worry I had that Sarah would figure out what we had done. It was a flash of knowledge.

What was happening in the Thurman house had already drawn a line between Sarah and me, and though it didn't stop me from loving her, it was draining the idea of forever from our love. There will be others, I thought for the very first time as I kicked my locker shut, spun the lock and started away, lying that I had to get to a team meeting. She is only a girl among girls. It was cruel, however private a thought it remained. Soon, a whole day will pass when you don't think of her once.

Thoughts whose meanness was al the harder to bear because their truth placed them out of reach, beyond forgiving.

My turn to visit the coach was scheduled to folow the last bel of the day, and I was late already. At that time of year, losing fifteen minutes can mean a lot when it comes to light, the after-school dusk easing ever closer to night. It made my walk to the Thurman house feel longer. And when it came into view, it was halfway to losing the vulnerable details—the bubbled paint, sagging porch—that in daylight denied it some of its power. The house preferred darkness for the same reason old whores do. It alowed for the possibility of seduction.

The between-class report from Randy, who'd gone in before me, told of a coach whose mental condition was deteriorating faster than his confinement alone should have given rise to. Ben had tried giving him a pen and piece of paper on which to write whatever he needed to say that he couldn't say aloud, and the coach had simply signed his name at the bottom and told Ben to fil in the rest any way he wanted. He hadn't eaten the food we delivered to him. He wasn't complaining of the cold, or of being falsely accused, or even of being lashed to a post in a sunless celar. What he kept saying was that he wasn't alone in there.

This was what kept me frozen on the sidewalk. I pretended that I was making sure nobody was looking before I crept along the hedgerow, but in fact I was wondering how much money I had left in my account from a summer of pool cleaning, and if it would be enough for a train ticket to Toronto.

He's not alone in there .

As if on cue, there was the sound of a distant train whistle, beckoning me. Folowed by a flash of movement in one of the side windows.

Pale skin. A blur of long, tossed hair from a head twisted from side to side. A blink of struggle.

It was the impulse to help, to save—it was a woman I'd seen—that crunched my feet onto the frozen grass. Sliding under cover of cheek-poking branches. When I drew square with the house I fel to my knees.

It was the same window where I'd noticed the hopeless fuckt the night we discovered Heather Langham's body. The word stil there, a legible blue against an interior of black.

Up the hil of Caledonia Street, the streetlights were flickering to life, one by one. That's what I'd seen. Not a woman but the bulb in the streetlight behind me popping to brightness.

Yet even with this mystery solved, I stayed where I was. The twilight, the dirty panes, the lightless interior: even if something was there, anything that could be observed through the window would be obscured if it showed itself again. It made me squint. There was the sense that, above al, the house wanted me to stick around, to witness. Better yet, to come inside.

Which I wouldn't do. What difference would it make? The coach wasn't going to tel me anything if he hadn't already told Randy or Ben. And they were coming by later for another visit anyway. It needn't be me going in there now, alone.