Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

"You ever feel like you missed out on something?" I ask. "Staying here?"

"Missed out?"

"The opportunities. Professional options."

"No, you didn't mean that. You think the people you left behind were just too scared to go where you did."

"I never saw it as leaving anybody behind."

"No?"

"Listen, I didn't—"

"You think I was avoiding life by staying," Sarah says, icy as the Grimshaw Arena's air. "Did you ever think you were doing the same thing by leaving?"

I'm thinking, for the minutes that folow, that this is pretty much it. We had both done our best to avoid the past, the vast body of unsaid thoughts between us, and now we had been shown to be fools. Sarah stil wanted the answers she'd sought the winter we were in grade eleven, and I stil couldn't give them to her. There was nothing now but to wait until the game's end—or earlier, if she decided to get up and leave—and return the buffering distance between us.

But then she surprises me. She holds my hand.

"Let me tel you what I know," she says, leaning close to my ear, so that I am filed by her voice. "Something happened to you when we were kids. Something awful.

You think you escaped it, but you never did. You see me as one of the casualties, the cost of running away to the circus. But I don't need to know. I'm grown up, just like you. Borderline old, if you judge a thing by how you feel most of the time. We can talk about the serious stuff if you want, or not. But we're both way too banged up to worry about scratching the paint. Know what I mean?"

Sarah leans away from me again, and the sounds of hockey return—the cut of skates, the thunder of armoured bodies against the boards—leaving me light in my seat. No tremors anywhere, no fight to remain stil. I watch the game, but al of my attention, every sense available to me, is concentrated on the woman in the seat next to mine.

"Close game," she says.

"It only looks that way."

After the game, Sarah drives us back to her house, where she relieves the babysitter of her duties and offers me a drink in the living room. She turns on the stereo and cranks up the song the CD had been paused at the start of. "Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran.

"Remember this?" she says, passing me my scotch and dancing on her own in the middle of the room, the same cool, feline moves that stirred me as I watched her on the darkened gym floor at school dances. "It's terrible , isn't it?"

"I like it," I say, not lying. "Is it going to wake Kieran up, though?"

"Nothing wakes that kid up."

I watch Sarah dance. Make a private request of my brain to not show me any scary pictures of Heather or Tracey or the boy or anyone but Sarah until the song is over. Just give me this. Alow the next three and a half minutes to be ghost-free.

When she's finished she sits next to me on the sofa. Her skin pinkened, lips plumped. She is so different from the girl I remember. Yet those are the same freckles I once kissed.

"Poor Trevor," she says. "It must be hard, being a mystery."

"I'm not a mystery. There's just one thing I can't talk about."

"That's what makes it so hard."

She touches the back of my neck. Puls me in. Her mouth warm and tasting faintly of vanila.

"We're going to have sex now," she says. "Aren't we?"

"Lordy. Do you think we could?"

We go up to Sarah's room. She draws the curtains and lets me watch her take her clothes off. When my shaking hands struggle with my belt buckle, she helps. And then she proceeds to help me in other ways too.

It is a kindness. But maybe there is even some suggestion of a future in it—an unlikely, difficult, but not wholy impossible future. Something we both could live in, live through. I had assumed that, with my disease, there was nothing I could offer women anymore. But perhaps this was true only of those who saw me as I am now and could envision little more than the decline to come.

Sarah could see this too, but also other things. She could see a past.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 12

Funny what the memory holds and what it decides it can do without. Like a drunk fisherman, it guts some of the least edible fish and tosses its prize catches back into the deep.

For instance, I can distinctly remember the smel of the pay phone receiver I put to my lips in the mezzanine of the arena after our second and final playoff loss to Seaforth, but not why I said nothing when a voice at the other end told me I'd reached Grimshaw Police dispatch and asked, "What is the nature of your emergency?" I didn't speak, didn't move. Just breathed in the receiver's ingrained traces of mustard, Old Spice and whisky sweat.

Perhaps the question posed too great a chalenge. What was the nature of my emergency? A kidnapped coach? ("Who kidnapped him?" "We did.") A missing teacher's buried body? ("Who buried her?" "We did.")

But no matter which of these crimes I had rushed from the dressing-room showers to confess, it was over for me. And I was surprised. I thought it was more likely to be the clownish Randy, the volatile Carl or— before his recent transformation—the meditative Ben who would break first. In fact, I was counting on one of them to tel.

Here's the thing: I wasn't a bad kid. I was a good kid. We were al good kids. And now it was time for our essential natures to take control again. So I got dressed before everyone else, puled a dime from the pocket of my jeans and dialed the cavalry.

I remember that perfectly wel. Just not why it didn't end there.

But the memory can lie too. Hide things away. Occasionaly, it can lie and hide even better than you.

Because there's Ben. Eyeing me through the crowd of disappointed fans lingering beside the trophy cases.

We can't, his look said . I want this to end too. But right now, you have to put the phone down .

I opened my mouth to speak to the dispatcher. To put words to the nature of my emergency.

They'll send us to jail . Ben started toward me, his face growing in detail as he approached . A grown-up biker-gang-and-rapist jail. We'll be their girlfriends in there. For years. And when we get out, we'll be fucked all over again .

I returned the receiver to its cradle.

"Sarah not home?" Ben said, lying for us both.

I remember dropping my equipment off after the game, teling my parents I was going over to Ben's house and walking along to the McAuliffes' with a bad feeling.

I'd had bad feelings about what was going on since our first hot-box meeting, when it was decided something had to be done. But that night, the ragged nerves took a turn into ful-blown ilness. Light-headed, tingly-toed. I had the idea that the Thurman house wasn't haunted as much as it carried contagion, and I was showing the first signs of infection.

This idea was folowed by another. A premonition of the life ahead that turned out to be largely true. Feeling sick, worrying about becoming sick, fighting and carrying sickness: this is what it meant to grow up, grow old.

By the look of Ben's blotched cheeks when I met him under the railway trelis, he'd caught the virus too.

"It has to happen tonight," he said.

When Ben opened the door to the celar, I couldn't tel if he heard the voices down there or if it was only me. A whispered conversation (too soft to make out any words) between the coach and someone else. No, not a conversation—it was too one-sided to be caled that. The coach murmuring with excitement, and his audience offering only a hissed Yes in response.

But how could I have heard al that within the few seconds between Ben's opening the celar door and placing his boot onto the first step, its protesting creak instantly silencing whoever was down there? Because I'd been hearing them before the door was opened. Whatever the coach was saying had been growing louder in my head from the moment we'd stepped onto the Thurman house's lot. A few seconds more and I might have clearly made out the words.