Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

Hold on, Trev, the boy says . You don't want Handy Randy to see the show without you, do you ?

No. I want to see the show too.

From the kitchen, Randy asks where I've got to. Then I'm in too. The sound of Randy's steps pacing over the curled linoleum. Along with the internal cold that signals the arrival of a virus. A sensation located more in the mind than the body. A degradation. The unshakeable idea that, in merely being here, I have shamed myself.

"How do you want to do this?" Randy asks once I feel my way to where he is.

I don't know. But let's stay together , I want to say, but instead say, "I'l take the celar. You look around on this floor and upstairs."

"Better you than me."

Then he's gone.

It could be courage that has me shuffle over to the celar door and push it open, staring down into the dark, but it doesn't feel like it. It is merely a surrender to the next moment.

What's suddenly clear is that it wasn't Tracey Flanagan who brought me here. I am here because the house was lonely for me. And in a way I can't possibly explain, I am lonely for it too.

I turn on the flashlight, and an orb of yelow plays over the stairwel's plaster wals.

But there is nothing to see. I'l have to go down there to find whatever might be found. And it's not something I am able to do without someone else going down first.

Or being pushed.

Pushed. The last time I stood here I'd wondered the same thing. Wondered if Carl, who stood behind me, was someone else entirely. Someone wearing a convincing Carl suit.

But it was Carl, only changed in the way al of us had been changed.

"It's different," he had said at the time, and I hadn't known what he'd meant. Though I do now.

I'm three steps down when I hear Randy's voice. Speaking my name from the other end of the hal. Careful not to shout, as though trying not to disturb another's sleep.

I backstep up the celar stairs and scuff to the hal. Randy is standing against the front door, so that at first I think he's trying to prevent it from opening. But as I get closer I see that his back isn't touching the door at al.

"Up there," he whispers.

Now the two of us stand at the bottom of the stairs. Nervous suitors waiting for our prom dates to come down.

But when someone appears at the top of the stairs it's not a girl in a chiffon dress. It isn't Tracey Flanagan, and it isn't the boy. It's one of us, unshaven and hunched.

Alive but with al the years of regret and negligence written over him like a useless map.

This is what frightens Randy and me, what we can see clearly for the first time:

There is the unreal.

And then there is the real, which can sometimes be the more surprising of the two.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 13

I didn't ask Ben how the coach had managed to get untied and take the gun from him. We walked out the back door together without talking of the boy, or the scene the blue light of the passing snowplow had revealed to me upstairs. Ben just crossed Caledonia Street and shuffled up the front steps of his house, kicked his boots against the wal to knock off the snow and slipped inside. I looked back at the Thurman house, half expecting some new display in one of its windows, but each pane of glass was a holow iris, taking in me, the street, the slumbering homes of Grimshaw, giving nothing in return.

I don't remember speaking to my parents when I came in (my father captaining the remote, my mother asleep sitting up on the sofa, a basket of half-folded laundry at her feet—their usual evening positions). It was strange how, after al that had happened in the house that night, I walked out and didn't speak a word to anyone until the next morning, when I caled Carl and, before he could say helo, blurted out "It's over" as if we'd been dating.

"I know."

"We have to let him go, Carl."

"I know."

"And last night, Ben and I were with him, and—"

"Not on the phone."

"You don't understand."

"Fuck you I don't."

"I saw something. There was—"

He hung up.

Ten minutes later we were walking over to the Thurman house together.

Why had I caled Carl and only Carl? There was no choice, realy. It could only have been him puffing steam out his nose, teling me to shut up every time I tried to explain what happened the night before, his eyes darting between the houses on either side of us, alert to witnessing stares.

It was early enough that there was little traffic on the streets. Stil, we approached the house by way of the back lane and slipped through the break in the fence.

As soon as we were through, we both stopped. The house looked different somehow, though it took a moment to figure out how.

"Did you leave the door open last night?" Carl said.

"No."

"Did Ben?"

"I was the last one out."

Carl started toward the back door. His gait— roling shoulders and old warrior's limp—suggested the weariness of a man charged with completing a serious task, but been thwarted at every turn by his forced partnership with children.

I folowed him in. By the time my eyes had adjusted to the dimness, Carl was already heading down the celar stairs. Neither of us had brought flashlights, thinking (if we thought of it at al) that the morning's sunlight would be sufficient. But there were only two half-buried windows in the celar. It was barely enough for me to see Carl standing just a few feet from where I had stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

"Oh fuck," he said.

I went forward to put my shoulder against his, peered into the near darkness beyond.

Emptiness. No, not that. Not only that. The cords we'd used to tie the coach to the post now a loose coil on the ground.

"We'l find him," I said.

"He's probably at the cop shop right now."

"No. They would have come for us already."

"You think he just went home and asked his wife to fry him some eggs and not to worry about where he's been the last three days?"

"I don't think he ever planned to go home after this."

"Right, right," Carl said, his thoughts so rushed it seemed to be causing him pain. "So why bother looking for him? We were going to let him go anyway."

"We need to make sure he's okay."

"Why wouldn't he be?"

"Because he was in here alone."

Carl shuffled closer to the post. Bent to inspect the cords.

"These haven't been cut."

"I tied him."

"You sure?"

"I was here, Carl. You weren't."

"Maybe I should have been."

He stood. Put his hands in his pockets, took them out again.

I said, "I'm not arguing with you right now."

"Is there something you want to argue about?"

"I'm saying we should get out of here. Look for the coach. If we can find him, maybe we can—"

"How are we going to find him, Trev? Put up posters? 'LOST—Half-Starved English Teacher. Contents of Teenager's Piggy Bank Offered in Reward'?"

"At least I'm trying."

"You fucking should."

"What's that mean?"

"Just that the last time I was down here, the coach was tied to that post and my gun was in the workbench drawer."

Our brains were running at the same speed. They must have been, because it took both of us the same one second to turn to see the workbench drawer upside down on the earth floor.

We both went for it. Carl got there first. Kicked the drawer instead of turning it over with his hand, either to prevent leaving his fingerprints or because he needed to kick something if not me.

The revolver was gone.

"Shit," Carl said. "This is some seriously shitty shit."

"He wasn't even supposed to know it was there."

"Unless somebody showed him."

"You're blaming me for this too?"