Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

"Okay. So you went in."

"The truth? I wasn't looking to rescue anything other than my own ass tonight, but yeah. I ran in there and up the stairs and kicked that door open—al the very last things in the world I wanted to do—and nobody was there. Then, maybe a minute later, I heard sounds downstairs. Footsteps. I went to the top of the stairs and looked down and there was Randy. And then you too."

From far away there comes a low roar. At first I take it as the approach of a freight train that we can feel through the trestle's rails and ties—cattle cars and fuel tanks and Made in China whatnot that wil soon be passing over our heads. But the sound rols on a moment, growing in intensity, before abruptly receding. Thunder.

Unseen clouds that have stolen the few stars from the sky.

"We were talking yesterday. Me and Randy," I find myself saying when the air is stil again. "About what we saw in the house when we were kids."

"The real things? Or the other things?"

"You saw him too then, didn't you?"

Carl locks the fingers of his two hands together. A here's-the- church-and-here's-the-steeple fist. "Him?"

"The boy in the house."

"We were boys. And we were in the house."

"It wasn't us. You just said you heard him as soon as you got off the train."

"Heard. Not saw."

"C'mon, Carl. We al saw him."

"Then tel me. What did he look like?"

"Look like?"

"His appearance. If you both saw the same person—if I saw him too—we should be able to agree on the colour of his hair, his eyes, the length of his nose. Al that."

It's the damnedest thing. But no matter how many times I have returned to the boy in my mind, no matter how vivid his presence in my dreams, I cannot conjure him in the details Carl has just asked for.

"Randy," I say, "why don't you start?"

"I'm not sure I can."

"Why not?"

"It's like being asked to describe, I don't know, air or something. Or loss, or anger. You can't say what shape it takes, only what it does to you."

Carl claps his hands together. "If that's what you saw, then I've seen him too."

"I could say more than that about him," I say. "He looked a lot like me."

"Or like me," Randy says.

"Or me," Carl says.

A second rumble of thunder reaches us from an even greater distance than the first. Yet this time, it continues to widen its sound. Bearing down on Grimshaw with sustained fury.

Carl says something, or tries to but the noise is too great for us to hear him. It's just his mouth opening into a circle and clenching shut, over and over.

Pain! Pain!

Then the terrible clatter of the wheels roling over us. The trelis's steel crying under its weight.

"Train! Train!"

I wait for the black cars to pass, my arms around my knees.

Close my eyes against the glint of Carl's teeth.

It's only the train, I know. But something sounds as though it has joined us down here. Something that is screaming and wil never stop.

Over the time it takes to reach the Queen's and check Carl in with my credit card, I am wondering the same thing. I wonder it al the way to Caledonia Street, where I stop at the curb opposite the Thurman house.

Why don't we talk about it?

Why, after al these years, do we not even mention the elephant in the room—the elephant in our lives —that is what we did and saw in the winter of 1984? One reason is that we promised never to speak of it again. And none of us wished to be the first to break this promise.

But it's realy more simple than that. We are men. Defined by the bearing of terrible truths more than a fondness for sports, for sex, for the wish to be left alone. It is as men that we remain silent to our horror.

I totter up the stairs to Ben's room. Rol onto the bed and sit up against the headboard, planning to record another entry for my Memory Diary. But when I reach for the Dictaphone on the bedside table, it's gone. At first, I assume I put it down somewhere else. Twenty minutes of upturning pilows and cheek- to-the-hardwood scans of the floor prove that it's not here.

I look out Ben's window. Wonder if the boy took it, and is now listening to it over and over for his own pleasure.

Then I wonder something worse. What if it is now in the hands of someone who hears it for what it realy is, not a diary at al but the confession of a crime? What if Betty McAuliffe is holding it to her ear under the sheets of her bed? What if someone who knew it was here—Randy, or Carl, who would have seen me in the window

—came in and stole it? This last one being the worst possibility of al. Not because my friends might be thieves, but because from this point on I wil be unable to prevent myself from wondering if they are.

What I need is a little bedtime reading. Something to slow my mind from its restless thinking. Trouble is, the only thing I'm interested in is Ben's journal. This time, as I curl up in his bed, I don't have the patience to move forward from where I left off last time, and skip ahead to the final pages.

September 14, 2008

Woke up this morning feeling strange. Not something strange in me-, but something that had touched me in the night. A stranger in my room.

I sat up in bed and saw that I was right.

A message smudged onto the inside of the bedroom window:

i found him

After this, the diary returned to its record of soups Ben had for lunch for a few days. No sightings of the boy, no shooing visitors off the Thurman property. And then the final entry:

September 20, 2008 This just happened.

It is the end of things, I know. Forgive me. I have done my best but I am tired now, so tired it's almost impossible to write this, to push the pen over this paper. I am tired and alone and I want only to

be with him, to comfort him. It's funny. It's so stupid, but it's taken until now to realize how much I've missed my father .

Forgive me

+ + + + +

Another message on my window tonight.

I had been keeping watch on the house, and turned away only long enough to get the glass of water I'd left by the bed. But when I sat down again it was there :

daddy's waiting

I slid the window open. The night smelled of lilacs and carnations. Not a good smell, though. Flowers left too long in dry vases.

He was sitting on the front steps. Stooped, elbows propped on his knees. He had been waiting He looked even more tired than me. Like he'd been running and had just stopped and was trying to remember what he'd been running from.

My father stood when he saw me. I can't exactly say what expression he wore. It was defeat, among other things. And sadness. So lonely it made him look hollow.

He turned and walked into the house. Like he'd been called in for bed. Like it was the end of a long, long day.

Forgive me.

Later that same night, Randy caled to tel me Ben was gone.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 14

We watched them come.

A lone police cruiser at first. The officer's shirt straining against the bulge around his waist. When he came out he wasn't wearing his cap anymore.

We stood together. Unseen behind the curtains in the front room of Ben's house, his mother out on a grocery run. When the paramedics and bearded man in a suit who must have been the coroner finaly emerged with the black bags laid out on gurneys—one, and then the smaler other—we held our breaths.

We remember al this, though stil not everything.

And some of the things we remember may not have happened at al.

The letter, amazingly, was Randy's idea.