Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

"Trevor?" the boy says, but not in the boy's voice.

Carl grabs me by the ankles and, leaning back, drags me through the grass and away from the house. Al of it ablaze now, the fire elbowing windows and bringing the ceilings down with oddly gentle crashes, as though the floors and wals have been cushioned by the heat.

When we make it to the sidewalk Carl lets go and sits next to me, the two of us able to do nothing more than watch the Thurman house flare and spit. I have a dim awareness of others around us—a clutch of bathrobed neighbours, a dog barking with the excitement of being outside, leashless, in the night.

No firetrucks or police yet, though their sirens join the undercurrents of sound. The murmuring witnesses, the yielding wood frame, the hissing voices rising up out of the smoke.

An ambulance arrives first. Stopping in front of the McAuliffe house, where we watch as the paramedics tend to someone lying under blankets on the front porch.

Tracey Flanagan, who is able to sit up and tel them who she is.

Then Carl is puling me close to him. His face appears freshly washed, streaks of white cut into the ash down to his jaw. But as he kneels with me I see that they are tears. Abundant, unstoppable.

There is nothing to do but what we have done al our lives, whether in our dreams or in our Grimshaw days. We watch the Thurman house and wait for it to show us how it is unlike other houses, how it is alive. The fire towering over its roof like a crown. The headless rooster stil, as though, after decades of indecision, northeast was its final determination.

I suppose it's possible that someone else sees him other than us, though I hear no shriek from the onlookers behind us. So maybe it is only Carl and me who see Randy in the upstairs window. The bedroom where the coach died. Where Roy DeLisle stood over Elizabeth Worth's body, excited and proud, wanting to show someone the remarkable thing he'd done.

Randy is staring down at us with the false calm of someone trying to hide his fear. A soldier doing his best not to worry his family as the train puls away, taking him off to war.

He takes a half step closer to the window frame and he isn't Randy anymore. He is the boy. Roy DeLisle as we have had to imagine him—a kid like us, looking like us. A kid expert at playing the same normal act we have played al our lives.

For a moment, Randy's face and the boy's face switch like traded masks, so that, behind the curtain of smoke, their differences are slight, almost imperceptible.

Randy.

The boy.

Randy.

The boy.

They could be the same person, except one is terrified by whatever is to come, and the other is oblivious to the fire that swalows him. In fact, he may even be smiling.

[18]

Where do hospitals buy their paint? Is it wherever the leftover stock goes, the tints that the buying public have deemed too depressing or nauseating to use in homes where people actualy live? Or is there thought to be therapeutic value to heartbreaking palettes, a motivation for patients to fake welness enough to be discharged early if only to escape the pukey turquoises and hork-spit yelows?

These are among the deep considerations I ponder over my days in a semi-private suite in Grimshaw General. The bad news—aside from the wals, the institutional wafts of bleach and vegetable soup—is that the fire touched me in a number of spots, which has left me counting down the last minutes to my every-four-hours pain meds. The good news is that I know my roommate.

That it is Carl and not a stranger I have to hear stifling farts and watching Friends reruns and moaning as the nurses change his dressings on the other side of the curtain makes the time pass less awkwardly, if no less slowly. And of course, when we're alone, we pul the curtains back to talk.

Carl had taken a cab to the train station but not boarded the 5:14 when it puled in. He couldn't say exactly why he decided to stay, other than "Something felt wrong, or was about to go that way." So he had gone to the place where wrong things were most likely to occur, keeping his eye on the back door of the Thurman house from his vantage point behind the see-saw. He had seen Randy enter in the late afternoon and then, some hours later, come running around from the side. He hadn't wanted to get any more involved than that, only to see who came out and when.

But then he had noticed the smoke. Soon afterward, going around to the front of the house, he had found Tracey Flanagan on the lawn and carried her to the McAuliffes' porch, banging on the door and teling Betty to cal an ambulance. When he asked Tracey how she'd got out of there, she said my name.

"It's like each of us had a job to do," I tel Carl. "I went in to find Tracey, and you went in for me."

Carl fluffs his pilow, sits up straight, turns on Jeopardy! " Wel, that's just the way it turned out. I see only what's right in front of me, you know what I'm saying?"

But of course he could see more than that. It's why he'd spent the cash I'd given him on cigarettes instead of a train ticket, why he'd smoked the lot of them while keeping his eye on an empty house. I didn't need to hear Carl admit to his belief in fate. It was more than enough to know that an absence of over twenty years and al the damage he had endured in that time had not slowed his run from the safe side of Caledonia Street to the other, to me.

We have no shortage of visitors.

On the less pleasant side, there are the police, who want to know everything and are frustrated by how little we offer them.

Carl and I stick to similarly vague stories. That is, the truth— minus the boy. We were just old pals who were concerned for Randy's emotional state folowing the suicide of a mutual friend, and figured he might try to harm himself.

"Why there?" each questioner asks. "Why that house?"

"Because it's haunted," we tel them.

In the end, their curiosity could take them only so far, as Tracey Flanagan's life had been saved, after al. The only crimes that were known to have been committed were done by Randy, and he was gone now. Other than the suspicion that we knew more than we were saying, the police had no charge they needed to lay, so they moved on, wishing us swift recoveries in ironic tones.

Betty McAuliffe brings us corn muffins and homemade raspberry jam, which save Carl and me from the frightening "scrambled eggs" and "oatmeal" that would have otherwise had to pass for breakfast. She tels us of her plans to sel the house. It's too big for her alone, and she doesn't relish the prospect of months of noisy buldozers and nail guns across the street. There are some one-bedroom apartments she fancies over on Erie Street, overlooking the river. It is al she needs.

"So long as you boys drop in sometimes," she says, enticing us with ham sandwiches and a Thermos of good coffee, though she doesn't have to sweeten the deal to elicit promises from us.

Todd Flanagan comes by to say helo, but within seconds his rehearsed words abandon him, his gratitude and relief leaving him mute. So I do the talking for both of us. I tel him that it was an honour to be able to get Tracey out of there, that it was likely to turn out to be the most proud moment of my life. Then I tel Todd that his daughter struck me as smart enough and brave enough to recover from this, that my money is on her turning out fine.

He embraces me. Pins me against my pilow for a long hug I'm sure Todd has never given another man in his life, just as I am unused to receiving one.

It's not the only love I receive from the Flanagan family during my stay. Tracey opens her arms to me when the doctors deem her wel enough to permit select visitors, and when I bend down to her, I am rewarded with cheek kisses.

"My dad was right," she says.