The Guardians (16 page)

    I lay
the journal down on the bedside table and sit in the chair by the window. Here
it is, the full extent of Ben's world: a tar- veined Caledonia Street climbing
up the hill to the right, and through the branches of the neighbour's maple,
the Thurman house, colourless and unnumbered. For all the seriousness Ben
brought to his role as watchdog, it doesn't look threatening from up here in
the neutral daylight so much as ashamed of itself. Was there ever a day when
Ben doubted himself and saw it as I see it now, weak and forsaken? Did he ever
run up against the boredom of waiting to see something in a building that had
nothing to show?

    I
suppose he had his memories of being inside it to keep certain possibilities
alive. He could look down at the Thurman house from this roost and visualize
the floor plan in his head. It must have been a kind of anti-love, unrequited
and undying, that kept him here. Instead of a girl, he had been altered by an
experience that had left him frozen, compelled to relive the past as
sentimental lovers do.

    Yet
there
was
a girl. Maybe she is why Ben stayed. Someone had to honour her
by carrying her memory, even as her name faded year by year. In recalling the
sight of Heather Langham walking up Caledonia Street, indifferent to the leer
of the house's darkened eyes, Ben was saving her from becoming nothing more
than another Terrible Story.

    I try
to summon this very image of her now, but it's beyond my reach. There is only
the moan of a car accelerating up the slope, the screech of a backyard cat
fight, the house. So I wait as Ben waited. The morning unmoored from time. It
might be meditative if it wasn't for the accompanying fear. The growing dread
that I'm not the only one watching.

    Poor
Trev. First day on the job and more scared than Ben ever was
.

    The
boy appears at the second-floor bedroom window in the time it takes my eyes to
move from the attic shutters, down to the front door and up again.

    
But
there's nothing to be afraid of. All you need is a rope. A chair
.

    He is
looking at me with the same open-mouthed, dumbfounded expression I feel on my
own face, a mimicry so expert that, for the first second, I try to see him as
me somehow, a telescoped reflection, some smoke-and-mirrors tomfoolery. But in
the next second, I realize the gap of years between us: the boy remains
sixteen, and I am forty.

    
All
you need to see is that none of it's worth holding on to, because it's already
gone
.

    I was
wrong. The boy cannot be me. And the persistence of him in the window confirms
his reality with each passing second he remains there. He is trapped inside,
but not necessarily forever. I can see that—
feel
that—in the strength he
gains even as he charts the depths of my weakness. There are ways out by
bringing others in. And with this realization—as though hearing my thoughts
just as I can hear his—the startled mask slips off, and he laughs.

    "Trevor!"

    Mrs.
McAuliffe's voice, cheerfully calling up the stairs. A voice that makes the
face in the window pull back into shadow.

    "Your
friend is here!"

    Randy
stands on the McAuliffes' front porch, arms crossed, refusing to cross the
threshold.

    "Hey,
Trev," he says, a little surprised to see me, even though he knew I'd be
here. Maybe a part of him was expecting Ben to come down the stairs, not me, a
joint-stiffened man with sweat stains the size of pie plates under his arms.

    "What's
wrong?"

    Randy
looks past me, at Mrs. McAuliffe, who remains standing in the hall.

    "I'll
leave you boys to your business," she says finally and shuffles away
through the kitchen door.

    Randy
still says nothing. Wipes his nose in a slow sweep of the back of his hand.

    "Why
don't you come in?"

    He
glances over his shoulder. Almost turns his head far enough to take in the
Thurman house, but not quite.

    "It's
like it's watching us," I say.

    "Bricks
and wood and glass. That's all it is."

    "I'm
talking about the inside." I take a step closer, lower my voice.
"Don't you feel it?"

    "No."

    "It's
a good thing you never got married. You're a lousy liar."

    "Listen,
Trev. I didn't come here to talk about an empty house." Randy shakes his
head. Physically jostles one line of thinking out of place to make room for
another. "The waitress," he says. "Todd's kid."

    "What
about her?"

    "She's
missing."

    I
used to think—or at least I did before the winter of 1984—that one could read
the capacity for badness in a face. The mugshots of drive-by shooters and child
molesters that were reprinted in the National section of
The Grimshaw Beacon
revealed a similar absence, the groggy complexions that told of cigarettes and
nocturnal scheming. I believed that when it came to discerning between the
truly evil and the rest of us everyday sinners,
you can just tell.

    But
I've come to learn that evil's primary talent is for disguise: not letting you
hear the cloven hooves scratching on the welcome mat is how the devil gets
invited inside. It's how he can become your friend.

    I was
thinking this, or something like this, when we pulled over to the curb and
asked the coach if he wanted a ride home, and he stopped to look into Carl's
Ford. At us.

    Carl
was at the wheel and Ben in the passenger seat, with me on my own in the back.
We had been driving around, arguing over the costs of doing something versus
nothing in discovering the truth of the coach's role in Heather Langham's
death. That is, I was arguing with Carl and Ben, and they mostly ignored me,
studying the houses we cruised by as though considering buying one.

    "Where
is
the freckly fuck?" was all Carl would say every few minutes,
referring to Randy, who wasn't home when we called.

    "We
can't do anything without him," I said. "We have to be together on
it."

    But
Carl and Ben just kept looking at the houses. They made me feel like I was
riding in a baby seat, watching the backs of their heads as though they were my
parents.

    "There
he is," Carl said. He took his foot off the gas and the Ford rolled on,
gently as a canoe after taking the paddles in.

    "Who?"

    Because
they could both see the answer to this on the street ahead, they ignored me. It
forced me to slide over between them and peer out the windshield.

    The coach.
Walking along the sidewalk with his back to us, a stiffening of his stride that
suggested he'd heard a car slow behind him. This was his street. A street we
had driven up more than any other over the last half-hour. Carl and Ben had
been hoping to come across the coach making his way home. And now that they
had, they drew even with him and pulled over to the curb.

    He
stopped. I don't know if he knew who it was before he turned to see, but it
seemed there was a half second's pause as he gathered himself.

    "What's
up, guys?" he asked, glancing up the street toward his house a half block
on.

    "Need
a ride?" Carl asked.

    The
coach squinted. We knew where he lived. Why would he need a ride? So: this was
an invitation. And not necessarily a complicated one. Boys on the team came to
him all the time. They told him things, sought advice. There were always
Guardians wanting to hang out with him, asking if he needed a ride.

    "You
think I'm that out of shape?" he said.

    "We're
just driving around. Killing time before practice."

    "You
want something to eat? My wife makes this baked spaghetti thing that's not half
bad. I'll be eating it the rest of the week if I don't get some help."

    "Thanks."
Carl glanced around the car at Ben, back at me. "We're not too hungry, I
guess."

    The
coach stood there. Unmoving except for his breath leaking out in feathery
plumes.

    "How
about it?" Ben asked.

    "I've
got some time," the coach said, pulling back the sleeve of his coat to
show the watch on his wrist, though he didn't look at its face. "A little
spin? Why not?"

    Less
than two hours before we had driven up to the coach on his walk home, we'd had
another hot box meeting in the school's parking lot. It's hard to recall who
said what, or the positions we started out defending (I think I changed my mind
half a dozen times during each circling of Randy's joint). What was agreed on
by all was that
something
had to be done. We alone knew Miss Langham was
murdered, the where and how it was done. Maybe, if this was
all
we knew,
we would have found a way to justify trying to forget about it. But the thing
was this: along with the where and how she was killed, we now felt sure we knew
the who.

    Why
not go to the police? A good question. As good today as the afternoon we asked
it in Carl's Ford, coughing it out through the blue haze. Why
not
? There
were some halfway reasonable answers to this, and we voiced them at the time:

    The
police would never accept our slim evidence of Ben's nighttime sighting.

    We
had found and moved and bled on and buried her body, which meant the odds were
greater that we had done it than anyone else.

    Pointing
a finger the coach's way too early would only allow for his escape.

    But
the real reason was one none of us spoke aloud.

    This
was our test. Heather Langham's memory had been adopted as our responsibility.

    It
was Ben who was the last to speak. Last, because he used words almost as
powerful as his reminder of friendship that had led us into a haunted house.
Words that have, in different contexts, ushered soldiers onto killing fields.

    "We
need to find the truth," he said. "We have to. For Heather. For
justice."

    Truth.
Justice. These were the opened doors through which we saw a way to save Heather
Langham in death as we had longed to save her in life.

    We
talked about hockey at first. Or the coach did, repeating the ways we would
have to exploit the weak links on Seaforth's defence. He sat next to me in the
back but spoke directly to the window, as if rehearsing a speech. He reminded
me of a dog who didn't like cars: sitting straight and still, but every muscle
tense as he waited for the machine to stop and the doors to open so he could
leap out.

    "We
saw you," Ben said.

    This
is how the conversation turned. Ben swivelling around in the passenger seat to
face the coach. And it was "we."

    "You
did?" the coach said. He looked at me, at Carl in the rearview mirror, at
the toothpaste stain around Ben's mouth.

    "Last
Monday. Going into the Thurman house."

    "Monday?"

    The
coach looked as though he was trying to remember his mother-in-law's middle
name or the capital of Bolivia.

    "Just
over a week ago. Monday
night."

    "Okay.
Monday night. Why would I be going in there, Ben?"

    "Why
would you? Why
would
you?"

    The
coach continued to look at Ben for a moment, then turned to me. "What is
this?"

    "Answer
the question," I said.

    "I
don't know what you're asking me."

    "Have
you been inside the Thurman house at any time in the last week?"

    "No.
Now you tell me. What the hell is a Thurman house? "

    He
chuckled at this, and I was sure we'd got everything wrong. The coach's
awkwardness had come not from secret knowledge but from us. He had detected a worrying
turn in his youngest players and was trying to guess what was wrong. We were
acting weird, not him.