The Guardians (3 page)

    "I'm
not hungry," he shouted back.

    "This
isn't about dinner, honey."

    She
was trying not to cry. We could hear that from the other end of the McAuliffes'
lot. We could hear it through the garden shed's walls.

    Ben
crossed the yard and stood before his mother, listening to her as she wrung her
hands on her Kiss Me, I'm Scottish! apron. He waited a moment after she
finished. Then, as though at the pop of a starter's pistol, he ran.

    And
we followed. Even as he crossed Caledonia Street and onto the Thurman property,
we stayed after him. Ben scooted around the side of the house and we came
around the corner in time to see the back door swing closed. Our feet had never
touched this ground before. It was the one place we never even dared each other
to go. Yet now we were running into the house, each of us fighting to be first,
all calling Ben's name.

    We
found him in the living room. He was leaning against the wall between the two
side windows. His crumpled form looked smaller than it should have, as though
the house had stolen part of him upon entry.

    "My
dad's dead," he said when we gathered to stand over him. "She said it
was an accident. But it wasn't."

    Randy
frowned. It was the same face he made when asked to come to the blackboard to
work through a long-division equation. "What do you mean?"

    
"It
wasn't
an
accident!"

    He
was angry more than anything else. His father was gone and it was his weakness
that had taken him. A coward. Ben had been shown to have come from shoddy
stock, and it was the revelation of bad luck that held him, not grief.

    So we
grieved for him.

    Without
a look between us, we knelt and took Ben in our arms. Four booger-nosed yard
apes with little in our heads but Wayne Gretzky and, now, Farrah daydreams. Yet
we held our friend—and each other—in a spontaneous show of comradeship and
love. We were experiencing a rare thing (rarer still for boys): we were feeling
someone else's pain as acutely as if it were our own. Ben wasn't crying, but we
were.

    More
than this, the moment stopped time. No, not stopped: it stole the meaning from
time. For however long we crouched together against the cracked walls of the
Thurman house's living room we weren't growing older, we weren't eight, we
weren't attempting another of the million awkward steps toward adulthood and
its presumed freedoms. We were who we were and nothing else. A kind of
revelation, as well as a promise. Ben had been the first of us to take a punch
from the grown-up world. And we would be there when the other blows came our
way.

    We
were pulling Ben to his feet when we heard the girl.

    A
moan from upstairs. A gasp, and then an exhaled cry.

    I
remember the three versions of the same expression on the faces of my friends. The
shame that comes not from something we'd done but from something we didn't yet
understand.

    We'd
heard that older kids sometimes came to the Thurman house to do stuff, and that
some of this stuff concerned boys and girls and the things they could do with
each other with their clothes off. Though we didn't really know our way around
the mechanics, we knew that this was what was going on up there in one of the
empty bedrooms.

    I'm
uncertain of many details from that afternoon, but I know this: we all heard
it. Not the moaning, but how it turned into something else.

    What
we heard as Carl pulled the back door of the Thurman house closed was not the
voice of a living thing. Human in its origin but no longer. A voice that should
not have been possible, because it belonged to the dead.

    The
moaning from the girl upstairs changed. A new sound that showed what we took at
first to be her pleasure wasn't that at all but a whimper of fear. We knew this
without comprehending it, just stupid children at least half a decade shy of
tracing the perimeters of what
sex
or
consent
or
hurt
could mean between women and men. It was the sound the dead girl made upstairs
that instantly taught us. For in the gasp of time before we stepped outside and
the closed door left the backyard and the trees and the house in a vacuum of
silence, we heard the beginnings of a scream.

    There's
a train to Grimshaw leaving Union Station at noon, which gives me three hours
to pack an overnight bag, hail a cab and buy a ticket. An everyday sequence of
actions. Yet for me, such tasks—pack a bag, hail a cab—have become cuss-laced
battles against my mutinous hands and legs, so that this morning, elbowing out
of bed after a night of terrible news, I look to the hours ahead as a list of
Herculean trials.

    Shave
Face without Lopping Off Nose.

    Tie
Shoelaces.

    Zip
Up Fly.

    Among
the fun facts shared by my doctors at the time I was diagnosed with Parkinson's
was that I could end up living for the same number of years I would have had
coming if I hadn't acquired the disease. So, I asked, over this potentially
long stretch, what else could I look forward to? Some worse versions of stuff I
was already experiencing—the involuntary kicks and punches—along with a slew of
new symptoms that sounded like the doctor was making them up as he went along,
a shaggy-dog story designed to scare the bejesus out of me before he clapped me
on the shoulder with a "Hey! Just kidding, Trevor. Nothing's
that
bad"? But he never got around to the punchline, because there wasn't one.

    Let's
try to remember what I do my best to forget:

    A
face that loss of muscle control will render incapable of expression.
Difficulties with problem solving, attention, memory. The sensation of feeling
suffocatingly hot and clammily cold
at the same time.
(This one has
already made a few appearances, leading to the performance of silent-movie
routines worthy of Chaplin, where I desperately dial up the thermostat while
opening windows to stick my head out into the twenty-below air.) Vision
impairment. Depression. Mild to fierce hallucinations, often involving insects
(the one before bed last night: a fresh loaf of bread seething with
cockroaches). Violent rem sleep that jolts you out of bed onto the floor.

    For
now, though, I'm mostly just slow.

    This
morning, when my eyes opened after dreams of Ben calling for help from behind
his locked bedroom door, the clock radio glowed 7:24. By the time my feet
touched carpet it was 7:38. Every day now begins with me lying on my back,
waiting for my brain to send out the commands that were once automatic.

    Sit
up.

    Throw
legs over side of bed.

    Stand.

    Another
ten minutes and this is as far as I've got. On my feet, but no closer to
Grimshaw than the bathroom, where I'm working a shaky blade over my skin.
Little tongues of blood trickling through the lather.

    
And, over my shoulder, a woman.

    A
reflection as real as my own. More real, if anything, as her wounds lend her
swollen skin the drama of a mask. There is the dirt too. Caked in her hair,
darkening her lashes. The bits of earth that refused to shake off when she rose
from it.

    That
I'm alone in my apartment is certain, as I haven't had a guest since the
diagnosis. And because I recognize who stands behind me in the mirror's steam.
A frozen portrait of violence that, until now, has visited me only as I slept.
The face at once wide-eyed and lifeless, still in the mounting readiness of all
dead things.

    Except
this time she moves.

    Parts
her lips with the sound of a tissue pulled from the box. Dried flakes falling
from her chin like black icing.

    To
pull away would be to back into her touch. To go forward would be to join her
in the mirror's depth. So I stay where I am.

    A blue
tongue that clacks to purpose within her mouth. To whisper, to lick. To tell me
a name.

    I
throw my arm against the glass. Wipe her away. The mirror bending against my
weight but not breaking. When she's gone I'm left in a new clarity, stunned and
ancient, before the mist eases me back into vagueness so that I am as much a
ghost as she.

    Impotence.
Did I fail to mention that this is coming down the pike too? Though I could
still do the deed if called upon (as far as I know), I have gone untested since
the Bad News. I think I realized that part of my life was over even as the doc
worked his lips around the P-word.
No more ladies for this ladies' man.

    Is
that
what I was? If the shoe fits.

    And
let's face it, the shoe fit pretty well for a while: an unmarried,
all-night-party-hosting nightclub owner. Trevor, of Retox. Girlfriends all
beautiful insomniacs with plans to move to L.A. I don't know if any of them
could be said to have gotten to know me, nor did they try. I was
Trevor, of
Retox.
Always up for a good time, fuelled by some decent drugs up in the
VIP lounge of the place with the longest lineups on Friday nights. I
fit.
Though never for long. I hold the dubious distinction of having been in no
relationship since high school that made it past the four-month mark. (I was
more often the dumped than the dumper, I should add. The women I saw over my
Retox years occupied the same world I did, a world where people were expected
to want something other than what they had, to be elsewhere than across the
restaurant table or in the bed they were in at any given time. It was a world
of motion, and romance requires at least the
idea
of permanence.)

    Who
else was there with me in Retox-land? My business partners, though they were
something less than friends, all work-hard—play-hard demons, the kind of guys
who were great to share a couple nights in Vegas with but who, in quieter
moments, had little to say beyond tales of how they got the upper hand in a
real estate flip or gleaned the "philosophies" from a billionaire's
memoir. On the family side, there was only my brother left, and I spoke to him
long-distance on a quarterly basis, asking after the wife and athletic brood he
seemed to be constantly shuttling around to rinks and ballet classes out in
Edmonton. My parents were gone. Both of major cardiac events (what heart
attacks are now, apparently) and both within a year of moving out of Grimshaw
and into a retirement bungalow with a partial view of Lake Huron. That's about
it. I've been alone, but well entertained.

    And
then the doctors stepped in to poop on the party. Within three weeks of the Bad
News I sold Retox and retreated into the corners of my underfurnished condo to
manage the mutual funds that will, I hope, pay for the nurses when the time
comes for them to wheel, wipe and spoon. Until then, I do my best to keep my
condition a secret. With full concentration I am able to punch an elevator
button, hold a menu, write my signature on the credit card slip—all without
giving away my status as a Man with a Serious Disease. In a way, it's only a
different take on the "normal act" I've been keeping up since high
school. It's likely that only my best friends from that time, my fellow
Guardians, know the effort it takes.

    Then,
in a small town a hundred miles away, one of them ties one end of a rope to a
ceiling beam and the other around his neck and the normal act has fallen away.
There is only room for the lost now. To let the dead back in.

    That's
it, Trev. Keep moving. Keep it simple.

    Button
Shirt.

    Find
Seat on Train.

    And
when the call for Grimshaw comes, do what every shaking, betraying part of you
will fight doing and get off.

    When
I remember Grimshaw now, a collage of places comes to mind. The Old Grove
Cemetery. The rail line that snaked through town, straightening only in front
of the station, polka-dotted with bird shat. The sky: low, cottony and grey.
The trail that followed the river right out of town and could, it was said,
lead a runaway all the way to Lake Huron. The sort of things everyone who has
grown up in a small town has their own version of.

    And
like every small town, Grimshaw had a haunted house.