The Guardians (37 page)

    Randy
looks at me with dead seriousness. "We have to do something to put this
place behind us."

    "You
think that's possible?"

    "Who
knows? We have to try. I think that's the key. If we do our best, maybe we
won't have to think about Grimshaw every other second until we drop dead."

    "Okay,"
I say, and sip my coffee. "So we try. Try what?"

    "To
face it. No more tiptoeing around."

    "Ben
watched for half his life and it didn't do any good."

    "But
Ben stayed
outside."

    The
maître d’ arrives with our meals, the bloody slices of beef set before us
steaming and thick as novels.

    "Are
you saying we have to go in and stay there?" I ask.

    "Not
us. But we'll have eyes and ears on the inside all the same."

    "How?"

    "Baby
monitors! Go on, say it. It's brilliant."

    "It's
brilliant. If we had a baby to monitor."

    Randy
sighs, savouring the rare moment of appearing smarter than someone else. "They've
come a long way, let me tell you. Now they come with video cameras and motion
detectors. You can pay me your half when you have a chance."

    "And
how exactly do these help us?"

    "We
do what Ben did—watch the house," Randy says, beaming now. "But
tonight, we'll watch it from the
inside.'"

    "On
the monitor."

    "It's
got a range of five hundred feet. And we'll be in Ben's room. But hidden. No
faces in the window, in case someone looks."

    "And
where's the sensor?"

    "Where
would you least want to sit around all night in that place?"

    "The
cellar."

    "Agreed."

    "Agreed
on what? Sorry, man, but I'm sure as hell not going down there to plant that
thing."

    "Already
done. By me. Today. During
daylight
hours."

    I
watch Randy slice off a dripping chunk of meat and drive it into his mouth, his
appetite the first giveaway that what we're going to do together this evening
isn't a real stakeout, it's therapy. What's important, what gives the voodoo a
chance of working, isn't the recitation of the right words or spraying of holy
water, but that we believe the process might actually work. And so we are
reinforcing our courage as we once did in the Guardians' dressing room before a
game. Pretend warriors.

    I can
see as he chews and swallows and grins over the white linen that Randy doesn't
really expect any confrontation to take place tonight. He's only acting as
though it might for my sake.

    "You're
a good man, Randy."

    "I'm
glad you can see that. I just wish you had long hair and smelled a little
better and looked great in a bikini."

    "When
was the last time you saw me in a bikini?"

    "Please.
I'm eating."

    After
dinner and several coffees, Randy and I start back toward Ben's house. It's
night now, but a fog has darkened the air even further, rubbing out the details
of Grimshaw's chimney stacks and the lights from its windows like a blindness.
Cars nose through the slick streets. In the fog, Grimshaw feels at once
familiar and altered, drained of some fundamental aspect that had previously
marked it as a place for the living, so that I am left with the sensation of
strolling into the afterlife.

    At
Caledonia, we don't immediately cross over to the McAuliffes' as we normally
would. Instead, we stop at the spot where I'd seen Gary Pullinger standing,
hands in our pockets, studying the islands of concrete that were once the front
walk, before taking in the house itself. Given the finality of the evening—the
last night in Grimshaw by the last of the Guardians who have come for the last
time to brave the scrutiny of its windowed eyes—I am expecting to feel
something different about the house. But it appears emptier and less
consequential tonight than it ever has, unfairly scorned, even pitiable. The
fog that passes between us and its door seems to erase its particulars,
sweeping it away into a past that will soon claim what's left of it and leave
an anonymous lot behind.

    I can
feel Randy wanting to say something along the lines of my own thoughts, a
comment at how unbelievable it is that the four walls and buckling roof before
us could be mistaken for a living thing. But I don't want the house to hear
him.

    "It's
getting cold," I say, elbowing him in the side. As best I can, I start
back across the street.

    Randy
passes me in the front hall and is already halfway up the stairs when Mrs.
McAuliffe steps out from the living room's shadows.

    "There's
lamb stew in the pot if you boys are hungry," she says.

    "Thanks,
Mrs. A.," Randy shouts down the stairs. "Already ate."

    It
leaves me alone with the old woman. In the hall, she appears more frail than
she did this morning and, at the same time, seems to be fighting this frailty
by way of a bulky knit sweater (Ben's?) and corduroy gardening pants.

    "What
are you two planning on tonight?" she asks, stepping closer.
"Painting the town red?"

    "Nothing
like that."

    "You're
welcome to use the TV in the basement."

    "Thank
you. But we're just, you know, hanging around."

    "Playing
records."

    "Sorry?"

    Betty
giggles. "It's what Ben would say to me when you were all boys, spending
hours up in his room, and I would ask what you were up to," she says.
'"Playing records, Mom!' 'Nothing, Mom! We're just playing records!' But
half the time I couldn't hear any music. Only you boys, talking and
talking."

    "Did
you hear what we were saying?"

    "No,"
she says, shaking her head. "But that didn't stop me from understanding
things some of the time."

    "A
mother's intuition."

    "Intuition,
yes. But that's not all."

    She
knows. That is, she knows
something
, as we always suspected she did. How
much she has guessed it's impossible to say, and I'm not about to ask. But what
she is telling me now is that we were party to a crime of a most serious sort,
and she has never shared this knowledge with another, not even her son.

    Studying
her now, I'm certain Betty McAuliffe was the only witness who watched us enter
the Thurman house the evening we discovered Heather Langham in the cellar. What
connections had she made once the coach went missing and then, soon after, was
wheeled out of the house across the street along with the woman—only a girl
really, rosy and unmarried and childless? It would have been impossible not to
speculate. Not to conclude.

    And
yet, even with this knowledge, she had remained sweet Mrs. McAuliffe. Lonely
Mrs. McAuliffe, baker of shortbread and pincher of cheeks and minder of her own
business. This was love too.

    "We'll
be out of your way tomorrow," I say. "Randy's already checked out of
the Queen's, so if it's all right by you, he'll be bunking on the pullout in
Ben's room."

    "No
trouble. You'll find extra sheets and—"

    "The
linen closet. I remember."

    She turns
away, as if at the return of a TV program she had been engrossed in. "I'm
off to bed myself," she says, beginning to turn off the lights one by one.

    "See
you in the morning, Betty."

    "The
morning," she repeats. Now in the dark, whispering it again, like a
lover's remembered name. "The morning."

    I
find Randy stretched out on the bed, adjusting the dials on what looks at first
to be an ancient cell phone, one of those banana-sized ones with the rubbery antennae
that came out in the '80s.

    "You
gotta check out the picture on this thing," he says. "I rented a
plasma screen to watch the finals last year and it wasn't any better than
this."

    I sit
next him to see that he's right. A square screen that shows a wide view of the
Thurman house's earth-floored cellar and, in the background, the bottom of the
stairs leading up to the kitchen. An empty space except for a couple of
crippled workbenches along the walls, random garbage balled up from where it was
tossed down from the top of the stairs. The air greened by the night lens, so
that the scene appears to be set on a cold lake bottom.

    "They
have these things for
babies?"
I say. "What for? To count the
kid's eyelashes as it sleeps?"

    Randy
turns up the volume. A moment of microphoned vacancy washes out from the
speakers.

    "Something
farts down there and we'll hear it," he says.

    "With
this thing? Probably smell it too."

    For
the first time, I notice it's dark in the room. The only illumination coming
from the monitor's screen and what orange street light finds its way through
the window. But as I reach to switch on Ben's Ken Dryden lamp, Randy grabs my
wrist.

    "We're
not here. Remember?" he says.

    "So
we're just going to sit in the dark?"

    "I'll
hold your hand if you want."

    "You
are
holding my hand." "Oh."

    I
slide down to the floor and crawl over to the beanbag chair in the corner. From
here, I can see the Thurman house's chimney, but little else. The fog has
thinned somewhat over the last hour, and has turned to an indecisive drizzle,
its droplets swaying and looping in their descent and, at times, even returning
skyward.

    "I
saw Todd Flanagan today," Randy says.

    "Yeah?"

    "At
the Wal-Mart."

    "And
you pushing a shopping cart with a baby monitor in it?"

    "As
a matter of fact, yes."

    "How
was he?"

    "Not
good. He was two minutes into our conversation in the vacuum cleaner aisle
before he figured out who the hell I was."

    "Poor
bastard."

    "He
asked after you."

    "What'd
he say?"

    "Can't
remember exactly."

    "Bullshit."

    "Okay.
He said it was really sad to see you all shaky and Parkinson's and whatnot,
especially when you could have been the best winger the Guardians ever
had."

    "It's
not half as sad as what he's going through."

    Does
fog make a sound? If it does, it whispers against Ben's window.

    "Randy?"

    "Yo."

    "You
think she could still be alive?"

    "I
dunno, boss."

    "But
what do you
think?"

    "Well,
let me ask you this: Do the missing ever come back?"

    "Sometimes.
If they just ran away. Or if they wanted to be lost."

    "Then
those ones weren't really missing to begin with."

    Over
the next couple of hours the night grows still, both outside the McAuliffe
house and within it. Betty must be asleep, as we haven't heard any creaks from
the floorboards below since shortly after I came up. She has the right idea. It
is only sporadic conversation between Randy and me—as well as changing shifts
watching the monitor screen—that keeps the two of us awake.

    "Coffee?"
Randy asks at one point.

    "Is
that what you carried up here an hour ago?"

    "I
got a Thermos at Wal-Mart today too. State of the art."

    "Am
I going splits on that with you too?"