I attempt to read on. But a minute later, I'm struck with a rare headache. A pair of marbles growing into golf bals at the temples.
I lay the journal down on the bedside table and sit in the chair by the window. Here it is, the ful extent of Ben's world: a tar- veined Caledonia Street climbing up the hil to the right, and through the branches of the neighbour's maple, the Thurman house, colourless and unnumbered. For al 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, compeled to relive the past as sentimental lovers do.
Yet there
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.
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.
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.
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—
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, cheerfuly caling up the stairs. A voice that makes the face in the window pul 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 hal.
'I'l leave you boys to your business,' she says finaly and shuffles away through the kitchen door.
Randy stil 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 al 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. Physicaly 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.'
MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 9
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