The Guardians

I surprised myself by answering instantly Honestly.

'A boy.'

'What's he look like?'

'Like you. Like any of us.'

'It would like you to think that.'

'You've seen it?'

Carl appeared to search his memory. 'Have you?'

'Yes.'

'Where?'

'Upstairs. The night we found Heather. But it was only me. Me, in the mirror on the bathroom door.'

'It wasn't you,' Carl said, his face looming closer. 'And it's not like us.'

'Maybe we should—'

'It's not'

Carl backed away. He looked like he had just lost a long and exhausting argument with himself.

I took his hand. A weird thing to do. The kind of thing Carl in particular would have resisted, taken as an affront to his unshakeable Carlness. But once we were connected, he held my hand as much as I held his.

We let go only once the night opened wide around us outside. Thankful that the others had already headed home.

It should go without saying that I never mentioned the hand-holding part to anyone ever again. Until today.

[10]

By the time Randy and I walk to Ben's house from the Old London it's later than I'd thought, and my exhaustion from the evening's revelations, as wel as the wine, prevents me from asking myself the one question that should have been asked before Randy disappeared around the corner of Caledonia and Church, leaving me standing on the McAuliffes' front porch, key in hand: Where am I going to sleep?

Al day I'd meant to tel Mrs. McAuliffe that, while I appreciated her hospitality, I couldn't accept her invitation to stay overnight in her son's room. Her dead son's room. But whether I was distracted by my tasks as executor or couldn't bring myself to disappoint the poor woman, I hadn't gotten around to it. Now it would be plainly wrong to scuff after Randy and get my old room back at the Queen's. Betty would be expecting me for breakfast in the morning, had likely gone out earlier to buy the makings for her specialties—raisin bread French toast and fruit salad. Indeed, she may wel stil be awake in her darkened room, awaiting the sound of my steps up the stairs.

I open the door and swiftly close it again once I'm in. A silent oath made with myself: if I am actualy going to spend the night in this place, I cannot afford even the briefest glimpse of the house across the street. In fact, it might be a better idea to not go upstairs at al, and simply crumple onto the sofa in the living room. I'm on my way toward it, checking the chairs for a blanket, when I'm stopped by a sound that comes from the kitchen.

A scratch, or the rustle of plastic. The sort of thing that could be confused with a breath from one's own chest.

From the halway, I can see part of the kitchen. Nobody stands there, knife in hand, as I half expect. There is nothing but the play of moonlight over the cupboards, moving around the tree branches in the September photo on the calendar pinned to the wal.

I'm partway to the kitchen entrance when a chunk of shadow breaks away and tiptoes over the linoleum. A large mouse—or smal rat—that, upon spotting me, races behind the fridge, its tail audibly scratching across an edge of drywal.

For a second, the silence suggests we're both working through the same thought.

What the hell was that?

The sheets in Ben's bed have been freshly washed and made even since I sat on them earlier in the day. Betty wants me to feel welcome. And I do. Or at least, I'm grateful for being able to pul the covers up to my chin so that the boy-smels of Ben's room are partialy masked by fabric softener.

Sleep, I have found, is like a woman you'd like to speak to across a crowded room: the harder you wish it to come to you, the more often it turns away. So it is that I am left awake and wishing, staring up at something awful (the beam that Ben looped his rope over) in order to avoid looking at something even more awful (the Thurman house, whose roof would be clearly visible if I turned my head on the pilow). Did Ben fight this same fight himself these past years? Was he forced to consider every knot and crack in the wood that would eventualy hold him thrashing in mid-air?

It is these questions that lead me into sleep. Into a dream that carries me down the stairs and across Caledonia Street to lie on the cold ground beneath the hedgerow the runs along the Thurman property line. Staring up at the side windows of the house, the glass a blackboard with fuckt finger-drawn in its dust.

It starts with a woman.

Standing up from where she had been lying on the living- room floor out of sight below the sil. A woman who places her palms against the glass. And with this touch, I can see she is naked, and young, and not alone.

Another figure calmly approaches from behind her. Male, his identity concealed by the dark, though his form visible enough for me to see that he is naked as wel.

He stands there, appreciating the ful display of her body. For a moment, I feel sure he is about to eat her.