The Guardians

'Smart?'

Sarah puled back a few inches so I could see her face.

'I love you, Trevor,' she said. And though I tried to say it back, it wouldn't come.

I remember this exchange so clearly now for a reason I hadn't expected when I first summoned it to mind. It wasn't the worry I had that Sarah would figure out what we had done. It was a flash of knowledge.

What was happening in the Thurman house had already drawn a line between Sarah and me, and though it didn't stop me from loving her, it was draining the idea of forever from our love. There will be others, I thought for the very first time as I kicked my locker shut, spun the lock and started away, lying that I had to get to a team meeting. She is only a girl among girls. It was cruel, however private a thought it remained. Soon, a whole day will pass when you don't think of her once.

Thoughts whose meanness was al the harder to bear because their truth placed them out of reach, beyond forgiving.

My turn to visit the coach was scheduled to folow the last bel of the day, and I was late already. At that time of year, losing fifteen minutes can mean a lot when it comes to light, the after-school dusk easing ever closer to night. It made my walk to the Thurman house feel longer. And when it came into view, it was halfway to losing the vulnerable details—the bubbled paint, sagging porch—that in daylight denied it some of its power. The house preferred darkness for the same reason old whores do. It alowed for the possibility of seduction.

The between-class report from Randy, who'd gone in before me, told of a coach whose mental condition was deteriorating faster than his confinement alone should have given rise to. Ben had tried giving him a pen and piece of paper on which to write whatever he needed to say that he couldn't say aloud, and the coach had simply signed his name at the bottom and told Ben to fil in the rest any way he wanted. He hadn't eaten the food we delivered to him. He wasn't complaining of the cold, or of being falsely accused, or even of being lashed to a post in a sunless celar. What he kept saying was that he wasn't alone in there.

This was what kept me frozen on the sidewalk. I pretended that I was making sure nobody was looking before I crept along the hedgerow, but in fact I was wondering how much money I had left in my account from a summer of pool cleaning, and if it would be enough for a train ticket to Toronto.

He's not alone in there.

As if on cue, there was the sound of a distant train whistle, beckoning me. Folowed by a flash of movement in one of the side windows.

Pale skin. A blur of long, tossed hair from a head twisted from side to side. A blink of struggle.

It was the impulse to help, to save—it was a woman I'd seen—that crunched my feet onto the frozen grass. Sliding under cover of cheek-poking branches. When I drew square with the house I fel to my knees.

It was the same window where I'd noticed the hopeless fuckt the night we discovered Heather Langham's body. The word stil there, a legible blue against an interior of black.

Up the hil of Caledonia Street, the streetlights were flickering to life, one by one. That's what I'd seen. Not a woman but the bulb in the streetlight behind me popping to brightness.

Yet even with this mystery solved, I stayed where I was. The twilight, the dirty panes, the lightless interior: even if something was there, anything that could be observed through the window would be obscured if it showed itself again. It made me squint. There was the sense that, above al, the house wanted me to stick around, to witness. Better yet, to come inside.

Which I wouldn't do. What difference would it make? The coach wasn't going to tel me anything if he hadn't already told Randy or Ben. And they were coming by later for another visit anyway. It needn't be me going in there now, alone.

I crawled out from under the hedgerow. Rose to my feet, started sidestepping back toward the sidewalk.

That was the right thing to do. Here's the wrong:

I looked back at the window. And saw a woman's

face come to the glass.

I fel back against the branches. If the hedge hadn't been there I would have colapsed, but it held me up, pinned to its nettles like a plastic bag blown against a fence.

When I looked at the window again, there was only an orb of streetlight. And the fuckt. Though wasn't the t slightly smudged from the moment before?

I started toward the back of the house, adding details to the face I'd seen. A woman. That was al I had to start with. Along with the idea that she was in desperate fear. And that she was naked. That she wasn't alone.

Tina Uxbridge.

I'd been thinking of her ever since Todd had come by our table in the cafeteria. In the back of my mind I'd been flipping through my (partly made-up) mental snapshots of Tina hip-swinging down the school's halways, Tina breastfeeding, Tina and Todd and the different ways they might have gone about conceiving their daughter. The truth is, I'd pictured her, dweled on her, before. Because she was pretty and I was sixteen. Because I was a sixteen-year-old boy.

I opened the back door.

For a time I stood in the kitchen, listening. I think I half expected to hear the coach's voice, cackling my name from the celar or pleading for release. The house's quiet should have brought relief, but didn't. I was waiting and listening. Which meant something else was too.

And then it told me it was.

We're waiting.

The faintest whisper, no louder than a midge's wings.