Twenty Miles (20 page)

They sat on the bench just behind the Scarlet goalie, huddled in for warmth, muscles clenching the tension they saw in their kids’ movements, thighs vibrating against each other. Sig read the anger in Isabel’s strides toward Ten and she grabbed Terry’s arm, steadying their bodies in the moment before impact. Then, Ten clattering to the ice while Iz stood above her, legs strong, looking down at the wreckage, and Sig gasped out her held breath, loosening her fingers against Terry’s arm, thumb reigniting its flutter-beat, kneading Terry’s soft muscle.

‘Pow,’ Terry whispered. ‘Pow.’

‘H
is birthday today!’ Ed shouted from his office as I walked past. I ducked my head in. He was sitting in his chair, hands in his lap,
TV
off.

‘Whose?’ I said.

‘Who’d you think?’ Ed snorted. ‘Norse’s.’

‘Today?’

‘Same as my sister’s. Today.’

‘Oh. Okay,’ I said. I thought about this. ‘He’d be thirty-eight, I guess.’

‘Nope, thirty-seven,’ Ed said.

‘Really? No, that can’t – ’

‘Yep. Same as me.’ Ed nodded.

I did the math. The year I was born – the same year he died. His age then, and my own age.

‘It should be thirty-eight, then,’ I said. ‘He was nineteen, right, when he–’

‘He was eighteen,’ Ed said. ‘He was eighteen. Positive. We were the same.’ A deep nod. Small sadness around his eyes at this mistake of mine.

V
alue Village, beside the
7
-Eleven just off campus, smelled like our attic back home. All that unaccountable taste and dust in the pockets, and I wondered, as I pawed through the rack of men’s coats, how many of them belonged to people who’d died. I felt the smell coming off on my hands. A woman wearing the Value Village red smock came up to me while I was peeling off the hockey jacket.

‘Here, I’ll hold that for you, hon,’ she said. Smoker’s voice,
hon
rattling like a coin down a drain. She looked about Sig’s age, her hair dyed pinky-orange, in a ponytail that was too high.
Elsie,
her nametag said. The white parts of her eyes were bloodshot a milky pink colour that made the blue parts look like they were lit from behind.

‘Thanks.’ I handed her the jacket and pulled on a black peacoat. It jutted from my shoulders, dangled past my hands. Next to us, a teenaged girl modelled a puffy football jacket, some unknown team,
Ned
stitched on the arm. She catwalked down the aisle, sucking in her cheeks, and the guy who was with her laughed.

‘Wicked,’ he said. ‘
Ned.
That’s hot.’

Elsie shook her head at the coat and took it from me. I pulled on a leather jacket. It was mottled brown, like a fall leaf. When I zipped it, the smell of an old baseball glove wafted up.

‘The one,’ Elsie breathed, as though I’d been trying on wedding dresses. She pushed me toward a mirror outside the change rooms. The collar was worn and ragged like a dog’s ear, the waist hugging in a bit, a zipper the colour of pennies. I took a couple of steps. Watched my legs, their bulk. I pulled the elastic from my ponytail. An aviation patch the shape of an old-fashioned plane was stitched on the sleeve. The arms all scratched. This jacket had flown.

‘You look like a movie star, hon,’ Elsie said. ‘I’ll ring you up.’

S
leep fought me in my Rez bed. I thought of all the sleeping bodies behind the walls, Gavin’s gravelly snores that had disgusted me at first and then began to lull me to sleep. Strange orphans, we were, in residence. Playing grown-up, playing house with a Rez boyfriend or girlfriend for a while, but always going back to our old beds, back
to borrowed cars and little sisters. Pretending bravely to be gone for good, and then making that decision that was never really a choice – to go back. Sig always said home is where you lay your head, her view a biased one. She’d lived in Kenora her whole life. She didn’t know what it was like to live in a building that smelled temporary. The huge recycling bins in the lobby full of paper, the remains of classes. Every test, every class, every essay, a gesture toward focusing the lens that would capture a blurred, older version of myself, that would eventually slice her out in angles and light.

I pictured Sig on the deck in the lawn chair – hard to picture her anywhere else in the house, alone, impossible to picture her sleeping. She was an orphan herself now.

The building slept, and I watched Kristjan. I’d probably known his real age at some point, but it had slipped a year somewhere along the way. A small error, considering the uselessness of numbers when skating against a ghost. Kristjan’s vapour trail, always a different version to dredge up, to match to the current edition of me.

He leered at me from the wall, drunk as hell. A boy. He could have been my younger brother. For close to a year, I’d been outgrowing him. I hadn’t known this – that these lines could jump, blur, dissolve to static. I looked down, spread my fingers wide. The fact settled in among their small bones: I’d outgrown his hands.

Highlight reels are a lie. A hockey game writes its own Coles Notes, this much is true. It’s like it’s manufactured in an ephemeral package, ready to be butchered and filleted into three clean chunks, then chopped further, this massacre, then strung together in highlight reels – for those who missed it, for the illegitimate fans who believe that a hockey game is a list of the goals and fights, nothing else.

A
TSN
Turning Point is a different story. A book could be written about every one. The Turning Point is often shown in slow motion. It occurs when, say, the puck is stolen somewhere around centre ice, the other guy not careful enough, a little cocky, while his team is changing lines, that chance crossing of variables that leaves the offensive end gaping and bare like the toothless open mouths of your teammates. And you’re the goalie, alone, and if you had time, maybe you’d feel abandoned by your teammates, maybe you’d feel pissed off and a little scared in the manner of a kid slingshot from a tube into the middle of the lake by her grandmother’s deranged boat-driving. But you don’t have time to feel any of this because this guy, this twenty-year-old phenomenon, whom they’re calling the second coming of Christ on skates, is a sustained flash of jersey and legs and stick, but not of puck, because it’s already behind you in the net, even as you’re lunging for it.

But, wait. Rewind. The Turning Point isn’t the puck rattling the crossbar behind you. Watch. Watch as the kid steals the puck. That
play.
Something will happen – he’s moving, he’s turning toward you. He’ll score, he won’t score, you’ll defy laws of whatever and open your glove and the puck will be in it, the puck will spill off his stick and the new defenceman will collect it, sheepish and grateful, the crowd will make a peeved noise at the kid like one giant parent.

Something will happen. But in that vibrating moment as the puck swaps sticks, the ice is empty, waiting, and the kid is moving, turning. He’s opening toward you.

J
acob and I shifted around in my bed, slipping into the routine for sleeping we’d stumbled out those nights when we’d play cribbage in my room until late. He’d just stay over instead of walking back to
his room on the other side of campus. The routine was this: we’d both start on our backs, overlapping a bit like crowded teeth on my narrow mattress. I’d start to turn, Jacob would follow, and we’d both end up on our sides, facing the same direction. All this in silence, or whatever muffled thumps and music stood in for silence in my end of Rez that night.

Sometimes we kissed. Jacob pushed my shoulders, like he did that night at the rink when he told me no. He’d kind of push me away, even while he was kissing me harder. I panicked when he did this, opened my eyes up fast, but he didn’t notice, his own eyes squeezed shut, eyebrows drawn in together like he was trying to remember something important. I moved into the space he created between us.

Sometimes we just slept.

I could feel his hands clasped together against my back, the small hairs on his knees brushing the damp backs of mine. Gavin was listening to Madonna – he’d been listening to Madonna all week – and ‘Like a Virgin’ buzzed through the wall, Gavin chiming in once in a while, a flat falsetto:
Like a virgin ... hoo!
Jacob laughed, a surprised huff that caught me just below my neck.

Then they were there: Toad, Boz and Heezer dancing to ‘Like a Virgin,’ Heezer’s favourite song, in the dressing room after practice, wearing Jill straps and sports bras, the Jill straps doubling as chastity belts. Toad had cut a toilet paper roll in half and stuck the pieces inside her bra. The three of them leaping around the room, Toad doing Elvis pelvic thrusts and Heezer dumping baby powder into her hands and throwing it in the air like confetti, the North End getting all hazy, the sweet grit in my nose, on my tongue, and Boz collapsing on the ground beside her stall, hand on her heart, laughing her head off, ‘Oh goodness. Oh my goodness.’ Toad making hand motions around the toilet-paper-roll cones like she was focusing camera lenses, her face dead serious.

‘Do you think,’ Jacob said, his voice loud. ‘Do you feel like, well. You know. You and me. That we’re growing?’

He pressed his palms against my back and I tried hard to understand this vaguely Hallmark lingo that he had a supply of.
Together,
we shall grow our love. Bigger it shall get, every day. Amen.
I pictured our bodies oozing together, a tumour all hair and teeth and tissue, expanding like a lump of bread dough.

‘Well, if you’re asking me,’ I said carefully. ‘I don’t know if you ... ’

‘I know about me, Isabel. I’m asking about you.’

What about me?

We went to a movie, a chick flick he’d chosen, the audience full of middle-aged women clutching Kleenex in their laps, and I was pretty sure that was a tear on his cheek when the lights bloomed at the end, but he didn’t touch it, and so I got antsy and couldn’t look at him and raced ahead to the bathroom. Another night, he reached into the pocket of his fleece and pulled out a handful of tube jigs, little rubber lures that looked like worms. ‘Nice, I haven’t worn this since the summer – I was wondering where these all were,’ and he stuck one in both of his nostrils. I was embarrassed at first, but then there was something about the tiny wobble in the jigs as he nodded his head, frowning, that made me laugh like a five-year-old. And the next morning, the jigs scattered across the floor next to my bed, my Rez room looked more like home.

I let his question ring through my body like a doorbell, my team-mates still dancing around to Gavin singing
Hoo!
Jacob’s hands on my back, but my teammates’ bones, their springing muscles, somehow closer. Right there.

‘W
e’re going to visit Terry in the hospital tomorrow,’ Sig said when she called.

‘What?’

‘Chris is a teammate of yours. This is what we do.’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think I can – I’ve got tons of homework.’ The excuse pathetic even in my ears.

Hal had been missing practice frequently. Players brought in casseroles, lasagna, muffins, and Toad and Boz dropped them off at Hal and Terry’s house.

‘Left them on her front step,’ Toad would say the next day, and that would be all. No one mentioned it. They just brought the food,
hidden modestly in bags, Hal’s empty stall bristling with plastic, kitchen smells setting up home in our corner of the dressing room.

‘Isabel, you don’t have any choice in the matter. This is a teammate of yours, and a friend of mine, and you will show your support. I know it’s not an easy thing to do, but I don’t have to remind you what it’s like, do I? Isabel. You will go.’

H
al sighed, disgusted, when players – on the other team, on her own team – went down in a game, propping her stick up dramatically on the boards, eyes rolling, as though we were in for a long haul. She was impatient with the frailties of others, dismissed them as though they were all contrived.

So, I clung to the possibility that Hal wouldn’t even be at the hospital. I imagined her navigating the halls, steering herself full-tilt through gurneys and wheelchairs, head fakes around nurses, her eyes on a muscular pivot, ducking in on her mom’s room for a few quick words, spoken without losing momentum, then gliding out again, the door shot open with a seamless twitch of her wrist, all stealth and held breath. I could see this – Hal fleeing out the hospital doors as Sig and I arrived.

Sig’s eyes shifted nervously over the light grey hallway. ‘I hate this bloody place,’ she muttered to me out of the corner of her mouth.

I nodded. Skin and bones. My hospital weapon, a mantra in my head.
Skin and bones.
This was how I navigated the hallways. I had a knack for picturing people sick, could read the blueprint of bone structure and then go from there, an inverse architecture, knocking down flesh and muscle. Preparing myself for the worst.

‘Whoops – this is her number here,’ Sig said, backpedalling stiffly to the closed door. She knocked.

‘Yeah?’ Hal’s voice rang quick, gruff. Sig opened the door a crack, and I stood behind her, crouched close to her back. I could still run. I’d take the stairs, beat a straight line to the revolving door at the front, the slow-motion suck of the door, and then I’d be out, I’d be gone. I’d prepared myself for Terry, but Hal – there was no way to prepare for Hal, no rules I could possibly flatten myself to in this
place, that room, the door opening, and that yellow smell coming out into the hall, Hal in there with it, taking it on.

‘All right if we come in?’ Sig said. I was still against her back, and then Sig moved, stepped inside. I was left alone in the hallway, and I had to go in. I pictured Hal on one of those black and steel chairs by the windows, her knee jerking an impatient rhythm. By the window, Hal could look outside, she could plan her next move – even while she was in the room, she would always be on her way out. And so, that was my backup. Skin and bones, and Hal in that chair, about to leave, legs ready.

I never pictured this: Terry so small in the bed that she barely took up a fraction, and Hal next to her, under the covers, huge, legs drawn into white mounds, dominating the bed with her wide shoulders, and Terry slumped like a sleeping child against her side, her body trailing tubes across Hal’s lap,
TV
flickering silent on a caged perch near the ceiling.