Twenty Miles (26 page)

A hockey game is nothing if not finishing what you started, but that’s not what Sig meant: me walking out in the middle of the game. She meant the team and school and the season, this supposed holiday hockey had visited upon me. But I hadn’t started any of this.

A girl had taken the seat next to me, although entire rows of the bus were open. She had acne scars around her jaw and ragged fingernails and was maybe around my age, but with the senile, caved-in look of an addict, eyes skipping absently around the bus,
out the window, over to me. She pulled a ball of red yarn from her purse and began to knit, the needles pulsing robotic. Between her wrists, a thin scarf dangled, spotted with holes like moths had already destroyed it.

‘You going to the States?’ she asked. I shook my head. The bus was headed east through Ontario. She shrugged like it was my loss and I turned back to the window and watched two teenagers at a bus stop, the streetlight behind them illuminating the snowflakes that were almost invisible in the darkness, so it looked like they were on a stage and the snow was fake and fell only on them. The girl leaned into the guy, who was wearing a leather jacket liver-spotted with age and, sitting there in the bus, I could smell the wet leather and knew the thick squeak his arm would make as he pulled the girl in closer and the way she’d suddenly stop feeling the snowflakes on the top of her head as the guy looked up at the sky and then moved his own head over hers.

They call it the hockey season as though this is the natural order of things and we should time our lives to its clock, all of us, moons hung on its frozen orbit. It’s just a game, but I couldn’t remember ever leaving the ice.

At the rest stop near Steinbach, my seatmate asked me if I had a quarter. I offered a couple, but she accepted just one, her fingertip chilled as she drew the coin from my palm. She stood for a long time at the vending machine, head cocked, the hole-filled scarf bleeding from her hand at her side. She pressed a button and a Sweet Marie chocolate bar tumbled down, a yellow flash behind the glass, and then she walked out into the snow.

As the bus rumbled back onto the highway, I saw her walking along the gravel shoulder toward the hunched, dimly lit outlines of Steinbach. A small Mennonite town far from the States. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and stared blankly at the bus as it passed. I wondered if I’d see Pelly again. I tried to watch the news on the tiny flickering box perched five seats up. A blond meteorologist in a pink pantsuit forecasted more snow. I heard Toad say,
How do you get a totsi’s eyes to sparkle? Shine a flashlight in her ear.
And so I went to sleep.

‘U
n-friggin-believable,’ Sig said when I walked into the living room. Reclined in Buck’s armchair, Peter Mansbridge mumbling on the
TV
. She fumbled angrily along the side of the chair for the handle, then cranked it, shooting upright. She blinked hard and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose as though I might be some sort of optical illusion. ‘I’ll be frigging damned.’

‘Nice greeting,’ I said.

‘Are you pregnant?’ she barked.

‘No.’

‘Depressed?’

‘No.’

‘Well, what in the hell, girl?’

I sat on the couch, unwound my scarf, arrows of cold released from its layers. Sig still staring like I’d just returned home with a sex change.

‘Well, don’t make yourself too comfortable,’ she said, wide-eyed, gesturing for me to get up. ‘It’s not like this is your place any more.’ She shook her head, examining the
TV
as though it might give her a hint. ‘Anyway, I’ve rented out your room, so.’

I looked at her wearily. ‘To who?’

‘Vlad,’ she spat.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said and headed to my room.

I
woke in the middle of the night to the sound of freezing rain on my window, a jarring sibilance, and I thought for a moment it was summer. I moved my leg carefully across the mattress, stretched it out over the side of the bed, and a flush of pain seeped down, hamstring to calf. The endless leg workouts in the Gritty Grotto. Jump squats, dead lifts, lunges, calf raises, hamstring curls, leg presses. Stan had told us our muscles were injured through exercise, the strain causing tiny tears. The way an earthquake leaves fissures in the land. Lesions, he called them too, as though the tremors of pain were a result of our own catastrophic negligence. He told us muscle grows only as it heals. Tissue paving over the wounds, layered bravado above the hurt places. The others knew this already,
or didn’t seem to care, the subliminal musing of their bodies as unsurprising to them as their fast legs, their clean-angled slapshots. But I was shocked.

Sig mumbled in her sleep on the other side of the wall, a dream translation in jibberish, then fell back into the amplified breaths that soaked the darkness around my bed, that made the air full and heavy.

I moved my hand up under my head, clenched a fist beneath the pillow, and a small strand of pain unravelled the length of my neck to my shoulder. I thought about how long it would take for my muscles to start shedding their layers. If I’d feel myself shrinking. All the small violences playing out in our bodies as we slept.

T
he silent treatment started the next day, Sig limping past me down the hall, chin down. As I stood at the fridge, she stared through me like a window. She held the phone out to me without looking when Pelly called, but I didn’t take it. Twice. Then she stopped answering.

I ranked in my mind all of the worse things I could have done. I monitored Sig’s legs, noticed for the first time the strange jerking of her thumb and how did I not notice it before? I offered her scrambled eggs. She turned her back to them and went to the bathroom. I listened to the answering machine, my teammates’ disembodied voices floating over me – or me, disembodied, floating over their voices. I’d walked out of hockey and become a ghost.
What’s the first thing a totsi does in the morning? Looks in the mirror. Introduces herself.

Beep. ‘Oh, yeah, hello, Iz? Uh, this is Aline Pelletier? Like from hockey? (Toad in the background, laughing: ‘She knows who you are, you loser!’) Anyway, uh, sorry, that was just Toad. Anyway, I was just calling to, uh, to see, like, when you’re coming back? Because, uh, your stuff’s still here, and so, we thought – well, uh, we were hoping – I hoped – you’d be back soon? Because your stuff’s still here – in your stall, like. So we thought you’d, uh, you’d come back to play maybe. (Cleared her throat.) Uh ... okay, bye.’ Click.

Beep. ‘Oh, hey, babe. Hey, Iz. This is Cheryl Bozzo calling. Just calling to see how you’re doing. Hope you’re okay? Um, Iz, I just wanted to say that if you ever want to talk about anything, or
just hang out, or whatever, then just call me, okay? Anytime. I mean it. We miss you. Seriously. Okay, talk to you soon, babe?’ Click.

They were descending mysteriously from their nicknames, one by one, first names outstretched. Cautious. Breathing down my neck. I was scared: that they’d never leave me alone.

That they’d leave me alone.

I
perched on the edge of the dock, next to Sig. She looked like a man, like a miniature version of Buck wearing his old red toque with the ragged pompom, his garbage mitts stained with fish blood, the army green parka. The clothes swallowed her. She held the fishing rod in one hand resting on her thigh, and a smoke in the other. Didn’t look at me when I sat down.

‘Goddamn Northern Light garbage,’ she said, jutting her chin upward. I looked. Streams of green and yellow writhed back and forth, desperate banners. She watched the lake where her line went in, blowing smoke out the corner of her mouth, away from me.

I jumped right in. ‘So, I quit.’

Sig licked her lips very slowly. She smiled with one side of her mouth. ‘Quit what?’ She snorted. Like a thirteen-year-old boy, Sig’s signature move in uncomfortable situations was deflection.

‘I quit hockey. It’s fine. I’ll be fine.’ My departure had become a solid thing, all of the pieces I’d run from melded together into this sharp mass of ice and paper and skin lodged in my legs, and I thought that once I’d handed it to Sig I’d be okay. If she would just take it from me, I’d become light again.

Sig blew out a long cloud of smoke. She looked at the cigarette as she crushed it on the dock, next to her leg, then threw it out into the hole in the ice. I’d never seen her do that before, throw a butt into the lake.

‘No, you’re not, girl,’ she said levelly.

‘Well. But I am. I’ve already decided.’

‘You finish what you started, Isabel.’

The way she dismissed my words with a cool flick, like ashing her cigarette.

‘It’s my choice,’ I said.

She pivoted her head toward me slowly, smiling like the Buddha statue next to our toilet that Buck’s sister had brought back from Thailand. ‘So what’re you going to do then?’ She gave the rod a forceful twitch, her lips retreating.

‘I’ll get a job.’

‘All right, then.’ Cleared her throat. ‘So, no university education to speak of and she goes and gets a job slicing meat at Wally’s Supermarket and rots away the goddamn winters with a senior citizen while all the rest of the kids are away being drunk and loose at school. Excellent plan.’ She gave the rod a bounce. I could see more sarcasm gathering in her face, a hot swarm of it around her mouth. I had no defence against this. Sig had her beaten-up flask nestled against her thigh, so I grabbed it and swigged, a diversion tactic, a smoky burn on my tongue, down my throat. I coughed and pressed on my mouth with the back of my hand. Sig looked at me, incredulous.

‘You’re drinking Scotch now too? Anything else?’ She gave a rough snort. ‘Anyway. You already have a goddamn job. You have the dream job, girl. Playing hockey and going to school and being a kid. There’s your job. If Kristjan’d had ... ’

She swallowed the rest of her sentence with the Scotch. Slammed the flask down between us, a challenge. I took it again. I’d go drink for drink with her, so she knew I could. Buoyed up on the hot cloud rising in my stomach, up through my chest. I had the sudden desire to knock her off the dock.

‘He’d have
what
?’ I demanded.

‘I thought we did a better job on you,’ she said, resuming her watch of the fishing line.

‘What?’ I said. ‘Kristjan – what? But he – ’

‘Oh, never mind,’ Sig sighed dramatically. ‘You wouldn’t listen anyways.’

‘I don’t – ’

‘If Kristjan’d had the opportunities you did, but there you go, taking it all for granted. Shitting on the team that was falling all over itself to – ’

‘Sig. I don’t think so.’

‘Oh, I see. You have something to say on that front, do you? Well, by all means. Enlighten an ignorant old lady. Go ahead.’

‘Just – all those stories. I didn’t ask for. I mean, okay, he was good at playing and all that. But what people seem to forget is that he, you know. He was a kid. And he left you with his
mess.
But those stories you told me. I never wanted.’

Sig had been nodding her head rapidly, mouth twitching, in some satirical imitation of a person who might agree with my scattered words. Hauling on the reel of the fishing rod like she’d caught something. But then the blue lure came up from the water and dangled above the ice for a few empty moments. Sig released it again and the lure dropped back beneath the black surface with a ripe plunk.

‘This is all very interesting,’ Sig said finally. ‘This is frigging fascinating. Pardon me while I just get my mind around the disaster we’ve made of your life, this war-torn country that is Isabel Norris.’

‘I didn’t say – ’

‘Drink the hooch and shut up!’ Sig barked, thrusting the flask in my direction. I jumped and took it. A huge, burning gulp, my throat clenching a fist, tears bunching clouds in the corners of my vision.

‘First off, don’t tell me about my goddamn son. You never knew him.’ She didn’t look at me, mouth drawn in tight. Her eyes darted quick around our dangling feet. My shoulders started to shake. ‘Secondly. You aren’t a mess. You’ve never been a mess. You’re a good girl who’s acting like a flake.’

Sig felt the front of her jacket for her smokes, then pulled them out, rested the rod on her lap. Lit up. She blew the smoke upward, chin jutted, eyes locking on the sky, and I could see her relax, shoulders dropping in the nicotine lullabye. She held her cigarette toward me then, waggled it between her fingers.

‘Might as well take up smoking now too. Go all the way. Like the delinquent you are,’ she said.

Her usual peace offering: a joke. But she had the cigarette right in my face and the slow turning of the Scotch felt like anger. I grabbed the smoke from her hand and drew my arm back to launch it on to the ice, but then I changed my mind mid-throw, shoved it
deep between my lips, clamped my mouth around it, breathed it down like Sig always did, like it was her last breath, and I could feel the specific shape of the smoke as it flooded my lungs, every burning wisp, and then a larger shape, sharp-edged, and I panicked and hacked, tears streaming down my face, turning to cold.

‘What the hell?’ Sig said and I coughed until it felt like I was bringing up my stomach, bent double over my knees. Gasps like sandpaper dragged through my lungs. When I could breathe again, the air had become ice. I lay my cheek on my knee, facing Sig, watching the small jitter of her rod, the quaking glove. The leg of my jeans wet under my cheek.

‘But what will you do?’ I said. ‘How will you.’ I didn’t know the questions. ‘How.’

Sig was quiet for a long time. Then she reeled in her line, rested the rod on the dock, inched over toward me. I could feel warmth leaking from Buck’s old jacket, the cigarette smell in its layers hardened by the cold. She reached her arm around my back then, grabbed my shoulder and pulled me toward her, a move my body remembered from when it was small. Not gentle, but like she was a wave, gathering me in on her arm’s current, that rough tug. It felt too strong to be her, she felt strong as me, and my muscles melted down. I folded across her lap.

S
ig watched Iz step carefully from a snowdrift onto the patch of ice, trailing threads of snow behind her small blades. The girl looked down at her feet, and Sig wondered if she could see a thing, the balaclava pushing her eyebrows down, the parka’s blue hood belling around her face. Without looking up, Iz put her mittened hand back behind her and moved it around, feeling for Sig. Sig chuckled and grabbed her hand. Iz took two steps on the ice as though walking.