[  1  ]

THE CALL COMES in the middle of the night, as the worst sort do.

The phone so close I can read the numbers on its green-glowing face, see the swirled fingerprint I’d left on its message window. A simple matter of reaching and grabbing. Yet I lie still. It is my motor-facility impairment (as one of my fussily unhelpful physicians calls it) that pins me for eighteen rings before I manage to hook the receiver onto my chest.

"I don’t even know what time it is. But it’s late, isn’t it? A familiar voice, faintly slurred, helium-pitched between laughter and sobs. Randy Toller. A friend since high school—a time that even Randy, on the phone, calls a million years ago." And though it was only twenty-four years, his estimate feels more accurate.

As Randy apologizes for waking me, and blathers on about how strange he feels doing this, I am trying to think of an understanding but firm way of saying no when he finally gets around to asking for money. He has done it before, following the unfairly lost auditions, the furniture-stealing girlfriends, the vodka-smoothed rough patches of his past tough-luck decade. But in the end Randy surprises me when he takes a rattling, effortful breath and says, Ben’s dead, Trev.

Trev?

This is my first, not-quite-awake thought. Nobody’s called me that since high school, including Randy.

How?

A rope, Randy says.

Rope?

Hanging. I mean, he hung himself. In his mom’s house.

He never went outside. Where else could he have done it?

"I’m saying he did it in his room. Up in the attic where he’d sit by the window, you know, watching."

Did his mom find him?

It was a kid walking by on the street. Looked up to see if that weird McAuliffe guy was in the window as usual, and saw him swinging there.

I’m quiet for a while after this. We both are. But there is our breath being traded back and forth down the line. Reminders that we aren’t alone in recalling the details of Ben’s room, a place we’d spent a quarter of our youth wasting our time in. Of how it would have looked with the grown-up Ben in it, attached to the oak beam that ran the length of the ceiling.

Maybe it’s for the best, Randy says finally.

Take that back.

I didn’t—it’s just—

"Take that stupid bullshit back."

Fine. Sorry.

Randy has led the kind of life that has made him used to apologizing for saying the wrong thing, and the contrite tone he uses now is one I’ve heard after dozens of defaulted IOUs and nights spent sleeping on my sofa between stints in rented rooms. But then, in little more than a whisper, he says something else.

You know it’s sort of true, Trev.

He’s right. It is sort of true that with the news of Ben McAuliffe’s suicide there came, among a hundred other reactions, a shameful twinge of relief.

Ben was a friend of mine. Of ours. A best friend, though I hadn’t seen him in years, and spoke to him only slightly more often. It’s because he stayed behind, I suppose. In Grimshaw, our hometown, from which all of us but Ben had escaped the first chance we had. Or maybe it’s because he was sick. Mentally ill, as even he called himself, though sarcastically, as if his mind was the last thing wrong with him. This would be over the phone, on the rare occasions I called. (Each time I did his mother would answer, and when I told her it was me calling her voice would rise an octave in the false hope that a good chat with an old friend might lift the dark spell that had been cast on her son.) When we spoke, neither Ben nor I pretended we would ever see each other again. We might as well have been separated by an ocean, or an even greater barrier, as impossible to cross as the chasm between planets, as death. I had made a promise to never go back to Grimshaw, and Ben could never leave it. A pair of traps we had set for ourselves.

Despite this, we were still close. There was a love between us too. A sexless, stillborn love, yet just as fierce as the other kinds. The common but largely undocumented love between men who forged their friendship in late childhood.

But this wasn’t the thing that bridged the long absence that lay between our adult lives. What connected Ben and me was a secret. A whole inbred family of secrets. Some of them so wilfully forgotten they were unknown even to ourselves.

Only after I’ve hung up do I notice that, for the entire time I was on the phone with Randy, my hands were still. I didn’t even have to concentrate on it, play the increasingly unwinnable game of Mind Over Muscles.

Don’t move.

It’s like hypnosis. And like hypnosis, it usually doesn’t work.

Everything’s okay. Just stay where you are. Relax. Be still.

Now, in the orange dust of city light that sneaks through the blinds, I watch as the tremor returns to my limbs. Delicate flutterings at first. Nervous and quick as a sparrow dunking its head in a puddle. An index finger that abruptly stiffens, points with alarm at the chair in the corner—and then collapses, asleep. A thumb standing in a Fonzie salute before turtling back inside a fist.

You know what I need? A week in Bermuda.

These were the sort of thoughts I had when the twitches showed up.

I need to eat more whole grains.

I need a drink.

The hand-jerks and finger-flicks were just the normal flaws, the software glitches the body has to work through when first booting up after a certain age. I had just turned forty, after all. There was a price to be paid—a small, concealable impediment to be endured for all the fun I’d had up until now. But it was nothing to worry about. It wasn’t a real problem of the kind suffered by the wheelchaired souls you wish away from your line of sight in restaurants, your appetite spoiled.

But then, a few months ago, the acceptable irregularities of the body inched into something less acceptable. Something wrong.

I went to the doctor. Who sent me to another doctor. Who confirmed her diagnosis after a conversation with a third doctor. And then, once the doctors had that straightened out, all of them said there was next to nothing they could do, wished me well and buggered off.

What I have, after all, is one of those inoperable, medically unsexy conditions. It has all the worst qualities of the non-fatal disease: chronic, progressive, cruelly erosive of one’s quality of life. It can go fast or slow. What’s certain is that it will get worse. I could name it now but I’m not in the mood. I hate its falsely personal surnamed quality, the possessive aspect of the capital P. And I hate the way it doesn’t kill you. Until it does.

I spoke to a therapist about it. Once.

She was nice—seemed nice, though this may have been only performance, an obligation included in her lawyer-like hourly fee—and was ready to see me all the way through what’s coming. But I couldn’t go back. I just sat in her pleasant, fern-filled room and caught a whiff of the coconut exfoliant she’d used that morning to scrub at the liver spots on her arms and knew I would never return. She was the sort of woman in the sort of office giving off the sort of scent designed to provoke confessions. I could have trusted her. And trusting a stranger is against the rules.

(There was something else I didn’t like. I didn’t like how, when she asked if I had entertained any suicidal thoughts since the diagnosis and I, after a blubbery moment, admitted that I had, she offered nothing more than a businesslike smile and a tidy check mark in her notepad.)

One useful suggestion came out of our meeting, nevertheless. For the purposes of recording my thoughts so that they might be figured out later, she recommended I keep a diary chronicling the progress of my disease. Not that she used that word. Instead, she referred to the unstoppable damage being done to me as an experience, as if it were a trip to Paraguay or sex with twins. And it wasn’t a journal of sickness I was to keep, but a Life Diary, her affirmative nods meant to show that I wasn’t dying. Yet. That was there too. Remember, Trevor: You’re not quite dead yet.

Your Life Diary is more than a document of events, she explained. It can, for some of my clients, turn out to be your best friend.

But I already have best friends. And they don’t live in my present life so much as in the past. So that’s what I’ve ended up writing down. A recollection of the winter everything changed for us. A pocket-sized journal containing horrors that surprised even me as I returned to them. And then, after the pen refused to stand still in my hand, it has become a story I tell into a Dictaphone. My voice. Sounding weaker than it does in my own ears, someone else’s voice altogether.

I call it my Memory Diary.

Randy offered to call Carl, but we both knew I would do it. Informing a friend that someone they’ve known all their life has died was more naturally a Trevor kind of task. Randy would be the one to score dope for a bachelor party, or scratch his key along the side of a Porsche because he took it personally, and hard, that his own odds of ever owning one were fading fast. But I was definitely better suited to be the bearer of bad tidings.

I try Carl at the last number I have for him, but the cracked voice that answers tells me he hasn’t lived there for a while. When I ask to have Carl call if he stops by, there is a pause of what might be silent acceptance before the line goes dead. Randy has a couple of earlier numbers, and I try those too, though Carl’s former roommates don’t seem to know where he is now either (and refuse to give me their own names when I ask).

Not much more we can do, Randy says when I call him back. "The guy is gone, Trev."

There it is again: Trev. A name not addressed to me in over twenty years, and then I get it twice within the last half-hour.

I had an idea, as soon as Randy told me Ben had died, that the past was about to spend an unwelcome visit in my present. Going from Trevor to Trev is something I don’t like, but a nostalgic name change is going to be the least of it. Because if I’m getting on a train for Grimshaw in the morning, it’s all coming back.

Heather.

The coach.

The boy.

The house.

The last of these most of all because it alone is waiting for us. Ready to see us stand on the presumed safety of weed-cracked sidewalk as we had as schoolchildren, daring each other to see who could look longest through its windows without blinking or running away.

For twenty-four years this had been Ben’s job. Now it would be ours.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 2

There were four of us.

Ben, Carl, Randy and me. Grimshaw Guardians all. Hockey players on the high-school squad that travelled the county’s gravel roads to do battle against the villainous Cougars of Milverton, cheating Rams of Listowel, cowardly Sugar Kings of Elmira. We were just sixteen years old the one and only season we played with the seniors, but we were decent enough—and the school small enough—to make the team. The only boys among just-turned men.

Randy:

A featherweight winger looping skilfully—if a little pointlessly—in front of the other team’s net. It always seemed that he liked to skate more than score. Sometimes, Randy would forget that there were others playing against him. Kids who wished to see him fail, to crumple to his knees and never get up again. It was usually a look of puzzled disappointment, not pain, that I would read on his face when he limped to the bench following these punishments.

Why? his eyes would ask as he took his place at the end of the bench, rubbing the charley horse out of his thigh.

Why would someone do that? I was just having fun.

Carl:

Short, but solid as an elm stump. Hair he left long so that it waved, black as a pirate flag, as he skated. Carl was the Guardians’ unpredictable pugilist, a rarely played fourth-liner who would skate up to a kid who had nothing to do with the play at hand—and, often, against whom no grudge was held—and commence a windmilling of fists into the poor fellow’s face.

Who knew if Carl would have been the fighter he was without the dark eyes and drooping smile that conveyed unintended menace? How less inclined to serve up knuckle sandwiches—and, later, less susceptible to needle and pill—if his dad had been another kind of man, one who didn’t leave and never return?

Sometime late in the third period of the first game of the Guardians’ season there was a bench-clearing brawl. It was an away game against the Exeter Bobcats, a team whose only real talent was for medieval hand-to-hand combat. We knew things were about to get nasty when their coach started tapping the shoulders of players on his bench and pointing at us. Then, with a collective whoop, they stormed over the boards and set upon us, their fans sending a volley of scalding coffee cups over our heads.

I mention this because, in my experience, who you first go to help in a riot is as sure a test of true allegiance as any I know.

So who did I rush to that night to prevent a Bobcat from pounding his face into the ice? I went to Randy, because he was my friend. And because he was squealing for help.

Trev! Carl! Ben!

And all of us came.

Once we’d thrown Randy’s attacker off him we were able to form a circle and hold our own. In fact, we ended up faring better than many of our older teammates, who left Exeter that night with split cheeks and teeth in their pockets.

On the bus ride home we, the youngest Guardians, were permitted to sit at the back, an acknowledgment of our success on the battlefield. I recall us looking at each other as we rolled out of the parking lot, unable to hold the giddy smiles off our faces. Which started the laughing. We laughed three-quarters of an hour through a snowstorm, and though we expected someone to tell us to shut our mouths or they’d shut them for us at any second, they never did.

Ben:

Our Zen mascot of a backup goalie. Because Vince Sproule, our starter, was eighteen and the best stopper in the county, Ben almost never saw ice time, which was fine with him. His proper place was at the end of the bench anyway. Mask off, hands resting in his lap, offering contemplative nods as we came and went from our shifts, as though the blessings of a vow-of-silence monk.

Ben was the sort of gentle-featured, unpimpled kid (he made you think pretty before pushing the thought away) who would normally have invited the torment of bullies, especially on a team composed of boys old enough to coax actual beards from their chins. But they left Ben alone.

I think he was spared because he was so plainly odd. It was the authenticity of his strangeness that worked as a shield when, in another who was merely different, it would have attracted the worst kind of attention. They liked Ben for this. But they kept their distance from him because of it too.

Trevor (Me):

A junk-goal god. Something of a floater, admittedly. A dipsy-doodling centre known for his soft hands (hands that now have trouble pouring milk).

There was, at sixteen, the whisperings of scouts knowing who I was. Early in the season the coach had a talk with my parents, urging them to consider the benefits of a college scholarship in the States. Who knows? Maybe Trev had a chance of going straight to pro.

Of course, this sort of thing was said about more than it ever happened to. Me included. Not that I wasn’t good enough—we’ll never know if I was or wasn’t. Because after the abrupt end of my one and only season as a Guardian, I never skated again.

I had known Randy since kindergarten, when I approached him and, offering to share my Play-Doh, asked, Do you want to be in my gang? I remember that: gang. And even though I was alone, Randy accepted.

Ben joined us in early grade school, Carl a year later. That was grade three.

My father, not known for his wisdom (though he took runs at it on the nights he hit the sauce harder than usual), once told me something that has proven consistent with my experience: while a man can accumulate any number of acquaintances over his life, his only true friends are the ones he makes in youth.

Yet why Randy, Ben and Carl and no others? I could say it was the way we saw ourselves in each other. The recognition of my own foolishness in Randy’s clowning, my imagination in Ben’s trippy dreams, my rage in Carl’s fisticuffs. How we had a better chance of knowing who we were together than we ever would have on our own.

What we shared made us friends. But here’s the truth of the thing: our loyalty had little to do with friendship. For that, you’d have to look elsewhere.

You’d have to look in the house.

We were in Ben’s backyard, out behind his garden shed, the four of us passing around a set of Charlie’s Angels bubble-gum cards. I remember the hushed intensity we brought to studying Farrah Fawcett. The wide Californian smile. The astonishing nipples piercing their bikini veils.

We were eight years old.

And then there’s Mrs. McAuliffe’s voice, calling Ben inside.

I’m not hungry, he shouted back.

This isn’t about dinner, honey.

She was trying not to cry. We could hear that from the other end of the McAuliffes’ lot. We could hear it through the garden shed’s walls.

Ben crossed the yard and stood before his mother, listening to her as she wrung her hands on her Kiss Me, I’m Scottish! apron. He waited a moment after she finished. Then, as though at the pop of a starter’s pistol, he ran.

And we followed. Even as he crossed Caledonia Street and onto the Thurman property, we stayed after him. Ben scooted around the side of the house and we came around the corner in time to see the back door swing closed. Our feet had never touched this ground before. It was the one place we never even dared each other to go. Yet now we were running into the house, each of us fighting to be first, all calling Ben’s name.

We found him in the living room. He was leaning against the wall between the two side windows. His crumpled form looked smaller than it should have, as though the house had stolen part of him upon entry.

My dad’s dead, he said when we gathered to stand over him. She said it was an accident. But it wasn’t.

Randy frowned. It was the same face he made when asked to come to the blackboard to work through a long-division equation. What do you mean?

"It wasn’t an accident!"

He was angry more than anything else. His father was gone and it was his weakness that had taken him. A coward. Ben had been shown to have come from shoddy stock, and it was the revelation of bad luck that held him, not grief.

So we grieved for him.

Without a look between us, we knelt and took Ben in our arms. Four booger-nosed yard apes with little in our heads but Wayne Gretzky and, now, Farrah daydreams. Yet we held our friend—and each other—in a spontaneous show of comradeship and love. We were experiencing a rare thing (rarer still for boys): we were feeling someone else’s pain as acutely as if it were our own. Ben wasn’t crying, but we were.

More than this, the moment stopped time. No, not stopped: it stole the meaning from time. For however long we crouched together against the cracked walls of the Thurman house’s living room we weren’t growing older, we weren’t eight, we weren’t attempting another of the million awkward steps toward adulthood and its presumed freedoms. We were who we were and nothing else. A kind of revelation, as well as a promise. Ben had been the first of us to take a punch from the grown-up world. And we would be there when the other blows came our way.

We were pulling Ben to his feet when we heard the girl.

A moan from upstairs. A gasp, and then an exhaled cry.

I remember the three versions of the same expression on the faces of my friends. The shame that comes not from something we’d done but from something we didn’t yet understand.

We’d heard that older kids sometimes came to the Thurman house to do stuff, and that some of this stuff concerned boys and girls and the things they could do with each other with their clothes off. Though we didn’t really know our way around the mechanics, we knew that this was what was going on up there in one of the empty bedrooms.

I’m uncertain of many details from that afternoon, but I know this: we all heard it. Not the moaning, but how it turned into something else.

What we heard as Carl pulled the back door of the Thurman house closed was not the voice of a living thing. Human in its origin but no longer. A voice that should not have been possible, because it belonged to the dead.

The moaning from the girl upstairs changed. A new sound that showed what we took at first to be her pleasure wasn’t that at all but a whimper of fear. We knew this without comprehending it, just stupid children at least half a decade shy of tracing the perimeters of what sex or consent or hurt could mean between women and men. It was the sound the dead girl made upstairs that instantly taught us. For in the gasp of time before we stepped outside and the closed door left the backyard and the trees and the house in a vacuum of silence, we heard the beginnings of a scream.

[  2  ]

THERE’S A TRAIN to Grimshaw leaving Union Station at noon, which gives me three hours to pack an overnight bag, hail a cab and buy a ticket. An everyday sequence of actions. Yet for me, such tasks—pack a bag, hail a cab—have become cuss-laced battles against my mutinous hands and legs, so that this morning, elbowing out of bed after a night of terrible news, I look to the hours ahead as a list of Herculean trials.

Shave Face without Lopping Off Nose.

Tie Shoelaces.

Zip Up Fly.

Among the fun facts shared by my doctors at the time I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s was that I could end up living for the same number of years I would have had coming if I hadn’t acquired the disease. So, I asked, over this potentially long stretch, what else could I look forward to? Some worse versions of stuff I was already experiencing—the involuntary kicks and punches—along with a slew of new symptoms that sounded like the doctor was making them up as he went along, a shaggy-dog story designed to scare the bejesus out of me before he clapped me on the shoulder with a "Hey! Just kidding, Trevor. Nothing’s that bad"? But he never got around to the punchline, because there wasn’t one.

Let’s try to remember what I do my best to forget:

A face that