Twenty Miles (3 page)

‘Are you okay?’ Pelly asked.

‘What? Oh, yeah, I’m fine.’

‘You worried about Hal?’

‘No, no.’ I wiped my skate blades with an old T-shirt, kept my head down. ‘A little bit, I guess.’

‘Just stay away from her for a while. She’ll forget about it. Pretty sweet hit though, eh?’

‘I just – I didn’t mean to, that’s all.’

‘It was like,
Pow!
And we were all like,
Holy shit, did that happen?
And we were laughing a bit?’

I
walked along the curve of boards toward the rink door that would spit me onto the road leading back to Rez. The ice lay empty and gleaming. Fluorescent lights hung a steady hum in the rafters, their blurred reflections crowding the surface of the ice. I passed an open door cut into the stands like a mountain cave, seats rearing up high above it. A man’s voice called out the door. ‘Is that Isabel?’

I thought it was Stan, the assistant coach. I turned around and a stranger stepped from the doorway, craning his neck nervously.

‘Look at you, then,’ he said quietly, as though we’d been reunited after years apart. ‘There’s the face.’

He looked kind of lost standing there in the small doorway, no one else around. He wore navy blue sweatpants that rode up a bit around the ankles, a white polo shirt tucked in. The shirt was old and thinned so you could see the orangey hue of skin and roughly sketched chest hairs beneath. A black leather fanny pack hung crooked around his thin hips.

I smiled awkwardly, my feet still pointing toward the door to the parking lot.

‘Oh – pardon me. Sorry.’ A high-pitched little laugh. ‘My – I’m Ed.’ He took a couple of hesitant steps over and then shook my hand. Strong shake, then, as though he’d just remembered something, he dropped my hand and combed his fingers through his hair with the quick motions of habit, adjusted the strands into a consistency meant to keep up the illusion his scalp wasn’t peeking through. But he had this look while he made the adjustment – he crouched his head down like he was about to be hit and rolled his eyes upward, hand performing the furtive adjustment, so it looked like he was pleading for me not to notice and, although I was confused, I instantly wanted to tell him he was handsome. I wanted to pat him on the back like a dog.

‘You don’t know me, I guess,’ he said. ‘You don’t. I knew your, uh, dad. I played with Kristjan back in the day.’ An apologetic tone.

Of course.

‘You’re from Kenora?’ I said.

‘No, we played Junior that one year here in Winnipeg. Billeted together. Geez, you look like him, eh?’ Amazed eyes.

‘That’s what I’m told.’

‘Okay, well.’ His eyes slid to the ground, then over to his door.

‘You work for the team?’ I asked.

He smiled quickly, then ran a hand over his mouth. Long fingers with knotted knuckles. ‘You could say that, I guess.’ He pointed past my head. ‘I drive the beast.’

The black nose of the Zamboni poked out from its stall beyond the boards, the headlights glowing dully in the shadows.

‘Oh, okay,’ I said and made a movement toward the door. ‘I see.’

‘You going out? Just hang on one second, I’ll come with you. Need a smoke.’

Ed patted the fanny pack. He went through the door, then came out pulling on a beaten-up windbreaker, fluorescent green stripes on the sleeves. He shut the door behind him and the room disappeared into the stands.

He held the door open for me. The late summer air felt curdled after the rink’s ice-thinned atmosphere; walking into the dark parking lot felt like an escape.

I’d stay away from the paths on the way back, take the lit road that wound around the perimeter of campus and smacked straight into the residence. Sig and I had mapped this route earlier in the day. A million years ago. Ed picked up a dusty pylon and used it to prop open the door, then pulled his cigarettes from the fanny pack. The lighter’s tiny flare and then the orange tip of the cigarette brightened against the shadows of his face. I hovered for a moment.

He squinted against the smoke blowing into his eyes and tilted his head at me. ‘You walking?’ he said.

‘Yeah, it’s not far. The residence. McMurtry.’

He clicked his tongue and looked down the road. ‘Murch, eh?’ The curving line of amber street lights. A rusty station wagon sped past, a thud of bass coming out the window with a tortured twist of song. It went around the bend and the low hum of distant traffic took over again.

‘Decent amount of people, I guess,’ Ed said. ‘You best keep under those lights, though. And stay off the street else one of those morons will mow you down.’

‘Yeah, I will,’ I said. ‘Okay, well, see you.’ I raised my hand and started to walk.

‘Buddy a mine told me about you,’ Ed called at my back. ‘His nephew plays in Dryden and he seen you play against him at some tournament. Said he couldn’t believe it – Norse has a girl and she has his hands. So Stan and me are having beers last winter, I tell him about it. We drove down – Moon too – that weekend to watch you play. I told them, “She has his hands, you know, you’ll want to see this.”’

I knew the game he was talking about. Moon had approached me afterward and we’d talked about the team. Then Sig and I took the ice road, plowed across the lake, home from the rink like we always did because it was quicker, but it felt like Sig was speeding, and I was scared the tires would spin out and the ice would twirl the car around and around like a toy.

‘I never really knew how they found out about me,’ I said.

Ed gave an embarrassed laugh. He waved his cigarette through the air like a ref saying
No Goal
and stepped away from the long triangle of light cast over the pylon onto the cement.

‘Just wanted to say hi is all,’ he said. ‘You best get going before you get cold.’

I took a couple of steps backwards. A crescent moon rubbed against the dark bulk of Sam Hall. ‘Bye, Ed.’

‘’Night, Isabel.’

S
ig relinquished Kristjan in chunks. Every night, a dose of him, as though it might cure what ailed me. She’d start with something tangible, something I could see there in the pictures – his teeth, say. Scraping at his grin in one of the old albums. She’d start with a tooth, the hard fact of enamel, and it would be hard to tell when she crept away from these small truths of his body into something bigger. That unknowable lake of myth that grew and grew.

‘Ah, but his teeth were such beauts,’ she’d start. ‘Teeth like your grandpa’s, big and strong. Kid drank milk like it was going out of style – jugs and jugs. We had our milk delivered then – none of this Safeway garbage. Charlie – that’s it. He was the milkman, and lugged all those jugs to the back porch for years thinking we must have twenty kids or thereabouts, me and your grandpa. But he only ever seen Kristjan slamming in and out of the house. So one day, finally, when he’s collecting money from me, he says, “Where you hiding all those other youngsters?” I laugh and say, “It’s just the one for us. The boy.” And you should’ve seen his eyes, they went real wide, and he says, “I don’t believe it.” And I just nod – what do you say to that? And he says, “Well, ma’am,” – called me
ma’am,
if
you can believe it, only time I was a ma’am in my life – “Well, ma’am,” he says, “we’ll have to look into getting that boy a cow all his own.”’

I shifted in my bed, and Sig shimmied in so she could swing her other leg up onto the mattress. She sat on top of the comforter, pinning me into a tight cocoon. The dim bedside light rippled shadows over the bed like water, so it seemed as though we were tucked into the cabin of a boat.

‘Well, I forgot ol’ Charlie and what he’d said, busy with Kristjan and his baseball – spring at the time. But not a couple of weeks later, if I don’t arrive home from bowling to find a big fat cow on our front lawn, chewing on the grass like the old doll owned the place!’

‘Liar!’ My eyes sparked open.

‘How can you call your poor old grandma names like that, child? A cow in
that front yard.
’ Sig feigned indignation, a hand thrown across her chest, and pointed in the direction of the lake.

‘Could it swim?’

‘Oh, she swam like a fish, Isabel. Can’t you just see it? She was too slow to take out for walks, real lazylike. So Kristjan would swim her way over to Eagle’s Nest Island and back. You’d just see their two heads bobbing along, way in the distance, Kristjan circling back once in a while to help her along. Hot summer, and Kristjan was a prune the whole time.

‘And that milkman, Charlie, never came again. We didn’t need him with Bobby Orr – that’s what we called her – right there in our front yard. Kristjan had as much milk as he could drink, eh? Kid needed his own cow.’

I
inherited a lot of his stuff. People die and their hockey equipment lives on. Sig joked that she’d cross-dressed me as a kid, decking me out in his old clothes all worn at the knees and elbows, but why the hell not, the clothes were there in the attic, ripe for the picking. But that wasn’t it – I knew Sig found some sort of satisfaction in the reincarnation of the clothes, seeing them walk again, seeing them run and climb trees.

So I got the clothes and the equipment and the following parts as well: his eyes, his laugh, his cowlick and his hockey hands, among others. Apparently this is the most unbelievable part, these hands of mine: I handle the puck the same way, have the same moves, have his
hands.
As though I’d grown from these hands somehow. Hands growing arms like branches, skin, crawling into bloom, growing a heart, eyes, a mouth. But first, the hands. The rest: an afterthought, a revision.

A
s I walked down the hall cutting the third floor of Rez in two, my neighbour slipped through his door and then slammed it behind him, as though he were being chased. I’d met the neighbour, Gavin, as I lugged my hockey bag out of my room before practice. The extreme straightness of his part looked like a wound, a pinkish line carved in his head, and I had to dodge his bad breath as he stepped in centimetres from me and said, ‘Greetings,’ eyebrows pulled down gravely. His dad had walked up behind him then, wrangling a huge stereo speaker that looked seventies, and gestured a sort of apology at me with his reddened face, moving his grey handlebar moustache in weary acknowledgement of this son of his, as he angled his elbows through the door.

All day, throughout the building, parents had been depositing kids. Handing us off. The hallways crackled with the static of separation, the hot worry of mothers. When the brown hallway door closed behind Sig, cleanly, quietly, I disappeared.

The smell of Windex and musty carpet spilled out as I opened the door. I yanked up the window and propped it open with the amputated arm of a hockey stick. Then I stood in the middle of the room and rotated a full circle, assessing my options. I sat on the plastic chair in front of the narrow desk that had only two legs, the front ones, and was bolted to the wall at the back, as though they’d sawed it in two and Gavin or someone else had the other half. I unpacked the box of school supplies Sig had put together and then arranged the binders and notebooks in the scarred wooden shelf above the desk and resisted the sadness offered to me in the pages of the little
blue Daytimer – Sig pulling it proudly from the Zellers bag: ‘Thought you’d need one of these.’

I lay on the bed and closed my eyes and tried to paint the space behind my eyelids the exact blue shade of the living-room walls at home.

Music boomed suddenly into my room from next door. Prince began to croon. I groaned. That huge speaker. I thought of the blue emptiness of the living room. Sig sitting in its bruise. She hated quiet. She would choose Prince over quiet. I picked up the phone.

‘Hello,’ she snapped, because a phone call was an insult to whatever she was doing.

‘It’s garbage day tomorrow,’ I said. She chuckled, slow, and then harder, gaining momentum until she severed it with a cough.

‘So?’ she said.

‘Did you put it out?’

She snorted. ‘Yes, Mother. Mother dearest. Four bags, all your junk, thanks a lot. Anything else?’

‘Nope,’ I said.

‘Well, the sky hasn’t goddamn fallen since the departure of Your Excellency, but you’ll be the first to know when it does. I even remembered to feed the dog. We may just survive this, kiddo.’ Sig snorted again. ‘How was it?’

I paused, weighed the possible answers. I could tell her about Ed.

‘I hit a girl,’ I said.

About how, when he watched me play, Ed saw Kristjan’s hands and in a poof of diesel and snow the Zamboni man became my fairy godmother.

‘She big?’

And I ended up there, lying in the narrowest bed I’d ever seen, in the smallest room, listening to the complaints of my muscles and Prince.

‘Pretty big.’

‘You hurt?’

And Sig had ended up alone.

‘Nah.’

‘She hurt?’

‘Well, didn’t seem like it. She was spread all over the ice, though.’

‘Ah,’ Sig said.

‘Yeah.’

‘She got up, though?’

‘Eventually.’

‘Ah. Well, no harm done, kiddo. Shake it off. All your equipment in there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What’d you eat for supper?’

‘Bought a tuna sandwich from the food court.’

‘The food court – look at you, eh?’

‘It was pretty crappy.’

‘Ah. Not bad for practice anyways. What are you doing now?’

I looked around the room. ‘Lying on my bed. My neighbour’s a nerd and he’s listening to Prince.’

‘Oh, hey now, you watch it, kid. You jocks. Nerds grow up to rule the world, you know, so you be nice to him. He could be prime minister one day and you’ll be in the beer leagues, Miss Big Time. Just watch it.’

I laughed. ‘I’ll be driving the Zamboni,’ I said, and Sig snorted.

‘Y
ou know you are not in the beer gardens if you can hear me right now.’ The bullhorn voice echoed into the room from the hallway, sending a ripple of surprised laughter around the lecture hall. ‘You are not in the beer gardens. You are in class. I know this because I am walking down the hall, past your classroom – ’ A woman in a long skirt and Doc Marten boots walked up the stairs and closed the door with a grudging smile. This door opened into the upper atmosphere of the lecture hall, the rest of the room dropping down from where she stood like a swim-down cave, old brown seats forming walls. It had rained the night before and the smell of wet grass and mud had been carried in on the soles of sneakers and sandals. I’d chosen a seat next to the stairs, midway down, and now I sat and waited, clutching my backpack on my lap. The woman descended the stairs. Was this the professor, Dr. Hurlitzer? Based on
the name, I’d pictured old and tall and square and moustached. She picked up a stack of papers from the desk in the pit of the room and looked up with a small twitch of her ponytail. She couldn’t have been more than thirty. I looked around the half-full room, wondering if I had the wrong one.