The Guardians Read Online Free PDF Page A

acknowledge the rudeness of its stare.
    But in this, of course, was the suggestion that she knew she was being watched. She was a woman already well used to being looked at. Usually, this looking inspired admiration and yearning in the observer. But we could sense that the Thurman house—or the idea of whatever inhuman thing lived in it—instead felt only bitterness. A reminder of its place in death and hers so vividly in life.

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    T HERE ARE MOMENTS when the tremors disappear all on their own. Whole chunks of time when my body and I are reunited, warring soldiers clinking tin mugs over a Christmas ceasefire. I’ll be looking out the window, and the hands that had been squeaking against the glass will be calmed. Or now. Sitting on the milk run to Grimshaw, the train starting away from the platform with a lurch, my heart giving enlarging shape to Randy’s announcement of the end of things:
Ben’s dead, Trev
. As we pick up speed, I can feel the closing distance between myself and the past, an oncoming collision my newspaper-reading and text-messaging fellow passengers are unaware of. And yet, I am still. Silently weeping into the sleeve of my jacket but physically in control, my limbs awaiting their orders.
    You can’t help anyone
, a voice suggests within me.
You can’t help yourself. Why not do what Ben did while you’re still able?
    Not my voice, though it’s instantly familiar. A voice I haven’t heard in twenty-four years.
    The train rolls out from under the covered platform and the city is there, the glass towers firing off shards of sunlight in a farewell salute. All at once, I’m certain I will never come back. I escaped something in Grimshaw once. But it won’t let me go a second time.
    Ticket, please
, the voice says, laughing.
    “Ticket, please,” the conductor tries again.
    It was thought, when they built the four lanes running west between Toronto and the border at Detroit a couple years before I was born, that the highway’s proximity to Grimshaw would lend new purpose to what was before then not much other than a service town for the county’s farmers. But there was no more reason to take the Grimshaw exit than there had previously been to limp in its direction on the old, rutted two-lane. Like many of the communities its size on the broad arrowhead of farmland stuck between the Great Lakes, it remained a forgotten place. Never industrial enough to be outright abandoned in the way of the ghost towns of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, but not alert enough to attempt re-invention. Grimshaw was content to merely hang on, to take a subdued pride in its century homes on tree-lined streets, the stained facades of its Victorian storefronts, its daughters or sons who met with success upon moving away. Now, entering it as a stranger, one might see a gothic charm in the wilful oldness of the place, its loyalty to the vine-covered, the paint-peeled. But for those who grew up here, it was only as it had always been.
    There are times of the year when certain places seem to be themselves more than any other time. Springtime in Paris, Christmas in New York. Toronto frozen at Valentine’s. Evenbefore the bad things happened, I saw Grimshaw as a Halloween town. Sparsely streetlit, thickly treed. The houses never grand but large, built at a time that favoured rear staircases, widow’s-peaked attics, so that they all had their own secret hiding places. Founded by Scots Presbyterians and consistently conservative in the backbenchers it sent to Parliament, Grimshaw had little sympathy for the mystical. Any mention of the supernatural was considered nothing more than foolishness, the side effects of too many matinees indulged at the Vogue. Ghosts? “Catholic voodoo,” as my father put it.
    Yet at the same time, it was its dour Protestant character that endeared its inhabitants to the everyday tragic, to the stories of broken lives and cruel, inexplicable fate. For our parents, the dead lived on,