The Guardians Read Online Free PDF Page B

love—or be loved by—a woman again.
    Personally, I favour an even more sentimental explanation: Sarah was meant to be mine. And the wound I am to bear is to have had her taken from me.
    Even today, I whisper “Sarah Mulgrave” and she is with me. A wrinkled nose when she laughed. Hair the colour of a new penny. A mouth that articulated as much when listening as when speaking: sharply etched, blushed lips, amused creases at the corners. And green eyes. Lovely in their colour but lovelier in what they promised.
    Sarah came to all the Guardians games, and though this earned her inclusion among the “puck bunnies” who fawned over Carl and the older guys on the team, the fact is she had little interest in sports. She would never have shown up to sit at the top of the stands, clutching a hot chocolate beneath the maniacal, hockey-stick-munching beaver of the Akins Lumber billboard, were it not to shout for number 12. Me.
    Afterward, if my dad wasn’t using the car, I would drive her home. The last of the wood-panelled Buick wagons. Hideous but handy. Because on those evenings we would take a spin out of town. Spook ourselves by switching the headlights off and flying over the night roads. Knowing that no harm could come to us because we were
young
—not children anymore, but still immune to what grimly went by the name of theReal World. The car hurtling into darkness. A foreplay of screams.
    We would slow only once we passed the “Welcome to the Village of Harmony” sign. Park in an orchard of black walnut trees. The pulsing silence of a killed engine.
    It was often cold out. But the shared heat of our skin fought off the chill until we lay side by side, our breath visible exclamations against the windows. My dad would take measurements of the gas he left in the tank, so in heating the car, we had to weigh the risk of discovery against the fear of frostbite. The result was sporadic, short hits of warmth from the front vents. To avoid getting up and baring my ass to those who might drive by, I learned to turn the keys in the ignition with my toes.
    Sarah’s dad was friendly but strict. He liked me, and was even prepared to look the other way when his daughter was returned home an hour past curfew, her cheeks flushed, smelling faintly of cherry brandy. But the unspoken deal between us was that he was permitting these liberties on the condition that, sooner rather than later, I would propose to Sarah. He married Sarah’s mom when they were both only a couple of years older than we were then. Teen weddings in Grimshaw were far from uncommon. Many kids knew what their professional lives were going to be by that time, the house they would one day inherit. What was the point in waiting?
    It was a plan I was happy to entertain myself. I had no sense, as Carl and Randy had (and maybe Ben too, though who could tell?), that we were too young tojudge who was right for us, that more sophisticated, realized women awaited us in our post-Grimshaw lives. There was nothing I could imagine wanting beyond Sarah anyway. I would marry her, just as her father wished. Why not? Sarah and I would look out for each other and let our lives, long and benign, wash over us.
    And I would give my right arm (for what it’s shakily worth) to know how that life would have turned out. Sarah could have waitressed, I could have found work on a construction crew or factory floor. We would have had our own apartment, something on the second floor over a shoe store or laundromat, the bedroom in the back. Just the two of us (the three? the four?), getting along fine without a coach or Heather Langham or friends I felt I should be ready to die for. Without a Thurman house.
    For
that
, go ahead. Take both arms.

[  4  ]
    M Y ROOM SMELLS of ammonia and wet dog.
    I’m on the top floor—the third—of the Queen’s Hotel. A brick cube whose one gesture toward grandeur, a tin cupola over the corner suite, had over the decades been painted with coats of blue