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  EDWARDS, ON THE NEXT

  FLIGHT OUT OF TOWN

  Edwards, wild, couldn’t get out of the first. He put the first three guys on and then walked one in, gave up a double, followed by a hard single. Boom-boom-boom. Nothing was working. His curve had no bite, his heater no heat.

  We brought in Reyes. He went 1-2-3 and made it look easy. Afterwards I saw Edwards in the tunnel and I think he was crying. He had been coming apart, we all saw it. This was exactly what he didn’t need. He untucked his jersey and then threw a water cooler at the clubhouse guy.

  On his phone later I heard him telling someone, I think his wife, that he should just come home. Leave the money on the table and catch the next flight, fuck this. You see a lot of guys buckle, but not usually so quickly, so completely. I felt for the guy. But I wanted his job. You’re supposed to want his job. This isn’t charity. So after all this I got a few starts and I did alright for us. Hit my spots, struck some guys out, kept the ball in the park. It raised my profile, got me traded to New York for prospects, got me into the playoffs. So when you think about it that way, I owe it to him. I owe this ring to Edwards.

  I WAS A WILLOW

  In the weeks after Ted Kane died I came to hate my own celebrity, as though having a dead boyfriend was the best thing I could have done for my own teenage popularity. I’d had Ted and then he exploded and left me with nothing but the pity and concern of a town full of strangers. All the boys and girls who’d never given me a passing glance were now suddenly offering a shoulder, a hug, an ear, a drink, a toke.

  “All boys are fugitives,” my mother once told me. She was full of rules and sayings and pearls of wisdom. I have none of these. I certainly don’t have rules. Not with my girls. I have intent. I have vain prayer. “They’re all fixing to go,” she went on, “running from something, or to something else.” What she neglected to mention was that some of them go up in the fireball of a modified M-80 before they ever get a chance to run away.

  This was 1980, the year we moved into the house on Pine Glen Crescent. By some trick of seniority and luck my father had gotten off the line and into the offices of Springer Electric, and so we moved up a bracket. We traded in our east side rowhouse for a single family with attached garage on a quarter acre in a leafier, richer neigbourhood on the west side. The cars were bigger. The basketball nets in the parks were lovely and new. The boys even seemed taller.

  We moved in July so by the time school started we had pretty much settled in. Of that summer I remember thunderstorms that would roll through Cavanagh like passing trains, two or three a night it seemed, leaving everything fat and ripe to the point of bursting: the impossibly green grass, the clean-feeling air in the morning. I remember my best friend Cassie Sherman’s parents leaving for the Labour Day weekend, and I remember the party she had. I remember kissing Teddy there, being tickled by the moustache on his sweet face, and the smell of cigarette and pot smoke caught in the brown carpeting of his beige 1974 Dodge Tradesman van.

  My memories of the explosion itself are a bit sketchier. This is probably my mind trying to protect itself from total insanity. What I hold onto is the November chill, and the stillness before the blast, then a rush of air from the other end of the culvert. Then the explosion, a noise like I have not heard since, everything going white, and then blue. Silence, and then a ringing, and then more echoes, water dripping. Then the recognition that Ted, who only an hour earlier had taken my precious flower, was gone.

  The dusk was smoky pink the evening of Cassie’s party. There were already fifteen or twenty people flopped around the yard and you sensed the neighbours were on high alert, waiting for their excuse to call the cops. But really, what more did they need? A house and a yard full of teenagers drinking beer, smoking, and soon crawling into every dark corner of the Sherman house to paw at one another.

  We all went to Cavanagh District High and back then half the school was made up of those country boys that surround this town like a pack of wolves. Teddy, of course, was one of them. They’d drive their pickups and road rockets into town, roar through the lot like they owned the place. It was terrifying and unspeakably alluring to a girl like me. Cassie had a thing for country boys, too, the ones with crap on their boots and danger in their eyes. But then Cassie had a thing for all boys. She’d be the first to tell you that.

  Ted Kane was quiet, though liked. Nobody had a problem with him, he just wasn’t all that visible. He didn’t crack wise, he didn’t pick fights, and he didn’t puff up his chest. He just was. Not a great student, and not a terrible one. Shy, not snobby. Unfashionable, but not an eyesore. He was a handsome boy, and I’d liked him since grade nine, I’d just never done anything about it. Now we were starting our last year of school, and I guess I was feeling a sense of urgency.

  So Cassie and I filled balloons with water and tied them off. Ted was standing near the maple tree in the Shermans’ front yard, in a circle with four other boys. They were talking, I remember, about who was going to sit at the top of the complicated social pyramid of CDHS. It was a pressing topic for all of us, because the Carmichael brothers were no more. Stevie Carmichael had ruled the school with daring and a pair of green eyes you just kind of wanted to jump into, but had graduated the summer before last, and Wayne, his younger brother and natural heir—who looked like a rat and was wired all wrong—was on his way to Joyceville for beating the life nearly out of somebody who’d looked at him sideways.

  Ted was saying, “District’s gonna be a lawless town,” when I came up behind him, raised the red balloon above my head, and brought it down across the back of his neck and left shoulder, where it broke open and splashed, and Teddy said, “Oh, shit!”

  He turned and we wrestled. I was laughing. Teddy had my arms and Cassie was dancing around us and trying to get another balloon into my hands. Ted was laughing and saying, “You’re gonna pay, Samantha Wallis, you are going to be so sorry.”

  And then we were on our way to his van, parked below a streetlight halfway down the block, where he was going to change his shirt. “Lucky for you I’ve got another,” he said.

  “How lucky for me.”

  As we stood next to the open side door of his van, the carpeted interior radiating an intense heat, he peeled off his wet shirt.

  Ted’s dad dug wells, and his mom worked for the school board. But both his uncles had dairy farms nearby, and that’s where he worked summers. The result was that farm boy’s body, those country muscles. Almost eighteen, skin kissed brown by the sun. I could picture him shirtless, holding a shovel, or at a swimming hole, or bending in to kiss me. I could picture him every time I closed my eyes. At the bottom of his ribcage the lines pointed toward his jutting hipbones that always peaked out above the top of his jeans; I never once saw him wear anything but jeans.

  He dug a blue T-shirt out of the back of the van and pulled it over his head, then ran a hand through his hair. The image would be perfect in my memory were it not for that ungodly moustache.

  I thought he would kiss me then. It just seemed like that kind of moment. But he didn’t. He looked at me and smiled, then said, “Let’s get back there and party!”

  “Right on,” I said.

  It got cold that night, as though summer had just upped and left. Darkness came all of a sudden, purple changing to black. Ted and I stuck close for most of the rest of the party, holding hands as we waded our way through groups of people doing all sorts of terrible things. I used to get those “If my mother could see me now” moments all the time, and I was having one then. I still get them.

  We were in the kitchen, eating chips and sharing a can of Molson Ex, when Cassie came in looking unwell, wearing Adidas shorts and a jean jacket, her skin the colour of pond ice. With her bluish, cloudy eyes she gave me the thousand-yard stare and sat down stiffly in one of the chairs.

  “Where have you been, honey,” I said, “and what have you been doing?”

  “I’m not really sure,” she said, “Rodney Struthers, I think.” At
that we both laughed. But here’s what’s truly funny: seven years later, my first love dead and my prospects dim, I married Rodney Struthers.

  Then Cassie’s mind seemed to snap back into her head. Her eyes got clearer and she looked at Teddy and me. “How are you two?” she asked. The “you two” sounded significant in a way that sent something racing through my body.

  “Decent,” Ted said. I blushed.

  “Decent,” she mocked.

  Rodney came into the kitchen. He said, “Hey,” but looked down, like he was trying to avoid Cassie’s eyes. We all said hey. His moustache was worse than Ted’s.

  Somebody was playing Aerosmith on Mr. Sherman’s turntable, and it sounded like they’d blown his speakers. It was crowded and loud and annoying in the house. Teddy said, “Let’s go hang out in the van,” and each of the half-dozen people in the kitchen assumed he was talking to them, so we all went out together: me, Ted, Cassie, Rodney, Missy Bell, and Jennifer Arcand.

  Ted turned the radio on. Blondie played, then the Eagles. There were speakers in the back of the van, buried in the same carpeting that covered everything. Ted had an old orange recliner back there, and big, thick blankets that you could curl up in. There were no windows, but he told us he wanted to have those small bubble windows put in. His father had bought the van used from a television repair business and Ted helped him strip out the fixtures in the back. He had plans for the van beyond the windows. “A sweet paint job,” he said, to cover up the beige, “and I’m gonna put a built in sofa bed, and, like, a bigger stereo. A little fridge over there, then maybe a TV.”

  “Sweet,” said Rodney.

  Ted lit a joint and we passed it around.

  “I’ll have it set up so I can live in it, if I need to,” he said. I took a puff and handed the joint to Cassie. I wondered why he would need to live in his van, but decided it’s just the kind of thing an almost-eighteen-year-old boy wants to imagine himself doing. Cassie took her drag, then handed the joint to Rodney.

  “Here ya go, Rod,” she said, kind of loudly, and then we all laughed for reasons I couldn’t quite make out.

  “Crazy on You” by Heart came on the radio then. “Everybody shut up,” I said. “I want to hear this song. I love this song.” But instead everybody started making fun of it, banshee wailing through the chorus. Everybody except Rodney, who just looked at his shoes.

  When the joint was done, and the next one gone, too, Cassie sighed, “I guess I should check on the house, or whatever.” She rose up on her knees, then turned and started fiddling with the door’s handle. She said, “Is there a trick, or…” and then Ted reached over and popped it open. The cooling night air rushed in, and the cloud of smoke poured out. It was as though we’d forgotten there was a rest of the world to think about. Missy and Jen followed Cassie, and Rod just kind of disappeared, a trick he’s still practicing.

  There was suddenly a chance to be alone with Ted, and I tried to stay cool. He crouched in the open door of his van and said, “You want to, I don’t know, hang out more?”

  “Sure. Sounds okay.”

  He pulled the big sliding door shut and offered me a blanket. I thought that was so sweet and chaste. I didn’t want to be chaste, in that moment. I wanted his mouth on mine. I wanted his hands. And yes, I know my daughters will soon want the same thing, and the little hell that’ll put me through will be the only sort of justice we ever get, won’t it?

  But I didn’t know how to get from where we were to where I wanted us to be, so I took the blanket and folded myself up in the recliner. He sat in his captain’s chair, and we talked. He pulled the leftovers of a six-pack from beneath the dash and opened a can. “You want one?” he asked.

  “I think I’m okay,” I said. I was high and hungry, perched on the edge of something that, if I went any further and got tipped into, I’d have a hard time climbing out of.

  We talked for an hour. It’s hard now for me to remember ever being like that: open. Wanting to tell someone everything. I told him anything I could think of about myself and about my life, and then he leaned in and kissed me. I could feel it coming, could actually feel the downy little hairs of his moustache before his lips met mine. We locked together, and he held my shoulders. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I put them on the back of his neck. We twisted our heads and he licked my front teeth, and then we pulled away and laughed.

  “Finally,” I said. “Christ.”

  He sighed. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

  “What are you even talking about?” I said.

  “I look around,” he said, “and I go, ‘Everybody here is always gonna be stuck here. We’re all gonna die in this friggin town.’ But I look at you, and I see how somebody could be happy. Like, how I could be happy.”

  “Wow,” I said, then put my head on his chest. “I’m so high right now. I feel so good.”

  Maybe he was nothing special, but he was nice to me and had dreams that didn’t involve hurting people. He liked explosions, he said, and fireworks, not for what they destroyed, but for the energy they released, the mania of it.

  In those moments after we kissed I let myself think of a future with Teddy Kane, when we weren’t speaking, when we were just lacing our fingers together and breathing, feeling one another’s warmth. I thought of a farmhouse outside of Cavanagh, and I thought of Ted in a plaid work coat and muddy boots. I dreamed of him coming home and stepping out of a truck and kissing me on the porch. Mostly I dreamed about us not being in Cavanagh.

  I didn’t dream of clipping coupons. I didn’t dream of dumping a can of cream of mushroom soup into a pot of noodles, adding a can of tuna, and calling it a casserole. I didn’t dream of finding that all the things my mother made look easy were anything but.

  Ted and I didn’t do much in his van that night. We just got closer and closer, and slower and slower. We weren’t talking a lot. Our eyes were closed. I kissed him on the forehead and he started awake and said, “I’m glad you’re still here.”

  He was exhausted, and completely wasted. His face was red and his eyes were like slits. He said, “Keep me awake, Sam.” So I sang to Heart to him:

  I was a willow last night in your dream

  And I bent down over a clear running stream

  Sang you the songs that I heard up above

  And you kept me alive with your sweet flowing love

  I stretched the last note out, just like Ann Wilson, I swear. I used to be able to sing. Teddy turned and looked at me. His eyes were glassy and red. It was dark in there, just the streetlight glare coming in the windshield, but I could see that. “Jesus, Sammy,” he said, “you’re good.”

  “You have no idea, Teddy,” I said, and at that moment I decided that I would one day take off my clothes for him.

  Later—the next day, actually, once everyone was gone, once Ted and I had slept in the van until 5:00, and he’d woken with a start, walked me to the Shermans’ front door, kissed me goodbye, and sped home in the hopes of getting there before his dad woke up, once there was just the aftermath and the cleanup to think about—Cassie and I sat beneath the patio umbrella and ate dill pickles right from the jar. I told her that I was in love with Ted. She said, “Whoa! Careful, honey!” It was just desire, she said, desire like a fog, blanking out everything. But it would soon burn off and be gone, Cassie told me.

  I told her no. It wouldn’t be like that.

  Yes, Teddy, you are going to die in this fucking town. We all are.

  I’m told there used to be a strict town-and-country divide at CDHS. There was one and there was the other, and that was that. I don’t know who the first was, but once a country boy started dating a town girl it was like a crack in the dam, and by the time we arrived, a new flock of grade nines trembling in our boots, it was common practice. So Ted and I walking the halls on Monday, hand in hand, raised no eyebrows. Country boy, town girl. It was just another day.

  We kissed outside classrooms. We held hands on the sidewalk out front, where everyb
ody smoked their cigarettes. We ate lunch together. On weekends he’d pick me up in his van and we’d drive around, or park, or stop by Cassie’s house. Slumped together beneath a heavy blanket, high, tired: that was the pose we held all autumn long. He got his hand up my shirt, nothing more. Cassie kept telling me, “You’re going to lose that boy if you don’t give it up.” But Cassie, I learned, could be wrong about these things.

  Finally, as November rolled in, the leaves almost gone, Teddy announced there’d be a party at his house. There was no reason for the party other than it had been a month or more since somebody had had a real good one. Mr. and Mrs. Kane were in Belleville with her sick sister, and they’d taken Bradley, Ted’s little brother, too, leaving Teddy behind. So what we had was an empty house and some full bottles. We took it upon ourselves to reverse that ratio. It doesn’t take many phone calls to round up a few dozen high school kids.

  The usual crowd gathered and the usual things happened. The smokers hung out on the porch. There was the constant noise of trees on fall nights, the skiffing sound as dry leaves are blown across pavement. Behind Teddy’s dad’s workshop they were having wrestling matches. People coupled off and disappeared into bedrooms and closets. The heavy stoner kids took over the stereo. Cassie sat at the kitchen table with four other girls and regaled them with her complete sexual history. There was a lot of laughing.