“Maybe it’s for the best,” Randy says finally. 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. 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. But there is our breath being traded back and forth down the line. Looked up to see if that weird McAuliffe guy was in the window as usual, and saw him swinging there.” Up in the attic where he’d sit by the window, you know, watching.” Nobody’s called me that since high school, including Randy. This is my first, not-quite-awake thought. But in the end Randy surprises me when he takes a rattling, effortful breath and says, “Ben’s dead, Trev.” 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. 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.Īs 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. But it’s late, isn’t it?”Ī familiar voice, faintly slurred, helium-pitched between laughter and sobs. 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. A simple matter of reaching and grabbing. 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. The call comes in the middle of the night, as the worst sort do.

The Guardians by Andrew Pyper