Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley Read Free Book Online Page A

doing something else: while feeding a toddler, or reading the paper, or talking to Buck over her shoulder. Now, though, she had the leisure to plumb every motion with all her concentration, eyes weighting each fragment of shell. She was forced to throw herself headlong into the stretched, yawning minutes of peeling because she didn’t have anything better to do. And now the egg was not co-operating. Her finger tripped while trying to lever up a larger chunk of shell and instead shattered the piece into smaller shards. Her fingers were always forced to go at peeling with a kind of athletic gusto, the nubbed tips getting right down into the meat of the egg to wedgeoff the shell, since she had no fingernails to speak of, every one bitten to the quick, unable to perform any graceful, manicured shearing of shell. She had to rely on contortion instead, on the joint pliability of egg and skin. But now, with every piece shattering into smaller ones under these missteps, the fingers said no, no, and the egg fell into an unconquerable labyrinth of shell.
    A few years ago, Grace had dragged her to an art show. Grace knew the artist and Sig had laughed when she first told her about it. The woman had saved the garbage from each of her breakfasts over the course of a year. She dried out orange and grapefruit rinds, apple cores, banana peels and then painted them with varnish. She kept milk and orange juice cartons and oatmeal packages and coffee filters and grinds and arranged them all in glass boxes. She saved every piece of eggshell. Sig was ribbing Grace – Grace quietly trying to shut her up – when they rounded a corner of the exhibit and came upon these shells. They were glued onto a vast red canvas, arranged in no particular pattern or form, just their own small broken shapes jostling sharp against one another, and Sig stopped suddenly, halted by this landscape, the unexpected violence. She didn’t say a word.
    Sig finally gave up on the egg. Spiked it into the garbage can with a frustrated grunt. Then, turning toward the sunlight coming in from the window, she held the hand up to her face as she might a misbehaving child, peering angrily into its stubborn flesh. And there. Proof. The fluttering thumb, its movement like a butterfly wing. A rhythm-less beating, fumbled attempt at flight. She felt a strange thrust of relief: it wasn’t her after all. It was this thumb, this separate thing. Wriggling like some insect caught by her hand. Held captive by skin.
    W e all got letters one day, those of us who remained. The cool white envelopes neatly containing three weeks’ worth of anxiety. Over the course of tryouts the orange plastic chairs in the dressing room had begun to disappear one by one. A couple of players didn’t make it through the first week. Tall, quiet Sandra with the wobblingslapshot, the sad eyes when the puck didn’t get off the ice, watching it dribble to the net. Christy, whose mascara ran macabre rivers down her face beneath her cage when she sweated. Her glacial stride. These two cut in the first week. Then, with what seemed like random whim, a pack of ducklings picked off by a muskie, others disappeared. There were covert meetings involved, I knew, hushed requests to visit Moon in her office. But I didn’t witness any of this, kept my head down in the halls, avoiding the crosshairs of the coaches’ eyes. Small mumbles before practice announcing the room’s latest losses: ‘Christy got cut. Sara got cut.’
    The stack of orange chairs grew higher and the team tightened, drills quicker with fewer skaters, the weaker links gone and a different friction now during scrimmages, the taut motions of teammates used to each other’s play, each other’s hands. I tried to attach names to strides, to playing posture, to ponytails. I began to get it right more often. I stayed away from Hal on the ice. The dressing room distilling slowly to its core of stalls.
    The hockey itself was the easy part: hands remembering