It was Spink who told me about what happened at the tournament. I knew it hadn’t gone well, because if it had gone well Jeff would have told me about it himself. Instead, when JC’s dad dropped him off, early Sunday afternoon, Jeff stole into the house quietly, dropping his coat on his shoes and creeping upstairs. His footsteps were heavy, like it took all of his strength not only to climb each step, but to stop himself from sinking into the floor.
The tournament was supposed to be for the full three days. The winner wouldn’t be declared until seven or eight o’clock that night.
“How’d it go?” I asked, later. At his door.
He just looked at me.
“What do you think?” he said.
“Are you still going to quit school?”
“I haven’t decided,” he said, getting up and looking at something on his shelf. Turning his big, dumb back to me. Mom didn’t come home until much later that night. When she saw his stuff in the foyer she came into the living room and asked me how it went. I told her that I had no idea.
“Not good, I think.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Well,” she said, “that’s too bad.” Then she laughed, like she was letting go of something. Like she’d thrown her wallet off a bridge. “That’s just too bad,” she said, again.
Jeff stayed pretty quiet from then on. I’d knock on the door to his room and he wouldn’t answer. Sometimes he would tell me to go away. Once or twice I opened the door and peeked inside to say hello and he got angry and told me to shut it. I never did, not right away, and so he kept yelling. Once he rushed me and knocked the door so hard back in my direction that it cut my lip.
“You asshole,” I said, tasting blood.
“Stay out of my room.”
He missed a tournament at Wizard Palace and stopped going to the weeknight hangs. I was worried about him, mostly because I knew what he was doing in there. He hadn’t given up. He was still working on his deck, trying to refine it and to figure out what had gone wrong. But it seemed obvious to me that it didn’t matter anymore. He’d missed his chance. Not because he’d failed, but because of what he let that failure do to him.
How badly had he missed his chance? I wasn’t sure why it even mattered to me. Why the specifics of it mattered.
But I had to know.
I found Spink sitting by the windows, his bright canvas sneakers propped up on a chair next to him while a girl I didn’t know tossed microwave popcorn into his mouth from across the table. “You’re missing me deliberately,” he said, after the fifth kernel bounced off his cheek. She laughed. I’d already finished eating with the guys. Spink’s jeans were covered in marker drawings and safety pins, pretty much a daily look for him.
He told me that Jeff had won the first two matches, which surprised me because it was already much better than I expected. “He actually did better than most of us,” Spink said, shaking his head. Jeff’s first victory seemed to go exactly according to plan. Jeff’s opponent was playing a known variant, but wasn’t particularly skilled. The second game was against a totally unique five-colour deck that managed to keep Jeff off balance for most of their three matches. “Jeff won by the skin of his teeth,” said Spink. “I mean, he was really sweating.” Then Jeff and Spink got separated. “I heard he’d split against his next two opponents,” he said. “I’d only won one of my first four matches. I was pretty envious.” But Jeff’s victory had been against an opponent he had planned for, and it had been really close. “He was having trouble getting his mana out,” Spink said. “Or he maybe thought he had too much. It was one or the other.”
Linnean leaned over from the other side of the table.
“Are you talking about Jeff?” he asked.
We both nodded.
“He thought it would be easy. That he could just roll over the competition. But it’s not easy. Not everyone plays as bad as me.”
“Of course,” said Spink.
Linnean tried to hit him from across the table.
“But anyway, he thought he didn’t have enough mana. So he traded some in from his sideboard. And then he lost the next two matches.”
“The next four, really,” said Spink.
“He didn’t win any more?” I said.
“But he took the mana out again after the next two losses. And then he tried putting more in again. And then tweaking other things. But he didn’t win again,” said Linnean. “I couldn’t stay with him for the last two matches. I kept an eye on him, but not very closely. You could tell he was really upset. I mean, Jeff would never say it.”
“No,” said Spink.
“But he was practically on the verge of tears —”
“I don’t know if Jeff would cry,” said Spink.
“Maybe that’s true,” said Linnean, thinking about it.
“More like a nervous breakdown,” said Spink. “Like he might start flipping tables.”
“Yeah,” Linnean and I said simultaneously.
“Anyway,” continued Linnean, “I was surprised he even finished those matches. He wasn’t playing like he normally did. He’d draw a card and the look on his face —”
“I saw the last match,” Spink said. “Or the last fifteen minutes of the last match. I’d drawn my last opponent. It was a quick game — I think we both were relieved to be able to pad our standings a little bit. I finished at two-four-two. Not bad. But obviously the tournament was over for me.”
“It was over for Jeff, too,” said Linnean. “After his third loss? I think? No chance of getting into the top eight.”
“Right — but it wasn’t over for him. The look on his face. When he drew a card — as I was saying — good or bad, he always looked crushed. It didn’t matter what he got,” said Spink. “It was like his cards had been infected somehow.”
“He didn’t go out with us that night,” said Linnean.
“What, really?” I asked.
“Not even for dinner. He stayed at the hotel,” said Linnean. “Said he was practising. Which was crazy. He wasn’t practising. Or, at least, I don’t think he was. I offered to stay with him, but he told me no. Said I should go out with the others.”
“He wasn’t there when we got back,” said Spink.
“Where did he go?”
“That’s the thing,” said Linnean. “We have no idea.”
“He didn’t tell you?” asked Spink.
“He hasn’t told me anything,” I said.
“He didn’t get back until late the next morning. We had to lie to JC’s dad so that he wouldn’t freak out,” said Spink.
“But we were pretty worried,” said Linnean.
“Has he ever done that sort of thing before?” asked Spink.
“I guess,” I said. “But not in a strange place.”
“It was so messed up,” said Spink.
“Why didn’t you guys tell me any of this?” I said.
They both shrugged.
Where could Jeff have gone?
* * *
I wanted to ask Jeff where he’d been when I got home, but when I went upstairs I saw that his door was open and his room was empty. On the days he didn’t go to school it was often a long time before he came home. I used to think he was at a friend’s, or at Wizard Palace, or maybe at the coffee shop, but I wasn’t so sure about that anymore. I wondered, for some reason, whether he wasn’t in the forest on the edge of town, the one we used to go to when we were kids. And the one we hadn’t really been back to after the accident.
I decided to walk out along the highway to find him, and I left a note for Mom to let her know. I didn’t say where I was going, only that I was out and probably wouldn’t be back until dinner, if that. I hoped she would save me some.
We were in the middle of a freak warm spell. A few days with the temperature at five or six degrees Celsius. Which maybe wasn’t so freakish for March, but it felt that way, because the winter had been long and that was our first relief. I put on my coat and my boots and a hat and I left my coat unzipped and took my gloves, but stuffed them in my pockets because I didn’t expect to use them.
Jeff could be a mystery sometimes, since it was so rare for him to talk about what was on his mind. Or for him to respond directly to what he would consider personal questions. He was always lobbing them back to you, forcing you to respond to something else entirely. Even with me. I guess I was kind of hoping that if I caught him he would finally break down and open up.
I imagined Jeff playing his last few matches. Feeling like the cards were conspiring against him, melting into each other, turning diseased and spreading the disease to him. Like the angel, dragged into incoherence by the knights and the Phyrexians, losing her detail, becoming just a smudge of paint. Evacuating the foreground, leaving only a ray of light, a call from God that was left unanswered. I could see it. And it scared me because I hadn’t thought he would take it that seriously and I didn’t know what he would do.
Why hadn’t he just stopped playing? I wish he had put down his cards and gotten up from the table and walked back to the hotel room. As soon as he realized he wasn’t going to win the tournament. I wish he’d gone out that night with his friends and had fun and gone to the second day of the tournament just to take it all in, as they’d planned, and told me all about it and then gone back to school again on Monday. Like normal. And put the game behind him, at least for a little while.
The park was almost deserted. There was a small child playing in the snow with their mother near the fenceline, a sled on the snow behind them. The kid so deep in their purple snowsuit that I couldn’t tell if they were a boy or a girl. A tiny pink backpack lay abandoned by the jungle gym, sitting on the frozen gravel. It was half-unzipped, and a crumby Ziploc bag peeked out from the hole.
I felt a peculiar kind of sadness looking at it.
I don’t know what I was expecting — I thought that by the time I got out to the park it would be eight or nine o’clock at night and I’d have to brave the forest in pitch-black darkness to find Jeff. Which was absurd, it was barely four. It was getting darker, but the sun wouldn’t set for at least another couple hours. I had imagined a ghostly scene, with the threat of animals patrolling the park’s border. For some reason it didn’t reassure me to see the park so differently, bathed in white, in the daylight, in its mundanity. I didn’t want to think that it could be indifferent to the crisis that I thought was on its way.
Without leaves to define the space, to conceal its limits, the forest seemed much smaller than it had when I was younger. Maybe part of that was that I was bigger, too. Or knowing that there wasn’t much living in there that would be likely to hurt me. The forest was nothing like it was in the movies — like Evie’s, in other words: no bears or goblins or snakes or dragons. At most, a few foxes or coyotes resplendent with mange.
There were more footprints than I would have thought at the entrance, splitting off in every direction. Human footprints, I mean. The creek was half-unfrozen and it didn’t seem safe to follow it along the bed, so I took the high route, which was easier going in the winter, anyway, without as much underbrush and with full body cover to protect myself against thorns. Along with several sets of boot prints, one of which I thought might have belonged to Jeff, a deer’s dainty hoofprints followed the creek for a hundred metres or so before branching off deeper into the woods. Or the prints of several deer, as I’ve heard they walk in the steps of their partners to conceal their numbers.
The farther I walked along the creek the more absurd it seemed to me that I would find Jeff there. I knew that what I was chasing wasn’t in Jeff, but in myself, like I could turn back time, go back to his accident and erase it, like it was his accident that had changed him, like what was different about him wasn’t something that had been always waiting inside him and would have come out no matter what. I almost turned back, but I kept going, reasoning that since I had come so far I might as well find out for sure whether he was there.
A set of footprints diverged suddenly from the group following along the ridge and dipped toward the creek. You could see from the way the snow was depressed, from the chunks of exposed brown clay, that whoever it was had fallen as much as climbed down. My heart skipped a beat, but I took a few breaths and closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I was careful to note that the ice hadn’t broken and there was no body lying in the creek. Or anywhere.
“Thank Jesus,” I said.
Even though I wasn’t religious I immediately regretted saying that. It seemed needlessly blasphemous to bring Jesus into the picture when things were so tense.
I followed the new set of footprints from the height of the creek bank, watching it meander across logs and over the places where the ice was heaviest.
As best as I could see, the footprints stopped at the old clearing. The raspberry bushes were thick up on the ridge, and the thorns kept catching on my clothing, so I climbed down, carefully holding on to the base of a sturdy-looking maple. The ice looked solid enough, and the creek was narrower there, anyway. Where the footprints ended was a flattened area where it looked like someone had sat down right in the snow. It was difficult to judge the size of the person who had been sitting down because the impression wasn’t clear — whoever it was had been there for a while and moved around a lot. I put a naked hand over the print and thought for a second that I could feel the departed person’s body heat, but I realized that was impossible, that there was no way the snow was going to keep that kind of information.
The footprints left the impression and went up the other side of the creek, where they headed back in the direction of the path. I studied them for a little while and then I turned around.
When I got home I found Jeff in the kitchen, eating soup directly out of a can. Mom wasn’t home yet.
“You aren’t even going to heat it up?”
Jeff shook his head and kept eating.
“Why weren’t you at school today?” I asked.
“I felt sick,” he said, between sips. “I’ve been home all day.”
I just nodded.
I looked at the counter and discovered my note was gone.
“Are you feeling better now?” I asked.
He shrugged and lifted another spoonful of soup to his mouth.
* * *
Some days I think back to that moment and instead of just accepting what he said without question I wish I had grabbed him by the shoulder, tried to jerk him out of his unreality, brought him back to the present, back to me. Even if that meant conflict. Even if he retaliated. Even if it made things worse.
It couldn’t have made things worse.
Why didn’t I reach out to him? Why didn’t I think he was worth fighting for? Didn’t I love him? Wasn’t I going to miss him?
Why was I so afraid?