The Weight of Stones Read online

  McKelvey left a message, speaking quietly into his phone. “Hey,” he said, “I’ll be home late. You don’t have to save supper.”

  He thought of telling her about his day but decided it would only cause her unnecessary worry. He waited awhile at his desk, fiddling with pens and papers, before turning off his desk light and slipping out. The sky was black, devoid of stars. The city was quilted in fresh white, which made everything look clean and new, as though the whole place had been built just a year ago. The dusting would be gone by midmorning under the glare of the early December sun. But for now, at just after six, the new snow made the city almost look like a place where bad things never happened. It covered up the filth, McKelvey thought, the way a hooker covers up the bruises on her cheek with foundation.

  He drove for a while before pulling into the parking lot of a convenience store a few blocks from his home, then he was standing in the phone booth in front of his car with his collar pulled up, the receiver cradled against an ear, reading the ads for chips and pop and candy bars posted over in the store window. Everything was on sale, two for one. Everything was a necessity. The use of payphones was not necessary, however, as the force supplied a cellular phone with which McKelvey had made a compromise: he would use it for work, but that was it. He could push himself towards the emerging technologies only so fast, so far. He still owned milk crates full of record albums, as yet unconvinced that the mysterious compact disc was here to stay. There was something about pushing a quarter into a phone, something about closing those folding doors off to the rest of the world. The streetlight overhead turned the flesh of his hand yellow as he dialed the number Paul had given him at the hospital group. A crumpled piece of paper dug from his pocket, words recalled. He couldn’t say why he was calling, exactly, or what he hoped to accomplish.

  A man answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

  “This Tim Fielding?”

  “Speaking.”

  McKelvey dug in his outer coat pocket for the package of cigarettes he’d bought after the meeting with Aoki. Player’s Light Regular. His old friend the old sailor. He lifted the foil flap, fished out a smoke with his teeth. His stomach fluttered with the anticipation of the first nicotine rush, that sick twinge of guilt. All the things that kept him coming back.

  “It’s Charlie McKelvey from Tuesday nights. Tuesday nights at the hospital group,” he said, fumbling for the two-cent matches that advertised rare coins. “I got your number from Paul there, the moderator.”

  He had thought about hanging up one ring before the man answered, and now McKelvey was wishing he had. He struck the match and lit the smoke, and with the first flood of nicotine and hovering tendril of blue smoke knew that he was in trouble now. No way to explain away the stench of smoke that would cling to him in this enclosed space. He supposed this carelessness meant he was beyond the point of caring now. In the end, that’s what carelessness always boiled down to, an indifference to the consequences. It was how most criminals eventually got themselves caught.

  “Oh, Charlie, right, right. The policeman,” Tim said. “Paul gave you my number?”

  “Well yeah, you know, he said you might help me with something I’m going through.”

  Tim laughed, and McKelvey took a long drag on the cigarette, holding the smoke until it began to burn his lungs like mustard gas. His eyes watered a little, and he released the smoke through his nostrils in two long funnels. Fuck it. He wasn’t going to quit these.

  “Me help you, right. He wants you to mentor me, I suppose. Sounds like something Paul would try to orchestrate behind the scenes. Anyway...” Tim said, and waited for the conversation to resume.

  “Mmmm, that’s right,” McKelvey said. “So how about it. One night this week, maybe?”

  “How about tonight?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Why not? Just stupid cop shows on TV,” he said. “No offence.”

  “None taken. I can’t stand to watch them myself,” McKelvey said. “Everybody thinks we’re running around with our guns drawn half the time.”

  “You mean you guys don’t get to do that?”

  “Sometimes. Most of the time I’m sitting at a computer for nine hours trying to learn some new software program so I can fill out my reports and upload them to an invisible mainframe, or whatever they call it...”

  Tim laughed again. McKelvey glanced at his watch.

  “Do you know Murph’s on Bathurst?” McKelvey said.

  “Sure,” Tim said. “Who doesn’t?”

  “The one and only. I don’t think Murph will ever retire,” McKelvey said. “He must be going on ninety. I could meet you there in, say, twenty minutes.”

  “I’m on my way,” Tim said and hung up.

  McKelvey stood in the phone booth watching his breath fog up the scratched and gouged Plexiglass, smelling the stale air, the reek of tobacco. He wondered briefly about fate and what had moved him to call the young man. He wondered about fate quite often these days, how chance meetings seemed always in the end to be so much more than they first appeared. How there was no such thing as pure coincidence. How everything—even the murder of a child, say—was supposed to have a purpose behind it, something to be taught or gleaned. Or perhaps it was punishment. A lesson to be learned. What goes around comes around. Call it whatever you will; the notion gave McKelvey a chill. He opened the phone booth door and walked into the night.

  Murph’s was a bare bones tavern wedged between a dry cleaner’s shop and a convenience store owned by a Korean family. It was an old and worn establishment that had stubbornly weathered the various decades and all the changing trends the city could throw at it. McKelvey thought of the place as an old sports jersey or a favourite hat that you loved and never wanted to put through the laundry, because everything that was special about it would be washed away. It had to stay the same, with the scuffs on the wood floor and the ages-old stains on the walls and the toilets that only worked half the time, a filthy plunger propped in the corner. Graffiti scrawled on the washroom cubicles stretched back to the 1940s, and that alone was worth the price of admission. For a good time call Gertie…

  They didn’t have much in common, it was true. Tim Fielding was a school teacher and an unapologetic socialist, and was not at all embarrassed to tell McKelvey over their first draft beer that he would have killed himself following his wife’s death if it hadn’t been for the Tuesday night meetings up at the hospital. No, they didn’t have much in common except for the shared experience of loss, but McKelvey liked the younger man. He got a good reading from the kid, and he had been ruled by his gut instincts for so long now, it was about all he trusted.

  “I pictured myself going through with it,” Tim said, “you know, parking my car in the garage with a hose running from the exhaust. I went to the hardware store one day and checked out furnace hoses. After I left class. After I left my fucking students. I held it in my hand, turning it over. It was that real to me, that close. I can’t even believe I’m saying this now. But you being a cop, I guess you’ve probably heard everything.”

  “What pulled you back?” McKelvey said.

  Tim shrugged. “Responsibility won out in the end,” he said. “I tried to imagine the impact on my class. I knew it was something that would stay with them forever, and it wasn’t fair. It’s hard enough to be a kid nowadays.”

  “You’re right about that,” McKelvey said. “I wouldn’t be a kid today if you paid me. We used to spend all day out in the woods, shooting squirrels with a BB gun or breaking glass bottles with a slingshot. TV wasn’t even an option most of the time. You used your imagination. You found something to do, or your father’d put you to work. And everybody wore the same jeans and the same cheap runners. Now you got nine-year-old girls dressing up like pop stars…” And they drank in silence in one another’s company. McKelvey didn’t have many friends outside of work, because he got a feeling for people right away, looked into their eyes in ways that his wife could never appreciate, always pick
ing apart their reactions or actions, judging, measuring. “Can’t you stop being a cop for one night?” Caroline would say. “Sometimes you treat our friends like suspects. Sometimes you treat Gavin like he’s a suspect.” He shivered now at the thought, and it stung. Remorse and regret.

  “You’re okay now, though?” McKelvey said after a mouthful of beer.

  “Oh sure, I’m a poster boy for mental health,” Tim said, and they laughed.

  Tim drew the frothy head from his mug of draft beer. He was a tall man, with a thin, latent musculature, glasses with a modern dark frame, and sandy brown hair that was receding faster than its owner could likely accept. When the young man smiled, McKelvey thought he looked a little like the Hollywood actor Ed Harris. Seemed like the majority of men nowadays were going bald. Must have been something in the water or the milk, steroids or hormones or some other form of voodoo. Not that his own hair was showing any signs of disappearing. Even Hattie had once remarked that he had a beautiful head of hair for an older gentleman. For an older gentleman, that was the qualifier...

  They watched the clientele ebb and flow. McKelvey remembered the times, when he was much younger, that Caroline had to call around to a series of neighbourhood bars just like this one in an attempt to locate him. McKelvey and his colleagues turning the after-work drink into a five- or six-hour run. Back when he was younger and unsure of what he was missing at home, all of them caught up in the male ego of it all, trading stories from the street, and the cigarettes and the laughs and the feeling that they were in a special club, the secret order of the brotherhood. Only a handful of the original crew were still ardent daily drinkers, unapologetic through three failed marriages and estranged children, and they wore the lifestyle on their faces. They were red-nosed and bloated, made old before their time. All young men break a few bones to learn their lessons, McKelvey thought. Takes us so much longer than our wives and lovers to learn to be still. How to pace the drinking, how to handle the testosterone and the anger and how to reconcile the day job with the home life. He understood that negotiations were required. The alternative was a life of lonely rooms and empty beds. Now it hardly seemed to matter.

  McKelvey’s moment of peaceful reflection was torn when he looked up and saw that Tim was crying. Like a small child, his eyes watered, and a few plump tears streaked down his cheeks. There was no sound. A man crying, it was one of the worst things, one of the most difficult parts of McKelvey’s job, the crying and the crying. Suspects crying when they got pinched, begging and sobbing for just one more chance at freedom, crying until snot ran glistening from their noses. But the worst was the family of victims. It didn’t matter the cause, not initially at least. Vehicle accidents, murders, drownings, drug overdoses, it was all the same when you were standing on a front step with your hat in your hand. It made McKelvey’s stomach clench so that he couldn’t eat for an entire day after he delivered a Notification of Death—N.O.D. The cop’s worst task.

  “What’s up, Tim? What’s up there, buddy?” he said. It didn’t matter what McKelvey said at these times, it always sounded foolish to his own ear, an actor reading lines.

  “Oh god, I’m sorry,” Tim said. “I just get like this sometimes. It’s the beer, I guess.”

  He wiped his nose and dried his eyes with a thumb.

  “Listen, don’t apologize, man. It’s okay,” McKelvey said. “Just let it go.”

  “I miss her so much,” Tim said, and now the tears resumed. “I keep getting to this place where it feels like maybe I could build a life again, you know? Maybe I could have a life again some day. Wake up without this weight on my chest, her name running through my head. I had everything, Charlie. I had the greatest love. We were going to have children...”

  McKelvey gritted his teeth, frustrated by his own awkwardness. He felt he ought to do something. It was the same when Caroline cried or began to reminisce about Gavin as a child, and McKelvey saw himself standing there like a big dummy with his hands at his sides. He felt like a statue—or worse, a man dead from the neck down. It wasn’t enough that he possessed the genuine desire to do something, the innate reaction to reach out, to comfort. It wasn’t enough, and he knew it. His wife deserved more. She always did.

  “I have moments where I forget,” McKelvey said, pushing the shadows from his mind. “I’ll be doing something, mostly at work, and my head gets buried in the little details. And then all of a sudden it’s like I’m coming up, breaking the surface, taking this huge mouthful of air. And that’s it, that’s when I realize that yeah, I had a son and he’s gone now...but I had a son. He was real...”

  “Do you think it’ll ever get any easier?” Tim said, his red eyes searching.

  McKelvey took the last mouthful of his beer. He held the beer in his mouth, buying a moment. It was dark draft, good and strong against his tongue. He felt he should tell this kid the way he saw it. Leave the lying to the grief counsellors and the facilitators like Paul up at the hospital group. Seven stages of grief? No, no. Grief was an onion. With each skin you peeled away, the thing just got softer, more delicate, and each layer burned your eyes a little more.

  “No,” McKelvey said, “I don’t believe so.”

  Tim’s face betrayed his surprise at McKelvey’s bluntness. As a young widower, Tim had grown somewhat used to everyone telling him things would get better, that it was okay to start dating again, that yes, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, life does go on.

  “I didn’t mean to kick you in the balls there,” McKelvey said and chuckled to lighten the moment. “You asked me a question, and I’m too tired to bullshit.”

  “No, no,” Tim said, “I appreciate your honesty. I’m not being facetious. I wanted to ask you that question in the meeting a few weeks ago, but you didn’t look like you wanted anybody to talk to you, to be honest.”

  McKelvey said, “My wife says I look like that a lot.”

  “Tell me something,” Tim said. “Why do women, good women, tolerate jackasses like you and me?”

  Tim was on his second large draft beer, about two and a half pints’ worth, and McKelvey could see the man was not a heavy drinker. His eyes were already glazing over with that watery, faraway look. There was a time when McKelvey himself could have sat there and drunk six large draft beers then driven home—yes, driven, in spite of or perhaps because of the fact he was a cop—then crawled right into bed beside his already sleeping wife. Not every day, to be certain, but with enough consistency that it became an issue to be addressed, placated.

  “Speak for yourself, young man,” McKelvey said. “I’m an asshole, not a jackass.”

  Tim choked on his mouthful of beer, a big smile across his face. “Not to be confused with a garden variety dickhead.”

  “There are grades to these things, levels to be achieved,” McKelvey said. “I don’t really remember what it was like being a husband in my early thirties, but I can guess that I wasn’t very good at it. You think you learn about women as you go along, but you don’t learn anything. They’re light years ahead of us.”

  “I never cheated on my wife, but I came close,” Tim said, and it came out so fast that it reminded McKelvey of a typical amateur’s confession. A breathless burst of information. “This supply teacher, she invited me to her place for a drink.”

  “Listen, you don’t have to...”

  “No, I want to tell you. I want to tell somebody, because it drives me crazy sometimes. I have to get it off my chest. There was this supply teacher, and we really hit it off, you know, joking around and being stupid. Getting caught up in the whole school flirt thing. She invited me to her place for a drink. She knew I was married, but I guess she didn’t care.” Tim paused, looked down into his drink, rolled the frothy remains in the bottom of the glass. “Anyway, we didn’t do anything. I had a drink, and we fooled around a little, then I got my senses back. I felt sick about it. And then six months later, Jennifer was killed by a fucking drunk driver. She was hit walking across the street that she crossed every
day when she was leaving work. The same street.”

  “Don’t do that to yourself. You should be proud of the fact you got the hell out of there. Most men would have jumped at the opportunity without even thinking, then lived with the consequences,” McKelvey said, and his mind flashed with childhood memories—listening with an ear to the floor while his mother and father argued below in the kitchen, accusations of infidelity, the awful words his mother spat. “Your tavern whores,” she said. And then the arguments seemed to simply dissipate, and McKelvey was left to decipher the silences, the glances that fell between his mother and father. The male gossip at Bud’s barbershop, the coded language that belonged to men of that era. Life in a small northern town. Every aspect of your life is everybody else’s business. To believe otherwise is to be an elitist—like anyone who came from a city in southern Ontario or anyone perfectly willing to pay four dollars for a cappuccino.

  “Listen, we’re idiots. Face it,” McKelvey said. “I used to think women had no place on the police force. I’ll admit to that line of thinking at one time. But not now. I see that women come at things from a whole different angle. I can’t tell you what that fucking angle is, mind you, but we need it. We need it.”

  Tim wanted to order another round, but McKelvey declined. He made an excuse about work, but the truth was his guts were on fire. The worst heartburn imaginable, like goddamned napalm cutting a line from his stomach to the back of his throat. It was a new sensation, a flash of heat and stabbing pain. Like something tearing. He was dizzy when he stood from the table, and he set a hand down to steady himself. It was the weight of the day, a bad day, and the fact he’d had too much coffee on an empty stomach. He did it to himself all the time.

  “You look like you’re getting the flu,” Tim said, sitting forward to pull his wallet from his back pocket. “It’s going around the school like wild fire. I got the free shot at the clinic.”