The Weight of Stones

The Weight
of Stones

The Weight
of Stones

C.B. Forrest

Text © 2009 by C.B. Forrest

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

Cover design: Vasiliki Lenis / Emma Dolan

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

RendezVous Crime
an imprint of Napoleon & Company
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
www.napoleonandcompany.com

Printed in Canada

13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Forrest, C. B.

The weight of stones / C.B. Forrest.

ISBN 978-1-894917-78-0

I. Title.

PS8611.O77W43 2009      C813'.6      C2009-900675-8

For Tracy
‘tears & laughter'

It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind, that you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself.

And for that wrong committed must you knock and wait a while unheeded at the gate of the blessed.

       -Kahlil Gibran

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

One

T
he meetings were held Tuesday nights in a small conference room tucked away down a maze of hallways at St. Michael's Hospital. McKelvey went as often as he could, which wasn't often these days. If he missed a session, he would lie to his wife about the meeting, waiting until they were in bed with the lights turned out, the quiet of the night interrupted only here and there by the barking of a neighbour's dog. He would carefully reconstruct the session as though he were on the witness stand, telling her about what this person had said, how it had helped him see something in a new light. These were harmless lies, bedtime stories told to soothe a wife. The truth was he hated the meetings, everything about them. The stuffy, stale heat of the room, the pale and lost faces of the other men around him; their
vulnerability
. These were tortures that dragged on for over an hour. But he went as often as he could. He went for her.

For the entire first year, they went together weekly to a psychologist specializing in grief and trauma of their specific variety. The sessions were intensive, intrusive and altogether more stressful than simply going for a long drive, which was what he much preferred. He felt a man could sort out almost anything on a long piece of open road. A highway let a man be a man on his own terms; there were no repudiations. But he went with Caroline, went for her. She did most of the talking, she did most of the crying, and he sat there like a pillar of flesh, Kleenex box on his lap. He got through it a minute at a time, gritting his teeth and nodding when he felt it was appropriate. He understood that opening the tap on this thing—that to turn the knob or flick the switch—would not signal the beginning of the
end
of grief as the professionals assured them, with their promises and their fifty-minute hours, their air of subtle superiority. It was, he knew, in fact just the opposite. The opening of the valve meant only the beginning of acute and chronic suffering, infinite in its scope. In his line of work he had learned and accepted the simplest truths of the human animal. There were places from which a person could not return. A wound becomes a scar, and the scar fades with time, but it will never be undone.

“The worst thing,” Caroline confessed during one of the sessions, “is how he died. Alone like that. Away from us. I can't help feeling that we cast him out. Families aren't supposed to do that…”

For a husband to hear those words come from the mouth of his wife, to bear the silent weight of those goddamned words—
to hear it spoken and to be unable to do anything
. That was true powerlessness, an unnecessary cruelty to a man already on his knees. For in the light of day, and in his heart of hearts, McKelvey knew that things had not been good between him and Caroline for a long, long time. Even before
this,
there had been the distance between them. They had stumbled through the battlefield of marriage and come out the other side, a little battered and bruised, but still together, still standing. Negotiations were held, compromises brokered. As with all couples who weather the storm, they had found a spot of common ground and made a sort of quiet peace.

The routine had been shattered by a single late night phone call. Their lives had shifted, buckled. The known world had collapsed around them, reinventing itself in muted colours, muted sounds. Days became a blur of handshakes and sympathetic looks, downcast eyes, hushed whispers as he walked through the halls at the office.

It was understood there was a
process
involved here, levels and phases to be negotiated. There were the stages of grief, as clearly outlined in the pamphlets and brochures. McKelvey wanted to break something or fix something, or simply run through to the other side. In the silence of his grief, he bore the weight of his guilt, the consequences of his decisions. For it was McKelvey who had pushed back hardest against the teen's drug use, the disrespect, the lack of appreciation for a home carved from the meagre bones McKelvey had gathered along the way. Nothing had come easy in his own life, so there was a desire to impart the lessons of a life learned the hard way.

After a time, Caroline had steered herself towards a group of mothers who gathered in alternating homes to discuss their grief from a distinctly female point of view. So it was that Charlie McKelvey found himself adrift for a time, driving away from the suffocating city, up through the lush farmland of Holland Marsh, the only sound in the car the soothing rush of tires on pavement or the beat of his own ragged heart. Long drives, tanks of gas, packages of cigarettes and wads of gum in a vain attempt to mask the reek of tobacco. It was ironic, he thought, how he had quit smoking a half dozen years earlier for the very reason that he wanted to ensure he would be around for his son's wedding day. Now there would be no wedding day. No grandchildren. The future, which only yesterday had hovered in the distance like the comforting and anticipated closing scene in a film, was now blurry and grainy, the storyline meandering without purpose. This was arthouse cinema. Their lives, both his and Caroline's, reduced to a series of comings and goings, a joint bank account, their future anchored entirely in memory.

Eventually, after much goading, McKelvey had agreed to participate in the men's grief group up at the hospital. He saved gas money but found no solace in the depressing room that smelled of cheap aftershave and burned coffee stewing in the aluminum percolator they also used for AA meetings. The men were all ages, from the youngest, a thirty-year-old named Tim, to the eldest, an eighty-three year old with the antiquated name Bartholomew. They represented all walks of life, too, from a shoe salesman to a cop. They were balding or they had hair, they were overweight, and they were tall and short, and they were just a bunch of idiots sitting in a room trying to do something that—in McKelvey's estimation—was akin to fucking around with a Ouija board in a darkened closet. He was not hardwired for this, and nothing good could come from it.

Most of the men in the group drifted in and out of attendance, likely just as uncomfortable in the dredging of grief as McKelvey found himself. A rare few shared regularly, wept openly, and curled balls of tissue in their moist, clenched fists while the moderator knelt before them, rubbing a hand across their back. McKelvey hated it most when a crying man's nose began to run, as though this physiological reaction somehow represented total and final
defeat
, a threshold breached. He felt sorry for them, and yet conversely he admired their ability to weep openly in a room full of strangers. It was beyond his grasp.

Two

O
n this Tuesday evening, the wind was lifting bits of garbage, the detritus of the city, and whirling it around the visitor's lot. Early December, the sky dark as coal and glowing at its edges from the burning lights of the city, the air thick with the dampness of coming snow. Upstairs in the meeting room, seated at the corner of a long conference table, Charlie McKelvey was chewing the skin on the side of his thumb. This was a habit his father had also possessed, one of the few things he remembered fondly about the man, an indelible impression. That and tearing his hangnails with his teeth. Caroline was always at him when his own thumbs were cracked and bleeding. Then McKelvey remembered it was something he'd seen Gavin doing on a number of occasions, this automaton's movement of thumb to mouth, and he wondered then if it was possible for a quirky family trait to be so deeply embedded in the coils of genes and DNA. A sort of torch of the generations.
And what other surprises had he
passed along in that weathered packet?

The meeting room was always too hot, and this day there was a pong of body odour, a lingering sour ripeness. McKelvey was not paying attention to the words unfolding around him. He was thinking about something his wife had asked him to do, and now he couldn't quite remember the details. They had shared a rare moment during breakfast that morning, McKelvey guzzling a coffee while standing over the kitchen sink, Caroline up early and eating a bowl of granola at the table. She had raised her head to him, yes. Words spoken. But now he was at a loss.

“Charlie?”

McKelvey startled, and said, “Sorry?”

He lifted his head and smiled benignly at Paul, the group moderator. McKelvey had been doing this since he was a child, the same quick little boy's smile that carried him through school when his grades weren't good enough. It was simply a part of his physical character now, like chewing the skin of his thumbs.

“I said, ‘Did you want to say anything to Tim?' From your experience?”

McKelvey blinked at Paul, then looked over at Tim. Tim was a young man, much younger than McKelvey. A widower at thirty, a crime by any stretch of the imagination. The details were unclear to McKelvey. He believed there had been an accident.

McKelvey shrugged and said, “Maybe next week I'll think of something.”