The Weight of Stones (2 page)

The moderator regarded him for a long moment, then he said, “That's what you said last week. And perhaps even the week before.”

McKelvey smiled and let the little poke roll off him. Then he shrugged and looked over at the young widower. He was a handsome kid, handsome in the fashion of a high school teacher, which is what he was. Sandy hair was swept back over a high forehead, and his clear eyes were framed by modern eyeglasses, small rectangles. McKelvey saw himself at thirty, intense blue eyes burning beneath a lid of thick black curls cropped short, already a married working stiff weighed down with the long shifts and routines of a life. Even back then he and Caroline had owned the choreography of roommates, roommates who happened to be intimate on a regular schedule. Even then it was only to answer a physical need, and it was in reality something they felt they could do for the other without losing ground one way or the other. He couldn't imagine the house without her.

McKelvey lowered his head and said, “I wish there was something I could say, you know. It's just that...I mean, with my job and everything, I see what happens to people every day. It happened to me. It happened to us. I can't change anything. And I don't know how I'm going to live to be eighty if every day is like this.”

Paul nodded and smiled. He said, “That was
something,
Charlie. See, you did have something to say.” Then he moved on to the man on McKelvey's right.

The men's voices melted to a murmur then, the vague sound of a TV bleeding through the wall of a cheap motel room, and McKelvey got lost in himself. He drifted out and beyond the confines of his physical body, eyes closed, blood hammering in his ears, until finally it was the only sound he could detect, soothing as the methodical
whoosh
of wipers sliding across a windshield.
Shook shook, shook shook.
There was nothing for a long time, and it was good, just the blackness of the back of his skull, of the deepest part of himself, and when he squeezed his eyes there was a burst of fireworks, coloured pins, geometrical designs. Then he was pulled to a specific place and time, an earmarked memory. As easy as closing your eyes and moving through time.

He is a boy standing in the sunshine on the sidewalk, squinting as he strains to look all the way up at his father, Grey McKelvey. There is another man standing on the sidewalk, someone who knows McKelvey's father, another miner, and while this man's features and voice are blurred, McKelvey understands there is a level of admiration here for his father.

“Al Brooks at the Legion was sayin' you might run for the union,” the man says.

Grey McKelvey laughs with just the right amount of humility. Flashes his smile and dips his head, the modest and practiced gesture of a man well used to an easy sell.

“Oh no,” Grey chuckles, “I don't think I'm cut out for that racket. No sir, not me.”

“Well, anyway, Grey, where are you two boys headed?”

McKelvey's face is warm in the sunshine, his eyes blinded by the soaring yellow light, the sky above them as liquid blue as the combat knife his father keeps in his top dresser drawer, nestled in with his wool socks and strange square packages with rigid rings at the centre. He feels his father's big hand squeeze his own small hand. He feels his father take a step closer to him, a wall of human security, sixteen feet high, eight feet thick.

“Taking Charlie here to get his hair cut over at Bud's...”

Then they are transported, and McKelvey sees and smells the inside of the old barbershop on the main street, the multi-coloured bottles of after-shave and hair tonic, the neon blue disinfectant for the black combs, the lather creams, the strong manly scent of sandalwood and alcohol, tobacco smoke and sweat.

Old Bud sets a board across the chair, hefts him up, ties a red apron around his neck, pushes his head forward and begins to work with the scissors. The sound of stainless steel parts working in concert. All the while McKelvey keeps his eyes closed, pretending not to follow the conversation between his father and Bud and the other men assembled in the barber shop, this sanctuary of all things male. They speak in loose code about local women, about their physical attributes, then on to hunting, drinking, eventually coming back around to a war story, for they all, with the exception of Bud, due to his age, had fought in the war in one way or another. Whether soldier, sailor or airman, the war is their generational bond.

Then the haircut is done, and he opens his eyes to the world once again. Bud takes a hard-bristled brush and whisks away the hair trimmings from the back of his neck, and the brush hurts, but he doesn't say anything, not ever. Bud with his big boxer's face that reminds McKelvey of an old bulldog with sad bloodshot eyes. Then Bud gives him a lollipop from an old coffee tin he keeps under the cash...and he can right now taste the sugary orange...

McKelvey opened his eyes. Like waking up. The meeting was closing in its traditional fashion, some of the men hugging, others patting one another on the back, congratulating each other for progress made in this battle against
grief
—or perhaps simply for making it through one more Tuesday night. McKelvey was one of them, and yet he was
apart
. He found it impossible to imagine himself slumped forward in his chair, head in hands, crying in front of strangers. He couldn't do it; it wasn't
in
him. He slipped out the door and was down the hall before the moderator finally caught up to him.

“Charlie,” he called, “Charlie, wait up. I'm glad I caught you,” Paul said, pausing for a breath. He smiled. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Listen, about tonight—”

“No, no. I wanted to ask a favour. It's Tim, he's...”

McKelvey glanced at his watch, but not really. He said, “It's just I'm running late and...”

Paul moved a hand to McKelvey's shoulder and looked into his eyes, unblinking.

“My daughter was hit by a car on her way to school six years ago, Charlie.”

“I know, Paul,” McKelvey said, “I know, I know.”

“We're in the same club, you and me. All the guys in that room. We're all on the same side of the street watching everybody else go on about their lives over on the other side.” Paul was a tall, slender, soft-spoken man. His eyes were hazel, moist. His eyelids fluttered when he spoke. He struck McKelvey as the sort of rare man who manoeuvred easily and completely without shame in the realms of emotion,
sensitivity.
It was for this reason a certain type of man—a man like McKelvey, say— often assumed at first glance that a man like Paul must be weak.

“Nobody else knows what it's like. How can they?” Paul said.

McKelvey said, “I know...”

“I need you to help Tim. He's not doing so well. Will you have a coffee with him, maybe go for a beer? I think you could help him. Maybe help yourself while you're at it,” Paul said.

“I guess,” McKelvey said. “It's busy right now at work, but maybe in a week or so.”

Paul reached into his pocket and handed McKelvey a folded square of paper.

“Give him a call, Charlie.”

McKelvey held the note between his thumb and forefinger, as though he had been handed a summons to appear. So the whole thing was pre-meditated, planned before the meeting had even begun. Paul was no fool, McKelvey knew. He knew the man had a way of getting more out of the group members than they set out to divulge, putting on this act of the eye-fluttering half-wit. The man possessed the sort of quiet intelligence that could not be underestimated by a police detective. McKelvey was always on guard in the presence of psychologists and social workers and group therapy moderators. Their craft was emotional sorcery.

“All right,” McKelvey said, shoving the paper in his pocket, “if it'll get you off my back.”

He turned and walked away, wishing he'd rounded that last corner about thirty seconds sooner. That was the truth of it, and he felt a pang of guilt for even considering the request a burden. It was a privilege to be asked.
You're such
an asshole, Charlie.

Three

M
cKelvey came through the door of his home, the simple abode he and Caroline had purchased on a quaint little drive off Queen Street East long before the east end neighborhood known somewhat piously as “The Beach” was out of the price range of a working class family. The tiny old white-washed cottages nestled across from the beaches of Woodbine, Kew Gardens, Scarborough, Victoria Park, had over the decades been bought and sold a dozen times, renovated for the yuppies of the 1980s, renovated yet again for the high tastes of the urban young in the 1990s. At the very closing of the twentieth century, the old cottages wore skylights, their innards gutted to accommodate open concept lofts, kitchen islands beaming with marble and slate, walls smooshed in the latest designer colours, and owners could be overheard on the local Starbucks terrace dropping names like Gluckstein. The McKelvey home was finished with a newer kitchen and hardwood flooring in the hallway and living room, but that was where the upgrades ceased. All else was preserved in its original simplicity. McKelvey did not see the sense in replacing a functioning faucet simply because it didn't
look
a certain way. Caroline, in her continual frustration, said it was one thing to change just for the sake of change, but another thing altogether to forget that time moves forward. She said one look at his collection of blazers and ties was evidence enough that McKelvey did not buy into the myth of first appearances.

He put his coat on its hook and stepped lightly down the hall to find her seated at the kitchen table. He watched her there for a moment, unnoticed, a voyeur. She was an attractive woman, plain and confident in her beauty, at ease in sloppy clothes, old fraying pyjamas. She was writing in her “healing journal”, a cup of herbal tea at hand. He longed for her patience, for her ability to pause and sit like this, to be quiet and still, to listen to the beat of her own heart against the din of the city. It was half past nine in the evening. The room smelled of toast made some hours earlier, the lingering scent of burned bread. She looked up. Their eyes locked, and for the first time in a long time, they were in the same room together at the same time.

“Home,” he said.

She glanced at the clock. The Tuesday night meetings ended at eight. He caught her eye and followed her gaze to the timepiece on the wall. He blinked. Like a kid caught, getting ready to explain.

“I went for a drive after the meeting,” he said with a shrug. And he was chewing gum, which confirmed everything. He coughed, too, and cleared his throat on cue.

“You need to quit, Charlie,” she said. But there was an indifference to it. Or perhaps it was simply exasperation. A lifetime with McKelvey and his bad habits, broken promises.

“I'm working on it,” he said. “Christ.”

She tilted her head a little but didn't say anything.

“Listen, I was going to tell you after I got the confirmation,” he said, “but I have a meeting with Aoki tomorrow morning. To find out what the Crown plans to do with...you know, with all the information I've been putting together.”

She stopped and looked at him, this strange expression on her face; it was a look he had not seen in a long time. A place where hope meets possibility.

“They're going to make an arrest? In Gavin's murder?” she said.

“I don't know. I mean, I don't see how they can't.” His thumb went to his mouth, and he chewed it for a second, a nibble between the canines. “Or at least it opens them up to spending some goddamned man hours on this thing. I swear, Balani's done almost no work on this in the past six months. Let it go cold.”

She looked at him. “If it was this man you say—”

“Duguay,” he said. “Pierre Duguay.”

“If it is this man, this Duguay, what will happen to him?”

McKelvey said, “Face trial, likely for second degree murder. If convicted, he'd get life. Maximum twenty-five, minimum ten. In reality, he'd probably serve eight to ten years behind bars, the last two in a halfway house or a minimum security health club.”