“So he could be free in as little as ten years.”
“It's the system,” he said, as though it explained everything. “We've got a system run by liberal judges. You know all this, Caroline. The frustration we face every goddamned day on the job. Make an arrest and see it chucked out the window because you said something that hurt the perp's feelings.”
“That's not enough time,” she said. “Not for my boy's life.”
“Listen,” he said, “it's too early to be talking about specifics here. Let me get through this meeting with the Crown and see where we're headed. Okay?”
“It's funny, isn't it?”
“What's that,” he said.
“How at first it's all you think about. Punishment and prison. Even the death penalty. And then after a while it's gone, it just doesn't matter any more. You come to the point where you lose your mind or you learn how to get past it. I stopped thinking about an arrest a while ago. It won't bring Gavin back. It won't
change
anything. It's a cliché I heard from some of the other survivors, but I didn't realize it was true until just now. I didn't realize that I would feel this way. Unchanged.”
Survivors.
He hated it when she used that word to describe their predicament. There were all sorts of words the counsellors were fond of tossing out as though it would win them points in a game of Psycho Scrabble. McKelvey cleared his throat again and said, “There will be justice; I promise you that.”
“You don't know that,” she said. “Don't make promises you can't keep.”
“I already said it. So there.”
She looked at him like a sister to a brother, a friend to a friend. She
knew
him. She knew Charlie McKelvey better than anyone else. Knew the weight behind those words he had spoken, knew there wasn't a day that went by that he didn't envision revenge. For things were black and white for Charlie. She looked at him, and he saw in her eyes how the past couple of years had changed her. They had both changed. McKelvey knew he had gained weight, all of his shirts stretched and his sports coats too tight, and his face looked heavy and tired, and what little empathy or humour he had left after almost thirty years on the job was long gone. With Caroline the change was inner, as though through the darkest days of the struggle she had discovered within herself a new reservoir of strength and hope. And
peace.
He understood in that moment that they were standing on opposite sides of a river, the water was rising, and it was getting harder to decipher the other shoreline.
McKelvey wanted to change the subject, in fact wished he hadn't brought it up at all. He said, as he moved to the cupboard and pulled down a mug, “I spoke with Paul after the meeting. I guess he wants me to help this kid out a little, talk to him. Guy lost his wife after two years of marriage.”
“Are you going to do it?” she said.
“I don't know what I'd say that would change anything.”
He went and took the pot from the stove and poured some tea into his cup. He held the pot for a moment, recalling the day Caroline had brought it home from a pottery night class at the high school. It was hand-painted, and the colours ran, and when glanced at quickly, it appeared to be the handiwork of a kindergarten student. It was during remembered moments such as these that McKelvey found enough feeling for his wife, enough shared days, to see him through.
“It's healthy,” she said. “That's what people do when they're hurting, they come together, they share. People have been doing it since forever. Sitting in caves talking about theirâoh my god, their
feelings...”
He replaced the pot on its pad on the counter. “Listen.” He stopped for a moment, looking for words. “Paul seems to think everyone has the ability or the desire to sit down and discuss this kind of stuff with complete strangers. What the fuck am I going to say to this kid?”
She looked at him, and he felt smaller. But it was the truth.
“God almighty, I've delivered that kind of news in person enough times, Caroline. You know what I'm saying? Standing on someone's front step at midnight, hat in hand. I don't need to come home and do it in my spare time, thank you very much.”
Caroline went to speak but stopped herself. She looked at him for a long minute then lowered her head to her journal. He turned and stood against the counter, nursing the hot tea. It was peppermint. He kept smacking his lips in an attempt to like it. He wasn't a fan of tea to begin with. It seemed to McKelvey that you could divide the world into two groups: tea drinkers and coffee drinkers. There were lifestyle and philosophical differences, an attitudinal
chasm
. He drank black coffee, six to eight cups a day, starting with the first cup grabbed on the way to the office for seven a.m. His guts were cramped and boiling by evening, requiring a bedtime shot of PeptoBismol, a sleeping pill, perhaps two. Caroline used to read aloud to him studies published in the newspaper about how coffee caused cancer of the bladder or blindness or erectile dysfunction, insanity or death. It was always something. But now it seemed to McKelvey that the joke was on anyone who thought they could cheat death simply by eating a certain way, cutting this or that out of a life, by following the so-called rules laid out in schools and in churches. No, death comes when death damn well pleases, and you often don't even have time to put your underpants on.
“This tastes like somebody's chewed gum,” he said and spat a mouthful into the sink. He poured the rest of it down the drain and moved to the fridge to wash the taste away with Diet Coke. He drank straight from the plastic bottle, four big swallows that burned and fizzed down his throat.
“I hate when you do that,” Caroline said without looking up. “Ever heard of germs?”
“You should see some of the stuff I touch in a day,” he said, wiping his mouth with the cuff of his dress shirt.
And he saw himself through a vivid and stark lens, all the
places he had been in a lifetime on the job, the rooms and
hallways, all the things his hands had touched, the bloodied
doorknobs and the bloodied cribs...
“I can just imagine.”
“Oh,” he said, “I don't know that you can.”
She finished the line she was writing, then she closed the book and held it to her chest, saying, “I'm going to go draw a bath. Do you want it after I'm done?”
McKelvey shook his head.
I
n the sombre hours between midnight and dawn, within the sleep that falls like the weight of the dead, McKelvey lost himself completely. It was the best destination, his one luxury at the end of a day that seemed to last a lifetime, hour by hour, minute by minute. Sometimes he saw the rest of his life in this way, as a series of days stacked like folded card chairs against some long table. It was his job to walk along that table, unfolding a single chair at a time, preparing a place for guests unknown, and the table had no end; it faded to infinity. It was just something to do. The way he saw his job lately, the endless hours logged to lay charges that would be turned into plea bargains or else dropped altogether. The way he saw his life at home. Hour by hour, minute by minute. Nothing came easy.
Then McKelvey startled awake from the same dream he'd been having every few weeks since his son's murder. There was no schedule to the dream, but it always returned, and it never changed. It was a dream of innuendo, shadows and murmured voices. There was no direction to it, no line to follow, as though it had been conjured in the mind of a drunk. There was only the residue of something not quite right, the pressure of impending doom, unnameable yet undeniable. Like the sick feeling he'd got in his belly as a child when he knew he'd done
something
to
someone
, but couldn't quite recall the particulars of the trespass.
He woke in a cold sweat, the sheets twisted around his legs, his breath raspy and chest clenched like a fist.
The neighbour's dogs barked and howled at the night, their empty-belly sounds made all the more stark by the late night silence of the street. Maybe somebody's cat was passing along the fence line, raising its arse in a taunt the way cats taunt a dog that is safely penned or chained. Then the barking ceased, and silence fell once again. McKelvey blinked to orient himself, wiped his face, turned to be sure his wife was still sleeping, and slipped out of the bed and down the hall to the room that had been his son's bedroom for seventeen yearsâ up to and until the teen's poor attitude, anti-social behavior and escalating drug use had popped the McKelvey family bubble of security and success. This was, they were assured, happening all the time inside seemingly happy suburban homes, a family's dream of earned contentment ripped open when a child or children passed with great difficulty beyond the stage of cute smiles and teeth too big for their mouths. Most kids made it through the minefield of adolescence a little wiser but without much serious trouble. They talked back a little, tried their hand at shoplifting or drew detention for skipping classes, got sick from smoking a joint at lunch in somebody's garage. But there was a minority, McKelvey knew from his day job and his own life, that entered a surreal zone of angst that could not be fully comprehended by anyone, professional or amateur. All parents felt responsible, but as a copâespecially as a copâMcKelvey felt a terrible burden of failure. It was the ultimate irony in life, akin to the local minister's daughter strolling around town with a swollen belly.
If a cop can't keep his own son off drugs, then who can?
The room had remained for two years as Gavin had left it when he took off at seventeen. No clear memory remained of that day for McKelvey, only a series of impressions: a muddle of angry voices, a plate shattered against a wall, threats uttered in hatred and confusion. He had lost himself that day, and his son and his wife, too. Within the tightly coiled mess of his incomprehensible frustration, there came forth the variety of anger that was buried within the memories of his own young life. He had put his hand through the drywall in the hallway, again in the master bedroom. And their boy was gone from their home.
For two years, Caroline had dusted the room without disturbing the contents. For two years, she had believed the boy would return home, eventually, when things got bad enough out there (and here was a source of constant friction between mother and father, for the mother believed the father's stubborn and hard-nosed approach, his “school-of-hard-knocks” and all of that idiotic police logic was the reason their child stayed away, despite the hardness of life lived on the fringe).
Two years later, and just a few months after Gavin's death, Caroline tore through the room like a twister with a green garbage bag. There was raw purpose to her movements. She was a robot programmed to remove every last trace of the child...
Erase
. She tore down the posters of punk rockers and gothic freaks, threw away the magazines and books, and left the remnants of her son's life at the curb for the regular Wednesday trash pickup. McKelvey had come home to find his wife curled in a ball on the boy's stripped mattress, thumb tacks peppered across the naked walls with bits of poster stuck beneath them. She was exhausted, and she wouldn't speak a word to him for four days. It terrified him to the point of inaction. He understood they were on a precipice of some sort. He felt everything shift within the deepest parts of himself, and it was frightening at first then somehow liberating. He felt as though he had little left to lose. What else was there?
Now the house was still and lonely, and McKelvey stretched out on the bed in Gavin's old roomâwhich was referred to simply as “the guestroom”, as though they ever welcomed visitors into their museum of grief. He closed his eyes, and he remembered the time when Gavin was four and had asked for a bunk bed.
“Bunk bed? What do you need a bunk bed for?” McKelvey had asked.
He saw Gavin's little face, four or five freckles on each cheek, the same thick coal-black waves that would one day become a majestic head of hair.
“My friend Gorley Robinson needs a place to sleep, you know,” Gavin said.
“Gorley Robinson, and who's that?”
“My friend. He lives in the closet right now. But it's too crowded with my shoes.”
“Ah, I see. Gorley Robinson who lives in the closet. Well, we'll see...”
McKelvey could reach out and touch the little boy's face, smell the chocolate milk on his breathâ
he was there, just there,
and for a moment his mind played the cruelest trick.
He sat up in the bed. The room was silent save for the quiet tick of a clock on a night table. Soft light from the street lamps outside bled through the Venetian blinds, painting slanted shadows across the wall. McKelvey lifted a wavering hand and reached out, blinking to clear his sight, but then Gavin was gone, faded or retreated. And he was left alone with the tormented thoughts of a guilty man, all of the rhetorical questions gathered across a lifetime hanging there in an empty room. Why had he not even considered getting bunk beds?
If I could go back,
he thought,
I would build the thing
myself. The best bunk bed in the neighbourhood, all the kids
would want to sleep over at Gavin McKelvey's...
He could see the lengths of pine, how the ladder would fit against the side with a set of brackets, and a runner so that you could slide it back and forth. He settled back onto the bed and closed his eyes tight. He felt the sting of a tear roll from the corner of his eye and slide down his cheek to the pillow. He tucked his hands between his knees to rock himself, and in this way he negotiated sleep.
T
he alarm sounds, and McKelvey slaps the top of the little black box, giving himself the gift of another eight minutes of lostness. When the second buzzer sounds, he finally opens his eyes and stares at the stucco on the ceiling with its familiar shadows. He collects his bearings; is it Tuesday or Wednesday? Time shifts, and days melt into weeks. Mondays are born and suddenly bloom into Friday afternoons. There is comfort to be found in the mundane routines.