The Weight of Stones (30 page)

“Things have gotten a little complicated,” he said. “Anyway, it's not important right now. I want you to know that I'll be around if she ever needs anything. If she needs someone she can trust down in the city. I'd like to help get her into a college or something. I could help with that.”

“I always had a soft spot for Jessie. You should have known her when she was a little girl. Always carrying a little pail around trying to catch frogs or minnows down in the creek when she'd come to visit. She was happy. I'm just sorry that I didn't step in sooner. I'll always wonder what would be different if I had taken her in with me sooner. Before everything went to hell. Maybe I could have changed her life.”

“You can't blame yourself,” he said and immediately felt foolish for saying it.

“No? Who should I blame then? My sister? Her father? It's just life, Charlie. We all draw sticks, some short and some long. I stopped wondering why all of this had to happen to one girl a long time ago. There's no answer. It just is.”

McKelvey said, “I think I know where you're coming from.”

“You should eat something,” she said, “you look tired. You're pale.”

He eased himself into a kitchen chair and sighed because it felt so good to take the weight off his leg. He thought of all the questions we ask ourselves across the days of our lives, all the wasted hours spent trying to answer them in silence.
Why?
Why me? Why now?
The whistle blew on the kettle, and Peggy filled the teapot with steaming water. Then Jessie was coming down the stairs again. She came into the kitchen dressed in old jeans and a sweater, her hair wet and combed back.

“Hey, Charlie, come here,” she said. “I'll introduce you to Emily.”

The bedroom upstairs was warm and smelled of blankets and baby powder. McKelvey held the child, and the tears came so easily, so naturally, and they came without a sound. It was a wonder, a miracle, all soft skin and good smells, and McKelvey thought only of his wife and the news he would deliver to her, this gift from their son. In that moment, standing in the small hot room with the taste of tears in the corner of his mouth, he saw what he had done, how far he had come to once again hold the flesh of his flesh, the blood of his blood. He was overcome with gratitude, and nothing else mattered, least of all the cost. The child's small hand explored his face, squeezing his nose. He laughed and kissed her forehead, and he closed his eyes. He looked ahead for the first time in years, saw himself with silver hair, photos hanging on his wall capturing the progress of a little girl.

It was getting late in the day, and he knew there would be a call out for his license plate. Peggy insisted he stay for a bowl of soup, and he did so gratefully. His mood was lifted to its highest point in years, regardless of the consequences, the wounded. He could feel the energy leaving his body, a new brand of exhaustion threatening to fall. He wondered about his ability to get back on the highway, make it home. He wondered for a minute about his own death and knew he wasn't ready. He shook the doubt and filled himself with the beef barley soup and three thick slices of warm homemade bread. Outside, dusk was falling, turning the sky the lightest shade of purple.

“I need to get back to the city,” he said and glanced at his watch.

McKelvey knew he had to get moving, or he would stay the night, perhaps longer. Yes, fall into the simple and good rhythms of life in the country. All of the aspects of life back home he had run from. The rural mail boxes and the cars on blocks, the same conversations at the barbershop and the grocery store, and the good people who arrived at your door with pies and stews at the first sign of familial need.

After she cleared the dirty dishes, Peggy got an address book down from a cupboard and got McKelvey to create a listing for himself. She handed him a folded piece of paper with her own information printed neatly in pen. He put the square of paper in his shirt pocket and suddenly recalled the moment he had accepted the note from Paul at the hospital group. That night in the hallway, the soft-spoken moderator catching up with him. And he thought of Tim Fielding. The school teacher had left three or four messages on his machine following the confusion at the tattoo parlour. Despite the promise of peace in the country, he was pulled back to the city with its awful deeds and white noise and subway smells and the school teacher and Hattie and all the people who were his family now, waiting for him to come home and do the right thing, to close the loop on the endless knot.

“I apologize for the surprise today,” he said, “but I appreciate your hospitality. You have a real nice place out here, Peggy. A real nice place.”

Emily was down for a nap, and Jessie was out on the porch having a smoke. He took out his wallet and put a hundred dollars in cash on the kitchen table. Peggy shook her head.

“With all due respect, Charlie, I don't need your money…”

“Please,” he said, “for diapers and all of that. It's not much, but it's all I have on me.”

She shrugged and left the money sitting there.

“Thank you, for all that you've done. For Emily,” he said. “And for Jessie. I'd like to stay in touch. I'd like to visit again, too, if that'd be all right with you.”

“You're welcome to visit any time, Charlie.”

He put his hand out to shake, and she looked him the eye as they shook hands. He limped to the porch, the blood rushing to his head, dizzy, and he stepped out into the early evening. He found Jessie in a wicker chair, smoking a cigarette with her little feet tucked up against her bottom. It was the sort of slow and warm country evening perfect for sitting in a chair and counting cars on the highway.

“I'm going to get that money you saved up, and I'll wire it.”

“You won't get it back,” she said. “Not from those people.”

He said, “I'll get it back. And with interest. Should be enough for your tuition.”

She nodded, and her eyes welled up.

“You have my number. You ever need anything, or if you come back to the city and need a place to stay...”

It was harder to leave than he'd imagined, or it was the exhaustion and the wound, or perhaps it was simply his getting older that made a lump form in his throat as he moved to her. He put an arm around her and smelled the cigarette smoke clinging to her young body like all the bad memories.

Twenty-Eight

A
t a gas station phone booth on the side of the rock-cut highway, he slipped his credit card into the machine and called his wife on the west coast with the news. Tractor trailers roared past or downshifted as they slowed to pull in for fuel or food. Caroline was slow to comprehend, to absorb the information, and she cried, then they cried together, and he told her how sorry he was for all of the things that had happened to them. It was like a dream, a story someone told you on a train.

“She's real, Caroline,” he said. “I held her with my own hands.”

He looked up to the darkening sky, cloudless and still, and he felt tired but strong. He was stronger than he knew. He could keep going if he had to, go on forever for his wife and his son and the idea of this family he had made. He thought of his father, and he wished the old man were alive to see how he had come through.

He hung up and dialed Hattie. She answered before the first ring was completed.

“Jesus murphy, Charlie. Where are you? Are you all right?”

“I'm okay,” he said.

“They're ready to put a bulletin out on you,” she said, “but I promised Aoki that you were coming in with your lawyer. She's been handling this whole thing like a bulldog. “

“I just held my granddaughter. My granddaughter,” he repeated. “She's beautiful. Her name is Emily…”

“God,” she said. “Charlie.”

He could hear Hattie's soft crying, the emotion coming uncoiled, and he reached into his shirt pocket to take out his cigarettes. The lighter flicked, and he took a long drag, his chest whistling. He was so tired, the weight of the years slipping from his shoulders. It was as though he had walked a thousand miles, and only now, at the end of the long journey, could his body finally admit its true exhaustion.
What a strange trip, this life. It's a dream we live,
he thought.

“Charlie,” Hattie said. “You have to come home now.”

“I guess I'm in some trouble,” he said.

He sounded like a little boy, the simplicity of it all, and it made her laugh through her tears.

“You're in a little trouble, yeah. But we can deal with it. It's self-defense. Just come home safe. Aoki's already been talking with the Crown, Charlie. Professional Services is all over Balani's house, his files. There's talk of a full internal investigation,” she said. “We can work through this. I'll be there with you.”

“I have a picture of her,” he said. “I think maybe she's got my nose or something.”

“The poor girl,” Hattie said. They listened to one another breathing across the static line. He took the small picture from his pocket and looked at it until his eyes watered and his throat felt tight. Finally, Hattie said softly, “Come home, Charlie.”

He filled up the little truck and bought a day-old coffee at the gas station. He bought a package of Tylenol and sprinkled four tablets into his palm then swallowed them down with a snap of the head. The road was wide open, and it was where he wanted to be, where he belonged with his head full of thoughts. His thigh was burning again, and he was lightheaded. Tired, so tired. He lit a cigarette and rolled the window down. The air smelled of early summer evenings in the country, freshly mown grass, wild flowers. And the wind felt good on his face. It would help keep him awake on the long drive home.

Twenty-Nine

U
pon his release from the prison in Kingston, Pierre Duguay moved through the underside of life, carving out a place for himself in rented rooms in other cities, in other towns. He made some good money for a few years cutting his own deals. But the work and the life became harder, then it was impossible. He was old at fifty-two. He worked the door of a tavern in north-western Ontario, manhandling drunken tradesmen, miners and peddling dope by the gram. He took a job working construction for a time, then got on with a painting crew, mostly ex-convicts looking to stay out of the system. He moved across the yellow and brown landscape of the prairies like a pioneer seeking new frontiers, finally coming to the oil camps of northern Alberta, where a man could re-invent himself without raising questions. He let his hair grow out and kept a beard most of the time, lines of steel grey laced within the black. He drifted from the life he had known, and those he worked with or drank with learned to respect the deep silence within him. He went by a different name, and in time it no longer stuck in his throat or sounded foreign when called out across a room. The polished crease across the flesh of his neck sometimes brought inquiries from the bold and the curious, and he invariably dreamed a different story until the truth was distorted even to himself.

He was often with a woman, but it never meant anything beyond a warm body and a break in his loneliness. None of them held a light to Chantal LeClair, who had ruined him for love, for she had known him, known his potential. He understood he was in a holding pattern of sorts, biding his time. He could lose hours sitting on the edge of his bed in his rented room, hovering there, lips working in silence as he sorted through the details, what he would do if he could relive those years again, where he had gone wrong. In this way Duguay became an old man who never stopped looking over his shoulder as he manoeuvred through the days of a life lived beneath the surface.

Now and then, Duguay would think of his mother, wondering where she was or if she was even alive, calculating her age against his own. And it was during these moments that Duguay truly understood that he had fooled himself into believing he had escaped the fates of the men in his old neighbourhood. He had watched them stumble through lives filled with prison records and bad teeth, poverty and despair, living for Saturday night quarts of beer. Eventually the muscles slackened, and the stomach began to hang, no matter how tough you were. He thought he was smarter than all of them, faster and stronger. But he was exactly the same, because he was their son.