The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  She said, “I don’t know what to think. You keep everything inside, all your cards close to your chest. I think somewhere along the line this stopped being about justice. This is about being the head of a family, about wronging a right. About being a cop and seeing the investigation get ground down. How am I doing so far?”

  “My family was destroyed, Hattie. Do you understand that? It’s the first piece of information I wake up to, and the last thing I fall alseep to. This weight on my chest, these thoughts on my mind. It’s in every breath, every step. I want to die knowing things were made right. Everything I didn’t do to help Gavin when he was alive is what I can do now. It doesn’t get any simpler than that,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything. She drank some wine. After a while, she looked at him and said, “Revenge is a funny thing. Makes people do all sorts of crazy stuff. But you have to ask yourself. Is extinguishing this ex-con’s life worth turning against everything you worked for as a cop for thirty years?”

  “I can’t look at it in those terms,” he said. “I’ve moved beyond the moral dilemma.”

  “Bullshit. You worked on the side of justice every day. You were part of the whole machine, you were part of the system. And so you have to believe in the system, Charlie, or it means everything you did in this job didn’t mean a fucking thing... It’d make you no better than they are. And you are a better man than that.”

  “We just sort of lost touch,” he said, just talking to hear himself, to maintain the cadence of their voices in the stillness of the house. “We didn’t see him much back then, Gavin I mean. I think I might have seen him a couple of times on the street, trying to wash windows or something, down by the highway overpass. Hell, I know I did. But I was stubborn or embarrassed, and I turned away. I know Caroline gave him money a few times. Probably more than a few times. She’d meet him in the food court at the Eaton Centre, slip him a hundred.”

  Hattie listened, waiting for him to find the words.

  “I knew he was screwing around with drugs a year before Caroline even suspected anything. Our line of work, right, you can pick it out. It was just some weed back then. I said to myself, let it go. He’s just a teenager smoking a few joints. He’ll find his way. Maybe he needs to get into some trouble to learn a lesson. Doesn’t mean he’ll end up on the street. I remember talking to a few of the guys on the Drug Squad, you know, about getting them to scare the shit out of Gavin and his friends. Bust them in the parking lot of the high school, put on a big show. Just something we talked about, and it made me feel like I was working on something. We just never got around to it. I had my work, and I stayed away more and more.”

  “What happened?” Hattie said.

  McKelvey sighed and shifted his weight. “He started stealing,” he said. “His friends got rougher. His moods were all over the place. We’d argue, and he’d put holes in the drywall. He stole some of Caroline’s jewellery. It was an ongoing escalation, and it finally came to a head. I guess it always does. He was rude to his mother one night, said something so vulgar that I slapped him across the face. I mean hard. Hard enough to make his nose bleed a little. Then everything went quiet. I told him to get the hell out of the house and not to come back until he was ready to act like a human being. A fucking civilized human being.”

  McKelvey saw it happening as he spoke it. How many times had he replayed that single night, that single two-minute portion of time? Countless. Over and over and over again, then over again. It was like poking at a hangnail or a diseased tooth; no matter how painful, you couldn’t break the habit. It was something he deserved, this self-torture. He felt oddly lighter now, though, much lighter than he had ever felt in all of those closed rooms with grief counsellors and therapists, and all those nights pretending to read those goddamned thick books Caroline brought home from the library.

  “I shouldn’t have hit him,” he said.

  “Nobody’s a perfect parent, Charlie. It’s the same in our job, we have to make decisions in a split second.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “and so did he. So did Gavin.”

  She got out of her seat and came behind him, locking her arms around his chest, her cheek to his cheek. He didn’t want her to hold him like this, but her grip was resolute, and soon he was crying without a sound, and his eyes were closed and everything was gone from his life. Then it was the smell of her and the feel of her skin on his skin, and they were kissing through the tears, kissing in spite of, or perhaps because of, the sadness.

  “Shhh,” she said, and took him by the hand back to the bedroom, where they fumbled like teenagers new to sex. They were pioneers stumbling though the wilderness here, coming to an open patch of ground that seemed suitable by default. Buttons were undone, pants removed, limbs tangled, confused, as though they were strange dance partners unfamiliar with the subtleties of each another’s physiological machinery.

  McKelvey stopped, rolling away. He stayed on his back, chest rising and falling.

  “What’s wrong,” Hattie said. “Do I have bad breath or something?”

  “It’s not you,” he said.

  Hattie propped herself up on an elbow. She looked at his face, brought her fingers to his cheek. The room was already filling with the closed-in scent of their bodies. “Come on, Charlie,” she said, sounding like a child denied, “let’s just screw, okay? We’re both adults here. I’m not going to get all weird on you after this.”

  “I’m not myself,” he said. “I don’t…”

  She said, “I’ve been a cop a long time. I’ve got my share of baggage, too, you know.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing, Hattie. I’ve lost my way,” he said quietly.

  “And you don’t want to bring me down with you, is that the story?”

  “I don’t blame my wife for leaving, let’s put it that way. I’m glad she did. She has the capacity to see the bright side, to maybe start again with the time she has left. I think I’m finished. I mean, I can’t see anything up ahead that’s worth waiting for...working for…”

  She moved her hand, playing with the sparse grey hair on his chest.

  “Everybody loses somebody,” she said. “You know that because you’re a cop.”

  He didn’t say anything. His eyes were closed as she continued to touch his body.

  “How many doorsteps did you stand on at three o’clock in the morning? A dozen? More? I don’t know how many times I told somebody the most important part of their life was gone. Maybe fifteen, twenty. I stopped counting after the very first one.”

  He listened to her voice, and it was the same as when he allowed himself to drift away to somewhere else, to get lost without really leaving, playing through memories and dreams. Hattie said, in the same voice she used for testifying in court, “This mother in Bedford reports her twelve-year-old son missing. She’s used to him playing in the woods near their home after school. Kid always comes home for supper at six. It’s after nine when I show up at her door to tell her that little Jimmy’s been found hanging from a skipping rope tied to a tree. And the worst part was, it was a genuine accident. Kid was trying to swing like fucking Tarzan.”

  “We become zombies,” he said, but his voice was hardly a whisper.

  “I remember the faces of the mothers, the fathers. I see over and over again what happened to their faces in that instant I opened my mouth. Like you can see this weight falling on them, this heaviness bringing them down, like they’re dying right in front of you...they’re dying, but they’re still standing.”

  “Sometimes I used to pretend I was in a movie,” he said, his eyes still closed. “I had these lines to deliver, and nothing else was real. It worked for a little while, I guess. I just went in and did it and then it was done.”

  “What was it like when you got the call,” Hattie said, “about Gavin?”

  “It was my boss.”

  “Aoki?”

  “She insisted on taking it. She called and then sent a ghost car over to pick us up. She was waiting for
us at the hospital,” McKelvey said, playing through the memory of that goddamned terrible night. The sickest feeling that ran from his crotch to his stomach, then all the way up to his throat, a fear that rang at the very core of his being, utterly helpless. “She’s a good woman. She’s tough.”

  They were both silent for a time. Then she turned to him. “Well, I think,” she said, and a grin was coming to her pretty face, “I think we should have a screw for every time we had to go and do that, Charlie. It’s the worst job in the world. What do you think, sort of like padding the karma for us?”

  He smiled at her black sense of humour, the tangled mess of her hair, and the fact that for a night, for no reason at all, he was lying next to her naked body. He was drowning, and the waves were getting higher, and he saw that she was offering a buoy. Something to clasp, to hold onto. He moved to her and felt that her body was chilled. He pulled himself into her, and they made love.

  Seventeen

  In the morning, Hattie was up early for work. She was pulling on her bra in the semi-darkness of the room. McKelvey lifted himself on his elbows.

  “How about dinner tonight?” she said.

  He rubbed his sleepy face with his palm and yawned. He shook his head. “I can’t make it tonight,” he said, still dozy. “I have this thing with a friend. A tattoo.”

  She looked at him for a minute then continued dressing. “I won’t even ask,” she said.

  He fell back to the bed and closed his eyes. Now that rest had finally come, he couldn’t get enough. He drifted for a time, his mind running and running, then he heard the front door close, and he was out cold.

  In the dream, someone was knocking on the door, ringing the doorbell. Ringing and knocking. It was just after ten, and McKelvey was still asleep. The knocking and ringing did not cease but seemed to grow in both volume and urgency. He raised his groggy head and listened again. He was not dreaming; it was his front door. He scrambled from the tangle of sheets and, dressed in his boxer shorts and white undershirt, ran to the front door, fumbled with the deadbolt, and swung it open.

  “Mr. McKelvey?”

  A stocky woman who looked to be in her late thirties was standing on the front step, wide-eyed and breathless. Her face was somehow familiar, but he couldn’t place her. It looked as though she had dressed in a hurry, pulling a long coat over Saturday track pants, and her brown hair was pulled back in a hasty ponytail.

  “I’m Carl Seeburger’s daughter, Anna. I’m sorry to bother you. It’s my father, you see, someone poisoned his dogs last night...”

  “Poisoned them,” he repeated, both tickled by the notion and suitably impressed that one of his seemingly humdrum neighbours owned the capacity to toss some balls of tainted hamburger over the fence. One just never knew.

  “...and when he found them in the backyard—two of them anyway—he suffered a heart attack,” she said, then paused to draw a much-needed breath.

  “Oh my god,” McKelvey said, forgetting the long-standing feud, forgetting the midnight prayers wherein he sought specifically this, the deaths of those same bastard dogs.

  “He’s at Mount Sinai. They have him heavily sedated, and it looks like he could be in for a triple bypass. All of that Limburger has taken its toll,” she said and tried to smile but instead stopped just short of breaking into tears. “I have a favour to ask, Mr. McKelvey. On behalf of my father. He was very implicit in his instructions. You’re the only neighbour who is still on speaking terms with him.”

  McKelvey’s mind spun. On speaking terms? What did the old German need, a few pints of blood for his operation?

  “I don’t know how I can help,” he said. He felt awkward standing there with the door open, dressed in his skivvies. Then suddenly his cop’s mind rewound her opening statement, and it struck him in the face with the force of a sledgehammer. ‘When he found them in the backyard, two of them anyway...’

  “The Doberman survived the poisoning,” she said, “and we have nowhere to put him. I’m allergic to both dogs and cats, and anyway I’m not allowed pets in my condo...”

  “Oh no,” McKelvey said, shaking his head, “see, I don’t really have a thing for dogs.”

  “I’m begging you, Mr. McKelvey, my father was implicit in his instructions.”

  “So you said. Still. I mean, I don’t...” He shrugged and turned his head, looking around the hallway as though his current situation explained everything.

  “The Doberman, Rudolph, is highly trained, Mr. McKelvey, and he’s—”

  “I’m not home very often, with my job and everything.”

  Anna squinted and said, “My father said you were retired very recently.”

  McKelvey was taken aback by the neighbour’s seeming awareness of his life.

  “Well, yes, but I’m consulting on a project. I have no way of knowing whether I’ll be home at night, so the dog could starve to death. Take him to a kennel and board him. That’s what those places are for. It’s not my responsibility.”

  Anna’s chin began to quiver, and a series of tears formed at the corner of her eyes and began their slow trickle down her rosy cheeks. His jaw clenched. The tears, a dirty trick.

  “He never got on well with other people,” she said, “but those dogs were like children to my father. He’s already in a fragile state, and if he knew his Rudolph was at a kennel, it would kill him. Please, Mr. McKelvey. Let me go and get the dog, and you can see for yourself how well-behaved he is, and I promise as soon as I can make other arrangements, I’ll come and get him. He won’t be any bother at all.”

  McKelvey stood there, stunned. If he had been groggy a few minutes earlier, he was wide awake now. His instinct told him the German was setting him up—yes, likely believing McKelvey responsible for the poisoning—and this was a sort of mean-spirited payback. The old bastard. But he hadn’t poisoned the dogs, much as the idea had crossed his mind, as many times as he had fantasized about walking over and shooting them in the fucking head with his service pistol. He looked at Seeburger’s daughter now and saw within her the desperation and emotion of all the families of victims he had worked with over the years. Her father was ill, perhaps even gravely so. He could always tie the dog up or keep it locked in the bathroom, or whatever it was people did when they didn’t want to be around a damned dog. Fuck.

  “Christ,” he muttered beneath his breath. “All right. A day or two. That’s it.”

  Anna Seeburger was gone from the front step and back within two minutes, with the sleek black Doberman on a leash, a bowl and a small bag of food under her arm. She dropped the dog off like a busy working mother dropping her baby off at daycare.

  “Whoa, hold up,” McKelvey said as she turned towards her Volvo which was still running at the curb, “give me your phone number or something, just in case I need to reach you.”

  She came back and handed him a business card. He held it with his free hand while the other held Rudolph’s leash. He closed the door and turned to see Rudolph sitting there in a perfect pose, the picture of Zen.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with you?” he said.

  The dog stared back with his glossy eyes, blinking. McKelvey moved the bowl and the small bag of food to the kitchen then unfastened the leash and hung it over the back of a kitchen chair. The dog followed him, maintaining an appropriate distance. McKelvey returned to his bed and climbed under the covers, his mind reeling from the strange irony of it all. When he opened his eyes and lifted his head, Rudolph was sitting there in his pose at the threshold to the master bedroom, a protector or a servant. Sitting there like a statue, silent.

  “So you’re the last man standing, is that it?” McKelvey said.

  Rudolph blinked and waited.

  McKelvey woke an hour later, and the dog was still there at the door, only now he was curled and sleeping. McKelvey put his feet on the floor quietly, easing his weight from the bed. He took a step, but the dog was feigning sleep and instantly raised his head, eyes open and alert. Rudolph stared with h
is big moist eyes, and McKelvey took a few steps to the door. He gingerly stepped over the dog then cautiously moved down the hallway towards the bathroom. Rudolph followed at an obedient pace, nails clacking on the hardwood.

  “Sit,” McKelvey said, turning in the hall. The dog stared at him for a moment. He remembered how the police dogs were trained with German-language signals so they would not listen to false commands. “Christ, don’t tell me the old guy speaks German to you.”

  Rudolph cocked his head to the side. McKelvey slipped inside the bathroom for a long shower. He would be just in time to meet Tim Fielding for his afternoon tattoo.

  Eighteen

  They had arranged to meet at a coffee shop on the corner of Queen Street West and Spadina. McKelvey came in a few minutes late and spotted Tim sitting at a table with a coffee. He bought a tea from a young man behind the counter who had large black rings expanded through his earlobes. He was reminded of pictures of lost tribes in National Geographic. There seemed to be no limit to the ways in which human beings were willing to distort or adorn or impale or otherwise defile their bodies. It was boredom on display in the twenty-first century. He shook his head on his way to the table.

  “Somebody looks happy,” Tim said.

  McKelvey sat down and yawned. “I finally got a good sleep,” he said.

  He wanted to tell his friend about Leonard Tilman. He’d made a few calls that afternoon and got confirmation of the arrest. Pulled over twenty minutes after an anonymous phone call. Due to his previous convictions and the conditions of his probation, Tilman would be remanded at the detention centre to await a bail hearing. McKelvey shivered with complicity, drawing the cosmic connection between himself and this stranger, Leonard Tilman. And they weren’t so different, Leonard Tilman and Charlie McKelvey, were they? That’s what he thought now. Just two lost souls, each of them drifting across the painted lines in his own way.

  He drank some of the tea and said, “Listen, I thought you’d want to know. I heard a report from a friend of mine on the force. Leonard Tilman was arrested for drunk driving last night.”