The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  “What’s her name?” McKelvey said.

  Jessie was quiet, and she stared at the road ahead. Just when he was beginning to think she would never give it up, she turned to him with red eyes and said quietly, “Emily.”

  Uniformed officers wove a spider’s web of yellow police tape around the perimeter of the blackened rubble, the scorched and twisted remains of the auto body shop. They closed the street at both ends. A police cube van was brought in to act as the situation headquarters. As the sun rose, the city’s media assembled at the periphery, television stations jockeying satellite trucks to provide live feed from the scene. The beamed images recalled days of Gaza, Belfast. The victims would be identified through dental records and DNA.

  One of the vehicles parked outside the shop was traced to a new member of the city’s organized crime task force, Detective-Sergeant Raj Balani. There would be many questions raised, leads followed to their end points. Links would be drawn between the deal made for one of Balani’s top civilian informants, a Marcel Leroux, and Balani’s involvement in the milieu. What was he doing at the auto body shop, and what went wrong?

  A gas explosion was ruled out, and the journalists filled the air with their assumptions of organized crime, drawing conclusions by what was left unsaid, relaying the scant information provided by the public affairs officers. A photograph on the front page of the Sun the next day would show cops dressed in white space suits carting three black body bags from the still-smouldering ruins.

  Twenty-Seven

  They crossed at the old swing bridge at Little Current. Something about the island immediately reminded McKelvey of the east coast, a trip he and Caroline had taken through rural Maine the year before Gavin was born. They’d stayed in a Cape Cod-style bed and breakfast, slept in late and made love in the mornings, laughing because they tried so hard to be quiet. It brought back good memories, the sense of this place. Cut off from the mainland, life here was slower, better. People lingered at the Post Office to talk about the weather and who had cancer. Boats on trailers in long gravel laneways and wild flowers growing among the weeds in the ditch, mailboxes with red flaps sticking up, and even the air smelled fresher, like it was a place where people could live a good life and be happy.

  He pulled over to the dirt shoulder to check the backpack for the printouts Hattie had provided, but there was nothing. The clip for an automatic pistol, heavy calibre, the box of gauze, a half-dozen cake donuts. He had forgotten the papers in the confusion of the night. Jesus Christ. Scenes from those dark minutes rushed forth, the sounds and the smells, the deep fear that surged through his crotch as they met in the dark—he was fighting for his life in that hallway. He squeezed his eyes shut then opened them again. He knew the address was on Government Road. Christ, the island wasn’t that big. Ask a gas station attendant. He chewed at the skin of his thumb a little and looked out the windshield at some black birds fluttering among a stand of trees across the road. It was the wound that was making him lightheaded. His life energy ebbing, he could feel it.

  “Are you going to ask me for directions,” she said, “or are we just gonna sit here?”

  He looked at her. The face of her, the girl and the woman. His son’s lover, a girl for whom he would have given his life. It made him proud to think of his boy in this way. Reverence for the mother of his child. It made him feel close to this girl in a way that he could not explain; he did not know her from a stranger, truthfully, and yet he knew he would give her anything she needed in this life.

  “Kidnappers generally don’t ask for directions,” he said.

  “Is that what this is, a kidnapping? Officially?”

  “That all depends on you,” he said. “Perspective is everything, kid.”

  A coy grin and the wheels turning, the street-savvy con performing the calculations.

  “I guess I do have some juice here after all, eh?”

  “Whatever you want to call it. Sure.”

  “Relax, Charlie, I’m not going to lay charges or anything,” she said, and it was the first time she had called him by his name. “The way things were going back there, it was just a matter of time. You think Duguay’s a bad dude, that asshole Luc was a real son of a bitch. I heard rumours he was setting Duguay up, spreading stories to the big boss. Just keep going up here. Stay on 6. I’ll tell you when to turn off. It’s a white house with an old barn off to the side.”

  McKelvey pulled the little truck back onto the road and shook off an overwhelming rush of fatigue. His eyes were raw, and his leg was pulsing with pain, and there was a nightmare awaiting him back in the city. But all he needed to do right now was keep the truck aimed between the lines of this road which had been waiting for him all along.

  Just outside Providence Bay, they pulled into the long dirt lane of the home Jessie had described. It was late afternoon. McKelvey sensed the shift within the girl, her body tensing, anxious. She was silent, sitting forward, twirling her hair with a finger as they eased up the laneway. McKelvey parked behind the only other vehicle, a Dodge minivan. He cut the engine, and they sat there. A dog barked. The late day sun was stepping back, giving way to a golden sacred evening of early summer. McKelvey smelled the absence of the big city, the fetid air blown through sidewalk vents, and it was good. It reminded him of the smell of summer back home, the wild flowers and the hay browning in the sun, the smell of lakes and creeks and rivers drying out.

  “Looks like she’s home,” he said.

  She nodded. He heard her draw a long breath. She was out of the truck and halfway to the side porch when the screen door opened, and a woman with a strong family resemblance was standing there. Her face was heavier with age, and the black hair was beginning to grey, but there was no mistaking the woman was Jessie’s aunt. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, and her hands, he noticed, were stained with mud or earth. He pegged her at forty-five. She stood there squinting, trying to comprehend. Her niece standing there, the context and the confusion. McKelvey slipped out of the truck but stood behind the door, an interloper.

  “Jess?” the aunt said.

  The stripper and the street urchin dissolved in that single moment, right there and then, transforming back into the girl she had been and could be again. Jessie cried as she took the four steps in two jumps and was wrapped in the arms of her aunt. McKelvey looked away, over to a golden retriever tied to a long rope, lying in the last of the sun. He thought of the old German’s dog, Rudolph, and how he figured he liked dogs after all.

  “My god,” the aunt said, “I didn’t expect you home. What’s happened? Jess?”

  But Jessie just cried, and she clutched.

  “Who’s your friend?” her Aunt said.

  Jessie turned toward McKelvey as though she had completely forgotten her guest. She wiped her nose and she said, “This is Gavin’s dad. Charlie McKelvey.”

  The aunt’s face told McKelvey that she knew the story of the boy, of his boy, and his place in all of this. He stood there behind the door of the truck, and he gave a little nod.

  “I don’t understand,” the woman said. She looked Jessie up and down and laughed and said, “My god, child, what are you wearing?”

  Jessie sniffed, and she glanced at McKelvey, her swollen eyes pleading.

  “There was an incident,” he said, the first thing to come to mind. He indicated the shiner raised beneath his eye as explanation. “With her employer. She’s okay, don’t worry.”

  The aunt narrowed her eyes and was about to speak when McKelvey saw her face change shape, and it was a look he instantly recognized. He saw his wife standing in the kitchen years earlier as they discussed, or argued about, the son who was drifting from them. The look that fell across Caroline’s face was the look on the aunt’s face right now, and it was a look McKelvey understood was born of defeat, or worse, the acceptance of that defeat. This woman knew that where the girl was concerned, the stories were necessarily embellished. This is what happened over time to the lover or the friend or the parent of an ad
dict, too. It was always something, always some new emergency to deal with.

  “You folks must be starving,” she said.

  McKelvey closed the truck door and limped towards the porch. The aunt followed him with her eyes, but she didn’t say anything. He grunted as he hefted himself up the stairs, and his forehead broke out into a sweat. The aunt held out her hand and said, “Peggy Rainbird.”

  “Charlie,” he said. “And I’m pleased to meet you, m’am.”

  Inside the house, it smelled of freshly baked bread and something else, fresh soil, and it reminded McKelvey of his grandmother’s house. It was a century home, an old shotgun farm house with a kitchen three times as big as any other room in the house. They stood in the kitchen while Peggy put a kettle on the stove. He saw down the hallway to an open door and spotted the reason for her muddy hands. There was a chair and a pottery wheel set up, a square of canvas set out for a drop sheet.

  “Go on and get changed,” she said to Jessie. “Your room’s still in the same place.”

  Jessie went through the kitchen and up the stairs. Sounds of drawers opening and closing, then water running for a shower. Peggy turned to McKelvey and said, “You’re Gavin’s father. Pardon my surprise. I understood from Jessie that his parents were killed in a car accident some years ago.”

  He made a face and put his palms up.

  “My sweet girl always has a good story,” she said.

  She reached above the sink to a shelf, pulled down a tea pot and dropped three bags in. McKelvey liked her. The way she moved, the way she looked him right in the eye. A no-nonsense sort of woman. Something in her reminded him of Hattie, and he thought of her back in the city, dealing with the mess he’d left behind. How he wanted to be with her.

  “Jessie has not had an easy go,” she said, turning to face him, folding her arms across her chest. The stance gave McKelvey the feeling he was in for a declaration of the state of affairs. This small woman with the youthful face was not a hayseed or a pushover. “I don’t know what story she gave you, or what version. She grew up in Sudbury, a rough section called the Donovan. Her father passed out on the couch one night when she was four years old, burned the house to the ground.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “I didn’t know about that.”

  “Her father was killed in the blaze. My sister was hardly capable of raising children on her own. She could barely look after herself. And Jessie, well, she fell through the cracks.”

  “She mentioned there was abuse,” he said.

  Peggy nodded slowly. She said, “My sister wasn’t overly selective when it came to companions in those days. Jessie was molested at the age of seven by a man who was living with her mother. By ten she had developed a personality disorder. And then, of course, like adding gasoline to a fire, she discovered the great escape of drugs and alcohol. From there it was like watching a line of dominoes fall.”

  “She said she never really knew her father,” he said.

  “Jessie doesn’t know what she remembers or what parts she made up.”

  “She’s lucky she had you,” he said.

  “I never had any children of my own, Mr. McKelvey.”

  “Call me Charlie.”

  “You probably see a middle-aged woman living out here in the country, and you make one of two assumptions. She’s gay, or she’s one of those crazy cat ladies. I’m neither, and yet here I am. I like life out here, Charlie. We’re just away, that’s all. Away from the noise and the constant movement.”

  “I’m starting to dislike the city myself lately,” he said.

  “I realize that it’s hard for her to come back and live here again. I give her the distance she needs to get things sorted out. She’s not ready to be a mother yet. I know about the drugs and charges for prostitution. I’ve been through the whole thing, so I can only imagine what brought her home this time.”

  “She was hanging with some pretty rough characters, it’s true,” he said. “But I think she’s trying. She’s not on drugs, I know that much. None of the hard stuff, anyway. You can tell by her eyes.”

  He decided against further extrapolation at this point. It wasn’t his place, and the aunt seemed to have the situation well covered.

  “When she’s ready to get the counselling she needs, when she’s ready to stop hiding in drugs and alcohol, then I’ll be here. With Emily.”

  She poured herself a glass of water from a jug in the fridge, filled a glass and handed it to him. He drank the cold water, and it was the best he had ever tasted, clean and tasting of river rocks and the earth.

  “I’m sorry about your son,” she said. “I never met him, of course, but I know what he was trying to do for Jessie. Has there been any progress in the investigation? Jessie said one of the detectives told her that there were no suspects. She mentioned that man’s name, the one on the news a few months ago. The biker who hung himself in his cell...”

  “Marcel Leroux,” he said.

  “That’s the one.”

  It was too complicated a thing to open up right here, right now. The pieces were falling into place. Marcel Leroux working out a plea bargain to net Duguay and also avoid charges in Gavin’s murder. Duguay serving as the big prize for the Crown, and also Balani and Leroux’s convenient fall guy. Balani the one pulling all the strings, playing both sides. It wasn’t the first time a good cop had lost his way, but still, it was the ultimate betrayal.

  “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 o
ut 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.