Читать книгу The Weight of Stones - C.B. Forrest - Страница 11

Four

In 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 years— 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 cop—especially as a cop—McKelvey 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 room—which 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 breath—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.