The Weight
of Stones
The Weight
of Stones
C.B. Forrest
Text © 2009 by C.B. Forrest
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Cover design: Vasiliki Lenis / Emma Dolan
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RendezVous Crime
an imprint of Napoleon & Company
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Printed in Canada
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Forrest, C. B.
The weight of stones / C.B. Forrest.
ISBN 978-1-894917-78-0
I. Title.
PS8611.O77W43 2009 C813'.6 C2009-900675-8
For Tracy
‘tears & laughter’
It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind, that you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself.
And for that wrong committed must you knock and wait a while unheeded at the gate of the blessed.
-Kahlil Gibran
Contents
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
The meetings were held Tuesday nights in a small conference room tucked away down a maze of hallways at St. Michael’s Hospital. McKelvey went as often as he could, which wasn’t often these days. If he missed a session, he would lie to his wife about the meeting, waiting until they were in bed with the lights turned out, the quiet of the night interrupted only here and there by the barking of a neighbour’s dog. He would carefully reconstruct the session as though he were on the witness stand, telling her about what this person had said, how it had helped him see something in a new light. These were harmless lies, bedtime stories told to soothe a wife. The truth was he hated the meetings, everything about them. The stuffy, stale heat of the room, the pale and lost faces of the other men around him; their vulnerability. These were tortures that dragged on for over an hour. But he went as often as he could. He went for her.
For the entire first year, they went together weekly to a psychologist specializing in grief and trauma of their specific variety. The sessions were intensive, intrusive and altogether more stressful than simply going for a long drive, which was what he much preferred. He felt a man could sort out almost anything on a long piece of open road. A highway let a man be a man on his own terms; there were no repudiations. But he went with Caroline, went for her. She did most of the talking, she did most of the crying, and he sat there like a pillar of flesh, Kleenex box on his lap. He got through it a minute at a time, gritting his teeth and nodding when he felt it was appropriate. He understood that opening the tap on this thing—that to turn the knob or flick the switch—would not signal the beginning of the end of grief as the professionals assured them, with their promises and their fifty-minute hours, their air of subtle superiority. It was, he knew, in fact just the opposite. The opening of the valve meant only the beginning of acute and chronic suffering, infinite in its scope. In his line of work he had learned and accepted the simplest truths of the human animal. There were places from which a person could not return. A wound becomes a scar, and the scar fades with time, but it will never be undone.
“The worst thing,” Caroline confessed during one of the sessions, “is how he died. Alone like that. Away from us. I can’t help feeling that we cast him out. Families aren’t supposed to do that…”
For a husband to hear those words come from the mouth of his wife, to bear the silent weight of those goddamned words—to hear it spoken and to be unable to do anything. That was true powerlessness, an unnecessary cruelty to a man already on his knees. For in the light of day, and in his heart of hearts, McKelvey knew that things had not been good between him and Caroline for a long, long time. Even before this, there had been the distance between them. They had stumbled through the battlefield of marriage and come out the other side, a little battered and bruised, but still together, still standing. Negotiations were held, compromises brokered. As with all couples who weather the storm, they had found a spot of common ground and made a sort of quiet peace.
The routine had been shattered by a single late night phone call. Their lives had shifted, buckled. The known world had collapsed around them, reinventing itself in muted colours, muted sounds. Days became a blur of handshakes and sympathetic looks, downcast eyes, hushed whispers as he walked through the halls at the office.
It was understood there was a process involved here, levels and phases to be negotiated. There were the stages of grief, as clearly outlined in the pamphlets