LITMIR.BIZ

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had not seen in a long time. A place where hope meets possibility.

      “They’re going to make an arrest? In Gavin’s murder?” she said.

      “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t see how they can’t.” His thumb went to his mouth, and he chewed it for a second, a nibble between the canines. “Or at least it opens them up to spending some goddamned man hours on this thing. I swear, Balani’s done almost no work on this in the past six months. Let it go cold.”

      She looked at him. “If it was this man you say—”

      “Duguay,” he said. “Pierre Duguay.”

      “If it is this man, this Duguay, what will happen to him?”

      McKelvey said, “Face trial, likely for second degree murder. If convicted, he’d get life. Maximum twenty-five, minimum ten. In reality, he’d probably serve eight to ten years behind bars, the last two in a halfway house or a minimum security health club.”

      “So he could be free in as little as ten years.”

      “It’s the system,” he said, as though it explained everything. “We’ve got a system run by liberal judges. You know all this, Caroline. The frustration we face every goddamned day on the job. Make an arrest and see it chucked out the window because you said something that hurt the perp’s feelings.”

      “That’s not enough time,” she said. “Not for my boy’s life.”

      “Listen,” he said, “it’s too early to be talking about specifics here. Let me get through this meeting with the Crown and see where we’re headed. Okay?”

      “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

      “What’s that,” he said.

      “How at first it’s all you think about. Punishment and prison. Even the death penalty. And then after a while it’s gone, it just doesn’t matter any more. You come to the point where you lose your mind or you learn how to get past it. I stopped thinking about an arrest a while ago. It won’t bring Gavin back. It won’t change anything. It’s a cliché I heard from some of the other survivors, but I didn’t realize it was true until just now. I didn’t realize that I would feel this way. Unchanged.”

      Survivors. He hated it when she used that word to describe their predicament. There were all sorts of words the counsellors were fond of tossing out as though it would win them points in a game of Psycho Scrabble. McKelvey cleared his throat again and said, “There will be justice; I promise you that.”

      “You don’t know that,” she said. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

      “I already said it. So there.”

      She looked at him like a sister to a brother, a friend to a friend. She knew him. She knew Charlie McKelvey better than anyone else. Knew the weight behind those words he had spoken, knew there wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t envision revenge. For things were black and white for Charlie. She looked at him, and he saw in her eyes how the past couple of years had changed her. They had both changed. McKelvey knew he had gained weight, all of his shirts stretched and his sports coats too tight, and his face looked heavy and tired, and what little empathy or humour he had left after almost thirty years on the job was long gone. With Caroline the change was inner, as though through the darkest days of the struggle she had discovered within herself a new reservoir of strength and hope. And peace. He understood in that moment that they were standing on opposite sides of a river, the water was rising, and it was getting harder to decipher the other shoreline.

      McKelvey wanted to change the subject, in fact wished he hadn’t brought it up at all. He said, as he moved to the cupboard and pulled down a mug, “I spoke with Paul after the meeting. I guess he wants me to help this kid out a little, talk to him. Guy lost his wife after two years of marriage.”

      “Are you going to do it?” she said.

      “I don’t know what I’d say that would change anything.”

      He went and took the pot from the stove and poured some tea into his cup. He held the pot for a moment, recalling the day Caroline had brought it home from a pottery night class at the high school. It was hand-painted, and the colours ran, and when glanced at quickly, it appeared to be the handiwork of a kindergarten student. It was during remembered moments such as these that McKelvey found enough feeling for his wife, enough shared days, to see him through.

      “It’s healthy,” she said. “That’s what people do when they’re hurting, they come together, they share. People have been doing it since forever. Sitting in caves talking about their—oh my god, their feelings...”

      He replaced the pot on its pad on the counter. “Listen.” He stopped for a moment, looking for words. “Paul seems to think everyone has the ability or the desire to sit down and discuss this kind of stuff with complete strangers. What the fuck am I going to say to this kid?”

      She looked at him, and he felt smaller. But it was the truth.

      “God almighty, I’ve delivered that kind of news in person enough times, Caroline. You know what I’m saying? Standing on someone’s front step at midnight, hat in hand. I don’t need to come home and do it in my spare time, thank you very much.”

      Caroline went to speak but stopped herself. She looked at him for a long minute then lowered her head to her journal. He turned and stood against the counter, nursing the hot tea. It was peppermint. He kept smacking his lips in an attempt to like it. He wasn’t a fan of tea to begin with. It seemed to McKelvey that you could divide the world into two groups: tea drinkers and coffee drinkers. There were lifestyle and philosophical differences, an attitudinal chasm. He drank black coffee, six to eight cups a day, starting with the first cup grabbed on the way to the office for seven a.m. His guts were cramped and boiling by evening, requiring a bedtime shot of PeptoBismol, a sleeping pill, perhaps two. Caroline used to read aloud to him studies published in the newspaper about how coffee caused cancer of the bladder or blindness or erectile dysfunction, insanity or death. It was always something. But now it seemed to McKelvey that the joke was on anyone who thought they could cheat death simply by eating a certain way, cutting this or that out of a life, by following the so-called rules laid out in schools and in churches. No, death comes when death damn well pleases, and you often don’t even have time to put your underpants on.

      “This tastes like somebody’s chewed gum,” he said and spat a mouthful into the sink. He poured the rest of it down the drain and moved to the fridge to wash the taste away with Diet Coke. He drank straight from the plastic bottle, four big swallows that burned and fizzed down his throat.

      “I hate when you do that,” Caroline said without looking up. “Ever heard of germs?”

      “You should see some of the stuff I touch in a day,” he said, wiping his mouth with the cuff of his dress shirt.

       And he saw himself through a vivid and stark lens, all the places he had been in a lifetime on the job, the rooms and hallways, all the things his hands had touched, the bloodied doorknobs and the bloodied cribs...

      “I can just imagine.”

      “Oh,” he said, “I don’t know that you can.”

      She finished the line she was writing, then she closed the book and held it to her chest, saying, “I’m going to go draw a bath. Do you want it after I’m done?”

      McKelvey shook his head.

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

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