Slow Recoil (13 page)

“You really should upgrade to the full cable package,” she said. “Thirteen channels, God, I'd go insane.”

He could see that she was working through something, knew her well enough now to measure the depth of her moods. It was ironic, he thought, how she viewed herself as a mystery too dark to be cracked, when in fact she was all there to see if you looked hard enough. Sometimes you just had to squint to see things for what they were, or maybe turn them upside down.

“Do you think I'm doing an okay job, Charlie?” she said. Curled up there in his chair, she seemed what, fourteen, fifteen? She looked it. Her wet hair pulled up in a towel. She was so young.

“You're a good mother, Jessie,” he said.

He took a seat on the sofa across from her. She looked at him, and he saw that she wanted to believe him. This was the place where he always found himself on rough terrain with this girl. Something inside her made it impossible for her to see herself in all of her strength. There were things you could tell a person and things a person had to find out about themselves all on their own.

“How do you know?” she said. “I mean, how can you be so sure?”

He said, “I know. I've seen it. Gavin's mother. My own mother.”

“But you don't think you were a good parent.”

He looked at her, then he sort of tilted his head to one side, a poker player trying to make up his mind on how to play out this hand.

“Why are you so hard on yourself?” she asked.

“I figure I was tougher on Gavin,” he said.

“Okay, why were you so hard on him then?”

He said, “He reminded me.” He stopped for a minute and thought of something. It stuck in his throat. “He reminded me of myself.”

It was the conundrum of the ages, McKelvey figured. How we tried to kill the things in others that reminded us of the worst in ourselves. Killing this ugliness. From father to son, and so on and so on. It wasn't fair, not at all, because a man couldn't be a good father until his own father had passed and he stood there staring into the void that was left. How many nights had he dreamed that Gavin was alive, really alive, that it was all just a big mistake—only to wake to the cold reality of that empty space. But there was a moment in there, upon waking, wherein he felt the greatest rush of gratitude for a second chance to take a run at this thing.
Fathering.
It was something.

“Gavin was very stubborn,” she said and smiled at some personal memory. “Both of us, really. Most of the kids living on the street are what you'd call extremely independent. Strong-willed. Something happened, and it pushed them out—usually abuse, right—but it's their own stubbornness that keeps them from accepting help. That's the truth of it, Charlie. Gavin knew in the end what he had done, the home he had left, and the chances he was blowing. It's why he was getting help and trying to get away from the Blades.”

“You should counsel kids,” he said. “You could reach them. God knows the cops have no effect. They see us as the sharp end of the system, we're the bad guys. After a while you get tired of giving people the benefit of the doubt. You see through the bullshit.”

“I'd rather cut hair,” she said. “I've had enough of that life. I don't want Emily to ever know about all of that. Will you promise me that you'll never tell her about my past, Charlie?”

“That's your call,” he said.

“I don't want her to think of me that way. The way I was,” she said.

“When you're a little older, and Emily's a little older, you might see things differently. How your past can be an asset. You know, show your daughter how you turned your life around. It takes guts, Jessie.”

She sighed and shifted in her seat. “It's hard sometimes,” she said. “Staying clean.”

“You're tough,” he said, and felt stupid for it. He wanted to tell her that it was more than that, that he looked up to her. Her knew about the short stick she'd drawn in life. The early abuse and the childhood fire that had claimed her father, all of the dark days she had stared down alone. It was the easy thing to do, to give up. Everybody was doing it these days. Fuck it. Someone will come along and look after you, help you find a cause for your blame.

“It's funny, because I got out of one scene and found another one. It just changes shape. The girls in the salon, a lot of them are into clubbing. They go to these after hours booze cans in the east end. Out by…what am I saying, you know where I'm talking about.”

“I know exactly where you mean,” he said. Oh yes, he'd walked through his share of booze cans, among that crew of the living dead, the cursed ones caught in that godawful crack between midnight and dawn. Looking for some kid from Jane and Finch who'd dropped out of high school in Grade Ten, who'd just committed his first armed robbery at the Gas-n-Go, on the fast track to the pen.

“I went with them a few weeks ago to this warehouse. It was the music and the crowd, the lights. The whole scene brought everything back. It was horrible. I almost puked, Charlie, I was that scared. Scared that I was in a dream, that this life I'm living right now was going to be taken away from me.”

He waited for her to bring out the rest. And he knew there was more to all of this. It was no different than his years on the job, sitting across from a perp in an interview room. You could coax and pull a little here and there, but for the most part the story had to come out the way it had to play out to its own rhythm.

“I wanted to leave. I knew I had made a huge mistake. My NA sponsor told me she'd fire me if I so much as stepped inside a bar. But you know how it goes. You're there with a group of people. I've been doing my placement with these girls for two months. I didn't want to pull up lame on them.”

Again she paused, and again he waited. He had all night.

“Some of the girls bought Ecstasy from this guy I sort of recognized from around the salon. He knows one of the girls there, Sasha. I bought a few hits from him… ”

“Did you drop them?” he said.

A single tear squeezed itself from the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek. It was all she was willing to give, for she quickly sat up and dried her face with the back of her hand. “No. No, I didn't. I got my head back on and tossed the shit out the window of the cab I took home. Now this fucking asshole Devon comes around the salon and keeps mentioning how I owe him for the pills. I wasn't born yesterday, right? I know a thing or two about how it works on the street. This guy throws out names, these heavyweights, the Crips this and that. He's a wannabe gangbanger. I don't want to tell him that I know the score, I've been down that road. It'd ruin my name in the business down here. It's a small circle, Charlie.”

“It's probably not worth very much, but I'm proud of you,” he said. And he knew he should move to her, put his arms around her. He sat there for a long moment, too long, remembering all those cemetery nights his wife had cried alone while he stood there, a statue in his own living room. He got up and crossed to the girl, and she stood to meet him, and she closed herself inside his arms, and she was a child again.

“You don't need to worry about all of that,” he whispered. “You go up to the Island and enjoy your vacation. Don't think about the city, Jessie. We'll get everything worked out, I promise.”

McKelvey was already visualizing his approach to this thing, his jaw set tight. Five minutes with this Devon character, and he'd have him re-oriented in his life path.

“I don't know what I'd do without you, Charlie,” she said.

In McKelvey's mind it was the other way around. For Jessie and Emily represented the only points of light flickering in the distance. The horizon was murky otherwise. They shone there up ahead through the nights of loneliness and regret. There were days wherein he truthfully wondered how he would reach the end of the month, to say nothing of the decade, stretching things an hour at a time. He circled job ads for security guard positions at least twice a week but never followed up. He went to the coffee shop near the police headquarters on College, hoping to accidentally on purpose run into a few old colleagues. There was a sense of things winding down, of being outside the realm of real activity and function.

“Well,” he said, looking to make her smile now, “I think we should eat those Krispy Kreme donuts, since Emily's mother won't let her have any. Cruel and usual punishment.”

She pulled back and slapped his shoulder. The sight of her red and puffy eyes made him want to carve a hole in his chest to put her inside, lock it tight. Her and the little girl both. The city was a tough show at the best of times, even more so for an ex-addict walking the line. And then, as though on cue, a police siren wailed across the top of the night.

As usual, McKelvey wakes at just after two. This sleepy-eyed, shuffling nocturnal routine. He stands there at the toilet with his boxers pulled down, willing the trickle. The stop-and-go. Standing there in the dark, in the quiet. The flow of his output is of some mild concern of late. Then again, he is old. Or just about. This is the simple, unalterable fact of the situation—he is no longer on the lip of the threshold, rather he has passed through the archway and is well along the path. How many pisses taken in a lifetime? A million? So it is to be expected, he guesses, this middle of the night stopping, starting. The infrastructure of the plumbing showing its wear and tear.

When he is finished, he closes the lid and makes a mental note to flush in the morning so he won't wake the girls. He pats warm water on his face and looks at himself in the mirror. At his bloodshot eyes, into his eyes, beyond them. Sees something there to be reckoned with, an outstanding account on the books. He opens the medicine chest, finds the bottle of pills. He opens the top and sprinkles the remaining tablets into his hand. He opens the lid of the toilet with his foot, tosses the pills in there with the dark golden pee. He flushes with a mild sense of loss and closes the lid. Perhaps the narcotics, he thinks, once entered into the Toronto water system, will assist in softening the sharp edge of a society already on its knees.

Goodnight, Toronto…

NINE

T
he next morning the
Sun
tabloid carried a Page 8 story about a blaze at a Rexdale garage. Fire crews called out in the middle of the night. The place burned to the ground. Jarko's Automotive. A photo of the smouldering brickworks, the roof collapsed in a pile of rubble. There was a quote from the responding platoon captain:
“Trucks from West Command
arrived on the scene within four minutes. We found the structure
fully involved. The fire marshal is conducting an investigation into
the cause of the fire. We are having difficulty locating the owner of
the business at this time…”

McKelvey's phone rang as the news was sinking in, and it startled him. “McKelvey,” he said.

“Good morning, sunshine. We're going for a drive, you and me,” Hattie said, and he could tell from the rush of sounds that she was driving, already on her way over, perhaps even idling at the curb. “I'll be there in five minutes. You've got some explaining to do.”

He was dressed in jeans and a well-worn button-down dress shirt left untucked. He stood on the sidewalk and smoked a half cigarette he'd found in the pocket of the shirt. Stale as sawdust, but still. It was a gift, akin to finding money in your winter coat the first time you wore it for the season. The day was grey, a cloudless pewter, but it was still warm as summer. He would take what he could get.

Hattie pulled up. On duty, at the wheel of an unmarked unit. He popped the door and got inside. She did a quick shoulder check and gunned it into the traffic, swung a quick turn and got them headed across King then down toward the waterfront. He immediately felt at ease inside the cruiser. The radio, the screening between the front and back seats, the smell, the history.

“So,” she said. “What's up?”

“Oh, you know,” he said, “a little of this, a little of that.”

She shot him a sideways glance. “Smell like you just had a cigarette,” she said.

“Half a cigarette,” he said. “A little gift of the gods.”

“Still smoking at your age,” she said. “Shame, shame.”

“I'm on a ration system.”

“Now there's an excellent idea,” she said. “Bet nobody ever thought of that one.”

They stopped for a red light. She waited half a beat, reached out and hit the siren so it squawked once and the dashboard lights strobed. She checked both directions and rocketed them on through the intersection, down beneath the overpass and out the other side. McKelvey shivered as they passed through, knowing his boy's body had been thrown beneath the concrete of the expressway overpass, thrown there among the weeds and the trash. His boy had lain there a full day before someone found him and reported it. All the while the city continued on above him, flies buzzing at his closed eyes, and his mouth.