The Weight of Stones Read Online Free Page A

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.
    â€œBunk 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.
    â€œMy friend Gorley Robinson needs a place to sleep, you know,” Gavin said.
    â€œGorley Robinson, and who’s that?”
    â€œMy friend. He lives in the closet right now. But it’s too crowded with my shoes.”
    â€œAh, 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