Crimes Against My Brother (14 page)

“Oh, I’m okay,” she said, gathering the papers back, now covered in snow. When she pulled her tam on, it fell almost over her eyes and pinned her ears down. But as she turned away, he saw that her left leg was injured; she dragged it slightly.

“What happened—did you hurt yourself?”

“Pardon?”

“To your leg—what happened?”

“Oh, I got that years ago—everyone knows.” She glanced at him and shrugged. But her eyes shone with a peculiar brightness that told him she knew all the ways this could be used against her and wondered if he would.

Ian, holding one of her brochures, watched her go along the street with streetlights shining down on the pale snow at intermittent spots. He followed her at a distance. She turned from one street to another and entered a small house at the back of a lumberyard.

He did not know what to do after that, but he felt very sorry for her. Eventually he went home and put the brochure on his fridge. “Richie’s Wharf must become a historic site!” it read.

He went to the young woman’s house the next day and knocked on the heavy door. The house was so low to the ground its windows
were only inches above the snow, and a snow angel left from Christmas still clung to one of the faded crinoline curtains.

She lived with her mother and her younger sister, Ethel. Ethel reminded him of a dozen young women in these forlorn places. She was incredibly thin, with milky skin and big scared eyes, and sat near the stove in the damp hallway, bearing witness. Her face was covered in shy, almost invisible freckles.

“I didn’t get your name,” he said to the young woman he had knocked over.

She stared at him for a second without recognizing who he was, as heavy wind rattled the window and blew snow across the street.

“Oh! Ian. I’m Sara Robb—you must remember me!” Sara had heard most of the rumours about Ian but did not care to believe them.

“I know you—we were in school together back at Bonny Joyce!” Ian said. It seemed a hoax by God—the God he and his friend Evan detested and had decided not to believe in when they were sixteen—that this most beautiful one in the household was, because of an accident, burdened and deformed.

So Ian started going back to that little smoky house, which in so many ways reminded him of his childhood house, every few days after that. After a time he told people about Sara. Perhaps even too soon, and perhaps wanting to be married now that he had moved into his house, he told his staff he loved her. He even bought the family groceries and paid their oil bills.

There was one other eventuality—something else—one more thing. Here is where he ran into two other people: his old boss Lonnie Sullivan, who teased him mercilessly about stealing Fitzroy’s money; and Sara’s best friend in the world, Annette Brideau. They both would come to the Robb house, sometimes together and sometimes separately, to have tea-leaf readings done. Annette would say little to him, but now and again he would see her glancing his way with her black, beautiful eyes.

Sara was very bright and she certainly soon loved “Mr. Ian,” as her mother called him. Mrs. Robb seemed frightened to call him anything less. “Sara,” she would sing when she picked up the phone, “it’s Mr. Ian.”

Sara sat out in the sun reading on spring days when the wind blew sulphur smoke across the backyard fences. But for Ian, she would have been off to university that fall—for him, she put her studies aside.

“I am well off,” Ian told her one night, “and my wealth will grow.”

“But that’s for you—what about for me?” Sara smiled.

He told her he loved her, and he did. Ethel was ecstatic, because of Sara’s predicament—the fear that, being lame, she wouldn’t find a man. And she was the gifted one! Ethel had been terrified that Sara would be marked as deficient because of her heroic act long ago.

But Ian, though he said he was well off to Sara, did not speak of money to anyone else. He was more guarded about money than anyone Sara had ever met, and she soon realized this when she mentioned his money in front of her family.

“I don’t talk about money to anyone,” he said to her later, and as sternly as he could.

And so she did not mention it again. But her family loved him in spite of his taciturn ways.

An effusive attention was given to Ian that might have seemed calculated if it had not come from such innocent, kindly and simple people. They were kindly in the way they talked about everyone, from their neighbours to Sara’s friend Annette, who often borrowed money from them when in fact she was supposed to pay for her tea-leaf readings. This, of course, was the same Annette Brideau Ian had been enamoured by, and who was now a hairdresser at Cut and Curl up near the highway. Annette had allowed her benefactor, Lonnie, to pay for this course some months before.

Now, Annette at Cut and Curl had been hearing about the boy she had so rebuffed in high school. And hearing about his success felt akin to a stab in the back. She had come a long way from those early days. Lonnie had taught her that she must do something with her beauty—she
must take the world by storm. In fact, he was planning a trip for her to meet a man in Truro, a trip that would help him absolve a seven-thousand-dollar debt he owed. Recently one evening, before setting out to town, Lonnie had again told her that she had picked the wrong man when she picked Harold. But Annette had long ago given up on Harold.

“Picks can change,” she said, lighting a cigarette in the dark. To look at her now was to see not the young girl who had hoped to be someone special but a woman provocative, beautiful and susceptible.

“Ian’s already taken,” Lonnie said to her.

“I don’t mean Ian—I am not interested in stealing someone’s man.”

“Though you could if you wanted—with one look,” Lonnie said. He said this in a husky suggestive voice, but she was nonchalant in her agreement.

“Sure—in a New York second.”

The air was as cold in the shed as out when he said this; the smell of cigar permeated the grey room. All of which caused a sadness within her, sadness that her life might be no better—and that others she had never thought could do anything were moving ahead. Not that she needed a man to get ahead, or even thought of it in that way. She was too bright for that! Still and all, to think that Sara, who she liked to pity, would have something she herself would not.

Lonnie was commiserating and his cigar smoke seemed to indicate this in the aluminum air, with the sweet smell of ice and falling snow. He wore an old worn jacket, with a battered fur hood. And he had a bundle of money that he hauled out and flipped through before tucking fifty dollars into her blouse.

Her eyes looked at him, steady, without emotion, as he tucked the money down.

“In a second,” she said, almost to herself.

A week later Ian was in the small foyer of Sara’s house, while Annette was in the awkward position of asking Mrs. Robb to throw down the tea and tell her if she would ever find a man, a man she could trust.
A man who was sensitive, said Annette. She leaned forward in her chair, wiggling her beautiful bum, her legs entwined about the chair legs and her face almost beatific with interest in those squelched and squalid tea leaves that held so much more romance for her than the confessions or masses that Sara still attended.

“I have been broken-hearted many times,” she said, smiling at everyone with a kind of summer whimsy (even though it was not summer). “I probably will not be able to find true love, or take much more of bad love!”

“Yes, of course you will,” Mrs. Robb said.

“You see, Annette, we all told you so—didn’t we tell you so!” Sara exclaimed.

“Well, it’s been my fault—I have not been as good a friend to some as I should.” And she glanced quickly at Ian and then glanced away.

“Of course you have,” Ethel said.

“Well there!” Annette said. “Thank you, Ethel. If I ever get a house, you can come work for me.”

Ian stared at her, slightly open-mouthed; here she was in front of him. The woman he would have killed for. The woman who’d had that awful relationship with Harold—who, she said, had broken her heart. My God almighty, Ian thought, she is even more beautiful than before.

In a strange childlike way, Annette believed herself to be the most progressive person in town. For she had read all the magazines that told her she was, and held all the opinions they told her to. But now she exhibited a trait to Ian she did not know she revealed: self-absorbed naïveté, with her sweet vulnerable hope in a tea-leaf reading. He found this in its own way brilliant. For the first time since entering Sara Robb’s house, he felt weak with old autumnal desire—of sunlight flashing on a late-October afternoon against the side of a house, or the smell of auburn hair at dusk—for as any rural man knows, it is autumn, not spring, for breeding.

Annette did not want Ian and she did not want to hurt Sara—but she realized Lonnie was right: she saw Ian’s infatuation with her, and she smiled and winked.

So she set her sights on Ian. And there was no one she had ever set her sights on that she could not have.

Nor did it matter that Harold still phoned her, in complete despair over his loss and her betrayal. Once, he waited for her behind the building across from Cut and Curl. When she came toward him, he grabbed her by the arm.

But Annette could always assume an expression of grave sorrow—and she assumed it now. “Let go of me—you are hurting!” she said. She did this not because she was mean but because she had been taught to use the weapons she had.

“Someday you will come back—I promise you that,” Harold said. And as she walked away, he yelled, “Don’t think I don’t know what you are up to. I will tell Sara!”

He saw that she stopped for a second, and knew he had not only hurt her feelings he had revealed her to herself.

The one who could see a plan within the fabric of Annette’s whimsical beauty was Corky Thorn—Molly Thorn’s brother. He was a tiny thin man, ugly and happy—kind to everyone and hoping the best for others, harmless to a great degree. He had been bullied most of his life and made the best of it. He was dating Ethel—and no one thought more of Sara than he, for it was Sara who had saved Ethel’s life. This fact made him silent in Annette’s presence, and once made him say she was a phony. He had not thought she was at first—but in the last while he had become more and more reticent to speak about her to the Robbs.

“Oh, come on—she is a good friend,” Mrs. Robb would scold him, in the way people who do not know the implications (or do not wish to know the implications) of something will often scold those who do. Then she would look hurriedly about, as if distracted.

“Well, just wait awhile and everything will turn out I am sure,” Ethel would say.

And Corky would mutter something that Ethel couldn’t hear or understand.

“What, what, what?” Ethel would say. “You have to speak louder, Corky.”

“Well, did you see them going for walks? Ian will be walking and all of a sudden Annette starts walking faster, so Ian keeps up with her and leaves poor Sara behind with me and you—and I don’t like it.”

“Oh, Sara doesn’t mind that!” Ethel would laugh.

Annette noticed his dislike and countered it by scolding him about his treatment of Ethel and his poor view of women. And she would evoke a time when things were different, and say that now women did not have to be so abiding. That is, she’d decided that anyone who disagreed with her must have a poor view of women, for this is what magazines told her and this is what she believed. It cost her nothing to believe this and made her feel special. And this was the way, since she was a child, she’d found her right to feel.

“I don’t have a poor view of women,” Corky said.

“You do.”

“Don’t.”

“You do. So someday I will just take Ethel to find someone new if you are going to be so unpleasant and suspicious, Corky,” she would say. And then she would smile in a generous way. She enjoyed that she could get the best of him. She saw that everyone was a little frightened of her—and she enjoyed this as well.

Corky was indeed worried that Ethel would find someone else, and was jealous, so he would frown. Everyone would laugh at how witty Annette was, and Corky would grab his jacket and leave, walking though giant puddles with his hands in his pockets.

Someday they’ll all be sorry, he would wince. Someday.

Annette worked at Cut and Curl, and there the owner, Diane—or DD, as she was called—often talked in an immature, self-infatuated way.

Diane was married to Clive. She’d got married young and was often confiding in Annette about her problems with him. He was too possessive, and now she felt—since she owned her own place—she must leave him soon.

Clive sold hair products for men and beauty products for women and travelled along the lonely coast with his boxes of radiant-smile hair tonic. He laughed almost idiotically and would gawk at others with dull perplexity—the first time he saw Ian he’d stared at him with such an insolent gaze that Ian simply looked at him and said, “Anything wrong?”

And he’d answered by gawking more and then looking about and laughing, as if sharing a private joke with others. That is, he had heard all about Ian, and since he had now seen him for himself, he believed he was in the know and could say the exact same things everyone else was saying.