Crimes Against My Brother (16 page)

There was one more thing the two women talked about. Sara was giving up a scholarship to university to marry—she had applied the very day Ian had met her, and a scholarship had been offered.

“I’d give up a dozen of those,” Annette said flippantly. What was this scholarship worth? It was worth some twelve thousand dollars a year. “Ha!” Annette laughed. “And by staying at home you’ll have a hundred.”

“You’ve reached the big leagues now,” that beauty said, with such unaffected innocence that both she and Sara laughed.

Sara, without telling Ian or anyone else, wrote the university, thanking them but saying she would not be attending. Then, with resolution, she walked to the post office and mailed that part of her life away.

There was another, hidden, part of her life too—a part that you might see if you looked closely and carefully at Ethel’s face. She and Ethel—they had grown up as little Injun Town girls, with the pulp yard just down the way. On sunny mornings in the old back porch, near where Ethel once saw a huge black rat, Sara and she used to set out their table and have a tea party, and Sara would read Trixie Belden books. She would read very professionally too, turning the pages with a good deal of form. But one day long ago, in that old lopsided porch where they were having a tea party, something happened. They were both there at 10:32 a.m., and then ten minutes later they were not; they had gone somewhere with someone.

No one but Ethel knew how Sara had protected her sister by saying “No, no, no!” and stamping her foot. And if you’d looked at her face at that moment, the word
no
meant more than refusal—it was a declaration that the act being committed was such a betrayal, and that she, as a child, understood this. The man she was talking to had given them candy and told them he knew where a prince was. And they had run down past the blocks of wood in the pulp yard to see—both little girls.

The man then told Ethel and Sara that if they drank what he gave them, they would see a prince. Sara had nothing to her name but one dress, and neither she nor Ethel had ever seen a prince. So they drank and got happy and then dizzy. And Ethel said she wanted to lie down. And suddenly Sara realized she had put Ethel in a terrible danger, because it seemed neither girl could walk well. She looked up at the man and smiled timidly, and then looked at the ground and pretended to be looking for something special.

She told him they had to go back to their house now, but he told them if they took their dresses off, they would be able to put other splendid dresses on because the prince was coming.

The man told Ethel to come back behind an old cardboard siding, where the new dress was. It had stars and diamonds on it, he said.

“No,” Sara said. But the man took them behind the pulpwood, in behind the cardboard. Ethel said she wanted to see the dress, and the man began to take Ethel’s dress off. But Sara stepped in between them and tried to tell the man she didn’t want the dress, that it didn’t matter if she saw the prince. That is all she could remember, stepping between him and Ethel and stamping her foot: “No, no, no.”

Sara was a little girl of six then, and now she did not know if she was still a virgin or not—she did not know anymore what it was that had happened. Only that Ethel had stood there watching as Sara said no. She thought Ethel too had forgotten it all. But one day last month, as if she remembered something, her eyes brightening, Ethel had said, “Now, Sara—your really, really prince has come, just like I prayed for you. See!”

There was one thing that worried Sara about Annette. And that was Annette’s friend, the young man who worked at the stables downriver, Ripp VanderTipp. And the very day she went to show Annette the diamond Ian had given her, Ripp was with her. Annette was troubled and worried when Sara came up to her, and Sara knew she had picked just the wrong time to show the ring.

When Annette saw this diamond, her face turned and her features distorted. She tried to be happy for her friend, but she knew she didn’t sound like she was. It was three times the size of the little diamond Harold had once bought her, when she had stayed up late practising how to sign her name Mrs. Harold Dew—with a flourish.

Ripp was there to tell Annette that Lonnie wanted to see her, and so she had better go down.

Annette went downriver, took off her shoes and sat in her little bedroom, where her life seemed very dark, where she could recall not one pleasant memory—where all her thoughts of being loved and wanted seemed a lie, and she had no idea what to do. She thought of the odd little house she lived in—thought too of her mom and dad and how they themselves lived, bickering over nothing. What, then, would happen to her?

She had trusted Lonnie—or had she? Well, she was wilful as well. And now, she realized, she had been naïve. She did not know if she was pregnant, because her periods had been irregular since she was fourteen. In fact, Dr. Hennessey had often been concerned about her, worried that she might develop blood clots, and had her tested at the hospital here and in Moncton. Yet nothing seemed to come of it except blood pressure tests. Dr. Hennessey told her that in years to come she must have regular checkups and perhaps someday she would need blood thinners. Why was that? Well, because he was an old man and believed he could tell things because of how thin the veins in her fingers were. Strange, she thought, that he’d picked up on this instantly when she turned thirteen. Twice since then she had developed blood clots in her legs; and for Annette who loved to dance this was now painful, and she had to take medication.

What was now happening seemed far more serious, however. And as yet she had gone to no doctor.

She’d had a pregnancy test, and had handed it to Lonnie yesterday and then left the shed—not able to look at it herself. And now he had told Ripp to have her come see him, and he was going to tell her if she was or was not pregnant. And if she was—because she had done what he had asked her to do—what would happen then? She thought about her mother, and what the gossips would say, and what others along Bonny Joyce would say. About Annette, who thought she was so much better than everyone else, who was so full of herself! And what about that man who supposedly had millions and was in love with her? It was a lie she had wanted to believe, because then she would get back at Harold—and them all. Yes, get back at them all—for why had nothing spectacular
happened for her? So this rich man was her way to be spectacular. Yet she didn’t even know where this supposed millionaire really lived. She would be a laughingstock.

And when she had asked Lonnie about him two days ago, Lonnie got furious and it frightened her. He’d called her down, told her she still owed him $5,300 and that she had ruined herself. So now she was not only worried but sick and ill. She thought of Sara and all her happiness, while she, Annette the wise one, was alone and pregnant.

“What will happen now?” she asked the statue of the Virgin. “Please help me!”

A voice—and she could never say what voice it was; in fact, it must have come from deep inside her—said, “Sara. Go to Sara. She will know what to do. She will help you because she loves you. You must rely on her. She, in fact, loves you more than anyone else.”

But Annette’s deeper secret and more envious thought was this: if she did go to Sara, Sara would protect and help, which was fine—but then what would happen? There would be no chance with Ian—and this is what she was now secretly hoping for, a chance with Ian. So no, she couldn’t go to Sara. And this moment brought it home and she could no longer deny it.

She went to Lonnie Sullivan. As soon as she entered his shed, he looked at her sternly.

“Well, I thought you had more sense,” he said. “He didn’t use protection and either did you—what kind of girl are you? I had you pegged for someone a lot smarter than that there—I should have nothing to do with you.” He sniffed and rubbed his nose and looked at the newspaper, and made pencil marks on a certain page, trying to solve a crossword puzzle. “All you wanted was his money—he caught on.”

She sat down on a little stool and started to cry; she had never cried so much in her life.

He read the paper while she did. Then he tossed her a box of Kleenex. “There is an easy way to get out of this mess—go back to Harold and have him marry you. He’d be so happy to have you back he’d never know the difference.”

“No,” she said. “Leave me alone—leave me alone—I just want to be left alone.”

“Then there is someone else—just maybe?” Lonnie said. He sounded compassionate; he smiled and his eyes shone just a little bit.

“There is no one,” she said. She looked up at him, thinking exactly the same thing that he was. Their eyes met and both of them knew it.

Then he said, “But it’s too late now. You can’t hurt Sara—she has been too kind to you.”

“I don’t want to hurt Sara,” she said, lowering her eyes, as if he had read her thoughts. She began to tremble.

Lonnie thought for a moment, twisting a plastic cigar wrapper in his hand. “Well … who’s to say? All is fair in love and war! In fact, didn’t she steal Ian from you once? As far as I look at it—”

“No, she didn’t do that!”

“The way I look at it,” Lonnie said quietly, smiling, “as soon as he went to town … The way I look at it.”

She wanted to believe him more than she’d ever believed anyone in her life. In fact, she had to.

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. What will I do?” But she glanced at him—yes, she knew whose fault this was. What a fool she had been to travel down that long ugly road to Truro with him—and for what? Why had she believed anything he said?

Lonnie only smiled. “Do you love him?”

She made no answer. She just stared out at the clouds that seemed to rush by the window.

“Then use what a woman has to get him,” Lonnie said. “And if it does not work—go back to Harold, have the kid, and I will be there for you.”

“Who will find out?”

“Find out? No one in the world—who can you trust if not me?”

She left the table, left the shed, left the yard, shaken and confused.

Lonnie stood at the door watching her go. After a while he waved.

At this point there seemed to be nothing for Sara to worry about. Sara certainly loved Ian. Ian thought things were settled. Ethel and Mrs. Robb did as well.

So why did he marry Annette?

Many in town a generation ago say it was because Annette was Annette and simply willed it. It was as if suddenly she decided enough was enough: she would not give up a chance at a man with a small fortune—to her it was that—just because of loyalty to someone so plain who relied upon her so much.

The destructive forces in any friendship always end in betrayal.

It started simply enough. And Annette was in fact sent by Sara to him. That was a stroke of luck. Did Sara know this? Begging Annette to go, did she relinquish some superior hand to an equally superior twist of fate? As the brightest of my students, Terra Matheson, mentioned: just as Ian in his heart of hearts thought he must fail because he felt unworthy of the money, Sara’s test to Annette was of a friendship that was impossible.

Still, Sara herself bade her go to Ian. Annette needed this opening; she could not have done it by herself. And this one request by her friend made her determined to see it through.

So Annette went to Ian’s store one evening a few months before the wedding, a deceiver sent by the one she needed to deceive, to tell him that Sara was sick and could not come by to see him—they had been out shopping all day for things for the wedding and she was exhausted.

“She said she will call first thing in the morning,” Annette said.

Ian thanked her and stood a little apart, near two fridges that were pushed out in front because they were on sale. The place had the smell of wiring and lights, and a feeling of dispossession that always permeates dry electrical places, that always gives the impression of man at odds with himself and his own nature. It was a place where a somewhat gangly, serious and naïve boy was surrounded by things he had “fixed up.”

“I am a fixer upper” was how he described himself to her. He wanted to impress her finally. (But he also knew the large store was much more than that—it supplied two-thirds of the river with appliances, wiring, lumber and wallboard, and lumber and lights from his store had built fourteen houses in the upper subdivision in the past two years. That made him one of the most important suppliers on the river and one of the richest—and he had reinvented the store since he had bought it, to make all this possible.)