Crimes Against My Brother (19 page)

Annette’s car was small, the seats sunken. She did not push all the way over, so they sat very near to each other. And that perfume, Evening Surprise, that Ian so delighted in, lingered—not because of the perfume but because of who wore it.

They drove off along the dark highway toward the little pedestrian cottage by the small inlet beyond Bartibog. He remembered her father putting the run to him when he’d come to see her one afternoon with a few wildflowers in his hand, the flowers dropping and falling as he walked. He had been fourteen then. He’d loved her then and had watched her walk past him in her two-piece bathing suit. Now he was driving her down to this elusive place—which was simply an old clapboard camp that had been moved to the edge of the water by her family years ago. Nothing at all special about it—homely and vacant it had sat—except that it belonged to her.

The roadway to the place itself was filled with ruts and puddles, and so they parked halfway down and journeyed on foot the rest of the way. She walked ahead of him—enticing him by not looking back. The waves, warm and cluttered, could be heard on the shore.

The cottage lay bleak against an old bog that was still fissured with slivers of ice. It existed in a kind of squalor, imitative of what other cottages were, and in defiance of others’ whims and fancy.

It was called “Earned My Leisure.”

Out beyond the point was a small island and the lights of the far shore. The cottage was surrounded by the sound of those insolent waves and the continual noise of washed-up derelict boards. They stood a moment—both pretending to each other that they were doing something ordinary and innocent. The wind blew and they saw the scrape of an old bird nest in a dying tree.

She fumbled about in the dark, beside the broken steps. The wind caught and lifted her skirt, and she seemed too preoccupied to notice. Finally she apologized, told him she couldn’t find the key to the door and asked him to help her through a window.

He found a stick to wedge under, opened it finally and helped lift her through. She put her legs up over his shoulders.

It was the first time he had ever really touched her.

Once in the cottage she ran to open the door, the running itself more proof of something covert. She was out of breath, and taking his hand asked him to help her up the loft ladder, where the fuse box was. They went up the loft together, she before him. He placed the fuses in, but when he went to push the handle, she said, “Please—don’t turn it on yet. I have to ask you something. I know—but I want you to understand—that I like Sara and I think we have to realize what it is—”

This made him brave and important. He pushed her back against the wall and lifted her short skirt up over her panties.

“No,” she said. “Lie down here.”

“What if I am pregnant—what will we do?” she said later, almost instantly, as if it had been the question she was asking even at the river, when they stared out at the
Liverpool Star
—or even before then, when she’d looked up at him over the tea leaves at Sara Robb’s; a question not only in response to the fact that they were lying on the old mattress in the upstairs loft.

“I—I am not sure—if—”

“No, you came inside,” she whispered. “You know you did, as soon as I moved my hips!”

It sounded like a scold, a small moral scold, something to hold against him and sober him up, and they were silent.

But then she added, “I have been with almost no men myself, so do not think I have—please.”

And in that she was being truthful. But he could not look at her. A feeling of shame came over both of them, and into the entire room, as they sat up to put on their clothes.

“How do you know you are naked?” God asked Adam and Eve. Strangely, both thought of this old lesson as they dressed.

Ian sat in his house after this night, shaken by what he had done. Perhaps, he decided, it would all blow over, be a fling and nothing more. He felt a dislike for Annette now—and he tried to take stock of himself. Yet he knew he should not feel dislike for her but for himself. Still, in some small way—in the way they had closed the cottage up and silently and quickly walked back to the car without looking at each other—both of them seemed terrified. The only thing he was good at was fixing appliances, and he should stick to that, he told himself, because he knew there were two more stores coming, Venieux’s and Foggarty’s, and those stores would have clients too. That is, just as he had been certain of his life while staring out at the
Liverpool Star
, now everything seemed disjointed and clouded.

The next day, he could not go to work. And late in the afternoon his old-fashioned doorbell turned. It was Sara in her new summer dress, the sun in her eyes, smiling at nothing, filled with joy. That night when he went along Pleasant Street he saw Corky at the lights by the bank, and turned up the street before he reached him. He knew Corky had seen him, and this knowledge filled him with dread.

A few nights later, they had the engagement party. Sara’s mother had saved her money and gone to Moncton with Ethel two days before, and
had bought Ian a set of expensive screwdrivers. The delight on her face, and on Ethel’s, when they gave him this present magnified his treachery.

Diane was seated beside Annette and had her own hair brushed back from her forehead, mimicking Annette, making her own eyes small and severe. She smiled at Sara and said, “Oh my God, you look so sweet, sweet enough to eat!”

By now the rumours had started. Ian knew this. But they were still only rumours, and some of the men looked at him now as being luckier than they were. This should not complicate matters—in future years, Ian thought, it would simply be known that he’d had an affair, a little fling, and life would go on.

But soon Diane and her husband, Clive, were saying that Annette and Ian were deeply in love. For Diane, deep love, true love, had to do with scandal and opposition and ruin. It had since she was a girl, not only in the magazines that exploited this but in the human forums, where it took great shape, like small little ghostly forms of erotica at any given time. You cheated and you were cheated on—that was Romance. That is what love was for Diane, and that is what it was for many other people in those long-ago days. Oh yes, there was also a feeling of remorse that clung to it all—that would show up now and again, among the old weeds at the sides of brown houses, but overall, the feeling of scandal and ruin that might attend someone who was never a part of the scandal themselves was an exciting one. And as things would have it, this was the feeling of many of my students, who said I was making far too much of a piece of tail, a roll in the hay—and one or two questioned my own life of lapsed morals.

The fact, however, remained: Sara was left alone during most of her own engagement party, and came to the realization that the town knew something about her that she herself was unaware of. She thought it was about her leg, and that she had been made fun of—for to have an affliction seemed always to alarm others in a strange way. There was a moment when all her guests were dancing, the music was loud, and she realized she did not want to get up on the floor—even when Corky
begged her to. It was not her own concern that embarrassed her; it was the concern of others.

So the next day when she saw Ian, she stood up straight and said, “Look—I think it’s improving. What do you think?” And she began to walk toward him—trying to walk as straight and natural as possible. But suddenly she faltered, her step slowed, and she smiled timidly.

Suddenly Corky did not want to speak to Ian. And Sara did not know why.

Over the next few weeks the rumours became heavier—rumours stating that Ian was really in love with Annette Brideau, that he had used Sara to get reacquainted with his old flame, and in doing so, he was despised. That is, the reverse of what had actually happened now settled in people’s thoughts. And yet to call him innocent in any of this was preposterous. And he knew this. He also knew he sometimes felt toward Annette something akin to rage. And she must have felt the same toward him. So if this was betrayal, I told my students, this is how it felt.

Annette telephoned Ian every evening after work. Sometimes he no more than got inside the door and the phone would ring; at other times the phone would be ringing when he got to the front steps.

“What are we going to do?” Annette would ask. “You haven’t told her?”

“No, of course not. I don’t know. Why didn’t you come to me last year?”

But Annette told him that last year he wouldn’t have looked at her.

“That’s a complete lie,” he said. But it was a lie he was willing and able to believe because he wanted to remain as he was to her. The secret, clandestine nature of their liaison—known by everyone—seemed to him unique, and beguiled him into thinking it was more than real, that true love was always hidden and covert, like in the movies he had never seen.

Suddenly Ripp VanderTipp came to see him, and gave him a fresh salmon. “For you,” Ripp said.

Then one afternoon Lonnie phoned him, asked him how he was and if he needed any of the copper tubing he had taken from the old reservoir.
Of course Ian did not need the old copper tubing, but was startled that Lonnie too was suddenly his friend. That is, Lonnie looked upon him now as an equal.

“You did well. You did so well. I always knew you would,” Lonnie affirmed. “Watch those other two—they is jealous of you now. You knows who I mean—Harold and Evan! They talk behind your back all the time. Say the worse terrible things about you—and I take up for you—say you stole what you got. I say it looks good on them is what I say. You just did right to fool them.”

“But I didn’t fool anyone,” Ian said.

“Oh, I know that—but the two of them had it comin’!” Then Lonnie paused and said, “The only one who ever really and truly stood up for you down this end of the river is Annette Brideau—she was always a tiger if anyone said anything against her Ian!”

The next night that Ian went to visit Sara (bringing over the salmon that Ripp had left him), her mother asked to read his tea leaves. And Ian blushed and said he did not feel comfortable with this. He had, in fact, gone there to see if the relationship with Sara could be saved, to admit what had happened, and hoped to resolve it. He wanted to talk to Sara alone, but he couldn’t seem to find a way. His courage failed him and he looked guiltily around the room.

“No, I don’t want my fortune read,” he answered.

“Why? I want to know how many children you and Sara will have.”

“Never mind it now,” he said. “It’s bad luck, I think!”

Sara said nothing. However, she knew; she had known for two weeks. She simply smiled at him and said, “Some other time, then.”

Sara’s mother was bitter, however. After he left, she grumbled at Sara, as if, after all this time, Sara had done something to displease him and destroy the relationship.

“Well, there you go—there you go! Such a fine man too,” she kept saying, fidgeting and coughing. “It’s your leg, and that’s the end of it!”

Of course, Sara’s mother wanted the marriage because it would free
her daughter, and in some mysterious way it would free her as well. So she gave in to her weakness to be like others and say what others did. And what others were now saying was that “one look at Annette and Sara was a memory!”

The rumours Sara heard could not be substantiated, and no one told her much, but the actions of those around her did.

Ethel became silent, her expression perplexed—as if the warning Corky had given, and that she had not heeded, had come true, and this seemed to have stunned her into silence. For little ugly Corky Thorn, who everyone teased, was the oracle people should have heeded. And she remembered him that one day, walking off through the puddles in the rain.

After this, Annette stopped showing up at the Robb house. After this, she was not seen. And it was, as is usual in these cases, Sara herself who felt she must have done something wrong: she must have insulted her friend, and if she could make it up by taking the blame, things would return to that happy state they had once been in. Yes, it was because of the bridesmaid’s dress, and how Annette didn’t like it; they’d had countless discussions about it—that must be it. She phoned Annette twice and asked her to visit. And Annette said she would visit, and then did not show up. So Sara phoned again and said, “Annette, I know it’s troublesome having a friend like me—not many would put up with me.”

“Don’t be so damn foolish,” Annette said.

Ethel too spoke about the silly bridesmaid’s dress. For she and Sara had to make it all about that in order for things to remain how they had been, and for Sara to remain in love with the man she loved and have that man respect and love her.

So then, on a rainy afternoon, Sara walked up to Cut and Curl and stepped into the smoky cloying room. Annette had a woman’s hand soaking in creme, and looked up startled and unforgiving. Suddenly Sara had done her a grave injury—that was the import of the look. Sara trembled. She was not used to having her only friend hate her.

The warm wind blew as she went back outside. She thought, after a while, of the hundreds of dollars she had given Annette for the bridesmaid’s dress. Worse than anything else, she felt like a fool. As she walked down the street, Ethel ran out to meet her, and suddenly saw Sara’s face, devastated. She had been weeping since she’d left the beauty parlour—and all Annette and Diane had done the week before to make her pretty, to make her more like them, had been sapped away.