Crimes Against My Brother (20 page)

Ethel was not good at fixing things. And she did not know what to do.

She walked up to Ian’s large house but didn’t go to the door. She simply stood outside looking at it, then turned and rushed back home.

Then she phoned Molly Thorn—now married to Evan Young—and asked her to come to Sara’s aid. She was trying her best to help, but this in itself seemed a defeat. Molly and Ethel decided to try to make Sara into a brand new person. But this was a futile hope, and the attempt only made Annette furious with Molly and Molly’s brother, Corky, who was Ethel’s boyfriend, and Evan Young himself.

“Love is love and you can’t change it,” Diane said romantically.

“Shut up, DD—please, for God’s sake, just shut up,” Annette said.

Molly told her husband she had a premonition.

“What kind?”

“This is going to destroy us all in some terrible way.”

“Don’t be so goddamn silly,” Evan said. “Go pray to the Virgin Mary and all your troubles will be over. I remember when Ethel was a little girl, she found an icicle shaped like the Virgin Mary and tried to save it—but lo and behold it melted in the sun—maybe you could look and find another one.”

But Molly was sure that betrayal was a cannibal and ferociously devoured anyone and anything it could. That it would, as a cannibal, turn someday on Annette herself—and yes, very likely on foolish Ian Preston as well.

Soon even Ethel left off trying, and Sara was alone. That is, totally alone. No one wanted to speak to her. And when she went into her
house, her mother busied herself in the kitchen, and Ethel ran upstairs and hid. Worse, she thought back to that horrible day, which she could barely remember, when she and Ethel were talked into going down to the chip yard—the chips looking like gold in the sunlight—to see the prince. Could it be that people had heard about it—could it be that? Could it be that Ian was worried about …?

The weather turned cold and rainy, and the small garden was saturated, and the round snowball flowers shook in the wind. Sara decided to do things for herself and showed up at Ian’s work in the pouring rain a week or so before the wedding date, her face less filled with pain or anger than sorrow. He had not returned her calls for the past three nights, and yet everything to do with the wedding was proceeding. So she had to know. And she was shaking, her legs trembling. She reflected on how ordinary he was, how small his ambition really was, and how fine she knew her own mind was—and this made what was happening all the more poignant.

“I love you,” she said. She blushed, strangely feeling that what she had just said was inappropriate. He smiled slightly and then his face went blank. That was because he realized this was her last desperate gambit to save their relationship—and that, in fact, it had come to this.

“It’s all right if you like Annette,” Sara said, speaking rapidly. “I like her too—and if you fell a little in love with her, that’s okay as well. She makes everyone love her, everyone give her money, has everyone do everything for her—that’s the way it is. But I think we have to protect her too—it’s our responsibility to protect and love her so she doesn’t do something terrible. You know, just between us, I think she’s been involved in things—you know she doesn’t want to be and is scared, but something is troubling her. I don’t want to say this,” Sara said, and as people who are rarely spiteful do, she now sounded dreadful when she spoke, “but you know, more than once she stole money from me. I didn’t want to tell you—and I think it was because she owed Lonnie Sullivan. She told me once she owed him $5,300 and everything. So, we know how he is. And once she took a deposit from the Motor Vehicle Branch where her dad
worked—Harold Dew took the blame and then she left Harold as soon as you got the money. For you see,” and here she looked around and whispered, “she asked me how much you made—she did!” She nodded to affirm the veracity of her statement just as someone left the store.

“Stop gossiping now. All those stories are nonsense! You don’t think I know?” Ian said. “Fifty-three hundred dollars—what nonsense. Lonnie is her friend—and I guess he is my friend too. I never thought I’d hear a girl like you talk like that. For God’s sake—go away if you are going to talk like that in front of my customers. I have a business to run.”

And as he said this, Sara knew she would never marry him, that she could not; that whatever it was between them was destroyed; that he was who he was, and she was who she was. And that he had made a desperate mistake, and she had not.

He looked away from her and then he said something he never forgave himself for: “Don’t worry, I’ll still give Corky the job he wants even if I don’t marry you! So Molly and Evan should be happy. We’ll get them in business too, so Evan won’t be going around talking about me behind my back just like you are doing behind Annette’s. Hell, I thought I had friends, but I guess real friends are hard to come by. It’s best to remain unaffiliated.”

Sara looked startled, and then she turned and walked away, dragging her left leg as she did, like a little girl.

The next night Corky came to the store. He said he couldn’t take the job with the siding, that he could not help repair the relationship between Ian and Evan that they had spoken about because he’d decided he might go out west to work. He apologized.

Ian nodded and didn’t answer. He felt ashamed.

Corky went toward the door and opened it. Standing outside, under the awning, he said, “I wouldn’t have minded working here, though. I could have helped you real good! You and Evan would have been best buds again. If you don’t watch it—well, you have to expand or lose. That’s what I was hoping to help you with.”

“Well, why don’t you still?” Ian said, smiling weakly.

“You know she gave up her scholarship,” Corky answered, tears in his eyes. “Now, I don’t know what a scholarship is—but I know that is what she gave up!”

Ian had not known. That is, he had not known about the scholarship at all.

After this, Annette stopped calling him. So he telephoned her. She said she had heard the wedding was called off. He said he did not know one way or the other.

“Is it me?” she asked. “People better not think that!”

She asked him to write a letter to her, explaining that he was the instigator of their relationship and affair, that it was he who had wanted to leave Sara, and that she, Annette, had tried to prevent it, that she was the one who had arranged the engagement party.

So he was struck dumb.

Then Lonnie Sullivan telephoned him, saying he worried about Annette’s overall health—that she might kill herself. She might jump from a bridge; that’s what he was most fearful of. “Do you know she was ill as a little girl? I got her to Moncton when she was thirteen. Probably saved her life, knowing me. So there you go. Something with her blood in her fingers or something. Now she falls in love—but thinks you only took what you wanted and don’t love her. She is really desperate. I’m afraid of what might happen. That bridge looks awful enticing when you are depressed. You couldn’t act like that, could you, Ian?”

“Act like what?”

“You know, hurt that little girl,” Lonnie said. “I look upon her as my own!”

Now Ian was plagued by the residual effects of his duplicity—and he was burdened by phone calls telling him his unfaithfulness had created
a victim not only of Sara but of Annette. So now he was pressured toward something—some masterful untruth, some golden lie like the veins of fool’s gold he’d seen that night up on Good Friday Mountain.

That evening he decided to do what Annette wanted. He wrote the letter. Now more than ever he was plagued with the idea that Annette and he had been destined to meet again, and that meeting Sara had only allowed this destiny.

He was still torn about what he should do when Lonnie came to his house and stood inside the foyer. His face pensive and somehow sad, he looked at an old painting on the wall that Ian had bought in support of the Heritage Foundation. He could only stay for a minute. It was raining; his hat was spotted with grease, his white shirt open, a cigar in his pocket. He was out of breath too and had to wait a moment before he spoke. He looked at Ian with great sorrow, and within the bones of this sorrow was a kind of historical dislike for Ian and his family.

Ian looked beyond him, into the yard, and saw Ripp VanderTipp sitting in his truck. And as Ian was looking at that person he detested, Lonnie told him that Annette was pregnant. Lonnie and VanderTipp were at his house because it was a terrible thing, and she needed all of them now more than ever. They had come as a reckoning. Ripp was especially upset, Lonnie said.

“That poor little girl got herself in some fix. If you just go off marrying someone else, what will become of her? That’s what Ripp is so worried about—a man has to do the honourable thing. That’s all Ripp talked about on the way up here.”

Lonnie stood there for another ten minutes speaking, but Ian did not hear what he said. Then Lonnie gave him a note from Annette.

She asked to meet Ian downriver and so he went. She was in DD’s car at the end of the old road that led to her cottage. When she saw him, she flicked the lights. He ran up to her and saw she was crying; desperation and self-pity had overwhelmed her. At this moment he knew he must—had to—choose her or Sara.

The next day he went to see Annette at work, with a dozen roses. As
he entered, a few of her friends were tittering. Annette, not knowing he was there, was imitating how Sara walked across the beauty shop floor.

Suddenly and quietly, Ian and Annette married.

Molly went to Sara’s to let her know that this was about to take place—to prepare her. Molly tried to say something positive, and to be spiteful toward Annette—but she had no more real ability to do so than Sara.

“We are all in trouble,” Molly said. “I do not know why—but life now is upside down, and will remain so for years. My husband is a changed man, and Harold is changed too. What has become of them?”

Corky Thorn paced the room, and finally, seeing the expensive set of screwdrivers that Mrs. Robb and Ethel had saved for and picked out for Ian Preston, broke down and cried.

But there was one reason for this marriage happening, beyond all other reasons: Ian’s self-will demanding that he do it, and telling him if he did not do it, he would lose out on the person he had loved since high school—and that it was inevitable, because he had loved her in high school. And since he had been waiting for her to love him, he could not let this pass him by. He had been spurred on when she rejected him, and this became the spur that proved his worth to her—and Sara was but the route that determined how she, Annette, who he truly loved, would come into his life again.

In fact, feeling guilty, this is what he tried to explain to his old friends Corky and Molly, and he became stern with them as he did so—even self-righteous, telling them they had better understand that Annette was not at fault.

Annette tried to smile for photos and make her wedding day the best of all days. She wore white with blue sequins and Diane was her maid of honour. And because the wedding was so rushed and there was no time to consider anyone else, Lonnie Sullivan was Ian’s best man.

Before the marriage, Sara wrote Ian a letter where she returned the diamond ring (though he had never asked her to). He had bought Annette her own—she had picked it out with Diane.

Sara wrote:
My dear, dear Ian (my love). Ethel and I were sitting out in the back yesterday talking of all the good times and how much fun it all has been
.

Sara left town because of the very scandal, and delight in scandal, her wound had created. People could not help looking at her and showing this mirth even in their true sympathy, especially with Annette pregnant and showing.

Nor did Sara want such sympathy. For a long time she could not stand to see people who knew what had happened. That is, she was now plagued by this as never before. Whereas before, even when rebuffed in high school, she had always thought: Someday, someone will come along. And she had believed what her mother had told her in a reading when she was fifteen: “Someday you will meet someone who will love you for who you are!”