Crimes Against My Brother (25 page)

“She was pregnant and the child is mine,” Harold said. He muttered this as he looked at his large hands.

Lonnie gave a start. He looked at his young friend, saw utter delusion, and shrugged. “Think what you will,” he said. “But I tell you this—she had only a few weeks to snare Ian, only a few weeks. Or she was going to go back to you. And so I planned it all very meticulously. So someday she will have to pay me. And she will pay me twenty thousand and that will be it. I need the twenty thousand pretty damn soon—so she had better realize it. If she thinks she can get off scot-free, she should go ask some of them widows I had. Then she’d know. Once I get my teeth in, I keep them in—and who can blame me? Life has done me no favours.”

But Harold was no longer listening. He was in a daze. “I want to see the pregnancy test!” he said.

“I can’t get it for you right now—but I will,” Lonnie said.

“But where is it?” Harold asked.

“Can’t say. I am looking for a good payment—I can buy up three places here for back taxes and sell them to the government. You know why the government is buying? Because a new pulp mill is coming to cut.”

But Harold was no longer listening. His heart had turned sick. He looked only at his hands, and mumbled incoherently to himself.

The one secret Lonnie should have kept his entire life he couldn’t keep. In fact, he woke the next morning in a stupor, wondering if he had actually said it. But Harold was long gone, the stove cold.

“I hope I didn’t go too far,” he said. “Oh, he’ll get over it—he’ll realize the child isn’t his. He’d be a fool to think the child his, wouldn’t he?”

But Lonnie was wrong about Harold getting over it. It was such a whimsical deception that Harold was crushed by it. And the boy … The insane question was planted in Harold’s lost mind: what if the boy was his?

It was as the poet said in a brief moment of clarity: too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart. Harold asked to see the pregnancy test three more times. But Lonnie told him he couldn’t show it to him. Finally he told Harold that the man who’d knocked Annette up was now dead—and that was that, and not to bother him about it, and not to come around if he was going to talk about it.

Then Lonnie did not see him for months.

Harold knew (though he pretended he didn’t) that he would rob Lonnie Sullivan to find the pregnancy test and get his own child back. He began phoning Annette when he knew Ian was at work, and talking about old times. And from time to time he would ask how her son, Liam, was.

Ian and Annette went to Jamaica for their honeymoon because she had heard so-and-so had done so. Then Annette came home and got sick. She cried a lot over nothing. People were frightened she would lose the child. Ian himself was plagued by the idea that she would lose it and blamed himself. What would the marriage be without the child?

Days would go by and she would not speak. When she did speak, she said he had tricked her.

He would stand at the door of their bedroom, in the dark, looking at her lying there with a facecloth over her beautiful forehead. Now and again he would whisper, “Is there anything I can do?”

They went to other doctors in other cities.

Her face was pale and her blond hair fell about her white cheeks. She began to take advice from a foreign woman about natural healing and went to classes. One snowy afternoon her fortune teller told her that many things would happen to her that were strange and wonderful and that she was extraordinarily gifted. And had she ever thought of writing a novel? That is, everything she wanted to hear from that woman she heard. And everything she heard was about herself, and everything about herself was extraordinary.

Ian found himself arguing over nothing with customers. Then, after a while, the few friends he had in town seemed to drift away—like Little Corky Thorn, and the man Ian played chess with, from the furniture store.

Still his pride told him he did not need friends, and if they left him because of Annette, so be it! That was the price he would pay.

People saw him driving around in Ripp VanderTipp’s truck. Lonnie was often at the door. Then Ripp and others came to the house. In fact, Ian wanted them there to cheer her. But she was still ill. They all worried—Lonnie even more than the others—that she would lose the child. It seemed to Ian that she wanted to. Once, she was put on an intravenous drip and DD came to the hospital.

Time passed, and the child was born. Annette was in labour for hours and hours. Ian was told to leave the delivery room, and sat alone in the waiting room with his hat in his right hand. It was storming, and he heard that someone had come into the hospital with a poisoned child.

“If Annette dies,” her mother said peevishly, “if Annette dies—you’ll be sorry.”

He was shaken, and went to a window and stared out at two attendants loading a child into an ambulance. “God, please let them live,” he said.

The next morning he heard that the child was Evan’s little boy. He looked at his own infant and thought: What kind of a friend was he to own a large house when that little boy had lived his entire life in two rooms?

A few months later, he and Annette hired Ethel. A few months after that, Annette wrecked the Mustang. She rarely came home. And then the money began to disappear.

“I would have been much better off without the money—I would have been much better off if Evan had got it. He would have been better off as well, and perhaps Molly would still be here with us,” Ian told Lonnie one night—for he spoke to no one else now, and trusted no one else. Lonnie had told him that the man Ian used to play chess with had said terrible things about Annette.

“I don’t know about you—but, well, I wouldn’t trust him,” Lonnie said about Ian’s only friend a year and a half after Ian was married.

“But I have done nothing to him,” Ian said. “And now I have no friends.”

“Never mind—things will turn out,” Lonnie said. “Don’t you worry about no one else but yerself! And what do you mean you have no friends? Ha!”

When I related all this to my class, my brightest student, Terra Matheson, did say, “Who the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” And she may have been right.

PART FIVE

O
NE DAY
, I
AN WAS TAKING A FRIDGE DOWN THE BACK STAIRS
by himself. Suddenly, thinking of Sara—as if she was right before him again at that moment—and thinking too of how she had walked way from the store, dragging her leg, he fell sideways against a rack of standard parts, lost his balance and tumbled downstairs, with the fridge crashing into him. But he knew in his most secret heart that some part of him had wanted to fall—for why had he done such a reckless thing?

He lay in pain and blood for over an hour before he was found, coming in and out of consciousness. The rumour started that he had been pushed by friends of old Joyce Fitzroy—and yes, he must have deserved it.

But as my student Terra Matheson would write about small-town betrayal and gossip, nothing ever really
had
to be true. And so Ian woke up in the hospital, the same as Evan had, and at almost the same time. His operation was performed in Halifax on a snowy evening in March. He was surrounded by his new friends: Dickie and Ripp and DD and Annette.

Everyone said the operation was a success. The doctor said he would have only mild to medium pain from now on but prescribed him a heavy painkiller, Dilaudid. He came home and went to sleep, certain everything would be fine. Yet he woke in the middle of the night with the same tinge in his back and a sudden feeling of terrible foreboding. So what the doctor had said turned out not to be true—within three weeks the pain was twice what it had been, and the doctors felt that another operation at this point would not solve things. If he didn’t take twice as many pills as prescribed he would find himself in agony.

It was at this time, when Liam was about two years old, that Clive and Diane were going through their divorce. The divorce was very public, and everyone was gossiping.

Annette would wait for Ian to come home and would try to fill him in on the sordid, terrible details—details of abuse and misconduct he knew but kept to himself.

“Whose side are you on,” she demanded one day, “if you are not on DD’s?”

“Clive is a bastard, but DD is a fraud who will betray anyone,” he said.

“Well, I knew you didn’t like my friends—you think you are way too good for them,” she said. “
DD a fraud who will betray
—shows how much you know about women. Shows how much. DD will never betray me!”

One night, walking home from work after an argument with a customer, Ian suddenly thought: What if I had not walked back to her car that night? What if I had not walked along that wood road to her cottage? Yet that was a foolish thought—he had done what he had done and no one sympathized with him now.

Phone calls started to come to Ian when Liam was four years old—phone calls where people would ask for Annette and then hang up. And even though he did not pay attention to them, he could not put them out of his mind. That is, Annette had made dozens of enemies in the town, and this was the result. It was the result of her arguments at the store—with one woman named Julia, and another named Bernice, and a third named Sherrie, whose husband Ripp VanderTipp and his friends had beaten up. These were things that Ian could not imagine or comprehend a wife of his being involved in, things that seemed to be happening now every month or two. Ian paid fifteen hundred dollars to Sherrie’s husband, who came to him with his arm in a sling, saying Annette herself was involved in the assault and he would contact the police.

The phone calls came late at night, always when Annette was out and Ian was getting ready for bed.

Do you know what Annette is doing now?

He would hear laughter and tittering before the line went dead. What infuriated him was how innocent he was, and how mocking the laughter seemed.

Annette must have been aware of these calls because she began to question him about them. She sometimes came home late and would sit by the phone in the upstairs hallway.

He questioned her—just once.

“They are just jealous of me,” she told him about certain people she’d had run-ins with. “And don’t dare you believe what Sherrie Tatter says about me.”

But he had never mentioned Sherrie Tatter to her.

He said nothing. No, he did not believe those phone calls. Yet now, whenever he answered the phone, he felt sick. Annette wanted to change their number, have it unlisted. He would not do that.

Still, the most damning phone call came one day to the store itself. It was a woman, her voice taunting.

“How’s Annette?” she asked. Before he could say anything, she continued, “How did she make out in jail in Bathurst?”

“Pardon?”

“Oh, that’s right, you don’t know—but you don’t mind Dickie?”

“What?”

“Dropping in to see her? Well, they fixed that little Bathurst thing. Now they say they are going into the tanning-bed business together once they get the money from you. Besides,” the voice added sweetly, “Liam doesn’t look much like you, does he?” Then the phone went dead.