Crimes Against My Brother (40 page)

So although Annette had waited to see if the contract would come, it had not. And now that the store was old and spooky and decrepit; now that her husband was disgraced in the eyes of his friends and neighbours, who all were waiting for the marriage to fail—now was the time to leave. To be married to someone so hated, so laughed at and scorned by everyone, was too much. She couldn’t cope with it anymore. And that, in fact, was her flaw.

In fact, the final contest would, in some important way, be fought between DD and Ian. And DD was always prepared for a fight.

So Annette went to Diane’s house for advice. She sat in silence as sunlight came with high winds against the window and the troubled little yard outside, as DD spoke about her own divorce, and how Clive had wanted to kill her—twice—and how she’d just got away from him in time, and how she worried about Annette and had dreams about her.

“I thought he was so much better than that,” DD told her friend. “Talking like a maniac about people and criticizing everything so no one likes him. Is he the only one who has a sore back?”

“Where would I go?” Annette asked.

“You can live here,” Diane said. Quickly. “Don’t even let on where you are—just leave. That is what you have to do.” Her eyes showed her delight.

Diane wanted to help because she would be the confidante. But most of all—knowing Ian did not like her—she wanted to inflict pain.

“I couldn’t believe it—I just couldn’t believe he would be so mean,” DD said.

“I can’t get a cent out of him,” Annette said. “My account at the bank is almost empty.”

“He’s a cunt,” DD said.

But Diane had only a small prefab house on Becker’s Lane, right beside a fire hydrant and a scraggly bush, and it wasn’t a place Annette could ever envision moving to. Especially with that drab floating stuff in a bowl
that gurgled when it came to the top of the water and that Diane thought of as a decoration, and the smell of the old dog that Diane’s husband had left when he moved out with his seven boxes of hairspray.

“No,” Annette said, a kind of restive sadness clinging to her voice. Then she added, “I have my son. As I have my son, I have my hope!”

These were women unlike those who talked in theory about equality and subversive tendencies. In fact, most women who spoke about independence for women would have been scared to death of them. These were women who could smile as they cut you to ribbons and skewered you around a barbecue. Lies? Fuck, what else was there?

On those long-ago days, Ethel took Liam down to her house and spoke of applying for a job at a restaurant near a bar called the Warehouse. The restaurant was called the Pudding Lounge. Then she and Liam would have “heaps of fun,” she said.

Ethel was the one who took him to church, and had been the one to prepare him for first communion, and had talked to him about saints and popes and God. She gave him a small daily-mass book and signed it in her crooked handwriting: “With love, Aunt Ethel.” She talked about Saint Faustina, who said the only measure of love is to be measureless. And it seemed that if anyone had this capability, little Ethel Robb did.

Liam would lie about his mom and dad, and not tell on them, and not say that they were in the throes of a special kind of tragedy. He bragged about them always, and made up stories to tell his teachers about them. He said that his father might work for
NASA
. Often he was unable to stop telling fibs. He tried, but he couldn’t stop.

He would say that his father was inventing a machine that would help the province and his mother was going into business with her friends, and they would soon move to Toronto or somewhere very special. He said that the prime minister had visited the house and that they flew on a private jet. He invited children to his birthday party when there was no
birthday party to be had. They came with gifts while he was in the kitchen trying to make them peanut butter sandwiches.

Liam climbed on the roofs of houses when other boys chased him home, and walked with dexterity far above the earth, and had a fort he called the Shelter under the big backyard trees. There he kept certain things: magnets and Spider-Man toys, and small parts of computers that he collected and wanted to build.

He was spied on, and reported to police, and gossiped about to others, by the neighbours like Ms. Spalding, who lived in the broad white house next door.

Ethel, however, did not lie and dislike, but showered him with affection, and told him that he must believe in God.

“Why should I believe in God?”

“I don’t know—maybe because God believes in you!”

The days were long and drawn out in school, and he was alone. He would fall asleep with his head on the desk. A teacher would yell at him, “Do you know the answer, Liam, to the seventh equation?”

“Z to the fifth,” Liam would answer without moving his head, not counting on the teacher’s displeasure that the answer was correct.

Sometimes when Liam would see a man waiting after school for his child, he would close his eyes and whisper, “Make it be Dad, make it be Dad—make it be Dad!”

Back on a day after the last blizzard in late February some years ago, two or three years after Lonnie Sullivan was found lying in his blood, Harold came into town to look at empty shops. It was the right time to get his pawnshop going, he decided, because so many buildings were closing up. He wanted one right in the centre of town.

Before he went to check out the best building available—an empty square block of a place, with the plaster already turning yellow and a grey water stain running the length of the ceiling—he saw Ethel Robb
walk across the park to the restaurant where she worked, holding Liam by the hand. Harold was doing much better because of his uncle’s death—ruled an accident. He had been left two old trucks and three thousand dollars—and of course no one knew that he had found much more. He had sold Ian’s property to Helinkiscor. He smoked cigars now himself, and had gained weight—so he looked very much like his uncle once did. He always had a cigar or two in his pocket, his shirt opened, showing his medallion and chest hair. He talked so loud at times that people in the mall would turn to look at him.

He went across the street to see the boy, who he now believed was his son.

He ordered three cheeseburgers, and watched as Ethel carried them to him. She was scared to death she would slip and spill them, for it was her very first day on the job.

“You got a big appetite,” she said.

“I do. Yes, dear, I have a big appetite—I’m big in every way.” He smiled. He tweaked the little boy’s ear and made him smile and said kind things about him, and asked if he would like some french fries.

“Share my plate,” he said.

He was the only customer, and the windows were covered in snow. He moved his seat closer to where Liam sat, and they talked about hockey. He talked about school and said Liam had better study and get an education so as not to end up sorrowful. He said he knew many people who were sorrowful, and didn’t want another person in town to be so.

The way the boy looked at him Harold was moved. He hugged him and asked him how he was.

Ethel wore multicoloured stockings and had two blue ribbons in her hair, and her big short-sighted eyes blinked rapidly and hopefully under her pink glasses so he felt a sudden compassion for her. Yes, he said, he remembered her as a girl at Bonny Joyce, and hadn’t time changed them all.

Ethel asked him if he knew what had happened to his uncle Lonnie Sullivan.

“Oh, that was years ago now—slipped, I guess,” he said. And he patted Liam’s head as he said it. He was attracted to Liam because Liam looked so much like his own dead brother, Glen. He kept glancing at the boy and smiling.

“Oh,” she said. “My Corky slipped too.”

Suddenly, as if to change the topic, Harold pulled something from his pocket: the fur hat he had got from Rueben Sores, who had stolen it from someone at the tavern a few years ago. He was taking it to Frenchies, the used-clothing store, to see if they wanted it. But he changed his mind now.

It was a woman’s fur hat, in fine condition, but he had no use for it. Rueben had given it to him because Harold had been so angry they had burned a small boy’s hands.

“Take this, for Christ sake, and shut up about it,” Rueben had said.

Now Harold told Ethel he had just bought it, and there was only one person he would ever think of giving it to. And he handed it to her.

“A present for you, dear!” he said.

She herself had nothing—just like Harold, and two generations of people from Bonny Joyce Ridge. She tried it on and smiled. She wouldn’t think of keeping it. The radio played some bebop-alula song from long, long ago that Corky had said was his very favourite song. It was called “There Goes My Baby,” and when she heard it, she should think of him. The snow hit the green window and melted, and she looked like a little doll in her big fur hat. She tried to hand it back, but Harold wouldn’t take it.

“My God,” she said, “that’s so expensive!”

“What do I care?” Harold Dew said, taking her hand and holding it gently. “It looks like it was meant for you.”

Then he did something so spectacular: he gave Liam a ten-dollar bill.

“Someday when she doesn’t know it, I’m going to send Mom a note that says I love her—and a chocolate doughnut,” Liam said, mostly to himself. “And make her guess who it’s from!”

“That’s a good idea—your mother is the most important thing,” Harold said, and he smiled gently, and kissed the boy’s cheek, and took his hands quickly in his to see if they were scarred.

In late April, Annette Brideau got a phone call from Wally Bickle himself and was offered a job at the mill. This came so suddenly and unexpectedly that she went into a state of euphoria, and went shopping, ordering almost an entire new wardrobe—skirts and slacks and blouses. She did not know about odious file 0991563; but neither did Wally Bickle.

It was over a week later when Ian heard of this job. Someone came into his store and told him. At first, Ian did not catch on. But once he did, he saw the disaster of it, felt it through to the pit of his stomach.

He sent Liam away later that afternoon, telling him he did not want to see him anymore. Then he went out later to bring him in, but Liam had gone.

So, like the remark he’d once made against Corky, Ian could not believe he had said anything so unkind.

He planned never to go back to the house. He would live on his own and move into an apartment on Charles Street that he knew was available. He would continue to fight the mill—no matter what! He would be able to walk to work, although he also thought of simply selling what was left of the sorry old store and going back to fixing radios. In fact, this was the only thing that might be available to him. Yet when he received the bill for the wardrobe, and realized the amount she had spent—twenty-three hundred dollars—he went back to the house in a rage, staggering along the street.

When he got home, he saw that his clothes had been moved and packed in boxes, and those boxes placed near the basement stairs. But at this moment, Annette attempted to be reasonable and sanguine. She shook as she lit a cigarette. She stood and then sat, and then walked away from him and back toward him. Then she sat again. She told him that she had tried desperately to save the marriage even when people had told her it was hopeless—and that she had lived in a state of denial about what he really thought of her, and now she had to finally begin to live for herself. She said that he had never thought
she was good enough for the likes of him. But now people were looking out for her, because they knew what she had had to endure. That she had endured too much—and everyone said to her, “How can you endure so much?”