Crimes Against My Brother (50 page)

One night Annette called out to Wally at the end of the chip yard.

“Wait,” she said, “please, Wally, wait. You have to know—I am—in pain. It’s like it was when I was a girl—remember I spoke to you about it?”

He did not see her at all.

Now, after work, she was on her way—with the streets sanded and the night air growing softer and glazed with ice—toward a bar called the Warehouse.

Later, sitting in a booth at the gaudy Warehouse, with its fake salute to marine life most of the people never experienced, she found herself
nervous and in pain. The crew were gone, many already laid off. She did not know that soon the office would be split up and many more would go. That her “crew,” who told jokes and snapped gum, had recently switched places to drink. They were going down to the Zanzibar—a place they said they wouldn’t go last year because it was where Annette’s store once was.

But Annette was suddenly no longer part of their equation; now they felt free to go to the Zanzibar, which Jeremy Hogg’s oldest daughter ran.

So Annette sat all alone and stared about her, looking up in expectation, ready to smile.

But tonight she began to feel something wrong.

The pain started in her groin, and was at times a ferocious pain inside her. But she dismissed the idea that she should go to the hospital to see if anything was amiss. For she was confronted now not by a congratulatory nod of the head, like the one from DD when Annette left the clinic, but by a more rueful salutation, one that came from an unshakable sense of loss. Something that she was not supposed to feel, and had been told as much.

Now too she was suddenly worried she had
AIDS
. She had heard of a woman who contracted that just by being out once. And then she knew something else. A woman who worked at the mill—Mr. Ticks’s secretary, Ines, furious that her husband was divorcing her and leaving town, had told Annette she’d hired a woman with herpes to sleep with him. And she had met the woman, a person named Kitty, who had arrived at the bar like an assassin, whose eyes burned into Annette when she looked her way, and reminded Annette of the stories she had heard when a little girl of hell. But hell was something they all laughed at, because hell was not believed in anymore by anyone. Even though they walked through it during their waking hours.

Annette had entered a different world, a world of the fallen, of angels beating their wings against a smoky bowl, and she no longer wanted this world, this world of the fallen. She wanted to hold someone in her arms, a child perhaps. Even the money Jeremy Hogg had placed for her had been lost in the savings and loans failure out west—and she
had lost all she had hoped to gain. But worse, there seemed to be no recourse to get any of this money back.

Annette was not brave. She was not noble. She was simply alone and sick and hurting, and did not know what to do. She had done what people advised her to do, and now she was alone—like 95 per cent of humanity at any given time. But now that she’d had the procedure, surely she and Wally would be happy? That was it: he did not want the child, and she had been promised happiness if she did what she wanted, for herself. Wally should know that their happiness was now guaranteed. This is what her notes had said to him—the ones she’d tried to leave on his desk.

The night was cold when she left the bar. Long ago she had been sworn to the calendar of what she was told were the superstitious events of the Catholic Church. She followed them darkly. But now that was only a dim memory. When she got home, she went in through the side door, crossed to the stairway and climbed up in the dark.

She called, “Liam!”

But the house was still, and empty as a cloister, and she was alone.

She was alone because others, many others, those people who’d watched with relish as she destroyed her marriage and hurt her child in ways that cannot be mentioned, had now drifted away, and said the same cruel things about her that she had said about others all her life. And she, she, Annette Brideau, was finally aware of this. But now the show was over. Her freedom such as it was, was complete. And the articles in
Cosmo
moved on to other things.

That night, Wally went to see Diane. They went to the Zanzibar. The music played languid and indolent at the booth where they sat. He kept twisting the swizzle stick from his drink and tapping it on the table. He asked her what had happened to Annette. Why had she changed so drastically? Why wasn’t she fun anymore? He asked if he could confide in Diane.

“What are friends for?” Diane said.

“Do you know what happened?” he asked.

“Yes.” For Diane always knew what had happened.

“I don’t even think it was mine,” he said. “It was probably someone else’s. She was mixed up! I mean, I tried my best to help her. For her husband was vicious—sadistic, really. You know that. It was Ian’s fault, so I tried to help her out. I don’t know what she is telling people, do you? About me, I mean—what she might be saying about me?”

“Oh God, no—I don’t know what she says, ever!”

“What should I do?” Wally said in a kind of panic. He knew his mom, whom he loved, might visit soon. “I think I got mixed up with a liar,” he added, almost hopefully.

“Yup,” Diane said, greedily confirming his assertion.

He begged Diane not to tell.

“Omigod, I won’t ever,” she said.

He asked her what she would like to do. She wanted to save the forest by starting an eco-project of her own, and use environmentally friendly hairspray.

“That’s commendable stuff,” he said.

Ian sat in jail. All through Easter of 1998, he sat in jail. The cool air was white and soft as the world drifted toward spring.

Ian had kept all the monies, and figures of monies, in his head now for fourteen or fifteen years. He tabulated and calculated in his head the amount of money spent and given away and lost. Yes, even worrying over every penny had not saved him in the end.

His store had been sold off—at one-fifth the price of what it should have been—last March to pay both his and Annette’s legal fees. That is, it was sold at forty-one thousand dollars.

The amount of money paid to Mr. Hogg by Annette was in the thousands. The money Ian had paid to his own lawyer was in the thousands. There had been liens on properties he had bought in good faith—the
ones he’d had to declare insolvent after two years and sell at an enormous loss. (These were the properties the old man who had given Evan a drive in his truck had spoken about.)

Now there was nothing.

Nothing at all.

And yet, he had captured Annette—the young girl he had loved and longed for. He could never have imagined hurting her. And look at what had happened!

He knew how much he’d loved Annette in high school, how he had planned to love her, how he’d longed for her when he met her again and how he desired her even now. But had she tricked him? He did not know. He only knew that he had done what was honourable; he’d had to do it. When he’d heard the child wasn’t his, he’d said nothing. But he had bought Lonnie Sullivan’s silence for the sake of the child. He had gone down in the night to protect his family. And Harold had left at the same time to find the pregnancy test and declare a family. And Evan had left the churchyard illuminated by the lit candle to honour his family.

Ian also knew that some people felt divorce was nothing much, that men were often at fault in divorce. He could not deny either premise.

But what bothered him was something more than this. He had been culpable from the first moment he pretended that the only reason he was walking with Annette was that they were both concerned about Sara Robb. And if he thought of it—if men and women were culpable in these increments every day, and they understood that they were, why did they not take measures to improve? And if these small manipulations caused wrong, how could they be thwarted?

Or if doing these things—as he and Annette had done—was not wrong, then why did such terrible things swell from them? And this is actually what the trunk was telling him. That is, the trunk was telling him, as much as Evan’s antifreeze and Corky’s wrench—that as a matter of fact, there was a God.

The trunk from 1840, which had been loaded on a ship out of Liverpool and brought across the high sea by an eighteen-year-old
woman named Ruth MacDonnell in a blue-and-white dress, was his boondoggle, and each rise and fall of the waves upon which that ship had sailed 150 years before bore witness. Poor Ruth had not figured long in the New World. She’d died in childbirth at twenty-two and was buried in the small church in Bartibog, the gravestone crumbling and covered in embedded moss. Yet the trunk remained pristine.

Why did he go to buy that trunk from his uncle? It was on a sudden whim, just a thought—when he felt kindhearted and filled with the lightness of being. If he had not thought of that trunk—if he had simply gone to Evan without seeking the trunk—he would surely have helped Evan get the money. Perhaps he would have worked for Evan—then things would have been like they should have been. Yet, getting the money—was that the transgression? Not if the money had not changed him. But the money did—and the final proof of that change, that transgression came in the form of Annette. Yet he did not blame her. He blamed himself. They had started out, after the honeymoon, to destroy each other—they had to, in order to be free of guilt. If Annette did not see this, he now did. But for the first time, perhaps, he was seeing that they did not want to destroy each other; each in their own way was determined to destroy and ruin only themselves. And now he knew—both had.

The amount he now tabulated, quick as a wizard, that he and she had lost over the last fourteen years, their dreams for Liam washed away like gutter rain: $2,231,651.43.

Ian was given two years in jail for break and enter. It seemed to the spectators who came to gawk and say “I told you so” that Ian didn’t care what happened to him.

As he prepared to go down to the medium security facility, a few people did drop by to see him, out of kindness. He was ashamed that Sara was one of them. The first thing he asked was for her to forgive him.

“Ahhh, but that was so long ago,” she said.

“No—it was just yesterday afternoon,” he replied.

He told her that one day years ago, he had snuck one of the books she
was reading, a book of short stories, and had read a story by someone who had an old river man saying that the best a person could hope for was to want nothing. How foolish he once thought that was, in his youthful anger, ambition and pride. Who could ever want so little? Now he would, if he could live his life over, live it for one dream only: to want and need nothing.

“It is a story by Anton Chekhov,” Sara said. How terrible Ian looked, his mouth split open, his eyes haggard, his skin grey, his voice a whisper.

“Well, whoever it was—he knew me.” Ian smiled.

She reached out and touched his cheek.

And looking down at her leg and seeing the brace she sometimes wore, he asked for forgiveness once more.

Annette Brideau entered her Golgotha. Not because she was destitute and not because she had done something she felt in her heart she should not have done. It was because of something else entirely. She felt she must do something to help her son. All of a sudden, she realized this. She was ashamed of how she had treated him, because she had not been able to show the love he deserved.