“Annette—please—stop—love and you will be loved.”
But the secret was: if she did so, it meant giving up her new position, a position where everyone was waiting to see what she, Annette Brideau would do. And she realized she valued this new position too much to let it go.
The next day DD told her she must get a divorce. There was no way to live with a man like that, and DD said she would not allow it. “For God’s sake, have some self-respect!” she said.
Annette told DD she was not even sure what lawyer to see, for she had nobody to help her. But DD was willing to help and to supply her with the name of a lawyer. That proved she was serious. In fact, she would recommend no other but him, the one Diane herself had when divorcing Clive: J. P. Hogg.
Annette went home determined to phone him. She picked up the receiver half a dozen times, stared at it in a daze, and placed it back.
Then one day, about two weeks after she had talked so privately to Mr. Fension, young Wally Bickle, the man from Bicklesfield, met her on the street and suddenly took her hand.
He looked with his new moustache, like most of the junior managers at the mill. He had a great ability to be arrogant to those who were lower than he was, and obsequious to those above him.
“I don’t know if you remember me,” he said. “We were introduced at the curling club.”
“My God,” she said, trembling slightly, “remember you! Of course.”
He moved closer and said, with great emotion, “But never mind him—how are you?”
His boyish face suddenly amazed her with its appearance of trained diligence and corporate virtue.
“Oh, I’m okay,” she said, smiling, and tears started in her eyes.
“Don’t worry,” he said, and he squeezed the hand he held. His puffy white coat rustled. “He must have gone through a breakdown—handing out pamphlets and all that. But you must have never seen it coming.”
“A breakdown, yes, that’s what it was,” Annette said, wholly convinced of it. “A complete one too!”
To have Wally Bickle’s approval meant that she was included in town society, for Wally wouldn’t approve of anyone until they were. Yes, he was unaffiliated except toward those who could help him out. This was her assurance.
Some years before, our young Wally Bickle was in the student police, where he wore a flashlight and had an armband. But after high school he didn’t get into the RCMP, which he so wanted. He then tried to enlist in the Bicklefield town police but failed an aptitude test.
Still dedicated to public responsibility, he worked as a collection officer, and Molly Thorn was in his register. Then he was hired at the Workers’ Compensation Board, where he had to deal harshly with Evan Young (he liked to mention how harsh he had to be). Then, when the Workers’ Compensation Board relocated, he was suddenly adrift, looking for another job, and was almost ready to leave the province, when he got a call from the mill. He got this call because of his mother, who knew Mr. Conner.
Wally Bickle went to the interview full of grave determination and was somber when they told him he might be needed in a truly professional capacity. After the interview he turned at the door. The mill whistle sounded, and there was a soft stench of sulphur and copper in the cold night air as shadows crossed the desks and sheets of stencil.
“What will my title be?” he asked Mr. Ticks’s secretary.
“What?”
“What will my title be?” he said abruptly.
“Oh! Wally Bickle, Assistant Office Manager in Standard Pulp Products and Supplies,” she told him.
“I see,” he commented most solemnly. He left and wandered back toward the dark metal stairway.
The next day, he had cards printed that said just that.
At first, and for some time after Annette had decided on a divorce, her husband knew nothing and she told him nothing. She listened to his plans to redo the store. She nodded when he told her things, and said he might be right, that his life could get back on track. But she said nothing.
Ian had an idea for a small filter that could be used to monitor the levels of toxins in the water from the mill. He worked on this in his spare time, hoping to make up for things. He would explain it all to Liam, and say he was hoping to make a critical contribution to the river.
He worked tirelessly at his partially destroyed store where no one shopped anymore. And secretly he spent hours at the courthouse archives and in the capital city of Fredericton, and twice he phoned his MP in Ottawa. He collected 170 pounds of documents that came in three taped-up boxes, and were left outside his door in the rain.
“Why did they want my property so desperately, Liam?” he asked, over and over. “Why did they want it so badly?”
What he did not know was in fact obvious: The road into Quebec, which our own government would pay for, would allow Helinkiscor to transport the wood from our own province to a mill in another province with better access to world markets, and force our own mill to shut down in less than five years. A road from his property across the west side of Good Friday Mountain was by far the best access into Quebec. That is why they had wanted it so desperately. And that is what Ian would not discover until others did. Because no one could have ever believed that the company did not even want the mill, just the thousands and thousands of tons of wood they would harvest. Nor did they ever expect to keep the people here working for long.
Ian tried to speak to Annette now and then, but Annette said nothing to him. However, she on occasion thought of Wally—she could not help it. She too had felt the trauma of being ostracized. And she never wanted to feel it again.
Some days she would drive passed the mill to see all the cars in the lot and try to figure out which one was his.
But DD knew what she was doing, and she knew the game being played. And despite all the concern for her friend, the idea of that game is what enthralled Diane.
So Annette went to her fortune teller, had the tarot cards read, played the Ouija board, and discovered that her life was now pointed irrevocably in one direction. That is, in the stern silence of nine at night, in the living room of the fortune teller, with its embroidered oversized cushions on the sofa, the Death card appeared. Annette shrank back in her chair.
The tarot reader assured her that this card only meant change. “Things will change,” she said. “It means change, not death!”
Later, when Annette asked the Ouija board if she would find unconditional love, it compelled her to spell yes. “Then it must be with Wally,” Diane said, looking over her shoulder and stroking Annette’s beautiful hair. “I am more sure now than ever.”
That night, as Annette left the fortune teller and ran back along the street, she bumped into someone—much as Ian had all those years ago. It was Sara Robb, who was now a medical doctor here. Annette started to fall, but Sara managed to grab her.
“Annette,” she said. “My soul, how are you?”
Annette wanted to speak—she really did. But she turned instead, and left Sara alone on the street.
The next day she went and had her hair done and a manicure at Cut and Curl. She did not understand she was upset because she had not spoken to Sara; she only knew she needed to look special and beautiful again. Her son came with her.
“This is exclusive,” DD said, putting Annette’s head back gently. “Watch, Liam, how I treat your darling mother.”
During those trips to Cut and Curl Liam would sit quietly, listening in the boredom of a mid-afternoon winter’s day. He was twelve years of age, and old enough to pick out the degree to which things were said and left unsaid. The room would smell of hair rinse and snow, of smoke and boredom, and was filled with the talk of aging middle-class women who were ultimately impersonators of those whose world they aspired to live in. Once, Annette inadvertently made fun of his crooked teeth. Later she looked at him and smiled, as if apologizing, and offered to buy him a pop. He smiled clumsily back, and covered his mouth.
Later that night Liam decided he woul
d get his own teeth fixed, and he applied for a paper route.
Now Liam went to bed worried about debt. Now Liam left for school in the morning plagued by the thought of debt. Now in his scribbler he wrote a household budget, and left it on the fridge for his mom and dad.
A week after Annette had seen Sara Robb, Ian left for Halifax to try to get money to help him develop the filter he had invented in his spare time. He was sure that with fifty thousand dollars he could manufacture these filters, distribute them to every mill in the country—and that they would be wanted.
He put the cylinder-shaped object in a box, smiled at his son and said, “Wish me luck!”
He took the train, and spoke to people he met naïvely and hopefully, as if he’d already been awarded the grant. They saw a young enough man still, sitting with his cane, staring out the window.
When he got to Halifax, to the Council of Atlantic Business and Industrial Entrepreneurs, his meeting had been postponed. No one was in the office on Barrington Street apart from a secretary, who had no information except that all meetings had been put back forty-eight hours. He waited two days, and his meeting lasted thirty-eight minutes.
He was asked if he had anyone who knew how to help him.
“My son,” he said.
He was asked him how old his son was.
“He is twelve,” Ian said.
His was a good idea—peculiar too, because all mills did already regulate their effluence and there were standards and practices already in place. In fact, any other effluent regulator would have to pass the standards and practices, which might take years, before it was authorized. They even made a joke about how this was a Catch-22: they could not give the money unless it passed the standards test, and how could they know it would pass the standards if they did not give the money? But there you go—there it was.
It was a good idea, and the council was most impressed that he was concerned about pollution and river systems. More people needed to be inventive and proactive. “Proactive” was becoming the new word.
Ian was ashamed—ashamed of his suit, which was now ten years out of date, and his hopeful pleading face.
The truth was, it was a face these people knew. And Ian they had heard of—he was known as a crackpot. The mill managers had been long aware of his application and they’d informed the person at the council that Ian was the troublemaker from the Miramichi. He came back without the contract.
When Ian arrived home, it was five in the afternoon. The streetlights were already on, and Ian sat in the corner of the living room, looking through his ragged black wallet because he had spent more than he thought he would.
That was the night Liam decided to do his trick.
In his childlike mind, Liam was doing this trick to keep them together, because he believed everything was now his fault. If he had not been so cranky, his parents would not have fought. If he had protected his father’s signs, the store would not have burned. Everything that had happened over the last two to four years had forced Liam into a world of model train sets and magic—a place of solitude children are sometimes forced into.
He had practised this particular magic trick in secret upstairs in his room before the mirror. After all this time his hands were healed, with little white scars on the tips of his fingers. He walked downstairs in a black cape Ethel had made for him, and wearing a top hat. Suddenly he appeared like a little Dracula, which startled both his parents. He smiled. He shyly asked if they would like to see a magnificent trick, then told them not to come into the den for forty-five minutes.
Just before he left them he said, “If I do something to surprise you, will you stop fighting?”
“Oh, we don’t fight,” Annette said.
And so Ian and Annette waited outside the den in silence, both of them as if being rebuked by an authority, both sitting on chairs, awaiting a summons. And when it got dark, long after supper, Liam said softly, “Okay, come in now.”
They entered the room as if entering some place of grave mystery. They saw his magic hat and gloves lying across the coffee table, but his cape was draped around him. And there, in front of them, Liam rose a foot or more off the floor, floating as if buoyed by some strange force.
Ian smiled, and delighted said, “How did you do that, Son?”
But Liam only said, “See? It’s easy to do things that seem impossible—so please stay together and don’t be scared, and I will get a job too and we will have everything we want! Mom, you don’t have to ever go away.”
Behind him a single light bulb shone, making a halo of his hair.
The very next day Annette went to visit her friend Diane. DD was waiting for her.
Annette for some reason wanted to prove herself—not to just anyone but to DD. Why this was, she could not say. She could not say that she was in some way seduced by the very act she was being encouraged to perform. And the more seductive it was, the more its seduction rested upon the fact that she could pretend she was trying to resist.
She had cried the whole morning. The reason for this was twofold. The divorce must come—but she had waited until Ian had lost out on the contract he’d wanted, which he’d said would make a million. She was, in fact, crying because he had lost the contract, and she felt sorry for him. But she also knew her friends—those who protected her—hated him and blamed him alone for all her unhappiness, and she must decide between him or them—and must decide now.
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.
Crimes Against My Brother Page 28