Crimes Against My Brother

by David Adams Richards

  But then she tossed her pen down and sat staring into nothing.

  To send the vial away was to condemn either Evan or Harold, or implicate Ian. But if it was Harold’s blood, people would say she had taken this blood just to condemn him and ruin her sister’s life. It would be every bit as bad as condemning Ian, who, they would say, she had a clear motive to seek revenge against.

  Rumour would destroy them all.

  What would spur this hatred against her was her own editorial in the newspaper during the time certain women were accusing her of being old-fashioned and insensitive. She had written that God calls on people not to do what is easy but what is right. She also quoted scripture, which is always a dangerous thing to do: “I knew you before you were in the womb. You were consecrated before you were born.”

  How could that insignificant amount of matter—that bright blush of someone’s fine makeup—hold such power?

  So even she, who was innocent, who tried her best to be fair, was paying the price of living.

  I will allow your fiancé to be free, the universe said, but you must condemn your sister’s husband—a sister whose life you saved and who you swore to protect. And if you do save your fiancé, no one will believe you. In fact, they will accuse you of being untruthful. But if you do not do this, the one who you love will go to jail, and may in fact die there. Then there is Ian, a man who betrayed you—you were the doctor on duty and made sure he was treated the night he came to the hospital A vial of blood—what is that to seep out of him? And if it is his, no one will believe you either.

  Or you can take the seed of blood you have collected and you can throw it away—into the dark bay below Bonny Joyce, and in tossing this seed you can live assured of the uncertainty that anyone around you, or you yourself, will ever do the right thing again. Because no one can do the right thing if you do not.

  Sara lived with these thoughts, lost weight, but she found no resolution. One afternoon she told Ethel a story. She asked Ethel to come and sit with her and said, “I want to tell you a story.”

  “Oh great,” Ethel said. “I love stories.”

  “Well,” Sara said, “there were two men, and one committed a crime. But both men had turned their lives around—and both men no longer were the men who at one time were guilty of thinking of this crime, because both men had at one time thought of this crime as being just. Yet one, out of misfortune or a moment’s indiscretion, committed it. Perhaps even by accident. But by his very act of committing it he set many free—even the other man who might have done it. Now both these men were better men now than they had been in years. Both simply wanted to be kind. But if someone turned evidence into the police, that someone would condemn one of these men to a place where being kind would cost him his life. So whoever gave evidence was condemning one of these two men to a life where his direction, his hope for goodness, would become a casualty of what he in rashness had done years before. And is this fair? So if you, Ethel, had the means to find out which of the two men it was—what would you do?”

  And Ethel simply said, “Harold is very good to me. He is not a bully anymore—like he was at first. Liam has changed us both. Liam is like our son. Much like our son should be. I can’t have babies you already told me—so Liam is my child now. I want you to know I love Harold, and I want you to know he loves me—and I want you to know we both love Liam, okay?”

  Sara kissed her, like she always did.

  And now a rumour was spreading across the town that the spinster who doctored children but did not have one of her own was in fact the kiss of death. She left the hospital at night under this suspicion, and was left alone again.

  This was exquisite torture—which man might she save by advancing a cut of blood that she could have collected at any time?

  Annette by this time in her life looked fifty. It was two months after she’d been laid off. She had put her big house up for sale in a bid to save something. She’d received notices of foreclosure and requests that she call the bank.

  She wanted to buy herself and Liam a little trailer on Becker’s Lane. She asked Diane to help her with a loan, but Diane couldn’t afford it. The little trailer was nice, she thought now—though a year ago she would have laughed about being seen in it. It had a small porch and two bedrooms, a little kitchen and a small living room. Yes, yes, yes, that is all one ever needed!

  On the night Liam was confirmed, he came home to find Annette in agony. Earlier he had knelt as his sponsors, Harold and Ethel, placed their hands on his head. He had whispered fidelity to the church and to God. Harold had hugged him and there were tears in the man’s eyes as he held Liam out at arm’s length.

  “I’ll take care of you. Don’t you worry about a thing,” Ethel said.

  But Liam left the reception because his mother wasn’t there. He left the old church basement and came home. His blue suit was too small and his ankles showed above his socks.

  He had now, after all this time, the gentlest smile his mother had ever seen.

  She was slumped near the window in her bedroom. She had been looking out the window for him to come home. He told her he was going to take her to the hospital. She was too weak to say no.

  He sat her up in bed, and took the golden necklace that Wally had given her for Christmas two years ago and tossed it onto the floor. Then he took the beads that Ethel had received from Father MacIlvoy and had given to him that very night, and started to place them around her neck.

  “They will probably burn my skin.” She smiled.

  “No, Mom, they won’t,” he said. His white lips trembled. He tried to remember prayers as he held her. But he could not remember any prayers at all.

  “Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” he said, his lips trembling.

  She looked at his face and touched it gently.

  He helped her dress—he was used to it now. There were red blotches on her face, and her breasts were scarred where she had had her implants. He got her best shoes and helped her put them on.

  “I am so sorry I hit you,” she whispered, touching his hair, which was damp with sweat.

  “All of us are sorry, the whole world, and those who aren’t don’t know. Little Wally Bickle is not sorry—but he does not know,” Liam said, not looking up while he tied her shoe.

  “You have to take me,” she said. “I don’t want no ambulance. Busybodies.”

  “I’m going to take you to Dr. Sara,” he said. “She is only four blocks away—she is still in her office tonight.”

  “Dr. Sara—she hates me,” Annette whispered, almost spiteful with terror.

  He laughed, then wiped tears from his face. “Oh Mommy,” he said, “don’t you know! She is one of the few who doesn’t.”

  They went out into the hot night, the trees gloomy and damp. They passed the FOR SALE sign. Yes, he remembered her pounding that into the soil just last week, as if she wanted to prove to the world she was going to make a change. And sadly, as if the world would care if she did.

  Sara Robb was at the office late for one reason: she had the vial of blood in her pocket, ready to either throw into the water or take to the police, when the boy appeared with his mother. She put the vial away, for suddenly she had to try to save Annette Brideau’s life.

  Annette said, “Oh my dear, dear Sara,” and clutched her hand, the prayer beads resting under her white chin and softly against her cold breasts. “Pray for me now. I am too young to die.”

  Sara discovered that Annette had a massive blood clot. She phoned an ambulance immediately. But the clot moved suddenly, stopping Annette’s heart at 10:15 p.m.

  Sara continued her heroic measures in the hospital for almost two more hours.

  Annette was forty years old, but almost no one heard that she had died that night, an old woman forgotten by everyone.

  Liam sat in the waiting room staring at an orchid in a large pot. He remembered going to first communion. The sky had been threatening that day, the wind blowing the big trees; Ethel had him by the hand.
A little shaft of light was falling from the cloud. “Angels,” Ethel had told him, as she combed his hair by the church’s big archway. “They are everywhere. Do not believe those who tell you they are not!”

  He was sixteen now. So where in the world would he go?

  Ethel and Harold told him their house was open to him as long as he wanted.

  “I am your father if you want,” Harold said gently. “You come live with us and I will be the best father I can be. It is not too late for that to happen!” And he added, “Liam, if there were more people like you in the world, there would be fewer people like me,” and he’d kissed his forehead.

  Sara made out the report on Annette’s death. She thought of how little Annette had been left with, how much she had lost, the prayer beads against her skin as a last resort, the sadness and confusion in her eyes, and her last words: “God forgive me.” She thought of everyone suffering the same way in this world, in one fashion or another, and made her decision: she would turn the vial in.

  Markus Paul interviewed Evan.

  “The problem is, I was once unconcerned about anything. Then I went into the woods hunting with Ian Preston, thinking only of money, and did not have a peaceful moment until I was standing over Sullivan’s body. Except what did I kill him with?”

  “Oh, we know what you killed him with,” Markus said.

  “What?”

  He showed Evan photos from the top and side of the red tool box, evidence taken by the photographer Wilson all those years gone by.

  “There was a wrench sitting there. Sullivan did not slip and fall—he was hit hard with a big wrench.”

  “A wrench?”

  “Look, you can make out its outline. Do you remember it—a wrench?”

  “No, I do not remember a wrench.”

  There were seventeen people at Annette’s funeral besides the pallbearers. The priest was young—in his twenties still. He had never heard of Annette. He spoke of the treasure of Catholicism, and the need for people like Annette in the Catholic Church. Strangely, it all seemed true. The day was warm, and the bright spaces between the many, many empty pews looked hopeful in the sunlight. The choir sang “Ave Maria,” and the coffin made of dark oak sat before the altar just as Corky’s had a very few years before.

  The death of Annette, although hardly noticed in the town at first, had over the course of that summer a profound effect on many. Some people who knew her became very depressed, and then quite suddenly became angry at themselves and others because they saw her youngster in the town park or going alone to the enclosure to swim, and became aware of the tragedy they had all been party to. They had participated in creating the very plight she’d found herself in that last night of her life, when little Liam was trying to find her best shoes.

  Wally began to be shunned everywhere he went. He came back from bible camp and tried to be humble. But humble did not sit well with him.

  Now he too was alone.

  He went to Diane to ask her if she was telling secrets about what had happened.

  “Omigod, no,” Diane said. “What do you take me for?” And she gave him not a smile this time but an astonished and spiteful look reserved for people she’d been told to dislike.

  But then she went on to Cut and Curl. She was going out with a younger man now, a bold and indifferent kind of fellow, sixteen years younger than she was, who seemed to care for nothing.

  His name was Rueben Sores.

  The dour great mill seemed to swallow Wally whole, the caking machines laying in wait for him to enter through the small back door, the ghost of forgotten office laughter echoing.

  Now he opened the locked personnel office where half the chairs had been stacked. He saw under Annette’s old desk the little monkey Liam had bought for her. It was lying on its side, as if ready to bang its cymbals in defiance. And there was a note on a yellow sticky from one secretary to another, written more than six years before: “Meet you in five minutes.”

  Liam was alone again.

  Once, Pint McGraw saw him and tried to catch up to him. He said, “Liam, wait! I have to tell you something very important—they are going to take me …”

  But Liam kept walking. In the far corner of a downtown building in the middle of the afternoon, he hid, and watched Pint as he looked for him, up and down the deserted street, trying to catch his breath.

  “I am sorry, Pint,” he whispered. “I am sorry.”

  Pint never had his own room. He never had a birthday party—the closest he ever came to a celebration was when Liam took him to his fort. He had a few Pokémon cards that Liam had given him long ago and a small case to put his glasses in. But sometimes he was so exhausted he would fall asleep with his glasses on. When they took him to the hospital, to the children’s ward, to the room with one window, it was already late in July. He had no visitors. They promised him his own harmonica. He asked them if Liam could visit.

  “Of course,” they said.

  He didn’t want to be there. Scared of being alone, he told them that he was feeling much better, so maybe he could go home.

  After a while—and a short while too—his hair fell out. He never saw Liam again.

  Liam lived alone. And his house was big, so he could hide there. He never spoke to people, so he didn’t know about Pint at the hospital, who was asking him to visit.

  He began to go back and forth to the beach at the enclosure. He began to notice that outside the huge mill, men had gathered in protest. Leading them was Rueben Sores. Rueben offered him smokes and told him stories—once placed a ten-dollar bill in his hand.

  Liam would remember that his mother had driven these roads for four years, working, believing she would have a good life. She in a way was a star—as close to a celebrity as we had here—and that is why they needed her to destroy herself.

  Once, he snuck under the gate by the lower entrance and placed the necklace Wally had given her on Wally’s car’s inside mirror. Then he turned and walked away.

  I don’t think he liked Mom at all, he thought.

  He would go visit his mother’s grave and sit beside it in the day.

  He didn’t think of things she had said to him about his teeth and how they were crooked. He knew that she was in many ways like a spoiled child. Even when she saw disaster all about her, she couldn’t stop pretending to be loved. He sat at the fresh grave, not able to bring himself to leave. His mouth would open in agony, and he would shiver the same way he had when they took the boys away and said he couldn’t build them forts.

  No one bothered with him anymore if he walked by his old school or toward the playground in the long dreary afternoons, or when he went out looking for beer bottles to drag up to the bottle exchange so he could go to a movie. So he could see Spider-Man like other kids. Or go swimming for fifty cents at the Kinsmen Pool, and sit in isolation near the rusted mesh fence.

  He could tell the town had come to its end.

  Sometimes he walked by his mother’s grave and did not go and visit it anymore. And once or twice someone asked him, “What are you going to do, Liam?”

  And he said, “I am going to go away.”

  Once Liam went away no one would bother him, no one would care. This is what he thought. He often thought of his mom, and tears would start. The treatment she had was, he believed, a crime against his brother. But she had been forgiven—if only she had known.

  He never answered those who called out to him. He never spoke to classmates at the beach. He never listened to his messages on the telephone.

  Then Harold and Ethel asked Liam to come and stay with them.

  Some days it got cold, and you could see fall would come. Harold said he cared for poor little fellas and he wanted Liam to work for him—he had started getting contracts that Lonnie Sullivan once had to move garbage. They would go and clean out sewers, sewer lines and septic tanks. It was a good job, and was how he himself had started out thirty years before.

  “How are things at the pawnshop?” Liam aske
d.

  “I had to close it up—too many people selling and no one buying. Couldn’t afford the rent—the downtown, boy, is dead!”

  “In some ways I expected that,” Liam said.

  “We will go and bring the stuff back here,” Harold said. “You can help me.”

  So they went and loaded what was left of the world. There were two table lamps, a wicker chair—the shotgun that Evan had once won on the horseshoe toss, that Ian had used, and was traded to the pawnshop by Hanna Stone’s son, along with two slugs, for the diamond of Annette Brideau.

  They put it all in the back of Harold’s half-tonne truck.

  Harold said that he had waited years to get that shotgun back. He told Liam how he had lost it and said, “You can have it.”

  “I can have it?”

  “Sure, it’s yours!”

  Harold bought Liam a Coke on the way downriver, and tousled his head.

  “How much did you love your mom?” Harold asked.

  But Liam couldn’t answer. His eyes filled with tears.

  “I’ll be the best father you ever had,” Harold said. There was a long pause as he shifted gears.

  Harold and Liam went fishing, and out on the bay one day they spied an old drifter, half covered in sand, lying on the beach in Neguac.

  “Do you want that?” Harold asked Liam and Ethel.

  “What could we do with it?”

  “What could we do with it? Well, we could put a new wheelhouse on it and redo the Cuddy—repair the keel, keep it for ourselves. I can drop an engine into it.”

  They hauled it home by truck. It was called Isa’s Morning Star. Harold said, “We will change the name to Ethel’s Hope.”

  At night they sat on the porch and drank beer.

  Harold had contracts for fourteen houses. It could have, might have, should have been a very good life.

  But was it fair, now that Harold had turned his life around—because of Liam and Ethel—was it fair that he would have to pay? And pay with twenty years? In doing so, in paying this way, would this redemption and change that he was experiencing for the first time in his life continue, or would he fall into bitterness and hatred again? And those other two—Evan and Ian, now both in jail—was it fair in any way that they were paying for things unseen? For Molly’s and Sara’s pain?