She crept upstairs and peeked furtively around the edge of the living room curtains, expecting to see only the dark-suited Jehovah’s Witnesses that regularly went in pairs up and down the street, getting short shrift at every door. But instead she saw—that nitwit from the bank?
Who ever heard of an assistant bank manager making a house call? Audrey forgot that she hadn’t intended to open the door to anyone, and yanked it open.
He looked back at her, his bland face startled, perhaps by the sudden force with which she’d opened the door. Or maybe he had the wrong house, Audrey thought hopefully. He’d made plenty of mistakes on their mortgage papers, she remembered that. They’d had to sign everything all over again.
“Mrs. Walker?” he said, flattening her fragile hopes as if clubbing them with a two-by-four. And right away, she just knew this was about their cleaned out account. About Dylan. Would they insist on pressing charges? Could they do that?
“May I come in?”
She nodded grimly and stepped aside, wondering if she should call a lawyer. Not that she knew any lawyers anyway. She’d have to rely on the Yellow Pages, and everybody knew that a bad lawyer was worse than no lawyer at all. She thought about calling Harold, remembered about controlling his stress, and decided against it.
The man from the bank came into the vestibule and stopped, as if waiting for permission. She motioned him into the living room. He sat down carefully on the couch and placed his black briefcase on the floor at his feet. He looked nervous, and that made Audrey more fearful than ever.
“Perhaps we should wait for your husband.”
“He won’t be back till six,” Audrey said. It was mid afternoon— maybe she could handle this herself. Maybe Harold didn’t have to be involved at all. She tried to smooth her hair and to brush some of the dust off her jeans. “I’ve been cleaning the basement,” she said.
“You haven’t spoken to him then?” the banker said, clearing his throat, and Audrey remembered that he had an irritating habit of clearing his throat, like a tic.
“No.”
“Oh.” The banker seemed surprised, looked at his watch. “He’ll be here shortly. I’ve set up a meeting. There’s something important we need to discuss.”
Something lurched in Audrey’s stomach. So much for protecting Harold. Maybe she ought to call Dr. Goldfarb, have him on standby; there was no telling how Harold might react to finding out his youngest son was a thief. Audrey went on the offence.
“You probably don’t know that the doctor has ordered that Harold have absolutely no stress right now?”
He shook his head, looking startled. “No, I had no idea.”
“He has a very bad heart,” Audrey lied. “This could kill him.”
“Oh,” the man said, some of the colour draining from his face.
At the sound of footsteps on the porch, they both turned to face the door. The door opened, and Harold appeared in the vestibule. He looked a little shell-shocked, Audrey thought, but he seemed to be breathing okay. She went over and gave him her usual welcome hug, and he kissed her on top of her head.
“Thank you for coming,” Harold said, shaking hands with the bank manager and then sitting down heavily in his La-Z-Boy chair. “But we could have gone to the bank.”
“No, really, that’s fine. It’s no trouble. Really.” He cleared his throat again in an extended way, and Audrey twitched in annoyance from her place at the opposite end of the couch. “Well,” he said, glancing nervously at Audrey. “I had a long talk with the bank’s fraud department after we spoke on the phone earlier today,” he began, looking at Harold. Audrey’s heart began to thump. “It’s not good.” He gave a nervous little cough and said, “We are really very sorry about the mortgage.”
Audrey looked at Harold, her mind blank.
“What mortgage?” Audrey said.
Harold turned to Audrey. “Did you have the phone off the hook all day or what?”
Audrey blinked. “What mortgage?”
“I haven’t had a chance to fill her in,” Harold explained to the banker.
“Oh. Right. Well, Mrs. Walker, to put it simply, your husband has—unfortunately—been a victim of identity theft.”
Audrey still didn’t get it. She wondered if this was somehow connected to Harold’s recent change in personality. She struggled through a fog of misapprehension to understand.
“This could happen to anyone,” the banker assured her, meaning to soothe. Meaning to exculpate himself and the bank, too. “It happens all the time. You wouldn’t believe how common this is these days.” He chuckled, gamely trying to make light of the situation, but his effort fell flat.
“What are you talking about?” Audrey said.
“Well,”—he cleared his throat again, as if girding his loins—“in a nutshell, someone has managed to obtain sufficient personal information on your husband to undertake various financial transactions in his name. It happens all the time. Usually, it’s simple credit card fraud. Someone gets enough of your personal information and applies for a credit card in your name.” As Audrey stared, appalled, he warmed to his subject. “Or, even better, they go through your blue box and pull out letters with pre-approved credit card offers. They send them in with a change of address, and start spending. Because of the change of address, you don’t get the bills, and it can go on for some time.”
Audrey looked at Harold.
“I bet you don’t shred those pre-approved credit card offers, do you?” the banker said.
“We don’t have a shredder,” Harold admitted tersely.
“Anyway, you mentioned your wallet went missing. At a funeral?”
Harold nodded.
“That’s probably what started it all. As I told you over the phone, you should never keep your social insurance number in your wallet,” the banker said. “Or your birth certificate.”
Audrey stared at the banker, not quite getting it. “But I cancelled all his credit cards.”
“I’m afraid that’s really not enough.” He looked back at Harold. “We didn’t know anything about it until you called us about the sports car problem.”
“Sports car problem,” Audrey echoed.
“In your case, we seem to be dealing with something quite complex. What we have here, actually, is an account takeover—whoever targeted you managed to gain access to all of your financial accounts.”
For Audrey, a connection was made.
“They drained your personal account and your joint account a few days ago, at about the same time they put a mortgage on this house.”
Audrey was struck dumb or else she would have said, “How is that possible?”
“And, I should warn you—he cleared his throat apologetically— this may be just the tip of the iceberg.”
Audrey began to feel light-headed. She heard, as if from a great distance, “Don’t worry—” But then she fainted, so she missed the part where he said, “You won’t be liable.”
• • •
EVEN THOUGH HE WAS grounded and he didn’t have access to a car anymore, John finally decided to call Nicole anyway. It had been over a week since he’d seen her, but it had taken him this long to get up the nerve. He had to come right home every day after school, but maybe he could cut classes and meet her for a coffee somewhere.
He couldn’t remember much of what they’d talked about at the funeral home, but he could picture her perfectly. He’d been fantasizing about her almost non-stop. He sensed—from her worldliness, from her parents’ expensive car—that she was one of those private school girls from uptown, Havergal maybe, or Branksome Hall, and the idea both excited and terrified him. He wasn’t in that league but figured maybe she could tell. Maybe she was attracted to him because he was the kind of boy her father wouldn’t approve of. He thought of how he must have looked to her when she first saw him standing on the street corner in his black suit, pissed off at the world. This was the fond drift of John’s thoughts since meeting Nicole at the funeral. But the diffi
culty was that he wasn’t a bad boy, a rebel, at all. He was scared, confused, and cautious to a fault, like his dad. But he was also taut with desire and longing.
Practically every night, he saw his father sprawled in his La-Z-Boy looking as if he’d given up. John couldn’t stand the sight of him looking so defeated. These days, whenever his mother said, you’re just like your father, he wanted to punch a hole in a wall. John had to fight against being nothing. Dylan didn’t have to fight that fight—somehow he’d been born cocky and resilient. The truth was John wished he was more like his little brother, which was humiliating.
So John decided that if it was a bad boy Nicole wanted, that’s what he’d try to give her.
He practised a few times in his head before he actually called her. “Hey, babe.” “Nicole,” he imagined saying in a gruff, sexy voice, which he could pull off if he was concentrating. But when he finally got up the nerve to make the call (while he was walking home from school—he had to be moving, and he needed privacy, he couldn’t do this from home) what he said was, “May I please speak to Nicole?” even though it was her voice that answered and it was probably her cell phone number she’d given him and no one else would have answered it anyway. He felt like an ass.
But she said, “Speaking.”
“It’s John,” he said, forgetting for the moment how utterly common his name was.
“John who?”
“We met recently, at a funeral . . .” he trailed off, hoping that she remembered. She was all he’d been thinking about, but a girl like her probably had so much going on she wouldn’t have given him a second thought. Why had he even—?
“It’s been a while, John.” She sounded ticked.
“I got into some trouble,” he said. It was true—there was his car accident, his adventure with Roy, being grounded.
“What kind of trouble?” Now she sounded interested, less ticked off.
“I trashed a car, got charged.” He left this out there for her imagination to run with. “You know.”
“Cool.”
“You want to get together?”
“Sure.”
He was thinking coffee, during the day, and wondering how that was going to sound after what he’d just said, when she said, “I know a place.” And the way she said it, so playful and suggestive, was so exciting he could hardly stand it.
“Yeah?” And now his voice was gruff and sexy without his even thinking about it, because he was thinking about being with her, and before he knew what hit him, he’d made a date to meet her a couple of nights later at 11 o’clock.
• • •
AFTER THE BANKER left, Audrey lay down on the couch with a cold, wet washcloth that Harold brought her folded neatly on her forehead. Harold sat on the couch with her feet in his lap, idly giving her feet little presses while he stared out the living room window.
This was how John found them when he got home from school.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
Audrey lifted one limp hand without opening her eyes and waved him off.
John went into the kitchen and fixed himself a ham and cheese sandwich, thinking about Nicole and how he was going to manage to sneak out of the house to meet her without getting caught.
CHAPTER FIVE
Supper that night was more animated than usual.
Often, Harold found family meals a bit of a strain. Audrey viewed family meals as a time to instill values, teach proper table manners, and enjoy civilized conversation. They all felt the pressure. As a result, the atmosphere was frequently tense, and the conversation stilted. The boys naturally wanted to talk with their mouths full, interrupt each other and trade mild insults, but Audrey wouldn’t allow it. It usually ended up with nobody saying much of anything. The sound of everybody chewing, Audrey’s questions about school, and the boys’ monosyllabic answers, made Harold miserable.
But the night of the identity theft was different. Harold ordered pizza, because Audrey was still too woozy from fainting to cook. Pizza they were allowed to eat with their hands. Also, Audrey was still in shock about the mortgage and wasn’t enforcing the rules as closely as usual. The boys were full of questions, which they mostly asked with their mouths full.
“What’s going to happen?” John asked anxiously, looping a piece of stretchy cheese around his finger.
“Nothing’s going to happen. The bank will take care of it. It’s all going to be fixed, don’t worry,” Harold said, hoping it was true. He remembered uneasily all the screw-ups the bank had made on their mortgage.
“How does someone steal your identity anyway?” Dylan asked through a mouthful of pizza dough, cheese, and pepperoni.
“Apparently, it’s surprisingly easy,” Harold said. “Although it can be complicated, too. My case is complicated.” He still couldn’t believe it had happened. “Someone—probably whoever took my wallet—got enough information about me to access my bank accounts. So they withdrew all our money. And there are all sorts of credit card bills—sports cars, you wouldn’t believe.”
“How do they do it, though?” Dylan asked, wanting the details.
As Harold explained what the bank manager had told them, Audrey, who still hadn’t touched her pizza, blurted out, “It’s going to take a lot of work to clear all this up!”
After supper, Harold decided to go for a walk. He wanted to clear his head, and he didn’t think sitting in his chair with the newspaper would do the trick tonight. He stepped off the porch into the early stirrings of a storm.
It was a dark, moonless, autumnal evening. As Harold walked along the streets away from the house, the wind wrestled with the trees high above him, whipping the branches around. It wasn’t raining yet, but it probably would, Harold thought, realizing that he’d left his umbrella behind. But he was far enough into his walk to think twice about going back to get it. He decided to take his chances.
He came to the end of one residential street and turned down another, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk a few feet in front of him, his thoughts gloomy, startled each time a dog entered his circle of vision before its owner loomed up behind it at the end of the leash, arm extended.
Harold soon found himself at the edge of Riverdale Park and stopped to cast his gaze far across the valley, in the direction of his childhood home. His thoughts turned to the different trajectories of his life and Tom’s. He and Tom were so different—no wonder they’d had such different lives. It was inevitable that they grow apart. Tom had never been depressed. He’d always lived life to the fullest. And thinking of Tom, Harold was startled by the sudden sharpness of his grief. All at once he wanted to weep—for Tom, and for himself.
Harold turned away from the park, walking faster. Eventually, his mind began to empty. He’d even begun to tell himself that with a little fortitude, he’d get through this thing with the bank, when there was an awful, rending crack—enough to put Harold on notice that something really bad was about to happen, but not enough notice for him to be able to do anything about it—and a branch split away from its trunk and came thrashing down, striking Harold on the head and shoulders and knocking him to the ground.
The main part of the branch had missed him—or he’d have been a dead man—but its smaller tributaries, sizable enough, had knocked the wind out of him and now pinned him to the sidewalk. He’d hit his forehead on the sidewalk and he could feel warm blood oozing down his face. He lay still, stunned but conscious, face down with his arms splayed wide beneath the heavy branch. He wished that he’d changed his mind about fetching the umbrella—that would have changed everything. He tentatively moved his fingers and toes a little, then his arms and legs, and found that nothing was broken. There was no paralysis, there wasn’t even any pain. That was the upside.
But the branch was too heavy for him. He couldn’t simply get up, pull it onto the nearest lawn, and carry on, hoping no one had seen him fall, the way you do when you trip in public.
Suddenly it began to rain. The cold rain revived him, and he
began to feel pain—a vicious throbbing in his head and an ache in his shoulders. A light flashed on at the front of the house he was spread-eagled in front of, a door opened and slammed. Someone was running down the walk. Harold pictured him, huddled against the rain.
“Are you all right?” the man asked, obviously alarmed.
For some reason, Harold thought of the opossum, which plays dead to fool its predators. But this man was not a predator; he was here to help.
“I’m fine,” Harold whispered, but even as he said it, he knew he couldn’t be heard over the sound of the wind and the rain, and besides, his face was pushed into the concrete.
“Shit!” the man said, and ran away.
Harold gingerly turned his face so that his cheek rested on the sidewalk. He figured when the next person came along, he’d better try to make eye contact.
But it was a big, slobbery dog that came upon him next and started to lick his face, making excited gulping noises and bathing Harold in slimy, smelly saliva. Harold tried not to think about where that tongue might recently have been. A woman bent down, forcing the blonde dog back with her hand on its chest.
“Can you hear me?” the woman asked.
Harold managed a small nod, his eyes open. She pulled out a cell phone and called for help.
Harold heard feet running down the walk again. “I called 911!” the man shouted importantly.
Now people were congregating from all directions, discussing what they should do.
“We’d better get that branch off him,” said one.
“No! Don’t move him,” said another.
“It’s a city tree,” said the man who owned the house in front of which Harold had been felled, to anyone who would listen.