The Divide

Roch, her little brother, never did. They grew up in a rough part of Montreal and went to the kind of Catholic school where the nuns carried wooden rulers with metal edges embedded in them—in certain hands, a deadly weapon. The nuns were big on geometry and devotions. Amelie, however, had had her own agenda. In an era when the Parti Quebecois was dismantling English from the official culture, Amelie had resolved to teach herself the language. Not just the debased English everybody knew; not just the English you needed to follow a few American TV shows.Real English. She had conceived of a destiny outside Montreal. She saw herself living in English Canada, maybe eventually the States. Doing something glamorous—she wasn’t sure what. Maybe it would involve show business. Maybe she would manage a famous rock band.

Maybe she would wait tables.

Roch was different. He never had any ambitions that Amelie could figure out. When he was real little he would follow her around as singlemindedly as a duckling; she would tow him down St. Catherine’s Street on su

Roch had needed the company. He never had friends. He took a long time learning to talk and he wasn’t reading with any facility until he was in fifth grade. Roch, it turned out, was slow. Not stupid—Amelie made this important distinction—just slow. When Roch learned something, he hung on to it fiercely. But he took his time. And in that school, in that place, taking your time was a bad thing. It made you look stupid. Not clever-stupid or sullen-stupid or anything dignified; it made you look dog-dumb, especially if you were also small and ugly and fat. Amelie had been bruised a few times defending Roch in the schoolyard. And that was when she bothered to stand up for him. A thirteen-year-old girl sometimes doesn’t want to know when her idiot brother is catching flack. She thought of him that way, too—her idiot brother—at least sometimes.

But Rochwasn’t stupid, Amelie knew, and he learned a lot.

He learned not to trust anybody. He learned that you could do what you wanted, if you were big enough and strong enough.

And he learned to get mad. He had a real talent for getting mad. Pointlessly, agonizingly mad; skin-tearing mad; going home and vomiting mad.

And then, eventually, he learned something else: he learned that if you grow up a little bit, and put on some muscle, then you can inspire fear in other people—and oh, what an intoxicating discovery that must have been.

Amelie trudged along Wellesley into St. Jamestown, past the hookers on the comer of Parliament, thinking October-night thoughts. She stopped at a convenience store to pick up a couple of TV di

She put Roch out of her mind and thought about Benjamin instead, and that lightened her mood. She even managed a smile, standing at the check-out counter. Because Benjamin was the great discovery of her life.

A recent discovery.

He had come into the Goodtime just about six months ago, on one of those ugly spring days when the wind is raw and wet and just about anybody is liable to wander in off the street. She took him at first for one of those wanderers: a tall, benign-looking, shy man with a puppydog smile, his collar turned up and a black woolen cap plastered to his head. An oddball, but not a Type, exactly; he looked straight at her in a way Amelie appreciated. She remembered thinking the odds were mixed on somebody like that: he might tip generously or not at all … you could never tell.

But he did tip, and he came back the next day, and the day after that. Pretty soon he was one of her regulars. He came in late one Wednesday and she told him, “I’m going off-shift—you’re late,” and he said, “Well, I’ll walk you home,” in that straight-ahead way, and Amelie said that would be all right—she didn’t even have to think about it—and pretty soon they were seeing each other. Pretty soon after that he moved out of his basement room on Bathurst and into the St. Jamestown apartment.

Benjamin was decent, well-meaning, kind.

Roch enjoyed crushing people like that.

Amelie’s smile faded.

And of course there was the other problem, which she tried not to think about, because, even among these other mysteries, it wastoo mysterious, too strange.

The thing about Benjamin was, he wasn’t always Benjamin.

The apartment was a mess, but it felt warm and cozy when Amelie let herself in. She kicked off her shoes, ran some hot water for the dishes, plugged a Doors tape into the stereo.

She was not deeply into Sixties rock, but there was something about Morrison: he just never sounded old-fashioned. The tape wasStrangeDays; the song that came up was “People Are Strange.” Loping drumbeat and Ray Manzarek moaning away on keyboard. That real sparse guitar sound. And Morrison’s voice doing his usual psycho-sexy thing.

Timeless. But she turned it down a little when she peeked into the bedroom and saw Benjamin asleep under the covers. He slept odd hours; that was one of the strange things about him. But she doubted the tape would wake him—he slept like a slab of granite.

Back to the dishes, Amelie thought.

Awright, yeah! said Morrison.

And if Roch came by—

But maybe he wouldn’t. She consoled herself with that thought, bearing down with the scrub brush on one of the Chinese dragon bowls she’d bought in Chinatown. The basic fact about Roch was his unpredictability. He might say he was going to do something, but that didn’t mean shit. You never could tell.

She took some marginal comfort in these thoughts, losing herself in the rhythm of the music and the soapy smell of the hot water.

She was draining the sink when the last song, “The Music’s Over,” faded out. She heard the click of the tape as it switched off, the faint metallic transistor hiss from the speakers … and the knock at the door.

“You should have called.”

“I tried earlier. You weren’t home.” Roch stood blinking in the hallway. “You’re supposed to invite me in.”

Amelie stood aside as he came through the door.

“Place is a mess,” he observed.

“I just got home, all right?”

He shrugged and sat down.

It was six months since Amelie had seen her brother, but it was obvious he hadn’t let up on his gym work. He was six foot one, a head taller than Amelie, and his shoulders bulked out under his bomber jacket. AD the body work, however, had done nothing for his looks. His face was wide and pasty, his lips were broad. He stood with his hands in his jacket pockets and Amelie could see them moving there, knitting and unraveling, making fists, the fingernails digging into the palms. She told him to sit down.

He pushed aside a pile of newspapers and sprawled on the sofa.

Amelie made coffee and talked to him from the kitchen. There had been a letter from Montreal: Mama was adjusting to the new apartment even though it was smaller than the old one. Uncle Baptiste had been in town, looking for work when the Seaway trade picked up again. She kept her voice down, because it was possible even now that Benjamin might sleep through the whole thing … that Roch would say what he had to say and then leave. She pi

She poured a cup of coffee for him and one for herself and carried them into the living room. She sat opposite him in the easy chair, took a sip—bitter black coffee—and listened to the sudden silence of the room, the absence of her own voice.