by Alice Zorn
Fara had walked from room to room, gaze levelled high, trying not to see the bed with its turmoil of grimy sheets, the tangled clothes on the floor — legs and sleeves wrestling to be rid of themselves — the clutter of empty beer cans and the rubber mask of a devil’s face in the kitchen. Those were all things that could be packed up and thrown away. They weren’t the house. A house was a shell that, in itself, didn’t carry memories. She and Frédéric would paint the walls, sand the floors, decorate. Make the house theirs.
Frédéric stirred his straw through the crushed ice in his glass. “Are you sure you’re all right about the suicide?”
She heard how he kept it at a distance: the suicide. She should learn that trick. A horror you named but didn’t claim.
“It’s been years.” The metal teapot dripped when she poured, soaking the white paper doily under her cup. What a time warp — doilies and beehive hairdos.
“What if the house reminds you?”
“You mean ghosts?” She blotted her cup on a napkin and sipped her tea. “If Claire’s ghost never haunted me, why should this boy’s?”
“As long as you’re sure you’re all right.”
“Are you sure you’re all right about cleaning up his stuff ? I can’t help you.”
“I don’t expect you to.”
“His father …” she began.
“What about his father?”
She remembered having to pack the clothes in Claire’s closet. The flowered summer skirts. The black suede jacket with the pansy embroidered on the pocket. A metal hanger bent from the weight of a dozen pairs of jeans Claire would never wear again. Fara had punched the clothes into bags, arms rigid, face wet. Shoved the bags down the maw of a charity bin.
She made a face now. “His father’s lucky you’re doing it.”
“Am I doing it? Have we decided to buy the house?” His wide-eyed trusting and trustworthy look. Ready to lead or follow. She had only to give him the sign.
Seven years ago she’d been trudging through snowdrifts down a sidewalk behind a man who leaped up the steps of the apartment building where she was headed. Through the glass she saw him batting snow off his sleeves and shoulders.
She opened the door, shook snow off her tam, eyeing him sidelong as she stomped her boots. “Ever seen such a snow?” What a silly thing to say.
“Crazy night to go out,” he agreed. As if a snowstorm ever kept a Montrealer home.
Fara had crossed her fingers inside her mittens, hoping he was coming to Tom and Karin’s party. She liked his boyish face, broad cheekbones, and lively eyes. He was taller than she was, too. She had nothing against short men, but it didn’t feel as sexy when a man had to lift his head to kiss her.
When she began to climb the stairs and he followed, she asked, “Are you following me?”
“You’re following me. I’m being polite and letting you go ahead.”
Both stopped before the door with the music and laughter. Fara blushed that her wish had come true so easily. Hold on! she told herself. Just because he’d arrived at the party alone didn’t mean he was single.
When he tugged off his brown toque, she asked, “Is that a helmet liner?”
“It only cost two bucks. I didn’t know it was a helmet liner.”
“I think it is.”
“How can you tell?” He turned it inside out and squinted at the washing instructions.
“A helmet.” She clamped a hand on her head. “Like soldiers wear. Inside, it’s got a liner. You can buy them at the army surplus store.”
“Ah!” He smiled. “I thought you meant a designer name — like Hugo Boss.” And affecting a British accent, “Excuse me, is that perchance a Helmut Liner?”
Another point in his favour. A man who could laugh at himself.
They walked into the crush of bodies and noise where separate friends hailed them. From across the room Fara tracked him. She wasn’t sure but she thought he did the same. No one seemed to claim him. They circled closer.
Et voilà, here they were, seven years later, married and about to buy a house.
“And you’re sure you’re sure?” Frédéric asked. “Because you weren’t so keen on the idea of a house, and now this one, with a suicide …”
“I like the house. I think I’m okay about the suicide. I should be, right? It’s been seventeen years.”
Rose
Rose didn’t have to start work at the hospital until two. In the morning she took the subway to St-Henri and walked past the discount stores, the pizza-slice and roti shops, the beer trucks unloading boxes. She turned down the wide street where a factory with a smokestack had been refurbished as condos. The brick had been cleaned but still looked old. The high, gleaming windows mirrored the sky. She had to take great steps over the converging and criss-crossing rails of the train tracks. Before Kenny explained that they curved north to skirt the mountain and south to the rail yards and downtown, she saw only a puzzle of parallel lines narrowing in the distance.
The first morning she unlocked the door by herself, she hung back. The dark room wafted with ghostly movement. Shadows hulked. She told herself it was only garbage. Planks and metal junk. She darted across the room to jerk aside the canvas curtain. Out the tic-tac-toe window she saw cyclists and the canal.
She’d been to the studio a few times now, and the view from the window was growing familiar. Between her and the bike path was a rusted chain link fence. Grey skies tarnished the water silver. Every few minutes a jogger or cyclist passed. If Rose craned her neck, she could see the sculptor near the loading ramp. Often he was working, bent over his stone with a chisel or a rasp, but just as often he had visitors and stood talking.
Rose banged the heel of her palm against the stiff catches on the lower panes of the window until she’d forced a few open. Fourteen panes across, four high: fifty-six panes of glass, each one filthy. She would need a ladder to get to the top rows.
She’d brought rags and a jug of bleach she’d carried from her apartment, on the bus and the subway. She was smarter when she realized she could buy a broom and bucket in St-Henri.
She couldn’t find a stopper for the sink, so twisted a corner of rag into the mouth of the drain. She filled the sink and poured in bleach. Inhaled its good smell as she scrubbed the rusty tap and sink. The hardened dribbles of paint — the crimson splashes that looked like blood — had bonded to the porcelain, but the sink was clean now.
She swiped at the cobwebs she could reach. Stooped and lifted. Dragged the cracked boards and corroded spines of metal across the room to the door. Now and then she stopped cleaning to listen. She heard the tap and scrape of the sculptor’s tools. A faint crescendo of drumbeats through the ceiling. The greedy keen of gulls. People on their bikes having a shouted conversation.
How her life had changed since she’d left the cabin in the woods and moved to Montreal. She no longer woke before dawn to birdsong, shoving aside her woven blankets to start a fire in the stove. Now she stayed up late to watch movies with Yushi. Life was both easier — a kettle that only needed to be plugged in — and stranger. Could she ever have foreseen claiming a room in an abandoned factory as her own? Or being a small yet necessary cog in the intricate network of a busy hospital? Sometimes, while she waited for the bus, she flipped through a circular rack of flowered dresses on the sidewalk. Yushi had made her taste mango, avocado, pomegranate, and papaya. Her life, once so austere, unfolded now with variety and sensation. It was all a surprise. All wondrous and new. Only, sometimes … a moment yawned — when she sat on the bus, watching an elderly man grip his shopping bag between his bony knees — and she knew she was adrift without attachment or family.
Kenny always asked when they were going to the country to get her loom. Not yet, Rose said. She had a pile of garbage she didn’t know where to take. She couldn’t reach the top of the window, which hadn’t been washed for decades
, without a ladder — or get rid of the spider webs that drooped from the ceiling. Spiders, Kenny joshed. Don’t tell me you lived in the woods and you’re scared of spiders? Spiders, she said, get into the yarn.
She was coming down the street on the way to her studio, as Kenny kept calling it, and saw a man sitting on the front doorstep. She thought it could be him but wasn’t sure until he lifted his takeout coffee in greeting. When she got closer she said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“Didn’t know if I was till I did. Come on.” He heaved himself up. “See what I brought.”
In the hallway stood a metal ladder. “Where did you get that?”
“I told you, I’ve got connections.”
She unlocked the door and he carried the ladder inside. “Wow! You really cleaned up. This looks great.”
“Except for that.” She pointed at the heap of wood and metal.
“I’ll figure it out.” He swung through the door.
The legs of the ladder opened easily enough, but Rose had to arm-wrestle with the mechanism to lock the legs. She wrapped a wet rag over the head of the mop and climbed the ladder to swab the corners of the ceiling. Kenny had propped the door open and was dragging away the garbage, sliding and bumping it down the hallway.
Rose pushed the ladder farther along, rinsed and wet her rag anew. She heard tapping she ignored until the person called, “Rose!” She looked around the room, then over to the window where she saw Yushi’s tufted black hair.
“How did you find me?”
“The guy hacking at the stone said this was your window.” Yushi’s green bike leaned against the chain-link fence.
“The sculptor? I’ve never even talked to him.”
“Your boyfriend does.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“That’s what the sculptor called him.”
“Because he doesn’t know he’s not my boyfriend.”
“How do you know he doesn’t tell people he is?”
Rose wanted to say he didn’t, but how did she know?
Kenny walked into the room and over to the window when he saw Yushi. “Hi, I’m Kenny.”
Yushi held up a paper bag. “I brought some brioches.”
“I’ll show you how to get in.” Kenny pivoted and jogged out.
“He’s not usually here,” Rose said. “I didn’t know he was coming today.”
“You didn’t know — or you don’t want to know?”
“He’s helping me.”
“He sure is,” Yushi said dryly.
“Hey, Rose’s friend!” Kenny called from the loading ramp.
“He’s never” — Rose began, but Yushi was already striding through the knee-high weeds toward Kenny — “tried to kiss me.”
Rose steered her cart as close as she could to the wall, so she and Kenny didn’t seem to be walking down the hallway together, though he kept pace step for step. He needed to borrow a piece of equipment and had followed her to three nursing stations already. The unit coordinator at the last one told him it would be easier if he went directly to the Inhalation Department. He thanked her cheerfully and stayed with Rose.
“You’re not going to paint the walls?” he asked. “Because I can help you with that.”
She hadn’t thought of painting. She shook her head. “No.”
“Yeah, you’d have to plaster first. Those walls are wrecked.”
An orderly, pushing a stretcher toward them, glanced at Rose and pursed his mouth at Kenny. Meaning what? Kenny was just being Kenny, wasn’t he? She didn’t believe he told people he was her boyfriend. The sparks and yearning weren’t there. When he touched her, it was a game to get her attention. She couldn’t explain why he was so willing to help her. Didn’t friends help each other? She had too little experience of friendship to know.
“Basically,” he said, “you’re happy as long as your studio is clean, right? You don’t want it all pretty and nice. You’re going to be working there.”
“I’m going to be weaving.” She didn’t think of weaving as work.
A woman walking past, swinging her stethoscope, said, “Hi, Kenny.” And smiled at Rose. Everyone in the hospital seemed to know him.
Rose had only one bag of cans for the next nursing station. She carried it to the med room. When she returned, Kenny was gone. The unit coordinator signed her clipboard. “Your friend said he’d see you later.”
Rose pushed her trolley to the elevator slowly, unable to pass two elderly women who scraped the floor with their walkers, legs swollen beneath the drooping hems of their gowns. The women didn’t talk. It took all their focus to stay upright and keep moving. Had they become friends, Rose wondered? Both ill, lonely, and sharing a hospital room.
Fara
Fara had the phone to her ear, scribbling in her desk agenda. 28B Boucher GI lab NPO m/n. Med + INR. The details weren’t for her. She knew to send the med sheet and latest INR result and keep the patient fasting, but she didn’t man the desk 24/7. With luck, if the patient left when she wasn’t there, someone might glance at her agenda for directions.
Zeery, who was standing at the counter writing in a patient’s chart, waited for her to hang up. “So, when do you get the house?”
“Next week.” Between interruptions was the only way to talk at work. Fara grabbed the manila folder an ER orderly had slid onto the counter and began leafing the loose pages inside into the appropriate sections of the patient’s binder.
“Already?” Zeery gaped. “You just saw the house.”
“It’s all happening so fast — except for when we signed the papers at the notary. That took forever. Two solid hours of signing. I thought my hand was going to fall off.”
One of the nurses, Valerie, dropped a handful of blood tubes onto the counter. “Where is this place you bought?” And to Zeery, “Stamp me labels, will you? 28C.”
“Pointe St-Charles.” No one Fara had talked to yet had ever been to the Pointe, though it seemed everyone remembered stories they’d heard on the news. A body found in a basement. Cars dredged from the canal.
Valerie smirked. “My sister used to date a guy who lived in the Pointe. She could never get a taxi to go there past midnight.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Fara said. “There’s a cab stand around the corner from our house.”
“That’s what my sister said. Because of the bikers.” Valerie scooped the tubes she’d labelled into a biohazard bag she set in the specimen basket.
“The bikers are gone now. And anyhow, what would bikers have to do with us?” Fara thought of the next-door neighbour who’d lived there for more than ten years. Yolette visiting her aunt as a child. Everyday people and ordinary goings-on. A neighbourhood where you could hear horseshoes, for Chrissakes!
She swivelled her chair around to reach for the lab results coming out of the printer. The patient in 40B had a potassium of 6.2. The level was panic high. Or, the patient was getting potassium in their IV and someone had drawn the blood too close to the IV site.
Fara glanced at the assignment sheet. Nahi’s patient. Nahi wouldn’t do that. Fara called into the intercom, “Nahi! I need to talk to you.”
Zeery said, “When you have your first party, I’ll get my mom to make butter chicken.”
“Your mom’s butter chicken?” Valerie hooted. “You’d better let me know when.”
Fara threw her a look. “You’re going to risk coming to such a dangerous neighbourhood?”
“For Zeery’s mom’s butter chicken? You bet! Anyhow, there’ll be a gang of us. We’ll all stick together.”
Fara saw she was serious. A posse of nurses, armed with high heels and lip gloss, daring the dark and dirty streets of Pointe St-Charles.
The intercom was beeping. Fara stabbed a button. “Oui? Can I help you?”
“It’s me.” Nahi’s dea
dpan voice. A patient could be spouting from an artery and Nahi would stay calm.
Fara wasn’t supposed to give medical information over the intercom, but the patients didn’t understand, and even the staff couldn’t always make out the words the ancient sound system garbled. “40B, potassium of 6.2, not hemolyzed.”
Against the muffled noise from the room, Fara heard, “Crime de bine.” No one under eighty even said that anymore. It was the Québécois equivalent of golly gee. Where had Nahi picked it up? Then, louder, he said, “Call Surgery. I’ll repeat the blood and do an EKG.”
A porter from Radiology held a requisition slip across the counter to show Fara. “Is that my patient?” Zeery asked, following him to the room.
Fara wrote the patient’s name and the test in the test book.
So far, she hadn’t told people at work about the suicide in the house. Even nurses and doctors, who were familiar with the idea, the process, and the physicality of death, didn’t like suicide. It was such a wrong way to die.
At the notary’s, Fara and Frédéric had met the father of the boy. A man of about sixty with a narrow forehead and slick hair curled on his collar. His nervous eyes didn’t once settle on them. He chewed gum with his front teeth — like a rabbit — as he waited for the pages to be slid his way. Pen gripped, knuckles a fence, he signed and pushed each page aside as if into a void. He ignored Frédéric, who sat beside him, the next to sign. At the last page he glanced at Yolette, asked if they were finished, and shoved back his chair. Frédéric stood to shake his hand, but he’d already slipped out the door. Fara wondered if he hated them for buying the house.
Fara grabbed the phone that was ringing. “Twelve Surgery.”
“It’s Mo. What’s up?” There were three Mohammeds on this month’s rotation of residents. The nurses had told them to decide who got called Mohammed, who Mo, and who by his last name — or whatever nickname he wanted to suggest. Fara gave Mo the potassium result and he said to repeat the blood test and do an EKG.