Five Roses

by Alice Zorn

  “Doing it as we speak,” Fara said.

  “So why call me?” he grumbled.

  “Because you’ve got the fancy letters behind your name.” They were both being facetious. If the nurses waited for a doctor’s say-so to react to every budding emergency, the floor would soon be chaos. Especially on a surgery floor, where the doctors disappeared into the OR for hours at a time. Legally though, as Mo well knew, he had to be notified — because he had the fancy letters behind his name.

  As Fara answered the other line that was ringing, she saw Brie, the charge nurse, coming down the hallway with a technician from Biomedical. Fara waved the page with the potassium result and Brie walked over to take it. Tall and chic in street clothes, Brie was all bones and angles, skinny and sexless, in nursing scrubs.

  “Oui,” Fara said into the phone. “Demain à huit heures.”

  “Whose patient?” Brie asked.

  “Nahi’s. He’s repeating the blood.” And into the phone, “Oui, Madame.”

  When she hung up, she had to stare at her desk to remember what she’d been doing. No wonder, with a job like this, she felt tangled by the end of the day.

  Fara and Frédéric stood looking out at the sun-bleached wood of the deck — their deck. “Happy?” she asked. “You got your house.”

  “No, no, no, no. Don’t turn this into something that will be my fault if it doesn’t work out. We agreed to buy the house.”

  “Of course it’ll work out. Why wouldn’t it?”

  “Didn’t you hear Eric?” Frédéric’s cousin had stopped in when they were visiting Frédéric’s mom a week ago. Eric was a class A handyman who carried a battery-operated screwdriver in one pocket, a Swiss Army knife in the other. He’d built his own two-storey bungalow, from the concrete basement floor to the shingles on the roof. According to him, with a new construction you knew exactly what you had, whereas an old house was an unknown mess of problems that might collapse on your head while you slept.

  “Eric is anal. OCD with a tool chest.” Fara bent forward to trace a scrape she’d just noticed running down the wall. Had that been there when they’d looked at the house?

  Ever since they’d decided they were buying the house, they’d been revising their to-do list. Frédéric thought they should focus on getting the kitchen, bathroom, and a bedroom in order. The other rooms could wait. The living room could wait. They weren’t going to be relaxing and watching TV for a while. Fara agreed — with the proviso that Frédéric’s very first job would be to dispose of the dead boy’s belongings. As long as his things were still in the house, he was. His stick of deodorant on the bathroom shelf. The beer bottles he’d drunk from. His jeans dropped on the floor like he’d just shimmied out of them. That weird devil’s mask. Remembering the mask made her shudder.

  Frédéric had stepped away to glance into the next room. “I’m thinking,” he said. “We want to strip these floors, right?”

  “That’s what we said.”

  “Then that’s the first thing we should do — all the rooms at once. It makes no sense to do one room, get sawdust everywhere, then bring the sander in again.”

  His voice sounded hollow because there were no furnishings to absorb the sound. It had nothing to do with a death in the house. And that strange feeling down her spine was the newness of being here. The idea of owning the house. No landlord to call if something happened.

  “What do you think?” Frédéric said. And when she looked blank, “Sanding the floors.”

  “Sure.” She nodded. The floors.

  Had the doorway to the bathroom moved? She’d thought it was off the main room, not the hallway.

  “Are you okay?” Frédéric asked. He slid his arm across her back and she relaxed against him. She would get over this uncanny sense of something just beyond her line of sight. It was the work, that was all. Overwhelming when you thought of everything to be done. Sanding, hammering, wiring, painting. Eric’s sour predictions hadn’t helped. Even Frédéric’s mom, who was so happy that they were finally settling down, had started to look anxious.

  But as Frédéric said, they would do one thing, then the next and the next, step by step. They weren’t rushing headlong into anything.

  He scuffed down the street — his old street — head lowered. He didn’t want to talk to any neighbours with their big hellos and phony church hugs. Questions, clucking, and fussing made them feel better. Bad luck had dumped on him, not them.

  He slowed when he saw the bags and furniture piled on the sidewalk. It was about time his dad started thinking about the house again, but why …

  Okay, the clothes were garbage. Who wanted to wear a dead guy’s stuff ? But why hadn’t his dad kept the dresser? Or the vertical blinds that had been such a bitch to install? The louvres were tied and wedged between boxes.

  He bent to flip open a box that wasn’t tucked tight. Hair salon magazines, the shower curtain, all of it shoved over the dishes his dad had packed away in an upstairs closet. Thin cream-coloured plates with a border of yellow roses. His mom had bought them at a church rummage sale. Fancy plates for Christmas and birthdays, she’d said. But then she took off and his dad put the fancy dishes in a box.

  He lifted a teacup. Yellow roses and a faded gilt handle. What were the chances his mom had heard? If she was still in Montreal, she might have read it in the paper. But he was pretty sure she didn’t still live here.

  He didn’t want to look anymore at their belongings heaped on the sidewalk. He turned and walked away, the cup snug in his palm.

  Fara had been on her knees all morning, tugging at broadloom. Some idiot had glued it to the floor. If she pulled too quickly, disintegrating fibres left a scabby crust on the wood. The wood had been painted mud brown, but close up, between the planks, she saw slivers of kelly green and peach. Earlier decorator statements.

  From upstairs she heard the drag of furniture Frédéric was manoeuvring piece by piece down the stairs to the sidewalk. He’d brought boxes, expecting to salvage the clothes for a charity, but they were too filthy.

  Claire’s apartment had been messy too — but no messier than usual. When Fara had phoned her at work to ask if she would be going to their parents’ for the long Easter weekend, Claire’s boss said he hadn’t heard from her for three days. She’s getting a written warning, he said. She does this again and she’s out. How am I supposed to staff this place when people don’t even have the courtesy to call in sick?

  In the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, Fara had expected Claire to be at work. Was she sick — too sick to call? They lived only a few blocks apart but didn’t see each other often. They’d grown up with different groups of friends and different tastes, Claire with her rock music and boyfriends with muscled arms, Fara with her books and art films. A week earlier, when Fara had seen Claire at the small grocery store where they both shopped, Claire asked if Fara still had a key to her apartment. Fara said yes, why would she have thrown it away? She didn’t wonder why Claire had asked.

  After talking with Claire’s boss, Fara tried calling her at home several times. Why hadn’t Claire let her know if she was sick? Or was this some kind of game? She often pulled stunts without considering the fallout. She’d deliberately failed a college course because she hadn’t liked the teacher. She’d taken a knife to her boyfriend’s leather jacket when she saw him flirting with another woman. Fara had had to call the police when he’d tried to break down her door. Claire acted on impulse, never planning an escape route, spurred by a private, hyperbolic rationale that didn’t alert her to danger.

  Fara had no idea what might have happened this time. She felt more impatient than worried. Annoyed that — once again — she was going to have to haul Claire out of a mess of her own making. Was she even home if she wasn’t answering her phone? Fara decided she had better go and see. After she finished work, she stayed on the bus past her stop. Traffic was heavy.
The bus inched along.

  It had snowed and the sidewalk had been scraped and strewn with gravel. In the years that followed, fresh gravel on a frozen sidewalk brought back the memory of that walk from the bus stop to Claire’s apartment. The crunch of her heels on the gravel, the clumps of dirty ice around the tree trunks, the air cold with the smell of snow.

  She buzzed at the outside door of Claire’s building. No answer. A woman who was taking her poodle for a walk let her in. At Claire’s door she rang again and put her ear against the door, but heard no music. Claire could play Guns N’ Roses on repeat for hours, the thump turned low so the neighbours didn’t gripe. Fara knocked on the wood and finally pulled out her key.

  Claire! she called. Because there was Claire’s parka tossed on the sofa, arms wide like a cartoon splat. It was her only winter coat. She had to be there. Claire!

  Dirty dishes soaked in dirty water. Claire never washed them until there were no clean ones left. There were three full bottles of olive oil on the counter. On the table lay an income tax form, partly filled out and open.

  Later, whenever Fara recalled Claire’s kitchen, she hated how specific the details were. Three bottles of olive oil. Why buy three unless you meant to use them? Why bother with income tax if you were planning to die? Which led to the inevitable thought: maybe Claire hadn’t meant to kill herself. Not for real. Maybe she was only … pretending? Experimenting? Which meant that Fara, who had a key to her apartment and was supposed to have found her, got there too late.

  Over the years, Fara had gone from berating herself to trying to imagine how Claire felt and what she was thinking as she waited to die. Or waited for Fara to find her. The end was always the same. Fara hadn’t. Claire had. She was dead. And once she was dead, what did the questions matter?

  More stuff heaped on the sidewalk, some of it still-good furniture he could have used if his dad had bothered to pick up the phone and call him.

  He climbed the three steps and tried the door, but it was locked. He groped in his pocket for the key. It didn’t fit. What the hell? Had his dad changed the lock?

  He walked to the end of the street and around the corner to the alley. The back fence was too high to see over the top, but the weathered boards had shrunk with age. He could see through the gaps.

  Someone was standing by the window — not his dad but a bigger man. And a lady pointing at the wall. Who were they? Had his dad decided to rent the house only half-renovated?

  He was watching so hard he didn’t hear the scrape of footsteps and the knock of the cane until old Coady said, “How about that? Your dad sold the house.”

  He pretended he hadn’t heard, but the words ricocheted in his head. Sold? Sold? Câlisse de shit de merde!

  Old Coady, the wizened turd, horked and said it again.

  He shrugged as if he already knew and didn’t care. He stepped past Coady and strode away.

  Maddy

  Maddy and Yushi always arrived at the market within moments of each other. One would cruise to the bike stand as the other was locking up. Today Maddy had already locked her bike and Yushi still hadn’t appeared. Maddy scanned the bike path along the canal and the bridge that crossed it. A man cycled toward her, the hem of his trousers tucked in his socks. A woman walked briskly in a filmy blue dress and running shoes. People were cycling or walking to their jobs downtown — which from this perspective, below the hill of Montreal, was uptown.

  Still no Yushi. Not good. Maddy jogged to the back of the indoor market, down the stairs to the basement. She slung her knapsack into her locker and grabbed a white apron from the starched and spotless stack. The staff were supposed to change their apron tout de suite if it became at all flecked or stained, though Madame Petitpois would then grill them. If one were handling desserts with care, each of the said desserts inside a fluted cup or cellophane band, how did one manage to get crème aux framboises on one’s apron? Hmm, how?

  As Maddy tied the strings of the apron behind her back, she glanced at the schedule posted on the wall. Yushi and Geneviève were on breads today. She was on pastries with Cécile. Cécile had to wear shirts with sleeves below her elbows to hide her tattoo of a skeleton. Cécile called Madame Petitpois “Pettypoo.” Any more anal, Cécile said, and her hole would close.

  The patisserie was among the best in a city where patisseries were competitive and highly vaunted. The dessert counter, where Maddy waited for a woman to finish conferring on her cellphone, was resplendent with concoctions of puff pastry, genoise, whipped cream, mousse, and marzipan. “Du chocolat?” the woman murmured. “Ou plutôt des fruits?” The woman could have made the call while she’d stood in line. Now that she was being served, she made everyone behind her wait. Bibbed apron taut across her breasts, clear plastic gloves on, Maddy had to wait, too. Haste was unseemly. Of course, once the woman decided, Maddy was expected to spring into whip-quick action. Urban fact #16: people who made you wait did not like to wait.

  Past the dessert counter were the deep wooden shelves stacked with bread. Round, narrow, oblong, square, and braided; rolled, studded, and filled with nuts, seeds, olives, herbs, cheese, and dried fruit. Yushi hadn’t arrived yet, and Geneviève still worked alone, shaking open bags, grasping loaves, tugging free her gloves each time to handle the cash. Maddy had heard Geneviève in the morning repeating the names of the breads to herself. She was a pretty young woman with a dimpled chin, the niece of one of the pastry chefs, but too timid to be working with an impatient public. Her cheeks bright with frustration, she’d just tried to shove a round miche into a baguette bag. More than a dozen people were waiting to buy bread, shifting their stance, looking past shoulders, checking the time on their phones. There was only a lazy queue of three people at the dessert counter.

  “I’m going to help Geneviève,” Maddy told Cécile.

  “Pettypoo will kill you.”

  “She’s downstairs.” Maddy had worked at the patisserie longer than Madame Petitpois. Relations between them were cool but mannerly. Petitpois granted that Madeleine was the oldest and most experienced of her girls. One day Maddy was going to tell her that, at forty-three, she was no longer a girl. Also that Maddy was short for Madzeija. Her name was Polish — no relation to Proust’s tea-soaked biscuits. She hadn’t told Petitpois yet, because she liked feeling Petitpois was a fool, blinkered by ignorance and outdated values.

  The next man in line for breads already held the exact change for a baguette pinched between thumb and finger. Maddy slid an olive fougasse into a bag and waited for the bread slicer to judder through a loaf of rye.

  Beside her, Geneviève stammered when a customer asked if the flour in their breads was genetically modified.

  “No,” Maddy said. “Our flour is milled from heritage grain.” She waved an imaginary wand across the rustic loaves, the rugged crusts.

  Then Yushi’s slender brown arm with its silver bangle reached across hers for a seed-encrusted bread, and there wasn’t enough room for all three of them in the narrow space, added to which Madame Petitpois had appeared, solid and disapproving.

  “Excuse me.” Maddy manoeuvred behind Geneviève to return to the dessert counter.

  When Maddy was younger, she’d despaired at her bottom-heavy hips and thighs she couldn’t cram into jeans. Now she felt comfortable with — and comforted by — her padding. She liked the swirl of skirts around her thighs. She wasn’t ever going to fall and break her hips. Though walking next to Yushi, she felt like a bowl next to a single-flower vase.

  They were heading toward a picnic table beside the canal. When they’d passed the last fruit stall Pierre-Paul, who always winked and joked with Maddy, had flourished two peaches and bowed to present them. Obviously, his wife wasn’t working today.

  “What did Petitpois say?” Maddy asked. Yushi had been late because the pedals of her bike had stopped turning. Something with the mechanism inside had broken. She’d had to walk to the neares
t subway station, which was nowhere near the bike path. Just before break time Petitpois had jerked a commanding finger at Yushi to follow her to the stairway.

  Yushi bit into her peach. “Mmm … Pierre-Paul knows his fruit.”

  “He’s married.” Maddy had played that game often enough. Whatever married men promised, for better or worse they stayed with their wives.

  She sat on the picnic table bench as Yushi swung onto the tabletop. Both faced the water, where two teenage girls laughed as they steered a paddleboat in crazy zigzags.

  “Petitpois?” Maddy prompted.

  “My place of employment could not be expected to accommodate my personal mishaps.” Yushi’s tone was even. Only the spiked antennae of her hair radiated annoyance.

  “Could not be expected to accommodate?” Maddy scoffed. “That’s overkill. You’ve never been late before.”

  “She wanted to be sure that I understood never to be late again.” Yushi leaned forward to eat her peach, juice dripping from her fingers.

  “Petitpois is way too strict with you. Where does she get off ?”

  Yushi grimaced. “I’d better go back.”

  “Already? We just sat down.”

  “Pettypoo suggested I make up for my lateness by taking short breaks for a while.”

  “How long is a while?” Maddy pulled a tissue from her pocket to wipe her fingers.

  “Who knows?” Yushi hopped off the table and headed across the grass. Peg-leg jeans and green sneakers. She was so slender she looked frail — until she moved. She had a toughness to her gait and narrow hips. A strange mix of reticence and temerity.

  Yesterday, during a lull, Petitpois had tried to give them lessons on how to modulate their voices when pronouncing the names of the desserts. Tartelettes aux fraises. Lingots. Pavé au chocolat.