Five Roses

by Alice Zorn

  His eyes pondered her wheels, brake pads, cables, handlebars.

  “Not for my bike. My friend’s broke — something with the pedals.”

  “Pedals …” He shifted against the brick. “Gotta see it.”

  “We’ll come tomorrow.”

  She pushed off from the curb and cycled home along Wellington, which was faster than heading back up to the canal. In the Pointe, A to E could be shorter than A to B. The streets spoked willy-nilly off each other. Maddy imagined that once upon a time they’d been farmers’ paths skirting marshes, aimed at stables, pastures, home, the church. Now they were paved and had street signs. St-Patrick, Mullins, Sébastopol, Bourgeoys — which was pronounced Bourgeois in French and Burgess in English.

  She turned down her alley and saw Frédéric on a ladder, reaching across his back fence. She slowed and swung off her bike. “Hi! How did the move go?”

  “Fine, thanks. We’re still upside-down in the house. I thought I’d try some yardwork for a change. Get some fresh air.”

  Maddy couldn’t tell what he was doing, with his arms poked deep into the vines that grew in profusion whether they were helped along or not.

  The gate scraped open. “Fred —” Fara stopped when she saw Maddy. “Hi.”

  “Congratulations,” Maddy said. “You moved in.”

  “Trying to.” Fara rolled her eyes. And to Frédéric, “Can you bring some of those boxes that I marked ‘kitchen’ into the kitchen? The movers left them in the front room.”

  He climbed down the ladder and walked through the gate Fara let slap behind him. She explained, “I pulled my back. Talk about timing. Did Frédéric ask if your boyfriend has a —”

  “No boyfriend,” Maddy said.

  “Sorry. I saw two men going into your house.”

  “They’re tenants.”

  “Do either of them have a drill? Frédéric’s stopped working.”

  “I doubt it, but I can ask.”

  “The people here …”

  Why did Fara say here as if she’d moved to a land overrun by troglodytes? “What about them?”

  “Do they stand outside your fence and stare at your house? Is that normal? I’m used to living in an apartment four floors up. I like to know I’m alone at home when I’m alone at home.”

  Maddy had seen Ben only once, but how often had he come? He didn’t go into the yard, did he? She shook her head. “Must be one of the guys from the rooming house at the corner. They’re harmless, don’t worry — except sometimes they take a leak in the alley. I yell at them when I catch them.”

  Fara grimaced.

  “Yeah, I know.” If Maddy saw Ben again, she would talk to him.

  The gate creaked and Frédéric stepped out. “There were only two boxes.”

  “There should be more.”

  “Not in the front room.” He climbed his ladder again.

  Maddy wasn’t sure if they were arguing and didn’t want to get pulled in as a witness. “Bye then. Good luck!” She rolled her bike to her gate.

  From her yard, she heard the stomp of Fara’s feet on the deck. Frédéric’s silence.

  She unlocked her back door, set the vegetables on the counter, and trudged upstairs, unbuttoning her shirt to change into a tank top. She wondered why Ben — if it was him — was hanging around the house. She remembered what Fara said the other day when she’d told her about Xavier’s suicide. She asked who’d found him.

  What a horror story, coming home and kicking off your shoes, looking up, and … hullo? Was that a body hanging in the hallway? What had it felt like to cut him down? Grabbing scissors or a knife to saw the rope, holding the weight of his slack body close. Maddy shuddered.

  Fara’s question had shifted the focus. Maddy saw what she meant now. Once Xavier had killed himself, he was dead. Story over. Ben was the one who had to go on living with the memory of finding his brother — the kind of memory that crept like a festering disease through the gut. Maddy knew it wasn’t ghosts that haunted people. It was memories.

  Bronislav stood at the kitchen counter, eating a wedge of bread smeared with cretons. Among Québécois who’d grown up with it, the ground pork fat and onion spread was a favourite. Maddy’s mother used to make a Polish version called szmalec — pork drippings mixed with chopped fat and crackling. From Bronislav’s thoughtful chewing, Maddy guessed there was a Russian version, too.

  “Hey, Bronislav. What’s up?”

  He scrunched his eyebrows. “Nothing is up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He gestured at the empty plastic container on the counter. She hoped he would throw it in the recycling bin. She hoped he would rinse it first. She hoped … whatever was reasonable to hope when you allowed strangers to share your living space.

  “No more cretons?” she guessed.

  He shook his head. “I am living.”

  “Living?”

  “Living,” he confirmed. “In two weeks.”

  “Ah, you’re leaving. And Andrei?”

  “Yes.” Bronislav’s truncated English served the purpose.

  “Are the two of you renting an apartment?” An apartment would be a step up from rooms. After that, a washing machine, a car, a house. Her parents had left their families and homes — all they’d ever known — to come to Canada to climb the rungs of Western opportunity.

  Bronislav looked sour. “In Gatineau.”

  “Why Gatineau?”

  “Our job is moving.”

  “You don’t want to live in Gatineau?”

  “We like Montreal.”

  “Can you change jobs?”

  He shook his head.

  She wondered if he didn’t want to look for a new job or if he was only allowed to stay in Canada as long as he worked at that particular job. Immigration was more complicated now than in the 1950s when her parents had come.

  “But you …” He wrinkled his brow.

  “It’s okay. I’ll get someone else. But I’ll miss the two of you.” They’d been good tenants, mostly gone from the house, working double shifts, keeping to themselves.

  “Yes.”

  Was he agreeing that she would miss them or was he saying they would miss her, too? He set his knife in the sink and tossed the empty container in the recycling bin.

  “Please rinse it or it smells.” And at his puzzled look, “Never mind.” She waited until he left and rinsed it herself. Dropped it back on a sheaf of flyers, a flattened box of rooibos tea.

  She didn’t actually need to rent out rooms. She’d long ago paid off the mortgage and didn’t have expensive tastes, but the house was too large for one person. Space yawned around her. When she was alone too long, she began to hear feet on the stairs. The pluck of guitar strings. She remembered the kids who used to live here, sprawled on sleeping bags, lighting joints off candles, barefoot in long skirts … those hazy weeks when she’d let Stilt convince her that losing the baby was a solution. Hey, he’d crooned, you’re only sixteen. What do you want with a baby?

  At sixteen, no, she hadn’t wanted a baby. She’d had no idea what to do with her, why the baby mewled and cried when she’d just been fed, how to make her stop. She’d thought of leaving her under a tree in the park and hoping someone kind would take her. She’d squeezed a pillow between her fists, daring herself to stop the crying once and for all. She’d felt so overwhelmed by despair and helplessness. What was she to do with a bawling, stinking baby? Her parents spat words at her — kurwa, dziwka, flejtuch — words she’d never heard before but knew were ugly. Was this why they’d crossed the ocean? For this shame she’d brought upon them? Let her take her bastard child and go find the father.

  But then, when the baby was stolen and she told her parents the most likely story she could think of — that she’d given her up for adoption — her father walloped her so hard across the h
ead that he knocked her to the floor. Her mother wailed, How could you? How could you? Your own child! Your own blood! Her father made as if to kick her but kicked a cupboard instead. Her mother kept shouting, her voice strained and high. In the doorway, Maddy saw her brother’s terrified face.

  Her parents brought the priest to force her to say where she’d taken the baby, but he’d already damned her when he saw her big belly and she refused to go to confession. Let him damn her again. She clenched her teeth, feeling the pain of the bruise on her face. It was too late now to tell the truth.

  For her parents, accustomed to hiding inside ignorance, the silence closed again. They acted as if nothing had happened. They never spoke of it. But they also didn’t encourage their Polish friends to bring their sons to visit as they’d used to. Maddy was no longer a nice girl.

  Only she herself — and the crazy woman with the braid — knew that Maddy had once had a baby. And perhaps her brother, though in all the years since, he’d never mentioned it.

  Yushi gazed from the hallway into the double front room then up the broad stairway. She’d already had a tour of the backyard and the kitchen. “And this whole house is yours?”

  “All mine.” Maddy waved for Yushi to precede her up the stairs, where there were more rooms and a skylight in the hallway to brighten the core of the house, even on gloomy days. In her bedroom, the large sash window looked onto the leafy branches of a beech tree, the brick house fronts across the street, and above the long, carved row of their cornices, the sky. She’d had the foresight to put away the clothes that were usually heaped on the settee.

  Yushi walked to the window. “No offence, but how did you afford a house bagging croissants? Did you rob a bank?”

  Maddy sat on the bed. “I inherited some money when my parents passed away.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Years ago. My father had pancreatic cancer. He went fast. And then my mother, four months later.”

  Yushi picked up one of the mussel shells scattered along the window ledge. Mementos of a vacation in the Gaspé. “Your mum followed him.”

  Maddy was surprised at such a romantic interpretation from Yushi. Nor did she believe it — her stodgy mother pining for her gloomy husband. “She had an aneurysm. She’d had it for a while. No one knew. It could have ruptured before he died.”

  “But she let him go first.”

  Again Maddy arched her eyebrows. “I think it just happened that way. I mean … okay, she didn’t know what to do with herself once she didn’t have him to take care of anymore. I tried to get her to go with the other Polish ladies to Goplana for a slice of poppyseed roll, but she wouldn’t. She went to church and she prayed. Or she sat in her chair with her rosary.” Maddy mimed how her mother sat with her fist closed with the rosary wrapped around it. “My brother and I thought she was depressed. We assumed it would pass. It wasn’t like our parents were happy together. Then her aneur-ysm burst.”

  Yushi was stroking her thumb along the water-worn edge of the shell. She’d turned while Maddy talked, a slim figure in silhouette against the light from outside. “Do you feel guilty?”

  “About them dying? Why should I feel guilty?” Maddy could have felt guilty about the fiasco of her pregnancy, but Yushi didn’t know about that. And over the years, she’d grown to feel that her parents had failed her as much as she’d failed them.

  Yushi tilted her head. “I don’t know. Sometimes …” But she didn’t continue. She set the shell on the ledge again. “So you got a big inheritance.”

  “Hardly a big one — but enough to make a down payment. Houses in the Pointe were really cheap back then.”

  Yushi was staring out the window again. “My mum would have been like yours. If he’d gone first. She would have wanted to be dead, too.”

  Maddy didn’t move, waiting to hear if Yushi would say more. She so rarely mentioned her private life and her past.

  “My mum waited on him hand and foot. She got up every morning to make him fresh roti before he went to work. Laid out his clothes on the bed so he just had to step into them — his underpants, his socks, his shirt, his pants. Even his belt. Every day she did that. Even for his factory clothes, not just weekends. He liked to get dressed up. He’s a real saga boy, my dad. He had this other woman he used to visit. He took her dancing. My mum knew about it, but she didn’t say anything. She believed that no matter what a man did, a wife did her duty.”

  Why was Yushi speaking in past tense? Her mom couldn’t be much older than Maddy. “Where is your mom now?” she asked gently.

  “She died. A year and a half ago.”

  Maddy let out her breath. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s partly why I left Toronto. It’s easier not to see him. My sisters and my brother can’t harass me about my duty.” She said the word with a Trinidadian lilt. And after a pause, her tone even again, “I hate the life he gave her. I hate how she put up with it. I hate how he didn’t even wait three months to bring the other one to live in our house.”

  Her controlled monotone reminded Maddy of how she used to clamp her arms to her ribs when women handed around babies. Everyone wanted to hold them and coo. Not her, thank you.

  Yushi leaned away from the window, looking off down the hallway. “What are these other rooms?”

  Maddy followed her. She was awed Yushi had told her as much as she had. She guessed Yushi probably didn’t have many friends.

  She tapped on the first door. “This room’s for storage. It’s just boxes and junk.” The next room was self-explanatory. The bathroom.

  “Skylight in here, too?” Yushi glanced up at it. “Lucky.”

  Maddy opened the next door onto an ironing board and a table with a sewing machine.

  “You sew?” Yushi asked.

  “It’s my mother’s old machine. She taught me, but I never liked sewing. If I have to, I can hem a skirt. But the machine and the scissors are the only things of hers I kept. She didn’t have any jewellery — and I did not want her rosary. I think of this as her.” She opened her hand at the sewing machine. “Meet my mother.”

  Yushi hefted the large steel scissors. “This is some serious hardware.”

  “Polish make. Hard and heavy. Potentially lethal.”

  Back in the hallway Maddy raised her chin at the remaining closed doors. “Those are the tenants’ rooms. Two of them.”

  “Aren’t tenants trouble?”

  “They take care of themselves. I just rent out the rooms. So far I haven’t had problems, knock on wood.” She touched the door frame. “These two are leaving in a couple of weeks. I’m going to paint before I get someone new. The rooms could use some freshening up. I should tear down the old balcony, too. It’s a fire hazard. I don’t even know what’s still holding it up. I think it’s practically solid pigeon shit by now.”

  Yushi traipsed behind her down the stairs. Again she looked around the kitchen with admiring eyes. “This is the best room, so big and bright.”

  “You should see it in the morning with the sun shining in.” Maddy lifted the lid on the pot of ratatouille, releasing a moist cloud of good smells — roasted eggplant, red peppers, garlic, oregano. Plates and a basket of pita stood ready. On the deck, she’d pulled the plank table from the wall, wiped away the spider webs, and flapped out a red tablecloth.

  They carried their plates, the pita, a dish of grated Parmesan, and bottles of beer outside. Maddy clinked her bottle against Yushi’s. Yushi said it was nice to be there. She tasted the ratatouille and pronounced it good. She scooped a mouthful of stew with a torn piece of pita and said, “This would be really good with roti. I could show you how to make them — or we could get fancy and make buss-up-shut.”

  “I’d like that.” Maddy had no idea what buss-up-shut was, but she liked the idea of Yushi teaching her to cook something new.

  A furry orange bomb catapulted over the fen
ce into the backyard. Yushi was startled, then laughed. Maddy didn’t think she’d ever heard her laugh before. “Is she yours?” Yushi asked.

  “He. Definitely a he. Tarzan of the alleyway. This is Jim.”

  Jim stepped onto the deck, the curled tip of his tail questioning that Maddy had invited a guest. Yushi held out her hand for him to sniff.

  “You like cats?” Maddy asked.

  “More than some people I’ve met.” Yushi’s bangle slid down her wrist as she scratched Jim’s skull and around his ears. He squinted, seemingly indifferent, then butted his head against her fingers in obvious command.

  Fara

  Fara snapped shut an empty binder and slid it onto the pile in the corner of her desk. Zeery walked past the counter, eyes on her phone, thumbs busy. She’d changed from nursing scrubs into snug jeans and a form-fitting top. Her breasts, hips, and ass were outlined, her knees, shoulders, and cleavage covered. Her wardrobe was an object lesson on meeting her culture’s guidelines for modesty in a world where she wanted to be seen as attractive.

  “You could say bye!” Fara called. If humans were to adapt, then the next generation should be born with insect eyes on double-jointed thumbs — to keep people from falling on their heads while texting.

  Zeery stopped moving but still finished her message before she looked up. “Why aren’t you gone yet?”

  “Tiff had an appointment. I said I’d wait. She came in early for me a couple of times when we had stuff with the house. Anyhow, go. Don’t get stuck in traffic.” Fara waved her off as she pulled the mail basket toward her and started opening envelopes.

  From down the hallway she heard the trundling and rattling of a cart. The sound belonged to a medieval costume drama, but it was only the young woman who delivered the tube feeding. She looked the peasant part with her solemn face, no makeup, hair tidy in a hairnet.

  “Noisy cart,” Fara said. “I think it’s got square wheels.”

  The woman glanced at her cart. She didn’t seem to realize Fara was joking. She handed Fara her clipboard to sign.