Five Roses

by Alice Zorn

  She heard shouting close by outside, but it wasn’t at her window. She pulled the lamp closer, having to pay attention to her sequence of blue thread, red thread, purple, then red again.

  Now someone was shouting at her window. “Hey, Rose!”

  She was surprised to see Kenny and circled her arm in the air to show him to come around to the door.

  “I didn’t remember which was your window!” he yelled.

  She pointed at the door again.

  “I banged on your neighbour’s window! Do you know she makes jewellery?”

  Rose had finally met the woman in the studio beside hers. She had white hair, cut short like a boy’s, and wore a cook’s apron over a long, loose shirt. She worked with silver she twisted around chunky stones. To Rose’s eye, the necklaces and earrings she fashioned were so heavy and large they no longer looked like jewellery. The woman said, Don’t worry, dear, it’s an age thing. These aren’t supposed to be sweet. They’re armour. On her breastbone rested an amulet the size and colour of a robin’s egg.

  Rose hadn’t known Kenny was coming, but she expected Leo. She’d told Leo about Kenny having found the studio for her and helping her get her loom, but she’d never told Kenny about Leo. Nor that she sometimes slept here. Quickly, she surveyed the room. The sponge mat was propped against the wall. The chest with the bedding could be just another place where she stored yarn.

  Kenny rapped on the door, then opened it. “I had some stuff to do thisaway and thought I’d come see your weaving. What are you making?” He peered at the thick chain of threads hanging down the breast beam.

  “Cloth to make cushions — a few of them. But I’ll attach the treadles a different way for each one.” She pointed at the treadles, which he’d called “pedals” when they’d taken the loom apart. “So, it’ll be the same yarn for each pillow but a new pattern.”

  “Neat.” He stepped away and gazed around the studio. She held her breath, hoping he wouldn’t ask about the sponge mat. “You’re really set up here. You’ve got a kettle, a table, chairs …”

  “Most important is my loom.”

  “Your loom.” He nodded, crossing to the window and looking out. “Did I tell you I’m not renting a car anymore when I head up to the cabin? I take the bus and Jerome picks me up. We go to the IGA and buy groceries and we’re all set for a couple of days.”

  She couldn’t picture Kenny and Jerome with a shopping cart in the IGA. Even if it was only partly true — another of Kenny’s exaggerated stories — it would be enough to trigger the gossips to brew a pot of coffee and get on the phone.

  “Yeah …” He turned around and leaned against the window ledge. “That’s what we were wondering about. It’s … um … getting cold and up till now we’ve been collecting old wood. You know, dead branches and stuff like that to burn. Is that all right?” He peeked at her.

  “You’re cleaning up. That’s good.” Though decayed branches wouldn’t make a very satisfying fire, especially as it kept getting colder.

  “Jerome was saying you’ve got some spots where the trees grow really thick and he could get his dad’s chainsaw and cut down a few.”

  Maman had asked Armand about that a few years ago, but he’d never come with his chainsaw.

  “The wood won’t be dry for this winter,” she said. “You’ll need to buy some.”

  “But you’d be all right with that?”

  “Go ahead.” She wondered what Armand — and the people of Rivière-des-Pins — made of Jerome spending whole weekends, from the sound of it, in Rose’s old cabin.

  Behind Kenny, through the window, she saw Leo, pulling an exaggerated funny face — jaw dropped, eyes wide — at the presence of a man in her studio. She waved him to come in.

  Kenny looked to see why she had waved.

  “That’s my boyfriend.” Rose felt herself blushing. Last night, when she was talking to Yushi, was the first time she’d said the word out loud.

  Kenny appraised her head to toe with a pleased smile. “Didn’t I say you’d be hobnobbing with all kinds of artistes and interesting people down here?”

  She felt an impulse to hug him for being so ready to accept Leo before he’d even met him. The sensation was so new that her blush deepened, and she lowered her face to hide the strange fluster of emotion.

  She slid off her bench to fill the kettle at the sink, because here was another first: using all three mugs at once.

  It was too cold to undress in Leo’s tower. They lay snug in his sleeping bag, his arm around her waist, his hand under her sweater, cupping her breast.

  Rose loved to listen to how alone with each other they were up here. It wasn’t like being alone with Maman in the woods with only the chirp of birds and shush of wind in the branches — theirs the only human voices for many acres all around. Here, above the city, she never lost the sense of human presence. The susurration of traffic was audible like a motor that kept the city running. There were always punctuated thumps from the rail yards or a factory. But no one knew where they were, or could have followed them had they known, with the ladder pulled up after them. Up here, they were above and beyond the city, cushioned by the quiet of distance and willed isolation.

  Here was where Leo had found refuge when he’d fled the foster homes where he’d been placed because of his mother’s rages. He’d run away and run away again, until he was too old for the social workers to make him stay. It wasn’t family or friends who had helped him, but strangers who’d shared what little they had. An elderly man with cracked glasses patched with hockey tape had brought him to the food kitchen. A girl in a pleated skirt gave him her scarf. The woman in the food kitchen snuck him into the church basement at night so he had somewhere to sleep. Her husband ran the garage where Leo was learning how to repair cars. Rose too, he said. She was the kindest of all. She had trusted him and let him love her.

  Rose didn’t realize, until he told her, that he was almost ten years younger than she was. But what did that matter? She stroked his face, touched his eyelids and lips, and under his locs, the soft nape of his neck, hoping with the gentle brush of her fingers to anoint him with every tenderness she could offer.

  The wind that swirled around the tower was cooler than on the ground along the canal. The walls exuded cold, and the open side with its penthouse view, was frigid. Rose had found a spot where they didn’t lie too close to the wind but she could still see the Five Roses sign past the edge of the platform, and behind it, the congested sprawl of city buildings.

  “You like your sign, don’t you?” Leo teased her. “We can go look at it close up if you want.”

  “No, I like it like this.”

  “It makes you think of your mom’s story.”

  “Yeah. It makes me wonder if she lived around here. If she knew about the sign.”

  “How would you find out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His hand, under her sweater, shaped her nipple, made it hard. His mouth puffed moist heat as he nuzzled her ear and the flat lozenge of her earring. She shifted against him and turned her head, mouth parted. They could have waited until they were in her studio where it was warmer. From Leo she’d learned the luxury of patience. Except that, sometimes, the right time was now.

  Fara

  Traffic careened along the curve, racing to beat the stoplight. The long-angled rays of the setting autumn sun spotlit the clock tower of the market. The pumpkins heaped around the stalls affirmed their own orange rotundity. They were their own suns, thank you.

  Fara waited at the curb to cross to the market. That morning they’d run short of coffee and Frédéric had made half cups. Cute, but no cigar. She needed a full dose of caffeine to withstand the upstream jostle of the subway, the standing-room-only bus ride to the hospital, the first sight of her desk buried under every colour of requisition used in the witchcraft of medicine.

  She b
ought half a kilo of French roast and held the tightly packed bag of beans — her favourite perfume — to her nose as she threaded past shoppers. A woman cradling a huge paper cone of flowers, friends having a delighted, isn’t-this-incredible reunion over a mound of kale.

  Her steps slowed when she glimpsed a woman waiting for a vendor to root through his leather apron for change. Where did she know her from? The stalwart back and shoulders, yes. The serious young woman who delivered tube feeding. Fara tapped her arm. “Hi! Remember me from the hospital, Twelve South?”

  The woman didn’t answer, but Fara saw the shutter-click of recognition on her face. “You live around here too?” Fara asked.

  “No.” She hesitated, then lifted her chin in the direction of the canal. “I have a studio in an old factory.” She’d spoken with such gravity the words sounded like a confession.

  “You’re an artist.”

  “That’s what I keep telling her,” a skinny woman with spiked hair interjected. “She’s got a loom. She weaves.”

  Fara arched her eyebrows as if impressed, though she knew nothing about weaving. The skinny woman looked familiar. “Do you work in the hospital, too?”

  “Making stew for four hundred patients? You couldn’t pay me.”

  But the woman didn’t explain what she meant and Fara wasn’t about to start guessing.

  As a loose group they strolled past the stalls, to the end of the market. Fara, flipping through the kaleidoscope of faces in her head, suddenly said, “I know where I’ve seen you before. At my neighbour’s — out on the deck. You know Maddy.”

  “Maddy.” The woman smiled. “Yeah …”

  “I’m Fara.”

  “Yushi.”

  Had she said Yooshi? Or Looshi? Fara didn’t want to ask her to repeat her name and get branded as an ignoramus white person who could only say Susan and Mary.

  Yooshi, if that was her name, turned to her friend. “I have to get back to work. If I see you at home later, I’ll see you. If I don’t, have fun.” She glanced at Fara as she left, which Fara supposed was a curt version of goodbye. Not overly sociable, was she, this Yooshi?

  The tube feeding woman still stood next to Fara. “You know,” Fara said, “I don’t think you ever told me your name.”

  “Rose.”

  “Ha!” Fara pointed into the distance at the Farine Five Roses sign. “You should take a picture of yourself with that sign behind you.”

  Rose glanced over her shoulder, but her expression stayed indifferent.

  Fara had thought it funny. An interesting coincidence, if nothing else. “I guess I’ll let you go. See you at the hospital.”

  She strode to the pedestrian bridge, which was painted the bright green of oxidized copper she thought of as Montreal green — the colour of gables and cupolas. The water in the canal had a dark, oily flatness. The nights had been cool enough lately that the trees had started turning. Someone had stuck posies of gold and crimson leaves between the slats of the picnic tables near the canal. Every time Fara crossed into the Pointe now, she felt the drop in bustle, money, and upscale edginess. At the market, you bought duck breasts and bluefin tuna. In the Pointe, you stopped at the dépanneur for canned food and beer. Though, sure, with the advent of people like herself and Frédéric, the Pointe was changing. Brick was being repointed, old windows and doors replaced. The air smelled of tar. Cement mixers sat on the sidewalk. The new residents complained to the city about the hookers, the graffiti, the garbage rotting in the alleys. She and Frédéric had gone to the community meeting with the mayor to demand more police presence. They’d met others who’d also recently moved to the Pointe.

  The old Pointe was still here. Witness the man in his crooked pose on the chair outside the dépanneur on the corner, the guys who played horseshoes, the elderly man hobbling along the alley with his cane, looking for gossip. He’d accosted Fara one day and asked if she knew about the crime that had happened in the house. Were there still people who thought suicide was a crime? I work in a hospital, she’d said coldly. I’m used to death.

  As she unlocked her front door, she eyed the grimy beige panelling of the entrance. She’d washed it, but decades of city dirt had fused with the paint. She’d debated stripping the wood the way Maddy had, but boy, oh boy, what a lot of work for what they only saw when they were coming home or leaving.

  She stooped to pick up the mail from the mat. A pizza flyer and an envelope from the bank. The hallway was dim in the dusk. She kicked off her shoes and hollered up the stairs. “Frédéric?” No answer.

  The French doors were closed because they’d had the heat on yesterday evening. She’d stained and varnished the wood and Frédéric had added a scrolled brass handle. The gleam of wood and glass changed the look of the downstairs, made the hallway elegant. And yeah, in whatever bizarre way the mind worked, she no longer saw the body hanging. She thought of the boy in the house less often. The reawakened memories of Claire’s suicide were fading, settling into the old hollow sense of loss she would sooner leave undisturbed.

  She slung her knapsack on the table in the kitchen, unlocked the back door, and stepped onto the deck. The fence paraded the patient innocence of wood that had withstood rain, sunshine, and snow. The man who used to stand out there seemed to have disappeared.

  Over on Maddy’s deck, her orange cat huddled next to the basket-weave chair, as if waiting for Maddy there, where she often sat, would make her appear. Fara clicked her tongue. One ear swivelled in her direction, but otherwise he ignored her. Cats, she smirked. So unto themselves.

  “How about …?” Anouk stood as if undecided before the shrink-wrapped mounds of ground beef. Then she winked at Ben. She hadn’t forgotten how he loved her pâté chinois. She’d already hefted potatoes, apples, celery, and a head of iceberg lettuce into the cart he was pushing.

  A few days ago he’d opened his door and there stood Anouk. My bag’s downstairs, she said. He’d tripped down on light feet, couldn’t get back upstairs fast enough, lugging the huge and heavy suitcase. She showed him the bruises on her arm where her boyfriend had grabbed her when he heard she’d had some fun for a change. What a total a-hole!

  She was so upset — and Ben so keen to show off that she’d come to him for refuge — that he’d taken her out for smoked meat and spaghetti. She’d had four Bloody Marys. Back in his apartment, she threw a blanket over the scratchy upholstery of his sofa and straddled him with all her clothes on. He knew this game, where she didn’t get undressed but squished her breasts out of their cups and twisted her skirt up her hips. He had to finger aside the crotch of her panties to get in. Sex with no clothes was easier, but Anouk was always wilder when he had to wrestle with elastic and lace to get at her good parts.

  The next day at work, Mathieu asked if it was true Anouk had moved in with him again. News didn’t take long to get around the Pointe. Ben shrugged. He didn’t know what Anouk meant to do and didn’t dare ask her.

  That evening, when he came home, she had pork chops frying and a can of mushroom soup open on the counter. That was her trademark fancy dish: pork chops in mushroom sauce.

  He went to the bedroom to change his oil-streaked shirt for a T-shirt. Anouk had glared when she’d seen the teacup on the window ledge. Who’s is that? she demanded. He thrilled at the snap of her jealousy — but didn’t want her to smash the cup to the floor. My mom’s. Her eyes narrowed. He wasn’t sure if she believed him. Then she pulled him to her. You poor baby.

  Today the teacup shared the ledge with her grandmother’s shepherd girl. The light from the window made the china crook gleam like the handle of the teacup. He looked around the room, but Anouk’s huge suitcase had disappeared. He eased open the top drawer of his dresser. His underpants had been pushed aside to make room for shiny twists of frilled nylon and lace.

  He walked into the kitchen, brimming with a sense of great, good luck. He gathered her close in h
is arms, feeling how perfectly she fit against him, smelling the perfume of her hair. We should get married, he murmured. She pulled back her head to look at him. For real? You can get a white dress, he promised. And walk down the aisle. She snuggled her head under his chin again. Don’t be silly, she whispered. I don’t need the jokers around here laughing at me in white. Let’s do it fast at city hall. She gripped her arms around his waist tighter. Let’s do it, Ben.

  Since then, because he’d been at work all week, she’d made the phone calls and booked a date. They had to wait three weeks, but three weeks was okay if he thought that, a week ago, he didn’t even know he was going to be married at all.

  Anouk wanted to visit her parents in Shawinigan to tell them. He’d already met them when he and Anouk used to live together. He didn’t care for her old man, a short bully with a mouth on him. Hard to believe he hadn’t had his face broken yet. Her mom looked like an older, more tired, fatter version of Anouk, but Ben bet that even when she was younger, she didn’t have Anouk’s spunk.

  Ben hadn’t decided yet if he was going to tell his dad or let him find out — the way Ben had found out about the house. It would serve him right to miss his own — his only — son’s wedding.

  Anouk had asked about the house and swore when he told her. Crosseur! What a bastard, your dad!

  Yeah, he was. But now Ben had Anouk on his side — soon to be his wife.

  They talked about Xavier, too. She said she’d always thought Xavier was over the top. A bit crazy. Had she told him Xavier tried to get her in the sack once? His own brother’s girlfriend, what did he take her for? Ben already knew the story — she’d told him before — but he let her tell him again. He remembered how Xavier was like a firecracker that could burst in your hands at any moment.