Rue des Rosiers

by Rhea Tregebov

  Sarah goes up to the bed and there Rose is, her beautiful sister, Rose, with her narrow, elegant wrists bandaged. The doctor said he didn’t know if there would be scars. Rose, big brown almond eyes closed, thinner than Sarah can ever remember her being, paler, despite the beginnings of her summer tan. Her skin so brown they used to joke that it was like photographic paper, expose it for ten seconds to the sun and she’d go dark. The famous story of Pat scrubbing and scrubbing at the back of Rose’s neck when she was a toddler, thinking the instant tan was grime. And now she’s paper white, a wraith.

  Even with her eyes closed, she looks sad.

  And Sarah wants to shake her, shake her awake and shake her back into her life. Why didn’t she want her life? Weren’t they enough for her? Even without the baby, why weren’t they enough for her?

  She can’t live without her sister. Doesn’t Rose know that?

  Her mother’s touch on her shoulder. Sarah realizes she’s been clenching her fists, releases them. She tells Pat she’ll sit with Rose, they should go and grab a cup of coffee.

  Pat nods, touches her shoulder again, pulls the blanket gently straight on Rose’s bed before she and Abe leave. Sarah doesn’t want to sit down, doesn’t want to open her mother’s magazine, doesn’t care what the pregnant Princess Diana is wearing or who the real Brooke Shields is. She turns her back to the bed, stares out the window onto the hospital parking lot.

  “Sarah?” Rose’s voice behind her. Thick, slightly muffled. Sarah doesn’t, for a moment, want to turn around. She doesn’t know what to say.

  “You’re here?”

  You’re not here and I need you.

  Sarah turns, touches her sister’s cheek. “I just got in.”

  “You’re really here?”

  “Yes. Dad drove me from the airport.”

  “I thought I was dreaming. I had the strangest dream just now. Something about water, you and Gail were with me, and you wanted me to go down to the shore of some lake, maybe it was the ocean.” Rose’s eyes begin to darken, a shadow passing over them.

  “Was it a bad dream?”

  “No,” Rose says, her eyes fixing on Sarah again. “Something came up out of the water, a log, and then it turned into something else, right in your arms, Sarah.” She’s looking at Sarah and tears are coming into her eyes. “A little water creature of some sort, an otter maybe. And you gave it to me.” Rose blinks away the tears, her face loses focus, goes blank.

  “Rose?”

  Rose closes her eyes.

  “It was a good dream?” Sarah is stroking Rose’s arm through the blanket. “You tired?”

  Rose opens her eyes again briefly, nods.

  “You don’t have to talk. I’ll just sit with you.” She takes Rose’s hand, starts humming.

  Her eyes closed, Rose asks, “What’s that?”

  Simon and Garfunkel. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water.’ “Nothing. Just humming. Sleep now.” And Rose seems to be drifting off again. Sarah hums quietly through the tune. Rose’s hand with its bandages is cold, thin, the long elegant fingers have their nails chewed all the way down. Rose used to keep her nails a bit long, always a touch of polish. She’d tease Sarah about her stubby fingernails. Rose lets go of Sarah’s hand, turns on her side, asleep. A slip of a girl. A fingernail paring. Crescent of a new moon.

  Sarah wants to give her something, a gift. For the dance last night she put on this corny silver puzzle ring she picked up at the Winnipeg Folk Fest years ago, some hippie sold it to her. She takes it carefully off her finger, puts it onto Rose’s. The ring fits fine, it holds.

  ~

  “Sarah?” A light touch at her shoulder.

  “Mom?”

  Pat is back in the room, a Styrofoam cup of coffee in her hand. “Has she been sleeping?”

  Sarah nods. “She saw me for a sec, talked to me for a minute or so about a dream she had.”

  Pat shivers.

  “It wasn’t a bad dream. Something about finding an otter in the lake.”

  Pat rubs at her forehead with the back of her free hand. “That all she said?”

  “She’s been asleep most of the time. Me too, I guess. Where’s Dad?” Sarah stretches, rubs at her eyes, which are gritty.

  “I sent him home. We should be getting you home too. David will be back here soon. You need to eat something. Coffee?” Pat offers the cup. “It’s awful.”

  “Thanks – I think.”

  “It’ll help you wake up.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  Pat nods towards the hallway. “Let’s not talk here. We don’t want to wake her.”

  More awful washed-out green on the hallway walls, odd black smudges an indecipherable script, marks from the gurneys, no doubt. A nurse nods as she goes by. Soft squeak of her white shoes. “I don’t want Rose to overhear,” Pat says. “Not at this stage. Give me a sip.” She reaches for the coffee, sips, shudders, hands it back. “My standards aren’t high, but really. Ugh.” She’s biting her lower lip. Pat is wearing cheap little sandals made out of some kind of transparent pink plastic, her toenails painted pink too. Jelly bean pink. Like a kid’s. Her mother’s feet look like little kid feet.

  Pat is explaining that the specialist, the psychiatrist, has confirmed what the GP was saying all along. It’s not just the blues, it’s clinical depression. But they’re diagnosing it as reactive – it didn’t come from nowhere. Generally that’s good. The other kind, endogenous – which does come out of nowhere – is harder to treat. So it was reactive in response to losing the baby. At first they didn’t want to put Rose on antidepressants, because talk therapy is supposed to do the trick if the depression is reactive. They tried a counsellor, and then a psychologist, but Rose didn’t like either of them, and they certainly did sound like morons. Rose just kept getting worse. The psychiatrist explained that people get into a vicious cycle. Rose wasn’t feeling well, so she wasn’t doing well at work, so she was afraid she’d lose her job, so she started getting even more anxious and down. By the time she finally got the prescription for antidepressants, she just wasn’t thinking straight. That’s what led to the suicide attempt. Right now, she needs to rest and stabilize for a couple of days, and then they can let her go home. Physically she’s all right. David got there soon enough, so the blood loss wasn’t significant. The antidepressants take a while to work, they’ll have to be patient. And they’ll have to keep an eye on her. Pat looks down when she says this.

  Keep an eye. Make sure she doesn’t try to kill herself again. Doesn’t try. Doesn’t succeed.

  Pat is twirling her wedding ring, a band of small diamonds set in white gold. She bites her lower lip again. “I’m just going to go in again for a minute and then we can head downstairs and get a cab. Rose will probably stay asleep. The medications are making her dopey. She’ll be all right for a little while, even if she does wake up and no one’s here.”

  Sarah stands in the hallway, watches her mother’s swift hands lightly touching Rose’s forehead, straightening the covers, quickly righting the arrangement of the water glass and pitcher on the bedside table. Pat touches Rose’s forehead again, a whisper of a blessing.

  Riding the elevator down to the lobby, Pat sorts through her purse, offers Sarah a mint. “I’m glad you could come. We really appreciate it. Taking the time off work. And the expense.”

  “Michael’s helping out with the ticket.”

  “He’s a dear.” Pat pops a mint into her mouth. “He’s a lovely man. I wish you’d give him a chance.” She looks at Sarah.

  Sarah fidgets with her bag, adjusts the shoulder strap.

  “Sometimes it seems like you never did get over that boy Nick. That whole thing. You had such a hard time of it.” Pat closes her purse, her mouth. Not wanting to say abortion. Not wanting to say crazy.

  ~

  work

  her first day back at the job, Sarah’s stacking bags of peat moss and sheep manure, tackling the backlog from her ten days in Winnipeg, sinking into the work. It’
s hot out, muggy, the weather’s moving into full summer swelter. Sarah’s coated in dirt from the bags, sweaty. She keeps seeing Rose’s face in the hospital bed. After asking Sarah a couple of questions about Winnipeg that she didn’t answer, her crew manager Gary backed off, let her be. She’ll put in extra hours to make up the time for as long as they need her to. Sarah’s just thinking about taking her lunch break when Gary comes up, clears his throat. She looks up, wipes her hands on the back of her jeans. Gary’s frowning, which isn’t unusual, but he looks hesitant, which is.

  “The boss – Hank wants to see you.”

  “I’ll wash up.”

  “He’s in the office.”

  “I know.” When is Hank ever not in the office? He’s certainly not on the lot hefting bags of manure, and she hardly ever even sees him dealing with customers. Hunched over his desk, yes, with a fan trained on him that looks like a prop from a 1940s private-eye movie. The whole office looks a bit like a B-movie set.

  She goes into the grotty staff washroom, rinses off her face and hands as best she can. Runs her hands through her hair in a cursory attempt at respectability. When she looks in the crummy little mirror she sees she still has a streak of dirt on her forehead. She rinses it off, stupid though it is to fuss. She’s not some school kid ordered into the principal’s office.

  When she walks in, Hank scowls in the faint breeze the fan is wafting through the stuffy room. Hank is always a bit of a blowhard, playing up his authority, and today he’s clearly in a bad mood to boot. “Sarah,” he says, without the usual invitation to sit down, “can you tell me exactly why you took ten days off work, with no notice, at the busiest time of the season?”

  “My boyfriend called you,” she says. “The day I left. I had to go to Winnipeg.”

  “Yes. Your boyfriend did call. And I had Gary call him back a bunch of times while you were gone to see when the heck you’d be back, but your boyfriend couldn’t say. Tell me, just what exactly was this family emergency?”

  “It was a family emergency. My family needed me.”

  “Look, Sarah, you’re an employee of this company, and you have certain responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is really quite simple: we need you to show up for work. You get that? Is that too hard to figure out?”

  Hank’s starting to fidget in his wooden swivel office chair – which really does look like a fugitive from a Raymond Chandler movie. Maybe he fancies himself a Philip Marlowe, giving her the third degree. Jerk. She doesn’t want to tell Hank about Rose.

  “Girls like you don’t have the foggiest idea what it really means to put in an honest day’s work. We’re counting on you here. It’s not all fun and games. You need to grow up. Take your job seriously.”

  “I do take my job seriously. But I also have a responsibility to my family.”

  “Look… Sarah…” His face and neck and ears have started to go red. “What you don’t understand is that I myself personally, I did you a favour trying you out for this job. You don’t exactly look the part of a landscape crew, do you now? What do you weigh? Ninety pounds? But we wanted to give you the chance to prove yourself. Everybody else here has to pick up the slack for you. I’ve gone out on a limb hiring a girl and now you go and take all this time off without any explanation. I need you to take responsibility, not just rely on your boyfriend to make excuses for you. And just because you have a lawyer boyfriend who’s ready, willing and able to foot the bills for you doesn’t mean you don’t bother to show up for work.”

  She doesn’t want to be here.

  Sarah gets up from her chair, heads to the door.

  “Sarah, I’m talking to you. Don’t you walk away from this conversation just because you don’t like what I’m saying.”

  She doesn’t turn around.

  “You walk out of here and you’re fired.” Hank has raised his voice as the door closes. “Sarah? You hear me? If you can’t take criticism, you’re fired. Tell Holly to pay you up what we owe you.”

  She goes into the cubby they call the staff room, grabs her stuff from her dented, pitiful little locker.

  “What’s up?” Gary’s hovering in the doorway.

  “I quit.”

  “Just calm down, Sarah. Let me talk to Hank.”

  “Actually, I didn’t quit. I got fired. You heard him. The whole friggin’ block heard him.”

  “The guy’s being a schmuck, Sarah. I’ll talk to him.”

  Schmuck. Gary’s got the Yiddish she taught him just right. Schmuck indeed. “I’m going home.”

  “Okay, okay. Just take it easy. I’ll talk to him tomorrow and call you at home. Be reasonable. Okay?”

  She walks out the back, her purse slung across her shoulder.

  “Sarah!” Gary calls after her. “What about your pay?”

  They owe her three weeks. Plus this morning’s wages.

  Holly can mail it to her.

  Outside it’s even hotter, the city revving its engines, ready to go full throttle into summer. A bus stops at the corner right beside her, breathing its foul breath in her face. She wants to throw something, hammer her fist through a wall. Guys would do that. But guys wouldn’t get told they didn’t deserve the job they were good at. Nobody has to help her do her job, nobody has to pick up any slack for her. She does an honest day’s work. She’s just as good as any guy on the crew. She’s better. She’s better than any of them. And twice as smart.

  And she’s out of a job.

  She’s out of a job. Because she lost her temper. Because Hank’s a schmuck. How’s she going to pay Michael back for the airfare to Winnipeg? How’s she going to pay her rent? She has two months’ rent in the bank, her dad always said make sure your savings come to two months’ rent, but that’s about it.

  What’s she going to do, and who the hell is she, without a job?

  She’s the schmuck. She’s the idiot. She can’t even hold down a crummy job. She’ll have to tell Michael. And Gail. And the family in Winnipeg. Everybody will be disappointed in her and nobody will be surprised.

  She doesn’t care.

  She does.

  She wants to hit something.

  ~

  The next day Sarah’s back at Gail’s loft, which has evolved since the first time she visited, a leather club chair, thick luxurious candles along the tops of the bookshelves. Every detail a sign that Gail’s settled in, that her life is in order: job, apartment, furniture. A whole, not a half-life. There’s a big fig tree drooping in front of one of the windows, Ficus benjamina. It looks like the sun may be too intense here: the tree is dropping yellowed leaves on the wooden floor. Sarah sticks a finger in the soil – dry as a bone. She fills a mug with water, empties it into the big pot, fills it again, empties it. Gail’s been standing at the window, swallowing what must be her second or third beer since Sarah came.

  “Do you have a watering can?”

  “There’s a pitcher on the table.”

  Sarah swishes the residue at the bottom. “What is this?”

  Gail takes the pitcher from her, sniffs, shrugs. “I dunno.”

  Iced tea? Dead sangria? She takes the pitcher to the sink, rinses it out, fills it and douses the thirsty soil.

  “Do you want me to make us spaghetti? Or I might have some leftover couscous.” Gail’s shuffling dishes and plastic containers in the fridge, opening lids. “Damn.” She’s spilled something viscous onto the floor. Maybe three beers, four?

  “Why don’t we just order in Chinese?” And before Gail can raise an eyebrow, Sarah says, “My treat.”

  Gail closes the fridge door. “No couscous.” She starts to mop up the mess on the floor with a dishrag.

  Sarah takes the dishrag from her, rinses it, grabs paper towels to attack the spill. “So let’s get Chinese.”

  “Okay, but let me pay for it.”

  “No dice, Gail. My treat.”

  “Your funeral. Spend your last ten bucks on take-out Chinese.”

  She’s got more than ten bucks. She can pay for
their dinner. She’s not penniless just because she got laid off.

  Not laid off. Fired.

  She’s never ever been fired before. She quit a few jobs, got laid off some, but never got fired.

  She hasn’t said anything to the Winnipeg family yet. When Gail called to invite Sarah over, eager for the Winnipeg news direct, she had to tell Gail, who didn’t say much. Probably biting her tongue. Because it was Sarah’s own fault. Mostly. Sarah had to tell Michael too, of course, who almost seemed relieved. No. No almost about it. He was relieved. He immediately started yakking about how proud he was that she finally told Hank off and walked out on him. Sarah is so much better off not stuck in that crappy job. Why doesn’t she give herself a break before the next crappy job, come with him to France? No point looking for another job until she gets back from Paris. The office is arranging Michael’s tickets, and they can still book her too, she just has to confirm. There’s no job holding her back.

  She feels in her pocket for the penny. She must have left it in her room, she puts it on the bedside table when she goes to sleep. Every penny counts. She’ll be counting pennies now, all right.