Five Roses (14 page)

Ricardo, the housekeeper, cautioned her. “Watch out, I just washed the floor.”

Fara stooped before the refrigerator. The light had burned out years ago and never been replaced. One day she would buy a bulb at the dollar store and screw it in herself. She shoved aside juice and plastic bags. There were a couple of containers of tube feeding but none for Labranche.

She stood again and scanned the kitchen. Stainless steel cupboards. A box of plastic spoons. The ice machine. A large garbage bin. The garbage hadn't been emptied yet, and she saw noodles slithered across a white Styrofoam container.

She leaned out the door to snatch a pair of gloves from the box on the railing. Grimacing, she dislodged the container from the noodles.
LABRANCHE
.
VIVONEX
.

She set the container in the sink and asked Royal, who was carrying a clutch of urine bottles down the hallway, to tell Brie to come to the kitchen. Ricardo still leaned against the wall next to his housekeeping cart. “That stuff's sticky, man. I had to wash the floor two times.”

“Someone spilled it.”

“And didn't clean up right.” He mimed lazy back and forth wiping. “Big puddle under the fridge.”

Brie walked toward them briskly. “What's the fuss?”

Fara showed her the food-smeared container. “Ricardo had to wash Vivonex off the floor. I've told you the tube feeding shouldn't go here.”

“There's nowhere else.”

“Well, don't be surprised if someone knocks it over.”

“Jesus.”

“Probably not him.” Fara dropped the container in the garbage again. She remembered the young woman who'd delivered the tube feeding. Her solemn expression. Her low, grave voice. She didn't look like someone who only half-did her job.

Ben slouched on the sofa in his boxers. The TV was on loud, but he wasn't watching it. Some police drama. On the coffee table, next to a few empty drink cans and flyers, sat his mom's teacup with the gilt handle.

He couldn't believe the new people had already moved in. He'd thought they would keep renovating the house the way his dad and Xavier had planned. Knock out the wall of that small room. Rewire and insulate upstairs. He'd expected to have months to sneak into the house, walk around, and remember. Even if the house didn't belong to him on paper, the space was still his — the shape of the rooms, the doors, the corners, the closets. He could walk to the fridge in the dark with his eyes closed.
That
was knowing a house.

Damn his dad for selling it. For not even asking if Ben wanted the house. Or was Ben the stupid one, thinking anything had changed? Ben was never the son who mattered to his dad. Only Xavier, who was always doing crazy things and taking risks, no matter how reckless or dumb. There was no telling if the rope around his neck was just another stunt. Maybe he was counting on their dad to come home in time, find him hanging, and freak out. Or maybe he thought a bruise around his neck would look cool — like the time he stabbed his ear with safety pins and had to take antibiotics for a month.

Ben hadn't been watching the show on TV, but when a commercial came on he lurched from the sofa to get a can of Pepsi from the fridge. He scratched his back because the nubbly upholstery made him itch. When Anouk lived there, she'd thrown a bedspread across it.

He still missed Anouk. Almost two years and no steady girlfriend since. They'd had an argument — he couldn't even remember about what — and she'd walked out. It wouldn't have been the first time she'd crashed at her sister's for a few nights. He was still expecting her to come back when one of the guys at work said he'd seen her in Verdun with her arm around someone new.

She'd always warned Ben that she liked to move along. He was the sucker who'd thought she would stay — not just because of the sex or because she made
pâté chinois
with creamed corn the way he liked it, but other crazy things he bet no other guy let her do. Like the manicures.

He stretched his fingers and frowned at the oily black rims of his nails. Except to cut them, he'd never paid attention to his nails before Anouk. First she scoured his hands with a scrubber until she almost tore his skin off. Then she soaked his nails in a jellied liquid. He had to sit still, but he could watch TV. Or the neat side part in her hair and her small, sleek head bent over his hand as she poked and snipped.

Through the shock and unreality of Xavier's death, Ben had clasped the smallest hope that Anouk would come to the funeral, if only to say how sorry she was. He'd scanned the crowd at the church, and later at the graveside. His dad had been drunk since before the funeral started. And his mom … he hadn't thought about his mom in years, but when Xavier died, he wondered if someone might have told her. He hadn't been looking just for Anouk at the funeral.

Ben clanked his empty can on the coffee table, picked up his mom's teacup, and walked to the bedroom. When Anouk used to live here, she'd kept a china shepherd girl her grandma had given her on the window ledge. In the morning the sun gleamed on its shiny arms and curly head. There, exactly there, he set the teacup.

Fara, nestled against Frédéric's chest, could smell soap and the soft musk of his skin. He'd showered when he'd come upstairs after working in the cellar.

“You've got to admit …” he began.

“Yeah?”

“Eric knows his stuff. He figured out those orange wires.”

Fara had no idea which wires Frédéric meant, but if Eric had helped, well, good.

“And the French doors. That's a really good idea, don't you think?”

Fara rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling that was only dimly lit by the bedside lamp. “I wonder what it's like for him.”

“For who?”

“For his brother — the boy who killed himself. He found him hanging.”

“Fara …” He turned toward her and cupped her shoulder.

“Sorry,” she said. “I can't help it. I think about it.”

“Maybe we shouldn't have bought this house.”

She remembered her immediate attraction to the room and the window facing the backyard. The real estate agent yanking aside the blinds and light flooding in. “I'll get over it,” she said. “I love the house.”

Ben didn't like standing in the shadows along the street because now and then a neighbour walked by whom he recognized — and who might recognize him. No one addressed him, though, as long as he kept silent. People in the Pointe knew to ignore what didn't concern them.

He had to wait a long time until the upstairs light was turned off. He waited longer and decided they must be asleep by now. He walked around the corner to the alley and through the darkness to the gate. Strange how they'd changed the lock on the front door and never thought about the gate.

He lifted the deck boards, set them aside, and eased himself under. So far, so good. This much he'd done before. He pushed against the window that swung inward on hinges. The frame was clumsy to hold open as he wiggled in. It wasn't much of a drop, but he scraped his arm against the stone wall.

Even in the dark, he could tell that the cellar was different. There was more space. He took careful steps to the stud he knew was on his left and felt along the wood for the light switch his dad had wired. The angle of light made the packed dirt of the floor look bumpier. Shadows leaned in around him. Weren't those his dad's tools on the workbench? His dad never tried to teach him to build things, but he sometimes helped Xavier. Ben had watched once as their dad showed Xavier how to fit two mitred corners together. Their dad held the wood, Xavier the bottle of white carpenter's glue.

Ben picked up the hammer, wondering how he could tell if it was his dad's. Suddenly, water gushed down the drain in the cellar, startling him. He shrank back, groping to turn off the light.
Shit! Were they still awake?
He strained to hear movement from upstairs.

He waited until the cool cellar air made the shirt on his back feel like a cold hand. He crept softly to the frame of dimness that was the window. Clicked on his flashlight just long enough to spy a crate he could set below the window. He pulled himself out as quietly and quickly as he could, listening all the while for sounds from inside the house.

Rose helped Kenny carry the pieces of her loom from the van into the warehouse. The breast beam, the beater, the treadles, the harnesses. He still wouldn't meet her eyes. On the drive back from Rivière-des-Pins he'd hummed with the radio, made random comments about the traffic and the weather, swerved his glance away from her — as if
he
were embarrassed. Wasn't sex what men wanted?

For her, the memory was more dreamlike than true. A command she'd obeyed in the night, hypnotized by the cabin, the whispers of the trees, the nearness of Armand, the reawakened longing of her body. She, too, would sooner forget what had happened. But she wished Kenny would stop acting as if she had a disease he was afraid of catching.

He set the warping reel against the wall and stood back. His hair was still raked upright, which he'd finally noticed in the rear-view mirror and tried to tug flat. “I should go. I've got to return my friend's van.”

“I'm staying. I want to start putting the loom together.”

He frowned at the different lengths and shapes of wood ranged along the wall. “You can't do that alone.”

“I can get started.”

“I'll come help you tomorrow — before work, around eleven.” He shuffled to the door without waiting for an answer.

“Kenny.”

He half-turned in the doorway, shoulders reluctant, wary of whatever she meant to say.

“Thank you for helping me — for getting my loom. I really needed it here.” She hoped he understood how truly grateful she was. Everything else should be forgotten.

One side of his mouth almost lifted. “Told you I'd get it, didn't I?”

He shut the door behind him and she was alone in her studio with the loom. It was in pieces — dismembered — with no diagram to connect the parts, but it was here. By tomorrow or the next day it would be whole again. The cranks and ratchets attached. The heddles on the harnesses. Since she'd had no boxes, she'd taken the drawers from the dresser in the cabin to pack the shuttles, bobbins, and lease sticks. She opened the drawers of the dresser she'd bought in St-Henri and began to fit the hooks and shuttles side by side in an order Maman would have recognized. Like Maman, whose hands could heft an axe, skin a rabbit, or re-thread a heddle when the yarn snapped, Rose's movements were deft and practical.

Several times she glanced at the window. She'd bought two lamps but had always preferred daylight for weaving. In the bare, white light, she could examine the row-by-row texture of the cloth and immediately spot any flaws. Her studio was large enough to place the loom in whichever relation to the window she wanted.

She looked at the pieces along the wall for the breast beam. She carried it to the line she'd mentally drawn on the floor. She stood back and considered. Here was where she would begin.

“Ho-ho-ho!” Rose heard as she closed the apartment door behind her. “Is that
Santa Claus
?”

Rose peeked around the wall. Yushi sat on the sofa with one foot in a basin of water, the other propped on a towel on her knee. With both hands she kneaded her instep, toes, and heel with a pumice scrub. Her weekly foot treatment.

“So, who was that guy who called?” Yushi asked.

“Let me put this away.” Rose carried the pillowcase she'd stuffed with sweaters she and Maman had knit to her room. She'd asked Jerome to call Yushi to tell her Rose wouldn't be home. She'd stressed the word
home
. She wanted him to hear that Montreal was home now, and that she had a roommate and a life in the city. Though she hadn't liked giving him the number. She should have asked Kenny to drive her back to Rivière-des-Pins so she could call herself. She didn't trust what Jerome would say. Or imply. The other option — not to call at all — wasn't fair to Yushi, who would have worried. Or might have worried. Rose wasn't sure. Her years of living isolated in the woods hadn't given her much sense of what people wanted.

Rose poured herself a glass of grapefruit juice and headed back down the hallway. “We got my loom.”

Yushi peered at her toes. “I figured.”

From where Rose sat at the table she could smell eucalyptus. “I asked the neighbour to call you.”

“He said he was a friend.”

“That's just his way of talking.”

Yushi lowered her foot into the water in the basin and lifted the other to her lap. “I guess it was just his way of talking when he said …” Yushi squirted exfoliating cream onto her palm and rubbed it around her heel. “When he said that you and your boyfriend were staying in your cabin.”

“He slept on the sofa.” Rose set her glass on the table.

“Rose!” Yushi pointed at the glass.

“Sorry.” Rose lifted it and wiped her arm across the wood.

“On the sofa? That must have been cozy.”

“I slept upstairs.”

“You never mentioned an upstairs.”

“It's an attic. There's just enough room for a bed and a dresser. There isn't even a window.”

Yushi's fingers rubbed and pressed and circled. Since Rose had seen how Yushi took care of her feet, she'd begun smoothing cream on at night so her skin wasn't as dry.

“My loom wouldn't come apart. Then it got late and we figured we'd stay and try again in the morning.”

“Who's the guy who called?”

“I told you — a neighbour.”

“You always said you and your mom lived in the woods. You never mentioned neighbours.”

“He lives past the woods, a couple of fields over.”

“How did he know you were there?”

Rose shrugged. “He saw the van.”

Yushi lowered her foot into the basin, scooped water across the tops, wiggled her toes. “Are you happy to have your loom here?”

“Yeah.”

“That's all that matters, right?” Yushi squeezed the towel around each foot.

Rose hoped the questions were over.

“Tell you what. Take this bowl and get some fresh water. Sprinkle in some of my bath salts and soak your feet. Then I'll do them.”

Rose felt the unusual kindness of the offer at the same time that she stiffened in refusal. No one had ever touched her with the attention and care Yushi applied to her feet. Not even Maman. It was too intimate. Rose was too shy. Especially now. She hadn't had a chance to wash since last night — since Kenny.

“I have to take a shower. My loom was really dusty. I …”

“Suit yourself.” Yushi stooped to the basin and carried it down the hallway.

Rose heard the great splash of water as Yushi emptied it in the sink. She felt she'd missed an opportunity — and that it was her loss.

Yesterday, when Rose saw Kenny in the hallway at work, she smiled and said hi. He blushed, ducked his head, said he was busy, and hurried away.

Two mornings earlier, when he'd come to her studio to help her finish reassembling the loom, he'd been careful to keep his distance. When Rose leaned across his arm to show him how to attach the ratchet, he held his back stiffly. She'd always thought that when he jiggled he was excited or nervous. She saw now that rattling his bones signalled an easiness in his body that he no longer had with her.

Because they'd had sex? It had hardly even been sex!

He had been so eager to spend a night in the cabin. She remembered how contented he'd looked during their candlelit supper of rice and canned tuna. But he hadn't once mentioned the cabin since. He acted as if … as if he didn't want to know her anymore. He'd promised to help bring her loom to Montreal, and now that he had, he meant to disappear.

Today, when she wheeled her trolley off the elevator on the twelfth floor, he was ambling down the hallway, slapping a white plastic package against his thigh. He saw her and his hand stopped. “Hi,” he mumbled and would have kept walking except that she blocked his path.

“Hi,” she said. “How's work?”

“The usual.” He jerked the package that dangled from his hand. “They run out of oxygen tubing and I have to play gofer.”

“I'm getting ready to start with my loom. I chained a warp and I've got it on the breast beam — you know at the front?” She levelled a line in the air at hip level. “Tomorrow I'll start hooking the threads through the reed.”

“How many threads?” That had impressed him when she'd first described weaving.

“Five hundred and seventy.”

His lips pursed in a soundless whistle.

“This part is called dressing the loom — sleying the reed, pulling threads through the heddles, winding the warp. Weaving is easy. It's the setting up that takes time. You should come see what it looks like when I'm weaving. You did so much to help me get the loom here.”

He backed away. “Sure.” But it sounded more like “I don't think so.”

He'd been listening as long as she talked about weaving. As soon as she'd mentioned him visiting, his face had changed. She pushed her hip against the cart to get it rolling again. Kenny was her only friend in the hospital and she didn't want to lose him. Not just because he was a friend, she realized, and she had almost none. Because she liked him.

At the desk on Twelve South, she handed the clipboard to the unit coordinator with the shaved skull who always signed without checking.

“You there,” said a tall woman behind the counter who leaned forward to read her hospital ID. “Rose, is that your name? I saved your ass the other day. The nurses were going to write a complaint. It would have gone in your file.”

Rose had no idea what she meant.

“I don't know who the culprit was, but it wasn't your mistake. Not mine, either. I know what you left and what I signed for. People are always looking for someone to blame.”

Rose remembered the tall woman now. She'd been at the desk and signed Rose's clipboard. Rose waited for her to explain what she meant, but she'd already forgotten Rose, turning to slap a doctor on the arm. “Where's that chai latte you promised me?”

Rose wheeled her cart to the kitchen, where she had to edge aside juice cans and bags of food in the refrigerator to make room for the Styrofoam containers of tube feeding. Whatever the woman was telling her, it seemed to have been solved. Why had she even told Rose? Was Rose supposed to thank her? She wished she could ask Kenny, who understood the complicated etiquette among hospital support staff. Maybe she would see him again on another floor. Or when she returned to the kitchen, she would check if there were any trays to deliver to Six South, where he worked.

Rose had put her chair inside the frame of the loom to sit as close as possible to the harnesses. She'd bought the chair in the furniture shop in St-Henri. When the man saw how she sat in each one, testing the exact height so her knees were slightly raised when her feet were flat on the floor, he laughed and called her Goldilocks. But then he took her down into his cellar workshop where he had more chairs. She didn't care about the shape of the legs, the state of the varnish, the style of chair. She had to sit correctly, since she'd be sitting like this for hours.

In addition to the light from the window, she'd turned on a lamp and angled it close. Halfway along the top of the first harness was a wispy knot of scarlet wool Maman had tied to mark the middle. For Rose, reaching for thread after thread, it helped to have a signpost. Five hundred and seventy divided in two was two hundred and eighty-five. Rose hoped to get halfway through before she had to leave to go to work.

She tugged the slipknot that held the next bundle of threads, fingered free the first one, and angled the hook through the eye of the heddle to grab it. Glance up, glance down. Make sure she had the correct heddle. If she made a mistake, the herringbone pattern she'd planned would be ruined. Glance up, glance down. Her guide was the long metal edge of the harnesses. The heddles themselves swam in an indistinguishable forest of long, skinny needles.

A light rain had started to fall, pattering on the weeds outside. The sculptor hadn't come today. From somewhere in the building she heard someone fingering guitar strings. The person wasn't playing a song — not yet — only repeating a sequence. Fingers and strings. Almost the same as what she was doing but with sound.
Huh
.

Yesterday Yushi had stopped by with a friend from work. They'd locked their bikes to the fence and come into the building. Yushi wanted to see what Rose had done so far on the loom. She introduced her friend, Maddy. Maddy lived close by. She and Yushi were going to head back to her place after cycling. You should come over sometime, Maddy said. Rose didn't answer. Why would she go to Maddy's? Or did she automatically become Maddy's friend because she was Yushi's? Maddy had hardly looked at what Rose was doing on the loom, though she'd hefted Maman's large steel scissors. I've got scissors like these, she said. They were my mother's. Rose almost said that these were her mother's, too, but she didn't. There was something about Maddy she wasn't sure she trusted. She watched Yushi and Maddy cycling off and thought how odd they looked together — especially on their bike seats. Yushi's bum was like a boy's. Maddy had great, fleshy haunches. Maddy was older, too, wasn't she? But maybe people did that: older friends, younger friends.

Rose hooked another thread. Glance up, glance down. Once she'd finished with the heddles, she would be ready to wind the warp. Maman knew how to do it alone, but Rose had only ever done it with Maman turning the crank while Rose stood at the front of the loom and held the warp taut.

She had known she would need someone to help and was going to ask Yushi, but now she wondered about asking Kenny. The last few days at work he'd seemed more comfortable with her, acting almost like his old teddy-bear self. Yesterday he'd walked into the kitchen. “Hey Rose! I'm picking up a tray so you can cool your feet.”

They seemed to have regained their easygoing camaraderie — except that it was different. He no longer poked her on the shoulder. He didn't come looking for her on her tube feeding rounds. He didn't want to be alone with her.