by Alice Zorn
Fara stood in the kitchen, holding her breath then breathing again. The smell was definitely in here. She opened the cupboard doors and took big sniffs. They smelled musty and of mice, but not … whatever it was. She crouched to the floor. It was ugly beige linoleum with a fleur-de-lis pattern trodden to a dull ochre smear at the sink. They would rip it up eventually, but Frédéric said not yet. There was too much else that needed to be done before they tackled the kitchen floor.
Was the smell coming from under the linoleum? Something soaked into the wood? She shuddered, thinking blood, thinking …
The problem wasn’t suicide. She could handle that. But she wished she knew how and where in the house. Like this, not knowing, she’d begun to imagine the worst in every room.
The boy’s presence had become more real since Frédéric had found the album of photos upstairs. He’d been handsome, his body lean, with brown hair swept across his forehead. Often he had a pretty girl beside him — though never the same one. He didn’t smile. His eyes were more connected to the camera than to the girl leaning against him.
Fara wondered if they should send the album to his father. He’d been so restless at the notary’s, pen gripped in his hand, wanting only to be rid of the house. Rid of the house and everything that had happened here.
Her own parents acted as if they’d never had a younger daughter. All signs of Claire had disappeared from their house — the frame with her high school diploma, the cushion she’d knit, Claire’s old bedroom renovated as a sewing room for their mother. Fara was sure she had the only pictures of her and Claire as children, not that there were many. Her parents took a yearly Christmas photo to send home to family, but otherwise saw no reason to take pictures of the girls. There were no birthday parties.
Fara put the photo album with the boy’s pictures on a shelf in an upstairs closet. She wasn’t sure if his father would want to see them, since he’d left them, but she also couldn’t bring herself to throw them away.
The new people trusted that the fence that enclosed the small backyard was secure. They walked back and forth before the uncurtained windows, happy, prideful, and inviolate, so they thought, in their new home. They never noticed Ben spying through the gaps in the fence — the piecemeal outline of his body that they would have seen if they’d looked. The boards were so weathered and flimsy, he could have kicked them down.
He’d watched and heard them argue about the sander. When the man turned it on, it roared with a noise that meant it was blocked, but the moron kept using it until sawdust spewed out the top. He didn’t even know enough to hammer down the nails sticking out of the floor so they didn’t rip the sandpaper. Was he lazy or stupid? With money to waste.
Every evening Ben waited until the new people left. He still had his key for the back gate. Last night he popped a couple of nails off the deck and hauled out the winter tires his dad had stored there. Why leave perfectly good tires? His dad had already given away the whole damn house for next to nothing.
All his dad wanted was to forget how he’d fucked up — telling everyone big stories about him and Xavier fixing up the house so they could sell it for lots of money. Real estate was starting to happen in the Pointe. Xavier didn’t give a damn about real estate, didn’t give a damn about renovating, didn’t give a damn about the house, didn’t give a damn about much. But did he have to kill himself ? Why didn’t he just hand the old man a signed piece of paper telling him to drink himself to death? Go for it, old man. Die!
Not fast enough, though. Not fast enough for Ben to get the house.
Fara was painting the small front room white. She pushed the roller up and down, trying not to look when people walked by on the sidewalk. Their heads were at the level of the windowsill, their voices beside her. “That’s what you said last time. You said it wouldn’t happen again.” The bounce of a basketball kept getting closer until Fara expected it to land at her feet. “You’re getting a whack if you don’t get your finger out of your frickin’ nose right now!” Fara didn’t hear the whack but the child began bawling.
Before they’d bought the house, she hadn’t realized what it would be like to live almost on the sidewalk. People didn’t seem to notice her painting the walls. They accepted there was a membrane, however invisible, between inside and outside — private and public. Fara supposed she would get used to it. Or never use this room.
“Ostie!” she heard from the bathroom, followed by the clatter of a tool dropped to the floor. Frédéric didn’t usually swear, but every day in the house uncovered new problems. A light switch sizzled. One of upstairs windowsills had been pulled out from the brick. The washing machine drain wasn’t connected to a pipe.
Fara leaned the handle of the roller against the window frame and stepped back to assess the wall. She thought she could still sense a shadow of green under the white, but that might be her mind playing tricks. It was bizarre how these small rooms had been made smaller yet by dull colours. Brown, khaki, green, grey.
She rubbed her knuckles into the small of her back and went to see how Frédéric was managing. He was on a ladder in the bathroom, poking his fingers into the light fixture hole in the ceiling. From inside the hole, wires dangled like cartoon punctuation. “How’s it going?” she asked.
“Nothing but black wires. How am I supposed to tell which is which?”
“How about you take a rest? Come sit outside for a minute.”
“Do you want a light in here or don’t you?”
Didn’t he intend to use the light, too? She decided not to say that out loud. She couldn’t help with the wiring, nor with his mood.
From the deck she gazed at her modest domain of hacked weeds and grass. Next spring she would plant tomatoes, green beans, maybe even strawberries. She glanced across the fence at the neighbour’s yard, which was larger. There were bushes and leafy plants, but no garden as far as Fara could tell. Along the edge of the deck stood large ceramic pots bursting with pink and red geraniums.
A movement closer to the house startled her. The neighbour, legs curled on a basket-weave chair, lifted her hand in a slow wave.
Fara was embarrassed to be caught gawking. “Sorry. I just wondered how big your yard was and if you had a garden. I can’t wait to plant one next year.”
The neighbour had twisted her thick curls up and poked them in place with geisha sticks. “You might have too much shade — because of the maple and the fence. Your yard’s pretty small, too. Have you ever had a garden?”
“No.”
“Well, then.” She smiled. “You won’t miss it.”
Fara smiled in return. Polite but not giving way. She still meant to try.
“So, you bought the house. I saw you coming and going. And I heard you sanding.”
“Did we make so much noise?”
“Renovation is all you hear in this neighbourhood. Everyone’s buying up the old houses.”
“Isn’t that better than letting them fall apart?”
The woman shrugged. “I’m actually surprised how long it’s taken people to discover the Pointe. We’re closer to downtown than Outremont or the Plateau, but it’s like Montreal doesn’t even know we exist.”
“You must have discovered it. You moved here years ago.”
“I was born here — not in this house, I bought it later. But in the Pointe, yeah. My name’s Maddy and this is Jim.” She scratched the head of the orange cat who was rubbing against the chair leg.
“I’m Fara. And that’s Frédéric.” Fara waved inside the house.
“When are you moving in?”
“This weekend. We took time off to fix up the house. It’s still nowhere near ready, but we have to go back to work and we already booked the movers. We’ve got a couple of rooms where we can sleep and eat.”
“Must have been a mess. The owner …”
“We know. The real estate agent told us about his so
n.”
Maddy tilted her head, her geisha sticks like antennae. “Not everyone would live there. It doesn’t bother you?”
“I work in a hospital. Somebody’s always dying. You get used to the idea.”
“That people get sick and die? Sure. But that’s not the same as hanging.”
Hanging. The word settled like an object between them, daring Fara to touch it. She remembered how the real estate agent had glanced at the ceiling fan. Frédéric had already taken it down — more plastic than metal and attached with only three screws. No way had the boy hanged himself there. She thought of the house. The ceilings were high.
Maddy clasped her arms. “Do you know where?”
Fara gave a small shake of her head.
“Between the hallway and the big room on the ground floor. He and his dad had just made the opening wider and finished it with a wood frame. He screwed a hook for the rope into the wood. You’d think … I don’t know. You’d think drugs would be easier.”
Fara had thought the same about Claire, but over the years she’d realized that people who were serious about suicide didn’t care about easy or pain-free solutions. They wanted to be sure it was final. Done. No recourse.
“Who found him?” Fara asked. “His father?”
“His brother.”
Fara’s skin prickled. The real estate agent had never mentioned a brother.
“He called the police but didn’t want to let them in the house when they came.”
Fara had called 911 too — in a panic — then tried to stop the ambulance drivers from coming inside the apartment. She’d yanked at their arms and screamed they should go. She didn’t want them to revive Claire if she was already brain-dead — or whatever happened when you tied a bag over your head. She hadn’t been able to touch the bag herself. Rigid with horror, staring at the plastic knotted and tucked around Claire’s neck, remembering Claire’s question about the key. She’d known Fara would find her.
“Are you all right?” Maddy asked.
Fara blinked. “… I’m thinking what it must have been like for his brother to find him.”
“His brother … I guess so. It must have been …” Maddy gave herself a shake. “I think most people wonder about Xavier. Why he wanted to kill himself.”
Neither woman spoke for a moment. “I should get back,” Fara said. “I’m painting the front room.”
“I’ll have you over once you’re moved in and settled.”
“Great. We’ll look forward to it.” Mechanical words. Fara wasn’t even aware she’d spoken.
She walked into the house, through the kitchen, to the wood-framed opening between the main room and the hallway. And there, above her head — how had she never noticed? — she saw the hole bored into the wood. A deeply gouged cone in the middle of the frame. Every time she’d walked in and out of the room, she’d stepped through the air where his body had hung.
No wonder his father had sold the house. At least Claire had …
Fara checked herself. Was any form of suicide nicer than another?
The grey light of dusk. Ben could make out shapes but no colours. The house was dark. The couple had gone back to wherever they lived. He’d followed them once, at a distance, as they walked to the subway.
He unlocked the back gate. He could creep across the yard by feel. His hands found the deck boards that he hadn’t hammered down again after he’d pulled out the tires.
That morning he’d remembered that the cellar window under the deck had never had a lock, only a hook on the inside frame. He shimmied into the narrow space and used the blade of his jackknife to ease the window open. They hadn’t even hooked it shut. Didn’t they realize that anyone could crawl under the deck and get into the house?
He fished the pliers from his jeans pocket and tugged the hook off the inside frame. He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. Nothing to them. He wasn’t a criminal. But he also wasn’t finished with the house yet.
He slid the window shut again. Now he could get in if he wanted.
Fara didn’t like standing so close to the top of the ladder. The metal trembled as she reached over her head. She imagined crashing and Frédéric finding her unconscious, neck broken, sprawled under a tumble of aluminum geometry. She shouldn’t be doing this while she was alone in the house. She dipped the scraper into the bucket of putty and reached up again. A million-umpteen things they still had to do before they could move in, but first she had to hide this hole.
She’d shown it to Frédéric, who asked if it bothered her. No, she said, I’ll just step aside so I don’t bump into his body. He assumed that, if she could joke, she was fine. He didn’t understand that she wasn’t joking. She didn’t believe in ghosts and didn’t worry about the house being haunted. But as long as there was a hole for the hook where his body had hung, she saw his body hanging. She wasn’t even sure if filling the hole would help, but she had to try.
At least now she knew where and how. She could stop sniffing the air in the kitchen. Or peering at the grout around the tub for bloodstains. He’d killed himself here.
So what? A hole was a hole was a hole was a hole. She repeated it the way she’d once told herself a bag was a bag was a bag was a bag. You recited a word until you reduced it to a meaningless nothing. Even so, how many years had passed before she could use a green garbage bag? She’d kept remembering Claire in bed, hands folded over her chest, her matted, eyeless teddy bear tucked in her elbow, green garbage plastic knotted over her head. How could she have done that to herself ? Like saying, look, I’m garbage. Fara hadn’t wanted to believe it was Claire — except that no one but Claire would have hugged that ancient, discoloured teddy bear.
Fara scraped putty into the ugly gouge in the wood. When the putty was dry, she would paint the frame with a darker stained varnish to disguise the patch. Except then she would have to paint the skirting boards to match. The window frame, too. Hiding a hole was work.
Making one, too. He’d drilled through the wood into plaster. Bought a hook long enough to hold his weight. He must have done it secretly over several days so his father and brother wouldn’t notice. Screwed the hook in place, then waited, wondering when to stage his death. Once the hook was in place, he could do it any time. Every time he walked into the room, he knew it was up there. The steel curve of a beckoning finger.
She stepped off the ladder and looked at her work from the floor. The patch of putty was only slightly paler than the wood. Maybe when it dried she wouldn’t even see it. She would still stain and varnish it — get another layer between herself and the hole.
Rose
Rose had said Kenny should pick her up on the corner of Parc and Villeneuve. She’d thought it would be easier than having him look for her address. She also wasn’t sure she wanted him to know where she lived.
Though she was early, she found him already parked in a white van with red letters along the side: FENÊTRES FAVREAU. He wagged a bag of doughnuts at her through the window. “I got you coffee.”
It wasn’t yet seven. Traffic was sparse, moving easily past stores, Chinese restaurants, pizza shops, apartment buildings. Kenny jabbed the radio button until he found music he liked. He asked if she liked it. She shrugged then said she remembered it from when she was in high school. He grinned, assuming that meant yes. She felt she was still asleep, dreaming she was sitting in a van and leaving the city to return to the cabin in the woods.
Kenny said he was pretty sure he knew where to find Rivière-des-Pins. “Near Rawdon, right? But why don’t you get out the road map?” He pointed at the glove compartment.
She unfolded the map across her lap and legs. A network of lines tangled thick around Montreal, thinning as they headed north. The occasional town was a hard knot.
“Why don’t you fold it in a square with the part we want to get to on the outside? You don’t have to hide u
nder it.”
She wished she could hide. She hoped no one would recognize her. Thérèse’s daughter. Crazy Thérèse. Imagine living in a cabin the woods in this day and age! Her poor daughter. Poor Rose.
Rose hated how people always used to feel sorry for her. She didn’t feel sorry for herself. She knew she wasn’t like the other girls at school, giggling about TV shows and makeup, whispering their silly, made-up secrets. Rose knew that when you had a real secret — like meeting Armand in the woods — you kept it to yourself.
No one except Armand ever came to their woods. Even the roaring ATVs stayed away since the accident with the Bilodeau boy. The trees grew too close. The ground heaved with their roots. When the boy fell from his ATV, his brother couldn’t stop it from rolling back and crushing his head.
Kenny sang a few lines along with the song on the radio. He was always in a good mood, but he was especially happy today. Even if she told him that people in Rivière-des-Pins believed the forest around her cabin was cursed, he would still want to go. His green tackle box and fishing rod lay on the floor behind them.
Yesterday he’d shown up at her studio with his fishing rod. Isn’t it a beaut? He swirled it in the air like a wand. I’m going to practise outside. She’d seen the odd person standing along the canal with a fishing rod. She didn’t think there were fish. Certainly nothing one should eat.
She was painting a dresser she’d found in a furniture shop in St-Henri. Three large drawers with two small ones on top. Twenty dollars, no tax, and the man had delivered it. He was an older man with an eye dulled by a cloudy spot she hardly noticed because he kept winking as he talked, turning every sentence into a possible joke. He had leaned against the counter in his shop, surrounded by shabby, scuffed furniture he’d cleaned up and repaired. He had a rhythm to his voice that reminded her of Yushi when she talked about food or her mother. Rose wondered if the man in the furniture shop came from Trinidad, but she was too shy to ask.
