Five Roses

by Alice Zorn

  It must be close to three now. Behind her, cyclists whizzed by on the path. A couple on a tandem were arguing, his voice querulous, hers matter-of-fact. A rumbling of wheels crunched stone. The two women who pulled the cart with its load of toddlers sang about the days of the week. “Jeudi bleu vient à son tour, Vendredi vert le suit toujours.” Maman hadn’t taught Rose the days of the week before she started school. The days of the week didn’t matter in the forest. Rose knew which plants she shouldn’t touch. The three-leaf flag of poison ivy.

  Rose unfolded her legs and brushed away a spider climbing the mound of her knee. From a distance she heard the thunk of a great weight being dropped onto concrete again and again. Some of the factories along here were still functioning — if not at their original trade of a hundred years ago, then at some form of noisy, mechanical labour. When the weather was nice, men in stained overalls hiked across the grass to lunch at the picnic tables that bordered the canal. The factories where they worked looked much like the one where she had her studio.

  The buildings around the silos farther along the canal were abandoned, their windows ragged holes, the glass long knocked away. When Kenny had first pointed them out, she’d seen only the decrepit shells of empty buildings, but slowly the urban metamorphosis of reclaimed and deserted buildings was growing familiar. She’d begun to pick out details — the gears and pulleys atop a shaft where bales or sacks must once have slid to a loading dock. The ten-storey zigzag of a rusted metal stairway against a brick wall. On top of the highest tower perched what must have been a watchman’s shed. The corrugated metal walls were stained with rust, but the peaked roof and the shape of the shed reminded her of her cabin in the woods.

  She frowned, remembering her ignorance when Kenny had first brought her here. He’d talked and talked, but she hadn’t understood how his stories from the past explained the present.

  She didn’t hear footsteps behind her until the man spoke. “Look at your face. What bad thought attacked you?”

  She looked up at a man in a woolly hat that hung in twists to his shoulders. “May I?” he asked with a formal sweep of his hand, but didn’t wait for an answer to cross his legs and drop next to her in one smooth movement. His skin was an even brown like Yushi’s. His eyes were lighter, more brown than black. And his hat, she now saw, was hair.

  “Leo,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” She was still wondering about his hair.

  “My name is Leo. Je me présente: Léo.”

  She hesitated. He was a stranger. But everyone in the city, except for Yushi and Kenny and a few faces at the hospital, was a stranger. And they, too, had been strangers a few months ago. “Rose,” she said.

  “Why are you sitting by the canal, Rose, meditating on the water and looking so unhappy?”

  His lips were full. One of his front teeth was chipped at the corner. What did those woolly bunches of hair feel like? And how were they bunched like that? She realized she was staring and looked away.

  “Hmm, Rose? What’s up?”

  “I was thinking of a friend — or he used to be a friend, but I don’t think he wants to be friends anymore.”

  “A boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  He looked down his nose at her. “Are you sure?”

  “He never kissed me. He never even tried.”

  “He was like a buddy.”

  “Yes.” It was true, she was thinking. Kenny had never even tried to kiss her. He wasn’t interested in sex.

  “How come he’s not your buddy anymore?”

  She frowned at her knees, no longer listening to Leo. She shook her head to make him stop. She had to think this through.

  Leo stood. “I’ll talk to you another time, Rose. You work out your problem with your friend. You’ll figure something out, don’t worry.” He ambled off to wherever it was he’d come from.

  Rose was trying to remember exactly what happened that night in the cabin. She’d woken, convinced that Armand was outside. She’d crept down the stairs, haunted by her longing. Touched Kenny in his sleep. Took what she needed — or tried to. She didn’t know when he woke or what he thought. Next morning she’d thought he was embarrassed, but that wasn’t it. He was afraid of her. The craziness of what she’d done to him.

  She tucked her knees to her chin and closed her eyes. The more she remembered the details, the more she knew this was true. Look at how he acted now, shying away from her, always keeping a distance between them.

  The grass rustled beside her. A bicycle tire and Yushi’s foot. The thin red straps of her sandal. “Here I am.” She dropped a paper bag with something Rose knew would be buttery and delicious — that Kenny would love — next to Rose.

  Rose stood, brushing bits of grass from her shorts, and waited for Yushi to lock her bike to the fence. The abandoned complex of buildings and silos farther along the canal blocked a geometrical silhouette against the afternoon sky.

  “All set,” Yushi said. “Show me how to weave.”

  They had to go around to the front of the warehouse, because the loading ramp doors were locked. The sculptor had wrapped his marble in canvas and plastic, and gone on vacation.

  Rose steered her cart of tube feeding off the elevator. She saw Kenny with a stack of towels clamped under an arm, talking to a housekeeper. She’d been watching for him. She’d planned what to say.

  She slowed her trolley and the housekeeper, a heavyset man with a bird’s-beak ponytail, interrupted his story. “Check.”

  “Check what?” Kenny asked.

  “You’ve got company.” He winked at Rose and backed away.

  Kenny glanced behind him and blushed. “Doing your rounds, eh?”

  “I wanted to tell you I started weaving. My roommate, Yushi — you remember her — she helped me with the warp and I’m …” She motioned swinging the beater toward her.

  “You’re off.”

  “I’m really grateful for all your help.”

  He took a step away. “That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” Another step.

  “There’s something else.” She spoke quickly to keep him there. “You always talked about going to my cabin. I thought you might want —”

  “I’m really busy these days. No time to go anywhere.”

  It hurt to hear how determined he was to avoid her, and she looked down at her trolley. “I didn’t mean go with me. I don’t want to go. There are too many ghosts there for me. I start to act crazy.” She wanted to say it more directly but couldn’t. Kenny wasn’t stupid. He would understand what she meant. “But you can go if you want. You can try fishing again. Maybe you’ll catch something.” She didn’t think so, but that was what he wanted. “And you can stay in the cabin.”

  She sneaked a look at him. He was listening.

  “I’ll tell you where the key is. You don’t even have to let me know when you’re going. But you should take food because there’s not much left there. If you can’t get a car, there’s a bus. You can go up any time.”

  He shifted his feet and hitched the towels under his arm higher. “You’re sure about this?”

  “Positive.” She wanted to say she was his friend, but what if he thought she meant girlfriend and backed away again?

  He had to move aside to make way for a patient on a stretcher. He and the orderly wheeling the stretcher nodded at each other. She wondered if she would ever learn the cat’s cradle of words and gestures that seemed to link everyone but her.

  Kenny waited until the stretcher had passed. “A cabin in the woods,” he said under his breath. “I could … hang out there?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s practically the best thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

  “You found my studio. And you got my loom here.”

  “I’ve even got a friend out there — Jerome.”

  She righted her clipboar
d, which had slid at an angle between her bags of tube feeding. She didn’t want Jerome in the cabin. Or Kenny stopping at Jerome’s house and meeting Armand. Armand would see a city boy with clean hands who’d never ploughed a field.

  But she’d decided to let Kenny stay in the cabin. With no conditions.

  “You’ll really let me go stay there?”

  “I told you. I want you to go.”

  Kenny lifted his palm at her. To her surprise, Rose understood she was supposed to smack her hand against it. She hit his thumb instead, but it was close enough. She felt herself smiling to match his grin.

  Maddy

  Maddy and Yushi crossed the bridge from the market to the other side of the canal carrying trays of sushi. They sat at a picnic table decorated with an origami flower in stiffly pleated yellow paper. “I love these,” Maddy said.

  Yushi tilted her head, looking at it, but didn’t comment. She popped a tiny avocado roll into her mouth.

  “That —” Maddy poked her chopsticks across the canal at a condo complex with round porthole windows. “That’s such a farce. Twenty years ago — ten years ago — you couldn’t pay people to live down here. The canal was full of toxic crud and who knows what else. When they started to clean it up, you should have seen how many car skeletons they dragged off the bottom. I’ll bet you there were bones inside a few of them. And now we’ve got condos with fancy windows to make people feel like they’re cruising along in a boat, having a martini.”

  Yushi smeared wasabi on a piece of mackerel. “It’s a canal. There must have been boats once upon a time.”

  “Barges filled with sacks of grain on the way to the mills.” Maddy nodded farther along the canal at the Farine Five Roses sign.

  “Five roses,” Yushi intoned. “It makes your neighbourhood sound like a garden.”

  “If there are only five of them? Some pathetic garden.” Maddy dabbed a ball of rice in soy sauce. “How’s your bike riding?”

  “My Irish stallion.”

  “Irish because it’s green?”

  “Irish because it’s mine and I’m Irish.”

  Maddy wondered what she meant by that but decided not to ask. Since Yushi had told her about her mother, Maddy trusted that Yushi thought of her as a friend, though she still had that aura of indifference, as if at any moment she could stand up and walk away.

  Then Yushi added, “On St. Patrick’s Day everyone’s allowed to be Irish. So I figure, why not every day if you want to?”

  Maddy couldn’t tell if she was joking. Maybe not saying she came from Trinidad had to do with her family. Maybe saying she was Irish was a smartass answer for people who asked where she came from.

  “What was Petitpois on your case about this morning?”

  Yushi shook her wrist with its silver bracelet. “This. She says it’s not hygienic to wear it while I’m serving food.”

  “And you said …”

  “I said I wear it for religious reasons and my family is already upset because I’m not wearing my bindi.” She poked a finger between her eyebrows. Maddy snorted.

  “And while I was talking to her I stared at the crucifix she’s got around her neck.”

  “It’s not right, the way she harasses you. You should talk to Zied.” Petitpois was their boss, but Zied was her boss. Zied was the head pastry chef, a big-chested man with a regal nose who sent an underling upstairs when he wanted an espresso. Whoever made it was supposed to add three packets of sugar and stir well.

  “Pettypoo I can handle. She’s a menopausal tyrant. Him, he’s a temper tantrum set on instant explode. Even if you’re not the target, the fallout could leave you with scars. Believe me, I had to work close up in a kitchen with a chef who threw whatever he could grab — a zucchini, a crepe pan, a wineglass, a glop of roux.”

  “Is that why you don’t work in a kitchen anymore?”

  Yushi aimed her chopsticks at Maddy’s tray. “You don’t eat ginger?”

  “Take it if you want it.”

  Yushi scooped the translucent petals. “Chefs … owners … all the politics. I just wanted to make desserts. I wasn’t interested in being a minesweeper in a daycare centre for misfits shrieking about their brochettes de lapin. And I tell you, we worked like crazy — way busier than it’s ever been over there.” She flicked a haughty glance in the direction of the market. “And where did all the money go? To pay for the owner’s coke habit and his fancy car.”

  “You mean … you were a pastry chef !” That explained Yushi’s knowledge and expertise.

  “I never had a fancy title. I made the desserts, that was all. Whisky chocolate ribbon cake, Paris–Brest, hazelnut mocha torte, caramel pecan tart, brioche for Sunday brunch — and cheesecake. No es posible to have a restaurant in Toronto and not serve cheesecake.”

  “So why are you working at a counter now, bagging bread?”

  “Why are you?”

  “Because I don’t know how to make a marzipan rose — or Paris–Brest or brioche.”

  Yushi looked into the distance. “If you can’t do what you want to do, it’s better to do nothing at all.”

  “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “It’s what I’m doing.” Yushi snapped shut her empty sushi tray. “Time to go back.”

  Maddy wanted to say more, but clearly not now.

  Maddy slid the baguette and vegetables onto the counter in the kitchen and ran upstairs to change into shorts and a tank top. In the hallway stood cans of paint.

  On her way back through the kitchen, she stopped to tear off the end of the baguette. Working at a patisserie had made her immune to sweets, but bread was a constant temptation. Her Polish genes craved starch.

  She opened the gate onto the alley and there sat Jim, a tangerine demigod too grand to jump over a fence if a human was going to open the gate. He rose off his haunches and blinked for her to roll back her bike so he could pass. “I beg your pardon,” she said, which he acknowledged by grazing his tail across her leg.

  She rode along Wellington, attentive to nervous rush-hour traffic. Urban fact #22: automobile drivers were territorial about their cars, the space around their cars, the road in general. At the Canadian Tire she could cross to the bike path by the river. A light breeze rustled through the poplars, flipping the silvery skirts of their leaves. Purple martins swooped in and out of the holes of an apartment birdhouse. A man standing by the path shouted, “As-tu l’heure?” She lifted her arm to show him she wasn’t wearing a watch.

  Her heart opened with the view as the river widened. She loved its blue lizard-skin ripple and the frills of foam from the rapids in the distance — the same rapids Jacques Cartier had thought were the Northwest Passage. He’d had no idea how large the world was.

  She passed a woman who was power walking with her hair still tucked in a French twist from her day at work. She wore running shoes and shorts, yet her hips moved with the memory of heels, clacking down the hallway of a downtown office.

  Maddy cycled at a good speed, gaining on a woman pulling a trailer buggy. As Maddy passed, she peered into the canopied shadow of the buggy. Bare knees relaxed in sleep. A polka-dot sun hat hiding the child’s face.

  At first, when Maddy had lost her baby, she thought she’d been saved. She’d believed Stilt when he said she was lucky the crazy woman with the braid had taken her baby. She’d thought she was lucky, too. She’d thought she could forget. The baby was a mistake she didn’t want to remember.

  Except that she’d felt the baby’s kicks against the taut skin of her belly. Her body had split wide, giving birth. Even if in her head she didn’t want to remember, the clock in her womb kept time. When she walked through parks and past playgrounds, where two-year-olds and three-year-olds clambered onto their mother’s laps, she felt how her own lap was empty. No little girl clutched at her hand or nuzzled a hot forehead against her neck. Somewhere in the worl
d her child was two and three years old. Then four and five, careening on a bicycle.

  Since she didn’t know where her child was, why couldn’t it be this one, singing to herself as she drew stick people in blue crayon? Or this one, with her mouth agape before a sandwich board with an ice cream cone? Maddy had clenched her hands by her hips, not allowing herself to step closer.

  The little girls grew into tweens in training bras. Teenagers who swung long hair over their shoulders, pretending they knew how to hold cigarettes. Young women with skirts stretched so tight around their thighs their steps minced.

  Her daughter would be twenty-seven now, more than ten years older than Maddy was when she’d had her. Impossible numbers. Nonsensical math. How could she have a twenty-seven-year-old daughter and not even know who she was?

  And yes, it had occurred to her that Yushi must be close to her daughter’s age. But … so what? Couldn’t she like Yushi simply for who she was? Maddy didn’t want to keep living under this cloud of self-blame. To what end? There was no changing what had happened — except to bear it in mind, see how she’d messed up, try not to mess up again.

  She veered off the bike path, bumping her tires across the grass toward a bench. She dropped onto it, unsnapping her helmet and raking her fingers through the hot, bunched mass of her hair. Far off, across the water, the horizon stretched in a bristle of matchstick trees.

  What she should have done, she knew now, was call the police. Too bad if Stilt didn’t want them in the house, smelling pot in the air, noticing how many underage kids belonged to his free-love harem. Her baby had been kidnapped, damn it! The police would have put out an alert for a woman with a braid that hung to her waist, carrying a baby that wasn’t hers. They would have blocked the airport and the train station. Checked the buses. Asked the ticket agents and drivers. No one else had a braid that long, a baby that young, and breasts that didn’t leak. They would have found her.