by Alice Zorn
Still standing in the weeds, she unfolded the paper. Hi, I’m a working stiff today. I wish I could see you instead. L. The precise edges of the printing were so unlike Leo’s casual, ambling walk. Yet she could hear his voice in her mind as she read and reread the two lines.
She, too, wished she could see him, but almost better at that moment was the lovely surprise of a letter on her window. Anyone could have seen it. Cyclists on the bike path. The sculptor, if he’d come early. Leo wanted people to see he knew her. The feeling was so precious and wonderful she wanted to hug it close. She held the page between her fingers as if it were a bloom. This was how people were supposed to come together. Not like Armand with his stiff-lipped mumble no one but she could hear.
She propped the page open like a card on the dresser. She glanced at it while she was weaving, and once, when she had to get up from the bench to advance the warp, she crossed the room and picked up the page to read the words again.
She always had to clip her hair back before she started work at the hospital, but today she thought about how she was showing off her pretty ears with the gold earrings.
Behind her someone called, “Rose!” She turned, saw Kenny jogging toward her.
“Hey, I wanted to tell you. This weekend? I’m renting a car. And that cabin in the woods — here I come!”
She’d told him where the key hung on a nail in the lean-to, where to find the sheets, to make sure he opened the flue before he started a fire in the stove. “The Coleman lamp,” she said now. “Unless you want to keep using candles, you should buy naphtha. Or more candles.” She felt she had to remind him that if he ran out of supplies in the woods, he couldn’t just step out the door to get more.
“I’ll have enough food,” he said. “I’m bringing a box.”
“A box will be hard to carry through the woods. Pack a knapsack.”
“Yeah …” Kenny bobbed his head. “The woods. I was thinking about that. What if I can’t find that path?”
When he’d helped her carry pieces of the loom through the woods, he’d thrashed through knee-high bushes, not seeing the trail between the leaves where he could have walked more easily.
She stopped at a nursing station and handed her clipboard across. Kenny followed her to the kitchen. “What if I get lost?”
The woods were an hour’s drive from Montreal — isolated in themselves, but hardly the great uncharted North. If he were to walk in a straight line in any direction, he would come to a road or a fence he could follow. Although he’d already gotten lost on the roads, hadn’t he?
“I don’t know,” she said. She could offer him the use of her cabin. She couldn’t give him eyes he didn’t have.
“I was thinking Jerome could show me.”
Rose jerked the trolley forward. On the sound system, an operator droned a licence plate number. Someone’s blue Jetta was blocking the ER entrance.
“I could call and let him know I was coming.”
She imagined the phone ringing in Armand’s kitchen. White counters with white cupboards. When Rose was younger, Maman sometimes sent her to Armand’s house with a question about the fields he ploughed or to order another cord of wood. His wife always insisted Rose sit at the table for a glass of milk and a brownie that was chocolatey moist.
Kenny shifted from foot to foot. “What do you think?”
What she thought was no. She wanted nothing to do with that family. But: she had also decided she wanted to let Kenny stay in the cabin. “It’s up to you,” she said finally.
“I need his phone number.”
“I don’t have it. We never had a phone to call anyone.”
“We can look it up.” He’d stopped walking, so she had to stop, too.
“How?” she asked. “You’d need a phone book for Rivière-des-Pins.”
“Here.” He walked into a visitors’ lounge where a woman slept on a plaid sofa with a crocheted afghan draped over her hips and legs. There was a drinks machine and a computer on a table. Kenny sat and began jabbing at the keyboard.
Rose hung back. She didn’t know what he was doing.
“What’s his last name?” Kenny’s two index fingers aimed at the keyboard. When she didn’t answer, he peered at her. “Jerome’s last name?”
“Villeray.”
He poked the letters one by one and a list appeared. “There’s no J. Villeray.”
“Is there an A? Villeray?”
“Yeah. That’s where he lives?” Kenny groped for the roll of hand towel farther along the table and tore off an edge to scribble the number.
Rose had said more than she’d meant to, but Kenny looked so pleased, flushing through his freckles as he shoved the scrap of paper towel in his tunic pocket.
Fara
Fara got off the subway one stop early to walk home through the market. Mounds of chubby tomatoes, tables heaped with corn, green beans, yellow beans, carrots, new potatoes.
At the patisserie she looked for Maddy, but couldn’t see her. White-aproned staff bustled with boxes and pointed at loaves with gloved fingers. She asked for a baguette and the diffident young man who served her asked which kind. “Ordinaire? Bio, traditionnelle, trente-six heures …?”
Fara didn’t want to be ordinaire, but she guessed each variation cost a bit more.
Weren’t the French smart? The baguette fit exactly in her grip and the crust kept it from getting squished. You could stride along, with a baguette wand leading the rhythm of your steps and hips.
She crossed the canal that separated the moneyed from the poor of the city. Maddy’s talk was changing how she saw the Pointe. Here, close to the market, the once-upon-a-time fac-tories that lined the canal had been sandblasted and renovated as high-end condos. Maddy said a small one cost six hundred thousand — in the same year that Fara and Frédéric had bought a house in the Pointe for one hundred and fifty. The Pointe was still mostly streets of brick row houses that had been built for the workers who’d dug the canal and supplied the labour for shipping, the factories, and the rail yards — who’d kept the manual side of industry moving. Since then, the industries had been shut down and the head offices moved to Toronto. The Pointe had one of the highest percentages of unemployment in the city. Enter people like herself and Frédéric who were looking to buy a cheap house. The real estate agent had called it revitalization of a crumbling neighbourhood, but as the new residents moved in, what was going to happen to the people who played horseshoes in the park and reclaimed an abandoned toilet for a flower box? Who sat on kitchen chairs outside the dépanneurs watching the goings-on in the street?
It had been over a month since Fara and Frédéric had moved into the house, but she still unlocked the door as if play-acting. Did this whole big structure of walls and floors truly belong to them? Her steps in the hallway echoed. They needed more furniture. Their square oak table, which used to be crowded into the kitchen of their apartment — so close to the refrigerator that she could open the door and grab the mayonnaise without getting up from her chair — now stood by itself in the dining room, which would fit a table twice its size. And there was still room for a cabinet for wineglasses, maybe even a side table against the wall.… What else did people put in dining rooms?
When she walked from the hallway, she still veered to the side. The idea of a hanging body didn’t spook her as much, but she was still aware it was there. She glanced up at the hole she’d puttied, sanded, and varnished. This weekend Eric was coming to install the French doors they’d bought. Frédéric wasn’t sure how to build the frame. He’d called a few carpenters and discovered that they made more per hour than he did as the manager of a payroll department. When Eric offered, Frédéric was grateful.
They’d decided that the small room off the dining room would be a guest room — another bed, another dresser, more furniture to buy. But why had Frédéric left the door closed again? She’d tol
d him to leave it open. Why shut up the room? He said he wasn’t closing it, but who else was there except for the two of them, huh?
She gave the door a push, but it knocked against something behind it. She hesitated. Don’t be silly. She looked behind the door and saw it had banged against the door to the closet, which was open. Was Frédéric planning to use it? He could have told her. But why leave the door wide open? And close the door to the room again? He could blame the shut door on a draft, but the closet door wouldn’t open by itself. Another mystery in the house. Like the odd knocking noise she sometimes heard in the walls. The creep of soft steps at night.
She shook her head. She did not believe in ghosts. If Claire’s ghost hadn’t haunted her, why should this boy’s? She might see a hanging body where there had once been a body hanging, but that was her imagination. Not a ghost. She made the distinction.
She slid the baguette onto the counter in the kitchen and stepped out the back door. On the deck lay Maddy’s orange cat. He was a fat fur sickle ending in white-tipped paws. His ears swivelled, but he didn’t lift his head until she crouched next to him, keeping her hands on her knees. She was allergic to cats.
“Hey,” she murmured. “You like it here?” He was so comfortably sprawled. Cat of the manor. She hesitated then pressed a finger along the curve of his spine, furrowing a groove in the thick hair, feeling the nubs of bone beneath. He flicked her a cool, green look. Is that the best you can do? Now that she’d touched him, she would have to wash her hands anyhow. She rubbed around his ears and scratched under his chin.
Claire had a cat when they were children. Their mother wouldn’t allow it in the house, not even during the winter. Claire built it a shelter near the back door and salvaged bones and gristle from the table. One day the cat disappeared. Claire had a tantrum, shrieking at their mother that she’d killed it. Their mother slapped Claire so hard that she fell against the corner of a chair and got a black eye. After that, Claire kept the creatures she caught — frogs and snakes, field mice and, once, a turtle — in a box hidden behind the garden shed. Some escaped, some died. She accepted that it was natural. As long as their mother didn’t find her pets, Claire felt they were safe. When she left home, she got herself a cat, a small tabby she called Tiger. Fara asked her, Why Tiger? He’s not orange. Claire said all cats believed they were tigers.
Before Claire killed herself, when she asked Fara about the key, she also asked if Fara could take Tiger for a few days if she went away. Where would Claire have gone? She had no friends outside the city. But Fara didn’t ask. Didn’t even wonder. Haven’t you got anyone else? she asked. You know I’m allergic.
Later, when she found Claire, she never even thought of the cat. Only afterward, when she called Claire’s few friends to tell them Claire was dead, did she hear that Claire had asked each one if they could take Tiger for a few days. Her ex-boyfriend had brought the cat to his mother, who wanted Fara to come get it. Fara was in shock, grieving — and angry at what Claire had done. What she heard about the cat made it sound as if Claire was more concerned about the cat than her own life.
Exactly, Fara thought now. Claire had loved that cat. She’d felt closer to Tiger than she had to her own family. Which said what about their family? And what kind of sister was Fara not to have seen that?
She sighed. No way to change what was done and gone. She’d done her best to pick up the pieces and keep moving.
Jim was purring with a leisurely stop-and-start rhythm. His eyes were half-slit, ignoring the sparrows that hopped across the yard. She smoothed her hand down his head and back. Her eyes were starting to itch. “That’s it, buddy.”
As she stood, she glanced at the back fence. No one.
Ben looked over his shoulder down the alley. The new people would be off at whatever jobs they did, but in daylight the neighbours could see him at the back gate. Except that people no longer sat on the stoop or looked out the windows the way they used to, keeping an eye on comings and goings. They stayed inside, watching TV. Even old Coady, poking along with his cane, only left his house every few days.
Once Ben shut the gate behind him and was in the backyard, no one could see him, unless the hippie next door looked out her upstairs window. His dad called her the hippie. She was the last of the free-love commune that used to live there. They had all finally left — except for her. Love must have gotten too expensive. He always said that, too.
Ben lifted aside the boards of the deck to crawl under. He was getting better at wiggling through the window. He just had to be careful not to scrape himself on the crusty edge of mortar. In the daytime, with the new people gone, he didn’t have to tiptoe around. He could be alone in the house. That was all he wanted — to be able to walk through the rooms. He didn’t give a damn about the new people’s stuff. He wasn’t a thief.
Here in the front room was where he and Xavier had slept on a mattress on the floor. Their dad had said that one day they would get bunk beds, but that never happened. Ben crouched to his knees to look out the window at the gigantic cottonwood tree behind the house across the street. A two-storey building with a great, leafy crown twice as high as the house. Looking out, low down the way he’d used to when he was little, made him feel small again — small, with Xavier curled on the grubby sheets beside him. They always forgot to close the curtains at night and when he woke in the morning, he imagined the branches in the sky had kept watch over him and his brother while they slept.
Ben ignored the sofa that was in the room now. The stereo system on a low set of shelves. He needed to take a leak and walked to the bathroom, which he could have found in his sleep — and had often had to. But this was a strangers’ bathroom with a blue shower curtain, and bottles and tubes of lotions stacked on a wicker corner unit. Only when he stood at the toilet and faced the wall did the old sense of the room settle around him … the memory of Xavier jostling next to him, the arcs of their piss splashing together. Ben tucked himself away, still staring at the bright yellow piss in the bowl. He leaned to flush, then didn’t.
In the room they’d always used as a living room, the new people had a table. French doors leaned against the wall. Where did they plan to put French doors?
He smelled fresh paint, but that must be from upstairs. He never went up there. Didn’t even want to. Downstairs was where they’d lived. His dad had tenants in the second floor flat up until he and Xavier decided to renovate. Why they wanted to renovate, Ben never knew. Did they plan to sell or get new tenants at a higher rent? Turn the two duplexes into a single house? Here, on the ground floor, they’d smashed through the old plaster walls to rewire and insulate and put up drywall. They’d knocked a big, wide entrance between the hallway and the main room. Why? To make it easier for Xavier to hang himself?
The kitchen looked much the same, with the cupboards and counters and sink. The new people’s fridge and stove were fancier — brushed steel with black handles. The dishes were done and put away, the counters wiped. Their own kitchen had never been that clean.
Yesterday, before he fell asleep, he’d remembered his dad’s secret panel under the corner kitchen cupboard. He slipped his finger into the hole and tugged. The hinged door opened, still full of his dad’s keys for locks that no longer existed. Ben dropped the loose jangle of metal in his pocket, and left the door hanging like a dropped jaw.
Fara stood chopping cucumber at the counter. The magazine with the recipe was on the stove, folded open to the page. The phone rang and she wiped her hands on her hips. “llo?” she asked. There was silence, then a click.
“Same to you,” she muttered, turning back to the counter.
The front door opened and she heard Frédéric drop his shoes, then the slap of his flip-flops.
“How goes?” he asked as he came into the kitchen and kissed her.
“I wish you’d flush the toilet when you use it.”
“I do.”
“Are you
telling me I’m dreaming in yellow?”
“Maybe you forgot.”
“I …” She pointed the tip of the knife at her chest. “I use toilet paper.”
He gave a shrug. “Sorry.” He reached for a chunk of cucumber he popped in his mouth.
“Did you know about that?” She lifted her chin at the corner cupboard, where a hinged flap hung open.
He stooped to look under the cupboard, examined the flap and snapped it shut. “How did you find it?”
“It was open.”
“Must have come undone.”
“How?”
He opened and closed the flap a few times. Each time there was an efficient magnetized click. It didn’t make sense that it would just drop.
When the phone rang, Frédéric moved to answer, but she held out her arm, knife still in hand. “Let me. Someone just hung up on me.” Into the receiver, she barked, “Hello!”
A man laughed softly. “Someone didn’t eat her cornflakes today.” The English was smooth — colloquial — but the vowels were tugged tight like elastics. He was a foreigner used to speaking English. “It’s me, Georg.” Gay-org. The way her parents would have said it.
“I don’t know any Gay-org.”
Again that soft laugh. “Sure you do. Remember …” He didn’t sound at a loss. He wanted to pick the right memory. “My motorcycle? Up in the woods behind your dad’s place?”
She’d never called her father Dad. He’d been Papa up until she was ten or eleven, then something had happened — she couldn’t remember what — that had made her so angry she’d vowed to call him Father. If they’d noticed, they gave no sign. She’d never called them Mama and Papa again. She’d also never called them Mom and Dad, names that in no way fit who they were. Nor had she ever been on a motorcycle. “You’ve got the wrong number.”
