Five Roses

by Alice Zorn

  “She’d tied a bag over her head. She didn’t have any drugs or alcohol in her system. The coroner told me. She suffocated herself stone-cold sober.”

  “That’s …” Maddy began but had no idea where to go.

  “He said it’s a peaceful death. The person keeps breathing and slowly falls asleep.”

  “But for you … to find her like that.”

  “Yeah. On a shock level, it ranks right up there. And as a statement, it’s gross. It’s like you’re no better than garbage.” The accusatory sharpness of the word rang clear. But who was she accusing, her sister or herself ?

  Maddy didn’t know what to say. Even though it had happened years ago, when Fara talked about it, she seemed to relive the details as if she were still in her sister’s apartment. “Do you know why she did it?”

  “Why?” Fara scowled. “Everyone wants to know why, but I don’t think why matters. Even if you find a reason, that’s just an excuse. The fact is the person did it. They ran up against a wall or they were depressed or they couldn’t face something or … whatever. We all have those times. Haven’t you?” Fara shot her a look, and as she seemed to be waiting, Maddy nodded.

  “But there are only certain people who choose suicide. That’s what I wonder — why was suicide an option for her? It’s not even an option. It’s the end of all options. What makes a person decide to do that? To people who are still alive that kind of decision just doesn’t make sense.”

  Maddy had had times, during those anguished months of living with her parents’ hatred, and not knowing what to do or where to turn with her baby, when she’d thought about jumping off a bridge — but never to the point of deciding which bridge.

  Fara leaned back in her chair. “That’s what Ben is feeling. He knows his brother’s dead, but he doesn’t believe it. He blames himself because he didn’t realize his brother was so desperate. He’s kicking himself in the head. So there’s guilt, but there’s grief, too. And what do you do with the grief ? Because you lost them, right? They’re dead. You’re in mourning. You grieve for them. But you’re angry, too. Because they didn’t just do it to themselves, they did it to you — and everyone they left behind. Suicide is such a fucked-up mess.”

  “I’m sorry,” Maddy said. “I had no idea …”

  “It was a long time ago.” Fara’s voice was cool now. Matter-of-fact. “I’ve been thinking about it more since we’ve been living here. I knew a boy killed himself in the house but not that he had a brother. I feel sorry for him. He’s going to have to figure all this out. The guilt, the grief, the blame. Do you really think it was him I saw?”

  “One of the neighbours told me they saw him with a key to your gate.” Under the table, Maddy crossed her fingers for her white lie.

  “Recently?”

  “I think so.”

  Fara tapped a finger on her empty bottle. “Nice if they would have told us.”

  Maddy tightened her lips. “Well, you scared him off for good now. He won’t come back.”

  “We should still tell the police.”

  “Do you have to?”

  Fara gave her a narrow look. “He knew we were living here when he broke in. Why should I trust him? Maybe we won’t press charges, but he should be warned. That seems pretty obvious to me.”

  Maddy nodded quickly. “Of course. You’re right.”

  “I think you have to go now. I need to lie down for a while. I probably shouldn’t have had a beer.”

  This was too abrupt. They should have had a few moments of quiet talk — of consolation — but Fara had already risen from her chair and was walking to the door. Maddy grabbed her jacket off the wall hook and thrust her arms in the sleeves. Fara waited. Her cheeks looked drawn, her mouth sad. Maddy wanted to say something, but what? Fara’s story about her sister was still too raw between them. Fara had already opened the door.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” Maddy said as she stepped past Fara.

  Fara’s pose — one arm on the door frame, the other holding the door — made her look awkward and graceless. Maddy wasn’t the huggy type, but she wished now she’d hugged her. Fara closed the door.

  In her house Maddy stood for a few moments, thinking about Fara. How strange that she’d chosen to live in a house where there had been a suicide.

  Rose

  Early November. A lowering sky, the light too dim to penetrate even the many panes of the windows. Rose had clicked on both lamps, angling their heads to shine on her loom. She pulled the beater toward her and stepped on the next treadle, closing the mouth of the threads, then opening it again. With each bite, the cloth grew in huckaback stripes of violet, poppy red, cerulean, and aqua.

  She swayed as she wove, with a gentle, back-and-forth bob of her shoulders. She loved hearing the pull of thread rattling the spool in the shuttle, the silvery jangle of the heddles, the paddle-knock of the treadles. Beneath the percussion of her loom, she heard an undertone of ghost looms thumping, the faint clangour of hundreds of harnesses dropping. Leo had tried listening but never made out the echo. Yet he believed her. Years ago this building had been a textile factory where men and women worked at enormous looms, weaving great bolts of cloth. Children stood at either end, throwing the shuttle across, or crawled under the shafts to fix tangles and free the heddles when they caught. When the children were hungry, they chewed the scraps of threads that had dropped to the floor.

  Next to the sponge mat propped against the wall were Leo’s two canvas sacks of clothes and belongings. When the wind had whipped the last leaves from the trees and the stars glinted like chips of ice in the night sky, Rose had finally convinced Leo to move to her studio. She could no longer climb the ladder because her hands were too frozen to trust her hold. Where are you going to spend the winter? she’d asked. You have to find somewhere warm. I’ll worry too much about you. But this is your space, he said. She touched his face with her fingers. It can be yours, too.

  At the triple knock on the door, she set aside the shuttle and crossed the room to let in Leo, who held a bag of food. The graze of his hair was cold on her cheek. She could taste that he’d eaten an apple on his walk from the market and smell the faint, wet-dog scent of his parka.

  He swung the bag onto the small table. “You’re expensive, girl.”

  “Because I wanted olives?”

  He shrugged off his parka. “It starts with olives. Then it’s fancy shoes, diamonds, and a little Japanese car so you can zip around the city — and trips to a four-star hotel in Cuba in the winter.”

  “Barbados.” She sat on her bench again, leaning forward to flick two heddles apart. “I want to go to Barbados to meet your grandparents.” Barbados sounded magical, but she was even more curious about his grandparents. Imagine having grandparents.

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” He’d joined her on the bench. “These are new.” He touched her earlobe. Yushi had given her a pair of silver hoops, her first earrings.

  “From Yushi,” she said shyly, still awed by gestures of affection and friendship.

  Busy as Yushi was these days, she’d insisted on meeting Leo. Rose had brought him to the market, where they’d shared a slab of spinach and goat cheese pizza. Leo had been easy and friendly. Yushi watched him closely. To Rose she said, So that’s why you were asking me about dreads.

  Rose’s hair hung to her shoulders now, but she almost always wore it clipped back or gathered in a short ponytail. She hadn’t known she could be so vain, but she liked showing off her pretty ears.

  “It started snowing,” Leo said. “Did you see?”

  She turned her head to the window, where bits of fluff drifted down from the endless duvet of sky. The day she’d answered Yushi’s ad for a roommate, flakes had twirled through the air as she’d climbed the metal stairs. That meant she’d been in Montreal for a year. Dates on the calendar never felt as real to her as the markers of th
e seasons. The first trillium in the woods. The first ice in the morning. The first snowfall.

  She relaxed against Leo’s chest, eyes on the almost invisible flutter of snow against dusk. She’d met him in the summer, with the smell of freshly mown grass in the air.

  She was wheeling her trolley down the corridor when she heard, “Hey, Rose!”

  Kenny waved a small box he was holding and shuffle-jogged toward her. “Hoo!” he exhaled. “You move fast. Guess where I was yesterday? Up at your cabin, when it started snowing. The trees getting all heavy with snow and the fire in the stove? I was like …” He held out both his arms and beamed at the ceiling.

  “I’m glad.” She remembered how desolate the cabin looked when she last saw it. The reproach of its blank window. “Someone should stay there.”

  “Why don’t you take Leo? He’d love it.”

  “Leo likes the city. Me, too.”

  “That’s it, eh? Bright lights, big action.”

  That wasn’t what Rose meant, but she wouldn’t have known how to explain.

  “You just let me know if you change your mind. It’s your cabin, eh?” He backed up a step, tapping the box against his leg. “Doctor can’t go into the room till I get her these masks.”

  Rose leaned into her cart again, steering it close to the wall as an orderly passed with a patient on a stretcher.

  She was pleased to see Kenny so happy. And how easy it had been for her. The same cabin she’d fled was the castle he’d dreamed of. She still wondered that he and Jerome seemed to have become friends, but maybe she’d never understood Jerome. The people in Rivière-des-Pins called him useless — so different from his hard-working, upstanding father — but those were the same people who had disapproved of Maman. And she herself knew Armand wasn’t the man everyone thought he was, either. She remembered how Jerome had helped Kenny carry her loom through the woods. She’d kept expecting a sneer, which, she had to admit, she never saw.

  People and how they acted were still a great mystery to Rose. Maman had been so alone and furtive. Even though she was close to Rose, there was so much she never told her. School had been an exercise to be endured. And how was Rose ever to understand a man like Armand?

  Her life among people had only truly started when she’d moved to Montreal and met Yushi and Kenny and Leo. They were her friends now, but she didn’t understand how they had known they would like her. She’d watched animals in the woods — rabbits and deer — freeze with their snouts lifted, smelling a stranger. Friend or foe?

  But how did people know? How did they decide?

  Rose climbed the metal stairs to her apartment with her hand on the railing. The snow that had fallen two days earlier hadn’t collected, but the steps were frozen and slippery. From the street she’d seen the light in the window and was glad Yushi was home. Since she’d started planning this dessert business, Yushi was spending most evenings at Maddy’s, whose kitchen she would be using. Even so, the hallway of their apartment was stacked with the bowls and cake tins they’d been buying, odd-shaped paraphernalia made of silicone, glass, plastic, and stainless steel … a pastry blender, a sifter, a dough scraper, piping tubes, a zester. Yushi had explained what they were. The only one Rose recognized was the rolling pin, except it wasn’t wooden like Maman’s but grey-and-white marble. Stone stayed cooler, Yushi said, which was important when working in the heat of a kitchen.

  Rose opened the door onto the smell of sautéed garlic and herbs. From the kitchen she heard voices, then a hoot that didn’t sound like Yushi. The rosewood table in the living room was strewn with papers and manila folders. Yellow sticky notes dotted the folders and the table.

  Rose hesitated, then walked down the hallway past the knee-high towers of baking equipment. Yushi was at the stove. Maddy leaned against the counter, her hips and thighs outlined in burgundy tights and a short denim skirt. Rose still felt they looked odd together, Yushi so elfin and Maddy so broad. The oddness wasn’t a criticism, but the only way Rose could formulate to herself that there was something about Maddy she didn’t trust.

  “Here she is,” Maddy said.

  Yushi glanced over her shoulder. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Do you want me to serve the rice?” Maddy asked. Three plates stood ready on the counter.

  Yushi nudged her away. “I’m cooking. You two go sit. Take placemats. Or no — wait. You can carry your plates.”

  Rose lifted her hands. “I haven’t —”

  “Go wash your germy hospital hands,” Yushi ordered. And to Maddy, “You take her plate.”

  They waited for her at the table, where they’d pushed aside the manila folders and papers. Yushi had made a cashew and vegetable stir fry. There was a bottle of wine on the table and a juice glass at each of their placemats.

  Maddy said, “We’re celebrating. As of today, we’ve got twelve restaurants who will take four desserts a week.” She raised her glass.

  Rose followed Yushi’s lead when she leaned forward to clink. “You’ll make forty-eight cakes a week?” she asked.

  “Cakes, flans, tortes, and brioche.” Yushi bobbed her head. “Maybe quiche. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Isn’t that a lot?”

  “Not if that’s all I’m doing.”

  Maddy stabbed her fork into a chunk of zucchini. “Rose is right. It adds up to a lot of hours in the kitchen. It would make more sense —” She stopped and looked at Rose. “I’ve been trying to convince Yushi that it would make more sense if she moved to the Pointe. So she wouldn’t be travelling across the city every day.”

  Rose knew what she meant. She, too, wished she lived closer to her studio and Leo.

  But — oh! She turned to Yushi, forgetting about Maddy. “Are you moving?”

  “I sort of thought,” Yushi said slowly, “that you might be moving. You’ve been spending quite a few nights at Leo’s.”

  Rose had never explained about Leo’s penthouse suite that was missing a wall, windows, furniture, electricity, a bathroom, and running water. In turn, Yushi had been so preoccupied with starting her baking business that she hadn’t visited Rose’s studio since Leo had begun sleeping there. Caught between two secrets, Rose didn’t know how to answer.

  Yushi watched her. “It’s too soon to say? You’re not sure about him?”

  Rose was sure that she and Leo belonged together, but she didn’t know if he knew, and they couldn’t both live in her studio all the time. They would get caught. Softly, she said, “We’ve never talked about getting a place.”

  “If Yushi moved to my house,” Maddy said, “you could get a place with him. Or he could move in here. You could stay. You wouldn’t even have to move.”

  Rose kept her eyes on her food. These were things for her and Leo to talk about, not Maddy and Yushi.

  “Stop,” Yushi told Maddy. “You’re talking too fast. You mentioned it, now let Rose think about it.”

  “Okay.” Maddy took a swallow of wine. “I’m just saying that —”

  Yushi held up her palm, and Maddy closed her mouth.

  Rose thought about having a place with Leo — not the studio with her loom and sleeping bags, but a real apartment like she had with Yushi. He’d told her he’d run away from rooms and apartments and houses. Rooms could so easily become cages where people snapped and snarled. Even people who loved you got nasty, hugging you one minute, weeping and slamming you hard against a wall the next. He’d grown up more frightened of his mother when she was happy than when she was sullen and depressed. The higher her spirits soared, the more demonic the crash. He remembered being locked in a room for so long he peed on the floor because there was nowhere to go, and wiping the puddle with his socks so she wouldn’t find it and hit him. Leo didn’t trust the way people turned monstrous behind the closed doors of their homes. Rose thought of how that hadn’t happened in her studio, even though they were more o
r less living together. She tried to imagine him in an apartment, taking a carton of milk from the refrigerator. Sitting on a sofa. Getting into a bed with sheets and blankets. She couldn’t picture it. Leo was a cheese-and-apples, wash-at-the-sink, sleeping-bag kind of guy.

  Yushi and Maddy were talking desserts again. “A nutmeg grater,” Yushi said, flipping open a folder and adding it to a list. “Nothing like fresh nutmeg in crème pâtissière.” Her silver bracelet jiggled as she mimed sprinkling nutmeg.

  She looked across at Rose. “Hey.” She laid her hand on Rose’s wrist. “Stop thinking about it. Everything will fall into place. It serves no purpose to worry about what hasn’t happened yet.”

  Maman would have said that.

  Rose had an hour before she had to catch the subway to work. She’d asked Leo if he wanted to go to a diner in St-Henri for soup. The booths had green Arborite tables with powder-green vinyl benches. The walls were the same sickly green. Under the stark white lights even Leo’s brown skin looked wan. Rose focused on the warmth of his eyes, his chipped tooth that made his smile endearing, the soft jute of his locs.

  Both leaned over the bowls of pea soup the waitress set before them. The smell reminded Rose of Maman returning from a trip to Rivière-des-Pins with the extravagance of a small ham. When they finished the meat, they used the bone to make pea soup.

  Then Leo said, “My ma used to make pea soup — with cow heel.”

  She waited to hear if he would say more about his mother. She wondered if, by cow heel, he meant a cow’s hard, black heel. Though was that any stranger than Maman’s Christmas meal of pig’s feet in gravy?

  The restaurant phone rang every few minutes. The man at the cash, who answered, shouted orders to the two cooks working at their grills and fryers behind the counter. “Deux grosses frîtes! Une pizza, large, all-dress!” She was getting used to the mix of English and French — Franglais — in Montreal.