Five Roses (9 page)

“I don't want you catching squirrels.” Bad enough when he brought her the mauled bodies of sparrows and mice. “No squirrels, okay?”

Maddy leaned forward in the lawn chair to snip the blowsy heads of the geraniums. Red petals fluttered to the deck. She'd changed into denim shorts and a peasant blouse she'd bought on sale and should have guessed wouldn't suit her. White puff atop big bum. It was fine, though, for sitting in the backyard.

She angled the shears into the leaves. Her father used to trim plants with her mother's sewing scissors. Heavy steel with black enamel handles. Her mother had brought them from Poland. As a child, Maddy had marvelled that the same scissors that bit through felted wool could take such delicate snips. Her father's blunt-boned knuckles and fingers so gentle among the flowers.

He wasn't a man of words — certainly not one for metaphors — but once, when she stood nearby as he snipped the fading flowers, he showed her inside the petals where the pistil was swollen with seeds. He said that when plants started to make seeds, they stopped blooming. So he was cutting the old flowers before they turned into seeds. Tricking the plants to keep them blooming. He called it a trick — a
sztuczka
. The explanation, indirect as it was, was the closest to sex education she'd had at home.

Her mother avoided all mention of the body and its functions. Maddy had found out about periods by listening to the older girls in the washroom at school. They said it only happened to girls — like growing breasts. Maddy's nipples had already started to swell. One of the girls told her periods would be next. Maddy wasn't sure what that was or how you could tell when it happened, but it excused you from gym. Some girls said it proudly. Others grumbled that it made them sick.

She didn't know what was happening when she started to feel nauseated from cramps low in her belly. When she saw the dark mess in her underpants, she thought she was dying — bleeding from the inside out. Crying, unable to keep it a secret, she told her teacher, who took her into an office and explained. At home, furtive and angry, Maddy showed her mother the extra Kotex pad the teacher had given her. She said she needed more. A bra, too. The teacher said she should be wearing a bra. Her mother, who lamented every expense and hoarded even pennies — each penny worth several
zloty
back home — went to the store for a box of Kotex and the Sally Ann for a bra. The pointed cups of the bra puckered over Maddy's small breasts but she wore it. Only years later did she realize how lucky she was that her mother had bought Kotex instead of making her wear the cloth rags she washed and reused herself. In this one respect, her mother allowed her to be Canadian. When Maddy finished the box of Kotex, which was kept behind the bucket of dirty laundry in the cupboard, her mother bought another.

But even after Maddy got her period, her mother still didn't explain about sex. She might not have known the words — or known you could speak about it. She hid behind her worries, her prayers, her scrubbing, her bread dough and jars of pickles, her great vats of cabbage in brine.

Maddy deduced what she could from the girls' talk at school about boys wanting to touch their breasts and begging them to rub their dicks. That part was disgusting — everyone said so — but then you had a boyfriend. If anyone said more than that, Maddy didn't understand. When Neil wanted to push inside her, even though it hurt, she let him. She didn't know what it meant when her periods stopped coming. She was hungry all the time and thought she was getting fat. She wore a large sweater, and over that a man's suit jacket she got at a church sale. She'd grown her curls into a shaggy mop she let hang across her face.

It was Mrs. Granville, the English teacher, who called Maddy to her desk and walked her from the classroom to the principal's office. The principal talked. Mrs. Granville, too. Maddy was fifteen. Their words blurred in the air. Why did they keep saying
baby
? She didn't want a baby. She blinked behind the hair that hid her face from view. The principal said she would have to call her parents. Her parents didn't have a telephone. Maddy was told to wait outside the office. When Mrs. Granville came out, she said she would walk Maddy home. She followed her up the steps and into the house, slipping off her shoes in the hallway as Maddy had. The floors shone, waxed and polished. Maddy knew her parents would be in the kitchen eating. They always ate before Maddy and her brother, Stan, came home from school, because her father had an evening job he went to after his work at the factory. Maddy's parents stared, appalled by the presence of a stranger in their kitchen. Mrs. Granville stood in her nylons on the linoleum tile, talking into a void. Maddy's mother spoke only Polish, her father only the most necessary words of French or English.
Pregnant
wasn't a necessary word. When Mrs. Granville finally realized that neither parent understood, she lay a hand on the high mound of Maddy's belly that was only partly masked by the loose sweater.

Maddy scowled, remembering, and dragged her chair across the deck to the next pot of geraniums. There was nothing to be done about the stupidity of the past. The mistakes and the ignorance. She angled her shears and snipped, dropped the spent leaves and petals by her feet. A
sztuczka. Huh.

Behind her, through the kitchen window, she heard the clank of cans being set on the counter. Bronislav and Andrei must be home. They moved in tandem. They hadn't known each other before arriving in Montreal, but now they worked at the same factory, cooked and ate together, rented two of her upstairs rooms.

“I'm out here,” she called, so they would know she was home.

Bronislav slid aside the door and stepped onto the deck. He was the more sociable of the two. “Hello,” he said. For him, that was a complete sentence.

Her turn now. “The weather's nice. Are you off today?”

He nodded. He seemed to have nothing more to volunteer.

She heard the cans being slid across a shelf. She allotted tenants one cupboard each, the middle shelf and a drawer in the refrigerator.

“Feel free to eat out here.” She waved her shears across the deck. “I'm just about done, then I'm off for a bike ride.”

“We are going to a wedding.”

“You know someone who's getting married.”

“No.”

Was it worth asking? She would only make him uncomfortable and he still might not tell her. “Enjoy yourself. Have a good time.”

“Yes.” He backed up, reaching for the handle behind him.

She scraped the heaps of dead flowers and leaves into a nest she carried to the composter. Pushing aside the lid, she squinted and held her breath against the insects that flew up. Her composter was a thriving stew of organic breakdown. In the fall she would shovel the rich black earth out the bottom and spread it around her bushes and plants.

In the kitchen she washed her hands, poured herself a glass of milk, and munched a few dates and tamari almonds. Through the ceiling she heard Bronislav and Andrei walking from their rooms to the bathroom, back and forth.

For hours after they left, the upstairs would stink of dollar-store cologne. Except for her own quiet movements, the house would be silent until dawn, when she might wake to their clumsy tiptoeing up the stairs, the lingering whiff of cheap cologne replaced by booze.

On sunny weekends the bike path along the canal turned into a pinball boulevard. There were speed-nuts in their Tour de France spandex; friends cycling in clots of six-way conversations; Daddy Bear, Mommy Bear, Kiddie Bear families; rollerbladers with their wide stride, pendulum arms, and overweight thighs hoping to lose weight overnight; and even pedestrians, some with strollers, some with dogs — not always on leashes. Urban fact #43: dog owners blamed cyclists when
their
brainless canines galloped into oncoming wheels.

Maddy waited until late afternoon, when the Pavlovian gong of suppertime called most of the crowd home. She turned onto the canal path behind a woman cycling with a milk crate strapped onto the back of her bike. Inside it sat a Boston terrier with dejected eyes — reconciled to the ride but still unhappy. As Maddy passed, she made kissy noises. The dog's gloom didn't change.

Ahead, on the other side of the canal, rose the art deco clock tower of the market. She wondered if Yushi had worked with Cécile, who was good, or Elsie, who was new and needed help, or Régis, who was a shit. The dessert and bread shelves would be almost empty, though customers would still be waiting for the last baguettes, the last cakes.

She debated stopping and saying hello. Slowed as she approached the bridge to cross to the market but didn't turn. She was already in the trance of cycling.

Past the market extended a row of renovated factory-condos with sandblasted walls and large plate-glass windows. An ex-boyfriend, Brian, used to rage about this so-called revitalization of old neighbourhoods. Revitalization, he spat. The real words are appropriation of cheap real estate. He was right. Someone was making a fat profit, and not necessarily — in fact, rarely — the people who currently lived in the neighbourhoods and would have to move elsewhere as the prices kept going up.

She crossed the next bridge to ride along the other side of the canal, where a hedge of rose bushes basked in the late afternoon sunshine. As a girl, she'd walked here with her best friend, Ginette. There were no rose bushes then, only Queen Anne's lace they'd picked to make lacy bouquets and pretend they were brides. Later, when Ginette had to go live with her grandmother in Rosemont, Maddy picked two bouquets so that Ginette would still get married one day.

Maddy's knees pumped. Wind cooled the sweat on her arms and her neck. She was approaching her favourite stretch, where the path twisted through the thick trunks of the cottonwoods. Shafts of sunlight dusted the grass, and the water in the canal gleamed green, reflecting the shade of the trees.

Fara took a deep breath. All she could smell was the varnish, which had hardened to a clear, if not quite smooth, gloss. The floorboards were uneven and Frédéric had had problems with the sander. The wood still showed scars of paint here and there — a stretched eye of brown, an abraded smudge of bright green.

Fara half-closed her eyes, still taking deep breaths as she walked to the kitchen. She'd become convinced she smelled something foul. It was too faint to identify or locate exactly, but she thought it came from here, in the kitchen.

Frédéric smelled nothing, but his nose was numb from working in the cellar. For the past year that the house had been abandoned, every cat in the neighbourhood had slunk in to piss in the cellar. Someone told Frédéric to spray vinegar on the walls and into the corners to neutralize the reek. Someone else had said bleach. First, he had to haul away the piles of rotten wood and corroded machinery. Movement was clumsy, because the ceiling was low — and made lower yet by the thicket of wires strung across it. He had to walk stooped, kept forgetting, and banged his head.

His build-a-house cousin, Eric, had arrived unannounced one evening. When he stepped into the cellar, he hissed,
Tabernac!
It stinks down here! He poked around, then chuckled. Haven't seen an electrical box this ancient since I don't know when. A microwave will blow it in three seconds flat. In the kitchen he chopped a hand at the counters. Better replace those! As if Fara and Frédéric couldn't see that for themselves. He knocked on the walls of the second floor and tilted his head, listening. Winter'll be cold here. Don't think you've got more than newspaper for insulation. Fara followed the two men through the house, touching Frédéric's arm now and again, so he knew he wasn't alone facing the volley of Eric's opinions.

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 son.”

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.