Five Roses (7 page)

Fara had the phone to her ear, scribbling in her desk agenda.
28B Boucher GI lab NPO m/n. Med + INR.
The details weren't for her. She knew to send the med sheet and latest INR result and keep the patient fasting, but she didn't man the desk 24/7. With luck, if the patient left when she wasn't there, someone might glance at her agenda for directions.

Zeery, who was standing at the counter writing in a patient's chart, waited for her to hang up. “So, when do you get the house?”

“Next week.” Between interruptions was the only way to talk at work. Fara grabbed the manila folder an ER orderly had slid onto the counter and began leafing the loose pages inside into the appropriate sections of the patient's binder.

“Already?” Zeery gaped. “You just saw the house.”

“It's all happening so fast — except for when we signed the papers at the notary.
That
took forever. Two solid hours of signing. I thought my hand was going to fall off.”

One of the nurses, Valerie, dropped a handful of blood tubes onto the counter. “Where is this place you bought?” And to Zeery, “Stamp me labels, will you? 28C.”

“Pointe St-Charles.” No one Fara had talked to yet had ever been to the Pointe, though it seemed everyone remembered stories they'd heard on the news. A body found in a basement. Cars dredged from the canal.

Valerie smirked. “My sister used to date a guy who lived in the Pointe. She could never get a taxi to go there past midnight.”

“That doesn't make sense,” Fara said. “There's a cab stand around the corner from our house.”

“That's what my sister said. Because of the bikers.” Valerie scooped the tubes she'd labelled into a biohazard bag she set in the specimen basket.

“The bikers are gone now. And anyhow, what would bikers have to do with us?” Fara thought of the next-door neighbour who'd lived there for more than ten years. Yolette visiting her aunt as a child. Everyday people and ordinary goings-on. A neighbourhood where you could hear horseshoes, for Chrissakes!

She swivelled her chair around to reach for the lab results coming out of the printer. The patient in 40B had a potassium of 6.2. The level was panic high. Or
,
the patient was getting potassium in their IV and someone had drawn the blood too close to the IV site.

Fara glanced at the assignment sheet. Nahi's patient. Nahi wouldn't do that. Fara called into the intercom, “Nahi! I need to talk to you.”

Zeery said, “When you have your first party, I'll get my mom to make butter chicken.”

“Your mom's butter chicken?” Valerie hooted. “You'd better let me know when.”

Fara threw her a look. “You're going to risk coming to such a dangerous neighbourhood?”

“For Zeery's mom's butter chicken? You bet! Anyhow, there'll be a gang of us. We'll all stick together.”

Fara saw she was serious. A posse of nurses, armed with high heels and lip gloss, daring the dark and dirty streets of Pointe St-Charles.

The intercom was beeping. Fara stabbed a button. “
Oui?
Can I help you?”

“It's me.” Nahi's deadpan voice. A patient could be spouting from an artery and Nahi would stay calm.

Fara wasn't supposed to give medical information over the intercom, but the patients didn't understand, and even the staff couldn't always make out the words the ancient sound system garbled. “40B, potassium of 6.2, not hemolyzed.”

Against the muffled noise from the room, Fara heard,
“
Crime de bine.”
No one under eighty even said that anymore. It was the Québécois equivalent of
golly gee
. Where had Nahi picked it up? Then, louder, he said, “Call Surgery. I'll repeat the blood and do an EKG.”

A porter from Radiology held a requisition slip across the counter to show Fara. “Is that my patient?” Zeery asked, following him to the room.

Fara wrote the patient's name and the test in the test book.

So far, she hadn't told people at work about the suicide in the house. Even nurses and doctors, who were familiar with the idea, the process, and the physicality of death, didn't like suicide. It was such a wrong way to die.

At the notary's, Fara and Frédéric had met the father of the boy. A man of about sixty with a narrow forehead and slick hair curled on his collar. His nervous eyes didn't once settle on them. He chewed gum with his front teeth — like a rabbit — as he waited for the pages to be slid his way. Pen gripped, knuckles a fence, he signed and pushed each page aside as if into a void. He ignored Frédéric, who sat beside him, the next to sign. At the last page he glanced at Yolette, asked if they were finished, and shoved back his chair. Frédéric stood to shake his hand, but he'd already slipped out the door. Fara wondered if he hated them for buying the house.

Fara grabbed the phone that was ringing. “Twelve Surgery.”

“It's Mo. What's up?” There were three Mohammeds on this month's rotation of residents. The nurses had told them to decide who got called Mohammed, who Mo, and who by his last name — or whatever nickname he wanted to suggest. Fara gave Mo the potassium result and he said to repeat the blood test and do an EKG.

“Doing it as we speak,” Fara said.

“So why call me?” he grumbled.

“Because you've got the fancy letters behind your name.” They were both being facetious. If the nurses waited for a doctor's say-so to react to every budding emergency, the floor would soon be chaos. Especially on a surgery floor, where the doctors disappeared into the OR for hours at a time. Legally though, as Mo well knew, he had to be notified — because he had the fancy letters behind his name.

As Fara answered the other line that was ringing, she saw Brie, the charge nurse, coming down the hallway with a technician from Biomedical. Fara waved the page with the potassium result and Brie walked over to take it. Tall and chic in street clothes, Brie was all bones and angles, skinny and sexless, in nursing scrubs.

“
Oui
,” Fara said into the phone. “
Demain à huit heures
.”

“Whose patient?” Brie asked.

“Nahi's. He's repeating the blood.” And into the phone, “
Oui, Madame.
”

When she hung up, she had to stare at her desk to remember what she'd been doing. No wonder, with a job like this, she felt tangled by the end of the day.

Fara and Frédéric stood looking out at the sun-bleached wood of the deck —
their
deck. “Happy?” she asked. “You got your house.”

“No, no, no, no. Don't turn this into something that will be my fault if it doesn't work out.
We
agreed to buy the house.”

“Of course it'll work out. Why wouldn't it?”

“Didn't you hear Eric?” Frédéric's cousin had stopped in when they were visiting Frédéric's mom a week ago. Eric was a class A handyman who carried a battery-operated screwdriver in one pocket, a Swiss Army knife in the other. He'd built his own two-storey bungalow, from the concrete basement floor to the shingles on the roof. According to him, with a new construction you knew exactly what you had, whereas an old house was an unknown mess of problems that might collapse on your head while you slept.

“Eric is anal. OCD with a tool chest.” Fara bent forward to trace a scrape she'd just noticed running down the wall. Had that been there when they'd looked at the house?

Ever since they'd decided they were buying the house, they'd been revising their to-do list. Frédéric thought they should focus on getting the kitchen, bathroom, and a bedroom in order. The other rooms could wait. The living room could wait. They weren't going to be relaxing and watching TV for a while. Fara agreed — with the proviso that Frédéric's very first job would be to dispose of the dead boy's belongings. As long as his things were still in the house, he was. His stick of deodorant on the bathroom shelf. The beer bottles he'd drunk from. His jeans dropped on the floor like he'd just shimmied out of them. That weird devil's mask. Remembering the mask made her shudder.

Frédéric had stepped away to glance into the next room. “I'm thinking,” he said. “We want to strip these floors, right?”

“That's what we said.”

“Then that's the first thing we should do — all the rooms at once. It makes no sense to do one room, get sawdust everywhere, then bring the sander in again.”

His voice sounded hollow because there were no furnishings to absorb the sound. It had nothing to do with a death in the house. And that strange feeling down her spine was the newness of being here. The idea of owning the house. No landlord to call if something happened.

“What do you think?” Frédéric said. And when she looked blank, “Sanding the floors.”

“Sure.” She nodded. The floors.

Had the doorway to the bathroom moved? She'd thought it was off the main room, not the hallway.

“Are you okay?” Frédéric asked. He slid his arm across her back and she relaxed against him. She would get over this uncanny sense of something just beyond her line of sight. It was the work, that was all. Overwhelming when you thought of everything to be done. Sanding, hammering, wiring, painting. Eric's sour predictions hadn't helped. Even Frédéric's mom, who was so happy that they were finally
settling down
, had started to look anxious.

But as Frédéric said, they would do one thing, then the next and the next, step by step. They weren't rushing headlong into anything.

He scuffed down the street — his old street — head lowered. He didn't want to talk to any neighbours with their big hellos and phony church hugs. Questions, clucking, and fussing made them feel better. Bad luck had dumped on him, not them.

He slowed when he saw the bags and furniture piled on the sidewalk. It was about time his dad started thinking about the house again, but why …

Okay, the clothes were garbage. Who wanted to wear a dead guy's stuff ? But why hadn't his dad kept the dresser? Or the vertical blinds that had been such a bitch to install? The louvres were tied and wedged between boxes.

He bent to flip open a box that wasn't tucked tight. Hair salon magazines, the shower curtain, all of it shoved over the dishes his dad had packed away in an upstairs closet. Thin cream-coloured plates with a border of yellow roses. His mom had bought them at a church rummage sale. Fancy plates for Christmas and birthdays, she'd said. But then she took off and his dad put the fancy dishes in a box.

He lifted a teacup. Yellow roses and a faded gilt handle. What were the chances his mom had heard? If she was still in Montreal, she might have read it in the paper. But he was pretty sure she didn't still live here.

He didn't want to look anymore at their belongings heaped on the sidewalk. He turned and walked away, the cup snug in his palm.

Fara had been on her knees all morning, tugging at broadloom. Some idiot had glued it to the floor. If she pulled too quickly, disintegrating fibres left a scabby crust on the wood. The wood had been painted mud brown, but close up, between the planks, she saw slivers of kelly green and peach. Earlier decorator statements.

From upstairs she heard the drag of furniture Frédéric was manoeuvring piece by piece down the stairs to the sidewalk. He'd brought boxes, expecting to salvage the clothes for a charity, but they were too filthy.

Claire's apartment had been messy too — but no messier than usual. When Fara had phoned her at work to ask if she would be going to their parents' for the long Easter weekend, Claire's boss said he hadn't heard from her for three days. She's getting a written warning, he said. She does this again and she's out. How am I supposed to staff this place when people don't even have the courtesy to call in sick?

In the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, Fara had expected Claire to be at work. Was she sick — too sick to call? They lived only a few blocks apart but didn't see each other often. They'd grown up with different groups of friends and different tastes, Claire with her rock music and boyfriends with muscled arms, Fara with her books and art films. A week earlier, when Fara had seen Claire at the small grocery store where they both shopped, Claire asked if Fara still had a key to her apartment. Fara said yes, why would she have thrown it away? She didn't wonder why Claire had asked.

After talking with Claire's boss, Fara tried calling her at home several times. Why hadn't Claire let her know if she was sick? Or was this some kind of game? She often pulled stunts without considering the fallout. She'd deliberately failed a college course because she hadn't liked the teacher. She'd taken a knife to her boyfriend's leather jacket when she saw him flirting with another woman. Fara had had to call the police when he'd tried to break down her door. Claire acted on impulse, never planning an escape route, spurred by a private, hyperbolic rationale that didn't alert her to danger.

Fara had no idea what might have happened this time. She felt more impatient than worried. Annoyed that — once again — she was going to have to haul Claire out of a mess of her own making. Was she even home if she wasn't answering her phone? Fara decided she had better go and see. After she finished work, she stayed on the bus past her stop. Traffic was heavy. The bus inched along.

It had snowed and the sidewalk had been scraped and strewn with gravel. In the years that followed, fresh gravel on a frozen sidewalk brought back the memory of that walk from the bus stop to Claire's apartment. The crunch of her heels on the gravel, the clumps of dirty ice around the tree trunks, the air cold with the smell of snow.

She buzzed at the outside door of Claire's building. No answer. A woman who was taking her poodle for a walk let her in. At Claire's door she rang again and put her ear against the door, but heard no music. Claire could play Guns N' Roses on repeat for hours, the thump turned low so the neighbours didn't gripe. Fara knocked on the wood and finally pulled out her key.