Rue des Rosiers Page 10

  No job to hold her here, but how can she owe Michael for a trip like this? He says there’s room in his apartment, it won’t cost anything for her to be there, just the ticket and he’s happy to pay. She doesn’t know and the penny isn’t here to tell her. The last few nights have been okay, but can she spend every night for six weeks sleeping beside Michael? Plus how can she leave now, when Rose is still sick? What if they need her in Winnipeg?

  “Chinese it is,” Gail says. “Your treat.” She dials, finishes her beer as she orders. Honey garlic ribs and beef with broccoli in black bean sauce, her standard order. Mu-shu chicken for Sarah. Hangs up the phone, grabs another beer from the fridge. “Twenty minutes. You want a beer while we wait? No, of course not. Soda? Lemonade?”

  Sarah nods. At least the pitcher’s been washed.

  “So tell me more.” Gail’s pouring her a glass of lemonade directly out of a fresh bottle. Good. Gail’s also swallowing back more of the new bottle of beer. Not as good.

  There’s not much to add to what she told Gail over the phone yesterday, but she knows Gail needs to hear it again, quiz her, ponder, worry it. Needs the beer to process the data Sarah’s providing: the cuts were crosswise just below the palm, not lengthwise. They’re not sure if they’ll scar. The bathroom door was locked, David had to break it down. Rose was unconscious when David found her but probably hadn’t been out long. All the evidence they’ve already gone over, and over, to figure out just how serious it was. Quoting the pipsqueak doctor – a cry for help, not a genuine attempt. She’s tired of these bits of facts but she knows Gail needs them. What she’s not sure about is whether Gail needs that much beer.

  The doorbell rings and Gail buzzes the delivery guy up, pays and tips him a buck, then changes her mind, hands him three more ones. On a ten dollar order. Sarah never tips delivery guys anything. She digs out a twenty from her wallet, hands it to Gail, doesn’t refuse when Gail gives her ten dollars change. Gail’s digging noisily through her cutlery drawer for chopsticks. “So once she got out of hospital, what was she like?”

  “I don’t know… She stayed in bed a lot. Really quiet. Not herself.”

  “But did you get a chance to really talk with her, ask her? Why she did it?”

  Sarah shakes her head.

  “How come you didn’t talk?”

  “I don’t know. The closest we came was right after I got there, when she told me about this dream she had. When I first got there she was pretty drugged up. But even after she got out of hospital, it was like she still wasn’t fully there. I’d be saying something completely ordinary, and she’d get all spooked looking. Like what I was saying wasn’t what she was hearing. But the last day or two that I was there, she started to seem a bit better, probably because the antidepressants were starting to work. Like she was maybe shaking it off a bit. Maybe.”

  “And, and when she did it, when she cut her wrists, it was because the meds were making her worse somehow?”

  She’s told Gail this twice already. “No. She never took the pills. She told David she was taking them, but she flushed them down the toilet. One a day.”

  Gail takes another long swig of her beer. She hasn’t touched her food. “I hate her.”

  “What?”

  “That. I hate that.”

  “You said you hated Rose.”

  Another long pull on the beer. “I didn’t. It was a slip of the tongue.”

  “You can’t hate Rose.”

  “I don’t! I never said that! It should have been me who went to Winnipeg.”

  “You had a case. You have a case.”

  “Fuck, Sarah, you lost your job! I wouldn’t have lost my job because I went to Winnipeg because my sister was in hospital! I have a decent employer!” Gail’s picking at her beef with broccoli but she hasn’t put anything in her mouth yet.

  “The Centre isn’t such a bad place to work. It’s this one guy, Hank, the boss. He’s a jerk.”

  “How can you defend them? Why are you defending people who just fired you?”

  Sarah’s hands are full of mu-shu pancake. She bites in, the hoisin sauce drips onto her plate. “Don’t feel bad.”

  “Don’t feel bad! How can I not feel bad when my sister tries to commit suicide?”

  It’s a funny verb, commit. It’s usually crimes that are committed. Is suicide still a crime? In French it’s a reflexive verb, se suicider.

  “What is wrong with you? How can you sit there musing on French verbs when our sister tried to kill herself?!”

  She didn’t know she’d said anything out loud. She’s so used to talking in her head. “I meant, don’t feel bad because you couldn’t go.”

  “Well, I do feel bad. It would have been better if I’d gone.”

  “Why?” They didn’t need a lawyer, they needed a daughter. A sister.

  “Why? Because … Look, Sarah –”

  “What?” What’s Gail on about? Sarah feels herself starting to go red.

  “Never mind.”

  “Spit it out, Gail.”

  Now it’s Gail who’s flushing. “Because they probably spent more time worrying about you than about Rose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean? I mean, Poor little Sarah, never finished university, what will become of her? And now she’s gotten herself fired from another loser job.”

  “Just stop it, Gail.”

  “You asked.” Gail takes another long swig of her beer, looks for a place to set it down. “You – you’re never any help. You’re hopeless. You can’t even look after yourself, much less Rose.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “I’m sick of you, Sarah. I’m sick of everything.”

  Fine. Let her be sick of everything. Sarah picks up her plate, dumps the food in the trash can. The lid bangs. Her purse is on the floor by the armchair. She picks it up. Second day in a row, here she is, walking out again. This time on her sister. “Don’t tell Mom about the job. I haven’t said anything to them yet.”

  Gail’s still at the table. “You don’t have to go. Eat something. You paid for it.”

  She paid for it all right. Sarah puts the purse over her shoulder.

  “Sarah. For Christ’s sake, I had too much beer, I didn’t mean it.”

  She walks out, but in the hallway, has to stop, cover her face. Walk it off. That’s what their softball coach would say when someone got clipped by a ball. She’ll walk it off, walk all the way home, let the city repair her.

  But she keeps just walking out, walking away from things.

  I’m sick of you, Sarah.

  That’s what Gail really thinks of her.

  Screw Gail. Screw everyone. She hates Gail. She hates everything about her life. She takes her purse, hurls it against the stair railing. The strap catches on the newel post and the purse boomerangs back into her face, smacks into her nose. She puts her hand to her face. Her nose is bleeding. The only time in her life she gets into a fight and she punches herself in the face. She is fucking hopeless. Just like Gail said. Even if she did try to take it back. Sort of. She sits down at the top of the stairs, digs a Kleenex out of her purse, two Kleenexes. It’s not that bad.

  At the curb she hails a taxi, still holding the Kleenex to her nose. When she gets into the backseat, she can’t find the seatbelt. The taxi starts, and she feels like a little kid, loose in the enormous back seat.

  She punched herself in the face. She wants to laugh and then she doesn’t. She can feel the tears coming into her eyes. This sick sense that everything is dropping away from her, everything she needs most: work, her sisters.

  “You okay, Miss?” the driver asks. He’s a thickset guy about Abe’s age.

  She nods.

  “Somebody hurt you?” In the rear-view mirror she can see the fatherly worry in his eyes. Violence against women. Women against violence against themselves. Somebody hurt her.

  Yes, me.

  She shakes her head. “It was an accident,” she says. “I’m okay.”
<
br />   ~

  Call

  “it’s your call,” michael tells her. He’s laid it all out for her. It’s a simple plan. There’s no reason she shouldn’t go with him to Paris, there’s nothing to tie her down, nothing keeping her here. Her job is a bust. And she can ditch the room on Palmerston without penalty, it’s week-to-week. He knows she doesn’t want to take any money from him, but she can cover her own airfare to Paris with the money she saves on rent. She doesn’t have to split the cost of the apartment in Paris; his firm is paying for it.

  He knows she’s worried about Rose, but there’s just not that much she can do. Rose is in Winnipeg and besides, she has a husband and parents right there to help her through this.

  And this way, they can see how things go in Paris. If she doesn’t want to move in with him when they get back, if the experiment fails – he actually says this, if the experiment fails – it’ll be easy enough for her to find herself another room to rent when they get back. Simple.

  It’s her call.

  It’s her call, but really it’s the penny’s.

  It feels cold in her hand; she’d picked it up from the bedside table. Such a small weight. She lets it shift in her palm, over and over. The flip side. The flip side of yes is no. The flip side of Michael is what? No-Michael. The flip side of Paris is Winnipeg. She closes her fist, shakes it back and forth like a pair of dice. C’mon Lady Luck. Opens her hand.

  What do you want?

  She’s afraid to want.

  She gives the penny a proper toss, catches it in her right hand, flips it down onto the back of her left. What does it say?

  The penny says yes.

  And so does she. Yes, she’s going with Michael to Paris. It was her call and the penny called it and so did she. Paris. City of light. City of romance. When Sarah was a teenager, she taped a cheap print of Van Gogh’s ‘Café Terrace at Night’ to the wall by her bed. Cobblestones and round café tables with their empty chairs and the light from buildings brightening the night. The dream of someplace else, someplace not Winnipeg, not the dull place she had to live in.

  The flip side of Paris is Winnipeg.

  And now it’s Winnipeg she needs to call, because she needs to call Rose. Sarah hasn’t spoken with her in the ten days since she left Winnipeg. Pat and Abe have telephoned, told her Rose seems steady, maybe a bit better. The meds just take time. Sarah’s been afraid to call, but now she needs to talk to her sister. To the sister she still wants to talk to. If Rose weren’t sick, Sarah would have told her about the argument with Gail, and Rose would have found a way to fix it. But if Rose weren’t sick, Sarah and Gail wouldn’t have had the fight.

  She needs Rose. Sarah dials, gets through right away; David answers.

  “Hey, it’s me, Sarah.”

  “Oh, Sarah, we’re just finishing dinner.”

  “Do you want me to call back?” But he’s already set the phone down, is talking in a low voice to Rose. Sarah can picture their kitchen, the big window over the sink that looks out onto their side yard. Rose’s quirky tchotchkes lined up along the windowsill: a little ceramic pitcher with stubs of pencils in it, an olive-wood bowl Sarah brought her back from Israel, candlesticks made from antique wooden spools. The shadow box David made from an old printer’s tray he found in the garbage mounted on the wall, filled with tiny contact-print photos he’d taken of all of them: Rose and Sarah and Gail, Abe and Pat, David’s parents.

  “Hey, Sarah.” Her voice is thin, not quite Rose.

  “Are you eating dinner? Should I call back later?”

  “Dinner? No, no. We’ve … we’re finished.”

  “How are you feeling? Any better?” Water is running in the background. David’s probably started the dishes. She can hear the light splash of dishes in the sink.

  Silence.

  “Rose? Are you there?”

  “Sorry, what did you say?”

  “I was asking how you were feeling.”

  “Feeling? I’m okay. I’m taking the pills now. They’re supposed to help.” The sound of water stops.

  “That’s good,” Sarah says.

  “Well, I knew all along I was supposed to be taking them,” her voice is wispy, “but I thought it would be better just to get well on my own.” A rustle on the end of the line, Rose adjusting the receiver. “That’s what I was thinking.”

  She wasn’t thinking right. She wasn’t thinking at all. “But you’re taking them now?”

  “I said that, Sarah. I said I was taking them and I am.”

  “Right. You did. And are you sleeping okay?”

  “Up and down. Mom says I need to catch up on my rest. I’m trying.”

  Sarah can hear David’s voice in the background. “Do you have to go?”

  “No, no, David’s just saying he’s going to sit outside on the porch.”

  “Nice evening?”

  “Beautiful.” There’s some of the old Rose, the real Rose, in the word. “How about there?”

  “Beautiful here too.” Sarah looks out the window; the leaves on the oak in front of her room still have their fresh spring green. The muggy heat has passed for now, and the last few days have been perfect. “Remember that Japanese quince bush I told you about in front of Michael’s apartment? When I was there yesterday I saw the buds opening.”

  “That’s nice.” The voice has gone wan again.

  “Rose, I was calling because I’ve got some news. Well, kind of good-news/bad-news. I’m not working at the Centre anymore.”

  “The pay was pretty bad.”

  “Minimum wage. But they laid me off.” She doesn’t say fired, doesn’t want to tell Rose the whole sad story, make her feel bad. Worse.

  “Oh, Sarah, that’s too bad.”

  “It’s okay. So … since I’m not working anyway, I’m going to take a holiday.”

  “Holiday?” Rose’s voice has gone even flatter, as if she doesn’t quite understand the word.

  “With Michael. You remember he went on that business trip to Paris?”

  “Michael was in Paris?”

  “I think I told you. I guess you forgot.”

  “Maybe you told me and I forgot.”

  Memory lapses: a side effect of the antidepressants or the sickness itself. Little pieces of Rose gone that they can’t get back. Silence. Sarah can’t hear anything in the background. “Rose? Are you there?”

  “You were saying something about a holiday? Paris?”

  Rose has never been to Europe. Never did the back-packing thing because she was always busy with her dancing – the troupe was on tour, they had rehearsals, performances…

  Why should Sarah get to go to Paris? It isn’t fair.

  “It isn’t fair.”

  “What?” Rose’s voice asking.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “It’s not fair. It’s not fair you losing the baby.”

  She can hear Rose’s receiver rustle again. “No,” Rose says. “It’s not.”

  Sarah leans her cheek against the window. “Remember that night you called me – you thought David was gone?”

  Pause, then, “Yeah. I remember.”

  “I kept thinking, why is she calling me, how can she think it’s me who can help?” The loser with the loser job. The screw-up. The dented floor model. She’d felt oddly honoured. And helpless.

  “Sarah.”

  “What?”

  A sigh. “We can help each other, but only so far.”

  Only so far. But aren’t they supposed to look after each other?

  “Sarah?”

  “Okay. I mean, I’m not sure.”

  “Hey, Sarah, you know I’m wearing that ring you gave me.”

  “The puzzle ring?”

  “Yeah. It fell apart once. David helped me put it back together. It’s not that hard.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “You said Michael’s going to Paris?”

  “He wants me to go with him.”

  “And?” Ther
e’s a hint of impatience in Rose’s voice.

  “And it’s not fair that I get to go to Paris and you don’t.” And it’s not fair that Rose’s baby died and it’s not fair that she wanted to kill herself and leave Sarah all alone.

  “Okay. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  ~

  And now Sarah’s got her passport, little navy-blue book with its gold-embossed coat of arms, its lion and unicorn, Union Jack and fleur-de-lis, crown. Her passport photo a black-and-white mug shot of her serious formal face, emblem of her official self, some self she doesn’t recognize. The woman with no job. No place to live. The woman who gets to go to Paris. The passport means she’s claimed for a given state, a given country. Home and native land. Description of bearer: sex: F; height: 151 cm; hair: brown; eyes: brown. This passport is valid for all countries unless otherwise endorsed. A Canadian passport, the golden ticket that gets you where you want to go, that keeps you safe, immune, when you get there. With a Canadian passport, no one can touch you. And this declaration of innocence and belonging will carry her out of the life in Toronto that’s wearing thinner and thinner; it will lift the barriers at the border and wave her into the dream city.