A Quiet Resonance

The cold hadn’t broken yet. Mid-March in Montreal was a liar: the sun showed up at a promising angle and you thought, okay, maybe, and then the wind came off the mountain and your face remembered what month it was. The snowbanks along Queen Mary had gone the colour of old concrete. Everything was grey and brown and salt-stained, the city wearing its worst outfit, daring you to love it anyway.

I was working on it. Ten weeks wasn’t long enough to love a city. It was long enough to learn a route.

Mine went like this: out the door of the apartment I shared with Ruby, down the hallway past the neighbour’s mat with the salt stain shaped like Australia, into the foyer, past the row of buzzers with their faded labels, out into the cold. South on Victoria. West on Queen Mary.

Then the part my feet had before I did. Grit the whole way, February’s salt ground into March’s ice, a dry scrape underfoot that got into my teeth. Past the Subway and the bagel place that made the block smell like sesame and wood smoke on mornings when the wind was right. Past the Pharmaprix. Past both Jean Coutus, which I still found absurd. Two of them. Within four blocks of each other. The neighbourhood couldn’t commit.

Past Snowdon metro, where the commuters poured out in waves I had already learned to time and the grate breathed warm diesel air up the backs of my knees. Then the stretch where the groceries clustered: the Metro, the produce markets with their crates of clementines and sad winter lettuce stacked on the sidewalk. Cold takes the smell out of everything. You could stand in front of forty kilos of citrus out there and get nothing at all. The florist with the buckets of carnations dyed colours that didn’t exist in nature. Little restaurants I hadn’t tried yet. Clothing boutiques I couldn’t afford and Ruby would have lost her mind in. The walk changed character as CDN gave way to NDG, the storefronts shifting, everything loosening. Twenty minutes door to door, faster if the lights cooperated, slower if I stopped to buy a coffee from the place on the corner that wasn’t as good as what I made at work but gave me something warm to hold.

I didn’t always buy the coffee. I bought it when my hands needed something to do. Which was most mornings.

Today, no coffee. Just the walk, the first breath of it going down like something swallowed wrong, my bag heavy with the OQLF flashcards I should have studied last night instead of building a second barn in Stardew Valley. The barn was excellent. My French medical terminology was not. The exam was months out and I still hadn’t booked it. I had the French. I’d had the French since I was five. What I didn’t have was the register. How to take every medical term I had learned in English and put it to work inside a French clinical scenario. Knowing the word wasn’t enough. I had to deploy it. Assessment, intervention, patient education, charting, all of it in a language that structured the same information differently. I could have skipped ahead. Taken the temporary permit the OIIQ gives nurses coming in from the rest of Canada, worked the floor with the exam still out there in front of me, a date I’d keep letting slide. I didn’t want it like that. French first, squared away, before I stood at anyone’s bedside in this province. One thing at a time.

I would study tonight. I had said that yesterday. The barn, in my defence, really was excellent.

A woman passed me on the sidewalk, pushing a stroller with a toddler who was furious about something. Existence, probably. I get it.

She was pale, breathing a little quick for the pace she kept. She favoured her left side when she bent to tuck the blanket back in, careful about the reach, six or eight weeks out from a C-section and still pulling at the scar. Iron, maybe, for the pallor. She didn’t know I’d seen any of it. Nobody ever did.

Knock it off, Julie. She’s a stranger on a sidewalk. She didn’t sign up for this.

I couldn’t stop.

It wasn’t the seeing I missed. It was what came after. Walking into a room and reading it before anyone told me what was happening, then moving, hands going first and going right, the chart catching up after. Three years of that. Three years of knowing what a body was doing before its owner did.

The café paid rent. The café was fine. My hands knew the difference, though, and some days the difference was a hairline crack and some days it opened up wide under me. Today it was somewhere in between. Today the café was making lattes. The nurse could wait.

There was a song stuck in my head. The one Ruby had on last night while she drafted. I didn’t know the band. I didn’t know most of the lyrics. I had the chorus and a couple of lines from the second verse and my brain had been running them on loop since I got out of bed, with the missing words filled in by whatever approximate noise made the meter work. I’d been humming it into my scarf since Victoria without noticing, and the wool had gone damp where my breath kept landing.

Something something I keep coming back. Something something in the dark. Or the park. Probably the dark.

The walk was still new enough to require attention. I hadn’t memorized which produce market had the better avocados, didn’t know which intersections had that Montreal timing where the light changed before you expected it. Everything here still felt like a place I was learning rather than a place I knew, and my ears had gone past aching into the numb part under the hat. Ruby said that went away. Ruby had been here longer. She had come first, found the apartment, said there’s a room. Didn’t ask if I was sure.

I had grown up in Timmins. Seven hundred kilometres northwest. A city of forty thousand people, which was enough to fill a hockey arena and not much else. Ruby had grown up there too, same high school, same hallways, same geography. Her family was still there, her mom calling every Sunday with weather reports and neighbourhood updates about people I had trained myself to stop picturing. My family was not still there the same way. My father was dead. My mother was alive and had been a person I did not talk about for longer than I had been an adult.

I had left in January. Packed my own car with what fit and drove nine hours south without stopping.

Not even at Cordelia. Cordelia is the halfway point and it had been a rule my whole childhood. The diner with the brown vinyl, grilled cheese and black coffee and a chocolate milk, then the arcade across the road. Both directions. Forty minutes added to every trip my father and I ever took anywhere. I could still taste it if I let myself, the cheese gone orange at the edges, the coffee too hot for a kid to be allowed and drunk anyway. I came up on the sign a little after three in the afternoon with my hands at ten and two and my jaw aching from however long I’d been holding it, and I kept my eyes on the road, and I drove past it. Stopping would have meant thinking. Thinking would have meant turning around.

I didn’t turn around.

People accepted simple explanations. Small city, wanted something bigger, needed a change. Nobody pushed past that. Nobody heard the past tense in needed and wondered why it sounded like an emergency instead of a preference. I had gotten good at keeping the surface smooth enough that there was nothing to catch on.

My thumb pressed the side of my middle finger. Small circles. I did this when I was thinking, or when I was not thinking and my hands needed a job. The cold was making my cuticles worse. I had been picking at the skin around my index finger since I left the apartment. I stopped. Tried to. Started again without noticing. My hands had their own agenda and they didn’t consult me. The skin around my thumbnail was raw enough that when I pressed too hard I tasted copper later, which was how I knew I had been at it again.

Café Soleil appeared on the corner at Earnscliffe, wedged next to the TD bank. Gold lettering on the window, and the little sun Mimi had drawn herself and was unreasonably proud of. Eight rays, one of them longer than the rest, because she had run out of napkin.

I pushed through the door and the warmth hit like a wall: espresso, browned sugar from the pastry case, the humid press of a small space filled with people who didn’t want to be outside. Underneath it, cardamom from whatever Mimi was proofing in the back.

Ashley was already behind the counter, apron on, phone propped against the register, dark curls pulled into a knot that was somehow still styled.

“You’re early,” she said without looking up. Her thumb kept moving on the phone.

“I’m on time.”

“That’s early for you.” She was already moving, lining the milk jugs along the steam wand, quick, three things going at once and none of them me.

She wasn’t wrong. I dropped my bag in the back, hung my coat on the second hook, because the first one still hung crooked off its screw the way it had the morning Mimi hired me, and tied on my apron. The strings had a small coffee stain near the knot from last Tuesday’s oat milk incident. My fingers were stiff from the walk, slow on them. I tightened the bow twice.

Mimi was in the kitchen, her radio tuned to the same French talk station, voices debating something political with the casual intensity of people who would never agree and didn’t want to. She came out of the back long enough to set a plate at my elbow, one of the cardamom buns, split and buttered, and was gone again before I could say anything about it.

I ate it. The bun gave under my thumb where she’d split it, the butter already gone to liquid in the seam, and it was finished in four bites before I’d decided to be hungry.

The café was half-full. Three regulars I had learned to recognize, two faces I hadn’t seen before. The espresso machine hissed. Ashley’s phone buzzed. Outside, someone’s dog was tied to the bike rack, watching the door with an optimism I found both moving and delusional.

Max arrived at 9:20, twenty minutes early. I had learned to expect it. They went straight for the espresso machine, coat off in one motion, and pulled a shot. Tasted it. Frowned. Adjusted something on the grinder. Pulled another. A small ritual that would have read as fussy from anyone else but was just Max being Max about coffee, which was one of maybe three things in the world Max was like this about.

“How is it today?” they asked, settling in beside me with the cup they had deemed acceptable. They wrapped both hands around the mug, testing the temperature before they drank.

“Quiet.”

“Good. I need quiet. My smoke alarm decided at midnight that it was dying and then took until three to prove it.”

“That explains your face.”

“My face is fine.”

Max took a careful first sip, eyes closing briefly. Assessment in progress.

“Your face looks like it was assembled from spare parts this morning.”

“Charming.” They lowered the cup. “I crushed you in Mario Kart last night, by the way. Three races. You’re getting worse.”

“I let you win.”

“You drove into the ocean. Twice.”

“Strategically.”

Ashley was talking to a customer at the register now, laughing too loudly at something. She had come at me like weather on my second day, all volume and lip gloss and asking me things nobody else was asking. Mimi ran the kitchen and the radio and the café and had never once asked me where I came from.

Ten weeks and these three. That was more than I usually managed.

Ashley’s phone buzzed again; she flipped it over without looking, then started telling us about a guy from Bumble who had texted her a poem at 2 a.m. Max set the cup down and asked, with enormous seriousness, whether it scanned.

Outside, Montreal was still pretending it was almost spring. I was still learning its streets, and I wanted it to stay that way.

The bell went over the door. Cold came in as far as my ankles. I reached for the milk.