Chapter 7
COMING HOME
The stairs are the first problem.
Fourteen of them. More than two weeks in a hospital bed and I've forgotten what stairs feel like.
I've climbed these stairs ten thousand times — with groceries, with laundry, with Poutine tucked under one arm and Bagel draped over my shoulder like a very fat, very orange scarf.
Fourteen stairs have never been a problem.
Fourteen stairs are just what happens between the front door and the apartment.
But fourteen stairs with crutches and a pelvis that catches every time I shift my weight — a deep stiffness where the hardware is, not sharp anymore but heavy, like something bolted together that hasn't learned to move yet.
That's a different equation. The physiotherapist gave me a protocol.
Lead with the right leg going up — the side that still works.
Lead with the crutches going down. Don't twist. Don't lean. Don't do anything fast.
Nora is behind me. I know this because I can hear her — not anxious exactly, but alert, ready to catch me if I slip.
One of her hands is near my back. Not touching.
Just near. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of it through my coat, which is the most distracting thing that has happened to me today, and today had some competition.
Because today, at the hospital, Maman announced she was moving in.
Not asked. Not suggested. Announced. She was standing by my bed with her coat buttoned and her purse on her arm and she said, "C'est décidé, je viens m'installer chez toi pour la récupération," I'm coming to stay for the recovery, in the tone she uses when the universe has been consulted and agreed with her.
I opened my mouth.
Camille got there first.
"Maman," she said, from the doorway, coffee in one hand and phone in the other. "You can't move in. Nora's right here."
She tilted her coffee toward Nora.
The room went very still. Nora was mid-fold on a hospital blanket. She stopped. Maman looked at Nora. Nora looked at the blanket. I looked at the ceiling because the ceiling has been my safest visual option for two weeks.
"She's been here every day," Camille said. Factual. Devastating. "She installed a grab bar in his bathroom. From a YouTube video. Maman, you don't even know what a grab bar is."
"I know what a grab bar is," Maman said, but the fight had already left her voice.
Camille turned to Nora. "You're staying with him, right?"
It wasn't really a question. It was a statement dressed as a question, one that only leaves room for one answer, and the answer was built from two weeks of showing up and a bathroom she'd already renovated.
"If that's — yes," Nora said. "I'll be there."
"Bon," Maman said. She kissed my forehead. She kissed Nora's forehead. She pointed at me and said, "Tu écoutes cette fille" — you listen to this girl — and left.
So now Nora is behind me on the stairs, carrying my bag, and neither of us has said a word about Camille's ambush, and we are walking into my apartment together because my sister made it impossible to say no and I'm not sure either of us wanted to.
Step six. Step seven. Something inside my hip catches and I stop. Not because the pain is bad — it's always bad — but because for a second the bad changes shape and I need to recalibrate.
"You okay?" she says.
"Yeah." I take the next step. "Just counting."
"Counting what?"
"Stairs. Making sure they haven't added any since I left."
She doesn't laugh. She doesn't not-laugh either. She does that thing she does — a small exhale through her nose, a sound that lives between amusement and worry. I add it to the list. The list doesn't have a name. It used to be short.
Step fourteen. The landing. My door.
I get my keys out. This takes longer than it should because crutches occupy both hands and I have to park one against the wall to free my fingers, and keys are slippery when your palm is doing the thing palms do when you're pretending not to be nervous about bringing a girl into your apartment for the first time under circumstances that are not even slightly how you imagined it.
The lock clicks. I push the door open.
And something hits me in the shin.
Bagel.
Ten pounds of orange fur and zero concept of personal boundaries.
He's already on my right leg — the one that works — pressing his head against my calf with the force of a creature who has been abandoned for almost two weeks and wants you to know it, loudly.
His purr is so aggressive it sounds structural — like a motor redlining.
Behind him, sitting on the kitchen counter like she owns the building and has strong opinions about the new management: Poutine. Black. Motionless. Staring at me with the expression of a cat who specifically arranged to be on the counter when the door opened so the visual impact would be maximum.
She doesn't come to greet me. That's not her style. Poutine's style is: I'll be here. I've always been here. You're the one who left.
"Salut, les bêtes," I say — hi, beasts — and my voice does something I didn't authorize.
It cracks. Just a wobble around the vowel, a tiny structural failure that I disguise as a cough.
The cough pulls on my hip and the hip reminds me it's broken and the broken reminds me why I was gone and none of this is supposed to make me emotional because they're cats, they're just cats, but Bagel is vibrating against my leg with his whole body and Poutine is watching me from the counter with those unblinking eyes and they're both here and I'm home and—
"The crutch," Nora says.
I look down. Bagel has wrapped himself between both crutches like a very affectionate safety hazard. If I take one more step, I'm going to trip over the cat and land right back where I started.
"Bagel." I try the authoritative voice. He looks up at me with an expression that says no. "Bagel, move." He purrs harder.
Nora bends down and scoops him up. He immediately melts into her arms — all ten pounds redistributing into a boneless orange puddle — and starts kneading her collarbone.
She holds him like she's done this before, which she hasn't, she's been in the apartment, installed things, measured things, but always without me, always when it was a project and not a life — and Bagel doesn't care about the difference. Bagel runs on warmth.
I watch her hold my cat in my doorway and my chest rearranges itself in a way I'm going to blame on the stairs.
"Your hip?" she asks, reading my face.
"Yeah," I say. "Stairs."
Marc came by while I was in the hospital — fed the cats, cleaned the litter, left a note on the counter that says Get better, idiot.
Poutine ate my shoelace. He gave Nora the spare keys so she could come set up the bathroom before I was discharged.
There's a stack of mail, a dead plant I forgot I owned, and a package on the kitchen table.
The package is from Sophie — she sent it to Nora, who brought it over.
Inside: a foam roller, compression socks, a jar of Organic Turmeric Recovery Elixir, a 400-page book called Healing Your Hips: A Journey, and a card covered in hand-drawn hearts.
At the bottom: fuzzy socks with firefighters on them.
"She ordered the socks at 2 AM," Nora says. "Texted me the receipt with crying emojis."
"She also told me to keep her car until she's properly back from Calgary," Nora says. "Apparently this is her contribution."
I hold up the book. "Four hundred pages."
"She means well."
"She means well loudly." I put it down. A shadow shifts in her expression — behind her eyes — and then it's gone.
The bathroom is a problem I've been not thinking about.
In the hospital, there were rails. There were nurses.
There was an entire infrastructure designed around the premise that a person might not be able to do basic things without help.
The hospital bathroom was humiliating, but it was humiliating in a medical way — clinical, expected, part of the process.
My bathroom is not clinical. My bathroom is a narrow room with a shower-over-tub I can't step into, a toilet I can't easily get down to, and a sink that requires exactly the kind of twisting my pelvis has specifically been told not to do.
Nora installed a grab bar by the toilet — the screw holes are neat, neater than anything I've drilled in this apartment, and I don't know if she's done this before or just learned fast, but either way it tells me something about her that I'm adding to the list.
There's also one of those raised toilet seats from the pharmacy. And a shower seat in the tub. A non-slip mat. A small basket of supplies on the shelf within arm's reach so I don't have to bend.
She did all of this without asking. Without announcing it. Without any of the ceremony that would have required me to say thank you in a way that also means I hate that I need this.
The first time I use the bathroom alone, it takes twelve minutes.
I have a system. I've been developing the system since the hospital — a sequence of movements that gets me from the door to the toilet and back without needing to call anyone, without needing to lean on anything except the grab bar that she installed, without needing to admit that a thirty-four-year-old firefighter can't take a piss without planning it like a tactical operation.
The system works. It's slow and it's graceless and at one point I have to brace my hand against the wall and breathe through an ache that travels from my pelvis to my back teeth, but it works. I managed it. Alone. That counts.
Nora is in the kitchen. She's pretending to organize the Tupperware Maman sent home with us, but I know she was timing me. Not in a checking-up way — how you notice how long someone has been in a room and make a calculation about when it's appropriate to worry.
"All good?" she says. Not looking at me.
"All good."
She opens her mouth — and I know what's coming.
I know it the way you know the second half of a sentence before someone says it, because I've been braced for it since we walked through the door.
She's going to offer to help. She's going to suggest a solution, or ask if I need anything, or do any one of the fifty kind, practical, devastating things she's been doing for the past week.
"I got it," I say.
It comes out harder than I mean it to. Not loud — I don't raise my voice. But the texture is wrong. There's a hardness in it that I didn't put there on purpose, one that sounds like a door being latched from the inside.
She pauses. Her hands stop on the Tupperware. For half a second her expression changes — not hurt exactly, but adjusted, like someone recalibrating a calculation in real time.
"Okay," she says. And goes back to the Tupperware.
I go to the couch. Poutine is already there, occupying the exact center of the middle cushion with the territorial precision of a creature who has been waiting two weeks to reclaim this spot and will not be moved by man, cat, or act of God.
I lower myself down — slowly, using the crutches and the arm of the couch and a technique the physiotherapist taught me — and end up beside her.
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't move. She stays exactly where she is, which is the closest thing to affection Poutine has ever offered and which I am choosing to interpret as welcome home, I suppose.
Nora hands me my phone. "Keep this on you," she says. Casual. Like she's reminding me to buy milk. "In case you need anything while I'm in the other room."
"I'll be fine."
"I know. Just — keep it close."
She doesn't push it. She puts the phone on the couch cushion next to me and goes back to the kitchen, and I let it stay because fighting this particular battle isn't worth the energy and because, if I'm being honest, she's not wrong.
Night.
Nora is in the guest room — the room I called a guest room but which is actually the room where I keep my weights and a fold-out couch that had never been unfolded until she arrived, and a poster of the '93 Habs that I should probably take down but haven't because it reminds me of watching the playoffs with my father before he moved to Rimouski and became a person who sends birthday cards two weeks late with sorry, forgot — love, Papa written inside, and I'm not going to think about that either.
She's set up in there. Her suitcase — a small one, the kind you pack when you're telling yourself this is temporary — is open in the corner.
Her laptop charger is plugged in by the window.
She's been quiet since dinner, which was Maman's shepherd's pie reheated and eaten at the kitchen table with Bagel on her lap and Poutine under the table pretending she wasn't waiting for scraps.
I'm in my room. The door is half-open because closed feels too far and open feels too close and halfway is the only distance that doesn't require a decision.
Bagel is on my bed, curled in the space between my arm and my torso, purring at a frequency that I swear is calibrated to lower blood pressure.
The phone is on the nightstand where she put it. Within reach.
The apartment is dark. The street lamp outside paints a stripe of amber across the ceiling. Somewhere outside, a snowplow scrapes the avenue.
I can't sleep. My body won't settle — the mattress is different from the hospital bed in every way, which should be better but isn't, because my pelvis memorized one position over the past two weeks and any deviation from that position registers as treason.
I shift. Something catches. Bagel adjusts.
Two hours pass. Or one. I don't check the phone.
Then I hear it.
Something in the kitchen. Small. A cupboard opening and closing. The whisper of bare feet on tile. The crinkle of something — a bag? A wrapper?
She's in the kitchen.
I don't move. Bagel's ear twitches. The sound continues — quiet, careful, the sound of someone trying very hard not to be heard.
The amber stripe holds still on the ceiling.
Whatever she's doing in there, she doesn't want me to know about it. And that sound — a person trying not to be heard — makes me want to get up and see.
I don't. Some things you let be.
I close my eyes. But I don't fall asleep either.