The House on Furby
The House on Furby
The basement smells like furnace dust and the previous tenant’s cat.
Jonah has been here two weeks and the smell is fading, mostly, except when the radiator kicks on and the heat stirs whatever is embedded in the carpet near the bathroom door. He stopped noticing it around day five. By day ten he’d stopped opening the window. Now the smell is just the apartment — his apartment, technically, though calling it an apartment is generous. It’s three rooms carved out of a basement: a bedroom with a concrete floor and a ceiling low enough that he can press his palm flat against it without straightening his arm, a kitchen whose counter is a repurposed door on brackets, and a bathroom where the shower head comes out of the wall at his collarbone and he has to crouch to rinse his hair.
Four hundred and seventy-five a month. The landlord lives in Charleswood and cashed Jonah’s post-dated cheques without comment. He didn’t ask about the ethernet cable Jonah ran along the baseboard from the phone jack in the hallway, and Jonah didn’t ask about the carpet stain or the window that doesn’t lock or the hairline crack running diagonally across the bedroom ceiling like a river on a map of a country he can’t name.
His desk is a door. Actual door — a hollow-core interior door he found in the alley behind the Maryland Bridge Goodwill, sanded the knob hole smooth, laid across two sawhorses he bought at Canadian Tire for eleven dollars each. His gaming rig sits on it, the tower humming its low fan-noise against the wall, the monitor casting blue-white light across the room when he’s up late, which is most nights. Second year computer science at U of M. He studies at the desk, eats at the desk, falls asleep at the desk often enough that he’s stopped making the bed some mornings because he never got in it.
He’s in the basement again. Different city, same position. He doesn’t think about this. It just is.
Upstairs, through two floors of old house, somebody is playing music. Vinyl — he can tell from the pops and the warmth of it, the way the bass bleeds through the floor joists differently than a laptop speaker would. Folk, maybe. A woman’s voice he doesn’t recognize, singing something slow. And below the music, lower, the creak of someone walking across hardwood in the main-floor apartment. The house carries sound the way old houses do, through the bones of the structure, so Jonah knows the rhythms of the people above him without knowing the people. He knows someone on the main floor gets up early — boots on hardwood, five-thirty, six at the latest. He knows whoever lives on the top floor paints, or something like it, because turpentine drifts down the stairwell when the hallway door is open, sharp and chemical and strangely clean against the basement’s damp.
He knows about the boots by the front door. Paint-spattered, untied, a woman’s size. They’re there every time he comes home, kicked off on the mat beside the radiator.
He knows about the hammering. Odd hours — Tuesday night, Saturday morning, once at what had to be midnight. Not angry hammering. Measured. The sound of someone building something, or fixing something, with patience.
He doesn’t know their names yet.
Early September. The elms on Furby are still green, heavy-leafed, the light coming through them dappled and warm in a way that makes the sidewalk look older than it is. Jonah is walking home from campus with his backpack pulling at his shoulders — three textbooks, a laptop, a charger he keeps forgetting to leave at home — and a man is on the porch.
The porch is the best thing about the house. Wide, concrete-floored, three steps up from the sidewalk, with a railing that might have been painted white twenty years ago and is now a colour that exists only on prairie porches — grey-white with rust bleeding through the bolt heads and paint curling up in strips that catch on your sleeve when you lean against it. Two lawn chairs live out here, the woven plastic kind, one green and one that used to be green. Neither belongs to anyone in particular. They just appeared.
The railing is half off. The man has stripped it down to bare spindles, laid them out on the porch floor in order — twelve of them, Jonah counts without meaning to — and he’s working a hand plane along a new post clamped to the stump of the old one. Rough-cut lumber. The shavings curl off the blade and land on the concrete in pale ribbons.
He’s mid-twenties. Dark hair. Work boots with the laces wrapped twice around the ankle because the boots are older than the laces. His tool belt sits on his hips the way Jonah’s dad’s tool belt sits — not like an accessory, like part of his body. He works without looking at Jonah, even though the porch step creaks when Jonah stops on it.
The hand plane makes a sound. A long, clean rasp, and the wood gets smoother, and the man pauses and sights along the edge of the post the way you’d sight along a rifle barrel, one eye closed, checking for true.
Jonah’s chest does something.
The gesture — the sighting, the one-eyed squint along the edge — is his dad. Not the same man, not the same hands, but the same motion. His father in the machine shed, sighting along the bracket he’d bent from flat stock. His father checking the edge of a board before cutting. That thing where the eyes and the hands work together and the body already knows the answer before the mind finishes the question.
“You live here?” the man says. He doesn’t look up.
“Basement.”
A nod. “Liam. Main floor.” He tilts his head toward the front door. “Rent deal — I keep the place from falling apart, landlord knocks off a couple hundred. Your furnace filter is filthy, by the way. I changed it.”
“Oh,” Jonah says. “Thanks.”
Liam’s hand plane takes another pass. The shaving curls. He blows sawdust off the surface and runs his thumb along the fresh wood and seems to be listening to something in the grain.
That’s it. Jonah goes inside, down the narrow stairs to his apartment, and puts his bag on the desk-door and stands for a moment in the hum of the furnace, which does sound different. Cleaner. Like it can breathe.
Over the next two weeks, things change in the house.
Jonah doesn’t notice at first. The baseboard in the hallway that was loose — the one he caught his toe on coming up the stairs in the dark — is tight now, the nails countersunk and the wood flush against the wall. The kitchen faucet that dripped, a slow metronome he’d been falling asleep to, doesn’t drip anymore. The bathroom door that stuck in the humidity, the one he had to shoulder open every morning, swings smooth.
He doesn’t connect these things to Liam. Not consciously. The house just seems to be getting better on its own, the way a body heals a cut — slowly, without announcement, the damaged place knitting shut while you’re busy thinking about something else.
Then one evening he comes up the basement stairs and Liam is in the hallway, crouched beside the wall, replacing a light switch cover. The old one is cracked down the middle and yellowed with age. Liam has a screwdriver in one hand and the new cover plate in the other and he’s holding both against the wall, trying to get the screw started one-handed.
Jonah takes the flashlight off the shelf by the front door and holds it without being asked. Angles the beam so Liam can see the screw slot. The same muscle — the anticipation, knowing what the other person needs before they say it. Holding the flashlight for his dad under the combine header. Handing over the 9/16ths.
Liam glances at him. A flicker in his eyes, not surprise. Recognition.
“My dad’s a farmer,” Jonah says. The most he’s said to Liam in two weeks.
Liam gets the screw started and drives it home. “My nan built her own cabin,” he says. “Thompson. No plans. Just built it.”
Silence. Liam finishes the second screw, stands, flips the switch. The hallway light comes on, brighter with the clean cover plate, and Liam gathers his tools and goes back to his apartment and closes the door and Jonah stands in the hallway under the new light and thinks about a woman in Thompson building a cabin with no plans.
The next time Liam is on the porch working, Jonah brings his laptop out and sits on the top step and codes while Liam planes. Neither of them says anything about this. Jonah has a compiler theory assignment due Thursday. Liam is fitting new spindles into the railing posts, each one hand-shaped to match the originals, and the rasp of the plane and the click of Jonah’s keyboard settle into a rhythm that neither of them sets but both of them keep.
Chloe is a sound through the ceiling before she’s a person. A smell in the stairwell before she has a name.
The vinyl. Old folk — Joni Mitchell, he thinks, though he’s not sure because his knowledge of Joni Mitchell comes entirely from his mom humming in the kitchen and he’s never matched the humming to an album. The record player is real. He can hear the needle drop, the half-second of dust and static before the music starts, a sound that belongs to a different decade leaking through the floorboards above his head.
The turpentine. Sharp, almost sweet, drifting down when the upstairs door is open. The hallway smells different on the days she’s working — less old-plaster-and-radiator, more chemical, alive.
The paint on the doorknob. He notices it a Tuesday afternoon in mid-September. Cadmium yellow, a smear on the brass knob of the front door, still tacky. He opens the door carefully, pinching the edge, and there’s a fingerprint in the yellow, a whorl and ridge pressed into the paint like a signature. A week later: ultramarine, same knob, same fingerprint. He starts checking.
He meets her on the porch. Saturday. She’s on the top step with her shoes off, bare feet flat on the cold concrete — and it is cold, September in Winnipeg, the concrete holds the night chill until noon — with a sketchbook in her lap and a pencil moving in long strokes across the page. She’s drawing the elm across the street. The tree is massive, a survivor, its canopy wide enough to shade the entire front yard of the house opposite, and she’s getting it down fast, her hand confident, not fussy. No erasing. The pencil moves and the tree appears.
She doesn’t look up when the door opens behind her.
“You’re the basement,” she says.
“Jonah.”
“Chloe. I’m the reason there’s paint on the doorknob. Sorry about that.”
She talks fast. No filtering, or not much — she says what she’s thinking at roughly the speed she’s thinking it, which is fast.
“River Heights, both parents teachers, you know the type — house full of books and opinions and nobody raises their voice but everyone has a position.” She shifts the sketchbook on her knee without looking up. “School of Art, final year, I do large-format oils which basically means I can’t afford to eat and my apartment smells like a chemical plant. Stayed in Winnipeg because the rent is cheap and the light is good and honestly the city doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not, which — I grew up in a neighbourhood where everyone pretends to be something they’re not, so.”
“What do you do?” she asks.
“Computer science.”
“Oh, like hacking?”
“Not really.”
“That’s less interesting.” A grin. She goes back to the elm.
He sits on the railing — the new railing, Liam’s railing, solid under his weight in a way the old one never was — and watches her draw for a minute. She doesn’t seem to mind. She doesn’t seem to notice, or care, or perform the not-caring. She’s drawing and he’s sitting and the elm is turning gold at the top where the sun hits it first, and neither of them is trying to be anything to the other.
She doesn’t recalculate when she hears where he’s from. He’d braced for it — the slight pause, the mental adjustment, the oh, Steinbach that usually comes with a half-smile and a question about whether his family is Mennonite, and then the conversation becomes about being Mennonite and he’s standing in the box again. Chloe doesn’t do any of that. She hears Steinbach and moves on to asking whether his internet connection is as bad as hers, and the fact of where he’s from sits in the conversation like furniture, unremarkable, already absorbed.
Liam hadn’t done it either.
September turns. The elms go gold and then amber and then bare, and the leaves pile on the sidewalk along Furby in wet mats that smell like tannin and rot, and the mornings get dark earlier and the porch gets cold, and things accumulate.
Liam is replacing the back steps. The old ones have gone soft, the wood punky and grey, and he’s pulling them out with a pry bar, the nails squealing as they come free. Jonah hears the noise from the basement, comes up, holds the other end of a two-by-ten while Liam measures and marks. They work for an hour. Liam saws and Jonah holds and neither of them speaks except when Liam says “other end” and Jonah shifts his grip. When they’re done Liam says “thanks” and Jonah goes back downstairs and that is the whole conversation.
Chloe leaves her door open when she paints. Third floor, the old attic rooms, the ones with the sloped ceiling and the skylight she didn’t ask about before signing the lease. The turpentine drifts down the stairwell. Jonah passes through the hallway on the way to campus and the smell is there and his shoulders drop half an inch and he doesn’t know why.
A cold night in late September. The furnace is slow to start — the pilot’s been unreliable all week and the landlord hasn’t called back. Jonah is at his desk in a hoodie and two pairs of socks, his breath not quite visible but close, and he hears Liam banging on the ductwork above him. Metal on metal, the sharp clang of a wrench on a pipe joint, a pause, another clang. Ten minutes. The furnace shudders awake, the vents breathe, and warmth spreads through the floor like water finding its level. Jonah pulls off the second pair of socks. Nobody says anything. Nobody needs to.
A week later. Jonah finds water on the basement floor, a slow drip from the ceiling where the pipe runs above the bathroom. Not much — a dark circle on the concrete, a bead forming at the joint every thirty seconds. He texts the landlord. Nothing. He waits a day. Texts again. Nothing. He texts Liam, whose number he has now, for building emergencies, because somewhere in the second week they traded numbers the way you trade numbers with a neighbour you might need to reach if the house catches fire.
Liam is at his door in four minutes. Bucket. Caulking gun. A rag over his shoulder.
“I’ll fix it Saturday,” Liam says, already on his knees, running his finger along the pipe joint, finding the seam.
He fixes it Friday.
October, and Chloe’s gallery show gets rejected.
Jonah doesn’t know the details. He doesn’t need them. What he knows is the music. The vinyl changes — the Joni Mitchell goes away and something else comes through the ceiling, louder, with an edge to it, guitar that sounds like it’s being played angry. The bass shakes the light fixture in his bathroom. She plays it for hours, the same album or maybe two albums, and the volume stays up past midnight, which she’s never done before.
He doesn’t go upstairs. He doesn’t knock on her door. He doesn’t text. He lies in bed and listens to the music through the ceiling and stares at the crack that runs across the plaster above him and at some point falls asleep, and the next morning he walks to the Nook.
The Nook is right behind the house, technically on Westminster, a diner in the old sense of the word — Formica counter, vinyl booths patched with tape the same colour as the seats though not exactly, a coffee machine that’s been running since six a.m. and will run until close at three. The coffee is fine. The cinnamon buns are better — big, soft, the frosting thick enough that it comes off on your fingers when you pull the layers apart. Jonah buys one and a coffee, both still hot, and carries them back to the house in a paper bag.
He hangs the bag on Chloe’s doorknob. Third floor. The paint-stained doorknob, the one with ultramarine in the ridges of the brass. He doesn’t knock. He doesn’t leave a note. He goes back downstairs and sits at his desk and opens his compiler theory textbook and reads the same paragraph three times without absorbing it.
An hour later his phone buzzes. Chloe. A cinnamon bun emoji. Nothing else.
That’s the whole exchange.
Liam’s truck won’t start on a Tuesday morning. Jonah hears the starter grinding from the basement — the laboured whine of a battery that’s giving what it’s got but what it’s got isn’t enough. He hears it twice, three times, and then silence, and then the truck door slamming harder than a truck door should be slammed.
He goes upstairs and out the front door. Liam is standing beside the truck — an old Silverado, white that’s gone ivory, rust flowering along the wheel wells — with his arms crossed and his jaw set in a way that Jonah recognizes from men who won’t ask for help and don’t know how to receive it.
“Pop the hood,” Jonah says.
Liam looks at him.
“Pop the hood.”
Liam reaches through the window and pulls the release. The hood goes up and Jonah leans in and the smell hits him — engine oil, coolant, the faint burnt-sugar smell of an alternator working too hard — and he’s twelve years old in the machine shed, his dad’s voice in his ear, start with the battery, always start with the battery. The terminal is green with corrosion, a crust of verdigris built up around the positive clamp, thick enough that the connection is barely making contact.
“Baking soda,” Jonah says. “And a toothbrush. You got either?”
Liam gets both from the kitchen. They mix the baking soda with water in a coffee mug and Jonah pours it over the terminal and the corrosion fizzes and dissolves, and he scrubs the clamp with the toothbrush until the metal shows clean underneath, dull silver against the green. His hands know this. He’s done it a dozen times in the yard at home, on the half-ton, on the grain truck, on the old Case tractor his dad won’t sell because the tractor was his dad’s dad’s and some things don’t get sold.
“Try it,” Jonah says.
The Silverado turns over on the first crank. The engine catches and settles into its idle, a low rumble that shakes the fender under Jonah’s hand.
Liam stares at him from the cab.
“Where’d you learn that?”
“Steinbach.”
Something happens in Liam’s face. Not a smile. Close to a smile the way a bud is close to a flower — the shape is there but it hasn’t opened yet. He nods, once, and puts the truck in gear, and Jonah stands on the curb and wipes baking soda paste off his fingers onto his jeans.
The Nook becomes their place. Not because anyone decides it. Because it’s right there, fifteen steps out the back gate and across the alley, and the coffee is always hot and the eggs are two-fifty and the woman behind the counter — Deb, her name is Deb, she’s been here nine years and she knows every regular by their order — doesn’t ask if you want a refill, she just pours it while she’s walking past and you say thanks without looking up and the whole transaction takes less than a second and involves no decisions at all.
They go separately at first. Jonah for breakfast before class. Chloe for lunch, when the light in her studio gets flat and she needs to leave the turpentine for an hour. Liam between jobs, sawdust still on his forearms, his coffee black, his order always the same — two eggs, toast, no questions.
One Saturday they’re all there at the same time. Jonah is in the corner booth with his laptop. Chloe comes in and slides in across from him without asking, her sketchbook under her arm, and orders coffee and a muffin and starts drawing the sugar dispenser. Ten minutes later Liam walks in and stands at the end of the booth for a second, holding his coffee, and Jonah moves his laptop bag off the seat and Liam sits down and that’s it. Three people in a booth at the Nook. Deb comes by and fills their coffees and doesn’t comment on the new arrangement because Deb has been watching arrangements form and dissolve at these tables for nine years and she knows what she’s looking at.
Chloe draws. Liam reads the Free Press, the actual paper, holding it the way old men hold newspapers, folded in quarters, licked thumb turning the pages. Jonah codes. Nobody talks for twenty minutes. When Chloe finishes her drawing she holds it up — the sugar dispenser, the salt shaker behind it, the edge of Liam’s newspaper in the background — and Liam glances at it and says “that’s good” and she says “I know” and Jonah laughs and Chloe grins and the Saturday booth becomes a thing without anyone naming it or scheduling it or even, later, remembering the first time it happened.
His mom calls on a Sunday evening. He’s at his desk, half-watching a lecture recording, half-reading a forum thread about memory allocation.
“Did you get the package?”
He did. A Canada Post box, slightly dented, sitting on the hallway table that Liam built from scrap lumber and nobody asked for but everybody uses. Inside: his dad’s old Carhartt jacket, the canvas the colour of weak tea, stiff with age, the zipper replaced at least once, the cuffs fraying. Also inside, wrapped in the jacket like a baby in a blanket: a bag of rollkuchen.
The rollkuchen arrived mostly as crumbs. His mom had wrapped them in wax paper and then in a bread bag and then in the jacket, but the mail doesn’t care about wax paper and bread bags and eleven hundred kilometres of highway between Steinbach and Winnipeg. He opened the bag and crumbs spilled onto his desk, and underneath the crumbs a few pieces had survived — broken, flattened on one side where they’d pressed against each other, but recognizable. He fished out the biggest one and went to the kitchen and found the Rogers syrup in the cupboard and drizzled it over the piece on a paper towel and ate it standing at the counter, the syrup warm-sweet against the oil and salt of the dough. Then he went back to the desk and ate the crumbs off the surface with his finger, pressing his fingertip into them the way you’d pick up glitter, and they tasted exactly right — oil and salt and the slight chew of the dough, even in pieces.
“The rollkuchen didn’t make it,” he says.
A pause. “Oh no. Not one?”
“Crumbs. Mostly.”
“Jonah.” The sound she makes — half-laugh, half-sigh, his name carrying something she’s not going to say and he’s not going to ask about. “Well. Next time I’ll send farmer sausage. That’ll survive.”
She asks about school. He tells her. She asks about the apartment. He tells her less. She asks if he’s eating enough and he says yes and she says “rice doesn’t count” and he says “it’s not just rice” and she says “is it rice and eggs” and he doesn’t answer because it is rice and eggs.
She doesn’t ask if he’s lonely. She wouldn’t use that word. But the jacket — the jacket is her answer to a question he hasn’t asked. His dad’s coat in a Canada Post box. You need a real coat, the note said, in her small angular handwriting. The same handwriting that organized the casserole schedule for the Bergens, that kept the church directory marked up in the margins with phone numbers and checkmarks.
He puts on the Carhartt after the call. Too big. The sleeves hang past his knuckles and he rolls them up twice, the canvas stiff against his wrists. The collar smells like the machine shed — diesel and grease and cold metal, a smell that has no equivalent in the city, that belongs to a building he can see with his eyes closed.
He wears it out to the porch. Sits on the step. It’s cold — October now, the temperature dropping every night, the air sharp with something that isn’t quite winter but knows winter is coming. He pulls the collar up and the jacket creaks and he sits there for ten minutes, not doing anything, not thinking about anything he could name.
Late October. The cold comes.
Not gradually, the way southern cold arrives, a slow tightening, a series of warnings. Winnipeg cold comes all at once, like a door slamming. Minus ten overnight and the windshield of Liam’s Silverado is opaque with frost by morning and the puddles in the alley behind the Nook freeze solid and crack under Jonah’s boots and the elms are bare, stripped clean in a single windy night, their branches dark against a sky that has gone the flat grey-white of a lake frozen over.
The porch is too cold for sitting.
They sit on it anyway.
Liam has a thermos. Stainless steel, dented, the cap doubling as a cup, the kind of thermos you find at a hardware store and use until you die. The coffee inside is strong enough that Jonah can smell it from the step below, bitter and hot, the steam rising in the cold air and vanishing.
Chloe has a blanket. Wool, heavy, some shade of red that’s gone dark with washing, wrapped around her shoulders twice so the ends trail on the concrete behind her chair. She pulls it tighter when the wind comes up Furby from Portage, the wind that funnels between the houses and arrives on the porch carrying the smell of exhaust and freezing dirt.
Jonah is in the Carhartt. Sleeves rolled twice. The canvas stiff enough that the jacket holds its own shape when he takes it off, like armour, like the ghost of a larger man standing in his room.
They talk about nothing. Rent going up — Liam heard from the landlord, finally, a voicemail left at a time guaranteed to hit the machine, announcing a fifty-dollar increase effective January. Liam’s voice when he says this is flat, controlled, the anger underneath it like water under ice. Chloe’s professor who doesn’t understand her thesis project, who keeps asking her to explain what the paintings mean, and Chloe saying “if I could explain what they mean I’d write an essay, I wouldn’t paint them” and Liam making a sound that might be a laugh. Jonah’s compiler theory midterm, which he passed but only because he studied for eleven hours straight and drank enough coffee to make his hands shake during the exam, and Chloe says “eleven hours?” and Jonah says “it’s a hard course” and Chloe says “that’s not hard, that’s insane” and Jonah shrugs inside the big jacket.
The talk winds down. It doesn’t stop — it thins, the way a creek thins before it goes underground, the silences between sentences getting longer, the sentences getting shorter, until they’re not really talking anymore, just sitting with the option of talking available and choosing, without choosing, not to use it.
A car passes on Furby. Its headlights sweep across the porch, catching the frost on the railing, the steam from Liam’s thermos, Chloe’s breath hanging for a second in the light before the dark closes back in.
The silence is fine. Not comfortable in the way that word gets used — as if silence needs to be qualified, defended, explained. Just fine. The cold is real and the coffee is hot and the porch is too small for three people but they fit because they’ve learned the configuration — Liam in the green chair, Chloe in the other one with the blanket pooling around her feet, Jonah on the railing with his back against the post that Liam planed smooth in September, the wood still pale where the old paint was stripped.
Chloe pulls the blanket tighter. She’s looking out at the street, at the bare elm, at the houses across the road where lights are on in kitchens and living rooms and bedrooms, yellow squares in the dark.
“I like this house,” she says.
Not to Jonah. Not to Liam. To the porch, maybe. To the street. To the cold.
Nobody answers. The thermos goes around — Liam to Jonah, Jonah to Chloe, Chloe holding it with both hands against the blanket, drinking slowly, passing it back. The wind comes up Furby again and Jonah’s ears burn and Chloe’s blanket lifts at the edges and Liam doesn’t move at all, just sits with his hands around the thermos cap, his breath making small clouds that drift across the porch and dissolve.
They stay longer than they should. The cold is the kind that gets into your knees and your lower back and the tips of your fingers and doesn’t come out for twenty minutes after you go inside. They stay anyway. Jonah can’t feel his ears and his nose is running and the Carhartt is good but not good enough for minus ten and sitting still, and he stays.
When they go in, they go to their separate doors. Liam to the main floor, his keys already in his hand, a nod over his shoulder that could mean goodnight or could mean nothing. Chloe up the stairs, the blanket trailing behind her, her bare feet on the cold hardwood — she’s taken her shoes off again, even in October, and her footsteps creak above Jonah’s head as she crosses to her apartment.
Jonah goes down. The basement stairs, the furnace hum, the low ceiling, the desk-door with the ring stain from this morning’s coffee. He takes off the jacket and hangs it on the back of the chair and the jacket holds its shape, arms out, like someone about to catch something.
He sits on the bed. The radiator ticks. Above him, faintly, the needle drops on a record and Chloe’s music starts, quiet this time, something slow, and through the wall beside him the pipes clang once as Liam runs water in the kitchen.
He doesn’t think about why he stayed on the porch. He brushes his teeth and gets into bed and the sheets are cold and then they’re warm and the music plays above him and the furnace hums beside him and the house settles around him the way old houses settle — with sounds, with shifts, with the particular groaning patience of a structure that has stood for a hundred years and will stand for more, holding whoever happens to be inside it.