The First Warm Thing

The night the ice storm took Mile End, the trees on Rue de Gaspé came down one branch at a time. Maëlle Phan heard four go between the Laurier metro and the corner of Saint-Viateur, each a rifle shot and then a long, glassy collapse, and stopped flinching at the fifth. She thought, without meaning to, of the man on the fifth floor, whom she had spent two years carefully not asking about. The freezing rain had been falling since mid-afternoon. It did not look like much in the air, a fine grey hiss under the one working streetlamp on Saint-Laurent, but it arrived on everything as a skin of clear ice a finger thick, on the parked cars and the stop signs and the power lines, which sagged between the poles like wet laundry and shone.

Past Saint-Laurent there were no streetlamps at all. Mile End had gone dark at twenty to seven, according to her mother, who had texted three times in capital letters from Côte-des-Neiges, where the lights were on and would stay on, and where there was a bed made up. Maëlle had answered once — Working. Building needs me. Love you — and put the phone in the inside pocket of her parka where the battery would keep warm.

The building stood at the far end of the block against the black line of the railway embankment: five storeys of brown brick, a textile factory until 1969, a warren of garment-workers' apartments until the nineties, lofts now, with the old loading bay bricked in and a lobby door of wired glass. Every window was dark. Ice had sealed the brass handle so completely that she had to strike it twice with the heel of her glove before it broke free, and the first thing she felt inside was that the lobby was barely warmer than the street.

She did not take her hat off. She stood a moment in the dark, breathing through her mouth, listening to the building the way she listened to it every night: the hollow tick of radiators going cold, the drip somewhere from a gutter over the lane, nothing moving on the stairs. Then she took the flashlight off her belt, found the ring of keys at her hip by touch — twenty-six keys, every door in the place, the weight of them familiar as a hand — and went to fetch the generator.

It lived in the storage room behind her office, a red portable set the size of a suitcase that the owners had bought after the last storm and never once serviced; she had serviced it herself, in October, on her own time, because she had read the manual and nobody else had. She rolled it on its two small wheels down the back corridor and shouldered open the lane door. The lane was a chute of pure ice between the building and the chain-link fence of the tracks. She set the generator three metres out from the wall, well clear of the door and the ground-floor windows, checked the tank by flashlight — full, as she had left it — set the choke, and pulled. It coughed. She pulled again, braced with one boot on the frame, and it caught and settled into a flat, rattling roar that was the most beautiful noise she had heard all day.

Her phone buzzed against her ribs as she was running the extension cord in under the door.

"Maëlle. It's me." The property manager's voice came in pieces. He lived in Laval, where it was merely raining. "Listen — the city's — it's going to be a declared emergency at nine. You don't — you lock up and go home."

"There are still people in the building."

"Most of them left. I've had — emails all afternoon, everyone's gone to family."

"Most isn't all." She knelt and seated the plug in the power bar, and the office lamp through the open door came on yellow and weak. "Monsieur Gauthier is on three. He hasn't emailed you, because he doesn't have email."

"Then — call the fire service, they'll — they're doing rounds."

"And until they do, the building has nobody in it who knows where the shut-off valves are."

"That's not — insurance doesn't —" A long crackle, a word that might have been liability, and then his voice clear for one sentence. "I am telling you as your employer to lock the building and leave."

"I heard you," said Maëlle. "I'm on shift at nine. It's ten to."

The line went dead before he could answer, and she was fairly sure it was the network and not him. She looked at the phone for a second, at the one bar flickering, and put it away, and did not feel especially brave. It was the job. The building called and she came; that was the entire arrangement, and she had kept it for eight years in two buildings and liked it better than any other arrangement in her life.

At nine o'clock exactly the battery radio on her desk said, in French and then in English, that the City of Montreal had declared a civil emergency, that the bridges to the South Shore had been closed since eight, that residents without heat should go to a warming centre, and that Hydro-Québec could not yet estimate restoration for the Plateau, Mile End or Outremont. She took the pencil out of her hair, since the pen had frozen in her pocket, wrote the time on the shift log, pushed the pencil back through the knot, and went up.

The interior stair was the oldest thing in the building, older than the apartments and the lofts, a brick masonry core that ran up the middle of the structure with no outside wall and a steel fire door at every landing. Her flashlight threw a hard white oval ahead of her up the treads, which were worn into shallow dishes at the centre by sixty years of women carrying bolts of cloth. It was a few degrees warmer in here than in the lobby. She noted it the way she noted everything, as something that might be useful later.

Two was empty. She went down the corridor anyway, knocking and calling at each door and trying the handles, because the Bélangers' cat had been left behind in the last storm and she had found it on the second day, furious under a sink. Tonight every door answered with the dead flat sound of an empty apartment. She checked the radiator valves in the corridor, felt the pipes — cold, still full — and made a note to think about draining them if it went past a day.

Three had a line of candlelight under the door at the end.

She knocked twice, then a third time harder, and waited, and heard the slow shuffle she knew, and a chain, and then Réal Gauthier opened the door in a cardigan over what looked like at least two sweaters, with a tartan scarf wound up to his ears and a candle in a saucer in his hand. He was eighty-six and small and bent, and he held the candle up to her face as if he suspected her of being someone else.

"Ah. The superintendent," he said. "I thought it was the Jehovah's Witnesses. They'd be the only other fools out."

"Monsieur Gauthier. The fire service will be doing rounds tonight. There's a warming centre. I can walk you down and wait with you."

He turned his head a few degrees, so that his left ear faced her, which was the deaf one. "What was that?"

"A warming centre," Maëlle said, to the right ear, stepping round him. "With heat. And soup. And a cot."

"And two hundred people coughing on me." He lowered the candle. "I have lived in this building since 1968. I lived in it when it was apartments for the girls off the Gaspé trains and the Portuguese and the Greeks, and the heating was one oil furnace that worked when it pleased, and I was cold then too. I have four blankets, a thermos, my pills and a radio. I am staying."

"The pipes are going to freeze by morning."

"Then they'll freeze with me beside them." He peered at her. "You're not going home either."

"I'm on shift."

"Hm." He seemed to consider that a sufficient answer, which for him it was. "You'll come by."

"Every hour," she said, and meant it, and he nodded as if he had won something and she had lost nothing, which was near enough the truth. She took his pill organiser off the kitchen table and checked it by flashlight — Thursday evening's compartment empty, Friday morning's full — and set it back square. The apartment smelled of candle wax and pipe tobacco though he had not smoked in ten years. On the table, beside the thermos, there was a stack of old type-cases he used as bookshelves, and she knew without asking which drawer had the cookies.

"Candle away from the curtain," she said.

"Yes, maman."

She left him with the door on the latch, not the chain, and did not tell him why, and he did not ask.

The fourth floor was empty. The graduate student in 4B had gone to her boyfriend's in NDG at noon and had texted a photograph of her ficus with the caption please?, and Maëlle had moved it away from the window already, in the afternoon, before her shift, without being paid for it. She did the corridor anyway, and the radiators, and stood at last on the fourth-floor landing with her flashlight pointing up the last flight.

It was two years since she had come to this building, and in two years she had not once gone up that final flight without being called.

The fifth floor was one unit. The whole top of the building, a single long loft under the roof, Le Goff, C. on a plain card in the mailbox downstairs in a hand she had first taken for an old woman's and then, when she saw him write it again on a delivery slip, understood simply to be old. She had seen him perhaps a dozen times. A large man, grey-haired, in a dark wool coat he wore regardless of the season, who said bonsoir to her in the lobby as if he had considered carefully whether to say it and then decided that the courtesy was owed. The day staff said he never took his mail before six in the evening. She had checked, in her first June, when it was still light at nine o'clock and she came on at dusk: his box was always still full.

And there were the envelopes. Brown, franked, not stamped, arriving three or four times a year, with a return address on Rue Berri and no organisation printed above it, only a reference number. She had held one in her hands once, when the carrier left it in the wrong box, and had carried it up to the fourth landing and slid it under the fire door to the top stair rather than knock, and had not turned it over to look at the back. Other people's paperwork was theirs. That was a rule of the job and also, she had come to suspect, a rule she kept for herself, because a woman who looked hard at the brown envelope would have had to ask why she had been counting them.

She did not go up. He had never once called her; not for a radiator, not for a leak, not for the lock that stuck in the cold every winter. He had a phone. If he wanted something from the building he would ask for it, in the complete, careful sentences she had heard him use on the delivery men, and she would come. She stood on the landing longer than there was any reason to, the flashlight beam lying across the brick, the cold coming through her parka at the shoulders, and then she turned and went back down.

In the lane the generator was still roaring. She checked it anyway, crouching on the ice with the flashlight in her teeth to look at the fuel gauge, the rain freezing in a glaze on her sleeve while she watched. It would run nine hours on the tank at this load. She had one more can in the storage room, and the stations on Saint-Laurent were dark. That was a problem for tomorrow. She stood and shook the ice off her arm and heard, across the tracks, a whole tree go over somewhere in Outremont, a long tearing crack and then a crash that she felt in her feet.

Back in the office she hung the parka on the chair to keep her shoulders out of it for a minute, pulled the space heater off the shelf and looked at it, and at the cord, and at the stairwell door, thinking about the brick core and the warmth it had held on the way up, and about an old man who would not leave his apartment and might, with enough persuasion, sit on a landing. She was still working out the length of cord it would take when the desk phone rang.

The landline. It had its own line to the exchange and it was the only thing in the building that had not noticed the storm. Nobody called it at night except the alarm company and, once, a drunk looking for his sister.

She picked it up. "Rue de Gaspé, superintendent."

There was a pause, and a click, and then a woman's voice that was not a woman at all but a recording, bright and bilingual and entirely unhurried.

"This is an automated welfare call from the Registry, on behalf of the City of Montreal, during a declared civil emergency. You are listed as the emergency contact for a registered address." A second click, and a different voice, flatter, reading out a field from a form: five-four-four-one, rue de Gaspé. "Under the Registry's emergency order, the registered occupant is confined to this address for the duration of the emergency. Please confirm the welfare of the registered occupant, unit five. Press one to confirm that the occupant is safe. Press two to request a callback. Press three if you are unable to confirm."

Maëlle stood in the yellow light of the office with the receiver cold against her ear and her hand on the ring of keys at her hip.

She knew what the Registry was, the way everyone in the city knew, the way you knew that there was a morgue or a parole board. It was a building on Rue Berri. It was a line in the newspaper once or twice a year. It was brown envelopes with a reference number and no name above the address.

"Press one to confirm that the occupant is safe," said the recording, patiently, again.

Above her, through five floors of brick and cold, the top of the building sat dark and silent, as it had sat every night for two years while she did not go up.

She did not press anything. She put the receiver down on the desk, off the hook, with the voice still going small inside it, and took the flashlight.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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