Re­wind

The alarm doesn't wake you anymore. Your body does it — 5:47, give or take — same as it did when you were seventeen and had to be at the yard before the foreman.

You lie still for a moment. The ceiling is water-stained near the window, a brown halo from ice damming and poor soffit ventilation. You know exactly how to fix it. For now you just look at it. Evidence of a problem someone left for someone else.

The supportive housing unit smells faintly of garlic from down the hall and the industrial cleaner they use on Thursdays. It doesn't smell like your old place in Vanier. Nothing does anymore.

You don't use in the mornings anymore. You still think about it — probably will for a long time — but thinking and doing are two different addresses, and this morning they're far apart.

From up here on the Gloucester job, Ottawa makes a different kind of sense. You can see the cranes along the Trillium line, the glass towers going up near Lansdowne, the units that will rent for $2,400 a month to people who work on the Hill. You've helped build three of them.

By noon your coffee is cold and your hands are warm from the work. You eat your sandwich sitting on the ridge, legs on either side, looking out over the Rideau.

This is what it took. You mean all of it. The apartment you lost in Vanier, the car you slept in off Coventry Road, the shelter downtown where you learned to sleep with your boots tied to your ankles.

We need to go back, you think from the roof. I need to show you where it actually started.

The math isn't hard. That's the thing nobody tells you — the math is never hard. You can do it in your head in under thirty seconds, and the answer is always the same.

Rent: $1,740. Up from $1,490 fourteen months ago. The letter called it a rent adjustment in accordance with provincial guidelines.

Take-home after deductions, average week: $1,180. Bad weeks, when weather or your back kept you off the roof, less. Physio was $85 a session and you stopped going in February.

The math doesn't move.

You set a limit at the casino — $60, sometimes $80. You mostly keep to it. One Tuesday in late February you won $340 and for about four hours felt like a man whose problems were administrative rather than structural.

She's on the couch when you get home, legs tucked under her. She does the quick read — eyes to yours — checking. You hate that you're the reason for it.

You open the cabinet under the sink. There's a bottle of rye back there. You've walked past it two hundred times.

Just tonight, you think. It's not quite a decision. More like a door you've been standing outside of long enough that going in starts to feel reasonable.

You close the cabinet.

You open it again.

The notice is on the door when you get home from the Barrhaven job. White envelope, your name handwritten. You read it once, then again.

It's an N13. Renoviction. The building has been purchased. Substantial renovations require vacant possession. You have 120 days.

Substantial renovations means we can get more for this unit than you can pay.

You sit at the kitchen table and start looking. Two-bedroom in Vanier: $2,100. One-bedroom: $1,800. Bachelor: $1,450 — first and last required. You have $340 in your account.

Ottawa Community Housing waitlist for a one-bedroom: 5 to 10 years. You are thirty-eight years old.

The first night you sleep in your truck off Coventry Road. January cold is not a metaphor. You run the engine twenty minutes at a time and watch the gauge drop.

You don't sleep.

At 4am you drive to a diner on Bank Street. The waitress doesn't ask why you're there at that hour. There's another man two booths over doing the same thing. You don't look at each other.

You find the room off Coventry Road through a guy on the crew. $600 a month, cash, no lease. The room is barely wider than the bed. There is a lock on the door.

For tonight, that feels like enough.

Outside, it starts to snow.

You call ConnexOntario. The worker reads the options slowly: detox, residential treatment, outpatient assessment. They tell you the website has the full directory.

You open it on your phone. Half the program links redirect somewhere else. Two of the programs listed no longer exist.

You start calling anyway.

Ottawa detox: full. "Try again tomorrow morning."

Tomorrow morning you're already on a roof in Gloucester.

Kingston detox: also full. The worker says if a bed opens you would need to arrive within a few hours. Kingston is two hours away. You say you can make it anyway.

Then you learn something else. Most treatment programs require an OAARS assessment. The wait time is four to eight weeks unless you're already in detox or in a shelter stabilization program.

You are in neither.

You sit in the truck, phone in your lap, screen gone dark. Somewhere a bed exists with your name eligible for it. The distance between you and that bed is not a number you know how to calculate.