The Woman in Valencia by Annie Perreault (book recommendations website txt) 📗

or fruit candies, Playmobil knight’s helmet, tampons, crumbs from old snacks, stray raisins ground into the lining, torn movie stubs, pen caps, tubes of lipstick that may or may not have gone rancid, child’s tiny sock, shredded old tissues, souvenirs kept for no particular reason, like the outdated Cape Cod tide chart, a dull pocket knife, a handful of messages from fortune cookies whose predictions never came true. Claire Halde has nothing to hide, other than the shame of the boring mess that has become her life.

Claire gazes at the worn leather, stretched out in places, and wonders whether anyone will miss the woman, whether somewhere children, a lover, a pimp or a boss is waiting for her.

Opening the zipper would no doubt solve the mystery of the stranger’s identity: first and last name, address, age, nationality, height, eye colour, mother’s maiden name. Perhaps that had been her last wish, which she’d conveyed by handing Claire the purse: not to die in anonymity. Or maybe it was the complete opposite: to shed her identity, to die incognito by leaving the purse behind. The numbers in the elevator light up one after another—third floor, second floor—and Claire still hasn’t decided whether she should look inside the bloodstained purse.

When the elevator comes to a halt and the doors slide silently open onto the bright lobby, decked out with green plants and charcoal leatherette loveseats arranged around a patterned rug, Claire presses the square metal button embossed with the number 7. She presses so hard her fingertip turns white, like that will make the automatic doors close any faster as they come together in a perfect seal, like the stabbing motion will speed up the cables or the cabin, or make the light move quicker—first floor, second floor, third floor, where a man steps forward and asks in a British accent, Going down?, then takes a quick step backward when he notices that the arrow above the door is pointing up. Claire never once takes her eyes off the tote bag, which is cutting into her wrist, as the doors slide smoothly back into place with an abrupt whoosh. Bag resting against her hip, Claire waits for the 7 to light up before stepping out of the elevator and walking toward her room.

When Jean asks her a few hours later why she didn’t go back downstairs to turn the bag over to the hotel staff, when he demands to know what came over her when she instead went back to their room, rolled the purse up in a towel and stashed it in her suitcase, she’ll answer him clearly, with the cold detachment of a rehearsed speech: The woman said keep the bag; I respected her last wishes.

THREATS AND EMERGENCIES

A human body part, shredded muscles and ligaments, shiny cartilage—that’s what Claire sees as she walks toward the paramedics. The fragment of heel bone, the size of a not-altogether ripe apricot, is some three feet from the body. It must have taken a bounce, like a rock in a game of hopscotch leaping along the concrete, leaving unsightly scratches on the delicate skin. It’s just lying there, a repulsive piece of bone surrounded by flesh, barely bleeding, a perfect match to the foot injury. The woman is on her back, her legs twitching on the sidewalk.

Claire will carry the mental image of the shattered heel bone with her for a long time, and she’ll think back on it often. In trying to imagine the pain that must have followed the impact, she’ll conjure up the collision between bone and concrete a thousand times in the weeks to come. She’ll even look it up: There are more than seven thousand nerve endings in a single foot.

She will relive the fall in her head. It would start with feeling like you’d been slammed in the stomach with a brick or an iron bar as you plummet through the void, like a punch in the gut that cleaves you in two.

Claire is familiar with that winded feeling: When she was ten, she’d fallen several feet while trying to nail a board into her new treehouse. In the blink of an eye, she’d toppled out of the tree, hammer in hand. She can still remember the pain of the bark scraping against the tender skin of her pale belly and the angry red streaks left behind. She’d lain on the ground, the wind completely knocked out of her for a few seconds, embarrassed by her clumsiness, blood in her mouth and pine needles matted in her hair.

But right now, Claire Halde is breathing freely, standing upright, trying to process the information swirling around the body—the different textures, the concrete and the sky, the bricks and the trees, the dwindling procession of sounds, the damping of decibels, the botanical sigh of the grass swaying in the wind, the comings and goings of the traffic around her, speeding up and slowing down. It strikes her how calm the hotel employees are; one of them lights a cigarette, inhales, then blows out a cloud of nicotine, blue curls of smoke hanging briefly in the air.

Out of the corner of her eye, she notices an old woman on the median in the middle of the boulevard crossing herself as a paramedic bends over to drape a thermal blanket over the chest, shoulders and exposed, delicate neck of the woman in Valencia, leaving only her face uncovered. She fixates on the sweat beading on the nape of the man’s neck, running down his back and soaking the collar of his pale shirt. Claire doesn’t dare ask him if the woman is dead. She imagines she must be, since no one is trying to revive her. There’s no blood—or very little, at least—no red pool forming under her skull, but maybe that’s because her hair is soaking it up. Claire has seen more blood on her son’s sheets when he wakes up with a nosebleed in the middle of the night.