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

back to her childhood, in a time before the hole in the ozone layer: the satisfying machine-gun sound when she would help her mother clean the windows, her father’s chin covered in shaving cream, her and her sister fighting over who would get to spray the fake Christmas tree with canned snow. Rat-a-tat-tat, followed by a long hissing sound and a cloud of particles released into the room, floating through the air, sticking in Claire’s throat. The foam cleaner, thick and white, expands and froths on contact with the mirror. The breathless runner’s reflection quickly disappears behind a snowy cloud of chemical foam.

*

Claire Halde goes back to her room, where she steps under the powerful jets of the rainfall showerhead, directly under the large disk dotted with tiny pinholes. She looks down at the rectangular bar of soap nestled in her palm. On contact with the water, fragrant, olive-green suds form on its surface. She’s relying on this late-night shower to calm her down and ease her into sleep. She relaxes slightly, rolls her shoulders, squeezes her shoulder blades together and releases the tension in her neck under the scalding water. The urge to cry hits her as violently as the need to sneeze; she thinks she might pass out in the suffocating steam, but she doesn’t care. The water plasters her hair to her forehead in hot, ropy clumps, but she doesn’t push them away. She has trouble opening her eyes against the force of the jets. The water runs into her mouth, gets up her nose, pools at her feet. In a sudden fit, Claire attacks her body with the miniature bar of soap, leaving her skin red in places. The sharp ridges of the soap rub painfully against her less fleshy bits: armpits, neck, backs of knees, anklebones, shins and wrists.

THE HOTEL AT NIGHT

It’s nighttime now. The day began with the intricate ballet of the phosphorescent jellyfish, the pirouettes of the dolphins, the amazement of the children—mouths agape, little hands pressed up against the glass of the tanks, dwarfed by the giant sea creatures, screeching with joy whenever a school of fish glided by—and it’s ended with the death of a woman replaying in a loop, sleep that won’t come, guilt, waves of nausea.

The images of the blonde woman twitching on the sidewalk have snuffed out all the magic of the Oceanogràfic. Her breath coming in gasps, Claire dissects the afternoon’s events minute by minute, from the stranger’s arrival at the pool to the chunk of heel bone lying on the pavement. Claire sees the woman walking toward her in slow motion, like a psychedelic catwalk performance or an actress in a film noir—Lynchian, Hitchcockesque. Her skeletal frame, her posture, shaky and distraught, a flash, then the sequence on fast forward: blonde hair, hoarse voice, waxy legs, white cotton square, oversized purse, hand struggling with zipper, cigarette trembling between lips, blood soaking through dressing, dripping down wrist onto blue towel, body slipping over edge of roof, scream trapped in throat, lungs devoid of air, elevator ride, spasms on sidewalk, chunk of bone and apricot-coloured flesh, ambulance siren, emergency blanket, sign of cross on median, taste of dirt in mouth, little girl hopping up and down, vomit, raw carrots.

*

In the hotel room, three sleeping bodies and her own rigid, restless one. Three bodies that have been inside her own: the two babies she carried in her belly, grown into small children slumbering in the wide hotel bed, little cheeks pressed up against an oversized feather pillow, the stiff, white cotton warmed by their moist breath; and the man who has caressed her, licked her, bitten her, penetrated her, made her scream and come, her neck, shoulders and pelvis spasming with brief and intense waves of pleasure. These three bodies have drifted off to sleep, while in Claire’s head, dark and terrifying fish slither through her thoughts. She sits motionless in the armchair next to the window, knees bent, heels pressed into her bottom, fingers laced around her shins, in a pitiful fetal position. Stomach still heaving, on the verge of vomiting at any second—a flashback to her first trimester with both kids—she digs her nails into the delicate skin of her palms, into the crevice between life line and head line.

She watches the children sleep, moved by the peaceful sound of their baby snores, comforted by the reassuring symphony of untroubled sleep. She’d know that breathing anywhere, that downy rising and falling that had soothed her when her babies had fallen asleep at her breast or dozed off in her arms for their afternoon nap, the tiny sounds of slumber and repose that have changed little over the years. Jean’s sleep, with its distinctive patterns, restlessness, and grunts and groans, is different. Unlike a milk-drunk infant, when he’s had too much to drink, his breathing gets loud and annoying. Claire elbows him in the side, but it’s about as effective as trying to shift an animal that’s been shot with a tranquilizer dart. The unyielding body next to her feels completely foreign.

Memories of nights spent nursing float to the surface. This is the same silence, enveloped in a deeper silence, the same kind of sleep that surrounds her now. She can picture herself walking into the kitchen in the middle of the night, parking herself in front of the fridge and opening the door with an exhausted jerk. After the predictable click of the rubber gasket unsticking and the lightbulb switching on above the top shelf, she’d stand immobile in the square of light, contemplating the contents, lulled by the drone of the motor. In this room, now, she feels like she did standing in the glow of that open door when, half-naked and famished, she’d eat yogurt straight from the container, hoping against hope that the newborn she’d just put down in the bassinette would sleep through the rest of the night without demanding another feeding. Those dimly lit hours of maternal