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

a sheet of paper folded in four, I found a list of bullet points, all starting with an asterisk and lined up neatly under the heading “Things To Do Before I Die.”

I’ve read that list from the late 2000s several times in the past few months. I was still in elementary school back then. It’s weird to think about her adding an item that involved me: “Run a marathon with one of my kids (maybe as my fiftieth-birthday present from them?).”

In my first apartment, near Little Italy, where I grew up, I hung a large, glossy 11 x 17 photo. In it, I’m six years old and there’s a P’tit marathon de Montréal bib pinned to my dark grey hoodie. Two long braids are splayed out in midair around my face, which is screwed up in effort. My eyes are fixed on the finish line, my forehead determined, my fists clenched. My mother, who’s running next to me, isn’t touching the ground; she’s suspended in a ray of light, her Adidas hovering over the asphalt and a carpet of dead leaves. She’s smiling at me proudly, as though she considered running a state of grace. There’s something unreal about your mom in this picture. Everyone who dropped by my place was struck by my rosy-cheeked, floating mom in motion—from her dazzling smile and ferocious look to her muscular calves emerging from form-fitting, electric-blue capri pants—every inch of her screaming: Run, sweetheart, you can do it!

I keep her many finisher medals from the Paris, London, Tokyo, New York City, Berlin, San Francisco and Boston marathons in one of my dresser drawers, hidden under a jumble of underwear. Whenever I’m rummaging around, half-naked, for a pair of nylons or flimsy lace panties, my fingers get caught up in the satin ribbons and the medals all jangle together. The clinking and clanging might as well be the sound of all the years that have passed, marked by a jeering brass band. I run my hand along the bottom of the drawer, finger the metal one more time, just to make sure the mementoes are still there—cold, sonorous disks buried under piles of white cotton and satin bras. I press them against my palm: the miniature skyscrapers of Manhattan and Tokyo, the Brandenburg Gate, Big Ben, the Golden Gate Bridge. When the medals rub up against one another, the embossed designs emit a shrill sound, like the singing of a cicada, filling my room with a preternatural cry, insistent and hypnotic.

My mother, fifty this month.

We didn’t set off fireworks over the lake like we did for her fortieth. But, in a few minutes, a starter’s pistol will be fired into the milky sky, and that burst will signal the start of the 2025 Valencia Marathon.

I will run this marathon—my first—as though my mother were next to me the whole time.

THE WEATHER OUTSIDE

It’s a rainy Sunday, ten years earlier. It’s exactly noon, Eastern Standard Time, according to the radio, which has been broadcasting the National Research Council of Canada’s official radio time signal every day since the Second World War. The summer storm lashing Montreal is more violent than the meteorologists had predicted. Strong enough to uproot trees and cause the river to burst its banks. In the Laurentians, power lines are toppling like dominoes. Bits of roofing shingles are hurtling through the sky, which is devoid of planes, because they’ve all been grounded. Even more than the disgruntled travellers staring up at the departure boards, Montreal drivers are edgy and impatient. Cursing, they’ve been jammed up in detours for hours because a cycling event—which will be called off abruptly due to the high winds—has shut down traffic across much of the city.

Seated in a tearoom, her back to the window and oblivious to all this, Claire slowly swallows her last sip of a cup of Earl Grey that’s gone cold. She’s sitting across from a girlfriend who’s got a better vantage of the sky.

“It’s completely black out there now. We’d better get home quick.”

“Yeah. Anyways, they’re waiting on me for supper.”

Claire calls home: Put the water on, I’m on my way. She runs home at a clip, the tepid, murky water splashing up the backs of her thighs.

She stops at a red light, sees her standing at the gas station.

She’s wearing a skintight miniskirt and a tank top that’s sliding down one shoulder, revealing the top half of a braless, saggy breast. She’s gesticulating in the middle of the street, purse swinging from her wrist, paying no mind to the traffic. Drivers honk at her and brake abruptly, throwing a curtain of muddy water over her trembling figure. Cars swerve around her, then drive off again into the storm. Her hair is thick and black, like steel wool. Her arms are scrawny and restless, whipping back and forth wildly through the air and water, like the antennae of a frenzied insect. The rain streams over her eyelids, which are blinking open and closed like someone in the throes of an epileptic seizure. She’s obviously high. The jerky movements of her arms and legs and the spasms contorting her face trigger a sudden flashback of the woman on the rooftop terrace.

Valencia. The feelings of impotence and imminent danger, buried deep inside her body for almost six years now, come rushing to the fore. Claire surveys her surroundings. There’s no one around. The rain-drenched sidewalks are deserted, no Good Samaritan steps out of his car or rushes out of the coffee shop across the street. The gas station attendant remains behind his bulletproof window, keeping an eye on his till. Claire and the woman are completely alone. Like a freak tidal wave, the memory of the Valencia Palace rises up and threatens to overcome her. For a moment, the horizon disappears behind a black wall of water.

It’s not unheard of for an aftershock to be stronger than the original earthquake. Memories rise up with a force that