The Woman in Valencia by Annie Perreault (best ereader for pdf and epub .TXT) 📕

Claire watches her children float like starfish with their father in the pool. They’re having a ball. Jean was right: An afternoon swim is doing them good. It’s precisely the kind of treat they enjoy on holiday, but it wasn’t exactly how she’d pictured her trip to Valencia, forfeiting the charming streets of the Old Town, sacrificing an ocean view—all for a pool. And now the woman with the dead eyes has appeared and she’s speaking to Claire in a foreign language she doesn’t recognize. Claire answers her in Spanish, then in English, but she’s having trouble understanding her; the woman’s voice is hoarse, garbled, confused.

“Can you help me? My bag, take my bag.”

The woman puts the purse down at her feet, revealing a square of gauze taped over the veins on her right wrist.

The dressing is white and carefully applied, like a nurse would do. Claire casts a sidelong glance at the pristine square covering the woman’s injury and her throat contracts.

Blood is trickling from either side of the folded piece of white cotton, running in red rivulets down her alarmingly pale arm. The stranger ignores it, caught up in trying to unzip her bag. Her hands are shaking, and her movements are clumsy. Claire looks away, back to the pool and her children. She feels numb and everything sounds muffled, as though someone were holding her head underwater, blocking out all the noise on the surface. The flow of oxygen to her brain has slowed to a crawl. Claire has never seen anyone bleeding like that, from a self-inflicted wound. But she’s seen the scars before, once on a man at a party and another time on a young woman she’d worked with as a camp counsellor. Claire no longer remembers the names of these people who’d discreetly shown her the inside of their wrist, like a shared secret. Time had marched on over their skin. The cuts had closed, healed, faded.

It dawns on Claire that the woman must’ve just come from a doctor’s office or been discharged from the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital. But the blood is still flowing, streaming from her wrist onto her palm and down her fingers.

Her eyes riveted to the dressing, Claire asks the woman if she needs help, suggests they call someone, summon an ambulance, drive her to a clinic. This seems to spook the woman.

“No, no, no, no! No help, just the bag.”

Claire backs off. She considers the possibility that the woman might be in the country illegally, that she has her reasons for not wanting to involve the authorities, just as she has her reasons for trying to take her life. The blood continues to run down the woman’s wrist, but she pays it no attention, rummaging frantically through her purse. Claire is seized with fright, imagining a gun, a knife, her children witnessing what’s about to happen. She’s paralyzed by the force of the premonition: This woman is going to shoot herself in the head, right here in front of me, in front of my son and daughter. The scenario is immediately replaced by the thought of the woman pulling a knife from her bag and threatening to slash Claire’s throat with it.

Then, nothing. In Claire’s mind, thoughts and fears mingle with silence, then turn to hunks of glass and metal that collide, cracking and shattering into pieces. Time seems to be splintering in slow motion, like when someone drowns or a ship flounders in a storm. At that moment, nothing else exists but the purse, a gaping black hole that’s swallowing up the rooftop terrace, the pool, the kids floating like starfish on the water’s surface, the Valencian sky, the fifteen floors of the Valencia Palace, the lounge chair that Claire shrinks even further into.

Finally, the woman pulls out a pack of Lucky Strikes. She offers one to Claire, who waves it away. With trembling fingers, the stranger lights a cigarette. She hands her bag to Claire and moves to a corner of the terrace to smoke. Claire sets the bag down on the end of her chaise longue and eyes it nervously, as though a rat might suddenly crawl out of it. She inspects a cut on her finger and checks her hands for blood.

Claire doesn’t immediately grasp what’s happening. She watches her children playing in the pool. They’re laughing, clinging to their dad’s neck, splashing each other. They’re happy.

She can’t have them see what’s going on with this woman. All her attention is focused on them: Protect the children, don’t scare the children.

The woman smokes for a minute next to the bushes, looks down at the ground nervously, and skirts the greenery along the edge of the rooftop like she’s looking for something. Then she shuffles back to Claire, who tries to hand the bag back to her.

“Keep the bag, keep the bag!”

Her tone is harsh, annoyed. She mutters something, a question that Claire doesn’t catch. She becomes agitated and she’s having trouble forming her words. Claire thrusts her beach towel at the woman and points her toward a blue door to the right of the pool. The stranger staggers off in the direction of the ladies’ changing room, mopping up the blood on her arm as she goes.

Perched on the edge of her deck chair, Claire can almost feel her nerves thrumming. She tries to get Jean’s attention—surely he’ll recognize the fear in her eyes or notice the look of panic on her face. She wants to call out to him for help, but she’s gone mute. The danger is setting off alarm bells inside her. Her body is firing off a series of signals that are coursing through her: nerve impulses, a surge of adrenaline, a quickening of her heartbeat, sudden dry mouth, waves of nausea. Primal instincts kick in. Her brain is foggy, and she’s tensed like an animal ready to pounce. The balance between Claire Halde’s sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems is about to