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

Manuel is still sleeping. Claire slips on a pair of shorts, a tank top and running shoes, and straightens her hair. The sweat is already beading on the back of her neck. It’s going to be a hot one. On the table in the entryway, she finds the set of keys, which she stuffs into her shorts pocket along with a twenty-euro bill. She leaves the apartment, closing the door softly behind her. She doesn’t leave a note on the table; let Manuel worry if he wakes up.

*

She runs in a straight line, parallel to the sea. It’s quiet here; the people she passes look hale and hardy, tanned and relaxed, like nothing in this vacation village could faze them. Bit by bit, the stiffness drains from her body, and she lets herself be lulled by the ocean air, the dazzling sun. Her jaw softens.

What an amazing machine the heart is, Claire has thought ever since she first started running a few years ago, coming to the sport at the age of thirty-three, marvelling at the sheer power of the organ, which she’d never really overtaxed up to that point, not even as a small child or a teenager.

With as much vehemence as most of her classmates, the young Claire Halde had detested running laps around the oval track behind the high school. She’d despised the awkward business of hurdles and the dreaded prospect of her shinbones cracking against the sharp gates with each running leap of her clumsy, gawky teenage girl’s body, breasts bouncing in her Fruit of the Loom cotton granny bra. She’d held an equal loathing for gymnastics—her balance beam jumps performed with no grace whatsoever—lap swimming, and the brazen nudity and immature antics of the locker room. She’d cursed her legs, for having to be waxed before gym class, and that goddamned bush of a bikini area, for having to be shaved before each pool session. For Claire, physical activity had always been a series of humiliations she’d had to endure, all the while envying the lithe, slender, perfectly hairless bodies of the pretty girls. The girls with the flat, toned stomachs and the bouncy ponytails who knew how to throw a javelin without bashing themselves in the back of the head, who shrieked with excitement when the gym teacher announced they’d be playing a team sport, who year after year made the cut for the regional track-and-field meets. She vividly remembers the forearms left red and smarting from volleyball serves, the missed passes, the bad throws, bad catches, bad bounces and bad kicks. Then there was the rope climb; she’d never forget that coarse rope, dangling there from the wall bars, and the sheer agony of having to hoist herself up its seemingly endless length, knot by knot, like an inmate scaling a prison wall. No, Claire Halde had never liked sports, and as for her heart, she’d mostly gone easy on it before taking up marathon running. She’d never given much thought to her heartbeat before, but now she craved that invigorating feeling, that energy burn of a hard workout, that furious acceleration of arms and legs as she ran, propelled forward, bounding along as though fleeing a tiger or a killer.

Before returning to Manuel, she stops at the supermarket to pick up coffee and oranges, pastries and jam, milk, a stick of butter, eggs. She waits a long time for the elevator, her skin damp, bag of provisions under her arm, smiling at the thought of a man waking up happy to eat breakfast with her.

KILOMETRE 36

… I think about you, Mama, I cling to the thought, I picture you running in your red dress, perpetually on the run in your red dress, according to the investigation Dad ordered into your disappearance, you spent three nights at the Valencia Palace Hotel, then nothing, an ATM withdrawal at the Madrid train station and two more in Seville to empty your bank accounts, but your name was nowhere to be found at any of the hotels in the Spanish capital or in Andalusia, in the CCTV pictures, we can see you, blonde, wearing that strapless red dress that no one recognized, not Dad or your friends—she always wore classic grey—you’re alone, you look good, a woman on the run maybe, but not running scared…

KILOMETRE 37

It doesn’t hurt me

Do you want to feel how it feels?

… I turn up the volume…

And if I only could

I’d make a deal with God

And I’d get him to swap our places

Be running up that road

Be running up that hill

Be running up that building

If I only could, oh

THE PRETTIEST BEACHES IN VALENCIA

To make Manuel happy, Claire spreads a towel out on the sand after breakfast, peels off her dress, kicks off her sandals. She sits facing the sea, legs stretched out, back loosely curved, forearms supporting her weight, elbows at right angles, stomach muscles flexed. Her body can be summed up in one word: tense. She’s not one of those girls who enjoys lazing around on the beach, working on her tan, and it shows. She soaks in the lines of the horizon, the sound and motion of the waves, the sea foam.

Manuel is a sun worshipper. His chest is flawlessly tanned, in stark contrast to his white Adidas swim trunks with black stipes down the side seams. Swim trunks that look very good on him. Very, very good, Claire notes. It takes a certain amount of confidence and the perfect tan to pull off a bathing suit that white, Claire thinks, adjusting her rather modest navy bikini.

Claire concentrates hard, focusing all her attention on the seascape in an effort to cover up her boredom. It’s the middle of the summer, and she’s barely seen more than a few waves. The heat is sweltering, the sand is scorching, the air is stifling.