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

Noticing Claire ass-up furiously scrubbing the insides of their kitchen cabinets, he snaps, “Would you give it a rest? This isn’t the Ritz. They must be cool if they’ve agreed to a house swap. They’re not going to freak out over a bit of dirt under the sink.”

“You don’t get it,” Claire retorts, letting loose great streams of Fantastik in an attempt to erase months of cutting corners in their weekly cleaning routine. “I don’t want them seeing any trace of us and our lazy-ass habits. It’s bad enough I saw a centipede last night.”

“A what?”

The night before, she’d scrubbed the bathtub with so much elbow grease and Ajax that tiny cracks had opened up across the knuckles of her index fingers. A thin crust of blood had formed around the edges of the deepest cut. Her dry, rough skin still smarted from the harsh cleaning products. Before going to bed, with an aching shoulder but a deep sense of satisfaction at the newly gleaming porcelain, she’d run herself a steaming hot bath, which she’d sunk into, her thoughts spinning with everything she still had to do before they left. Between the ammonia fumes still lingering in the air and the clouds of steam building up in the bathroom, Claire had had trouble breathing. Relaxing her neck and shoulder muscles, she’d let herself slide deeper into the tub until she could feel the water lapping at the hair at the back of her neck. She’d closed her eyes but couldn’t relax. The heat wasn’t agreeing with her; her heart had begun to quiver strangely—a harmless cardiac episode, but worrying, nonetheless. She’d never liked taking baths. She’d straightened up like a shot when she spotted an ugly bug scurrying between the faucets and up the wall, its yellow carapace gyrating back and forth.

“A centipede! You know? A house centipede.”

She mimes the insect’s creepy-crawly legs with her fingers.

“Like a millipede, but uglier—a hairy millipede. Think I should’ve killed it? It was moving really fast and skittering all over the place. God knows where it went.”

Jean has never heard of centipedes and has a suitcase to zip up. Claire goes to their room, pulls all their clothes out of their drawers and stuffs them into big garbage bags, which she shoves in the kids’ closet. On their dresser, next to a mushroom lamp with a white polka-dotted red cap and a Lego armoured vehicle, a fish is wriggling in its bowl, on the surface of the water. Claire walks over to toss in a few flakes of fish food.

“Kids, kids, come see this! Quick! Your fish has a…”

Claire lifts her son up so he can get a better look at the fishbowl.

“Balou has a new friend. A centipede. A house centipede!”

But the centipede is just lying there, motionless in the bowl, plastered to the glass, head down in a perfectly straight line. Its body looks bloated.

“Is it dangerous?” her daughter asks.

“I don’t know. Anyways, it’s dead.”

Claire picks up the fishbowl and carries it to the bathroom. With a net, she gingerly scoops out the tangled mass of legs, shakes the corpse out into the toilet and flushes. The fish begins to twitch nervously, seized with convulsions that quickly peak, then goes completely still. Claire taps the thick glass with her finger. The fish doesn’t react. She rocks the bowl gently. The water ripples, but the fish remains motionless, belly up in the water.

“Jean…”

Claire walks over to her husband, holding the fishbowl in her hands.

“Maybe he had a heart attack. Or the centipede poisoned him. Or maybe it was a panic attack.”

“Shit! He could’ve picked a better time. We’d better not tell the kids,” Jean sighs wearily. “We’ll deal with it when we get home.”

Claire dumps the water and the fish into the toilet bowl, with the same coldness with which she’ll one day say, in a single breath, Jean, I don’t love you anymore. Go on, get out of here. She pulls the chain. Balou disappears into the sewers in concentric circles. She stows the empty bowl, the pouch of fish flakes and the net under the immaculate kitchen sink. She takes a moment to rip up the note she’d written in Spanish explaining to their guests how to feed the fish and clean the tank.

At the last second, she grabs her travel journals in a panic from her nightstand and stashes them in a shoebox, which she hides behind a pile of blankets in the linen closet, only to promptly forget where she put them. Once home from their vacation, they will search high and low for that bloody shoebox full of Japanese notebooks with the tan covers, like a collection of bleak Soviet-era packages. Years of handwritten confidences, line after line of her life story recorded in a rainbow of inks and leads, a stream of cursive writing, frenetic and illegible in places, that will only be found a few years later when they are packing up to move—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The taxi has just pulled up, and chaos and confusion break out in an attempt to get people and possessions loaded and ready to go: two kids, two suitcases, one stroller, one blankie, and one carry-on backpack.

Four passports? Check, confirms Claire Halde as she pulls the zipper closed on her purse. She closes her eyes, takes a few deep breaths, releases the tension from her jaw, and takes one last look back at their house. All is well.

“To the airport, please.”

Let the vacation begin.

BARCELONA

As they leave for Spain, they have no idea how their summer will unfold. They have five weeks of vacation and the keys to an apartment in the Sant Antoni district of Barcelona. They have no set plans for their summer in Catalonia, apart from taking things hour by hour, day by day, and wandering wherever their next adventure takes them. Time passes in a succession of days, then weeks, peaceful and