SITGES
The Sunday after the fall, a few days before returning to Montreal, as they’re strolling along the shore in Sitges—“Must-see seaside resort,” according to the guidebooks—Claire notices a woman sit down on a stone palisade overlooking a cliff. As Claire looks on, the woman shifts her weight onto her hands and raises her legs. Claire stops dead in the middle of the street, drops her little girl’s hand, shakes her head. Her entire body freezes. She takes a step forward, ready to sprint toward the cliff, and just as she frantically screams STOP!, she realizes the woman is smiling. Her head is at a forty-five degree angle, and she’s pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head, which is covered with a thick helmet of dull, brown hair. The woman is posing for her husband, a sweaty, oily-faced man in Bermuda shorts, holding a camera not six feet away. Claire trembles as she takes her daughter’s hand again, and Jean glares at her, eyebrows furrowed.
“What the hell, Claire?”
“I don’t know, I just thought…”
MONTREAL AIRPORT
At carousel 6, they’re still waiting for their luggage to emerge. People are getting impatient. Some look visibly annoyed, foreheads creased with frown lines; others are huffing and puffing, taking their exasperation out on their life or travel partner: Talk about a crappy ending to our holiday, what a shitty company, worst experience of my life, we should make a complaint. Jean crosses his arms and exhales loudly; he casts an irritated glance at the kids, who are standing next to the conveyor belt, waiting eagerly for the suitcases to appear. Claire keeps her distance, hangs back from the crowd; quite frankly, she’d like to walk away from the whole scene. She looks away. Her gaze travels above the roiling sea of peeved heads and shoulders and comes to rest on a giant TV tuned to a twenty-four-hour news channel. Headlines scroll by on a blue ticker at the bottom of the screen: “New surge of violence in Sudan. Young woman found in California 18 years after kidnapping. Teenage girl drowns in Rimouski River. Montreal beats record high set 83 years ago.”
Later, as Claire is looking out the window at the cars crawling by on the Metropolitan, another news bulletin will announce the latest in a string of tragedies in the Mediterranean. Libyan authorities have found the bodies of one hundred and thirteen migrants washed up on shore after their boat capsized off the coast of Sicily, the radio announcer will drone. It’s estimated that some one hundred others may have gone down with the ship, she’ll conclude, before moving on to the sports scores, the weather, the arts and entertainment segment, and finally the traffic. At that point, the taxi driver will turn up the volume and let out a long, weary sigh. Claire and Jean will look at each other silently in the air-conditioned car. Drivers will need to be patient: It’s going to be another long ride home.
*
Over the years, various news stories she reads will continue to raise the spectre of the woman in Valencia. “Man throws himself off Tate Modern,” a headline will blare one July afternoon. A woman will confess to the Evening Standard that she finds it “really sad that this happened on the first sunny day of the year and just before the Olympics.” Memories of the Spanish city will come surging back with news of an investigation into how a drunk man died after being struck in the head by a metro train at the Langelier station one January evening. Sprawled out on the platform, he was ignored by at least forty bystanders and three transit employees. No one lifted a finger to help him as two metros came and went, mere inches from his body, as a full sixteen minutes elapsed, and the man lay dying without anyone raising an eyebrow. When Winston Moseley, Kitty Genovese’s killer, dies in prison at the age of eighty-one, more than half a century after brutally raping and murdering her in the middle of a New York City street, Claire Halde will read old newspaper articles about how thirty-eight witnesses watched the scene unfold from their apartment windows without coming to the victim’s rescue.
At night, too, she will be haunted by the outline of the woman’s body—that skin and that blonde hair. The unrelentingly hoarse and garbled voice will penetrate her nightmares. And when she’s running—months, even years after the trip to Valencia—she’ll sometimes feel a dull throbbing, a jarring sensation in her heel bone. Never again will she be able to hear the word Valencia without thinking about the woman, without reminding herself: While on vacation in Spain, you let someone die.
II RETURN TO VALENCIA (THE HOSTILE POINT ON THE HORIZON)
THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE
I remember my mother running.
I think about her often, sprinting like she was trying to escape from us, run away from us at top speed.
Since arriving in Spain three days ago, I’ve been carrying around the same soft-cover notebook with the mustard-yellow binding. I run my hand over its smooth surface; I’m too scared to read it again. I’m keeping my distance.
Over the years, my mother amassed countless of these slim notebooks, which she bought from a Japanese stationery store in New York City. When I turned eighteen, my father gave me a pile of them, most of them identical, all of them dog-eared to varying degrees. There’s a rectangular sticker on the cover of one of them, the same kind she used to label our school workbooks and Duo-Tangs. In the blank space framed by a thin blue border, she’d written in cursive, in black ink: “Trip to Spain.” Tucked between the pages, on
