The Woman in Valencia

her trips, shoeboxes filled with pictures of unidentified volcanoes, glaciers, beaches and cities, eventually supplanted by a jumbled mess of misnamed computer files, my mother was a disaster, completely disorganized, never wrote anything on the backs of printed photos, all the snapshots of my childhood, birthdays and Christmases, first days of school, vacation memories and Halloween costumes—me as a ladybug, a witch, a princess in a poufy dress, buried up to my chin under a layer of sand, skipping among the ruins of Angkor, me with my first pigtails, covered in ice cream, on horseback next to a volcano, nose buried in a tropical drink, naked in the bathtub, asleep on a train, cheek pressed up against my blankie, smiling gap-toothed over a chocolate cake topped with strawberries—all stored in a single folder on her computer labelled Pictures, I find one of my mother with short hair, there aren’t many pictures of her with long hair, there’s one I like a lot, you’re wearing a leather jacket, faded jeans, pretty red lipstick, you’re my age, twenty-three, tangled brown locks blowing in the breeze, you’re standing regally on the steps of the Trans-Siberian, at the station in Yekaterinburg, as though all the forests in Russia were your kingdom, a wide smile on your face, a happy young woman, cheeks rosy, eyes sparkling, a colourful wool shawl draped around your neck, I found it tucked away in a box, that floral-print shawl from Russia, moth-eaten and full of holes…

KILOMETRE 22

… we’re back at the port of Valencia, I glance at the boats, the yachts, the flowerpots in the median, the palm trees, a playground surrounded by a fence that looks a lot like a candy necklace, now we’re running through the misting station, like a lukewarm bath meant to bring down a fever, cooling off my neck and head, I’m braced from head to toe, my soul rinsed clean, bleached, a brief chill runs through my brain like I just chewed an ice cube, if only the same could be done with dark thoughts, wash them away…

KILOMETRE 23

… again with the dry mouth, I run my tongue over my lips, five minutes thirty-nine seconds, still okay, stay focused,

whenever her face pops into my mind, it’s always got that same sad, clouded look on it, the expression from those last few days, sometimes my mother would stop mid-sentence during bedtime stories, and I could tell by the look in her eyes, the shadow passing over her face, that her thoughts were miles away from the fairy tales, one day at the grocery store, she opened up the ice cream freezer and just stood there, unmoving, staring at the cartons of lemon sorbet, forehead pressed up against the frosty door, Léon had tugged on her sleeve and asked: Are you okay, Mama? and she hadn’t answered, we’d pushed past her to grab a tub of mint chocolate chip, then, without a word, she’d gone back to pushing the cart, and we’d trotted along behind her to the cash, my mother, already almost gone, hauling her grocery bags all the way home, serving us ice cream in deep bowls, then leaving us alone in front of the TV, Mama will be home in a hour, I need to go for a run…

KILOMETRE 24

… it feels like my body is turning to lead, everything wants to slow down, arms, legs aren’t swinging as freely as they did before, I need to stay sharp, on the flyleaf of your running journal you’d written “Beware of the middle miles,” a sentence from The Competitive Runner’s Handbook, a guide you’d considered your Bible, a worn, dog-eared volume that I devoured hungrily, lingering on the passages you’d underlined and annotated—it’s around the middle of the race, according to the author, that you tend to lose focus and fall off your pace—you’d taken a yellow highlighter to the pace charts, underlining the times you needed to pull off a 3:30 marathon, and converted the miles to kilometres, in your journal you’d also jotted down a list of mantras: “The worst is yet to come,” “Just flow,” the quote by Rilke again, “Just keep going. No feeling is final,” and my favourite, “Relax your shoulders,” I don’t know if you actually repeated them to yourself while running, I think it’s more like your head was filled with a bright light or a raging blizzard when you ran, or like a thick bank of fog rolled in and your brain became a fathomless ocean, a seabed untouched by doubt…

KILOMETRE 25

… I have this memory of my mother, a holiday in the islands, I must be nine or ten, I’m wearing an emerald-green bathing suit, my little brother is round and happy, collecting seashells and bits of broken crab shells, my mother takes me snorkelling, she adjusts my mask, it’s tugging on my hair, I’m scared, but I really want to go, she shows me how to breathe, points to the looming black formations beneath the turquoise water, explains that they’re coral reefs, we set out, the sun over our shoulders, I’m already a strong swimmer, my mother is holding my hand, I grasp her fingers tightly, I’ve never swum with so much water beneath me, we follow the schools of fish, we explore, my heart is pounding, my feet kicking, I swim in my mother’s wake, I feel incredibly alive and so tiny compared to the deepness of the water, the marine life, I stay close to her, my hand folded into hers, then my mother gives my arm a tug and points to something, I don’t see it at first, I look hard, there’s so much to see, then it’s right there in front of me, a giant sea turtle gliding along just a few metres away, I also remember seeing a stingray and feeling terrified as I watched it lurking in the sand, that moment alone with my mother