She remains there, motionless, petrified, the purse resting against her bare thigh, watching the closed door of the ladies’ room. It’s midnight blue and scuffed up near the bottom, and Claire has no idea what she’ll see when it finally swings open, but then it does, and the woman emerges.
A blonde bag of bones, those are the words that come to mind when Claire sees the woman in Valencia once again making her way across the patio. Skin, too, waxy, grey skin. Narrow hips, a tight, flat stomach, scrawny arms, a sinewy neck that’s nothing but skin and bones propping up a head of washed-out blonde hair. The look in her eyes is dark and empty, devoid of all light. Her body moves jerkily, like a marionette with invisible strings that are holding up her head and controlling her arms and legs, which carry her to the edge of the roof and over the railing in a scissor-like motion. She crouches down and rests her bottom on the ledge for a moment—a few seconds or a few minutes, who can say, time seems to stand still—and then the woman gently eases herself into the void.
On the boulevard far below, passersby scream.
*
Presumably, the body—under the combined effects of adrenaline and helplessness, overcome by disgust and impotence, filled with dismay and anger—might simply give out: dizziness, a sudden drop in blood pressure, retching, disorientation due to emotional shock, or even a momentary loss of speech, which can happen sometimes.
Some people’s teeth chatter, others start to shake uncontrollably, like they’ve just emerged bone dry from freezing cold water. Others experience an emotional short circuit, flipping the switch on pain—theirs and others’—numbing themselves to their feelings as a means of self-preservation.
The shock can sometimes be followed by night terrors, mystery rashes—the skin talks, after all—or clumps of hair falling out in handfuls to block the bathtub drain, floating in the soup like dead flies. No one is immune to sudden baldness, the kind that leaves the scalp riddled with unsightly and glaringly obvious bare patches. And yet, nothing. None of this happened.
*
Claire strides purposefully toward the crowd gathered near the ambulance. She says what she has to say without hesitating. She states her version of the facts in carefully enunciated Spanish.
Her skin most likely gives her away. She doesn’t realize it (and won’t until the next time she looks in a mirror), but she’s deathly pale. There’s a horrible pasty taste in her mouth, her heart is racing, and a mental fog is creeping in, clouding the scene and blocking out any immediate thoughts.
She’s on autopilot: calm and collected, saying all the right things, leg muscles tensed for action. She’s rock steady on her feet, which is hard to believe for someone who’s fainted more than half a dozen times since her teens. The first time, she blacked out suddenly on the scorching sand, beach chair folded under her arm, after reading Anna Karenina in the sun for hours. Then, when she was fifteen, in a case of history repeating itself, she passed out in a heap of smarting skin after exiting a tanning booth, naked and cocky. Next came the time, in her early twenties, when a stranger’s arms were the only thing that prevented her pale, limp body from hitting the floor of a crowded metro car during rush hour on the blue line. Years later, she was introduced to the term “vasovagal syncope” for the first time when, bare-assed on a paper sheet with a speculum between her legs, she emerged from a fog after a ham-handed doctor perforated her uterus with a copper IUD. Over the years, she’d come to dread what might happen if she stood up too quickly; she shrunk from heatwaves and developed an aversion to large crowds. But all the precautions in the world didn’t keep her from keeling over at a rave, dehydrated and fresh off a heartbreak, or from swooning after getting out of bed moments after having her second baby. Another time after that, she slumped to the cold, beige tiled floor of a suburban shopping mall after donating blood to the Red Cross. And as if that wasn’t enough, she managed to faint dead away in a snowbank, wrapped in a bubble gum-pink bathrobe, after stepping out of an overheated sauna in the middle of the Ural Mountains, the same place where a ten-ton meteor would blast across the sky a few years later. And, most recently, as her terrified kids pawed through the medicine cabinet in search of a Band-Aid for their mother, she dropped like a sack of potatoes after slicing her thumb open with a bread knife. And yet, despite this ridiculous propensity to fainting and her sensitive vagal nerve, she remains steadfastly upright on the sidewalk in front of the Valencia Palace Hotel.
She stands frozen to the spot, her eyes glued to a chunk of heel bone that someone really should do something about.
MONTREAL, SUMMER 2009
Head under the sink, Claire gingerly picks up mouldy bits of old sponges, stiff and crumbling, wondering disgustedly why she even kept them in the first place. The same disdain is levelled at gnarled, rusty balls of steel wool, stained rags and the dregs of a bottle of Windex. Claire Halde scrubs or tosses anything that looks remotely sketchy.
She checks her watch and sighs. Air France flight 347 for Barcelona is scheduled for takeoff at 7:45 p.m. Tonight, another family will move into their house for the summer. Catalan strangers will sleep in their beds, shit in their toilet, stand their toothbrushes up in the ceramic cup that Claire has soaked in bleach overnight to dissolve weeks of slimy stains and fine lines of black mould built up in the cracks.
Jean is gathering up all the electronics—cables and chargers, batteries and cases, Bluetooth accessories and adaptors—which he’s organizing obsessively in a large bag full of pouches and compartments as though he
