26 Knots

by Bindu Suresh

  Invisible Publishing

  Halifax & Picton

  Text copyright © Bindu Suresh, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: 26 knots / Bindu Suresh.

  Other titles: Twenty-six knots

  Names: Suresh, Bindu, 1983- author.

  Identifiers:

  Canadiana (print) 20190079673 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190079681

  ISBN 9781988784243 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988784304 (HTML)

  Classification: LCC PS8637.U754 A614 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Edited by Leigh Nash

  Cover design by Megan Fildes

  Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Picton

  www.invisiblepublishing.com

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  for Andrew Harder, most honourable of men

  I

  Years later, he would reach out for her hand as she walked, oblivious, past where he was standing on the train paused at Lionel-Groulx. By then she will have drawn the nectar from every memory, dried the fallen petals with constant thought—the slightly ridiculous sway of his hips to jazz, the kisses in her creased palms as they made love, his crescent body arched around hers in the morning moonlight.

  But then, on that warm June afternoon, that life was just beginning—Araceli and Adrien were simply two young journalists, their future before them like a field of long, swaying grass.

  “This is my first fire,” she had said, opening the slim spiral notebook to a blank page as they watched charred fragments of building chip from the facade, covering the ground before them like a slow and purposeful rain.

  Adrien stood over his kitchen counter with a screwdriver, cracking open thick-shelled oysters and placing them in a glass bowl. Sébastien, a friend of Adrien’s from the Gaspé who was staying with him for the summer, stood next to him, his leg outstretched to keep Adrien’s black cat from jumping up onto the counter.

  Araceli was looking at a photograph on the fridge. It had been cut in half, on an angle; it showed Adrien, his back against the ocean, his hair wet and tucked behind his ears. His right arm had been cut off at the shoulder, a perfect scissor-line caressing his cheek.

  “I’d been at TVA for a year when the CBC called and offered me a job,” Adrien said, his lips pursed as square fragments of shell fell into the sink. He gave a sheepish shrug. “So I said, well, yes, it’s the CBC, so.”

  “So, you said yes,” Araceli said, touching the edge of the photograph. “Is this the Gaspé?”

  “It is,” Adrien said. He paused, turning away slightly to wipe his wet hands on a dishtowel. “But come, I have better pictures.”

  In the living room he pulled out an album with dark blue covers. He put his arm around Araceli’s waist as she flipped past seascapes, a picture of Adrien’s sister against the Atlantic with a child in each arm. He placed his hand, shyly, on her leg.

  “What do you think, Sébastien,” he said, calling out toward the kitchen. “Isn’t the Gaspé the most beautiful place in the world?”

  He pressed his lips gently against her neck.

  “Chez nous.”

  That night Adrien and Araceli made love for three hours. On the balcony under the moon and the swaying trees, in the humid summer air—her hands above her head and her fingers laced through his—he would stop to kiss her, still inside her.

  Inside the bedroom, warm, his blond body curved around hers and their legs interwoven, because drying each other’s skin with the rough purple towels had ended with her pushed against the tiled wall, his mouth on her throat, Araceli said, “I want to get to know you better.”

  Adrien laughed. Araceli nestled into his vocal cords as they rumbled against her forehead.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know,” she said lightly, but thought: What did your face look like before? And the other day, when you were out on the stairs—were you crying? How do you behave around the people you do not love?

  Adrien sat up and pulled Araceli onto his lap, folding his arms underneath her chest.

  “It’s just that we’re so sex-centric. If we’re left alone for five seconds we end up making love, wherever we are.”

  “That’s what couples do when they’re falling for each other,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “We have all summer to get to know each other.”

  Later that week, Araceli saw Adrien at a church in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. They smiled at each other; they delighted in leaving his apartment each morning and not knowing if they would be thrown together again, sent to cover the same story at the same time.

  The vestibule of the church was filled with long tables. Araceli crossed the room to meet Adrien; he stepped away from his cameraman. Looking at the family of refugees crowded at the table’s end, he said, “That family from Bogotá. They’ve been here for a month and they’re as attached to Montreal as if they’d been born here.”

  After the press conference, the three rejected refugees stood to one side, in the nave of the church, refusing to leave and void their claim to religious sanctuary. Araceli approached the mother, and then the daughter, neither of whom yet spoke much English or French; and, after she’d shared what she could remember of her time as a child in South America in their common language, they told her about the razors, the slashed arms, the skin wrapped in bloody newspaper. The woman called her husband over to show Araceli his scars.

  Adrien sat next to her on the church’s stone steps, his back against the pediment of a statue. This time he said, “I feel alone in Montreal. I feel like I don’t belong here.” He said the words evenly, as if by doing so he could reduce their weight.

  Araceli smiled. She, who had moved from Argentina at the age of seven, who fell into a comfortable stride everywhere, who had watched her parents look at each other in wonderment, snapping their fingers, at the loss of simple words like mesa and cuchara.

  To feel so lost after a move of only a few hundred kilometres: this was the sense of home, of having one’s feet take root, that endeared Adrien to Araceli.

  In English, Araceli was vibrant and cheerful; in Spanish, she was soft, maternal, with a voice from the undulating Córdoban hills; in French, she was endearingly wide-eyed and lost, tripping over her words as if they were large obstacles. Adrien liked her most, but knew her least, in his mother tongue.

  II

  The afternoon Pénélope met Gabriel at a high school cafeteria in Oka, he had been the only other adult there. Without a second thought, she had paid for her grilled cheese sandwich and taken the seat across from him.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You were across the street and saw the sign.”

  Pénélope nodded. Gabriel folded his newspaper under his coffee cup.

  “Believe it or not, we’re actually lucky. That restaurant is terrible.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “My mother works as a counsellor here,” he explained. “I live in Montreal, so I try to visit her every once in a while. Where are you from?”

  “Quebec City,” Pénélope said. “But I live and work in Montreal. I’m a journalist. I’m doing a piece on Kanesatake—you know, something beyond arson, exile, and police blockades.”

  “I’ve never been to Quebec City,” Gabriel replied. “Are you with the CBC?”

  “No, TVA.
I started there a year ago.”

  “TVA.” Gabriel smiled. “Is that the building on de Maisonneuve, near Papineau? I think my firm might have built that.”

  An hour passed. The school bell had rung once, and then again; the cafeteria was now empty but for a handful of students.

  “My sister Lille, I think, forgave our father more,” she said. “She was younger. She saw much less of what he did to our mother.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Nothing overt. He never hit her, for example. He just always made her feel unsafe, as if he were just about to leave. Or close their bank accounts.”

  “Are they still together?”

  Pénélope paused. “No. My mother died a few years ago.”

  In the silence that followed, they heard the clattering of trays as the students at the table beside them got up to leave. Gabriel reached across the table and took Pénélope’s hand in his own.

  “I never knew my father,” Gabriel said quietly. “I thought I did, but the man my mother said was my father turned out not to be. She kept the truth from me for years.”

  Only later, holding the double-striped pregnancy test up to the grey light of the bathroom window, or even after that, as she overlooked the rushing St. Lawrence from the Jacques Cartier Bridge, was Pénélope able to recognize this moment as a knot—as the first knot in an otherwise smooth life.

  III

  The woman in the photograph—the one whose cheek was pressed to Adrien’s so tightly it had to be cut away—was Sinziana. Adrien remembered the first time he’d seen her, sitting directly in front of him in his third-year political theory seminar at Concordia. It was the first day of class, and from the fact that she was two seconds behind on every instruction given, Adrien realized she didn’t speak English—it had been the same for him three years before, having moved from the Gaspé to attend university in Montreal.

  He zipped up his backpack as quietly as possible. He kept his pencil and his notebook in hand as he stood, walked down his row of chairs, up hers, and sat down beside her. She had looked at him, grateful; only then did he realize that she was beautiful.

  After class, he found out she was Romanian, and had just transferred from the Sorbonne. She had broken up with her boyfriend the month before, left her mother in Paris a year before that, and lost her father over a decade earlier in an anti-communist riot.

  It was the first thing he liked about her. She forged ahead, alone, not the kind of girl who would doubt that you loved her, whose insecurity needled its way into every crevice, weakening the mortar of every wall.

  Adrien came home from work—a father with a hunting rifle, first his wife holding her hands up over her face and their kids, screaming in circles, then all four of them dead, with interviews all day and his evening news report at six, in full view of the blood on the living room windows—to find his morning coffee cup sitting on top of a Bell phone bill. He lifted the mug to check the date.

  “Sinziana?”

  The wood floor creaked as she came into the kitchen, her arms covered in white paint and sawdust. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel, then placed it on the table next to the bill. “I thought you promised you wouldn’t hide these from me anymore.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” Adrien reached over to cover Sinziana’s paint-flecked fingers, his hands cold and stiff still from the December wind. “I just want you to be able to focus on your work. On creating something really beautiful.”

  “We talked about this already,” she said, pulling her hands out from under his, picking up the coffee mug and taking it to the sink. “I’d rather worry about the phone bill than feel like I don’t live here. You don’t share anything with me.”

  Sinziana tossed the coffee mug onto the dirty dishes; they heard two or three of them break. She glanced at Adrien. She saw the corners of his mouth tighten briefly. He was still looking down, now at the Hydro-Québec invoice stacked under the phone bill.

  “It’s just I…” she started. Her voice wavered. She looked into the sink, her eyes full of tears; the edges of that morning’s cups and bowls were blurry. “You would never have done this with Stéphanie.”

  “I didn’t even live with Stéphanie.”

  Sinziana fingered the edge of a broken plate. It had split very evenly in half. She hated the way he was looking at her now—calmly, as if she were an illogical child.

  Adrien stood and walked into the next room; Sinziana heard him sit down and roll the chair toward the desk. A few seconds later she heard the scattered tapping of his father’s typewriter.

  She paused, then pulled up a breakfast plate from the sink and, using two purposeful hands, slammed it against the floor. She watched as the triangular shards of broken china flew as far as the table legs and slid under the fridge. The cereal bowl, smashed next, broke into four curved fragments, covering the kitchen floor with nuts and milk.

  Adrien came out of his study and watched her. A piece of china rested near one of his toes. Sinziana, watching him, dropped every dish from the sink, then every clean dish in the cupboard, methodically working through the saucers, wineglasses, and serving platters. She avoided anything she knew wouldn’t break.

  Half-asleep, Adrien lifted his head and looked down toward the foot of the bed. The skin of his calves felt wet and sticky against the bedsheets. He sat up quickly, tearing off the blankets, lifting his leg from the blood-soaked silk. Sinziana, lying next to him, was breathing rapidly; her skin was pallid and tears darkened her thick eyelashes. Adrien placed his hand gently on her stomach.

  “I could feel it bleeding away,” she choked, turning her face toward him.

  “You should have woken me up,” he said, his hand still on her pale, flat stomach as it rose and fell. “Does it hurt?”

  Sinziana shook her head. Adrien looked down at the red delta spread between her legs, all the way past his knees. He felt his chest tighten between his shoulder blades, as if his body were being crushed inward.

  Her legs began to shake.

  “We’ll get you to the hospital,” he said. “Right away.”

  Adrien wiped Sinziana’s clammy, trembling skin with a soft cloth, made her coffee and toast she couldn’t swallow, and helped her get dressed, like a little girl, in loose pyjama bottoms and an old T-shirt. He helped her scared eyes into the taxi cab and sat in the hospital waiting room with her until they were called in.

  The next night he watched her sleep, sweat-soaked despite the mid-winter chill, while he sat on the edge of the bed, wakeful and restless.

  And then, after three days of gazing out into the out-of-focus world, of tripping over their steps, they awoke in each other’s arms, cold, with veils hanging over their faces—under shrouds that let them hide from each other.

  Sinziana’s last night in the apartment on des Érables—the one that prompted the scissors, the careful separation of faces in the pale light of a grey dawn—was on a cold March evening, after she discovered the ashes of two different brands of cigarettes.

  “I found this today,” she had said, placing the black ashtray in front of Adrien.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Two different cigarettes, Adrien. Two. Who was over here? Did you think I wouldn’t find this?”

  Adrien sat back in his chair. Outside, rain poured down the tightened windows and froze, droplet over droplet, keeping the warm glow of the candlelight inside.

  “This is ridiculous, you know.”

  Sinziana cocked her head.

  “Marie-Ève is an old friend from Chicoutimi. She came over this afternoon for coffee. She wanted to meet you, actually,” Adrien said. “If you had come home earlier, you two could have met.”

  “I’m sure that’s exactly what you would have wanted.” Sinziana walked into her studio, where she lifted the creaking lid of her pottery kiln with two mitts, her face reddening from the steam and heat. She turned to face him, looking back through the candlelit door
way. “You could live perfectly well without me, couldn’t you?”

  Adrien held up his hands and pushed his chair back. “This is ridiculous,” he said again, standing up.

  Sinziana fumbled through the noisy tool box on the work table. She was searching for something to busy her hands, desperately stalling while she looked for a way to pull herself back over the precipice she had thought to be rescued from.

  What she had wanted: Of course not, sweetheart. If you leave, every love I have after you will be but a bridge I build over an abyss. Or: Sinziana, if you left this place I would come to loathe it, for bearing your footprints without holding your weight.

  It was then, seeking above all to bring him back to her as he strode away, that Sinziana grasped the old wooden handle with its two rusted rivets; that she felt the bright silver knife fall into her hands, even as home—the home with the stencilled flowers she had drawn on the walls and the man she had slept quietly against—slipped out of them.

  They stood as if in a duel. Adrien watched Sinziana, who was breathing quickly, drops of sweat on her forehead and nose. He saw the sharp point in her loose grip. From the darkness of the kitchen he looked at her, arrogant, knowing he could now blame her as he broke it off.

  IV