by Bindu Suresh
Gabriel remembered sitting in the kitchen with his mother, near the oven, her baking an apple pie, and then a cherry pie, both burned around the edges to a deep brown crisp. She placed a warm, damp palm on his knee. She had tears in the corners of her eyes as she told him, again, about the plane crash, about his father: his flying thousands of metres above cold rocks and summer lakes, and then his fumbling hands on the controls and the static on the radio, the quiet downward glide between the trees. He died, she said, not in the belly-first collision that had killed those standing, but after, later, in the final gas-lit explosion that incinerated them all.
She had pictures of Gabriel, as a five-year-old, at his father’s funeral. He had held the ashes, she said, the mixture of soot and body and airplane, the singed dirt.
But there was one detail his mother had overlooked: that in a town of fifty thousand, a bogus, fabricated plane crash was even harder to substantiate than a bogus, fabricated father. She had underestimated, too, how certain clues would reveal the truth to her son—the shared private glances of other parents; the teachers who were a little too kind; the unabashed, pointed laughter of other children—so that by the time Gabriel was fourteen, he knew that parts of her story were too well-written, and that others gaped, empty as an animal’s yawning jaws.
V
Adrien brought the cigarette to his lips, the embered tip glowing against the dark trees and hidden rooftops of the Plateau. The unvarnished wood of the balcony was soaked with rainwater; on it sat Adrien, naked, and Araceli, her legs still wrapped around his waist, her shoulders covered with a blanket.
“Adrien,” Araceli said. “How did your last relationship end?”
Adrien told her about Sinziana and the ectopic pregnancy. In the darkness, Araceli smiled at his soft accent, at the shorter o, the quicker y; at the same time she felt a heavy weight sink into her chest, imagining him having to translate those words, explain them over and over again.
“I don’t think either of us recovered from losing the baby. At least, not enough to stay together.”
“I’m so sorry that happened.”
“It’s okay. It wasn’t meant to be. I had always been very excited about having kids, but somehow I wasn’t with her. Not near the end.”
Adrien put out his cigarette against the wood floor of the balcony, tightening his arms around Araceli’s waist.
“She was very difficult to live with,” he said. “One day, we’d gotten into a fight. She asked me to meet her later that night after work at a bar on Crescent. When I got there, she was dressed up, toute belle, and she just sat there. She wouldn’t even look at me. She ignored me all night.”
It started to rain again. Adrien cupped his hand against the small of Araceli’s back, making a pool of the rivulet of rainwater that flowed down her spine. “What about your last relationship?”
“We fought a lot,” Araceli said. “Every day, every hour, over whether or not I really loved him. Then, one night, he said he knew I loved him but that he was sure he loved me more. And he was right. That was it. And it was over, even though we stayed together for a year after that.” The sharp, cold rain stung Araceli’s exposed calves. “I will never do that again,” she said. “Be the one who loves less.”
Together, Adrien and Araceli had, at the most, a couple of months—and three weeks of these Adrien had spent in the Gaspé without her, leaving Montreal on his motorcycle to drive twelve hours up the long, jagged coast.
“Remember what you are worth,” his father had said the last time, when he’d announced to his family that Sinziana was pregnant. She, that night, had sat in the corner, on the oversized brown chesterfield: shy, swallowed by cushions, lost for words.
This time, about Araceli, the old man had said, walking with his middle child beside the grey waves, stepping slowly along the rocky, cold beach: “I don’t see it in your eyes this time. I don’t.”
When Adrien returned to Montreal, his legs stiff from the journey, his fingertips cold beneath his gloves, he had forgotten Sinziana. And he might have chosen Araceli, even against his father’s advice, had it not been for Pénélope.
Araceli had ordered breakfast, and then lunch; outside the café on Saint Catherine, rain plastered pictures of naked dancers to the sidewalk. Adrien had not called, not since yesterday, when, gruff and recently awoken, he had promised that today he would take her to explore Trois-Rivières.
And now, alone at the table, her two unfinished meals waiting beside her unblinking phone, she felt as if she were galloping through a prairie field with the reins cut, as if she had stepped off a shelf into an ocean of limitless depth.
Between Sinziana and Pénélope, Araceli had no chance; the past and the future were equally heavy burdens that limited the present to a sliver, a small crack in a doorway. She was the path between two destinations, a body to lie and stretch across like the wild terrain between cities, between homes; someone Adrien loved because she pulled him through the eye of a needle, brought him to the gentle stroke of his thumb against his fiancée’s forehead, to her large white breasts falling against each other like soft mountains in the pale moonlight.
That August, one week after Adrien had met Pénélope, Adrien and Araceli came to the same instantaneous, silent conclusion: that Araceli, carrying two awkward suitcases up the precipitous outdoor staircase, had hardly anything in the apartment to pack.
There were no photographs to cut in half. There were no bloody bedsheets to throw out, no cords of kinship to be prematurely severed. She had a toothbrush, a hair dryer, a sweater from their first date, maybe, but nothing of a weight that had to be borne, packed away, or buried in storage. She had underlined exactly one paragraph in one book, in pencil. And even now, after three months, she walked cautiously around the apartment, turning on unfamiliar lights in the unfamiliar dark, creeping with the gait of a guest, with a stranger’s quiet footsteps.
All this to say: it was comparatively easy for Adrien to feel like he had erased Araceli, a fact, of course, that made it nearly impossible for Araceli to do the same.
But what Adrien discovered, after Araceli left on a one-way ticket to New York City: that a connection cut short was impossible to forget; that love, when skipped over, rests as a pebble lodged in one’s memory.
VI
For Adrien, the loss of Araceli coincided with the dep-arture of his best friend, Sébastien, who moved his few belongings out of Adrien’s apartment the day after Araceli left. Sébastien had been waiting in the kitchen that last night, as Adrien broke the news to Araceli in the doorway, and then insisted on taking her out for dinner as planned; he had been there when they returned; he had sat next to Adrien on the windowsill later that night, listening to Araceli play the piano. There to add an air of camaraderie, of normalcy, to the desertion.
Sébastien had done so stony-faced: he, who had paid particular attention not to prepare food with milk or wheat; who had listened, the door ajar, to Adrien making love to Araceli on the balcony; who, within a few weeks of knowing her, had made grandiose statements he actually meant, that she was always welcome at his family’s home in the Gaspé, and that he loved her, already, like a sister or a friend.
“My friend, tu t’es fait emporter par une vieille fille,” Sébas-tien said after he met Pénélope. After this, Adrien ignored his calls.
Among the August losses from the apartment on des Érables: one ash-coloured, rolled-up mattress; a guitar case and sheet music; an old friend’s squash racquet and indoor court shoes.
VII
Pénélope knew that, by now, Adrien would be back at the apartment waiting for her. They had left his place at six that morning, Adrien dressed in polyester gym shorts that hung down to his knees, a scuffed white volleyball in hand, Pénélope wearing the black patent heels and black-and-white checkered dress she’d had on the day before.
Adrien had been flustered, so invested was he in her errand. Still, he knew better than to sit at home, his whole body trembling, while
his rival lifted his fingertips to her lips, whispering the old, soft endearments. While the minutes for her were hours, those same minutes were, for Adrien, days.
It had taken eight hours, but she had done it; six hours to and from Quebec City, and two more to move her ex from kissing her cheekbones to the other side of his bedroom, where he pulled open drawers and threw underwear, socks, blouses—even things that weren’t hers. He tore pants and dresses from their hangers in the closet that, in the particularly brutal and practical manner of those who have fallen out of love, she picked up and stuffed into her bag. It saved her having to come back.
Adrien greeted her with relief. He had been afraid, secretly, that she wouldn’t really do it.
He rented a cottage, by the sea—not far from his parents’ house in the Gaspé—and took her there on a five-day weekend that saw them each call in sick. When they returned, he started driving to Quebec City every other day, after work; he had to leave Pénélope’s bed before sunrise to make it back to Montreal in time to deliver the early-morning news.
Pénélope made the same trip in reverse, and after a few sleep-deprived weeks, Adrien watched her close her eyes, for a full two or three seconds, in the middle of a televised interview with the leader of the opposition.
In their first month together, Adrien studied his new girlfriend’s deep-set eyes, the long bridge of her nose, her naturally mauve lips. He watched her move, back and forth, from the balcony to the bed. He started to use words like we, us, our; he’d even let slip the phrases your shelf, your drawer.
Three months later, when Pénélope took a pay cut and a demotion to move to Montreal and work for TVA—to be near him—Adrien walked down to Phillips Square and bought a ring with clusters of diamonds and swirls of white gold, which he hid in the bedroom closet behind his old political science notes.
VIII
The night Adrien broke up with her, Araceli had taken the steep, badly lit steps up to his apartment slowly, though he was waiting at the head of the stairs, a blond giant, and she could feel his eyes and mouth embracing her already. She laughed up at him as she held her skirt above her knees.
Adrien’s breath was soft on her neck. Her fingers were wrapped in his hair. He murmured, she murmured back. His arms draped loosely around her torso. She pressed her lips to his, but he stood solid, resisting her; his head was a marble bust. She kissed him again, touching the sides of his face, and his lips held firm, firm in the decision they’d made. By the third kiss, his lips were patiently limp.
“I have something to tell you,” he said.
Standing there, on the threshold at the top of the stairs, Adrien told her he loved someone else. And, when he told her about the weekend beach-house rental he had arranged for himself and his new girlfriend, in the Gaspé—when Araceli learned that he, too, was capable of such a commitment, of lunging after the months of aimless parries, with her—she felt love slide through her like a spear of light, like an arrow, as pure and white as moonlight.
What had happened: Adrien went to meet a fellow Radio-Canada journalist from Quebec City—a sidewalk-corner meeting arranged by text message between live hits—and felt dizzy the moment he saw her on Marie-Anne. He blacked out, and when he woke he was lying on the ground with her lips against his.
Araceli took a step down one stair. The years of lying to him began: first, here, with her eyes and her body, seeming to take the news in stride. Then, two years later, meeting him on a wintry street corner, with the kisses on each cheek, her joy at hearing of his engagement. And, monthly, every time she called him or he called her, with the ease in her voice that was the ultimate lie: that she could bear to just be his friend.
Lies of such immensity they surpassed their love in memory, for him as well as her.
If there was a consolation prize, Araceli had won it. Finally, they descended the stairs, together. He consoled her on the wet sidewalk on the way to their favourite pizzeria, her hand clasped to his chest in friendship.
“You are my friend, and I care about you,” Adrien said, stumbling over friend as if ashamed to say it, as if surprised at the word.
Araceli, for the first time, heard Pénélope’s name—asked for it, in fact—then asked where Pénélope lived, what she was like, when he’d realized he loved her.
“It was like a flash of lightning,” he said. Le coup de foudre.
“You are my friend,” Adrien repeated, skirting over the word as a flat pebble skips across a cold mountain lake, a sliver slipping through skin.
Over dinner, he explained everything. He had been seven-teen the first time he had made love, with Stéphanie, his first girlfriend. The first time he’d had sex was before that, when he was fifteen, with a girl he had just met at a campfire on a Gaspé beach. Making love and having sex, after all, were two different things.
“Don’t you agree?” he asked from across the table.
And Araceli, who had only ever made love, who years later, in the arms of a half-dozen other men, would still only be making love to him, of course, agreed.
IX
That afternoon in Oka, Pénélope and Gabriel sat with their palms flat on the low tables, her dark hair reflecting the afternoon’s late light, his laugh, deep and rumbling, starting in his chest and moving up through his shoulders and hands—until the last school bells had rung and the hallway fell empty and silent. They had spoken for long enough that Gabriel knew, as they walked down the crumbling concrete steps, as he strode over the sparse yellow grass with her slim fingers woven between his large ones, that she was taken by someone else, that there was a shared apartment together in the Plateau. Still, he pulled her through the crisp fall air; still, he pulled her toward the trees and the sunset. And Pénélope, though she remembered Adrien’s clear blue eyes behind hers in the mirror, though she said his name to herself and felt the full blood push through her veins—still her fingers clung urgently, still she followed, skipping to keep up with Gabriel’s faster stride.
It was six and already it was completely dark. A cold wind rustled the dry, crisp leaves still on their branches. Gabriel and Pénélope crackled over small forest twigs, crushing fallen pine cones under their hasty, scrambling feet.
They stopped in a glade. Pénélope rested her back against the trunk of an elm; Gabriel pressed his thumb and forefinger against her cheekbones. He stroked her neck, the base of her throat, the small triangle of skin exposed by her jacket. His hands were gentle, awed, and a bit surprised still, as if he, too, had been pulled through the trees.
Beneath this, Pénélope felt the rough insistence of his fingertips, the pressure of his torso against hers, and pulled him inside her, her hands gripping his back.
Then his breath against her neck, against the tree, the northern wind caressing the naked bark.
Pénélope stayed in the musty, darkened cabin—room number four at Oka’s only hotel—for a week, waiting for the wounds to heal.
During the day, when Gabriel was out with his mother, Pénélope lay naked under the ceiling fan in the unseasonal October heat, daydreaming. She remembered the evening, three days ago now, that Gabriel had first made love to her. She had undone the buttons of her blouse hurriedly, nearly tearing them loose from the cloth, naked from the waist up, the weight of Gabriel’s body pressing her back against the tree. The rough bark of late autumn had scraped her skin until she was raw and bleeding.
For six days she trailed her fingers over her torn shoulders—for six days she turned cuts into scars so small that Adrien would never see them, so large that he would never again touch the skin underneath.
In the cooler nights, Gabriel told Pénélope about his youth, and about his mother, Rachel:
“When I was eighteen, I left home,” he said. “I had two months of high school left but it didn’t matter. I went to Kingston to live with my uncle, Jacob. I confronted my mother about the story of the plane crash and she told me that the pilot was a family friend, not my father. And that my father was still alive
.
“When I got to Kingston, my uncle told me what he knew: how his father had stalked the entrance hall in front of the heavy oak door he had locked against Rachel, muttering that his daughter was a Jezebel, a harlot. Rachel screamed outside for hours, long after their parents had gone upstairs, while their five other siblings crowded onto the landing, listening to Rachel yell that her clothes had been torn off, that she had been raped.
“It was the first time I heard the word spoken out loud,” he said. “The next day, my mother left on the early-morning bus to North Bay. One of her brothers went down to the penitentiary with a wooden baseball bat to find Marcel Tremblay, but he was gone already, too.
“And I thought, right then,” Gabriel said, “is it enough that I now know who my father is, or do I need him to recognize my face, and admit what he did to my mother, before I kill him?”
X