26 Knots

by Bindu Suresh

  She stepped out of the airport into the sun and the chilly air of late autumn, walking toward a line of cabs. She thought, briefly, that she wouldn’t call him, but from the moment she landed, Adrien was everywhere: his sock-clad feet padded the wooden floors of his living room, and Araceli heard his footfalls echo behind her; he took a deep breath on his balcony, and she felt the warmth of his exhale on the back of her neck.

  In the taxi, on her way into the city, she texted him. And Adrien texted her back, immediately, with a time and place for lunch the next day.

  Araceli saw Adrien in everyone. First, in the blond curls of a young girl holding her father’s hand in line at a bakery, her hair settled on the nape of her neck just as Adrien’s did. Then, seen from behind, a man near an indoor pool, his legs spread apart, his hips pushed forward slightly, as Adrien’s would be, like him a small triangle of hair on his lower back. Then, near a library, a young man with Adrien’s face, with exactly his face.

  And then Adrien himself, walking down the north side of de Maisonneuve three years after they last parted, Araceli on an early-morning plane toward Manhattan, nearly missed; there he was, with those ridiculous glasses and unshaven face and oh, that beauty, and Araceli realized that there was nothing of those other three in him.

  They walked down Saint Laurent and into a restaurant in Chinatown, moving to chairs sheltered from the November wind; scarved and gloved couples flanked them on either side. Adrien insisted on paying for lunch. And at the end, just as their plates were being cleared, he said, “I’m going to be a father soon.”

  Araceli thought: The last three years have been thin as a dying breath, as a winter wind over naked fields; the three summer months I was with you were as thick and heavy as blood fighting to course a broken body. It has been three years already, for your love for Pénélope to grow, for a child to grow inside her, and my love for you has not aged a day.

  XVI

  Pénélope picked up the phone. Adrien had been about to say, This whole day, it’s been like flying, when the hoarseness of her voice drew him back to the triangle of blood on the bedsheets, the early-morning emergency-room visit: “Something’s wrong,” she said. “I have to talk to you when you get home.”

  Adrien took a taxi. He didn’t trust himself to drive his motorcycle; already he felt the cold seep of autumn in his fingers and toes, felt fear curl like a fallen leaf around his heart.

  “The baby is fine,” Pénélope reassured when he arrived, reaching for his fingers like a sympathetic hostess.

  When she spoke again, it was of the small cabin where she had stayed with another man. She spoke of the trees outside the window, the leaves crisp and rigid against their stalks, the cold greyness of the sky. “Everything else was dying and I was not,” Pénélope said.

  “His name, I want his name,” Adrien heard himself say.

  “It was the most intense connection I’d ever felt,” she said.

  Only then did he notice the two brown suitcases. So this had been arranged in advance—was her lover picking her up at a certain time? How many minutes would she oblige their years together? He felt like a fool, he who had thought to know everything she thought.

  “What I ask myself,” Adrien said, as if giving a speech, “is why a man would seduce a woman who was with somebody else, who was having a baby with somebody else.”

  Pénélope blinked quickly, her left hand protecting her stomach, stepping backwards as if he might hurt her. When had she become such an actress? Was she doing it on purpose, to add insult to injury? So that she could, in the end, blame him? For a second, faced with her feigned terror of him, it was as if he didn’t know her, and his sudden hatred swept him blind.

  “His name is Gabriel,” she said finally, a suitcase in each hand, knowing he hadn’t really wanted to hear it.

  XVII

  Adrien felt as if there were an abyss around every corner—nearly anything could remind him of Pénélope and her infidelity. Today it had been a white piece of printer paper, loosely affixed to the wall of the doctor’s office with Scotch tape: “Get paid participation in our study—for couples who have started a new sexual relationship in the last two years.”

  He ran errands. He greased the joints of the bedroom door. He replaced the missing wheel on the dishwasher rack. He bought the cat four different kinds of cat food. He tidied the apartment, and then allowed his belongings to become scattered around it again.

  Adrien doubled back, paced around city blocks in circles, crossed to walk down the other side of the same street. He thought: Was I wrong? Was the feeling false, that Pénélope was the one? He had asked her: Was what we had not good enough? Did it not feel right? What of our years together?

  There may be another love, another woman, another betrayal even, waiting—but what of his decision to love Pénélope to the end, whereby he’d partitioned his soul?

  All paths led back to her.

  “How did this happen?” he’d asked Pénélope. Words he had spoken to her that were now irrelevant came to his mind, like pieces cut from different puzzles—enough, right, years.

  She had looked at him as if to say: Falling in love is not a road that can be retraced; it is an end that hides its own origins, a path in deep winter whose tracks fill with snow.

  Certain words were permanently ruined for him, words that stretched longer in his memory than Pénélope’s speaking of them: intense, connection, ever. Those three words strung together, with her intonation—she was trying not to hurt him and had come up with this?—her beautiful small wrists, her emphasis on ever felt: taken together, these words were the final sally of a round of bullets.

  Some days, his love for Pénélope stood like an impediment before him. It was monstrous, and whole, and impossible to grasp all at once; he could touch it only as a guide, his left arm extended as if feeling his way out of a maze, know it in pieces as he tried to lead himself out.

  XVIII

  In the car, the two sisters sat silently. They were west of the borough of Saint-Laurent, on Côte-de-Liesse, when Pénélope turned toward Lille and said: “I don’t know what it is about him. I was so cruel, I threw it in his face.” Lille touched her sister’s knee. “It’s always like that,” she said. “There’s no way around it. C’était une rupture.”

  The next morning, though, it was as if the last three years had never happened. Pénélope thought: This skirt I wear is the only skirt, this red-and-yellow scarf the only scarf. I will take the only road into the only city to meet my only love. I am carrying his child.

  She felt her body, a pillar, blunt the autumn wind; she stood like a still fortress in the dawning light. Gabriel, she knew, would already be at the top of Mount Royal, waiting for her.

  Life yawned and stretched in her thirty-year-old body.

  Five days later, they got married. Pénélope had called her father to invite him to the civil ceremony at the courthouse on Notre-Dame. She then called Lille, who arrived early the day of the wedding to help her sister with her hair. Gabriel’s mother, on three days’ notice, took time off work and drove the two hours from Oka.

  There are two photographs from their wedding day. In one, Pénélope is wearing a knee-length sequinned white dress from Zara. Gabriel stands next to her, his fingers in the crook of her arm. Lille is open-mouthed, speaking to her brother-in-law, her left hand in the air. In the other, Gabriel and his father-in-law are shaking hands, Pénélope’s father mid-laugh.

  Beyond the marriage itself, Pénélope and Gabriel were delighted that their hidden affair was now out in the open: that Pénélope could take the two keys she always had to conceal in her purse, one gold and one silver, and place them on her key ring, a partner’s privilege; that Gabriel could set that photograph of her, taken one morning as she looked out the window, her blouse partially unbuttoned, on his desk at work.

  They decided on Cuba, finally, for their honeymoon. The room they rented was at the back of an old house in Central Havana, separa
ted from the rest of the bed and breakfast by a dark green, heavy-smelling garden. There was a kitchen too hot and enclosed to cook in, an open-air shower, and their bedroom, the long side of the double bed pushed against a wall, the room lit with a soft yellow bulb, a dark red rug on the floor in front of an antennaed television set. They had tried to be quiet, their first few nights there, but eventually they surrendered, two people digging deeply and blindly into shared earth.

  Walking down the streets of Havana, they bought bottles of soda water—with a touch of rum, for Gabriel—and sat along the Malecón, turning to face the ocean and then swivelling back at the sound of a guitar, the prompting of a singer.

  On the beach they had chosen as theirs, the one they discovered by randomly stepping off the public bus that shuttled down the coast, they started to discuss baby names.

  “Arielle,” said Pénélope.

  Gabriel shook his head. “Kristin,” he offered.

  “No, you see,” Pénélope said, her still-wet, sand-covered foot resting atop his ankle, her leg alongside his. “We have to find a name that works in both French and English.”

  “Stéphanie,” said Gabriel.

  “That was Adrien’s ex-girlfriend’s name,” said Pénélope. “Veto.”

  “Veto,” Gabriel said. “Véto. That works.”

  “That does not work,” Pénélope laughed, kicking the soft, cool sand against his shins.

  And, even there, she could tell Gabriel was distracted. It was as if a part of him were still missing to her, like a page she’d skipped over in her reading of him that she couldn’t go back to. As if he had a secret that had been made easier to conceal by all the other secrets they had kept, all the lies they had told, and was now suddenly evident, a tiny corner of him pulled away at every moment.

  Pénélope, weeks later, would realize she had no lasting impressions of Havana at all; all she could remember was the nights in bed, and their walks through the city, her focus on his stride, on his body not a foot from hers, the slight pressure of his hand in her own.

  Back in Montreal, they started to speak about their future, now laden with guarantees: of keeping Pénélope’s car, an old Volkswagen Beetle from the 1990s, currently stored in the backyard of the house left to the daughters by their late mother; of holding on to that house, in case their own daughter one day decided to go to McGill; of where they would spend their anniversary, their years of good health, of how each of them would be, at sixty, at eighty, at a hundred.

  XIX

  Kill him, Gabriel finally decided, placing the bag of cut corn and smoked turkey Pénélope handed him in the trunk of the car. Kill him before my child is born.

  From the other side of the table Pénélope looked formid-able, like an earth goddess, a growling lioness.

  “And you would leave me here, six months’ pregnant.”

  “Pen, I still wake up wanting to kill him,” Gabriel said. “I want to find out what happened, find out the truth. I want this to be over before Chloe is born.”

  Pénélope didn’t answer. She looked to the waitress clearing plates at the next table. Behind Gabriel, a man and his daughter were playing chess; in the silence between them she could hear the slamming of bishops and knights into wooden time clocks.

  “You do realize,” she said slowly, “that what you’re doing is no different. That our daughter, like you, will grow up fatherless.”

  “Sweetheart,” Gabriel started. As soon as he’d said it, they both knew it was the first hollow word that had ever passed between them. Reaching over for her hand in apology, he continued. “I’m coming back, you know. As soon as I find him.”

  “What if he’s already left North Bay?”

  The day before, Gabriel had gotten a call from his godmother, a nurse at the hospital in North Bay. I think he’s here, she had said. I’m not sure. I haven’t told your mother.

  “I know. I’m afraid of that, too,” Gabriel said.

  Pénélope closed her eyes. There it was again, that note in his voice; that same ache she’d heard when he first told her his mother’s story. His voice a taut, pulled string. She reached across the table with her other hand, resting her fingers against his elbow and caressing the length of his arm.

  “When would you need to leave?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow,” he replied.

  Pénélope made up her mind. She decided to let her life fall into step with his; she would hold his hand and climb aboard his train, even as she felt it barrel down a lost and ruined track.

  The air in the bedroom was dense and close. Pénélope stood on her tiptoes, Gabriel’s arms around her; her pregnant belly between them, his shoulder bag pressed awkwardly into her waist, she felt cocooned, safe.

  She watched as Gabriel lifted his bag off of the bed and carried it toward the door. She felt their love as if she had slid her fingers into the one firm handhold on a slippery cliff.

  If someone had told her then, this will be the last time you see him, she would not have believed them; she would not have believed that their love was also mortal.

  XX

  When Adrien next saw Pénélope, she was walking down Saint Denis, her belly large even through her heavy winter coat. She was carrying four bulky shopping bags.

  “Pénélope,” he called.

  She turned; for a brief second he saw how she would glance at a stranger. Then she waved, and Adrien strode rapidly across the street toward her. He had been on his way to the Sainte-Élisabeth for a beer with Sébastien, and now knew that he would be late—but he knew his old friend would forgive him this, too.

  They had walked half a block down Saint Denis and were almost at de Maisonneuve when Adrien stopped in front of a chocolaterie.

  “Remember this place?”

  “Of course.” Pénélope smiled. She felt like a bowstring, loosened and set to rest for the night; gentle.

  “Shall we order some hot chocolate?” he asked.

  XXI

  Gabriel felt suddenly lost, as if he hadn’t grown up in North Bay. He took a taxi to the hospital from the bus station. Using a different entrance from the one he remembered from his childhood—he had spent hours here whenever Lucas had been paged on the drive back from school, in the years the doctor and his mother had been together—he approached the receptionist’s desk, explained who he was, and asked to see Dr. Harrison.

  “It’s been a long time,” Gabriel said. His voice was raspy, deep; the way it sounded in early morning. He realized, standing in front of the doctor—this man who had delivered him, proposed to his mother four times, and who, the fourth time she had said no, had driven her to Oka himself to help set up her new life—that he hadn’t spoken a word to anyone since he’d left Montreal.

  “I’m looking for a man,” Gabriel continued, clearing his throat, stepping through the open door of the office. “I need to know if he’s still in the hospital. A friend of mine called a few days ago to let me know he was here.”

  Lucas nodded. He had checked the patient’s drowsy pupils himself, watched his surgeon’s hands tremble as he reached for the chart; realizing who the man was, he’d marched out of the emergency room, leaden anger spreading through his body, down to his feet, into his fingertips. Fifteen minutes later, Lucas had strode back into the emergency room with a vial of potassium chloride, only to find that Marcel Tremblay had left against medical advice.

  “So he’s been here.”

  “He was here three days ago,” he said quietly.

  Lucas led Gabriel out of his office and down a well-lit hall into a dark room. He closed the door behind them and turned on the light.

  “You’ll find what you need in here.” He paused. “The chart is labelled with the first three letters of his last name. I’ll stand guard outside the door for five minutes.”

  Lucas looked at Gabriel, and thought: He has his father’s eyes.

  The file, when Gabriel found it, contained little. On the carb
on-copied patient admittance forms his father had left no permanent address, no registered phone number, and no employment information. His local address was a Comfort Inn. Gabriel turned to leave—wary of the metronomic click of heels down the spare hallway—and was about to slide the brown folder back into place, when he found it: the all-important photocopy paper-clipped to the back page.

  Gabriel’s knowledge of his father doubled. From the OHIP card he discovered that Marcel Tremblay was actually Marcel René Tremblay, born January 24, 1946. There was a blurry photograph. A signature. And there, on the back, a government-endorsed address in Ottawa.

  Gabriel had done everything he could think of. After going to the motel, and then taking the bus to Ottawa—a five-hour journey that had brought him to a locked apartment door and to a mailbox stuffed full of another man’s bills—he had gone north, and then west, back toward North Bay.