by Bindu Suresh
Pénélope acted quickly. She called and left a message for Amélie, her oldest friend and only accomplice; she walked east on Saint Catherine toward Saint Denis and paid for her fake passport; she booked a room at a Sainte-Julienne hotel under this new, false name. She withdrew four thousand dollars from her savings account at TD, mentioning loudly to the teller how warm it was going to be in Cuba.
Online, she booked a return flight from Montreal to Havana in her own name, leaving the next day and returning in three weeks. She wouldn’t, of course, ever use the second ticket; it would be lying innocently on top of her holiday wear when embassy and insurance officials, accompanied by the Cuban police, packed up her things and repatriated them.
Gabriel would remember that he loved her, when he found out she was dead. And when he put two and two together—when he realized that she was alive, and that her crime against him matched his crime against her—he would never want to see her again.
And: if her death was now the only way to remind Gabriel of his love for her, it was, ironically, also the only way she could bring him home.
On the plane, she missed her daughter; the soft weight of her flesh in her lap.
And so it was that Pénélope heard the soft, pattering footsteps of death not once, but twice: first under stormy Cuban waves, and then again a month later, when she plummeted like deadweight into the St. Lawrence River.
The first time, she had escaped. She had seduced the gallant, handsome scuba-diving instructor at the all-inclusive resort with the story of an abusive husband, and he, Julián, had arranged the rest.
On the day of the fateful dive, Julián had fitted her personally. After adjusting her weight belt, puffing up her vest, and checking her regulator and pressure gauges, he slipped a compass into her wet hands.
“Go east,” he had whispered. “My brother will be waiting for you.”
The blue waves were choppy against the rusting motorboat as they left Havana. They had intentionally chosen a tempestuous day. Diving last, Pénélope reached the bottom, waited for Julián to lead the others toward the reef and then swam, hard, to the east. Martín, waiting two hundred metres away in the murky, hidden seas, had brought the extra air tank they would need to share; an hour later, having traversed a kilometre of ocean and sweating under her wetsuit, Pénélope boarded a motorboat back to Havana.
Later that night, in the brothers’ kitchen, she coloured her hair blond with leftover dye Martín’s girlfriend had left under the sink. Then, using the fake passport that had cost twice as much as her flight home, she landed in Montreal the very moment the dismayed rescue workers called off their search.
The second time, of course, wasn’t so simple.
She imagined Gabriel’s first thought, upon hearing the news of her death: of her being pulled into the current, under the waves, her pale skin nibbled and gnawed by a hundred small fish.
Amélie sat across from her, dressed in black: a matching patterned skirt, silk blouse, and heels. Pénélope, on the other hotel bed, watched her friend with newly green eyes.
“Thank you for these,” she said quietly.
Amélie nodded. Pénélope got up and put the other six pairs of contact lenses in the mini-fridge and then sat back down on the bed.
“I’m sorry, Amélie.”
“I don’t think that’s enough,” she said. “You have no idea how devastated people are. You’re just sitting in here dreaming up vengeance for your stupid affair. And I helped you. I made this happen.”
“Amélie.”
“No,” Amélie said. She stood up and began pacing the faded beige carpet. She opened the window—pulling it upward, hard, giving a small cry as it came unstuck—and, noticing a couple walk by on the street outside, immediately lowered her voice.
“Did you know that Ian Matthews came to the funeral? I haven’t seen him since high school. Dozens of people came, Pénélope.”
“Amélie,” Pénélope said. “Was he there?”
Amélie sat down again. The warm, early-September breeze blew loose strands of hair against her cheek. She looked down at her perfectly polished shoes.
“You know, I don’t think I really believed, until right now, that you’d done all of this for him,” she said. “I was sure there had to be some other reason.”
“Amélie. Just tell me.”
Amélie’s thin mouth pressed into a straight line. She stood, moving to sit beside Pénélope. She wrapped both arms around her friend’s waist and rested her head on Pénélope’s shoulder.
“No,” Amélie whispered. “I looked everywhere. He wasn’t there.”
Pénélope didn’t respond.
“Adrien was there. And you should have seen Chloe. She had no idea what was going on.”
“Stop,” Pénélope said.
The secret Pénélope died with:
That—after hiding on the outskirts of Montreal for three weeks, hiring a man to photograph the signatures in the register at her own funeral, and discovering that Gabriel really hadn’t attended, or called, or even gone by the apartment to look for Chloe—she felt her love for him start to fall from her shoulders like a snake’s moulting skin.
That—after seeing the photographs and videos brought to her by Amélie, and watching her grandfather, his wrinkled hand and bent arm brought to his face to hide his tears—she’d felt so mortified she really had wanted to die.
Intolerable to her was the certainty that her love would regenerate, that her heart would nose out a different skin. That someone else could come to mean as much to her. That her memory of the night she had lain beside Gabriel—rain pouring down the windows, moonlight on his naked face, the tender words she had whispered that she knew he wouldn’t hear—would become placid, fond, maybe forgotten entirely.
And, now that she felt but the fading tendrils of love for him, how to reconcile what she had done to the ones who had, in the end, cared more? Every morning for months she had felt Gabriel’s betrayal like a boulder set on her sternum, unable to draw a full breath into her lungs. It had kept her in bed as Chloe cried, for minutes, and once, for hours, until the baby, exhausted and hungry, had fallen back asleep. To live out her days with this new sinking weight, her guilt to replace his betrayal?
How to go on, and know: that her love for Gabriel, and his having left her, had meant more to her than Chloe?
No—before that the bridge; before that the half-ice and rocks below.
Nobody walks along this bridge. There is a long, lonely footpath that stretches all the way to Longueuil, but today it was deserted, as Pénélope knew it would be. This death—the real one—will be sharp as an icy guillotine; the St. Lawrence will slide through her muscle and bone like the edge of a knife.
The steel rafters thrummed wildly under her fingertips. A cold autumn wind whipped her hair around her face as she pulled off her shoes and set them under the bench, next to her gloves. Using her toes to climb up the metal grille, Pénélope paused, poised on the thick iron railing, as balanced and relaxed as a dancer. The river below her was flush with grey rain and early ice. Pénélope recalled scampering onto the balustrade of the lookout point in North Hatley, decades ago, with Lille. She smiled. For the first time in weeks, she thought of stepping down.
Before she jumped, before the animal panic of a tumbling body overcame coherent thought, Pénélope felt a note of triumph: One day, Gabriel, you will look up from your work and suddenly remember me, she thought. And I will be gone.
And while she fell: The slope of your neck into your shoulders; what had made my heart ache now has the consistency of dried pebbles in my hand.
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