Title: Coming up for air / Sarah Leipciger.

Names: Leipciger, Sarah, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190177659 |
Canadiana (ebook) 20190177667 | isbn 9781487006501 (softcover) |
isbn 9781487006518 (epub) | isbn 9781487006525 (Kindle)

Classification: lcc PS8623.E4746 C65 2020 | ddc C813/.6—dc23

Cover design: Jennifer Lum

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

For Eve, for Ali and for Kieran

‘The thing about women from the river is that
our currents are endless.’

Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries

Prologue

L’Inconnue (The Unknown Woman)

Paris, France, 1899

This is how I drowned. I stood beneath the arch of the Pont Alexandre III, on the Left Bank of the slick and meandering Seine. Moon-silver, cold. I took off my coat and boots, and folded my coat neatly, and laid it over my boots, which I lined up side by side with the tips pointing down to the water. I stood quietly for a few minutes, watching the surface of the river form soft little peaks that folded into themselves again and again and again.

I took a step closer to the water so I could peer down its throat. But this was the gut of night, and even with the moonlight, the water was an opaque, bottomless thing. Not for the first time, I climbed into the underbelly of the bridge, and shuffled along the arch, hugging the pillars, towards the middle where the river was deeper. There was the smell of rust and cold steel and there was the smell of the river and there was a chance that, in this moment, things could have gone differently. A small sign from the world to tell me it would rather I stayed than left. The nasal call of some rook. A shooting star, a whistling boatman, a change in the wind. Nothing happened. So. I leaned forward, expelled my last breath, and let myself fall. The black water closed over my head like a toothless mouth.

The cold was a shock, and so was the burden of my heavy clothes. I opened my eyes to oblivion. What I thought had been my last breath was not my last breath – I had been wrong about that. For a few seconds, I was as calm as music, but then my body pedalled and thrashed; it didn’t want to drown. This wasn’t a new-found desire, after all, to live. This was about air. Oxygen. And my lack of it. My lungs, each of my muscles, hung suspended, seized in pain. I kicked until my head broke the surface, and in that moment I saw the bridge passing above me. I sucked a breath of sweet air before I went under again and wheeled my arms, looking for something solid to hold as I was carried downriver. My suffocating limbs became blocks of stone.