The Good Suicides Read Online Free PDF Page A

of reheated croquettes that had already acquired mythical status for them both, was that “I need time to get used to the idea,” which in Leire’s opinion was usually the prelude to “This isn’t for me.” Nevertheless, Tomás surprised her by returning just a couple of days later to have a “serious talk.”
    And they did, long and drawn-out, weighing up the pros and consas if it were all a rational subject, and at the same time knowing it wasn’t. In the end, however, they had come to a series of agreements. One, they weren’t in love, at least not in that idyllic way in which you can’t imagine life without the other. Two, they lived in different cities, although separated by barely three hours on the AVE fast train. Three, the baby was part of both of them. So the conclusion, nicer in the wording than in the small print, had been: no, they wouldn’t be a couple—at least at the moment—but they would be parents. “Parents with touching rights,” María called them.
    They were satisfied by this resolution and they truly were doing all they could to carry it out. Tomás was spending some weekends at Leire’s; he’d taken care of the move and of tasks like putting in sockets; he spoke of Abel with enthusiasm and threatened to make him a member of Real Madrid. They hadn’t touched on the subject of money; María had bought them the few things in the baby’s room and, with regards to the apartment, Leire didn’t plan on accepting even a euro from him. Until the birth of the baby no more can be asked of him, she thought. Although deep down she would have liked to have had someone by her side at the antenatal classes, at the scans, when the on-screen sight of what was inside her brought out tears she couldn’t understand, or, for example, on Friday nights, when she was too tired to go out but not so tired that she wanted to be alone. Or also during that interminable
Reyes
bank holiday, she thought as she contemplated the Sagrada Familia, that unfinished witness to her boredom that she was beginning to hate at times. However, Tomás was in the Sierra—the name of which made Leire think of resistance fighters or bandits—skiing with some friends. It wasn’t Tomás’s fault that she had nothing to do and that her best friend, María, had gone away for the weekend, although it hardly encouraged her to think of him fondly. Leire’s mother, Asturian and not one to mince her words, had summed everything up in some phrases that were becoming prophetic. “Alone. When the baby is born you’ll be alone. If you cry in the night, you’ll be alone. And the day he learns to say ‘Papa’ you’ll show him a photo. That’s if you have one,”she’d predicted before starting to cut a chicken into pieces with unusual fury. And she, though she didn’t dare say it aloud, had murmured inwardly something along the lines of: “I’ll worry about that when the time comes.”
    Nevertheless, the truth was that she sometimes did feel lonely, not helped by her early maternity leave due to some rogue early contractions she’d had in mid-December. She’d already spent months condemned to office work, but at least she was at the station, she could participate in cases, she had people around her. There was still a month and a half before Abel’s birth. Six weeks in which—as she saw it—she would do nothing but get fat, visit her doctor, see other pregnant women and choose baby clothes. She knew by heart all the magazine articles about the best way to bathe, change and stimulate a baby, a distraction already forming a pillar of sage advice that reached half the height of the sofa.
    It was as night was falling the next day that, lying on the sofa watching an episode of a detective series that had been shown at least twice before, the feeling of abandonment became so intense that she didn’t even have the urge to cry. The unfamiliar apartment, the lack of obligations and the absence of contact with others, increased by so