Claire's Head (13 page)

She had first moved in as a graduate student back in the mid-1980s when the East Village was a raunchier but already desirable place to be. In those days, she slept on a futon and her guest bed was a couch draped in pink fun fur, magazines strewn about it. Then Michael Straw moved in. His drafting table occupied the space between the two front windows. He remodelled the place: built Rachel a proper desk, bookshelves, the closet, kitchen cupboards. They slept in a loft bed in the middle room.

When Michael Straw moved out, he took his drafting table, his whiskey, and since he was the one who cooked, every piece of kitchen equipment bought during his tenure (all the items that Rachel had bought for him, plus those that they-had purchased together). Rachel made him dismantle the loft bed, and thereafter slept on the mattress alone, a homemade Murphy bed that she lowered to the floor at night and during the day tipped up against the wall. She got rid of the sofa. Briefly, the apartment was Rachel's and Star's, until their sojourn in the West Village. After their return, Star slept in a crib at Rachel's side, then on the mattress beside her, her stroller wrapped with three feet of thick chain and locked in the stairwell below.

Three years ago, Rachel had bought her current bed, brass frame, new thick mattress and box spring, and set it up in the
front room. Her first real bed, she insisted. Claire, who had witnessed the apartment's transitions on visits over the years, thought the bed's prominence a paean to sleep or sex rather than invalidism. A new beginning. Although perhaps she was not taking account of how a history of pain lurked here, as throughout the apartment.

With her silk eye pillow over her lids, Claire stretched out on Rachel's bed. She had never felt as desperate to escape – to escape Toronto, to begin with. The cartography program that she had wanted to attend was in the city, so there had been no need to move away for college. She had travelled – more so when she was younger – and this had satisfied much of her urge to explore. She had a friend, Maura Addison, who had moved to New York to redraw borders on maps for the UN, and another, Louisa Herskovitz, who went north to Yellowknife to slug it out with the male surveyors, but at the point when Claire had felt most restless and in need of a different home (even then she had not been able to decide where she would go), she had met Stefan.

Yet putting things this way failed to acknowledge the part that pain had played in these choices, how it gave rise to a deeper ambivalence within her. Sometimes, when her migraines were bad, she wanted nothing but to be housebound, her desire, then, only for stillness, for the recognizable smell of her own sheets, the known dark corners and memorized ceiling of her own bedroom. Longing was reduced to a dream of return, the return of the familiar. On the other hand, there were times when a bad headache, or a succession of bad headaches, made the familiar seem toxic. The same sheets, ceiling, the creak of the fourth stair became merely a conduit for pain, and she longed to be anywhere
not associated with pain. It was like the way Allison's old arthritic cat used to wander from room to room, moving from chair to closet to floor, as if somehow a different place would by itself offer the necessary balm. Likely Rachel felt something similar. Perhaps this state of mind had simply overwhelmed her. The question was, escape to where?

In the morning, after eating a quick breakfast, Claire knocked on the door across the hall. The neighbours invited her inside, reintroducing themselves as Jim and Alex, and offered her a mug of tea. They had lived in the building even longer than Rachel had.

Their kitchen was cooled by air conditioning and dim – spatially the mirror image of Rachel's but nothing like the bright pallor of her walls, or her kitchen's warm stuffiness. Theirs had the air of an elegant cave, a burgundy-tinted salon. In a dark silk dressing gown, Jim slumped over a squat teapot while Alex, a soft-bellied older man in tank top and shorts, lounged in the doorway to the room beyond.

Jim's brow creased. He said they'd received the note that Claire had left two weeks ago but didn't have anything to report. It was true, they hadn't heard much noise recently from across the hall; the last few years, it was sometimes hard to tell when Rachel was there and when she was away. They both seemed sheepish, a bit furtive, as if they ought to have noticed something else and hadn't. All March, they'd been away in Mexico. They'd been upstate the last time Claire had come to town. Jim rested his hand on Claire's back as he handed her a mug. Had she talked to Otto, the guy at the other end of the hall, who was
admittedly a creep (not dangerous, just weird) – and what about the girls downstairs?

They'd last seen Rachel – Jim shot a bashful glance at Alex, who rubbed his knuckles back and forth across his upper lip – in February? February. Sheepish again. A Friday night? They'd run into her on the landing. She said she was off to a meeting. She did not say what kind of meeting. Nothing more, nothing out of the ordinary to report.

“Did you notice the mail piling up in her box?”

“Yes,” laconic Alex said. “Assumed she was out of town.”

“Do you have any idea why there's no mail now?” Claire was convinced the post office was still returning it, although when she'd called, the woman she'd spoken to seemed to have no idea where Rachel's mail had gone.

“Could be she's having it forwarded to another address.”

In the lower left-hand drawer of Rachel's desk: seven files of notes and clippings of articles. All old. Some half-used notepads. At the very back, a single photograph of Michael Straw, and a file of Star's drawings, some of which still bore crease marks from having been folded in the mail. Big-headed figures, a fat sun shining over three blue creatures that might be dogs. To Mum, Love Star. To Rachel, love Star. Another file folder, right at the back, marked M & D, which Claire took out and opened on her lap.

Inside there were only two objects. A card with a picture of Monet's water lilies on the front contained a message in Sylvia's hand: To our beloved Rachel on her thirtieth birthday. Hope
you're living life to the fullest and may you continue to do so for years to come! Love, Mum and Dad. The other object was more mysterious. It appeared, at first, to be nothing more than a pad of blank white paper. When Claire examined it more closely, she realized that indentations of her father's handwriting were scored into its pages. He must have penned a note on a sheet that had been torn off, the pressure of the pen leaving these grooves beneath. Their father had never, almost never, written them things. Birthday cards, postcards were always in their mother's hand, signed from the two of them. Claire had one postcard that her father had sent her, from San Antonio, Texas, where he'd gone alone to a math convention when she was twelve. She could not make out all the ghostly words on the pad. Sylvia – that was clear. Blue suitcase. Zipper. Hugh. How familiar the cursives of his “g,” the final jut of his second “h.” Had the indented letters faded over the years? Had Rachel been able to make out all the words? His presence was summoned up anyway, the heft of his body, the timbre of his voice. Rachel must have taken the pad from the house when the three of them had cleared it out, keeping this find to herself. Perhaps she considered it such an odd item to hold onto that she feared they might tease her, or perhaps she thought that neither Claire nor Allison would care about something of so little apparent consequence. And yet Claire found it hard to put the pad back. She could think of no justification, at this stage, for removing it. If she simply, carefully ripped out an underlying page, on which the grooves of their father's writing were a little less deep, Rachel would never know, and yet such an act felt like stealing, violating the integrity of the object. She slid the pad back into the folder, the folder into the drawer.

In another folder were years' worth of medical insurance statements and receipts for prescription drug purchases. Rachel tended to do as Claire herself did: stock up every four or five months. Her last purchases, on February 15, 2000: forty-eight Zomig (several hundred dollars' worth), two hundred Anaprox, one hundred Tylenol 3s. Thirty Ativan. Before that: thirty-six Zomig on November 12, 1999. Claire took note of the prescribing doctor's name. How long would forty-eight Zomig last Rachel? There was also a chance that Rachel had phoned in for more renewals from wherever she was.

Though the pill count was high, it was not, to Claire's eye, out of line. Rachel had always relied on drugs, even more than she had. Rachel was the one who'd tried hard-core painkillers, who'd suffered through an addiction to Fiorinal. For women's magazines, she wrote about all kinds of treatments, from the mainstream to the kooky, and passed on any migraine-related tips that came her way, but for herself scoffed at anything that seemed too alternative. Claire was the one who'd tried an osteopath, a cranial sacral therapist, two naturopaths, three acupuncturists, a biofeedback specialist, none, so far, to any long-lasting effect. Friends with migraines had found cures – magnesium had done the trick for Irene Tate – but nothing so far had really worked either for her or Rachel.

From the bottom right-hand drawer, Claire pulled out an answering machine, a relic from the days before voice mail. The phone line still beeped with messages that she could not retrieve. Before leaving Toronto, she'd called Rachel's New York number and discovered the voice-mail box to be full. Perhaps, by connecting the answering machine to the phone and wall jack and
setting it to pick up after two rings, she'd be able to intercept the line, before the voice-mail function kicked in, and retrieve any new messages.

She set up her laptop on Rachel's desk and began to feed into it the computer disks jumbled in the desk's top right-hand drawer. Four were empty, the rest contained files full of articles in various versions, all old, and some out-of-date software. None of the magazine editors whom she had contacted had commissioned the migraine article that Rachel was ostensibly working on at the time of her disappearance. Claire had tried to locate the article on-line, without success. Of course this did not mean that Rachel hadn't written it, although perhaps she had abandoned the attempt, or the article itself was a ruse, a way to get herself seen by the neurologists in Montreal, and experts elsewhere.

Claire searched for signs, however minute, that Rachel had returned in her absence, that she might be hiding out close by or trying consciously to elude them. She'd checked the depressions in the bed upon entering the night before, the fridge, the contents of the bathroom garbage, the position of the tube of toothpaste beside the kitchen sink and the indentations in it, Rachel's assemblage of pills in the kitchen cupboard, the pattern of dust on her desktop.

And now: the number of pairs of underwear in the chest of drawers in her closet, the items of clothing on hangers, the arrangement of empty hangers. And then, since nothing seemed to have altered, Claire began to slip her hands into the pockets of Rachel's trousers and jackets, as one might search through the belongings of the dead, fingers closing around Kleenexes, lint-covered pills, old MetroCards, more business cards, but there
were no obvious clues as to where Rachel had gone or why, no longed-for secret message. Cardboard filing boxes were stored on a top shelf. On the closet floor, within a slim, clear plastic shopping bag was folded a slinky silver top, tag still attached. The impression of Rachel's feet hollowed out her worn shoes.

Claire had to stop and collect herself. She was back in Etobicoke, in the old bungalow, with Rachel and Allison, only they weren't in the room with her. She was in her parents' long double closet, in the dark, the sliding door pulled shut, surrounded by their clothes. What she wanted to bear away with her was not the clothes but the scents that clung to them, the particular commingling of her father's nut-like musk and her mother's perfume of citrus and rose, an essence impossible to capture. Even if she managed to bottle it, it would fade.

She sat on the floor of Rachel's apartment with her head in her hands. She was here because of them, too, because surely her parents would have wanted her to do something to help Rachel, especially since they could no longer do anything themselves.

At 11:52, Brad Arnarson called, his voice staccatoed by the crackle of a cellphone. “Hey, what's up?” His call caught Claire batting away dry-cleaning plastic as she dragged a fan from the back of Rachel's closet.

“Looking through Rachel's stuff. Why?” His offhand tone and question threw her. What did he think she'd be doing? “Where are you?”

“– on 11th Str – outside Danal – on line for brunch – long are you around?” His line kept breaking up.

She yelled. “Till Monday afternoon.”

“I've got a pretty insane schedule all weekend.” She sensed a falling off of his concern, a glimpse of the life he lived beyond Rachel. Perhaps he felt he'd done what he needed to do by alerting her to Rachel's absence. The work of finding Rachel was hers.

“Did a Detective Bird call you?” she asked.

“Yeah, and I told him pretty much what I told you.”

“Do you have a moment now?” He mumbled something. “What exactly did Rachel say about how bad her migraines were before she left?”

“What – Claire, sorry – just a sec.”

She shouted her question again.

“Bad,” he said. The connection got suddenly better. Perhaps he'd changed location. There were still street sounds around him. “But I don't really have a point of comparison. She said she kept reacting to more triggers and she was worried about reaching some point of total toxicity. I stopped by at a meeting of this pain support group she went to a few times – kind of an
AA
thing. They get together once a month in a basement on St. Marks Place.”

“Rachel went to this?”

“She said it was totally not like her, but – Anyway, I asked around and no one there has seen her since January.”