Claire's Head (4 page)

There was a fear that overcame her, linked to a sensation of being slightly out of control, as though her body were not altogether hers or the line between the world out there and her in here was very thin.

At night sometimes, as Claire lay in her bedroom beside solid, comforting Allison, her body began shrinking. She thought of it as the elevator feeling: shrinking was like falling down an elevator shaft, being both the one falling and the one
who watched herself fall, whole but diminishing in scale. Other nights she grew. Her limbs swelled. If she concentrated all her attention on her right hand, it kept growing: its proportions remained the same, it simply expanded. She could not move. She had no warning which nights the distortions were going to happen. Whether she would be dropped into a deep well or lifted into the sky. Disappear or balloon to fill the world.

She didn't talk about it. She assumed this happened to everyone (Rachel, Allison), and that because the experience was so common, no one spoke of it.

Nor did it seem unusual to desire to measure things, trying to keep the world's wildness at bay. So much sensation – from the whirr of crickets to the whoosh of cars accelerating between stop signs on Rathburn Road, the sometimes bewildering facial expressions of other people, the pressure of others' gazes and skin, the hard plastic curves of a beloved toy figurine lost when it fell through her fingers into a sewer grate, the assault of the penny arcade machines beside an English beach, the overblown sweetness of honey – and so little means of blocking anything out.

One winter afternoon, aged eight, Claire made her way towards her parents' bedroom where the pale curtains were often left half-closed. In this room, she was alone, unobserved. She was not thinking in any plotted way about what she was doing. Her mother, and Rachel, and Allison were down the hall and around the corner, a right-hand turn into the kitchen. Claire peeled off her socks. The radiator beneath the window was sheathed in an aura of heat. She pressed her right foot against it. Her skin and
muscle flinched. She persisted. She counted to ten, pulled her foot back, and examined the pink flush growing on her sole. The stinging swelled and receded. No other sensation existed while she did this. Then she tried the same with her left foot.

She began to slip away to her parents' bedroom regularly, in the later afternoon, when she was least likely to be missed, while her mother was preparing supper and her sisters bickering over homework at the dining room table, her father still away at the school where he taught math. Always at the same radiator, beside the rocking chair over which Sylvia hung her worn shirts and pantyhose, faintly sweet with the odour of her feet and shoes. Beneath the radiator's eight pleats, dust gathered amidst the pale blue stubble of the broadloom. Cold air billowed through an open slit of window. Claire did not close the door. She folded her knees, pressed both feet to the hot metal, and started counting. Each time there came a point when she could no longer hold her feet in place, her arches contracting even as she bit her tongue and urged herself to go longer. She did not cry. The pain was worse, far worse, when she pulled her feet away. It bowled her over. She bit her hand to counteract it. But the pain was hers, no one's but hers. She controlled when it started and when it ended, and this produced a satisfaction so deep it became exhilaration. She began to use her wristwatch to time herself – three minutes and forty-four seconds, forty-five, forty-six. Her feet so piercingly tender afterwards it was hard to walk. One step, two steps, three. Once she held her feet so long that she burned them enough to blister. Did she make a sound that time? Someone in the doorway. Her mother in the doorway,
bounding across the room, yanking her by the wrist, What the heck do you think you're doing?

Slowly Claire grew aware that Rachel also got headaches. Or, slowly Rachel also began to get headaches. Until then, Claire had only thought of her sisters as people who did things, who sometimes did things to her or made her feel a certain way. Rachel, in particular, seemed out of reach, twelve, nearly thirteen, loping around in that musky, budding body of hers. The year Claire turned nine, they moved to a somewhat bigger bungalow, blocks from the old but far enough that she had to switch schools. She and Allison still shared a room but it was larger, their beds, pushed to opposite walls, four large paces away from each other. Now and again, when Claire came home from school with a headache and took to her bed, she'd open her eyes later to find another person in the room. Rachel not Allison. Out of the dim haze of those afternoons, Rachel materialized, gazing down at her, Rachel lying in Allison's bed. Long, dark hair, long and angular face, her elongated legs growing even as she lay. Sometimes Rachel pulled Allison's pillow over her head. Eyes closed, Claire listened to the rasp of Rachel's breath, her own breath echoing Rachel's. There was comfort in Rachel's presence. They did not need to speak. Their mother came in and gave them each two 222s, aspirin with codeine, to quell the pain. Strange to see Rachel so quiet and stilled. Rachel who ran and won the hundred-metre dash in junior high school track meets. On the shelf beside the window, Allison's gerbils madly spun the metal wheel in their cage.

Sometimes, ten-year-old Allison appeared, swinging open the door. There she was, through the slits of Claire's eyelids, a Band-Aid on her left shin, another on her right elbow – the one who tripped on her shoelaces, who bumped into things.

“You're in my bed,” Allison said to Rachel.

“So?” Rachel removed Allison's pillow from her forehead.

“I have a headache,” Allison said.

“You do not,” said Rachel. Dark hair was matted like a stain across her brow.

“I do so,” said Allison. She sat on the edge of the bed, then swung her legs up, forcing Rachel to shift over. There was barely room for the two of them as Allison rolled onto her side, scrunched up her eyes, clutched her stomach and began to moan.

“Cut it out,” Rachel said, rising on one elbow. But Allison kept moaning.

“I mean it,” Rachel said. And, “Go bother Claire.” When she pinched Allison, Allison shrieked.

First came the rap of their mother's footsteps along the hall, then she veered into the room, her left hand gripping the door frame. “What's going on in here?”

“I have a headache,” Allison said.

“Where?” Sylvia asked as she approached. “Do you feel sick?”

“All over the top of my head,” Allison said. Her eyes were wide open, the whites glistening in the dusky light, the room shielded by curtains.

Sylvia laid her palm against Allison's forehead, as if checking for fever. “One side or both sides?”

They all waited for Allison's response. “Both,” Allison said at last.

Sylvia sighed, leaning over Allison to kiss her, which made Claire's heart leap about indignantly. “You'll be all right.”

As soon as their mother left, pulling the door almost all the way closed, Rachel turned to Claire and spoke in a gravelly voice. “She has a migraine.”

“Who?” Claire asked.

“Mum.”

“A what?”

“It's what you have.”

“How do you know she has one?”

“From the way she's rubbing her shoulder and her neck.”

Word dovetailed with image: her mother's right hand unconsciously working the muscles of her right shoulder, playing with the tight tendons beside her throat, kneading the place at the back of the head where the neck joined the skull, where, beneath her skull (as in her head, as in Rachel's), on one side the pain was beginning to throb. And it came to Claire that she had seen her mother like this not just minutes ago, leaning over Allison's bed, but on other occasions.

C
laire arrived at La Guardia late on the Saturday morning. The world shone with a supple, exquisite brightness that was not normal because she so seldom experienced airports without some level of pain-induced perceptual interference. This time, the hour-long flight, the dry air of high altitudes, the convulsive shifts in pressure, had not given her a headache. She bought a bag of almonds and an apple to tide her over on the food front, then headed down the flight of stairs to the baggage claim, her overnight bag in one hand. She did not take the escalator.

By the baggage carousels stretched banks of pay phones, their silvered surfaces built right into the walls. The first one she tried didn't work but the second one did, its buttons clicking as she pressed Stefan's number at the lab. She left him a message saying she'd arrived, her head was fine, and she'd try him at home that evening. If he needed to reach her, she'd be at Rachel's.

Fishing Brad Arnarson's number out of her datebook, she called him. He picked up after four rings, a little hoarse, as if
he'd just woken up, although it was nearly noon. He'd told her to call as soon as she got in and they would make plans to meet. Claire said she was still at the airport. “What time do you want to come by Rachel's?” she asked.

“Say two?”

Outside, the sun shone brilliantly, battering car windshields. The drivers of yellow taxis leaned on their horns. A black man yanked down the baggage doors of a Manhattan-bound airport bus. A beautiful day and such blare all around her. As Claire raced for the bus, she kept her eyes peeled for Rachel, on the off chance that Rachel, wheeling her flight bag behind her, was about to make a sudden, miraculously timed reappearance.

A man in attendant's greens sat smoking on the fourth of the six steps that led up to Rachel's apartment building on East 9th Street. He was watching a teenaged girl coax a shivering, hairless dog down another set of stairs to the basement veterinary clinic. On all sides, heat pressed in. The fetid, cheesy stench of warming garbage rose from a row of metal cans lined against the wall of the building next door. Sweat had already gathered at Claire's underarms, dampening her flowered dress. At home, she might have been sitting in the cool kitchen, reading the paper, or biking with Stefan by the lake. The vet attendant glanced at her as she passed him on her way to the front door.

The door, which was sometimes locked and sometimes not, wasn't. In the vestibule, Claire checked for Rachel's name, there as it had always been, and pressed her buzzer.

After a minute, she let herself through the second door into
the front hall. A hole in the ceiling, half-covered with a green garbage bag, had not been there the last time she had visited, on her own, early in the fall. Dog fluff floated down the stairwell. Parrots squawked behind closed doors. Nothing felt askew or in any way sinister, as she mounted the six dizzying flights, 100 steps, that led to Rachel's door.

Claire knocked. And listened, trying to still her racing breath, her flushed face pressed to the crack between door and the metal security plate bolted along the frame's edge. No funky smells from inside. Only the familiar, softly sulphurous scent of gas drifted through the hall. She unlocked the three locks, fumbling over the keys until she got each one to fit in turn, catching her finger on the security plate as she pushed the door open, swearing as her skin smarted. She called out Rachel's name. Sunlight poured through the kitchen windows. Pigeons erupted from the window ledges. The door slammed shut behind her. She locked it from the inside.

Warm air enveloped her, the close stickiness of a place that appeared to have been uninhabited for a while.

Claire dropped her bag.

Fourteen paces to the farthest point in the apartment, through the kitchen, the middle room, the third room that did triple duty as study, bedroom, living room, to the far end where two windows looked over 9th Street. Rachel's champagne-coloured duvet was pulled loosely over her bed, as if before leaving she'd given it one half-hearted tug. Her pillows lay one atop another the way she piled them when she had a headache so that she could lie with her head raised. A small alarm clock – the time was 12:57 – sat on the floor by the bed. Papers lay scattered
on her desk, around a gap, twenty-five by thirty centimetres, the size of her laptop computer, black grit coming up when Claire swiped her finger across the space. Rachel's books (anatomy books, medical books, books of all sorts) were lined up on her shelves and in stacks, beneath the shelves, on the floor. The framed photograph of Star and one of their parents, an early snapshot taken in Addis Ababa when Rachel herself was no more than a baby, remained in place on her desk. Yellow Post-it notes clung to the wall above the telephone, while a couple of numbers were scribbled in red ink right on the wall. When Claire picked up the phone, the line pulsed with the quickened dial tone that signalled waiting messages.

Nothing looked, at least superficially, all that different than usual. Dust swirled across the floor. Dust gathered in clumps in the corners of the middle room, skittering over Rachel's Moroccan slippers – but then Rachel hated to vacuum.

Inside the closet, four empty hangers dangled amidst the row of clothes. Spumes of dry-cleaning plastic lay in waves beneath. On the shelf above the clothes' rail gaped a space big enough to hold a small suitcase. In the top drawer of a chest of drawers, Claire counted seven pairs of underwear, four beige, three black. Surely Rachel owned more. On the other hand, she did not appear to have packed for a long trip.