Claire's Head (5 page)

The contents of Rachel's fridge were an opened bottle of Evian water; a shrivelled piece of ginger; a canister of film (which Claire had a feeling she'd seen on a couple of previous visits) rattled in the otherwise empty egg tray; a handful of vegetables rotted in the crisper. A bowl, a plate, a glass, a knife and fork, were stacked in the sink.

Insect corpses lay scattered in the bathtub, three centipedes and the carapace of a cockroach. The water in the toilet bowl had turned an unpleasant rusty colour. In the bathroom garbage basket, long strands of dark hair were coiled among piles of Kleenex.

No note, no sign of a note.

Back in the kitchen, Claire grabbed a handful of nuts from her bag, then opened the door of the cupboard that ran along the wall to the left of the sink. The bottom shelf, just above eye level, served as Rachel's medicine cabinet. Bottles of vitamins and over-the-counter pills, a desperate cornucopia of prescription medications, were jumbled together. Claire lifted the bottles out and set them on the kitchen table.

Among the various abandoned prophylactics – drugs that Rachel had tried to keep headaches at bay – were a half-empty bottle of Sandomigran, and an expired bottle of Elavil, which Claire used at a low dose to ward off her migraines, and another of Epival.

She found an almost-empty bottle of Anaprox, good for calming muscles, which she herself took whenever she had a migraine. It heightened the effectiveness of Zomig, the triptan drug that targeted the specific receptors implicated in the migraine's neurochemical processes. Rachel, too, used Zomig, but there was no sign of any, none that Claire could find, only one partly used cardboard blister pack of Imitrex, an earlier triptan drug, which, they agreed, no longer worked for them as effectively as it used to.

There were other things Claire expected to see and didn't: no Tylenol 3s. And no 292s, prescription codeine with aspirin, so
no prescription codeine drugs at all, only a Canadian bottle of over-the-counter 222s. On the other hand, Claire was always cautioning Rachel about codeine overuse, not only because codeine was addictive, but it could actually lower your pain threshold. Which Rachel knew. Rachel had had both Zomig and Tylenol 3s on her in Montreal. Presumably she'd taken all her supplies of those drugs (months' worth, possibly, in the case of Zomig, since Rachel, like Claire, tended to fill her prescriptions in bulk). Odd that she'd left nothing of either at home, particularly the Zomig. This might suggest some premeditation – a determination, even before setting out for Montreal, not to return, at least not soon thereafter. No doubt she had some Anaprox on her, too. While careless about some things, Rachel would never let herself get caught without medication – of this Claire was convinced. Neither of them ever went out the door without a pocket stash of something.

And yet, and yet – the apartment wasn't abandoned. Electricity still juiced through the switches – the overhead light bloomed when Claire flicked it on and the fridge had been humming the whole while. Blue flames leaped to life on the gas stove when she switched on one of the elements. Someone was paying the utility bills. The phone worked. By the looks of such things, Rachel might waltz in the door at any moment. Her landlord had not tried to repossess the place.

Claire scooped up the keys from the kitchen table and headed back downstairs. In the front hall, pieces of mail were practically bursting out of Rachel's mailbox, and when Claire turned the key, the lock stiff with the pressure of the contents, the metal door sprang open, spilling envelopes in all directions.
She picked envelopes off the floor, tugged free those items wedged deep within the box. Folded amidst the real and junk mail was a piece of paper on which someone (the mail carrier?) had scrawled
CLEAN OUT YOUR MAILBOX!!!

At the back of the first floor hall, which smelled now of damp dog and garlic, Claire stopped to toss the obvious junk mail in the recycling bin before carrying the rest upstairs. When she re-entered the apartment, the pigeons, who had returned to their perches, leaped up with less ferocity. The heat hit her even more intensely. Before sorting the mail, she set about opening windows, wrestling with the stiff catches, pushing up so hard on the frames that she was frightened of falling out. Now she felt like an intruder, disrupting things, trampling on traces of Rachel. The window ledges were thick with pigeon shit. Cooler air blew in, skivvying the dust. She scarfed down another handful of nuts and gulped the rest of the bottle of Evian water.

There wasn't a lot of personal mail. A couple of handwritten envelopes. A postcard from St. Petersburg from someone named John, who began,
I know you haven't heard from me in years
.

Envelopes from
Elle, Vogue, Marie Claire
might be cheques, payments for articles. There was a bank statement. Surely under the circumstances, it was permissible to open Rachel's bank statement. At first Claire simply stared. All those zeros. Thirty thousand dollars in Rachel's chequing account. Some of that money might be the remains of the sum they'd each received from the insurance settlement after their parents' death. At the time, Claire had found it funny that Rachel did not do as she and Allison had done: put some of the money into buying a house or apartment. A condo. Allison had no doubt argued in favour of this, but
Rachel had told Claire why bother when she had a cheap, rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan that she liked. This was her March statement. Her rent, $550, disappeared on the first of the month – presumably Rachel had given her landlord a fistful of postdated cheques at the beginning of the year.

Bills were paid by automatic withdrawal. There was an unspecified bank transfer of $1,000 which might be the monthly allowance that Rachel paid Allison towards Star's care. Later in the month there were a couple of automatic withdrawals for several hundred dollars apiece, not even amounts, and accompanied by additional withdrawal fees, which suggested they'd been made outside the country. No further information was offered.

An official letter sent by the post office on April 24 announced that Rachel's mail would be held until further notice, since there was no room in her mailbox; she should contact the Cooper Square station as soon as possible regarding pickup or alternate delivery. There was also what appeared to be a credit card statement – Claire was slicing her finger along the top of the envelope, when, from across the kitchen, the buzzer sounded.

The three buttons beneath the intercom spelled BLT. Like the sandwich, as Rachel had said when she'd shown Claire how to work them. Pressing T, Claire shouted, “Who is it?” She pressed L and listened to a male voice holler back through static. She presumed he'd said Brad. He could have said Bacon. Hitting B, she buzzed him up.

As soon as his footsteps reached the top of the stairs, Claire opened the door. He was blond. A limp mess of uncombed hair.
As breathless and moist as she'd been upon reaching the summit. He looked young, boyish, perhaps younger than he was. At first sight, there was nothing obviously discomforting or menacing about him. His pale skin, despite the flush of his face, gave him an appearance of all-over milkiness, a guileless, quizzical air. His thin plaid shirt hung open, the sleeves rolled above the elbows. A damp white undershirt beneath. A cellphone hooked to the waist of his jeans. A sharp hint of sweat. On first impression, he seemed too mild, too kind, too
unstylish
, to be a boyfriend of Rachel's. He looked like he'd stepped out of a field, or, no, out of a picture of a field.

He was staring at Claire, too, as he approached, perhaps examining the ways in which she did or did not resemble Rachel. Put Allison between them and the connections became clearer. Rachel's face was the sternest, her hair the darkest brown; she also had the best cheekbones, their father's. Allison, the tallest, shared her squared jaw. Claire, the small one, didn't, and her hair was light brown, almost fair, but her mouth and lips were, like Rachel's, their mother's. You saw their resemblance when they smiled.

“Hi.” He held out his hand, and Claire shook it. “Have you found anything?” He followed her into the apartment.

“Not really, not yet.” All at once she felt like crying but swallowed the urge. She gathered up the medications in handfuls and stuffed them back in the cupboard.

Just as she had done, he walked all the way to the far end of the apartment, glancing about, as if Rachel might pop out from behind the furniture.

“Do you happen to know her phone code?” Claire asked.

“Unh-unh.”

“I've used it when I've stayed here but I can't remember it.” It drove her crazy that she, who had a good memory for details, couldn't recall it, though it was nothing obvious (like Rachel's date of birth) and she had not visited Rachel all that frequently.

“I've been looking through her mail.” They returned to the kitchen. The pigeons had floated back to the window ledges where they were quietly hooting.

Brad Arnarson fingered the postcard on the table, then glanced at the bank statement. Claire hoped she wasn't betraying Rachel by exposing something as private as her finances.

She picked up the credit card statement that she'd been in the process of opening. She really didn't want to be doing this.

On March 16, charges from the Hotel du Parc in Montreal. (Rachel must have stayed until the sixteenth then.) On the seventeenth, a $1,245.68 charge from Air Canada. This was the date the transaction had gone through, which wasn't necessarily the date when the ticket had been purchased, and the statement gave no clue as to where the transaction had taken place, nor where Rachel was flying. It could have been a delayed charge for Rachel's ticket to Montreal or it could have taken her somewhere else entirely.

There were no subsequent charges.

“How long have you known Rachel?” Claire asked, as they pulled out chairs on either side of the table.

“Just about a couple of years.”

“And were you – I'm sorry, I don't know a better way of asking – were you a couple?”

“Kind of.”

“Does that mean you were and you're not now?”

“I'm not sure. I know that sounds strange. We'd entered some kind of grey zone. It wasn't totally clear.”

“It was clearer before?”

“Yeah. For a while, things were pretty intense. But we've both been really busy. We have a lot of commitments. And there were complications. Things haven't been all that easy for her lately.”

“Not easy how?”

“With her headaches, for a start. They'd been giving her a hard time and she was having trouble finding anything that helped. So that was depressing her, and obsessing her, kind of, I'd say. And I think she was looking to do more straight journalism, still on medical issues but she was getting kind of fed up with the women's magazines.”

“They pay okay, don't they?”

“Yeah, they pay.”

“So you think maybe she's on some, I don't know, investigative mission?”

“Could be.”

“The last time you saw her –”

“We got together a week before she left – and that was fine, it was great, we had dinner, we had a good time.”

“But you spoke to her –”

“The night before she left. She was kind of frantic because she had something to finish before she took off, and she wasn't feeling well. She was kind of on edge. I think she'd been trying to pull back from people generally. So I don't know how personal some of it was. Her mood. We argued. She told me I was too involved. I'd called mostly to make sure she was okay – but there was also something she wanted that I wasn't prepared to do.”

Sex, was it an argument about sex?

Was Rachel trying to dump him and he wasn't getting it? If this was indeed the reason for her running off, it did not explain why she hadn't got in touch with Claire, or with Allison and Star.

It was odd that Rachel had never mentioned his name. Did this make the relationship more a delusion on his part than something actual, for all that they had no doubt slept together, spent time (nights?) together in this very apartment? Yet Rachel's accounts of her relationships were not altogether to be trusted. She could be by turns confessional and secretive, and more often secretive – private, she might say. When Michael Straw had moved in, she had said nothing to her family for eight months. Later, she said it was because she'd felt nervous, uncertain about whether the relationship would last. She had been equally oblique when he moved out. There had been other boyfriends whom they'd heard little of, their presence signalled ambiguously in Rachel's conversation by references to “a friend.”

Was there something Rachel found embarrassing about Brad Arnarson or was she simply trying to protect herself? If he did not immediately strike Claire as conforming to her sense of Rachel's taste – she would have said Rachel liked her men more assertive, men capable of sweeping her away – well, there were also limits to what she knew of Rachel's taste in men.

Just like that, her head – specifically, the point behind her right eye – began to pulse. Claire leaped to her feet. “I need to get some lunch.”

“Want to find something on First Avenue?” Brad rose also.

“Something fast.”

“You've got your choice.” He listed Cuban, Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Indian, Italian, Venezuelan, and Belgian waffles. He did not seem thrown by her sudden shift in tempo but kept pace as they hustled out the door and down the stairs.

“Japanese.” Outside, as they bounded towards the corner, Claire pointed north to the Japanese restaurant at the intersection of 11th Street and First Avenue where she had often eaten with Rachel, most recently during her last visit to New York. Last September 13, it would have been, or the fourteenth. Despite being raw, sushi was a good food for both of them – heavy on protein, which helped stabilize their blood sugar and thus warded off migraines, and neutral (just fish and rice). Seaweed (healthy and green) on the side. In September, Rachel had remarked that sushi was the only food she was still eating out with any regularity. It felt safe. Talismanic. Just as there were times when Claire, pitching towards a headache, hung all her hope on a Granny Smith apple, because someone had told her there was something in green apples that counteracted migraines. She wondered if Rachel had told Brad that she also suffered from them. Likely Rachel had mentioned it at some point.