Claire's Head (6 page)

They had barely squeezed into their corner table before Brad waved a waiter over.

“How fast can you bring us some sushi?”

“Sashimi,” Claire said.

“Okay, sashimi.”

Fast, it seemed, since the lunch rush was over. Once their orders were taken, they turned their attention back to the matter at hand.

“Are you going to call the police?” Brad Arnarson asked.

“Not sure yet.” In Claire's mind, puzzlement still prevailed over fear.

“What about a private detective?”

She shook her head vehemently. “Not yet.”

That last visit, Claire had flown down on her own to take in a show of antique maps at the Pierpont Morgan Library. In recent years, she and Stefan had usually come down together, twice when Rachel was out of town and they could be on their own in her apartment. Claire, rather than Allison, was the one who had more frequently visited Rachel in New York.

In September, Rachel had seemed in good spirits. She had taken Claire to a boutique on 7th Street run by a friend of hers – Adele, that was the woman's name but Adele what? – and bought her a pair of silver gloves, which Claire had almost never worn.

“Do you know a friend of Rachel's who owns a store on 7th Street?”

“Adele Thomas.” Brad was drinking from a cup of miso soup, eyeing her over the rim of the bowl. “Are she and Rachel close?”

“I don't know.”

“We can stop by after lunch, if you like.”

Their food arrived: teriyaki chicken for Brad, sashimi for Claire, who began to wolf down the glistening strips of raw fish.

In September, they'd sat two tables closer to the sushi bar than where Claire and Brad were seated. Notice anything unusual, Rachel had asked, plucking Claire's arm. No matter how carefully Claire scanned the room and its decor, the cramped tables, the
special menus for soft-shell crab and tempura asparagus written in coloured highlighter and taped to the walls, no matter how carefully she revisited her memories of previous visits, nothing seemed to have altered. I'll give you a clue, Rachel said. She nodded towards the three men in white jackets working the sushi bar, little white hats moored like boats on top of their heads. Ah. They weren't Japanese. They were speaking Spanish. I'm amazed you didn't notice, Rachel said. In the last year, it's like this in every sushi restaurant around here.

“When do you go home?” Brad asked. (This day, also, three Hispanic men were chopping fish behind the bar.)

“Sunday evening.” The muscles along Claire's right side, at the nape of her neck were seizing up. She was uneasy, that was all, and caught off guard. “I may need to go right back to Rachel's after lunch.”

He nodded, without seeming either surprised or perturbed. “I can stop by Adele's.”

“It's okay. I can go tomorrow.”

Brad shrugged. “Well, let me know if there's anything you want me to do.”

“How did you meet Rachel?”

Now he blushed, his cheeks as full of colour as when she'd first encountered him at the top of the stairs outside Rachel's apartment. “We had a professional connection. And then we reconnected nonprofessionally after that.”

Ever since meeting him, Claire had been trying to imagine what his professional life consisted of, what lay beyond the plaid shirt and concerned demeanour – actor, computer programmer, banker, grad student? “What do you do?”

His blush had receded. He was signalling the waiter – already – for the bill. “I'm a massage therapist.”

Once, Claire had flown to New York to visit Rachel, and arrived with a migraine (not unusual). A bad one (worse luck). Rachel was actually there when Claire, the extra set of keys in her pocket, reached the apartment. As soon as Rachel saw Claire wobbling in the doorway, she beckoned Claire in. C'mere. Gently.

She pulled Claire's bags from her arms and pushed her into a kitchen chair and handed her a glass of water along with a couple of familiar pills. Standing behind the chair, Rachel pressed her fingertips sharply into Claire's shoulders, above the collarbone, then along the vertebrae at the nape of her neck. Oh, babe. Leaning over her, she worked the occipital area, at the top of the nape, on the right side, hard as a wall as a rock. Claire was close to tears, each pulse like a dodgem car slamming away behind her eye, but Rachel seemed to know, without Claire having to say anything, without seeking far, the precise spots on Claire's scalp where the muscles gripped, those strange little muscle joins that the migraine made throb (pain which didn't originate in the muscles but travelled there), the searing place over the right eyebrow. Claire's pain spoke and Rachel heard it. Her fingers, barely stumbling, spoke back. It was the fact that her fingers could identify the pain as much as her attempts to release it that was so comforting.

Once she had returned to Rachel's apartment, Claire medicated herself and stretched out on the bed, on top of Rachel's duvet, head on the raised pillows, eyes covered with the small silk eye pillow that she always carried with her when she travelled. Later, she tossed it aside. Light slid slowly across the walls of Rachel's room. The height of the brass frame of Rachel's bed meant that the view through the east-facing side window, the direction in which the bed faced, offered nothing but sky and rooftops and mostly sky, through which Claire floated. Rachel must have lain here like this, a ghost, an echo. Stefan, too, had sprawled on this bed beside her. How quiet the room was. For moments at a time, Claire would forget, as she drifted, that she was here because Rachel was missing. She could have been almost anywhere. Stefan might walk through the door. The pigeons' voices and the flapping of their wings dropped to a sibilant murmur. From a distant window ledge came the droning of a dove.

It was 9:07 by the alarm clock beside Rachel's bed, and still light, when Claire roused herself and pulled on a T-shirt over her bra and underpants. At eight, Stefan had called and, still murky with drugs, she'd told him she would phone him later, adding that there was no sign of Rachel. Now, her head slowly clearing, she padded from window to window. In a minute, she would call him back. Then she would have to rouse herself further and find some dinner.

On the rooftop on the north side of 9th Street, a woman was watering a garden of yellow climbing roses. In the east, on the roof of the building next door, only five floors up and thus
clearly visible from Rachel's sixth-floor apartment, a cocktail party was in progress. Three young men lingered by the south edge of the rooftop, each with a jacket hooked over his shoulder, a martini glass in the other hand. Three young women in diaphanous dresses hovered close to the east side of the roof, the sunset like silk on their bare backs, arms smooth as bones. It was a Saturday night, for others only an ordinary Saturday night. The pigeons had vanished.

Until her parents' deaths, when she was twenty-six, Claire had always taken comfort in statistical odds. She quelled any nervousness about flying by telling herself that she was far more likely to die in a car crash than in the air. Her parents' accident had savaged that comfort, for the odds of both your parents dying at the foot of an upward-bound escalator in an arrival hall at the Frankfurt International Airport, falling and being crushed beneath their luggage and a metal luggage trolley that had come loose from the patented metal grips on the escalator, were so minute as to be infinitesimal. Yet this had happened.

After the first years of grief, Claire had tried to salvage some consolation. Their deaths offered a kind of statistical inoculation. The odds of something equally terrible happening to another family member had to be as infinitesimal. By this reasoning, Rachel would be safe. Yet there were limits to this consolation. After all, the world was ruled by randomness. People were transformed or vanished or died when you least expected it. She could not forget that if a young woman had not, years ago, leaped to her death from a bridge, neither she nor Rachel nor Allison would even exist.

O
n Sunday evening, Claire flew home almost but not entirely empty-handed. She'd gathered up the pages that Rachel had abandoned on her desk and stuffed them into her flight bag. Most of them seemed to be notes towards an article on insomnia – at Christmas Rachel had been writing about narcolepsy. On another page were scribbled words which Claire deciphered as
trigeminal nerve, migraine generator, brain stem
, and a phone number with a Montreal area code for a Dr. P. L'Aube.

She had spent the day searching through Rachel's belongings. In particular, she'd looked for Rachel's passport, or a date-book, or an address book, none of which she found. There was no sign of a cellphone either, although in the right-hand bottom drawer of Rachel's desk, Claire found three sets of cords and adapters – the remains of lost cellphones? The upper drawers of the desk, and notably the shallow middle drawer, were strewn with business cards, as if Rachel had simply emptied her pockets into them. Claire sorted through the cards and pulled out the
ones marked with the names of editors at magazines: she would try calling these from work the next morning. Also Rachel's bank and phone company.

At lunchtime, she'd knocked on the door of Rachel's neighbours, two men, a couple, whom she had met briefly in the past, but they weren't in. She slipped a note under their door. Nor when she stopped by Adele Thomas, the boutique, was Adele there, only a young underling with very short hair who said that Adele would be in France for the next two weeks but gave Claire Adele's home number.

Back in Rachel's apartment, Claire tried the phone numbers written in red ink on the wall, which proved to be a car service, a Japanese restaurant, and a pharmacy on Second Avenue. She even called information and got the listing for Michael Straw, who now lived in Brooklyn with a woman Claire believed to be his wife. She was acutely aware that for him Rachel was history, as he surely was for her. When Michael came on the line (of course he remembered Claire, he said), he commiserated but was clearly relieved that Rachel's peregrinations didn't concern him any longer.

Home to downtown Toronto. How strangely quiet and empty, after New York, the evening streets seemed – York Street as Claire walked north from Front, where the airport bus had dropped her off, towards her streetcar stop on King. How few other pedestrians there were, all of them lost in scale beneath the glass-clad office towers. Her perception of space was entirely different here: the bank towers barely seemed to crowd each
other, and between the green gleaming walls spread wide slices of azure sky.

Too much space, Rachel had complained. Everything so spread out. She claimed it was one of the reasons she'd left Toronto for New York.

On the other hand, Claire loved the way the streets stretching east and west became ribbons of two- or three-storey hundred-year-old buildings rather than corridors of five- and six-storey tenements. It pleased her to live in a city full of houses and vistas that opened through trees to the sky.

She loved living close to the lake, too, that inland sea, loved the sense of expansiveness the lake offered. The air felt different in its proximity even when you couldn't see the water. There were breezes, yes, but also the invisible promise of a wide horizon nearby.

Not that she and Stefan had consciously searched for a house close to the lake. Claire was aware of a certain constriction in herself when she moved inland, and perhaps she suffered from an unacknowledged desire to find a city within this city as unlike her childhood suburban home as possible (Stefan had spent his childhood in Hamilton, not Toronto). Growing up, she certainly had not thought of herself as living by a lake; the lake, then, had seemed far away.

They had looked for months before buying a house, before daring to make an offer; then were nearly outbid. So many of the houses they saw were hopelessly, heart-sinkingly ugly – old houses modernized with lurid broadloom and vile veneer cabinetry, panelled doors replaced by hollow wood, rooms stuffed with dolls or sports plaques, quaint but unnecessary second-floor
kitchens, closed doors behind which lurked vicious dogs or aquaria filled with snakes, old washing machines with hand-turned mangles in the neat basements of deceased old women, other basements fat with vats of homemade wine. They kept to the west end, traipsing the kilometres west from Bathurst to Roncesvalles, from College south to King. Neither of them had ever lived with anyone before, which made Claire nervous. Surely that was a bad sign, that neither of them had managed to live with anyone before, though she was only twenty-six and Stefan twenty-seven when they'd met. She had already almost convinced herself that she would never meet anyone with whom she would be able to live and who would want to live with her.

The house they bought needed work, a brick-fronted Victorian semidetached on Adelaide Street not further abused by anyone else's terrible taste. It had seemed solid enough, which was important to Stefan, the angles of its walls and floors not too, too wonky, and Claire, who loved its antique trim and the height of its ceilings, allowed herself to be pulled along by Stefan's conviction that this was the place for them.