Claire's Head (9 page)

Managers were never here right now.

“Just the dates?”

“I'm sorry,” the girl repeated, her eyes scrunched as if it were easier not to look at Claire full on. “Have you gone to the police?”

“Yes, but I'm trying to find out what I can by myself.”

The hooks of the girl's plucked eyebrows shrugged.

“I'll go down on my knees,” Claire said. She couldn't believe she'd said that. She pulled out the photograph of Rachel.

“I'll take that,” the girl said. She stared at the photo, then at Claire. “I can see if anyone remembers her.”

“I'll have to make you a copy.”

“Theres a Xerox shop over on Parc. Look, I'm not saying anyone will remember – unless she's three foot high and limps.”

Hair dark enough to seem black in certain lights. Red-tinted at the ends. Shoulder-length when last seen though it could be any length now. A long brown braid at one time. Of middle height, though sometimes she looked taller than she was. Slim. Those runner's legs. Those cheekbones.

How hard it is to fix the details of what is not in front of you – the room at your back, those who are gone. To remember anything is to select some details and leave out others. How difficult to recall eye colour, for instance: it's as shifty an item of memory as any, even the eyes of those we are closest to, perhaps because they come to us bearing traces of so much more than colour (unless we can deduce them to be brown). Claire struggled to remember her parents' eyes, both, like Rachel's, in the blue-grey spectrum, but where, more precisely? Were her father's closer to the blue of certain clouds, her mother's the green-grey of a lake? And what of Rachel's? The purest grey, Claire thought, but she was guessing. And Stefan's?

Back upstairs in her room, she called him.

“You're out of breath,” she said when he picked up the phone. It was already dark in Montreal, but in Toronto, farther west in the same time zone, the sky, she knew, would still be the jade of twilight.

“Just got in.”

“From work?” She angled herself so that, despite the 545 kilometres between them, she was facing in his direction.

“I stayed at the lab working on some arrays, and then we went to a movie. Rob and Maria and I, a horror movie. Claire, you would have hated it.” If he sounded sheepish and perhaps a little guilty, it was because he loved going to movies (loved horror films, none more than those involving killer bugs and mutant viruses). Claire found it difficult to sit through any movie (the flickering image, the visual overstimulation), a state of affairs which even she found pathetic, though there didn't seem to be much she could do about it. Scary movies, in which her whole body succumbed to a seizure of tension, were the worst. Occasionally, she and Stefan went to see films anyway, although Stefan never tried to convince her to accompany him, any more than he encouraged her to do anything – drink alcohol, hang out in smoky bars – that might cause her to react. She did not mind him dashing out to a movie as soon as she left town. “And how was your trip?” he asked.

“Unmomentous and almost on time. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. How are you feeling?”

“Fine, I'm feeling fine. I don't think the hotel's going to give me any more information, though.”

“They probably won't unless you bring in the police. Presumably that Detective Bird will contact them.”

“I'm really not sure what Detective Bird is planning to do.”

“Well, we'll bug him.”

“I suppose I'm counting on the neurologist.”

Long ago, Rachel had talked about becoming a doctor, even a neurologist – towards the end of high school and during her first two years at university. She had taken a range of science courses and done well but backed away from the idea of medical school in the end because, she said, her migraines were too disruptive. She did not think she had the stamina for it.

Claire, who had never thought she would hold down a full-time job, understood this. Map-making had appealed as something she might be able to do on her own, on her own time – she had never expected to stay at City Maps as long as she had.

Later, she and Rachel had joked that since neither had become a neurologist, one of them ought to have married one, preferably a migraine specialist who was on top of the most cutting-edge research and who would, in addition, understand their neurochemically volatile condition. Rachel had even given the imaginary neurologist a name, Tom Lukacs. Now, she said, all she had to do was meet him. Claire had come close, with Stefan Simic, star medical researcher, whose father's family hailed from Dubrovnik, who dreamed of creating customized treatments for individual cancer patients by targeting the particular molecular pathways of individual tumours. The pin-in-the-right-place approach, he called it. How could Claire possibly begrudge him his fixation on lethal cancers, or argue with his priorities, when her neurological quirk resulted only in pain, which made you suffer, but couldn't kill you.

The moment Claire hung up the phone, the red message light began to flash. There was one message waiting. The young
woman spoke in a breathless volley. “Rachel Barber checked in on March 14 and checked out March 16. She stayed in room 514. Please delete this message immediately, and don't tell anyone how you got the information.”

Claire sank to her knees and offered up a prayer of thanks to the hook-eyebrowed girl at reception. Not just the dates, but the room number. Numinous detail. Only given this much information, greedy, she wanted more: what about Rachel's itemized hotel bill, which, if she'd charged long-distance calls to her room (conceivable, knowing Rachel), would have listed not only the ones to Claire and Allison but any others.

She would call Stefan to tell him, but first she left the room and hurried to the elevator, riding it two floors down to the fifth floor. She counted nineteen steps along an identical hall to room 514, on the other side from her own, facing north. You'd see the mountain through the window. The illuminated cross on top. You might, possibly, between buildings, pick out the rooftops of the Royal Victoria Hospital and the Neurological Institute, on avenue des Pins, nestled halfway up the mountain. In the bay just beyond the room, ice roiled and crackled in a machine. Claire laid her hand on the door. She pressed her ear to its mute, painted wood.

One night at dinner, the year Claire turned fourteen, Rachel (who would have been eighteen and on the verge of heading to university) asked Hugh, their father, Why didn't you stick it out at medical school? We could certainly have used a doctor in this family. They were, as Claire remembered it, all five of them at
the kitchen table, not in the dining room, which probably meant a Friday night. Perhaps Rachel was teasing him, being mouthy rather than accusatory. Without saying a word, Hugh screeched back the legs of his chair and left the room.

“Jeez,” Rachel said.

“Nothing you can joke about,” Sylvia said. That was all she said.

“Clearly,” said Rachel.

“Rachel.”

“Forget it,” Rachel said and stormed out.

What they knew, what Claire understood then, was that as a young man, not long after Rachel's birth, their father had dropped out of medical school. He had not flunked out, he had simply decided not to go back for his final year. There was no indication that Rachel's birth had in any way provoked his decision. He had simply decided that medicine was not for him. His first love was, had always been, mathematics. He would teach. Claire was not certain why, if his love was pure mathematics, he didn't go to graduate school and consider a research career instead of hightailing it to Addis Ababa, with Sylvia and six-month-old Rachel in tow, to teach in an international school.

He needed money. A job. Still.

They understood, if not then, then a little later, that by abandoning medicine he had become a disappointment to his family, to his parents who had wanted him to become a doctor, who had uprooted themselves from London's East End and come to Canada in order to give their children, Hugh and Al, but especially Hugh, the oldest, the brightest, the scholarship student, the opportunities they did not think he would have in
England. He was sixteen when they emigrated. All the rest of his large family – his uncles, aunts, all his cousins, his grandparents – remained behind.

He was a gifted teacher, from all reports, whether or not he had sensed this talent in advance. His math whizzes, whom he coached for national and international competitions, loved him, as did the students who only came to love math through the flare of his teaching, his conviction that mathematical skill was not innate but could be taught. He won teaching prizes, ran a math club for hours after school. At home, they saw glimpses of his galvanizing light, never more so than when they asked him for help with mathematical problems. Then he came to jumpy life, gesticulating, leaping up from his chair, urging them onward, although it was clear to all of them that they were not, and never would be, in the league of his best students. Some of these came in quiet, nerdy clusters to the funeral. He and Sylvia had flown to Frankfurt for a conference on math pedagogy – they were to rent a car, afterwards, and travel south towards Strasbourg – when they were killed.

In late spring of the year Claire turned fifteen, their grandmother was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. As soon as the school year ended, Hugh returned to Victoria to help out his father and brother, who lived only a ferry ride away in Vancouver, with her care. The cancer was terminal but his mother was not immediately dying. Gruelling though her treatment was – radiation, chemotherapy – she appeared to be responding to it.

When he came home to Toronto, late in the summer, Hugh
announced that they should all think of moving to Victoria, or perhaps he alone should do so, if only temporarily, although after that one night, to Claire's relief, the idea was never mentioned again. Occasionally morose before, he was more so now, even sulky. Sometimes, out of the depths of his fatigue, he would stare at Claire as if he barely saw her, or as if there were something about her that baffled him. And how, even when she had a headache, could she dare make a bid for his attention and sympathy? Her headaches went away. They came back but they did go away. He nagged Sylvia to set up an appointment for Claire with a neurologist, who prescribed her pills (a beta blocker called Propanolol), but these did nothing to help.

Rachel was no longer living at home by then but in a shared house on Huron Street, downtown near the university. She came home occasionally for dinner and would regale Claire with stories: of how once, in the thick of a migraine, she'd lurched out of a subway car and thrown up over the edge of the subway platform. Once, when no medication worked, she'd ended up in the emergency room at Toronto Western, brought by a frantic boyfriend convinced she'd had a stroke. When she went into the hospital for a knee operation to repair cartilage torn at the end of her high-school track career, she got shot up on Demerol, which, she claimed, deadened all pain from the knee but didn't touch the headache keening through her as she was wheeled into the operating room. Claire did not know if her parents heard these stories. Rachel swore that none of the pain was affecting her studies – she was fine, she was doing fine.

And they coped, they did. Most days when she came home from high school, Claire would down a couple of 222s, before collapsing on the sofa for an hour. She was not a malingerer. She didn't believe her life would go on like this, although so far it had.

The summer after Grade Twelve, she found work in an antiquarian bookshop on Bathurst Street, south of Dupont, whose owner, elegant Irene Tate – tall and boyish, her silvering hair held back in a ponytail – also got migraines, as Claire discovered a week after starting the job. Once, Irene said, she'd had a headache that had lasted ten years – no joke, it waxed and waned but never entirely disappeared until in the end it gradually faded away. These were the years when she was raising her two sons, which might have had something to do with it. Irene, too, carried pills on her at all times, always something in her purse or wadded into a Kleenex in her pocket, as she showed Claire. On some afternoons, she left Claire on her own under the shop's rickety ceiling fan while she retreated to her upstairs apartment. What Claire felt in Irene's presence was not only horror at the thought of the ten-year headache but also relief and comfort: there were others outside her family, others with migraines even worse than hers.

Time ran along two parallel tracks: pain time and ordinary time. You slid from one to the other, one as familiar as the other. Pain time did not progress: you fell into it as into a ditch, you followed it like a fractal shoreline that, at any scale, repeats and repeats itself.

Was it the Christmas after Grade Twelve that Claire and Rachel and Sylvia all came down with migraines at once? No, it was later. Looking back, it was impossible to remember the pain. It was retrievable only through context. Propped against the counter, Sylvia basted the goose, brown bruises beneath her eyes, nearly oblivious to the fat spitting at her from the roasting pan. Rachel busied herself silently setting crystal and silverware on the dining room table, swearing under her breath. Claire tried to slice root vegetables without cutting her fingers off. Meanwhile, Allison, taller and skinnier than any of them and the only one without a headache, would look at them balefully now and again as she carved open chestnut shells for a chestnut purée, ripping at the skins with such vigour and without cease that the tips of her fingers bled.

For dinner, Hugh opened a bottle of fine Alsatian wine, lamenting that there was hardly any point in doing so, although in the end he and Allison largely polished off the bottle between them, in addition to making inroads into a bottle of port, so that by Boxing Day, as far as heads were concerned, they were all much in the same shape.

The night before, they had put on the tissue paper party hats that came in paper crackers, and at the end of dinner, Allison convinced them all to sing a round of
We Wish You a Merry Christmas
and so followed a tuneless, monotonal dirge over the flaming pudding. As the brandy burned, wild and blue, and they fell silent, Hugh rose to his feet and, without preamble, blue tissue-paper crown still balanced precariously on his head, began to recite Lewis Carroll's “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”