Claire's Head (16 page)

She held in her mind an image of him from early in their relationship. Stefan had invited her to a dinner dance, a black-tie affair sponsored by a scientific research council. Until this point their encounters had been more low-key, hesitant and wary on her part. Their movies, dinners, café rendezvous had already involved Claire in explanations, as offhand as she could make them, about why she couldn't watch a lot of films and barely touched alcohol. (At least, if necessary, she could still sneak home alone at the end of the evening to medicate.) This invitation seemed more serious in its intent.

There was Stefan, slim, olive-skinned, neat in a borrowed tuxedo, his dark hair newly trimmed. At the end of the meal, as the tables were being cleared, he told her emphatically that he did not dance. Ever. He hated dancing. As the music began, they sat a little awkwardly over the dregs of their coffee, watching other couples, most older than they were, take to the floor. When Claire asked him if he'd change his mind for just one dance, he
shook his head. Then, at the end of the next song, he relented. As they rose together, he did not take his eyes from her, as if that would help overcome his self-consciousness. He was not as awkward a dancer as she'd feared. Bashful but not graceless. He was doing this for her, to please her. The gesture moved her fundamentally towards him, towards love.

Five weeks after they met, her parents died.

Every night she'd spent away from him, and there had not been many, she would turn herself ritualistically to face whatever direction he was in relation to her and bid him goodnight: north-northwest in their own bed from Rachel's apartment in New York. Away from him, she drifted to sleep imagining his body beside hers, turned from her as he turned just before sleep, an act that she intuited not as withdrawal but as vulnerable exposure, as trust. He offered her a view of himself – the curve of his shoulders, the scape of his back – that he could not see. She had never minded his absorption in his work, his late hours and weekends at the lab, the fact that she could walk up behind him as he sat hunched over his computer at home, unaware of her until she laid a hand on his shoulder. His powers of concentration, his capacity for self-immersion had always seemed like good things, and attracted her, perhaps because she found in them some mirror of herself.

The night she got word of her parents' accident, Claire had called Stefan, weeping, from Allison's apartment, downstairs from her own, Allison seated on one side of her, Lennie on the other. When Stefan asked if she wanted him to come over, she said no. Perhaps it was the pressure of his longing to comfort
her and the uselessness of that comfort that she hadn't been able to bear, although she would beg his forgiveness before flying off to Frankfurt the next day.

There had been no vulnerability like that she'd felt after her parents died. Danger lurked everywhere. She could not step off a curb without thinking of falling. The horror and randomness of their deaths terrified her. She quailed in the face of it. How fragile her body was. She shook climbing into a car, panicked if she had to drive for more than half an hour at a stretch. Avoided elevators and escalators, had nervous attacks in the echoing, cement-walled stairwells of buildings in which she climbed stairs to avoid the elevators or escalators. Every journey, no matter how tiny, held the possibility of death within it. Within one possibility lay others, lay innumerable deaths, all the way to the molecular level. Standing on a subway platform she was certain of tumbling onto the tracks. Or being pushed. A cyst at the base of one finger meant cancer. Her reactions were hysterical. Knowing this didn't help. Claire's only reassurance was that Kyra McCloud, a friend whose father had died of leukemia two years before her parents' death, had gone through almost the same thing.

It saddened Claire that Stefan would never know her as a woman with parents. In those first five weeks, she had not yet been ready to introduce him to them. Instead she found herself reduced to photographs, to anecdote. (Here's my mother with her parrot in Ethiopia, my father outside Addis on his motorbike.) Stefan would never see her in her parents' presence, have her revealed in some new, idiosyncratic light by how she behaved around them. She had met Stefan's mother, Helene, and stepfather, Richard,
on several visits to Ottawa. They welcomed her with the slightly exaggerated warmth of people who felt a little sorry for her (both parents, so young, such a tragedy). Stefan did not talk much about his father, Tomas, an importer of what Claire was never quite certain, who lived part-time in Florida. She'd met him once, over an awkward restaurant dinner.

She played Stefan the last recording that she possessed of her parents' voices, captured on what had been the tape from her answering machine. A couple of weeks before they flew to Germany, Hugh and Sylvia had each phoned and left messages on the same night, as if unaware that the other had done so. A power generator had blown in the east end of the city. Whole neighbourhoods were in darkness. From the west, Hugh called to see if Claire was all right – she lived on her own (if in the same house as Allison and Lennie), and she was his youngest daughter. He had a habit of making such calls. After massive thunderstorms or on nights of sheet ice. Later, Sylvia, on the fainter bedroom phone, invited Claire to dinner, perhaps without leaving the bedroom where she liked to curl up and read on the bed, perhaps without speaking to Hugh, without knowing there'd been a blackout at all. Claire did not get home until late: there'd been no power outage in the restaurant where she'd eaten dinner with friends, or at the house, though she would discover that a friend of hers gave birth that night, a planned home birth not planned for candlelight. After the accident, she took the tape out of the answering machine. It was just luck that she hadn't erased their voices, so unbearably ordinary, having no idea what they were hurtling towards. She listened to the tape once with Stefan, then never again.

During the first months after her parents died, the only thing Claire really wanted to read, it seemed, were maps. She piled them at her bedside, bought atlases the way other people bought CDs, pored over maps of anywhere in the world except Germany. The maps made the world seem reachable, less overwhelming. Stefan brought her road maps, atlases, a glow-in-the-dark globe. She spread the maps out across her bed. She whispered place names to herself, trying to edge towards sleep, a hard place to get to. Oaxaca, Madagascar, Isola di Capri. Sometimes she broke down. She didn't know if she wanted to go away or stay in one spot. She needed the awareness of other places and the rooting of home. On any map, so much is missing. This drew her attention and broke her heart. She clutched an old school ruler of her mother's or slept with it under her pillow. Place names and measurements ricocheted through her head during sex. Small and lean, leaner than she'd be at any other time, Claire tucked herself against Stefan's body. She raged. Some nights Stefan asked if he should stay away. Some nights she said yes. Bewildered, she didn't know what she wanted. (But he was
there
, he came back, he didn't abandon her. He approached her gently. He suggested things they might do together.) Longing felt like something that entered her from outside, a betrayal of grief. Even on those nights when she was alone, she began to shepherd herself towards sleep by imagining Stefan beside her.

Strangely, her migraines seemed unaffected by her parents' death. They did not grow suddenly worse or more frequent, although some days she suffered the uncomfortable illusion of having a pill stuck permanently in her throat, even when she'd
swallowed nothing. Rachel agreed that her migraines hadn't worsened either.

Nor did their headaches suddenly ease. Sadly. (In Housing, one floor below the map department, Claire met a woman who didn't have a migraine for two years after her husband died.)

“I spoke to that guy, the healer, earlier this evening,” Claire said. The rain had stopped, but water still raced through the drainpipes beneath the window, and the air was full of ozone and the odour of wet bark. “He called me back.”

Stefan rolled on his near side to face her. “Where was he calling from? I thought you said he was in Israel or Geneva.”

“He was in Geneva. Maybe he likes to make international calls in the middle of the night.” The healer, Ariel, had a strong Israeli accent. Over the phone, Claire had not known what to make of him. “He invited me to come to Amsterdam.”

“Why? Can't he tell you whatever he knows over the phone?”

“He said he doesn't know where Rachel is. He hasn't heard from her since March. He also said he thought he could help me.”

“Help you how?”

It was the healer's insistence, his conviction that he could help that had made the strongest impression, the implication not necessarily being that he would be able to help her find Rachel but that he could help in her own search for health. He had said he would ask his angels for guidance when it came to looking for Rachel. His angels. “With my headaches, I think. But maybe he knows more than he's letting on. I can't tell. I'm thinking maybe I should go. Maybe she's still in Europe.”

Detective Bird had finally called them back. He'd confirmed that Rachel had flown from Montreal via Toronto to Amsterdam, on KLM, on March 16. She had cancelled her return date of March 23. The return portion of the ticket had not, or not yet, been used. Of course this did not necessarily mean she was still in Europe. Since Rachel lived in the US, if they wanted to access other records with some efficiency, they might want to hire an American private investigator.

Claire could not imagine Detective Bird having much patience with the peculiarities of a man such as Ariel.

“I'm finding things out, aren't I? I found out why she flew to Amsterdam. Or one reason, anyway. I keep trying to decide how I'll feel if I don't go, if I don't and Rachel doesn't turn up. She went to him three times, and maybe she'd have gone more – we don't know. He's unconventional, clearly, but maybe he does something that works. He says people travel from all over to see him.”

“You said he heals with energy.” Stefan sounded, not dismissive, but a little dubious.

“He says he talks to angels, too.”

“Claire.”

“You want me to find something that will help with the headaches, don't you?”

“Yes, okay, yes.”

“I don't know how to judge any of this without seeing him.”

“Can you take more time off work?”

“Charlie knows what I'm doing. I'll make up the hours.”

“When would you go?”

“He's going to be in Amsterdam next week, so I guess some time next week, presumably staying over the Saturday night afterwards so the ticket's cheaper. Anyway, it's not really my money. Think of it as some of the insurance money. I can afford it because of what happened to my parents, and they would want me to do this. Don't you think?” With a finger, she traced Stefan's cheekbone and the familiar line of his long nose. She wanted him to acknowledge the strength of what she was doing, the initiative. “Can I live with myself if I don't go is what I keep wondering. I'm trying to take care of things.”

Three years into their relationship, Claire and Stefan had taken a week-long trip to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Most of their money and energy was being spent renovating their house, but they were tired of renovation and tired of that long, long stretch of late winter that refuses to concede even the possibility of early spring, and so decided on the spur of the moment to do something neither of them had done before: book a last-minute package vacation south.

Claire did not mind flying, only its physiological effects on her. Those who simply feared flight could drug themselves into a torpor and wake up stunned at their destination. She was awed by those who extracted themselves from airplane seats upon arrival feeling little more than cramped and woozy or sleep deprived. Once or twice she had experienced this, like a miracle, but long flights, transatlantic, anything over an hour, were neurochemically taxing. Flight attendants were as alien to her as
those who drank alcohol on planes: she could no more conceive of doing their job than being a seven-foot-tall basketball star or a contortionist. She didn't know how Rachel flew as much as she did, although according to Rachel, drugs still worked for her even when in the air, or had until recently.

In St. Kitts, as she had done upon other occasions, Claire answered the immigration official's questions while silvery with nausea. She was in the midst of the most profound physical dislocation. Other people must experience a version of this but not so intensely or so painfully. Being in any airport was hard even when, like this one, it was open to the air and had no escalators.

Everything outside her was reduced to surface. Suitcase. Floor. Thatched roof. She didn't experience auras but there were other forms of sensory distortion. Bright objects were spiked, sunlight an anathema. Odours heaved towards her: smoke, the miasma of car exhaust. She could identify things but was incapable of providing any context for them or making their relationships clear. Heat. Sky. Stefan's back. The burning point behind her right eye. Walk to the van. Part of her remained mute.

They drove. Sugarcane. Town. Road. Ocean. White hotel.

A chamber-boy led them up a flight of white cement stairs. The stairs were covered but open to the air, windows mere squares in the plaster. Outside: a pile of refuse, palm trees, hydro line, houses with corrugated metal roofs, mountain. On the phone they'd had to choose: room over the pool or room with a view. They'd hesitated. A view sounded good, but Stefan had picked pool, on the theory that the question was rigged and something was missing, namely the ocean. And there it lay, beyond the pool, over the edge of a cliff. Vindicated, he coaxed Claire out
to the balcony where they stripped off their shoes and sat for a moment in plastic chairs, their bare feet up on the railing and stared (Claire in hat and sunglasses, eyes slits, perched on the edge of her chair, stomach heaving) out into the blue Atlantic. Three points beat a tattoo along the top of her head. Back inside, Stefan unbuttoned his shirt. How effortlessly the journey peeled from him. Narrow-chested but lithe, he seemed ready to leap from one place to another, the hunch of his shoulders already unfurling. How easily his olive skin, unlike her paler flesh, would tan.