Claire's Head (17 page)

Claire removed her toilet bag from her suitcase. From her carry-on bag, she took the remains of a bottle of water and a small red tin of Tiger Balm. She'd grown accustomed to the orange unguent's burning smell. It had the lustre of the familiar, something to cling to when the rest of the sensory world was at sea. Perhaps it helped ease the muscles of her neck and temples. Or not. The hope that it did counted. She rubbed some into her skin, then tottered to the bathroom, moistened a face cloth and carried the face cloth back, a bleary five paces, to the nearest of the two double beds, where she collapsed. She hadn't thrown up yet and hoped she wouldn't. She unzipped her cotton trousers, stepped out of them, and embarked upon the only act of intimacy she felt capable of. “Stef, can you inject me?”

The first time that she had been injected with Imitrex, the first time that she had ever tried the drug, it was Rachel who had done the injecting. Out of the haze of a Frankfurt hotel room, just off the plane from New York, Rachel had appeared, in a white spring coat, leaning over Claire. Try this, Rachel said quietly, pulling a pale-blue appendage that looked like an oversized ballpoint pen
out of her handbag. Allison was also in the room, in a chair by the window, all three of them pale and numb and red-eyed. Claire and Allison had arrived from Toronto earlier that morning. Give me your thigh, Rachel said calmly as she pulled back the sheets and exposed Claire in her underwear. She held the injector to Claire's skin and pressed a small red button at the end of the pen. There was no needle to be seen. Claire simply felt the prick as the point of the invisible needle pierced her. That first time the drug had worked like a dream, releasing her, the erasure of the headache a perverse miracle in those cataclysmic hours after her parents were killed. In half an hour, Claire was able to stumble to her feet.

Since then the drug had never worked quite as effectively. Sometimes she took it as a pill. The injections worked more swiftly but were more expensive. She also hated injecting herself. Because there was no element of surprise, her muscles tensed in anticipation, which left a bruise. Even when Stefan asked
ready?
, she could not predict exactly when he would press the button.

He said he didn't mind giving her injections. He injected plenty of mice on the job. This thought was not altogether comforting, but at least Stefan had no anxiety about needles. Instrument in hand, he approached Claire. Sometimes they tried to make a game of it, although Claire was not often up to this. Once Stefan put down the injector, forehead wrinkling, and said he hated causing her pain, even in a minor way, though he would do whatever he could to make her feel better. Then he jabbed her.

Ah. Claire pulled a sheet over herself and covered her eyes with the face cloth. Here they were on a Caribbean island and
she had to fall apart, discover some new neural alignment, before her body would let her enter the new place. The visible world retreated. The drug tightened the breath in her chest. It made her fingertips tingle. In the dark space she'd created, she concentrated on her body's bounded edges and the drug speeding through her, each chemical shift a slight shift in sensation. It was not like being carried towards orgasm in any way except there was an edge, a line you crossed that lifted you towards release and sometimes you travelled there straightaway, you flew, you crossed over, and sometimes you travelled towards but failed to cross the line, you approached then stalled, you knew the state you longed for but you could not long too much. Neither could you give in to despair. You did not know in advance how the journey would go. Wait, patient. Hopeful. Claire lay with arms outstretched, palms raised.

The ecstasy came afterwards, once the pain had passed.

“Why don't you go downstairs and get some lunch? Or go to the pool.” Her disembodied voice. “Can you order me a tuna-salad sandwich?” In a couple of hours, she would feel better. She would. For the moment, as much as Claire wanted Stefan with her, she wanted him gone, his presence as forceful as a smell, though her repellence only masked her guilt and deeper exasperation at herself.

The door clicked. Once gone, she wanted him back, desperately. Through the open window, from below, chinaware clanged. Someone smashed into the pool, displacing air and water for miles. A saline ocean breeze flooded Claire, stinging her nostrils, plunging her into a sinkhole of sadness. In her mind, she tried to follow Stefan's path but gave up.

Some time later, the door opened. She removed the face cloth from her eyes as Stefan appeared in blurry outline beside the bed. He asked how she was feeling. Better, she murmured. He sat gently on the edge of the bed but made no attempt to kiss her. Sometimes she did not want to be touched. Sometimes she asked him to lie in the dark beside her, touching but not stroking her palm, this being all the contact she could manage, even the lightest touch communicating all that was active and persistent about him.

Even without touch she could feel his desire to get moving, be doing something. Make plans. Which she was decidedly impeding. At the best of times these were attributes she loved about him. He was trying to submerge, to overcome his frustration. She sensed this. He knew all this was not her fault. He knew she wanted to be on her feet as much as he wanted her to be. On the whole, he was sympathetic and patient with her, for all that he was not a headache sufferer himself, other than occasional muscular twitches that a couple of ibuprofen sent away. He had broken bones, which she hadn't, and infrequently suffered from rashes on his hands and neck that made him horribly self-conscious. He would have preferred her migraines to have a clearly identifiable cause (and solution), but, thankfully, did not seem to think her a hypochondriac. In their early days, Claire had hoped that her happiness in his presence might itself work as a cure, although she had not held it against Stefan when this hadn't happened.

Downstairs, he said, there was an outdoor dining area facing the ocean. You could see the ocean at the horizon beyond the pool and through some palm trees. Blackbirds kept leaping from table to table, stealing crumbs of bread and sugar and sticking
their beaks into the pots of jam and ketchup. Someone would bring her sandwich in a minute.

Soon, soon she would try to sit up.

Afterwards came the giddiness, the conviction that everything was going to be all right, everything
was
. Still fragile, still in some chemical flux, at least Claire was standing, showering with Stefan, running her hands, the miniature bar of hotel soap, over his back. They kissed. Towelled dry and changed before her, Stefan seated himself at the white wicker desk and booked a rental car by phone so that they could circumnavigate the island in the morning (Claire's desire), then drive to the beach.

It was still light, if approaching dusk, when they set out for dinner, taking a right turn immediately upon passing through the hotel gate and following the road that switchbacked slowly towards the harbour and Basseterre, the capital, the town they'd barely passed through and which Claire had barely glimpsed, on their way from the airport. On their left, another single-storey hotel was sandwiched between the pastel enclosing walls of private dwellings and hedges of bougainvillea. On their right, through scrubby trees, appeared the cliff that toppled down to the sea.

Stefan had dressed for dinner in a white shirt that he had pressed himself back in Toronto, a shirt on which a line of red stitching ran around the collar and down the front. It might have been something his mother had given him. Like Claire, he wore sandals, his long toes protruding beyond the brown leather straps. She slipped her hand in his.

“Talk to me,” she said. He seemed, now, a little distracted.

“I was thinking about when I met you.”

“And then my parents died. Our timing was terrible.”

“About right when I met you. Not the very first time, the second time, at that party. I was thinking about the way you walked into the room. You'd gone to the kitchen to get drinks and you were coming back. There was something about the way you looked. You seemed so self-possessed. Like you knew how to look after yourself. It was very important to me. Or when we went to that movie and you left your gloves and the guy didn't want to let you back inside because the next showing had started but you insisted.”

This was going somewhere, although Claire wasn't yet certain where. “Okay.”

“Even when your parents died, you didn't totally fall apart. Half the time I didn't know what to do but you rallied. I admired you so much.”

“You could have run away. You didn't.”

“But sometimes I worry because even though it doesn't seem like you need looking after, actually you do.”

“Everybody does sometimes.”

“What about your headaches, Claire? Sometimes you are truly incapacitated.”

“I ask you to inject me, and sometimes I ask you to bring me things like crackers or a glass of water but I don't ask you to look after me.”

He was frowning at the horizon. “No, I know, I know, but I worry about you. I worry – I worry that I
want
to look after you.”

She was puzzled. “And that's wrong?”

“I worry about what the desire means. I told myself, after being with Jenny, that I wanted, I needed to be with someone who didn't need looking after. I was frightened I was falling into a pattern, of looking after people. And when I met you, you didn't seem like that.”

Jenny, whom Stefan had been involved with before Claire, was a fellow researcher, who worked in a genetics lab in a hospital just down the street from his. She suffered from depression and sometimes would take to her bed for weeks, refusing her medication, at which point, Stefan, who had never actually lived with her, virtually moved into her apartment in order to take care of her.

Behind Jenny, Claire knew, there was another haunting, probably the greater one, although Stefan did not mention it. During his adolescence, his mother had been so miserable as her marriage to his father broke down that she had spent afternoons for weeks at a time zonked out on tranquilizers on the living-room couch. Stefan, not his older brother or younger sister, had been the one trying to rouse her, to look after her.

What if Stefan
were
unconsciously attracted to her migraines, to her as a woman with migraines? “It's a neurological condition,” Claire said. “I deal with it as best I can. I try not to let it stop me.”

“And you don't, but in the beginning I had no idea how often you got them.”

“You don't have to worry about me, really you don't.”

“I'm not saying any of this because I'm unhappy. Claire? I just needed to talk things out a little.”

“And you feel better?”

“Yes.”

He gripped her hand. They kept walking.

Though Stefan seemed released from whatever had been troubling him, it was Claire's turn to feel preoccupied. Unsettled. Unmoored. They descended into the town and, taking off their sandals, strolled a little way along the sandy shore of the harbour where, a day later, they would watch women scrape the scales from fish with bottle caps nailed to a piece of board, and men press transistor radios to their ears, desperate for the latest on the West Indian cricket team in a Test match, and a girl whose hair formed black burrs all over her head would follow Claire and tug at her skirt and beg to be taken home with them. As the beautiful equatorial dusk dropped into dark, they passed small wooden fishing boats, overturned for the night, and Claire couldn't help noticing the one painted pink with a red stripe beneath the gunwales named
Patience
.

Everything she'd counted on felt suddenly fragile. Stefan. Stefan's support. The life they had, the life they were in the process of creating. Who she was. The nature of her vulnerability. The version of herself that Stefan saw and was drawn to. She had never thought of the migraines as a sign of weakness only as something that had to be borne. But perhaps he did see her as weak, incapacitated, a kind of invalid. Now she was the one feeling frightened.

How much of another's pain can anyone bear? Everyone has limits. But they had come this far, had already been through so much. Surely they would be all right.

They headed back to a seafood restaurant on the near side of the harbour, right on the water, which a woman at the hotel had suggested to them. Cheered now, Stefan ordered a beer and then a Ting, while Claire stuck to bottled water. Beneath the table, Stefan squeezed her thigh. She wanted fish. How could you be by the ocean and not eat fish? But her snapper proved a bad
choice
, full of tiny perilous bones, and halfway through the meal Claire realized her headache was rising again on the other side. Pain travelled, it traversed the hemispheres. It slipped free of whatever bonds in which you tried to enclose it, its veil cast aside. The migraine moved from one side to the other. This was normal, yet she was on the edge of capsizing into despair, convinced she was doing something terribly wrong only she had no idea what. She was failing Stefan. She downed a 292, despite the fact that codeine was barely useful any more. She couldn't take any more Imitrex until she got back to the hotel. She ordered a tea. Stefan took one look at her and, aware of her distraction and pallor, quietly asked if she wanted to go back.

Claire shook her head. Are you sure? She nodded. So Stefan ordered dessert, a slice of key-lime pie. Claire said she would try a bit. She held on to the sides of her chair, knuckles tightening. The moon was rising round and white through a window beyond Stefan's right shoulder. To remain sitting upright was a feat of strength – couldn't he see that?