Claire's Head (32 page)

She had never personified her pain. She had only occasionally thought of it as an animal, as a dog, a big black dog. She had never felt the need to bring God into the picture, although, yes, sometimes the pain felt like punishment. She had never imagined someone sitting at the end of her bed asking, What would you give up to be free of it? Of course she had asked herself what would she give up and how she would change her life if only she could figure out the thing that would make the headaches disappear. Inevitably there was bargaining, even pleading. What would she give up now, at this moment?

She had to stop fighting. Fighting for this to end. Fighting her anger, the bad twin of despair. She was near tears. With pain comes desire. Part of pain is desire, the longing for somewhere, another state, anything else. To be in that elongated palm tree, up in that sky. She was the hills, the mountains. A policeman (soldier? a man with a gun in his hand?) peered into the car and waved them on. There must be some comfort, some source of consolation somewhere, if only she knew where to look for it, although thoughts of Rachel, who might have travelled this road in a similar state, were no longer providing any. The daemonic flash of the ocean. A toll booth. The hairy legs of a burro. Let me be healed.

“What did you say?” Brad asked.

She was lying in another motel room, given over to the vertiginous sensation that the road was still speeding beneath her. When she opened her eyes, Brad was standing on his head.

A moment later, he was upright, looking down at hen. “How bad is this?”

“About as bad as it gets. Only I'm frightened because I don't know how bad it's going to get.”

“You don't think we need to find you a hospital, do you?”

“No, no hospital.” Even if she'd wanted to, she couldn't get back to Toronto, because she had no way to get there. She had only the haziest idea where she was. They had passed through Mexican towns, skirted cities. It was impossible to imagine flying. She was pretty sure they were, now, nowhere near an airport (or a hospital). In any case, no one would let her on a plane in this state. If Stefan had been with her, he would not have been as calm as Brad. His anxiety – his helplessness in the face of her greater helplessness, his need to be useful – would have permeated the room and infiltrated her. He would perhaps have fought harder to get her to a hospital, get her out of here.

“Is there anything I can do?” Brad asked gently.

“Hit me on the head with a hammer.”

“If you want, we can rest tomorrow, take a break.”

She was losing all sense of what they were up to other than being in motion. She no longer knew if she was doing whatever she was doing for Rachel, or for herself, although she still had some sense that fear and loss and the fear of loss were propelling her. She was still looking for something. “Might as well be in the car. Let's keep going.”

In the morning, she sent Brad out in search of a farmacia and suppositories, some kind of anti-nausea medication in the form of a suppository since her nausea kept growing and she wasn't certain she would be able to keep even a pill down. Neither of them knew the Spanish word for suppository which meant, unhappily, that there might be some sign language involved. He set off and returned apologetically without them.

In the car, the vinyl of the seat beat beneath her legs. Her hat clutched her head. The windshield enwrapped her. Such things weren't themselves any more as much as they were aspects of what she felt, the shape, the pattern of her pain. Perhaps the place of pain changed constantly. Perhaps all places were the place of pain.

She closed her eyes. The road carried her onward. She was falling. No, she was walking down a corridor off which rooms kept branching. In the rooms, people began to materialize.

She was on a mattress set upon a wooden floor, among rumpled yellow sheets and a fibrous green blanket, lying beside Kevin Giddings. They were alone in his shared apartment, on a Saturday afternoon. Kevin was small, nearly as small as Claire, but had a bass voice so sonorous he should have been in radio, a voice that seemed particularly striking given his small size. He wanted her to take off all her clothes, her unbuttoned blouse, her creased pink skirt, her bra, her underwear, for them to be naked together, which was normal, but then the process of seduction, their slow, delicious unwrapping of each other, which she loved, would be over, and she would be left with nothing but the momentousness of Kevin's desire, and equally, her awareness of his fear, his need not just to see and touch her body but to work
his way inside her head and dissolve her secrets. She was unnerved, above all, by this sense of invasion. Even as she began to feel the urge to retreat, to extricate herself from him, she had a premonition, if she allowed herself to think about it (she did not really want to think about it), that he would be the one to leave her, however much she tried to shield herself from the knowledge.

She was living in a two-room apartment on Cowan Avenue when she met Tom Speck, for whom she would have done almost anything. The night he told her he was leaving his girlfriend because he wanted to be with her, she opened her door to him and led him up the stairs to her apartment; that night and other nights, she opened herself to him. She had never felt so giddy, so craven, so smitten, so eager to be with anyone, never felt so moved by someone's presence, in someone's presence, awed that his desire for her seemed to match hers for him. When he left her, simply walking through those rooms became devastating. She moved out of the apartment on Cowan and had never been able to walk down that block again.

A room with a wide, rectangular window. A teak desk with four drawers, two on each side. A man in a grey sports shirt was sitting at the desk with his back to her. What was he doing? He was painting. But he had stopped long ago. He had a good eye, a gift for composition and colour, he had taken almost all the photographs in their family albums, photos which were, in their framing and composition, far beyond most people's tipsy, blurry snapshots. When he gave himself over to the teaching of mathematics, he stopped painting. He was whistling softly, the hairs along his bare arms individually illuminated. She was very small. She wanted him to turn around and look at her without her
having to call out to him but he had not noticed her. She could not see what he was painting.

They had found a couple of their father's oil paintings when they cleaned out the house, landscapes, Ontario landscapes. Allison had taken one, a grove of birch trees at the edge of a lake, which had been hanging above his desk, and Claire a farm scene found stacked against the back wall of his closet. It reminded her of day trips that she used to take alone while still in college, out into the countryside north of Toronto, to practise triangulation techniques. There was no need for her to do this, it was an old-fashioned way of mapping distance, still functional but hopelessly outdated. She liked its simplicity, and the heroism that had once been involved in mapping great distances this way, the length and breadth of France, Peru, Lapland. She would pull her borrowed car onto the shoulder of a quiet road whose gravel surface had been tamped down with tar. She set up two card tables along the side of the road and measured the distance between them. If you knew the distance between two points, you could figure out the distance to a third, far-off point. She drew lines on the paper affixed to each of the card tables, lines that if continued would intersect at the rusty roof of a barn set back from the road, beyond a copse of trees. Then she calculated all three angles. In a tree to her right, a flock of crows was gathering. Of course, knowing the distance (straight as an arrow) to the third point gave you no clue how to reach it. In the future, a flock of crows in a tree inevitably made her think of her father.

In her bedroom in the apartment on Booth Avenue, the phone rings. It is so late at night or early in the morning that, struggling from sleep, Claire is tempted not to answer, for as likely as not it's
a wrong number, unless it's Stefan, as it's not all that long since they hung up on each other after talking for hours, until almost 2 a.m., for these are their very early days, their days of folly and ardour; what if it is Stefan calling to say he cannot sleep because he is thinking of her as she has lain awake at night thinking of him. She negotiates the room with ease even in the dark, knowing instinctively the placement of her dresser and small blue armchair, aware of indistinct sounds, quickening voices, from Allison and Lennie's apartment below hers, which is puzzling because she has no idea why they would be awake at this hour. Before she can pick up the phone from her desk, a pounding begins on the door below, the door that separates the two apartments. Allison is banging on the door, screaming her name. Now she is frightened. She thinks, Fire. A man with a knife. Someone has broken in and murdered Lennie. She runs down the stairs towards Allison even as the phone goes on ringing and ringing.

They are in a hotel room, she and Allison and Rachel. In Frankfurt. Lennie is there, too. At first he is the one shouting at Claire and Rachel. And then Allison, distraught and in tears. How could you do this, how could you run off and leave me at a time like this?

Why had she left Frankfurt and gone to Paris that day with Rachel? Because Rachel had asked her to. Because she'd felt obscurely flattered that Rachel had asked her, even if this meant leaving Allison behind. Always she had wanted Rachel's attention,
ever since childhood, Rachel's more than Allison's, because Allison was always there. Her love for Allison was the love of the one close by, the one whose voice was heard daily rising through the floorboards when they lived one on top of the other in the house on Booth Avenue. Even in childhood, Rachel had seemed elusive, as if she might at any moment slip away. And yet Rachel had drawn close – years ago, it was Rachel who had lain in Allison's bed beside Claire, a guardian presence despite her own headaches. For all her self-absorption there were times when Rachel paid attention. It was Rachel who had leaned over Claire in her Frankfurt hotel room the morning of their arrival, who, before pulling out her blue injector, had brushed the hair from Claire's face, like a mother, their lost mother, and yet, on the surface, so unlike their real mother that perhaps she was all the more seductive because of this.

The day of their arrival, after Rachel had injected Claire, Rachel and Allison had gone together to the hospital. Claire had not wanted to go with them. She had refused to accompany them to make the formal identification and to begin the travel arrangements for the transport of their parents' bodies back to Toronto. She could not bear the thought of seeing her parents in this state. Instead she had gone back to bed and lay clutching a pillow to her chest, trying not to move. If on the night of the fourteenth or early in the morning of the fifteenth of May, she had done something, anything, different – not talked so long to Stefan, stayed awake instead settling into bed after setting down the phone, some microscopically alternative gesture – perhaps her parents would still be alive. They would not have stepped onto an escalator, that escalator, not picked out that defective
luggage cart. (Let them have travelled on a different day, let them have had no desire to go to Germany at all.) If she and Allison had caught an earlier flight (they'd caught the first flight they could) and reached their mother in hospital (their father was pronounced dead at the scene but their mother died four hours later, never fully regaining consciousness, before they'd even left Toronto), perhaps they could have saved her (no, the doctors insisted, her internal injuries were too great). Surely there was something Claire could have done (she had no idea what) that would have saved them from this awful, ridiculous death.

After a while she rose and dressed and spoke briefly to Stefan by phone, although it was hard to know what to say. She called her Uncle Alan in Vancouver, as she had promised Rachel and Allison she would do. Carefully, she gathered her bag from the table by the window and left the room.

She rode an elevator downstairs. Outside she passed a fountain. The air was grey and misty, leaves the pale green of spring. She walked along a road. Out of the mist, an airplane sheared close overhead, landing gear outstretched. The ground quaked. Claire crouched low, hugging her knees, holding herself together, trying to keep the roar building inside her from tearing her apart. Her parents were not going to walk into her hotel room, however much she longed for them to do so. They weren't going to attend a conference or drive towards Strasbourg. Every journey led to death.

At 5:07 a.m., just after midnight Toronto time, there was a knock on her door. She wasn't sleeping. The three of them had only parted a few hours before, after staying up in Allison's room, crying, talking, Rachel pacing back and forth and calling
out about lawyers and lawsuits, to hell with how helpful and aghast the airport officials were. Allison said she just wanted to get through the funeral. In the dark of her own room, Claire was sitting up in bed, eyes open to keep herself from imagining —

Rachel softly called out her name. When Claire opened the door, there was Rachel, in her white coat, a black handbag slung over her right shoulder. She came and perched on the very edge of Claire's bed, inspecting Claire closely, her right foot, in a red boot, tapping the floor. She seemed, not calm but calmer, if glazed with fatigue. No doubt she'd had no sleep either.

“You up for a little trip?”

“A trip where?”

“I need to get away from here for a bit, for a few hours.”

“Into town?”
At this hour?

“Maybe.”

“What about Allison? And aren't there things we have to do today?”

“Allison has to be here when Lennie arrives. We won't be gone long.”

Did she believe Rachel when she said that? Had she herself felt any desire to get away before Rachel introduced the idea, or was she simply taken up with convincing herself that Rachel wanted her company in particular, rather than that of the closest available escape partner. In any event, Allison could not have come. (When, as quietly as possible, Claire left a brief note propped against Allison's door, there was no stirring from within her room.)