Claire's Head (34 page)

“I can't go on like this.” She vomited into a plastic bag.

“Hold on, I'm going to pass.”

Brad veered the car in behind another truck. More clouds of noxious diesel smoke. Jungle verdure closed around them, the sides of the road crawling with vines. Beyond this truck was yet another, straining on a hill, so now they were sandwiched between two of them. For miles. Neurology is destiny, Rachel had once cried. As if to say that living like this was their fate. There would be no escape. Claire vomited again. She was in a dark place. She was the dark place, the thin white line of the self dissolving —

She undid her seat belt and unlocked her car door. Opening the door, she leaned all her weight against it.

“Claire!”

Brad swerved them into the ditch at the side of the road, tilting them at an angle as Claire tumbled out into bushes that were cool and green and studded with thorns.

W
hen she awoke, the pain was on the right side again but fainter and then, perhaps half an hour later, it moved across her forehead to the left side. It zigzagged back and forth like a weary traveller as it receded.

They were in a sparsely furnished room. Beside her on the bed, Brad lay asleep in his clothes. A fan rotated slowly on the ceiling. She was uncertain how much time had elapsed – hours, days – since she'd lost track.

Claire rose, a little wobbly, her muscles sore as after strenuous physical exercise. She was in her bra and underwear, and bruised, at least down the right side of her body, from where she'd fallen out of the car. No, not fallen, she'd practically thrown herself out of the car. She could have – But she hadn't. She was all right. Mostly. She'd borne what had seemed at first unbearable and reached the far side – for now, anyway. Elation filled her, which might be a chemical high, but that hardly mattered. She felt exhausted but cleansed. The world flowed back towards
her and she took it in, took herself in with a new kind of clarity, which wasn't precision but a different, more expansive awareness.

The overhead fan creaked and swayed a little as it turned. A crack ran down the wall beyond the double bed, from the ceiling almost to the floor. There was nothing to indicate where they were, geographically speaking. Their window overlooked a courtyard in which there was a small, drained swimming pool, with a crack, even more severe than the one in their room, cutting through one of its blue, paint-chipped walls. According to Claire's watch, it was a little before 6 a.m. A man in flip-flops was watering the flowerbeds with an air of sober concentration. She debated calling out to him and decided not to. In the bathroom, on the back of the door, she found a sign listing prices, in Spanish and English, at the Hotel Santa Monica, but the sign did not say where the Hotel Santa Monica was.

Brad had not yet awoken, and she figured she should let him sleep, after all his driving and what she'd put him through. She was still trying to determine how long it had been since they'd arrived in this place – how long she'd spent in that bed. One day or two? There had definitely been stretches when she'd thought the pain would never retreat and she'd be stuck in that state forever.

She was aware that Brad had carried her into the room, lifting her in his arms up a flight of stairs. But then she'd not been in much condition to walk. He had undressed her and laid her on the bed and pulled a sheet over top of her. He had been gentle but had kept his distance, even when they were both lying on the bed, and had hardly spoken to her, except to ask if there was anything she needed. He had come and gone a few times. There was respect
in his withdrawal, a sympathetic acknowledgement that she just had to get through whatever it was she was going through. His acceptance made the experience oddly intimate, though not shared. In the midst of the worst of it, she did not have to pretend or strive to feel anything other than what she was feeling.

In a plastic bag, beside their overnight bags, which Brad must have brought upstairs, Claire found an orange and the remains of the package of almonds they'd bought, long ago, in Las Vegas. She ate some nuts and the orange, which took the edge off her hunger – a normal appetite, now, no nausea or panicky sense of famishment.

When she sat back on the bed, Brad opened his eyes. “Hey,” he said, and stretched out his arms. There was stubble on his chin, and his hair was matted and flattened, his left cheek creased and pink where it had been pressed to his pillow. “How are you feeling?”

“Much, much better, thank you.” She smiled and slid down the mattress until she was lying, facing him. He reached out and touched her temples with his fingertips. His gaze glanced over the bruises on her arm.

“I'm sorry about my, you know, leap out of the car.”

“A little scary there for a moment,” he said, “but understandable, I guess.”

He rolled to one side, flexing his left wrist back and forth, feeling the joint with the fingers of his other hand as if his wrist were sore.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“Not really. Just a bit of an awkward lift getting you out of the car.”

She drew his arm close and pressed her lips to his skin, to the place that he had been touching. The last thing she wanted was injure the massage therapist. He shook out his wrist as if it were indeed fine.

Laying her hand against his right cheek, the exposed, pale one, she was washed with tenderness, with a gratitude so deep that it became something else. He wrapped his arms around her, as if the tenderness and gratitude were mutual.

His fingers made their way up the ridge of her spine, following the line of her vertebrae, not with a masseur's pressure but simply making contact. She slid her hand beneath his shirt, inside the back of his jeans and pressed it to the warm triangle of skin at the base of his spine, drawing his calm heat into her. In her arms, his body was sturdier than she would have expected. Touch was layered over the residue of pain. It moored them in the present, allowed them to shut out Rachel and concentrate on each other for a little while.

And while it was tempting, in the midst of her surprise and temporary serenity, to believe that something in Brad's presence was her cure, the cure that her journey had been leading her towards all along, it seemed unwise, even dangerous to think this.

Lying on his back, Brad took hold of her hand and caressed the webbed skin between her thumb and forefinger. He did not appear self-conscious, or surprised to find himself doing this. His gesture seemed to punctuate his thoughts. “Once I burned out and stopped massaging altogether. I just couldn't deal with it. I was doing all this therapeutic work and there were so many hard-core cases. Dancers desperate to get back to performing, stroke victims, journalists, musicians with overuse injuries terrified
they'd never play their instruments again. A friend got me a job as a gaffer. I'd always wanted to work in film. I know that may sound like an insane way to take a break. The hours were gruelling but I just couldn't take making a movie as seriously as most people did. I liked it, but the whole time friends kept saying to me, you have a talent, you can't waste it. Only I had to figure out a way to make things feel different. I kept telling myself, pain is a mystery not the enemy. I can help people but I can't always heal them. Healing's mysterious, too. Less pain is definitely good but you need a certain amount around to listen to. Of course, I admire people who figure out ways of dealing with massive amounts of it.”

“So you gave up the therapeutic work.”

“No, oh no, I still do quite a lot, on the days I'm not at Pure, and I'm not saying the people I see at Pure don't need help –”

She was giving up on the idea of a cure. She would find an accommodation with her pain, make a place for it. The possibility, no, the necessity of doing so was something he, too, understood. If she concentrated only on pain's constraints, she would lose sight of what it had given her. She would lose sight of part of herself. Free of her headaches, there would perhaps be less of her. They kissed, Claire winding the fingers of her left hand with Brad's right, aware of the pressure of their joined palms.

They went out for breakfast at a restaurant, little more than a taqueria, down the street from the hotel, their bodies brushing against each other as they walked, coming this close and no closer. They were in a little town called Rio Grande, about two
hours north of Puerto Escondido, and had arrived on the Wednesday afternoon. It was now Friday. So near then, if Rachel were indeed somewhere in the vicinity.

Back at the hotel, they were greeted by the owner, Felipe, a middle-aged man whose taut belly pressed against the confines of his navy T-shirt. “Hola, girl with headache,” he called out, as if a headache were a mark of distinction. “How are you feeling?”

“Very well,” Claire said.

He hoped they were not too worried by the crack in the wall of their room. It was from the earthquake of a year ago, as was the crack in the pool and the spidery lines in the hotel's exterior stucco, which he pointed out to them. His own house had fallen down – while his children were at school, thanks God. The hotel had not. He did not seem frightened that it was going to.

Claire asked Felipe if he knew of any sort of retreat near Puerto Escondido. A retreat? There was a very small place, where a man, a magician, lived and where local people went, on the road to Puerto Escondido. He treated headaches by pulling on people's hair. His wife went for treatment to this man, Felipe said, but he did not because – he tugged at the air – he did not have enough hair to pull on. People visited but did not stay there.

They gathered their bags and prepared to head onwards. It was difficult stepping back into the car, given all that Claire had gone through inside it, but the car's interior felt altered by the shift in intimacy between Brad and herself, their new ease in each other's presence.

It was possible, surrounded by the ridge of mountains in the distance to the left and grassland sweeping towards the ocean on their right, to prolong the sensation that they were cut off from the rest of the world, for Claire to put off worrying about Stefan for a little longer. Potholes were marked with piles of stones. A hawk roosted near the top of a tree. Cattle grazed among stumps, a line of trees left standing between the fields and a strip of sandy beach. A continent lay between her and Stefan. From this distance, he seemed small and far away. And yet she owed him answers, about having a child, about what they were, what she was doing.

When an unmarked pothole loomed, Brad swerved to avoid it. He glanced across and touched Claire's leg – no more than that. What she took from him, what he seemed to take from her, was something potentially seductive but, above all, steadying.

A straightaway carried them into Puerto Escondido, and then the road began to curve around the harbour, the hidden port, part of the town rising up the hill to the left and the other part continuing down a slope towards the ocean on the right. Water glittered at them through a scattering of low buildings and palm trees. They had made no plans as to where to stay but since this was a tourist town and it was not high season they assumed they would find somewhere without difficulty. They took the first turn past the harbour, just beyond a little ravine in which scrubby trees half-hid a river or creek, and turned right, down a small road. A hotel appeared, on their left, just up from the beach, pink-walled and gated and more picturesque than the Hotel Santa Monica. Having arrived here, and liking what they saw, they had neither the inclination nor energy to look anywhere else.

There were rooms available. A fountain warbled in the colonnaded courtyard. There were fewer Americans at this time of year, said the woman who was checking them in at the Maria del Flor, just Europeans, and mostly Italians. “Double or twin?”

“Double,” Brad replied without pause, his sunglasses pushed back into the hanks of his blond hair.

“We're looking for a retreat,” Claire said to the woman. “We don't have a name but we heard there was a place near here. Maybe not right in town but outside. I'm not sure what sort of place exactly but somewhere people go to get away from the world.”

“Temazcalli?” the woman asked.

“I don't know.” Claire looked at Brad.

“It is in the hills. There is a special kind of massage they do there. A traditional Indian way. There is steam. There is fasting, I believe, if you wish. You can go to stay. If you stay, it must be at least a week. Some people stay longer. They go to meditate, detoxify.”

“Can you spell the name?” Claire asked. She was trying to write it down. “Do you have the phone number?”

“There is also the nunnery,” said the woman. “Do you know about the nunnery? Sometimes people go there. They do –” She pointed to her eyes “how is this called? Healing through the eye?”

Claire had no idea. “Iridology,” Brad said.

“But the nunnery is far,” the woman said, flicking one hand as she spoke. “Past Puerto Angel.”