Claire's Head (7 page)

They had the money from the insurance settlement to help with their renovation. Under the circumstances, there was something reassuring about Stefan's own obsessiveness and tenacity. He was a good person to be renovating a house with, as careful and methodical as Claire was. Together they tore out old mouldy carpets and stripped the hideous speckled wallpaper, deliberating, sometimes for hours, over choices of light fixtures and faucets. They were both fastidious about cleaning up as they went and about measuring everything accurately. There was pleasure in such exactitude, Claire thought, passion in order, until the day
when she struggled to get two corner joins of the new bathroom baseboard to line up properly and collapsed in tears at a three-millimetre gap, a gap that, as Stefan reassured her, would be filled in with silicone and hidden behind the toilet. Stefan proved as inconsolable when, trying to move the porcelain pedestal of the sink, he dropped and chipped it, and lay on the hall floor for over two hours, despite all Claire's efforts to drag him to his feet. But such moments were few, and they were pulled onward.

Flight bag in hand, Claire hurried up the three steps onto the front porch. She could, by now, count her way through these rooms in her sleep. Nine steps from the front door to the entrance of the kitchen, where the clock on the stove read 8:26. Stefan had left a note on the counter: Out playing basketball, back any minute, love, love, love, S. Up the twenty-one narrow stairs to the second floor, where she paused at the top before taking four more steps down the hallway to the entrance of their bedroom.

Once explorers had mapped the country by counting steps. Sir William Logan had counted his steps until the soles of his shoes fell off in tatters and his feet grew ragged. For three months, he had walked through clouds of mosquitoes, mapping the coastline of the Gaspé cove by cove, from dawn until the sun fell at night. Claire had fallen in love with exploration stories like these. Of course, there was no more room in the world for this sort of mapping.

All the time that she and Stefan were renovating the house, Claire was working on the base map of the city. Home cosmography, Charlie crowed. That's our legacy. Claire and the other photogrammetrists moved through the city grid by grid, aerial photograph by aerial photograph; the photographs were updated each year around the third week of April, after the snow had gone but while the trees remained leaf-free, before a cover of foliage enshrouded the city from view. They worked it out so that each of them got to transfer their own immediate neighbourhood from photograph to grid and as luck would have it they lived far enough apart that there were no conflicts.

Claire got: part of Lakeshore Boulevard, the old Molson Brewery, Fort York on its hump of land squeezed between the elevated Gardiner Expressway and the railway tracks. King Street, Queen Street, Dundas Street as her northern boundary, Bathurst Street to the east, Dufferin Street to the west. To the south, the shoreline. Once upon a time, just out of her cartography program, she'd specialized as a mapper of coastlines, entranced by their finicky, fractal details.

She stylus-drew the footprint of her house, and the house attached to it, the property lines, the ailanthus tree in the backyard, the alley. She did not inscribe what everyone on the block called the Ugly Garage, across the alley from their yard, its patched-up walls of Insulbrick listing so much that they swayed in one direction, then another depending which way the wind blew. One door was painted dung brown, the other a foul green. Plants that tried to grow up its sides, even deadly nightshade, withered and died, leaving desiccated skeletons. Strange smells seeped beneath its doors: car oil, vinegar, sulphur. The tarpaper
roof was littered with empty pigeon coops and pigeon shit. Now, on the city map, the Ugly Garage didn't exist; it had been erased, this being what they and all their neighbours wished for. A small act of cartographic defiance. Someone else might catch and correct it. It didn't matter. When Claire had worked for a map publisher, before coming to city maps, they routinely left at least one small inaccuracy on every map as a way of tracing the map as theirs. These mistakes marked their claim to uniqueness. If another company's maps appeared with the same inaccuracy, they'd know their maps had been copied.

The last aerial photographs that Claire had worked on were those taken on April 22, 1998. She asked everyone she knew where they had been and what they were doing that day between the hours of eleven and two to see if by chance she could find them as she blew up the shots to work on. A fool's game, really. Pedestrians were dots; at most, blobs with shadows. Cars appeared clearly, identifiable more by colour than make. Even Rachel happened to be in town that day, visiting Star, and was out there somewhere, perhaps in Allison's white Subaru, Star strapped beside her, in one of all the white cars snapped and stalled forever in the southbound lanes of the Don Valley Parkway.

In the dark, hours after Claire had returned from New York, she and Stefan quietly untangled their bodies. He stroked the skin between her shoulder blades, then laid his right hand on her left hip, which she registered as a different signal, the desire for the continuation of another dialogue.

“If we had a baby we wouldn't be lying here, like this,” she said, covers half off, his damp sports clothes abandoned at the foot of the bed beside her flight bag.

“We might be.”

“If we had a baby, and if I ended up in pain all the time because I couldn't take the drugs I need, would you support me and look after the baby and not resent me, most of all not resent me?”

“Claire, why think the worst? It's not going to happen like that”

“You don't know. You don't know what's going to happen.”

Stefan had always wanted a child. He said he believed something would be lost between them if they did not have a child, an idea which bewildered Claire. Things would be different if they did not have a child but would something inevitably be lost? And if one thing was lost wouldn't another be found? One night, two months ago, he'd said that life without a child would be like living in a prison. Or being a monk. A monk? A prison?

Perhaps in their earlier days, because they were younger and had not been together as long, the subject had not come up as frequently. Or perhaps Claire had failed to notice, had not heard the depth of Stefan's longing because she herself had not been thinking much about having a child. She found it impossible to
decide
in the abstract: How could you think about whether to have a child without first knowing how strong your relationship was? They had spoken of marriage (sometimes Claire liked the idea of being married, although other things were more important: love, a home, being pain-free). Stefan had never been that
set on marriage, at least, he said, until they resolved the matter of whether or not they were going to have children.

And now: his long, careful fingers rubbing the smooth skin above her hipbone, as if on a quest. The two of them weren't old, he argued, but were getting older. There was still time but not a lot of time.

“I'm frightened,” she said.

“What are you frightened of?”

“If I'm trying to get pregnant or when I'm pregnant or breast-feeding, I can't use the migraine drugs because it's too risky. You've never seen me try to function without good drugs. I was already using Imitrex when I met you, okay, from just after I met you. You haven't seen what it was like when I was younger and there were times, days in a row, when I really couldn't function. This me you love and want to have a baby with, this is me on drugs.”

“How do you even know what you'd be like now without the drugs?”

“I don't know but I can imagine.” She was thinking of Rachel, of course, and what had happened to Rachel when she got pregnant, which Stefan would guess, although he said nothing to indicate this. What if she attempted to become a mother, and like Rachel, failed? “If I didn't get migraines –”

“Maybe there's some other way to bring things under control.”

“I keep trying. You know that. I try everything. I'm open to just about any suggestion.”

“Have you ever thought that maybe you think about your headaches too much and possibly that makes them worse?”

And how was it possible not to think of them, not consider their possibility, not be aware of each subtle fluctuation of sensation within her head, her body? It was like an awareness of the weather, the internal weather of her nervous system. He was asking her to be less conscious of the world, of herself

“Other people with migraines have children.” Was it a sign of his desperation, that he was tacitly roping in Rachel, of all people, on his side of the argument? “Your mother –”

“My mother didn't get migraines as frequently as Rachel and I do.”

“Why is that?”

“I don't know. Stef, I'm not saying no, I'm just saying not yet.”

The next night, after work, Claire drove out to Allison's. Though she'd called to let Allison know she was coming, when she rang the doorbell on Glebeholme Boulevard only the dog barked in response. Perhaps Allison was putting the girls to bed or had locked herself for a brief respite in the bathroom, so Claire followed a dweedle of music around to the side of the house and rapped her knuckles against the window of the small basement room where Lennie was practising. He waved at her with his violin bow. Banker by day, he played in an amateur orchestra on weekends and grabbed half an hour some weeknights to rehearse. He'd grown up in Montreal, west of rue du Parc in a seven-room apartment with his four siblings, parents, and paternal grandparents, who had emigrated from Guangdong province
and ran a supermarket in Chinatown. He and Allison had met at university in Guelph and been together ever since.

Bow in hand, slippers on his feet, he let Claire in the front door, fending off shaggy Belle, who kept hurling herself towards them. He kissed Claire's cheeks, asked for news of Rachel, and when Claire shook her head, pointed with his bow and told her Allison would be down in a moment. He offered her a drink but Claire said no thanks, and when she insisted she'd be fine waiting on her own, Lennie nodded and slipped back downstairs, leaving her with the churning dishwasher and head-butting dog and a faint meander of Mozart's
A Little Night Music
.

The stairs from the second floor creaked as Allison made her way down them. “Three in bed,” she said, “and the middle one said, I'm not sleeping. At least she's drowsy now.” She crossed her fingers, with an air of blithe exhaustion. The one in the middle, Claire knew, was Star.

On the fridge were photographs of the three girls, all black-haired, though Star's hair was thicker and didn't lie as flat. Fifteen months younger than Amelia and already as tall. How uncanny (they had all remarked on it) that in some ways Star looked more like Allison than she did Rachel, more like Allison than either of Allison's own daughters – the same almond-shaped eyes and crease in her left cheek when she laughed. Her two-plus-one girls Allison sometimes called them.

One of the cats, Georgia, a marbled brown, slipped in through a tear in the screen of the kitchen window, bounced from counter to floor and vamoosed in the direction of the living room. Allison's hair, clipped at the back of her neck, sprayed
upwards in a cockscomb. She plucked a corked bottle from the counter and raised one eyebrow. Jealously, Claire shook her head. “Kiwi?” Allison tossed one through the air and Claire caught it as Allison tucked the bottle under her arm and carried a clean but smudged glass towards the table. A movement at the top of the stairs, behind Allison, out of Allison's sight, caught Claire's eye – a small figure in a sleeveless purple nightgown gazed down at them. “So –” Allison began as Claire laid her hand on Allison's wrist and without looking up, Allison nodded and said, “Let's take Belle for a spin around the block.”

She poured some wine, not into the glass but a child's plastic cup, then dashed downstairs to let Lennie know where they were off to, while Claire turned, intending to wave to Star, but Star had vanished.

The grass outside was damp against their sandalled feet, Claire's mouth full of the kiwi's sour-sweet flesh. The dog lol-loped across a stretch of lawn. “So,” Allison said again.

“There was no sign that she's been back. I'd say it looks like she left on a regular trip – she took her computer, most of her medications. There's nothing obvious to suggest she was planning on being away for a long time.”

Allison exhaled. “It's weird, okay, it is. And the guy?”

“Well, they've been involved.”

“There's a surprise.”

“He's a massage therapist.”

“Oh great, she gets involved with her massage therapist.”

“I think it happened afterwards. Anyway, it didn't sound like things were going all that well. They had an argument before she left.”

“Is there someone else?”

“He didn't say.”

“Well.” Allison slugged back a mouthful of wine. “I suppose it's possible she's fallen madly in love and run off. It's not impossible. Except there's Star. Why no word, why would she do that to Star?”

“What have you said to Star?”

“She's travelling. It's an important trip. She can't get to a computer or the telephone. This can only go on for so long, though. Either I think she's sent messages and they've all, all one of them, whatever, got lost, or something's happened –” Allison whistled for the dog. “I can't –”

“I know someone in the police department,” Claire said, listening to the soft clink of the dog's tags and the shush of their sandals against the sidewalk. “We deal with the police department all the time. We make maps for them. I'll see what he has to say.”

“That would be good.”

“And I have the number of a doctor in Montreal, the guy, I think it's the guy she went to interview. I've been trying to get hold of him.”