Claire's Head Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Claire’s Head

  “Brilliantly conceived and executed.… Complex, breathtaking.…”

  — Globe and Mail

  “Graphic and powerful.”

  — Ottawa Citizen

  “Bush has given readers what is not only a heartfelt depiction of pain but also a thought-provoking read for anyone who, like Claire, uses their head.”

  — Books in Canada

  “Bush is never false. She possesses in spades the gift of sincerity which brings her strongest characters bounding to life.”

  — Montreal Gazette

  “A neurological thriller.… Bush is a deeply intelligent and empathetic writer.”

  — Edmonton Journal

  “Catherine Bush is a master of geography. She has a knack for highlighting the sensory minutiae of place so vividly that you feel like you’re tailgating her characters through the spaces they inhabit.”

  — NOW magazine

  BOOKS BY CATHERINE BUSH

  Minus Time (1994)

  The Rules of Engagement (2000)

  Claire’s Head (2004)

  Copyright © 2004 by Catherine Bush

  Cloth edition published 2004

  First Emblem Editions publication 2005

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bush, Catherine, 1961-

  Claire’s head / Catherine Bush.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-635-6

  I. Title.

  PS8553.U6963C53 2005 0813’.54 C2005-901267-6

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  The first epigraph is taken from In the Land of Pain, by Alphonse Daudet, trans. Julian Barnes. Copyright © 2003 Julian Barnes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Random House, Inc. 1745 Broadway, New York 10019.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  The Canadian Publishers

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5G 2E9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  For H. W.

  and my grandmother, Hilda Maud Hawes

  “Pain, you must be everything to me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit.”

  – Alphonse Daudet,

  In the Land of Pain, trans. Julian Barnes

  “Now I can do no more … What will become of me?”

  – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Rachel’s House of Pain

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  When the phone rang, Claire was upstairs in her study, drawing the shoreline of Lake Ontario by hand. She liked to test her recall of the intricate patterns of coasts and shores – every inlet and promontory. As she picked up the phone, she noted the time, 3:42 in the afternoon. She was aware of her coordinates: she faced east, the window to her right, south, open just a crack, perhaps four centimetres.

  “Is this Claire Barber?” asked an unknown male voice.

  “Yes,” she said. “Who’s this?”

  “My name’s Brad,” he said. “Brad Arnarson. I’m a friend of Rachel’s. Your sister. I’m calling from New York. I was wondering when you last heard from her.” Claire glanced out the window, mentally spanning the distance from Toronto to New York.

  “In March.” It was now Saturday, June 3, 2000. Not only did she not know Brad Arnarson, but she had never heard Rachel mention his name, which was not necessarily significant, since Rachel, four years older and given to courting mystery when she chose, could be quite reticent about her private life. “We spoke the night of March 14.” The date had stuck. Then again, precision was Claire’s forte. “She was in Montreal on a trip and called me from her hotel the night she arrived.”

  “I talked to her the night before she left,” Brad Arnarson said. “At least that’s where she said she was off to.”

  To have heard nothing from Rachel, her oldest sister, in two and a half months was not all that unusual. Claire assumed she had been busy. A writer specializing in medical issues, Rachel freelanced and travelled a lot, often on assignment. In April, Claire had e-mailed her to see how she was doing and when Rachel didn’t respond, Claire had not thought too much about it, since Rachel was not always dependable about staying in contact.

  “She told me she was in Montreal to interview someone, a doctor, a migraine specialist, for an article.”

  “The thing is,” Brad Arnarson went on, “I don’t think she’s been back to New York. I’ve called and left messages. I’ve gone up to her door and knocked. I’ve asked around in the neighbourhood, in shops, the health food store, the dry cleaner’s across the street from her building, and no one’s seen her. My place isn’t that far away. On 12th Street. I’ve walked along 9th at night and the only light I’ve seen lit is one I know she keeps on a timer. I have a set of keys. I could let myself into the apartment, but I thought I should talk to someone else first.”

  “You’re a close friend?”

  “Yeah, pretty close.”

  “Did she give you my number?”

  “No, first I tried to find your other sister, Allison, but I couldn’t.”

  “She’s listed under her husband’s name.”

  “You were the first C. Barber.”

  Had he been spying on Rachel? Stalking, only Rachel wasn’t there to be stalked. Were there reasons to be suspicious of him, for all that his concern seemed genuine?

  “I’ll call you back. Can you give me your number?” She wrote his home and cellphone numbers on a piece of drawing paper, not yet certain how worried she should be.

  The last time she’d spoken to Rachel, Rachel had not sounded well. But then Rachel had been in the grip of a migraine, which Claire had intuited, from the rasp in her voice, before she’d said more than a word. When Rachel’s headaches were particularly bad or when, because of them, she was feeling despondent and lonely, she called Claire. How bad, Claire had asked that night. 2.85, Rachel croaked, which was at the high end of their private code, the Barber Pain Scale. It ran from zero to three, broken down, at Claire’s suggestion, infinitesimally within that range. Was it the flight, Claire asked, although she was more often the one who suffered migraines while flying. Maybe, Rachel said, maybe flights were beginning to be a trigger for her, too, although they never used to be.

  She’d felt the quiver of something before leaving. She’d eaten a sandw
ich at La Guardia before catching her plane. There’d been a slice of cheese in the sandwich, and dairy was a big trigger for her these days. She’d taken the cheese out, but maybe there was some kind of residue. On the flight, feeling a headache coming on, she’d had a sip of coffee, no more than a sip – she’d been trying to be so careful about such things, about too much caffeine, although sometimes, conversely, a swig of coffee early in the migraine cycle would nip the pain in the bud. This time the caffeine only made things worse. As soon as she got to her hotel room, she’d medicated – a Zomig, two Tylenol 3s – but the drugs didn’t seem to be working.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  “Give them a chance. Perhaps you just need to sleep it off. Or if you can’t sleep, try to relax. Breathe deeply. Think of the sea, something calming.”

  Claire knew how inane her words sounded, how hard it was to offer comfort. When a migraine came on, the pain swelled, like the sea over a small boat, overwhelming the horizon. It wasn’t just in the head, but down one side of the body. All of you felt disturbed, helpless, assaulted.

  In the two and a half months since that conversation, it had struck Claire now and again that Rachel hadn’t called seeking solace when in pain. Odd, if she’d broken a nasty and persistent bout, that she hadn’t let Claire know what had done the trick. Perhaps she’d been feeling so well, so blissfully pain-free, that thoughts of Claire and headaches had fallen by the wayside.

  “I have to talk to this neurologist tomorrow,” Rachel had said from Montreal. “About some new migraine research. It seemed like a good idea when I set it up.”

  “Maybe the neurologist will be able to help you.”

  Phone in hand, Claire padded down the upstairs hall to Stefan’s study at the front of the house. He looked up as she entered, away from a computer screen radiant with shifting colours, his chin and neck retracting as he swivelled his chair towards her. “Who was it?”

  “A friend of Rachel’s. Some guy from New York named Brad. I’m not sure what kind of friend. He hasn’t heard from her since just before she left for Montreal to interview some researcher, and I haven’t heard from her since the night she arrived there. He doesn’t think she’s been back to her apartment.”

  Stefan picked up the marble that he liked to play with while he worked and circled it in his left palm. “Maybe she went back home and took off again.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Maybe she was invited to someone’s beach house in the Caribbean. Or a yacht. Maybe she’s having an adventure and is on a yacht somewhere.”

  “It’s possible, but not very likely.”

  “Have you talked to Allison?” He set the marble down in a little white china dish.

  “No, no, I was just about to call her.”

  It had been four weeks since Claire had spoken to Allison, her middle sister, which was not unusual given the hectic pace of both their lives, Allison’s even more than Claire’s. Although Claire had not heard from Rachel, Allison surely had. Rachel was more faithfully in contact with Allison than anyone else, since for the past four and a half years, Allison and her husband, Lennie Lee, had been raising Rachel’s daughter, Star, along with their own two daughters.

  When Claire called Allison’s house, seven-year-old Amelia answered. Behind her, Belle, the mutt, barked, four-year-old Lara yelled, and six-year-old Star yelped back, while Lennie tried to mollify them. The two cats, Maggie and Georgia, had no doubt skedaddled somewhere. “Hi Claire,” Amelia shouted. “My mum’s at the zoo.”

  “Thanks, sweetheart,” Claire said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Saturdays, Allison, a senior zookeeper, was not usually at work. The woman who answered the phone in the Indo-Malay keepers’ quarters went to get her. “Someone called in sick,” Allison said, “and one of the rhinos is under the weather, so things are kind of crazy around here. What’s up? This’ll have to be quick.”

  “When did you last hear from Rachel?”

  “Speak to her? When she was supposed to come here in March and left a message saying she couldn’t come after all.”

  “Do you remember the date?”

  “Not the exact date. Mid-March. She called from Montreal.”

  “Do you remember what she said?”

  “Not her exact words but something like, I can’t make it right now. Something’s come up. She didn’t make it seem like she was going to be away for a while.”

  “How did she sound?”

  “I don’t know. It was a message. Guilty. Rushed.”

  “And no calls, no e-mails, nothing for Star since then?”

  “She sent Star a postcard from Montreal, that’s it.”

  “You don’t think it’s weird?”

  Allison gave a sigh. “I’ve left messages. I guess I thought she was busy. Or away. It’s odd but I’ve been busy. You haven’t heard from her either?”

  “Not since the night she arrived in Montreal. I just got a call from this friend of hers in New York who doesn’t think she’s been back to her apartment since Montreal, and he’s worried.”

  The last time Claire had seen Rachel, at Christmas, she’d looked tired, perhaps a little paler than usual. She had come to Toronto for ten days to stay at Allison’s east-end home and spend time with Star, although she had also brought her computer and had a piece to finish, something on narcolepsy. On Christmas Eve, Claire and Rachel had found themselves briefly alone together in Allison’s living room, while Stefan and Lennie trooped down to the basement with the three girls. Allison had sprinted upstairs.

  “How’s your head?” Claire had asked, because all fall Rachel had been complaining, once in a bleak phone call from Shanghai, that her headaches were worse than they’d been in a while.

  “Not great,” Rachel said, rubbing her index finger along the ridge of bone beneath her right eye. “I feel like I keep reacting to more triggers. Food triggers. Caffeine, alcohol. Smoke.” She shrugged. “Yours?”

  “Okay,” Claire said carefully. “The drugs work mostly. The hormonal ones are bad but there’s not a lot I can do about that.”

  Allison stuck her head through the doorway, heard what they were talking about, and retreated. Girls’ voices rose up the basement stairs.

  For dinner, they had pan-fried Chinese dumplings and pizza, which Rachel didn’t eat. They grazed off paper plates while lounging around the living room, and attempted to stop the girls from handling every present under the tree. Rachel spread herself out on the carpet beyond the coffee table and cajoled Amelia and Star and Lara into giving her a massage by offering to pay each of them a quarter. Neck and scalp, please. They seemed happy to oblige, in a rather manic and distracted way, fingers probing her as if she were a pudding and ruffling her long, dark hair while they shouted, Give me money. Rachel said, You have to work for it first.

  Later, Star, whose given name was Astra, lay curled between Rachel’s legs, her head on Rachel’s thigh, while Rachel, still on the floor, leaned against the sofa and stroked Star’s pale-brown forehead – like any mother and daughter.

  Allison wanted to read a story. Lennie suggested a round of Rummy 500, no, Crazy Eights, all right, Go Fish, since this was all Lara, at four, could manage, and even Claire, who hated card games, agreed to play. Only Rachel, who hated them even more, wouldn’t. She left the room momentarily. Claire heard the faint pop of a blister pack being opened, a pill no doubt extracted, then a rush of water from the tap. When Rachel returned, she was chewing smoked salmon on a cracker, the last of the hors d’oeuvres, a glass of soda water spiked with lemon in her hand.

  Originally, Rachel had booked her return ticket to New York for the second of January, insisting that she feared none of the dire predictions of millennial disaster and wanted to be with her family, her daughter, for the giddy countdown to a new millennium, but on the morning of the thirty-first, she called Claire at home to wish her a Happy New Year and said she was flying back that afternoon. She’d decided she
wanted to be in her own place. Had a more enticing offer of celebration turned up? She didn’t say. Was she nervous about the warnings of disaster after all? Had something happened at Allison’s? Had she lost some internal equilibrium and had all she could manage of that chaotic household?

  After she and Allison hung up, Claire tried Rachel’s cellphone, which Rachel was forever forgetting to turn on or recharge, or losing, and which she hadn’t used the night she’d called from Montreal. Claire sent her an e-mail and left a message at her New York number for good measure. If she had known the hotel where Rachel had stayed in Montreal, she would have tried there, too, as doubtful as it seemed that Rachel was still on the premises.

  No messages of any sort on Sunday. Yet if something terrible had happened, surely they would have heard. Heard something, heard somehow.

  On Monday morning, as they did most days, Claire and Stefan walked together to work, east along Queen Street, past Bathurst, then Spadina, before turning north up University towards Dundas. On the northwest corner of Dundas and University, they kissed and parted, Stefan continuing up University to the hospital that housed his molecular medicine lab, while Claire set off east, 512 more steps, past Yonge to Victoria, where, in an unassuming office building, the City Map Department resided.

  She had worked in the map department for just over seven years, since shortly after her parents’ death. She had loved maps ever since childhood and, as a child, had spent hours drawing them, of both real places and imaginary. From the start, mapping had been a way to give the world order, to hold back the riot of sensory signals that sometimes threatened to overwhelm her, and to compensate for the disorder that, more frequently than she liked to admit, was let loose inside her. Making a map, any map, was a chance to bring a little more clarity and form to the world.

  These days, mapping no longer meant being able to draw but, in an age of digitized information, to be able to assemble maps from banks of data. To sort and select the details you needed. Map-makers were data organizers. So Claire had adapted. Where once you had to be able to inscribe a line a thousandth of a centimetre thick, now you simply had to be able to recognize the difference between a line of five thousandths and one of seven thousandths of a centimetre. Sometimes the map-makers had competitions. But there was more to the work than data, crowed their boss, Charlie Gorjup, chief map-maker and former surveyor: every single city department depended on their maps. The city itself, he boasted, would not exist without them. They were geographic enablers, in the business of leaving a record both of what happened and what could be.