Claire's Head Read online

  For her first three years, Claire had worked as a photogrammetrist, up in the eyrie of photogrammetrists, who sat in a row behind a glassed-in window a full storey above the floor where most of the map-makers worked. The map department was housed in what had once been a gymnasium, built puzzlingly at the top of the building rather than at ground level. Charlie called the photogrammetrists his aerialists, a visual pun, since what they did was translate aerial photographs. When Claire had worked in the upper tier of their domain, she had been drawing, converting the scanned-in photos of the city into lines. Grid by grid, they’d assembled a new base map of the city: every building, every street, every tree, everything that could be marked in outline. All the other maps they created would draw on this master data, be a subset of the base.

  Now the photogrammetrists huddled towards their double-screened computers like strange movie viewers, wearing the same kind of 3-D glasses, staring at twin frames of aerial photographs stereoscopically, and converting the information that revealed height (bridges, lampposts, roofs) into full 3-D computerized display.

  After three years, her eyesight growing wonky, Claire asked to be transferred down. Charlie Gorjup, who prided himself on being a flexible man, on letting his mappists work odd hours, on shifting people around within the department if they requested and it was possible, brought her to the gymnasium floor to work on custom maps, between New Names and Utilities.

  She was lucky to have landed a job that suited her so well, and to have so sympathetic a boss. The building she worked in didn’t make her sick. The two storeys of air in the converted gymnasium weren’t stuffy or rancid with carpet or cleaning chemicals. Charlie was accommodating about her occasional missed days or headache-induced late arrival or early departure, without Claire having to acknowledge to him how deeply her life was shaped, or distorted, by the coming and going of her migraines. A combination of drugs kept her headaches relatively under control and managed the pain when it came, although she was conscious, at times, of the fragility of this stability.

  All day, as she worked on a map for Parks and Recreation of city wetlands, which meant every watery surface imaginable, for use in mosquito control, Claire’s mind kept returning to Rachel. Where was she? Travelling? What had happened to her in Montreal? And if she had run off, why now?

  Once, Rachel had vanished without a word for over three months, but that time there had been a reason, an obvious catalyst. Eight years ago, in May, on May 15, their parents had been killed in an accident. (For the first five years afterwards, the three of them had spoken on the anniversary of their parents’ deaths; the sixth year, only Claire and Allison had done so, and the last two years, Claire had simply noted the date to herself.)

  Rachel had not disappeared right after their parents’ death. No, in the immediate aftermath, she had flown to meet Allison and Claire in Frankfurt, at a hotel, not far from the airport, where the accident had taken place. After Frankfurt, she had come to Toronto for the funeral and together they had travelled to the West Coast, to Victoria, where both their parents’ families had settled and where their mother’s mother and father’s father still lived.

  Accompanied by their weeping grandparents, they had scattered their parents’ ashes within a grove of trees, and then flown back to Toronto to begin the difficult task of sorting through the belongings in their parents’ west-end bungalow, the home of their childhood, and putting the house up for sale. In those agonizing days, it was Rachel who had taken charge, ushering them through what needed to be done, solicitous to the way that grief threatened to overwhelm them all. She had overseen the consultations with lawyers – German and Canadian – who were trying to determine if there would be a court case or just an insurance settlement. She kept on when both Allison and Claire were too overcome to do much of anything.

  Then, at the beginning of that December, just when she might have been thinking of returning to Toronto to spend that first parentless Christmas with Allison and Claire, as they had assumed she would do, Rachel called to say she was going on a trip. Neither Claire nor Allison spoke to her directly. She did not say, in her messages, where she was going, or for how long.

  There had been no word from Rachel at Christmas, which Claire shared with Allison and Lennie in their ground-floor apartment, in the house on Booth Avenue where she lived on the second floor. On Boxing Day, while Allison and Lennie set out for Montreal to visit Lennie’s family, Claire, somewhat anxiously, allowed Stefan Simic, her new boyfriend then, to bear her off to his mother’s house in Ottawa.

  Weeks went by and there was still no word from Rachel. No postcards or letters arrived. Michael Straw, the architect with whom Rachel had lived for six years in her 9th Street apartment, until shortly before their parents’ death, had not heard from her. The lack of word was puzzling, and yet Rachel had always been impetuous, a little willful and unpredictable, and somewhat blind to the effect of her behaviour on others.

  More weeks passed. Phone messages left at Rachel’s New York apartment went unreturned. Once or twice, however, the line rang busy. Late one night, near the end of March, Allison, who was having a harder time than Claire coping with Rachel’s absence, managed to land a voice on Rachel’s line, not Rachel, but a woman who gave her name as Mary Po, who began by stuttering that she was Rachel’s roommate. Where was Rachel, Allison demanded. Had she received any of their messages? When Allison threatened to bring in the police, jittery, squeaky Mary Po relented and said that she was really more a subletter than a roommate, since Rachel wasn’t actually there, but the sublet wasn’t legal, so Rachel had instructed her not to answer the phone and all she knew was that Rachel was travelling and had said she would give Mary two weeks’ notice before her return. She’d thought Rachel had spoken of coming back at the end of February but hadn’t heard from her.

  Allison hired a private detective. It had been a horrific year, and she couldn’t put up with any more craziness. With remarkable efficiency, the detective tracked Rachel down at a beach resort in Thailand. From some palm-thatched lodge, Rachel called Allison (so Allison told Claire), and said, after everything they’d gone through, she’d just needed some time to herself; she was on vacation; they were all adults now; surely they did not have to know at all times where she was. Anyway, why would they assume the worst?

  Shortly thereafter, she returned to New York and, perhaps as an act of penance, paid a visit to Toronto, tanned, apparently healthy, vague about whether she’d travelled alone or with anyone and what her itinerary had been, although she mentioned India and the Andaman Islands. She came back, Rachel told Claire, when she ran out of prescription migraine drugs.

  “Hey, Claire,” shouted Parker in New Names, “Does Falling Street sound like Colleen Street?”

  His voice made her jump, even though she was used to him calling out such questions.

  She raised her head from her computer to consider it. If she called back yes, the developer who had proposed Falling Street for some new field-engulfing residential tract would have to go back to the drawing board, since no name that could potentially cause any confusion when someone dialled 9-1-1 would be accepted. “Yes.”

  There was a Rachael Street in Toronto but no Rachel Street. In Montreal, there was a rue Rachel. In March, in Montreal, Rachel had sounded depressed, and desperate, but no more so than she had at other times. As they both did, at times. When it seemed as if a headache or a round of headaches would never end.

  If Rachel had indeed gone travelling, this time she did not appear to have left a squeaky-voiced subletter occupying her apartment, at least not according to Brad Arnarson. Which suggested less premeditation. Or what?

  Next to Claire, Bianca was complaining about the map of head lice cases that she was constructing for the Public School Board: where infested students lived, where their parents worked, in order to document the infestation’s spread.

  Logan, at the large-screen computer beyond, told Bianca to pipe down. His forensic map, for the police department, dr
ew on information given by suspects and witnesses in a High Park rape investigation to establish people’s walking patterns, to determine confidence regions – how close, based on the evidence and statements, witnesses and suspects could have been to the crime at the hour in question.

  All mapping, Charlie Gorjup argued, was forensic, a kind of investigation.

  Claire stood up.

  At five, she reversed her path and set off west towards Stefan, who, like her, worked ten floors in the air. It would have been convenient if, a true aerialist, she could have tightrope-walked ten floors above Dundas Street to meet him.

  He was not at his desk when she entered his research team’s office, not examining DNA arrays on his computer, colour-coded grids of control cells and those subject to experimental conditions, over which he pored to see which were expressing under different sets of conditions. He worked with a fierce concentration that Claire loved. He, too, was mapping things. His research involved testing the responses of cancer cells at low-oxygen levels, searching for particular molecular pathways to target in cancer treatment.

  Nor were there any other researchers around, which might mean they were beavering away in the lab somewhere or had already left for the day. Claire pushed through the door at the back of the office with the poster of the Bridget Fonda movie Point of No Return taped to it and made her way along the corridor off which opened the labs themselves – some filled with beakers or a centrifuge or refrigerator units, some sealed behind doors emblazoned with biohazard signs – until, turning left at the end of the hall, she came to a small door with a square window which emitted a glow of red light. And there was Stefan, on the other side of the door, in the tiny room where she often found him, crouched over the fluorescent microscope, the narrow curve of his spine shifting as he moved, dark hair drifting over his checked collar, olive skin rouged. She liked watching him think, unobserved – a heated, familiar rush that never failed her. Was love possible without admiration? How bony and agile his back and neck, his invisible mind ticking. When she knocked and waved through the portal, he turned and waved back, happy to see her, and without needing to move from his stool, opened the door. She had to do no more than slip into the gap between his legs and clasp his hands, room for only the two of them in this rose world.

  “Claire, what’s wrong?” Stefan touched his fingers to her temples, his glimmer of anxiety transferred to her.

  “Thinking about Rachel.”

  He kissed the side of her neck. “Rachel’s perfectly capable of looking after herself.”

  The next night, Tuesday, Claire called Brad Arnarson back.

  “Have you heard anything?” she asked him, although she assumed, even before he responded, that he hadn’t. “Have you been in touch with any of her other friends?”

  “I don’t actually know a lot of Rachel’s friends. I’ve run into a couple of people but no one seems to have seen or heard from her recently.”

  “Did anything happen right before she left?”

  “I don’t know. I keep wondering. She was under kind of a lot of stress and she didn’t seem very happy.”

  Claire wished she could visualize him. Blond? Dark? A Scandinavian surname. Rachel had always said she had a thing against blond men, so perhaps not blond then. Claire could not reliably get a grip on Brad Arnarson from his voice. Friend, he’d said, which could be euphemism – coyness or reticence. She was indebted to him for calling her but remained internally at odds about the nature of his concern.

  “I’m thinking of coming to New York to check up on the apartment myself,” she told him. She had a set of keys that Rachel had given her on an earlier trip to New York and had told her to hang on to, so that she would have them on subsequent visits and in case of an emergency, although the emergency that Claire had contemplated was Rachel losing her keys or having them stolen and needing dependable Claire to courier the extra set to her.

  On Wednesday night, Claire called Allison once more, but got only voice mail, which probably meant that Allison and Lennie were putting the girls to bed. At 9:17, Allison phoned Claire. “Nothing,” Claire said.

  “Nothing here either,” said Allison. “In the past year we haven’t heard quite as often, every couple of weeks or so. But she visits. I knew we hadn’t heard and I’ve been meaning to do or say something but things get so crazy around here. I suppose I convinced myself she’d be in touch by Star’s birthday, which is like three more weeks, but, yeah, I guess I’m worried.”

  As Claire hung up the phone, the right side of her temple began to pulse. A point in the centre of her scalp. A second one at the base of the bone above and behind her right eye. Another point at the base of her skull, beneath the occipital bone, on the right. (Rachel said there was a point on the sole of her foot that ached whenever she got a migraine.)

  Claire had no desire to get on a plane and fly to New York. She was thrown off-balance even having to consider it. She racked her brain for the names of the one or two of Rachel’s friends she’d met on previous visits – Sophia, was it Sophia, whom they’d bumped into on Avenue A? Or Eileen, with whom they’d shared a quick dinner in a café on the corner of First Avenue and St. Marks Place? If she couldn’t remember their surnames it was likely because Rachel hadn’t mentioned them.

  From the fridge, Claire pulled a carton of leftover Thai food. She’d eaten an early dinner, right after work, before heading to a yoga class. Now she spooned chicken with basil onto a plate and set the dish spinning in the microwave.

  Stefan came home. He’d stayed late at the lab and gone straight to the gym. Wet-haired, he swept in the front door, trailing his slim shadow, drawing the scent of lilacs in with him.

  Claire wiped her lips on a napkin. They kissed, Stefan touching his fingers to the back of her neck. She loved him, loved the life they shared. She did not want to be pulled away from this. She could, of course, sit tight for now, do nothing. There would be an explanation for whatever Rachel was up to. And yet something kept gnawing at her. Stefan poured himself a drink, cracking ice cubes into his glass, and sat. Wrapping her feet around the rungs of his chair, Claire fed him a forkful of chicken.

  “What’s the harm in having this guy look in on Rachel’s apartment?”

  “I have no idea who he is. He might be a murderer.”

  “And there’s no one else you can think of to ask.”

  “Not offhand. And even if he goes in, I’m not sure he’ll notice the right things. He could wreck things – clues.”

  Through the screen of the open window came the snuffling of the neighbours’ bulldog along the foot of their shared fence. Here, too, the perfume of lilacs penetrated. Five and a quarter metres away, on the far side of the alley that ran between their narrow row of yards and those belonging to the houses on the next street, a security light blinked on.

  “We could go down together next weekend,” Stefan said. “I can’t this weekend. I said I’d go into work. I’m supposed to look over some results with Rob.” He didn’t want to go, Claire knew. He believed Rachel would turn up. In her own sweet time. She was flighty. She was (she knew he thought this though he wouldn’t say it aloud) a woman who had abandoned her child. “Why not give her another week to see if she shows herself? Now she knows everyone’s trying to get hold of her.” This sounded reasonable.

  Claire frowned. She rubbed the occipital point at the back of her neck. When she caught Stefan looking at her, she dropped her hand. “I may go down to New York this weekend.”

  Claire had migraines long before her parents’ death. She’d had migraines since childhood. She’d suffered from them even before Rachel had.

  Where did the pain begin? She could not remember anything as decisive as a first headache, rather she had a growing awareness of their being part of her life’s landscape. They were not as frequent during her childhood, however. And when they came – when they shook her, when she was capsized into them – the headaches always took her by surprise.

  She had no sense, then, o
f warning signals. Nor was she able to attribute the migraines to any obvious cause, if they were in fact caused by anything outside her body and its complicated neurochemistry, her faulty nervous system with its particular sensitivity to pain. No one had yet used the word “migraine” around her. Now she was aware of triggers – things that didn’t strictly cause the migraine but made her more vulnerable to its processes – but not then.

  Then, the pain simply appeared. It was. She became it. One side of her head was seized, one side of her body. It took her over, like a fit. Even without a headache, she’d feel suddenly at sea and vomit. (Once, she remembered being terrified by a big black dog, then being put to bed with a headache, although no one else in her family recalled anything about the dog. Another time, when she and her sisters were left overnight by their parents with some friends, she must have come down with a migraine, though what she remembered was throwing up all over their baby-blue carpet.)

  At home, in the bedroom that she and Allison shared, her mother drew shut the curtains and passed Claire a plastic bag of ice cubes to lay across her forehead. Beside the bed, she set a turquoise plastic tub – the barf bucket. Broad-browed, dark-haired, a dry hand to Claire’s head, how matter-of-fact her mother was, as if there were nothing very unusual about Claire’s pain. How far away she seemed, her hand, her body retreating.