Claire's Head (11 page)

“Mostly.”

He rose to his feet. “I hope some of this helps. I hope you find her. If you have any more questions, let me know.”

Dr. Tagliacci swept Claire out of his office, the pressure of his hand still on her palm as he sprinted ahead of her, white coat flapping, down the hall. She wasn't sure what to make of him. After bumping into Pierre L'Aube in the reception area, who confirmed that he had spoken briefly to Rachel but not seen her, she exited the Neurological Institute at ten past eleven. She had just under six hours until her train left. She had already checked out of her hotel room. She'd found something, proof that Rachel had been here, and, for the third day in a row, had been suffering from a migraine, but where this led she did not yet know.

From the east, a bus clambered up the hill of Pine Avenue while a breeze tossed up by the river to the south climbed the slope of University, the hot bus wind and sultry river breeze intersecting at the point on the slope where Claire stood. Rachel, too, must have stood on or near this spot, in March, in the snow and near-dark, spurned, it would appear, by Dr. Tagliacci, without a PET scan, her stubborn head still aching. (She'd been prepared to lie to get her brain scanned, if she'd claimed that she'd been medication-free for twenty-four hours.)

Presumably, in this state, she had returned to the hotel. In the morning, if not wholly well, she'd nevertheless felt well enough to check out. When had she called Allison to say she wasn't coming to Toronto, in the morning or the previous night? At what point had she decided to leave Montreal, to vanish from the island?

T
he doors to the Indo-Malay pavilion were locked, but lights were still on and human figures visible among the trees. Claire rapped on the glass and one of the figures, a young man in green T-shirt and khakis, approached and tried to shoo her away. The zoo was already closed to visitors for the night. She had parked over by the administration building, as she did on her occasional visits, and walked into the zoo from there. Im here to see Allison Barber, Claire shouted, pointing in the direction of the keepers' quarters. She was uncertain whether the young man could hear her, but he unlocked the main doors and let her enter the pavilion's tropical interior.

“I'm Claire, Allison's sister,” she said.

“I think Allison's in with the orangs.” Not the actual orangutan enclosure, it would seem, visible near the centre of the pavilion as they made their way along a path near the periphery, and where a woman, not Allison, was hosing the cement floor. Far above their heads, birds hooted as they settled for the night
in the thirty-foot rafters or among the high canopies of the trees. Leaves brushed against Claire's arms.

The young man opened the door to the keepers' quarters and led Claire fourteen steps along a corridor to another door, which he unlocked. Then he called into the large, turquoise-walled interior, “Allison. Allison, your sister's here.”

“My sister?” Allison appeared, also in a green T-shirt, carrying a handful of keys. Sweat made the planes of her face shine. At the sight of Claire, she looked worried.

“No big news,” Claire said. “I got back from Montreal last night. I drove out because I thought it might be easier to talk to you here.”

Allison nodded. Three days a week, she worked an early shift, rising before dawn and arriving home just as the three girls were let out of school. Two days a week she worked late and came home in time to tuck them into bed. “Only I can't be too late. Let me check that everyone's locked in.”

They walked together along the row of barred enclosures, the orangutans' night quarters, which rose to skylights overhead, the turquoise walls and evening light that fell from above making the enclosures bright enough. In high school, Allison had spoken of wanting to be a veterinarian but, after getting a degree in animal husbandry, she had come to the zoo to work full-time. She loved the exotics, she said, having a continent's worth of creatures under her care, and she didn't want that care to be exclusively medical, even if some days all they seemed to do was clean – clean up shit.

“Which one's Dido?”

The orangutans were divided by age and rank (an old, sour male slumped in a cage by himself at the far end). Most sat quietly munching leafy twigs. Allison pointed to a young female in a pen with two others, lolling on her back in a patch of straw. There was no sign that her upbringing had been in any way unusual, that she had, in fact, been raised by a team of keepers, including Allison, who now, at least in front of Claire, paid no special attention to her. A young male pressed himself to the bars and spat at Allison as she passed.

“A normal bit of attention-getting,” Allison said, wiping off her forearm.

When she switched off the lights, the room softened to blue. (Once Claire had asked Allison if she thought the orangutans, or any of the great apes, got migraines. Allison said she didn't know. It would be hard to tell. One of the mountain gorillas over in the Africa pavilion suffered epileptic fits. Sometimes one of the female orangutans rubbed her head as if she had a headache. Since migraines were recorded across time and in most human populations, it was not impossible that apes suffered them, too.)

They passed back through the keepers' kitchen. Through the animal kitchen, where a young woman was snapping plastic lids over the buckets of monkey chow, and out, again, into the pavilion. Claire followed Allison around to the back entrance of the orangutan exhibit, which Allison unlocked. The woman who had been cleaning the floors had left.

Inside, the door locked again behind them, Allison seated herself on a rectangular riser of cement, on top of a tidied pallet of straw. “You don't mind?” A tire hung above them from a rope
attached to a roof beam. A film of sweat was spreading over Claire's skin.

“It's fine.” The Plexiglas enclosure, vaulting to the heights of the glass roof above, was echoey but private: only in daytime would people peer in. “She talked to a doctor, but not the one I thought she'd spoken to. One strange thing is she wanted him to give her a brain scan – he was doing some kind of study but told her he couldn't use her.”

“That's weird if she was there as a journalist.”

“I guess.”

“Did she think something was wrong?”

“I don't know.”

Allison wiped her hands on her khakis. “I wish I could remember what her last message said. Now of course I wish I'd saved it but why would I? I know I listened to it in the morning, which would have been March 16, right? But I don't know when she sent it. I was pissed off. She'd said she was coming and then she wasn't, and however sorry she sounded, I was the one who was going to have to tell Star. I keep thinking maybe she said something about trying to visit a couple of weeks later, not that it matters now, but I could be making that up.”

“I've talked to her phone company and bank but they say they can't give me any information because of privacy regulations.”

“Won't Detective Bird get that sort of thing?” Allison was grazing a piece of straw back and forth against her left wrist. “What I keep wondering is if all this has something to do with Star. Everything seemed fine at Christmas. Didn't it? I know she left early, but I don't remember anything upsetting happening.

Star wants to know if Rachel's coming for her birthday. But what if she feels it's too difficult, even like this, that somehow it's better if she's not around, if she's not around at all.” Allison looked at Claire. “Did she say anything to you about this?”

“No, she didn't.”

This was what Claire knew: nearly four and a half years ago, one Saturday afternoon in January, Rachel had arrived without warning on Allison's doorstep, along with eighteen-month-old Star strapped in her stroller.

According to Rachel, as soon as Allison opened the door, she had bolted into the house, leaving Star on the doorstep with Allison, and raced to the downstairs bathroom where she vomited into the toilet.

In Allison's version, ashen-faced Rachel had stood there, and said, I've made a mistake. I need your help.

According to both, Rachel had spent most of the afternoon in bed in what was then Allison and Lennie's guest room, while Allison entertained Star along with two-year-old Amelia, and it wasn't until that evening, after the girls had been put to bed, that Allison and Lennie and Rachel sat down in the living room to talk.

I've made a mistake. Apparently these were the words that Rachel kept repeating. And, I can't go on like this.

You're exhausted, Allison told her. Which was totally understandable. And possibly depressed, which happened to some women. But, as Allison pointed out, Rachel was not exactly without means. She had money from their insurance settlement.
Even if she had qualms about it, she could put Star full-time in daycare, at least for a while, or hire a nanny, or stop working for a spell – give herself a break until she got some of her energy back. Why didn't she consider leaving New York, which wasn't the cheapest or easiest place to raise a baby, particularly in a six-storey walk-up? Why not come back to Toronto for a bit, where she had family to help?

The thing was, as Allison reiterated to Claire, she had made all these suggestions before, earlier in Star's babyhood, although, until now, Rachel had claimed she didn't need help. She would figure things out on her own. She couldn't stop working, she argued, because she was a freelancer and if she stopped altogether she would lose her contacts, and she did not want to leave New York. For the first eight months of Star's life, she had swapped apartments with a friend, who lived in the West Village on the ground floor of a building near the corner of Grove and Bedford streets, but Max's apartment, for all its accessibility, was also small and dark, made claustrophobically smaller by being stuffed with antique furniture that Max had recently inherited from a deceased aunt. After eight months, Rachel decided that she couldn't bear it any longer, fled its mausoleum-like interior and brought Star back to the airy heights of her own apartment.

They could take Star for a couple of weeks: this was Allison's initial suggestion. No, Rachel said, no, actually I was thinking more like a couple of months. She said she was at the end of her tether. She didn't think it was good for Star to go on like this either.

And so, Allison said to Claire, what were she and Lennie supposed to do when no amount of encouragement seemed to shift
Rachel? Even though her first response was one of disbelief. You couldn't have a child and then change your mind about it.

When Allison asked if Rachel was planning to go away somewhere, Rachel said no, or anyway not for very long. All she really wanted was to crawl into bed for a month and sleep.

It wasn't that Star was an especially difficult child. She wasn't colicky. She didn't always sleep through the night but a lot of babies didn't. She wasn't as easy as Amelia, but then everyone agreed that Amelia had been an almost unnaturally easy baby.

A span of two months was longer than a holiday. It was long enough for Star, who had cried herself to sleep every night for the first week when Allison told her that her mother was going away for
a little while
, to settle and adapt to their household. Perhaps the whole thing would not have been possible if Star had been less self-reliant and Amelia less happy-go-lucky. Perhaps it would just have been harder. Perhaps it had been unwise – unwise? – to reassure Rachel so vigorously that Star was fine because after two months she asked Allison if Star could stay a little longer, she had an assignment that would take her for a week or so to Georgia, not the state but the country, to Tbilisi, and then, a few weeks later, she called and said, if Star was so at home, perhaps, if they could manage it, she could stay on a month more. She was nervous about disrupting her. She was terrified of things going back to the way they'd been. If Allison and Lennie couldn't – she began to talk a little wildly about putting Star up for adoption.

Lennie was the one who said it would be a terrible thing for Star to be raised by someone who clearly didn't want to do it, but if they were going to take her in, they would have to work
out a formal arrangement. Neither he nor Allison was prepared to condemn Rachel's behaviour outright, at least in front of Claire, perhaps because they were trying to protect Star, or wanted to give Rachel's motives the benefit of the doubt. (If she was so unhappy, perhaps she
was
doing the right thing, and it was true that afterwards she did seem calmer and for a while her migraines eased.) They would make the best of the situation, a situation which was about to become a little more complicated, since Allison, who swore she'd never set out to recreate their own lost family, had just become pregnant with Lara.

And yet, Allison said, there was no sign that Rachel had ever mistreated Star, even if it was impossible to know what had gone on when the two of them were on their own in Rachel's apartment. Allison had seen more of Rachel and Star together than Claire had, and spoken to Rachel about Star more frequently. At first, Allison said, she'd been nervous about Rachel's lack of preparedness for motherhood, despite her rampant eagerness, and it was true that she was given to uttering aloud some of the things that other mothers only thought: there were days when she wanted to chuck the baby out the window. Of course she had never meant this literally.