Claire's Head (2 page)

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.

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?