Claire's Head (23 page)

Shellfish. Please help.

Was it the milk? Or possibly the strawberries, or the bananas? Was it something in the water? Was she made more susceptible by frustration or despair at the hopelessness of her search for Rachel, her worry or her torpor of the day before? Was the Ariel effect over? Stress or release? Something obvious or hidden? Had the indulgence of allowing herself to feel well, capable of being healed, set her up for a fall? Had she lacked faith? Had her spirit gone into shock at its re-entry into her body? Surely part of the pain was its apparent randomness, the state of not knowing what had tossed her overboard, yet the part of her brain not wholly occupied with sensation searched for meaning, to draw a line between pain and trigger. When she closed her eyes against the light, the white white light pouring in on her, Claire saw hills, the Tuscan hills rising and falling.

She opened her eyes. She sat up and edged her legs over the bed. The sea, the sea. Made it to the bathroom. Lay down on the floor. Struggled to stand and pour herself a glass of water.

One pill. Another pill. Another.

Made it back. The phone rang. All the way across the sea, in the early hours of the morning, Stefan had woken, heard her calling out for him.

“Signorina Barber,” a voice said.

“Who is this?” Claire rasped.

“Dottore Maggiorelli, Signorina Barber. You have not been seen today. Are you all right?”

“I have a headache.” According to the bedside clock, it was nearly noon.

“Did you spend a lot of time in the waters yesterday?”

“Not a lot.”

“It is unfortunate but not uncommon for our guests to suffer what we call a thermal crisis, often on the second or third day of their visit. Do not be alarmed. Think of it as a sign that the body responds. However, we would like to send someone to make certain you are all right.”

“Doctor Maggiorelli –”

“Miss Barber, I insist.”

The first knock on the door was housekeeping. Permesso, permesso? A woman in a housecoat, carrying a duster, let herself in, saw Claire, began apologizing, Scusi, scusi, and backed out. Along with the second set of knocks came voices. If she did not answer the door, would they go away? (Whatever happened, she had to be well enough to check out of her room in just over an hour.) She could not get off the bed to answer the door.

There was the chirr of a lock turning, the door handle depressed, and the door opened upon an attendant in a white uniform holding a tray, Dottore Maggiorelli, in his white coat, propping open the door behind her.

Claire pulled herself up. At least her nausea had lessened a little. She inhaled the alcoholic note of Maggiorelli's cologne or aftershave. On the tray, which the attendant laid atop the hotel room's desk, against the wall opposite, was a glass of ice water, some slices of cucumber, and a basket of bread sticks.

“How are you feeling?” Maggiorelli asked.

“Not well,” Claire replied.

“Quite possibly you are suffering a thermally induced migraine. Which is unpleasant but you will undoubtedly feel even better than usual once it passes. This is not an uncommon experience. I hope it will not dissuade you from the benefits of our waters.”

“It isn't fair,” she said ruefully.

“It isn't,” he agreed. “You have the medication you require?”

She nodded, though, in truth, apart from the release from nausea, the Zomig, even now, didn't seem to be doing much.

“I have to check out by one.”

“We shall arrange a late checkout for you. Or if you must stay, you must stay.”

“I can't.”

He rested his palm against her forehead. “No fever.”

“Do you have any idea where Hannah di Castro is? She used to work here.”

If he was caught off guard, he didn't show it. “Hannah, yes, Hannah left us in April. She specialized in idrofisiochinesiterapia. She was very good, but has gone now to work for the world wildlife refuge. No more people, she told me, just animals.”

“What's idrofisio –”

“It is a form of muscle therapy that takes place in the water.”

“Is the animal refuge near here? Can I get there?”

“Oh, maybe fifteen minutes. Ten kilometres?” He conferred with the attendant in Italian (diece, she said, vente?). “No more than twenty minutes.”

“Do you think she's there now?”

“Honestly, I have no idea. You might try calling. But you cannot go now, like this.”

“I think my sister Rachel came here in March. She also gets migraines.” The xeroxed photograph of Rachel was in her bag on the floor. She couldn't reach it. “She doesn't look like me but there's a family resemblance. Is there any chance you remember her? Or could you help me find out for certain if she was here?”

“In March?” The doctor looked at Claire. She had no idea what he saw. “I'm sorry, there are too many guests.”

She could not afford to stay in bed. She had until mid-afternoon to meet Hannah di Castro before she had to begin the drive back to Grosseto, before her return to Rome and evening flight back to Amsterdam. Pain was simply a form of consciousness, a quality of awareness (if we are not aware of it, it does not exist); therefore, she simply had to get herself out of the state in which the migraine filled her consciousness completely and make some room for other things. As long as her nausea stayed in retreat, she would manage.

Woozily Claire waited for a porter to bring her rental car around to the front steps of the Terme. She would drive, whatever the dangers (two Tylenol 3s had dulled the pulsing sensation after the Zomig failed to do much good). Luckily, there was no other traffic on the road. She canted forward over the steering wheel. What was the place of pain? She should have asked Ariel exactly what he meant by this. Did he mean “place” literally, as in she had to figure out where in her body the pain came from (somewhere in her head) or was he referring to the role it played, its importance to her? Had she somehow put the pain in her head (as opposed to elsewhere)? Was putting it in her head,
which was and was not part of the body, different than putting it in her brain? Or was he suggesting that there were places out in the world where her pain lived and which she had to find?

It was as if she were driving with the top of her head. Up hill and down. The hills were rising and falling inside her. All she had to do was fix on this task, follow the line of the road. Take the left turn at the junction.

Hannah di Castro had a monkey clinging to her hair, so that, stepping out of a doorway as Claire climbed out of her car, she immediately called to mind not Rachel, but Allison. Claire had eased her way to a stop at the end of a dirt track, between two stuccoed buildings, as Hannah had told her to do when they spoke briefly by phone. Her headache began to recede a little.

Holding out her hand, slender but muscular, not as tall as Allison, jeans riding her boyish hips, Hannah said, in English, that she and Piero, the vet at the refuge, were nursing the infant monkey, and no matter how often she settled it on her back, it would climb into her hair, because her head – she lifted a handful of her long, black hair – most resembled its mother.

Above them, the swallows shrieked and darted, diving around the tops of a stand of cypresses.

She and Piero cared for abandoned animals and injured wild animals, Hannah said, hands reaching for her neck to steady the monkey, as she led Claire into a house lined with reddish tiled floors, past a living room in which a metre-long lizard snoozed in front of an electric heater. The heater filled the room and the hallway with gusts of preternatural heat.

They settled on chairs in a similarly red-tiled kitchen where Hannah offered Claire a glass of bottled water and motioned to a bowl of figs sitting on the table. She apologized for the confusion at the Terme about her whereabouts. She
had
gone travelling after ending her contract there, before coming back to live and work with Piero. She believed she'd left a forwarding number. She had not spoken to Ariel in close to a year.

In the spring, she had in fact gone back to Israel to visit a favourite aunt who lived in Tel Aviv, the same aunt through whom she had first met Ariel, ten years before, when her aunt was being treated by him. She herself had first gone to him as a patient but he was also the one who had sensed that she had a gift. Up until then she had had some standard kinesthesiology training, and she had specialized in treating very deep muscle injuries, not superficial strains but damage to the very quality of the tissue that did not show up on X-rays. But she learned, through Ariel, that she did not always need to touch the body to affect the tissue.

She had worked for some years in a clinic in Rome and also on her own. The work she had done at the Terme was again a little different – she had come out here because she loved the country and took what work she could find.

The monkey watched Claire over the top of Hannah's head, pressing first one cheek, then the other against Hannah's scalp – like a child, but not a child. When Claire picked a fig from the bowl and began to peel and eat it, the monkey watched her fixedly until Hannah, too, picked up a fig and fed tiny pinches of fruit to the creature.

“Why did you give up working at the Terme?”

“I grew tired,” Hannah said. “All those people. And I met Piero. Perhaps the animals deserve this care also. But your sister, yes, she came here from Amsterdam. She had seen Ariel. Her muscles were very sore, very stiff and hard. Blood did not circulate well through the tissue. The tone of the muscle was very bad. She was losing strength. She was having a lot of trouble writing. She could not write much at all any more. And of course this is a big problem because of how she earns a living.” She stroked the monkey's fur.

“Did she talk about her headaches?”

“Only a little. I said she should stay here for a while, not at the Terme, we would find another place for her to stay and we would do some more work together. Four, five days is not long, not long at all. But she said she could not stay any longer.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“No.”

“Did she mention Naples or anywhere else in Italy or Europe?”

“No, no, I am afraid not.”

“Was she travelling with anyone?”

“No, by herself. If I hear anything from her, any time, any time, I will let you know.”

C
laire had told Stefan when her flight from Amsterdam was getting in but did not expect to see him waving at her when, a little after four, she exited through the security barrier in Toronto, on the far side of the baggage claim and customs control. She fell into his arms, nearly crushed against him. She was glad to be home. She'd been a fool to head off to Europe, to Italy anyway. A wild goose chase. (All she had to show for her efforts were the remnants of a really bad headache.) They kissed. Stefan seemed both effervescently relieved to see her and distracted. Taking her bag, he paused, then, in a rush, said that Brad Arnarson had left a message at the house that morning – he hadn't been able to get hold of her before this, of course, since she'd been in transit, but Brad had heard from Rachel.

“What?” Claire's shriek bounced off the walls, her voice so loud people turned. Every filament of fatigue and discomfort was flung to the back of her head. “When?”

“She sent him a postcard.”

“When? From where?”
Him?
She wrote to
him
.

“From Las Vegas. Claire, I'm not kidding. He said it just arrived but it looks like it took a long time to reach him.” Outside now, they made their way along a cement walkway towards the parking garage.

“What did it say?” she asked dizzily.

“He didn't leave that in his message.”

“Couldn't you have called him back?”

“I assumed you'd call him as soon as you got in or, if you felt too wrecked, in the morning.” Even when she slowed, Stefan kept walking.

“But you knew I'd want to know.”

There was a moment of awkwardness between them as Stefan settled her bags in the trunk and Claire fumbled her way towards the passenger door. He hadn't wanted to tell her, she realized. He simply wanted her home. Then they were in the car, winding their way towards the exit, slowing in one of the lines to pay, decelerating in inverse proportion to the acceleration of Claire's thoughts. What was Rachel doing in Las Vegas?
Las Vegas?
What exactly had the postcard said? How could she have done this – got in touch with him and not any of them? Claire reached out and brushed Stefan's thigh – the last thing she wanted was to get angry at him – as they were released into open air, along a ramp that fed them through a tricky merge into traffic speeding south along arterial Airport Road and from there along another artery onto the 427.

“How are you?” she asked, trying to observe him through her haze.

He kept his eyes on the road. “Some great results coming in on these arrays.”