Claire's Head (8 page)

C
laire called Matt Patel, her contact in the police department. He wanted to talk about the High Park rape investigation. When she asked his advice about Rachel, he passed her along to a detective named William Bird, who took down the little information she could give him. Montreal. March 14. Hotel du Parc. She hated making Rachel's absence official. It felt disloyal. Its admission of seriousness sent things into a different zone. Detective Bird reassured her that most missing people turned up. Or simply did not want to be found. People left tracks all over: credit card transactions, cash machine withdrawals, border crossings, car rentals, airline flights. As Claire knew. To begin with, he asked, did she or anyone else have any theories about what had happened to her sister? She was having trouble with her migraines, Claire said. She sensed that this was not what Detective Bird was after. She also sensed that he was busy, Rachel was one among a crowd of missing people out there.

Claire tried calling the various editors in New York, whose
business cards she'd brought home with her. None had heard from Rachel in the last few months. She tried again to reach the neurologist, Dr. Pierre L'Aube of the Montreal Neurological Institute, whose phone line, whenever she attempted to call, rang busy in an irritatingly old-fashioned way. After a few more busy signals, she finally reached Dr. L'Aube's receptionist. A lot of journalists call, the receptionist said. Not called, Claire reiterated, came in person. In March. And hasn't been seen since. Could she check with the doctor? Consult his appointment book? Could she please ask the doctor to call Claire? This was Thursday morning; she heard nothing back all day. Friday the doctor's office was closed. Over the weekend, Claire went in to work. On Monday, she tried the doctor again. More busy signals. Trying to reach the doctor by phone was getting her nowhere.

Exasperated, she called Stefan at the lab. “What am I supposed to do?”

“You could do nothing. You could wait. Keep calling.”

“What am I obliged to do, under the circumstances?”

“Or you could go to Montreal.”

“Maybe I should go to Montreal.”

She walked through the warren of desks and down the hall to Charlie Gorjup's windowed office. He beckoned her in. The window looked west, out over the intersection of Yonge and Dundas, the southeast corner penned in by billboards, awaiting redevelopment; on the southwest corner loomed the white bulk of the Eaton Centre. She asked him if she could take a day off. Headache? Not today, Charlie, I'm hoping to take the day after tomorrow. What's up? She might have explained that she had
something else to map, and in some fashion Charlie would have understood this. Without meeting his gaze, overcome all at once by a self-consciousness that bordered on shame, she told him that her sister seemed to be missing. Charlie knew her parents were dead and how they'd died. Neither of them made the obvious joke about what extraordinary bad luck it was for another family member to have vanished. Go, Charlie said, waving his hand. Take the time you need. Hey, Claire, most missing people show up.

She called Stefan back and told him what she was planning. She'd take the train. She booked herself a room overnight in the Hotel du Parc. The next day, Tuesday, after work, she caught a cab to Union Station and boarded the five o'clock express.

Some years earlier, shortly after she moved to New York, Rachel had sent Claire a copy of the McGill Pain Questionnaire, the first codified attempt to give patients a tool to describe their pain. Professor Ronald Melzack of McGill University in Montreal had formulated the famous questionnaire, using words gathered from pain sufferers themselves. (Is it flickering, quivering, pulsing?) Possibly Rachel had gone to Montreal to track down Ronald Melzack, although surely she didn't need new ways to measure her pain, only to be released from it. Perhaps writing an article had been a ploy to get herself seen by someone at the renowned Neurological Institute, where doctors would understand something of the migraineur's dilemma, the invisibility of the pain, how few obvious traces it left, how difficult it was to diagnose or describe.

Claire tossed her bag into the overhead rack and settled herself into a seat by the south-facing window. She'd bought herself a notebook, blank as yet, and slipped a photograph of Rachel inside the cover, Rachel laughing – her long face, the sheen of her dark hair. She carried other versions of Rachel with her, too, visions impossible to capture. Rachel's quick, clean stride. Her tumultuous hand gestures. The fixity of her gaze. The way she would rub her index finger back and forth over the darkened skin beneath her eye. By this signal, Claire would know her anywhere.

Six and a half years earlier, right at the end of the year, Claire had received an ecstatic phone call from Rachel. “I've got some news. Eight weeks along, due in mid-July. I know it's still early but I wanted to tell you.”

“Congratulations,” Claire said, although what she felt upon hearing word of Rachel's pregnancy was a bewildering array of emotions, happiness being only a part of it. Not that the news was entirely a surprise: for the last half a year, since shortly after her return from her mysterious Asian sojourn, Rachel had been speaking openly about her attempts to conceive. (Was her desire sparked in any way by her discovery, upon her return, that Allison was already pregnant and had been so, quietly, privately, sharing the news with none but Lennie, a mere four months after their parents had been killed? Was Rachel's sudden longing provoked in turn by their terrible death?)

The complication, on Rachel's end, was that there was currently no man in her life to be the father of a child. She did not
seem to view this as an insurmountable impediment. She required a man, yes, but seemed less convinced about the need for a relationship.

Allison thought she was crazy. Claire did not know what to think. During her six years of living with Michael Straw, Rachel had not spoken of wanting a child – at least not to Claire, nor to Allison from the sound of it. And there were times, during those years, when Claire truly thought that Rachel had settled down and found a man capable of holding her sustained attention. Claire had liked Michael, missed him when he was gone from Rachel's life. Tall, thick-browed, half-Irish, he had an almost abrupt courtliness on first meeting, yet was willing to sing Irish ballads for the family after dinner, in a lilting baritone, during a visit that he and Rachel made to Toronto. He wore white shirts, always, Rachel said, an ironed one to work, yesterday's crumpled one when he stumbled out of bed in the morning. They had seemed happy together. Rachel had seemed happy. She was never bored, she said, which was her idea of fulfillment. Later, she would complain that Michael brooded more and more in private. Towards the end, there were apparently affairs. On both sides. Claire was under no illusion that Rachel was easy to live with. Perhaps Michael wasn't easy to live with either.

Then, after her return from Asia, Rachel began to speak about her longing for a child, for the joy, the new states of awareness and intimacy that a child would bring. She welcomed the potential transformation of her life. She knew now that she did not want to live without this experience.

“Can I ask about the father?” For a moment Claire was terrified that Rachel did not know for certain who the father was.
There had been a handful of hopeful but ultimately unsuccessful encounters over the last few months, from what she'd gathered.

“He's an engineer. It's him, there's absolutely no question. He was born in Bombay, works at MIT. He sat down next to me on an Amtrak train. We were on our way to Boston. It all happened very fast. He's incredibly good-looking and has an extraordinary mind, extraordinarily sharp. Claire, we just made a connection. The whole thing was extraordinary. I had an immediate sense.”

“Did you tell him what you wanted?”

“Yes, eventually, and he was incredibly generous, it was an act of extraordinary connection and generosity.”

“You spent time together in Boston?”

“No, Claire, no, it all happened on the train.”

In Kingston, Claire woke up. The Japanese couple sitting across the aisle from her had gone, replaced by a tanned young man in a denim shirt whose sleeves were not rolled but ripped above the elbows. A copper bracelet encircled his right wrist. He had the look of a student, whether or not he was one. He was leafing through Peterson's
Field Guide to Mexican Birds
.

She wondered, not for the first time, about the nature of Rachel's train encounter – was it the first, the only one on public transport? (How exactly did you go about seducing a stranger on a train, on a plane, or allow yourself to be seduced?) Presumably, Rachel's desire had been palpable, her avidity, her curiosity, her restless desire to be desired, her confidence that she would be, augmented by her longing for a baby. Claire had
no idea how you got from here – sitting beside a man on a train – to there – having sex with him. What did you say? Had Rachel asked about sexually transmitted diseases? Surely, for the sake of her child-to-be, she'd made certain that the engineer didn't get migraines.

Claire's gaze travelled along the chestnut arm of the young man across the aisle. He looked up as if her regard were a touch, but his glance did not appear to be an invitation. What could she say to the reader of
Mexican Birds
(strange choice for a trip through Ontario), or he to her? What had the Bombay-born engineer seen in Rachel? (Her longing? Her beauty? Her grief?) Had he and Rachel made their way to the train compartment's tiny bathroom singly, or together, heedlessly, bodies already helplessly brushing, figuring they'd never see anyone around them (including each other) again?

Claire's room in the Hotel du Parc was seven floors off the ground and faced south. It was four paces wide and eight paces long. It contained a king-sized bed, a desk, and a bureau that held a monstrous television above a locked mini-bar. She walked straight to the window and switched off the air conditioner, stopping the chemical flow of coolant into the room. She tugged open the small panel of window that vented to a real, murky city breeze as Rachel, even in winter, had no doubt done. Travel by train was not as bad as air travel, but any sealed environment posed hazards. Hotel rooms weren't the worst but had their perils: recycled air and powerful cleaners and chemically suspiring carpets.

Claire had told Rachel about a man she knew who'd been a vet, until the smells of the disinfectants used in the clinic where he worked began to give him migraines. It took him a while to figure out the connection, and it depressed him when he did, because he loved animals and loved working with them, but the recurrent pain was making it difficult for him to function. So he became a travelling salesman for veterinary products, hoping to keep his hand in the business somehow. As he criss-crossed the country, the headaches came back, as strong as ever. He realized he was reacting not only to veterinary products but to the cleaners and aerosol sprays used in hotel rooms. He hit upon a temporary strategy. He'd go for product conferences and, walking into his hotel room, fling open the windows. He refused to stay in rooms where the windows didn't open. He'd instruct the housekeeping staff not to clean or enter his room while he was staying in it, although they often disobeyed him and he'd return to the telltale traces of air freshener. Eventually, he gave up on animal care altogether, went to architecture school, and became a city planner.

With her head out the window, Claire listened to the city of Montreal, its streets swollen with tourists out for a stroll or a late supper on a muggy summer night. She could order from room service or go out to join them. If Stefan had been with her, they would have gone out. She felt the imagined clasp of his hand in hers. They had been to Montreal together five years before, staying with a friend of Stefan's who lived on a flat and treeless block of Hôtel de Ville. They had walked hand in hand, Claire in a brand-new yellow rayon dress, along Mont Royal to the park and up the mountain. Now she was in no mood to
surrender to the city: Montreal felt like a tunnel she had to manoeuvre through. She lay down on the bed and breathed deeply. Then she rose, swiped on some lipstick, ran her hands through her hair, and made her way downstairs.

An older couple in identical pantsuits was checking in. Once they were done, Claire approached the young woman who had welcomed her a little while before. “Puis-je vous aider?” The hotel clerk made her uniform look almost voluptuous, a white shirt, tight over her breasts, above a narrow maroon skirt.

“I'm trying to find out some information about a hotel guest. Not one who's staying here now. She was here in March. Rachel Barber. She's my sister. I think she checked in on the fourteenth and checked out on the sixteenth, but I'd like to confirm those dates. She hasn't been heard from since.”

“I'm not allowed to give out that kind of information,” the clerk said in accentless English. “I'm really sorry. Maybe if you speak to the manager but she's not here right now. Can you try in the morning?”