Claire's Head (12 page)

There were times when she had seemed almost relaxed, happy as a mother. Hadn't she? The day they'd all met out at the zoo, for instance. This was Allison's doing. Rachel, who'd been in town with nine-month-old Star, had made plans to drive out to the zoo with Allison, and Allison had convinced Claire to join them. This was during the period when Allison was fostering
Dido, also nine months old, one of a team caring for Dido around the clock after her orangutan mother, Sunny, refused to accept her. They took turns in eight-hour shifts, holding her, always holding her – in a sling against the breast or on the back or scooped against the hip – to simulate as much as possible the experience of a baby orangutan who does not leave her mother's body during her first two years of life. It was exhausting work, Allison said, especially with Amelia waiting for her at home at the end of the day, but thrilling, too, given Dido's need for love and her fight for survival. Allison had gotten it into her head that she wanted Star to meet Dido because they were the same age. She wanted to see them interact, compare them develop-mentally. Rachel was game. And Allison wanted Claire there, she wanted them all to be together.

Claire drove out to meet them on a Saturday morning. They walked, Rachel pushing Star's stroller, from the administrative parking lot back through the admin building to a room off a corridor that ran along the rear of the building. A plain room with a sink and metal counter, cupboards above, pillows on the floor, some rubber toys, a couple of stuffed animals (a monkey, a lion), which they pressed Dido to when they needed a stretch break or to make a bathroom run. Another woman handed off Dido to Allison, who hugged Dido to her hip, Dido's long arms draping over Allison's shoulder. Rachel unbuckled Star from her stroller.

Had Rachel seemed happy that day? Allison had seemed happy, happy to have brought them all together, to reaffirm that they were still a family. And Rachel, too, had seemed glad to be with them, affectionate with Star. It was perhaps only to Claire
that her garrulousness appeared a little forced, as if she were covering up something, but then Claire was particularly attuned to the ways people hid certain internal states from others. And surely her surprise at the sight of Rachel being so maternal – lifting Star from her stroller, burying her face in Star's neck and kissing her – revealed more about her than it did about Rachel.

Allison held Dido and Rachel Star close enough to each other that Dido, small-eyed, protuberant-mouthed, haloed in orange fur, extended an arm and wandered her long fingers through Star's fine brown hair. Take a picture, Allison instructed Claire – the youngest, childless sister. Wriggling in Rachel's grasp, Star reached out and, before they could stop her, slipped her fingers between Dido's lips. Dido didn't bite.

“Baby don't do that,” Rachel said, raising her eyebrows at Allison as she wiped Star's hand matter-of-factly on her shirt, then slid Star's fingers into her mouth and sucked them clean. “You crazy monkey.”

Allison offered Dido to Claire, who took her hesitantly, clasping Dido to her chest, feeling Dido's fingers track across her back and wind themselves into her hair. The curious, restless pressure of those fingers was so intimate as to be almost alarming and sent a surge through Claire not unlike that she'd felt when holding Amelia or Star. Rachel wouldn't hold Dido. Which seemed surprising, even at the time. She said she had her hands full. She said she didn't feel like being fondled by a baby orangutan although she let Dido examine her hand and play with her hair. Claire thought that Rachel had been fighting the effects of a migraine that day. But perhaps she had been thinking even then about what she would do nine months on. Was
some idea being planted in her head as she watched animated Allison hold Dido and Star together, or did the thought not occur to Rachel until later?

Surely Rachel must have foreseen that getting pregnant and giving birth to a child would involve pain of one sort or another. When she called Claire during those couple of years it was more often to talk about her migraines than the baby. She'd stopped using most drugs when she began planning to conceive but, just back from Asia, she did not seem to be terribly troubled by headaches. During her pregnancy, her migraines grew worse, no doubt in part due to the hormonal shifts going on within her. Sometimes she didn't make it out of bed for days, she said, but she had a friend, friends, checking in on her. She cut back on work. She rallied herself by repeating that she was only going to be in this state for a matter of months.

(There were also those stairs, hefting her pregnant self up those six flights to her apartment. It was as if, whatever longing had possessed her, Rachel had never stopped to consider in practical terms what being pregnant and having a baby in a six-storey walk-up would be like.)

After Star's birth, things did not get better. Sleep deprivation gave Rachel migraines, and of course there was more hormonal turbulence. She gave up breast-feeding after two months so that she could go back to Imitrex and Tylenol 3s. She was swallowing Imitrex like crazy, she said, when no one even knew the long-term risks of the drug, but she didn't feel like she had a choice when she really couldn't function without it.

What had she hoped for? Optimistically, dangerously, had she gambled that getting pregnant and having a child might make her migraines vanish? This happened to some women – some free at least for the duration of pregnancy, some forever. It might happen to Claire but the possibility didn't seem worth counting on or even worth thinking too much about, especially given what had happened to Rachel, who now claimed she'd take the pain of childbirth over suffering through a really bad cycle of migraines –
not
that this meant that she ever wanted another child.

In the orangutan enclosure, seated on their concrete box, Allison frowned at Claire.

“So what are we supposed to do?”

“I don't know,” Claire said. A flicker of fear passed between them. “But I feel like I need to do something.”

“Even if she needs help,” Allison said, “she may not ask for it.”

They had been schooled in self-reliance, it was true. This was part of their legacy: stories of coping, of determinedly going it alone, had been handed down to them by their parents.

There was, for a start, the story of Rachel's birth.

Two days before Rachel was born, their father, still a medical student, had fallen ill, so ill that he took a taxi to emergency at the Toronto Western Hospital where he was admitted and diagnosed with hepatitis. He was flat out on his own hospital bed when Sylvia went into labour across town at the Toronto General. He was still there a week later when Sylvia brought Rachel home. For three weeks Sylvia could not even visit her husband because he was too contagious; then she would leave
her baby with friends while she made the trip to his bedside. For the first six weeks of Rachel's life, Hugh did not see her except in the photographs that Sylvia brought to show him. He would joke in later years that the terror of his first child's birth had made him sick, which, it would turn out, was perhaps not such a joke, after all.

Meanwhile, Sylvia and Rachel were making out on their own in the Clinton Street apartment. An only child, Sylvia had almost no experience of babies. She swore she'd never even changed a diaper. But she coped. She did not move in with any of her friends. Her mother did not come out from Victoria to help her. Perhaps she had not asked for help. (Or turned it down when it was offered?) Surely it could not have been easy, those six weeks, alone in the apartment with her first child, navigating the slippery winter streets, unprepared for the isolation, anxious about both her husband and her baby, prone to migraines. Surely those weeks must have been bewildering and exhausting. Perhaps there were days when
she
wanted to chuck the baby out the window.

And then, mere months after that, her husband announced that he would not be returning to medical school, that he was abandoning his plans to become a doctor. A four-month-old child, her plans for the future tossed up in the air, her husband jobless and in debt, what was her state of mind then? Hugh found a job, in Ethiopia, of all places. So they picked themselves up and moved across the world to a compound in Addis Ababa, and yet they did not seem to have been undone by these upheavals. Bird-crazy Sylvia bought herself a parrot, which she named Theodotius, and Hugh a second-hand Jeep and a motorbike, on which he made solo expeditions into the countryside,
and Rachel was put in the care of an Ethiopian nanny named Desta, whom she adored and who spoke to her only in Amharic. Two years later, she would return to Toronto speaking more Amharic than English, and one word more than any other, the Amharic word for yes, pronounced
ow
.

C
laire arrived back in New York on the Friday night. She had arranged to take another day off work and return home on Monday. As she eased open the door to Rachel's apartment, she breathed in the faint odour of gas, the lock clicking into place as she bolted the door behind her. She stopped to catch her breath. There was a strange relief in returning to the familiarity of this place. She set down her bags by Rachel's closet in the middle room, her overnight bag and her laptop computer, and struggled with the windows to let loose some of the appalling heat.

“A day and a half was not enough,” she'd said to Stefan as they sat in the kitchen, late in the evening of the day she'd visited Allison at the zoo.

“Why not let Detective Bird do his work?”

“All he's doing is making some phone calls.”

“Give him a chance. And we can always hire a private detective. That worked last time.”

Lennie had set up a missing person Web page for Rachel and listed her name with various on-line missing-person sites. They had sent out an e-mail bulletin to everyone they could think of, asking for news, any word, sightings, but nothing useful had come back yet.

Claire tapped the rim of her glass. “There's got to be something down there that'll help. I know I could wait a little longer but next weekend's the long weekend and then everyone's going to start going on vacation. And Allison can't do very much.” Also, although she hesitated to speak of it to Stefan, she felt that she owed this to Allison: because of all that Allison did do, for a start.

“Maybe she doesn't want to be found,” Stefan said. “You've considered that, haven't you?”

“If we knew that – but we don't know. Maybe it's not just an adventure.” She reached across the table and squeezed his fingers. “And then the two of us can spend next weekend, the long weekend together, do something, or just hang out.”

“We could take out the bikes. We haven't done that in a while. Go out for dinner.” He ran his fingernail in delicate whorls across her palm, waiting for the very lightness of his touch to make her shudder, as it always did.

Standing by Rachel's sink, Claire let the water run up through the pipes before pouring herself a glass. She swallowed a small round cream pill and an ovoid yellow one. Zomig. Anaprox.

An uncomfortable band of sensation was pressing against her forehead; it had not yet congealed into a pulsing on one side of her head but inevitably would.

She called Brad Arnarson at home and left him a message saying that she was back in town and asking him to call her at Rachel's. From her bag, she pulled out some of the food supplies that she'd brought, a package of rice cakes, a small jar of cashew butter, and spread some of the nut butter onto a rice cake. She deliberated over whether to get out a plate and didn't, just used her fingers to scoop up fallen crumbs from the floor. She kept being unnerved by the thought that even now Rachel would see their worry as an overreaction and insist that they keep their noses out of whatever she was up to. It was her own business. If only one could assume that.

Across the hall, the neighbours' door banged. A whisper of voices, the faintest of footsteps echoed through the wall. So they were there this time. It was late. In the morning, whether Rachel would approve or not, Claire intended to go and talk to them.

A flicker of breeze reached her. Rachel used to have one of those window-mounted air conditioners. Claire had no idea where she stored it. She stumbled to the front window to check on the rooftop rose garden on the north side of 9th Street. The umbrella was furled for the night. Two weeks on and different roses were blooming, a scattering of white ones, pale smears in the dark, on the bush next to the one that had been in profusion during her last visit, as if a dial had turned, one degree to the west.

On the roof next to the garden, two couples were sharing a late-night barbecue. The women lounged on white ribbed lawn chairs near the edge of the flat surface, their ankles resting on the
cornice, wrists dipped over the rooftop, flicking the ash from their cigarettes into the air over 9th Street.

How quiet it was in this apartment, how quiet it always was, unusual for New York or any big city – and how much of the life in this city took place in the air. Perhaps these were things that Rachel also loved, reasons she'd refused to move anyplace else: however much she liked to travel, she also liked to return here.