Claire's Head (31 page)

“Well, about that.”

“Do you know the name of the retreat?”

“All Cleo knows is that it's somewhere near Puerto Escondido. I don't think there can be that many. We'll find it when we get down there. And if we drive, maybe we'll find traces of her along the way.”

“And she really said she was staying for a while?”

“Cleo seemed to think so.” Though how long a while remained an open question.

“What about your job?” she asked.

“I figure I can put things on hold for about a week. Rearrange clients. People will wait. I'll have to make some calls and work like a maniac when I get back.”

There was a certain mania to going, a leap into further disorder on both their parts. Who knew if she even had a job to get back to? She would only anger Stefan by going and she would be setting off without any Zomig – which would be a gamble, yet as long as they had something to go on, it seemed wrong to turn back. She had crossed some threshold: it was impossible to turn back.

How quickly the mirage of the city fell away. There were two more metastatic bumps of gambling towers, in Jean and Primm, before they were past and sandhills swallowed up all towns and the road began to climb. The car was a black '94 Chevy Cavalier, a colour that was probably not ideal for driving in such heat, but the vehicle seemed functional, which was the main thing. They had brought
sandwiches, apples, bananas, bags of nuts, cartons of soy milk, and bottles and bottles of water, all stashed in the back seat.

Brad wanted to drive the California desert roads through the Mojave and Joshua Tree National Park and cross the border at Mexicali. He said that he and Rachel, when they had discussed flying out to Las Vegas, had spoken of taking a side trip to Joshua Tree.

The throbbing in Claire's head had weakened but she still felt a little queasy. She was glad to be in a car, not in a bus or on a plane. Although a car was cell-like and involved entrapment (they were driving with the windows sealed and chemically cooled air blowing at them), a car was also porous. If the chemicals in the air conditioning began to bother her, she could roll down her window, stare unimpeded out at the desert, and let air that was hot and dusty, but blissfully untreated, blow in.

As they drove, she asked Brad how he'd come to massage and he said he'd discovered he had a talent for it, mostly through working on friends. When he first moved to New York, some of his closest friends were dancers who spent half their time in pain. He told her about massaging a friend through childbirth. Francie was a single mom who had asked him to help her through the birth – she wanted a man there and who better than a male friend who knew how to massage? Of course the doctor and nurses had all assumed he was the father and it had been too much trouble to disabuse them of the notion. He said he liked Francie well enough and had been happy to help, up to the point when she'd bit his hand during a particularly difficult contraction, but a nurse had slapped some ointment on him and they'd
gone on and some hours later, there he was, bewildered, holding Francie's newborn daughter in his arms.

He said he wondered sometimes what he would do when he was older, because he wasn't sure he could see doing this forever. Did Claire know any old massage therapists? He didn't. You needed to be fit for it, you needed to train – at least for the kind of work he did. He could open his own clinic, but he wasn't sure he wanted to. He liked massage partly because it was portable, you could take it almost anywhere. He'd always thought he would travel more than he had. He still wanted to go abroad, to train – to Thailand, to Hawaii to learn
lomi lomi
, two strong men hefting your body back and forth between them. He wanted to experience it, anyway.

“Did you give Rachel massages even after you were involved with her?”

“Professionally? No, no, I wouldn't do that. I couldn't see her as a client. At home, of course. Not as often towards the end. It was kind of a sticking point. She wanted me to and I wanted her to see someone else, to find another professional relationship, not to depend – because in a way she was inexhaustible and I didn't want – after that guy, the one from the support group who could see in the dark – I looked him up, I asked him if he'd heard anything from her, I thought there was a chance she'd gone to him, but she hadn't.”

At the Kelso Road, they turned off the interstate and pulled up outside a grey and desiccated structure, the only building between
them and the horizon. Brad wanted a coffee. The weathered sign above the door promised gas, although there was none, none until Amboy and then only the possibility of it.

Two giant towing rigs were parked by the abandoned gas pumps, advertising their twenty-four-hour services, as if rescuing the gas-less was clearly the more profitable business. Inside, two men and a woman, none young, all wreathed in spires of cigarette smoke, sat at a battered table, a baby in a car seat resting at the feet of one of the men, who rocked it sharply with his foot while chanting, You're a mess, you're a mess, you're a mess.

Were there elevations ahead? Claire asked the woman. Elevations? Were there mountains, she persisted, or hills? There are knolls, the woman responded.

The desert held its own illusions. The scale of the landscape was so great – mountains lunar in aspect, their bases running with scree, the strange forest of Joshua trees, all shaggy arms and shock-headed protuberances, a forest you could see through – that no matter how fast they drove, they seemed to creep because everything around them was so slow to change.

They slid through ghostly Cima, a mere tumble of buildings, one truck and no evident sign of human life. Kelso appeared just as uninhabited.

They stopped outside an abandoned and now boarded-up railway station to pee. There were two turquoise Johnny-on-the-spots under some bedraggled trees to one side of a gravel parking area. Black cap on his head, Brad did a funny dance as he walked – shaking one leg at a time, rolling his shoulders, waving his arms, stretching, Claire presumed.

When she climbed out of the car, a hot wind buffeted her,
tugging at her hat, thrusting her sundress between her thighs. Cumulonimbus clouds crowded the southern horizon. The vast sky up above was blue and sere. Each time the wind spasmed to a stop, silence descended. She breathed in and out with a kind of wonder, amazed at how far she'd travelled, how far Toronto was from here.

They crossed the border towards the end of the afternoon. Claire offered to take the wheel but Brad said he was fine, he liked driving, distance driving especially, and he never got to do any in New York. Before crossing, they had to stop to buy Mexican auto insurance and more gas. An itching had begun in Claire's left eye, as if a speck of grit were lodged there, although when she peered into the mirror above her sun visor, nothing was apparent. Maybe the sun was bothering her eyes because she'd lost her hat; it had blown out the window when she'd rolled the glass all the way down one time, the hat bouncing like a tumbleweed across the road to be crushed by the car behind them.

They drove around a bit looking for a replacement sun hat and came up empty-handed, finding nothing but baseball caps and those ridiculous mile-wide sombreros sold in tourist shops, one of which Claire finally gave up and bought. With a knife borrowed from a gas station attendant, Brad hacked at the brim until he'd brought it down to a wearable size.

Once they entered Mexico, Claire grew aware of a certain slurring of the landscape, a somewhat familiar failure on her part to be able to fix on external details. The butchered sombrero scratched the back of her neck when she leaned against her
headrest. She kept testing her internal perimeters to see what condition they were in.

They pulled into a motel just before dusk, since they'd been advised that it was unsafe to drive after dark. If they were awake at dawn, they could be on their way early in the morning. Before they'd set off from Las Vegas, Brad had taken the photograph of Rachel and made it into a poster, with the words
MISSING PERSON
printed across the top and his New York phone and cellphone numbers beneath. He had been handing out the poster whenever they stopped and taping it to utility poles, or, if given permission, inside gas stations, or, as now, in the lobby of the motel.

They unloaded their bags, along with two bottles of water and a carton of soy milk and a bag of nuts, and made their way into a room with unravelling carpets and twin beds, a room which, to Claire's nose, smelled rancid with the odours of all manner of human activity although she didn't have the heart to complain.

Lying on the bed closest to the bathroom, she searched through her knapsack and bag of toiletries, checking to see what medications she had left, just in case. Gravol for nausea, a couple of Anaprox and Tylenol 3s rattling in an orange plastic prescription bottle, the Imitrex packet and probably useless Elavil, which she'd stopped taking, anyway. Nothing as innocuous as a simple aspirin. Her migraine was definitely coming back on the other side, which was part of its pattern, but under her current circumstances worrying. She could try downing a cup of strong coffee, which might constrict her now-dilating blood vessels. If she was lucky, and intervened at exactly the right moment in the cycle, caffeine might abort the headache. Uneasily, she rubbed the left side of her forehead.

Brad came over and grasped the back of her neck.

“Ow. Yes. Left side. Ow.”

He rubbed the nape of her neck for a few minutes then released her. “Try to relax, Claire.”

She came back to the room after drinking a cup of coffee. They would go out for dinner but first Brad, too, wanted to lie down. She was aware of his breath from the next bed as it slowed, a little hoarse gust at each exhalation. She tried to lengthen her breaths, rounding through her belly and her ribs. Her hands and feet, despite the heat, were freezing. She tried to guide the warmth of her body towards her fingertips, to even the flow of blood along her agitated blood vessels. She was aware of Brad's body in the bed beside hers and tried to ignore it. To relax was to fall back, to let things fall, to trust, not to strive too hard or be distracted. She was not particularly good at it. Sometimes, true relaxation seemed to her a little like praying: she didn't as much imagine as sense a vast sky like the one over the California desert spreading above her, as she, or some interior version of her body (her spirit), fell back open-armed – released – beneath it.

In the morning, her headache had grown worse. At breakfast, Claire tried another cup of coffee but this time, the caffeine only made the pounding behind her left eye stronger. She hadn't called Stefan. She couldn't call Stefan. (Brad, who might have noticed her failure to do so, hadn't said anything about it.) Back in the room, she locked herself in the bathroom with her toilet bag. Even if she could hold on without drugs, she wasn't sure it would be wise; she wasn't at home but on the road with a man
who might be familiar with her symptoms through his familiarity with her sister's, but who in any case she barely knew, and if things got unpleasant for her, they weren't going to be too pleasant for him, either. She took out the small cardboard Imitrex packet and unfolded its two enclosing panels. Inside were four foil-sealed spots for pills. Three were clearly empty, the foil over them broken; the fourth, slightly punctured, appeared to contain a pill until Claire pressed on the foil and it popped too easily. There was nothing inside.

She must have moaned or made some sound because Brad called her name through the door. (Rachel must likewise have thought there was one pill left, for why would she have kept the packet otherwise?) Unless Rachel was laughing at her.

Thankfully there was little navigating to do, beyond pointing themselves south, and when Brad had a question about their route, Claire was still able to rouse herself to consult the map. Mostly he left her alone, which was good. Now he was approaching the car carrying a blue plastic bag. Sliding back into the driver's seat, he showed her its contents: toilet paper and toothpaste, crackers and oranges and avocados. He snacked on the avocados as he drove, peeling back the skin and eating the flesh down to the pit. Then he chugged back some soy milk from one of his vacuum-sealed containers. The next time they stopped, he returned bearing a packet of rough, turquoise-coloured paper, which he unwrapped to reveal five damp, warm tortillas, fresh from a market tortilla machine. He said he'd held up five fingers and at first they thought he meant five kilos. At every stop, he
showed around the poster of Rachel. He was outside the car, gesticulating as he tried to make himself understood in fractured Spanish, surrounded by a circle of small, dark men in shining white shirts. Back in the car, he offered Claire crackers, an avocado, a piece of chicken. She took the proffered piece of chicken.

They drove on. She turned to look at him, struggling to overcome, even momentarily, the frightful solipsism of her pain, her helpless absorption in it.

“Did Rachel ever talk much to you about Star?”

“Not a lot,” he said. “It was a difficult subject. I mean, I knew about her, of course, but I never met her.”

“Do you, have you ever wanted a child?”

“Not really. I've always felt I spend enough time as it is looking after people. Why, do you?”

“I'm trying to decide.”

When her nausea grew, she took a Gravol, which did nothing to appease her headache but made her groggy. The whole world felt suspect, subject to forces beyond her control. Perhaps she, Claire, was indeed a weakling, so pervious that she felt everything, quaked at a scratch, winced at what others deemed a tic. Only she could drink hot liquids at temperatures that made her mother and Stefan recoil, scalded. She had pressed the soles of her feet to a radiator until they burned. It was impossible to know what others' pain was or what it meant that some could tolerate more, some less. Rachel had always resolved the problem of doubt. She was there like a mirror, her evident pain proof of the substance of Claire's. Claire had always assumed their pain was similar. And yet —