Claire's Head (33 page)

There was a moment, after she and Rachel were already in a taxi, as soon as it became clear that they were not going into town
but to the airport, when Claire begged to be returned to the hotel, but Rachel wouldn't hear of it. They were not going to the same terminal, she said. Claire had to get over her fear, starting now. The accident had happened on an escalator. There were escalators everywhere. She could not allow this to make her frightened of airports. It sounded as if Rachel were talking to herself as much as to Claire. She needed to stay in motion. At moments of crisis, she needed to be in motion, be elsewhere, this seemed clear. But she was not simply impulsive. She must have done some admittedly last-minute planning after the three of them had parted hours before, because when they approached the Air France ticket counter, she pulled out a piece of paper and asked in French if there were two seats available on the 7:30 a.m. flight to Charles de Gaulle, returning that evening on the 21:30. Even then Claire could have pulled back, or tried to argue Rachel out of this folly but she didn't. This was a chance not only to be with Rachel but, in the midst of grief, to be, for once, as reckless as Rachel was.

In Paris, they took a train from the airport into the city. A drum beat in Claire's head. Sometimes even allowing herself to feel something strongly meant she ended up with a migraine. If she let herself cry. At Châtelet, they followed the signs for the exit that led to the river and Notre Dame. Somehow she was going to have to tell Rachel that she had a headache coming on, even here, even now. They reached the top of the stairs, stepping into the blazing light. I have a headache, I have a headache.

Rachel led Claire over to a thick stone wall on the near side of a small square, unzipped her handbag and pulled out the pen-like injector. This time, she told Claire to inject herself. (Where? Here? Like this? But what choice did she have? She lifted her
skirt and pressed the injector to her thigh.) When Claire asked, Rachel swore she was fine, although she kept touching the skin under her right eye, as if she might be on the verge of a migraine but didn't want to admit this, among other things.

Since her arrival in Frankfurt, Rachel had not mentioned Michael Straw, which struck Claire as odd. He had not accompanied her nor did it seem that he was coming to join her, as Lennie had flown to Allison's side. She would ask Rachel about him, just not yet.

She wondered why Rachel had wanted to come to Paris. They had visited as a family, the summer that Rachel was eleven and Claire on the verge of turning seven. It was Rachel, not Allison, who had mooned over creatures made of bread (a coiled snake, a frog, an alligator) glimpsed in the window of a Left Bank boulangerie. Their father had bought a bread alligator and they'd sat in a row on a bench in the Jardins du Luxembourg, all five of them, tearing at its limbs. But Rachel, like Claire, had definitely been back to Paris since then, at least once with Michael, Claire was certain.

They began to walk – over the Petit Pont, the Cathedral of Notre Dame to their right across a wide square dappled with the shadows of clouds and babbling drifts of tourists. Rachel seemed to have no real plan now that they'd actually arrived, other than to keep moving, as if in this way to distract herself from grief. Street names moored Claire. She tried, in spite of everything, to keep track of them.

As they crossed the Quai de Montebello, Rachel began to talk. She said they should have gone to Naples instead. There was a place she would have shown Claire, a chapel that she loved.
All these details returned to Claire now, as if she were once again walking the streets of Paris with Rachel Rachel said she'd gone back to the chapel in Naples three times during her last visit to the city. Perhaps Claire would have understood why she loved the chapel of San Severo so much. Inside was the most extraordinary sculpture, a veiled Christ, the marble veil over the prone figure carved as thin as tissue, allowing the lineaments of the stricken body, the bones protruding through the flesh, to be visible through the veil, so lifelike that she'd wanted to run her hands over the stone. But that was not all. In the basement of the chapel, in an alcove at the bottom of a small, metal spiral staircase were two bodies, standing upright. The bodies were flayed, all their skin removed, leaving the blackened masses of veins and muscle exposed, out of which their eyeballs, blue irises surrounded by gleaming whites, stared. They dated from the eighteenth century, and were apparently fabricated anatomical models, although some mystery surrounded their origin and there was a chance that they were actual preserved bodies. In any case, what were they doing in a chapel, albeit in the basement? Some kind of bizarre
memento mori?
Testament to the frailties or the marvels of the flesh?

And there was another church, Gesu Nuovo, a baroque church now dedicated as a shrine to a twentieth-century doctor, who had been made a saint. Inside, whole side chapels and hallways were completely covered in small silver replicas of body parts – eyes, ears, legs, breasts – that people had fixed to the walls in a bid to be healed. Worshippers knelt in front of the doctor's statue. At the sight, Rachel had burst into tears.

They crossed the rue St. Jacques, turned again to the right, and found themselves walking east along a narrow street that it
took Claire a moment to recognize as the rue St.-Séverin, the stone wall on their left that of L'Église St.-Séverin. On her last trip to Paris, she had approached the block from the opposite direction. She was on the verge of pointing out this geographic convergence – San Severo, St. Severin – to Rachel, but Rachel had already hurried to the far side of the street, as if putting all her talk of Naples and suffering bodies behind her. She stopped outside an épicerie, dove her hand into a display of fresh almonds, furry and green, and, as Claire caught up to her, asked, “Ever eaten them fresh?”

Claire followed her into the store where two men, one at the cash register, the other sorting fruit, turned to look at Rachel, not ogling but alert to her beauty, which her misery muted but could not altogether hide. Rachel brought a little paper bag of almonds to the older man behind the counter, who asked her in French if she knew how to open their skins. In his country, Morocco, this was women's work not men's. He spoke these words with more wistfulness than dismay as he demonstrated. It was into Claire's palm rather than Rachel's that he tipped the first, peeled almond. She set it on her tongue and ate it, its taste nearly lemony, as if it were still connected to the tree. She wanted to tell the man that her parents had just been killed – no, she didn't want to confess it, she wanted simply to have the knowledge shared. She was glad to be here, which was not the same as being happy, but for the space of a few breaths, she did not wish to be anywhere else. She was thankful to Rachel for bringing her, to the man for his gift. And then thoughts of her parents, and guilt about leaving Allison, began to rise again, for all that Lennie should have arrived from
Toronto by now, so Allison wouldn't be on her own. She could find a public phone and call her, even if this was not among Rachel's plans – and yet she was overwhelmed by a kind of torpor as if to call would be to break the spell that Paris, and Rachel, had cast over her.

From the Rue St. Germain, they walked east along the Rue du Four and then along the Rue de Grenelle, Rachel pressing them onwards now, as if she had recovered or gained some sense of purpose. They walked still without speaking much, without discussing the idea of a destination. After lunch at a restaurant on the far side of Les Invalides, they made their way along the Avenue des Bourdonnais into the gardens surrounding the Eiffel Tower. Here Rachel announced that she wanted to climb the tower, an ambition that baffled Claire, since greenish rain clouds were gathering and they would have to take their place among the throngs of tourists already waiting in line.

But Rachel, who had never before, in Claire's presence, expressed any particular interest in views from great heights or visiting major tourist attractions, seemed adamant. “When it rains everyone will scatter.”

“What if they don't?” Claire said. “We have so little time. Why waste it doing something like this?”

Without warning, Rachel took off, white coat waving in her wake, running across the wide square beneath the tower, towards the Pont d'Iéna. Midway across the bridge, Rachel hoisted herself onto its stone parapet and stood above the sidewalk and the river, flapping her arms.

“Rachel!” Breathless, Claire flung her arms across the stone as if to reach Rachel's ankles.

“Were orphans,” Rachel cried, right at the edge, teetering.

“Rachel, come down!”

A sightseeing boat was making a lugubrious three-point turn below. A couple of people on board glanced up.

Rachel turned and looked at Claire. She pushed strands of hair out of her face as she climbed down from the parapet. What had she been doing? Before Claire had a chance to consider whether Rachel had really been intending to jump, or to ask Rachel what she thought she was up to, Rachel shoved her hands in the pockets of her coat, and said in an almost shockingly offhand manner, “You know, don't you, that Dad was engaged before he met Mum?”

“Before – you mean a while before or he was engaged when he met her?”

“About a year before. But she died. She killed herself. Janna Berkowicz. She was a pharmacy student. They were engaged and then she got pregnant, not the other way around, as I understand it. Then she found out she had lupus, which is not a good thing to have if you're pregnant. Anyway, apparently he offered to help her get an abortion, being a medical student and all, which would be the best thing for her health, but she refused. He told her he would stick by her no matter what happened. But I suppose she decided she couldn't bear to be sick or have an abortion, that she couldn't bear for him to put up with her under either of these circumstances, or whatever, something proved unbearable, because she jumped off the Bloor Street Viaduct.”

Claire was standing on a bridge, its stonework solid and frail beneath her. “When did you find this out?”

“Mum told me. The last time I was up in Toronto. We were driving to the liquor store. I was asking about Dad's decision to quit medical school and all of a sudden she came out with this. She said she thought it was time we knew.”

“We?”

“I told Allison. I thought Allison said she was going to talk to you. Or Mum was. I know Allison talked to Dad about it.”

“But all these years they never said anything. And no one said anything to me.”

“Mum said he didn't want it to intrude on our sense of family. He didn't want us to have to think about it. He wanted it to stay in the past. Which you could argue is never really possible but that's what he wanted.”

She'd flung herself, like numerous suicides before and after her, from a bridge whose great arches spanned a ravine, a half-hidden river, and the wide lanes of the Don Valley Parkway. Claire had never heard of anyone who'd survived the plunge. She had driven countless times across the Bloor Street Viaduct, from east to west, from west to east, knowing nothing of this crucial episode in her father's life.

“Did Mum know this when she married him?”

“I don't know. I didn't ask her that.” Now, of course, it was too late to ask. Unless Allison had thought to, they would never know the answer to this question.

She was taken aback by the fact that no one in the family had told her. (Did it matter now whether the failure was deliberate or careless? What else was being hidden from her?) This revelation would be forever tied to the agony of her parents' death. Jana Berkowicz falling, her mother and father falling, although
her parents had made no decision to end anything. They had exercised no choice. No sooner was her father killed than he was transformed again – his whole past, the life that he'd lived with them, recast in the light of this knowledge. Between her parents lay this spectre of loss, of illness that led to madness if suicide was indeed a form of madness. Beneath her mother's guilt over her migraines and her father's helplessness in the face of them lay this. Why had he never spoken of it? He'd wanted to spare them, but spare them what exactly? The hidden will still be revealed. What isn't spoken simply finds another language. Perhaps their headaches gave voice to his grief, among other hidden things. Pain will out.

The horror, the senselessness of her parents' death convulsed Claire once more. The waste of it, the outrage.

She did not know why Rachel had suddenly decided to tell her about Janna Berkowicz after climbing down from the stone parapet of the Pont d'Iéna. Had Rachel been thinking of her even before she scrambled onto the bridge? Afterwards, they never discussed her bridge-climbing incident or spoke much to each other about that day in Paris. Claire had always thought, had wanted to believe that Rachel was, at that moment, simply playing with her, acting out a dare, giving in to a wild spasm of lament, but this was perhaps to ignore the way Rachel had looked, after Claire's shout, before descending from the parapet. (And what of her strange desire to climb the Eiffel Tower?) Yet if she had come to Paris intending to kill herself, why bring Claire, unless she had wanted Claire there in order to save her, to pull her back from whatever she was contemplating. Or perhaps something had happened in Paris that had pushed her to the
brink (something Claire had done or failed to do?). Was there some crucial trigger that Claire had failed to see?

Did Rachel need her again now? Was she calling to her, giving her another chance, or was she, wherever she was, not thinking of Claire at all at all at all?

They were on a stretch of winding, hummocky road, each jolt of the car ricocheting through Claire. Brad slowed as they came up behind a struggling truck that spewed black clouds of diesel smoke, the fumes reaching them, entering her, even with the car vents sealed and the windows closed.

The road was shoulderless, a single lane in either direction.