Claire's Head (35 page)

Up in their room, Claire called the number that the woman had given her. A man answered in Spanish. Habla inglés, she managed, and gathered from his response, in rapid Spanish, that he didn't. Perhaps he understood English even if he didn't speak it.

“Is this Temazcalli? I'm looking for a woman named Rachel Barber. Is she staying there?”

When his reply proved once again incomprehensible, she passed the receiver to Brad, whose grasp of Spanish, while rudimentary, was better than hers. “Alguian habla inglés? I'm looking for una mujer, Rachel Barber, de New York, canadiense – is she there?”

“Or Sylvia di Castro,” Claire interjected.

Brad made a kind of grimace as he listened, then he covered the receiver with his palm. “I'm sorry, I can't really make it out. He keeps saying, I think he keeps saying something about silence, but I'm not catching it. I know I'm not getting a yes or no answer.”

“We could call back. We could ask the woman downstairs for help.”

“Gracias.” Brad hung up the phone.

“Do you know if Rachel speaks Spanish?” Claire asked.

“Maybe she picked some up in New York. Maybe she's learned more down here.” Brad rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Maybe we should just figure out where this place is and go. If she's there and gets word that someone's looking for her, maybe she'll bolt.”

“What's your hunch – do you think she's there?”

“On a hunch, I'll say yes.”

For all that Rachel was potentially so close, Claire was feeling a measure of hesitation. She did not know what they would do
or say to Rachel, when and if they found her. What Rachel would do at the sight of them – the two of them together. Or what she was going to do if Rachel wasn't there. She had to return to Toronto. Whatever happened, she was preparing herself to return to Toronto, to Stefan, even though she was no longer convinced that she would be able to slip back, like the missing piece of a puzzle, into her life as it had been. And yet she did not regret what she'd done, or what she'd gone through: the journey, the immeasurable ways in which she'd been touched. She would go back, although she did not know what awaited her. Mystery. Disorder. Not necessarily bad things. She did not know what Stefan would want from her.

When she and Brad went downstairs, the woman at the desk had been replaced by a small sign in Spanish and English. Someone would return at five o'clock. It was, now, a little before three. No one seemed to be about. Even the bakery up the street was closed until the next morning. They debated whether to head into the centre of town, to try to find someone who could point them towards Temazcalli, or wait and, as seemed most likely, set off in the morning.

“Before we do anything,” Claire said, “I really have to eat or else.” So far the brightness inside her head was holding.

They made their way down to the beach and walked until they came upon a strip of restaurants, set back from a long, straight stretch of sand where the surf was high. After a late lunch, they kept walking until a fierce downpour sent them scurrying inside and up a set of stairs to a second-floor bar. They shook out their
hair and clothes and patted their faces dry with paper napkins. Protected from the elements by a palm-thatched roof, they seated themselves on stools open to the air, with a view, through a curtain of rain, of the ocean.

“Will you tell me,” Claire asked, sipping from a can of pineapple juice and looking not at Brad but at the sea, “how you came to get involved with Rachel?”

“She was a client,” Brad said, “and we'd done a piece of work together, but she wasn't coming in as regularly, so it wasn't like – of course, it's odd we hadn't run into each other before, given how close we live, but we hadn't. Anyway, one day I was in Commodities, the health food store on First, when she came in. We started talking. She asked me if I wanted to go for a coffee. Maybe she felt something right from the start, from when she first met me. I do think she's drawn to people who've had some intense experience of pain themselves. I don't know how conscious she is of it. I don't know if it makes her symptoms worse or shapes them in any way. It's not something I ever found easy to talk about with her. She'd get very defensive. We went to this café and she told me she had a feeling that I'd experienced some deep pain and wondered if I'd tell her about it. I was shocked. That she'd seen this about me. And one way and another, things went from there.”

“What happened to you?” She had sensed the depth of his empathy and responded to it, but had assumed his familiarity with pain grew out of his talent, out of his professional life. Unlike Rachel, she had not asked him about it, until now – but then the circumstances under which she'd met Brad were entirely different.

“I had a bad case of rheumatoid arthritis.” He rubbed his wrist. “This was a long time ago, back when I was in college. It took a long time to diagnose. No one seemed to recognize the trouble was in my joints and because I wrestled, at first everyone thought it was a sports injury. So it was pretty hard for a while, because no one knew what the problem was, and it would go away and then come back. I'd ache and not make it out of bed for days. I had to drop out and move back home. My mother would pray over me. Eventually, this was in St. Paul, before I moved to New York, I met this woman, who did a lot of work on my muscles, on the tissue around the joints. A massage therapist. She was amazing. When they finally made the diagnosis, the doctor who was treating me wanted to put me on this incredible drug cocktail but I wouldn't do it. I was doing all this research on my own. I took all these vitamins. I worked out as much as I could. At a certain point, my symptoms started to recede. It's hard to know exactly why, because some people aren't so lucky, but they did.”

“And never came back?”

“Not in the same way. I have to look after myself. I can't take anything for granted. Everything changed because of it.”

He was bearing lightly on an experience that could not have been light at all. Those days and days in bed. His mother praying over him. “I thought for a while I was going to end up as some kind of invalid.” He shrugged, his fingers smoothing over his bottle of beer, the joints of his knuckles shifting easily to Claire's eye, and she was moved by the sight, by his skin, by the thought that he carried this invisible history within him, not weakness, a legacy of mysterious healing; empathy was called up out of her, too.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“Sorry? What's there to be sorry about?”

For an instant, she entertained the thought of a life with him. Whatever happened with Rachel, they would keep going, to Hawaii, to Thailand. But something stopped her. It seemed like another form of escape.

When the rain let up (it had been nothing more than a late-afternoon shower), they stood, adjusting their still-damp clothes. At the top of the stairs leading down to the street, Brad leaned in close. “I'm sorry about what happened to your parents. For days and days, I've been meaning to say that.”

Claire nodded: grief rustled in her chest and subsided.

At the hotel, the woman was back at her post behind the counter. Claire asked if she would call Temazcalli for them and explained that they were looking for her sister, whom they had reason to believe was there. She wrote two names on a piece of paper, Rachel Barber and Sylvia di Castro, and handed the paper to the woman.

Hola, hola. The woman's voice rolled on in Spanish, now animated,
now
accommodating, then quiet, her head cocked as she listened to the voice on the other end of the line.

“Okay.” Without hanging up, she set the receiver down on the wood of the counter. “Rachel Barber, the Canadian, she is there. For nearly three months she is there. But there is a difficulty if you wish to see and speak to her because she is in the most extreme retreat. She does not speak to anyone.”

“Doesn't speak to anyone,” Claire said.

“There are a few people who do this. They have small separate houses for them.”

“But is she well, she's not sick?”

The woman picked up the receiver once more and spoke into it before resting it against her shoulder. “She is well. She walks in the hills. She meditates. If you wish, you can pass by in the morning.”

They sat side by side on the bed, their backs to the carved wooden headboard.

“She's there,” Claire said, hugging her knees to her chest. Her relief, her joy were matched by a degree of incredulity – she did not quite dare to believe that they had found her. Or that Rachel, who, for all her single-mindedness, had never struck Claire as a silent person, had removed herself so far from the world that she would not speak. Repeatedly, Rachel had referred to her need to give up something: this time, she seemed to be renouncing almost all human contact. (And was it working, was her renunciation bringing her the solace she sought?)

“So what do we do?” Brad asked. He lay down and stared at the stuccoed ceiling. His face looked pale and angular. She could not now think of touching him.

“I guess we'll go there in the morning.”

“And then?”

“I don't know exactly. We'll have to see when we get there. We'll ask them to let her know we're there –”

“What if she doesn't want to see us?”

Which was possible, although Claire didn't much want to consider this. “We have to see for certain she's all right. And make sure it's really her. We can't just take someone else's word for it over the phone. I mean, I can't. I would feel – And we need to know, we need to have some idea when she's coming back.”

“Only maybe – maybe, Claire, maybe it would be better not to disturb her. Okay, we have to confirm it's her, but if she needs to be alone – if she's chosen, if she's put herself in seclusion and whatever she's doing is making her feel better, and then we come along and burst in and wreck that – I'm not sure I want to live with the responsibility.”

Claire's eyes filled with tears. “But we can't be here, be so close, and not go.”

They fell silent, inwardly wrestling. A shutter banged and at the sound, a dog began to bark. Light from the setting sun fell across the far wall.

That night, warily, they got ready for bed. In the dark, after some hours of near sleeplessness, Brad pressed his body to Claire's, his breath ragged in her ear. “We'll go,” he said.

In the morning, they ate breakfast at the bakery just up the street. Back at the Maria del Flor, they debated whether to leave their bags or check out. Since they did not know altogether what lay ahead and it would be easy enough to return, they took their bags, along with a page of directions, with them.

Claire navigated. At the top of the hill, where their small road met the highway, she instructed Brad to turn right, which
led them out of town. They were to continue down the highway, still a narrow single lane in either direction, for perhaps two kilometres, past a couple of turnoffs on the right, both of which ran down a short, sharp slope to the beach. A haze of mist marked the line of surf. They were looking for a turning on the left, away from the ocean. There would be only a small wooden sign. It was easy to miss. They missed it, although Claire, half-blinded by the sun rising over the hills, shouted out as they passed. Brad pulled up, and since there was no other traffic in sight, reversed speedily until they were opposite what seemed to be little more than a dirt track. The woman at the hotel had said the retreat was not far up the lane, at most half a kilometre.

Brad nosed the car off the road, into a grassy dip. He switched off the engine but kept his hands on the wheel. “You go,” he said.

“On my own.”

“She doesn't need to see both of us.”

Nervous and a little discomfited, Claire waited a moment. “All right.” She opened her door and stepped out, and, after glancing in either direction, jogged across the road.

Almost immediately, the dirt track began to climb. Pebbles and grit slid between her feet and the soles of her sandals. She was anxious and dry-throated, and had forgotten to bring any water. To turn away from Rachel now, to leave without knowing how she was, still felt to her like a kind of abandonment, for all that there was a streak of selfishness to the desire to see Rachel and the place where Rachel was, if Rachel did not want to be seen.

On her right, an opening in the undergrowth led to a ramshackle yard, an old brown sedan pulled up in front of the low
rectangle of a house, chickens squawking and pecking at the bare ground that surrounded it. The hillside to her left was covered in small, scrubby trees. A little farther on, on her left, a containment wall began, running down the slope towards her for about fifty metres and turning to run for another fifty metres into the trees. The wall was plastered and painted white. Above it, and level with her, appeared the roofs of some small buildings, one roof of red clay tile, the others of palm thatch. A gurgle of water met Claire's ears: not a creek but perhaps an outdoor shower or a tap. She thought she heard the slap of footsteps hurrying up the hill on the other side of the wall, the velocity of another presence, and at the sound her heart quickened, but there were no voices.

Up ahead, where the hillside flattened out, rose a larger two-storey building, also stuccoed, its roof tiled, a balcony running along the second floor, under the overhang of the roof. A white rope hammock was strung up at the far end. A cluster of dark palm trees partly shaded the exterior. Near the house, Claire glimpsed some flowering shrubs, hibiscus and bougainvillea. A series of flagstone steps likely continued down the slope. All was still, cloaked in heat, bleached by the dazzling light. No one appeared. The very quiet of the place filled her with unease and a strange longing: she was curious about what sort of sanctuary lay within the walls.

Farther along the crest of the hill, a group of smaller buildings was scattered, each a short distance from the other. Perhaps it was in one of these that Rachel was living. Claire wondered if there were others at the retreat who had taken a similar vow of silence, and what kind of company Rachel kept or if she spent most, or all, of her time alone. She did not know what to make
of Rachel's choice. Was there something sacrificial, penitential to her solitude, and if it was solitude that had proved so healing, would she then need solitude forever? If solitude failed, what else was left to her?