Claire's Head by Catherine Bush Page A

her, she exited the Neurological Institute at ten past eleven. She had just under six hours until her train left. She had already checked out of her hotel room. She’d found something, proof that Rachel had been here, and, for the third day in a row, had been suffering from a migraine, but where this led she did not yet know.
    From the east, a bus clambered up the hill of Pine Avenue while a breeze tossed up by the river to the south climbed the slope of University, the hot bus wind and sultry river breeze intersecting at the point on the slope where Claire stood. Rachel, too, must have stood on or near this spot, in March, in the snow and near-dark, spurned, it would appear, by Dr. Tagliacci, without a PET scan, her stubborn head still aching. (She’d been prepared to lie to get her brain scanned, if she’d claimed that she’d been medication-free for twenty-four hours.)
    Presumably, in this state, she had returned to the hotel. In the morning, if not wholly well, she’d nevertheless felt well enough to check out. When had she called Allison to say she wasn’t coming to Toronto, in the morning or the previous night? At what point had she decided to leave Montreal, to vanish from the island?

 

    T he doors to the Indo-Malay pavilion were locked, but lights were still on and human figures visible among the trees. Claire rapped on the glass and one of the figures, a young man in green T-shirt and khakis, approached and tried to shoo her away. The zoo was already closed to visitors for the night. She had parked over by the administration building, as she did on her occasional visits, and walked into the zoo from there. Im here to see Allison Barber, Claire shouted, pointing in the direction of the keepers’ quarters. She was uncertain whether the young man could hear her, but he unlocked the main doors and let her enter the pavilion’s tropical interior.
    â€œI’m Claire, Allison’s sister,” she said.
    â€œI think Allison’s in with the orangs.” Not the actual orangutan enclosure, it would seem, visible near the centre of the pavilion as they made their way along a path near the periphery, and where a woman, not Allison, was hosing the cement floor. Far above their heads, birds hooted as they settled for the nightin the thirty-foot rafters or among the high canopies of the trees. Leaves brushed against Claire’s arms.
    The young man opened the door to the keepers’ quarters and led Claire fourteen steps along a corridor to another door, which he unlocked. Then he called into the large, turquoise-walled interior, “Allison. Allison, your sister’s here.”
    â€œMy sister?” Allison appeared, also in a green T-shirt, carrying a handful of keys. Sweat made the planes of her face shine. At the sight of Claire, she looked worried.
    â€œNo big news,” Claire said. “I got back from Montreal last night. I drove out because I thought it might be easier to talk to you here.”
    Allison nodded. Three days a week, she worked an early shift, rising before dawn and arriving home just as the three girls were let out of school. Two days a week she worked late and came home in time to tuck them into bed. “Only I can’t be too late. Let me check that everyone’s locked in.”
    They walked together along the row of barred enclosures, the orangutans’ night quarters, which rose to skylights overhead, the turquoise walls and evening light that fell from above making the enclosures bright enough. In high school, Allison had spoken of wanting to be a veterinarian but, after getting a degree in animal husbandry, she had come to the zoo to work full-time. She loved the exotics, she said, having a continent’s worth of creatures under her care, and she didn’t want that care to be exclusively medical, even if some days all they seemed to do was clean – clean up shit.
    â€œWhich one’s Dido?”
    The orangutans were