Free Claire's Head by Catherine Bush Page B

Ville. They had walked hand in hand, Claire in a brand-new yellow rayon dress, along Mont Royal to the park and up the mountain. Now she was in no mood tosurrender to the city: Montreal felt like a tunnel she had to manoeuvre through. She lay down on the bed and breathed deeply. Then she rose, swiped on some lipstick, ran her hands through her hair, and made her way downstairs.
    An older couple in identical pantsuits was checking in. Once they were done, Claire approached the young woman who had welcomed her a little while before. “Puis-je vous aider?” The hotel clerk made her uniform look almost voluptuous, a white shirt, tight over her breasts, above a narrow maroon skirt.
    â€œI’m trying to find out some information about a hotel guest. Not one who’s staying here now. She was here in March. Rachel Barber. She’s my sister. I think she checked in on the fourteenth and checked out on the sixteenth, but I’d like to confirm those dates. She hasn’t been heard from since.”
    â€œI’m not allowed to give out that kind of information,” the clerk said in accentless English. “I’m really sorry. Maybe if you speak to the manager but she’s not here right now. Can you try in the morning?”
    Managers were never here right now.
    â€œJust the dates?”
    â€œI’m sorry,” the girl repeated, her eyes scrunched as if it were easier not to look at Claire full on. “Have you gone to the police?”
    â€œYes, but I’m trying to find out what I can by myself.”
    The hooks of the girl’s plucked eyebrows shrugged.
    â€œI’ll go down on my knees,” Claire said. She couldn’t believe she’d said that. She pulled out the photograph of Rachel.
    â€œI’ll take that,” the girl said. She stared at the photo, then at Claire. “I can see if anyone remembers her.”
    â€œI’ll have to make you a copy.”
    â€œTheres a Xerox shop over on Parc. Look, I’m not saying anyone will remember – unless she’s three foot high and limps.”
    Hair dark enough to seem black in certain lights. Red-tinted at the ends. Shoulder-length when last seen though it could be any length now. A long brown braid at one time. Of middle height, though sometimes she looked taller than she was. Slim. Those runner’s legs. Those cheekbones.
    How hard it is to fix the details of what is not in front of you – the room at your back, those who are gone. To remember anything is to select some details and leave out others. How difficult to recall eye colour, for instance: it’s as shifty an item of memory as any, even the eyes of those we are closest to, perhaps because they come to us bearing traces of so much more than colour (unless we can deduce them to be brown). Claire struggled to remember her parents’ eyes, both, like Rachel’s, in the blue-grey spectrum, but where, more precisely? Were her father’s closer to the blue of certain clouds, her mother’s the green-grey of a lake? And what of Rachel’s? The purest grey, Claire thought, but she was guessing. And Stefan’s?
    Back upstairs in her room, she called him.
    â€œYou’re out of breath,” she said when he picked up the phone. It was already dark in Montreal, but in Toronto, farther west in the same time zone, the sky, she knew, would still be the jade of twilight.
    â€œJust got in.”
    â€œFrom work?” She angled herself so that, despite the 545 kilometres between them, she was facing in his direction.
    â€œI stayed at the lab working on some arrays, and then we went to a movie. Rob and Maria and I, a horror movie. Claire, you would have hated it.” If he sounded sheepish and perhaps a little guilty, it was because he loved going to movies (loved horror films, none more than those involving killer bugs and mutant viruses). Claire found it difficult to sit through any movie (the flickering image, the visual