Read Online Claire's Head by Catherine Bush - Free Book Online

seen me try to function without good drugs. I was already using Imitrex when I met you, okay, from just after I met you. You haven’t seen what it was like when I was younger and there were times, days in a row, when I really couldn’t function. This me you love and want to have a baby with, this is me on drugs.”
    â€œHow do you even know what you’d be like now without the drugs?”
    â€œI don’t know but I can imagine.” She was thinking of Rachel, of course, and what had happened to Rachel when she got pregnant, which Stefan would guess, although he said nothing to indicate this. What if she attempted to become a mother, and like Rachel, failed? “If I didn’t get migraines –”
    â€œMaybe there’s some other way to bring things under control.”
    â€œI keep trying. You know that. I try everything. I’m open to just about any suggestion.”
    â€œHave you ever thought that maybe you think about your headaches too much and possibly that makes them worse?”
    And how was it possible not to think of them, not consider their possibility, not be aware of each subtle fluctuation of sensation within her head, her body? It was like an awareness of the weather, the internal weather of her nervous system. He was asking her to be less conscious of the world, of herself
    â€œOther people with migraines have children.” Was it a sign of his desperation, that he was tacitly roping in Rachel, of all people, on his side of the argument? “Your mother –”
    â€œMy mother didn’t get migraines as frequently as Rachel and I do.”
    â€œWhy is that?”
    â€œI don’t know. Stef, I’m not saying no, I’m just saying not yet.”
    The next night, after work, Claire drove out to Allison’s. Though she’d called to let Allison know she was coming, when she rang the doorbell on Glebeholme Boulevard only the dog barked in response. Perhaps Allison was putting the girls to bed or had locked herself for a brief respite in the bathroom, so Claire followed a dweedle of music around to the side of the house and rapped her knuckles against the window of the small basement room where Lennie was practising. He waved at her with his violin bow. Banker by day, he played in an amateur orchestra on weekends and grabbed half an hour some weeknights to rehearse. He’d grown up in Montreal, west of rue du Parc in a seven-room apartment with his four siblings, parents, and paternal grandparents, who had emigrated from Guangdong provinceand ran a supermarket in Chinatown. He and Allison had met at university in Guelph and been together ever since.
    Bow in hand, slippers on his feet, he let Claire in the front door, fending off shaggy Belle, who kept hurling herself towards them. He kissed Claire’s cheeks, asked for news of Rachel, and when Claire shook her head, pointed with his bow and told her Allison would be down in a moment. He offered her a drink but Claire said no thanks, and when she insisted she’d be fine waiting on her own, Lennie nodded and slipped back downstairs, leaving her with the churning dishwasher and head-butting dog and a faint meander of Mozart’s
A Little Night Music
.
    The stairs from the second floor creaked as Allison made her way down them. “Three in bed,” she said, “and the middle one said, I’m not sleeping. At least she’s drowsy now.” She crossed her fingers, with an air of blithe exhaustion. The one in the middle, Claire knew, was Star.
    On the fridge were photographs of the three girls, all black-haired, though Star’s hair was thicker and didn’t lie as flat. Fifteen months younger than Amelia and already as tall. How uncanny (they had all remarked on it) that in some ways Star looked more like Allison than she did Rachel, more like Allison than either of Allison’s own daughters – the same almond-shaped eyes and crease in her left cheek when she