Healer: A Novel

by Carol Cassella

  On the way home Claire turns the heat up twice before she realizes Jory has the rear window open and is scattering fragments of all the brochures and bulletins into the snow along the side of the highway; her secret trail of crumbs that might eventually lead her back to someplace she cares about. Claire bites back a tirade about littering and shuts off the radio, starts talking about what electives Jory can take. They’ll shop for some new school clothes; maybe it’s time she gets her own cell phone. “Baby, I know it’s hard. And scary. You’ll make friends here. I promise. We should be back in Seattle by next fall.”

  But by the time they leave the highway Claire has quit probing for some path into Jory’s hurt soul. The small space inside the car grates with her anger.

  There are fresh tire tracks at the top of the long driveway down to the house. “Jory, somebody’s here. Oh, no! What if it’s the moving van? They were supposed to call first!” She looks in the mirror to see Jory’s reaction—she is totally absorbed in writing looping versions of her signature on the window in the fog of her breath. But when they see Addison’s Lexus parked where it had obviously slid down the last ten feet of the road, Jory screams. She is out of the car, hopping red-footed through the snow until he picks her up in his arms. His eternal child. A fist grips Claire’s chest, something scary-close to tears that she can’t promptly attach to joy or surprise. Something else altogether.

  She waits until the other two untangle. “Hey. Which airplane did you drop out of?” With Jory watching, Claire goes to Addison and loosely wraps her arms around his waist. She stands still, feels the cold silkiness of his parka against her cheek and waits for his scent to come back to her, slow to uncoil in the icy air. When she is ready to pull back enough to look at his face he holds her fast. Not demanding, not begging. Asking, she concludes. Asking her to move on.

  “I couldn’t find my key,” he says, in a tone of chagrin that is big enough to make Jory wrap her arms around him again.

  “I thought you were the movers when I saw the tracks.” Jory flashes a look at her and Claire adds, “I mean, we’re happier it’s you! And I’m sure they would have just driven right back to Seattle if we weren’t here.” She puts a hand over her eyes. “Oh God. Come in. You must be frozen.” She unlocks the house—wondering, actually, why she had bothered to lock it in the first place, as if the deer or coyotes were a threat.

  Jory consumes her father. That is the word that comes to Claire’s mind—consumes. She adsorbs herself into his presence with an energy Claire hasn’t gotten from her in weeks. When Jory was two or three she had gone through a phase of coming into their bedroom every night, almost always right at two o’clock, as if she could tell the time. She was so small she had to hoist herself into their bed, where she would slide neatly between them, tense and wide awake with the exhilaration of her trespass. They were usually too tired to carry her back; and there had been so many months when every premature breath had felt perilous that the ease of cuddling until they all three seemed to breathe in unison still surprised Claire. Eventually they just bought a king-sized bed.

  Claire occupies herself with dinner, scrounging through what had seemed like such a well-stocked refrigerator to come up with something more meallike than she and Jory usually eat. She starts boiling water for pasta and chopping cloves of garlic. The kitchen grows warm with steam, the window above the sink sweats into a gray glaze, softer than the black block of sky.

  Addison comes in and stands behind her while she splits the pods open with the flat side of the knife blade. “You cut Chicago short?”

  He starts to say something, then seems to change his mind and starts again. “It wasn’t the right meeting. Better to concentrate on Los Angeles next week.”

  Claire nods. “Meaning what? Too many people already knew?”

  He doesn’t answer her and she has to think, carefully, for a minute about how much she wants to say so early in this unexpected visit. “Can you get out the olive oil? Top shelf.”

  Halfway through dinner Jory excuses herself to watch TV, coming down from the flirtatious high her father has ignited. Claire picks at her spaghetti, finally pushes it away and folds her arms on the table. “Did she tell you yet?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I got a job.”

  Addison puts his fork down and stares at her. When he says nothing after another moment Claire raises her eyebrows. “A job. I got a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  She tilts her head, giving him a minute to retract his question before she finally answers, “At a clinic. I start tomorrow.”

  “Claire. You don’t have to—”

  She cuts him off. “How do I not have to do this?” She picks up her plate and silver and walks into the kitchen. “I kind of like having health insurance. Must be the doctor in me. I don’t think it comes with a retirement plan, unfortunately.”

  “Ah! God.” He sets his elbows on the table and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”

  She drops the plates in the sink so hard one chips. “No. You could have waited until one of us ended up in the emergency room and let me find out then. There are some things, just maybe, it’s better to learn from your spouse than a Gap store clerk.”

  As if she had a sixth sense, Jory dances into the kitchen asking for ice cream. Claire gets out bowls while Addison fills the sink with hot soapy water, and their forced felicity over dessert eventually feels real enough to turn away from the anger.

  They play a round of Life, another of Clue, and then Claire piles two comforters and pillows on the couch. “I have to go to sleep, guys. You can toss for who gets the other half of the bed.” She can see from Addison’s fallen face that he’d forgotten they were short on beds until the moving truck comes. She kisses Jory’s cheek, and Addison’s lips—lingering just long enough to let him know that she does prefer the felicity to the argument. But when she wakes up at six to go in for her first day of work, Jory is in bed beside her.

  • 10 •

  In the second year of residency every doctor-in-training was set up with a fledgling clinic practice one afternoon each week. In many ways these four or five hours out of the eighty- or ninety-hour work week were the only ones that resembled the life they would lead after they graduated, caring for average ambulatory patients with average ambulatory problems. Their hospital work was more exciting. Almost always. To be admitted to a hospital, patients had to be so thoroughly diseased or traumatized there was no option to send them ambulating right back to their homes. The only real difference between their resident’s clinic and the private practice most of them were headed for was that all the patients were poor, uninsured, and had no other doctor to call. When their pain or breathlessness or swollen joints became unbearable they would start in the emergency room, waiting hours to be questioned and examined by student doctors who sporadically excused themselves to consult a small library of textbooks in the cramped office behind the triage desk. After enough inspection of cavities and orifices and blood and X-rays for the residents to reach a plausible diagnosis, the patients were discharged with instructions printed out on a half sheet and stapled to the bill they couldn’t pay: “Take all your pills, watch for swelling and redness, change your dressing twice a day, follow up with your physician.” Thus, in rotating order, the doctorless were matched up with the doctor trainees who needed living and breathing specimens to learn their trade. It was a nicely symbiotic arrangement, on paper. But it will be different here in Hallum, at Dan’s clinic, Claire thinks. Her patients will have a choice. They will choose her. They will want her. She will have time for them.

  She parks the Audi near the clinic steps and opens the door, then shuts it again and scrounges through her purse for a brush and her lipstick. When she angles the rearview mirror toward her face she is almost startled by the nervous look in her eyes. Who wanted to be treated by a nervous doctor? A dark shape cuts across the window and she nearly jumps to the other side of the
front seat. Then Anita bends low enough to look inside the car. She smiles and jangles her key ring, apparently assuming Claire has already discovered the front door is still locked.

  As soon as Claire is out of the car Anita starts telling her how many patients they have scheduled for the day, which ones will be no-shows (because yesterday was payday), and which ones will bring their whole family in without an appointment (because whenever they can get a ride to the clinic they pile grandma and all the babies into the truck to see Dr. Zelaya without even considering how tired he gets at this age), and which ones will show up just as she’s trying to lock the doors tonight, but this time she is not going to be softhearted about it. Her feet get too swollen by the end of the day to put up with these delinquents.

  “When is your baby due?” Claire asks her.

  “Not soon enough! I’m only four months. But it’s number three. No more belly muscles, I guess. I pooched out really quick this time. I washed your coat for you.”

  She points to Evelyn Zelaya’s newly ironed white coat on a hanger just beyond the waiting room, drops her bag onto the floor behind the desk and begins turning on lights and the computer. “You know how to make coffee, right? I hope better than Dr. Z.”

  Dan comes in the back door ten minutes later. He asks her just to shadow him for the first few days. A weight lifts when she realizes she won’t have to tell anyone she is their new doctor. Not yet, anyway. He introduces her to the patients as his “colleague.” They look at her, then shift their eyes back to Dan for some confirmation of trust before they smile or nod and allow her to melt into the background. She stands tucked into the corner behind the exam room door—her starched coat with the false name embroidered on it, her hands rigid in the empty pockets—and tries to pick out words she understands. Dolor, sangre, sarpullido, pastillas, pinchazo… She tries to piece caught words and phrases into symptoms or cures, tries to work them into questions she will need to ask some patient within a few days, if Dan doesn’t change his mind about her. In medical school she had learned a fair bit of Spanish at the public hospital. Even Seattle, as far as you could get from Mexico, had a densely woven Hispanic world populating the apartments and row houses of Beacon Hill and the Central District.

  A little after nine the back door slams open, sending a shiver along the wall and a gust of snow across the mat. “You’re late,” Dan calls out without looking up from the medical chart he’s making notes in.

  “I’m early. This the new doctor?” Frida, the clinic’s nurse, is a compact woman with skin the color of brown eggshells, who wears her black hair twisted up in a hot-pink bandana, socks and sandals on her feet despite eighteen inches of snow. She flashes a stunningly toothy smile at Claire and from then on acts as if they’ve worked together for years. Claire finds the sense of being taken for granted enormously reassuring. “How’d he get you suckered into this job?” Frida asks, shaking more snow off her coat onto the floor and pouring herself a cup of coffee. “He must not have told you what it pays, that’s for sure.”

  Claire glances at Dan, who has not lifted his eyes from the chart. She sees the corner of his mouth twitch, and when she looks back at Frida she’s laughing. “You should give her a raise just for making a decent pot of coffee.”

  Claire still hasn’t asked about the salary; she is forty-three years old, and this is the first time she has worked for a paycheck other than the assigned and nonnegotiable stipend of a resident. She hardly knows what to ask, as if she has any option. Her main financial goal is to make sure Dan doesn’t regret his offer.

  By the time he pauses for their lunch—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and peeled grapefruit—Claire is too numbed by her own ignorance to be hungry. She had scribbled a few notes on the sly in the first few patients’ rooms, worried that if Dan caught her he would slap up against how embarrassingly inexperienced she is. It feels like the medical journals she’s been reading for the last decade are little more than movies trying to imitate real life.

  At the end of this first day she gives herself a competency test. She stands against the closed exam room door of the only patient still left in the clinic and imagines herself one step ahead of everything she sees and hears, translating the words she understands and anticipating Dan’s next move, which question he will ask, what physical exam he’ll do, what blood test he’ll order. She gives herself a score of 55 on a sliding scale weighted by the language barrier. Clearly failing.

  Dan looks exhausted, a sallow shadow darkening the pockets under his eyes. Claire tries to apologize for all her questions, her fumbling, her inadequate Spanish, how she has slowed his pace and kept them all here past six. He stares fixedly at her while she talks until she runs out of words, at which point he squints his eyes, deepening the sharp groove that runs in the narrow space between his brows, and leans a notch closer, almost broodingly serious. “You’re not planning to quit on me, are you?” She shakes her head. And then he laughs, all the lines in his face breaking a new way. “Well, then. I’ll head home. Frida’s in the back—she can lock up.”

  After she says good night Claire walks toward the front entrance, where she’d parked eleven long hours ago, the waiting room now lit only by the single streetlamp at the edge of the parking lot, a diffuse fluorescent gloom. She thinks, for a moment, that Anita must have left a radio on, but as soon as she nears the swinging gate at the end of the hall she recognizes the voice of a patient seen two hours earlier, a young woman from Guatemala who’s just started at Walker’s Orchards, come in with a complaint of headaches. Her back is turned when Claire enters the waiting room. She’s reading the symptoms of diabetes out loud from a poster on the wall. At Claire’s approach, she says, “Ah, Miguela. Mira. Es la mujer.” Then, holding open her small bag of drug samples: “¿Cuántas puedo tomar cada día?”

  Claire is more startled when another woman’s voice comes from near the desk, behind her. “Oh, bien. Doctora, you have in Spanish?” Claire looks inside the bag and takes out one of the boxes—the directions are only in English. Dan must have been tired, to have forgotten the translation. She writes them on a blank sheet of printer paper and says the words out loud, hoping she’ll be able to tell from the woman’s reaction that her simple Spanish is clear: “Una pastill cada mañana, y una pastill de la noche. Claro? Dos cada día.”

  “En la noche,” the woman standing behind her says, and Claire looks at her closely for the first time; a small woman, maybe thirty-five or so, a little young to be the patient’s mother. Suddenly Claire recognizes her. It’s the woman from the grocery store; the one she had glimpsed here at the clinic the first day she visited. She feels a rush of relief to see that the woman appears well. Claire hadn’t noticed her eyes before, underneath the knit cap she’d worn. They are almost too large for her petite face, accented by stark brows that arch toward her temples like wings, Claire thinks; the silhouette of a soaring bird.

  Claire holds out her hand, feeling almost like she’s run into some old school friend, surprisingly happy to stumble on some link in Hallum that doesn’t ache of her former life clashing with this new one. “¡Señora! Cómo está?” The woman glances at her friend and back to Claire, in a puzzle. “The jacket,” Claire exclaims, trying to come up with the Spanish words. “At the grocery store. Chaqueta.” At last her face breaks open into recognition and she smiles, darts over to the coat rack and pulls off Addison’s red and cream plaid wool lumberman’s jacket.

  “Sí, sí. Muchas gracias, señora. So warm.” Claire remembers her voice now, too, the English words heavily accented, as if she has learned them from a book with almost no verbal practice.

  “So you have a friend here?” Claire makes the circling dance with her finger again, this time indicating the two women. “¿Amigos?”

  “Amig as,” she corrects, but shakes her head. “Sólo estoy ayudando a ella esta noche. Only helping.” With that she turns to the younger woman and asks her something before they both put on their coats. “Thank you, doctora.”

&
nbsp; “De nada,” Claire answers. Just before she locks the door after them she asks, “¿Cómo se llama? Your name? What is your name?”

  The woman is all but hidden inside Addison’s jacket; its masculine bulk makes her look unusually vulnerable, but she reaches out her hand and takes Claire’s with an assuredness uncommon among the patients she’s met today. It is as small as Jory’s. “Miguela. Miguela Ruiz.”

  Claire raps on the bathroom door but Addison doesn’t hear her over the running water, and his voice—“Stairway to Heaven” in falsetto. She goes inside and closes the door, sits on the toilet seat. It’s comforting in the small steamy room, tinted with the scent of pine soap and the creamy smell of his shaving cream. Addison pulls the shower curtain back. “Hey! How was it?”

  “Exhausting. Humiliating.” She unbuttons her sweater and twists her hair up off her neck. “Between you and me? I feel lost.”

  He shuts off the water and pulls a towel from the shower curtain rod. “Well, it’s a totally new experience for you, Claire. You haven’t practiced medicine in fourteen years. How could you not feel lost?” He steps over the side of the tub with the towel wrapped around the soft bulge at his waist. He is heavier since he’s been on the road, eating fast food and convention dinners. Ordering the extra martinis that might close the deal.

  “I thought I’d kept up better than this. I don’t know, I guess I was reading too many articles about the latest angiotensin receptor blockers and not enough about parasites and vitamin deficiencies.”

  “Buy some new books—primary care stuff. You’ll catch up.”

  She thinks about it for a minute. What possible image could she give him to bridge the gap between his concept of what a doctor is and this job. “I don’t know where to read about how I’m supposed to treat diabetes when the patient lives in a trailer with twelve other men. How do you keep a supply of clean syringes and refrigerated insulin?” She raises her hands to make a point and then lets them drop back into her lap. “I don’t even understand their language. I’m not sure I won’t end up doing more harm than good.”