Healer: A Novel

by Carol Cassella

  “What is it?”

  “What does it look like? It’s a graduation present.” She leans against the wall with her hands jammed into her coat pockets. Her black curls spiral out of her lemon yellow headband like party streamers.

  “Graduation?”

  “Three weeks and you haven’t quit—not that I don’t see you think about it now and then.”

  “Only when Anita gives me three rooms at the same time with no translator.” Claire lifts the lid and takes out a Dove dark chocolate bar and a pocket Spanish–English dictionary. She laughs, “Hah! Reading my mind again!”

  “I thought you needed one you could hide in your coat.”

  “Yeah. Maybe it will osmose straight into my brain. Thank you.” She leans over and gives Frida a spontaneous hug.

  Frida returns the hug, one armed and one beat late, as if it surprised her. She tucks her chin down and Claire can tell that she’s a little embarrassed, but a little pleased, too. “So what do you think? Is it getting easier?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’m kind of afraid I have just enough knowledge to be dangerous.” She rather wishes Frida would burst out laughing at this but continues without a blink. “It’s me who should be thanking you guys.”

  “Is your husband still in town?” Frida asks.

  “He’s trying to get Jory organized for school today. We’re about to give her the ultimatum.”

  Frida seems to turn this fact over a few times, maybe just trying to imagine this absentee father shopping for school clothes. “Hmm. She’ll be happier once she knows some other kids.” She pushes away from the wall with the sole of her foot and pulls the strap of her purse over her shoulder. “Buy you a cup of coffee on your way home?”

  Claire shakes her head. “I can’t drink coffee after noon—keeps me awake.”

  “Great. I’ll buy you a beer.”

  No one answers at the house, so she calls Addison’s cell phone, thinking they have probably driven into town. But when he doesn’t answer that, either, Claire calls the house again. At last Jory picks up, sounding almost giddy and thoroughly annoyed at having to stop whatever she is doing to pick up the phone.

  “Why are you laughing?” Claire asks.

  “We’re playing Pictionary.”

  “It’s that funny?”

  “Dad made a new rule.” She starts giggling again. “You have to draw all the pictures holding the pencil in your mouth.”

  I should have thought of that, Claire thinks. The last time she spent an entire evening without speaking to me. “Okay, honey. Well, tell him I’ll be home in an hour. Start some dinner would you? Hugs and kisses.” But Jory has hung up some seconds before.

  Frida has already snared a table and ordered two glasses of beer by the time Claire gets to the bar. “I figured you were in a hurry. Took the liberty,” Frida says.

  The minute she sits down Claire feels completely spent, an almost pleasurable sense of having been thoroughly worked, like a sauna after a long run. “I feel like I just got off a night on call in the ER.”

  “Did you even eat lunch today? Dan almost never does, lately. He’s losing weight.” Frida twists her yellow bandana off and wraps it around her wrist, her hair gradually loosens around her face. “But you can tell you’re catching up with it, can’t you? I mean, you were great today!”

  Claire shrugs, but can’t help smiling at the compliment. Just those few words and she feels brighter. The beer comes and she takes a small sip, worrying she’ll be asleep at the table if she finishes the glass. “I think every patient I saw asked me for an antibiotic. Even the skin rashes.”

  “Have you spent any time in rural Mexico?” Frida asks.

  Claire raises her eyebrows and smiles. “Does Cancun count?”

  “Only if you followed your waiter or maid back to their house in the barrio. Most village pharmacies stock about four drugs of any consequence: Amoxicillin, Septra, maybe Cipro if they’re lucky. That and ibuprofen. Antibiotics are the only medicine they’ve ever seen save a life.” She puts her beer down and strips off her sweater, only a neon orange tank top underneath. Her arms are surprisingly muscular, her shoulders broad and well grooved in the triangles where her deltoids and biceps intersect. In her fleeces she looks almost stout, but now Claire sees there is little fat on her.

  Frida is the daughter of a black mother and white father who had married in the early seventies, convinced the racial divide would soon be obsolete. They had lived in a commune in the Texas hill country until it disintegrated, and then moved to central Mexico near San Miguel de Allende. At some point their altruism had merged with the benefits of capitalism and now they ran a spa that was often photographed in Travel + Leisure or Town & Country, though a percentage of proceeds funded a local charity. Claire had asked her once if her name was derived from Frida Kahlo, but Frida said she shortened it from her given name, Freedom, after she started nursing school back in Boston, hating the obligation of such a noun. Now that Claire is getting to know her, that seems like a perfect analogy for her personality—the bleeding-heart optimist blended with the coolheaded pragmatist. Enormously giving, up to the point it stopped being fun. It is making for an easy friendship, Claire thinks, not having to waste any time with social charades, which Frida has a tendency to throw her head back and laugh at—the broad, rolling sound of it as big as her broad smile.

  Claire pours a handful of salty pretzels into her hand and asks Frida, “Are you worried about Dan? He seems pretty tough.”

  “I love worrying about Dan. That’s my biggest contribution to the clinic. You know why he started this place, right?”

  Claire pushes the bowl of pretzels toward Frida. “He told me some about where the money comes from.”

  “That’s the how, not the why.” Frida pours her beer into a glass mug, angling it steeply along the side with the practice of a former waitress or bartender. Claire comments on it and she laughs. “Got through school courtesy of The Cask and Flagon.” She takes a sip and settles back in her chair. “He won’t tell you unless you ask him. His mother lost a whole family crossing the border during the Depression. Three kids and a husband.”

  “Dan’s father?”

  “No, no. She married Dan’s dad a few years later—in California, I think. Dan didn’t even know she’d had another family until he was grown up.”

  “What happened?”

  “They were coming across from Sonora. A whole group. In the middle of the desert her husband was bitten by a snake and couldn’t keep up. They told her she could stay with him or leave and save her kids. So she sent the children on ahead with another family and stayed with her husband, thinking he might get better overnight. But he didn’t. She ended up walking for three days, until somebody found her, half dead.” Frida leans closer. “She never saw her kids again.” She squares her wide shoulders and settles back. “She ended up in LA with Dan’s father. They never let Dan speak Spanish growing up—which is why his accent is so lousy. I think Evelyn taught him.”

  “Is she Hispanic?”

  “Evelyn? Evelyn is everything.” Frida laughs. “She’s white. But she sees the world differently. Like she was born nowhere. Or everywhere. He and Evelyn started the clinic about fifteen years ago with money they raised in a bake sale.”

  Claire stops chewing and narrows her eyes. “A bake sale? You’re kidding.”

  “I am not kidding. A bake sale and guilt. They twisted the arms of every rancher, orchardist, restaurant and hotel owner between here and the Canadian border—everybody who was making a profit on migrant labor—to put this clinic together. The other docs in town do a little pro bono, but the nearest state-run public clinic is seventy miles away. Across a pass that’s closed half the winter.” She lifts her shoulders once, as if that’s the best she can do with the story in brief. “This clinic is Dan’s mission.”

  “How big a donor is Ron Walker? I saw the plaque with his name.”

  “Big. The biggest. But others, too. And some grants. Dan gets anoth
er doc in now and then. But you have to do this job because you love it. And it’s hard to keep working for love when you want to buy a house and have a few kids. Especially since land prices here have tripled.”

  Claire looks away; her eyes light on the skin of her own folded hands, turning red and chapped in this hard climate. She wonders if Frida is still trying to figure out what Claire is doing here. Frida leans over her crossed arms and scans Claire’s flushed cheeks. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me how you landed here. Not that I wouldn’t love to hear.” She raises her eyebrows in a little wave with a conspiratorial smile on her face, like she is giving Claire an opportunity to do something good for herself she just hasn’t tried yet. When Claire doesn’t say anything Frida sits back again and shakes her head. “My mother always told me I should quit entertaining myself by messing with other people’s minds.”

  Claire presses her lips together, then stretches them into a tepid smile. “I don’t know. My mind might improve with some messing these days. And my own mom would probably agree.” She takes a drink from her beer, enjoying the bite of it at the back of her throat. “It’s not really that complicated,” she says, then puts her glass down and rakes her hair back from her face, clenching her fingers into her scalp. She looks at Frida to gauge how much she is up for—the story seems so clear in her mind until she tries to track down the beginning. “Okay. That’s a lie.” She smiles and shakes her hair loose again. “It’s actually very complicated. But the gist is that Addison is in research. Biopharm stuff. Twelve years ago he designed a blood test for ovarian cancer and started a small biotech company—Eugena.”

  “A blood test for cancer. So I could have, like, one poke, and find out if I have ovarian cancer?”

  Claire nods. “One poke. Before it’s ever metastasized. When surgery could cure you. It’s still too expensive to be used as a screening test, but in a few years it might be part of a routine chemistry panel. It made the cover of Newsweek. Lots of hoopla. So, anyway. He sold Eugena two years later.”

  Frida settles back in her chair with her beer glass resting on her abdomen, clearly ready to hear as much as Claire is willing to tell. “Something tells me he sold it for a lot of money.”

  “Yeah.” Claire smiles and raises her glass to her mouth, but puts it down again before she takes a sip. “Yeah. It was a lot. Kind of made it easy not to go back and finish my residency.”

  Frida waits through a minute of silence before she nudges Claire to go on. “And then?”

  “And then we bought our land here, planning to build a new house. And then Addison came up with a new idea. A cancer drug. One of the VEGFR-2 drugs. Heard of them?”

  Frida looks across the room as if the answer might magically appear on the specials board. “Vaguely. Fill me in.”

  They’re antiangiogenesis drugs. They inhibit blood vessel growth in cancers, so they kill the cancer without killing all the other tissues. Cure you without all the horrible side effects. At least theoretically. Lots of promise in the lab but lots of disappointments in real patients. The usual.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Frida says, flagging the waitress for two more beers. “He figured out the problem nobody else saw.”

  Claire lets out half a sigh, half a laugh and lifts her chin. “He’s a smart boy, my Addison. It was all the buzz.” She starts in on her second beer, aware that this is the first time she has talked about vascumab, Addison’s drug, with anyone other than him—inherently poisoned conversations that clarified nothing. Resolved nothing. Now, here, she could offer her own version. Uncontested. No broken web of trust tearing at every word.

  “Out to save the world, huh?” Frida says.

  Claire’s face flinches briefly before she smiles again. “I guess if you’re already rich and brilliant, you might as well save the world, too.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He put the money he got for Eugena into a new lab. Brought other investors in, too.” She scoots nearer the edge of her chair remembering the liquid flow of credit offered once Addison had assembled his stellar team. “It takes an unbelievable amount of money to design and produce a drug. Unbelievable. Half a billion dollars, easy. And the whole process—the designing, the applications, the testing—it’s years before you earn a dime. And you’re in a race against a dozen other labs working on the same class of drugs. It’s a huge risk.” Frida is listening with wide eyes, looks like she is either appreciative or entertained by Claire’s passion on the subject. “But Addison wanted to fund it with a small group so he’d have more control. The goal was to prove the drug worked in early phase studies and license it to a big pharma company, let them carry it to market. Two companies were already talking to him. He hired some of the best people in the field—lured away the lead scientist from another lab in California that was working on a related drug. Everybody was given a share in the company—everybody stood to make a fortune if it succeeded.” She pauses, considering where the line for libel could be drawn in a small town bar, in a conversation with a friend. “Anyway. They’d already applied to start the first tests in volunteers—phase one trials—when Addison discovered a possible liver reaction in some of the animals.” She stops. It would take her the rest of the night to explain all the unanswered questions tangled in that single sentence. Now she wishes she’d cut the whole story to one line: “Some mice got sick and then we went broke.”

  “Well,” she finally goes on, “I’ll cut to the chase. He had to pull the application at the last minute.” Frida seems to recognize Claire doesn’t want to say much more; Frida’s face looks softer, fuller, easing a fixed tension around her eyes that Claire hadn’t noticed until right now.

  “And you lost everything along with it,” Frida says.

  “He had some loans called. It got ugly pretty fast. And, well, there you go. Or here we are, I should say.”

  Frida smiles at this, but there is painful compassion behind it. “So we don’t get a cure for cancer, then?”

  Claire tilts her head to one side and tries to look optimistic. “He’s hoping he can run the animal studies again. He thinks it was an error in the data. It really was a great idea. Or is. It really might save a lot of lives.”

  “So why would one error shut down the whole lab?”

  Claire feels her smile stiffen again. “It wasn’t so much the error itself. It was the way it was handled.” She lifts her beer, hoping Frida will let her talk about something else now. “Onward and upward. Or backward. Didn’t somebody once say ‘Fading gentry is the leading edge of a revolution?’”

  “I don’t know, did they?”

  “Well. They should have. So, cheers to the revolution.” Claire raises her mug in a falsely gallant toast. “At least Dan gets another doctor out of it, assuming I’m more a help to him than a liability.”

  The bar is filling up, all the locals who’ve finished work, and gone home and finished dinner, now meeting up with friends. Someone catches Frida’s eye and waves, then another. There seems to be a friendly acceptance of the general lack of anonymity in this town; it makes Claire aware that she hasn’t crossed over yet. She feels Frida watching her and almost wishes she could have told her more. On the other hand, she thinks, there is no better place to find privacy than in anonymity.

  • 13 •

  By the time Claire gets in her car it’s after ten. Flakes of snow bat at her windshield. Out of the blue she remembers a cliché about Eskimos having thirteen different words for snow. That had never made any sense to her before they moved out here.

  Addison is probably asleep by now. He has the kind of brain that can unwind right in the middle of the organic chemistry puzzle that just might tag the next decoded gene. Once, when they were hot-in-love-dating she had asked him what he was thinking about. Only a young woman would ask that of a man, she knows now. The question came at that stage when their bodies were almost electrically interdependent and there were few censored thoughts. But she wanted to hear about the never-shared part of himsel
f—learn some secret that would irrevocably bind them. And she wanted him, too, to plead for her own secrets, because for every thought she voiced, a thousand more hummed under their conversation.

  “Nothing,” he had said. “I’m thinking nothing.” At first she felt shut out, and then freshly inspired to make him trust the fortress this new love felt like. And then, long after he’d fallen asleep, she felt disappointment. Maybe his deepest interior was more a void than a universe. Either way, it was the first spark of understanding that even in this fathom of union, two people were still two people.

  Now, after fifteen years of marriage, she understands that some of what Addison thinks is impossible to explain. At least in any comprehensible human language. She imagines it as infinitesimally small particles of blinding light zinging from one neuronal synapse to another, mapping out biochemical puzzles he didn’t even know he was tackling.

  She knows it leaves him feeling disconnected sometimes. Lonely even. Driving through the darkness with the windshield wipers flapping away at the snow, she plays with a vivid memory of Addison coming home from the lab well after midnight, years ago. Claire, half asleep, was hanging over the side of Jory’s crib trying to keep a pacifier lodged in her squalling mouth. He’d walked into the room with such a vacant stare she’d been jolted back into the moment, worried he’d stumbled home after too many drinks or bashed his head in a car accident. She’d left Jory to go to him. “What’s wrong? You look—I don’t know—like you’re in shock.”

  She could practically watch his brain shooting signals out to his tongue, trying to shape his insight into vocalized tones, his eyes scanning the horizon of the room and his mouth half a smile. Finally he’d gotten out the best he could: “Right now—until I go back to the lab tomorrow—I am the only person on the planet who knows what I’ve just discovered.” He looked right at her then, and she could tell he wished there were some possible way to transfer what he was feeling to her own experience, because it was going to forever separate them. He was in a time and space that was transforming not just his life’s work, but his whole perspective on the universe and his purpose within it—and he wanted to bring her with him. But that was impossible. Impossible. He took her hands in his own, gripped them right up against his chest. “Not just the only living person, I’m the only person ever. Ever.”