Healer: A Novel

by Carol Cassella

  She remembers it all now, every detail of that night that she’d almost forgotten. The way he smelled like the rain, the blue light from the clock washing over his face in the dark room, the give of the bed as he lay her down, Jory now soundly sleeping. He turned the words he couldn’t find into his body, moving and seeking and wanting and probing and penetrating in a way his mind would never be able to—the closest they could be.

  They had made a baby that night, the first in a series of incomplete fusings of body and soul. She didn’t know, when she lost that accidental life, that every future conscious, desperate try would fail, too; and so when the spotting had started, the cramping taken hold, she had cried, but not with the yawning despair that would come with the others. Every pregnancy that followed Jory was a celebration, even after they both learned they should protect their hearts. And every loss broke them wide open with grief. When Claire couldn’t bear it anymore she’d had her tubes tied. But almost as hard as giving up her own hope was the fear that she had failed him somehow, that her uterus was too weak to create the family he wanted so badly. It was years before she realized her loss mattered more to him than his own.

  She starts to cry with the memory of it—for the part of Addison she will never be able to know, and for the children that never got to breathe, and even for the fact that her body could not accomplish that miracle anymore.

  His discovery in the lab that night had culminated in Eugena, and within a decade Eugena would most likely save a thousand lives. More.

  The only light downstairs comes from the computer screen; the illuminated clutter and lingering odors give Claire a good guess about Addison and Jory’s evening: the damp floor below their dripping coats and the piles of snowballs mounded in pyramids just beyond the porch, the monstrous box of CDs from Addison’s car next to Jory’s iPod, the smell of brownies. They have left one for her, neatly wrapped in plastic on a saucer—the only tidy thing in the house. She is at least appeased by their graciously sparing her a corner piece, and she could entertain herself believing they had left the pan out on the counter only so that she could scrape up the hard crumbs she is fond of. She fills it with hot water to soak and walks around the couch to turn off the computer.

  “Hey. Have fun?” Addison rubs his hand over his face and props himself up on an elbow.

  “Couldn’t get her to give up the bed, huh?” Claire asks, sitting on the edge of the cushions.

  “Not worth the struggle. The movers called. They’ll be here day after tomorrow.”

  Claire nods. “The day you leave.”

  He is awake now; sitting up in his boxer shorts, he pulls the down throw around his bare shoulders. “I have to leave tomorrow. Early.”

  “You’re kidding. What changed?”

  “One of the people I want to meet with can only see me tomorrow afternoon.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a while, both of them sitting side by side listening to the wind shake snow from the trees. Finally: “We haven’t talked about much.”

  “Well, I guess nothing has really changed.”

  “Yeah,” Claire answers wistfully, thinking that the problem was really that everything had changed, and that was more impossible to talk about than nothing. “Is this guy very promising, do you think?” Addison does a little dance with his shoulders, which tells her as much as she wants to know about it.

  “Addison, do you remember Ron Walker? He hosted the fund-raiser we went to at the Fairmont a few years ago. Where we bought the Galapagos trip. He’s one of Dan’s main backers.”

  “Really?” He shimmies his legs behind her to lie down again, pulling the comforter over his chest and wedging his pillow under his arm so he still looks half engaged with the conversation. His hair is spiked up at the crown of his head like a Steller’s jay’s crest; Claire licks her fingers and twists it down into a deep black widow’s peak, laughing softly at the effect.

  “I think you should talk to him,” she says.

  Addison shrugs. “I’m happy to talk to him. About what?”

  “About money. Investing. What else?” She catches his mildly defensive look and picks up his hand. “He’s a venture capitalist, Addison. Lots of biotech, among other things. He might be really interested in vascumab, especially now that I’m connected with the clinic—meaning you’re connected with the clinic.”

  He takes his hand out of hers and sweeps his hair back off his forehead. “Claire, I can’t just call him up out of the blue and…”

  “It’s not out of the blue. You’ve met him. I work at the clinic he sponsors. Isn’t it worth a try?”

  “Honey, I know it sounds simple, but I don’t think you really understand how the business end of all this works.”

  Claire stands up, her voice clipped. “And you’re implying you do?” She slaps both hands over her eyes and spins around once. “Okay.” Her hands drop to her sides. “I am not going to do this. Look, I have to go to bed.” She leans over and kisses him, hard and sure. “Wake me up before you leave. Drive safe.”

  “Claire,” he calls after her as she heads upstairs. “Claire! At least listen to the good news.”

  She turns around with her hand on the banister and looks down at him, “Okay. What’s the good news?”

  “I got Jory enrolled in school. She’s starting tomorrow. You’ll need to drop her off at eight.”

  Claire feels her body relax, part of her brittle anger giving way. She whispers now, knowing Jory is just behind the bedroom door. “You got her to go? How?”

  He lies back down and rolls onto his side. “Bribery. I got her a cell phone.”

  He does not wake her before he leaves, or if he has knelt at the side of her sleeping body and tried to kiss her awake, the thorny fortress held fast around her. When her alarm goes off she looks down the stairs at the empty couch, and then out the window where his car has left skidding tracks in the snow. But in the bathroom she finds a sticky note curling up from the mirror, printed in the childlike, blocky letters he’s always preferred to script:

  I’M SORRY

  I LOVE YOU

  She peels it off and reads it again, wondering if the forgotten period was completely unintentional.

  If Jory is angry about school—or terrified, or excited—she isn’t giving Claire a hint. She sits as far toward the passenger door as possible and opens it before the car is fully stopped, stepping into the stream of students wearing her UGGs and skinny jeans like she’s been part of their circle since first grade. It is the fact that she will not meet Claire’s eyes even when she turns to say good-bye that confirms she is scary-close to tears. It’s all Claire can do not to call after her, deciding, after a wrenching flashback on her own high school experience, that the kindest thing to do is drive away.

  A few snowflakes spiral onto the windshield. Claire looks up the number for the man who plows their drive and punches it in. “Hi, this is Claire Boehning, out on Northridge Road. A moving truck is coming to our house tomorrow with a load of furniture and I just want to be sure we can have the road plowed early if it snows tonight.” She squints out at the sky, swollen white and still. “I heard we could get a foot or more, any update on that?”

  There is a pause on the other end of the line. Then: “I apologize for this, Mrs. Boehning, but we need another check from you before we can come out.”

  “Can’t you just send the bill after, like always?”

  “Well…” He clears his throat. “Your last check to us didn’t go through.”

  Claire pulls off the road and slides to a stop. “Didn’t go through? Our check bounced?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, can you take a credit card number over the phone?”

  She hears him chuckle. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t have a credit card machine. Basically run this operation out of my house.”

  She stumbles for a reasonable excuse, assuring him she’ll pay any bank fee and interest. Then she calls the moving company. They tell her if they don’t deliver
tomorrow they will not come for at least ten days. Last, she dials Addison’s cell phone but hangs up before he answers. When “Layla” hums on the car seat next to her, she ignores it.

  • 14 •

  Most of her patients are women. At first Claire presumes this just reflects the clinic’s population, and it’s true that more women seek out medical care, or carry sick babies and toddlers in by bus or on foot while their men stay in the orchards and canneries. But after the first few weeks she starts to get it: the men would rather wait for Dan than see her. They catch Dan’s eye when he passes through the waiting room, raise their hats and graciously offer their position in line to the female in the adjacent chair when Claire calls out for the next patient. Thus her swelling Spanish vocabulary grows with a feminine shape, plush with words of reproduction and cyclic rhythms, punctured with the language of domestic strife and subservience.

  Often the first five minutes of each visit dispenses with the reported complaint on the intake form, and the next half hour is spent teasing out the irritating boyfriend from the abuser, the discontented adolescent from the dangerously depressed, the voluntary undocumented worker from the enslaved. The stories they are slowest to tell are the hardest to hear; the men tell them through scars—machete wounds and bullet fragments and calcified fractures on X-rays. But the women’s stories are often invisible—pelvic pain with no organic cause, too many pregnancies for so few surviving children, personal questions hastily diverted and difficult subjects changed.

  Patients’ charts are now stacked a foot deep on her desk, most of them labeled with Spanish surnames Claire’s accent still cuts sharp corners into, the graceful curls of Ulribe and Flores, Aranda and Osario. She keeps a sheet of notebook paper folded inside the dictionary Frida gave her, jots down unusual words, some because they are hard to remember and some simply because they are beautiful to her: alborozar, pensamiento, incertidumbre.

  Dan, Frida and Anita try to shunt the most straightforward complaints and the best English speakers to Claire, but she still slows the day down. She has to ask Dan for help with any specialist referral—she doesn’t know any of the orthopedists or ophthalmologists or general surgeons in the valley. A list of county doctors is pinned to the bulletin board above her desk, but there is an unwritten code of pleading and negotiating to win the few slots they can afford to donate. She has to catch Dan between his own patients to help her sort through the pills and potions brought up from Mexico or Honduras or Guatemala, purchased in tiendas or farmacias on the advice of lay healers and grandmothers. Often they are drugs no one’s used in the United States for a decade or more. Her patients come from a place where doctors are rare and illness is common, where purified and illicit drugs alike pass through poorly regulated channels, and cures might be sought in the roots of plants or the bark of trees, the dung of cows or the fangs of snakes.

  By six o’clock she has seen twelve patients and Dan has seen twenty-two. Frida is already standing by the back door with her coat on. Dan comes out of the last patient’s room and disappears into the storage closet, emerges a few minutes later with two pairs of metal forearm crutches in different heights. He sees Claire and asks her to follow him.

  Jorge Iglesia, a man of twenty or so, is sitting in the chair. He stands when Claire comes into the room, gripping the side of the exam table to pull himself upright. His left leg stops just below the knee. Dan has him try out the crutches and adjusts the height of the pair with the closest fit. He introduces Claire as “the new lady doctor” and asks the man to show her his shoulders. Jorge unbuttons his shirt with an embarrassed smile and turns around, rotates both arms in front of him and then extends them fully out to each side, tensing the muscles in his back. His left scapula flares away from the spine like a broken wing.

  Dan thanks him and hands him his shirt. “What’s your diagnosis, Dr. Boehning?”

  “It’s a winged scapula,” Claire answers. “Isn’t it?”

  “Remember the cause?”

  She cocks her head for a minute. “He’s damaged his long thoracic nerve. The crutches, probably.”

  Dan smiles like he’s been teasing her with this spontaneous quiz, but she also spots, maybe, a hint of pride in the set of his mouth. It passes quickly enough but suddenly she feels a little less overwhelmed.

  Dan picks up a worn-out pair of crude wooden crutches from the floor. “He found these at a Salvation Army store but never got them fitted right.”

  After Jorge leaves Claire asks Dan how he lost his leg.

  “Tried to jump a train coming up through Nogales and fell under the wheels. A Border Angel found him and took him to a hospital.”

  Claire is speechless for a moment. “Someone found him in the middle of the desert before he died? That’s incredible. What are the odds on that?”

  Dan nods and studies the toe of his boot. “Yeah. Lucky. Not too likely to find work here as an amputee, so he’ll be back in Mexico soon. But he’s not too likely to find work there, either.” After a solemn pause he looks at Claire and shrugs his shoulders.

  As much as Claire had resisted letting Jory get a cell phone, she’s called her on it six times in the last two days. Yesterday, Jory’s first day of school, Claire left work early to be there when the students were let out. But it’s clear that is an impossible daily commitment, and equally clear that Jory would walk home through a blizzard before she would take the school bus. Today, they struck a deal. Jory would walk into Hallum and do her homework at the bakery until Claire could pick her up, though when Claire looks at her watch and the pile of work on her desk it’s clearly magical thinking to say she can be at the bakery before it closes. She calls Jory again.

  “Hey, sweetie, how did it go?” She inflects her voice with all the time in the world, as if her whole day has been on pause until she returned to motherhood.

  There is a moment of empty space before Jory says, “Hmm. Okay.” Claire listens hard to those three syllables, cupping the receiver against her ear with the palm of her hand wishing some trapped echo might tell her what Jory means.

  “Well, that’s great! Second day! It’ll get easier and easier after this.” Jory is stone silent now, leaving Claire’s upbeat words bouncing alone between Hallum and some orbiting satellite. She tones it down. “I’m running a little late. How about you walk over to the grocery store and pick out something you want for dinner. I’ll call and give them a credit card number.”

  “It’s dark.”

  “Honey, the store is just across the street. I’ll be there in half an hour. Buy a treat for yourself, too.” Little more than breath comes back to Claire through the phone. “Please?” She hears Jory mumble something. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Promise.”

  She makes notes on her last two patients but accomplishes little else, pushing her chair away from the desk to survey the chaos. Dan and Frida seem to thrive on it—or at least stay unflustered. Dan runs the clinic no differently than medicine functioned when he was in his own residency—handwriting all the notes, the only computer so old it chews up more time than it saves. She pulls open a filing drawer and flips through journal articles and pharmaceutical brochures that are so out-of-date they are useless, if not dangerous. Whoever replaces her here, once Addison is back at work, should have a talent for organizing as much as for healing. Maybe that is the gift she can leave them—hire some young doctor who’s energetic and fresh, who speaks Spanish and knows how to set up computer transcription and spreadsheets. One who can live on a shoestring. And is board certified.

  She flicks off the overhead light and is zipping her coat when she hears a knock on the gate between the hallway and waiting room. Anita, probably, though the bigger she grows the more often she leaves on time, and more than once has scolded Claire (at least it felt like a scolding) that she’ll be no good to anyone, in the clinic or at her own house, if she burns out quick as a match.

  But it is not Anita. It’s a patient. With a surge of both sympathy and impatience Claire imagines askin
g someone who’s already waited this long to go home, imagines Jory watching the grocery’s door for her rescue. As soon as the gate swings shut, though, she recognizes the petite shape in the nylon ski cap and the jacket that Addison wore to Huskies football games twenty years ago.

  “Hello! Buenas noches! ¿Su amiga está aquí, tambien?” Claire looks around the room for the girl who had been with her at the last visit.

  “No. Ella esta mejor ahora. Better now. I speak some English, okay?”

  “Of course. I’m sorry. I can’t remember your name?” Claire raises her tone at the end of the sentence, a question of translation more than content.

  “Miguela Ruiz.”

  “Ruiz. Miguela.” Claire’s repetition overlaps Miguela’s introduction, making them both laugh, making it a little easier to stand in this empty building, in this half-lit room.

  Miguela lifts her hand in a gesture toward Claire’s coat. “You are going home?”

  “Well”—Claire glances over her shoulder at the dark hallway leading to the exam rooms—“we’re closed. Cerrado.”

  “Cerrrrrrrado.” Miguela moves her tongue exaggeratedly against her front teeth, clarifying the sound that has no equal in English. Then she smiles, her lovely brows lifting.

  “I can’t examine you now, with no one else here, but if there is a problem…” Claire sees a puzzled look flicker across Miguela’s face and repeats it all slowly.