Addison puts the box back on the shelf, nudges the corner into perfect alignment with the row so it looks untouched. “I couldn’t even get an appointment.” He puts his hands in his pockets and scans the racks and cabinets filled with drugs. “It’ll happen someday. Vascumab, or its twin, will get approved. Maybe not by me… but it’s too close to perfect.” Now he turns and looks at her, matter-of-fact about the whole enormous issue. “I’m not talking about profitability, you know. Should start a clock—count how many colon cancer patients go down before it finally gets to market.” Claire nods. He had done that with Eugena. He had actually had a clock custom made with annual deaths from ovarian cancer, the twelve o’clock position ready to designate the first day Ovascreen was made cheap and easily available.
He breaks out of the mood and nods toward the exam rooms. “What’s down there?”
Claire takes his hand. She turns on a light in the first empty exam room and gives him another tour of the modest supplies and equipment, like a new mother showing off her baby’s room. “Take off your jacket. I’ll check your blood pressure. Free.”
“I can check it free at the drugstore.”
“Yeah, but you won’t. When did you last have a physical exam, anyway?” She wraps the black sleeve around his arm and twists the valve shut, puts her stethoscope in her ears and watches the dial while she slowly releases the pressure. The needle arcs smoothly around the perimeter until it hits 140 and then it makes a tiny jump every time his heart beats. She looks at his face and listens as the thudding dies away to silence. “Addison. You’re hypertensive. Did you know that?”
He pulls the bell away from his arm and whispers into it, jocular again. “Since I saw you wearing that white coat.”
“Seriously.” She loops the stethoscope around her neck and unzips the Velcro wrap around his arm. “I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but if you were my patient I’d be on you for this.” She flicks her middle finger over his belt line. “Do you always have to go out for steaks and martinis after these meetings?”
“The size of the investment correlates with the size of the fillet. And the size of the olives. It’s a proven statistic—Harvard Business School did a study on it. I heard sex brings down blood pressure.” Even as he says it he blushes, remembering their passionless night in bed. Sunlight streams through the small window facing him. In the full white light his face is ageless, as if he has all the time in the world to remake himself. Contrary to Claire’s first impression when she met him nineteen years ago, she knows he has been aging well—despite the gentle decomposition of his body over these last stressful months. His hairline, which had begun receding at the age of twenty, has arrested itself in a pleasant lolling W, exposing pale swatches on the crests of his brow; fine blue veins serpentine along his temples, maybe flowing right this minute with the effluvia from some neuronal tempest that might, just might, lead to the next cancer-curing miracle. If he had money to back it.
“I can get you a new microscope. Newer than the one you’ve got, at least,” he says. A cloud slides across the sun, and the lines around his eyes and mouth stand out again. He brushes a strand of hair off her face and his fingers linger along her cheek. “You’re doing something good here, Claire.”
By the time they sit down in The Rattler, a café that converts to a cowboy bar at night, they are both peeling off layers of clothing, the day making good on its hint of spring. Addison’s hair stands straight out after he plucks off his cap. Claire reaches across the tabletop to smooth it down. They order coffee, which comes in thick white mugs stained and chipped in a timeless, comforting way.
The waitress comes over to get their orders and they each pick up the menu for the first time. Addison asks the waitress how the cheeseburger is, whether he can add grilled onions and how much extra that will cost. She doesn’t answer immediately and he says, “Well, if the raw onions add on fifty cents…”
“Seventy-five,” she answers.
“Okay. Seventy-five, and it takes a tablespoon or two of oil, that’s about a nickel, and four or five minutes to cook them—how much does your cook get?” She pointedly looks at the full tables waiting for her and shrugs. “Well, for sure more than you, right? Let’s say twelve an hour and a share of tips, so…” He takes the pencil out of her hand and scratches a number on his napkin. “So say a dollar twenty—let’s be generous—a dollar twenty-five. Plus seventy-five plus a nickel. We could add something for cleaning the pan, but if he’s cooking on a flat grill the cleaning really shouldn’t count, do you think? So, Two oh five. For grilled onions. Tell you what. I’ll have a plain cheeseburger with relish. Claire?”
Claire sets her coffee mug on the oilclothed table and stares at her husband for a minute. Then she looks up at the humorless waitress and smiles. “Toast, please.” As soon as the waitress walks off Claire kicks Addison’s shin under the table. “She could be a patient of mine, Addison. Please. I live here now.” The smile slides off his face. Claire drops her head back, grips the edge of the tabletop so hard her fingers blanch. “We. We live here now. For now.” He pulls his hands closer to himself, as if he might stand up and walk out. She starts to reach for him—an automatic urge to make peace; instead she crosses her arms and leans across the stretch of checkered cloth to tell him in a constricted voice, “I didn’t mean it that way. You know that!”
They don’t say much for the rest of the short meal, though she can see the gradual turning in his eyes from defensive anger to regret. She listens while he talks about Jory’s school, and the car, and her mother; listens for the light of him to come back for her, unwilling to tell him she needs it, wondering if they should have a little clock made for this, to measure out the time it takes each small battle to end, to watch it lengthen. They would need two clocks, though, she thinks, “His” and “Hers,” before they might know for certain who is moving toward and who away.
Addison leaves the waitress an embarrassingly large tip. On the walk back to the car they stop in front of a local art gallery, pottery and handblown globes and clay speckled with bubbles and bumps. A pair of earrings catches her eye, deep blue glass beads with a gold wave twisting down the center—a bright fish in a frozen sea. “I wonder how they get that gold inside the glass?”
He leans closer to the window. “Pretty. They’d be pretty on you, with your eyes. You want to see how much?”
A cloud covers the sun and Claire wraps her arms tight around herself, feeling cold again. “I don’t need them.” She moves down a few feet and examines some pitchers and bowls. “Kind of funny how people pay more for all the mistakes when something’s made by hand,” she says.
“What?” Addison sounds more distracted than actually confused.
“Well, I mean, if a bowl or a vase is machine made we want it to be perfect. No flaws. But if it’s made by hand…”
“I love you, Claire. You know that.”
Claire shudders briefly, fixes her gaze on a paper cup spinning in a gust of wind behind Addison’s feet. “Yes. I know.”
“And all of this”—he gestures around himself, around both of them, without looking at anything, not even Claire, taking in the melting piles of muddy snow, the broken curb, the wind, the cup—“All of this is…” He stands still and his hands drop to his sides. He looks into Claire’s face and lets his eyes trace the curve of her jaw, the arch of her cheek. “I don’t know why I lied to you.” His voice is utterly plaintive—even if she didn’t understand the words, she would hurt for him.
“It wasn’t a lie, Addison. Not to me, at least. You hid things. All right. But you never…”
“It was a lie of omission. It was still a lie.”
Claire tries to find an answer, something she can say that will take the pain out of his eyes. But then she sees that he isn’t waiting for anything from her—he would be more wounded by any palliative assurance. He just needed to say it.
She glances at her watch. “I have to get back. Anita probably opened up again. What should I
pick up for dinner?”
“I’ll make dinner,” Addison says, taking her hand and walking toward the car. “I’m in the mood for grilled onions.”
She finds two notes taped to the door when she gets back: one for her, telling her to have a nice afternoon and get out of here; the other for any patients who might show up without an appointment, giving them directions to the hospital and instructions for 911.
Claire takes the address out of her purse, unfolds the paper and hunts for the street name on the map she keeps in her car. Her patient lives at one of the smaller orchards, twenty miles or more west of town. His chart didn’t list any cell phone number, and calling the orchard office would necessitate giving the patient’s name to whomever answered the phone, making a public link between him and this clinic. So instead she puts more gas in her car and drives.
The fields are still dormant under thinning snow. But there is movement now, a rousing of the earth almost invisible in the still gray and white landscape. Flocks of phoebe and towhee and dove pushing the cold ahead of them. The river teasing back what it had relinquished, pushing, scouring through ice. Even half aware of it, Claire feels the power, like a surge, a resurrection.
She looks at the paper again and turns off the highway up a muddy road to a few dozen acres of bare, espaliered apple trees. There is a ranch-style, wood-sided house that appears to be the office, and behind it are two long aluminum box trailers that must house the workers. She hesitates for a minute, feeling more comfortable knocking at the house, but more certain she could confidentially find her patient in one of the trailers. After she parks, she can tell the closest is uninhabited, its door torn away and the roof caved in from snow. But the second has a light on, and as she approaches she can hear Mexican music.
The man who answers looks at her suspiciously, first glancing past her to scan the yard. He relaxes when she tells him she’s come to find someone else. Señor Rubén Aguilar. ¿ Lo conoce?”
He opens the door wider and stands on the folding metal stair, starts a flurry of Spanish and gestures out across the fields, squinting into the setting sun. Claire finally puts her hand up to stop him, a gesture she is used to now. “No comprendo! Más despacio, por favor!”
He nods sympathetically and starts to talk louder, as if she were deaf. But she is able to grasp that Rubén has moved on to another orchard. Walker’s. She thanks him and starts the thirty-mile drive all the way across the valley, wishing she’d just started at Walker’s in the first place. Even if it wasn’t Rubén’s given address, Walker’s employed so many people someone would have known his whereabouts.
She is discovering that the entire migrant community shifts shapes and places—like holographic figures, more or less solid depending on how visible Immigration patrol is that month, or how desperately they are needed back home, or how much money has been paid or held back by employers who have skirted H-2A and are governed by no code more rigorous than their own conscience. It is especially true of the women, who can become as untraceable as this morning’s mist. They dissolve across borders on the heels of husbands and boyfriends to take leftover jobs, or care for babies in tents and discarded trailers. And when they leave, it might well be alone, without the man or child that made them risk everything in the first place.
The only time she has driven all the way up the private road to Walker’s was when she dropped Miguela off, well after dark. Like many big orchards in the area, Walker’s offices are lodged in what used to be the original landowner’s home, built before agriculture became so corporatized, probably before this land was even cultivated. This home is a rare find in the valley, built of large granite stones with a chimney on either end; rough wood windows set deep into the walls—larger than the windows in other houses built around the same time, as if the owners had valued light more than insulation. At the east end a set of French doors opens onto a tiled patio nested under an arbor of dead vines. She can see why Walker bought it. It is seductively romantic, even if the business never earns a cent.
A carpenter is cutting planks across the backs of two stout sawhorses in the yard. Men walk in twos and threes up from the orchard, carrying trimmers and ladders. The sun cuts low over the tops of the trees, breaking beneath the visor rim so that Claire is momentarily blinded. She pushes herself higher in the seat and scans the yard, the cabins, the orchard, the faces of the Latino men who propagate this white man’s enterprise. No one looks familiar. Scents of sawdust and burning applewood come to her as soon as she gets out of her car.
She almost expects Ron Walker or his wife to open the front door when she knocks, greet her with an invitation to dinner—the place has such a look of home. But a minute or so after she rings she is ushered into a rather bland, purely functional office by the foreman, offered a seat in a folding metal chair beside his desk. He is a politely busy man, and hesitates for only a moment when Claire says she is looking for Señor Aguilar on a personal matter. He has her write the name down and carries it over to a bank of scarred metal filing cabinets pushed against a lovely stone wall, the keystone of an arched fireplace barely showing behind them. While the foreman looks through the drawers Claire studies the room, imagining how she would pull it together if it were her home, wishing she could see the whole house before she leaves. He pulls a file out and turns toward her, skimming the first few pages. Claire is already on her feet when he shakes his head. “I’m sorry. We don’t have him listed as ever working here. Is it important?”
“Oh. That’s not him, then?” Claire says, pointing at the file.
“Lot of Aguilars. Garcias, Mendezes. … Lot of workers over a lot of years.”
“Well, this would have been just a few weeks ago.”
The foreman flares his empty hand open, a magician proving his innocence. “Wish I could help. Lot of ’em go south for strawberries and asparagus before coming back up with the cherries. You could check back in May or so.”
It will be a matter of waiting, then. Hoping that the inflammation in Rubén Aguilar’s liver is spurious, something that will either resolve on its own or cause him enough symptoms, early enough, to force him back to her or some other willing doctor before the organ fails.
The boxy white clapboard pickers’ cabins appear mostly empty, probably won’t fill until the real work on next fall’s crop begins in a month or so. She drives past them slowly, scanning the narrow passageways and yard for Miguela. Near the bottom of the road a young man, about the same build and age as Rubén, is clearing out a blocked trench that’s damming the snowmelt into a muddy pool, hacking at the rocks and roots so hard he has taken off all but his undershirt and splattered jeans. Claire stops to wait for a passing truck and decides to make one last try, if only to ease her conscience. She rolls down the window and calls to the man, “Discúlpeme. ¿Conoce Rubén Aguilar?” He looks up, then glances over his shoulder—like they all do, she thinks. All of them waiting for deportation. He walks nearer, wiping the sweat off his forehead so it leaves a dirty streak. His pickax is slung loose in one hand; it is thickly calloused—she can see the cracked lines of dirt even from her car.
“Rubén Aguilar,” Claire pronounces it for him again, ready to turn onto the highway as soon as he shakes his head. He looks like he wants to answer her, wavering. “Soy la doctora de la clínica,” she adds, and this time she is rewarded with a wide smile.
“Ah, sí, sí, Señora. Es mi amigo, pero él no vive aquí ahora. Ya regresó a la casa en Wenatchee.”
Claire puts the car into park and gets out the paper with Rubén’s name. “What house in Wenatchee? Do you know his address?”
“Sólo teléfono.” He lets the pickax fall to the ground and digs deep into his pocket for a cell phone, punches in some letters and lets Claire copy the number off the screen. She reaches through the window and shakes his hand, feeling illogically ebullient, in a way, as if she had cured Rubén Aguilar herself. But it’s not completely unreasonable to feel relieved, she decides on the drive home. If he were getting sic
ker his friend would probably have said something about it. And the best medical care around here is in Wenatchee.
Unless he went there because he was getting worse, she thinks, slowing the car down. She pulls into a riverside park and gropes for her phone, practicing the Spanish words that might explain why he needs to see a doctor. She punches Rubén’s name and number into her growing list of patients. But a woman’s polished voice answers with the name of some company. Claire apologizes and hangs up, checks the number again and reenters it more slowly. This time when the same voice answers she at least asks for Mr. Aguilar, thinking maybe he is working in a Wenatchee business office now—as if the receptionist is likely to know the name of an undocumented immigrant who cleans the bathrooms or weeds the gardens.
Claire is almost curt when she thanks the woman and hangs up, frustrated at losing her patient so late in the chase. Frustrated with the wasted evening. Despite it all, she drives back to Walker’s and looks for the worker who’d been friends with Rubén, drives all the way up to the deserted, locked offices, the empty cabin yards, before she gives up and goes home.
• 19 •
Sunday morning Addison brings her coffee in bed. Claire, soft and swollen with sleep, props herself up against the headboard. As soon as she takes the cup he holds up a bowl of sugar and she scoops out two spoonfuls, then a third, stirs the coffee and licks the spoon. “Bad new habit,” she says, hunching back against the pillows.
“Vices are endearing. Handy it’s a cheap one,” he answers. “Jory’s saying she needs new tennis shoes and I just melted the pancake flipper thing. I thought we’d drive over to Walmart later today. Want to come?”
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