Healer: A Novel

by Carol Cassella

  Jory sits in the backseat plugged into her music and Addison spends the hour-long drive telling Claire about his newest strategy. If none of the bigger pharmaceutical companies will invest, he’ll look for another biotech company working on similar molecules; form a partnership and build a new consortium of private lenders. He drives with his left hand dangled over the top of the steering wheel and sketches numbers out on the dashboard with his right index finger, as if Claire can read the untenable sums he seems convinced are ready and waiting once people understand the potential in vascumab. More and more, she is noticing, he gives her such details only when he doesn’t have to look straight into her eyes.

  After ten miles of it she closes her hand around his outstretched wrist and stops the invisible calculations. “How is this a ‘new strategy’? Aren’t you just trying to convince the same investors to give you a second chance?”

  He glances at Jory in the rearview mirror. “It’s spreading the risk over a larger group. I want to take it bigger—look for some mezzanine lenders.”

  “Some what?” Claire asks, a hot tingle creeping up the back of her neck.

  “Mezzanine. Just like it sounds. Sort of between a bank and a venture capitalist.”

  Claire knots her fists between her knees, thinking that it isn’t faith in vascumab that was damaged when human trials were denied approval—it is faith in Addison, who had taken all the blame as head of the lab. After a minute she says, “You know, I met Ron Walker the other day. He came to the clinic.” Addison keeps his eyes fixed on the pavement. “Why are you so resistant to talking to him?” she asks.

  “Why are you so convinced I should?”

  She gestures at the road with one hand, as if the answer were painted down the middle of the highway. “Maybe because at least some of the profit might end up at Dan’s clinic. Maybe because he’s the only rich person I know who’s still talking to us. What? You don’t want me to have any input on where the money comes from? Like the last time?” Claire sees his cheeks flush and waits for a backlash, but he checks his mirrors and drives on, the small twitch underneath his eye the only sign he’s wounded. She has to swallow hard not to cry—not here, with Jory in the car.

  Inside the vast concrete box of a store, Jory takes off to look at the electronics section and DVDs, forgetting, apparently, that she has come here for shoes. Addison and Claire wander through the kitchen section. Addison stops in front of a combination microwave-convection oven and pops the door open and closed until Claire heads down toward the utensils. Neither of them mentions the matched sets from Williams-Sonoma they had sold in the garage sale. Until the car ride today they’ve avoided any discussions about money during this visit. The debts are still so unfathomable it feels pointless to Claire. What difference would a microwave-convection oven make when one page of disputed data had evaporated seven million dollars? If anything, it felt satisfying to argue about a plastic spatula versus an aluminum one. That’s three dollars they can carry around in their pockets.

  She sees it clearly at this instant—the rush to salvage what was left of their wealth, to save Addison’s magic molecule, has been the perfect excuse not to talk about how it was lost in the first place. And here is the fallout—a marriage crumbling under the weight of silence. They end up abandoning their empty shopping cart and walking down the aisles with no purpose other than distraction.

  Jory is nowhere to be seen. Addison looks in Entertainment while Claire goes toward Shoes. She is starting to comb the dressing rooms when Jory tugs on the strap of her purse. “Come look at this, Mom.”

  “Where’ve you been? The store closes in half an hour.”

  “They never close. I found the most beautiful necklace. Who would have thought—in Walmart.”

  “What happened to tennis shoes?”

  Jory charges off to the jewelry section, which is at least in the direction of Shoes. The clerk smiles when she sees her coming and opens the case, takes out a necklace with a pendant of minuscule diamond chips clustered over a gold-fill heart. Jory holds it around her neck and the clerk angles a large standing mirror toward her.

  “It’s pretty, honey. Very pretty on you. We need to get your shoes.”

  “Mom, it’s only two hundred dollars.”

  Claire nods. “It’s beautiful, Jory. I wish I could buy it for you. We don’t have two hundred dollars for a necklace. Let’s get your shoes. Thank you,” she tells the clerk, and walks away.

  Jory meets them ten minutes later in the shoe department, takes the first pair without so much as a word, and stares out the window on the drive home, her iPod idle in her lap. She disappears upstairs mindful not to stomp, but the small house shakes when she slams her door.

  “Leave it,” Claire says when Addison starts up after her. She puts a pot of water on the stove to boil for pasta and pours two glasses of wine, signals for Addison to come into the kitchen so her voice won’t resonate directly up to Jory’s bedroom. “Does she tell you anything about school? Ever mention any friends? She isn’t even talking about dance lately.”

  Addison pulls a chair in from the dining table and straddles it with his arms crossed over the back, turning his glass so the light glows jewel-red through the wine. Claire remembers a party they’d held one summer on their deck, a wine tasting at which each guest had to describe their mystery vintage in a poem created from a vintner’s list of words. Addison had won hands down, their friends in hysterics over his “luscious, insipid geraniums, flabby but foxy in their noble finish.” It helped that they were on their tenth bottle by the time he read. The kitchen warms and steam fogs the windowpane. Claire dumps a package of tortellini into the water and pulls a second chair in to sit beside him. “The more I’m alone with her the less she talks to me. I hate leaving her here by herself so many evenings.”

  He shifts in his chair, rests his chin on the wooden ladder back. After a moment he turns his head toward her again, with his cheek nested in the crook of his elbow. “Have you told her everything?” He whispers the words, maybe to keep Jory from overhearing, maybe because he doesn’t trust his voice.

  Claire whispers back, “No. Not about Rick’s data. She thinks the study stopped because the lab ran out of money. And I haven’t said anything to her about the personal loans.” She sees the muscle in his cheek twitch. “Addison?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do we need to see a counselor?”

  He hesitates, clears his throat softly before he answers her. “Probably. But I don’t know how we’d pay for one right now.”

  Evelyn Zalaya’s salt-and-pepper hair is pulled back in a thick chignon that would look old-fashioned except for the magnificent silver and turquoise barrette pinning the weighty coil at the nape of her neck. Her earrings match, twisted silver with embedded blue stones. Sculptural art, really. It would seem affected on another woman, Claire thinks, but somehow on Evelyn the unusual pieces look more like a celebration of craft, a complement to the artist more than an adornment. When she opens the front door Addison lags behind on the porch steps; Claire can practically hear him struggling to find his act, remembering to smile a beat too late. She has always been the more social one, floating from group to group in a party, smoothing over gaps in conversations until Addison clicked with someone and ended up in a corner, diving into protein encoding or small molecule arrays or Janis Joplin. But when Claire introduces him, Evelyn ignores Addison’s outstretched hand and gives him the same assured hug she had given Claire, and in that one gesture sweeps away his fear that he will be called upon to justify why he is not supporting his family.

  Assessing the size and quality of the house and furnishings, Claire has to wonder where two doctors have put their incomes. It is modest even by the standards of full-time Hallum residents, little more than a double-wide dressed up with shingles and strips of wood trim. As soon as she breaks from Evelyn’s embrace and looks past her into the main living area Claire sees that they have turned their home into a personal museum of folk art. Brilliantl
y colored textiles woven in playful geometric patterns cover the chairs and throw pillows—huipiles and ponchos and rugs. Paintings hang above the faded red twill sofa and overloaded bookcases, around the bricked-in woodstove, are propped two and three deep against the wall along the floor, as if they’d been bought that very day and await the right mood or the right sunlight to properly set them in the ideal spot. Most depict tropically colorful village or farm scenes painted in the saturated hues of a hot climate, unrelenting sun and humid air intensifying the greens and blues and reds. Jory is immediately drawn to the vivid, miniature worlds and Evelyn points out half-hidden figures—a naked boy being chased by a dog, an old woman bathing in a metal tub.

  Dan stands up from the sofa when they come in, and for the first time Claire sees that he is not actually any taller than Addison; it is the lean, straight lines of his face and torso, the clear definition of his bones showing through his clothing that has made her see him so. She catches the slightest waver in his balance when he holds out his hand to take her husband’s. Addison shakes Dan’s hand tentatively once. Claire feels a sudden catch in her breath at his awkwardness, as if she had blinked and seen the world from inside his wounded ego for an instant. She has told Dan and Evelyn next to nothing about Addison’s lab; only general comments about investigational cancer drugs and the cumbersome necessity to master business skills and salesmanship in order to fund his passion. Dan would pause after any such mention, give her all the chance she needed to tell him more, then head off to see the next waiting patient after an agreeable if indecipherable nod. Moving closer now, she hears him start an easy conversation with Addison about the remarkable trout fishing to be had on the stretch of the river near this house come summer.

  They eat a stew that Evelyn calls Serrano Pork Chili, her own recipe, hot enough to bring tears to Claire’s eyes. Evelyn and Addison eat heartily, unfazed by the peppers. Jory takes one bite and from then on stirs the bowl and brings an empty spoon up to her mouth. Dan hardly touches his own, but when he notices that Claire is washing every bite down with ice water he gets a beer for her. “Water just makes it burn more.” He puts a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream in front of Jory and she pushes the chili aside with a meek “Thank you.”

  “Who’s the art collector?” asks Claire.

  “Evelyn,” Dan answers. “She worked with Doctors Without Borders for a long time, traveled all over. Africa. But Central and South America mostly. I tagged along. She teaches painting up at the town museum now that she’s retired from medicine. Took her seventy-three years to work at her real passion,” Dan says.

  Evelyn adds, “Medicine was a passion, too. A rich life needs more than one passion.”

  Dan stretches his arm across the back of Evelyn’s chair. “Art. Medicine. Last comes me.” He winks when he says this, apparently a running joke between them.

  They must have been a handsome couple, Claire thinks. Both sort of noble, in an unassuming way. Evelyn looks younger than Dan and still has a graceful fluidity about her. They are still handsome together, she amends. “I haven’t ever been to the museum. You’re talking about the one across from the grocery store?”

  “Oh, you must come!” Evelyn claps her hands together, as if the idea of introducing someone to this prize of hers is a present. “You must. All of you. Half the time it goes unstaffed, but if you let me know I’ll take you through. We have drawers full of old photographs. I’ve seen some of your place.”

  “Our house? The Blackstocks’?” Addison asks.

  “You know it was one of the first homesteads around here. There was a log cabin that burned to the ground around 1890, exactly underneath your current house. A lot of that barn is original.”

  “I’d heard about the cabin.” Claire says. “We found a photograph of two children, ‘Robin and Marilyn,’ probably taken in the fifties. I always meant to find them and mail it back.”

  “They were Blackstocks. Those kids died in the polio epidemic just before the vaccine came out.” Claire stops eating with her spoon halfway to her mouth, surprised at the degree of emotion that comes over her, a tinge of shock as if their deaths affected her life in any real way. Evelyn reaches over to pour more beer into Claire’s glass and catches Jory’s sidelong look at her mother. “At least that’s the story people tell.”

  Evelyn goes on. “There’ve been a couple of fires out there—that aspen grove over the rise behind your barn burned about twenty years ago, after a power line blew down. Lot of history out there. Your house used to be the grandest thing around here.” She laughs in a quick burst and adds, “Long before I got to Hallum!”

  “How long have you lived here?” Addison asks.

  “Forty-eight years, if you count from the time we moved.” She puts her hand over Dan’s. “But only about twenty-five if you subtract our travels.”

  Claire and Addison and Jory had traveled a lot as well. Every year until this one they had taken some trip—England or Hawaii or the Bahamas. Claire is about to bring up the museums they visited in London two Christmases ago, but the grand galleries and halls seem banal to her at this moment, surrounded by these meticulously painted scenes and the photographs of Dan and Evelyn in front of squat, windowless cement blocks with red crosses painted over the doors, lines of children waiting to be weighed and immunized.

  Evelyn begins picking up dishes from the table. Claire and Addison get up to help but Evelyn shoos Claire back to her chair. “Keep Dan company. He needs it. Jory can scoop ice cream and tell me something about dance.”

  A portable CD player on the bookshelf plays Spanish-language folk songs, a guitarist and female vocalist, words that Claire only intermittently understands: “If you were looking, if you dreamt of freedom,…” something else she can’t translate. She sits on the sofa, one leg crossed underneath her and her arms splayed out along the back, feeling the muscles in her shoulders and neck ease. The smell of woodsmoke and garlic and yeasty bread, the deep sagging seat cushion, the music—all of it blends, calms, like someone stroking her hair or rubbing her feet. Dan rocks back in his chair and presses a hand over his abdomen.

  “You didn’t eat much. Frida says you’re losing weight,” Claire says.

  He smiles and adjusts himself in his chair, resting his hands on his knees. “Evelyn’s peppers. She’s burned off all her tastebuds. Steven Perry says he wants to take out my gallbladder—must need a new fly rod. I’ll tell you if you need to worry.” Then he gives her that look she has grown to enjoy, like he is keeping some secret wrapped up in tissue paper and ribbons, ready to offer it at precisely the right moment. “Thanks for not quitting yet.”

  “Well. Thanks for not firing me. Yet!”

  “Do you ever think about going back to finish your residency? Taking your boards?”

  Claire rakes her hair back from her face, gives herself a moment to answer this. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s been so many years. I can’t even imagine it right now. I’m still just trying not to drown. Or hurt somebody.” She rolls her eyes when she says it, proving it is at least half a joke.

  Dan laces his fingers together on the table; Claire can see the stiffening in his hands, the swelling of his knuckles. “Hell. I shouldn’t even bring it up. Take your boards and somebody else’ll hire you away.”

  She sits up, remembering Rubén Aguilar. “I meant to ask you—I got some abnormal labs back on a patient I saw a few weeks ago and I can’t track him down.”

  “What labs?” he asks.

  “His liver enzymes were high. I want to get a hepatitis screen, but he didn’t come back for follow up. It’s Rubén Aguilar.” She pauses for a moment, looking for recognition in Dan’s face. “Well. I don’t think you ever saw him. Anyway, I drove out to his orchard, but he’d moved. Could it be pesticides?”

  “Early for that. We don’t usually see much pesticide exposure till later in the summer. Which orchard?”

  “Johnson’s—a small place, way east of the highway. But they told me he’d moved to Walker’s, and then
somebody at Walker’s, another worker, said he’d moved to Wenatchee, and that turned out to be a dead end.”

  “Nobody in Walker’s office knew where he’d gone?”

  Claire shakes her head. Then she scoots closer to the table and leans forward, lowering her voice. “But speaking of Walker, do you have a phone number for him?”

  Dan seems to consider Claire’s question before he answers. “Walker’s not likely to know any of his workers. Kind of stands back from the day-to-day in his businesses. The Money God, if you will.”

  She smiles at his assumption. “No, no—I wasn’t going to ask him about Rubén. I want Addison to talk to him. About a business deal.”

  As if he had been listening for his name, Addison steps out of the kitchen and Claire sees the change on her own face register in Dan’s expression, a mix of empathy and angst, and… something else. A memory, maybe. He has had almost twice her years to collect them. Three times her years living a marriage.

  Addison has a soaking-wet, hot-pink apron tied around his neck, and his hands are gloved in suds. It would be funny but for the expression of betrayal on his face. It makes her want to turn away—not with shame for anything she’s said, but because it is so clear that her husband is prepared for her betrayal, is only waiting for a hint of proof as minor as this mention of his name with Walker’s.

  • 20 •

  On the drive home Claire can practically feel Jory’s eyes moving from one parent to the other, waiting for someone to break the tension. It was only a few months ago that a moment like this would have ended with one of them erupting in laughter, teasing the other out of the mood, letting Jory witness one way to resolve an adult argument. Claire turns away from the prejudiced set of Addison’s jaw to watch the night landscape pass by her window, feeling the interior of the car close in around her, silently shouting her side of the fight they can’t have. The worst of it is that tonight she was genuinely trying to help. It was his pride that was making him twist it all against her, his assumption that she is trying to manage his business.