“Nobody waiting at home. Nobody at all.”
They find a table in the corner at the same dark bar they’d shared a beer just a few weeks or so after Claire had started at the clinic. This time, though, Claire recognizes some of the faces at the tables. The waitress, Vicki, has a daughter in a dance class with Jory; she drops the menus on the table and sits down for a minute, asking Claire about a popping sensation her daughter gets in her knee every time the teacher has them do a specific kind of turn, which neither Claire nor Vicki can remember the name for.
“Jory’s making friends, finally,” Frida says after Vicki leaves.
“She is. A couple of girls from dance.”
“That’s critical—especially being an only child. Means you drive about a hundred miles a day, everything’s so far away. But kids out here who don’t stay busy get in trouble.”
“I see one boy showing up on her Facebook page pretty often. Not so wild about that.”
“Who?”
“Zach somebody. Mentions baseball a lot.”
Frida nods. “Zach Avery. He’s okay. His dad owns the bakery.”
“How do you know that?”
Frida shrugs and leans away from the table when Vicki brings over a beer for Frida and a glass of wine for Claire. “If you weren’t moving back to Seattle, you’d know everybody, too, in a couple of years. At least by name.”
Claire squints at the menu in her hand, discomfited that Frida would address such a flammable topic so obliquely. “So that’s what you’ve heard?”
“I didn’t hear a thing. You come back from your weekend in Seattle all buzzin’ and chirpy and now these last few days you’ve been so preoccupied I figured you’d won the lottery and decided not to share it.” She scans the menu, tipping back in her chair for all the world like she is talking about what flavor cake they should order for Anita’s baby’s christening party.
Claire lets her own menu fall flat on the tabletop. “You’re kidding. You guessed all this?”
“You’re not as subtle as you think.” Frida takes three consecutive swallows of her beer and wipes her mouth on her napkin, rests her forearms against the edge of the table. “And then there were those Seattle Windermere and Coldwell-Banker ads that kept showin’ up on your desk.” She drums her fingers on the varnished wood tabletop and regards Claire with a taunting smile. The waitress comes back just at that moment with a plastic basket bulging with curly fries dusted in an inorganic hue of barbecue-orange.
“I’m sorry,” Claire says, genuinely contrite now. “So you’ve been working with me for the last month waiting to hear I’m quitting.”
“Not at all. I’ve been waiting to hear you’re quitting since you started, six months ago.”
“Frida, does being so damn blunt about everything always work for you?”
“Sure separates my friends from the pretenders.”
Claire stares at her for a moment until Frida bursts out laughing; a spray of orange fries lands in the middle of the table and she slaps a hand across her mouth, laughing even harder.
“Yeah, well, I guess you could separate them by spitting on them, too.” Claire drapes a paper napkin over the flecks and plants the basket of fries on top. “I probably deserved that, anyway. So how do you know I haven’t just been protecting you from my own horrific dilemmas until I have them sorted out?”
Frida laughs again. “I don’t need all your pretty manners. You know me better by now.”
“I stopped showing you any manners the day Dan left. But okay. Here’s the thing.” Claire picks up a tightly wound coil of fried potato and pulls one end until it breaks in the middle. “Addison’s in Seattle. He’s been in negotiations with an investor about his drug.” It makes her uncomfortable to refer to the man who has funded both their salaries so anonymously, but for once Frida’s perceptive ability to slice through bullshit doesn’t seem to pick up on it.
“So he’s already gotten that far?”
“Well. There’s a chance he’ll be backing out of it. It’s gotten complicated.” She pops half the fry into her mouth and chews it thoroughly, suddenly craving more of the salty-sweet fat. “So I guess tomorrow I’ll find out if we’re going to be have money and choices again, or stay broke.”
Frida cocks her head and uninhibitedly studies Claire with a curious look, maybe trying to guess why she’s finally telling her this, maybe wondering what else has gone unsaid for so many weeks. “And if you stay broke… ?”
“I don’t know. I guess we stay just where we are. I do, at least.”
Frida freezes for an instant, then says, “Well. I haven’t seen life stay in one place for quite so long as you seem to be expecting. Nothing in the middle, then?”
Claire uncoils another fry and twists her mouth into a forced smile. “The ugly truth is that when you’ve been as well off as we were the middle can feel pretty broke.”
“And how about the middle with you and Addison? Or does staying together also depend on whether you’re rich or broke?”
Claire’s stomach knots up and her appetite disappears. Then Vicki walks up with their food, carrying a circular tray big as a side table on one hand. She kicks the folding metal brace open with the toe of her shoe, as smooth and practiced as any dance move Jory has perfected, swings the tray off her shoulder so it balances precisely across the parallel bars. Claire is thankful for the interruption, too stunned by Frida’s remark to acknowledge she heard it. Claire veers into the first fresh subject that comes to mind. “Well, thanks for the thumbs-up on Zach, the Baker’s Kid. At least when we were teenagers our parents could hear one half of a phone conversation. Now I just hang around waiting till Jory forgets to sign out and read whatever I can. I get tempted to pretend I’m her and start a chat session sometimes. It’s scary being a parent—you can’t imagine.”
Frida seems to take Claire’s cue and starts talking about Anita’s baby boy, born five days ago and already Anita is saying she wants to come back to work. “She’s just tired—he’s still feeding every three hours. Those first few months are too precious to miss, though. They go fast enough. I guess it’s harder to remember that after you have more than one.”
Claire nods. “You’re right. Especially with Jory being so premature—I didn’t want to miss a minute.”
Frida is unusually quiet for the rest of the meal. Claire picks at her food and tries once or twice to reopen the topic of staffing, whether they should advertise in the whole five-state region. She promises, again, that she’ll stay until someone new is settled, says they should both visit Dan next week and talk about writing another grant, maybe they could afford a nurse practitioner in addition to an MD. Everything she says feels false.
After dinner they walk to Frida’s car first, the nearer one. Claire leans over to hug her, wanting at least their physical contact to bring them closer again. She can’t blame Frida for feeling the threat of desertion despite all her reassurances, if indeed that is what made her lash out. But the arm Frida puts around Claire feels stiff. When Claire starts to pull away, though, Frida gives her one last intense squeeze and holds on to Claire’s hand, exhales like she’s been holding her breath for too long and says, “When my husband walked out eight years ago he took my little boy with him. He was ten. His name is Andy. I haven’t seen him since.”
A cry escapes from Claire and she covers her eyes. “Oh my God. My God, Frida. You never told me.”
“You would have heard someday. Everybody in town remembers it. Reason I stay here is because it’s the only place he’d know to look for me—if he ever tries.”
Claire finds it hard to make any words come out. “I’m… I’m so sorry—I wish I’d known.”
“I stopped talking about him two years after the police stopped trying to find him.” She steps off the curb and unlocks her car door, looks almost afraid Claire will try to touch her again, console her. Like the smallest thing might unleash the terror in a new way she hasn’t figured out how to fight.
Claire pu
ts her hands in her pockets, her arms and hands and facial expression awkwardly posed in self-conscious shame, and she’s ashamed even of that—of being focused on her own irrelevance in the face of what Frida carries with her every day.
Frida sticks one hand out of the window and gives a little wave above the roof of the car. Then she backs out and stops, rolls down the passenger window and waits until Claire steps near enough to hear. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that tonight. At least some of it was meanness. Or frustration. My own selfish way to shake you up. But maybe I just want you to know the middle isn’t so bad if you’re not there alone.” She turns her head away briefly, then says, “It’s not bad at all, Claire.”
It’s still light when she gets home. The payback of short northwestern winter days is this gift of indolent summer twilight, time to linger in the subtle drama of shadows and purple sky.
Miguela is in the kitchen putting the dinner dishes away. She had asked Claire to repeat everything Dan remembered multiple times, going over some parts of the story with a dictionary in her hand until the unlucky truth settled in and replaced the tortured murder she’d envisioned. Even as the discovery of Esperanza’s cause of death is threatening to tear Addison and Claire’s future apart, it seems to be piecing Miguela’s life back together. She has not said this in so many words—if the blend of languages they have made together even contains such possibilities—but the hum of secretive purpose that was always part of her, moving around her like an aura, has quieted.
Claire knows Miguela is leaving soon, knows it through the precise pronunciation she is demanding from Jory during their Spanish lessons, and the recipe she writes out for gallo pinto, the Nicaraguan dish Jory has come to crave. For the last week Claire has opened the door to Miguela’s room each morning just far enough to check whether she is still in her bed, her clothes are still on the shelves.
And then Miguela asks Claire for permission to take Jory on a picnic by the stream, just the two of them. When they come back it is obvious Jory has been crying. She eats dinner in silence and excuses herself as soon as the dishes are done. Claire follows her up to her room and quietly shuts the door. Jory is sitting at her blue wooden desk, the one Claire had painted with butterflies to match her walls in the Seattle house. The window is open and the cyclic song of frogs swells up from the bog near the aspen grove, then the solemn hoot of a distant owl. The bookshelves and walls are still filled with pictures of Jory’s Seattle friends, but there is a Hallum sweatshirt draped over her pillow and a photo of one new friend on her bedside table. Claire sits on the bed, waiting for a signal. Finally she asks, “Want to talk about it?”
Jory won’t look at her. “Did you ask her to leave?”
“No. You’re the only one she’s talked to about it. You’re her best friend here.” Jory doesn’t move. Suddenly Claire feels like she is looking down a ladder of all the trials and separations Jory will face in her life, all of them crowding into this blink of time with no space to recover, one crisis hurtling right into the next. It would be a curse to know the future. She aches to reach inside Jory’s young heart and hold the pieces together.
“She just said it’s time,” Jory finally says. “Why can’t she stay with us? She could live better here.”
“Nicaragua is her home. She cares so much about you, Jory. You know that.”
Jory wipes her face. “She gave me this.” She hands Claire the worn red cloth-covered book of Rubén Darío poems Miguela has been using as Jory’s primary Spanish textbook. “She asked me to come to Nicaragua sometime.”
“We’ll all go. I’d love to go. And now you’ll be able to speak the language a little.” They sit in silence, then, until it is clear Jory wants to be alone. Claire kisses the top of her head and starts to leave.
“You know what her name means, don’t you?” Jory says just before Claire opens the door.
“‘Miguela’? No. I didn’t know it had a meaning.”
“‘Esperanza.’ Her daughter’s name. It comes from esperar. It has two meanings. It can mean ‘to hope’ or ‘to wait.’ Both verbs in one word, even though they seem so different.”
Two days later Claire and Jory drive Miguela into Wenatchee to catch the bus for Seattle; from there she will fly to Managua, Nicaragua. Claire watches Jory for a signal about how prepared she is for this good-bye. Her conversation is almost giddy at first, a pressure of nervous, disconnected thoughts. But the resilience of adolescence takes over by the time they arrive and all she talks about is the visit to Jalapa she has thoroughly planned.
They have to wait more than an hour for the bus. Miguela has never been on an airplane; she keeps checking her pack and her ticket, jumping between Spanish and English, halting her conversation altogether every time another Greyhound arrives or departs. She seems unconvinced that she will be in Nicaragua by tonight—laughs about how easy it is to get out of the United States.
Just before she gets on the bus, Claire puts an envelope into Miguela’s hand. “A little piece of America to take home.”
Driving back to Hallum, Jory asks her what was in it. “A thank-you,” Claire says. “Something she can turn into what she needs.”
• 35 •
She hears Addison’s car pull into the driveway after midnight, hears the dinging sound of the alarm while he gets his bag out of the trunk, the car door slamming, then the front door opening and closing behind him. She tries to guess from the pace of his footsteps, the energy or defeat in his weight hitting the stair treads what he will tell her. Their phone calls this week have been studiously open-ended. Utilitarian. Safe.
He opens the bedroom door with one hand gripping the edge, as if that might hush its usual creak.
“I’m awake. It’s okay,” Claire whispers.
He stands still for a minute, then picks up his bag and carries it to the closet, sits on the side of the bed to take off his shoes, all without saying a word.
“So, I guess it isn’t okay. Is it?”
He takes off his tie and belt, loosens his pants and lies down next to her. “No. Not okay.”
Claire pulls the sheet up to her neck, holding it there with both hands. “Does Ron own Optimus?”
“His holding company owns it. Ron’s not very involved with the daily business. But yes. His money runs Optimus.”
The room is suddenly very hot, as if a silent explosion has gone off in the middle of her and is consuming them all. She wants to loft the sheet over her body like a fan, and at the same time she must keep the sheet clutched tight around her. “Did Ron send Esperanza to Optimus?”
“No. He’d never met her. He had no idea any of his employees, Esperanza or Rubén, were enrolling in the drug trials. I won’t say it was coincidence—there’s a grapevine effect. The trials pay a little money and this study gave them meals and a bed for a month.”
Claire waits for him to go on, certain from his mood alone, the tone of his voice, that there is more, that she cannot let herself feel relieved. After a minute she asks, “What’s wrong, then? If Ron didn’t know about it and he’s done nothing illegal… Surely you got the drug trial stopped.”
Addison crosses his arms under his head; the shifting of his body seems to sink him deeper into the mattress, as if a weight were pressing down. “The drug trial went through just fine—it concluded two months ago with Esperanza and Rubén categorized as ‘lost to follow-up,’ meaning they drop out of the statistics altogether. The other volunteers were all Caucasian; none of them had an abnormal reaction. It’s possible there’s a genetic variance that affects Hispanics. Without their results the drug looked safe. In fact, the drug would probably be moving right through FDA approval if Ron hadn’t notified Optimus and the review board.”
Claire rolls up on her side now, so her face is above Addison’s in the darkness. “Ron did everything he could, then. Even Optimus, didn’t they? It shouldn’t affect vascumab. Why are you still acting like something’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong is the drug they we
re studying. The sponsor is a biotech company in California. They’ve been working on antiangiogenesis drugs for years—long before I was.”
“So it was another VEGFR-2? Just tell me, Addison. Are you worried it was the same kind of liver problem you found in the mice? Is this drug similar to vascumab?”
He shakes his head once, then sits up and smiles with a pitifully ironic twist of his mouth. “The drug is vascumab, Claire. Identical. I saw the design; it’s my molecule.”
“How is that possible? You have a patent…”
“We have a provisional patent. On part of the molecule. The company testing the drug at Optimus is the same one Rick worked for before I hired him. He went right back to them after he left Seattle, last spring. Remember the bike tour Rick and Lilly bought at that auction? Walker’s charity thing?” He waits for Claire to react, stares at her frozen face for a moment before he goes on. “The medical director at Optimus was on that trip.”
Claire explodes in righteous outrage. “Rick signed a confidentiality agreement! All those proprietary information restrictions… he couldn’t take your idea out of your lab!”
“Yeah, I guess I could sue them. Rick could counter that they were working on the same drug all along. And who knows, Claire? Maybe they were. Should I spend a few hundred thousand dollars trying to save the patent on a dangerous drug? The only thing that matters is that vascumab is the reason Esperanza is dead.”
In the morning Claire wakes up and reaches for Addison. The sheets are damp where his body had lain; his dreams must have tossed him into a sweat. She sits up. The window above the bed is open and the day is fresh with rising dew, a pink and baby-blue day before the sun burns across the field.
It is so quiet here—even six months after leaving the city she is surprised to hear nothing on the land that she wouldn’t have heard a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. No cars or sirens, rarely even planes; the only sound of urgency is in the competing calls of the birds, the howls of coyotes, the abrupt silencing of an animal caught and killed. A magpie flushes out of the wild mock orange below the window. She hears Addison cough and a moment later he steps into her view.
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