Healer: A Novel

by Carol Cassella

  He looks small from this vantage: the tail of his wrinkled white button-down shirt hangs loose over his baggy gym shorts; his hair is a halo of black fluff. In the morning light the full blow of last night’s conversation rushes back to her. She holds her breath with her eyes squeezed shut until her pulse sings in her ears, praying he is down there waiting for her to wake up, waiting to tell her he has already seen the solution.

  She scratches her fingernails on the screen. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” He searches out her face under the shadow of the eave.

  She goes downstairs in her bathrobe and a pair of rubber flip-flops, sits down on the top step of the porch. Even this early in the morning the day is already hot. “Did you sleep at all?”

  He shakes his head but doesn’t turn to look at her.

  She waits a moment before she says, “It’ll be okay, Addison.” Still he doesn’t answer. “It’ll be okay. You’ll figure something out. A new molecule. Or a new cancer test.”

  He scans the horizon with his hands loose at his sides, his posture relaxed. Without seeing his face it could seem like he didn’t have a concern in the world. Finally he turns around and sits at the other end of the lowest step. “I’m sorry I did this to you, Claire. To you and Jory. I was stupid to risk our own money.” She wants to move nearer to him, sit close enough to feel the invisible connection that has always kept them together through the worst of their arguments. But something in his face holds her back. “I don’t know if I’ve actually said that to you before—out loud.”

  “You didn’t need to.”

  He lets out a little huff, almost a laugh, that makes her feel ashamed for saying something she doesn’t believe.

  “Okay. You do need to,” she says, suddenly angry at his feckless apology coming so late; flooded with a storm of frustration more than forgiveness. He doesn’t respond and she slaps her hand on the wooden step. “Well, do you want me to scream at you? Hasn’t there been enough of that?” She hates the bitterness in her voice.

  Addison sits splay-legged with his elbows on his knees, not once turning to face her; so detached it feels like he’s goading her on. He rips a long stem of weedy grass out of the dirt and peels it into fine green curls.

  Claire has an urge to wrench it out of his hands. “All right, then! How could you do it? Borrow against everything we owned without even talking to me? Rob our family of every safety net?” Claire’s voice breaks apart now in a single harsh sob. She grits her teeth against it. “Oh God. I’m just so tired of putting a good face on everything. Promising Jory it’s all going to be okay.” She drops her head into her hands. “I’m terrified, Addison.” Part of her aches for him to come to her, feels safer in their simmering anger and blame than the aftermath of what they are doing.

  He doesn’t move.

  “Claire, where did you think all the funding came from for Eugena? You think a line of investors were begging to give me money? I walked us right out to the ledge for it. And you didn’t even know, did you? And I won. Women won—all over the world. You know how many women won’t have to die of ovarian cancer because of Eugena? And vascumab… God! The difference I thought it could make!” He throws his head back with an audible groan. After a long moment he shakes his head, staring out toward the aspen that fringe the cusp of the hill. “By the time Jory was three or four you stopped even pretending you were going to finish your residency. And I didn’t care. Even before we sold Eugena. Even when we were broke, I didn’t care if you ever finished. Whenever we had a discussion about money you seemed to take it as a judgment—like I was pressuring you, making your decisions for you. So I dropped it. It was like you’d rather pretend everything worked itself out through magic.

  “You remember when I sold my dad’s car? Told you a Mustang collector had seen it on the street and called with an offer? I sold it to a lab tech so we could pay the rent that month. And then, after we sold Eugena…”

  He didn’t even need to finish. Claire knows. After Eugena, money had gone from being a perpetual strain to being a miracle, a blessing. And within a few years it had completely melded into the background of their lives, becoming familiar to the point of being expected; stealthily seeping into the fabric of every choice they made until they forgot there had ever been limitations.

  It feels as if the earth is moving out from under Claire. Like a fundamental property of nature she has trusted to the point of neglect—gravity or air or light—is disappearing. Is this how a marriage dies? she wonders. The deepest wounds torn open again and again by the forgotten apology, the neglected thank-you, the complacent assumption that love will sustain itself. How do you finally decide that all you can hope to save are the disunited hearts, because the union itself is irreparable?

  “I’m not a good businessman,” Addison says. “Never wanted to be. I’m a biochemist. I needed to raise money for my project and I found a way. I never told you how I was financing the lab because you never asked.” He looks at her again, his anger spent. “And that probably still makes it all my fault.”

  A noise from the window over the porch hushes them and a minute later Jory walks outside. “You’re fighting again,” she says. “Something’s gone wrong, hasn’t it. With Dad’s job offer.” Addison’s head drops and he glances at Claire. Jory raises her voice. “Quit hiding this from me. I thought somebody was buying Dad’s drug and everything was going to be fine again.”

  After an awkward silence, Addison turns around and motions for Jory to sit between them. “I’m sorry you feel like we’re hiding things, Jory. Yes. There is a problem with the sale.”

  “What? What’s the problem?”

  “The problem.” He ties a knot in the long stem of grass he has been worrying, tosses it onto the dirt and plucks another, giving himself a moment. “The man who was going to invest his money in my company believed he was buying a certain asset. My drug, vascumab. You know what an asset is? In business terms?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know, maybe not. Something that’s good.”

  Addison nods. “That’s right. An asset is something that has value, something that’s worth money to someone else. In this case vascumab was the asset he was buying, essentially. But some new information was discovered that means my drug isn’t safe to use. That means it’s not worth any money. So now I have nothing to sell him. It’s sort of like you had a nice car or a beautiful diamond ring and someone offered you money for it. But if the car didn’t run right or the ring turned out to be fake, you’d have to give the money back.”

  Jory looks like she has heard only half of Addison’s explanation, or maybe the question she wants answered is not what he’s assumed. “I thought you were working on a cure for cancer. How can that not be worth anything?” She sounds more hopeless than a fifteen-year-old should be able to convey.

  Addison is quiet for a long time, his face unnaturally still. He throws the grass away and gets up. “Yeah. That’s a good question, Jory.” He walks inside, letting the screen door slam behind him.

  Claire scoots closer and runs her hand along Jory’s temple, twists a heavy strand of her hair through her fingers. “It’s complicated, sweetie. But it’s…”

  Jory grabs her mother’s hand, stopping her. “Did this have anything to do with Miguela’s leaving? Did she leave because Dad isn’t getting the money?”

  “No. In fact, what Dad learned about his drug made it possible for her to go home, which is what she wanted.”

  Claire expects Jory to contest this, argue and blame them again. But Jory’s eyes are moving over her mother’s face much as they would when she was years younger and Claire would try to explain any difficult fact of life—why her best friend could be so much more hurtful than people she didn’t care about; why a grandfather could love her but forget her birthday. Explanations that made little sense at the time but which, Claire knew, she would turn and shape until they budded into something useful and comprehensible, ready in the place and time she needed them.

  Jory looks out
over the field, the sun high enough now that prickles of sweat glisten on her upper lip. “At least tell me when we’re going to go back to living normally.”

  “Do you mean move back to Seattle?” Claire asks.

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to go back to Seattle anymore.” She pivots her body away, maybe afraid of tears. “I just mean normal. Like we used to live.”

  Claire rests her cheek on Jory’s back, hears the thrum of her heart through her thin shirt, her skin. She remembers a day when Jory was so tiny she barely stretched from wrist to elbow along the bones of her mother’s arm. A lab technician had pricked her wrinkled red heel with a lancet and squeezed until a drop of blood oozed down a capillary tube for her bilirubin test. Jory, so premature her eyes were incapable of focus, had searched the universe for her mother’s face and cried out in wonder that the world could hurt her. The cells violated fifteen years ago didn’t even exist anymore—already sloughed and replaced, forgotten as thoroughly as Claire’s heartbroken consolation. It makes her breath feel short to think of it now, to wonder if all these years of protecting Jory have only made her more vulnerable.

  She turns Jory’s face toward hers. “What we had, the way we lived in Seattle—sweetheart, that wasn’t normal. That isn’t how most people live.”

  Jory swallows twice and asks in a strained whisper, “Well, do you think this is normal? Are we going to live like this forever?” She looks up at the rotted Victorian trim work, the cupped and peeling porch boards. She looks at the door her father slammed shut between them a few moments ago.

  Claire takes both of Jory’s hands into her own and holds them firmly in her lap. “No. Not like this. Maybe not like we did—but we’ll be fine. We’ll be okay.”

  Addison calls out the screen door that he is making pancakes, if they’re ready to come inside. Jory looks at her mother, and then at the sketch of color behind the screen that is her father. She pulls her hands away and stares at Claire with such maturity it startles her, like she has aged five years in a heartbeat. “Mom, don’t you get tired of saying that to me?”

  • 36 •

  The first time Addison and Claire came to Hallum Valley was only four months after she met him in the emergency room where he worked as an orderly. Four months after their first date: the last D in ADCVANDISSLD. It was Memorial Day weekend, and one of Claire’s med school friends had invited a group—anyone who wasn’t on call—to spend the three days at her grandparents’ old log cabin.

  Addison had met her friends a few times: a dinner after an afternoon lecture, at the Comet for a beer once. But Claire had been circumspect about fully including Addison in her tightest circle. Other boyfriends had come and gone during the first two years of medical school and she’d dragged them to every party without a second’s thought about anyone’s opinion. And what was there not to like about Addison? He was smart—already accepted into the PhD program even before he’d finished his master’s degree. He could make people laugh, once you got him off the subject of polymerase chain reactions or monoclonal antibodies. He had a better music library than anyone she’d ever known. And he was cute, kind of. Cute in a different way than her other boyfriends. No full head of hair, a little extra tissue in places the others had been all muscle, always saying he was going to start working out as soon as he finished his next set of exams.

  She was only beginning to admit to herself that the real reason she was on edge about a weekend spent in a small cabin with her closest friends (who would all be giving Addison the closest if most considerate inspection) was the sense that she was floating in a small boat far out in the ocean, coasting up the side of a larger-than-average swell on a calm, blue day. But gathering underneath her was the mass of a tidal wave, a natural force that would change her life quite permanently if she allowed it to. She was old enough to know there might be other chances if she let him go. But nothing like this. Not like this.

  He picked her up on that Friday morning in his ancient pickup truck—her more reliable car wasn’t big enough to carry the barbecue grill they’d promised to bring. The traffic was horrendous leaving the city, but horrendous in an oddly happy way, a million people having an enormous party, trapped on the I-5 bridge watching boats weave drunkenly through the Montlake Cut. Addison rolled his window down to change lanes, the grill blocking his view, and the blare of boat horns and rock bands gusted into the cab like so many invisible flower petals shaken loose by a spring breeze.

  The truck held its own in the stop-and-go traffic up the highway, but the gradual climb up the western slope of the Cascades sent occasional puffs of dark smoke out the tailpipe, the engine whined steadily higher until they were both tense, as if even the weight of conversation might burn it out for good. Clouds pulled in, covering the broken blue that had been a rare enough May gift for Seattle. They massed up against the peaks until a misty rain turned the charcoal powder on the grill’s hood into rivulets of black grime, and Addison’s frayed windshield wipers beat blurry streaks across the glass.

  But then they reached the summit, and in one of those moments when the geography of the Pacific Northwest manifests all its magnificence, the clouds stalled just below the snow-covered caps, and on the other side the sky shone so bright Claire’s eyes stung. The truck practically coasted down the eastern slope, making it all the way to the turnoff a few miles from the cabin, where it met a solemn, peaceful death.

  They got out and walked. With the persistent tension about the truck’s reliability resolved Claire was in a surprisingly happy mood. Unencumbered, even if on foot. Addison was, too, she could tell, though she knew the cash to repair the truck would be hard to spare.

  It was hot on this side. A mile from the cabin the road veered next to the river and they waded out to a large rock near the middle, the water just melted from snow and their feet bright red by the time they climbed up. The flat area was so limited they had to sit back to back and hook arms for balance.

  She knew the turning point was coming for them, expected that after a weekend immersed with Addison in this group who knew her so well, the building wave would have to break, one way or the other. They had shared many things already: dinners in the small cheap restaurants on Broadway; hours and hours of studying; her bed. The requisite facts of their lives had been conveyed. Addison knew Claire’s parents had divorced when she was in high school; she knew his parents were together but shouldn’t be—enough facts to trust this was not a dead end. But each of them, too, had held back. When Claire thought about it later, it seemed clear to her why: it was only these retained secrets that still offered either of them a way out.

  Addison dipped his hand into the splash and rubbed it over his neck. “My mom loves water. Rivers. She would take us into Chicago to walk along the river. And she can’t swim.”

  Claire turned her head so she could see at least a part of his profile. “Really? She can’t swim?”

  “Nope. Grew up in a little Midwest town without a drop of swimmable water. Got married at eighteen, and my dad sure wasn’t going to teach her.” They didn’t talk for a while after that. The river must have swept away the odor of their human presence finally, and on the bank animals and birds began to go about their gathering and hunting without a perception of threat. “There were a lot of things my dad never taught my mom. It was almost like he could see the future—she would have left him if she’d had any means. I think. I hope.”

  “I’m sorry. It must be hard—knowing they’re unhappy.”

  He looked back up the road toward where they had abandoned the truck. “Well. It didn’t have to be that way. They could have made other choices, I think.”

  “You mean about who they married? Or staying together.”

  “No. Maybe that, too.” He picked a flake of rock away and skipped it over a calm pool. “I mean about how they live. They fight a lot. Dad works for a while and then he hits the card tables, convince he was a day away from rich. I think if they’d lived when you could just barter fo
r stuff they might have been okay.” A raccoon appeared from behind a Douglas fir just yards away, waddling like a cat with a broken back to the edge of the water, where it washed some scrap of food. They were quiet until it moved out of sight. Then he asked her, “What about your parents? Why do you think your dad left?”

  Claire started to give the usual explanation of differing interests, the fights that happened behind closed bathroom doors or inside the parked car, maybe thinking Claire wouldn’t know any better. But then she boiled it down to the source. “The same, really. My mom worried all the time. I think she believed all her problems would be fixed if they could get a bigger house or take better vacations.”

  She’d felt his body change against her then, the taut muscles that were keeping him from sliding off the rock loosening enough to curve into her own more closely. Finally he slid his hips around so he was beside her, both of them facing upstream. He took her hand into his lap. “I’m a lab rat, Claire. I want to do bench research. It’s never going to pay me very much.”

  She felt the wave beneath them rising, lifting, hurtling them forward and interlaced her fingers with his. “I know.” She had laughed then, out of relief and terror and exhilaration, and because they agreed without even spelling it out. “And I really tried to like a specialty that pays better than family practice.”

  They had gone through the weekend closed inside their brand-new world after that—a transformation blatantly obvious to all of Claire’s friends. There were too few rooms or beds to divide up as couples, but those were the last nights Claire and Addison lived apart.

  It is the building wave that makes Claire think of that day now. Not the odd fact that their love had gone in such a geographic circle, and not the portentous conversation. Not the heat. It is the sense memory she has of a silent and monumental force carrying her smoothly, steadily up and up, only menacing because it gathers stealthily enough to be missed. And the deadliest consequence of a tidal wave, she knew, was if you failed to see it in time and rescue what is dear to you.