Healer

by Carol Cassella

  The weather is turning worse; a hostile tease of cold, as if nature were whispering its warning to take shelter. When they had come here for ski vacations such a turn was always exciting. She and Jory would stand by the enormous open log fires in the big resort lodge, and Jory would check at the front desk every hour to see if the passes were closed, hoping for an excuse to miss a day of school. They would call room service for extra down comforters and hot chocolate, and snuggle in the deep window seats watching the black night turn white with whipping snow, a surge of alarmed exhilaration every time the lights flickered. When you can pay for so much protection from the elements, the threat becomes a game. She turns the heat up in the car and leaves a message for Jory, who, despite three calls in a row, will not pick up the phone.

  There is only one more place within any reasonable radius, a free clinic advertised with one line in the classifieds, on a street somewhere south of the warehouses. She stops at the highway debating whether to even bother, then turns south, away from home. The grid of Hallum is so small the roads quickly untangle into long reaches down fence lines that bulge against the weight of snow. Deer stand with their backsides to the wind, nipping at the brush and young trees, which skew at angles through the drifts, having survived the deep cold only to be destroyed by the winter-starved herds. The road is clear for the most part, though each heave of wind stirs up a snowy ghost before the car. It’s a little disorienting, with the clouds so low they hide the mountains and the diffuse light of late afternoon washed evenly across the sky.

  She comes around a low hill and a distant line of trees marks the river to give her some bearing, but the only visible buildings are a few scattered ranch houses and barns. She must still be four or five miles outside of town; it is an area well beyond the usual tourist loop. Farther on, a cluster of concrete blocks squats between this road and the highway—a metal fabricator, a lumber yard, a tractor repair barn—the working industry that churns gritty and resolute behind the ski shops and gift galleries.

  At the entrance to the driveways she sees a white sign with a bright red cross painted above two words: CLINIC and CLINICA. The building itself looks identical to its industrial neighbors, coldly functional, cheerless but for the yellow light brightening a row of high windows. She would wonder if she’d truly arrived at a medical facility—one for humans—but for the sign above the glass door. She puts the car into reverse and starts to back out of the lot, then brakes again, scans the empty yard and parks beside the wheelchair ramp leading up to the entrance. What harm is there in talking to them? Maybe they could give her a lead? And then there is the harsher truth she’s just starting to face: she has been turned down by every other clinic in this town.

  The waiting room is less bleak than the building. The mint green walls are lined with molded plastic chairs stamped out in sun-faded primary colors. Seven are occupied. A couple of teenaged girls, one wearing a skimpy tank top, are huddled over a Hollywood gossip magazine. The rest of the patients are Hispanic, and Claire feels their eyes on her as she walks up to the reception desk in her knee-length down coat carrying her leather briefcase. There is a swinging gate that separates the waiting area from what must be exam rooms and offices; it looks deserted, with only a single light at the far end of the hallway and all the doors shut.

  The woman behind the front desk is also Hispanic, young and round faced with smooth hair parted in a perfect line down the middle of her scalp and pulled into a tight black ponytail. She is typing data into an ancient computer—a bulky CRT box that blocks Claire’s view of her body. Claire starts to introduce herself but the woman holds her hand up as a stop sign without even glancing up, then jumps into a stream of animated Spanish. Claire is about to stop her when she notices the telephone headset. She puts her briefcase on a chair and waits, studying the posters thumbtacked to the walls: YOUR CHILD’S DEVELOPMENT, DIABETES CAN HURT YOU WITHOUT HURTING, ARE YOU SAFE IN YOUR OWN HOME? Most are in Spanish.

  A children’s area is set up in one corner, miniature plastic chairs tucked under a wooden table holding a wire maze dotted with sliding colored beads. When Jory was three she had caught her foot on just such a toy and bitten down so hard on her tongue they had rushed her to the local emergency room with blood spilling from her lips. Claire had been too panicked to think of any first aid at home, not even ice.

  “Can I help you?” The first English words she’s heard in this room make her turn back to the desk, but the woman is still focused on the computer screen. After a minute, though, she says it again, now taking off the headset and fixing Claire with a mildly impatient look.

  By now Claire has changed her mind about coming in the door at all, feels, in fact, an overwhelming desire to be soaking in a hot bathtub—and not the pitted tank waiting for her at the house. She wants her old tub. The capacious, milky-white oval with the sloping back and the brass waterfall spout that somebody else is now paying a mortgage on. She shakes her head at the receptionist, ready to duck out and leave when someone starts toward her down the hallway. Lit from behind he looks Ichabod-ish, tall and slightly stooped with lanky limbs and a long torso. But as he crosses the threshold of light she sees his face and her mood abruptly changes. It’s the doctor from the hospital—the old cowboy. God, she didn’t even realize she’d filed him under such a nickname, but there it is, presenting itself so spontaneously she breaks into a smile.

  There is an angularity about Dan Zelaya that begs a question of heritage—Native American, maybe, or Middle Eastern—his name obviously Hispanic; white hair that defies classification except as elderly human being, aging along a final common pathway. A mixture, surely, judging by his skin tone and the blue cast in his dark eyes, and his name. He straightens up some when he sees her, bringing his heels together as if he might make a small bow. He has on that same string tie he was wearing at the hospital. She starts to introduce herself to him again, but he gets there first, introducing her to Anita, the receptionist, who stands up to shake her hand. Now Claire sees that she is well into a pregnancy.

  Dan opens the gate and starts back down the hallway as if it is understood she will follow him. He has a long stride and she has to skip a step to catch up. He leads her back to a large room with two exam tables covered in crisp white paper. A couple of stainless steel Mayo stands are pushed against the wall, there are a red crash cart and an EKG machine that clearly predates the digital age, a cast cart, a plastic case of sutures. It must be their urgent care room. “How’d you find me?” Dan asks her.

  “I got a bit lost,” she answers. He breaks into a wry smile at this and Claire shakes her head. “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that! I’ve been visiting all the clinics in the area.”

  He waves his hand in front of his face, brushing aside manners. “I like it better the first way. Everybody who comes in here is either lost or getting close. Anybody hire you yet?”

  Claire is about to give him the optimistic spin she’s been rehearsing for Jory, but shrugs, worn out on selling herself. “Nope. Nothing. Want a copy of my résumé? I have plenty left.”

  He presses his lips into an uninspiring taut line and shakes his head. “Wish I could even think about it.” They talk for only a few minutes before Anita raps on the open doorjamb and calls Dan into the hall with a spatter of scolding Spanish. A flash of color moving behind Anita’s shoulder catches Claire’s attention, a red and cream plaid so familiar she starts toward the door. It’s Addison’s jacket, the one she had handed through the window of her car a few nights ago. The woman wearing it—it must be her—is swallowed by the bulky coat, could be a child it dwarfs her so, a ruff of black curls rolling just above the collar line like fur trim. Claire starts to call out to her, wondering if she is ill, was possibly ill that night, but she has already moved out of sight.

  Dan sees the startled look on her face and smiles. “Anita is happiest when she’s boxing me into line. Running late again.” He offers Claire his hand. “Keep at it. There’re a lot of sick people here who don’t have
a doctor. Trust me on that one.” He points out the rear exit that leads to the parking lot and follows Addison’s jacket into the exam room.

  Claire takes a minute to look around the urgent care room, wishing she had the funds and the business sense to set up her own clinic, be her own boss, who could scoff at her half-page résumé and give herself a big fat raise. She considers leaving a résumé on the counter for Dan to discover after she’s gone, but decides it would, at best, cause pointless guilt in someone she already likes.

  It looks like he has set it up on a shoestring, this place. But sufficient, she decides. Probably sufficient to take care of most people’s needs. There is something inspiring about recognizing that Dan must make most of his diagnoses based on physical exams—the stuff she’d been taught in basic science and introductory medical school classes and then quickly put secondary to CT scans and MRIs and cardiac catheterizations. You got a better grade when you could stuff the workup and formal presentation of a patient with solid numbers, something more quantifiable than the subjective description of what you’d heard through your stethoscope. Every medical intern learned that lesson the first time they were raked over the coals for not knowing the blood calcium level to a decimal point.

  She hikes her purse over her shoulder and is almost out the door when she notices a plaque nailed onto the wall: URGENT CARE ROOM FUNDED WITH A GENEROUS DONATION FROM RONALD S. WALKER. She sets her briefcase down and looks more closely at the brass square, runs her finger over the name. In one of those moments where the world seems to shrink she remembers a charity fund-raiser she had attended only three or four years ago at the Fairmont in Seattle, hosted by Ron Walker. She knows him. Well, she doesn’t really know him. But she’s met him. Come to think of it, it was for some medical charity fund—maybe this clinic.

  They had gone with Rick Alperts and his wife, Lilly, only a few months after Addison had hired Rick. They had seemed so young to Claire. They weren’t, really—only younger by eight or so years—but they were young to the glitzy biotech world that Addison and Claire were already becoming a little jaded toward. Addison had bought a table for the lab, treating all his bright young recruits to a glimpse of the gold that beckoned alongside the reward of saved lives. Rick had met another avid biker that night, and bid six thousand dollars on a custom-built bicycle and a group trip along the Tour de France route. Claire had sat next to Lilly. She clearly remembers telling Lilly about the sale of Eugena, how Addison had brought the signed paperwork back to the hotel that night with a bottle of French champagne, tied about the neck with a ribbon knotted through a two-carat diamond solitaire—her belated engagement ring. He had dumped a box of lavender bath foam into the tub and climbed in with her, made Claire open the envelope right there dressed in nothing but a froth of scented bubbles, made her read the astonishing numbers out loud.

  It almost turns her stomach to think of it now, the way Lilly kept looking at Addison. How she had asked Claire to tell the story over again, the glitz and gold eclipsing everything else Addison was working for.

  After the study fell apart and Addison told Claire about the disputed lab results—data Rick still insisted were anomalous—she had asked Addison if giving Rick a share in the company might have been the root of it. Would things have been different without the promise of such a payoff? But Addison had heatedly countered that no drug is perfectly clean. Every drug study contains gray zones, where judgment and experience ultimately have to define what is fact and what is irrelevant variance at the diminishing ends of a bell curve. He had talked as if the margins of scientific theory could build a new house around their family. As always, when he defended Rick, it had deteriorated into a tearful impasse they both had to walk away from. Now she often wondered if Addison was subconsciously atoning for his own delay in reporting the missing data to the review board; his refusal to blame Rick seemed nearly irrational.

  She and Addison had bought a week in the Galapagos at Walker’s auction that night. She already knew that Ron Walker had investments out here in Hallum—Walker Orchards, the landmark hillside of apple and cherry trees south of town, thousands of them standing in meticulously groomed parallel rows, their pink and white blossoms so lush in spring that weekend traffic slowed with rubbernecking tourists. Its sprawling stone house was practically a symbol of Hallum’s agricultural history. Walker didn’t live there, but she remembered talking to him about Hallum at the fund-raiser. They’d actually been talking about wine at the time, and Addison had said he’d always dreamed about getting a vineyard going on the east side someday, when he had time. Walker said he’d gone in for apples instead, “breaking the Gen X trend,” though he was older than both of them by at least a decade. She can practically feel her brain cross-linking the threads—tagging the Walker from Seattle with the Walker who owned the orchard and the Walker named on this plaque. So, who knows? she asks herself, turning once to scan the meager equipment in this room. Maybe that ancient EKG machine was bought with the check they wrote for that trip. She can’t help thinking about what they might do with that twelve thousand dollars if they still had it today.

  • 8 •

  The predicted snow hovers and teases until she is almost home and then, like an enormous down pillow, the weight of such nearly weightless particles breaks and spills silently from the clouds. She punches in the number for the house and waits for Jory to answer, hangs up and hits Redial until Jory’s petulant “Hello” puts a halt to Claire’s imagined fires or falls.

  “Did you eat anything? There’s leftover hamburger in the fridge. Can you heat that up?” Jory exhales into the telephone, only enough to confirm that she is alive and whole. “I should be home in half an hour. Or so. Is the furnace working okay? You’re not cold, are you?”

  “I hate hamburger.”

  “Well, cook some eggs, then. Or mac and cheese. It’s starting to snow pretty hard, so don’t worry if it takes me a while to get back. Did Daddy call?” Claire waits for some response until she hears the double blip of lost reception.

  The driveway is nearly impassable by the time she gets home; the car slithers and skids down the last steep turn. Proof again, she thinks, that snow tires might help you go but they weren’t much good at helping you stop. Jory is eating Chunky chicken noodle soup out of the can with a huge glass of chocolate milk. Claire pulls a chair next to her; Jory seems determined not to acknowledge her.

  “Hey,” Claire says.

  After a long, chilly minute Jory clips, “Hey, yourself.”

  Claire leans forward on her crossed arms, close enough to break the seal of her daughter’s exclusive space, waiting to see if she’ll be allowed to stay. “I was gone a long time. I’m sorry.”

  There is no response to this but a slight, magnetic pull toward her mother instead of away. Claire tilts her face until her temple rests on Jory’s shoulder, awaits the yield as her daughter relaxes. “Are you still hungry?” Jory shrugs. “We could have a popcorn and movie night.” Claire starts up the stairs. “Give me a minute. I’m freezing.”

  She strips her clothes onto the bathroom floor and puts on her robe, then dumps a whole box of bath salts, Anna’s gift from the going-away party, into the skim of rising water dyeing it an iridescent blue-green. She’s been saving them, planning to share a bath with Addison as a celebration when they move back into some decent home with some decent bathtub. But the truth about life, she is deciding, exactly at this moment, in fact, is that you never know what lies around the corner. She’s just sold off a closet of clothes she’s barely worn, books she’s never read, a cellar of wine that was getting more valuable by the day. So she will soak in this tub alone and imagine Addison, perhaps soaking at this very moment in the Drake’s deep, marble-lined tub, a billion tiny bubbles fizzing in the coils of his chest hair.

  The water is still cold when she tests it. “Jory,” she calls down from the bathroom. “I’m not getting any hot water. Did you take a long shower or something?”

  Jory walks to the bottom of t
he stairwell and looks up, her hair tangled down the front of her robe. She looks so childlike from this vantage that Claire feels her throat constrict. “No. The stove stopped working, too.”

  Claire comes back to the kitchen and turns on the burner, sniffs the air for gas. “Oh God. We must be out of propane.” She turns the knob on and off again, then looks at Jory. “You didn’t smell anything funny, did you? Did the stove just stop while you were cooking?”

  “I was cold. I had the stove on to keep the kitchen warm.”

  “You’re kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding me.” Jory stands quietly in the middle of the room before almost imperceptibly shaking her head.

  Claire raises the window in the kitchen and throws open the front door. “Jory—you can’t heat the house with an unvented stove! You want to die of carbon monoxide poisoning? Were you just not thinking?” But then she sees the hurt look on Jory’s face. Their house in Seattle had radiant floor heat, a remote-controlled gas fireplace, stayed a cozy 70 degrees in every season.

  Claire goes to her, wraps her arms around her daughter’s slight shoulders and feels her shudder once, smells the sweet coconut rinse in her hair. “It’s okay. I’ll check the second tank; it might still have some gas. It’s all gonna be okay, babe.”

  But after a half hour in the knee-deep snow holding the flashlight in her mouth while she tries to pry the housing off the second tank she slogs back into the house, her hands aching. She piles wood into the stove and heats up a Cup Noodles in the microwave, holding the Styrofoam in her palms and watching her fingertips go from white to pink to red. The soup tastes frighteningly good—salty and starchy and thoroughly preserved. Jory is at the computer now, hypnotized inside her digital social life. Claire walks up behind her and scans the status posts scrolling down the screen, abbreviated quips about parties and ski trips and clothes. All Seattle friends. Nothing on the screen written by Jory herself. As if she is spying on the world taken away. Claire kisses the top of her head. “Come to bed soon, will you?”