Healer

by Carol Cassella

  “For me? Here? Doing what?” Claire is tempted to turn around and look for anyone else Miguela could be referring to. The note of perplexity in her voice sparks an embarrassed look on Miguela’s face; her dark eyes pull back a little. “I didn’t mean…”

  “No, no. I am sorry.” Miguela shrugs Addison’s jacket higher on her narrow shoulders. “Thank you.”

  She turns to go and Claire reaches out to stop her, brushing against Miguela’s fingertips before settling on the rolled-up sleeve of her own husband’s coat. “Señora Ruiz, what kind of job do you want? I can talk to Dr. Zelaya tomorrow. What work do you do?”

  Miguela shrugs but doesn’t move to pull her arm away. “Cleaning. Washing. Anything you need.” She smiles at Claire, forgiving any awkwardness. “It’s okay. I will come another day.” She leaves then, with a small wave through the glass panes after the door swings shut behind her.

  Claire starts to lock the door after her but opens it again and leans out, “Miguela, I’ll talk to him. Okay? Come by in a few days. You never know.”

  Jory is standing outside the grocery store stamping from one foot to the other in a manner guaranteed to make Claire feel guilty. “Why didn’t you wait inside the doors?”

  “Why didn’t you get here when you said you would?” She dumps the grocery bag and her backpack in the rear seat and climbs into the car, cupping her hands in front of the heat vent. Claire gives her a minute to declare her mood, which turns out to be more conversant than her frigid glare had implied from the curb. “They have crappy food at this school.”

  “Don’t say crap, please.”

  “Okay. Shitty food.” She shoots her mother a schmaltzy smile and laughs. “I’m kidding, Mom. Not about the food, though. Fried cheese sticks?”

  Claire pulls onto the highway with a glance at her daughter’s profile. “So, tell me something good about the school.”

  Jory lifts a shoulder and stares at the road. But after a minute she says, “There’re some okay people, I guess.” And then, harshly: “God, Mom, watch out for that guy on the road!”

  Claire focuses through the snow looking for headlights and then spots the red plaid jacket walking between the dark track of wheels and the wall of plowed snow that obliterates any shoulder. She turns the wheel to the right and the car shimmies and slides when it crosses the frozen stripe down the middle of the lane, stopping with the front tire scythed up onto the churned white waste. Jory’s hand braces against the dashboard and she stares at her mother openmouthed when Claire gets out of the car and calls out to the figure picking her way across the broken blocks of compacted snow.

  “Señora Ruiz?”

  After a mix of confused Spanish and English Claire persuades her to get into the backseat. They are quiet while Claire rocks the car forward and back until it catches friction and rolls safely into tracks of bare pavement. She’s getting better at driving in the snow, she thinks, developing an instinct for the way the car will respond in the myriad concoctions of water that cover the roads and change by the hour. Claire feels Jory’s eyes flashing on her, checking for some sign as to who this woman in the vaguely familiar jacket is.

  “Where do you live?” Claire asks, glancing at Miguela’s face in the rearview mirror.

  “The orchard. Walker’s Orchards.”

  Claire turns around for a moment to face Miguela. “You’re working at the orchard? What kind of work do they have you doing in winter?”

  “I clean—the offices, the house.” She falls quiet again, stares out at the snow. After a moment she asks, “Your child is here?”

  Claire introduces Jory, who gives Miguela a quick, shy smile before she unleashes a raft of hair from behind her ear so it falls over her face. Miguela slips toward the middle of the seat and leans forward, patting the backpack on the cushion beside her. “You are in school? You must study very much.” Jory doesn’t answer this but Claire sees her tuck her chin deeper in the collar of her coat. “I am a teacher. I was a teacher. Before I am here.”

  “A teacher?” Claire asks. She is caught off guard by this. Teachers, shopkeepers, secretaries—these, the tiny, emerging middle class of the developing Latin world, did not come to the United States to work. The laborers came, the carpenters and field pickers, the waitresses and laundresses and factory workers who were the cheap and renewable engine of goods and services for the 10 percent who lived in luxury. Their poverty was so endemic, so unrelenting they were willing to be smuggled in the trunks of cars or nailed into shipping containers or herded across deserts by some minion at the bottom of a cartel, whose only motivation to keep them alive was full payment on delivery. “Where are you from?”

  “Nicaragua. Near Jalapa. In the mountains.”

  Claire focuses on the road as she slows for an oversized pickup approaching from the other direction, the oncoming lights blinding after miles of uninterrupted winter darkness, a spray of slush spattering her door. “How did you end up in Hallum?” She scans for Miguela’s face in the rearview mirror when she doesn’t answer, sees her looking at Jory. Contemplating is more the word that comes to mind. Jory’s blond hair often caught the eye of people for whom such a thing was rare.

  “I followed a person,” Miguela finally says. “What do you study?” She leans farther forward as if that might persuade Jory to turn toward her and sweep her hair back, reveal her whole beautiful face. Miguela’s accent, now that Claire pays attention to it, is different from that of her Mexican patients. Something in the way she drops her s’s.

  Jory looks across the front seat at her mother, as if she needs permission to talk to this woman in the back of their car, rescued off the side of the road from a frigid winter night. “I’m in ninth grade.” Claire smiles at her and Jory goes on to list her classes, even volunteering an opinion about her math teacher—more than she has told her mother to date.

  Claire is almost embarrassed to acknowledge how little she knows about Nicaragua. If she had to find it on a map it would take a while, sorting out Panama and El Salvador and Honduras and Guatemala—the blur of countries between Mexico and South America that always seemed to be starting or ending a revolution. “I didn’t know anyone from Nicaragua was living in the valley,” Claire says. But, really, there could be a whole orchard full of Nicaraguans living in Hallum. How would she know? Jory has been gradually angling her shoulders around so she is half facing Miguela; she whispers something, then clears her throat and says it louder. Through a whip of hair pulled across her mouth like a veil she asks Miguela why she had become a teacher.

  Her father had been a teacher, Miguela explains—and so, of course, he joined the revolution when Pedro Chamorro was murdered. She pauses before going on; Claire imagines Miguela waiting to hear, “Oh, yes, I knew that many Nicaraguan teachers had joined the revolution,” or, “Oh, yes, Chamorro.”

  “Did your father speak English?” Claire asks her.

  “A little. He died when I was a small girl. But he showed me to read.” She rests her hand near Jory’s on the seat back between them. “Do you like poetry?” She waits for an answer. Jory looks at her mother, either for reassurance or even, perhaps, the answer—Claire can’t see her eyes. Miguela laughs softly. “All Nicaraguans are poets. Even the presidents!”

  Before Claire can comment Miguela points out a speckle of light on the hills above them. “There, the orchard. I will walk now.”

  “No, no. Way too cold for that,” Claire says. She slows enough to pick out the unlit driveway cut through the bank of snow; the tires slip once then grip and carry them up to the house and cabins.

  “Your father is dead?” Jory asks. Claire shoots a look at her, but Jory is staring at Miguela.

  “In the war. He was in the school and a contra bomb…” She claps her hands and flutters her fingers in the air in lieu of the word. “When I am twelve.”

  Claire can feel Jory turning this around in her narrow world, scanning for some similarity in her safely padded life. A few divorces had already occurred, one e
rrant girl sent off to a boarding school. The first time she’d seen a homeless man she had listened intently to Claire’s gentle explanation and, after a moment of consideration, asked if that meant he had to eat in restaurants every single night.

  “Here. Here is good.” Miguela points to the nearest in a row of identical white cabins backed up along the driveway. No lights are on in any of them. Claire reverses the car so the headlamps shine through the narrow corridor between the first two, waits for Miguela to wave her away.

  Walker’s employee housing is better than most; anyone would agree with that. Anyone who gives a second glance at these particular pickers’ cabins, strung across the hillside below his orchards like a train of boxcars. The first time they’d driven through the valley, when Jory was quite young, she’d delighted in the idea that some farmer with many children had built playhouses for each daughter, with curtained windows and front doors with real metal knobs and latches. She had spotted one with a green painted flower box not far outside of Wenatchee, and every trip she would turn off her movie and hover at the car window looking for that particular house, checking to see if the flowers appeared tended and watered. She had made up a name for the girl who played there, Aurora, and could spot any change to her cottage—a curtain left half open, a single jelly sandal forgotten by the door.

  Claire loved hearing Jory intensify this imaginary friendship every time they passed the cabin. When she was driving, Claire would slow the car down and look for signs of life, almost believing in Aurora as vividly as Jory did. But the houses were always abandoned, the work being seasonal and the migrants only there to sleep between the long hours of pruning and harvesting.

  Thinking about it now, she couldn’t remember ever telling Jory the truth—explaining the purpose of the clapboard shacks, their economic role in an agrarian community. Of course, Jory knows all that by now, but Claire has never asked where or how she learned—when she had finally given up and transfigured the child Aurora into the adult Jose, or Gabriel, or Manuel.

  After Miguela is out of sight and they are back on the highway, Jory asks, “Where exactly is Nicaragua?”

  • 15 •

  The moving truck finally arrives on Saturday, pulling down a driveway freshly plowed thanks to a cashier’s check carved off Claire’s first earned salary in fourteen and a half years.

  It feels like Christmas—like the Christmas that was virtually canceled when they sold their house. Addison had stonewalled the buyer about the holiday, maybe because it was the last thing he felt he could still control. “We gave up half a million dollars to these people. I will not give them my Christmas on top of it,” he fumed, venting to Claire until she could only sit and watch him pace, watch him funnel his rage—every cursing word of blame he’d held in check when he’d faced the review board and sacrificed his dream drug—onto this one symbolic day of peace.

  The buyers threatened to walk until he galled them into silence with a week of exorbitant rent so that his own family, Jory and Claire and he, could sleep on air mattresses and open their few presents in the middle of a bare living room. The house had looked enormous after the movers took the last of their furniture away. The blank walls echoed, the floor danced with floating ghosts of dust and hair; only the lit-up Christmas tree held any cheer—not even that, it was just a little less sad than the cheerless, vacant space that now belonged to another family.

  Jory watches the truck turn around and back up to the door, stomping her feet against the cold while the drivers unlock the metal doors. She looks truly excited for the first time in a month; as if she is waiting to find her life inside there, hoping that the enormous van will disgorge everything she’s missed along with her white and blue bedroom furniture, then swallow up her loneliness and haul it away to some distant state, some other kid’s misfortune.

  Despite all they have sold or put in storage the room is too crowded once the van is unloaded. Their contemporary furniture looks ridiculous in this old farmhouse, if Claire is honest with herself. She sits on the arm of Addison’s leather recliner, which they’d discovered on a trip to England—the shipping cost had almost exactly equaled what she earned in a month at the clinic. Every wall is lined with stacked boxes; the dining table and kitchen counters are buried under crates of things they have no space for. She should have left half of it behind.

  She gets up and peels the plastic tape off a cardboard container—kitchen items: a fruit dehydrator, a pasta press, an espresso machine; a set of Christmas dishes she’d ordered from Denmark and never used. She sinks down into the oversized chair and wraps herself up in a silk and wool throw that had perfectly matched the wallpaper in their library. The fabric and leather, even the tang of forged metal bracing, exude an odor of home—the scent of a place that is still identified in her mind when she speaks the word, home. Maybe, in time, in patience, it will seep into the plaster and paint and wood of this house. Or the next house. The house they will reward themselves with when this is over. So she will make this Christmas, of a sort. It surprises both Jory and her that such familiar items can feel so new after five weeks of eating and sitting on garage sale castoffs. The last thing the movers lower from the truck is a jaggedly cut slab of concrete, which Claire tells them to put at the bottom of the porch steps.

  “What is that, Mom?”

  “Your footprints. From when you were five and we had the new patio laid in the garden.”

  Jory stares at them for a contemplative moment. “Does Dad know you chopped a hole in the patio before the new people moved in?”

  “I’m sure they’d rather have their own kid’s footprints in their cement.”

  As soon as the movers have wrangled her bed frame and dresser up to her room Jory hunts down clean sheets and pillowcases, sweeps the pine floor twice before she unrolls her rug. Claire carries a box of Jory’s summer shorts and swimsuits upstairs and Jory looks almost embarrassed to be caught arranging books and various kitsch collected from fairs and parties, investing her heart in this room, this still-opposed home.

  “It looks nice in here! Your furniture fits pretty well, don’t you think?” Claire says, but she feels a catch in her chest remembering Jory’s window seat overlooking Lake Washington. Claire had painted the walls with blue and white flowers and yellow kites, hung a sheer curtain over the opening so Jory could hide in her own safe, secret world.

  “Do we have any window cleaner?” Jory asks.

  Claire stifles her amazement. “Sure, under the kitchen sink. Don’t use all the newspaper, we need it for the stove.” She swings the closet door open with her foot and drops the packing box on the floor.

  Jory lets out a small cry. “Wait…” At the same moment Claire notices a plastic storage box in the corner of the closet. She pulls the chain on the overhead lightbulb; the top of the container is pierced with dime-sized holes. The sour smell hits her the second she pries off the lid. “Jory! How long has this been here? You can’t keep a mouse as a house pet! What? Did you rescue it from the Havahart? What were you thinking?” Her voice heats into a white anger, igniting every retort she has stifled in the last weeks. Jory feels it, is already crouched on the other side of the large box, grabs the rim as if her mother would destroy the small, terrified creature cowering in a mound of shredded flannel. Claire stands up and Jory’s fierce grip jerks the container hard enough to flip it onto its side, jar lids of water spill across the floor and the mouse disappears under the door in a flash of fur.

  Claire looks at the filth of wet rags and food and excrement and, suddenly, the task of cleaning it up seems as monumental as unpacking every box downstairs, or heating this freezing, desolate house, or stretching her paycheck from today until Addison announces he has signed with Novartis or Bristol-Myers Squibb. She sinks onto the floor and braces her back against the wall, staring at the upended bin.

  The room splinters with silence after their altercation. Then Jory heaves one single, pleading sob. “I was lonely. I was just… lonely.” Claire reaches over
and takes her hand, pulls Jory to her chest and waits for the earth to settle.

  She stays up past two in the morning clearing a path to the refrigerator, poking through random boxes and listening to cassette tapes on an old Sony Walkman that had miraculously escaped the trash pile. She makes a cup of hot chocolate and spikes it with peppermint schnapps, loses it in the forest of boxes and finds it again, multiple times.

  Their Seattle house had started life as a 1960s rambler on an oversized lakefront lot; it came on the market only months after Addison sold Eugena. By then it was dwarfed by the new, hotel-sized homes on either side of it, smaller than their neighbors’ garages. Addison and Claire were still too flush with the shock of unanticipated wealth to buy anything ostentatious, anything that didn’t demand sweat equity. They had agreed they would go slowly, cosmetic fixes only until Addison could get his next blood test to market. Claire would eventually finish her residency and take her boards, as soon as Jory started all-day school, so she could bring in at least a part-time salary. And the house was sweet in its humble, squat proportions, Claire thought. The three of them could move about the low-ceilinged rooms with enough personal space to breathe and grow and create, but still sense, always, the other two. Room for independence without isolation, privacy without secrets.

  They painted the shingles, put a swing set in the fenced yard and moved in on July fifth, the first official day of Seattle sunshine. But by early winter the drafty windows and warped doors and claustrophobic kitchen were getting to them. Addison said they were heating half of Lake Washington. They might as well invest in a sound structure. And by early spring the stock they’d collected in exchange for Addison’s biotech start-up had split and risen and split again. They started to feel safe. They started to notice their neighbors had all gotten newer cars and taken more exotic vacations and built new additions onto their already massive homes. They started to spend.