Healer

by Carol Cassella

  “Did you write that?”

  Miguela laughs, and Claire is struck by how it changes her, realizes there is a quality of sorrow that underlies Miguela’s quiet face, a trace of it even in her laughter. “No. That is Rubén Darío. The greatest poet of Nicaragua. The greatest poet of the world, my father would have said. But I thank you for your compliment.”

  Claire studies Miguela, wanting the pieces of this woman’s life to make sense. “And now you,” Claire says. “Your turn. What are you afraid of?”

  Miguela slips her arms into the sleeves of her blouse, watches her fingers push the buttons through the stitched holes so that all Claire can see are her navy black curls. “The same as you. Being alone.”

  • 17 •

  Jory has packed two grocery bags with Newman-O’s, white bread, Annie’s mac and cheese and ice cream. “Can’t you eat anything that isn’t white?” Claire asks. “And don’t tell me the chocolate half of the cookie counts.” She sends Jory back inside for a minimum of three vegetables and a fruit. Claire can see her through glass doors, grabbing a net bag of oranges. There is no learning curve with one child, every mistake Claire learns from raising Jory can only be applied to Jory, all over again. By the time she has figured out how to be a working, often single parent—which arguments to bite back, which to dictatorially win—by then Jory will be gone. She knows that thought is ridiculous, still, something in her chest twists so tight her eyes sting and she clenches her teeth to keep from crying. Miguela had it, didn’t she. When you are naked in fear, when you wake up screaming in the night and see the lightning flash on what really matters, it is so simple: it’s the people you love. Jory. Jory and Addison.

  She watches Jory cross the aisles inside the store, probably running over to grab iceberg lettuce or canned peas. What part of a child is mother, father, or their very own recycled soul from heaven? “Just another question to ask God someday,” Addison would tell her. He has always seen both God and science in his test tubes, marveled at the miracle of biochemical truths. But even test tubes would still miss the very true fact that Jory’s life had made an unbreakable knot between Addison and Claire, too, as much as if the blood of the three ran in a circle instead of only through the heart of the child. Claire wondered, sometimes, if getting married with Jory already in form, though unviable and symbiotic, had made them a different family, in a way she could not define. Maybe stronger, because three people had entered into that original union, even if only two were voluntary. But maybe weaker because their union had this unplanned influence, like the invisible pull of a distant planet, imperceptibly but definably skewing their orbit.

  Claire was actually in the middle of her obstetrics and gynecology rotation when she discovered she was pregnant with Jory. She’d worked so many days in a row that time had blurred, and it wasn’t until she noticed the stamped date on her milk carton had expired that she actually thought about the time of the month. Addison was still sound asleep in her stuffy attic apartment when she called him from the hospital. “What are you doing on July eighth?”

  She could hear the bedsprings creak as he rolled over, imagined him tangling the sweaty sheet around his naked waist, the tufts of hair standing out over both ears like windblown flags. “What time is it?” he mumbled. “Oh God. I have to be at the lab in twenty minutes. Did you reset the alarm?”

  “Yes. You probably shut it off in your sleep. You didn’t answer me.”

  She heard him sit up. “Try me again.”

  “July eighth. What are you doing?”

  At last he began to sound awake, appropriately curious. Hopefully worried. “Ummm. Celebrating your graduation from residency?”

  Claire was tucked into a corner desk on the labor and delivery charity ward; a sliding glass partition separated her from the room filled with new mothers and their wailing newborns, six of them crowded into one echoing space with thin curtains separating the beds. She slid the window open and held the receiver out so Addison could hear the squalling, catlike cries of day-old infants.

  She had been horrified when the little pink plus sign materialized on the test strip. With fifty thousand dollars of medical school debt accrued and eight months of residency to go she had no room for this… this… fluke! How could it be anything else? She repeated the test three times using kits they stocked in the outpatient clinic.

  And then, of course, the miracle overtook her. The shock of waking in the middle of the night, struggling to incorporate this drugstore test result into her perfectly planned life, into a body that felt absolutely the same as it had two months ago—completely normal! —began to alter, became less a shock and more a fire of anticipation, slowly consuming everything else she once considered important.

  Addison, on the other hand, slept with his hand fixed over her abdomen from the first night onward, as if he might miss the budding of an ear, an arm, a toe without sustaining the nearest connection he could achieve.

  How could she not love that in him?

  And their calls still reliably conclude with “I love you,” repeated each to the other. The words are said sincerely, refer to something honest and valuable, but those three words—subject, verb and object—have morphed and morphed again since they were first shared like priceless gifts.

  Maybe that happens for everyone, she thinks. Maybe those three words can mature and grow old just as the union itself grows old, no longer pristine and fresh but still vital. Maybe it proves that love is like any living thing—capable of almost unrecognizable change over the decades, scarring over astonishing wounds, so the words can still be true, just not true in the way they began.

  Claire doesn’t even hear his car. She wakes up to Jory’s shouts and the door slamming hard, and then the two of them laughing, interrupting each other over and over. She lies on her back and stares at the ceiling, focusing on a water stain over the bed that seems to be expanding week by week, finding hidden shapes in the serpentined brown lines and blotches. One of them looks remarkably like a dollar sign. She tries to predict from the pitch of his voice if this will be a good visit.

  They move into the kitchen area, and Claire hears them through the thin floors—the clatter and bang of pans, the slam of the refrigerator door. He will be frying up eggs-in-a-hole for Jory, her favorite breakfast. And there is Jory’s voice, the almost continuous, unfiltered stream of her thoughts. She rarely talks that freely to Claire anymore. Jory’s conversations with Claire seem to have already been edited before they leak out during dinner or housework. Claire will see her take a breath to start a sentence, then twist her tongue and lips into altogether different words—it’s worse than whatever the truth might be. Once Claire banged her fist down on the table and shouted, “Just say it!” hearing how ridiculous she sounded even before Jory started laughing at her. And they do still laugh together, she reminds herself. Out of the blue a fierce hug and “I love you, Mommy” can startle her out of dinner preparations or reading. But it seems like those moments are happening less often the longer Claire works at the clinic, the less she’s home. Time travels faster for a forty-three-year-old than a fourteen-year-old.

  There is another outburst from downstairs. For the space of a heartbeat she considers putting a glass cup to the floorboards and pressing her ear soundly against the bottom. Then someone turns on the radio and the volume of their conversation drops too low, only episodically pierced by Jory’s shriek or Addison’s guffaw. Claire climbs out of bed and goes into the bathroom for a long shower.

  When she comes downstairs Jory is cross-legged on the floor, knees splayed apart with a dancer’s flexibility. Addison is on the couch, tapping out a fast and complicated rhythm on the coffee table while he talks, one half of his brain a combustion of musical energy and the other half a fully focused parent, so engaged with Jory she clearly forgives his absence. “Hi. You’re here! We didn’t expect you until later in the week,” Claire says.

  Addison stands up and slips his hand into his pockets, as if he is embarrassed about
his coffee table rock band. “Hey. Turned out the best people in San Francisco were the ones I’d talked to in Chicago, so I decided to come home.” She recognizes the dark plea in his eyes, and doesn’t ask why there is no need to follow up with any of the investors who have heard his pitch. Instead she crosses the room to meet him, places her arms around his waist and lifts her face. It almost surprises her, the sensation of his mouth on hers again. He pulls her into him and she yields, aware that Jory is studying them for clues. In the chilly room the temperature of his body feels dramatic, her chest and stomach warm, her back exposed. She starts to pull away and, for just one moment more, he holds on.

  “Jory, you should get your stuff together. Bus’ll be here soon,” Claire says.

  “What time?” asks Addison, turning to face Jory with a fresh-scrubbed smile. “Hey, how about I drive you? I want to see where you spend your days.”

  By the time Claire gets home that evening, Addison and Jory have completely rearranged the living room, pushed the dining table so it fronts the living room windows and turned the sofa so it faces the windows overlooking the orchard in the back instead of the television set. Addison has carted all the packing boxes still stuffed with possessions they will never use or need in Hallum out to a dry corner of the barn.

  “What do you think?” Jory asks, still sweating from the labor.

  Claire hangs her coat on a hook and looks around. “Where did the other armchair go?”

  “Dad let me put it in my bedroom. By my window. We wanted all the furniture to face out, like, to face the view.” She sweeps her hands along the perimeter where the windows are all black as coal after the winter sunset.

  “I love it,” Claire says, loving Jory’s happier mood. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Shower.” Jory scrapes the metal legs of the love seat around to face the TV again, leaving a white arc along the wooden floor. She clicks the channels until she hits a rerun of Friends.

  Over dinner Claire says, “Dan and Evelyn invited us to dinner this weekend.” Addison looks up from his attentive carving of the roast chicken and she sees a flash of reluctance before he smiles, genuinely enough. She is annoyed to think that he might be hesitant to meet them, but then wonders if he’s only afraid of the questions they’ll ask.

  “Great. That’s nice of them,” he says, ferrying a thigh to her plate.

  Jory, on the other hand, has no second thought. “I don’t have to go, do I?”

  Claire is about to remind her that Dan is responsible for the food on their table, but then Addison rests his hand on Jory’s knee and she whips her hair behind her ears, puts a forkful of potato in her mouth and muffles, “Okay. Fine. Whatever.”

  It is the first night since leaving Seattle that Addison and Claire have slept in the same bed, and when Addison moves a chair in front of the door they can feel one another’s shyness, as awkward as a first, tentative coupling. Only it’s worse, Claire thinks. Because tonight they feel awkward and shy about what is lost between them, the memory of what had been so easy and instinctive. They undress, shivering, and are easily drawn to each other’s warmth underneath the down comforter. But within moments she stiffens, every part of her mind above her limbic drive crowded with questions; wondering if she would even recognize the words that could destroy their marriage in the blink of an eye. And so in midstroke they fall apart, Addison exhales one cryingly sad sigh, then kisses her temple and rolls onto his side, pulling her arm around him so her cheek rests against the broad rise of his shoulders. Neither of them speaks, allowing the history of fifteen years of marriage to absorb the silence.

  In the morning he walks her out to the Audi with a mug of his favorite oversweetened chai tea wrapped between his hands for precious heat. He is still in his pajamas and has shoved his bare feet into his best Italian loafers. The sun is barely over the mountains and a mist rises up from the valley floor, a sheer pink and yellow veil lofting slowly into the palest blue sky. It is Claire’s favorite time of day, Addison’s least, and so all the kinder of him to ruin his loafers in this muck just to walk her to the car.

  “What a sky. Free art. And we don’t even have to find the wall space to hang it on,” Claire says.

  He hugs the mug close to his body and shivers, squints to look out over the fields. The aspens at the edge of the property are faint as a memory through the mist. She scans the sky for a forecast encrypted in the clouds, but the morning seems full of the anticipation of warm weather. A quiet settles between them and the calls of birds rise up, ravens and magpies, the piercing scree of a red-tailed hawk, the throaty rumble of blue grouse—the first she has heard this year. Addison watches her with worry in his eyes, his mouth working at a smile. She can’t read him right now. “Can I meet you for lunch in town?” he asks.

  “Sure. Who wouldn’t want to play hooky on a day like this? Someplace cheap.” She grins. “I guess almost everything in this town is cheap, isn’t it?” He kisses her, then goes back into the house. Halfway up the drive his foot breaks through a skim of ice and she hears the loafer suck and pop out of the mud.

  • 18 •

  It is not a busy day—Anita attributes the lull to a couple of Border Patrol cars spotted in town the day before. Claire parks herself in a sunny exam room window to catch up on consultants’ letters and lab results, ripping open envelopes and putting her initials on the bottom of every page, stacking them up to be filed in patients’ charts, trying to decide which abnormal results are so serious she has to track down the patient for more testing. In another clinic she would pick up the phone, or wait for the next scheduled visit. But she learned weeks ago that most of the phone numbers Anita takes down for their records are made up, half the addresses, too—even when she promises they don’t give out information to Immigration.

  Claire rips open another envelope and scans the numbers, her pen poised to scribble “C.B.” in the corner and file it away. But this slip makes her put her pen down and walk to the files behind Anita’s desk to find the chart. She has to read her note again to see the patient’s face, a meek twenty-one-year-old who’d come up from Michoacán last year, a boyishly thin mustache on his upper lip and two missing fingers on his right hand after a carpentry accident, which, he’d told Claire, had made it harder to get hired. She rereads her notes until he comes back to her clearly, the way he’d conscientiously used English words here and there with a shy question mark in his voice after each of them, the feeling she’d had that he was growing the sketchy mustache hoping he might be able to hide behind it someday. His main complaint had been nausea, but the only thing her exam had shown was a little tenderness under his right rib cage and a few bruises—all of it vague enough to be anything from pesticide exposure or viral hepatitis, to depression or too much tequila.

  But the lab slip is more alarming. His liver enzymes are abnormal and his pro-time and INR, a measure of blood-clotting proteins made by the liver, are high. They don’t tell her anything about the cause—there are dozens of possibilities. But it is the kind of information that will send her driving from orchard to orchard to track him down, chewing up the evening hours she wants to be home with Jory.

  She is copying down his listed address when something scratches against the window. She jumps, then smiles at Addison’s face pressed up against the glass, a wool cap pulled down so that his ears stick out. He mouths something she can’t decipher, and when she shakes her head he cups his hands around his mouth and talks into the pane. “There’s a ‘closed’ sign on the door,” he says. His breath leaves a circle of fog in which he inscribes a heart with a frowning face.

  She pushes open the glass front door. The smell of the air he sweeps in with him is tinged with spring, a faint curl of green caught up in white winter, dissolving almost before she can identify it. “Hi. Sorry. Come on back. I’ll give you the blue plate special tour.”

  Frida walks out of the office and makes a blindingly quick appraisal of the two of them before she breaks open her all-eclipsing smile and takes Addi
son’s hand, cocking her head, Claire is convinced, just to shake her sprocket of curls. “Dan left early for an appointment—I guess Anita decided that meant we were all on a vacation,” Frida says. She is looking at Claire now, a friendly neutrality in her eyes that admits she understands more than she has been told, and will ask for nothing more than Claire wants to share.

  “Dan left early?” Claire asks. “That’s a first.”

  Frida shrugs. “Bonus on top of the stock options and soaring wages here. Take a two-hour lunch.”

  Claire laughs. She leads Addison around the corner. “Lab is back here. The microscope is only half as old as me.” She sees him lift his eyebrows when she opens the door to the glorified closet that functions as the clinic’s lab. She looks around the room herself, more objective about it seeing Addison’s reaction. The nearly obsolete centrifuge for hematocrits, the box of microscope slides that is so old the embossed cardboard has yellowed. It looks like a makeshift medical museum. Most of the equipment was donated to Dan when he opened the clinic fifteen years ago, when it was already too old to sell. But she’s proud of it all, in a way—discovering that for the first time as she pulls out a paper towel and wipes a splotch of blue dye off the sink. “Every time we do a test here for free we save the clinic money for rent or salaries.” Addison starts to ask a question but she cuts him off, shows him the pharmacy stocked with drugs donated by the industry giants he’s been pitching vascumab to for the last three months.

  He picks up a package of Augmentin and flips it over, studying the box as if a roll of million-dollar bills might fall into his hand if he opened it. Claire watches the change of light on the curves of his face. After a moment she says, “They turned you down in San Francisco, didn’t they?” It is out before she can stop herself, but then she is glad, decides she’s tired of whispering around the subject, willing even to see the wound in his pride.