Healer

by Carol Cassella

  She had been so determined and stoic in those first weeks after Addison confessed everything to her, adamant that they could not look backward. She found a Realtor immediately, a woman recommended by friends when Claire explained that she and Addison were looking for something farther out of town, a little more space for Jory. Acreage, maybe. A paddock for a horse someday.

  The Realtor walked through the house with Claire on one of those rare brilliantly sunny afternoons that kept the whole city from moving south in late fall. Notepad in hand, she opened closets, ran her finger along the custom-wrought metalwork of the banister, unlatched the French doors onto the capacious tumbled-brick patio that overlooked Lake Washington.

  Claire finally stopped narrating the tour and fell back a step to let this broad-backed woman in a pink wool crepe suit lead her through her own house. Pinky, as Claire began to think of her, slowly pivoted in the library, absorbing the handblown glass globe over the hanging light fixture. She assessed the imported Spanish tiles around the fireplace, catalogued the carved wooden chess set that Addison had carried home from India on his back when he was nineteen, the shelves of rock-and-roll history and the biographies in which he lost himself when insomnia struck at two or three in the morning. She put a price tag on all of it. The experience reminded Claire of one of those dreams where you are caught in a public place wearing only your underwear, a discount brand at that.

  “Beautiful woodwork. And the view, obviously. Good closet space,” Pinky had said.

  Claire didn’t know if she was supposed to respond to this. The words had been vaguely addressed out into the room as if Claire were invisible, a hired attendant. It forced her to look at her own house through the eyes of this detached appraiser or some anonymous buyer. On such a bright morning the impartial sunlight exposed how long it had been since they’d painted the walls or refinished the floors, shadowing the gouges in the woodwork, the scratches in the kitchen appliances.

  Finally Claire spoke up. “We were planning a kitchen update soon. And the master bath. We’d already had the architect draw up plans—those could be included in the sale. We spent fifteen thousand dollars on them. The plans, I mean. They’re very complete.”

  Pinky flashed a smile over her shoulder. “Kitchens go out of date so quickly, don’t they? We’ll want to stage it.” It must have been the royal “we” she referenced—Claire had no desire to stage anything. She wanted to sell the house to someone who loved it as she loved it, and then be gone and never reconsider. She wanted it to happen overnight. Today. Before she could panic and padlock herself to the garden gate.

  Pinky went on. “People want to come in and imagine their own things in a house. Not yours.” She gave Claire an insider’s smile. “Not that yours aren’t beautiful—but no photographs. Clear the room out some, freshen it up. Sort of… generic —you know. It’s got great potential being right on the lake. In a different market you could ask almost whatever you wanted.”

  In a different market. Claire heard the echo as the market in which Addison had borrowed all the house’s equity. And in truth, Claire realized, as she prepped for the first public showing, people didn’t want to see how the Boehnings lived in the house. They didn’t even want to see how they themselves would live here. They wanted to see how imaginary people lived. Perfect people. With no clogs of hair in the shower drain, no piles of laundry, or overstuffed Tupperware drawer. They were hoping to find a house that would not just shelter them—it would transform them.

  Out on the lake a group of scullers beat by, the coxswains chanting in harsh rhythm with the slender white wake stirred by the oars. The Realtor stood at the window watching them, looking at the distant towers of Seattle’s skyline across the water. “Pity I didn’t have this listing last year. I had the perfect client and nothing to show him.”

  Pinky (even Addison called her that by the time they listed), furrowed her powdered brow and asserted that nobody would buy a house between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But Pinky did not know what Claire and Addison knew. The news about the aborted drug trial was leaking. The bridge loans Addison had taken were overdue and no one was willing to extend. So he had borrowed against their personal brokerage accounts. And then the stock market fell. Addison was getting margin calls and there was no more cash to meet them.

  Even now she could almost understand his bad judgment. There had been so much money—money in stocks and bonds. Money in CDs and treasury bills. Money in test tubes and fragments of DNA. Claire had stopped looking when she signed credit card slips. She had stopped complaining about unreasonable return policies, or outrageous interest penalties when the payment was a single day late. Last year she had actually given away a laptop that froze up rather than spend two days reformatting it—an excuse to buy the one with a bigger hard drive and sleeker case. The memory of it shames her now.

  The list of needs when their house was empty and beckoning had mutated into a list of wants, and then blurred until she forgot how to distinguish the necessary from the desired. Even the translation between time and wealth began to warp. She could fill a day scouring galleries for the perfect glass bowl to set upon the sofa table, just so, where the sunlight caught fragments of color that matched the paint and the upholstery. And that was to be its only purpose—a bowl intended to hold… nothing. Air. Reflected light. After years of such forays and purchases the niches were filled with hand-enameled trays and Santa María pottery and spun-copper baskets. The floors were plush with Tibetan carpets and tribal throw rugs. The perfect eclectic mix of primitive and midcentury European paintings hung on every wall. Shelves were laden with art books, cabinets bloated with crystal, closets burst with coats and suits and gowns and boots. In the space of seven months, from the time Addison discovered the toxic liver tissue in one strain of mice to the day they sold the house short, most of it ended up auctioned off or sold for a fraction of its purchase price.

  They took the first cash offer on the house. Two weeks later they held an estate sale. The doorbell rang at six fifteen, the sun not even up on a rainy winter day. Claire answered it in her bathrobe, still half asleep, expecting some urgent warning from the police, some locked-out neighbor or kicked-out teenager. A slumped, tobacco-stained gentleman stood on the soggy mat holding a torn bit of newsprint. A misread address, perhaps. Should she be worried about a robbery? Who brought a newspaper to a robbery? Claire knotted her hands into the fleecy neck of her robe, her breath puffed in little cloud balloons.

  “We’re here for the sale?” Out in the circular drive a woman and child watched from a brown car with no hubcaps.

  “What?”

  “Is this 4352 Lake Crest Circle?” The man stepped back and looked above the doorway to recheck the address. Two other cars pulled up to the curb.

  Claire propped the door open with a garden stone and padded back upstairs to her bedroom. “Addison. People are already coming. Get some clothes on.”

  “What?” He bolted upright in foggy panic. “Here for what?”

  “The sale. Get up. They’re down there now. Roaming through our house. I told you we should have let the auction company handle all of it. Oh God. Why didn’t I at least set the coffeemaker!” She pulled on blue jeans and a sweatshirt, ran a hot washcloth over her face and a brush through her hair before she went back downstairs.

  “How much is this?” a woman asked her.

  “Everything should have a tag on it.” Claire turned the silver pitcher over. “Twenty-five dollars.”

  “Is it sterling?”

  “It’s plate,” Claire said aloud, thinking, It was a wedding gift from my cousin, who was too young at the time to know plate from sterling, who ended up marrying a journalist and moved to somewhere in Indonesia. If it were sterling it would be two hundred dollars.

  By ten o’clock her living room had more people in it than when she’d hosted the fund-raiser for ovarian cancer research. Now she was host to a party of strangers, people of varied clothes and varied colors, bargain hunters who had g
otten up before dawn to drive across town to a rich person’s distress sale, spotting opportunity in the fine print of a classified ad. And it was only at that moment, watching the general populace haggle over the price of a silver-plated cream pitcher, that she recognized how deserving she had grown to feel.

  The best of their belongings had already gone to an auction house and would be brought up to a public stage in chunks over the next few weeks. Addison had half joked and half consoled that he might hit the jackpot before their furnishings hit the block, and they could buy it all back. And Claire had laughed. Laughed because she was determined, grit-teethed, that she would not cry during daylight hours about the loss of property. In the hours and days after Addison showed her the numbers she realized the material wealth they’d amassed was dissolving like a sugar cube castle in a summer rainstorm.

  Claire knew they must jump together onto some new marital foundation, if they were going to survive. It should be no more difficult than leaping back to the solid ground on which they had begun their married life. There had been no money then, only hope and some reassuring groundwork—his almost-finished doctorate, her medical degree, his brilliance and charisma, their youth and an infinite faith in possibility.

  In the crucible of their financial implosion Claire felt vitally bonded to Addison. After a day of sorting and packing their remaining possessions Addison would open a bottle of wine and tell her more; justify his decisions by explaining the smudged zones of judgment around bell curves and P values, how questionable data might be thrown out as statistical “noise.” The wine would loosen him, and Claire would see the shrewd scientist crumpling as the overwhelmed businessman scrambled to keep his lab intact once Rick Alperts left.

  Claire was appalled at herself for ignoring the signs for so many months, and perhaps for that reason alone she was determined to be Addison’s most strident defender. She alone knew his secrets, just as she knew the folds of his neck and the curl of his navel and the crests and waves of his ears. His secrets gave her power; power that had flourished inside the flushed and scented skin of their early marriage, and then almost imperceptibly diminished over time. He depended on her again now—depended on her to know his blackest truth and keep it safe. She felt the fierceness of it: a claw sunk into her heart that made them blood brothers as much as husband and wife, it made it easier to divorce sentiment from the house and the cars and the clothes. For a while.

  The last night in their home he slept close to her, curled so that one arm snugged her to him, his hand grasping her belly. She was conscious of the loose flesh there, where Jory had stretched her until crescent moons blossomed just below the surface of skin. And she was conscious that he didn’t care; that he loved their girl, and loved her and loved the flesh that made all of it.

  Then one bright flash before the moment of sleep revealed how much the illusion of his superiority mattered to her, and how much it was anchored by trust. Until all of this, until all was stripped bare, she had not seen it. She took his hand, flaccid and warm, and brought it up to her mouth, not realizing she would bite into the palm until she tasted his sweat.

  • 22 •

  Claire sleeps in the new earrings Addison gave her before he left. Twice during the night she dreams, rouses, reaches toward Addison’s vacant space, then touches the smooth polished glass. The last spring snow falls that night, and when she wakes up in the morning almost five inches cover the ground.

  She builds a fire and pours milk into a pot for hot chocolate, then goes back upstairs to wake Jory, who is still deep in the enviable coma of sleep unique to infants, teenagers and addicts. Claire sits on the edge of the bed. Jory’s hair is a torrent of spun gold curling down her back. When she was a baby Claire would sometimes pull a chair to the side of her crib and sit for hours, watching the stripes on her thin cotton gown ripple in time with her breath. After so many precarious months the miracle had been too fragile to trust.

  She strokes Jory’s back to wake her, and her fingers catch in another strand of gold. Claire untangles it from Jory’s hair, traces it around until she finds the diamond-studded heart pendant.

  She walks back downstairs and calls Addison’s cell phone, doesn’t wait for more than “Good morning.” “Did you buy a necklace for Jory yesterday?”

  “Does this mean it’s not a good morning?”

  “Just… Sorry. No. I don’t know yet. Did you buy her a necklace at Walmart?”

  She hears a deep sigh and knows the answer, then she is back upstairs shaking Jory awake, tugging at the thin gold chain until it threatens to break.

  “What?” Jory mutters, then sits up and grabs her mother’s hand around the pendant.

  “Where did this come from?” Claire asks her, barely reining the accusatory edge in her voice.

  Jory hugs her knees to her chest in a barricade. “You know where it came from.”

  “Did you steal it? Did you?”

  Tears are already streaming down Jory’s face, her lips blushing red. “I didn’t steal it! I bought it.”

  “Bought it with what? Where did you get two hundred dollars?”

  Jory throws herself onto her stomach and yanks the comforter over her head. Claire yanks the comforter completely off and throws it onto the floor. “Get dressed. Now. We are going for a drive.”

  She calls the clinic to say she can’t come in until this afternoon. Frida answers that not many patients are likely to come with the snow, anyway, and makes no comment about the distress in Claire’s voice.

  Claire smells burning milk and turns off the stove, dumps the contents of the pan into the sink and runs back upstairs to get dressed. Then she stops—paralyzed when it dawns on her—and races back downstairs to her desk wearing only jeans and a bra. She pulls on the bottom drawer so hard it comes out of the frame altogether. Every receipt is filed there by month and she dumps the March folder onto the floor, spreading the receipts out so she can spot the grocery store logo. She lines the last four up side by side, a picket fence of spent money, half of it borrowed, to buy milk and eggs and toilet paper and soap.

  Every one of the receipts gives Jory away. Every receipt has a fifty dollar charge for a Visa gift certificate on it. Enough to add up to a necklace and more, but not enough to be glaringly missed.

  Claire makes herself take five deep breaths, then five more. Five more still before she goes back into Jory’s room, picks up her cell phone and her iPod from the dresser and locks them in the file cabinet. “We are leaving in five minutes. Get your boots on. It snowed last night.”

  “I’m not coming.”

  “Fine. I am taking the grocery store receipts and this necklace to the police. I’m sure they’ll have an idea about how you can pay it back.”

  The roads are terrible but Claire is too mad to care. Jory radiates her own fury from the backseat. Three times Claire starts to lecture her but clenches her teeth together instead; still, the rage screams unchecked in her mind. She guns the car at a stop sign and feels the tires shimmy over the fresh, wet snow. She almost turns back at the pass; the snow plows haven’t been through, but a glance at Jory’s defiant face in the rearview mirror keeps her on the road. She can see the crest and it is only another twenty-minute drive down the other side—when the roads are dry.

  She digs her cell phone out of her purse and tosses it back to Jory. “Call your father. Call him and tell him what’s going on.”

  “He’s probably in a meeting or something,” Jory says, her voice congested with tears.

  “Yes, and I am supposed to be at work, too. I am not a single parent. Not yet.”

  “There’s no signal here,” Jory says, flipping the phone shut.

  Of course not. Claire feels like she is choking on her thoughts, they are rushing through her brain so fast. Jory would never have worn that necklace to bed unless she wanted Claire to find it. Worse. Needed her to find it. That stab of guilt makes Claire mad all over again. At herself, at Jory, at five inches of snow in late March, for God sakes. She w
ants to drive all the way to Florida and get on a boat headed for a hot place where nobody knows her name. “Give me the phone,” she says.

  “There’s no signal. I’ll call him on the other side.”

  “Hand me my phone!”

  “What? You think I’m trying to steal your stupid phone, just because you stole mine?”

  Claire whips around to face Jory, and at that moment the road edge, buried by fresh snow, cuts under the right front wheel. The car shoots forward and Claire has the sick sensation of falling. She jerks the wheel to the left and the car spins halfway around, the clouds and trees and mountain all flashing across the windshield at the same instant in time. The car skids across the highway and bounces off a guardrail then back again to the other side. A white blast hits her in the chest and the car stops with a jolting snap.

  The backseat is quiet and for one fraction of an instant Claire reels past all the anger of the last year, pleads with God to save her baby and cries out for Jory.

  After another instant of shocked silence Jory answers her. “Way to go, Mom.”

  Claire covers her face with her hands; her cheeks are wet. She turns around and reaches for Jory. “Are you okay? Does anything hurt?”

  Jory shrugs, then shakes her head, and then she starts to cry.

  “Okay. Okay.” Claire holds her breath to slow her pulse down, her fist over her chest. “So, we are both okay.” She turns the ignition key and the engine starts, but when she puts the shift into reverse and presses lightly on the pedal she hears a harsh clatter that makes her lift her foot as if she’d been slapped for presuming the car would move. “Stay in the car. Try the cell phone again, will you?”

  Her door has smashed into the guardrail, and through her window she sees a freefall down the mountain, eight inches and a ripple of metal away. She unbuckles her seat belt and crawls across the seats to step into the snow, gets on her hands and knees to look under the car. The mysterious spaces beneath the frame and body disappear into black shadows. She takes the flashlight out of the glove compartment and gets onto her back to wriggle underneath the car. Ice is impacted between the tire and the axle and she slams at it with the butt of the flashlight until it cleaves away. With a surge of relief, she shines the light over the braces and bars and bolts of metal four inches above her face. And then she sees that the fender is jammed into the rubber grooves of the tire.