Healer

by Carol Cassella

  “Me?” He breaks his gaze for a second. “Nah. I might have been designing cleaner bombs, but never setting them off.”

  Claire is lying on her back staring up at him, aware, from this position, of how his jowl pouches along his jawline. “I have a lot of patients like her. What they’ve left behind…” She closes her eyes. “It makes those turtles sound lucky.”

  “Claire?” He waits, almost rhetorically, it feels to her. Like he’s waiting to see the fight going on in her boil itself out. “You still have time here. You’ve already helped a lot of people.”

  When she doesn’t answer he undresses, throwing his clothes on the floor at the foot of the bed. He turns out the light and lifts one drowsy hand, stroking her cheek before he tucks it under his pillow and folds his knees up, the place he always starts in sleep.

  “You trust him, don’t you? Ron, I mean?” Claire asks.

  “Trust him how?”

  “I mean, it’s more than just the money. You think he really believes in vascumab? What it can do for cancer?”

  She can tell this pulls him a step back into his daytime world; he sighs with a tinge of impatience. “Yeah. I think he believes it’s a good drug. But right now I have to mainly trust his business sense. Just getting vascumab ready for phase one trials again is going to cost ten or fifteen million. He can’t take that kind of risk just to be a good Samaritan.”

  She tries to make out the details of his face in the darkness. “Have you called any of the lab team yet?”

  “The team?” He says it with such bite she knows she’s hit a sensitive point. Rick had been the key player, when it came down to the irreplaceable brains. “The team is all otherwise employed.”

  She puts her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I just meant… God. What did I mean? It’s just the uncertainty of it all.”

  They are both wide awake now. After a minute he sits up, naked, and stares at her, then flops his half of the covers off and climbs out of bed, unzips the top compartment of his suitcase and squats in front of it. He comes back with something in his hand, a small blue velvet box, which he places on the comforter between them, then tucks his crossed legs underneath the sheet again.

  Claire doesn’t touch it.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “Open it.”

  “Addison, I’m really glad you have faith in Ron, but I’m not ready to spend invisible money.”

  “Okay. Then I’ll open it.” He holds the box between his hands and pries the hinge back. Sitting on the puffed satin bed inside is a square of cardboard with a pink thread attached to a small gold safety pin.

  Claire laughs. “Thank God. I thought you were going to give me something too gorgeous to return. What is it?”

  Addison plucks the paper out of the cleft intended for a jewel and holds it in front of her—the tag from her blue dress. “I’m at least sure enough of the deal to cut the tags off.”

  “Okay. I guess it’s unethical to take it back at this point anyway.” She kisses him. “Thank you.”

  Addison makes a grand gesture of snapping the hinged box closed again, then holds it up in front of her face and shakes it. Something rattles against the cardboard sides. “Hey, maybe I forgot something. Better look.”

  Now Claire’s eyebrows draw together. “Please, Addison. I don’t…”

  “Just take it, would you?” She reluctantly reaches for the box, holds it for a moment before she opens it again and pulls the satin-covered cushion out. Underneath it is her diamond ring.

  Addison waits for her to move, finally takes the box out of her hand, dumps the ring out and puts it on her finger, turning it so that it matches flush against the wedding ring it was designed for. “Anna called me. She didn’t have the heart to sell it.”

  He makes love to her that night almost too consciously, too carefully, the exuberance she’d seen in him before dinner tamped down—by caution, by her own hesitance, or because they’d watched their beautiful grown-up girl recall for them a night that is gone. It is not a thing she can ask him to explain. Hours later, sleepless, she goes into Jory’s room, rests the palm of her hand on Jory’s forehead as if checking for a fever. Jory sleeps through the touch, deeply, utterly vulnerable, the way only the protected can sleep. Jory. The true sunshine of their lives. Conceived to Bill Withers and twenty-six “I knows” played over and over until Claire could count it right, or stop laughing long enough to try. It’s almost funny, she thinks, that the only babe to take and hold was conceived out of wedlock, like a proof against righteous laws. Twenty-six “I knows” and this house still ain’t no home anytime he goes away.

  • 30 •

  It feels good to be in a pattern of two parents and a child again. The balancing of who scolds and who consoles, who pays and who withholds is healthier when it is split between them—the tried-and-true strategy of good cop, bad cop, but no one has to be stuck in either role too long. The first few days Miguela has to be coaxed to the dinner table with them. But Addison’s uninhibited interest in Nicaragua’s turbulent history brings out another facet of Miguela: the teacher, the daughter of a revolutionary idealist. And it is Jory, remarkably, more often than Claire, who ends up translating the missing words for Addison.

  Addison spends his days on the phone with his lawyers and accountants and a few technicians from his dismantled lab who might be willing to come back to work for him.

  But at the clinic, for Claire, a glass bubble seems to have wrapped itself around questions of moving back to the city. Every time she makes a follow-up appointment with a patient, every time she sits at that wobbly card table with Frida and Anita eating peanut butter sandwiches, she pushes the moment she needs to talk to them one day, one week, one month farther. They have cohered as a group, in the same way she had cohered with her interns and residents in the middle of brutally long call shifts during her training, under the pressure of too much work for too few people. It was friendship fired in shared strife, richer and more dependable even than friendship born of shared neighborhoods or social tiers.

  On good days Dan comes in for an hour or so, sits with his feet up and listens to Claire talk about the patients he knows better than she ever expects to. He starts with specifics: Juan Rivas is likely sending his steroid pills back to his wife in Mexico for her arthritis, so if his polymyalgia is worse, tell him you’ll give him more but he has to take his own pills, too. Dean Grauer’s father had Huntington’s and he’ll come in every two or three months about a rash or a pain in his knee, but what he really wants to know is whether he’s showing symptoms—don’t write any of this in his chart because if he ever gets health insurance again it could be a preexisting. She takes meticulous notes the first two or three times, then one day he takes the pen out of her hand and tosses it in the trash. “It’s the forest we’re going for here, Claire.”

  Late one evening Claire comes out of an exam room and Frida puts a chart in her hands. “I can’t even get this guy to talk to me. You try.” Claire starts to counter that Frida’s Spanish is still twice as good, but Frida’s already walked in to see the next patient.

  Gabriel Sanchez, a small Chiapan with a thick accent who has lived in a tent since arriving in Hallum two weeks ago, is here to see the doctor about a rash. Claire introduces herself as Doctora Boehning. He hesitates a second and looks at the closed door, then takes his hat off and crumples it into his lap. The imprint of the canvas band has left a dent in his forehead that continues right on around through his thick black hair. He nods. “Señora.”

  Claire sits on the stool so her face is the same height as his. Slowly, practicing every phrase in her head before she says it, she asks him when the rash had first appeared. What part of his skin is affected. Does it itch, or hurt, or weep? Is it bumpy or raised? Splotchy or smooth? Has he been exposed to any new lotions or sprays? Mr. Gabriel Sanchez—his first name that of God’s messenger, his last a name older than America itself—won’t look at her, keeps his eyes on his cap, turning it in his hands as if feeling along the
rim for some essential tactile detail.

  She finally asks him to show her his rash. “Senora. Perdon. Dr. Zelaya no está?”

  “No. No está aquí hoy. Sólo yo. Soy su doctora.”

  She sees him stifle a grimace and worries her Spanish is still flat out wrong at times and she’s missed something. After passing the Spanish–English dictionary back and forth it becomes clear that his rash is in his crotch, and the exam he finally allows her to perform, with one arm thrown over his pinched-shut eyes, confirms that he has crabs. It takes another fifteen minutes of stumbling Spanish and the shared dictionary, she opening it to words in the front half and he searching for words in the back half, to hopefully convince him that all his tent mates must use the special shampoos and lotions, too, and they must wash their bedrolls at the Laundromat in hot water, not the icy waters of the river they are used to.

  She drops a store-bought pie and rotisserie chicken off with Evelyn and gets home long after her own family has eaten dinner, so tired she falls asleep before she’s changed out of her clothes. She wakes up after midnight to discover Addison has put her book on the nightstand, taken her shoes off and covered her with a light blanket before he slid under his half of the bedspread. She peels her jeans off, flips her pillow over and buries her cheek in the cool fresh cotton.

  And then she hears a voice—Jory, calling out in her sleep. She stops her breath and listens hard enough to hear the hum of her pulse. Nothing. Then footsteps. She slips to the door in bare feet and cracks it open. Jory is sitting at the dining table in the wavering yellow light of an emergency candle stuck inside an orange juice glass.

  “Why are you still awake?” Claire hisses, upset enough to scold but not wanting to wake Miguela. Jory sits bolt upright—the sudden, defensive move spurs Claire to put on her bathrobe and come all the way down the stairs. “What are you doing? It’s a school night!”

  “I had to look something up for a test tomorrow,” Jory says.

  Claire scans the empty table. “So if you’re studying for a test, where are your books?”

  Jory stands up with her arms crossed tight around her slender body. “Okay. I’ll go to bed.” She starts to walk by Claire and something metallic hits the floor and skids across the room.

  Claire turns on the overhead light, blindingly bright after the candle glow. “What’s going on, Jory?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you drop?” Claire folds her robe close around her legs and starts searching the floor, walking nearer the table and along the wall. She sees a glint of gold beside the table leg and squats down; Jory lets out an audible cry. Claire has to crawl on her knees to reach it, a dull gold locket about the size of a half dollar, hinged on one side. She picks it up, grasping the edge of the table to balance herself in a wave of vertigo. The first thing that flashes through her mind is the diamond necklace—the discovery she made a month ago while trailing her fingers through her sleeping daughter’s hair that Jory was capable of such a lie—the lie of such a theft.

  She holds the locket out on her open palm in front of Jory’s horrified face. “Where did you get this?” Jory shakes her head once and then seems to freeze. Claire’s voice drops from a shrill accusation to a harsh plea. “You didn’t steal it, did you? Jory, please tell me…”

  After a minute of tense silence Jory starts to cry and Claire wants to apologize to her, wants to hold her in her lap, wants to shake her and accuse her all over again. Her shoulders sag. “Jory…” she says forlornly. But Jory has already walked into the kitchen doorway and is standing next to Miguela.

  “She did not steal it. It is mine,” Miguela says.

  Jory is looking at Miguela, imploringly. Beseechingly. The anguish on Jory’s face makes Claire feel like part of her own flesh is being pulled away, a deep thudding certainty that some critical secret has been shared without Claire’s protection. “Jory, I want to talk to Miguela alone for a minute. Wait upstairs, please.”

  Jory immediately sits on the closest chair and locks her hands under the seat, as if her mother might still be capable of physically carrying her out of the room. Claire closes her fist around the locket and sits down solidly in her own chair, looking from Jory to Miguela, weighing the choices. “All right. Okay. Miguela, sit with us, please. We’ll all talk.”

  Miguela’s hands are knotted in her lap and her head is bowed. Claire wants to reach over and lift her face up, make her show her eyes. After a long, uncomfortable pause Miguela looks at Claire and says, “The locket belonged to my daughter, Esperanza.”

  Jory lets out a cry of betrayal. “You don’t have to tell her!”

  Claire starts to get up, but it is Miguela who addresses Jory now. “Your mother needs to know, Jory.” Miguela looks exhausted, like the act of breathing causes her physical pain. But right now, in this house tonight, Claire is not Miguela’s doctor, not even her friend. She is only Jory’s mother.

  Claire flicks her eyes between Miguela and Jory—Jory looks like she’s ready to grab Miguela’s hand and run out the door. “Why is this a secret, Miguela? You told me you’d had a baby,” Claire says.

  “Yes. But I did not tell you how she died.” She pauses, seems to struggle for words. “I did not come to the United States for money. I did not come to the clinic for a doctor. Or a job. I came to find who killed my daughter.”

  Claire is silent for a minute, trying to decide what to say. “Your daughter was here? In Hallum?”

  “Esperanza left Nicaragua when she was fifteen. Three years later she came home, so sick I did not know her. A stranger found her in a bus and drove her to me. To Jalapa. She was pregnant. She died four days later.”

  Jory is silently crying, tears running down her immobile face. Claire realizes it is the first time she has seen her daughter cry in the manner of an adult, suppressing every other controllable sign of grief. Claire moves her hand to the middle of the table, where Jory can reach it if she wants. “I’m sorry,” Claire says. “I’m so sorry, Miguela. Do you know why she died?”

  Miguela shakes her head, more in hopelessness than as an answer. “She came home with only this.” Miguela puts an envelope on the table. Claire recognizes it as the one she’d been reading the night she moved in. “Go on. You look,” Miguela says. She slides it across the table. It is so worn the paper has the texture of flannel at the creases. Inside are two pieces of paper. The first is a check stub from Walker’s Orchards, and the other is an appointment card for Dr. Dan Zelaya.

  Claire turns it over in her hands, hoping for a revelation in the few words and numbers. “Every time I saw you at the clinic, you came in before we opened or when we were closing. When Anita wasn’t at her desk. Were you looking for her records? Her medical chart?”

  Miguela nods.

  “Why didn’t you just ask me? Even after you moved in here. With us. You didn’t think I would help you?”

  Miguela looks out into the middle of the room for so long Claire starts to repeat her question, but Miguela breaks in. “Esperanza went to a special house to live. The men at the orchard sent her. They made her sick—they put medicine in her and made her sick. She had bruises.” Miguela runs her hand over her arms and face. “Bruises everywhere.”

  “Are you sure she was pregnant?” Claire asks.

  “Her stomach was this big.” Miguela holds her arms out in front of her abdomen. “I wanted her baby to live, but it did not move. Never.”

  Claire’s mind is flying through the possible complications of pregnancy and the confused translations that had stretched across four thousand miles, two cultures, and the contorted delusions of critical illness. “Maybe the house was a hospital—someplace to have her baby?”

  Suddenly Jory speaks out, her voice sounds edgy, almost desperate. “Tell her about the needles they used on her. Esperanza wasn’t sick before the people at the orchard sent her to that place. It wasn’t a hospital.”

  Miguela looks worn out, like she doesn’t have the reserves left to convince Claire of anythi
ng. She snaps the locket open and looks at it, then passes it to Claire. Inside the small gold frame is a picture of a girl Jory’s age, with Miguela’s eyes, Miguela’s hair. “Here is all I know. In Nicaragua, if you are born with nothing, you will live all your life with nothing.” Her eyes are glistening but her face is composed, the purpose of her life crystallized inside the unexplained events that transformed the girl in this snapshot into the pregnant woman who came home to die.

  Claire can’t find any words.

  After a long silence, Miguela says, “I know. You can’t see it.” She sounds both plaintive and resigned, as if faced with an immutable injustice that she is deciding not to fight anymore. She searches Claire’s face like no language in the world could translate their separate lives, an expression of such sophic compassion that Claire feels exposed.

  “What?” Claire asks. “What can’t I see?”

  “You cannot see what you have.”

  Claire waits for Addison to say something. She has tried to stay as clearheaded as possible, repeating not only what Miguela has told her tonight but all the odd occurrences she’s noticed since Miguela showed up in front of the grocery store out of nowhere; how they had all just seemed like cultural or linguistic quirks until they exploded inside this weird story. She’s trying to fathom how she could have invited someone into their home, into Jory’s life, based on trust alone, when she knew so little about her.

  Addison is lying on his back, naked underneath the sheet, his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes closed. She leans over him, finally taps her finger in the center of his forehead. “Are you listening?” He reaches up and closes his hand around her own. “I’m listening. I’m thinking. Go on.”