Healer: A Novel

by Carol Cassella

  A flash of red and white light shows up ahead and Claire tells Addison to pull into the ampm so she can pick up milk—anything to break the tension. He wheels into the parking lot without a word and she is out before he’s fully stopped, slamming the door behind her. She squints under the store’s bright fluorescent lights, irritated, now, by their harsh contrast to the dark car. The low-pitched buzz of the coolers, the red eye of the security monitor, the watchful gaze of the night clerk—it feels like a jury is observing her family conflict. She pulls a Darigold carton off the refrigerator shelf and carries it to the cash register, only at the last minute realizing she has no cash. She pulls her purse off her shoulder and starts plucking quarters and dimes out of the pockets and seams, finally looks up to ask the cashier what the minimum purchase is for a credit card.

  She stops, speechless. The woman putting the milk into a small brown paper bag is hers—her patient—the woman who’d been hunched at the end of her exam table just two days ago, hiding bruises underneath her thick pancake makeup and, even worse, beneath her clothes. “I’m so sorry. I mean, I don’t have enough money. Enough cash,” Claire stutters, the first words that come to her, tumbling ahead of what she wants to say: I tried to find someone to help you. You didn’t have to hide from me.

  The woman… no, it is a girl, really. Only little more than a girl. She stares down at the bag, pays careful attention to folding the top of the brown paper in a crisp, unwrinkled crease before she pushes it across the counter toward Claire. “It’s okay, ma’am. Just pay the rest next time.”

  She shuts the door quietly when she comes back to the car, fumbles with the buckle on her seat belt. Addison pulls out on the highway slowly, cautiously. The silence in the car, she can tell, is now there to guard her, and she looks at these other two Boehnings, trying to guess what was said while she was in the store. When she can’t stand it anymore, Claire turns to Addison and chokes out in half a sob, “I’m just trying to help. To help you. To help us!” She sees the quick twitch below his eye; the car holds steady, fixed for home. “So I have to live with the consequence, but I’m not supposed to have any say in how to get out of it. Is that it? Is that how you want us to be?”

  Without a word to this Addison slows the car down, steers onto the shoulder just emerging from the melting snow. He shifts into Park and stares at the road ahead as if he could see it still moving underneath them. “All right,” he says, his voice alarmingly calm. “All right. I’ll call Walker when I get to Seattle. If that’s what you want.”

  Long after they are asleep Claire startles awake, listening for whatever threat broke into her dream; the house and land are still except for the whip of wind in the aspen grove. Addison is softly snoring. She blows across his neck until he shifts his body and falls quiet; the dimly lit folds of his chin and full pout of his parted lips make him look untroubled as a child. She bends over him, waiting for him to feel her eyes. “I’m scared,” she whispers. “I don’t know where we are anymore.”

  He has always been such a lucky man, had been born believing in his own luck. He’d warned her, when it was clear they would marry, Jory still without formed digits—a tailed frog floating in a dime-sized salt bath—warned her about the genetics of his lineage, the twisted gifting of his luckiness. When Jory was eight or nine she had asked Claire (it seems almost prescient now), “Is Daddy very much like Granddad was?” She had met her paternal grandfather so few times before he died she couldn’t have any clear memory of him, and Claire is half glad for that. Addison’s father had nearly gambled himself into homeless shelters by the time he was diagnosed with lung cancer. The more money Addison gave him, the faster it disappeared.

  “Well,” Claire had finally answered, “you’ve seen his picture. They look a little bit alike. Of course, Daddy’s more handsome.”

  Jory had tucked this fact into a corner of her emerging self and continued, “What did he do? I can’t remember.”

  Because we never told you, Claire thought. “He was in the military for a while when Dad was little. And after that, well, he was kind of an investor.”

  “What do you mean? What did he invest in?”

  “Various things. Kind of a financial risk analyst.”

  So maybe it was Addison’s inherited chemistry that convinced him his solitary signature, borrowing against their communal property, was justified by the profit he expected to count into Claire’s trusting hands. His conviction that vascumab deserved production, deserved its market share and more. The return, in fact, should hardly matter. What mattered was the drug. The patient. The cure. And maybe that was part of what she’d fallen in love with—not the luck itself but Addison’s blissful, gullible belief that with any luck at all fate would ultimately be fair.

  He’ll go away again tomorrow, put on his pressed suit and tie and stride into the offices of billionaires with all the numbers and practiced spiel they should need to believe their next chart-breaking product could be vascumab, a pale yellow liquid, the targeted poison that might shatter all the nearly imperceptible gains most new chemotherapies tout as success. Before his own project had imploded Addison relished in scoffing at the two, three, six extra weeks of life manufacturers were using to justify “improved” drugs that cost a thousandfold more than the current standard of care. “And the side effects still ruin any quality of life,” he would say, following Claire around the kitchen with the latest Clinical Oncology journal rolled up in his hand, whapping it on the counter to make his point. She’d gotten used to it after the first few months, realized it was an exercise for him to share the rush he got from his work, the humming conviction that vascumab was a unique, critical leap in cancer care.

  Claire had realized he was on the brink of a personal miracle even before he did. He’d come home late from an international pharma meeting, with that distracted manner he got with all of his incipient ideas, the germ of it clustering and dividing deep in his cortex—a peculiar restlessness waking him in the middle of the night to hunt for notes, tracing the dim scheme onto an imaginary whiteboard with his forefinger, like a sleepwalker who couldn’t be startled awake. It reminded her of labor, this ineluctable struggle that overtook him as the seed bloomed into a viable molecular answer. Gestating —it came to her now as the perfect word to describe his invisible amalgamation of facts and hypotheses into an idea ultimately too huge to contain. It was almost as if the project happened to him, not because of him, as if his brain had been tapped by the stars to bear this infant of pharmaceutical progress.

  She had awakened at four one morning to an empty bed and found him sketching out molecules on the back of an envelope at the breakfast bar, target proteins and ion channels. It was winter and she had on a thick cashmere robe with the collar turned up around her throat. Addison, too, was in a bathrobe, so engrossed in the lightning burst of what became vascumab that his thick green fleece had fallen loose, exposing a wide V of pale chest and belly. “I can’t believe it,” he said, tapping, tapping the point of his pen in the center of the paper so that a cluster of blue dots broke through the surface like Braille. “I have to try it.” He looked up at her for the first time since she’d come into the room; his expression implied that she knew exactly what he was referring to, as if the bald crown of his head were made of glass.

  Claire shivered and waited. It was like trying to anticipate an earthquake, a volcanic eruption—a shifting of space and ground that would change everything in unpredictable ways. She had been through it before with Addison, when he had first conceived his ovarian cancer test. She’d held her breath, grabbed hold and ridden the wave with him, never fully understanding the science he explained, but trusting that if she clung tight enough he would carry Jory and her to higher, safer ground.

  Addison says good-bye to them after dinner Monday night. He has been back just long enough for Claire to get used to both sides of the bed being warm, used to the rock and sway when he rolls over in the night, and the pocket of cold air left in his wake. In their other l
ife she would move into that space, press her body against his; more often now she only wraps the comforter tighter around her neck. Without wanting to, she admits some balance has shifted; having him away is the routine, at home he is the guest.

  Jory clings to him in the doorway, then returns to her homework and instant messaging. Claire walks him out to his car. A wind has come up and the sky is brushed with the thin white cirrus clouds of changing weather, maybe the last surprise snow of spring before the greening.

  Addison stands with one foot propped on the runner, one arm cocked up on the open door. “I have this great idea for a new business.”

  “Okay. I’m ready,” Claire says.

  “Telemedicine.”

  “That’s not new, Addison.”

  “No, just listen. I’m going to call it Dial-a-Doc.” Claire narrows her eyes. “You call an eight hundred number with, say, a skin rash. And it puts you through a menu: ‘If your rash is itchy, press one. If your rash is oozing, press three. Bleeding? If you’ve soaked more than two towels, press two. Abdominal pain? If you’re vomiting, press four.”

  She laughs but can’t hide the sarcastic bite spurred by their arguments the day before. “Maybe you should just start selling Laetrile!”

  He puts his hands on her shoulders and gives a little shake, bends his knees to bring his eyes down to hers. “Claire. It’s a joke.”

  Her eyes start to fill and he pulls her against him so the world is swallowed up inside his damp wool coat. “It’s gonna be okay. We’ll make it. I’ll make it okay.” When she finally breaks away he reaches into his pocket and hands her a small white box. It is the earrings, the blue glass earrings with the golden wave she had seen in the gallery window. “Not exactly Tiffany’s.”

  “Thank you,” she says, but it comes out as a whisper. “You already did Tiffany’s.” She pushes her hair back and slides the wire loops into her ears.

  He kisses her and gets into the car, stops a few feet down the drive and rolls down the window. “Remind Jory to check our Lotto numbers. I taped the tickets to the fridge.” And then he is gone. Again.

  When Claire goes back inside Jory is at the computer holding up a fan of tickets she and Addison had bought the week before. She shrieks, “Mom, MOM! Come look at this. I think we won! COME LOOK AT THIS!”

  Claire reads the numbers out loud one by one while Jory checks them against those displayed on the computer screen. They match, all six of them. Jory falls off the chair and kicks her legs out in a split. “Whooey! Seattle, here I come!”

  “One problem, hon. Look at the date.”

  Jory sits up and snatches the ticket out of her mother’s hand. “You mean he picked the right numbers one day too late?”

  “No. I mean he bought a ticket on Thursday with Wednesday’s winning numbers. To make you laugh. Why don’t you call him as soon as you’re ready to laugh about it. Better start your homework.”

  Claire sits at the dining room table with her laptop open to their bank’s website, and this month’s bills laid out in categorical columns. Her pay stub is parked at the top, as if it might rain money down in some fair distribution to every waiting envelope. She sits with her hands jammed into her blue jeans and stares at a vague point in the middle of all the papers. She’s tried three variations, the first time arranging them according to balance due. Then she reversed the order, hoping that paying off the small debts might bolster her courage to write the bigger checks. Third was by order of importance: Would it be easier to lose their lights or their propane? Their car insurance or Internet access? Telephone or next week’s groceries? In that go-round the Internet had started on the lowest rung, but she knew Jory would run away from home if they lost that contact with her world. She loosely sums the debts in her head and subtracts them from the red number highlighted on the computer screen. It’s almost funny how meaningless the digits can become if you stare at them long enough. She plays around with putting all the zeros that used to come behind the final tally in the front, moving the decimal place around randomly. It doesn’t really change what they’re going to eat for breakfast tomorrow morning, after all.

  She digs deep in her pocket and places another item on top of her pay stub—the diamond ring Addison gave her eleven years ago when he sold Eugena. He’d had it custom designed to sit flush with her plain gold wedding band, but other than that it’s quite simple—a standard gold circle with four prongs holding a standard brilliant-cut stone. Your average two-carat GV VS1 diamond.

  She opens her cell phone and calls Anna, her closest friend in Seattle. “How’ve you been?” Claire asks, pushing away from the table so the bills are not in her direct line of vision.

  “Claire! You must have read my mind. Sherry and I were talking about you yesterday. We want to come out for some skiing. Or is the season over?”

  “They stopped grooming three weeks ago.”

  “Then we’ll just come out to see you —help you plow the back forty for spring planting.”

  Claire forces a smile, hoping she might sound like she finds this funny. “It’s okay. We’re still buying our vegetables at Food Pavilion.” She rakes her hair back from her face. “Wait till the weather’s better. Kind of mud season now.”

  “So how’s the job?” Anna asks.

  “Pretty good. I’m starting to feel like I’m helping more than just slowing the whole clinic down. I saw a case of measles the other day. Dan, my boss, had a case of malaria.”

  “God, Claire. It sounds like you’re practicing medicine in Africa.”

  The remark stings, for some reason Claire can’t pin down. She is already wishing she had not called, wishing she could blurt out her request without any more empty banter. “Yeah. Right here in the middle of America. How’s your house remodel coming?”

  “You won’t believe what they’ve done now. The new doors were just installed and they screwed up the finish on the thresholds.” One of Anna’s children is practicing piano and Claire hears the ding and click of a computer near the phone. “The color at the side door is different than the front door—it looks like it came from a different manufacturer or something.”

  “Can’t they just swap it out?”

  “Contractor says because we wanted a custom-made door for the front the same threshold won’t fit. Or something. He says we have to live with it. Forty-five hundred dollars and he says we have to live with it!”

  “Well, how different do they look?” Claire asks her, scooping the diamond ring onto her Bic pen and dancing tiny rainbows across the white bills and envelopes.

  “Different. One has more brown in it. They look different.”

  “Are the doors next to each other?”

  “They’re on opposite walls. Okay?” Anna hits a more direct note. “Okay. So most people won’t see it, I know. But it’s the principal of the thing. I want what I ordered. Total headache.”

  Claire looks around the living room, the wallpaper from 1960 peeling from the corners of the ceiling, the neon-bright kitchen cabinets Jory and her friends had painted. “Maybe you need to find a new hobby, Anna.” She intends it to be a joke but Anna must have heard the cut. She is quiet for a minute. Claire sighs. “Did that sound bitchy? I’m sorry. God, you’re the only friend I talk to anymore and I can’t even be nice.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Me and my stupid thresholds.”

  The laptop’s screen saver kicks on and a slide show of family photos starts; almost all of them are Jory. Blinking her childhood away before Claire’s breaking heart. She shuts the lid and turns the chair to face out the back windows of the living room. “Anna, I’m kind of in a jam. I want you to do a favor for me. If you can.”

  She can practically hear Anna biting the inside of her lip the way she does. Finally she asks, “Is it about Nash’s investment?”

  Claire stands up and walks to the window, presses her forehead against the cold glass. “No, Anna. That’s between Addison and Nash.” Even as she says it she is hit by the memory of a quarrel that s
prang up when she had warned Addison about mixing friendship and money.

  She can hear the apology in Anna’s quick reply. “I shouldn’t have… Of course. I’ll do anything I can to help you, Claire.”

  Claire strolls over to the stairwell and rests the phone on her shoulder for a moment. It is quiet upstairs. “I want you to sell my diamond ring. There’s no place out here to even try. Take it to Fox’s and see what they say.”

  She hears Anna close a door and the background noise dims. “Are you and Addison okay?”

  She wishes Anna would make it easy for her, wants to shout at her to just say yes, not punish her with sympathy. “Addison’s in a difficult place right now.”

  “Yeah, I know. But are you okay?”

  Claire lets out a hard laugh. “‘You’ the plural or ‘you’ the singular?”

  “Well, by this point in a marriage, is there a difference?”

  Claire tips her head back for a minute and tries to relax the muscles at the back of her throat. “If I send it by insured post, will you be there to sign for it? You can say no, Anna. I don’t want to put you on the spot.”

  “You know I will. Anything.”

  Before she seals the box, Claire takes the diamond out one last time and slips it onto her finger, holds her hand splayed in front of the woodstove so the fire refracts through the crystal. The mantelpiece above the stove is crowded with framed photographs Jory had unpacked and arranged all over the room, even before the moving truck had left the driveway. For the first time Claire notices the one that is missing, almost certain it had been there the week before. Forgetting the ring, she pushes every picture on the mantel aside—her wedding portrait, birthday parties, Santa’s lap—searching for that very first picture they had taken of Jordan Lillian Boehning, weighing 2.8 pounds, still attached to all the tubes and wires that ended up binding their three lives together.