Healer

by Carol Cassella

  She goes upstairs to the bedroom they are sharing—temporarily, she reminds herself. Until Addison finds an investor. Until Addison sells his molecule. Until Claire can support them all. She drains the cold turquoise water out of the tub and washes her face and underarms with Wet Ones before climbing in bed, waiting for Jory to join her, deciding to worry about it all tomorrow.

  But her dreams wake her before midnight. Dreams of falling from ripped-open airplanes, dreams of the solid earth breaking apart and swallowing her house, dreams of misshapen, hooded figures. She rolls onto her back to stare at the ceiling, listening to the skitter of mice inside the walls, counting Jory’s regular, even breaths. This is not cancer, she tells herself. No one is dying here. I have my mind, my hands, the will to earn a living. I have Jory, my sweet, contentious, adolescently self-centered Jory. And Addison. I have Addison.

  She gives up on sleep, and slips out of bed to check the thermostat again. The overhead light illuminates a pale circle in the living room floor she’s never noticed before, where some mysterious repetitive motion has worn the varnish away. A rocking chair perhaps, or some former resident’s dog turning circles before settling. She stands at the front window looking across the field to the valley, discernible only as deeper black under a slightly paler sky at the limit of sight. The sky has cleared. The new snow is a vast, unmarred crystal sheet.

  There is a small cupboard beneath the staircase packed with abandoned goods they’d poked through when they first bought the house, disjointed bits of history too worthless to sell but too cool to throw away, including a few oddly matched snowshoes. The Realtor had used them to show the place to clients in winter when the drive was left unplowed. It’s obvious these are from an earlier generation—wood and cord and leather instead of the high-tech metal and nylon designs Claire has seen racked beside skis and snowboards in sports stores. She untangles two similar enough to pass as a pair, carries them to the door and slips her bare feet into her damp fleece-lined boots, stuffs the bulky sleeves of her bathrobe into Addison’s down coat. Then she steps outside, straps the webbed snowshoes on and awkwardly sets out across the field toward a rim of rising moon.

  If you headed north from this exact spot with the right gear and enough stamina you could walk clear across the Canadian border and never hit a fence. Who knew, maybe all the way to the arctic circle. They’ve spent so many of their vacations to Hallum at the resort, playing tennis or swimming or ice skating, that they have explored few of the trails carving through the adjacent state lands and traversing the Pasayten Wilderness. She has a momentary image of a backpacker pulling out a passport and converting money at a border crossing. But of course it is all woods and mountains out there, the odds a million to one you’d see a patrol.

  The snow absorbs all sound and reflects all light; the silence is profound. It hammers inside her skull with her pulse and is, at the same time, as expansive as the star-studded sky. And the cold. A cold that can embrace you—kiss you into death. Her body warms as she pushes farther across the field; she finds a pace of exertion that matches her reserves, a comforting rhythm in the crunch of the web and frame on new snow, the regular huff of her breath. Nothing else.

  She misses Addison, mad as she still is. But if he were with her they would be arguing, after that last horrible phone call. That’s the thing about a marriage—even a good marriage. It’s so easy to spread your own blame around, pin half your own bad choices onto somebody else. And if Addison has told her lies, or maybe fairer to say “withheld truths,” didn’t that fit patterns they’d both carved into their marriage from the day she quit her own career?

  The night Addison told her what had happened at the lab and what had happened to the money—how fast the cascade had snowballed from “putting some skin into his lab, a personal investment,” to drowning debt—she was the first to say they should sell their home. A house couldn’t bleed, couldn’t cry. It would shelter and swaddle the next family as comfortably as it had theirs. Thank God they could sell it to pay off the debt. She had consumed her anger by moving forward, pouring so much optimistic fuel into the planning and packing and sorting that any lurking spark of rage blew out as she flew on to the next task. It had taken her months, maybe not until last night, to realize that she couldn’t allow her mind to linger. Because then she might discover how much or how little she would ever be able to forgive.

  She sleeps late the next morning, wakes in a curled pocket of warmth with Jory’s legs sprawled diagonally across the bed, every breath a puff of smoke. As she is heading for the shower she remembers the propane, wonders where the money will come from if they have to fill the big tank. She puts on layers of clothes to trudge out to the barn where it takes her half an hour of clanking through rusted tools and car parts to find a wrench, her hands too numb to use it now. When she comes through the front door she discovers the reason for the worn patch of flooring she had noticed the night before; Jory is spinning pirouettes on her toe shoes in the corner of the living room, her gold hair in a wild sweep. Her skin is taut against the muscles of her straightened leg, defiantly brimming with time and possibility; no damage yet to be undone.

  God, her body is half a woman’s now. More than that.

  She must have been up for a while; one of the boxes Claire pulled out of the cupboard with the snowshoes last night has been opened and the contents are haphazardly spread over the floor and sofa cushions—glass medicine jars, a tin box of school track medals, a single moth-eaten, button-up high heel, framed photographs and drawings all wavy and spotted with water damage. Claire clears a place on the couch and watches Jory spin her way right through the floorboards. Once she’s warm again Claire puts her soaking boots back on and high-steps into the same deep snow prints she had made last night, climbs onto a cinder block and hammers at the propane connector until she is sweating in her parka—all the more desperate for a bath. Finally she boils a jar of water in the microwave and pours it over the encrusted mechanism, then cracks it free with the wrench.

  When she comes back inside this time Jory is sitting on a folding metal chair facing the window; the skinny wires of her iPod earbuds snake up her neck and nestle like white parasites in her ears. She is playing an invisible set of drums in the air, rocking out with her legs splayed wide for balance. “The water should be hot again soon,” Claire says, cranking her boots off from the heels. “I’ll have to put the chains on to get the car up the driveway.”

  Jory doesn’t turn around. Claire comes up behind her, can hear the music even with the earbuds plugged tight to Jory’s auditory canals. “It’s too loud,” Claire says, then plucks one out and puts her mouth where the parasite had been planted. “Too loud! You’ll wreck your hearing. You’re listening to Sting?”

  Jory shrugs. “Beats that Withers guy with all the ‘I knows,’ whoever he was.” She pulls the wire out of her mother’s hands but turns the volume down. “It’s Dad’s iPod. I can’t find mine, and I know I packed it with my hair straightener. I bet he’s got my iPod. You’d think he would have noticed it’s pink. Some guy called for you.”

  “Who?” Claire asks.

  “Don somebody.”

  “I don’t know anybody named Don. Did you write it down? Why don’t you ever write messages down?”

  “Why don’t you hook up the answering machine? Maybe it was Dan. Weird last name. Doctor Dan.”

  Claire stands in front of her, takes the iPod out of her hand and turns it off. “A doctor called for me? And you didn’t write it down? I’m looking for a job, Jory. Think. What was his name? Did he say which clinic?”

  “Z. Zihautanejo. Zenia. Zinzanni. Z something.”

  “Zelaya? Dan Zelaya?”

  “That’s it!” She takes the iPod back and heads up to the shower.

  “Did he leave a number?” Claire calls up the stairs, but all she hears is the rhythm of “Magic, magic, magic,” hammered out on the sink with the wooden shanks of Jory’s toe shoes.

  • 9 •

  T
he next morning Claire wakes Jory at seven with a tray of fresh pancakes covered in butter and syrup, brought to her bedside. Jory slams her pillow over her head and groans. “You can bring a pillow and blanket in the car, but you have to come,” Claire says.

  “Why? You’re the one who wants a job.”

  Claire leaves the tray on a chair and walks out, turning back from the doorway to say, “Sometimes ‘want’ has nothing to do with it. Get dressed. We’re going to look at the school on the way back from town.” She closes the door just as the pillow hits the wall beside it.

  It takes forty-five minutes to untangle the snow chains and wrestle them onto the tires. The snow has settled overnight; a fine crust sparkles over the surface and gives with each step, as if she were the first person to walk this corner of the world. Ice crystals sting the rim of her nostrils. She waits outside for Jory, arrested by the blindingly white field. The marks from her snowshoes have blurred into wide teardrop-shaped shadows, and an evenly staggered line of pierced holes track her eyes to a mule deer beyond the orchard. It is a blue and white world this morning.

  Jory refuses to put on her shoes. Claire watches her walk across the icy driveway in bare feet and considers how long it might take to generate frostbite. She storms back into the house to grab Jory’s muddy snow boots and throw them on the passenger floor side. They drive to town in silence.

  Dan unlocks the clinic door wearing a scuffed leather workman’s jacket, blue jeans and the same boots he’d been wearing both times she’s seen him. As he steps back inside he sees Jory in the backseat of the car and invites Claire to bring her in for some hot chocolate, but Claire promises him that her daughter is happier wrapped inside her blankets trying to sleep.

  He flicks on lights behind the desk—they are the only two people here, apparently. She starts to ask him about his message yesterday, but the phone rings and he picks it up, talking in fluent Spanish pronounced with so little accent—not even an attempt, really, no trilled rs or blunted vs—that Claire can almost understand him. She had taken two years of college Spanish, but when she and Addison spent ten days on the coast of Spain after a European pharmaceutical meeting she’d relied on an electronic translator. She could read enough to get them through restaurants and museums and castles, but the dialect and speed of native speakers, their words rippling along without a breath between them, laced with slang, had totally stumped her. Addison learned just enough to assure their guides and concierges that his wife spoke fluent Spanish, and then he’d stand aside with crossed arms, his face bulging and flushed with choked laughter while Claire tried to stop the incomprehensible flurry of words. The memory makes her wish he were here to applaud her translation of Dan’s bland Spanish. And then, just as suddenly, she remembers sitting in her kitchen two months ago trying to help their housekeeper, Consuela, understand why, through no fault of her own, she no longer had a job.

  Dan hangs up and waves her through the swinging gate into a hallway lined with four identical exam rooms. Opposite these is the urgent care room she’d seen the other day. There is also a pharmacy—or at least a large closet lined with shelves stocked with generic drugs and pharmaceutical samples—and what must have once been a bathroom, now converted into a rudimentary laboratory with a microscope and centrifuge.

  “We still do our own gram stains now and then. Remember how?” Claire looks at him expecting a laugh, certain he must be kidding. “No matter.” He leads her into one of the exam rooms and pulls out drawers holding culture swabs, speculums, guaiac cards, sterile lancets, cotton four-by-fours and gloves. He fans out various colored lab slips and order forms and shows her where to mark the diagnosis and name and billing code. “Not that we get paid for much of it.”

  She tries to concentrate on everything he tells her, tries to be interested in how the ancient lab equipment works, and the donated slit lamp and glucometer. They don’t have any pharmacist, he says, but the drug companies give them meds through the SHARE program, which the clinic doles out on a sliding scale—in other words, pretty much free. He shows her stocks of splints and bandages and plaster casting mix, how to thread the paper roll into the EKG machine, how to wrap electrical tape around the broken leads when they fault.

  He has a way about him of leading without looking back, as if his agenda were understood without any need for explanation. It isn’t an ego-driven assuredness like she’d experienced so often in medical school, or even with Addison’s colleagues. More like a placid acceptance that paths have been laid out for all of us and there is no point beating about for alternatives. Initially she thinks Jory must have taken some specific message from him last night that she forgot to relay, that he had called her back to finish the interrupted tour, or encourage her help with fund-raising. But even with his scarce eye contact, his look of being immersed in some question too immense to tackle in conversation, she finds the urge to pin his motives down quiet inside her, a readiness to let this unfold as it will.

  After twenty minutes or more he stands at an alcove kitchenette between the pharmacy and lab and pours two cups of coffee from the Mr. Coffee parked next to the microwave. “It’ll boil your teeth down. Want some creamer?”

  She takes a sip and her lips involuntarily purse. “It’s fine. Nice and hot.”

  He leans against the wall and crosses one boot over the other. There is no finish on the leather anymore—they seem a part of his own skin, they are so thoroughly worn. He swirls his cup, watching the surface, in no hurry to wrap up whatever he believes he has started.

  A door closes in the front room, a computer is booted up, Claire tries another sip of the coffee. Dan glances toward the gate that separates patients and caregivers and clears his throat, “You already have a lab coat? I never wear white myself. But I’ve got extra in the closet.”

  “Are you hiring me?” The note of incredulity in her voice makes it sound like she’s joking. And it feels that way to her—as if it might hurt less if she makes the joke first.

  “I need you to start today, if you can.”

  “Today?” She hesitates, thinking about Jory out in the car, the moving van supposed to show up any day. And then a more uncomfortable thought: wondering if this is the job she wants, recognizing a twinge of dismay at giving up the career she’d never really started in the first place. Then slamming back into the truth: this is the only job she can get. “No,” she answers. “Tomorrow. I can start tomorrow. I don’t have a lab coat. I’ll borrow one, if that’s okay.” Dan opens a closet and pulls out a coat, turns it to look at the front, swaps it out for another and holds it out for her to put on. The breast pocket is embroidered with the name Dr. E. Zelaya. “Your wife?” Claire asks.

  Dan nods. “She’s retired now. Volunteers from time to time. She’ll like you. Put your papers there on the desk and we’ll get them run through the administrative bullshit. The pay is lousy compared to what you’re used to, I expect.”

  Claire holds the envelope with her résumés in her hands. “I’m not used to any pay at all,” she says, looking at his eyes to see if she should hand back the coat. “I haven’t worked as a doctor in fourteen years.”

  He nods slowly, moves his tongue around inside his mouth searching for some foreign particle or just a moment to react. “Any secrets I have to know about?”

  She hesitates, wondering how he would react if she told him everything. He shifts his gaze to some point beside her, as if to give her a moment of privacy; his thick eyebrows are white with only a thin spatter of black hairs. “I’m not board certified. I’m licensed, but I’m not certified. It could affect your insurance.”

  “These patients don’t sue. They need a doctor. Got a DEA?”

  “It’s expired.”

  “I’ll write the scripts until you get the paperwork in. Do you want to know your salary?”

  Claire starts to answer him and stops, bites the inside of her lip. “Is it negotiable?”

  “Nope. Not now.”

  “Then tell me later. I want the job.
”

  Despite Claire’s promise that they will only drive by the school, stop just long enough to pick up registration forms, Jory remains barefoot and determined to stay put in the backseat. She steadfastly averts her eyes while Claire drives in a slow circle around the single-storied building.

  “It doesn’t look so bad,” Claire says. There are two tennis courts, buried under snow and ice. The building itself is relatively new, with square and rectangular windows set at skewed angles in the stone walls, as if to promise some degree of humor will find its place in the school day. Jory slumps deeper in the backseat while Claire goes in to introduce herself and get the papers. It isn’t the patriarchic redbrick establishment that her private school in Seattle is, to be sure. But with a graduating class of thirty-two, maybe Jory can find a place for herself here.

  She reaches the entrance just as the bell rings. Classroom doors slam open and students turn the hallways into a five-minute party. She flattens herself against the wall and watches, mentally inserting Jory into the mix. Jory, with her taste for Juicy Couture and skinny jeans mixed in with all this fleece and worn denim. But they look like nice kids to Claire. A janitor rolls open a floor-to-ceiling door that runs on a track in front of the lunchroom; groups immediately crowd at the round and rectangular tables. Claire imagines Jory looking for one vacant seat on her first day and feels a clench of recollected adolescent trauma.

  Before she leaves the office she grabs fliers about the after-school clubs: the Nordic ski team, the rodeo club, the theater program. Nothing for dance. Claire asks the school secretary: there is a woman who teaches jazz in her home, but Hallum, as Claire already knew, has no ballet studio.