Healer (10 page)

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.

On the way home Claire turns the heat up twice before she realizes Jory has the rear window open and is scattering fragments of all the brochures and bulletins into the snow along the side of the highway; her secret trail of crumbs that might eventually lead her back to someplace she cares about. Claire bites back a tirade about littering and shuts off the radio, starts talking about what electives Jory can take. They’ll shop for some new school clothes; maybe it’s time she gets her own cell phone. “Baby, I know it’s hard. And scary. You’ll make friends here. I promise. We should be back in Seattle by next fall.”

But by the time they leave the highway Claire has quit probing for some path into Jory’s hurt soul. The small space inside the car grates with her anger.

There are fresh tire tracks at the top of the long driveway down to the house. “Jory, somebody’s here. Oh, no! What if it’s the moving van? They were supposed to call first!” She looks in the mirror to see Jory’s reaction—she is totally absorbed in writing looping versions of her signature on the window in the fog of her breath. But when they see Addison’s Lexus parked where it had obviously slid down the last ten feet of the road, Jory screams. She is out of the car, hopping red-footed through the snow until he picks her up in his arms. His eternal child. A fist grips Claire’s chest, something scary-close to tears that she can’t promptly attach to joy or surprise. Something else altogether.

She waits until the other two untangle. “Hey. Which airplane did you drop out of?” With Jory watching, Claire goes to Addison and loosely wraps her arms around his waist. She stands still, feels the cold silkiness of his parka against her cheek and waits for his scent to come back to her, slow to uncoil in the icy air. When she is ready to pull back enough to look at his face he holds her fast. Not demanding, not begging. Asking, she concludes. Asking her to move on.

“I couldn’t find my key,” he says, in a tone of chagrin that is big enough to make Jory wrap her arms around him again.

“I thought you were the movers when I saw the tracks.” Jory flashes a look at her and Claire adds, “I mean, we’re happier it’s you! And I’m sure they would have just driven right back to Seattle if we weren’t here.”
She puts a hand over her eyes. “Oh God. Come in. You must be frozen.” She unlocks the house—wondering, actually, why she had bothered to lock it in the first place, as if the deer or coyotes were a threat.

Jory consumes her father. That is the word that comes to Claire’s mind—
consumes.
She
adsorbs
herself into his presence with an energy Claire hasn’t gotten from her in weeks. When Jory was two or three she had gone through a phase of coming into their bedroom every night, almost always right at two o’clock, as if she could tell the time. She was so small she had to hoist herself into their bed, where she would slide neatly between them, tense and wide awake with the exhilaration of her trespass. They were usually too tired to carry her back; and there had been so many months when every premature breath had felt perilous that the ease of cuddling until they all three seemed to breathe in unison still surprised Claire. Eventually they just bought a king-sized bed.

Claire occupies herself with dinner, scrounging through what had seemed like such a well-stocked refrigerator to come up with something more meallike than she and Jory usually eat. She starts boiling water for pasta and chopping cloves of garlic. The kitchen grows warm with steam, the window above the sink sweats into a gray glaze, softer than the black block of sky.

Addison comes in and stands behind her while she splits the pods open with the flat side of the knife blade. “You cut Chicago short?”

He starts to say something, then seems to change his mind and starts again. “It wasn’t the right meeting. Better to concentrate on Los Angeles next week.”

Claire nods. “Meaning what? Too many people already knew?”

He doesn’t answer her and she has to think, carefully, for a minute about how much she wants to say so early in this unexpected visit. “Can you get out the olive oil? Top shelf.”

Halfway through dinner Jory excuses herself to watch TV, coming down from the flirtatious high her father has ignited. Claire picks at her spaghetti, finally pushes it away and folds her arms on the table. “Did she tell you yet?”

“Tell me what?”

“I got a job.”

Addison puts his fork down and stares at her. When he says nothing after another moment Claire raises her eyebrows. “A job. I got a job.”

“Doing what?”

She tilts her head, giving him a minute to retract his question before she finally answers, “At a clinic. I start tomorrow.”

“Claire. You don’t have to—”

She cuts him off. “How do I not have to do this?” She picks up her plate and silver and walks into the kitchen. “I kind of like having health insurance. Must be the doctor in me. I don’t think it comes with a retirement plan, unfortunately.”

“Ah! God.” He sets his elbows on the table and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”

She drops the plates in the sink so hard one chips. “No. You could have waited until one of us ended up in the emergency room and let me find out then. There are some things, just maybe, it’s better to learn from your spouse than a Gap store clerk.”

As if she had a sixth sense, Jory dances into the kitchen asking for ice cream. Claire gets out bowls while Addison fills the sink with hot soapy water, and their forced felicity over dessert eventually feels real enough to turn away from the anger.

They play a round of Life, another of Clue, and then Claire piles two comforters and pillows on the couch. “I have to go to sleep, guys. You can toss for who gets the other half of the bed.” She can see from Addison’s fallen face that he’d forgotten they were short on beds until the moving truck comes. She kisses Jory’s cheek, and Addison’s lips—lingering just long enough to let him know that she does prefer the felicity to the argument. But when she wakes up at six to go in for her first day of work, Jory is in bed beside her.

• 10 •

In the second year of residency every doctor-in-training was set up with a fledgling clinic practice one afternoon each week. In many ways these four or five hours out of the eighty- or ninety-hour work week were the only ones that resembled the life they would lead after they graduated, caring for average ambulatory patients with average ambulatory problems. Their hospital work was more exciting. Almost always. To be admitted to a hospital, patients had to be so thoroughly diseased or traumatized there was no option to send them ambulating right back to their homes. The only real difference between their resident’s clinic and the private practice most of them were headed for was that all the patients were poor, uninsured, and had no other doctor to call. When their pain or breathlessness or swollen joints became unbearable they would start in the emergency room, waiting hours to be questioned and examined by student doctors who sporadically excused themselves to consult a small library of textbooks in the cramped office behind the triage desk. After enough inspection of cavities and orifices and blood and X-rays for the residents to reach a plausible diagnosis, the patients were discharged with instructions printed out on a half sheet and stapled to the bill they couldn’t pay: “Take all your pills, watch for swelling and redness, change your dressing twice a day, follow up with your physician.” Thus, in rotating order, the doctorless were matched up with the doctor trainees who needed living and breathing specimens to learn their trade. It was a nicely symbiotic
arrangement, on paper. But it will be different here in Hallum, at Dan’s clinic, Claire thinks. Her patients will have a choice. They will choose her. They will want her. She will have time for them.

She parks the Audi near the clinic steps and opens the door, then shuts it again and scrounges through her purse for a brush and her lipstick. When she angles the rearview mirror toward her face she is almost startled by the nervous look in her eyes. Who wanted to be treated by a nervous doctor? A dark shape cuts across the window and she nearly jumps to the other side of the front seat. Then Anita bends low enough to look inside the car. She smiles and jangles her key ring, apparently assuming Claire has already discovered the front door is still locked.

As soon as Claire is out of the car Anita starts telling her how many patients they have scheduled for the day, which ones will be no-shows (because yesterday was payday), and which ones will bring their whole family in without an appointment (because whenever they can get a ride to the clinic they pile grandma and all the babies into the truck to see Dr. Zelaya without even considering how tired he gets at this age), and which ones will show up just as she’s trying to lock the doors tonight, but this time she is
not
going to be softhearted about it. Her feet get too swollen by the end of the day to put up with these delinquents.

“When is your baby due?” Claire asks her.

“Not soon enough! I’m only four months. But it’s number three. No more belly muscles, I guess. I pooched out really quick this time. I washed your coat for you.”

She points to Evelyn Zelaya’s newly ironed white coat on a hanger just beyond the waiting room, drops her bag onto the floor behind the desk and begins turning on lights and the computer. “You know how to make coffee, right? I hope better than Dr. Z.”

Dan comes in the back door ten minutes later. He asks her just to shadow him for the first few days. A weight lifts when she realizes she won’t have to tell anyone she is their new doctor. Not yet, anyway. He introduces her to the patients as his “colleague.” They look at her, then shift their eyes back to Dan for some confirmation of trust before they smile or nod and allow her to melt into the background. She stands
tucked into the corner behind the exam room door—her starched coat with the false name embroidered on it, her hands rigid in the empty pockets—and tries to pick out words she understands.
Dolor, sangre, sarpullido, pastillas, pinchazo…
She tries to piece caught words and phrases into symptoms or cures, tries to work them into questions she will need to ask some patient within a few days, if Dan doesn’t change his mind about her. In medical school she had learned a fair bit of Spanish at the public hospital. Even Seattle, as far as you could get from Mexico, had a densely woven Hispanic world populating the apartments and row houses of Beacon Hill and the Central District.