Healer (15 page)

“Out to save the world, huh?” Frida says.

Claire’s face flinches briefly before she smiles again. “I guess if you’re already rich and brilliant, you might as well save the world, too.”

“So what happened?”

“He put the money he got for Eugena into a new lab. Brought other investors in, too.” She scoots nearer the edge of her chair remembering the liquid flow of credit offered once Addison had assembled his stellar team. “It takes an unbelievable amount of money to design and produce a drug. Unbelievable. Half a billion dollars, easy. And the whole process—the designing, the applications, the testing—it’s years before you earn a dime. And you’re in a race against a dozen other labs working on the same class of drugs. It’s a huge risk.” Frida is listening with wide eyes, looks like she is either appreciative or entertained by Claire’s passion on the subject. “But Addison wanted to fund it with a small group so he’d have more control. The goal was to prove the drug worked in early phase studies and license it to a big pharma company, let them carry it to market. Two companies were already talking to him. He hired some of the best people in the field—lured away the lead scientist from another lab in California that was working on a related drug. Everybody was given a share in the company—everybody stood to make a fortune if it succeeded.” She pauses, considering where the line for libel could be drawn in a small town bar, in a conversation with a friend. “Anyway. They’d already applied to start the first tests in volunteers—phase one trials—when Addison discovered a possible liver reaction in some of the animals.” She stops. It would take her the rest of the night to explain all the unanswered questions tangled in that
single sentence. Now she wishes she’d cut the whole story to one line: “Some mice got sick and then we went broke.”

“Well,” she finally goes on, “I’ll cut to the chase. He had to pull the application at the last minute.” Frida seems to recognize Claire doesn’t want to say much more; Frida’s face looks softer, fuller, easing a fixed tension around her eyes that Claire hadn’t noticed until right now.

“And you lost everything along with it,” Frida says.

“He had some loans called. It got ugly pretty fast. And, well, there you go. Or here we are, I should say.”

Frida smiles at this, but there is painful compassion behind it. “So we don’t get a cure for cancer, then?”

Claire tilts her head to one side and tries to look optimistic. “He’s hoping he can run the animal studies again. He thinks it was an error in the data. It really was a great idea. Or is. It really might save a lot of lives.”

“So why would one error shut down the whole lab?”

Claire feels her smile stiffen again. “It wasn’t so much the error itself. It was the way it was handled.” She lifts her beer, hoping Frida will let her talk about something else now. “Onward and upward. Or backward. Didn’t somebody once say ‘Fading gentry is the leading edge of a revolution?’”

“I don’t know, did they?”

“Well. They should have. So, cheers to the revolution.” Claire raises her mug in a falsely gallant toast. “At least Dan gets another doctor out of it, assuming I’m more a help to him than a liability.”

The bar is filling up, all the locals who’ve finished work, and gone home and finished dinner, now meeting up with friends. Someone catches Frida’s eye and waves, then another. There seems to be a friendly acceptance of the general lack of anonymity in this town; it makes Claire aware that she hasn’t crossed over yet. She feels Frida watching her and almost wishes she could have told her more. On the other hand, she thinks, there is no better place to find privacy than in anonymity.

• 13 •

By the time Claire gets in her car it’s after ten. Flakes of snow bat at her windshield. Out of the blue she remembers a cliché about Eskimos having thirteen different words for snow. That had never made any sense to her before they moved out here.

Addison is probably asleep by now. He has the kind of brain that can unwind right in the middle of
the
organic chemistry puzzle that just might tag the next decoded gene. Once, when they were hot-in-love-dating she had asked him what he was thinking about. Only a young woman would ask that of a man, she knows now. The question came at that stage when their bodies were almost electrically interdependent and there were few censored thoughts. But she wanted to hear about the never-shared part of himself—learn some secret that would irrevocably bind them. And she wanted him, too, to plead for her own secrets, because for every thought she voiced, a thousand more hummed under their conversation.

“Nothing,” he had said. “I’m thinking nothing.” At first she felt shut out, and then freshly inspired to make him trust the fortress this new love felt like. And then, long after he’d fallen asleep, she felt disappointment. Maybe his deepest interior was more a void than a universe. Either way, it was the first spark of understanding that even in this fathom of union, two people were still two people.

Now, after fifteen years of marriage, she understands that some of what Addison thinks is impossible to explain. At least in any comprehensible
human language. She imagines it as infinitesimally small particles of blinding light zinging from one neuronal synapse to another, mapping out biochemical puzzles he didn’t even know he was tackling.

She knows it leaves him feeling disconnected sometimes. Lonely even. Driving through the darkness with the windshield wipers flapping away at the snow, she plays with a vivid memory of Addison coming home from the lab well after midnight, years ago. Claire, half asleep, was hanging over the side of Jory’s crib trying to keep a pacifier lodged in her squalling mouth. He’d walked into the room with such a vacant stare she’d been jolted back into the moment, worried he’d stumbled home after too many drinks or bashed his head in a car accident. She’d left Jory to go to him. “What’s wrong? You look—I don’t know—like you’re in shock.”

She could practically watch his brain shooting signals out to his tongue, trying to shape his insight into vocalized tones, his eyes scanning the horizon of the room and his mouth half a smile. Finally he’d gotten out the best he could: “Right now—until I go back to the lab tomorrow—I am the only person on the planet who knows what I’ve just discovered.” He looked right at her then, and she could tell he wished there were some possible way to transfer what he was feeling to her own experience, because it was going to forever separate them. He was in a time and space that was transforming not just his life’s work, but his whole perspective on the universe and his purpose within it—and he wanted to bring her with him. But that was impossible. Impossible. He took her hands in his own, gripped them right up against his chest. “Not just the only
living
person, I’m the only person ever.
Ever.
”

She remembers it all now, every detail of that night that she’d almost forgotten. The way he smelled like the rain, the blue light from the clock washing over his face in the dark room, the give of the bed as he lay her down, Jory now soundly sleeping. He turned the words he couldn’t find into his body, moving and seeking and wanting and probing and penetrating in a way his mind would never be able to—the closest they could be.

They had made a baby that night, the first in a series of incomplete fusings of body and soul. She didn’t know, when she lost that
accidental life, that every future conscious, desperate try would fail, too; and so when the spotting had started, the cramping taken hold, she had cried, but not with the yawning despair that would come with the others. Every pregnancy that followed Jory was a celebration, even after they both learned they should protect their hearts. And every loss broke them wide open with grief. When Claire couldn’t bear it anymore she’d had her tubes tied. But almost as hard as giving up her own hope was the fear that she had failed him somehow, that her uterus was too weak to create the family he wanted so badly. It was years before she realized her loss mattered more to him than his own.

She starts to cry with the memory of it—for the part of Addison she will
never
be able to know, and for the children that never got to breathe, and even for the fact that her body could not accomplish that miracle anymore.

His discovery in the lab that night had culminated in Eugena, and within a decade Eugena would most likely save a thousand lives. More.

The only light downstairs comes from the computer screen; the illuminated clutter and lingering odors give Claire a good guess about Addison and Jory’s evening: the damp floor below their dripping coats and the piles of snowballs mounded in pyramids just beyond the porch, the monstrous box of CDs from Addison’s car next to Jory’s iPod, the smell of brownies. They have left one for her, neatly wrapped in plastic on a saucer—the only tidy thing in the house. She is at least appeased by their graciously sparing her a corner piece, and she could entertain herself believing they had left the pan out on the counter only so that she could scrape up the hard crumbs she is fond of. She fills it with hot water to soak and walks around the couch to turn off the computer.

“Hey. Have fun?” Addison rubs his hand over his face and props himself up on an elbow.

“Couldn’t get her to give up the bed, huh?” Claire asks, sitting on the edge of the cushions.

“Not worth the struggle. The movers called. They’ll be here day after tomorrow.”

Claire nods. “The day you leave.”

He is awake now; sitting up in his boxer shorts, he pulls the down throw around his bare shoulders. “I have to leave tomorrow. Early.”

“You’re kidding. What changed?”

“One of the people I want to meet with can only see me tomorrow afternoon.”

She doesn’t say anything for a while, both of them sitting side by side listening to the wind shake snow from the trees. Finally: “We haven’t talked about much.”

“Well, I guess nothing has really changed.”

“Yeah,” Claire answers wistfully, thinking that the problem was really that
everything
had changed, and that was more impossible to talk about than nothing. “Is this guy very promising, do you think?” Addison does a little dance with his shoulders, which tells her as much as she wants to know about it.

“Addison, do you remember Ron Walker? He hosted the fund-raiser we went to at the Fairmont a few years ago. Where we bought the Galapagos trip. He’s one of Dan’s main backers.”

“Really?” He shimmies his legs behind her to lie down again, pulling the comforter over his chest and wedging his pillow under his arm so he still looks half engaged with the conversation. His hair is spiked up at the crown of his head like a Steller’s jay’s crest; Claire licks her fingers and twists it down into a deep black widow’s peak, laughing softly at the effect.

“I think you should talk to him,” she says.

Addison shrugs. “I’m happy to talk to him. About what?”

“About money. Investing. What else?” She catches his mildly defensive look and picks up his hand. “He’s a venture capitalist, Addison. Lots of biotech, among other things. He might be really interested in vascumab, especially now that I’m connected with the clinic—meaning
you’re
connected with the clinic.”

He takes his hand out of hers and sweeps his hair back off his forehead. “Claire, I can’t just call him up out of the blue and…”

“It’s not out of the blue. You’ve met him. I work at the clinic he sponsors. Isn’t it worth a try?”

“Honey, I know it sounds simple, but I don’t think you really understand how the business end of all this works.”

Claire stands up, her voice clipped. “And you’re implying you do?” She slaps both hands over her eyes and spins around once. “Okay.” Her hands drop to her sides. “I am not going to do this. Look, I have to go to bed.” She leans over and kisses him, hard and sure. “Wake me up before you leave. Drive safe.”

“Claire,” he calls after her as she heads upstairs. “Claire! At least listen to the good news.”

She turns around with her hand on the banister and looks down at him, “Okay. What’s the good news?”

“I got Jory enrolled in school. She’s starting tomorrow. You’ll need to drop her off at eight.”

Claire feels her body relax, part of her brittle anger giving way. She whispers now, knowing Jory is just behind the bedroom door. “You got her to go? How?”

He lies back down and rolls onto his side. “Bribery. I got her a cell phone.”

He does not wake her before he leaves, or if he has knelt at the side of her sleeping body and tried to kiss her awake, the thorny fortress held fast around her. When her alarm goes off she looks down the stairs at the empty couch, and then out the window where his car has left skidding tracks in the snow. But in the bathroom she finds a sticky note curling up from the mirror, printed in the childlike, blocky letters he’s always preferred to script:

I’M SORRY

I LOVE YOU

She peels it off and reads it again, wondering if the forgotten period was completely unintentional.

If Jory is angry about school—or terrified, or excited—she isn’t giving Claire a hint. She sits as far toward the passenger door as possible and opens it before the car is fully stopped, stepping into the stream of students wearing her UGGs and skinny jeans like she’s been part of
their circle since first grade. It is the fact that she will not meet Claire’s eyes even when she turns to say good-bye that confirms she is scary-close to tears. It’s all Claire can do not to call after her, deciding, after a wrenching flashback on her own high school experience, that the kindest thing to do is drive away.

A few snowflakes spiral onto the windshield. Claire looks up the number for the man who plows their drive and punches it in. “Hi, this is Claire Boehning, out on Northridge Road. A moving truck is coming to our house tomorrow with a load of furniture and I just want to be sure we can have the road plowed early if it snows tonight.” She squints out at the sky, swollen white and still. “I heard we could get a foot or more, any update on that?”

There is a pause on the other end of the line. Then: “I apologize for this, Mrs. Boehning, but we need another check from you before we can come out.”