Healer (18 page)

They painted the shingles, put a swing set in the fenced yard and moved in on July fifth, the first official day of Seattle sunshine. But by early winter the drafty windows and warped doors and claustrophobic kitchen were getting to them. Addison said they were heating half of Lake Washington. They might as well invest in a sound structure. And by early spring the stock they’d collected in exchange for Addison’s biotech start-up had split and risen and split again. They started to feel safe. They started to notice their neighbors had all gotten newer cars and taken more exotic vacations and built new additions onto their already massive homes. They started to spend.

They hired an architect. Claire collected file drawers full of
magazine pages and tile samples and paint chips. Their dinner talk lingered over notions of how a house can affect productivity and mood, how space and light can transform the language of private life. As the stock rose and split and split again they luxuriated in unfettered choices about windows and ceiling heights, curved walls and arched doorways—stone and plaster and wood made intimate, plotted out in blueprints and billed by the hour. Jory had been only four at the time, but they’d bought Lego sets and doll furniture and encouraged her to build the bedrooms and play spaces and closets of her fantasies while the architect took notes. They ended up taking the house down to the studs. The whole remodel took two years and cost more than any new house in the neighborhood. And now it was owned by someone else.

On the last night before the movers came to haul their belongings away, with boxes stacked so high the house looked like a cubist representation of family memory, Claire had walked out onto the dock that jutted into Lake Washington from their stone retaining wall. She stood under the cold, fixed stars and listened to the silence, felt the cold, damp air, as fresh as any wilderness lake. She had promised herself, when they’d moved in, that she would do this every night—take ten minutes, five minutes, two minutes, to walk from her warm house onto the dock, taste and smell the water and sky that she had paid millions of dollars to “own.” She tried to remember the last time she had opened the doors to the porch after dinner, stood suspended above the lake and looked into its black mirror for falling stars. It had been years.

She hunts down her hot chocolate one final time—gone cold with a skin of milk floating like an island in a brown pond. The kitchen sink is still hidden under boxes; she walks out the front door and steps barefooted into the snow, taking a queer pleasure in the stinging cold. There is no lake at this house, no dock to allow her to walk over the water. But there are stars, even more brilliant in the middle of winter, in the middle of nowhere. She cranks her neck back and searches for the north star. The cassette tape hisses between songs and then Joni Mitchell is singing,
“Still I sent up my prayer/Wondering who was there to hear/I said “Send me somebody/Who’s strong and somewhat sincere.’”

She listens until her feet hurt too much to stand it any longer, and flings the contents of her mug across the snow. Then she pulls her arm all the way across her body and hurls the cup out as hard as she can, hearing no sound when it sinks into the snow.

• 16 •

“How is Gretta?” Jory asks from the backseat. She is dancing a small hand mirror in front of her face trying to put mascara on as the car jounces up the rough driveway.

“If you want me to drive you, you need to get up on time. You’re going to put your eye out with that thing.” Then, with a sharp glance over her shoulder: “She’s fine. What makes you ask?”

“I heard you talking to her last night.” Jory snaps the compact shut and stuffs it in her backpack. “It’s a small house.”

A truck loaded with cattle is grinding up the long hill at the junction with the main road, the animals calling out in low, plaintive wails. Claire clears her throat. “She sends her love.” Then, after a pause: “What did you overhear?”

“Mainly you promising we’d be back in Seattle soon. So am I meeting you at the bakery again? You’ll get there before they close tonight?”

“I’ll try, babe. I think we need to split the week, half on the bus, half I drive you.” She waits but Jory is staring out the window, silent until they reach the school. “You know, you could take a friend with you—to the bakery or home in the afternoon. I could drive them back to town after dinner.”

Jory hikes her backpack onto her shoulder and unlatches the door. “Yeah. Well. We’re just moving again. Aren’t we.” She pauses with the door cracked open, looking at the crowd of kids through the fogged
window. Claire turns toward her, sees her glossed lips tense for half a second before she steps out. “Love ya, Mom.”

It distresses Claire that Gretta is the only example of a grandparent Jory will clearly remember. Her love is genuine enough, but it is, somehow, always…
waiting.
Waiting for the best moment to show itself. Waiting until times are better. Claire’s father had tried to explain his leaving with many words, all forgiving and hopeful and reassuring. But it was a single sentence about Gretta in his very last letter to Claire that finally caught it: “She’s worn a rut of worry in her mind so deep and comfortable she doesn’t know how to be happy anymore. Nothing’s ever good enough.”

Anita is finishing her coffee when Claire slips in the back door. “Frida’s looking for you. Waiting room’s already packed. Drink up quick.” She rinses her cup and pours one for Claire but pauses with the coffee suspended between them. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just… a teenager.”

She studies Claire’s face, maybe assessing how much consoling is needed, balancing it against the schedule. “Like they say, toddlers step on your feet. But teenagers, they step on your heart. Dan wants to see you before you start—back room.”

The door to the urgent care room is half closed; Claire hears Dan talking with another man, a conversation interrupted at moments by a soft laugh, and the voice of a woman, too, all in the rising tones of friendship more than business. She raps on the wood and steps in.

“Hey! There she is.” Dan leans forward to push himself up from his chair, an arrested instant as he transfers his weight that makes Claire wish she could see his face, want to grasp his arm. And then he is introducing her, though she could have guessed who both people are.

Evelyn Zalaya looks like her name, tall and lithe, like her body has never gotten in its own way; a narrow, slightly arched nose and finely wrinkled skin that must have been flawless in her youth. Her eyes are a clear, unflinching blue. She must have heard a lot from Dan already; she holds Claire’s hands as if she’s known her for months, asking about Jory and Addison and the old house.

The man with them is Ron Walker. He’d been in a tux when Claire had met him at the fund-raiser, of course, and even then she could tell that he was not a formal man, uncomfortable in his starched collar and stiff patent leather shoes, as if maybe he had dressed up only to earn more money for the cause. It had made her feel at ease with him, and the wrinkled khakis and somewhat ratty sweatshirt he’s wearing today make him look more like a patient than a donor. He takes her hand, loosely at first, with a question that she sees catch and connect the second he places her, then grips with a firm shake until the bite of his ring pinches. He is taller and thinner even than Dan, but with a soft fullness to his ruddy face, a dense, glowing web of veins over his cheeks and bulbous nose that gives him a perpetually happy look—which could be a hindrance or a convenient ruse in locking up a business deal, Claire decides.

“Boehning, Boehning. Eugena, right? Addison Boehning—went to Harvard before he came back for his doctorate.”

“How do you remember that?” Claire asks.

Walker breaks into a wide grin. “I remember the
Newsweek
article. I like talent.” He focuses more closely on her then, like he’s separating Claire from his memory of her husband. “How’d we get lucky enough to hook you up with Dan here?”

Claire flushes at this, her ease abruptly discomfited by a scramble to explain why she is now in Hallum as a resident instead of a tourist. She feels Dan watching her and he taps Walker on the arm. “That phone call you made hit a gold mine, by the way. Got enough antibiotics to purify the whole valley. Come take a look.” He escorts them all into the tiny pharmacy where unopened boxes of sulfonamides, penicillins and cephalosporins are stacked high enough to block the window, and, after some general talk about the clinic and a suggestion for dinner together, Claire slips away, back to the packed exam rooms.

The hallway is filled with green flags, needy people in disposable paper gowns hoping for experienced advice. Claire looks at the charts propped in clear plastic bins beside each room, wondering if the thickest, most frayed folders would be harder because they are stuffed with recurrent illness and unsolved complaints or easier because the
patient might speak English. Frida walks in from the waiting room, the swinging gate whapping against the wall with her determined stride. She takes one look at Claire’s face and says, “Start in two. White girl, first time here. I brought a spinach lasagna for lunch.” Then, under her breath: “Sick of damn peanut butter.”

The girl is eighteen. She sits on the edge of the exam table fully dressed in clothes that are a size too small, wearing pancake makeup so thick it’s impossible to judge the natural color of her skin. Her eyes are ringed with black liner; Claire focuses on the play of light reflecting in her iris and pupil, trying to read her reaction to Claire’s greeting, to her white coat. It takes twenty minutes of oblique questions about vague complaints—headaches and dizziness and fatigue—to maneuver the girl into saying why she’s here, allow Claire to touch her body and see what’s hidden.

By the time Claire finishes her exam and steps into the hall they are so far behind the waiting room has run out of chairs. She pulls Dan into the office and shuts the door. “I don’t know if I should call the police? Or send her to a women’s shelter?”

“The nearest women’s shelter is two hours away. The police won’t touch the boyfriend unless she wants to press charges.” He takes a folder out of the file cabinet and hands Claire a page with two names and addresses typed on it. “These are the counselors in the valley who’ll see her for free, but good luck getting an appointment this month. Or next.”

Frida comes into the office, looks at the names in Claire’s hands and says, “I figured—soon as I saw her. Tell it to me.” She drops a stack of lab slips on her desk and listens with her arms crossed and her head bowed, then takes the piece of paper, scans it quickly and gives it back. “Too young for Medicare, too rich for Medicaid, too broke for Blue Cross. Totally sucks.” She walks out to get the next patient ready, but stops with her hand gripping the doorjamb, turns to look at Claire with her lips in a set line over her bold white teeth. “Get her to make a regular appointment with you. Keep her talking.” She looks uncharacteristically depressed by the girl’s plight, even though Claire knows she’s seen the same or worse a dozen times—like she’s as sad for Claire as for the
girl herself. “You’re not going to save them all. You know that, don’t you?” She tilts her head slightly to the side when she asks this, letting Claire understand it is not a rhetorical question, that she will wait here until she gets a response.

By the close of the day her feet are aching but she has nearly kept up with Dan, thanks to a run of bilingual patients. She finds him sitting at the table in the urgent care room, bent over his knees so the ripple of his spine shows through his thin shirt. He looks up when she comes in, maybe just startled, but she sees a glint of discomfort before he changes his face for her. “Hey,” she says. “Everything all right?”

He smiles. “Old age. Things start to hurt. Put it off—that’s my advice.”

Claire laughs. “Yeah. I’ll do my best.” She sits next to him and leans on her elbow, holding his eyes long enough to test him. “You’re sure? You’d let me know if you needed anything, wouldn’t you?”

“You’re doing it. You’re here.” But now it is his turn to test, and she finds it hard not to look away. He puts his hand over hers with a sound of dry leaves. “Just give what you can. While you can. That’s what I need.”

Frida raps on the office door and hands Claire another chart with a blank progress note page in it. “Hey. Last one—that lady who only comes in before we’re open or after we’re closed. Only wanted to see you. Room two.”

The mild irritation Claire feels at having to interview even one more person disappears when she sees Miguela sitting on the end of the exam table. “Hello! I was thinking about you the other day—something on the news about Nicaragua. Did you find any other work? Outside of Walker’s Orchards?”

Miguela looks puzzled and holds her thumb and first finger up an inch apart, as she had done the night Claire first saw her outside the grocery store. “
Más despacio, por favor.
Slower.”

Claire tries her Spanish. “
¿Encontrado trabajo?
” Miguela shakes her head, but Claire can’t tell if she’s referring to the work or the words. She decides to start fresh, doctor to patient. “
¿Cómo puedo ayudar?
”

“Ha
encontrado,
” Miguela gives her a clear, encouraging smile. Her teacher’s smile, Claire imagines. “
Es más correcto.
A better way to say.
”
They finally settle into a mix of slow, clearly pronounced Spanish and English, a blend and rhythm that works for both.

She has come with a variety of complaints—a sore throat, a mild stomachache, a cough, blurry vision. Claire’s questions only bring up more disparate symptoms instead of narrowing the possibilities down, until she finally asks when Miguela last had a complete physical exam. “
Todo? Nunca.
Never.” She shakes her head, raising her eyebrows as if to express that even visiting a doctor could be considered a luxury. Claire is struck, again, by the sweep of her brows, the large, almond-shaped eyes—so disproportionate within her otherwise diminutive features they verge on anomalous, but instead combine to a strangely distinctive beauty. There is something else there, too. Something irrevocable and determined behind the lush lashes, the rich brown irises. The thought flashes through her mind that Miguela is a woman rarely surprised by life anymore, or—worse maybe—beyond disappointment. Like she has no more trust to let go of.