Healer (20 page)

“What do you think?” Jory asks, still sweating from the labor.

Claire hangs her coat on a hook and looks around. “Where did the other armchair go?”

“Dad let me put it in my bedroom. By my window. We wanted all the furniture to face out, like, to face the view.” She sweeps her hands along the perimeter where the windows are all black as coal after the winter sunset.

“I love it,” Claire says, loving Jory’s happier mood. “Where’s Dad?”

“Shower.” Jory scrapes the metal legs of the love seat around to face the TV again, leaving a white arc along the wooden floor. She clicks the channels until she hits a rerun of
Friends.

Over dinner Claire says, “Dan and Evelyn invited us to dinner this weekend.” Addison looks up from his attentive carving of the roast chicken and she sees a flash of reluctance before he smiles, genuinely enough. She is annoyed to think that he might be hesitant to meet them, but then wonders if he’s only afraid of the questions they’ll ask.

“Great. That’s nice of them,” he says, ferrying a thigh to her plate.

Jory, on the other hand, has no second thought. “I don’t have to go, do I?”

Claire is about to remind her that Dan is responsible for the food
on their table, but then Addison rests his hand on Jory’s knee and she whips her hair behind her ears, puts a forkful of potato in her mouth and muffles, “Okay. Fine. Whatever.”

It is the first night since leaving Seattle that Addison and Claire have slept in the same bed, and when Addison moves a chair in front of the door they can feel one another’s shyness, as awkward as a first, tentative coupling. Only it’s worse, Claire thinks. Because tonight they feel awkward and shy about what is lost between them, the memory of what had been so easy and instinctive. They undress, shivering, and are easily drawn to each other’s warmth underneath the down comforter. But within moments she stiffens, every part of her mind above her limbic drive crowded with questions; wondering if she would even recognize the words that could destroy their marriage in the blink of an eye. And so in midstroke they fall apart, Addison exhales one cryingly sad sigh, then kisses her temple and rolls onto his side, pulling her arm around him so her cheek rests against the broad rise of his shoulders. Neither of them speaks, allowing the history of fifteen years of marriage to absorb the silence.

In the morning he walks her out to the Audi with a mug of his favorite oversweetened chai tea wrapped between his hands for precious heat. He is still in his pajamas and has shoved his bare feet into his best Italian loafers. The sun is barely over the mountains and a mist rises up from the valley floor, a sheer pink and yellow veil lofting slowly into the palest blue sky. It is Claire’s favorite time of day, Addison’s least, and so all the kinder of him to ruin his loafers in this muck just to walk her to the car.

“What a sky. Free art. And we don’t even have to find the wall space to hang it on,” Claire says.

He hugs the mug close to his body and shivers, squints to look out over the fields. The aspens at the edge of the property are faint as a memory through the mist. She scans the sky for a forecast encrypted in the clouds, but the morning seems full of the anticipation of warm weather. A quiet settles between them and the calls of birds rise up, ravens and magpies, the piercing scree of a red-tailed hawk, the throaty rumble of blue grouse—the first she has heard this year. Addison
watches her with worry in his eyes, his mouth working at a smile. She can’t read him right now. “Can I meet you for lunch in town?” he asks.

“Sure. Who wouldn’t want to play hooky on a day like this? Someplace cheap.” She grins. “I guess almost everything in this town is cheap, isn’t it?” He kisses her, then goes back into the house. Halfway up the drive his foot breaks through a skim of ice and she hears the loafer suck and pop out of the mud.

• 18 •

It is not a busy day—Anita attributes the lull to a couple of Border Patrol cars spotted in town the day before. Claire parks herself in a sunny exam room window to catch up on consultants’ letters and lab results, ripping open envelopes and putting her initials on the bottom of every page, stacking them up to be filed in patients’ charts, trying to decide which abnormal results are so serious she has to track down the patient for more testing. In another clinic she would pick up the phone, or wait for the next scheduled visit. But she learned weeks ago that most of the phone numbers Anita takes down for their records are made up, half the addresses, too—even when she promises they don’t give out information to Immigration.

Claire rips open another envelope and scans the numbers, her pen poised to scribble “C.B.” in the corner and file it away. But this slip makes her put her pen down and walk to the files behind Anita’s desk to find the chart. She has to read her note again to see the patient’s face, a meek twenty-one-year-old who’d come up from Michoacán last year, a boyishly thin mustache on his upper lip and two missing fingers on his right hand after a carpentry accident, which, he’d told Claire, had made it harder to get hired. She rereads her notes until he comes back to her clearly, the way he’d conscientiously used English words here and there with a shy question mark in his voice after each of them, the feeling she’d had that he was growing the sketchy mustache hoping he might be able to hide behind it someday. His main complaint had been
nausea, but the only thing her exam had shown was a little tenderness under his right rib cage and a few bruises—all of it vague enough to be anything from pesticide exposure or viral hepatitis, to depression or too much tequila.

But the lab slip is more alarming. His liver enzymes are abnormal and his pro-time and INR, a measure of blood-clotting proteins made by the liver, are high. They don’t tell her anything about the cause—there are dozens of possibilities. But it is the kind of information that will send her driving from orchard to orchard to track him down, chewing up the evening hours she wants to be home with Jory.

She is copying down his listed address when something scratches against the window. She jumps, then smiles at Addison’s face pressed up against the glass, a wool cap pulled down so that his ears stick out. He mouths something she can’t decipher, and when she shakes her head he cups his hands around his mouth and talks into the pane. “There’s a ‘closed’ sign on the door,” he says. His breath leaves a circle of fog in which he inscribes a heart with a frowning face.

She pushes open the glass front door. The smell of the air he sweeps in with him is tinged with spring, a faint curl of green caught up in white winter, dissolving almost before she can identify it. “Hi. Sorry. Come on back. I’ll give you the blue plate special tour.”

Frida walks out of the office and makes a blindingly quick appraisal of the two of them before she breaks open her all-eclipsing smile and takes Addison’s hand, cocking her head, Claire is convinced, just to shake her sprocket of curls. “Dan left early for an appointment—I guess Anita decided that meant we were all on a vacation,” Frida says. She is looking at Claire now, a friendly neutrality in her eyes that admits she understands more than she has been told, and will ask for nothing more than Claire wants to share.

“Dan left early?” Claire asks. “That’s a first.”

Frida shrugs. “Bonus on top of the stock options and soaring wages here. Take a two-hour lunch.”

Claire laughs. She leads Addison around the corner. “Lab is back here. The microscope is only half as old as me.” She sees him lift his eyebrows when she opens the door to the glorified closet that functions
as the clinic’s lab. She looks around the room herself, more objective about it seeing Addison’s reaction. The nearly obsolete centrifuge for hematocrits, the box of microscope slides that is so old the embossed cardboard has yellowed. It looks like a makeshift medical museum. Most of the equipment was donated to Dan when he opened the clinic fifteen years ago, when it was already too old to sell. But she’s proud of it all, in a way—discovering that for the first time as she pulls out a paper towel and wipes a splotch of blue dye off the sink. “Every time we do a test here for free we save the clinic money for rent or salaries.” Addison starts to ask a question but she cuts him off, shows him the pharmacy stocked with drugs donated by the industry giants he’s been pitching vascumab to for the last three months.

He picks up a package of Augmentin and flips it over, studying the box as if a roll of million-dollar bills might fall into his hand if he opened it. Claire watches the change of light on the curves of his face. After a moment she says, “They turned you down in San Francisco, didn’t they?” It is out before she can stop herself, but then she is glad, decides she’s tired of whispering around the subject, willing even to see the wound in his pride.

Addison puts the box back on the shelf, nudges the corner into perfect alignment with the row so it looks untouched. “I couldn’t even get an appointment.” He puts his hands in his pockets and scans the racks and cabinets filled with drugs. “It’ll happen someday. Vascumab, or its twin, will get approved. Maybe not by me… but it’s too close to perfect.” Now he turns and looks at her, matter-of-fact about the whole enormous issue. “I’m not talking about profitability, you know. Should start a clock—count how many colon cancer patients go down before it finally gets to market.” Claire nods. He had done that with Eugena. He had actually had a clock custom made with annual deaths from ovarian cancer, the twelve o’clock position ready to designate the first day Ovascreen was made cheap and easily available.

He breaks out of the mood and nods toward the exam rooms. “What’s down there?”

Claire takes his hand. She turns on a light in the first empty exam room and gives him another tour of the modest supplies and
equipment, like a new mother showing off her baby’s room. “Take off your jacket. I’ll check your blood pressure. Free.”

“I can check it free at the drugstore.”

“Yeah, but you won’t. When did you last have a physical exam, anyway?” She wraps the black sleeve around his arm and twists the valve shut, puts her stethoscope in her ears and watches the dial while she slowly releases the pressure. The needle arcs smoothly around the perimeter until it hits 140 and then it makes a tiny jump every time his heart beats. She looks at his face and listens as the thudding dies away to silence. “Addison. You’re hypertensive. Did you know that?”

He pulls the bell away from his arm and whispers into it, jocular again. “Since I saw you wearing that white coat.”

“Seriously.” She loops the stethoscope around her neck and unzips the Velcro wrap around his arm. “I mean, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but if you were my patient I’d be on you for this.” She flicks her middle finger over his belt line. “Do you always have to go out for steaks and martinis after these meetings?”

“The size of the investment correlates with the size of the fillet. And the size of the olives. It’s a proven statistic—Harvard Business School did a study on it. I heard sex brings down blood pressure.” Even as he says it he blushes, remembering their passionless night in bed. Sunlight streams through the small window facing him. In the full white light his face is ageless, as if he has all the time in the world to remake himself. Contrary to Claire’s first impression when she met him nineteen years ago, she knows he
has
been aging well—despite the gentle decomposition of his body over these last stressful months. His hairline, which had begun receding at the age of twenty, has arrested itself in a pleasant lolling W, exposing pale swatches on the crests of his brow; fine blue veins serpentine along his temples, maybe flowing right this minute with the effluvia from some neuronal tempest that might, just might, lead to the next cancer-curing miracle. If he had money to back it.

“I can get you a new microscope. Newer than the one you’ve got, at least,” he says. A cloud slides across the sun, and the lines around his eyes and mouth stand out again. He brushes a strand of hair off her
face and his fingers linger along her cheek. “You’re doing something good here, Claire.”

By the time they sit down in The Rattler, a café that converts to a cowboy bar at night, they are both peeling off layers of clothing, the day making good on its hint of spring. Addison’s hair stands straight out after he plucks off his cap. Claire reaches across the tabletop to smooth it down. They order coffee, which comes in thick white mugs stained and chipped in a timeless, comforting way.

The waitress comes over to get their orders and they each pick up the menu for the first time. Addison asks the waitress how the cheeseburger is, whether he can add grilled onions and how much extra that will cost. She doesn’t answer immediately and he says, “Well, if the raw onions add on fifty cents…”

“Seventy-five,” she answers.

“Okay. Seventy-five, and it takes a tablespoon or two of oil, that’s about a nickel, and four or five minutes to cook them—how much does your cook get?” She pointedly looks at the full tables waiting for her and shrugs. “Well, for sure more than you, right? Let’s say twelve an hour and a share of tips, so…” He takes the pencil out of her hand and scratches a number on his napkin. “So say a dollar twenty—let’s be generous—a dollar twenty-five. Plus seventy-five plus a nickel. We could add something for cleaning the pan, but if he’s cooking on a flat grill the cleaning really shouldn’t count, do you think? So, Two oh five. For grilled onions. Tell you what. I’ll have a plain cheeseburger with relish. Claire?”

Claire sets her coffee mug on the oilclothed table and stares at her husband for a minute. Then she looks up at the humorless waitress and smiles. “Toast, please.” As soon as the waitress walks off Claire kicks Addison’s shin under the table. “She could be a patient of mine, Addison. Please. I live here now.” The smile slides off his face. Claire drops her head back, grips the edge of the tabletop so hard her fingers blanch. “We.
We
live here now.
For
now.” He pulls his hands closer to himself, as if he might stand up and walk out. She starts to reach for him—an automatic urge to make peace; instead she crosses her arms and leans
across the stretch of checkered cloth to tell him in a constricted voice, “I didn’t mean it that way. You know that!”