Healer (31 page)

They leave the heavy drapes open so the lights of the city and the distant harbor illuminate them both kindly, agelessly. The bedsheets are the soft, expensive kind that Claire used to buy with impunity. In this plush hotel room paid for by Ron Walker, this capsule of hope Ron Walker has inspired, they fuse the present with the best of their past. They roll and burrow and play silently on the other side of the locked door from their sleeping daughter, eventually locking together in naked sleep.

Claire wakes up twice in the night, and holds her breath with her eyes closed while the dream of it all crystallizes into a real memory, into something that will still be there when the sun rises. She thinks about Jory’s face, what she might say when they tell her.

• 27 •

When Jory was nine Addison had taken four days off from work to drive her back to Chicago so she could see her grandparents’ graves. Claire stayed behind to help her own mother move into the house they had bought for her, and only later heard the story from the child, and the story from the father—marveling at their disparate details.

Jory told Claire she had begged and pleaded to drive by the house her daddy grew up in. He had driven her around and around, finally parked on his street and let her guess which one was his house. She had looked at them all carefully until she was sure—the two-story white brick box with matching black shutters up and down, and a chimney in the middle of the roof. She loved the way it lined up so neatly with all the other houses on the street, each with a trim square of green lawn. But she couldn’t get him to tell her which window had been his room.

After Jory went to bed Addison had apologized, but also defended himself to Claire. He
had
decided to take Jory to his childhood home, had actually driven her down his street—worse now than it was when he was a kid. Then he had seen Jory’s expression and kept driving, almost randomly, until he ended up in a safe neighborhood and parked the car along the curb. He had let Jory come to her own conclusions.

Claire insisted it was more critical to show Jory the truth, to teach her how to decide her own destiny and make whatever she wanted of her life. But the subject was still too tender for Addison. His father had been to Seattle only once, resurfacing after a lengthy binge just a few
months before he died. He had walked through their freshly rebuilt Lake Washington home, slowly pivoted in the middle of the living room and whistled, “So. You got a rich man’s house now. My son is a rich man.” Claire had seen the look on Addison’s face.

On the way home from Chicago they had stopped for the night in some small Idaho town, a motel where the TV only picked up two stations. Addison had walked down the highway to a Les Schwab tire dealership and brought back two bags of popcorn, then let Jory stay up all night watching a
Three Stooges
rerun marathon. She sat mesmerized at the foot of the bed while Addison leaned against the headboard flicking bits of popcorn into her hair, complaining about the spiders and centipedes in the room. When she finally caught him she poured the rest of her own greasy bag down the back of his shirt.

He had once used the story to sum up his philosophy on life and death to Claire: hell must be an eternity of forgetting about the popcorn tangled in your daughter’s hair while you sat on a polyester bedspread in Idaho watching Moe, Larry and Curly live again. In fact, hell, as he saw it, was an eternity of remembering all the parts of your life you didn’t know mattered until they were gone, gone.

Jory knows the truth about Addison’s family by now, though Claire can’t even recall how she’d learned. There hadn’t been any traumatic moment of revelation—she’d been young enough that one set of facts was easily replaced by another, as long as she still woke up in the same bed.

Claire and Jory check out of the Mayflower on Sunday and Addison stays in Seattle. Driving back to Hallum, Claire asks Jory if she remembers the trip to Chicago, if for nothing else than to get Jory to take her iPod earbuds out and talk more. “What made you think of that out of the blue?” Jory asks.

“I don’t know. Houses. Aren’t you excited about the news?”

Jory shrugs. “Yeah. I guess.” She is quiet for a long time, then abruptly adds, “I’ll get excited when we buy
our
house back from
those
people. How’s that?” The earbuds go back in and Claire tries to concentrate on the scenery and the winding mountain road.

Twenty miles later Jory turns to Claire and says, “This man went out
to buy groceries and his wife was at home and heard on the radio that some crazy person was driving the wrong way down the highway. So she called her husband on his cell phone and said, ‘Be careful ’cause some crazy person is driving the wrong way down the highway.’ And he said, ‘You’re telling me! There’s not just one—there’s a whole ton of them.’” They both laugh, Claire until she is wiping her eyes. And then Jory says soberly, “I am excited. I am, Mom. I’m just scared it won’t last.”

Claire would not have described the house as untidy—“not particularly clean,” maybe,
that
she might have agreed with—but tidy enough. When they open the front door and flick on the light, however, both she and Jory put their bags down quietly and look around the room, taking in the absence of dust and webs, the scent of lemon and vinegar, the uncluttered surfaces that shout to them now, for the first time, of how desperately they had wanted this attention. Jory walks to the refrigerator. She opens it and turns to her mother, mouths, “Amazing,” so that Miguela, presumably asleep behind the floral print curtain, will not hear. Then she bends down and pulls out two plates wrapped in Saran, each arranged with a broiled chicken breast, beans, grilled onions and corn.

They carry the plates upstairs on a cookie sheet and eat on the end of Claire’s bed with the door closed. Even this room seems refreshed. There is a small bowl of crushed sage leaves on the bedside table, its clean, savory scent hovering just below the surface, like a window opened in summer. Claire had wondered how it would feel to open the front door and see the same peeling wallpaper, the leaking windows, wondered if the room would overwhelm her with its irreversible decay after their weekend back in the city. But whether because of Miguela’s thorough cleaning, or unacknowledged attachment, she’d felt immediately relaxed. At peace. At home.

“She would come with us, right?” Jory asks.

Claire finishes chewing, wonders for a minute if she has missed part of what Jory has said. Then she realizes that Jory is asking about Miguela.

• • •

Within a week of returning to Hallum the dinner with Walker seems less real, less…
shiny.
In a way, the diminishing euphoria feels better to Claire. Safer. The very nearness of his money was like a mirror forcing her to relive what she’d already survived. But she still allows herself to play out the fantasy of how it would be different this time: They would budget. They would diversify. This time, it would all stay transparent. She begins to view it as a pact with fate—
Give me this chance, this second lightning strike, and I will show you I can be worthy.
But even inside this cautious realm she is enticed to linger at shopwindows, tempted to put three small steaks in her grocery cart instead of ground meat. She buys the first box of Bing cherries shipped in from a thousand miles away at three times the price she would pay for them next month.

A week to the day from their night at the Mayflower, she stops in front of the same gallery where Addison had bought the glass earrings and sees a pair of dangles made from seed pearls and garnet briolettes, displayed on a black velvet tray with the tiny price tags carefully turned over. It wouldn’t hurt to look, she decides. Nothing like the diamonds and rubies she would have considered buying two years ago.

She pulls open the door and the jingle of bells makes the shopkeeper look up—Claire is the only customer, it would be awkward to turn around and walk out. “I wonder if you could tell me how much the earrings are? The ones in the corner window?” And then the woman is unlocking the display case and putting the clusters of faceted gems in Claire’s palm.

She turns a mirror so it reflects Claire’s face. “They match your hair—lovely with your skin tones.”

At first Claire only holds one next to her earlobe, but then they are on, suspended like drops of colored water on gold threads.

“They’re only one fifty.” The shopkeeper examines the tag again. “But you’re in luck today. The artist wants to move them, so I can make an adjustment. Say, one twenty-five? Can I wrap them for you?”

In luck today.
And then she feels it. Feels lucky. Remembers how willingly Walker had poured the champagne, the excitement in his smile, how inclusive it had felt. “Well… Yes. Thank you.” She puts her credit card on the counter and the clerk reaches into a drawer for a box.
“Wait. No. No, I’ll just wear them.”

She checks her face in the rearview mirror driving back to the clinic, enjoying how the sunlight catches and plays in them when she moves her head. But a hundred yards from the clinic she pulls over and calls Addison, who is still in Seattle. “You haven’t heard anything from the lawyers yet, have you?”

He laughs at this, though not meanly. “There are still a dozen things that could turn the deal, Claire. I can’t even predict how long it might take.”

She feels heat rise in her chest. “Yeah. That makes sense.”

He must hear the mix of anxiety and desire in her. “It probably
will
work out. But even if it doesn’t for some reason, it’s still a change in the tide. It means vascumab can still attract an investor. Walker’s no fool, Claire.” And he must believe that; even Addison is gradually letting “when” replace “if” in his conversations, mentioning the best car to replace the bashed Audi, or a new idea about the house remodel—at least decent insulation and a better furnace.

Even the arrival of spring encourages her. In only a week the season has changed, the trees frosted with tender new leaves, the recently turned fields tinted a pale green, so faint she would miss the change of color but for looking down the length of the planted rows of alfalfa and spring rye. When she drives into the clinic early, farmworkers are already walking down the long, parallel rows of apples and cherries and apricots with sharp, purposeful tools—pruners and clippers and saws and scythes.

There is a noticeable uptick in the number of patients they are seeing. Frida warns her that this is just the beginning; as soon as the California cherries show up on the grocery store shelves in Washington, everybody who picked them will follow: “Heading north for the harvest and Dan’s hospitality.” Her voice has a complaining wheedle when she says it, but Claire can see that she’s energized. She moves from patient to lab to pharmacy to patient with clean efficiency.

Anita is also growing. “How long are you going to keep working?” Claire asks her, taking the first patient’s chart out of her hand.

“Until I pop. My sister takes care of my kids during the day. As soon
as this one’s born we swap. She helps out here and I stay home. I’ll tell you the truth—this work is easier.”

Dan, though, seems more subdued, more selective about the patients he sees, letting Claire or Frida get the intake history and physical on anyone who is new to the clinic, sticking to the patients he already knows, taking a moment now and then to give Claire a summary of his most complicated cases. Just before lunch she leaves an exam room to discover him waiting for her, propped against the wall by one leg, making notes in a chart. “Do you have a minute?” he asks. The patient he introduces is fifty-eight, a subsistence farmer who’d sliced acre after acre off his land over decades, until he was left with a run-down house and yard. He is sitting in the chair that would usually be occupied by a relative or translator. Dan is on the rolling stool, leaving Claire to lean against the end of the exam table. “Just tell Dr. Boehning the same things you told me, Jim.”

Claire sees Jim look long and slow at Dan. “Why would she want to hear about me fixing my fence?”

Dan is sitting forward on the stool with his hands on his knees. He presses his palms down firmly so his elbows wing out, leaning closer as if Jim is hard of hearing. “Go on and tell her. Say exactly what you said to me.”

Jim rotates in his chair toward Claire, somber faced. “I have a fence out back that needs paint.” He blinks and looks at Dan again, almost like he needs reassurance to keep talking. “Well, I fell. Landed on my back and thought I should have Dan check me out.”

Dan nods his head, urges him to go on. “Just like you said it to me. She’s a doctor, too.”

“All right. I fell a few times last week, too. A few other things.”

Dan leads him through a description of symptoms with careful, nonjudgmental questions. Jim complains about not being able to read the paper anymore, about coughing every time he eats. He finds his hands starting to shake sometimes. The longer he talks, the more agitated he gets, looking as if he might break down. Dan stands up and rests his hands on his shoulders, calming him like a parent might calm an upset child. “Tell you what, why don’t you wait outside with Elizabeth
and let Dr. Boehning and me talk for a minute.”

After the door closes Dan says, “I’ve been Jim’s doctor for two years. He’s been coming here for one thing or another every couple of months and I only made the diagnosis today. Did you catch it?”

“Based on his fall?” she asks.

“Based on all of it. The fall. What he said, what you saw.” Dan is smiling at her now, his unique mix of colleague and teacher and friend, obviously enjoying this game physicians play from their earliest days in medical school, matching the described traits of an illness to the subjective complaints of a patient.

“It’s a movement disorder, I think. I can’t be sure without examining him.”

Dan nods. She sees him narrow his eyes, a look on his face like he has won a secret bet, takes personal pride in her answer. “Parkinson’s,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Not a good thing to have, but at least we know how to treat him.”