Healer (34 page)

And then she hears a voice—Jory, calling out in her sleep. She stops her breath and listens hard enough to hear the hum of her pulse. Nothing. Then footsteps. She slips to the door in bare feet and cracks it open. Jory is sitting at the dining table in the wavering yellow light of an emergency candle stuck inside an orange juice glass.

“Why are you still awake?” Claire hisses, upset enough to scold but not wanting to wake Miguela. Jory sits bolt upright—the sudden, defensive move spurs Claire to put on her bathrobe and come all the way down the stairs. “What are you doing? It’s a school night!”

“I had to look something up for a test tomorrow,” Jory says.

Claire scans the empty table. “So if you’re studying for a test, where are your books?”

Jory stands up with her arms crossed tight around her slender body. “Okay. I’ll go to bed.” She starts to walk by Claire and something metallic hits the floor and skids across the room.

Claire turns on the overhead light, blindingly bright after the candle glow. “What’s going on, Jory?”

“Nothing.”

“What did you drop?” Claire folds her robe close around her legs and starts searching the floor, walking nearer the table and along the wall. She sees a glint of gold beside the table leg and squats down; Jory lets out an audible cry. Claire has to crawl on her knees to reach it, a dull gold locket about the size of a half dollar, hinged on one side. She picks it up, grasping the edge of the table to balance herself in a wave of vertigo. The first thing that flashes through her mind is the diamond necklace—the discovery she made a month ago while trailing her fingers through her sleeping daughter’s hair that Jory was capable of such a lie—the lie of such a theft.

She holds the locket out on her open palm in front of Jory’s horrified face. “Where did you get this?” Jory shakes her head once and then seems to freeze. Claire’s voice drops from a shrill accusation to a harsh plea. “You didn’t steal it, did you? Jory, please tell me…”

After a minute of tense silence Jory starts to cry and Claire wants to apologize to her, wants to hold her in her lap, wants to shake her and accuse her all over again. Her shoulders sag. “Jory…” she says forlornly. But Jory has already walked into the kitchen doorway and is standing next to Miguela.

“She did not steal it. It is mine,” Miguela says.

Jory is looking at Miguela, imploringly. Beseechingly. The anguish on Jory’s face makes Claire feel like part of her own flesh is being pulled away, a deep thudding certainty that some critical secret has been shared without Claire’s protection. “Jory, I want to talk to Miguela alone for a minute. Wait upstairs, please.”

Jory immediately sits on the closest chair and locks her hands under the seat, as if her mother might still be capable of physically carrying her out of the room. Claire closes her fist around the locket and sits down solidly in her own chair, looking from Jory to Miguela, weighing the choices. “All right. Okay. Miguela, sit with us, please. We’ll
all
talk.”

Miguela’s hands are knotted in her lap and her head is bowed. Claire wants to reach over and lift her face up, make her show her eyes. After a long, uncomfortable pause Miguela looks at Claire and says, “The locket belonged to my daughter, Esperanza.”

Jory lets out a cry of betrayal. “You don’t have to tell her!”

Claire starts to get up, but it is Miguela who addresses Jory now. “Your mother needs to know, Jory.” Miguela looks exhausted, like the act of breathing causes her physical pain. But right now, in this house tonight, Claire is not Miguela’s doctor, not even her friend. She is only Jory’s mother.

Claire flicks her eyes between Miguela and Jory—Jory looks like she’s ready to grab Miguela’s hand and run out the door. “Why is this a secret, Miguela? You told me you’d had a baby,” Claire says.

“Yes. But I did not tell you how she died.” She pauses, seems to struggle for words. “I did not come to the United States for money. I did not come to the clinic for a doctor. Or a job. I came to find who killed my daughter.”

Claire is silent for a minute, trying to decide what to say. “Your daughter was here? In Hallum?”

“Esperanza left Nicaragua when she was fifteen. Three years later she came home, so sick I did not know her. A stranger found her in a bus and drove her to me. To Jalapa. She was pregnant. She died four days later.”

Jory is silently crying, tears running down her immobile face. Claire realizes it is the first time she has seen her daughter cry in the manner of an adult, suppressing every other controllable sign of grief. Claire moves her hand to the middle of the table, where Jory can reach it if she wants. “I’m sorry,” Claire says. “I’m so sorry, Miguela. Do you know why she died?”

Miguela shakes her head, more in hopelessness than as an answer. “She came home with only this.” Miguela puts an envelope on the table. Claire recognizes it as the one she’d been reading the night she moved in. “Go on. You look,” Miguela says. She slides it across the table. It is so worn the paper has the texture of flannel at the creases. Inside are two pieces of paper. The first is a check stub from Walker’s Orchards, and the other is an appointment card for Dr. Dan Zelaya.

Claire turns it over in her hands, hoping for a revelation in the few words and numbers. “Every time I saw you at the clinic, you came in before we opened or when we were closing. When Anita wasn’t at her desk. Were you looking for her records? Her medical chart?”

Miguela nods.

“Why didn’t you just ask me? Even after you moved in here. With us. You didn’t think I would help you?”

Miguela looks out into the middle of the room for so long Claire starts to repeat her question, but Miguela breaks in. “Esperanza went to a special house to live. The men at the orchard sent her.
They
made her sick—they put medicine in her and made her sick. She had bruises.” Miguela runs her hand over her arms and face. “Bruises everywhere.”

“Are you sure she was pregnant?” Claire asks.

“Her stomach was this big.” Miguela holds her arms out in front of her abdomen. “I wanted her baby to live, but it did not move. Never.”

Claire’s mind is flying through the possible complications of pregnancy and the confused translations that had stretched across four thousand miles, two cultures, and the contorted delusions of critical illness. “Maybe the house was a hospital—someplace to have her baby?”

Suddenly Jory speaks out, her voice sounds edgy, almost desperate. “Tell her about the needles they used on her. Esperanza wasn’t sick before the people at the orchard sent her to that place. It wasn’t a hospital.”

Miguela looks worn out, like she doesn’t have the reserves left to convince Claire of anything. She snaps the locket open and looks at it, then passes it to Claire. Inside the small gold frame is a picture of a girl Jory’s age, with Miguela’s eyes, Miguela’s hair. “Here is all I know. In Nicaragua, if you are born with nothing, you will live all your life with nothing.” Her eyes are glistening but her face is composed, the purpose of her life crystallized inside the unexplained events that transformed the girl in this snapshot into the pregnant woman who came home to die.

Claire can’t find any words.

After a long silence, Miguela says, “I know. You can’t see it.” She sounds both plaintive and resigned, as if faced with an immutable injustice that she is deciding not to fight anymore. She searches Claire’s face like no language in the world could translate their separate lives, an expression of such sophic compassion that Claire feels exposed.

“What?” Claire asks. “What can’t I see?”

“You cannot see what you have.”

Claire waits for Addison to say something. She has tried to stay as clearheaded as possible, repeating not only what Miguela has told her tonight but all the odd occurrences she’s noticed since Miguela showed up in front of the grocery store out of nowhere; how they had all just seemed like cultural or linguistic quirks until they exploded inside this weird story. She’s trying to fathom how she could have invited someone into their home, into Jory’s life, based on trust alone, when she knew so little about her.

Addison is lying on his back, naked underneath the sheet, his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes closed. She leans over him, finally taps her finger in the center of his forehead. “Are you listening?” He reaches up and closes his hand around her own. “I’m listening. I’m thinking. Go on.”

“I don’t feel like you’re taking this seriously.”

“Why? Because my eyes are closed?” He rolls up on his side, props his cheek on the angle of his wrist and stares at her. “I really am. Listening. I’m trying to figure out what part of this has you so upset—her daughter’s death or the fact that Jory knows more about it than you do.”

“I just… I wouldn’t have thought she could lie to me.”

He gives her a thoughtful, questioning look. “Well, did she lie to you? Or just not tell you the whole truth.”

“Why would she hide it from me, though?” Claire falls onto her back now. “This story about her daughter being poisoned in some house… do you think she could have been part of a prostitution ring? On drugs?”

“That’s not unimaginable given the stories you bring home. Maybe Miguela’s hiding it because she’s scared. It sounds like she thinks someone in Hallum is responsible.”

“Addison?”

“What?” he finally asks.

“Walker’s not the type to do something like this, is he? Get a
teenager pregnant and send her out of the country? Or worse—send his workers into prostitution?”

He lofts the sheet and turns onto his stomach, pulling his pillow under his chest. “This is the same man who funds your charity clinic. As far as I know he’s happily married.” His eyes are blinking heavy and slow, they drift closed for a moment.

“Since when does money and power keep a man from taking advantage of people who work for him?”

He rouses again with this, “It’s two
AM
, Claire. You’re not making sense.” He blinks again, waiting for her to answer or go to sleep. “You want to believe her, don’t you? That’s why you’re so upset.”

Claire nods. “Yeah. I want to believe her. Believe
in
her. I feel responsible for her. But it’s him, too,” she says.

“Him who?”

“Walker. I need to believe in him, too.”

• 31 •

Anita is due to deliver any day, and her sister, Rosa, has been coming in most afternoons just to lighten her load. When the volume picks up in the afternoon the four women fall into a rhythm of patient triage and flow—symptoms and vital signs, medication lists and wound care pass between them like relay batons, each of them kindly, efficiently cutting to the quick of the complaint. Even the patients seem to catch on that there can be no unessential requests or the last in line will get no care at all. They all go forward as if Dan might come back to work any day, because none of them can imagine this place surviving long without him.

Other than putting an advertisement in the newspaper, Claire hasn’t brought it up. She and Frida are at the clinic until after eight thirty each night, dividing up Dan’s messages and lab reports, trying to guess what his patient care plans would have been, delaying as many follow-ups as possible so they don’t have to call him at home.

“So, where would they go?” Claire finally asks, her lap filled with crisscrossed stacks of pathology slips and radiology reports and pink phone call memos. “Would Kit or Hale or the hospital take up the slack?”

“How could they? They already see plenty of people for free,” Frida answers. Then she dumps every paper on her own lap into her black plastic in-box and puts on her windbreaker. Buttoning it up quite deliberately, she circles her chin around the room, at the dangling
lightbulb, the cracked window over its flimsy chicken-wire mesh, the broken linoleum squares on the floor. “I don’t know! How much can you worry about where all the water goes after a flood? You just swim harder while it’s high. This place is falling apart as it is.” She walks out through the swinging gates and then walks right back in before they’ve stopped moving, points her finger at Claire and says, “You need to get home to your girl. That’s who needs you most. Don’t you let her daddy raise her without a mother.”

It is an unusually light morning. Frida says it’s because they are starting to harvest; too much money is hanging on the trees for workers to leave the fields for any reason. Anita blames it on
La Migra,
the border patrol, circulating through town again. Claire listens to them both and says Hallum must be a pretty pure place, because if there’s any season an orchardist would be enticed to bribe the law it would be for the picking of fruit. Half the crop would rot on the ground without the migrants.

An hour after everyone else leaves, Claire turns out the lights in the waiting room and walks to the bank of file cabinets behind the reception area. She has a name, she has a birth date, she knows the season in which Esperanza was seen. There is a grant proposal sitting on her desk right now to hire a part-time person to digitize their files, but Dan had always eschewed any need for more than their one aging computer; all the records in the clinic are still written and filed by hand.

Esperanza Ruiz’s clinic chart is almost pristine, the cream-colored folder unblemished. Claire sits down at Anita’s desk and flicks on the light. From the story Miguela has told her she suspects Esperanza died of some complication of pregnancy, probably toxemia—a poorly understood biochemical backfire between fetus and mother. She had been only seventeen, young enough that toxemia was more likely, and it could also explain the bruising and swelling and confusion Miguela described.

Dan must have seen Esperanza a few months before she went back to Jalapa. The single page inside her chart, dated early October, sketches a typical intake history and physical. Her chief complaint was nausea and vomiting, her physical exam remarkable only for some slight
swelling in the ankles, a heart rate a bit faster than expected. Her last menstrual period was reported as August, but there is a question mark beside it, and if Dan did a pelvic exam, he didn’t put his findings on the page. Esperanza’s height and weight show that she was a stout girl, unlike her mother. Dan’s impression, at the bottom of the page, lists a differential of pregnancy, viral gastroenteritis or hepatitis and an order for some blood work—a hematocrit and white cell count, a chemistry panel and pregnancy test. He could have easily gotten a urine pregnancy test in their own makeshift lab, but if he was drawing blood anyway, if she hadn’t been able to give him a sample, he might have just tagged it along with the blood he sent to the hospital lab. For whatever reason there is nothing else in the chart except the typed-out page of demographics that Anita must have recorded. Esperanza’s address was Walker’s Orchards.