Healer (19 page)

“Well,” Claire says, after a moment’s pause. “Why don’t we do that today?”

She runs through the long list of standard questions that builds a record of a patient’s physical life: when Miguela was born, her childhood illnesses and immunizations, when she began menstruating and with what regularity, how many pregnancies she has had and how many children borne. A list of injuries and surgeries and broken limbs, eating and exercise habits, allergies and medications. And throughout, Claire laces in questions about Miguela’s parents and siblings and partners, her schooling and jobs and interests, almost forgetting the late hour of the day, forgetting that Frida and Jory are both waiting.

Then she begins the physical exam, starting at Miguela’s head and gradually moving down, studying her body in systematic sections—the texture of her hair, the clarity of her lenses and reactions of her pupils, the pearly surfaces of her eardrums, the size of her thyroid gland and the hollows of her neck. Her throat is slightly erythematous—probably a minor virus. Claire listens to the sounds of her heart and pounds her
fist down Miguela’s spinal column and over her kidneys. She looks at her nail beds and skin and the straight, true lines of her long bones. She helps Miguela lie flat on the table with her knees slightly bent and presses gently on her abdomen, hunting for the edge of a swollen liver or spleen. Then Claire asks her to wait while she gets Frida in to observe her pelvic exam.

She guides Miguela’s feet into the padded stirrups and warms her hands and the speculum under water before inserting the blades, then twists the metal stem of the gooseneck lamp to illuminate the cervical os, readjusts the light and looks again.

Claire starts to ask Miguela a question but stops herself, glances at her notes open on the counter beside her—pregnancies: zero; gestations: zero; abortions: zero; wondering if their mixed languages have gone wrong. “I’m sorry. You said you’ve
had
a baby?
Tiene niños?
”

The answer is the same, stated slowly and clearly pronounced in English and again in Spanish. “I have no children.” But the opening to her uterus is in the shape of a linear slit, rather than the tight circle of a nulliparous woman. It is obvious that Miguela has delivered a child.

Frida leaves the room after Miguela sits up. Claire asks a few random questions again, only so she can repeat the questions about pregnancy more innocuously, leaving room for different answers that still don’t change. She strips off her gloves and gives Miguela her blouse before labeling the swab and slide from Miguela’s Pap smear.

“Dr. Boehning, how do you think when you are afraid?”

“What?” Claire turns around. Miguela hasn’t moved; the blouse lies creased across her lap. It’s such an oddly personal question—it flusters her, coming out of the blue. From the sound of her voice Miguela could be asking about something as simple as where she grew up, what food she eats or books she reads. She puts the glass slides and cultures carefully into a plastic lab bag and sits on the stool. There are hidden problems buried inside many patients’ questions—it is hard enough to tease through them without the barrier of language. “When I’m afraid of what?” she asks.

“Well, only you can know.”

Claire thinks about it for a moment. She had been afraid the night
Addison finally told her the truth about vascumab, but, really, that had been less fear than a slow, sinking despair. She had been afraid for Jory when her labor came too early, when she had just finished her pediatrics rotation and seen the consequences of premature birth. There had been a car accident in a rainstorm once, the weightless instant of spinning across the wet pavement until time stopped at the moment of impact. She shakes her head, turning the question around to discern Miguela’s need, the root of
her
fear. “Are you asking how I make a plan when I’m afraid?”

“No. When you feel danger—for your life. What do you think then?”

When her life is in danger.
How can she answer that? No one has ever shot at her, she has never run from traffickers, or rationed water in 120-degree heat, or struck back at an abusive boyfriend. An answer comes out quite spontaneously, before she can thoroughly consider, but she knows it’s true. “My daughter. My daughter and my husband.” She would think about how much she loved Jory and Addison, and how much she would miss them, how much more she has to do for them before the end of her life.

Miguela’s eyes are in soft focus. After a moment she says, “‘
Cuando quiero llorar, no lloro,/… Y a veces lloro sin querer
. …’ ‘When I wish to weep, I cannot,/and at times I weep without wanting to. …’”

“Did you write that?”

Miguela laughs, and Claire is struck by how it changes her, realizes there is a quality of sorrow that underlies Miguela’s quiet face, a trace of it even in her laughter. “No. That is Rubén Darío. The greatest poet of Nicaragua. The greatest poet of the world, my father would have said. But I thank you for your compliment.”

Claire studies Miguela, wanting the pieces of this woman’s life to make sense. “And now you,” Claire says. “Your turn. What are you afraid of?”

Miguela slips her arms into the sleeves of her blouse, watches her fingers push the buttons through the stitched holes so that all Claire can see are her navy black curls. “The same as you. Being alone.”

• 17 •

Jory has packed two grocery bags with Newman-O’s, white bread, Annie’s mac and cheese and ice cream. “Can’t you eat anything that isn’t white?” Claire asks. “And don’t tell me the chocolate half of the cookie counts.” She sends Jory back inside for a minimum of three vegetables and a fruit. Claire can see her through glass doors, grabbing a net bag of oranges. There is no learning curve with one child, every mistake Claire learns from raising Jory can only be applied to Jory, all over again. By the time she has figured out how to be a working, often single parent—which arguments to bite back, which to dictatorially win—by then Jory will be gone. She knows that thought is ridiculous, still, something in her chest twists so tight her eyes sting and she clenches her teeth to keep from crying. Miguela had it, didn’t she. When you are naked in fear, when you wake up screaming in the night and see the lightning flash on what really matters, it is so simple: it’s the people you love. Jory. Jory
and
Addison.

She watches Jory cross the aisles inside the store, probably running over to grab iceberg lettuce or canned peas. What part of a child is mother, father, or their very own recycled soul from heaven? “Just another question to ask God someday,” Addison would tell her. He has always seen both God and science in his test tubes, marveled at the miracle of biochemical truths. But even test tubes would still miss the very true fact that Jory’s life had made an unbreakable knot between Addison and Claire, too, as much as if the blood of the three ran in a circle
instead of only through the heart of the child. Claire wondered, sometimes, if getting married with Jory already in form, though unviable and symbiotic, had made them a different family, in a way she could not define. Maybe stronger, because three people had entered into that original union, even if only two were voluntary. But maybe weaker because their union had this unplanned influence, like the invisible pull of a distant planet, imperceptibly but definably skewing their orbit.

Claire was actually in the middle of her obstetrics and gynecology rotation when she discovered she was pregnant with Jory. She’d worked so many days in a row that time had blurred, and it wasn’t until she noticed the stamped date on her milk carton had expired that she actually thought about the time of the month. Addison was still sound asleep in her stuffy attic apartment when she called him from the hospital. “What are you doing on July eighth?”

She could hear the bedsprings creak as he rolled over, imagined him tangling the sweaty sheet around his naked waist, the tufts of hair standing out over both ears like windblown flags. “What time is it?” he mumbled. “Oh God. I have to be at the lab in twenty minutes. Did you reset the alarm?”

“Yes. You probably shut it off in your sleep. You didn’t answer me.”

She heard him sit up. “Try me again.”

“July eighth. What are you doing?”

At last he began to sound awake, appropriately curious. Hopefully worried. “Ummm. Celebrating your graduation from residency?”

Claire was tucked into a corner desk on the labor and delivery charity ward; a sliding glass partition separated her from the room filled with new mothers and their wailing newborns, six of them crowded into one echoing space with thin curtains separating the beds. She slid the window open and held the receiver out so Addison could hear the squalling, catlike cries of day-old infants.

She had been horrified when the little pink plus sign materialized on the test strip. With fifty thousand dollars of medical school debt accrued and eight months of residency to go she had no room for this… this… fluke! How could it be anything else? She repeated the test three times using kits they stocked in the outpatient clinic.

And then, of course, the miracle overtook her. The shock of waking in the middle of the night, struggling to incorporate this drugstore test result into her perfectly planned life, into a body that felt absolutely the same as it had two months ago—
completely normal!
—began to alter, became less a shock and more a fire of anticipation, slowly consuming everything else she once considered important.

Addison, on the other hand, slept with his hand fixed over her abdomen from the first night onward, as if he might miss the budding of an ear, an arm, a toe without sustaining the nearest connection he could achieve.

How could she not love that in him?

And their calls still reliably conclude with “I love you,” repeated each to the other. The words are said sincerely, refer to something honest and valuable, but those three words—subject, verb and object—have morphed and morphed again since they were first shared like priceless gifts.

Maybe that happens for everyone, she thinks. Maybe those three words can mature and grow old just as the union itself grows old, no longer pristine and fresh but still vital. Maybe it proves that love is like any living thing—capable of almost unrecognizable change over the decades, scarring over astonishing wounds, so the words can still be true, just not true in the way they began.

Claire doesn’t even hear his car. She wakes up to Jory’s shouts and the door slamming hard, and then the two of them laughing, interrupting each other over and over. She lies on her back and stares at the ceiling, focusing on a water stain over the bed that seems to be expanding week by week, finding hidden shapes in the serpentined brown lines and blotches. One of them looks remarkably like a dollar sign. She tries to predict from the pitch of his voice if this will be a good visit.

They move into the kitchen area, and Claire hears them through the thin floors—the clatter and bang of pans, the slam of the refrigerator door. He will be frying up eggs-in-a-hole for Jory, her favorite breakfast. And there is Jory’s voice, the almost continuous, unfiltered stream of her thoughts. She rarely talks that freely to Claire anymore.
Jory’s conversations with Claire seem to have already been edited before they leak out during dinner or housework. Claire will see her take a breath to start a sentence, then twist her tongue and lips into altogether different words—it’s worse than whatever the truth might be. Once Claire banged her fist down on the table and shouted, “Just say it!” hearing how ridiculous she sounded even before Jory started laughing at her. And they do still laugh together, she reminds herself. Out of the blue a fierce hug and “I love you, Mommy” can startle her out of dinner preparations or reading. But it seems like those moments are happening less often the longer Claire works at the clinic, the less she’s home. Time travels faster for a forty-three-year-old than a fourteen-year-old.

There is another outburst from downstairs. For the space of a heartbeat she considers putting a glass cup to the floorboards and pressing her ear soundly against the bottom. Then someone turns on the radio and the volume of their conversation drops too low, only episodically pierced by Jory’s shriek or Addison’s guffaw. Claire climbs out of bed and goes into the bathroom for a long shower.

When she comes downstairs Jory is cross-legged on the floor, knees splayed apart with a dancer’s flexibility. Addison is on the couch, tapping out a fast and complicated rhythm on the coffee table while he talks, one half of his brain a combustion of musical energy and the other half a fully focused parent, so engaged with Jory she clearly forgives his absence. “Hi. You’re here! We didn’t expect you until later in the week,” Claire says.

Addison stands up and slips his hand into his pockets, as if he is embarrassed about his coffee table rock band. “Hey. Turned out the best people in San Francisco were the ones I’d talked to in Chicago, so I decided to come home.” She recognizes the dark plea in his eyes, and doesn’t ask why there is no need to follow up with any of the investors who have heard his pitch. Instead she crosses the room to meet him, places her arms around his waist and lifts her face. It almost surprises her, the sensation of his mouth on hers again. He pulls her into him and she yields, aware that Jory is studying them for clues. In the chilly room the temperature of his body feels dramatic, her chest and
stomach warm, her back exposed. She starts to pull away and, for just one moment more, he holds on.

“Jory, you should get your stuff together. Bus’ll be here soon,” Claire says.

“What time?” asks Addison, turning to face Jory with a fresh-scrubbed smile. “Hey, how about I drive you? I want to see where you spend your days.”

By the time Claire gets home that evening, Addison and Jory have completely rearranged the living room, pushed the dining table so it fronts the living room windows and turned the sofa so it faces the windows overlooking the orchard in the back instead of the television set. Addison has carted all the packing boxes still stuffed with possessions they will never use or need in Hallum out to a dry corner of the barn.