Healer (33 page)

Claire looks at Addison as soon as “Ain’t No Sunshine” starts, and suddenly she can’t breathe, as if every soft part of herself between her mind and her heart is wrung tight. He must feel her looking at him; she sees his face change even in profile. Or maybe he remembers it himself. He should—this song has often enough been the inside joke that breaks through any argument. And just as suddenly she doesn’t want him to look at her, doesn’t want him to look for the same passion that had made this child to this song fifteen years ago. Doesn’t want to see him questioning, as she is, how much Ron Walker’s money can resurrect.

• 29 •

The first night Addison is home, Miguela takes her dinner into her own room. Claire finds her with her plate balanced on her lap, eating on the side of her bed. Claire squats in the corner of the alcove against the washing machine, her knees folded inside her crossed arms. “The house feels smaller now, with my husband here. I know.”

“Señora…”

“Claire.”

“Señora Claire, I should go back to the orchard.” She says it so quietly it’s almost hard to understand, even sitting this close. Miguela continues to eat, but Claire has the feeling this is only so she won’t have to look at her.

“We want you to stay. Mr. Boehning will be going back to Seattle again, probably. It’s made a big difference to have you with Jory in the afternoons. She really likes you, Miguela. You’re her friend.”

Miguela looks up at Claire. For one flash her eyes seem naked, on the verge of taking Claire into her history—gone in a blink. “I can stay for Jory, if you need me. For a while. But I have something to ask you…” They are interrupted then; Jory unabashedly pushes the curtain aside and asks who wants ice cream, scooping a spoonful directly from the carton into her mouth.

Claire gives Miguela an apologetic smile and struggles to stand up on tingling feet. “How about my husband makes you a door before he leaves?”

It is finally Addison, though, who draws Miguela back to the dining table. He is rocked back on the rear legs of his chair proofreading an essay Jory has written for English, his shoulders almost imperceptibly swaying with the words. When he’s done he places the paper on the table and nudges it toward Jory. “So how much do you know about
arribadas
?”

Jory sucks the last taste of ice cream off the spoon and drops it in her bowl. “It’s when the sea turtles come out of the ocean to lay their eggs at night. Sometimes they come in these huge waves, like, thousands and thousands of them, laying millions of eggs.” Her arms draw circles over the table, as if she can see the turtles swimming up to the beach. “Nobody knows what signals them. But after they hatch, almost all of the baby turtles die trying to cross the beach to get to the ocean. Miguela told me about it.”

Addison glances at Claire, who makes a perplexed face.

“Cool. What else do you talk about?”

Jory drops her eyes too quickly at the question, Claire thinks, instinctively alert to what her daughter
doesn’t
say as much as what she says. “Jory? Dad asked you a question.”

But Miguela answers her from the kitchen doorway, her unexpected voice making them all turn in unison, Jory with a startled intake of breath. “My father took me to see the turtles laying their eggs, when I was young. Much younger than Jory. I have always remembered it. I thought Jory would like to hear.”

Addison looks embarrassed; the tops of his ears take on a pink glow that Claire usually notes as a cue to change the subject. He stands up and rests his hands on the back of his chair. After a minute, when Miguela still hasn’t moved, he clears his throat and says, “Please. Please sit with us.” He seems completely unaware of Jory’s fidgeting, how she remembers a math test she still needs to study for and takes her books to the corner of the living room.

The night is so warm they can open their bedroom window; the ratcheting cadence of crickets is slow and hypnotic in the deep grass. It reminds Claire of the steady patter of rain in Seattle, how it tapped the
roof like worrying fingers rippling over and over on a wooden table; nature at its least threatening. Dependable. Repetitive. “You’ve been home three hours, and you know her better than I do,” Claire says.

Addison is lying on his back, one arm angled across his forehead so his fingers swing just beside Claire’s face. “Well, you have to admit it’s pretty amazing,” Addison says. “Her father was a Sandinista revolutionary? Killed by the contras? That all seemed like it was happening on another planet when I was in college. And now it’s living in our laundry room.”

Claire starts to laugh and Addison rolls up on his elbow, bunches the pillow underneath his arm. His dry-cleaned shirt is turned back at the cuff. She smells the starched white cotton, the Tom’s deodorant, the oils in his hair and the slightly smoky sweat under his arms, all of the blind scent that would be Addison and only Addison in a room of a thousand men. “Good thing you were born when you were. A few years earlier and you would have been bombing public buildings,” she says.

“Me?” He breaks his gaze for a second. “Nah. I might have been designing
cleaner
bombs, but never setting them off.”

Claire is lying on her back staring up at him, aware, from this position, of how his jowl pouches along his jawline. “I have a lot of patients like her. What they’ve left behind…” She closes her eyes. “It makes those turtles sound lucky.”

“Claire?” He waits, almost rhetorically, it feels to her. Like he’s waiting to see the fight going on in her boil itself out. “You still have time here. You’ve already helped a lot of people.”

When she doesn’t answer he undresses, throwing his clothes on the floor at the foot of the bed. He turns out the light and lifts one drowsy hand, stroking her cheek before he tucks it under his pillow and folds his knees up, the place he always starts in sleep.

“You trust him, don’t you? Ron, I mean?” Claire asks.

“Trust him how?”

“I mean, it’s more than just the money. You think he really believes in vascumab? What it can do for cancer?”

She can tell this pulls him a step back into his daytime world; he sighs with a tinge of impatience. “Yeah. I think he believes it’s a
good drug. But right now I have to mainly trust his business sense. Just getting vascumab ready for phase one trials again is going to cost ten or fifteen million. He can’t take that kind of risk just to be a good Samaritan.”

She tries to make out the details of his face in the darkness. “Have you called any of the lab team yet?”

“The
team
?” He says it with such bite she knows she’s hit a sensitive point. Rick had been the key player, when it came down to the irreplaceable brains. “The
team
is all otherwise employed.”

She puts her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I just meant… God. What did I mean? It’s just the uncertainty of it all.”

They are both wide awake now. After a minute he sits up, naked, and stares at her, then flops his half of the covers off and climbs out of bed, unzips the top compartment of his suitcase and squats in front of it. He comes back with something in his hand, a small blue velvet box, which he places on the comforter between them, then tucks his crossed legs underneath the sheet again.

Claire doesn’t touch it.

“Go ahead,” he says. “Open it.”

“Addison, I’m really glad you have faith in Ron, but I’m not ready to spend invisible money.”

“Okay. Then I’ll open it.” He holds the box between his hands and pries the hinge back. Sitting on the puffed satin bed inside is a square of cardboard with a pink thread attached to a small gold safety pin.

Claire laughs. “Thank God. I thought you were going to give me something too gorgeous to return. What is it?”

Addison plucks the paper out of the cleft intended for a jewel and holds it in front of her—the tag from her blue dress. “I’m at least sure enough of the deal to cut the tags off.”

“Okay. I guess it’s unethical to take it back at this point anyway.” She kisses him. “Thank you.”

Addison makes a grand gesture of snapping the hinged box closed again, then holds it up in front of her face and shakes it. Something rattles against the cardboard sides. “Hey, maybe I forgot something. Better look.”

Now Claire’s eyebrows draw together. “Please, Addison. I don’t…”

“Just take it, would you?” She reluctantly reaches for the box, holds it for a moment before she opens it again and pulls the satin-covered cushion out. Underneath it is her diamond ring.

Addison waits for her to move, finally takes the box out of her hand, dumps the ring out and puts it on her finger, turning it so that it matches flush against the wedding ring it was designed for. “Anna called me. She didn’t have the heart to sell it.”

He makes love to her that night almost too consciously, too carefully, the exuberance she’d seen in him before dinner tamped down—by caution, by her own hesitance, or because they’d watched their beautiful grown-up girl recall for them a night that is gone. It is not a thing she can ask him to explain. Hours later, sleepless, she goes into Jory’s room, rests the palm of her hand on Jory’s forehead as if checking for a fever. Jory sleeps through the touch, deeply, utterly vulnerable, the way only the protected can sleep. Jory. The true sunshine of their lives. Conceived to Bill Withers and twenty-six “I knows” played over and over until Claire could count it right, or stop laughing long enough to try. It’s almost funny, she thinks, that the only babe to take and hold was conceived out of wedlock, like a proof against righteous laws. Twenty-six “I knows” and this house still ain’t no home anytime he goes away.

• 30 •

It feels good to be in a pattern of two parents and a child again. The balancing of who scolds and who consoles, who pays and who withholds is healthier when it is split between them—the tried-and-true strategy of good cop, bad cop, but no one has to be stuck in either role too long. The first few days Miguela has to be coaxed to the dinner table with them. But Addison’s uninhibited interest in Nicaragua’s turbulent history brings out another facet of Miguela: the teacher, the daughter of a revolutionary idealist. And it is Jory, remarkably, more often than Claire, who ends up translating the missing words for Addison.

Addison spends his days on the phone with his lawyers and accountants and a few technicians from his dismantled lab who might be willing to come back to work for him.

But at the clinic, for Claire, a glass bubble seems to have wrapped itself around questions of moving back to the city. Every time she makes a follow-up appointment with a patient, every time she sits at that wobbly card table with Frida and Anita eating peanut butter sandwiches, she pushes the moment she needs to talk to them one day, one week, one month farther. They have cohered as a group, in the same way she had cohered with her interns and residents in the middle of brutally long call shifts during her training, under the pressure of too much work for too few people. It was friendship fired in shared strife, richer and more dependable even than friendship born of shared neighborhoods or social tiers.

On good days Dan comes in for an hour or so, sits with his feet up and listens to Claire talk about the patients he knows better than she ever expects to. He starts with specifics: Juan Rivas is likely sending his steroid pills back to his wife in Mexico for her arthritis, so if his polymyalgia is worse, tell him you’ll give him more but he has to take his own pills, too. Dean Grauer’s father had Huntington’s and he’ll come in every two or three months about a rash or a pain in his knee, but what he really wants to know is whether he’s showing symptoms—don’t write any of this in his chart because if he ever gets health insurance again it could be a preexisting. She takes meticulous notes the first two or three times, then one day he takes the pen out of her hand and tosses it in the trash. “It’s the forest we’re going for here, Claire.”

Late one evening Claire comes out of an exam room and Frida puts a chart in her hands. “I can’t even get this guy to talk to me. You try.” Claire starts to counter that Frida’s Spanish is still twice as good, but Frida’s already walked in to see the next patient.

Gabriel Sanchez, a small Chiapan with a thick accent who has lived in a tent since arriving in Hallum two weeks ago, is here to see the doctor about a rash. Claire introduces herself as Doctora Boehning. He hesitates a second and looks at the closed door, then takes his hat off and crumples it into his lap. The imprint of the canvas band has left a dent in his forehead that continues right on around through his thick black hair. He nods. “
Señora.
”

Claire sits on the stool so her face is the same height as his. Slowly, practicing every phrase in her head before she says it, she asks him when the rash had first appeared. What part of his skin is affected. Does it itch, or hurt, or weep? Is it bumpy or raised? Splotchy or smooth? Has he been exposed to any new lotions or sprays? Mr. Gabriel Sanchez—his first name that of God’s messenger, his last a name older than America itself—won’t look at her, keeps his eyes on his cap, turning it in his hands as if feeling along the rim for some essential tactile detail.

She finally asks him to show her his rash. “
Senora. Perdon. Dr. Zelaya no está
?”

“No. No está aquí hoy. Sólo yo. Soy su doctora.”

She sees him stifle a grimace and worries her Spanish is still flat out
wrong at times and she’s missed something. After passing the Spanish–English dictionary back and forth it becomes clear that his rash is in his crotch, and the exam he finally allows her to perform, with one arm thrown over his pinched-shut eyes, confirms that he has crabs. It takes another fifteen minutes of stumbling Spanish and the shared dictionary, she opening it to words in the front half and he searching for words in the back half, to hopefully convince him that all his tent mates must use the special shampoos and lotions, too, and they must wash their bedrolls at the Laundromat in hot water, not the icy waters of the river they are used to.

She drops a store-bought pie and rotisserie chicken off with Evelyn and gets home long after her own family has eaten dinner, so tired she falls asleep before she’s changed out of her clothes. She wakes up after midnight to discover Addison has put her book on the nightstand, taken her shoes off and covered her with a light blanket before he slid under his half of the bedspread. She peels her jeans off, flips her pillow over and buries her cheek in the cool fresh cotton.