Healer (40 page)

“Yeah. I don’t know, maybe not. Something that’s good.”

Addison nods. “That’s right. An asset is something that has value, something that’s worth money to someone else. In this case vascumab was the asset he was buying, essentially. But some new information was discovered that means my drug isn’t safe to use. That means it’s not worth any money. So now I have nothing to sell him. It’s sort of like you had a nice car or a beautiful diamond ring and someone offered you money for it. But if the car didn’t run right or the ring turned out to be fake, you’d have to give the money back.”

Jory looks like she has heard only half of Addison’s explanation, or maybe the question she wants answered is not what he’s assumed. “I thought you were working on a cure for cancer. How can that not
be worth anything?” She sounds more hopeless than a fifteen-year-old should be able to convey.

Addison is quiet for a long time, his face unnaturally still. He throws the grass away and gets up. “Yeah. That’s a good question, Jory.” He walks inside, letting the screen door slam behind him.

Claire scoots closer and runs her hand along Jory’s temple, twists a heavy strand of her hair through her fingers. “It’s complicated, sweetie. But it’s…”

Jory grabs her mother’s hand, stopping her. “Did this have anything to do with Miguela’s leaving? Did she leave because Dad isn’t getting the money?”

“No. In fact, what Dad learned about his drug made it possible for her to go home, which is what she wanted.”

Claire expects Jory to contest this, argue and blame them again. But Jory’s eyes are moving over her mother’s face much as they would when she was years younger and Claire would try to explain any difficult fact of life—why her best friend could be so much more hurtful than people she didn’t care about; why a grandfather could love her but forget her birthday. Explanations that made little sense at the time but which, Claire knew, she would turn and shape until they budded into something useful and comprehensible, ready in the place and time she needed them.

Jory looks out over the field, the sun high enough now that prickles of sweat glisten on her upper lip. “At least tell me when we’re going to go back to living normally.”

“Do you mean move back to Seattle?” Claire asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to go back to Seattle anymore.” She pivots her body away, maybe afraid of tears. “I just mean
normal.
Like we used to live.”

Claire rests her cheek on Jory’s back, hears the thrum of her heart through her thin shirt, her skin. She remembers a day when Jory was so tiny she barely stretched from wrist to elbow along the bones of her mother’s arm. A lab technician had pricked her wrinkled red heel with a lancet and squeezed until a drop of blood oozed down a capillary tube for her bilirubin test. Jory, so premature her eyes were incapable
of focus, had searched the universe for her mother’s face and cried out in wonder that the world could hurt her. The cells violated fifteen years ago didn’t even exist anymore—already sloughed and replaced, forgotten as thoroughly as Claire’s heartbroken consolation. It makes her breath feel short to think of it now, to wonder if all these years of protecting Jory have only made her more vulnerable.

She turns Jory’s face toward hers. “What we had, the way we lived in Seattle—sweetheart, that wasn’t
normal.
That isn’t how most people live.”

Jory swallows twice and asks in a strained whisper, “Well, do you think this is normal? Are we going to live like
this
forever?” She looks up at the rotted Victorian trim work, the cupped and peeling porch boards. She looks at the door her father slammed shut between them a few moments ago.

Claire takes both of Jory’s hands into her own and holds them firmly in her lap. “No. Not like this. Maybe not like we did—but we’ll be fine. We’ll be okay.”

Addison calls out the screen door that he is making pancakes, if they’re ready to come inside. Jory looks at her mother, and then at the sketch of color behind the screen that is her father. She pulls her hands away and stares at Claire with such maturity it startles her, like she has aged five years in a heartbeat. “Mom, don’t you get tired of saying that to me?”

• 36 •

The first time Addison and Claire came to Hallum Valley was only four months after she met him in the emergency room where he worked as an orderly. Four months after their first date: the last D in ADCVANDISSLD. It was Memorial Day weekend, and one of Claire’s med school friends had invited a group—anyone who wasn’t on call—to spend the three days at her grandparents’ old log cabin.

Addison had met her friends a few times: a dinner after an afternoon lecture, at the Comet for a beer once. But Claire had been circumspect about fully including Addison in her tightest circle. Other boyfriends had come and gone during the first two years of medical school and she’d dragged them to every party without a second’s thought about anyone’s opinion. And what was there not to like about Addison? He was smart—already accepted into the PhD program even before he’d finished his master’s degree. He could make people laugh, once you got him off the subject of polymerase chain reactions or monoclonal antibodies. He had a better music library than anyone she’d ever known. And he was cute, kind of. Cute in a different way than her other boyfriends. No full head of hair, a little extra tissue in places the others had been all muscle, always saying he was going to start working out as soon as he finished his next set of exams.

She was only beginning to admit to herself that the real reason she was on edge about a weekend spent in a small cabin with her closest friends (who would all be giving Addison the closest if most considerate
inspection) was the sense that she was floating in a small boat far out in the ocean, coasting up the side of a larger-than-average swell on a calm, blue day. But gathering underneath her was the mass of a tidal wave, a natural force that would change her life quite permanently if she allowed it to. She was old enough to know there might be other chances if she let him go. But nothing like this. Not like this.

He picked her up on that Friday morning in his ancient pickup truck—her more reliable car wasn’t big enough to carry the barbecue grill they’d promised to bring. The traffic was horrendous leaving the city, but horrendous in an oddly happy way, a million people having an enormous party, trapped on the I-5 bridge watching boats weave drunkenly through the Montlake Cut. Addison rolled his window down to change lanes, the grill blocking his view, and the blare of boat horns and rock bands gusted into the cab like so many invisible flower petals shaken loose by a spring breeze.

The truck held its own in the stop-and-go traffic up the highway, but the gradual climb up the western slope of the Cascades sent occasional puffs of dark smoke out the tailpipe, the engine whined steadily higher until they were both tense, as if even the weight of conversation might burn it out for good. Clouds pulled in, covering the broken blue that had been a rare enough May gift for Seattle. They massed up against the peaks until a misty rain turned the charcoal powder on the grill’s hood into rivulets of black grime, and Addison’s frayed windshield wipers beat blurry streaks across the glass.

But then they reached the summit, and in one of those moments when the geography of the Pacific Northwest manifests all its magnificence, the clouds stalled just below the snow-covered caps, and on the other side the sky shone so bright Claire’s eyes stung. The truck practically coasted down the eastern slope, making it all the way to the turnoff a few miles from the cabin, where it met a solemn, peaceful death.

They got out and walked. With the persistent tension about the truck’s reliability resolved Claire was in a surprisingly happy mood. Unencumbered, even if on foot. Addison was, too, she could tell, though she knew the cash to repair the truck would be hard to spare.

It was hot on this side. A mile from the cabin the road veered next
to the river and they waded out to a large rock near the middle, the water just melted from snow and their feet bright red by the time they climbed up. The flat area was so limited they had to sit back to back and hook arms for balance.

She knew the turning point was coming for them, expected that after a weekend immersed with Addison in this group who knew her so well, the building wave would have to break, one way or the other. They had shared many things already: dinners in the small cheap restaurants on Broadway; hours and hours of studying; her bed. The requisite facts of their lives had been conveyed. Addison knew Claire’s parents had divorced when she was in high school; she knew his parents were together but shouldn’t be—enough facts to trust this was not a dead end. But each of them, too, had held back. When Claire thought about it later, it seemed clear to her why: it was only these retained secrets that still offered either of them a way out.

Addison dipped his hand into the splash and rubbed it over his neck. “My mom loves water. Rivers. She would take us into Chicago to walk along the river. And she can’t swim.”

Claire turned her head so she could see at least a part of his profile. “Really? She can’t swim?”

“Nope. Grew up in a little Midwest town without a drop of swimmable water. Got married at eighteen, and my dad sure wasn’t going to teach her.” They didn’t talk for a while after that. The river must have swept away the odor of their human presence finally, and on the bank animals and birds began to go about their gathering and hunting without a perception of threat. “There were a lot of things my dad never taught my mom. It was almost like he could see the future—she would have left him if she’d had any means. I think. I hope.”

“I’m sorry. It must be hard—knowing they’re unhappy.”

He looked back up the road toward where they had abandoned the truck. “Well. It didn’t have to be that way. They could have made other choices, I think.”

“You mean about who they married? Or staying together.”

“No. Maybe that, too.” He picked a flake of rock away and skipped it over a calm pool. “I mean about how they live. They fight a lot. Dad
works for a while and then he hits the card tables, convince he was a day away from rich. I think if they’d lived when you could just barter for stuff they might have been okay.” A raccoon appeared from behind a Douglas fir just yards away, waddling like a cat with a broken back to the edge of the water, where it washed some scrap of food. They were quiet until it moved out of sight. Then he asked her, “What about your parents? Why do you think your dad left?”

Claire started to give the usual explanation of differing interests, the fights that happened behind closed bathroom doors or inside the parked car, maybe thinking Claire wouldn’t know any better. But then she boiled it down to the source. “The same, really. My mom worried all the time. I think she believed all her problems would be fixed if they could get a bigger house or take better vacations.”

She’d felt his body change against her then, the taut muscles that were keeping him from sliding off the rock loosening enough to curve into her own more closely. Finally he slid his hips around so he was beside her, both of them facing upstream. He took her hand into his lap. “I’m a lab rat, Claire. I want to do bench research. It’s never going to pay me very much.”

She felt the wave beneath them rising, lifting, hurtling them forward and interlaced her fingers with his. “I know.” She had laughed then, out of relief and terror and exhilaration, and because they agreed without even spelling it out. “And I really tried to like a specialty that pays better than family practice.”

They had gone through the weekend closed inside their brand-new world after that—a transformation blatantly obvious to all of Claire’s friends. There were too few rooms or beds to divide up as couples, but those were the last nights Claire and Addison lived apart.

It is the building wave that makes Claire think of that day now. Not the odd fact that their love had gone in such a geographic circle, and not the portentous conversation. Not the heat. It is the sense memory she has of a silent and monumental force carrying her smoothly, steadily up and up, only menacing because it gathers stealthily enough to be missed. And the deadliest consequence of a
tidal wave, she knew, was if you failed to see it in time and rescue what is dear to you.

Jory goes up to take a shower after she bolts her food, and Addison and Claire carry their plates out to the porch, where at least the hope of a breeze seems cooler. Addison unbuttons the top of his shirt and pulls it out from his belt; yellow jackets swarm over his plate and feed at the rim of the pooled syrup, unfazed by his waving hand. He finally puts the plate under the porch steps. “It’s been two years since I walked more than fifty yards from this porch,” he says.

Claire twists her hair up, pinning it to the top of her head with one hand and fanning her blouse with the other. “The stock pond was full a month ago. It must be lower now. Miguela used to go there a lot, I think.”

“Show me.”

“The pond? Now?”

He looks like he is challenging her, wants to push her to a new place. “Yeah. Why not?”

It amazes her that the grasses have grown so high in such a short time, already brushing against her calves, their braided wheat tips like soft whips. Small golden crickets, invisible among the golden stems, buzz like a rattler’s tail when she steps across a gully, snapping her focus onto the bare earth for the ripple that might be a snake. Addison sees her freeze and takes her hand, leads her slowly, cautiously around the low hill and the bright green and white aspen to the water. They can hear the stream when they stand still, even though the grass hides all but a single silver stripe where it curves into the wide, slow circle stalled behind Jory’s rock dam, and beyond that the deep pool of the stock pond.

The water level has dropped a foot or more since Claire was here with Jory and Miguela. The shallowest edges are dense with cattails and reeds, but the huge flat rock still juts into the clear center. Claire dangles her sandals from the fingers of her right hand and slides her feet along the mossy rocks, shifting her weight from one tremulous balance point to the next. When she reaches the rock she makes a single flamboyant leap from the last large stone and waves her sandals above her head with a whoop.