Healer (7 page)

Claire’s lips are tingling. “And now we are at day ninety-one and you can’t pay back the retirement fund. Is that what you’re telling me?”

When Addison does not refute her, in fact, does not answer her at all, she hangs up the phone without another word.

• 6 •

Jory is tucked into a fetal curl against Claire by morning, the sunken center of the old mattress a trapped pool of heat in the cold room. Claire kisses her cheek and stuffs her own still-warm pillow against Jory’s back before she slips out of bed to dress. Her face looks gray in the mirror; she had barely slept. She checks the furnace, thrumming steadily and yet the room couldn’t be more than 60 degrees. She mounds a pyramid of paper and kindling and small logs in the cold stove, sets the butane lighter on top for Jory to use, then goes back upstairs to tape a note to the bathroom mirror, signs it with a lipsticked heart.

Claire drives to the biggest clinic in town, a low brick building huddled beside the river. The gravel parking lot holds four or five cars, Subarus and four-wheel-drive pickups, cars suited to the valley’s deep snow and spring slush. She had not felt nervous on the drive here, had felt, in fact, a blinding, determined confidence storming out of her anger. A furious resolve not to talk to Addison until she had a job. But suddenly she wishes she’d called ahead, or asked Jenna, the pediatrician she’d met at the hospital, to call ahead for her. What was she thinking? That the county is so starved for doctors she can barge out of the blue into a busy physician’s office hours? That because she shared the letters
MD
behind her name she had some invisible privilege?

The receptionist asks for her name and insurance card, and Claire says she hasn’t actually come to see the doctor. Well, yes, she
has
come
to see Kit, to see the doctor, but not as a patient. She takes a breath and starts over. She is looking for a job.

“Are you a nurse?”

“No, I’m a doctor. I just moved here.”

The woman behind the desk pauses, and then leans across the counter. “Can you wait a bit? She’s backed up right now, but I’ll tell her you’re here. She may not think she needs any help, but I’m the one who makes out her schedule.”

Kit Halpern has a single thick chestnut braid dangling over her shoulder alongside the curving black tube of her stethoscope. She has close-trimmed, unpolished fingernails and her white coat hangs open over khaki pants and a plain navy turtleneck. She wears no makeup; looks like a woman who probably doesn’t consider makeup a smart use of her time. Claire pictures her getting dressed early every morning, putting on the same clothes she’d worn the day before if they are passably clean, braiding her dark hair with memorized motions, not a glance in the mirror. Threads of gray are woven through the braid—she is probably older than Claire by five or six years. There is an assertiveness in the lines at the corners of her mouth, and the direct gaze of her clear gray eyes suggests the comfort of compassionate authority.

Claire waits while Kit dictates a chart note. The facing wall is covered with degrees and certificates—it looks like she’s stuck them in whatever cheap ready-made frame best fit the paper, more a convention than a point of pride. Claire scans the bookcases for photographs—Kit on a horse, Kit with three wolfish-looking dogs. No Kit husband. No Kit children. She tries to imagine herself owning that side of this desk, its labeled plastic trays stacked high with her own patients’ medical charts. She still remembers all the secrets a chart can tell, the pain nobody talks about: marital infidelities that shed light on genital sores, the unconfessed alcohol that explains a distressed liver. The averted gaze of teenagers who squirm about falling grades and missed curfews and the smell of pot in their hair, young enough to believe they invented sin.
And how would the Boehning financial disaster be diagnosed? What tabbed section of the chart would hide their secret?
She tries to remember if there is a blood test to measure stress hormones.

She catches Kit watching her and blushes. “Candace, my receptionist, says I should hire you. But maybe I should ask you if you’re looking for a job first?” Beyond the half-open office door a nurse walks a patient down the hall; another two exam rooms have red flags calling for Kit as loud as alarms.

“I
am
looking for a job. I’m sorry I didn’t call you first, to make an appointment.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. You’ll find Hallum’s pretty casual. In a year you’ll recognize everyone on the street—which is a bit of a problem when you’re a doctor here. I get almost as many consultations in the grocery store as I do in the office. Where did you go to medical school?”

“University of Washington.” Claire reaches into her briefcase and pulls out one of the résumés. “I want to tell you up front… I haven’t worked in a long time. Not since I had my daughter. But I’ve tried to keep current. My license is up-to-date. And I read the journals. I know that’s not the same as treating patients, but I was thinking maybe I could start working almost as an apprentice. On a reduced pay scale.” She sounds nervous, talking too fast. It isn’t Kit that puts her on edge, it’s this job. It’s realizing this is a job she might like, this is a doctor she’d like to learn from, to work with. She holds the résumé in her lap for a minute, looking at its open white spaces wishing a sheer force of will could tack on those last few months and that critical piece of paper. Then she puts on a determined smile and hands it over.

Kit swivels back in her chair, reading. Claire concentrates on relaxing the muscles of her forehead. What’s there is good, might even be considered impressive. She’d coauthored three papers while she was in her internship, one in
JAMA.
She’d made Alpha Omega Alpha, had been a star of her internship class. She was elected chief resident, but had to drop that when she went on bed rest. Her references are well-known names in academic medicine, even though some have already retired. Jory had done a great job with the layout. Claire was kind of amazed she’d known that much about fonts and formatting. If she’d ever been that thorough with her homework she’d have made the honor roll.

She watches Kit’s eyes move down the single sheet of bond paper in her hands, and spots the precise moment Kit recognizes the problem. The narrow crease between Kit’s dark eyebrows deepens and she looks up, puzzled. “You didn’t finish your residency?”

Claire sits up straighter. “No. I couldn’t. I had some trouble with my pregnancy. I had to go on bed rest at twenty-six weeks. Then Jory—my daughter—needed a lot of medical care for a couple of years. And then…” She lets her eyes rest on a leafless tree shivering outside the office window where an empty bird’s nest is buffeted in the wind. She lifts one shoulder and lets it drop again. “No. I never finished.”

“So, you’re not board certified?”

“I couldn’t take the boards. I was short the required hours.” That answer is obvious to both of them, but saying it aloud feels like some kind of justified penance. The whole room seems to sigh, and Claire sees Kit’s shoulders sag. She knows, then, that she would have gotten the job. She could have worked with this admirable woman and nurtured her own medical practice alongside her.

Kit folds her arms across the résumé on her desk. She looks almost as disappointed as Claire, which, for some reason, makes the rejection harder. “It’s not me,” Kit says. “It’s the insurance. My malpractice insurance would never take you. Well, that’s not really fair. They would take you at a higher rate. I can’t afford to hire you if you’re not board certified.”

Claire’s face goes hot, embarrassing her even more. She should have told Kit outright, before she even sat down. She feels like a liar, telling everyone at the hospital, and Kit, too, that she is a family practitioner. She is a doctor of nothing. All that work, all those years of school, and she had quit before she got the final official stamp. In a profession that demanded the gold seals that were only doled out with the last handshake on the graduation stage, she had blown it.

Claire tightens her fingers around the leather binding of the steering wheel until her wedding ring bites into her flesh. She feels diminished by the verbalization of the years she’s been away from the practice of medicine—personally diminished, as if it subtracted from her value as
a human being to say the double digit aloud and admit that she’s never earned back the fortune her education cost her parents and the state. She should paste a picture of Jory at the bottom of her résumé where the missing months of training should be—Jory’s, at least, was one life she knew she had saved.

The wind whips at her car and the low gray clouds blur onto the snowy horizon scratched by black lines of bare cottonwood and willow. Maybe she has no right to try to be a doctor again. Really
be
a doctor—place her hands on someone else’s naked skin in search of a diagnosis, ask questions of strangers she wouldn’t expect them to answer to their spouse. Maybe she’d given up that privilege when she dropped out of her residency in premature labor, and then never gone back after Jory was born. She had trained for six and a half years preparing to take care of thousands of people—tens of thousands of people over the working years of her life. And then she had given it up in order to take care of one. She had walked away without even admitting it was a conscious decision, forever couching it as a temporary pause. If there was to be only this one child, who had seemed both sturdier and more vulnerable with each of the four failed pregnancies that followed, then Claire would not hire out any part of motherhood. She would prove to the universe the mistake it had made in giving her only one chance. At least that was the most palatable reason she could live with. And by the time she had gotten up the courage to go back, there was so much money she could walk away for good.

But now there was no money. Now she had no choice.

• 7 •

It takes only two more days to burn through the possibilities for an uncertified, inexperienced doctor to earn a paycheck anywhere near Hallum Valley. Claire makes appointments with three other private clinics near town, stopping last at Hale Richardson’s. He is sixty-four, “almost busy enough for a second doc,” until he sees Claire’s résumé. He is nice about it, as the others were. By the time he walks her to her car she feels worse for him than herself, he looks so uncomfortable. “Sure you want to stay in Hallum? Might have better luck in a bigger market.”

Claire folds her résumé into a square small enough to fit in her pocket. “My husband lost his job. It was quicker to sell our house in Seattle than the place out here.” Hale has the kind of face that makes her want to go on, to explain that it was a bit more than a lost job. It was an entire company. A fortune, in fact. Overnight. Their whole life gambled away on a single blip of disputed data. Instead she shakes Hale’s hand. “You’ve been very kind. Keep an ear out for me. If you hear of anyone desperate enough to hire me…” He laughs with her and Claire gets in her car, waving as she pulls onto the road before he can counter.

The weather is turning worse; a hostile tease of cold, as if nature were whispering its warning to take shelter. When they had come here for ski vacations such a turn was always exciting. She and Jory would stand by the enormous open log fires in the big resort lodge, and Jory would check at the front desk every hour to see if the passes
were closed, hoping for an excuse to miss a day of school. They would call room service for extra down comforters and hot chocolate, and snuggle in the deep window seats watching the black night turn white with whipping snow, a surge of alarmed exhilaration every time the lights flickered. When you can pay for so much protection from the elements, the threat becomes a game. She turns the heat up in the car and leaves a message for Jory, who, despite three calls in a row, will not pick up the phone.

There is only one more place within any reasonable radius, a free clinic advertised with one line in the classifieds, on a street somewhere south of the warehouses. She stops at the highway debating whether to even bother, then turns south, away from home. The grid of Hallum is so small the roads quickly untangle into long reaches down fence lines that bulge against the weight of snow. Deer stand with their backsides to the wind, nipping at the brush and young trees, which skew at angles through the drifts, having survived the deep cold only to be destroyed by the winter-starved herds. The road is clear for the most part, though each heave of wind stirs up a snowy ghost before the car. It’s a little disorienting, with the clouds so low they hide the mountains and the diffuse light of late afternoon washed evenly across the sky.

She comes around a low hill and a distant line of trees marks the river to give her some bearing, but the only visible buildings are a few scattered ranch houses and barns. She must still be four or five miles outside of town; it is an area well beyond the usual tourist loop. Farther on, a cluster of concrete blocks squats between this road and the highway—a metal fabricator, a lumber yard, a tractor repair barn—the working industry that churns gritty and resolute behind the ski shops and gift galleries.

At the entrance to the driveways she sees a white sign with a bright red cross painted above two words:
CLINIC
and
CLINICA
. The building itself looks identical to its industrial neighbors, coldly functional, cheerless but for the yellow light brightening a row of high windows. She would wonder if she’d truly arrived at a medical facility—one for humans—but for the sign above the glass door. She puts the car into reverse and starts to back out of the lot, then brakes again, scans the
empty yard and parks beside the wheelchair ramp leading up to the entrance. What harm is there in talking to them? Maybe they could give her a lead? And then there is the harsher truth she’s just starting to face: she has been turned down by every other clinic in this town.

The waiting room is less bleak than the building. The mint green walls are lined with molded plastic chairs stamped out in sun-faded primary colors. Seven are occupied. A couple of teenaged girls, one wearing a skimpy tank top, are huddled over a Hollywood gossip magazine. The rest of the patients are Hispanic, and Claire feels their eyes on her as she walks up to the reception desk in her knee-length down coat carrying her leather briefcase. There is a swinging gate that separates the waiting area from what must be exam rooms and offices; it looks deserted, with only a single light at the far end of the hallway and all the doors shut.