Healer Read online

  Claire does her best to smile. Her mouth turns up, she can force that, but she can’t seem to make the rest of her face—her exhausted eyes, her knotted brows—go along. She wants to ask Jory how much she’s overheard behind closed doors, what rumors she’s picked up at school beyond the explanations Addison and Claire have given her. And at the same time Claire doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t have the heart to reassure Jory, yet again, that the family is the house, and thus it will go wherever they go and can never be sold or lost. But as if graced by a moment of precocious instinct, Jory averts her gaze from her mother’s face, suddenly intent on drawing faces in her melted ice cream. “We’ll find a better house this time. You get your pick of rooms,” Claire says. Jory lets out one short laugh without looking up and Claire can’t tell if she appreciates this effort at optimism or is scoffing at her mother’s simplification.

  “So,” Jory says after a deep sigh, her tone altogether new, as if the prior sentences had been spoken by other people in some other place. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Unpacking. Dusting. Want to help?”

  “No,” Jory answers, rocking back on her chair.

  “Great! I get to decorate your room, then?” Claire asks, hungry for her own ice cream again.

  “I thought I’d just paint bull’s-eyes around the spots of mildew on the walls. So what are you doing after you unpack?”

  “After we unpack?” Claire picks up her spoon and pulls the sweet thick cream onto her tongue, a simple pleasure. Any topic feels easy to her now. “I might start looking for a job.”

  “A job?” Jory sounds dumbfounded, and the front legs of the chair slam onto the concrete floor. “Doing what?”

  Claire cocks her head at Jory’s incredulity, gives her a moment to backpedal before she answers, “Being a doctor. What else? Should I try to earn money as a professional mother?”

  Jory considers this. She looks at her mother appraisingly, and a flash of the eighteen-year-old whips by. “I can’t see you as a doctor.” Claire shrugs and spoons a lump of ice cream into her coffee, watches the ivory whirl blend to an even chocolate hue. Jory’s snorts—the fourteen-year-old returns. “I mean, I know you’re a doctor. But you’ve, like, probably forgotten everything by now. I mean, how long has it been since you actually took care of a patient?”

  “Well, how old are you?”

  “Fourteen. And three months. And thirteen days,” Jory answers after a moment’s calculation.

  “Okay. It’s been fourteen years, six months, and twenty days since I saw a patient,” Claire answers, remembering those last weeks in bed, unsuccessfully willing her own uterus to hold quiet and nurture Jory’s wispy lungs one more day, one more hour, to inch her over the line of survival. All Claire’s years of medical training would have felt absurdly pointless if the final price paid was losing this life inside her.

  “God. Please don’t make me the first guinea pig,” Jory says. “So, are you going to wear a white coat and all?”

  “I don’t know. Is that what makes somebody a doctor?”

  Jory is quiet for a moment. She studies her mother with a skeptical look on her face that makes Claire feel oddly insecure. Or maybe it isn’t skepticism—maybe it’s embarrassment. Is she embarrassed to think about her mother seeing actual patients, possibly her own classmates, if indeed she deigns to attend school in Hallum?

  Claire shifts uncomfortably in her seat and fingers the handle of her coffee cup. Then she tucks her hands between her knees and leans across the table confidentially, “Maybe you can help me write a résumé. Know how?” Jory shakes her head but sucks in her bottom lip, probably considering the opportunities she might wrangle out of this offer. Claire plunges on. “You could help me practice my interview. Or at least figure out what to wear.”

  Jory picks up her Coke and holds the cold glass in hands cloaked by the stretched out sleeves of her high-necked sweater. It is a Renaissance look that suits her, thinks Claire, harmonizes with her waist-length hair and her pale skin—Juliet debating Paris’s proposal of marriage. Portia contemplating mercy. Or would the fouled fortunes in the Boehning household twist her into mad Ophelia?

  “Well, whatever you do, don’t wear red. You know that red suit you have? You should ditch that suit, Mom. Sorry,” she adds in inauthentic apology.

  “My black one okay?”

  Jory shrugs and tips her glass up for the last sip of Coke, sucks out a ring of melting ice to encircle her folded tongue. “Caw ah fith yo heh?” Claire frowns, confused, and Jory swallows the ice. “Can I fix your hair?”

  “What do you suggest?” Claire rakes her fingers through her hair.

  “Bangs. To hide your wrinkles. And color the gray.”

  “Do I have that much gray?” Claire had skipped her last hair appointment knowing what the bill would be, a childishly vengeful part of her imagining Addison marking their months of duress as he watched her hair grow out.

  “Since Christmas you do. It actually looks kind of good on you, but nobody wants to hire somebody who’s old.” Jory postures for the anticipated lecture; a stilted confidence wavers in her eyes.

  But Claire feels part of herself drain away, as if her core has suddenly shrunk inside her skin. Right now she has no stomach to cope with the fact that age can be an asset for a physicianw—if it comes with experience and credentials. She stands up. “Let’s go,” she says, shoving her arms into her coat.

  Jory hesitates, her groundwork shifting beneath her. “I didn’t mean…”

  “It’s all right. I just need to get the fire going or the house will be too cold tonight.”

  • 2 •

  The fire is stone dead by the time they get home, no smoke at all from the chimney and the living room windows forbiddingly black. Claire wishes she’d left a light on, some beacon at the end of the long winding drive down through sagebrush and aspen to the house. The reflection of starlight off snow is the only illumination, an isolation that is more appealing when Addison is with them, when they have come to the country only to find respite from the city. She hands her cell phone over the car seat. “Call Dad. He’s probably back at his hotel by now.” She listens to Jory’s end of the conversation, overblown descriptions of unloading the U-Haul and the two of them wrangling the mattress up the narrow staircase, when will he get the Internet going so she can check her Facebook, what color she intends to paint her room here. He is never left waiting for the door to swing open on some pocket of her inner life. Claire parks and takes another two boxes out of the trunk, then knocks on the rear window of the car to get Jory to come inside.

  “Hey, how did your meeting go?” she asks her husband when Jory finally relinquishes the phone. She tries, as always these days, to ask such a simple question as if their fate didn’t depend on it.

  “Good. Pretty good.”

  “Pretty good?” She pins one of the boxes between her hip and the wall of the house while she unlocks the door. Jory is huddled behind her, jumping from foot to foot to keep warm.

  “What can I say? There are a lot of labs working on anti-angiogenesis drugs. I set up meetings with two companies next month.”

  “So no contract talk.” Claire bites her lip, reminding herself again not to start every one of their conversations with a question about his work, pinning too much hope on an answer she knows she won’t hear yet.

  “Nobody wants to commit right now, Claire. Even the giants are feeling the credit squeeze.”

  She steps inside the house and slides the heavy box to the floor, presses her forehead against the closed door and clenches her jaw against the cold. “It’s down to seventeen tonight. They’re saying it’ll go below zero next week. I’m calling the furnace guy again tomorrow. We can’t get it above fifty-five without the woodstove.”

  “Do everything you can to get him to repair this one.”

  She hates the ominously sober note in his voice, the implication that he needed to tell her that. Every conversation seems to circle back to mone
y, the vortex sucking them down faster than they can swim. She takes a breath and tries another stroke. “Is your hotel nice? Bring me some good soap if they have any.”

  “It’s fine. I’m at the Sheraton. The conference in Chicago is at the Drake, but I might just stay at the airport.”

  Claire sits down at the dining room table still wearing her coat and runs her fingers through her hair, pulling it back from her brow and massaging her scalp. “Addison. Just stay where the meeting is. Half the deals get done in the bar anyway—you always say that.” She slumps deeper in her chair and picks at the caked debris caught in the grooved tabletop. “I might try to type up a résumé tonight.” She says it bluntly, too tired to fake the cheerleader.

  Addison chuckles as if this were a joke, but when Claire doesn’t respond he adds, “We can hold out another few months. You don’t really want to try this, do you?”

  Now Claire laughs, so loud Jory’s face pops up over the back of the sofa. Claire drops her voice. “I just paid eighteen percent interest on a cheeseburger!” Out of the blue she remembers the going-away party her closest friends threw for her, organized at the last minute because Claire hadn’t had the nerve to tell anyone they were leaving Seattle until after the house had sold. They had brought her feminine, indulgent gifts—bath salts and brass boxes of herbal tea and a coupon for a spa day; baked casseroles she could freeze for the drive over the mountains. It had all been quite lovely until one of them asked how Addison was handling the disappointing news about his study drug and the others fell awkwardly silent. Her friend Anna, married to Addison’s biggest investor, had finally rescued the moment by joking that Addison could earn a million faster than Wall Street could lose it. But Claire hadn’t been able to get her spirits up again, their gifts now feeling like more unpayable debts.

  Addison clears his throat and she can almost feel him grip the phone, swerving back toward a calmer discourse. “So. You guys okay there? You’ve got enough wood, I hope. Be sure to let the Hendlers know we’re in the house—they’ll call the police if they see smoke.”

  “Yeah. I’m getting great at building fires. Bring some space heaters out next weekend though, would you? And mousetraps.”

  “Sure. They’re on my list.” He sounds relieved to be given this purposeful assignment, so easily accomplished. She knows he will dictate a reminder note to himself as soon as they hang up—he has always loved making lists of tasks just so he can cross them off. She had caught him, on more than one occasion, writing down chores he had already finished. Once she had figured out her own birthday gift—her Audi—when she saw the checked-off reminder to call the insurance company.

  Claire gets up and walks to a dark corner of the kitchen while Jory crouches by the woodstove crumpling paper into balls and sorting through the woodbox for smaller pieces. The kitchen sink smells of mildew; she turns on the hot water faucet to flush the drain. “Addison? Do you think, I mean, did you get the feeling anybody at the meeting has heard about why the review board shut the study down? Is that why you’re not getting new investment money?”

  She hears him take a deep breath and almost wishes she could snatch the question back. “No. I don’t think so. That should be protected as proprietary information; nobody’s legally allowed to talk about it. Not even Rick Alperts.”

  Claire wraps her arms more tightly around herself, shivering inside her down coat. “You haven’t run into him at any of the conferences, have you? Would he take that chance?” It is a ridiculous question. Rick is fueled by risk. But somehow it’s easier when they turn together against him, make Rick their living and breathing common enemy.

  “I heard he’s back in California. People know we ran out of time—ran out of money—but nobody knows the details.”

  “So you’re pretty sure he hasn’t talked to Nature or the Wall Street Journal?”

  He laughs, but she can hear the tension in it. Even so his laugh still relaxes her, as it always has, skips her past the last months to remind her that one stupid gamble should not be allowed to ruin love. “No. Not yet, anyway. Sleep tight tonight, okay? I’ll see you Saturday,” he says.

  On Wednesday morning she hangs her black suit at one end of the shower and turns the handle all the way to hot, hoping steam will erase the creases pressed into the material after being packed in a box for three weeks. She forgets about the blouse, though, and once she finds it, crammed into another box with silk scarves and lingerie, she has to button the suit jacket up to the top to hide the wrinkles. Dress shoes are in some other huge container, somewhere, labeled on one side or another with thick black marker MOM’S CLOSET. Around two in the morning on the last day before they had to be out of the house she had given up on neatness and begun pitching her wardrobe into any half-filled moving crate, most of them not yet delivered. She dives headfirst into the most likely container, its sides bulging with the weight of personal adornments, and comes up with a single black leather high heel. The other one turns up two boxes later beneath a clock radio, a Ziploc bag of perfumes and three Tumi handbags.

  “Now your hair’s a wreck.” Jory stands in the doorway, swallowed inside Addison’s thick bathrobe, black circles of mascara bleeding under her eyes.

  “Well. Matches my clothes, then. Dad forgot his bathrobe, huh?”

  Jory shrugs and picks up a brush from the table, stands in front of her mother and lightly sweeps the tangles off her forehead, training locks of hair around the curve of her fingers. “Stand up. Turn around. You look okay. Not like a doctor. But okay.”

  “Yeah, well, who needs nice clothes when you wear a white coat all day, anyway. You all right here alone for a few hours? There’s oatmeal. And a pizza in the freezer. I’ll go to the store tonight.”

  “I’d be better if you’d gotten a TV hooked up,” Jory says, brushing her own hair now, winding the mass into a silken tower on her head and posing with the brush at her lips like a bristling microphone.

  “At least we got the computer going. There’s a box of DVDs under the chair. I think we need some kind of dish for the Internet.” She props a full-length mirror against the wall, Jory now splay-legged on the bed behind her. It has been weeks since Claire wore anything except blue jeans and a sweatshirt, and the suit feels cut for a different woman. She smoothes the fabric over her abdomen and turns to see herself from another angle. The fit, she decides, is not the problem.

  “So this suit’s all right?”

  Jory rolls over on her back and stares at the ceiling. “Sure.”

  Claire walks to the bed and leans over to fill Jory’s view. “I’m just talking to people at the hospital, Jory. We’ll probably be back in Seattle before I have to take a job. Okay? Don’t just eat chips and soda for lunch. Something with some protein in it. You should be able to call me on my cell phone. I’m pretty sure the signal reaches there.”

  She picks up her Coach briefcase—perhaps the third use since she bought it ten years ago. Inside are the résumés she and Jory had worked all yesterday to create. Jory had gone to the town library to download templates, and pulled adjectives out of the air so the short facts of Claire’s relevant history might fill at least three quarters of a page. She has xeroxed copies of her medical degree, internship certificate and license tucked into the inner pocket of the briefcase as well. No one will ask to see them today, unless they take her for a complete charlatan. But they make her feel authenticated. She kisses Jory on the cheek and walks on tiptoes out to the car so her slender sharp heels will not break through the thin ice.

  • 3 •

  There are three medical clinics in Hallum Valley and one hospital capable of minor orthopedics, low-risk deliveries, appendectomies and a rare exploratory laparotomy if the weather is too bad to get to a city. A ninety-minute drive gets you to Wenatchee, where almost any medical or surgical problem can be patched up. There are plenty of opportunities for a doctor to work. She tells herself this again, much as she did twenty years ago. Economies may rise and fall, wars can be won or lost, ruling
powers conquer and be conquered in turn, and people will still need doctors. The size of the city shouldn’t matter. Health should be the equalizer of all human beings.

  Claire had used this consolation to justify taking out her medical school loans; used it to fortify herself in the middle of the night when she groped for something stable and safe in the scary liminal zone of young adulthood while her mother railed on her to figure out a way to support herself. She would train herself in the art of healing—because no one could take that away from her. Security she could pack and carry in the protected space of her mind. Forever. So it had seemed, at least, when she was young and did not understand that one bad decision made in the middle of the night could leech away even the most fervent self-confidence.

  The Sunrise Bakery is ten miles from their land—eight down small county roads and two more down the highway—almost as quiet as the back roads at this time of year. She parks the Audi in a pond of muddy slush, grips the door rim and pivots on the thin leather sole of a single pointed toe in order to plant one shoe on solid ground, soaking the other foot in a grimy melt of plowed snow.

  It is a small place; six tables and a single booth, a big window lined with loose panes that rattle at every gust of wind. She waits for her coffee and looks around the room; a few retired couples reading the newspaper, two women in fleece vests talking in the corner, their hats still snugged down over their ears. One of them glances at her shoes and bites back a smile. Claire smiles at her and pays for the coffee. Then she steps through the slush again and drives home, changes into black jeans and snow boots, and drives across the mountain pass to the hospital.

  Hallum had nearly turned into a ghost town three decades ago, shrinking with each graduating batch of offspring. Mining and timbering and farming had all been played out and the few made rich had moved on. Then Reaganomics seemed to manifest, and the golden spout of technology trickled money down in buckets, in tubs, in pools, in lakes. Hallum survived by cultivating two classes, the servers and the served, both sliding along the Teflon interface of tourist dollars. Thirty-year-olds dressed in REI vests and biking shorts bought second and third homes and then flat-out retired in search of the raw Northwest. They paved Issaquah and North Bend and Cle Elum and kept on, drove east in hybrid SUVs all the way across the Cascades to Hallum Valley, land the planet seemed to have held in waiting until superfluous income could inflate its only dependable commodity: breathtaking natural beauty. Stock options and initial public offerings were converted to five-bedroom log homes with solar panels and gasoline generators.