Healer (16 page)

“Can’t you just send the bill after, like always?”

“Well…” He clears his throat. “Your last check to us didn’t go through.”

Claire pulls off the road and slides to a stop. “Didn’t go through? Our check
bounced
?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, can you take a credit card number over the phone?”

She hears him chuckle. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t have a credit card machine. Basically run this operation out of my house.”

She stumbles for a reasonable excuse, assuring him she’ll pay any bank fee and interest. Then she calls the moving company. They tell her if they don’t deliver tomorrow they will not come for at least ten days. Last, she dials Addison’s cell phone but hangs up before he answers. When “Layla” hums on the car seat next to her, she ignores it.

• 14 •

Most of her patients are women. At first Claire presumes this just reflects the clinic’s population, and it’s true that more women seek out medical care, or carry sick babies and toddlers in by bus or on foot while their men stay in the orchards and canneries. But after the first few weeks she starts to get it: the men would rather wait for Dan than see her. They catch Dan’s eye when he passes through the waiting room, raise their hats and graciously offer their position in line to the female in the adjacent chair when Claire calls out for the next patient. Thus her swelling Spanish vocabulary grows with a feminine shape, plush with words of reproduction and cyclic rhythms, punctured with the language of domestic strife and subservience.

Often the first five minutes of each visit dispenses with the reported complaint on the intake form, and the next half hour is spent teasing out the irritating boyfriend from the abuser, the discontented adolescent from the dangerously depressed, the voluntary undocumented worker from the enslaved. The stories they are slowest to tell are the hardest to hear; the men tell them through scars—machete wounds and bullet fragments and calcified fractures on X-rays. But the women’s stories are often invisible—pelvic pain with no organic cause, too many pregnancies for so few surviving children, personal questions hastily diverted and difficult subjects changed.

Patients’ charts are now stacked a foot deep on her desk, most of them labeled with Spanish surnames Claire’s accent still cuts sharp
corners into, the graceful curls of Ulribe and Flores, Aranda and Osario. She keeps a sheet of notebook paper folded inside the dictionary Frida gave her, jots down unusual words, some because they are hard to remember and some simply because they are beautiful to her:
alborozar, pensamiento, incertidumbre.

Dan, Frida and Anita try to shunt the most straightforward complaints and the best English speakers to Claire, but she still slows the day down. She has to ask Dan for help with any specialist referral—she doesn’t know any of the orthopedists or ophthalmologists or general surgeons in the valley. A list of county doctors is pinned to the bulletin board above her desk, but there is an unwritten code of pleading and negotiating to win the few slots they can afford to donate. She has to catch Dan between his own patients to help her sort through the pills and potions brought up from Mexico or Honduras or Guatemala, purchased in
tiendas
or
farmacias
on the advice of lay healers and grandmothers. Often they are drugs no one’s used in the United States for a decade or more. Her patients come from a place where doctors are rare and illness is common, where purified and illicit drugs alike pass through poorly regulated channels, and cures might be sought in the roots of plants or the bark of trees, the dung of cows or the fangs of snakes.

By six o’clock she has seen twelve patients and Dan has seen twenty-two. Frida is already standing by the back door with her coat on. Dan comes out of the last patient’s room and disappears into the storage closet, emerges a few minutes later with two pairs of metal forearm crutches in different heights. He sees Claire and asks her to follow him.

Jorge Iglesia, a man of twenty or so, is sitting in the chair. He stands when Claire comes into the room, gripping the side of the exam table to pull himself upright. His left leg stops just below the knee. Dan has him try out the crutches and adjusts the height of the pair with the closest fit. He introduces Claire as “the new lady doctor” and asks the man to show her his shoulders. Jorge unbuttons his shirt with an embarrassed smile and turns around, rotates both arms in front of him and then extends them fully out to each side, tensing the muscles in his back. His left scapula flares away from the spine like a broken wing.

Dan thanks him and hands him his shirt. “What’s your diagnosis, Dr. Boehning?”

“It’s a winged scapula,” Claire answers. “Isn’t it?”

“Remember the cause?”

She cocks her head for a minute. “He’s damaged his long thoracic nerve. The crutches, probably.”

Dan smiles like he’s been teasing her with this spontaneous quiz, but she also spots, maybe, a hint of pride in the set of his mouth. It passes quickly enough but suddenly she feels a little less overwhelmed.

Dan picks up a worn-out pair of crude wooden crutches from the floor. “He found these at a Salvation Army store but never got them fitted right.”

After Jorge leaves Claire asks Dan how he lost his leg.

“Tried to jump a train coming up through Nogales and fell under the wheels. A Border Angel found him and took him to a hospital.”

Claire is speechless for a moment. “Someone found him in the middle of the desert before he died? That’s incredible. What are the odds on that?”

Dan nods and studies the toe of his boot. “Yeah. Lucky. Not too likely to find work here as an amputee, so he’ll be back in Mexico soon. But he’s not too likely to find work there, either.” After a solemn pause he looks at Claire and shrugs his shoulders.

As much as Claire had resisted letting Jory get a cell phone, she’s called her on it six times in the last two days. Yesterday, Jory’s first day of school, Claire left work early to be there when the students were let out. But it’s clear that is an impossible daily commitment, and equally clear that Jory would walk home through a blizzard before she would take the school bus. Today, they struck a deal. Jory would walk into Hallum and do her homework at the bakery until Claire could pick her up, though when Claire looks at her watch and the pile of work on her desk it’s clearly magical thinking to say she can be at the bakery before it closes. She calls Jory again.

“Hey, sweetie, how did it go?” She inflects her voice with all the
time in the world, as if her whole day has been on pause until she returned to motherhood.

There is a moment of empty space before Jory says, “Hmm. Okay.” Claire listens hard to those three syllables, cupping the receiver against her ear with the palm of her hand wishing some trapped echo might tell her what Jory means.

“Well, that’s great! Second day! It’ll get easier and easier after this.” Jory is stone silent now, leaving Claire’s upbeat words bouncing alone between Hallum and some orbiting satellite. She tones it down. “I’m running a little late. How about you walk over to the grocery store and pick out something you want for dinner. I’ll call and give them a credit card number.”

“It’s dark.”

“Honey, the store is just across the street. I’ll be there in half an hour. Buy a treat for yourself, too.” Little more than breath comes back to Claire through the phone. “Please?” She hears Jory mumble something. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Promise.”

She makes notes on her last two patients but accomplishes little else, pushing her chair away from the desk to survey the chaos. Dan and Frida seem to thrive on it—or at least stay unflustered. Dan runs the clinic no differently than medicine functioned when he was in his own residency—handwriting all the notes, the only computer so old it chews up more time than it saves. She pulls open a filing drawer and flips through journal articles and pharmaceutical brochures that are so out-of-date they are useless, if not dangerous. Whoever replaces her here, once Addison is back at work, should have a talent for organizing as much as for healing. Maybe that is the gift she can leave them—hire some young doctor who’s energetic and fresh, who speaks Spanish and knows how to set up computer transcription and spreadsheets. One who can live on a shoestring. And is board certified.

She flicks off the overhead light and is zipping her coat when she hears a knock on the gate between the hallway and waiting room. Anita, probably, though the bigger she grows the more often she leaves on time, and more than once has scolded Claire (at least it felt like a
scolding) that she’ll be no good to anyone, in the clinic or at her own house, if she burns out quick as a match.

But it is not Anita. It’s a patient. With a surge of both sympathy and impatience Claire imagines asking someone who’s already waited this long to go home, imagines Jory watching the grocery’s door for her rescue. As soon as the gate swings shut, though, she recognizes the petite shape in the nylon ski cap and the jacket that Addison wore to Huskies football games twenty years ago.

“Hello!
Buenas noches! ¿Su amiga está aquí, tambien?
” Claire looks around the room for the girl who had been with her at the last visit.

“
No. Ella esta mejor ahora.
Better now. I speak some English, okay?”

“Of course. I’m sorry. I can’t remember your name?” Claire raises her tone at the end of the sentence, a question of translation more than content.

“Miguela Ruiz.”

“Ruiz. Miguela.” Claire’s repetition overlaps Miguela’s introduction, making them both laugh, making it a little easier to stand in this empty building, in this half-lit room.

Miguela lifts her hand in a gesture toward Claire’s coat. “You are going home?”

“Well”—Claire glances over her shoulder at the dark hallway leading to the exam rooms—“we’re closed.
Cerrado.
”

“
Cerrrrrrrado.
” Miguela moves her tongue exaggeratedly against her front teeth, clarifying the sound that has no equal in English. Then she smiles, her lovely brows lifting.

“I can’t examine you now, with no one else here, but if there is a problem…” Claire sees a puzzled look flicker across Miguela’s face and repeats it all slowly.

“Ah! No. I am not sick.” She takes her cap off and shakes her head, heavy black waves of her hair fall loose over her face and she combs them back with splayed fingers, a gesture Claire can tell is part of her physical language, as unconscious as breathing. “I came for a job. To work for you.”

“For me? Here? Doing what?” Claire is tempted to turn around and look for anyone else Miguela could be referring to. The note of perplexity
in her voice sparks an embarrassed look on Miguela’s face; her dark eyes pull back a little. “I didn’t mean…”

“No, no. I am sorry.” Miguela shrugs Addison’s jacket higher on her narrow shoulders. “Thank you.”

She turns to go and Claire reaches out to stop her, brushing against Miguela’s fingertips before settling on the rolled-up sleeve of her own husband’s coat. “Señora Ruiz, what kind of job do you want? I can talk to Dr. Zelaya tomorrow. What work do you do?”

Miguela shrugs but doesn’t move to pull her arm away. “Cleaning. Washing. Anything you need.” She smiles at Claire, forgiving any awkwardness. “It’s okay. I will come another day.” She leaves then, with a small wave through the glass panes after the door swings shut behind her.

Claire starts to lock the door after her but opens it again and leans out, “Miguela, I’ll talk to him. Okay? Come by in a few days. You never know.”

Jory is standing outside the grocery store stamping from one foot to the other in a manner guaranteed to make Claire feel guilty. “Why didn’t you wait inside the doors?”

“Why didn’t you get here when you said you would?” She dumps the grocery bag and her backpack in the rear seat and climbs into the car, cupping her hands in front of the heat vent. Claire gives her a minute to declare her mood, which turns out to be more conversant than her frigid glare had implied from the curb. “They have crappy food at this school.”

“Don’t say
crap,
please.”

“Okay. Shitty food.” She shoots her mother a schmaltzy smile and laughs. “I’m kidding, Mom. Not about the food, though. Fried cheese sticks?”

Claire pulls onto the highway with a glance at her daughter’s profile. “So, tell me something good about the school.”

Jory lifts a shoulder and stares at the road. But after a minute she says, “There’re some okay people, I guess.” And then, harshly: “God, Mom, watch out for that guy on the road!”

Claire focuses through the snow looking for headlights and then spots the red plaid jacket walking between the dark track of wheels and the wall of plowed snow that obliterates any shoulder. She turns the wheel to the right and the car shimmies and slides when it crosses the frozen stripe down the middle of the lane, stopping with the front tire scythed up onto the churned white waste. Jory’s hand braces against the dashboard and she stares at her mother openmouthed when Claire gets out of the car and calls out to the figure picking her way across the broken blocks of compacted snow.

“Señora Ruiz?”

After a mix of confused Spanish and English Claire persuades her to get into the backseat. They are quiet while Claire rocks the car forward and back until it catches friction and rolls safely into tracks of bare pavement. She’s getting better at driving in the snow, she thinks, developing an instinct for the way the car will respond in the myriad concoctions of water that cover the roads and change by the hour. Claire feels Jory’s eyes flashing on her, checking for some sign as to who this woman in the vaguely familiar jacket is.

“Where do you live?” Claire asks, glancing at Miguela’s face in the rearview mirror.

“The orchard. Walker’s Orchards.”

Claire turns around for a moment to face Miguela. “You’re working at the orchard? What kind of work do they have you doing in winter?”

“I clean—the offices, the house.” She falls quiet again, stares out at the snow. After a moment she asks, “Your child is here?”