Healer (24 page)

She digs deep in her pocket and places another item on top of her pay stub—the diamond ring Addison gave her eleven years ago when he sold Eugena. He’d had it custom designed to sit flush with her plain gold wedding band, but other than that it’s quite simple—a standard gold circle with four prongs holding a standard brilliant-cut stone. Your average two-carat GV VS1 diamond.

She opens her cell phone and calls Anna, her closest friend in Seattle. “How’ve you been?” Claire asks, pushing away from the table so the bills are not in her direct line of vision.

“Claire! You must have read my mind. Sherry and I were talking about you yesterday. We want to come out for some skiing. Or is the season over?”

“They stopped grooming three weeks ago.”

“Then we’ll just come out to see
you
—help you plow the back forty for spring planting.”

Claire forces a smile, hoping she might sound like she finds this funny. “It’s okay. We’re still buying our vegetables at Food Pavilion.” She rakes her hair back from her face. “Wait till the weather’s better. Kind of mud season now.”

“So how’s the job?” Anna asks.

“Pretty good. I’m starting to feel like I’m helping more than just
slowing the whole clinic down. I saw a case of measles the other day. Dan, my boss, had a case of malaria.”

“God, Claire. It sounds like you’re practicing medicine in Africa.”

The remark stings, for some reason Claire can’t pin down. She is already wishing she had not called, wishing she could blurt out her request without any more empty banter. “Yeah. Right here in the middle of America. How’s your house remodel coming?”

“You won’t believe what they’ve done now. The new doors were just installed and they screwed up the finish on the thresholds.” One of Anna’s children is practicing piano and Claire hears the ding and click of a computer near the phone. “The color at the side door is different than the front door—it looks like it came from a different manufacturer or something.”

“Can’t they just swap it out?”

“Contractor says because we wanted a custom-made door for the front the same threshold won’t fit. Or something. He says we have to live with it. Forty-five hundred dollars and he says we have to live with it!”

“Well, how different do they look?” Claire asks her, scooping the diamond ring onto her Bic pen and dancing tiny rainbows across the white bills and envelopes.

“Different. One has more brown in it. They look different.”

“Are the doors next to each other?”

“They’re on opposite walls. Okay?” Anna hits a more direct note. “Okay. So most people won’t see it, I know. But it’s the principal of the thing. I want what I ordered. Total headache.”

Claire looks around the living room, the wallpaper from 1960 peeling from the corners of the ceiling, the neon-bright kitchen cabinets Jory and her friends had painted. “Maybe you need to find a new hobby, Anna.” She intends it to be a joke but Anna must have heard the cut. She is quiet for a minute. Claire sighs. “Did that sound bitchy? I’m sorry. God, you’re the only friend I talk to anymore and I can’t even be nice.”

“Don’t worry about it. Me and my stupid thresholds.”

The laptop’s screen saver kicks on and a slide show of family photos
starts; almost all of them are Jory. Blinking her childhood away before Claire’s breaking heart. She shuts the lid and turns the chair to face out the back windows of the living room. “Anna, I’m kind of in a jam. I want you to do a favor for me. If you can.”

She can practically hear Anna biting the inside of her lip the way she does. Finally she asks, “Is it about Nash’s investment?”

Claire stands up and walks to the window, presses her forehead against the cold glass. “No, Anna. That’s between Addison and Nash.” Even as she says it she is hit by the memory of a quarrel that sprang up when she had warned Addison about mixing friendship and money.

She can hear the apology in Anna’s quick reply. “I shouldn’t have… Of course. I’ll do anything I can to help you, Claire.”

Claire strolls over to the stairwell and rests the phone on her shoulder for a moment. It is quiet upstairs. “I want you to sell my diamond ring. There’s no place out here to even try. Take it to Fox’s and see what they say.”

She hears Anna close a door and the background noise dims. “Are you and Addison okay?”

She wishes Anna would make it easy for her, wants to shout at her to just say yes, not punish her with sympathy. “Addison’s in a difficult place right now.”

“Yeah, I know. But are you okay?”

Claire lets out a hard laugh. “‘You’ the plural or ‘you’ the singular?”

“Well, by this point in a marriage, is there a difference?”

Claire tips her head back for a minute and tries to relax the muscles at the back of her throat. “If I send it by insured post, will you be there to sign for it? You can say no, Anna. I don’t want to put you on the spot.”

“You know I will. Anything.”

Before she seals the box, Claire takes the diamond out one last time and slips it onto her finger, holds her hand splayed in front of the woodstove so the fire refracts through the crystal. The mantelpiece above the stove is crowded with framed photographs Jory had unpacked and arranged
all over the room, even before the moving truck had left the driveway. For the first time Claire notices the one that is missing, almost certain it had been there the week before. Forgetting the ring, she pushes every picture on the mantel aside—her wedding portrait, birthday parties, Santa’s lap—searching for that very first picture they had taken of Jordan Lillian Boehning, weighing 2.8 pounds, still attached to all the tubes and wires that ended up binding their three lives together.

• 21 •

No one, in theory, should know the exact reason Addison’s drug trial was aborted. His corporate lawyers had worked overtime to insure that, and billed for every minute of it. But Claire knew proprietary information clauses and injunctions couldn’t stop the gossip at El Gaucho steak house or the Seattle Tennis Club. Her shame—their decision to leave Seattle, her excuses and obfuscations—probably fueled even more rumors.

She had been so determined and stoic in those first weeks after Addison confessed everything to her, adamant that they could not look backward. She found a Realtor immediately, a woman recommended by friends when Claire explained that she and Addison were looking for something farther out of town, a little more space for Jory. Acreage, maybe. A paddock for a horse someday.

The Realtor walked through the house with Claire on one of those rare brilliantly sunny afternoons that kept the whole city from moving south in late fall. Notepad in hand, she opened closets, ran her finger along the custom-wrought metalwork of the banister, unlatched the French doors onto the capacious tumbled-brick patio that overlooked Lake Washington.

Claire finally stopped narrating the tour and fell back a step to let this broad-backed woman in a pink wool crepe suit lead her through her own house. Pinky, as Claire began to think of her, slowly pivoted in the library, absorbing the handblown glass globe over the hanging light
fixture. She assessed the imported Spanish tiles around the fireplace, catalogued the carved wooden chess set that Addison had carried home from India on his back when he was nineteen, the shelves of rock-and-roll history and the biographies in which he lost himself when insomnia struck at two or three in the morning. She put a price tag on all of it. The experience reminded Claire of one of those dreams where you are caught in a public place wearing only your underwear, a discount brand at that.

“Beautiful woodwork. And the view, obviously. Good closet space,” Pinky had said.

Claire didn’t know if she was supposed to respond to this. The words had been vaguely addressed out into the room as if Claire were invisible, a hired attendant. It forced her to look at her own house through the eyes of this detached appraiser or some anonymous buyer. On such a bright morning the impartial sunlight exposed how long it had been since they’d painted the walls or refinished the floors, shadowing the gouges in the woodwork, the scratches in the kitchen appliances.

Finally Claire spoke up. “We were planning a kitchen update soon. And the master bath. We’d already had the architect draw up plans—those could be included in the sale. We spent fifteen thousand dollars on them. The plans, I mean. They’re very complete.”

Pinky flashed a smile over her shoulder. “Kitchens go out of date so quickly, don’t they? We’ll want to stage it.” It must have been the royal “we” she referenced—Claire had no desire to stage anything. She wanted to sell the house to someone who loved it as she loved it, and then be gone and never reconsider. She wanted it to happen overnight. Today. Before she could panic and padlock herself to the garden gate.

Pinky went on. “People want to come in and imagine their own things in a house. Not yours.” She gave Claire an insider’s smile. “Not that yours aren’t beautiful—but no photographs. Clear the room out some, freshen it up. Sort of…
generic
—you know. It’s got great potential being right on the lake. In a different market you could ask almost whatever you wanted.”

In a different market.
Claire heard the echo as
the market in which Addison had borrowed all the house’s equity.
And in truth, Claire realized, as she prepped for the first public showing, people didn’t want to see how the Boehnings lived in the house. They didn’t even want to see how they themselves would live here. They wanted to see how imaginary people lived. Perfect people. With no clogs of hair in the shower drain, no piles of laundry, or overstuffed Tupperware drawer. They were hoping to find a house that would not just shelter them—it would transform them.

Out on the lake a group of scullers beat by, the coxswains chanting in harsh rhythm with the slender white wake stirred by the oars. The Realtor stood at the window watching them, looking at the distant towers of Seattle’s skyline across the water. “Pity I didn’t have this listing last year. I had the perfect client and nothing to show him.”

Pinky (even Addison called her that by the time they listed), furrowed her powdered brow and asserted that nobody would buy a house between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But Pinky did not know what Claire and Addison knew. The news about the aborted drug trial was leaking. The bridge loans Addison had taken were overdue and no one was willing to extend. So he had borrowed against their personal brokerage accounts. And then the stock market fell. Addison was getting margin calls and there was no more cash to meet them.

Even now she could almost understand his bad judgment. There had been so much money—money in stocks and bonds. Money in CDs and treasury bills. Money in test tubes and fragments of DNA. Claire had stopped looking when she signed credit card slips. She had stopped complaining about unreasonable return policies, or outrageous interest penalties when the payment was a single day late. Last year she had actually given away a laptop that froze up rather than spend two days reformatting it—an excuse to buy the one with a bigger hard drive and sleeker case. The memory of it shames her now.

The list of needs when their house was empty and beckoning had mutated into a list of wants, and then blurred until she forgot how to distinguish the necessary from the desired. Even the translation between time and wealth began to warp. She could fill a day scouring galleries for the perfect glass bowl to set upon the sofa table, just so,
where the sunlight caught fragments of color that matched the paint and the upholstery. And that was to be its only purpose—a bowl intended to hold… nothing. Air. Reflected light. After years of such forays and purchases the niches were filled with hand-enameled trays and Santa María pottery and spun-copper baskets. The floors were plush with Tibetan carpets and tribal throw rugs. The perfect eclectic mix of primitive and midcentury European paintings hung on every wall. Shelves were laden with art books, cabinets bloated with crystal, closets burst with coats and suits and gowns and boots. In the space of seven months, from the time Addison discovered the toxic liver tissue in one strain of mice to the day they sold the house short, most of it ended up auctioned off or sold for a fraction of its purchase price.

They took the first cash offer on the house. Two weeks later they held an estate sale. The doorbell rang at six fifteen, the sun not even up on a rainy winter day. Claire answered it in her bathrobe, still half asleep, expecting some urgent warning from the police, some locked-out neighbor or kicked-out teenager. A slumped, tobacco-stained gentleman stood on the soggy mat holding a torn bit of newsprint. A misread address, perhaps. Should she be worried about a robbery? Who brought a newspaper to a robbery? Claire knotted her hands into the fleecy neck of her robe, her breath puffed in little cloud balloons.

“We’re here for the sale?” Out in the circular drive a woman and child watched from a brown car with no hubcaps.

“What?”

“Is this 4352 Lake Crest Circle?” The man stepped back and looked above the doorway to recheck the address. Two other cars pulled up to the curb.

Claire propped the door open with a garden stone and padded back upstairs to her bedroom. “Addison. People are already coming. Get some clothes on.”

“What?” He bolted upright in foggy panic. “Here for what?”

“The sale. Get up. They’re down there now. Roaming through our house. I told you we should have let the auction company handle all of it. Oh God. Why didn’t I at least set the coffeemaker!” She pulled
on blue jeans and a sweatshirt, ran a hot washcloth over her face and a brush through her hair before she went back downstairs.

“How much is this?” a woman asked her.

“Everything should have a tag on it.” Claire turned the silver pitcher over. “Twenty-five dollars.”

“Is it sterling?”

“It’s plate,” Claire said aloud, thinking, It was a wedding gift from my cousin, who was too young at the time to know plate from sterling, who ended up marrying a journalist and moved to somewhere in Indonesia. If it were sterling it would be two hundred dollars.

By ten o’clock her living room had more people in it than when she’d hosted the fund-raiser for ovarian cancer research. Now she was host to a party of strangers, people of varied clothes and varied colors, bargain hunters who had gotten up before dawn to drive across town to a rich person’s distress sale, spotting opportunity in the fine print of a classified ad. And it was only at that moment, watching the general populace haggle over the price of a silver-plated cream pitcher, that she recognized how deserving she had grown to feel.