Healer (25 page)

The best of their belongings had already gone to an auction house and would be brought up to a public stage in chunks over the next few weeks. Addison had half joked and half consoled that he might hit the jackpot before their furnishings hit the block, and they could buy it all back. And Claire had laughed. Laughed because she was determined, grit-teethed, that she would not cry during daylight hours about the loss of property. In the hours and days after Addison showed her the numbers she realized the material wealth they’d amassed was dissolving like a sugar cube castle in a summer rainstorm.

Claire knew they must jump together onto some new marital foundation, if they were going to survive. It should be no more difficult than leaping back to the solid ground on which they had begun their married life. There had been no money then, only hope and some reassuring groundwork—his almost-finished doctorate, her medical degree, his brilliance and charisma, their youth and an infinite faith in possibility.

In the crucible of their financial implosion Claire felt vitally bonded
to Addison. After a day of sorting and packing their remaining possessions Addison would open a bottle of wine and tell her more; justify his decisions by explaining the smudged zones of judgment around bell curves and P values, how questionable data might be thrown out as statistical “noise.” The wine would loosen him, and Claire would see the shrewd scientist crumpling as the overwhelmed businessman scrambled to keep his lab intact once Rick Alperts left.

Claire was appalled at herself for ignoring the signs for so many months, and perhaps for that reason alone she was determined to be Addison’s most strident defender. She alone knew his secrets, just as she knew the folds of his neck and the curl of his navel and the crests and waves of his ears. His secrets gave her power; power that had flourished inside the flushed and scented skin of their early marriage, and then almost imperceptibly diminished over time. He depended on her again now—depended on her to know his blackest truth and keep it safe. She felt the fierceness of it: a claw sunk into her heart that made them blood brothers as much as husband and wife, it made it easier to divorce sentiment from the house and the cars and the clothes. For a while.

The last night in their home he slept close to her, curled so that one arm snugged her to him, his hand grasping her belly. She was conscious of the loose flesh there, where Jory had stretched her until crescent moons blossomed just below the surface of skin. And she was conscious that he didn’t care; that he loved their girl, and loved her and loved the flesh that made all of it.

Then one bright flash before the moment of sleep revealed how much the illusion of his superiority mattered to her, and how much it was anchored by trust. Until all of this, until all was stripped bare, she had not seen it. She took his hand, flaccid and warm, and brought it up to her mouth, not realizing she would bite into the palm until she tasted his sweat.

• 22 •

Claire sleeps in the new earrings Addison gave her before he left. Twice during the night she dreams, rouses, reaches toward Addison’s vacant space, then touches the smooth polished glass. The last spring snow falls that night, and when she wakes up in the morning almost five inches cover the ground.

She builds a fire and pours milk into a pot for hot chocolate, then goes back upstairs to wake Jory, who is still deep in the enviable coma of sleep unique to infants, teenagers and addicts. Claire sits on the edge of the bed. Jory’s hair is a torrent of spun gold curling down her back. When she was a baby Claire would sometimes pull a chair to the side of her crib and sit for hours, watching the stripes on her thin cotton gown ripple in time with her breath. After so many precarious months the miracle had been too fragile to trust.

She strokes Jory’s back to wake her, and her fingers catch in another strand of gold. Claire untangles it from Jory’s hair, traces it around until she finds the diamond-studded heart pendant.

She walks back downstairs and calls Addison’s cell phone, doesn’t wait for more than “Good morning.” “Did you buy a necklace for Jory yesterday?”

“Does this mean it’s not a good morning?”

“Just… Sorry. No. I don’t know yet. Did you buy her a necklace at Walmart?”

She hears a deep sigh and knows the answer, then she is back
upstairs shaking Jory awake, tugging at the thin gold chain until it threatens to break.

“What?” Jory mutters, then sits up and grabs her mother’s hand around the pendant.

“Where did this come from?” Claire asks her, barely reining the accusatory edge in her voice.

Jory hugs her knees to her chest in a barricade. “You know where it came from.”

“Did you steal it? Did you?”

Tears are already streaming down Jory’s face, her lips blushing red. “I didn’t steal it! I bought it.”

“Bought it with
what
? Where did you get two hundred dollars?”

Jory throws herself onto her stomach and yanks the comforter over her head. Claire yanks the comforter completely off and throws it onto the floor. “Get dressed. Now. We are going for a drive.”

She calls the clinic to say she can’t come in until this afternoon. Frida answers that not many patients are likely to come with the snow, anyway, and makes no comment about the distress in Claire’s voice.

Claire smells burning milk and turns off the stove, dumps the contents of the pan into the sink and runs back upstairs to get dressed. Then she stops—paralyzed when it dawns on her—and races back downstairs to her desk wearing only jeans and a bra. She pulls on the bottom drawer so hard it comes out of the frame altogether. Every receipt is filed there by month and she dumps the March folder onto the floor, spreading the receipts out so she can spot the grocery store logo. She lines the last four up side by side, a picket fence of spent money, half of it borrowed, to buy milk and eggs and toilet paper and soap.

Every one of the receipts gives Jory away. Every receipt has a fifty dollar charge for a Visa gift certificate on it. Enough to add up to a necklace and more, but not enough to be glaringly missed.

Claire makes herself take five deep breaths, then five more. Five more still before she goes back into Jory’s room, picks up her cell phone and her iPod from the dresser and locks them in the file cabinet. “We are leaving in five minutes. Get your boots on. It snowed last night.”

“I’m not coming.”

“Fine. I am taking the grocery store receipts and this necklace to the police. I’m sure they’ll have an idea about how you can pay it back.”

The roads are terrible but Claire is too mad to care. Jory radiates her own fury from the backseat. Three times Claire starts to lecture her but clenches her teeth together instead; still, the rage screams unchecked in her mind. She guns the car at a stop sign and feels the tires shimmy over the fresh, wet snow. She almost turns back at the pass; the snow plows haven’t been through, but a glance at Jory’s defiant face in the rearview mirror keeps her on the road. She can see the crest and it is only another twenty-minute drive down the other side—when the roads are dry.

She digs her cell phone out of her purse and tosses it back to Jory. “Call your father. Call him and tell him what’s going on.”

“He’s probably in a meeting or something,” Jory says, her voice congested with tears.

“Yes, and I am supposed to be at work, too. I am not a single parent. Not yet.”

“There’s no signal here,” Jory says, flipping the phone shut.

Of course not.
Claire feels like she is choking on her thoughts, they are rushing through her brain so fast. Jory would never have worn that necklace to bed unless she wanted Claire to find it. Worse.
Needed
her to find it. That stab of guilt makes Claire mad all over again. At herself, at Jory, at five inches of snow in late March, for God sakes. She wants to drive all the way to Florida and get on a boat headed for a hot place where nobody knows her name. “Give me the phone,” she says.

“There’s no signal. I’ll call him on the other side.”

“Hand me my phone!”

“What? You think I’m trying to steal your stupid phone, just because you stole mine?”

Claire whips around to face Jory, and at that moment the road edge, buried by fresh snow, cuts under the right front wheel. The car shoots forward and Claire has the sick sensation of falling. She jerks the wheel to the left and the car spins halfway around, the clouds and trees
and mountain all flashing across the windshield at the same instant in time. The car skids across the highway and bounces off a guardrail then back again to the other side. A white blast hits her in the chest and the car stops with a jolting snap.

The backseat is quiet and for one fraction of an instant Claire reels past all the anger of the last year, pleads with God to save her baby and cries out for Jory.

After another instant of shocked silence Jory answers her. “Way to go, Mom.”

Claire covers her face with her hands; her cheeks are wet. She turns around and reaches for Jory. “Are you okay? Does anything hurt?”

Jory shrugs, then shakes her head, and then she starts to cry.

“Okay. Okay.” Claire holds her breath to slow her pulse down, her fist over her chest. “So, we are both okay.” She turns the ignition key and the engine starts, but when she puts the shift into reverse and presses lightly on the pedal she hears a harsh clatter that makes her lift her foot as if she’d been slapped for presuming the car would move. “Stay in the car. Try the cell phone again, will you?”

Her door has smashed into the guardrail, and through her window she sees a freefall down the mountain, eight inches and a ripple of metal away. She unbuckles her seat belt and crawls across the seats to step into the snow, gets on her hands and knees to look under the car. The mysterious spaces beneath the frame and body disappear into black shadows. She takes the flashlight out of the glove compartment and gets onto her back to wriggle underneath the car. Ice is impacted between the tire and the axle and she slams at it with the butt of the flashlight until it cleaves away. With a surge of relief, she shines the light over the braces and bars and bolts of metal four inches above her face. And then she sees that the fender is jammed into the rubber grooves of the tire.

She shimmies out from under the car and rests beside the front wheel, combing chunks of icy mud out of her hair. Her lips are chapped from breathing through her mouth. After a moment she stands up, her legs shaking. The view from here is actually quite spectacular. She’s driven across this pass four or five times and never really paid much
attention, always too intent on getting there and back. She pulls a few calming words together in her mind to break the news to Jory that they will have to start walking.

Jory looks at her in amazement, as if she has been told to fly. “It’s ten miles to anybody’s house!”

“Downhill. But we need to start now. We’ll probably see another car soon.” Claire says this at the same time she admits to herself they had not seen a single car on the drive up. The back of her jeans are soaking wet; she shivers in the light breeze. “The snowplow should be coming by sometime.” Jory’s door takes an extra jerk from the outside, but finally pops open.

They haven’t gone half a mile before Jory stops. “Why aren’t there any pay phones out here if they know there’s no cell service?”

Claire keeps walking, not even looking back. “There aren’t any stores up here. Or houses. Who’s going to use a pay phone?” A half mile farther, Jory sits down in the middle of the road. Claire finally turns around and comes back to her. It’s beginning to snow again, lightly. She squats in front of Jory and grasps her hands. “Honey, we have to walk. We have to keep moving. It’s the only way out of here. I cannot carry you.”

Jory stares hard at her mother, as if with enough fight she could bend the truth to her liking. After a long moment she says, “One of your earrings is gone.”

Claire reaches up to her right earlobe and feels the blue glass pendant, then touches her left earlobe. Empty. She collapses to her knees and starts patting the front of her coat, running her fingers through her hair, twisting in every direction searching the snow for the earring she knows is lost underneath the mangled bumper, buried deeper and deeper with every falling flake. “Did I have it on in the car? Did you notice?”

Jory shakes her head. “So. I guess
you
wish they’d put pay phones up here, too, now?”

Claire lets out a sob and Jory looks ashamed. Claire slaps her bare, freezing hands into an inch of wet snow, sits down flat on the roadway until her legs burn. Finally she looks at Jory, aware that her
expression must be alarming to her child, knowing she should try to scrounge up some comforting optimism. All she can do is scream out the only truth she is sure of right now: “There is no
‘they,’
Jory. Get that through your head before you go any further in your life. There is no
‘they.’
Nobody is going to rescue you every time you fuck up. We are on our own out here.”

• 23 •

They walk a little over two miles before a snowplow radios for the state patrol and they get a lift all the way back to the house, which makes Claire feel better about having paid their taxes. Jory barely spoke to her before they were picked up, stomping ahead with her eyes on the road whenever Claire stopped to take in the vista of snow across the freshly plowed fields, spread like a diamond-studded washboard miles below them with the river whipping hard and silver down the middle of the valley floor.

The shared warmth and safety of the house finally shakes Jory loose again—that or the fact that the necklace is at this moment being towed to a garage, and who knows if they’ll retrieve it before the return date expires. She fixes a plate of cheese and crackers and brings it to Claire. “We could see if the store has another pair,” she says. Claire looks at her quizzically and Jory adds, “Another pair of your earrings.”

Claire nods, trying to act like it’s as simple as that. She builds a fire in the woodstove and upends their wet boots on a bench to catch the heat before she starts a dinner of baked chicken and rice. Jory turns the stereo on. If there is any unintended benefit to locking up her iPod, Claire figures, it is that she can hear the lyrics of her daughter’s music. Jory comes into the kitchen and fleetingly rests her arm on Claire’s shoulder before asking if she can help.