Healer (28 page)

They walk out to the parking lot together, the sky a steely blue that is neither night nor day. Frida stands with her car keys in her hand and squints down the valley, where the paler twilight remembers the sun. She takes a long breath, rolls her shoulders up to her ears and then drops them, stretching her arms behind her. Something in the motion reminds Claire of her favorite birds, the blue herons that used to roost in their trees on Lake Washington, hunting along the shallow shore with elastic necks, walloping into the air on ragged wings with pterodactyl cries.

Frida takes her time absorbing this magnificent sky, then turns to Claire. “You don’t seem quite so gun-shy around here anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…” She tilts her head up, like maybe there is an answer floating by. “I mean when you first started working here you seemed like you were afraid you were going to break somebody. Drop some patient on the ground and shatter him to pieces.”

Claire feels a surge of pride, quickly chased by a surge of embarrassment, like she’s taking credit for something she hasn’t earned yet. “At least I’m speeding up. You didn’t hear anything from Dan, did you?”

Frida shakes her head. “You’re worried. Aren’t you?”

Claire stares at a pin of light hovering on the horizon above Frida’s
shoulder. An airplane coming at her or moving away. Or Venus. “He wouldn’t tell us, would he?”

“You’d have to pull it out of him like an old bullet.” She’s quiet for a minute, then adds, as if it were clearly connected, “He’s seen so many patients by this age he almost has a second sight about sickness—I sometimes wonder if that’s how he can run this place on next to nothing. Line up a room of people and he can smell which one is really sick.”

Frida could have no way of knowing how that remark twists in Claire’s plexus, remembering her last week of residency, that night in the emergency room. She can still see the woman’s face. All the residents knew her—she came in three or four times a month wanting narcotics. “Well,” Claire says. “I won’t be matching that.”

Frida lets out a low hum. “That man taking TUMS for his heart attack today would disagree, I think.” She opens the door to her car, seems to make a point of dropping the subject. “Go get your girl. See you tomorrow.”

She drives slowly past the grocery store, scanning the white-lit doorway where Jory usually stands, calls the house one last time and gets no answer, then parks and searches the store without finding her. But as soon as she turns the last bend in their driveway she sees that every light in the house is blazing; the music is so loud she can hear it through the closed windows of the car. The door is locked; Jory doesn’t hear her knock so she lets herself in, she drops her keys and purse on the table. Jory is dancing, oblivious and invisible, her eyes closed so that all she sees is the slow, swaying rhythm, moving her body in places Claire knows a human is not hinged. Near the end she opens her eyes and freezes, abruptly aware of her mother.

Claire smiles, wishing she’d stayed outside and spied through the windows. “So, you like Bill Withers now?”

Jory twists a strand of hair into her mouth and Claire can barely understand her. “I guess I like that song. That ‘Sunshine’ song, with all the ‘I knows.’”

“Twenty-six,” Claire says. “There are twenty-six ‘I knows’ in that song.”

Jory turns off the stereo and the room seems colder in the silence. “You counted them!?”

Claire stands still for a minute. “Ask your Dad about it someday. When did the bus get you home?”

“Two and a half hours ago. Actually, two hours and forty-five minutes.”

“Think we’re safe enough to turn out a few of these lights yet?” Claire sees Jory blush, a little surprised that she’s so sensitive about it. “I’m sorry I was late, sweetheart. Bakery tomorrow, okay?”

Claire fills the rice cooker and rests with her back against the sink, looking into the alcove that juts off the kitchen. It had probably been converted from an attached woodshed—at least that’s what she remembered the architect telling them. The ceiling slopes so steeply there is only a four-foot corridor along the living room wall with enough headroom to stand up. There is a closet-sized toilet stall that none of them ever uses—Claire hasn’t cleaned it for months. A washer and dryer stand beside it. The floor is covered with cracked linoleum and the only light comes through one small window above the laundry area, too high to see out. No question, it is the gloomiest corner of the house, the place to hide all the junk nobody has time to pick up. Its only saving grace is the clean scent of laundry detergent. But they could put in some sort of door, some paint, a carpet. It could work, if Miguela wanted it to. Maybe better than where she is now.

The rice cooker clicks off and she lifts the lid, filling the kitchen with a starchy floral scent. Jory is vigorously whipping Skippy, sugar and tamari into her own version of peanut sauce. Claire puts her hand on Jory’s, arresting the whirl of her fork, and she looks up with a half-expectant, half-defensive expression. “I saw Miguela today.” Claire pauses, considering how much explanation she should give. “How would you feel about having her stay with us. Just for a while,” Claire asks.

“Like, stay with us
where
?”

“Here. I’d put a door on the alcove.” Jory sucks her cheek in and Claire gets ready to hear her protests, practicing responses for each of the tumbling reactions she sees in her face.

“Is this about the necklace?”

“No. Not just about the necklace. It’s… I have to work late a lot.”

Jory’s jaw rocks back and forth and her eyes fix on a spot somewhere near the alcove entrance. She shrugs. “Sure.” Then she picks up the fork again and whips the white, tan and brown goo into a blended whirlpool.

• 25 •

They spend the weekend trying to turn the alcove into a passable home. Claire lets Jory choose the paint colors and bedspread, a few throw pillows and a poster of a dancer’s muscular legs in ragged warm-ups and frayed toe shoes. The room doesn’t actually have a bed in it yet, only an inflatable mattress. But then, it doesn’t have a tenant yet, either.

“So when are you going to ask her?” Jory asks, her hair streaked with turquoise paint.

“I have to find her first. She’s always found me. Maybe you should tie your hair back.” Jory looks at the blue ends and tries to peel the paint off with her blue fingernails. “Or paint the other side so it matches.”

“Speaking of, Mom, can I make a suggestion?” Claire tries to make her face look open, since she knows she will hear it whether she agrees or not. “If you’re going to use the drugstore dye you should add in some highlights.” After a pause she adds, “That didn’t hurt your feelings, did it?”

Claire draws a strand of hair in front of her face. “It washes out. I think I’ll just highlight it with gray.” Jory seems to find this joke hysterical. “
Now
you’re hurting my feelings!” But it has been a long time since Claire has seen her laugh so unself-consciously. Not since her father was last home.

Addison had been quiet on the phone for a long weighted moment
when Claire told him her decision about Miguela. “It’s an awfully small house, Claire. And you don’t know that much about her.”

“No. But Jory likes her. We don’t have a lot of options at the moment; everything is so up in the air.” She’d waited, then, to hear him contradict her, part of her was always waiting, fatigued with waiting, for the screen to go black and the lights to come up at the end of this movie.

“Well,” he’d finally said. “I guess it’s better than having her stay alone so much.”

And maybe only because of the rush of disappointment his agreement stirred, she asked him, “Did you call Ron Walker?”

“I will. I’m still planning to.”

Jory had been watching a music video while her parents talked, a blond babe crooning for her Romeo so she’d never have to be alone. After Claire hung up the phone she walked over and shut it off, telling Jory to do her homework, but wanting, really, to cry for all the trouble that still lay ahead in her daughter’s life. Wanting her to find love and to be loved and wanting to warn her all the same. And in the end, wanting most of all to smash the money machine that produced these videos that made Jory long for love before she even knew herself.

Claire looks around the freshly painted room—and it feels more like a room now, less like a laundry alcove. “It reeks of paint in here,” she says. “I like the color, though. What do you think? Should I talk to her next week?”

Jory stretches to open the small window above the washer and in only a moment the air feels fresher. Claire sees a new stripe of turquoise paint on the other side of Jory’s hair—maybe she’d taken Claire seriously. “Why not find her tomorrow?” Jory asks.

There is no cell phone number in Miguela’s medical chart, or in Anita’s database. Claire drives to the orchard after work and parks near the cabins, wishing she knew which one Miguela inhabited. After twenty minutes the car is getting cold, and she decides to ask the foreman where Miguela lives.

She rings the bell, a little nervous about how he’ll react, how much
he’ll want to know. But it is Miguela who opens the door, with a mop in her hands. She accepts Claire’s offer without even asking the salary. The foreman shows no more annoyance than a shake of his head when he writes out Miguela’s last paycheck. The strangest aspect of it all, Claire thinks, is the feeling that she and the foreman are brokers for this woman’s labor.

Jory is upstairs when they get back to the house, but a flowered bedsheet has been tacked up in front of the alcove and a glass jar with the earliest wildflowers, bluebell and yellow bell mixed in with the dark spiny leaves of Oregon grape, is sitting on the washer.

“We have an air mattress for you.
Una cama,
” Claire says.

Miguela smiles, lifts her dark brows, suggesting as much a confidence in Claire’s intentions as any delight with her new quarters. But then she sets her pack down and opens the door to the toilet stall, picks up the jar of flowers and puts it down again, runs her hand down the flowered bedsheet. “It’s good,” she says.
“Perfecto.”

When they come out of the kitchen Jory is sitting on the stairs hugging her knees to her chest. Claire sees a blush of color in her cheeks. A small crush, she thinks, like she has a little crush on Miguela. But then it’s gone, and Jory jumps up, remembering something, leads them both back into the kitchen and shows them the little hook she has made for the bedsheet out of a broken coat hanger, so the curtain can be held open for more light. Jory takes Miguela on a tour of the house—the two bedrooms upstairs, and the bathroom, making it sound like they have always considered the utility alcove a spare bedroom, once even taking her hand for a moment as they start back down the stairs.

Claire unpacks the air mattress from its zippered bag and plugs in a hair dryer, watches the vinyl bed inflate with soft popping sounds. It fills the small space, leaving only a single foot of room to walk along the opposite wall. When the noise of the dryer stops, she hears Jory talking. She is kneeling on the end of the sofa explaining the photographs on the mantel to Miguela, who points to a picture of Jory at about age eleven, only three years ago. They had gone to Costa Rica for a vacation over Christmas break and Jory had built a snowman in the sand, three half spheres lying supine on the beach under a palm tree, as if the tropical
heat had knocked him flat—that or he was going for a suntan. Jory is wearing a bikini that shows her scrawny, prepubescent body, sand sticking to her thighs. It is stunning, really, how recent that trip feels to Claire, how fast her baby has grown up. When they were emptying out the house for the movers Claire had discovered a box of diapers tucked at the back of a linen closet, still sealed up and good as new. She’d given them to the mother of a new baby down the street.

Coming home from work the next day she hears voices through the front door and stops with the knob half turned. Listening. It has been so long just the two of them, mother and daughter. Two women sharing a small space, one still struggling to be in complete control and the other trying to take more control than she knows how to cope with. She doesn’t intend to sneak in on them, but still, opens the door more quietly than usual, hangs her coat on the hook without a sound, takes an extra moment to smooth the folds. The room is warm and Claire smells cooked onions and garlic.

Miguela is laughing. Claire hasn’t heard her laugh like this before—without a tangling catch in the undercurrent. “
Pero el perro no es perfecto.
” Miguela releases the
r
’s in a light tap, then a snare drum ripple, then a single tap again.”

“
Peddddo,
” Jory says, sounding like she has held ice in her mouth long enough to partially freeze her tongue. Claire steps fully into the room now and sees Jory pushing the point of her tongue against the roof of her mouth with her fingertip. Miguela sits with her heels on the rung of her chair, head bowed over her knees and her shoulders shaking. When Jory sees her mother she stiffens like she’s been caught with a cigarette.

Miguela stands up and smoothes her hair back, wedges her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “
¿Quiere comer
? I make a small dinner.
Gallo pintó.
” She waves her elbows toward the set table. Two plates are already streaked with bits of rice, beans, and tomatoes. A third, clean place setting is laid out at the other end with a cloth napkin folded under the fork and a pitcher of water, thin slices of lemon floating among the ice cubes like pale aquatic flowers.

The following day Claire comes home after work with a collapsible metal bed frame and twin mattress she picked up at the consignment store south of town. She has also bought two new mattress pads with the hope they might make sleeping on top of a stranger’s nocturnal history more hygienic. It would make Claire sleep better, at least. She stacks up three plastic milk crates to make a cabinet for Miguela’s clothes and brings one of the narrow bedside tables down from Jory’s room.