Healer (38 page)

The man is sitting up on the gurney with his interlocked hands supporting his quivering thigh. His left foot has been severed across the metatarsals, cleaving off all but the great toe, which juts at an unnatural angle. Someone, a friend—hopefully, please God, not his boss—has tied an elastic band around his ankle to stop the blood flow, but Claire can tell from the doorway that this is strangling what remains of his foot. It is colored a dusky blue-gray. A fine red spackle fans over the white paper stretched across the vinyl mattress.

“
Buenas noches, señor. Me llama Doctora Boehning. ¿Cómo se llama?
” She walks up to him as if this were the most normal of days for both of them, the most typical of injuries. She puts her right hand over his right hand and then slides her first two fingers over his radial pulse—his heart rate is decidedly over 100, probably a combination of blood loss and dehydration and pain.
“¿Habla ingles?”
He shakes his head and she continues in Spanish.
“¿No será más cómodo acostado? ¿Cuántos años tiene?”
She is hoping that he will tell her he is under eighteen and eligible for Medicaid.

Frida brings over IV supplies and a bag of lactated Ringer’s solution and puts a blood pressure cuff around his arm. “How did he get here?” Claire asks, just as glad now that the patient can’t understand her.

“Two guys carried him in through the back door and got out as soon as they saw me. Ambulance is already on the way.”

“Great. Can you get the ER on the phone for me? Even better, the surgeon on call. I think it’s Perry.”

Claire slips an elastic tourniquet around his arm just below his elbow and looks for veins. He is so dehydrated they are slow to fill. But his youth, his lean build, his years of manual labor have blessed him with easy targets for her IV. “Veins thick as steel pipes,” Dan would have said. She scrubs his skin with alcohol, hits the bright red flash almost as soon as she enters the skin, advances just far enough to withdraw the needle and slip the flexible catheter into the lumen of the largest vein running along his forearm. Then she moves down to his ankle and slowly loosens the constricting band. He whistles with a sharp intake of breath and his leg goes rigid.

Frida hands her the phone. “Ambulance says five minutes. Perry’s on hold here. How much morphine do you want?”

“Start with two. Put some oxygen on him. Thanks, Frida.”

Steven Perry doesn’t seem fazed. It is, he says, just the beginning of the picking season and the accidental intersection of farm equipment and human flesh will keep him busy until late fall. By the time the medics come the patient is somewhat comfortable and his pulse is down to 70, but his foot is still an ugly color from the ankle down. Frida has already started clearing out the waiting room when Claire comes back; it’s almost seven o’clock. Rosa has rescheduled anyone who wasn’t urgent, and sent anyone who looked too sick, or even just too anxious, off to the emergency room, where they could wait all night to be seen.

Claire sits in one of the empty chairs while Frida locks the doors. It occurs to her that she has never actually sat in a chair in this waiting room; she’s never looked this closely at just how scarred the walls are and how pitiful the faded health education posters look tacked up to the walls. “These chairs are really uncomfortable,” she says when Frida sits down in the orange plastic chair next to her. “We should get some with cushions. Well, after we pay last month’s electric bill.”

Frida pulls her stethoscope off her neck and coils it in her lap. “So when are you going to tell me who this ‘we’ is? For real, I mean.”

Claire searches Frida’s face for a clue about how much information she’s ready to hear. “What do you mean, ‘for real’?

“I mean, who exactly is going to be working here by the time they’re harvesting apples and we have twice the patients we saw today. Are you still planning to hire someone?”

Claire raises her eyebrows and sighs. “Sure.” She looks at Frida with a wry smile. “Why? You see a line of applicants somewhere?”

“Course! That ad we put in the local paper has the phone ringing all day long.”

Claire nods, too tired to put all the pieces together and laugh. “I’ve got another one ready to go in the journals and medical bulletins. Offering the same whopping salary we get. Maybe I should troll the mortgage foreclosure list looking for homeless docs, huh?”

Frida doesn’t laugh this time, fiddles with the stethoscope in her lap for a moment before she says, soberly, “You know what I’m asking you.”

“Yeah.” Claire pushes up from the chair and starts shutting off the lights and the computer. “Let’s go get some dinner. Can you?”

“Nobody waiting at home. Nobody at all.”

They find a table in the corner at the same dark bar they’d shared a beer just a few weeks or so after Claire had started at the clinic. This time, though, Claire recognizes some of the faces at the tables. The waitress, Vicki, has a daughter in a dance class with Jory; she drops the menus on the table and sits down for a minute, asking Claire about a popping sensation her daughter gets in her knee every time the teacher has them do a specific kind of turn, which neither Claire nor Vicki can remember the name for.

“Jory’s making friends, finally,” Frida says after Vicki leaves.

“She is. A couple of girls from dance.”

“That’s critical—especially being an only child. Means you drive about a hundred miles a day, everything’s so far away. But kids out here who don’t stay busy get in trouble.”

“I see one boy showing up on her Facebook page pretty often. Not so wild about that.”

“Who?”

“Zach somebody. Mentions baseball a lot.”

Frida nods. “Zach Avery. He’s okay. His dad owns the bakery.”

“How do you know that?”

Frida shrugs and leans away from the table when Vicki brings over a beer for Frida and a glass of wine for Claire. “If you weren’t moving back to Seattle, you’d know everybody, too, in a couple of years. At least by name.”

Claire squints at the menu in her hand, discomfited that Frida would address such a flammable topic so obliquely. “So that’s what you’ve heard?”

“I didn’t hear a thing. You come back from your weekend in Seattle all buzzin’ and chirpy and now these last few days you’ve been so preoccupied I figured you’d won the lottery and decided not to share it.” She scans the menu, tipping back in her chair for all the world like she is talking about what flavor cake they should order for Anita’s baby’s christening party.

Claire lets her own menu fall flat on the tabletop. “You’re kidding. You guessed all this?”

“You’re not as subtle as you think.” Frida takes three consecutive swallows of her beer and wipes her mouth on her napkin, rests her forearms against the edge of the table. “And then there were those Seattle Windermere and Coldwell-Banker ads that kept showin’ up on your desk.” She drums her fingers on the varnished wood tabletop and regards Claire with a taunting smile. The waitress comes back just at that moment with a plastic basket bulging with curly fries dusted in an inorganic hue of barbecue-orange.

“I’m sorry,” Claire says, genuinely contrite now. “So you’ve been working with me for the last month waiting to hear I’m quitting.”

“Not at all. I’ve been waiting to hear you’re quitting since you started, six months ago.”

“Frida, does being so damn blunt about everything always work for you?”

“Sure separates my friends from the pretenders.”

Claire stares at her for a moment until Frida bursts out laughing;
a spray of orange fries lands in the middle of the table and she slaps a hand across her mouth, laughing even harder.

“Yeah, well, I guess you could separate them by spitting on them, too.” Claire drapes a paper napkin over the flecks and plants the basket of fries on top. “I probably deserved that, anyway. So how do you know I haven’t just been protecting you from my own horrific dilemmas until I have them sorted out?”

Frida laughs again. “I don’t need all your pretty manners. You know me better by now.”

“I stopped showing you any manners the day Dan left. But okay. Here’s the thing.” Claire picks up a tightly wound coil of fried potato and pulls one end until it breaks in the middle. “Addison’s in Seattle. He’s been in negotiations with an investor about his drug.” It makes her uncomfortable to refer to the man who has funded both their salaries so anonymously, but for once Frida’s perceptive ability to slice through bullshit doesn’t seem to pick up on it.

“So he’s already gotten that far?”

“Well. There’s a chance he’ll be backing out of it. It’s gotten complicated.” She pops half the fry into her mouth and chews it thoroughly, suddenly craving more of the salty-sweet fat. “So I guess tomorrow I’ll find out if we’re going to be have money and choices again, or stay broke.”

Frida cocks her head and uninhibitedly studies Claire with a curious look, maybe trying to guess why she’s finally telling her this, maybe wondering what else has gone unsaid for so many weeks. “And if you stay broke… ?”

“I don’t know. I guess we stay just where we are. I do, at least.”

Frida freezes for an instant, then says, “Well. I haven’t seen life stay in one place for quite so long as you seem to be expecting. Nothing in the middle, then?”

Claire uncoils another fry and twists her mouth into a forced smile. “The ugly truth is that when you’ve been as well off as we were the middle can feel pretty broke.”

“And how about the middle with you and Addison? Or does staying together also depend on whether you’re rich or broke?”

Claire’s stomach knots up and her appetite disappears. Then Vicki walks up with their food, carrying a circular tray big as a side table on one hand. She kicks the folding metal brace open with the toe of her shoe, as smooth and practiced as any dance move Jory has perfected, swings the tray off her shoulder so it balances precisely across the parallel bars. Claire is thankful for the interruption, too stunned by Frida’s remark to acknowledge she heard it. Claire veers into the first fresh subject that comes to mind. “Well, thanks for the thumbs-up on Zach, the Baker’s Kid. At least when we were teenagers our parents could hear one half of a phone conversation. Now I just hang around waiting till Jory forgets to sign out and read whatever I can. I get tempted to pretend I’m her and start a chat session sometimes. It’s scary being a parent—you can’t imagine.”

Frida seems to take Claire’s cue and starts talking about Anita’s baby boy, born five days ago and already Anita is saying she wants to come back to work. “She’s just tired—he’s still feeding every three hours. Those first few months are too precious to miss, though. They go fast enough. I guess it’s harder to remember that after you have more than one.”

Claire nods. “You’re right. Especially with Jory being so premature—I didn’t want to miss a minute.”

Frida is unusually quiet for the rest of the meal. Claire picks at her food and tries once or twice to reopen the topic of staffing, whether they should advertise in the whole five-state region. She promises, again, that she’ll stay until someone new is settled, says they should both visit Dan next week and talk about writing another grant, maybe they could afford a nurse practitioner in addition to an MD. Everything she says feels false.

After dinner they walk to Frida’s car first, the nearer one. Claire leans over to hug her, wanting at least their physical contact to bring them closer again. She can’t blame Frida for feeling the threat of desertion despite all her reassurances, if indeed that is what made her lash out. But the arm Frida puts around Claire feels stiff. When Claire starts to pull away, though, Frida gives her one last intense squeeze and holds on to Claire’s hand, exhales like she’s been holding her breath for too long and
says, “When my husband walked out eight years ago he took my little boy with him. He was ten. His name is Andy. I haven’t seen him since.”

A cry escapes from Claire and she covers her eyes. “Oh my God. My God, Frida. You never told me.”

“You would have heard someday. Everybody in town remembers it. Reason I stay here is because it’s the only place he’d know to look for me—if he ever tries.”

Claire finds it hard to make any words come out. “I’m… I’m so sorry—I wish I’d known.”

“I stopped talking about him two years after the police stopped trying to find him.” She steps off the curb and unlocks her car door, looks almost afraid Claire will try to touch her again, console her. Like the smallest thing might unleash the terror in a new way she hasn’t figured out how to fight.

Claire puts her hands in her pockets, her arms and hands and facial expression awkwardly posed in self-conscious shame, and she’s ashamed even of that—of being focused on her own irrelevance in the face of what Frida carries with her every day.

Frida sticks one hand out of the window and gives a little wave above the roof of the car. Then she backs out and stops, rolls down the passenger window and waits until Claire steps near enough to hear. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that tonight. At least some of it was meanness. Or frustration. My own selfish way to shake you up. But maybe I just want you to know the middle isn’t so bad if you’re not there alone.” She turns her head away briefly, then says, “It’s not bad at all, Claire.”

It’s still light when she gets home. The payback of short northwestern winter days is this gift of indolent summer twilight, time to linger in the subtle drama of shadows and purple sky.

Miguela is in the kitchen putting the dinner dishes away. She had asked Claire to repeat everything Dan remembered multiple times, going over some parts of the story with a dictionary in her hand until the unlucky truth settled in and replaced the tortured murder she’d envisioned. Even as the discovery of Esperanza’s cause of death is
threatening to tear Addison and Claire’s future apart, it seems to be piecing Miguela’s life back together. She has not said this in so many words—if the blend of languages they have made together even contains such possibilities—but the hum of secretive purpose that was always part of her, moving around her like an aura, has quieted.

Claire knows Miguela is leaving soon, knows it through the precise pronunciation she is demanding from Jory during their Spanish lessons, and the recipe she writes out for
gallo pinto
, the Nicaraguan dish Jory has come to crave. For the last week Claire has opened the door to Miguela’s room each morning just far enough to check whether she is still in her bed, her clothes are still on the shelves.