Healer (6 page)

“Did you ever get dressed today?” Claire asks, dumping the wet clothes in a laundry basket.

“What? In case my friends came by?” Claire returns the look without a word, and Jory drops it with a noncommittal shrug.

The kitchen is exactly the same as Claire left it, except for the Cheerios stuck to the sides of an empty cereal bowl. She’s too tired to cook, or at least too tired to be imaginative about it. She puts a plate of sausages in the microwave, which she serves up with sliced jack cheese and apples and a bowl of roasted almonds. Jory sits grimly in front of her plate as if saying a silent, sullen grace. “What’s the matter?” Claire asks.

“I thought you were buying dinner.”

“This is actually very nutritious if you think about it. A little unorthodox, maybe, but it’s got all the food groups.” Claire studies the
table for a minute and gets up to scrounge through the refrigerator. She comes back with a bag of washed spinach and opens it into a bowl, picking out a few darkly rotting leaves. “There. Balanced meal.”

“Where is Dad, anyway?”

Claire glances at her watch. “Landing in Chicago. I’m sure he’ll call.”

Jory peels the translucent casing off the sausage and coils it at the edge of her plate. “What’s in Chicago?”

“Another meeting. People who might want to help him get his lab running again.” Claire reaches across the table and folds the sausage skin into a napkin. “We’ve talked about this, honey. He doesn’t like having to travel so much. He’d rather be here. With you.” Jory flicks her eyes at Claire. “With
us
.”

They eat in silence after that. Claire finally opens the newspaper, unfolding it noisily across half the table just to disguise the sound of Jory’s chewing, which she seems to be intentionally exaggerating. Jory picks at the denuded sausage and the cheese, then gets up to serve herself a bowl of ice cream. “They were still alive, weren’t they?”

Claire looks up over the newspaper and shakes her head once. “I beg your pardon?”

“When you threw them into the snow. They were still alive.”

Claire pushes the paper aside and presses her fingertips against her closed eyes, presses until the blackness is flecked with tiny purple dots. “Sweetie. Mice carry diseases. We can’t let them breed under the sink.”

Jory smacks the back of her spoon against the surface of her ice cream, slamming it into a mushy vanilla pond. “It’s worse that way. Doing it halfway like that. You should either save them or kill them.”

She swallows a spoonful of ice cream like it’s gristle. Claire can tell she is trying not to cry. A hot wave floods up from Claire’s stomach, makes her want to dig the damn mice out of the snow and revive their pitiful frozen souls. “Well, maybe their mother found them out there. And they say freezing isn’t a bad way to die.”
Did she really just say that?
Jory is stone-cold silent, wrapping all her anger into this cause. “Okay,” Claire starts over. “You’re right. I was a chicken about it.” The towel twisted around Jory’s hair has slipped to one side and she holds her head at a slant to keep it balanced, finally jerks the wet mass of cloth
onto the floor. A strand of damp hair trails through her ice cream. Claire clears her throat. “We could get a pet. A cat.”

Jory might as well be deaf for all the response she offers, but Claire sees the tension curving her lower lip, the eyes fixed on her bowl.

“Like, a barn cat. Only we’ll keep him inside. We wouldn’t even have to feed him.” That remark finally starts the tears down Jory’s cheeks. Terrible as she feels, Claire prefers this to the stalemate. “Well, you
wanted
a cat when we were in Seattle. I thought it would make you happy!”

“Get a cat? And you’re looking for a job? How long are we staying out here?”

She looks so miserable Claire is ready to forgive the dumped clothes and open window and filthy kitchen. She walks around the table and squats with her hand on Jory’s sleeve. “Oh, baby. I can’t give you a number. It’s just till Dad gets things back on track with his company.”

“You keep saying that. You and Dad both, since we sold the house. But you never say how long that will take. I mean, look at this place!”

Claire rubs her daughter’s back but feels her spine stiffen even through the two bathrobes, a twitch of withdrawal she tries to respect, accepting that this house looks different to all of them now that it is their only home. “I can’t tell you how long. Who knows, maybe Dad found an investor at the meeting today—it could happen anytime. And I’m just exploring the jobs out here. It’s all going to work out, sweetie. It’s temporary. I promise.”

And a mother always, always keeps her promises. So the mark has been set, the cards laid out. It cheers her up, in a way, as if such a promise had the power of all round-bellied maternal goddesses behind it. How many blind leaps into optimism mothers offer their children. And maybe that was part of the reason things usually did work out all right. Maybe the endgame attributed to fate could be bent by the collective will of mothers—there was a thought to play with, though it made it hard to figure out how anybody could possibly wage a war under that cosmic plan.

She sends Jory upstairs with the laptop and a DVD and unpacks
the groceries, almost enjoying the fresh start to the kitchen. Yes, the spices are only the cheapest, sealed up in their clear plastic bottles with their red plastic caps, not the little tins of polished silver with hand-lettered labels she used to buy at DeLaurenti. But they are all fresh. The cabinets are uncluttered, as minimalist as the days of her first apartment with Addison, when they would spread a beach towel in front of the wall heater and eat cheese and crackers and popcorn and peel a whole box of mandarin oranges with a bottle of the cheapest wine, and enjoy it all just fine. Just fine.

She scrubs each shelf before arranging the items in neat rows, sweeps years of dust out from behind the refrigerator along with the remnants of the mouse nest, imagining this kitchen with new appliances and countertops and slate floors. It’s the perfect setting for soapstone, this antiquated kitchen. Maybe they should put in an Aga stove.

They had already sketched out plans for a remodel, even hired an architect at one point years ago. He and Addison had turned the practicalities of design into a philosophical art—debating the “vernacular references” of the farmhouse lines, the “cultural history” imparted by dormers versus hip roofs. Addison reveled in the house-to-be, blind to the existing buckled floors and ruptured gutters, the deflowered bouquets of sprung wires. It was the planner in him. The dreamer. Claire understood that better than he ever would. Addison was happier in the creative adventure than in any finished house. And where would the world be without dreamers? Especially the world of science. Back in the Stone Age. Still depending on witch hazel and poultices. Claire was fine with letting him conspire and doodle and walk through imaginary configurations. In fact, until this week they’d spent all their vacations to Hallum at one of the local resorts, visiting their property only to scruff around in the orchard hunting deer antlers and the translucent sheddings of snakes, collecting the small sour apples in autumn for pies they never baked.

Claire had always been more intrigued by the land than the remodel, craving the escape it promised from their overscheduled lives. They already had more house than they needed in Seattle, she’d said. Room enough for all three to get lost in, intersecting through an intercom
or a meal grabbed between carpools and Addison’s long days at the lab. And then he had started work on vascumab, became hypnotized by his certainty that this drug, his very own invented molecule, would turn cancer treatment end over end. He had finally let the architect go until they had time to spare.

Looking around the room now, it’s obvious to Claire that the most prudent decision would be to tear the whole house down and start over. Still, it’s disquieting to think about condemning so much history to a landfill; an insult to the family that slaved to build it—the Blackstocks, whoever they were. Almost funny to realize that several generations of living, all the birthing and loving and arguing, even the dying, could be fully played out in one spot, yet the only lasting memory seemed to be their name.

Her cell phone rings—a riff from Eric Clapton’s “Layla” that Addison had plugged in to signal his calls. His voice sounds bright, and combined with her current magical optimism she opens with a retelling of the day that makes it all fun, the way she knows they will look back on it in a year or two. “I’m thinking I should put some shredded newspaper in the Havahart traps so the mice can stay warm till we dump them out in the woods.” He laughs at this. Claire ducks behind the kitchen wall so Jory won’t figure out they find humor in her compassion. She can see his full mouth lift his already boyish features into the uninhibited hilarity of a kid. He has always been able to make her laugh before any dispute grew too hot to control, at least until these last few months. But since the night he told her the truth, all of it, about the drug study data and the money, a few of their arguments have been caustic enough to leave scars. “So how’s the Drake? Is the bathtub nice and deep?”

“Built for two!” he answers. “Wish you were with me. How did you like the hospital?”

“Well, that’s quite a segue!” Claire jokes. “I don’t know. Nice enough. The doctors I met seemed nice. If we stay here long enough to get sick I’d feel okay going to some of them.” She pauses, expecting a comeback. “I was glad nobody asked to see my résumé, though. It’s hard to even introduce myself as a doctor, you know?”

He’s quiet for a moment, then answers, “Yeah. I know.”

Claire had expected him to contest her insecurity, bolster her. She laughs anyway, unwilling to let the conversation turn negative. “Sure you know! You have to carry your résumé in a two-inch binder.” She opens the refrigerator while she talks and studies the fresh contents—there is something deeply reassuring in knowing they could survive a week or more in a blizzard now. She pours milk into a mug and dumps in two tablespoons of chocolate, adds a third and sticks it in the microwave. Addison seems to be waiting, as if he could see all of this. “I should have been a pediatrician. Maybe the board would give me credit for raising Jory and I could get certified.” She expects a chuckle at least, and wonders for a minute if they’re still connected.

“Yeah,” he answers at last, in a resigned tone, and even though she knows he does not mean it, she hears it as a stinging reminder of how far she’s fallen from medicine.

Her mood darkens. She takes a gulp of hot chocolate and tries to start over. “It must be freezing up there. Have you seen the list of who’s coming to the meeting? Stock market went up today—a little. Maybe you should treat everybody to a hot buttered rum or two and then just slip a blank check in front of them.”

“There’s an idea.”

“Oh, I have a better one. I thought of this in the car today—start talking about all the symptoms of colon cancer and pick out the guy who looks the most nervous. You’d get both an investor and a customer—just like that guy with the cure for baldness.” She waits through another minute of silence and shakes the phone, looks at the handset as if his face might appear in the shining black plastic. “Addison? Are you still there? I’m just trying to cheer you up.”

She waits again, and finally hears him say, “I don’t know how I’m going to pay our health insurance bill this month.”

Now Claire is silent. She puts the hot chocolate down, acutely aware of how still the room is, how still a winter night is. “You mean, you don’t know which account to pay it from?”

When he finally answers she is more frightened by his tone than his words—the vacancy in his voice. “Nash’s investment was split, do
you remember? Half for drug development and half to be paid when the review board, the IRB, approved the phase one human trials.” Nash. Married to Anna, Claire’s best friend. He’d bet twenty million dollars on vascumab, ten of it lost now, but ten still on the table, leverage Addison could play to attract new investors.

“And? He’s still in, right? I thought he promised you he was still in until you could repeat the animal trials and go back to the review board.”

“It’s a problem of timing—”

She interrupts him, doesn’t have the patience for another lecture about venture capital risk or equity positions or stock options. “Maybe… I don’t know… maybe we have to borrow against the retirement plan. I mean, the accountant said that was possible, right?”

When they had discussed this, the most dire contingency plan, Addison had always stonewalled on risking that much of their future. It was the only asset left besides this land and this house. She hears the faintest sound through the phone, a low hum that couldn’t be Addison, it sounds more mechanical than human. Suddenly she is back at the Gap store in downtown Seattle crowded against the counter by impatient Christmas shoppers, trying to explain to the flustered clerk why her denied Visa charge for a twelve-dollar umbrella has to be a fluke. “What have you done?”

“We were so close, Claire. Weeks from IRB approval and Nash’s second check. I couldn’t let it fall apart. I had to bridge the gap.”

“What are you saying to me?” Claire feels like a gaping hole has broken through her middle. Standing perfectly still, she tips off balance and grabs for the counter. “It’s impossible to take out your whole retirement fund. It isn’t legal.”

Addison’s voice sounds like it’s coming from another planet, bleeding with humiliation, but oddly detached, too. Like he’s talking about someone else’s life. “I rolled it over. I transferred the money. The law allows you ninety days between withdrawal and deposit.” Claire is sitting on the floor though she doesn’t remember sliding down the wall. She tries to talk but nothing comes out.

Addison goes on, “Nash said he’d back me up if there were a delay.
I had to keep the lab going—I had salaries to pay. It didn’t feel like a choice.”

Claire coughs and chokes out, “And then Nash changed his mind, didn’t he?”

There is a long pause before Addison answers. “He heard about Rick and the animal data. He’s got a business to run, Claire. It’s not a question of friendship.”