Healer (2 page)

Jory is quiet for a while, then says, almost accusingly, “We don’t have very much wood.”

Claire flinches, hears it as,
“Fathers build fires, mothers only turn up thermostats,”
wants to retort that they have a lot less of everything they are used to, thanks to her husband. “We have plenty of wood out in the shed,” she answers. “I should teach you how to get the stove going.”

Jory ignores her, tucking her hands between her knees and turning toward the windows so that all Claire sees is the fall of gold hair.

“It’s a good woodstove,” Claire continues. The Realtor had told them that, hadn’t he? She hadn’t really cared at the time; they’d never expected to sleep here in winter. “I’ll call the furnace man tomorrow. And Dad can bring some space heaters when he comes.”

“School starts tomorrow,” Jory says. Claire chucks bits of wood onto the conflagrant pile and slams the stove door before they can spill out. “School starts tomorrow,” Jory repeats, taunting her now.

Claire looks up and answers her, for the first time today, in the voice of an equal. “It will be all right. There’s a school in Hallum if we stay very long.” She sees Jory’s stony expression and adds, “Or you can homeschool if you want. Whatever you want.”

Jory seems to grow smaller, as if she would clench herself into a
tight ball. Her face is locked inside her crossed arms so that her voice is barely audible. “I want to go back.”

Claire sits on the ash-covered hearth and stares at the burning cinders tumbling against the glass like small animals scrambling to escape an inferno. “Well. There is no going back. Not yet.” The words come out as stern as a slap, not what she’d intended; she clenches her teeth at the sound. But other words still burn inside her head, words she chokes before she can hurt the people she loves—a litany of all they can’t go back to: no private school, no ballet lessons, no abiding trust that tomorrow will be the same or better than today. Not even the leeway to haggle for a fair offer on their lakeside home in Seattle.

It seems a perverse joke, Claire thinks, that after years of saving and insuring it had not been a fire or flood or disease that brought their world down. It wasn’t global warming or terrorism, no collapsing levies or tsunamis—none of the headline threats that had spurred her to restock their Rubbermaid emergency boxes and stash wads of cash in suit jacket pockets at the back of the closet. Instead, for Claire and Addison and Jory, it felt quite personal, like a precisely-placed bomb destroying only
their
lives, leaving their neighbors and friends to stand unscathed and sympathetically gawking.

Claire had discovered the first hint of their ruination smoldering in a declined Visa credit card on a Christmas shopping trip with Jory, buying, of all the ironic possibilities, a twelve dollar collapsible umbrella. She’d left a message on Addison’s cell phone warning him that their credit card number had been hacked, thinking the problem lay with the bank or the computer system. Surely they had been wronged by some outside force.

The daylight has almost faded but she doesn’t want to leave the fire even to turn on the light.
It is easier with Addison away.
The thought darts across the surface of Claire’s subconscious with the speed of an endangered bird. Jory is staring down at the scarred pine floor, oblivious to her mother’s distress. Claire can keep up a front for Jory—mothering teaches you that from the first reassuring smile you give your toddler after a tumble. But if Addison were here he would see through Claire, she is sure. He would see her doubt and then the doubt could become real—could become the edge of the splitting maul. It
almost makes her want their life here to be too difficult without him. If they can make it alone, just Jory and her, what unites their family except the tenuous hold of memories?

Jory is shivering and Claire hunts around for a box that might hold sweaters. She rips packing tape off cartons of china and shoes and bedding, the gritty sound of tearing cardboard almost welcome in the face of Jory’s determined silence. In the third box Claire finds some of Addison’s ancient high school track sweatshirts protectively folded around candlesticks and vases and a favorite Waterford bowl. She tosses a sweatshirt to Jory and pulls another one over her own head, cinching the hood close around her face, smelling something familiar in the thick cotton: a musty hint of old wood, or even, she imagines, Addison’s gym locker, the indelible perfume of his adolescent sweat. She lines the fragile crystal pieces along the mantelpiece, dusting the bowl with her sleeve before she sets it down.

“Why are you unpacking that stuff?” Jory asks through her cloak of hair.

“No reason to leave everything in storage.” Claire unwraps a serving platter, searching her emotional reserves for some way to mitigate the desolation she hears in her daughter’s voice. “They’re pretty, aren’t they? We might as well enjoy them while we’re here.”

“They’ll just get dirty. Or broken.”

“Your grandmother gave us this plate, right before you were born.” Claire looks at her distorted image in the silver, imagines her own mother sitting down for dinner with them in this drafty room, pursing her lips as she serves herself slices of tomato or fruit tart while Claire tries to explain why they’ve moved. “Put it on the table for me, please?”

Jory doesn’t move. Claire sets the platter on top of another unopened box and stands up, brushes the ash off her blue jeans. “Let’s go into town for dinner.”

Without looking at her, Jory says, “I thought we couldn’t afford to eat out anymore.”

“We can’t.” Claire pats her pockets and kicks aside the newspapers scattered beside the woodbin. “Where did I leave my keys?”

•   •   •

Food helps. The cheaper and greasier the better, sometimes. Over a cheeseburger Jory starts to talk again: a conversation about hair straighteners—what
is
the ideal width of the irons? Can eyelash curlers really pull out your lashes? And ballet, of course, her friends at the dance school and what they think of the recital piece. Maybe she could get new pointe shoes mailed to her, since there is no place to buy them in this itsy town.

Claire has begun to view adolescence as a compartmentalized, revolving door. Openings flash by into different sectors of her daughter’s life and the trick is to stand close at hand, poised and ready to jump in. There is a time-warping aspect to it: a flash forward to Jory at eighteen, competent and hopeful; a glimpse back to Jory at eight, vocal, with fresh, uninhibited awe.

Claire pushes her French fries across the Formica table toward her daughter and rests her chin on interlaced hands. “We’ll drive back to Seattle when you need new toe shoes. It’s not so far if the passes are clear. We can make a weekend of it now and then. Get your friends together.” She doesn’t bring up the fact that there is no ballet school in Hallum Valley. “Once the furniture comes how about you invite some friends over here?”

“Like, to do what?”

“Ski. Hike. Mountain bike.” Claire eats another French fry, stalling to come up with something teenage girls might actually enjoy in Hallum. “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

“Go to the movies. Shop. Hang out in the mall.
Nothing
we can do here.” Jory drifts into silence again. “Speaking of, where am I supposed to sleep tonight?”

“Were we speaking of that? Just share with me tonight.” The house is minimally furnished with a sofa they’d bought at a yard sale last summer, a set of folding metal chairs and a dining table. But until the moving truck arrives they have only the old double bed they’d squeezed into the U-Haul with some smaller boxes. “We’ll be warmer that way.” She expects Jory to balk at this suggestion, but instead her face softens, as if she’s been relieved of an unexpressed burden. It occurs to Claire that it is the very mattress Jory was conceived upon.

The waitress brings the check over and asks if they want any dessert. Claire orders two ice creams and a coffee only to postpone looking at the bill. Every penny of it will be borrowed; they are borrowing to pay interest on borrowed money. What’s another ice cream? Jory slides the plastic binder that holds the check toward herself and flips it open to see the total, then slaps it shut again and pushes it back to her mother. “Let’s say Dad finds a new investor next week. Can we buy our house back?” She flashes the comic grin that has always signaled she is near the edge, ready to snatch her feelings back at the slightest threat and turn everything into a joke.

Claire does her best to smile. Her mouth turns up, she can force that, but she can’t seem to make the rest of her face—her exhausted eyes, her knotted brows—go along. She wants to ask Jory how much she’s overheard behind closed doors, what rumors she’s picked up at school beyond the explanations Addison and Claire have given her. And at the same time Claire doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t have the heart to reassure Jory, yet again, that the
family
is the house, and thus it will go wherever
they
go and can never be sold or lost. But as if graced by a moment of precocious instinct, Jory averts her gaze from her mother’s face, suddenly intent on drawing faces in her melted ice cream. “We’ll find a better house this time. You get your pick of rooms,” Claire says. Jory lets out one short laugh without looking up and Claire can’t tell if she appreciates this effort at optimism or is scoffing at her mother’s simplification.

“So,” Jory says after a deep sigh, her tone altogether new, as if the prior sentences had been spoken by other people in some other place. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Unpacking. Dusting. Want to help?”

“No,” Jory answers, rocking back on her chair.

“Great! I get to decorate your room, then?” Claire asks, hungry for her own ice cream again.

“I thought I’d just paint bull’s-eyes around the spots of mildew on the walls. So what are you doing after you unpack?”

“After
we
unpack?” Claire picks up her spoon and pulls the sweet thick cream onto her tongue, a simple pleasure. Any topic feels easy to her now. “I might start looking for a job.”

“A
job
?” Jory sounds dumbfounded, and the front legs of the chair slam onto the concrete floor. “Doing what?”

Claire cocks her head at Jory’s incredulity, gives her a moment to backpedal before she answers, “Being a doctor. What else? Should I try to earn money as a professional mother?”

Jory considers this. She looks at her mother appraisingly, and a flash of the eighteen-year-old whips by. “I can’t see you as a doctor.” Claire shrugs and spoons a lump of ice cream into her coffee, watches the ivory whirl blend to an even chocolate hue. Jory’s snorts—the fourteen-year-old returns. “I mean, I know you’re a doctor. But you’ve, like, probably forgotten everything by now. I mean, how long has it been since you actually took care of a patient?”

“Well, how old are you?”

“Fourteen. And three months. And thirteen days,” Jory answers after a moment’s calculation.

“Okay. It’s been fourteen years, six months, and twenty days since I saw a patient,” Claire answers, remembering those last weeks in bed, unsuccessfully willing her own uterus to hold quiet and nurture Jory’s wispy lungs one more day, one more hour, to inch her over the line of survival. All Claire’s years of medical training would have felt absurdly pointless if the final price paid was losing this life inside her.

“God. Please don’t make me the first guinea pig,” Jory says. “So, are you going to wear a white coat and all?”

“I don’t know. Is that what makes somebody a doctor?”

Jory is quiet for a moment. She studies her mother with a skeptical look on her face that makes Claire feel oddly insecure. Or maybe it isn’t skepticism—maybe it’s embarrassment. Is she embarrassed to think about her mother seeing actual patients, possibly her own classmates, if indeed she deigns to attend school in Hallum?

Claire shifts uncomfortably in her seat and fingers the handle of her coffee cup. Then she tucks her hands between her knees and leans across the table confidentially, “Maybe you can help me write a résumé. Know how?” Jory shakes her head but sucks in her bottom lip, probably considering the opportunities she might wrangle out of this offer.
Claire plunges on. “You could help me practice my interview. Or at least figure out what to wear.”

Jory picks up her Coke and holds the cold glass in hands cloaked by the stretched out sleeves of her high-necked sweater. It is a Renaissance look that suits her, thinks Claire, harmonizes with her waist-length hair and her pale skin—Juliet debating Paris’s proposal of marriage. Portia contemplating mercy. Or would the fouled fortunes in the Boehning household twist her into mad Ophelia?

“Well, whatever you do, don’t wear red. You know that red suit you have? You should ditch that suit, Mom. Sorry,” she adds in inauthentic apology.

“My black one okay?”

Jory shrugs and tips her glass up for the last sip of Coke, sucks out a ring of melting ice to encircle her folded tongue. “Caw ah fith yo heh?” Claire frowns, confused, and Jory swallows the ice. “Can I fix your hair?”

“What do you suggest?” Claire rakes her fingers through her hair.

“Bangs. To hide your wrinkles. And color the gray.”

“Do I have that much gray?” Claire had skipped her last hair appointment knowing what the bill would be, a childishly vengeful part of her imagining Addison marking their months of duress as he watched her hair grow out.

“Since Christmas you do. It actually looks kind of good on you, but nobody wants to hire somebody who’s old.” Jory postures for the anticipated lecture; a stilted confidence wavers in her eyes.

But Claire feels part of herself drain away, as if her core has suddenly shrunk inside her skin. Right now she has no stomach to cope with the fact that age can be an asset for a physicianw—
if
it comes with experience and credentials. She stands up. “Let’s go,” she says, shoving her arms into her coat.

Jory hesitates, her groundwork shifting beneath her. “I didn’t mean…”

“It’s all right. I just need to get the fire going or the house will be too cold tonight.”