Healer (39 page)

And then Miguela asks Claire for permission to take Jory on a picnic by the stream, just the two of them. When they come back it is obvious Jory has been crying. She eats dinner in silence and excuses herself as soon as the dishes are done. Claire follows her up to her room and quietly shuts the door. Jory is sitting at her blue wooden desk, the one Claire had painted with butterflies to match her walls in the Seattle house. The window is open and the cyclic song of frogs swells up from the bog near the aspen grove, then the solemn hoot of a distant owl. The bookshelves and walls are still filled with pictures of Jory’s Seattle friends, but there is a Hallum sweatshirt draped over her pillow and a photo of one new friend on her bedside table. Claire sits on the bed, waiting for a signal. Finally she asks, “Want to talk about it?”

Jory won’t look at her. “Did you ask her to leave?”

“No. You’re the only one she’s talked to about it. You’re her best friend here.” Jory doesn’t move. Suddenly Claire feels like she is looking down a ladder of all the trials and separations Jory will face in her life, all of them crowding into this blink of time with no space to recover, one crisis hurtling right into the next. It would be a curse to know the future. She aches to reach inside Jory’s young heart and hold the pieces together.

“She just said it’s time,” Jory finally says. “Why can’t she stay with us? She could live better here.”

“Nicaragua is her home. She cares so much about you, Jory. You know that.”

Jory wipes her face. “She gave me this.” She hands Claire the worn red cloth-covered book of Rubén Darío poems Miguela has been using as Jory’s primary Spanish textbook. “She asked me to come to Nicaragua sometime.”

“We’ll all go. I’d love to go. And now you’ll be able to speak the language a little.” They sit in silence, then, until it is clear Jory wants to be alone. Claire kisses the top of her head and starts to leave.

“You know what her name means, don’t you?” Jory says just before Claire opens the door.

“‘Miguela’? No. I didn’t know it had a meaning.”

“‘Esperanza.’ Her daughter’s name. It comes from
esperar.
It has two meanings. It can mean ‘to hope’ or ‘to wait.’ Both verbs in one word, even though they seem so different.”

Two days later Claire and Jory drive Miguela into Wenatchee to catch the bus for Seattle; from there she will fly to Managua, Nicaragua. Claire watches Jory for a signal about how prepared she is for this good-bye. Her conversation is almost giddy at first, a pressure of nervous, disconnected thoughts. But the resilience of adolescence takes over by the time they arrive and all she talks about is the visit to Jalapa she has thoroughly planned.

They have to wait more than an hour for the bus. Miguela has never been on an airplane; she keeps checking her pack and her ticket, jumping between Spanish and English, halting her conversation altogether every time another Greyhound arrives or departs. She seems unconvinced that she will be in Nicaragua by tonight—laughs about how easy it is to get
out
of the United States.

Just before she gets on the bus, Claire puts an envelope into Miguela’s hand. “A little piece of America to take home.”

Driving back to Hallum, Jory asks her what was in it. “A thank-you,” Claire says. “Something she can turn into what she needs.”

• 35 •

She hears Addison’s car pull into the driveway after midnight, hears the dinging sound of the alarm while he gets his bag out of the trunk, the car door slamming, then the front door opening and closing behind him. She tries to guess from the pace of his footsteps, the energy or defeat in his weight hitting the stair treads what he will tell her. Their phone calls this week have been studiously open-ended. Utilitarian. Safe.

He opens the bedroom door with one hand gripping the edge, as if that might hush its usual creak.

“I’m awake. It’s okay,” Claire whispers.

He stands still for a minute, then picks up his bag and carries it to the closet, sits on the side of the bed to take off his shoes, all without saying a word.

“So, I guess it isn’t okay. Is it?”

He takes off his tie and belt, loosens his pants and lies down next to her. “No. Not okay.”

Claire pulls the sheet up to her neck, holding it there with both hands. “Does Ron own Optimus?”

“His holding company owns it. Ron’s not very involved with the daily business. But yes. His money runs Optimus.”

The room is suddenly very hot, as if a silent explosion has gone off in the middle of her and is consuming them all. She wants to loft the sheet over her body like a fan, and at the same time she must
keep the sheet clutched tight around her. “Did Ron send Esperanza to Optimus?”

“No. He’d never met her. He had no idea any of his employees, Esperanza or Rubén, were enrolling in the drug trials. I won’t say it was coincidence—there’s a grapevine effect. The trials pay a little money and this study gave them meals and a bed for a month.”

Claire waits for him to go on, certain from his mood alone, the tone of his voice, that there is more, that she cannot let herself feel relieved. After a minute she asks, “What’s wrong, then? If Ron didn’t know about it and he’s done nothing illegal… Surely you got the drug trial stopped.”

Addison crosses his arms under his head; the shifting of his body seems to sink him deeper into the mattress, as if a weight were pressing down. “The drug trial went through just fine—it concluded two months ago with Esperanza and Rubén categorized as ‘lost to follow-up,’ meaning they drop out of the statistics altogether. The other volunteers were all Caucasian; none of them had an abnormal reaction. It’s possible there’s a genetic variance that affects Hispanics. Without their results the drug looked safe. In fact, the drug would probably be moving right through FDA approval if Ron hadn’t notified Optimus and the review board.”

Claire rolls up on her side now, so her face is above Addison’s in the darkness. “Ron did everything he could, then. Even Optimus, didn’t they? It shouldn’t affect vascumab. Why are you still acting like something’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong is the drug they were studying. The sponsor is a biotech company in California. They’ve been working on antiangiogenesis drugs for years—long before I was.”

“So it was another VEGFR-2? Just tell me, Addison. Are you worried it was the same kind of liver problem you found in the mice? Is this drug similar to vascumab?”

He shakes his head once, then sits up and smiles with a pitifully ironic twist of his mouth. “The drug
is
vascumab, Claire. Identical. I saw the design; it’s my molecule.”

“How is that possible? You have a patent…”

“We have a provisional patent. On part of the molecule. The company testing the drug at Optimus is the same one Rick worked for before I hired him. He went right back to them after he left Seattle, last spring. Remember the bike tour Rick and Lilly bought at that auction? Walker’s charity thing?” He waits for Claire to react, stares at her frozen face for a moment before he goes on. “The medical director at Optimus was on that trip.”

Claire explodes in righteous outrage. “Rick signed a confidentiality agreement! All those proprietary information restrictions… he couldn’t take your idea out of your lab!”

“Yeah, I guess I could sue them. Rick could counter that they were working on the same drug all along. And who knows, Claire? Maybe they were. Should I spend a few hundred thousand dollars trying to save the patent on a dangerous drug? The only thing that matters is that vascumab is the reason Esperanza is dead.”

In the morning Claire wakes up and reaches for Addison. The sheets are damp where his body had lain; his dreams must have tossed him into a sweat. She sits up. The window above the bed is open and the day is fresh with rising dew, a pink and baby-blue day before the sun burns across the field.

It is so quiet here—even six months after leaving the city she is surprised to hear nothing on the land that she wouldn’t have heard a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. No cars or sirens, rarely even planes; the only sound of urgency is in the competing calls of the birds, the howls of coyotes, the abrupt silencing of an animal caught and killed. A magpie flushes out of the wild mock orange below the window. She hears Addison cough and a moment later he steps into her view.

He looks small from this vantage: the tail of his wrinkled white button-down shirt hangs loose over his baggy gym shorts; his hair is a halo of black fluff. In the morning light the full blow of last night’s conversation rushes back to her. She holds her breath with her eyes squeezed shut until her pulse sings in her ears, praying he is down there waiting for her to wake up, waiting to tell her he has already seen the solution.

She scratches her fingernails on the screen. “Hey.”

“Hey.” He searches out her face under the shadow of the eave.

She goes downstairs in her bathrobe and a pair of rubber flip-flops, sits down on the top step of the porch. Even this early in the morning the day is already hot. “Did you sleep at all?”

He shakes his head but doesn’t turn to look at her.

She waits a moment before she says, “It’ll be okay, Addison.” Still he doesn’t answer. “It’ll be okay. You’ll figure something out. A new molecule. Or a new cancer test.”

He scans the horizon with his hands loose at his sides, his posture relaxed. Without seeing his face it could seem like he didn’t have a concern in the world. Finally he turns around and sits at the other end of the lowest step. “I’m sorry I did this to you, Claire. To you and Jory. I was stupid to risk our own money.” She wants to move nearer to him, sit close enough to feel the invisible connection that has always kept them together through the worst of their arguments. But something in his face holds her back. “I don’t know if I’ve actually said that to you before—out loud.”

“You didn’t need to.”

He lets out a little huff, almost a laugh, that makes her feel ashamed for saying something she doesn’t believe.

“Okay. You do need to,” she says, suddenly angry at his feckless apology coming so late; flooded with a storm of frustration more than forgiveness. He doesn’t respond and she slaps her hand on the wooden step. “Well, do you want me to scream at you? Hasn’t there been enough of that?” She hates the bitterness in her voice.

Addison sits splay-legged with his elbows on his knees, not once turning to face her; so detached it feels like he’s goading her on. He rips a long stem of weedy grass out of the dirt and peels it into fine green curls.

Claire has an urge to wrench it out of his hands. “All right, then! How could you do it? Borrow against everything we owned without even talking to me? Rob our family of every safety net?” Claire’s voice breaks apart now in a single harsh sob. She grits her teeth against it. “Oh God. I’m just so tired of putting a good face on everything.
Promising Jory it’s all going to be okay.” She drops her head into her hands. “I’m terrified, Addison.” Part of her aches for him to come to her, feels safer in their simmering anger and blame than the aftermath of what they are doing.

He doesn’t move.

“Claire, where did you think all the funding came from for Eugena? You think a line of investors were begging to give me money? I walked us right out to the ledge for it. And you didn’t even know, did you? And I won.
Women
won—all over the world. You know how many women won’t have to die of ovarian cancer because of Eugena? And vascumab… God! The difference I thought it could make!” He throws his head back with an audible groan. After a long moment he shakes his head, staring out toward the aspen that fringe the cusp of the hill. “By the time Jory was three or four you stopped even pretending you were going to finish your residency. And I didn’t care. Even before we sold Eugena. Even when we were broke, I didn’t care if you ever finished. Whenever we had a discussion about money you seemed to take it as a judgment—like I was pressuring you, making your decisions for you. So I dropped it. It was like you’d rather pretend everything worked itself out through magic.

“You remember when I sold my dad’s car? Told you a Mustang collector had seen it on the street and called with an offer? I sold it to a lab tech so we could pay the rent that month. And then, after we sold Eugena…”

He didn’t even need to finish. Claire knows. After Eugena, money had gone from being a perpetual strain to being a miracle, a blessing. And within a few years it had completely melded into the background of their lives, becoming familiar to the point of being expected; stealthily seeping into the fabric of every choice they made until they forgot there had ever been limitations.

It feels as if the earth is moving out from under Claire. Like a fundamental property of nature she has trusted to the point of neglect—gravity or air or light—is disappearing. Is this how a marriage dies? she wonders. The deepest wounds torn open again and again by the forgotten apology, the neglected thank-you, the complacent assumption that
love will sustain itself. How do you finally decide that all you can hope to save are the disunited hearts, because the union itself is irreparable?

“I’m not a good businessman,” Addison says. “Never wanted to be. I’m a biochemist. I needed to raise money for my project and I found a way. I never told you how I was financing the lab because you never asked.” He looks at her again, his anger spent. “And that probably still makes it all my fault.”

A noise from the window over the porch hushes them and a minute later Jory walks outside. “You’re fighting again,” she says. “Something’s gone wrong, hasn’t it. With Dad’s job offer.” Addison’s head drops and he glances at Claire. Jory raises her voice. “Quit hiding this from me. I thought somebody was buying Dad’s drug and everything was going to be fine again.”

After an awkward silence, Addison turns around and motions for Jory to sit between them. “I’m sorry you feel like we’re hiding things, Jory. Yes. There is a problem with the sale.”

“What? What’s the problem?”

“The problem.” He ties a knot in the long stem of grass he has been worrying, tosses it onto the dirt and plucks another, giving himself a moment. “The man who was going to invest his money in my company believed he was buying a certain asset. My drug, vascumab. You know what an asset is? In business terms?”