Healer by Carol Cassella Page A

uninsured, and had no other doctor to call. When their pain or breathlessness or swollen joints became unbearable they would start in the emergency room, waiting hours to be questioned and examined by student doctors who sporadically excused themselves to consult a small library of textbooks in the cramped office behind the triage desk. After enough inspection of cavities and orifices and blood and X-rays for the residents to reach a plausible diagnosis, the patients were discharged with instructions printed out on a half sheet and stapled to the bill they couldn’t pay: “Take all your pills, watch for swelling and redness, change your dressing twice a day, follow up with your physician.” Thus, in rotating order, the doctorless were matched up with the doctor trainees who needed living and breathing specimens to learn their trade. It was a nicely symbioticarrangement, on paper. But it will be different here in Hallum, at Dan’s clinic, Claire thinks. Her patients will have a choice. They will choose her. They will want her. She will have time for them.
    She parks the Audi near the clinic steps and opens the door, then shuts it again and scrounges through her purse for a brush and her lipstick. When she angles the rearview mirror toward her face she is almost startled by the nervous look in her eyes. Who wanted to be treated by a nervous doctor? A dark shape cuts across the window and she nearly jumps to the other side of the front seat. Then Anita bends low enough to look inside the car. She smiles and jangles her key ring, apparently assuming Claire has already discovered the front door is still locked.
    As soon as Claire is out of the car Anita starts telling her how many patients they have scheduled for the day, which ones will be no-shows (because yesterday was payday), and which ones will bring their whole family in without an appointment (because whenever they can get a ride to the clinic they pile grandma and all the babies into the truck to see Dr. Zelaya without even considering how tired he gets at this age), and which ones will show up just as she’s trying to lock the doors tonight, but this time she is not going to be softhearted about it. Her feet get too swollen by the end of the day to put up with these delinquents.
    “When is your baby due?” Claire asks her.
    “Not soon enough! I’m only four months. But it’s number three. No more belly muscles, I guess. I pooched out really quick this time. I washed your coat for you.”
    She points to Evelyn Zelaya’s newly ironed white coat on a hanger just beyond the waiting room, drops her bag onto the floor behind the desk and begins turning on lights and the computer. “You know how to make coffee, right? I hope better than Dr. Z.”
    Dan comes in the back door ten minutes later. He asks her just to shadow him for the first few days. A weight lifts when she realizes she won’t have to tell anyone she is their new doctor. Not yet, anyway. He introduces her to the patients as his “colleague.” They look at her, then shift their eyes back to Dan for some confirmation of trust before they smile or nod and allow her to melt into the background. She standstucked into the corner behind the exam room door—her starched coat with the false name embroidered on it, her hands rigid in the empty pockets—and tries to pick out words she understands. Dolor, sangre, sarpullido, pastillas, pinchazo… She tries to piece caught words and phrases into symptoms or cures, tries to work them into questions she will need to ask some patient within a few days, if Dan doesn’t change his mind about her. In medical school she had learned a fair bit of Spanish at the public hospital. Even Seattle, as far as you could get from Mexico, had a densely woven Hispanic world populating the apartments and row houses of Beacon Hill and the Central District.
    A little after nine the back door slams open, sending a shiver along the wall and a gust of snow across the mat. “You’re