Healer by Carol Cassella Page B

late,” Dan calls out without looking up from the medical chart he’s making notes in.
    “I’m early. This the new doctor?” Frida, the clinic’s nurse, is a compact woman with skin the color of brown eggshells, who wears her black hair twisted up in a hot-pink bandana, socks and sandals on her feet despite eighteen inches of snow. She flashes a stunningly toothy smile at Claire and from then on acts as if they’ve worked together for years. Claire finds the sense of being taken for granted enormously reassuring. “How’d he get you suckered into this job?” Frida asks, shaking more snow off her coat onto the floor and pouring herself a cup of coffee. “He must not have told you what it pays, that’s for sure.”
    Claire glances at Dan, who has not lifted his eyes from the chart. She sees the corner of his mouth twitch, and when she looks back at Frida she’s laughing. “You should give her a raise just for making a decent pot of coffee.”
    Claire still hasn’t asked about the salary; she is forty-three years old, and this is the first time she has worked for a paycheck other than the assigned and nonnegotiable stipend of a resident. She hardly knows what to ask, as if she has any option. Her main financial goal is to make sure Dan doesn’t regret his offer.
    By the time he pauses for their lunch—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and peeled grapefruit—Claire is too numbed by her own ignorance to be hungry. She had scribbled a few notes on the sly in the first few patients’ rooms, worried that if Dan caught her he would slapup against how embarrassingly inexperienced she is. It feels like the medical journals she’s been reading for the last decade are little more than movies trying to imitate real life.
    At the end of this first day she gives herself a competency test. She stands against the closed exam room door of the only patient still left in the clinic and imagines herself one step ahead of everything she sees and hears, translating the words she understands and anticipating Dan’s next move, which question he will ask, what physical exam he’ll do, what blood test he’ll order. She gives herself a score of 55 on a sliding scale weighted by the language barrier. Clearly failing.
    Dan looks exhausted, a sallow shadow darkening the pockets under his eyes. Claire tries to apologize for all her questions, her fumbling, her inadequate Spanish, how she has slowed his pace and kept them all here past six. He stares fixedly at her while she talks until she runs out of words, at which point he squints his eyes, deepening the sharp groove that runs in the narrow space between his brows, and leans a notch closer, almost broodingly serious. “You’re not planning to quit on me, are you?” She shakes her head. And then he laughs, all the lines in his face breaking a new way. “Well, then. I’ll head home. Frida’s in the back—she can lock up.”
    After she says good night Claire walks toward the front entrance, where she’d parked eleven long hours ago, the waiting room now lit only by the single streetlamp at the edge of the parking lot, a diffuse fluorescent gloom. She thinks, for a moment, that Anita must have left a radio on, but as soon as she nears the swinging gate at the end of the hall she recognizes the voice of a patient seen two hours earlier, a young woman from Guatemala who’s just started at Walker’s Orchards, come in with a complaint of headaches. Her back is turned when Claire enters the waiting room. She’s reading the symptoms of diabetes out loud from a poster on the wall. At Claire’s approach, she says, “ Ah, Miguela. Mira. Es la mujer. ” Then, holding open her small bag of drug samples: “ ¿Cuántas puedo tomar cada día ?”
    Claire is more startled when another woman’s voice comes from near the desk, behind her. “ Oh, bien. Doctora, you have in Spanish?” Claire looks inside the bag and takes out one of the boxes—the directionsare only in English. Dan must