The Healer

She watched him as he said this. And then she said, “This isn’t begging, it’s warning.”

She turned and walked back to the truck.

When Ross Troyer spoke in the kitchen his voice caused the heat duct that fed his daughter’s room overhead to resonate. Caroline would know her parents were arguing by the quality of the sound from the duct. Her father did not have to raise his voice, all he had to do was speak long enough each time for the duct to resonate. She would know he was not talking on the phone because the phone was directly below her bed, in the front sitting room, next to her mother’s hand. She would know her parents were arguing because it was only when they argued that her father addressed more than one or two words to her mother at one time. If Caroline were to crouch by the register, as she used to do when she was a child, she could hear what he was saying, and if she were to lie flat on the floor and press her ear to the register, as she used to do until the burden of knowing came to outweigh the secret strength of it, she could hear as well what her mother was saying, all the way from the front sitting room, which was separated from the kitchen by the dining area, less a room than a space between the kitchen and the front room. There her mother, the dog at her feet, would be watching TV or reading a magazine or doing a crossword puzzle, a tumbler of vermouth on the coffee table in front of her, while in the kitchen her father, who did not drink, would be cleaning his rifle or going through real estate listings, and Caroline would know that he was listening to her mother as he had always listened to her, now listening and now not listening, in a way that to judge from his intermittent responses had done nothing over three decades to diminish the irritating effect of her words. Sooner or later the duct would start to resonate.

It was resonating tonight, but Caroline did not get off her bed, where she had been writing (the small black notebook now slack in her hand, the ballpoint pen capped and fallen to the bedspread alongside her knee), but listened only to the pure sign of her parents’ arguing as she had listened to it not as a child crouched at the register who understood the words or most of them but earlier, as an infant on her back, her limbs waving in air to its inflections, her muscles drinking its rhythms, that she might be informed by, and so survive, and in surviving one day react against and in reacting echo and so recreate the world of her parents’ emotions. Now, twenty years later, loath, she was sitting upright on her bed, where she could hear echoing inside her the legacy of that infant thirst: the tone and rhythm and tenor of the old wrangle, of the voices that moved without ceasing. And all of it—not only her parents’ passion but the turmoil it caused at the depths of her own muscles, her own being—was no less physical and familiar than the traffic noise and the rest of the low constant din from the street or than the full moon visible through the window like a halogen floodlamp behind speeding clouds. And she continued to listen to the rasp of the curtains in the night breezes and to the sound of her own breathing deeper and slower. And the other, the interior and past, was contained within the ground of these immediate sights and sounds, soothed by them, slowed and quieted though not silenced, held by them in an embrace of perception that calmed and so enabled the discovery of grace even in that.

In the front room Ardis Troyer had been drinking Bright’s President vermouth with ice while snapping through the pages of Chatelaine. She had been doing this for some time, every once in a while leaning forward to take a sip of her drink, but then she closed the magazine on her lap and sat like that, with her hands folded upon it. Reached for her drink. Drained it. Set down the tumbler with alcoholic care, though she was not drunk. Cleared her throat. Keeper, the black Lab, who lay with his chin on his foreleg, opened his eyes to look at her but was not roused to lift his head. She began to speak, at first almost wistfully but with increasing force and in a tone of amazed grievance concerning matters financial as they pertained to old plans of household acquisition and renovation too long in abeyance. Expectations cancelled, prolongations of waiting endured, not without bitterness.

These were old beads, slick with handling, and it would be remarkable if her husband listened at all.

When she spoke next, the connection at first obscure, the subject was her fellow waitress Gail Poot’s sister-in-law Bertie, who recently with the help of her husband Wilf had set herself up in the electrolysis business.

“Hair removal,” Ross Troyer said from the kitchen.

“That’s right. Unsightly body hair. Also spider veins. Spider veins is same equipment, different course.”

She reached for her glass. “Gail says people still think it hurts. Bertie told her it takes a little practice to get the depth right, that’s all. You get the depth right and they don’t feel a thing. A mild discomfort. Bertie’s better at it than most of them. She can already do thirty an hour.”

“Not customers she can’t.”

“Customers? Hairs.”

“Christ.”

“Bertie says the people act just like patients. They respect you and they’re grateful. They never dreamed this would be possible in their lifetime. What more could you ask? I think it would be a wonderful opportunity. In hard times people look to their appearance.”

He was studying a real estate listing.

“When it’s all they’ve got,” Ardis said.

“Who’s Bertie?”

“Gail Poot’s sister-in-law.”

“Gail Poot isn’t married.”

“No, but June is, and Dave’s brother Wilf married Bertie.”

“Dave’s an asshole.”

“I have no doubt that Dave is. Unfortunately we’re not talking about Dave. Any more than we’re talking about Gail or June or how in hell they’re related.”

“They’re half-sisters.”

“Ross, she could take the course.”

“What course?”

As he said this his chair scraped. Keeper looked around. She could see from where she sat that her husband was rising to his feet, and she was about to ask him, as long as he was up—but he passed from view, and she heard the back door open. She closed her mouth.

Night air blew cooler from the kitchen. Keeper got up, though with difficulty, and went to see. His toenails clicked across the linoleum of the dining area toward the kitchen.

Ardis felt for the remote. The screen flashed and came on. A jet-lagged-looking man in a foreign suit and brass-coloured hairpiece was standing in a studio audience pulling a silk rope of scarlet and blue from the cleavage of an obese woman looking up at him with a fight-or-flight expression, possibly an admixture of gratitude. Ardis watched this feat at once absently and in an attitude of calculation, as one who though with weightier matters on her mind would solve the illusion. When she heard a scuff on the fire escape she switched off the TV.

She looked to the kitchen. “You could at least shut the door after you when you wander out without a word.”

He was leaning a rifle against the wall by the table.

“Keep leaving those in the truck and the next we know some ten-year-old’ll be lying dead in the street.”

He was clearing the table.

Keeper returned from the kitchen to circle next to the coffee table, preparing to lie down once more.

“But anyways,” she said.

He was laying the rifle upon the empty table.

“Handsome? As long as you’re up—?”

A few minutes later he came into the front room carrying a bottle of vermouth by the neck. Keeper looked around. Her husband stopped at the coffee table, extending his free fist, palm-downward, over the tumbler. As he did this, she gazed at the back of that hand, a fervent scrutiny. Reached out to stroke the hairs along the clench-smooth skin of it. A tentative caress. At the first touch of her finger the fist released. Two ice cubes clattered into the tumbler. The other fist came forward to pour.

“Thank you, lover,” she said and then quickly, “Why can’t you clean that thing in here? Shouting back and forth like a couple of fishwives.”

He was returning to the kitchen and made no answer.

She took a deep breath and told him everything she had learned from Gail Poot. Where the course was offered, how many weeks, how many hours a day of classes, the cost. She told him what Gail had reported the necessary equipment had set back Wilf and Bertie, and she told him the dimensions of the space in the Belmount Mall they had rented and how Wilf had done all the necessary carpentry and wiring and even a certain amount of the plumbing to get her started. What the space had cost per square foot. How long the lease.

This was information with a real estate component, and he seemed to listen. When she had finished telling him everything she knew, he cleared his throat and said, “No.”

“Don’t tell me Alex Connor wouldn’t give you a good rate,” she cried immediately, prepared for this. “She can pay us back. If she stays on here, she contributes for once in her life like anybody else. It’s not like we don’t need the money.”

“No.”

A silence fell.

“I honestly don’t know any more,” Ardis said quietly, “why I bother.” This admission drew no reply.

“I guess a person lives around here long enough,” she continued, snapping the pages of her magazine, “she just gives up. Who wants to go on slamming their head against the same wall?”

And this question drew no answer.

After a few minutes Ardis said, “I’ll tell you one thing. No woman not a complete monster who’s ever been through the living hell of a child is not going to look out for her, it doesn’t matter how useless she’s turned out, and when men grow tits maybe they can start to understand that.”

Neither did this assertion elicit any sort of response.

“You know what I’d like to know?” Ardis said. “Why in God’s name she’d stop the healing.”