The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe Read Free Book Online Page A

back for a good guess, Miss.”
    “What kind of doctor are you?”
    He crunched a blackberry between his back teeth. The juice was flat, without its electrics. He was disappointed. “I’m not really the kind of doctor you might be thinking of. I’m more of what you would probably call a naturopath. I treat the soul as well as the body.”
    “Ohhhh,” she said, knowingly. “You’re an herbalist.”
    “I do use herbs,” he said. “But I use many things.”
    “And they work?”
    “They do. Usually. If it’s not too late.” This last statement seemed to sting her, and she laid her hand on the chair back across from him. When he looked up at her face, she was staring past him, out the window and onto the road. “I’ve upset you somehow,” he said.
    “No. You haven’t. But it’s sad to think that it could be too late for anyone.”
    “You can’t unsalt a soup,” he said.
    She smoothed the back of the chair and then patted it, as if it were an animal she cared for. “I have a niece. They keep her at home now because she has seizures. She stiffens up and falls over, as if she’d dead.”
    “That sounds very serious indeed.” He poured more hot water into his cup.
They come to me,
he thought.
I am called.
“Has she seen a doctor?”
    “A raft of them.”
    “Bring another cup, Miss . . . ”
    “MacDonald. Grace MacDonald.”
    “I’ll make you a cup of my tea, and we’ll discuss your niece.”
    She protested mildly—it was impolite of her to harass him like this at seven twenty in the morning—but he insisted, and she went back behind the counter and got herself a cup. He put a tiny

amount of the damiana in it and covered it with hot water. “It tastes like chamomile,” she said.
    “Very much like chamomile,” he replied. “Now tell me about this girl.”
     
    When Grace called her sister Terry, it was still before eight in the morning. She told her that she wanted to bring someone over to see Rose. Terry sighed on the other end of the line. Rose was sleeping, at last she was sleeping. But Grace pressed her: She’d had a visitor in the café and she felt he could offer something none of the doctors could. “He gave me a tea that makes you feel like Wonder Woman,” said Grace. “You should meet him. He’s like a shaman.” She could hear the exhaustion in Terry’s voice—Rose’s attacks happened around the clock. She would shriek in surprise while in bed, and Terry would rush into the child’s bedroom to find her stretched out stiffly on the floor, quaking, or standing in the corner of her room, a look of stark terror on her face. It was like having a newborn in the house again, a haunted newborn.
    “I don’t want a visitor right now, Grace. I look like hell.”
    “He won’t care, Terry. I have a feeling. Let us come over.” She came back to the table with a look of elation on her face. “You are such a good man to do this,” she said. “You have no idea what my sister has been through. First her divorce and now this. She and Rose go back and forth to Toronto for tests—they stick her inside of every machine you can think of. Can you imagine?”
    “I can.”
    She lowered her voice. “She lives in that house as if her daughter is already dead. As if she’s already mourning her. They need some hope.”
    “Let’s see what we can do,” he said.
    The house was only two blocks from the café. He took his valise out of the back of his car and tugged on the bar fridge door, a habit. He checked the cable from the fridge to the lighter outlet. Then they walked together under the fall sun, now fully up over the horizon and casting a lemony light over the road. Terry greeted them at the door with a tired smile. “It’s very kind of you to come, sir.”
    “I was just passing through. It’s pure coincidence, if you believe in such a thing.”
    “Do you?”
    “No, I don’t. Is she awake?”
    “She is now.”
    Terry led her sister and the stranger into the house, a lovely old