Michael’s Wife (10 page)

“
Encelia farinosa
.” He brushed a yellow blossom with the back of his index finger as if he were caressing the cheek of a baby. “Or flowering brittlebush, a hardy plant. But then I suppose you can blame my father.”

“For the bush?”

“No, Michael's obsession with the he-man life. That swimming pool was once a reflecting pond. Shortly after Michael was born father had it enlarged and deepened. Later he built a gymnasium.”

A bee darted through the chain link of the fence at her shoulder and busied itself about the yellow blossoms of the brittlebush.

“As soon as Michael was big enough to carry a gun father took him hunting. Michael learned to kill at an early age. I suppose he had to make up for his weakling brother.” Paul looked up at her through his thick glasses with a resigned half-smile and shrugged.

She felt embarrassed for this quaint, stuffy little man. Was he trying to make friends? Was this an opening for her to make amends with this world of Laurel's?

“What is this thing called?” She walked over to the giant cactus that had impressed her so the night of her ill-fated escape. It seemed less intimidating in the daylight.

“It's pronounced sa-war-o but spelled
s-a-g-u-a-r-o
, the grand old man of the desert. They can grow to fifty feet or more and live to be two hundred years old. This one's over a hundred and fifty.” He climbed to the top of the ladder, standing next to it to show her how it still towered above him.

Laurel stuck a tentative finger into the crevice between vertical barbed ridges and was surprised to find the green surface cool and waxy.

“This saguaro was here before that house was built, before you or I were born and it will be here after I am dead and perhaps you. And that is only just. You see, Laurel, you are no more important in the eyes of nature than this cactus or that bush. Not particularly important at all.”

He climbed down the ladder and removed his sweater, one side of his salt and pepper mustache quivering slightly as it often did when he was excited or disturbed. “In fact, man was nature's one great error. The most destructive of her predators and a most unnecessary creation. It's as though she created a beautifully ordered world and then as a strange afterthought added a timed, built-in, self-destruct mechanism. A curious thing to do.”

“Your philosophy sounds very un-Catholic.”

“Oh, yes, the church. I'm a very good Catholic, you know.” And again the little half-smile.

“I thought the religious way of thinking was that God created the world for man to enjoy.” A breeze stirred her hair and the desert air came alive with the subtle fragrance of desert flowers and a faint smell like that of dried herbs.

“God created nature which created the life forms of the universe, including man, but man created the church, you see. And I am just a man,” he said with a sadness she couldn't understand.

Light wisps and then soft puffs of clouds glided over the nearby mountaintops. The sky that had been so empty and washed pale and flat by sunlight seemed to deepen, to gain dimension and color as the little puffs touched and then combined to form larger clouds. More followed them over the ragged brown peaks.

Leaning against the fence again she watched as Paul brought pot after pot of tiny cacti from the laboratory and set them in the sun in long rows against the house. She began to relax in the warmth of the sun. It was peaceful here and lonely. Paul, nursing his plant life with such tenderness while he spoke degradingly of human life, seemed lonely too. It must have been hard for him when his father brought a young bride into the household.

“Paul, tell me about Michael's mother. Did you hate her?”

He looked up from the plant in his hand as though surprised by her question. “Hate Maria? Well, at first I suppose I did. She was very different from Mother. My mother was stern, practical, ugly. She had brought me up to think that Mexicans were dirty and lazy. She and Father never got along that I can remember.”

He put down the plant and picked up the clipboard, holding it, gazing out at the desert beyond the fence. “But Maria was everything different—gentle, kind. He married her only a year after Mother died. Maria and I were both nineteen and she was a Mexican. It was all very embarrassing, but we soon became friends. She would come out here often and talk to me while I worked, ask questions. In fact, you remind me of her now, standing there by the fence with the wind blowing your hair.”

“Do I look like Maria?”

“Not really. But she did have long dark hair and dark eyes like yours and the same timid, startled expression. I used to get the impression that she was always poised for flight, that if I would frighten her she'd just disappear.”

“Did he love her?”

“Father? He had two loves—money and beautiful women. Maria was beautiful, so I suppose he loved her. But he had a way of destroying beautiful things, tearing up the desert for shopping centers, overgrazing it, leaving a scarred earth behind when a mine closed. I have seen him lasso a saguaro from a horse and topple it over just for sport. Do you realize, the chances of one saguaro reproducing itself, let alone a tiny plant ever reaching maturity? They are a priceless and dwindling treasure of the desert.” Paul lowered his voice and looked away from her. “And then he killed Maria, too.”

“That was an accident.”

“When a man crashes through life the way my father did many innocent victims suffer, human and otherwise. And it's always an accident!” He put the pencil back behind his ear and hurried into the laboratory, slamming the screen door behind him.

“Paul, wait.” And she followed him. It was dark and cool inside after the desert sun. “Aren't you going to tell me what you asked me here for in the first place?”

“What I asked you here for …? Oh, yes. I'm afraid my conversation, as my life, is a bit disjointed. I did have two things to tell you.” He put a lab coat over his short-sleeved shirt and perched on a high stool. “The first is a simple request. Take Jimmy and move to Phoenix with Michael.”

“Move to Phoenix? But Michael wouldn't take me with him. Besides I'm afraid.”

“Afraid for yourself, Laurel? That isn't a cataclysmic problem. As I told you, you are not all that important. If you can remember that, life will be a great deal easier to get through.”

Evan Boucher appeared from the back of the lab and walked past her with a plant in each hand. She avoided his eyes and waited until he'd carried the plants outside.

“I'm important to me!” Paul's insistence on her insignificance as a human being was getting irritating. And the idea of living with this husband she didn't know … well, that was out of the question.

“You will never repair your marriage living here, and Michael won't give you a divorce. He'll never do that, Laurel, so what other choice is there?”

Instead of answering him she picked up a book lying on the table by the window. There had to be another way out of this problem. He had to be wrong. The frontispiece read, “
The Sonoran Desert; Plant Life, Animal Life, and Nature's Philosophy of Survival and Scarcity
, by Dr. Paul Elliot Devereaux II, Ecologist, Philosopher, and Professor of Sonoran Studies. The University of Arizona Press.”

“What was the other thing you wanted to tell me?”

“The authorities in Denver have been notified of your casual reappearance and a hearing has been set for June 16.”

The book hit the edge of the table and landed on the floor. “Will I go to prison, Paul?”

“I doubt it. You are somebody's mother. And for some reason that holds great weight in the courts.” He hunched over a microscope and didn't bother to look up as she left.

By afternoon the puffy clouds had all but filled the sky over the valley, their bottoms growing darker as the day wore on. It was hard for Laurel to believe that it ever rained on the desert, but the smell of rain was in the air.

She went to Jimmy's room and sat in the rocking chair she had carried from the old nursery and watched as he played at her feet. Maria had probably rocked in this very chair, watching Michael. It had taken much persuasion to get Consuela to unlock the old nursery and let her take the chair. But why keep it locked up in that room of shattered, dusty memories when there was a baby in the house?

Tiring of his trucks, Jimmy crawled up on her lap with a high-pitched giggle and snuggled against her, his thumb in his mouth. She felt the bond growing between them, not so much that of mother and child but of two lonely people looking for comfort.

His skin had such a pale, milky tone for a child who lived in so much sun. But then he was seldom allowed out of this room. The house was a prison for him, too. And Paul had offered them an escape, the only one possible. “Take Jimmy and move to Phoenix with Michael.”

The room darkened as the storm gathered outside and she rocked harder, holding his warmth close to her. “What other choice is there?” Paul had said.

She sang
Rock-a-Bye Baby
because it was the only lullaby she could remember and because she wanted to shut out the sound of the rising wind. Soon Jimmy slept, his head tilting back and forth with the movement of the chair. And still she sang; repeating the lullaby over and over, the wicker rocker creaking an accompaniment. There had been a storm brewing inside her from the moment she'd entered Laurel's world, and she feared the turmoil would break out now if she stopped singing.

It was getting dark and the wind rushed at the house with rolling gusts that left short breathless spells in between, the great bell in the bell wall clanging hollowly with the stronger gusts. She jumped as lightning tore at the sky and lit the room and sang louder, trying to drown out the answering rumble that seemed to thunder above the house.

And then the door facing her, the door to the balcony, opened and Michael Devereaux was in the room. The lullaby stuck in her throat. It was Friday and she hadn't expected him until Saturday.

The welcoming smile for his son faded, leaving his lips parted, frozen. It was like a dark still life, she sitting motionless in his mother's rocking chair, his son asleep on her lap, and he in uniform with his cap in his hand and his hair mussed by the wind. There was a snap that made her release her breath and again lightning flared, momentarily flooding the room with its cold light and glinting in Michael's eyes.

She watched the play of expression on his mobile face, his eyes widen with surprise and then narrow. Did she bring back some memory of Maria sitting in this chair? There was a tightening in her breasts as excitement mingled with fear. Life with this man could be frightening, chaotic, dangerous, but it would never be dull.

What sounded like enormous drops of rain pelted the tiled roof for a bare minute and the storm was over. It had taken all day to build to nothing.

The tension in the room seemed to ease with the passing of the clouds. As Jimmy stirred in his sleep, replacing the thumb that had slipped from his mouth, she looked down, breaking the current that had sizzled between them when Michael's eyes held hers.

“I thought Jimmy should have the rocking chair. No one was using it.”

Michael walked to the dresser and put his cap beside the portable TV and with his back to her looked up at the ceiling, his shoulders hunched. “What am I going to do with you?”

The hopelessness in his voice made her aware that hers was not the only untenable position in this strange relationship. She could almost feel the agony of this intense man with a wife he could not endure and would not divorce.

In May the days grew so warm that lunch was moved into the coolness of the dining room. The saguaro sprouted creamy little flowers with thick, waxy petals. It looked a bit silly, this giant, with the small circlet of pale flowers on its top and on the top of its arms while tiny cacti that had sat unnoticed behind rocks bloomed with brilliant blossoms that sometimes dwarfed the plant itself.

During the week Laurel settled into a routine, dining with the family and, when Jimmy was alone, spending her time with him. On weekends when Michael could get to Tucson, he and Claire took Jimmy on walks or outings in the car and continued the swimming lessons. Jimmy was not learning to swim, but he was learning in a brave, resigned way to undergo the torture without crying. Weekends were the loneliest for Laurel.

The first time Jimmy called her “Mommy” she realized that she had taught him that. Little slips like, “Mommy will get that for you” or “Come sit on Mommy's lap.” It hadn't happened often but he'd picked it up very fast. Their relationship deepened, growing beyond just a friendship into an almost uncomfortable clinging tie that made his wide dark eyes look a little less lost, the only eyes around her that weren't full of reproach. To him she was not an unwanted encumbrance, an embarrassing reminder of family misfortune. He needed her love, her arms as a harbor from Claire's scolding, her reassurance against the coldness of his aunt and uncle, her comforting when he scraped a knee or when Michael left for the base. His need for her fed her own need for self-respect.

In this time Laurel came to know that she could never give up Jimmy. And she knew that only as Laurel did she have any right to him.

Michael did not come to Tucson for several weekends and she had Jimmy to herself. She slept less as the Denver trip drew nearer. By the time Michael reappeared she was in such a state that she walked the halls and covered walkways until early morning and felt drugged and listless during the day. She would wait in her room until it was late and the house was quiet before starting out on her nightly prowls.

One unusually warm night she left her coat in the wardrobe and threw a peignoir over her nightgown. She descended the stairs to the courtyard and was halfway across it before she noticed Michael standing in the shadow of the walkway on the other side. It was too late to turn around. She would have to confront him sometime; it might as well be now. But she wished she'd worn her coat.