The Shadow Wife (16 page)

“I think I can help Mara,” she said. “There is still a great deal of energy and grace left in your friend. I think I can tap into that, but it will take time.”

Joelle thought back to what she had witnessed in the nursing home. “She was massaging your hand, wasn’t she?” she asked.

“It seemed that way to me.” Carlynn smiled.

Joelle knew she would never be able to bring Carlynn back to the nursing home now that Liam had seen her there and had reacted the way he did. But she didn’t want to address that with Carlynn just then.

“I honestly thought she looked better by the time we were ready to leave,” Joelle said.

“Well, of course, we’d both like to think that. Only time will tell if we’re fooling ourselves or not. It doesn’t always work, Joelle. You must understand that.”

Joelle laughed. “It’s harder for me to accept that it sometimes
does
work,” she said. She glanced at Carlynn. “Do I pay you per visit or…?”

“You don’t pay me at all,” she said. “I’m retired. I only work when I truly want to. And from what you’ve told me, Mara is worth my time and energy.”

“Thank you,” Joelle said.

They fell silent again as they drove past the entrance to the Spyglass Hill Golf Course. After another minute or two, Joelle pulled into the driveway of the Kling Mansion and started to press the buzzer on the stone pillar.

“3273,” Carlynn said.

“What?” Joelle asked.

“That’s the code. Just press 3273.”

Joelle did so, and the gate slid open. She pulled all the way up the driveway and stopped the car near the house.

Carlynn made no move to get out of the car. Instead, she looked at Joelle. She was no longer wearing her sunglasses, and her gaze was steady and, somehow, disquieting. “There’s much you haven’t told me, isn’t there?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” Joelle put the car in park and took her foot off the brake pedal.

“I mean, with Liam. With you and Liam, perhaps?”

Joelle thought back to the scene in Mara’s room, wondering what Carlynn had gathered in those few awkward moments. She was about to tell the older woman she was imagining things, but found herself nodding, instead.

“Yes,” she said.

“Come in.” Carlynn nodded toward the house. “Turn off your car, come inside, and let’s talk.”

Obediently, Joelle turned off the ignition, stepped out of the car and walked with Carlynn up to the front door of the mansion.

Mrs. McGowan, the housekeeper with the Irish accent, greeted them at the door and took Carlynn’s handbag from her.

“Have you two met?” Carlynn looked from the housekeeper to Joelle.

“Yes, indeed.” The housekeeper smiled. “She thought I was you at first.”

Carlynn laughed at that, and Joelle blushed.

“We’re going in the library for a little chat,” Carlynn said to Mrs. McGowan. “Please let Alan know we’d rather not be disturbed.”

“Would you like something to nibble while you’re there?” the housekeeper offered.

“Please, dear.” Carlynn then took Joelle’s elbow and walked slowly with her through the living room and into the library. A large room, though not nearly as big as the living room, the library had one wall of windows looking out on the sea and cypress, and three walls covered from floor to ceiling with books.

Joelle sat at one end of the leather sofa, while Carlynn sat at the other, turning to face her. Behind Carlynn’s head, Joelle could see the evening fog rolling in, pink-tinged from the falling sun.

“So, tell me,” Carlynn said, folding her hands in her lap once again. “Tell me what made you freeze up when Liam walked into the room.”

“Did I freeze up?” Joelle asked.

“You did, indeed.” Carlynn wore a small frown.

“I hadn’t told him I’d contacted you to see Mara,” Joelle said. “He’s even more skeptical about healers than I am, so I hadn’t really wanted him to know.”

Carlynn tipped her head to the side. “And what else?”

“What else is that…I’m in love with him.” She blurted out the words, but Carlynn did not look the least bit surprised.

“Yes,” the older woman said gently. “I know.”

“How could you possibly know?”

“Because it was written all over your face when he walked in and when you watched him kiss his wife,” she said. “I didn’t need to possess any special gift to see that.”

Joelle shut her eyes and covered one side of her face with her hand. She felt exposed. “It’s so complicated,” she said.

“Tell me.”

Lowering her hand from her face, Joelle leaned back against the cool leather of the sofa, letting out a sigh. “Well,” she said slowly, “I told you how I fixed them up, right?”

Carlynn nodded.

“At that time, I just liked Liam a great deal, and I loved Mara.”

“Yes, she was your closest friend,” Carlynn said. “Your confidante. A sister you never had.” It had been weeks since she’d last spoken to Carlynn about this, but the woman seemed to remember their conversation well.

“Right.” Joelle nodded. “And they were so very wonderful together. They were perfect. I had no bad feelings about it at all…well, except a bit of envy because I knew how good their marriage was and how lousy mine was. My ex-husband and I would go out with them from time to time, but Rusty, my ex, just didn’t fit in. He was very quiet. Into computers. Into working with machines instead of working with people, the way Liam, Mara and I were. After Rusty and I divorced, Mara and Liam were very good to me. They always included me in parties
they had, and they asked me out with them now and then, even though I was single.” Other couples with whom she and Rusty had been friends had faded away, but not Mara and Liam. “Mara and I still had lunch together once a week or so, and we’d go hiking every once in a while. She never let her marriage cut into our…girl-time.” Joelle shook her head. “I miss her so much,” she said.

“I’m sure you do,” Carlynn said, and it suddenly occurred to Joelle that Carlynn had lost a flesh-and-blood sister, a twin. She probably understood completely what Joelle’s life was like now that Mara was no longer an active, contributing part of it.

There was a knock on the library door.

“Come in,” Carlynn said, looking past Joelle to the door.

The elderly man Joelle had previously seen working in the garden entered the room, bearing a tray of sandwiches and iced tea. He lowered it to the coffee table in front of them.

“Thanks, Quinn,” Carlynn said. “This is Joelle, by the way, a new friend of mine.” She motioned toward Joelle. “Joelle, this is Quinn.”

“Hello, Quinn.” Joelle nodded a greeting at the man.

“How do you do,” he said, then turned to Carlynn. “Do you need anything else?”

“No, thank you,” Carlynn said. “You’re a love.”

Quinn turned and started for the door, smiling at Joelle as he passed her, and she thought, although she was not certain, that he winked at her before shuffling away.

God, he seemed far too old to be working! And Mrs. McGowan had to be near seventy. Joelle doubted there would be many people willing to hire such old-timers. It was kind of Carlynn to keep them on.

Carlynn picked up one of the small plates with its crustless white-bread sandwich and handed it to Joelle, who took it, although she was not hungry. The filling was chicken salad. She could smell it as she rested the plate in her lap.

“You were telling me about your relationship with Liam and Mara,” Carlynn prompted, handing her a glass of iced tea.

Joelle set the tea on top of a wooden coaster on the coffee table and looked out the window. “After Sam was born,” she said, “and Mara had the aneurysm, it was Liam and I who stayed by her bedside in the hospital. She was in a coma for a couple of weeks, and we sang to her. At least Liam did.” She remembered him bringing his guitar into his wife’s hospital room, singing some of the songs he and Mara had often performed together, while Joelle stroked her arm or combed her hair. “I read to her, or just talked to her. We took turns being with her, along with Mara’s mother, Sheila, and Liam and I really started leaning on each other. He included me in all the decisions he needed to make about her. Her rehab. What nursing home to put her in. I felt like I was part of the family.”

“You were,” Carlynn said, swallowing a bite of her sandwich.

“I helped him with Sam.” She broke into a smile at the thought of the little boy. “He’s a treasure, Carlynn. You’ve never seen a cuter child. I love him to pieces, and I don’t know what Liam would do without him.” She bit a small corner from her sandwich, then swallowed it before continuing. “I tried to help Liam deal with all the mixed emotions he was having. He’d essentially lost a wife and gained a son. But he’d been the one who’d wanted the son in the first place, not Mara, so of course he felt terribly guilty.” She lifted her sandwich toward her mouth again, then set it down without taking a bite. “Liam and I talked every single night on the phone. Every night.”

“You’re using the past tense.”

Joelle nodded, sighing. “About three or four months ago, Sam had his first birthday. And, of course, that was also the one-year anniversary of Mara’s aneurysm. I helped Liam and Sheila celebrate Sam’s birthday, then afterward I was alone with Liam at his house, Sam was in bed, and we were both so upset. We’d been getting closer and closer all year. We loved each other.”
She was confident of that fact. Confident that Liam had loved her as much as she did him. “And that night, it just…got out of hand.”

“You made love,” Carlynn said, and Joelle nodded. She stood up, struggling against the memory and unable to look at Carlynn at that moment. She walked over to the window to see that the fog had obliterated the view of the ocean and was now teasing the branches of the cypress trees behind the mansion.

“I went home afterward,” Joelle said, still facing the window. “I couldn’t get Mara’s face out of my head. I knew how she felt about fidelity. My God, we’d talked about that sort of thing so often. We both felt so strongly about it, about the sanctity of marriage and wedding vows. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I was like a teenager who didn’t know any better. Who didn’t know that A would lead to B and on and on and on.”

She walked back to the sofa and sat down again, looking at the magazines arrayed neatly on the coffee table without really seeing them. “The next day,” she said, “he called me and said he felt worse than ever, that we never should have done that, that he was sorry, that we had to stop spending so much time together, that he still had a wife he loved. Etcetera.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Joelle. How painful for you.”

“I knew he was right. And yet…to just cut off our relationship like that. It was all I had left.”

“And all he had left, too.”

“He has Sam,” she said, and started to cry. “And now I’m cut off from both of them.”

“But you work together, don’t you?”

She nodded. “Every single day. And we have meetings together, and help each other out on cases, and eat lunch together with Paul, the other social worker, and we don’t ever really look each other in the eye. It’s torture.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“And there’s more,” Joelle said.

“Yes.” Carlynn wore a sympathetic smile.

“I’m pregnant.”

Carlynn nodded. “I know.”

“How could you have known that?” Joelle’s hands flew to her belly. She’d thought she had hidden her pregnancy well.

“I’m a good guesser.”

Joelle thought something other than guessing was at work here, but she continued. “Fifteen weeks pregnant. I thought about an abortion, but I’ve wanted a baby so long.”

“And Liam doesn’t know?”

“He has no idea.”

“When will you tell him?”

“I don’t plan to,” she said. “I’m going to leave before my pregnancy becomes too obvious. I’ll move away. I’m not sure where I’ll go yet. Maybe to Berkeley where my parents live.”

“Isn’t it unfair of you not to let Liam know?” Carlynn leaned toward her on the sofa.

Joelle shook her head. “There’s nothing he can do about my being pregnant except feel worse than he already does, Carlynn,” she said. “He can’t marry me.”

“Do you really want to leave Monterey?” Carlynn asked her.

Joelle hesitated a moment before answering. “Honestly, no. I love it here. But maybe I can come back someday.” She let out her breath, looking up at the ceiling. “This doesn’t have to be forever.”

“Does Liam still perform his music?” Carlynn asked the question seemingly out of the blue.

Joelle shook her head. “No. I don’t think he’s picked up his guitar since Mara went into the nursing home.”

“Well.” Carlynn set her sandwich plate on the coffee table. “There is one thing I know for absolute certain about you, Joelle.” There were tears in Carlynn’s eyes as she moved closer to Joelle, wrapping her thin hand around Joelle’s where it rested on her knees. “You are a tremendously noble human being.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Look at what you’re doing, honey. You love this man so deeply that you want to find a way to heal his wife, to return his wife to him, because you know that’s what will make him truly happy. Even though
you
love him. Even though you’re carrying his
child.
You’ve placed his happiness above your own. Few people would do that.”

A bit embarrassed, Joelle looked at her uneaten sandwich resting on the coffee table. “It feels good to love someone that much,” she said, her voice a near whisper. “It’s the only thing that feels good about this whole situation.”

“The next time I visit Mara,” Carlynn said, “I’d like Liam to be there, as well. Can you arrange that?”

Joelle grimaced. “I’m not even sure how he’s going to react to your being there today, Carlynn,” she said. “But I’ll ask him.”

“Good.” Carlynn patted her hand and stood up. “Now you’d better get out of here before the fog socks you in.”

Joelle nodded, although she was thinking it might not be that bad to be stuck in the mansion with Carlynn.

At the front door, she kissed Carlynn’s cheek.

“Thanks so much,” she said, opening the door and walking outside. The world was filled with translucent gray air, but all Joelle could think about was that she had a new confidante. An unexpected confidante.