The Shadow Wife (17 page)

Although she was not very far from Carmel, the fog obscured parts of the road, and she had to drive slowly. She felt trapped inside her car with nothing but the memory of that night with Liam.

She and Liam had sat with Sam on Liam’s bed, looking through a picture book with the little boy and singing him silly songs, like “Itsy, Bitsy Spider” and “Pat-a-Cake,” and Sam didn’t care a bit that Joelle couldn’t carry a tune. He giggled and let her nibble his fingers while he cuddled with her and his dad. When Sam grew tired, Liam carried him into the nursery and tucked him into his crib, but Joelle stayed where she was on Liam’s bed. She was looking forward to talking with Liam about the day, and
if she realized the sofa in the living room would be a more appropriate place for such conversation, she didn’t let herself think about it.

Liam came back into the room and fell forward onto the bed, his head resting on his folded arms. His face was turned toward her, but he wasn’t looking at her. Instead, he seemed to be staring into space. The light on the night table caught the pale blue of his eyes, and she wanted to touch his cheek, the place where the long, sexy dimple formed when he smiled, but she kept her hands to herself instead.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked him.

He licked his lips. “About you, actually,” he said. “About how great you’ve been this year. How I couldn’t have made it without you. How good you are with Sam. How much I need those late-night phone conversations with you. How incredible you’ve been at helping me deal with all the nuts-and-bolts issues around Mara—the nursing home, dealing with her doctors, the whole gamut. You took so much of the pressure off me by being there.”

“I’m glad,” she said, touched.

With a sigh, Liam rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. “We’ve been grappling with this mess for a year,” he said. “One long fucking year. My beautiful wife is a… She’s just gone. I don’t know who that person is inside that screwed-up body, but Mara’s not in there anymore.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Why didn’t I listen to her, Jo?” he asked, turning his head to look at her. “Why did I talk her into having a baby? If I’d only listened…really let myself
hear
…how afraid she was. How much she didn’t want to have a baby. She knew it was the wrong thing for her.”

“She made the choice, Liam. She—”

“It was
my
choice,” he said. “
You
know it and
I
know it. She did it for me. She had a selfish side to her, I know that, but she would have done anything for me. I begged her to do something she knew was wrong. She had a gut feeling about it, Jo.”

“I know,” she said. “But—”

“I
destroyed
her.” He began crying, like a child might cry, with rivers of tears and shaking shoulders, and Joelle wrapped her arms around him and held him tight, as though trying to keep the parts of him together. “I
killed
her, Jo,” he said.

“Liam, no,” she said, her own tears beginning to mix with his because she knew his words were, if only in his own heart and head, the truth.

He opened his eyes to look at her. Really look. She felt him explore her face as he lifted a long, thick strand of her hair from where it lay against her breast and draped it over her shoulder. “Thank you for being with me,” he said. “I love you.”

“And I love you.” She stared into his eyes for a moment before leaning forward to kiss him, and she wasn’t surprised when he met her halfway. The kiss was long and deep and started a hunger in her body she hadn’t felt for years. He leaned away from her, only to return for another kiss a second later, and when she slipped her tongue between his teeth, he groaned.

She was wearing a long, loose skirt, and as he rolled on top of her, he carved a place between her legs with his own, until she could feel his erection press against her through their clothes.

Slowly, Liam raised himself to his knees above her. Taking her hand, he pressed it to the bulge of his penis beneath his slacks, which were still zipped, still belted. He looked at her with the eyes of a man who had not known physical love in a year.

“Please,”
he said.

There was no way she could deny him. It would have been like denying herself.

Lying next to him afterward, exhausted and chilled, she pressed her lips to his shoulder. “I love you,” she said, but there was no reply.

She didn’t feel it yet herself, but she knew it was coming. The guilt. She feared, though, that it had already found Liam. Without a word, he slipped out of the bed, leaving her skin cool where
his body had been touching hers. He reached for the afghan that lay across the end of the bed and covered her with it, tucking it all around her as though he truly cared that she be comfortable and warm. He leaned over, and she felt him brush her hair from her forehead with his hand, then kiss her lightly on the temple. She heard him walk into the bathroom, then into the guest room, closing the door behind him. And she knew that she had both found and lost something, all in the same moment.

L
IAM WONDERED IF
J
OELLE WAS SIMPLY IGNORING HIS CALLS.
H
E’D
been trying to reach her since seven, when he’d arrived home from his visit to Mara. He left her one more message, calling her from the phone in his bedroom.

“Call me no matter what time it is when you get home,” he said.

There was no point in going to bed yet because he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he’d spoken to her, so he walked into the den and sat down at the computer desk. Once online, he navigated to the website that contained the essays—sometimes uplifting, sometimes heartbreaking—about aneurysm survivors. His jaw ached from clenching his teeth all evening, and he tried to relax as he looked through the website, but within moments he’d realize his jaw was clamped tight again.

There were no new essays on the site, even though he hadn’t visited it in a few days. He tried to read some of the older stories, but it was a struggle to find one that could still hold his interest. Those stories had offered him such hope in the beginning. They were written not only by the families of patients, but often by the patients themselves after they’d come back from the brink.
In the beginning, he’d imagined Mara one day adding her own essay to the site, but that fantasy had evaporated along with his dreams for their future together.

He knew the essays by heart, and he had analyzed them. They fell into two broad categories: Either the patient had died within a few days, or they had begun their recovery. Sometimes that recovery was rapid, sometimes it was slow and involved many steps backward, but it always headed in the direction of rediscovered health. None described the limbo that had become Mara’s existence. He’d longed to find a story like Mara’s: a young woman, alive but not truly living, who’d left her husband with a small child and no promise of a future. If he found such a story, he would have written to that husband to ask him how he was handling it. How did he get up and keep going every day? How did he face his own future? How did he feel in the middle of the night when he woke up and reached for his wife, his lover, only to remember that she was lying in a nursing home and could offer him nothing more than a vacant smile?

How did other men in his position manage this? At the age of thirty-five, was he to have only his fantasies—and his own hand in the dark—as his wife and lover for the rest of his life? Would this man Liam searched for, but could not find, give in to temptation the way he had with Joelle?

In those moments when he could step away from the pain and the loss, he would ask himself if there might be a reason for what had happened to his family. What was he to learn from this? But he could see no lesson here. Just a cruel joke by a cruel god.

He recalled working with the husband of an Alzheimer’s patient a couple of years ago. The man had been in his sixties, and he’d slept with an acquaintance, a one-night stand. “I needed to know I was still a man,” he’d said.

Liam had maintained his professional composure, remaining nonjudgmental as he helped the man talk through his feelings of loss and grief. Personally, though, he had recoiled from the man’s words: “I needed to know I was still a man.” To himself,
he’d thought,
Selfish bastard. Whatever happened to your vow of “in sickness and in health”?

When he thought of that man now, he knew he’d been of little help to him. He hadn’t understood what it was like to lose that part of oneself. Not just sex, but the intimacy that accompanied it, the waking up together with stale breath and bad hair, and feeling love in spite of it all.

His head began to ache as his thinking turned in circles. If he hadn’t pushed Mara to have a child, she would be well. She’d still be that healthy, vibrant, bright, talented woman with whom he’d fallen in love. But then he would look at Sam and wonder how he had ever existed before having this child. Sam was a miracle wrapped up in flesh and blood, and the thought that he and Mara might never have created him was unthinkable. And yet, if Sam did not exist, Mara would be well. He could get lost in those thoughts, spinning in a circle that had no end.

He’d picked up Sam at Sheila’s that evening after visiting Mara. Once or twice a week, he wanted to visit his wife alone, so Sheila would keep Sam longer. Thank God, he’d been able to work things out with his mother-in-law. They’d had a long lunchtime meeting the day after the spanking incident, when their heads had been cooler and their hearts more in sync, and they’d worked out a compromise: Sheila would not, under any circumstances, spank Sam. Instead, she’d call Liam when she had a disciplinary problem, and they would think of a solution together. He’d asked Sheila to reward Sam’s good behavior and not focus too much on the bad. Although she’d looked annoyed at taking parenting advice from him, the plan seemed to be working. He hadn’t heard from Sheila again about the matter in the two weeks since their conversation.

His phone rang, and he quickly logged off the internet and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Hi.” It was Joelle’s voice, and he felt the return of anger in a rush.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

“I spoke with Carlynn Shire about Mara, and—”

“Why? You’ve always pooh-poohed the idea of Carlynn Shire,” he said, truly bewildered by Joelle’s behavior. “Your parents—”

“I can’t explain it,” Joelle interrupted him. “I just wanted to talk with her about the situation, and when I did, she thought she might be able to help. I didn’t think it would hurt to at least let her meet Mara.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You’re the one who’s always saying she’s probably a quack, that she didn’t really save your life.”

“I know. But what if I was wrong?” Joelle asked. “Mara believed so strongly in the power of the mind to heal the body. You know that. Don’t you think she would have wanted us to try everything we could?”

“Mara
has
no mind,” Liam said, and then winced. That was not true. At least, he didn’t want it to be true. “I think it’s abusive,” he said. “You subjected Mara to something she didn’t ask for. I don’t like the idea of some stranger coming in there and—”

“Mara hasn’t asked for
any
of the treatment she’s received,” Joelle reasoned. “She’s dependent on those people who love her to make treatment choices for her.”

She was right, of course, but that didn’t stop him.

“I don’t want you bringing
anyone
to see Mara without my permission,” he said.

“Didn’t you notice Mara seemed a bit more alert when you were there?” Joelle asked.

He scowled into the phone. “No, I didn’t. As a matter of fact, I think she was completely worn out from her visit with you and Carlynn Shire. She didn’t touch her, did she?”

“She massaged her hands with baby lotion.”

Why that seemed like such an invasion, he couldn’t say. He felt as he had when Sheila told him she’d spanked Sam. Mara was as
trusting and vulnerable as a little child, ignorant of everything going on around her, and she would smile through any assault.

“She thinks she can help, Liam.”

“That’s totally ridiculous.”

“You may be right, but she’s a nice woman and maybe she can do something we don’t understand. What would it hurt to let her try? She wants to see Mara again. And she asked that you be there, as well.”

“The answer is no, Joelle,” he said. “No, I won’t be there, and no, you may not bring her to see Mara. Don’t ask me again. I have enough to deal with right now.” He hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

He walked from the den to the bedroom, still angry, and with an added sense of having escaped from a great threat. If he yelled at Joelle, he was safe. That aching longing he had for her, the love and admiration, didn’t exist when he was chewing her out. And he thought now that he would be able to sleep tonight.

Around three in the morning, though, he woke up with a start, feeling much as he had the night after they’d made love, when he’d turned away from her with the hope of saving himself.

San Francisco, 1956

L
ISBETH WAS TERRIFIED.
D
R
. P
ETERSON HAD BORROWED
G
ABRIEL
Johnson’s tennis racket the day before and now wanted her to return it to him at San Francisco General. That was why she was locked in the stall in one of the first-floor ladies’ rooms at the hospital during her lunch break. The tennis racket rested against the tiled wall while Lisbeth stared at herself in the mirror, trying to get her breathing under control.

What would she say to him? She’d never had a problem talking to him over the phone, and lately their conversations had grown even longer. But over the phone her voice did not give away her size.

She thought about Gabriel often when she was in bed at night, and she talked to him in her head all the time when she was alone. She told him everything about herself, which made it hard for her to remember that he did not actually know her as well as she felt he did.

A few weeks ago, he’d suggested she call him Gabriel instead of Mr. Johnson.

“I’d feel strange calling you by your first name,” she’d said.

“I want you to,” he’d answered in that deep voice that she loved. He had this way of making her feel like his equal, as though that was very important to him. As though the chief accountant of a big hospital and a medical secretary were on the same level.

“Okay, Gabriel.” She’d smiled, relieved, actually, since she called him that in her imagination all the time and was always afraid she’d slip while talking to him on the phone.

Her fantasies of Gabriel had become so intense, such a glorious part of her quiet existence, and she feared they would come to an end once he saw her. Touching up her makeup in the ladies’-room mirror, she pressed powder to her forehead and nose and rubbed a circle of rouge onto her cheeks. She didn’t want to look as though she’d made herself up especially for this meeting, so she skipped a fresh application of lipstick. She patted her petal curls into place. It was a stylish haircut, but what did it matter when the face that it framed was as round as a bowling ball? In her fantasies, she would meet Gabriel Johnson after losing sixty or seventy pounds. When, exactly, that would be she didn’t know. In the past six months, she’d added another ten pounds to her two hundred, and she was beginning to have difficulty finding a uniform for the doctor’s office that fit her.

She thought of simply leaving the racket with someone at the hospital’s reception desk, but as much as she didn’t want to be seen by Gabriel, she was longing to see him, to see the man who had facelessly filled her fantasies and her dreams for the past year and a half.

The woman at the information desk was an elderly volunteer, and the name tag attached to her collar read Madge.

Lisbeth smiled at her. “I’m looking for Gabriel Johnson’s office,” she said.

“Is he the bookkeeper?” the woman asked.

“The chief accountant. Yes.”

“That’s the business office.” The woman pointed a misshapen finger toward the bank of elevators in the corridor. “Second floor. Take the elevator and turn right, and his office is there on the corner.”

Lisbeth felt nauseous in the elevator, and she knew the perspiration was returning to her nose and forehead. By the time she turned the knob of the door to the business office, her hand was shaking.

There was no one sitting at the reception desk when she walked into the business office. She stood, waiting, for an uncomfortable moment, the racket at her side, before spotting an open door halfway down a narrow hallway.

“Hello?” she called, hoping the person in that office would hear her, but there was no response.

She walked down the hall and knocked on the open door, peering inside the room at the same time. A colored man sat at a desk, and he looked up at the sound of her knock.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m looking for Gabriel Johnson.”

The man had been writing something, but now he set down his pen.

“I’m Gabriel Johnson,” he said.

“No—” She stopped herself. She wanted to tell him that he couldn’t possibly be Gabriel. She wanted to tell him he was wrong, or to ask him if he was playing some sort of trick on her. But that voice. She recognized it, the depth and gentleness of it. She was stunned beyond speech, though. Gabriel—
her
Gabriel—was colored?

“Ah, I see you have my racket,” he said, standing up. “You must be Lisbeth.”

“Yes.” She tried to smile, holding the racket toward him. Her fantasy instantly evaporated, leaving a huge empty space inside her chest. She refused to think of herself as a bigot, but a romance with a colored man was out of the question. Her knees were full
of jelly, and she was glad when he motioned toward the chair opposite his desk.

“Please, sit down, Lisbeth.”

She handed him the racket, then sank into the chair. Suddenly, she understood why Gabriel played tennis on Dr. Peterson’s private court. He would not be welcome at most of the courts around town.

Gabriel sat down again, resting his racket on the desk. He smiled at her, and she saw so much in that smile. She could see an apology there, and understanding, along with a deep well of sadness.

“I should have told you in our phone conversations that I was a Negro,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “I should have told you that I was fat.” The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them, and she laughed out loud at herself.

Gabriel laughed, too. In fact, he roared, then shook his head, taking off his horn-rimmed glasses to wipe his eyes. “I would say you are every bit as lovely as your voice,” he said.

What else could he say? she thought. He was trying to take the awkwardness out of the moment. She was certain, though, that he felt the same sting of disappointment at seeing her that she felt at seeing him.

“Hey,” he said suddenly. “I wanted to show this to you.” Lifting a framed photograph from his desk, he handed it to her. It was a picture of a sailboat, and it looked very much like the sloop her family had once owned. She looked from the picture back to him.

“Is this yours?” she asked. “The boat you told me about?”

He nodded. “What do you think?”

“It’s a beauty,” she said. “It reminds me of the boat my father used to take me out on.”

“I love it,” he said, taking the picture back from her and placing it again on his desk. “I feel so free out on the water.”

She remembered that feeling well, although she’d not
experienced it in a long time. “Where did you learn to sail?” she asked.

“My father taught me, too,” he said. “On an estuary in Oakland.”

She remembered him telling her he was originally from Oakland, but now she pictured his childhood home in the section of that city where the colored people lived.

“Is that why you went in the navy?” she asked, recalling that he had told her he’d served in the war.

“Yes,” he said. “You have a good memory. And I recall that you grew up along the Seventeen Mile Drive. And you have a twin sister.”

“Right.”

“Identical or fraternal?”

“Identical,” she said, although it felt like a lie, since she was nearly twice her sister’s size.

“Amazing to think there are two of you.” He smiled. “Are you alike in other ways, as well?”

Lisbeth bit her lip. She did not want to talk about Carlynn. She did not want to draw attention to the twin who had always received it. Yet, she longed to pour her heart out to this man who seemed so interested in her. She drew in a breath.

“We are nothing alike,” she said. “Carlynn’s a doctor. She graduated from medical school last June, and now she’s an intern here at SF General.”

“So, you both have an interest in medicine.”

It seemed ridiculous that he was comparing Carlynn’s being a doctor to her being a secretary in a physician’s office, but he was actually right. She loved it when Dr. Peterson talked to her about his patients, especially when he spoke of those he seemed unable to help, and she often pressed him for the medical details of those cases. Sometimes, she wanted to ask Carlynn to come over and just sit with one of those patients in the waiting room, just touch his or her hand gently, to see if perhaps she could make a difference.

“Yes, we do,” Lisbeth said. “But I could never be a doctor.”

“Why not?” Gabriel asked.

“I’m just not…as smart as she is. I know that supposedly we have the same brain. But somehow…she’s just smarter than me, that’s all. We went to different schools.” She didn’t want to sound small and bitter. Besides, education was not the primary difference between herself and Carlynn. “And she has this…ability…” She spoke slowly, not certain how much to say. Carlynn was still very secretive about her gift. “She will be a gifted physician,” Lisbeth said simply.

“I don’t think you give yourself enough credit,” Gabriel said. “Whenever I talk to you, I’m struck by how concerned and well educated you are about Lloyd’s patients.”

“Thank you,” she said, touched by his kindness. Then, suddenly, she shook her head.

He leaned forward on his desk. “Why are you shaking your head?”

Don’t cry,
she told herself.
Don’t cry in front of him.

“It’s just that—” She stopped herself short. Could she say this to him? She had little to lose at this point. “You’re so nice. And I…talking with you on the phone…I’ve allowed myself to imagine…well, we have common interests, and so I allowed myself to foolishly think we might…”

“Me, too.” His smile was warm, his teeth very white against his milk chocolate-colored skin, and he suddenly looked beautiful to her. “Though I guess I knew that when you met me, it would be over. I’m a Negro, to begin with. I’m what…ten years older than you?”

“I’m twenty-seven,” she said.

He groaned. “Eleven years older, then.”

And I’m fat,
she wanted to add, but managed to stop herself.

“Is it impossible?” he asked.

She raised her eyes quickly to his. “You mean…?”

“Is it impossible for us to go out together?” He looked ill at ease for the first time, and she felt like hugging him to make
him comfortable again. “I mean,” he continued, “how would you feel about that? Would it be awkward for you to be seen with me?”

She shook her head. “No.” She hoped she was being honest in her answer. “No. I wouldn’t care.”

“What about your family?”

Oh, God.
“My sister wouldn’t care,” she said, hoping that was the truth, as well. “But my mother…” Her voice trailed off.

“Your mother?” he prompted.

“She thinks…well, she sees…” She started to say colored people, but he had referred to himself as a Negro, and she decided she should use his language. “She sees Negroes as servants or manual laborers.”

He nodded. “Not unusual,” he said, and she picked up a hint of some old, deep anger in his voice.

“But—” she shrugged with a laugh “—she already detests me, so I guess I shouldn’t worry about that.”

“Detests you? Why on earth?”

“I…oh, it’s a long story.”

He suddenly picked up his phone and pressed the intercom button.

“Nancy?” he said. “No interruptions.”

Hanging up the phone, he stood and closed his office door until it was almost completely shut, but not quite, and she was grateful for his sense of propriety. He sat down again.

“When is Lloyd expecting you back?” he asked.

She looked at her watch. “At around one,” she said.

Gabriel picked up his phone again, and with a jolt, Lisbeth noticed he was missing two fingers on his left hand, both the pinkie and ring fingers. They’d been sliced off right down to his hand, and she wondered what he had been through. Had he lost them as a child or an adult?

Gabriel dialed a number. “Lloyd? It’s Gabe,” he said. “Lisbeth Kling is here and she’ll be late getting back to you. Yes, it’s my fault. I need to keep her here a while longer. We have
some things to discuss.” He smiled across the desk at her. “Sure, thanks.” He hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair.

“Now we have time for your long story,” he said.

She told him everything, letting out the secrets and sadness of her childhood years. She spoke of her love for her sister despite her feelings of bitterness and resentment, emotions she usually tried hard to keep hidden. She cried, but only a little, when she spoke about how hard it was to go home these days. She
needed
to spend time at Cypress Point, she told him, the way someone else might need food or medicine, but she had not yet figured out a way to prevent her mother’s insults from ruining those visits for her.

Never before had she chronicled the hurt in her life in quite this way. She’d never allowed it to spill out to another soul. Gabriel’s face was full of sympathy and understanding, and she had the feeling he had experienced the same sort of ostracism she had. Not from a mother, perhaps, but from the world at large. Somehow, though, he had overcome it, and she wondered if he might be able to teach her how to do the same. His gentleness, his attentive listening, was seductive and comforting, and by the time she had finished her story she was in love—with Gabriel the man, not Gabriel the fantasy.

“Don’t answer now,” he said as he walked her to the door after their long conversation. “But I would love to go out with you. Sailing, or out to dinner, or just about anywhere. Do you have a phone?”

“I can only use my landlord’s phone in an emergency,” she said, thrilled, but by this point, not surprised, by his invitation. “I can call from Dr. Peterson’s office, though.”

Stepping back to his desk, Gabriel jotted down a phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to her.

“I’m giving you an open invitation,” he said. “If you decide you want to go out with me, please call. I’ll leave it up to you.”

“Dr. Kling. Call the front desk.” The voice came over the hospital loudspeaker, and Carlynn looked up from the chart on
which she was writing. She was accustomed to being paged these days, now that she was an intern. The pages were often from Alan, of course, but he was good about using the paging system for business only, keeping their personal relationship out of the hospital. They had been dating for six months now, and after their initial conversation about her “gift,” Alan had found ways to bring her in on cases. A couple of times he’d even spirited her into patients’ rooms in the middle of the night so that she could sit with them while they slept, her hands on their bodies. She’d discovered, though, the mere touching of the patients alone did not seem nearly as effective as when she was able to look into their eyes and speak with them. She and Alan were both fascinated by trying to determine when her skills would work and when they wouldn’t. What made the difference? She truly could not say.