The Shadow Wife

“I actually slept out here in the living room because the bedroom was too small for all three of us,” Joelle said. “I slept on a mattress on the floor for ten years.” She shook her head. “That seems so strange to me now.” She walked toward the minuscule bedroom. “This was my parents’ room—the room where I was born.”

Liam shook his head in wonder. “What a childhood you must have had.”

“Come on.” She took his hand. “Let’s find the schoolhouse. That’s where the cypress should be.”

They started walking north again, and it wasn’t long before she spotted the cabin that had housed her first five years of school.

“Yikes, look at it,” she said with a laugh.

The cabin was completely covered with green vines. In order to get the door open, she had to cut some of them with the shears they’d brought along.

“It’s so tiny,” Joelle said when she and Liam walked inside. The cabin was much smaller than her memory of it. Much smaller, but amazingly, it still possessed the cool, musty smell that had greeted her nearly every day when she was growing up. “How did we ever get all the kids in here?” she wondered aloud. There were no desks or chairs now, just empty space.

“Did you do some writing on this?” Liam pointed to the large black chalkboard, still attached to the wall at the front of the room.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. She’d written many sentences and worked out many math problems on that board. “I got a surprisingly good education here, Liam,” she said. “But enough of this. Let’s find the cypress.” She was anxious to see if the tree would still be there, if it had survived, maybe even flourished, on the bluffs of Big Sur.

Liam followed her outside again and around the west side of the schoolhouse. “The cypress is on top of a hill,” she remembered, stepping over the vines that covered the ground.

She spotted the rise of rubbly earth that she’d once considered a hill, and on top of it, a beautiful, bent and twisted Monterey cypress. “Oh my gosh!” she said. “That must be it, but it’s huge!”

“Well,” Liam said, “it’s as old as you are.”

“It’s so pretty,” she said. The cypress was no more than fifteen or sixteen feet tall, but its gnarled and twisted crown of green had to be at least that broad. The direction of the wind was evident in the way the branches reached toward the schoolhouse and away from the Pacific.

They helped each other climb up the small hill. Joelle held open a plastic bag, while Liam took the cuttings from the tree, following the instructions Quinn had given them to make sure they took a bit of the brown stem along with the leaves. “It’s not a good time of year to take a cutting from a cypress and expect it to take root,” Quinn had warned them, but Joelle had wanted to try, anyway, as long as they were here. Quinn had promised to work with the cuttings in the greenhouse at the mansion, doing his best to get them to root.

“Think we have enough?” Liam peered into the bag, and she nodded.

They exchanged a look, then, and she sighed.

“Well,” she said. “I guess we’d better do what we came here to do.”

Quietly, they walked back to the car, both of them sobered by what lay ahead of them. Joelle took the time to wrap the cuttings in wet paper towels and store them in the cooler in Liam’s trunk before taking her place again in the passenger seat.

Neither of them spoke as they bounced back along the rutted dirt road from the commune, but once Liam turned left onto Highway One, he glanced at her.

“How are you going to know the exact spot?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I will,” she admitted. “Carlynn told me the general area, though, and I think that will be good enough.”

She was thoughtful as Liam drove along the twisting highway. This was her first day away from Joli. The baby was still in the hospital, and Joelle spent most of her days with her, feeding her and rocking her now that she was out of the incubator. If all continued to go well, Joli would be coming home January first, the day she was supposed to have been born, and Joelle was anxious to have her daughter home with her, to slip into the routine of motherhood. She’d have three months off. Then Sheila would take care of both Joli and Sam, and Joelle was immensely grateful to Mara’s mother for allowing herself to become attached to her baby.

Joelle and Liam usually visited Mara together these days, although once a week or so, Joelle encouraged Liam to go by himself. She knew he still needed that time alone with his wife.

“I think that must be it,” Joelle said, leaning forward in the car, pointing ahead of them toward the hairpin turn in the distance.

“Man, I would not want to drive off a cliff from that height,” Liam said with a shudder.

“We’ll have to try to park somewhere and walk over to it,” Joelle said. “What about on that straight part of the road?”

“There?” Liam pointed ahead of them.

“Right.”

“We’ll still be taking up half the lane,” Liam said.

“But people will be able to see the car, at least,” she said. “It’ll be all right, don’t you think?”