The Shadow Wife

Delora sent regular checks to Carlynn, but none to Lisbeth, saying that Lisbeth was on her own since she had elected not to go to college. She had paid for Lisbeth’s secretarial school, but the money for her had stopped the moment she’d graduated. Delora, however, still sent Carlynn far more than she needed for her school and living expenses, and Carlynn insisted on giving her a portion of it. Lisbeth had long ago stopped arguing about it. She needed the money and figured she deserved it just as much as Carlynn did.

“Thank you.” She accepted the bills from Carlynn and slipped them into her own purse.

“Did the man call today?” Carlynn asked. “Dr. Peterson’s tennis partner?”

Lisbeth shook her head, her cheeks turning pink. She’d told Carlynn about Gabriel’s phone calls, nearly every word of them. But she had not told her his name or that he worked at SF General. Carlynn might try to get a look at him then, and Lisbeth didn’t want to hear that he chewed his nails at his desk or was only five feet tall. She preferred her fantasies to reality.

“No, he didn’t,” she said with a scowl. “They’re not playing tonight, so I probably won’t get to talk to him until Tuesday.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Carlynn said. Despite her beauty, Carlynn had no more dates than Lisbeth, and she didn’t even have the time for fantasies. She was married to medical school.

Lisbeth would have liked to talk more about Gabriel, but Carlynn suddenly set down her sandwich and turned to look out the window, letting out a great sigh.

“I don’t think I can eat,” she said.

“What’s the matter?” Lisbeth asked.

Carlynn returned her gaze to her sister, the gleam of tears in her eyes. “Oh, this little girl at the hospital.”

Lisbeth could have guessed. Carlynn was way too soft. “Carly, honey, you’re not going to survive being a doctor if every patient upsets you so much,” she said.

“I know, I know. And it’s getting harder every day.” She leaned across the table as though someone might overhear her. “The more I get to actually work with patients, the harder it is for me not to…you know…help them in my own way.”

Lisbeth knew her sister had been careful to keep her gift under wraps at the hospital. She didn’t want to be seen as different or better than the other students, and she certainly didn’t want to be thought of as crazy.

“What’s wrong with the little girl?” Lisbeth asked.

“She has a very serious case of pneumonia, probably fatal because it’s complicated by a congenital deformity of her lungs.” Carlynn looked down at her sandwich, her nose wrinkled. “She’s eight, and she’s dying. We visit her on rounds every day, and one or two of us listen to her lungs and talk about her as though she wasn’t there, and just watch her die.” Carlynn looked pained, and Lisbeth wondered, as she had a number of times before, if being a doctor was going to take too much out of her sister.

“And you think you can help?” Lisbeth asked.

“I think I should at least try. But I don’t dare. I’ve thought of sneaking into her room at night, but if I got caught I’d have a hard time explaining what I was doing there. She’s still conscious and able to talk. She’d tell someone I’d been there.”

Lisbeth knew that Carlynn had, on a few occasions, been able to spend enough time with a patient to touch him, or, as she would say, to “send her energy coursing through his body,” but she’d done it quietly, surreptitiously, and only with unconscious patients. She’d told Lisbeth about overhearing a few of her fellow students talk about how strange she was, and Lisbeth knew she was terrified of fueling that assessment of her.

“You have to find a way,” Lisbeth said. She knew her sister would never be able to live with herself unless she did.

“How?” Carlynn wrapped up her sandwich, probably saving it for later. Lisbeth’s was already gone.

“What about during those rounds you were talking about?” Lisbeth asked. “Can you get near her?”

“Only if the teaching physician chooses me to listen to her lungs. But that would only take a few seconds.”

“Not if you can’t seem to hear well. Maybe your stethoscope is broken, or for some other reason you need to listen harder and longer than the other students.”

Carlynn rolled her eyes. “They’ll kick me out of med school,” she said. “They already think I’m weird.”

“Let’s see.” Lisbeth lifted her hands, palms up, in the air. “On the one hand, you’ll be seen as weird, but the girl might live. On the other hand, you’ll be seen as a good and normal doctor, but the girl will probably die.”

“Ugh.” Carlynn wrinkled her nose again. “Don’t say it that way.”