The Shadow Wife

Carlynn drew in a long, deep breath, then let it out in a slow wash of warmth against the baby’s temple. Within seconds, the infant let out a muted whimper. Johnny listened hard, praying for another sound from his child. Carlynn breathed again against the baby’s temple, and suddenly a cry filled the room. Then another. The baby grew pink between the woman’s hands, and in the hushed room, she wrapped a piece of an old flannel blanket around the infant and handed her to Ellen.

Johnny leaned over to nuzzle his woman and his child, a wrenching ache of love and gratitude in his chest, while outside the cabin, the fog rose into the sky, and for the first time in a week, Big Sur was bathed in sunlight.

1

Monterey Peninsula, California, 2001

THERE WERE NIGHTS WHEN JOELLE THOUGHT SHE COULD actually feel the fog rolling in outside her window, cutting her off from the rest of the world. She had trouble sleeping on those nights, and they were frequent during the summer months. She would awaken each morning in the dim interior of her condominium, every window coated in white. She’d moved from Carmel Valley to the seaside village of Carmel two years before, when she was thirty-two and newly divorced, and although she loved the beauty and quaintness of the storybook town, she thought she would never adjust to the closed-in feeling she had in the mornings.

It was more than the fog keeping her awake on this early-June night, however. Joelle turned from side to side in the bed, bunching her pillows up beneath her head, then flattening them again, wondering, as she had for the past couple of weeks, if every twinge low in her belly might be the start of her period.

She had never been regular. Sometimes she could go months without a period; other times she would be surprised by two periods only a week or two apart. The capricious nature of her cycle had made getting pregnant problematic, if not impossible, during the eight years of her marriage to Rusty. The absence of a period would give them hope, which would be dashed when the pregnancy test came up negative. Her failure to conceive eventually led to the end of their marriage. Two years ago, after medical tests had revealed no clear reason for either of them to be unable to procreate, Rusty had told her he’d met someone else and wanted a divorce. Joelle supposed she should have been angry, but in a way it had been a relief. Their marriage had been reduced to one focus, and she was tired of the temperature taking, the urinating on test sticks, the probing of impersonal doctors. The mechanical and regimented nature of their marriage had eaten away at their love for one another.

All the speculation about which of them was the cause of their infertility was answered when Rusty’s new wife had gotten pregnant. He now was the proud father of a little boy, and Joelle knew that she, herself, would never have a child.

Laughter rose up from the street outside. Her bed was in the center of a turret, windows on all sides, and the laughter and chatter surrounded her as though the revelers were beneath her bed. Although her condo was a fair distance from Ocean Avenue, the main street in Carmel, tourists sometimes had to park this far from the heart of the village, and she knew that was what she was hearing—people on vacation, who didn’t have to get up and go to work in the morning, and who had spent the evening exploring the little shops and art galleries and eating in cozy restaurants. She pressed one of her pillows over her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

Her condo was one of two in a charming old white stucco house, which had, at one time, been a one-family residence. It was only three blocks from the ocean and Carmel’s white sand beach, and from the windows of her second-story bedroom and living room, she could watch the sun sink into the Pacific in the evening, when the fog was not too thick. Her neighbors, Tony and Gary, lived in the condo downstairs. Her relationship with the gay couple was affable and neighborly, and she occasionally ate dinner with them or watched a movie on their big-screen TV, but they were in their twenties, and they had each other. Sometimes she could hear their laughter rising up through her floorboards, and she felt her aloneness even more keenly.

The tourists were getting into their cars now, and the sound of slamming doors rose through her windows and slipped beneath her pillow, which she clutched over her head.

It was no use. She was not going to sleep.