The Shadow Wife

“No, don’t come,” Liam said. “She asked me specifically to tell you not to come. Right now she’s well taken care of. Everyone here knows her and will keep an eye on her.” He recalled one of the nurses telling him that Joelle might be out of work for six weeks. “I’m not sure what her recovery will be like, though,” he said to John. “She’ll probably need some help when she gets home. That might be a better time to come down.”

“Will you keep us posted?” John asked.

“Yes, and she should have a phone in her room later,” Liam said. “I’ll call you when I get the number.”

That seemed to satisfy her father. Liam hung up the phone and sat staring at his blank computer screen.

Why hadn’t they used a condom? Two social workers, two intelligent people in their thirties. Two idiots. Yet, she had been so famously infertile, and they both knew the other was disease-free. A condom, had they stopped to think about using one, would have seemed superfluous. But if they had stopped to think, it wouldn’t have happened at all. And he knew they had both carefully, intentionally, not stopped to think.

He’d needed Joelle so badly that night. He’d needed to know he was still a man, just like that sixty-year-old man he’d seen who had the wife with Alzheimer’s.

He would visit Mara that afternoon. She would make her puppy-dog squeals when he walked into the room, and he knew exactly what she would be saying with those sounds. I remember you, she would say. You’re the one who loves me. You’re the one I can trust, no matter what. You’re my husband, in sickness and in health.

24

San Francisco, 1957

LISBETH SAT ON THE CABIN TOP OF GABRIEL’S SLOOP, MUNCHING on a pear. For the first time in her life, she did not crave candy and ice cream and cookies. Although she was dressed in knee-high rubber boots, bib overalls over a jersey, a yellow slicker, hat and gloves, she could actually feel the difference in her body beneath all that gear. Certainly, she was still larger than she wanted to be, but there was some unmistakable definition to her waistline, and although her hips and thighs were hardly slender, she could fit into the overalls without looking like an elephantine version of the pear she was eating. She had forgotten how it felt not to be tired all the time from carrying around so much extra weight.

She and Gabriel had been going together for six months, but they’d only been able to start sailing about a month ago, when the wintry San Francisco cold began to soften around the edges, and they could get out on the water without either freezing or capsizing. Their inability to sail had not interfered with their dating, however. They’d explored San Francisco together as though they were tourists, and met often for dinner at a restaurant after work. They had a few favorites, especially in the primarily Italian North Beach area where Gabriel lived, where the beats read their poetry in the coffeehouses, and where no one looked twice at a Negro man and a white woman walking or dancing together. She learned to play whist and bridge in the dark, smoke-filled clubs, and she fell in love with jazz and rhythm and blues.

She and Gabriel could talk all day and all night and never run out of things to say. He told her about growing up in the English Village section of Oakland, where a white Realtor had purchased the house his family had wanted and then transferred the title to Gabriel’s father, which had been the only way a Negro family could get into that neighborhood. His mother had been a housekeeper, his father a porter on the Southern Pacific railroad, where just about every man Gabriel knew worked. His father had died on one of the trains when Gabriel was eleven years old, killed by a fellow crew member during a game of craps.

Gabriel’s family had little money after that, and he’d worked his way through school and college. He’d met his wife, Cookie, at Berkeley, and they’d been married eight years when she discovered the lump in her breast. By the way Gabriel spoke of his late wife, Lisbeth knew he’d adored her, yet she never felt he was comparing her to Cookie. Gabriel knew how to focus on the future without letting the past get in the way, and he was teaching her, through his example, to live the same way. The fact that they both had suffered in their childhoods and their early adult years certainly drew them together, but it was their yearning to create a future that would be peaceful, bright and full of love that sealed that bond.