The Shadow Wife

“I don’t have to bury the placenta under it, do I?” She tried to keep the teasing tone out of her voice, but wasn’t sure she had succeeded. She decided she would wait a while before admitting to them that she’d contacted the healer. She could only handle so much of her parents’ eccentricities at one time.

“No, of course not,” her father said. “We’ll go down and get you a cutting from it.”

“She really should get it herself,” her mother argued.

“You guys are too much.” Joelle laughed. “Is the soup ready yet?”

As she lay in bed that night, Joelle found herself thinking of Big Sur and the Cabrial Commune. It was more the smell of her mother’s vegetable soup than the discussion about the cypress that brought the memories to mind, and she felt a yearning to go back there, to the place she’d spent her first ten years of life. The troubles of the outside world had been nonexistent there, and the world inside the commune consisted only of friends and forest and fog. It was the place where her father and the midwife, Felicia, had taken the time to dig a hole and plant a cypress to ensure her future. She knew exactly where her cypress was planted—near the northwestern corner of the cabin that served as the schoolhouse. Each of the kids who’d been born at the commune knew which cypress was theirs, and all mysticism aside, it had been a pretty nice custom.

She’d been to the Big Sur area several times in the last twenty-four years, but never to Cabrial. Rusty had shown no interest in visiting the place where she’d grown up, and each time they drove down Highway One to Big Sur, she would pass the dirt road leading to the commune with an unspoken longing.

Maybe, after she had the baby, she would go.

26

San Francisco, 1959

“SHE’S MY RIGHT ARM,” LLOYD PETERSON SAID, HIS HAND ON Lisbeth’s shoulder. “I’m not sure if I can get along without her that long.”

He was looking across the reception desk at Gabriel, who had come to the office as they were closing up to plead with Lloyd to let Lisbeth take a vacation. Lisbeth had already told Gabriel she couldn’t possibly take a whole week away from the office in the middle of the summer, when she was the only girl working, but Gabriel was not one to give up easily.

“You need a break,” he’d told her as they walked back to his place from the cinema the night before. “You work too hard.” They’d just seen Some Like it Hot, during which Gabriel had whispered to her that he’d take her over Marilyn Monroe any day. Those flattering words were still on her mind as she listened to Lloyd and Gabriel’s amiable argument over the possibility of her taking some time off. He wanted to go to the coastal town of Mendocino with her for a week’s vacation. Although Lisbeth longed for a week alone with Gabriel, she knew Lloyd couldn’t spare her. Still she decided to let the two men—the two old friends and tennis partners—duke it out.

“Let’s talk about this over a beer,” Gabriel finally said to Lloyd, who nodded in agreement, and the two of them left her alone to close up the office.

Lisbeth had to smile as the men walked out the door. She doubted Gabriel would win this one, but it was sweet of him to try.

She turned on the radio on her desk, as she always did when she had the office to herself. Switching the station from Lloyd’s favorite, where the Kingston Trio was singing “Tom Dooley,” to the Negro station Gabriel had introduced her to, where the music was earthier and made her want to dance, she set about filing the charts that had been used that day.

Gabriel had become almost fanatical about wanting to take a vacation in Mendocino. He’d been talking about it ever since Alan and Carlynn honeymooned there after their wedding nearly two years earlier. They’d raved about the peace and quiet and the natural beauty of the location, saying how perfect it was for a romantic getaway. It would be different for her and Gabriel, though, Lisbeth knew. Whenever they stayed in a hotel, they had to get two separate rooms. Someday, Gabriel promised her, they would be married. She now wore a spectacular diamond and sapphire ring on her left hand, but they had not yet set a date. She trusted their relationship, its depth and its love, but she knew Gabe still harbored the fear that marriage to him would cost her more than he was worth.

She’d certainly thought about the price she was paying for being with Gabriel. She had not visited Cypress Point since Carlynn’s wedding, and she missed the mansion and the view from the terrace in a way that could cause her actual physical pain. Sometimes at night, she yearned for her old bedroom, where the open windows let in the sound of the waves slapping against the rocky shore.