The Shadow Wife

Even though he had not brought his guitar to their last meeting in Mara’s room, he had to admit that the visit had been almost fun. He’d brought a couple of tapes that he and Mara had made of their performances, instead. They’d listened to the music while Carlynn did whatever she was doing to Mara’s hands, and the songs brought back memories of various concerts and made him and Joelle laugh again. The laughter had seemed alien the first week, when he and Joelle obediently talked about their memories of being together with Mara. How long had it been since they’d laughed together? But last week had been better. Joelle didn’t seem like so much of a stranger, or an enemy, or, as Carlynn had pointed out to him weeks earlier, an evil person to be avoided. She seemed actually quite harmless, and it felt okay to enjoy his time with her as long as it was to help Mara. That was how it had been the first year after the aneurysm: he and Joelle had done many, many things together, all in the name of helping Mara. It wasn’t until they did something just for themselves that their togetherness felt wrong.

Joelle was back at work now, a week sooner than her doctor’s recommendation, but she seemed fine. Pregnancy looked good on her. There was something about her small size and long hair and the clothes she was wearing, which drew attention to her expanding middle, that led everyone to talk about how cute she looked. Was he the only person who thought she also looked very, very sexy? He’d always found something provocative in her petite body and in the way her long dark hair fell over her breasts. He could still remember the weight of that hair on his chest and his thighs and the feeling of it in his hands. That memory would come to him at the most unexpected and inappropriate times—when he was working with the family of a cancer patient, for example, or in the midst of a meeting with the E.R. staff—and he was annoyed with himself for being unable to control it.

Everyone at the hospital was still speculating about how she came to be pregnant. He speculated right along with them, feigning ignorance. People thought he knew and was keeping it from them, not because he personally had been involved in the conception, but because he and Joelle were good friends. The newest rumor was that she was pregnant through in vitro fertilization with one of her gay neighbors having donated the sperm. He said nothing to dissuade that thinking. But his big worry of late was that Joelle’s baby might look like Sam, with those telltale blond curls.

It upset him that that night would not go away. With Joelle pregnant, that night would always be there, staring him in the face, first in the shape of her pregnancy itself, and later in the form of a child. What his relationship would be to that child, he didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine any relationship at this point.

He’d told Sheila that Joelle was pregnant, not wanting her to find out either by bumping into her or through the grapevine, and again, he pleaded ignorance to knowing how she came to be that way. Sheila, he thought, had eyed him suspiciously.

Now he felt Mara’s eyes on him as he opened the case and pulled out the guitar. Would it upset her to see the instrument that she used to play so well, far better than he ever could, when she was unable to even hold it herself? But there she was, smiling as usual, with no hint of sorrow or distress or anything, really, other than that simple happiness that had become such a part of her.

“Okay, now,” Carlynn said as she stood up from the recliner. “Is that the best chair for you to sit on to play?” She pointed to the straight-back chair and he nodded.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and Joelle admonished him with a teasing look.

“You want to sing with me, Jo?” he asked.

“No way,” she said. She took her seat in the recliner, while Carlynn sat on the bed and began massaging Mara’s hands.

He started with “There But for Fortune,” then played and sang several more songs in a row, and it felt like coming home to him. He no longer cared what this music was doing to Mara. He was in his own world, and it was a good place to be.

He played one of his favorite songs, an upbeat tune that had a zydeco feel to it.

“Oh!” Joelle said in the middle of the song, hands on her belly. “She’s dancing.”

He stopped playing and looked at her. “She?” he asked, and Joelle nodded.

For some reason, he hadn’t thought of the baby as a girl. Or as a boy, either, for that matter. He’d managed to give it no identity whatsoever. But now, as he continued singing, he couldn’t get the image of a curly-haired, blond baby girl out of his mind.

“Play the one you and Mara wrote for me,” Joelle requested when he’d finished that song.

“Only if you’ll sing it with me,” he said.

“Are you out of your mind?” she asked.

“Come on,” he said, although he knew she couldn’t carry a tune. “It’s just a fun song. You don’t have to really be able to sing.”