The Shadow Wife (30 page)

“Her old man is the guy sitting over there.” Penny pointed. “Johnny Angel.”

“Johnny Angel?” Carlynn tried not to laugh.

“His real name is something else, but that’s what everyone
calls him,” Penny said. “I’ve slept with him a few times, too. He’s very young, but the young ones can go all night long, if you know what I mean.”

“You slept with him while his wife is
pregnant?
”

“Her suggestion,” Penny said. “It’s a different world here, Carly.”

A large woman with long, frizzy gray hair walked into the cabin and climbed over the bench to sit next to Penny.

“How’s your voice today, Penny?” the woman asked.

“Same as always,” Penny said. “Felicia, this is my old friend Carlynn. Felicia’s the midwife here. She’ll be delivering Ellen’s baby.”

“How far along is she?” Carlynn asked the midwife.

“Carlynn’s a doctor,” Penny whispered to Felicia.

“She’s thirty-eight weeks.” Felicia’s voice was loud and commanding. She dished a large serving of vegetables and rice onto her plate. “I think she’s going to be early, though,” she added. “She said she was having some back pain today.”

Carlynn nodded. That explained the halfhearted laughter.

Felicia looked across the table at her as she began to eat. “Do you have any antibiotics on you?” she asked. “River has the clap and he ran out.”

“No, sorry, I don’t,” she said, although she had brought some just in case she needed them to treat Penny. She would leave them for the guy with gonorrhea if Penny didn’t need them.

“Hey, Pen!” Terence called from one of the other tables. “Since you have company tonight, would you like to sleep at my cabin? Give your friend some privacy?”

“No, thanks,” Penny said as loudly as she could, to be heard over the chatter and crying babies. “I want to be with her.”

“Oh, I get it.” Terence smiled, and Carlynn grimaced.

“It’s not like that,” she said to the man. “I’m a married woman.”

Everyone laughed as though she’d said something hilarious, and she smiled.

“Let me start treating you,” Carlynn said when she and Penny had returned to Cornflower. She was anxious to see how Penny would respond to her touch. “I’d feel so good if I could get you back to New York and into that beauty parlor musical.”

“Beauty parlor musical?” Penny frowned at her.

“Didn’t you say you were going to be in a musical about—”

“Oh,
Hair!
” Penny interrupted her, laughing. “Oh my God, Carlynn, a beauty parlor musical! You’re too much.” She could hardly catch her breath for laughing, and Carlynn joined in, not sure what the joke was.

“
Hair
is about Vietnam, and love and diversity and people taking care of each other. It is decidedly
not
about a beauty parlor. God, I love you, Carly.”

“Now don’t start that.” Carlynn laughed. “I am
not
sleeping with you. No lesbian stuff.”

“Right, you’re a married woman.”

“Are you making fun of me?” Carlynn grinned. She was a fish out of water, but felt no discomfort at being the brunt of the jokes, as long as Penny was the joker. “Come here,” she said, pointing to one of the mattresses on the bedroom floor. “Lie down and get comfortable.”

Penny lay down and Carlynn sat on the mattress next to her, taking her hands. “Tell me about when it started.”

“Is this how you do it?” Penny asked. “You talk, like a shrink? I’ve been to a shrink already. He was useless.”

“I’m not a shrink, honey,” Carlynn said. “Now just talk to me. How did it start?”

Penny cried as she reported waking up one morning without a voice. Carlynn tuned out the outside world, the shouts of children, the occasional laughter from an adult, the guitar music that was floating in through the window from somewhere nearby. Closing her eyes, she let Penny’s words come inside her. This was going to work. She could feel it in Penny’s hands, in the absolute concentration in her face. Thank God. She did not
want to disappoint her old friend. It might take some time, but Penny would get her voice back.

The next day, when the world was again white with fog, Ellen Liszt’s cries filled the commune, and everyone knew she was in labor.

“Should I help?” Carlynn asked Penny as she stared out the bedroom window in the direction of the cries.

Penny shook her head. “No. Believe me, they don’t want a doctor in there,” she said. “They don’t particularly trust doctors here.”

Except to hand out antibiotics when they contract a sexually transmitted disease, Carlynn thought.

She spent the morning working with Penny some more, listening to her and gently placing her hands on her throat. At lunch that afternoon, Penny said something in a perfectly natural voice and everyone turned to look at her. Instantly, the whisper was back, but Penny got up and did a little jig across the wood-plank floor of the cabin.

Walking back to Cornflower, they passed Rainbow Cabin and could hear an occasional cry, more of a scream really, from the mother-to-be inside. Johnny Angel chopped wood at the side of the cabin without seeming to notice the two women passing by.

“I thought you said the men help deliver their babies?” Carlynn asked.

“Most do,” Penny said. “But Johnny’s freaking out, I think. Poor kid.”

She worked with Penny’s voice for an hour, then sat with her on the sofa in the small living room, sewing patches on several pairs of Penny’s well-worn jeans. Suddenly, there was the sound of steps on the front porch, and Johnny Angel burst into the cabin. His face was ashen, his hands raised in panic.

“The baby’s not breathing!” he said.

Carlynn dropped her sewing and ran toward the door, Penny
and Johnny close behind her. “Which way?” she asked as she stepped off the porch into the fog.

Johnny grabbed her arm and ran with her toward the cabin he shared with his young girlfriend, but he stopped, frozen at the front steps.

“In there.” He pointed inside.

Carlynn looked at him squarely. “Your girlfriend will need you,” she said, taking him by the wrist and nearly dragging him inside with her.

Felicia was on her knees on the mattress, crouched between the young mother’s legs, holding a bluish baby. Carlynn dropped to her own knees beside her.

“The cord was wrapped around her neck,” Felicia said, handing the infant to her.

Carlynn placed the baby girl on the bloodstained newspapers that covered the mattress, then bent over her to perform CPR, covering the tiny nose and mouth with her own mouth, gently blowing air into her lungs, then pressing with two of her fingers on the infant’s breastbone.

“I’ve tried CPR,” said Felicia, but Carlynn continued puffing and pressing. After a moment, she felt Felicia’s hand on her shoulder.

“She’s gone,” Felicia said gently. “She’s gone.”

“No!” Ellen cried from the bed, struggling to raise herself up, trying to see. “No, please!”

Holding the baby with one hand on her back, the other against her chest, Carlynn lifted her until her own lips touched the infant’s temple. Shutting her eyes, she willed every ounce of her strength and energy and breath and life into the child. Her body began to rock, very slowly, in time with her breathing. She couldn’t have said how long she sat that way, rocking, breathing, holding the child between her hands, but after a while, she felt a flutter beneath her right hand, a twisting of tiny muscles beneath her left, and when she opened her eyes, the baby girl let out a whimper, then a wail. Carlynn became aware of her
surroundings again as if rising up from a dream, and by the time she wrapped the baby in the flannel blanket Felicia handed her, the child was pink and beautiful.

She found herself strangely reluctant to relinquish the baby, and she held her for another moment, running her hand over the infant’s dark hair before reaching forward to hand her to Ellen. Then she walked outside, still dazed and a little dizzy from her efforts, to find that the fog had burned off, and sunlight followed her to Penny’s cabin.

She slept the rest of that afternoon and most of the following day, and when she awakened, the air outside the window was growing dark. Penny sat on the other mattress and told her the baby was nursing well and appeared healthy.

“They named her Shanti Joy Angel,” she said, her voice a whisper.

Carlynn giggled.

“They’re all on to you now, Carly,” Penny said. “A few of them had heard of Carlynn Shire, but they hadn’t made the connection to you till now. They were all ready to come to you with their sniffles and rashes and bellyaches, but I told them that’s not what you’re here for.”

“Thanks,” Carlynn said. “I’m sorry, though, that I lost time for treating you.”

“That hardly matters in light of things,” Penny said. “You must be starving. You haven’t eaten since yesterday. I brought you some food from dinner. Does it always take this much out of you? The healing?”

Carlynn stretched and smiled. “That little baby took everything I had, Penny,” she said. “But I’m fine now, and after lunch we’ll get back to work on you. How long have I been sleeping?”

“You arrived Saturday. The baby was born yesterday afternoon, and now, it’s Monday night.”

“I can’t believe it.” Carlynn sat up. “I’m a lazy lump.”

“I brought you some rice and veggies,” Penny said. “They’re still a little bit warm from dinner. You ready for them?”

Carlynn nodded. “But then I have to find a phone somewhere, Penny,” she said. “I have to call Alan and tell him I’ll be here a few more days.”

“The nearest phone is miles and miles away,” Penny said. “I tell you what. Everyone’s agreed that you should have the next shower. The water’s heated up and ready for you. So, how about you get up, go use the shower, have some food, and meanwhile, I’ll borrow your car and go call Alan. How’s that sound?”

She would have liked to speak with Alan herself, but the thought of a shower, food and a little more time in bed sounded even more appealing at that moment. “All right,” she said. “Oh! But my car is on empty.”

“I’ll borrow Terence’s van, then. Just give me the number.”

She wrote down Alan’s numbers at both the center and their row house, as well as Lisbeth and Gabriel’s, in case Penny had trouble finding Alan. Then she dragged herself out of bed, picked up one of Penny’s flashlights from the floor and headed outside, walking toward the latrine.

The rest of the week went quickly, and it was a week Carlynn knew she had needed for herself. She’d had no vacations the past few years. The center was truly her life, and she had never considered taking a break from it, but the peace here, the lack of contact with newspapers and television and the rest of the world, was rejuvenating beyond anything she might have expected. She enjoyed holding the baby whose life she had, perhaps, saved, and the thought of leaving the infant, of never seeing her again, was distressing in a way she couldn’t understand. Everyone at the commune called the baby’s survival a miracle, but she was not sure. All she knew was that she could now hold in her arms a beautiful little girl who would probably not have survived had she not been at the commune. Maybe that had been the reason for Penny losing her voice, everyone said, to draw Carlynn here at that exact moment, to make her part of some huge, cosmic
plan. Carlynn neither knew nor cared if their rationale was the truth. That sort of thinking only annoyed the scientist in her.

Penny’s voice came back in force on Thursday morning, and Thursday night there was a celebration around the bonfire in honor of Carlynn Shire, the straight woman doctor who turned down marijuana and hashish and LSD and cheap wine, who had given them Shanti Joy and had allowed them to hear Penny’s true voice in song for the first time.

Lisbeth was typing letters for Carlynn when Alan walked into the reception office at the Carlynn Shire Medical Center the following afternoon. He stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips.

“When the heck is Carlynn coming home?” he asked.

Lisbeth turned to look at him. She understood Alan’s frustration. She, too, felt the void Carlynn left by not being at the center, and Alan had to be experiencing it at home, as well. That they were unable to communicate with Carlynn except through that one phone call from Penny made her absence that much more difficult.

“This weekend, I’m sure,” Lisbeth said. “She has to be back by Monday, because her appointments start up again then.”

“I feel like I don’t know her anymore,” Alan said glumly.

“Oh, Alan, that’s silly.”

“I know, but I haven’t gone a day without talking to her in over ten years.”

“Maybe she’s been seduced by communal life,” she joked, but Alan looked so distraught that she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. “Why don’t we go get her?” she suggested.

Alan looked surprised. “I’d thought of that myself, actually, but I don’t even know where she is, exactly.”

“Well, we know she’s in a commune in Big Sur,” Lisbeth said. “We can ask around. The locals will probably know where it is.”

Alan looked at his watch. “All right. If you’re serious, let’s do it.”

“Let me call Gabe and see if he wants to go with us,” she said, excited at the thought of the adventure.

“It’s nearly four o’clock,” Alan said. “I have some notes to finish up. Should we wait until tomorrow?”

“No,” Lisbeth said, suddenly anxious to get on the road. “Let’s go tonight.”

“We won’t be able to find anything in the dark,” Alan protested.

“I know a lodge where we can stay,” Lisbeth said. Lloyd Peterson had once told her about a lodge he liked in Big Sur. “Might be tough to get a room, since it’s a Friday, but let me try. That way, we’d be there bright and early tomorrow and could start looking.”

Alan nodded and smiled. “I can’t wait to see her,” he said. “Thanks, Liz.”

There was a full moon hanging in the sky over the ocean, but the winding road was still too dark for Lisbeth’s comfort. They were nearing Big Sur on Highway One. The little reflectors built into the line in the middle of the road formed a long string of lights, and she and Alan were alone out here. It was spooky, she thought. They didn’t see another car as Lisbeth’s Volkswagen Beetle crept around each curve.