The Shadow Wife (34 page)

“Have you thought of a name?” Liam asked. His voice sounded thick.

She didn’t answer right away. She had, actually, but it had been a fantasy name, one she could never use because it meant combining her name with Liam’s, and although he had been with her all night and all morning, she didn’t yet trust this change in him.

“You have, haven’t you?” He looked at her quizzically, and she knew her hesitancy had given her away.

“Yes, but I don’t think you’ll like it.”

“What is it?”

“Joli,” she said, looking across the incubator at him, and he broke into a grin.

“I was going to suggest that,” he said.

“Really?” She laughed.

“Did I hear you just name her?” Patty had been working behind Joelle, and now she moved closer to the incubator, pulling the little name card from the plastic holder in the front of the box and withdrawing a marker from her pocket.

Joelle grimaced at Liam. She hadn’t realized the nurse had been close enough to hear.

“We’re naming her Joli,” Liam said firmly. “J-O-L-I. It’s a combination of our names.”

Patty cocked her head at him quizzically. “Are you…?” Her eyes were wide, and she didn’t finish her sentence.

“That’s right,” Liam said with a smile. “I’m this baby’s father.”

C
ARLYNN RESTED HER HEAD AGAINST
Q
UINN’S SHOULDER.
T
HEY
were in their bed at the mansion, and the night was so clear that she could see the stars through the window from where she lay. She’d returned from the hospital a couple of hours ago, exhausted after spending much of the evening visiting Joelle and her new baby. So far, things looked good for that little one. Carlynn had touched her through the portals of the incubator, but only to stroke her twiglike arm. She told Joelle that her touch was no more mystical than her own. And she told her much, much more.

“You’ve wanted to tell her everything from the start, haven’t you?” Quinn asked her now.

“Yes, and I’m not sure why,” Carlynn said. “I remember my sister saying she felt drawn to Joelle when she was an infant, and I felt drawn to her, too.” She tapped her fingers against Quinn’s bare chest. “Are you worried that I told her?” she asked.

Quinn chuckled, and she loved how the sound resonated through his body beneath her ear. “I’m an old man,” he said. “You know I stopped worrying years ago. Just don’t tell Alan
that you told her.” He hesitated. “Did you tell her about Mary, too?”

“I had to,” Carlynn said. “When I told her the truth about us, she said she felt sorry for Alan, so I just had to tell her that Alan has had a wonderful soul mate and lover for the past fifteen years. I think that shocked her more than anything.” Carlynn smiled at the memory of Joelle’s response.

“I thought Mary was a
housekeeper,
” Joelle had said, stunned. “And I thought Quinn was a
gardener.
”

They were quiet for a moment. Carlynn watched the light of a plane move slowly across the dark sky until it disappeared behind the frame of the window. She had never felt so tired, and she knew her exhaustion marked a change in her body. She had so few nights left to sleep next to her husband.

“Do you regret our ruse?” Quinn surprised her with the question, and she lifted her head to look at him.

“In more than twenty years, you’ve never asked me that,” she said.

“I think I was afraid of the answer,” Quinn said, stroking her arm with his hand. “I knew you felt coerced in the beginning. Alan and I were operating out of grief and madness, I think, and you had no real choice but to go along with it.”

“Well, I sure regretted having to give up sailing,” she said with a laugh. That had been a true sacrifice for her. Everyone knew the real Carlynn never would have sailed.

“You’re making light of it—” Quinn squeezed her shoulders “—but I know that was a great loss for you.”

She sighed, resting her head on his shoulder again. “It’s hard for me to regret the ruse when I think about the center.”

“We’ve done a lot of good there,” Quinn agreed.

She and Alan and Quinn had won numerous awards over the years for their research into the phenomenon of healing.

“But Lisbeth died when Carlynn did, Quinn,” she said quietly, “and that was doubly excruciating for me. The new Carlynn, the person I became, the person I am
now,
is neither of those
women, really. And I think you know that I was never completely comfortable with the deception.” She lifted her head to study his face again. “I didn’t want to die that way,” she said. “Feeling as though my life had been a lie. I had to truly heal someone before I died, make a difference in someone’s life. Does that make sense to you? I needed to finish what Carlynn started when she saved that baby’s life.”

“It makes perfect sense,” he said.

She thought of what else she regretted.

“At first,” she said, “it bothered me a great deal that we weren’t able to have a normal sort of marriage.”

“Me, too,” Quinn agreed. He was quiet for a moment. “But it’s been okay, hasn’t it?” There was an edge of worry in his voice.

“Much more than okay,” she agreed. “I think that’s why I wanted to help Joelle and Liam so badly. They reminded me of us.”

“How’s that?” Quinn sounded puzzled.

“They love each other, but they can only be married in their hearts,” she said. “Like you and me. Oh, we’re married, yes, but no one knows that but us. And over the years, I came to realize that no one else ever
needed
to know about that bond for it to be real.”

He lifted her chin with his hand to give her a kiss on the lips. “I love you, baby,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

“And I have an idea.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Tomorrow—” he smiled “—I’m taking you sailing.”

J
OELLE KEPT HER GAZE GLUED TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD IN FRONT
of them as Liam drove slowly down Highway One. She was watching for the coastal redwood. She knew the sign that read “Cabrial” hadn’t been attached to the tree for years, but the tree was still there, at least as of a few years ago, the last time she’d made the trip south. She had no idea who, if anyone, still lived at the commune, and she only hoped, now that she had decided to make this trip, that the old dirt road leading in was passable.

The day was perfect. It was late December, and there was not a trace of fog along the coast. To their right, far in the distance, the ocean and sky met in a fine blue line.

“There’s the tree,” Joelle said suddenly. “I’m glad to see they didn’t kill it when they nailed up the sign.”

“I turn here?” Liam stopped the car at the entrance to the dirt road.

She looked down the road, which was little more than an overgrown path through the woods. “You think your car will make it?”

“I think we should give it a try,” Liam said, and he turned into the tunnel of green.

The dirt road did not look like anything from her memory. It was rutted with tire tracks, so it must have been used sometime since the last rain, but not by anyone who had taken the time to maintain it in reasonable condition. The trees seemed thicker, more enveloping than when she had been a child, and they scraped the side of the car as it bounced through the woods.

“Do you think anyone still lives out here?” Liam asked. “It doesn’t look like it by the state of this road.”

“I doubt there’s anyone here from the original commune,” she said. She knew that in the early eighties, political infighting had caused the splintering of what remained of the commune, and most, if not all, of the members left. If anyone was living in the cabins now, she hoped they wouldn’t mind her trespassing.

“This way.” She pointed toward the small clearing next to the large stone cabin that had served as their kitchen and dining hall.

Liam parked near the cabin steps. No other vehicles were in the clearing, and as they got out of the car, they were met with an almost eerie stillness. The air was cool, filled with the scent of earth and leaves.

“I think the place is deserted,” Joelle said, not disappointed. She walked onto the wide porch of the stone cabin and opened the unlocked door. The long tables were gone, and cobwebs formed lacy netting between the cabinets and the old wooden counter. “I don’t think anyone’s been here in a very long time,” she said.

“Show me where you lived,” Liam said, and she was pleased that he cared enough to ask.

“Let’s see if I can still find it,” she said, heading for the door.

They walked along the overgrown path leading away from the stone cabin until they reached the clearing where she thought they would find the Rainbow Cabin. She almost didn’t recognize the building at first. The cabin next door to Rainbow was no longer there, and without that landmark it took her a moment
to realize the remaining cabin was, indeed, her old home. The small structure was doorless now, and two rusty hooks hung from the top of the doorjamb.

“That’s where the Rainbow sign hung.” Joelle pointed to the hooks as she walked inside, and Liam followed close behind her.

“I actually slept out here in the living room because the bedroom was too small for all three of us,” Joelle said. “I slept on a mattress on the floor for ten years.” She shook her head. “That seems so strange to me now.” She walked toward the minuscule bedroom. “This was my parents’ room—the room where I was born.”

Liam shook his head in wonder. “What a childhood you must have had.”

“Come on.” She took his hand. “Let’s find the schoolhouse. That’s where the cypress should be.”

They started walking north again, and it wasn’t long before she spotted the cabin that had housed her first five years of school.

“Yikes, look at it,” she said with a laugh.

The cabin was completely covered with green vines. In order to get the door open, she had to cut some of them with the shears they’d brought along.

“It’s so tiny,” Joelle said when she and Liam walked inside. The cabin was much smaller than her memory of it.
Much
smaller, but amazingly, it still possessed the cool, musty smell that had greeted her nearly every day when she was growing up. “How did we ever get all the kids in here?” she wondered aloud. There were no desks or chairs now, just empty space.

“Did you do some writing on this?” Liam pointed to the large black chalkboard, still attached to the wall at the front of the room.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. She’d written many sentences and worked out many math problems on that board. “I got a surprisingly good education here, Liam,” she said. “But enough of this. Let’s find the cypress.” She was anxious to see if the tree
would still be there, if it had survived, maybe even flourished, on the bluffs of Big Sur.

Liam followed her outside again and around the west side of the schoolhouse. “The cypress is on top of a hill,” she remembered, stepping over the vines that covered the ground.

She spotted the rise of rubbly earth that she’d once considered a hill, and on top of it, a beautiful, bent and twisted Monterey cypress. “Oh my gosh!” she said. “That must be it, but it’s huge!”

“Well,” Liam said, “it’s as old as you are.”

“It’s so pretty,” she said. The cypress was no more than fifteen or sixteen feet tall, but its gnarled and twisted crown of green had to be at least that broad. The direction of the wind was evident in the way the branches reached toward the schoolhouse and away from the Pacific.

They helped each other climb up the small hill. Joelle held open a plastic bag, while Liam took the cuttings from the tree, following the instructions Quinn had given them to make sure they took a bit of the brown stem along with the leaves. “It’s not a good time of year to take a cutting from a cypress and expect it to take root,” Quinn had warned them, but Joelle had wanted to try, anyway, as long as they were here. Quinn had promised to work with the cuttings in the greenhouse at the mansion, doing his best to get them to root.

“Think we have enough?” Liam peered into the bag, and she nodded.

They exchanged a look, then, and she sighed.

“Well,” she said. “I guess we’d better do what we came here to do.”

Quietly, they walked back to the car, both of them sobered by what lay ahead of them. Joelle took the time to wrap the cuttings in wet paper towels and store them in the cooler in Liam’s trunk before taking her place again in the passenger seat.

Neither of them spoke as they bounced back along the rutted
dirt road from the commune, but once Liam turned left onto Highway One, he glanced at her.

“How are you going to know the exact spot?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I will,” she admitted. “Carlynn told me the general area, though, and I think that will be good enough.”

She was thoughtful as Liam drove along the twisting highway. This was her first day away from Joli. The baby was still in the hospital, and Joelle spent most of her days with her, feeding her and rocking her now that she was out of the incubator. If all continued to go well, Joli would be coming home January first, the day she was supposed to have been born, and Joelle was anxious to have her daughter home with her, to slip into the routine of motherhood. She’d have three months off. Then Sheila would take care of both Joli and Sam, and Joelle was immensely grateful to Mara’s mother for allowing herself to become attached to her baby.

Joelle and Liam usually visited Mara together these days, although once a week or so, Joelle encouraged Liam to go by himself. She knew he still needed that time alone with his wife.

“I think that must be it,” Joelle said, leaning forward in the car, pointing ahead of them toward the hairpin turn in the distance.

“Man, I would not want to drive off a cliff from that height,” Liam said with a shudder.

“We’ll have to try to park somewhere and walk over to it,” Joelle said. “What about on that straight part of the road?”

“There?” Liam pointed ahead of them.

“Right.”

“We’ll still be taking up half the lane,” Liam said.

“But people will be able to see the car, at least,” she said. “It’ll be all right, don’t you think?”

“Let’s try it.” Liam slowed the car, then pulled as close to the low guardrail as was possible. “How’s this?” he asked.

“Perfect.”

They got out of the car, and Liam reached in the back seat for
the simple metal canister. He lifted it into his arms, and Joelle fell in next to him as they walked in silence toward the hairpin turn.

Carlynn had asked Joelle to be the one to do this. Lying in her bed at the mansion, the hospice nurse adjusting the morphine in her IV, she’d explained as best she could the area where both she and her sister had, in many ways, lost their lives.

“Wouldn’t Alan or Quinn want to do it?” Joelle had asked her.

“Those old men would fall off the cliff, dear,” Carlynn had said. “I’m sure they’d be grateful if you and Liam would take care of it.”

This wasn’t going to be easy, though. They’d reached the very point of the hairpin turn, and Joelle stepped over the guardrail and held her arms out for the canister.

“Step back a bit,” Liam said, handing the container to her. “I’ll come out there, too.”

He joined her on the precipice. Crouching down, Joelle set the canister on the ground and lifted its lid. She didn’t look inside. Did not want to see Carlynn contained in there. Slowly, she stood up, the open canister in her arms.

“You all right?” Liam asked, and she knew he could see the tears in her eyes.

“Just anxious to set her free,” Joelle said. She raised the canister high out in front of her and tipped it. The breeze caught the ashes, sending them south, and Joelle watched some of them land in the chaparral, others sail on toward the sea.

She felt Liam’s hands on her shoulders, and leaned back against him. He put his arms around her, then pressed his cheek to her hair.

“What a life she had,” Joelle whispered.

“A true mix of joy and sorrow,” Liam said. “What amazes me is that, in spite of everything, she and Quinn were able to have a long and wonderful marriage.”

“They really did,” she agreed.

“We’ll last as long as they did.”

“How can you be so sure?” she asked.

“Because,” Liam said, squeezing his arms tightly across her chest, “we’ve been healed.”