Mr. Hatch had told her of a hole in the east corner of the chain-link fence that surrounded the facility. A hole just large enough to shimmy through. Her heart thudded against her breastbone, fueled by equal parts fear and exhilaration. In three days’ time, she’d be home again. It was just a matter of getting there. Then she and Charlie could figure out what to do next. Her disease hadn’t progressed at all since her visit to the doctor in Los Angeles. Perhaps it was—how had she heard it phrased?—permanently arrested. She’d also heard tell among the residents of doctors on the outside willing to treat lepers without quarantine. Either way, sitting around Carville wasn’t helping anything. Her daughters needed her. Charlie needed her. And she needed them.
Dozens of old oak trees dotted the wide lawn between the last houses and the fence. Moss drooped from the boughs, the color of old bones in the darkness. Her valises had grown heavy, and mud squished between her toes inside her shoes. When she reached the fence, she felt along the links for a break. The cold metal scratched the pads of her fingers. Every sound made her start and freeze. She groped along the entire length of the fence from the east corner to the hedgerow that marked the edge of the patients’ side of the reserve. Nothing. Not a single break or hole. She retraced her steps, squinting in the near blackness, running her fingers over the metal links as low to the ground as she could manage without crawling.
By the time she’d made it back to the eastern corner, the cloud cover had parted, and moonlight brightened the grounds. But even with the light, Mirielle couldn’t find the hole Mr. Hatch had described. Had he lied to her? Had the hole been repaired?
Mirielle’s chest tightened, and her eyes smarted. Helen’s first birthday was barely a month away. She set down her bags and tugged absentmindedly on her bracelet. Surely, God hadn’t kept her alive just to be parted from her daughters. She picked up the valise that held her silver-framed photograph, grabbed ahold of the fence, and started to climb. The metal rattled with her weight and bit into her palms. It snagged on her skirt and tore her stockings, but she kept climbing. Slow. Lurching. Her fingers ached as she neared the top. Holding on with one hand, she heaved the valise up and over the strands of barbed wire crowning the top. It landed with a thump in the weeds on the far side. Now what? How did she get up and over?
A breeze swept down from the levee, shaking the fence. She clutched the metal links and closed her eyes until the breeze died down. Then, she released one hand and shrugged her arm out of her coat sleeve. She could use the coat to blunt the barbs. The breeze stirred again, catching the dangling fabric and whipping it back. She grabbed hold of the fence, just as the fingers of her opposite hand began to lose purchase. Her coat slipped down her arm, flapping like a cape from her wrist. Before her fingers could grasp the coat, the wind tugged it free. It fluttered like a lame bird to the ground.
Mirielle considered climbing down to retrieve it, but her hands already trembled with fatigue. If she didn’t climb over now, she’d never make it back up. She inhaled the cold night air down to the bottom of her lungs and reached for the top strand of wire. It sagged with the force of her grasp. She loosed one foot from the fence and planted it several links above the other, then shifted her weight and sprang upward, hoping the momentum would carry her over the fence. But she hadn’t counted on her skirt catching on the barbs, caging her legs so she could not swing them over. For a moment, she teetered at the top, barbs poking and slicing through her skin. Then she fell. Her flailing arms hit first. The bones of her left forearm snapped. Her backside and skull struck the ground next. She heard herself howl, and her vision blurred.
* * *
Mirielle wasn’t sure whether she’d passed out, or simply shut her eyes against the pain and howled on. But when her eyes opened, two white buzzards circled above her. No, not buzzards. The sisters and their hats.
“Hush now, dearie,” one of them said. “You’ll wake the entire colony.”
A light flashed in her face, and a male voice said, “What’s going on here?”
“Another absconder, I’m afraid,” the other sister said.
“No, no.” Mirielle tried to shake her head but the motion made her nauseous. “I just . . . tripped.”
“Help us get her to the infirmary,” the sister said.
The blinding light switched off, and two hands grabbed her beneath the armpits and hoisted her up. Pain blazed from her forearm. She yelped again.
“Can you walk?” the man said. Mirielle recognized him as the night watchman.
Her legs were steady, but the world swayed. Every part of her hurt—her back, her head, but most especially her arm. She took an unbalanced step. “I think so.” She took another, teetered, and fell back into the man’s arms.
With her good arm looped around the watchman’s neck, she managed to limp to the infirmary. Lights were on in several of the houses. Nosy residents pressed their faces to their window screens. Her dress, she realized, was torn and bloodied from the barbed wire, filthy from the mud. But it wasn’t as if they hadn’t seen worse. Take a look in the mirror if you want a show, she would have yelled, had it not hurt to speak.
The sisters had run ahead and prepared a bed for her. They cut away what remained of her dress and stockings, swabbed her many gashes with alcohol, and helped her slip into a hospital gown. Soon Doc Jack arrived, eyes bleary and hair standing on end, and with him Sister Verena, her long blue dress as crisp and sharp as her gaze.
Doc Jack checked Mirielle’s eyes with a small flashlight, then probed along her spine and the back of her head. “Some bruising in the lumbar region and at the base of the skull but nothing more serious,” he said to one of the sisters who’d found her and now sat scribbling in Mirielle’s chart. Then to Mirielle, he said, “You’re lucky. A minor concussion. A broken arm. You could have broken your neck.”
His eyes were kind, his tone gentle, but Mirielle looked away and said nothing. She didn’t feel lucky. Her arm felt as if it were on fire. Her dress and stockings were ruined. Tomorrow her name would be whispered over every breakfast tray. More importantly, she was still trapped in this hellhole. Helen would turn one without her.
Doc Jack gave Mirielle a shot to help with the pain while he and Sister Verena reset her arm. The medicine fogged her mind and blunted the pain, but she still winced and yelped when Doc Jack reset the bone.
“You shouldn’t have tried to run away,” Sister Verena said once the procedure was complete, wrapping her arm in gauze then strips of plaster-soaked muslin. “What devil possessed you to think you could scale a barbwire fence?”
Mirielle couldn’t tell whether Sister Verena really believed a devil possessed her or if that was simply her fuddy-duddy way of calling Mirielle stupid. Either way, she hated her. Sister Verena had no idea what it meant to be a mother, how the pain of your children’s absence was worse than a thousand broken arms.
“I was just out for a nightly stroll when I slipped,” Mirielle said. It was a ridiculous lie, but she wasn’t about to satisfy Sister Verena with the truth.
“So that blue fabric caught in the barbed wire isn’t from that immodest costume you call a dress?”
Mirielle looked her square in the eye. “No.”
“And the two bags Watchman Doyle found by the fence are not yours?”
“Nope.”
“As you say, then. Must be somebody else’s. I’ll tell Mr. Doyle to take them straight to the incinerator.” She applied the final strips of muslin to Mirielle’s cast and stood.
“Wait.”
Mirielle’s shoes and dresses could burn. But the photograph. That was irreplaceable.
“They’re mine. There’s another bag on the far side of the fence by the road.”
Sister Verena lifted her chin and smirked. “I thought so.”
CHAPTER 11
Mr. Hatch may have lied about the hole in the fence, but he hadn’t lied about the jail. No sooner had Mirielle’s cast set than she was whisked away to a small, cement building at the far edge
of the colony. Her cell was fitted with the barest adornments—a bed, a table, and a thatch-backed chair—all of which creaked and wobbled. The room’s lone window, a sliver of a thing high up in the wall, let in meager light and no breeze. Her only companions were a mouse who lived in a crumbling section of the wall near the corner, and Watchman Doyle. Of the two, she preferred the mouse.
Her only reprieve was twenty minutes each afternoon when she was permitted to wander the fenced-in jail yard for exercise. Mirielle relished these short snatches of fresh air and insisted on going out even if it rained. Most days, Irene stopped by. She came straight from her shift in the pharmacy, smelling like fifty-cent perfume and week-old fish. They’d chat for a few minutes through the chain-link fence, Irene doing the lion’s share of the talking. Then Irene would slip her a candy bar or magazine when the watchman wasn’t looking and say a cheery goodbye.
The rest of the time, Mirielle fixated on escape. Not from the jail, but from the entire wretched colony. She’d have to wait for her broken arm to heal, of course. And this time she’d take only one bag . . . two tops. Instead of carrying them by hand, she’d sling them on her back so both hands would be free to climb the fence. If she wrapped her leather duster around the top strands of barbed wire—carefully this time, not as an afterthought—she could scramble over without a scratch. From there, it’d be easy as pie to get home. No one would suspect a fresh-faced, smartly dressed woman of being a leper. She’d catch a ride in a jiffy and be at the train station in New Orleans before anyone at Carville realized she was gone.
Lying on the lumpy mattress in her cell, she imagined herself back home, the French doors in the great room thrown wide, a sea breeze fluttering the gossamer curtains, an ice-cold gin fizz in hand. Her favorite record played on the phonograph. Laughter sounded from the nursery where the girls played. The briny smell of oysters Rockefeller wafted from the kitchen. Charlie’s roadster rumbled up the drive. Home. She just had to escape and make it there.
* * *
One afternoon a few weeks into Mirielle’s jail sentence, Irene handed a letter through the fence instead of the usual rumpled magazine or half-melted Oh Henry! bar. “I asked Frank to set aside your mail. This came yesterday.”
Mirielle grabbed the letter without bothering a glance in Watchman Doyle’s direction. There was no return address, but her silly alias—Mrs. Pauline Marvin—and the colony’s post address were written in Charlie’s hand. She traced his tidy lettering before bringing the envelope to her nose. It smelled only of paper, not the spicy scent of Charlie’s aftershave she’d hoped to inhale.
“From your hubby?” Irene asked.
Mirielle nodded.
“When my old man was off fighting in the Philippines, I was just as lovestruck as you. God, how I missed him.” She toyed with the gaudy gold and ruby ring on her index finger. “Did I ever tell you the story of how he won this for me in a poker match in Dallas—”
Mirielle gave a small cough.
“Aw, hell. Here I am yappin’ when you must be wanting some time alone with your letter.” She gave Mirielle a wink. “I’ll come around tomorrow, baby, in case you got a reply you want me to smuggle out.”
Mirielle thanked her, then sat down in the shade of a nearby tree with her back to the jail and tore open the letter.
March 14, 1926
Dearest Mirielle,
In the quiet hours since your departure, I’ve thought often of our time together. Surely you know, those early days were among the happiest of my life. Our afternoons at the seaside with the children. Those fancy-dress parties and tea parties and raucous parties in the Hills. How you glowed then! Not even Douglas could boast a more enchanting wife. And what a wonderful mother you were. Everyone loved you then, I most of all.
But how quickly things fell apart after Felix’s death. Neither one of us has known happiness since. I thought Helen’s birth might be a chance at a second life for us. But your accident so soon after robbed us of that. My picture failed—the one you didn’t even bother to come out and see—and there were grumblings around the studio to drop me. And you, you couldn’t understand because you’ve never endeavored for anything in your life. Never had to struggle.
I’d put everything I had into my work at the studio. I realize now it was a vain attempt to make up from without for being undernourished within. You’d gone into yourself and were nothing but a shell of a woman, moving from sofa to liquor cabinet and back again without any concern how your blueness was killing us. Even when you were up—playing mahjong with the other studio wives or drifting among the crowds at a party—you were a phantom. Not even Helen’s cry or Evie’s laughter could stir you. It got so I preferred to go out alone and make excuses for your absence or linger on set long after everyone else had gone home. Loneliness was better than your desolate company. Anyone who saw beyond the glib presentations we made of ourselves could guess at my bravado and your intractable melancholy.
I do not begrudge you your sadness. How could I when I feel it so deeply too? But your indifference, your impatience, your selfishness—these things all but ruined us. And I worry they may ruin us still. I know you deplore your current situation, but you must follow the doctor’s advice and remain at Carville until you are well and fully healed. Think what news of your disease would do to our family. My career would be shot. The girls hated and sorely teased. We’d have nothing when already you’ve left us with so little.
I hope you will not hate me for saying so, but I see your illness as a gift. And I plead you don’t squander it. The woman I met all those years ago shined as much from within as without. She had passion and pluck. She cared about people and things beyond her own misery. Here, at last, is a hardship you cannot drink away. Perhaps, in your struggle, you can find that woman again.
Your husband,
Charlie
Mirielle stared at the letter dumbfounded. The paper was from Charlie’s stationery, the handwriting unmistakably his own, but the words . . . surely they hadn’t come from his pen. Selfish, indifferent—what kind of man said these things to his wife when she was unjustly locked away and suffering from a terrible disease? And what did he mean by saying you were a wonderful mother? That she no longer was?
She started to crumple the letter before realizing there was a second page behind it. She peeled the pages apart and saw it was a drawing. Several stick figures standing beneath a crayon-shaded blue sky and an oblong yellow sun. Mirielle smoothed the crinkled edges and traced the waxy figures with her finger. Charlie was easy to spot with a square hat and polka-dotted bow tie. Evie too. She’d drawn herself with long braids and a pleated skirt. Next stood Mirielle, holding baby Helen in her arms. All four of them wore broad, U-shaped smiles.
Mirielle smiled too. From the branches above, a bird warbled. A white butterfly flitted above a nearby patch of clover flowers. Charlie was wrong. The past year and a half since Felix’s death, she hadn’t been as awful as he’d made her out to be in his letter. Maybe not an ideal wife, but certainly still a good mother.
Her eyes drifted from the butterfly back to Evie’s drawing. A fifth figure, a woman, stood spaced apart from the others. A maid? The cook? Mirielle examined the woman more closely. She held what looked to be a cocktail glass. Her short coiffure matched Mirielle’s peroxide-lightened bob far better than the long, dark hair of the woman holding Helen. Instead of a smile, she wore a frown.
Mirielle had mistaken the nanny for herself. She was the figure apart.
Watchman Doyle hollered from the jail steps that break time was over. Mirielle ignored him. The birdsong that only moments before had sounded so lovely now scratched at her ears. With tear-rimmed eyes, she crammed the letter back in the envelope, then carefully folded the picture and slipped them both in her pocket.
CHAPTER 12
Mirielle lay in bed, tossing Charlie’s crumpled letter up and down like a baseball. Pale light filtered in through the tiny window, and gray clouds blotted out any trace of sky. It could be no
on. It could be nearing evening. She couldn’t tell and didn’t care.
She’d lost count of how long she’d been holed up in this dingy room. Charlie’s letter had arrived three weeks into her jail sentence, but how many days had passed since? Two days? A week? She tossed the wad of paper up, swiping at it when it began to fall. She missed, and the crumpled letter struck her in the nose.
It didn’t hurt. Nothing seemed to hurt anymore. Not her broken arm. Not her stiff back. Not her once pounding head. Only her inner parts hurt, as if someone had turned her inside out and scoured her with a Brillo pad.
The letter rolled to a stop beside her on the lumpy mattress. She picked it up and teased it back into a rectangle, smoothing it against the hard surface of her cast to flatten the wrinkles. The paper was worn thin now from having been wadded and unwadded so many times. The ink was smeared too. But it didn’t matter. She’d committed nearly every line to memory. The smudged letters were only placeholders, a path to follow with her eye as Charlie’s voice sounded in her mind as if it were not a letter at all, but a phonograph recording. Sometimes his voice was plaintive. Sometimes angry. But the words never changed.
He couldn’t forgive her for Felix’s death. And how could she blame him? It had been her fault. But those other charges he’d heaped so insensitively upon her—selfish, indifferent, unaccomplished—of those she was entirely innocent.
Her hand closed around the paper, crumpling it again. He ought to have said these things before when she had the means to act on them. Coward.
She threw the ball of paper so high it struck the ceiling. Flecks of yellowed plaster rained down. She caught the paper this time and tossed it back into the air just as the main door to the jail swung open. Mirielle knew well the sharp whine of its hinges. Charlie’s letter landed on the bed and rolled off onto the floor. She didn’t bother to retrieve it.
The Second Life of Mirielle West Page 6