The Second Life of Mirielle West

by Amanda Skenandore

  Mirielle nodded, remembering her own incident with the hot curling iron.

  When Sister Loretta finished dabbing between what remained of the man’s toes, she draped the towel over her arm and moved the basin aside so the man could lower his legs. Milky, fetid water sloshed over the basin’s side. Mirielle dropped the towels she was holding and lurched back like a crab, smacking her cast on the hard floor. Pain radiated through her arm.

  Sister Loretta mopped up the spilled water as if it were nothing.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” Mirielle asked. “Of catching the gaz—the disease?”

  “I came to Carville back in 1904.” She glanced at Mirielle, her expression serene. “You were probably just a little girl then. The Daughters of Charity had already been here a decade taking care of patients. Not once in all those years has anyone on staff gotten the disease.”

  “Really?”

  “We wash our hands and do our best to keep the place clean. It’s not a very hardy germ. Feebly contagious is all.”

  “I don’t need to worry then? I mean, about making my own condition worse.”

  Sister Loretta stood. “A little care, and you’ll be just fine, dearie.”

  Mirielle nodded and gathered up the towels she’d thrown aside. She glanced at the basin of water, trying to rid her imagination of all the tiny, jellyfish-like germs swimming inside. After all, how many times had she waded in the ocean without being stung? She tucked the towels under her arm and picked up the basin, bracing it against her cast. She could do this. A little care, and she’d be fine. With each slow step to the hopper, she repeated Sister Loretta’s assurances in her mind.

  She flinched with the splash of water when she upturned the basin over the hopper, but a strange satisfaction bloomed inside her watching the water swirl down the drain and all those tiny germs along with it.

  CHAPTER 14

  The next day, Mirielle spent the afternoon hastening from bed to bed in the ladies’ infirmary. No sooner had she refilled a glass of water or fluffed a pillow than another patient’s bell rang. Everything was made doubly hard with her arm still in a cast. Her feet ached when she returned to her room, and she would have ignored the call to supper had Irene not barged in and dragged her to the dining hall.

  Fastening the buttons of her beastly uniform the next morning, Mirielle began to second-guess this helping business. How was fetching someone an extra blanket or emptying their bedpan getting her any closer to home?

  When she arrived at the small, one-room X-ray building for her shift, a long line had already formed along the walkway outside. Twice weekly the building doubled as the shot clinic. Her fellow residents looked resigned, if not a bit wary as they stood waiting. Mirielle tugged at her ill-fitting collar, then shimmied past and went inside.

  The hulking X-ray equipment had been pushed against the walls to provide room for a dressing screen and a small table crowded with supplies. Doc Jack sat on a stool behind the screen while Sister Verena inspected a set of needles each the size of an ice pick. When she was through with her inspection, she handed Mirielle a record book.

  “Listed here is each patient’s prescribed dose of chaulmoogra oil. Call it out when they enter and I will prepare the syringe. You must also keep the supply table stocked and needles cycling through the boiler for sterilization. Do you think you can manage that?”

  Mirielle grabbed the book and rolled her eyes. Of course she could manage it.

  The first patient entered and told her his name. She opened the book, balancing the spine on her cast arm, and flipped through the pages until she found his record. “Eight cc’s.”

  The man shuffled behind the screen and unbuttoned his drawers while Sister Verena drew the medicine into a syringe. A sluggish air bubble drifted upward through the oil when she tapped the glass. She handed the syringe to Doc Jack, who wiped one side of the man’s rear with betadine, then jabbed in the needle. A rush of queasiness washed over Mirielle as she watched the plunger descend. When Doc Jack removed the needle, a syrupy mix of blood and oil oozed from the injection site.

  Mirielle unbuttoned her collar and fanned herself with the record book to keep her breakfast down while Doc Jack mopped up the mess with a cotton square. He taped another square over the site and said, “All done,” at the same time as Sister Verena said, “Next dose.”

  Mirielle turned back to the line of patients. The man in front grunted out his name, and she thumbed through the record book, her stomach still swimming. Soon it was all she could do to keep up with names and doses, never mind the dwindling supply of cotton squares and the pile of sticky needles in need of sterilizing. Morning passed in a blur, and her queasiness faded. She bustled between the back table where the boiler sat and the line of waiting patients, juggling the open record book in one arm and fresh supplies in the other.

  The lunch bell brought only a brief reprieve. Soon patients were lining up again. Most seemed to remember exactly where they’d stood before the bell and filed into line without fuss or jostling. But Jean, the young girl who lived with Mirielle in house eighteen, cut in near the front. Several of the adults behind her cussed and grumbled.

  “Brat,” one of them said.

  “Get back to the end of the line, or I’ll drag you there by the earlobe,” said another.

  “Hey,” Mirielle said, setting down the record book and moving toward the ruckus. “Leave her alone.”

  After the tadpole incident, she’d kept her distance from the girl, though she suspected the crayon markings that had mysteriously appeared on her cast when she woke this morning and the tangle of worms between her sheets two nights before to be Jean’s handiwork. But that didn’t mean the other patients had any right to bully her. She was a child, after all. Only a few years older than Evie.

  “Ain’t no one allowed to cut in line,” a fellow with Jack Dempsey–sized arms said. His red, disease-thickened face made him look all the more like a man who’d just come from twelve rounds in the ring.

  “That doesn’t mean you get to call her names.”

  “I can do whatever I damn please.”

  Another man stepped out from his place in line. “Mais, Dean! Ya in a hurry to get your ass poked today?”

  Mirielle recognized him—first by his blunt, misshapen hands, then by his vivid blue eyes—as Frank, the tour guide she’d yelled at her first day at Carville. He waved over Jean with one of his claw-hands. “Anyway, I promised I’d save a spot for her.”

  Jean skipped to his side, a grin, sweet as it was sinister, stretched across her face. Dean scowled but quit his griping, and Mirielle returned to the tiresome record book.

  “I see ya found a way to skip the line,” Frank said when he and Jean made it to the front several minutes later. “Looks good on ya, the uniform.”

  Mirielle didn’t return his smile. “No one looks good in matte white.”

  He chuckled. “You’re about as good at taking a compliment as ya are at absconding.”

  Ignoring his steady gaze, she balanced the record book in the crook of her cast arm and flipped through to find their names. She’d called out Jean’s dose to Sister Verena and was looking for Frank’s when a flash of movement caught her eye. Before she’d realized what was happening, squares of cotton were floating in the air. They clumped together in a small cloud as they left Jean’s outstretched hand, then dispersed as they fluttered downward like huge square snowflakes. Jean giggled. She skipped past the dressing screen and out the door. Cotton squares landed everywhere—on the X-ray equipment, on the floor, on Doc Jack’s head.

  “Ahem,” Sister Verena said, setting down her syringe and brushing the white squares off her shoulders and the pointy wings of her hat.

  Mirielle bent down and began scooping the cotton off the floor. Frank squatted beside her.

  “I’ve never met an ornerier child in my life,” she muttered. Her children would never misbehave like that.

  “Don’t think too badly of her,” Frank said, helping Mirielle wi
th the mess. “Been here three years and she ain’t heard nothing from her family. Not a visit or a letter. Her daddy, he dropped her at the front gate and didn’t look back, him.”

  Mirielle glanced at him, then back to the cotton squares scattered across the floorboards. The ever-present ache she felt for her daughters deepened. Did they know how hard she was trying to make it back to them? Or did they feel as abandoned and forgotten as Jean?

  CHAPTER 15

  From the outside, the pharmacy looked like one of the patient houses: a long, single-story structure adjoining the walkway. But instead of beds and side tables and living room sofas, it was crowded with cabinets and balance scales and gurgling equipment.

  Mirielle lingered in the doorway, delighting in the strange sounds and smells. This was the sort of place she’d imagined in jail. This was the sort of place they’d find a cure.

  She introduced herself to the sister in charge, Sister Beatrice, and followed like a chick at the woman’s heels as she showed Mirielle around. An industrial-sized mixer sat on a counter churning ointment. Disinfectant bubbled in a double boiler nearby. Percolating jars of pale, yellow liquid crowded a bench along the opposite wall. At the back of the room, open shelves crammed with medicine bottles stretched to the ceiling.

  “What are we working on today?” Mirielle asked. “Something new?”

  “Why, yes. Have a seat and I’ll get the supplies.”

  Mirielle grabbed a stool and sat at a large, marble-topped table in the center of the room. If Vanity Fair came to interview Mirielle about how she, a lowly patient, found a cure for leprosy, this was where they’d set up for the cover photo. She’d sit just where she was now, angled toward the camera, holding a beaker and smiling. How proud Charlie would be of her then.

  The uniform would have to go, of course. She’d need a haircut and maybe a permanent too. It wouldn’t be hard to persuade a beautician to visit the colony once everyone was cured.

  Irene, who also worked in the pharmacy, arrived just as Sister Beatrice shuffled to the table with a stack of iron trays.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I had a little dispute to settle back at the house.”

  Pennies to dollars it involved some prank Jean had played on another of their housemates. At least Mirielle wasn’t the only one the girl terrorized. She hadn’t forgotten what Frank had said yesterday about Jean’s father. As cruel as Charlie’s letter had been, at least he hadn’t forgotten her.

  Irene sat beside Mirielle at the table. The white cotton uniform fit her worse than it did Mirielle. The fabric pulled and bunched around her wide hips, and the buttons at her bust strained to stay fastened. So much for factory-made garments, stout sizes and all.

  Sister Beatrice drew Mirielle’s attention back to the iron trays. Each one was lined with shallow pockets. Capsule molds, she told Mirielle. Next the sister brought over a hot plate and set a pot of gelatin atop it. Once the gelatin melted, Mirielle and Irene’s job was to coat each of the molds in the hot liquid.

  The task proved far less glamorous than Mirielle’s imaginings. More than once, she burned her fingers with the molten gelatin, not always realizing she’d done so until seeing the red and blistered skin. Her bulky cast constantly got in the way. Irene didn’t burn herself once. She yapped nonstop as she worked, hardly looking at the molds, and still managed a more even coating than Mirielle did with her trays.

  Irene talked in stories. “I remember this one time when . . .” Or, “Back in my younger days . . .” There wasn’t a clear chronology or connection from one to the next, and Mirielle had a hard time keeping up. Sometimes, Irene would stop in the middle of a story and veer off in an entirely new direction. Other times, she’d pause mid-sentence, tap on Mirielle’s cast and say, “Careful, baby. Watch out for them drippings,” and Mirielle would look down to see she’d burned herself yet again.

  By the time they’d finished all the trays, Mirielle had caught enough fragments of Irene’s stories to piece together her history. She’d grown up in farm country somewhere in the eastern part of Texas. Married young. Had a son. Lost her husband in some war. Not the Great War. Cuba? The Philippines? Mirielle couldn’t remember. After his death, Irene and her son moved to the city. She married again. Divorced. One husband, she’d wed for love. The other, a “real son-of-a-bitch,” she’d wed for money. But Mirielle wasn’t sure who was who or in which order they’d come. Eventually, Irene and her son had ended up back in East Texas where they’d started, this time with means to buy and run their own farm. Their own “hunky-dory ending.” Until the disease.

  When the gelatin cooled and set, Sister Beatrice brought over a large jar of chaulmoogra oil. The rancid-fish smell Mirielle had come to know so well spread through the room the minute the sister removed the lid.

  “I thought we were working on something new today,” Mirielle said.

  Sister Beatrice smiled and held up a can of cocoa powder. “We are.”

  “Cocoa powder might be the key to fighting the disease?”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” the sister said, “but it might make the chaulmoogra go down easier.”

  “And hopefully stay down,” Irene said under her breath.

  Sister Beatrice gave Mirielle and Irene each a glass pipette. She instructed them to fill the capsules with oil and top them off with a pinch of cocoa before sealing them with a drop of hot gelatin. Irene got right to work, but Mirielle set down her pipette and buried her face in her hands.

  “What’s wrong, baby?”

  “Cocoa? Cocoa!” She slammed her cast down on the table, regretting it the moment after when pain shot through her arm. The jar of chaulmoogra oil rattled, and her pipette rolled toward the edge. Irene caught it before it could fall to the floor and shatter. “I thought we’d be doing something important today.”

  “We are. How many times have you puked up your chaulmoogra pills and your lunch with it? Heck, half the folks around the colony would just as soon grease their hair with this stuff as eat it.”

  “It’s still not a cure. Nothing I’m doing—not here or in the infirmary or that horrid dressing clinic—is helping me get home.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  Mirielle swiveled around to face her, reaching out with her good hand and clutching Irene’s. “I’ve got to get home. You’re a mother. You understand.”

  “You knock out twelve negative tests, and you got your parole.”

  “I can’t wait for that. A year, maybe longer. And some people never make it to twelve. What if I’m one of them? A cure is the only sure bet.”

  “It ain’t that simple. And it ain’t gonna happen overnight. In the meantime, what you’re doing does matter.”

  Mirielle let go of Irene’s hand, picked up her pipette, and plunged it into the jar of oil. “How does filling capsules or changing bedpans or ticking off names in a ledger matter?”

  “For one, if you’re anything like me—and you are—you’ll go crazy if you don’t stay busy.”

  Mirielle counted out ten drops then moved on to the next capsule. Already Irene was wrong. They were nothing alike. Never mind Irene’s misguided fashion sense or her cheery personality. Mirielle didn’t know the first thing about busy, unless one counted mahjong in the afternoon and a dancing party in the evening as busy. And she certainly didn’t see why busy was a desired state. The past four days had been the busiest of her life, and all she wanted to do today when she was done was crawl into her bed and sleep for a week. Busy was what gave people wrinkles, premature gray hair, and a nervous laugh.

  “Maybe I’m not cut out for this . . . work thing.”

  Irene spun around. “You tellin’ me you never worked? Not a day in your whole life?”

  “I hosted a charity luncheon for the Red Cross during the war.”

  “Baby, that don’t count as work. I was milking cows and collecting eggs before I could walk. After my first marriage, I slung hash for five years straight at an eating-house in Dallas. It sure beats mucking out a barn
. Them customers could get handsy, though.”

  “You were a waitress at a hash house?”

  Irene shrugged. “What of it? A gal’s gotta eat as surely as a fella does. And I had my son to look out for. You tellin’ me you wouldn’t put on a uniform and serve a man breakfast if it meant feeding your girls.”

  “Of course I would,” she said, and tugged on her abysmally loose and scratchy collar. “I’m wearing a uniform now, aren’t I? It’s just . . . I still don’t see how it helps.”

  “The uniform?”

  “No, this.” She waved her pipette like a pointer at the mess of cocoa powder and oil and gelatin before them.

  “Listen, everyone gotta find their own meaning in what they do. For some folks, it’s keeping busy. For some, it’s serving God. For some, it’s just plain surviving.”

  Mirielle looked down at the marble table. It reminded her of her vanity at home. The swirls of black and gray through the glittering white stone. How had she ended up here? What she wouldn’t give to be dipping into face powder instead of cocoa, smelling her favorite eau de la violette perfume instead of fishy chaulmoogra oil.

  Irene gave her a gentle nudge with her elbow. “I ain’t saying someday you ain’t gonna help find the cure to free us all and get you home. But there’s gonna be a heck of a lot of days between now and then you gotta show for, baby, and they ain’t all gonna be pretty. Best you have some reason to get up in the morning or one of these days you just won’t bother. They don’t call it the disease of the living dead for nothin’.”

  Mirielle gave a slow nod, then straightened and dipped her pipette back in the oil. “I wanna prove Sister Verena wrong. My husband Charlie too. They both think I can’t stick with anything.”

  Irene flashed her a conspiratorial smile. “That’s a good start.”

  April 14, 1926

  Dear Charlie,

  How are Evie and Helen? Send another of Evie’s drawings with your next letter, will you? And you must write the moment Helen starts walking or says her first word. I hate to think that when I return home she’ll be talking and waddling about and I will have missed all those precious first moments. You’ll teach her to say mama, won’t you?