The Second Life of Mirielle West

by Amanda Skenandore

  I miss you all, but you’ll be happy to know my work here keeps me terrifically busy, occupying my hands while you occupy my thoughts. For several hours any given day, I am beside the nurses and doctors in saving the lives of my fellow patients. It’s all very important and exciting. I’m told I am a quick study and bring a sense of cheer and style to this otherwise desolate facility.

  Consumption and pneumonia are bigger killers here than the disease itself, though it certainly does its share of damage. And people’s limbs don’t just fall off either. That’s plain hooey. Many patients suffer injuries to their hands and feet on account of nerve damage. Without watchful care, these injuries can fester and end in the amputation of a toe, a finger, or even an entire leg. Other patients suffer muscle weakness or even go blind. But fear not, I am still in the utmost health. Not a new spot or symptom since I arrived.

  I could continue on for pages about all that I am doing but simply haven’t time. Hugs and kisses to the girls. Should any of our friends wish to write while I’m away tending to my sick aunt, please ensure they can do so care of you.

  Your Wife,

  Mirielle

  CHAPTER 16

  Mirielle stood with her back to the mirror and craned her neck, straining to see her reflection. Was the lesion on her shoulder darker? No, that was just the blotchy glass. The spot on her lower back, however, was bigger than it had been last week by half a centimeter. At least from this angle. When she looked over her opposite shoulder, the spot appeared smaller.

  But neither her vantage nor the mirror could account for the new lesion on her neck. She’d noticed it in jail, but blamed the cell’s musty bedclothes and bad air for the irritation. Then, after she was released, she blamed the scratchy collar of her uniform. But now, after nearly a month, there was no denying what it was.

  She ran her index finger over the spot. It was scarcely larger than a dime but red and rough to the touch. A few strands of pearls or a fur stole would be enough to hide it. A little face powder might do the trick too. But she couldn’t help thinking again of Ben-Hur—the horrified face of the guard when he discovered Ben-Hur’s mother and sister in the dungeon, the way the crowds scattered at the cry of “Leper!” “Not a sound,” his sister said when they’d seen Ben-Hur sleeping. “He belongs to the living—we to the dead.”

  Was that true? Was Mirielle only fooling herself with her hopes for a cure? Did she too belong to the dead? It certainly felt that way when she looked around the colony. And not because of ruined faces and missing limbs. It was in their eyes. Even those who could see had an emptiness to their stare.

  Not everyone was that way. Not Frank or Irene. Even Jean had a glint, albeit a mischievous one, in her eyes. But perhaps they were fools too.

  Mirielle wrapped herself in her kimono, cinching the silk ties tight about her waist, and returned to her room to dress for the day. One thing could be said for her dreary uniform: it saved her the trouble of sorting through her dresses and hats and shoes to pick a suitable ensemble. Doc Jack had recently removed her cast. Her lower arm was still tender, but at least she could now button both sleeves.

  When she arrived at the dressing clinic, several patients were already soaking their feet or gritting their teeth as the sisters examined and redressed their wounds.

  “Fetch me some Ichthyol ointment please, Mrs. Marvin,” Sister Verena called before Mirielle even had the chance to hang up her raincoat.

  She shrugged out of her coat and grabbed the ointment from the cabinet.

  “Is it too much to ask that you be on time?” Sister Verena said when Mirielle handed her the jar. She was seated beside a patient in a wheelchair. One of his legs was missing at the knee. The other, outstretched and propped atop a stool, was covered with sores.

  “This isn’t the right ointment. How many times do I have to tell you, Ichthyol is the purple ointment, not the white.” She handed the jar back to Mirielle. “I suppose a minim of focus is too much to ask as well.”

  Mirielle stalked back to the cabinet and swapped the white ointment for the purple. Nothing she did was enough for Sister Verena. What did that even mean, minim?

  For the next several hours, Mirielle dried feet, emptied water basins, and fetched supplies. Near the end of her shift, Hector came in. He limped when he walked, and the skin around his wrists was still faintly red from the handcuffs. He sat down on one of the low stools, and she filled a basin of water for him.

  Mirielle had seen him only a handful of times since their arrival, and always just in passing. Like Irene, he seemed taken with this notion of busyness and worked several odd jobs around the colony. When he wasn’t at work, he kept to the company of other Mexicans, but today, as always, he doffed his hat and nodded at her.

  “¿Cómo está, señora?”

  Mirielle had to stop herself from reaching up to hide the lesion on her neck. “Just peachy,” she said dryly. “You?”

  “No estoy mal.”

  She watched him unlace his shoes, remove his socks, and tuck them neatly beneath his stool. He rolled up his pants—hospital issue, Mirielle could tell by the dull fabric and uneven seam, but a vast improvement to the tattered trousers he’d arrived in. When he started to remove the old bandages that covered his feet and legs, he winced.

  “Here, I’ll help.” Mirielle scooped a palmful of water from the basin. “Sometimes getting the gauze a little wet helps to loosen it.” She dripped the water onto his bandages and began to peel and unwind them. It was slow, halting work. Whenever she met resistance or felt the dressing sticking to his skin, she scooped up more water. At first, Hector sat rigid, his jaw clenched and knuckles white. But soon, his shoulders and hands relaxed.

  Mirielle relaxed too. She tucked a towel beneath her knees for cushioning and rolled up her shirtsleeves. His skin was rough and chapped with several outcroppings of nodules that oozed milky fluid. One of the gashes he’d incurred during his flight in Yuma still hadn’t healed. She worked with particular care around these areas so as not to cause him any more pain.

  “I’m not really that peachy, to tell you the truth. I awoke to find toothpaste in my slippers this morning. Courtesy of that pesky Jean, no doubt. And this job. It’s not one bit what I expected. I thought I’d be . . . well, I guess I don’t know what I thought, but not this.” She looked up at him, awaiting some response, but he only smiled. Probably didn’t speak much English. She continued. “Everyone’s got their strengths, right? Well, this isn’t mine. I’m good at . . . dancing and looking nice and throwing a swell party.”

  She finished unbandaging his right leg and guided his foot into the basin of water. Then she started on the left. “I guess when I say it that way, it sounds pretty frivolous. Not that you understand me. But I was a good mother too. Before, anyway. I’ve got two daughters and miss them like mad. My littlest one just had her first birthday. Who knows”—her voice faltered and she wiped her eyes on her sleeve—“who knows if she’ll even remember me when I get home. But I will get home. It’s the one thing I’m sure of.”

  She peeled away the last of his dressings and ushered his other foot into the water. He gave a long sigh and wriggled his toes.

  “I think you are very good at this,” he said.

  Mirielle looked up at him. “You speak English?”

  “I was born in California, same as you.”

  “Oh . . . er . . . sorry, I assumed . . . How do you know I was born there?”

  “I recognize you from the magazines. Your husband’s last movie was muy graciosa, very funny.”

  Mirielle’s stomach tightened. She glanced quickly around, but no one else was close enough to have heard him.

  “He’d love you for saying that. The critics didn’t think it was muy graciosa or even a little graciosa.” She looked down at the smooth depression at the base of her finger. She never wore her wedding band when she worked at the clinic. “I . . . I didn’t even see it. You won’t tell anyone, will you? I mean, who I am. Who my husband is.”

>   Gossip spread quicker here than a flask of gin at a dry party. One indiscretion and the entire colony would know her real name by suppertime. A spiteful resident, a letter to a tabloid editor, and the entire country would know she was a leper.

  “Your secret is safe with me, señora.”

  Maybe it was the warmth in Hector’s eyes, or their shared journey in that stuffy boxcar, but Mirielle trusted him. “Thank you.”

  She gathered up the used bandages and toweled off the damp floor. Her gaze snagged again on the long gash across his leg that hadn’t healed since their arrival. “How come you tried to run away?”

  “I could ask you the same question.”

  “You’ve got a family too?”

  “Sí. Three boys and a girl. They’re grown now, though.”

  “You were trying to get back to them.” She looked out the rain-speckled window at the low, gray clouds. The grounds of Carville stretched for acres beyond the warren of houses and medical buildings. But sometimes it felt as claustrophobic as her jail cell. What good were tennis lawns and baseball diamonds, soda fountains and movie projectors when you couldn’t see your children?

  “I was not running back to them. I’m not welcome there anymore.”

  His words drew her attention from the window. “Where were you trying to go, then?”

  He shrugged. “Somewhere I could get work.”

  He told her how he’d met his wife, and they’d married young. Life had been good for a while. They owned a small bean farm south of Seventieth Street. Then came the disease. Fast too. Not like for some who go years with nothing more than a little numbness and a few spots. Word got around, he told her, and no one would buy their crop anymore. They lost the farm. His kids were expelled from school. They moved north to San Gabriel, but soon people were talking there too. The health department came around and threw him in the pest house. Meanwhile, his wife and children were shunned and starving. Nobody wanted a leper’s wife picking their fruit, scrubbing their floors, not even mucking their stables. Nobody wanted a leper’s kids playing with their own. He escaped, and they moved again. And again. Without treatment, the disease got worse, impossible to hide.

  “No one else in your family got sick?” she asked.

  “Gracias a Dios, no. But, by the end my wife was afraid to look on me.” He broke from Mirielle’s gaze and stared at the blank wall behind her. “I overheard my oldest boy say he wished I’d hurry up and die so they’d all be free of me. After that, I left.”

  He told Mirielle about the odd jobs he worked along the coast while she dried his feet, dabbing at the beads of water that clung to his red, waxy skin. He stitched together flour sacks and slept beneath them when it rained, sending nearly all his wages back to his family.

  “Even with me gone, life is still hard for them,” he said. “Without the farm, they have nothing. I didn’t know there’d be work here. It isn’t much, but it’s something.”

  Silence stretched between them as Mirielle finished drying his feet. The tenderness in his voice when he’d spoken about his family affirmed how much he still cared for them. The desperation in his eyes when he’d fled in Yuma made sense to her now. She felt it too, hotter now than before, as if she’d swallowed part of his story and taken it on as her own.

  Mirielle handed him his shoes. “Once there’s a cure, we can both go home.”

  “I hope I make it that long, señora.” He glanced down at his ulcerated legs.

  “You will.”

  He limped across the room to where Sister Verena waited with her ointments and fresh bandaging. Mirielle grabbed the water basin and carried it to the hopper. She caught her reflection in the trembling water—hair frizzy, nose shiny, lesion flaunting itself red and ugly above the collar of her blouse. Hopefully, she’d make it that long too.

  CHAPTER 17

  That night, Mirielle sat on the worn but cushy sofa in house eighteen’s living room. Her back ached from hours of schlepping water and leaning over stinky feet. The chaulmoogra pills she’d taken with supper rumbled in her stomach. When she burped, the strange taste of chocolatey fish lingered on her tongue.

  She tried not to think about what awaited her tomorrow in the infirmary. More bedpans, no doubt. And call bells. And cranky patients who wanted their pillow readjusted every five minutes. She could just not show up. Sleep in and take a long, hot bath while her housemates were gone to lunch. But then Sister Verena would have the satisfaction of being right about her. Charlie, too. Besides, Hector had told her she was good at the job. When she’d unwrapped and dried his legs, she hadn’t once flinched or gagged like she had her first days in the clinic.

  She rubbed her stiff neck and tried not to think about how nice it would be to have an ice-cold gin fizz in her hand and a jazzy record playing in the background. Irene owned a Victrola phonograph cabinet and kept it in the living room for anyone to use. But someone—likely Jean—had broken the turntable. Mr. Li, a Chinese man who lived in house thirty and could fix anything, according to Irene, was waiting on parts to repair it. So Mirielle had only the chirp of crickets carried through the open window to fill the silence.

  She’d heard of people coming to cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and suffering a nervous breakdown because of the constant noise. Mirielle felt just the opposite. The country silence strained her nerves. No wonder an entire house at Carville was reserved for those who’d gone mad.

  She slipped off her shoes and curled her feet beneath her on the sofa. One of her housemates had left a rumpled magazine on the side table. She picked it up for something to do. A young starlet with glossy black hair and honey-brown eyes stared up at her from the cover. They’d met once at a party, hadn’t they? Mirielle couldn’t remember. There were so many of this type of girl in Hollywood—young, pretty, hopeful. You could see the ambition in their eyes like daggers. She and Charlie laughed about it. The way these girls fawned over him and anyone else they thought had pull at the studios. They were mad about each other then, she and Charlie, as close as any two people could be. Now the thought of him alone at these parties, surrounded by fawning ingenues, made her unsettled stomach roil all the more.

  The longer she stared, the more daggerlike the cover girl’s eyes became. Mirielle pulled the collar of her blouse over her lesion and flipped open the magazine to rid herself of those eyes. Ads for typewriters and toothpaste filled the first few pages. Then the table of contents and a full-page spread announcing Paramount Pictures’s upcoming release, A Kiss for Cinderella. She didn’t have to flip back to the cover or check the contents page to know the magazine was months out of date. She remembered Charlie talking about the picture just after Christmas. That was true of everything at Carville, though, dreadfully provincial and months, if not years, behind the times.

  But it beat listening to crickets. She’d just turned to the first article and begun reading when the creak of floorboards caught her attention. She looked up and saw Jean standing in the doorway. Irritation prickled her skin. How long had Jean been there gawking? What mischief was she up to?

  She flashed Mirielle a shy smile, and Mirielle’s irritation retreated. Her daughter Evie had the same spattering of freckles across her nose and the same naughty habit of sucking on the ends of her braids. It seemed a trifle now, though, and Mirielle’s throat tightened thinking of all those times she’d scolded Evie when she ought to have let her be.

  “You don’t have to stand there,” Mirielle said.

  Jean hovered a moment more in the doorway, then bounded over and hopped onto the sofa next to Mirielle. The seat cushion groaned. She pointed to the magazine.

  “Just a gossip rag,” Mirielle said. “Stories about actors and actresses. Reviews of the latest pictures. Nothing a little girl would find interesting.”

  Jean frowned and jabbed a finger at the pages.

  “Don’t you have paper dolls or spinning tops or some such toys to play with?”

  Jean shook her head. Mirielle knew that wasn’t true. She’d
stepped on the crayons and rusty jacks Jean left lying around. But she couldn’t blame the girl for being bored when her entire world amounted to a tangle of hospital buildings and a few acres of swamp.

  “All right. You can listen along.”

  The first article was about an actress who’d retired from the screen after suffering a nervous breakdown. In her final days, she couldn’t manage more than three to four hours’ work a day and fainted from sheer weakness many times on the set. “Not surprising,” Mirielle interjected. “Those studios run their actors ragged.”

  She paused, remembering Charlie’s last film, the one he’d started not long after her accident. He’d all but lived at the studio. He blamed that on Mirielle’s moods, but she knew the big producers were just as much at fault.

  Jean nudged her, and Mirielle continued to read. The actress’s doctors sent her to some mountain spa for absolute rest and quiet. Here, Mirielle paused again and snickered. If that place were anything like Carville, all that quiet had likely made her condition worse.

  “ ‘It was terribly pitiful to see such a mesmerizing woman grow so thin and anxious,’ ” Mirielle said, reading a comment made by one of the actress’s old screen pals. “ ‘Her once lovely complexion had become like that of a lep—’ ” Mirielle choked on the word.

  She glanced at Jean, who lay with her head on the opposite armrest, jogging one foot in the air and sucking on the end of her braid. Hopefully, Mirielle’s mumbling had been enough to conceal that hateful word. She closed the magazine and set it facedown on her lap. “That’s enough Hollywood gossip for tonight. I’m sure it’s past your bedtime.”

  Jean frowned, but peeled herself off the sofa and trudged to her room. When she was gone, Mirielle flipped back to the article and tore out the page, wadding it into a tiny ball before throwing it in the trash bin.