Michael’s Wife

by Marlys Millhiser

  “I think you’ve outsmarted yourself this time, Mrs. Devereaux. This is the first I’ve noticed any resemblance between Michael and Jimmy.” Claire looked squarely at Laurel and shrugged. “It was a good try though.”

  Laurel took a closer look at the young Michael. He nestled against his mother in a way that gave an impression of security, possession, his expression seeming to dare anyone to come between them.

  She guessed him to be about Jimmy’s age when the portrait was painted. Only in the incongruous metallic eyes did he resemble the powerful, self-sufficient man he would become. The plumpness of his cheeks did not suggest Michael’s rugged cheekbones. His size, the shape of his head and nose were Jimmy. Change the color of the eyes and hair and that would be Jimmy sitting in the portrait.

  They left Janet alone in the immense salon peering at her brittle victory, her shoulders hunched.

  “Jimmy wants go home.” He didn’t even remove his thumb to speak.

  “I’m with you there, big boy. Let’s hunt up your father and persuade him, too.” They were just starting up the staircase in the entry hall.

  Claire, a little ahead of them, turned with her embarrassing giggle. “Consuela has put you and Michael together in your old room. I’m interested to see how you work that out.”

  The wild horses still romped over the spread on the king-sized bed. Dark wooden furniture as massive as ever. The light spilling through the windows onto the parquet floor was still cut into patterns by the bars of iron grillwork. This room looked enormous after the cubbyholes in the beige bungalow.

  But all was not the same. The lamp that once sat on the dresser between the double mirrors now lay in several pieces across the red rug. And Michael stood at a window overlooking the desert outside. He turned to glare at her with such an intensity that her request wavered on her lips.

  “Jimmy and I … would like to go back home.”

  “This is Jimmy’s house and mine.”

  “I don’t think this is a good time to visit, do you?”

  “I won’t be forced from my home by that bitch.” It was the kind of a statement that should be shouted but it wasn’t. It was delivered in a quiet, emphatic manner that made it useless to argue.

  “But what are we going to do? Consuela has put us both in here.”

  He didn’t answer but continued to stare at her. Drops of moisture glistened on his upper lip.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I guess I’d forgotten what my mother looked like. I didn’t realize how much you resembled her.”

  “Is that why you married me?”

  “I was a grown man when I met you, Laurel, looking for a wife, not a mother.”

  “Grown men don’t break lamps.”

  “Would you rather I broke heads?”

  “I don’t think anyone would be too upset if you went down and bopped Janet a good one right now.”

  “Did she explain her little performance after I left?” he asked, turning back to the window.

  “She wanted to get everyone’s reaction. She thinks that Paul still loves Maria and you married me because I look like her. That you’ll never love anyone but Maria and that Jimmy is not your son because he has blond hair.”

  “That’s all nonsense.” He picked up Jimmy and held him against his shoulder.

  “Then why all the reaction, Michael? It’s a good picture and belongs in that room. Why was it put away? No one’s ashamed of Maria. Why wouldn’t you all want to remember her?”

  “My father had her things put away because we didn’t want to be reminded of our loss.”

  “But.…”

  “Do you know what I remember—what the portrait downstairs brings back to me? Screams. Screaming tires and a screaming woman. Blood all over everything and a form covered by a sheet that wouldn’t answer when I called to it. Blood soaking into it, pieces of flesh and hair sticking to it. Arms that held me back so that I couldn’t touch it, go to it.” His voice was so low yet so powerful that it forced the ugly, pathetic picture from his mind to hers. But his hand, so gentle, protective, stroked his son’s hair.

  “We can’t all block out what we don’t like to remember as conveniently as you, Laurel.”

  “Then you do believe that I can’t remember?” A tenuous hope flared within her.

  He considered her a moment but didn’t answer her question. Instead he carried Jimmy to the connecting door. “You can sleep in here tonight. I’ll sleep with Jimmy.”

  But Jimmy didn’t sleep with Michael that night. He crawled out of the crib and crept into Laurel’s bed. He barely spoke all weekend, refused to let his mother out of his sight, to take a nap. They had to set him a place in the dining room where he could eat with Laurel, perched on a stack of books.

  Neither Janet nor Paul appeared for lunch or dinner Saturday, so they ate with Claire and spent most of the afternoon and evening at the pool. Jimmy trailed Laurel like a shadow, screaming and kicking if she tried to close the bathroom door on him.

  That evening at the poolside Michael lounged in a deck chair after a rigorous, monotonous, exhausting swim that had taken him from one end of the pool to the other so many times that Laurel lost count. He was still breathing heavily, watching Laurel with half-opened eyes that frightened her a little, embarrassed her a little more. She wondered how Collen would interpret that look.

  Her pink bikini seemed to weigh a ton but covered nothing as she dragged herself out of the pool and stretched out on a beach towel. Jimmy sat close beside her. He’d refused to get into the water but had walked beside it, keeping pace with her.

  “What have you done to him?” Michael’s voice startled her, coming out of the quiet, darkening night—the moon not yet up.

  “Bathed him, fed him, comforted him, read to him, spanked him, loved him, been at his beck and call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The same thing any mother does.”

  “Sounds exhausting.”

  A bat swished close over head, dived toward the pool for a drink and flew off. Laurel felt the goose bumps rise.

  “It’s no more than your mother did for you.” She sat up and put her arms around Jimmy, drawing him close. He was fighting to stay awake.

  “I lost my mother at an early age.”

  “Jimmy isn’t going to lose me … not again.” She laid him back on the towel and he didn’t move.

  “You sound sure of yourself,” Michael said in a warning whisper.

  Laurel returned his stare, surprised at the determination in her voice. “I’ll fight for him, Michael. I don’t know how, but I’ll fight.”

  “And you think I won’t? That I’ll just give him to you?”

  “No.” She looked away, unable to stare him down. “I think it would break his heart to lose either of us.”

  “He’s young.” And then a low rumbling chuckle and that infuriating lift of his eyebrow. “Are you suggesting we continue to live as we have been? Just how long do you think that can last?’

  “I don’t know. You’re leading a full life, out almost every night. You seem to be enjoying yourself.” She hated the shrewish tone in her voice.

  “Do I?”

  Suddenly angry, she rose and stood over him—her nails cutting into her flesh as she balled her hands into fists. “I’m sorry I messed up your life. I can’t go on apologizing forever. I don’t know how or why I left or why I came back. I just know I’m here. I exist. I have no excuse for it, but I exist. And you’re going to have to face it, Michael.”

  “And then what? Take you back as my loving wife because you’re Jimmy’s mother? And because you’ll condescend to take me, too, to get Jimmy?” he said, a shadow of a smile on thin lips. “It won’t wash, Laurel. There was never a flimsier excuse for a marriage.”

  “We could try.” It came out as a choked whisper. She wasn’t sure she’d really said it until his pale eyes widened and the smile vanished. Somehow she’d caught him by surprise and herself as well.

  “Hey! Can I join the family sw
im?” Claire came up beside them in her pear-shaped tank suit. She looked from one to the other. “Oops! Didn’t mean to interrupt a domestic squabble.” Getting no answer, she climbed down the ladder into the pool.

  Laurel returned to her place beside a sleeping Jimmy, tears of embarrassment in her eyes. Why did I say that? She looked over her shoulder to find Michael’s eyes still on her. She’d shaken him, too. No. She was imagining things. No one ever shook Michael.

  Claire stayed in the pool only long enough to get wet and then took the chair next to Michael’s. Laurel sat with her back to them, making a pretense of toweling her hair.

  “I really am sorry if I interrupted anything.” Claire didn’t sound sorry.

  “We’d just finished a very interesting conversation,” Michael answered.

  Laurel felt her cheeks burning. Was he laughing at her? He proposed nightcaps and left the courtyard to get them.

  “Why isn’t Jimmy in bed?” Claire said behind her.

  “He’s afraid to have me leave him. He doesn’t like it here.”

  “He liked it all right before you came along. And he never got his eye blackened around here either.”

  “That was an accident, Claire. He fell off his tricycle.”

  “My, you’re just tearing into everybody tonight.”

  When Michael returned, it was to an atmosphere of cold silence. But he and Claire were soon reminiscing, with long silent spells in between. They had little to reminisce over, Laurel noted with satisfaction.

  “Is Paul overworking you?”

  “Oh, you know how he gets when he’s this close to something. But it’s exciting. We think he’s figured a way to transplant saguaro. He’s been trying to for years. And that big one in the lab garden has been diseased. Well, he’s about cured that; it’ll be another year before we can be sure. It’s really our test case. But it could be the end of the decline in the saguaro population.”

  “What’s he going to do, run around and doctor every saguaro on the Sonora?”

  “No, but this book might get the state and conservationists interested in a mass transplanting and disease-control program. You can’t save them all, just stop ‘this race toward extinction’ as he calls it.”

  Michael was silent for a long while, the ice tinkling in hisglass as he swirled his drink, and then in a hesitant manner that was unusual for him he asked, “Is it just me or … has Paul aged this summer? This work seems to be affecting him strangely. I don’t suppose Janet’s making it any easier for him.”

  “They argue more, at least she does,” Claire said. “She likes to be the center of attention and right now that cactus is more important to him than any human being could be. Do you know he talks to it? He feels so responsible for saving them … if this experiment fails.…”

  Laurel gathered up Jimmy and as many towels as she could manage and left them without saying good night.

  She was still awake when Jimmy crawled into her bed. She snuggled close to him. Somehow, unintentionally, in her blundering way, she had won a small victory that night. She’d given Michael something to think about.

  14

  Laurel was sure of it the next morning when Michael invited her to go to mass.

  They seemed like a family for the first time, sitting in church with Jimmy between them, other families around them. And Laurel waited for something familiar to happen, to stir an old memory. But everything seemed wrong. The service was in English, the rest of the congregation stumbling as much as she through their responses, having to read out of little books provided in each pew.

  The congregational singing was off-key, a robed choir leader trying to lead them through it. She seemed only a little more lost than everyone else.

  No memories came back to her that morning, but she knew a certain happiness as unfamiliar as the church service. She was a part of something—a group, a family. This happiness lasted until dinner. For Janet had yet another bomb in her arsenal.

  Sunday dinner, with the red and gold brocaded tablecloth that looked like a drapery, the brass candlesticks, and everyone present, even Jimmy propped on his books beside Laurel. It was the first they’d seen of either Janet or Paul since the previous morning.

  The atmosphere was strained, but Michael was more relaxed, more talkative than she’d ever seen him. He drew Paul out of his sullen silence and soon had his brother talking animatedly of his hopes for the saguaro, the work he’d done on the big cactus in his fenced laboratory. When he could talk of his work, Paul seemed less detached. Claire joined in and Laurel asked questions. The tension eased.

  Even Janet listened attentively. She’d groomed hard to bring back the butterfly illusion, but the summer’s toll still showed on her face.

  It wasn’t until Consuela had cleared the table and begun to serve the iced dessert that there was a lull in the conversation and Janet spoke up. “Did Evan Boucher get ahold of you, Laurel?”

  “Yes, he stopped by one afternoon.”

  “When was this?” Michael asked curtly.

  “One Sunday when you and Jimmy were at the zoo.”

  “That reminds me.” Her sister-in-law had a triumphant expression that didn’t seem in keeping with the shambles she’d made of the weekend. She placed her spoon on the plate under the sherbet glass as a signal for everyone to begin. “Someone else has been calling for you here.”

  “For me? Who?” Laurel felt the tension seep back into the room.

  “I didn’t know exactly how to handle it until I’d talked to you.” She tasted her dessert, looking around the table to be sure she had everyone’s attention.

  She did.

  “And I told him you were out and I didn’t know when you’d be back.”

  “Him?” Laurel felt her face growing hot.

  “Yes. He’s called several times. I didn’t know if you wanted me to give him your new address. He sounded … oh, rather uneducated. He wouldn’t leave a number.”

  “Who was it?” But she knew. There was only one person it could be. And she knew what Michael would think. She could feel his stiffness next to her without even looking at him.

  “Well, let’s see if I can remember.” Janet made a pretense of concentrating. “Ummm … McBride, yes, that’s it, McBride. Harlow McBride … no … Harley. Harley McBride! Do you know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any relation to the Florence McBrides?” Paul asked, and when she didn’t answer, he turned to Michael. “You know, the old man who hung himself on the Milner ranch when Father closed the place? No, maybe you weren’t home then. It’s been some time ago. Had six children, I think.”

  “Harley is his son,” Laurel volunteered. It didn’t matter anyway. Nothing did. She was sunk. She wished she’d told Michael about Harley, but he’d always cut off any discussion about anything that had happened before the night he’d found her in Raymond McBride’s motel.

  They left immediately after dinner, a cold dangerous Michael driving as if the car were a jet with no traffic to skirt. Laurel had visions of herself under a sheet like poor Maria, pieces of hair and flesh.… She was too frightened and defeated to explain anything, knew it would be useless to try. She hoped that Jimmy, asleep in the back seat, would be spared as Michael had been on that fateful ride so long ago.

  When the state patrol car pulled them over to the side of the road, Michael got out to talk to the patrolman. Laurel waited for him to take a swing at the officer. He was in that mood she didn’t trust. But after a long and seemingly polite conference Michael returned without a ticket.

  “Just a warning?” She couldn’t believe it.

  “Yes.” It was the only word he spoke to her on the long drive home.

  In fact, he said little more than “yes” or “no” to Laurel for the next week. He came home before dinner, played with Jimmy, showered, and left carrying a light sport coat over his arm. Laurel and Jimmy ate alone, the faint smell of Michael’s after-shave lingering to remind them of him, to remind Laurel that he was probably not
dining alone. Her small victory had been short.

  Saturday morning she woke with a headache so intense it made her dizzy. She’d lain awake until Michael came home, trying to cry, to release the leaden pressure that had built up all week.

  Michael and Pat had driven off together that morning in Michael’s car, wearing twin flight suits. His working hours kept her in constant confusion. He worked some weekends and then was off a day or two during the week. Sometimes he flew at night. Her only clue to whether he left for the base or just to get away from her was the clothes he wore.

  Through the kitchen window over the sink, Laurel watched Jimmy and Sherrie splash in her new wading pool as she washed the breakfast dishes. Myra walked across the yard, bent and splashed water on them. She turned and came to Laurel’s door.

  “Hey, you wouldn’t have some iced tea, would you?”

  “Bring the jar in.” Laurel dried her hands and pointed to the glass jar on the patio where the desert sun had brewed tea for her, a trick she’d learned from Myra.

  “We’re going to have to bring those kids in early. It hasn’t cooled off since yesterday.” Myra sugared her tea and lit a cigarette. “You don’t look so hot.”

  “I woke up with a headache.”

  “Mike doesn’t look so good either.”

  “No.” And then to change the subject because she didn’t want to discuss Michael, she said a little lamely, “They’re enjoying the new wading pool. I wish I’d thought of it, keeps them cool.”

  “Yeah,” Myra said, turning to look at them. “Sherrie hates to take a bath, but I can’t get her out of that pool. Kids.”

  “I wonder if they’ll become hippies someday. We’re always scrubbing them, making them mind, thwarting them. I wonder if they’ll rebel.”

  “Probably. But they won’t be hippies. Hippies will be establishment by then, another generation that made this awful mess of the world. They’ll have some new kick of their own—God help us all!” Myra giggled and then turned serious. “But that’s not what I came to talk about.”