The Shadow Wife

“We’re hiring Gabriel and Lisbeth,” she said.

Alan glanced at her. “You know that’s what I want, Carly,” he said, “but I think your mother’s serious. She won’t give us the money if we hire them. You heard her.”

“Then we’ll get the money elsewhere,” Carlynn said. “I’m through letting her run my life. I want my sister and brother-in-law working with us.”

“So do I,” Alan agreed. “Gabe will probably have some ideas on how to get funding.”

Carlynn smiled at him. “You know what I feel like?” she asked him.

“What’s that?”

“I feel like I’m giving birth to something,” she said happily. “I feel like I’m finally getting my baby.”

Alan eased his foot onto the brake pedal, pulling the car over to the side of the narrow road.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He stopped the car and turned the key in the ignition, then pulled her into his arms. “You have no idea how happy I am to hear you say that, Carlynn,” he said, and he held her close to him until a driver pulled up behind them began to press his horn.

It took two full years of planning, but the Carlynn Shire Medical Center opened its doors during the summer of 1966, when flower children wandered the streets of San Francisco, Vietnam became the subject of protests, and Gabriel started referring to himself and other Negroes as “black.”

Carlynn and Alan rented the entire first floor of their Sutter Street medical building and transformed the new space into a bevy of treatment rooms, meeting rooms and offices, using the seed money from a small grant Gabriel had managed to secure.

Lisbeth handled all the office-management duties and secretarial work. As they grew, her hope was to hire someone to help her with the more mundane tasks of operating the center, but for now she was delighted to be the person in charge of getting the place up and running.

Money was an ongoing problem, though. Gabriel wrote grant proposals in his limited free time; they had no funds to bring him on board as a paid employee yet, and he continued to work in the business office at SF General. A bigger problem, though, was dealing with the multitude of patients arriving from all over the country who wanted to be treated at the center or to volunteer to participate in research. It was Alan who screened the patients, deciding which of them should be allowed to see Carlynn, because her medical practice was to be only part of her work. Yet, despite Alan’s careful screening and Lisbeth’s explanation to callers that they must speak to Alan Shire first, there were often people waiting on the building’s doorstep when they arrived in the morning. Carlynn was not good at turning them away, and Alan finally suggested she come in the rear door of the building and leave the appointment seekers to him.

It was important that Carlynn see only a few patients each week. The rest of her time was needed for the interviews Lisbeth set up for her with newspapers and magazines, and for speaking engagements with organizations that might be interested in funding her research. Alan spent most of his days with his nose buried in books and journals as he toyed with various study designs.

Ever since the four of them had made the firm decision to create the center, Carlynn’s dark mood had lifted. Her life had a meaning and purpose she’d been missing before. She might not ever be able to have children, but she was creating something that gave her equal satisfaction. She was touching lives, the way she’d always wanted to, and she hoped the work of the center would give her the chance to touch many, many more.

32

SAM WAS IN BED, AND LIAM WAS SITTING ON THE SOFA IN THE living room playing his guitar. He’d sorted through all the old music he’d stored in the spare room after Mara became ill. He’d bought new strings, a couple of new pieces of music, and now he couldn’t stop playing. He thought about the guitar all day at work, jotting down lyrics and chords for new songs. At night, music had taken the place of the internet, where he used to search for the miracle for Mara, and he felt a little guilty about that. But he consoled himself that he had the great Carlynn Shire herself working with his wife. What more could anyone want?

He’d brought the guitar to two of those meetings with the healer at the nursing home now, and the last time, Carlynn had Mara sit up in her wheelchair. Carlynn was still touching her, holding her hand in both of hers, but the four of them were in a circle of sorts, and if it had felt strange to be singing while Mara lay in her bed, this was even stranger. Mara had stared at his fingers. What was she thinking? Did she remember playing the guitar herself? Did she feel a longing for the music? For him? If you could speak, Mara, what would you say?

If anyone were to observe him and Joelle on those occasions, they would probably think of them as comfortable old friends who could chat easily and regularly with one another, but that was not the case. The safety he felt in that room evaporated the moment he was alone with Joelle or talking to her on the phone. Then he was back to the superficial, businesslike conversations he’d gotten accustomed to having with her over the past few months. How are you? Fine. How was your day? Good. Her belly was growing and he rarely said a word about it. Did she think he had no feelings about the situation? Did she think he didn’t care that he would soon have a daughter and didn’t know what the hell he should do about it?

At twenty-five weeks pregnant, Joelle was like a walking billboard for his infidelity. And no one knew. No one even guessed. No one would ever think such a thing of Liam Sommers and Joelle D’Angelo.

He was pulling a piece of old music from one of the boxes on the sofa when he noticed the flash of headlights shoot across the walls of the living room. A car was pulling into his driveway. Standing up, he walked over to the window and peered outside. Sheila’s car was parked near the carport, and he could see the interior lights come on as she opened her door. What was she doing here at ten-thirty at night?

He opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. “Sheila?” he called as she got out of her car. “Is everything all right?”

She walked from her car to his front porch without answering him. At the bottom of the porch steps, though, she looked up at him. “I need to talk to you,” she said. Her blond hair glittered in the light from the porch, and her eyes were cold. He shivered.

“Come in.” He stepped back into the house and held the door open for her, a little unnerved. “Has something happened with Mara?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t know.” Sheila didn’t so much walk as plow into the room. She was boiling mad, and he felt his heart rate speed up.