The Shadow Wife

by Diane Chamberlain

  Gabriel had become almost fanatical about wanting to take a vacation in Mendocino. He’d been talking about it ever since Alan and Carlynn honeymooned there after their wedding nearly two years earlier. They’d raved about the peace and quiet and the natural beauty of the location, saying how perfect it was for a romantic getaway. It would be different for her and Gabriel, though, Lisbeth knew. Whenever they stayed in a hotel, they had to get two separate rooms. Someday, Gabriel promised her, they would be married. She now wore a spectacular diamond and sapphire ring on her left hand, but they had not yet set a date. She trusted their relationship, its depth and its love, but she knew Gabe still harbored the fear that marriage to him would cost her more than he was worth.

  She’d certainly thought about the price she was paying for being with Gabriel. She had not visited Cypress Point since Carlynn’s wedding, and she missed the mansion and the view from the terrace in a way that could cause her actual physical pain. Sometimes at night, she yearned for her old bedroom, where the open windows let in the sound of the waves slapping against the rocky shore.

  She thought, too, about the financial cost a marriage to Gabriel would mean for her. She would lose a fortune if she was cut out of her mother’s will. That only meant, she tried to reason with herself, that she and Gabriel would live like most couples, dependent on only themselves and their own resources to get by. They would never be rich, but between her small salary and Gabriel’s larger one, they would be in better shape than many people they knew. She should need nothing more than that.

  It was not fair, though. Not fair that Carlynn, who had gotten the best of everything as a child, should still receive it now, as an adult. It was a struggle for Lisbeth not to shift the anger she felt toward her mother onto her sister’s shoulders. When Carlynn would return from a visit to the mansion, Lisbeth could barely look her in the eye, she was so jealous. She knew that her twin fought with Delora to allow Lisbeth to visit Cypress Point, but there was no way she could win that battle. Delora had all the power.

  Although Lisbeth hadn’t set foot in the mansion in two years, Carlynn made regular trips to see their mother, whose eyesight was worsening and who was developing other aches and pains as well, even though she was only in her fifties. Carlynn would be upset after those visits, because although she possessed the ability to heal total strangers, she seemed unable to rid her mother of her ailments.

  Carlynn was upset over other matters, as well, Lisbeth knew. After two years of marriage, she was still not pregnant, and Lisbeth heard the frustration in her sister’s voice every month when she’d call to announce she had, once again, gotten her period.

  Lisbeth, though, had decided she didn’t want children, and she thought Gabriel seemed relieved by that decision. He still worried about how their half-white, half-Negro children might fit into the world, but Lisbeth’s reasoning went even deeper than that. Her own childhood had been so unhappy, and her memories of herself as a little girl so excruciating, that she couldn’t bear the thought of watching a child of her own endure anything that might be hurtful. She still used a diaphragm to keep from getting pregnant, but Carlynn had told her that within a year or two, birth control pills would be on the market. Lisbeth had kept her joy over that news to herself out of sensitivity to her sister, who might never need a pill to avoid getting pregnant.

  Little Richard was singing about Miss Molly when Lloyd and Gabriel surprised her by returning to the office. Lloyd wore a look of defeat on his face, but Lisbeth knew him well enough to see the smile behind it.

  “Your boyfriend drives a hard bargain,” Lloyd said to her, and she looked at Gabriel.

  “We’re going?” she asked, surprised.

  “This Saturday,” Gabriel said. “For an entire week. I already called to book two rooms for us at the same inn where Carlynn and Alan stayed. Right on a bluff over the water.”

  Lisbeth walked around the desk to give each man a hug. She could hardly wait to call Carlynn to tell her the news.

  Mendocino was a small, stunning village, perched on a bluff high above the Pacific, and in some ways it reminded her of the area around Cypress Point. As they drove into the town in Gabriel’s open convertible with its fins and whitewall tires, she wondered if that might have been the reason he had so wanted to bring her here. Maybe it was his attempt to give her back a bit of what she’d lost.

  The architecture ranged from Victorian to early Californian, and the homes and shops looked bright and clean in the afternoon sun. In the distance to their left, a group of people stood at the edge of a bluff, staring out to sea.

  “What’s going on out there?” she asked, and Gabriel followed her gaze to the bluff.

  “Everyone’s dressed in black,” he said. “It’s probably a funeral service of some kind. Maybe they’re scattering someone’s ashes into the sea.”

  She thought he was right as she, too, noticed the dark clothing and somber demeanor of the group silhouetted at the edge of the cliff. “What a glorious location,” she said, and it was a moment before she could tear her gaze away.

  The inn was small and lovely, set back just a bit from the bluff and surrounded by a gorgeous coastal garden in full bloom. They walked together into the small office at the side of the inn, and Lisbeth was relieved when the woman behind the counter greeted them with a wide smile, as though she had interracial couples checking in every day of the week. Lisbeth wondered if they might have been able to get away with a double room instead of two singles, but Gabriel would never have agreed to that. He was more protective of her honor than she was.

  “No keys,” the innkeeper said after they had paid and signed the guest book. “You have the two rooms on the second floor. Just turn right at the top of the stairs.”

  Gabriel thanked the woman, and they left the office, gathered their luggage from the car and entered the front door of the inn. At the top of the stairs, they turned right and opened the first of two doors.

  The room was small and cozy, with a white iron double bed and a view of the bluffs. Lisbeth set her suitcase down and walked over to the open window, its white, gauzy curtains wafting into the room on the soft breeze. She could see the dark-suited throng walking away from the cliff, some of them with their arms around one another.

  “I think this room is mine,” Gabriel said.

  She looked at him in surprise. “Why don’t we look at both of them before we decide who gets which?” she suggested.

  “All right.” He set his own suitcase on the floor. “Let’s look at the other one,” he said, walking back into the hall.

  She was first to enter the room and her gaze instantly fell on a wedding dress hanging from a hook on the closet door. “Oh,” she said, drawing back quickly. “This must be someone else’s room.”

  Gabriel stood right behind her, preventing her from exiting. “No,” he said, his lips against her ear. “I think it’s yours.”

  Lisbeth felt a chill run up her spine. That dress. She suddenly recognized it as the dress she had tried on two years earlier when shopping for Carlynn’s wedding dress with her. She could never forget that magnificent arrangement of satin and lace.

  “I…I don’t understand, Gabe,” she said.

  He turned her toward him, smiling at her. “Will you marry me?” he asked. “Here? Tomorrow? Out there?” He nodded toward the view outside the window. “On the bluff overlooking the ocean?”

  For just an instant, she felt torn, thinking of the wedding she’d long dreamed about, where she and Gabriel would be surrounded by family and friends. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that she would become Gabriel’s wife. Tomorrow night, they’d be able to share a hotel room for the first time. She would be Lisbeth Johnson.

  She threw herself into his arms. “Yes, of course I will!” she said. “How on earth did you know about the dress?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No…except that I’m thinner than I was when I last tried it on.”

  “It will fit,” he p
romised. “And I’ll find someone here who can take pictures of you in it, so you can show everyone back home how beautiful you looked.”

  The minister was to meet them on the bluff at eleven the following morning, and at ten, Lisbeth put on the dress and styled her hair, which would probably fall flat once she was out in the damp, cool air above the ocean. But she didn’t care. There was no full-length mirror in her room, but she knew the dress fit perfectly, and the beauty of wearing it was more in the feeling than in the seeing. Carlynn had something to do with this, of course. How else would Gabriel have found the right dress, in the right size for her? She had no flowers, though, and her hands felt a bit awkward, with no place to rest. Gabe had probably not given a thought to flowers.

  At ten of eleven, Gabriel knocked on her door. She pulled the door open, and Gabriel’s eyes glistened behind his glasses when he saw her. “You are the most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said. “And you look beautiful yourself.” He was wearing a white tuxedo she had never seen him in before, a red carnation in his lapel.

  He put his hands on her arms and looked into her eyes. “I wasn’t going to tell you this,” he said. “I wanted it to be a surprise, but I know how sad you must feel that Carlynn’s not here with you. So, I’m going to tell you that she is.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “She is? Where?”

  “She and Alan will meet us on the bluff, okay?”

  “Oh, yes!” she said. “Thank you so much, Gabe.”

  “And she has flowers for you,” he added.

  She laughed, slipping her hand through the arm he offered her.

  It took them a few minutes to get down the narrow stairs of the inn. Her dress was perfectly tailored with a narrow cut that hugged her slender body, but Gabriel had to carry the long train in his arms to prevent them both from falling headlong down the stairs.

  They started walking toward the cliff overlooking the water, Lisbeth searching for three people—Carlynn, Alan and the minister—but she was distressed to see another crowd on the bluff, as there had been the day before. Probably another scattering of ashes, she thought, and it was only as they neared the throng of people that she began to make out faces. Carlynn. Alan. Lloyd Peterson and his wife. Gabriel’s mother and sister, aunts and uncles and cousins from Oakland. Their boating friends. All of them standing there on the bluff, grinning at the stunned look on her face.

  Gabriel clutched her hand where it rested on his arm.

  “Surprise, baby,” he whispered to her. “We’ve been planning this for months.”

  She was unable to take another step forward as she began to cry. Carlynn ran out from the crowd to hug her, hard, and handed her a bouquet of red roses, and the Negro minister from the Johnson family’s Oakland church walked toward her and Gabriel, since Lisbeth seemed unable to move herself.

  “We assumed you wouldn’t mind if I was your matron of honor,” Carlynn whispered as she took her place next to her.

  Lisbeth shook her head numbly, noticing that Alan stood next to Gabriel as his best man. She floated through the ceremony, touched beyond words that Gabriel had planned this, going back in her mind over clues she’d missed: Lloyd allowing her to go on this trip after pretending to be against it; Carlynn asking her a month or so ago if she thought they were exactly the same size now; the Fourth of July celebration at Gabriel’s mother’s house, when the chattering in the kitchen had stopped the moment Lisbeth had walked into the room.

  She barely heard the words of the minister, managing by some miracle to get the “I do” in the right place. Her eyes were on her husband as she waited for the moment she could wrap her arms around him, telling him she would never forget this gift he had given her.

  They celebrated in the side yard of the inn with a feast and three-tiered wedding cake served under a huge tent which had been miraculously erected in the garden during the ceremony. And afterward, she and Gabriel retired to the honeymoon cottage, located a distance from the inn itself, where the innkeeper had already moved their luggage.

  In bed that night, Gabriel held her close.

  “Do you mind that I did it this way?” he asked. “I saw all the anguish Carlynn went through in planning her wedding, and I just didn’t want any of those crazy family problems to get in the way of your day. But you didn’t get to do any of the planning, yourself, and I worried that—”

  She kissed him to stop his talking. “This was perfect,” she said. “The fact that you did this for me, for us…I can’t think of anything more remarkable you could have done.”

  She snuggled against him. She didn’t care about planning a wedding, or even about the quaint little honeymoon cottage, or the view from the bluffs, or the dress she had worn. At that moment, she didn’t even care about her mother’s will, which would no longer contain Lisbeth’s name except to acknowledge her as the daughter to whom Delora would leave nothing. All she cared about now was the man lying by her side.

  27

  AT TWENTY-ONE WEEKS, JOELLE COULD NOT HAVE HIDDEN HER pregnancy even if she had wanted to. She sat on the front porch of the condominium that Saturday afternoon waiting for Liam to pick her up to go to the nursing home, and for the first time she was wearing maternity clothes in public. She had on black leggings with a soft, stretchy fabric panel over her belly, a red cotton sleeveless blouse and a white, black-trimmed sweater tossed over her shoulders in case the day grew cooler, which was often the norm in Monterey. Her mother, who, until that morning, had been staying with her while she healed from the appendectomy, had taken her shopping the day before, and Joelle thought they must have hit every thrift shop in Monterey County.

  “No need to pay high prices for clothes you’ll only be wearing a few months,” her mother had said.

  Her father had stayed with them the first week, but he needed to get back to the coffeehouse he managed, so only her mother had been with her for the last two weeks. It had been a good visit. A wonderful visit, actually. For the first couple of weeks, Joelle had not felt up to leaving the condominium except for her doctor’s appointments, and her mother had grocery shopped and cooked for her. They played cards and board games, just the two of them, with Tony and Gary joining them a couple of evenings. She and her mother talked in a way they’d never really had the time to before. Joelle learned that her mother was still madly in love with her father after all these years, despite what she referred to as some “difficulties” during those last few years at the commune, something they had hidden well from Joelle. Her mother told her how afraid she’d been when she found out she was pregnant and the absolute terror she’d felt when she thought her baby had been born dead.

  “I remember wanting to scream,” she said, “but I was all screamed out by that point.”

  Joelle couldn’t bear to think what that experience had been like for her parents. Her baby, to whom she was already irrevocably attached, no longer felt like a bubble so much as a butterfly, and she couldn’t imagine going through nine months of falling in love with her unborn child only to have something go wrong at the last minute. That thought made her glad she didn’t have to go back to work right away. She was not at all in the mood to deal with stillbirths, and she knew that when she returned after this sick leave, someone else would have to take those cases. If not for her own sanity, then out of kindness to the bereaved parents, who should not have to receive counseling from a healthy pregnant woman immediately after enduring such a loss.

  Her baby was more real to her now. The sonogram she’d had several days ago had shown arms and legs, one visible eye, an open mouth. Rebecca had asked her if she wanted to know the baby’s sex.

  “Yes!” Joelle had said.

  Her mother had been with her, marveling at the image on the screen, and Rebecca pointed out the barely perceptible labia to both of them.

  “Three generations of women, right here in this room!” her mother said, and for some reason, that made Joelle cry. Although she had not intended
to do so, her imagination flashed forward to a baby dressed in little-girl clothes, a child with braids in kindergarten, a giggling teenager in a prom dress and a happy young woman at her wedding. And who would be the man walking that little girl down the aisle? She was afraid it would not be Liam.

  She longed to tell Liam that the baby was a girl, but he had not even mentioned her pregnancy since their conversation in the recovery room after her appendectomy, and she was angry with him for that. She feared expressing that anger, though. Feared pushing him farther away. How would he react if she told him he would soon have a daughter? She was most afraid that he wouldn’t react at all, and if that was to be the case, she didn’t want to know it.

  He’d called her every few days while she was away from work, but she’d gotten the feeling he was making the calls out of a sense of duty rather than desire, and their conversations had been short and superficial. She had no idea what was going on inside his head, and she didn’t dare ask him; it was apparent he didn’t want either of them to dig too deeply into the other’s thoughts and feelings. It had been easy to honor his unspoken wishes while her mother had been with her, when she hadn’t felt the need for much contact with anyone else. But now, with her mother gone and two more weeks of recovery ahead of her, she worried that she would have too much time to think.

  It was now ten of one, and Liam was late. They were to meet Carlynn at the nursing home at one o’clock. Quinn would drive her there, Carlynn had told Joelle, and he’d run a few errands while she spent an hour with the two of them and Mara. Although Liam wisely had not balked when Joelle told him the plan, she knew he saw this whole outing as pointless, if not preposterous.