The Second Life of Mirielle West

by Amanda Skenandore

  “How long till we know?” Mirielle asked the doctor.

  “A few days.”

  “Days? I have a family, a baby who needs me.” Without thinking, her hands went to her breasts, long since dried of their milk. “I have to get home.”

  His tired eyes regarded her, and she convinced herself it wasn’t pity but simple kindness that made them soften. “I suppose I could go examine the slides myself. Give me an hour, maybe two.”

  “Thank you.”

  He started to shuffle around the screen, but Mirielle called out to him. “Doc Jack.”

  He turned around.

  “The man with the handcuffs, is he okay?”

  “Took near an hour to saw the darned things off him, but yes, he’s fine.”

  “And the other man?” Mirielle hesitated. Did she really want to know? “The man who came in on the stretcher.”

  His smile faded. “We did an emergency tracheotomy on him this morning, but he was already bleeding into his lungs and didn’t come through.”

  Mirielle nodded as the doctor left, feeling suddenly queasy. Her fingers trembled as she fastened her girdle and brassiere atop her chemise, and shimmied back into her dress.

  * * *

  Doc Jack returned just over an hour later as promised. Sister Verena trailed behind him, her stiff skirts rasping as she walked. The doctor smiled at another patient as he crossed the room toward Mirielle. Said a cheery hello to another one of the sisters. A good sign, Mirielle decided. But when he pulled the stool up to her bedside and sat, he was no longer smiling.

  “I examined your slides very carefully, and I’m afraid the doctors in California were correct. You are infected with the Mycobacterium leprae bacillus.”

  The infirmary began to sway as if an earthquake were upon them. Mirielle put her hands out on either side of her and clutched the mattress. “Bacillus?”

  “I’m sorry, that’s how we refer to the microorganism, the germ, that causes leprosy.”

  “But that’s . . . that’s impossible. I feel completely fine.”

  “Lucky for you, we caught it at a very early stage. With the proper treatment, it may never advance. . . .”

  Mirielle tried to unscramble his words and reassemble them in a way that made sense. “The passengers on the train and I had to drink from the same water barrel. I may have accidentally touched one of them too. Maybe those are their germs on the slides, not mine. If I could shower, brush my teeth, then you could test again and it would be negative.”

  “That’s not how the disease develops. It takes years to incubate . . . er . . . grow inside you. Many patients here contracted the disease as children and didn’t show signs—”

  “I have to go.” Mirielle stood and reached for her bags. “Home. This isn’t, I can’t, you’ve made a mis—”

  Doc Jack stood too and laid his hand on her arm. “I’m afraid you can’t. Leave, that is. Carville is the best place in the world to be for the treatment of leprosy. We’ve got the best personnel, and we’re trialing new remedies all the time.”

  “There isn’t a cure?”

  He squeezed her arm, then sank his hand into his pocket. “Well, no. Not exactly. We have medicines and therapy that help in certain cases and can—”

  An orderly rushed into the room and yelled between panting breaths, “Doc Jack, you’re needed in the men’s infirmary.”

  “I’ve got to go, but I’ll see you again soon. Nurse Verena can answer all your questions.”

  Mirielle shuffled backward until the underside of her knees hit the creaky bed frame. No cure? She sank onto the mattress and looked around for a basin in case her undigested lunch rose any farther up her throat.

  “Do you have any more questions?” the sister asked.

  Questions? Mirielle had a million but couldn’t form them into words. She shook her head.

  “And a name?”

  “What?”

  “I need a name to put on your chart, dear.”

  Mirielle closed her eyes—hoping that would stop the room from spinning, stop the vomit burning its way up her esophagus, stop the charade that had suddenly become her life.

  CHAPTER 7

  “This is Mrs. Pauline—” Sister Verena untucked Mirielle’s chart from beneath her arm and glanced inside. “Pauline Marvin.”

  The name sounded ridiculous said aloud by Sister Verena. Was it too late for Mirielle to change it? Then again, the entire situation was ridiculous. A different name—something more generic and less personal—would hardly change that.

  The sister nudged Mirielle toward a small group waiting outside the infirmary. “Your traveling companions, I believe you know.”

  “I’m Hector,” said the Mexican man, meeting her eyes a moment before returning his gaze to the ground. His tattered and dusty clothes had been changed for clean ones, and his wrists were wrapped in gauze.

  “Olga,” said the puffy-faced woman.

  But these weren’t their real names. Surely they’d been pressed for an alias too. Who had they been before? A twinge of regret stirred inside Mirielle at not having spoken to them on the train when they weren’t yet so cleaved from the world.

  Like Mirielle, they both held a hospital-issue pillow and sheet set.

  “And this is Frank Garrett,” Sister Verena said, gesturing to a man Mirielle didn’t recognize. “Mr. Garrett has been a patient here for several years and is very active in the colony. He’ll give you a tour of the facility before showing you to your assigned houses.” She flashed her closed-lipped smile, then turned back to the infirmary.

  “Call me Frank,” the man said, extending his hand.

  Mirielle gasped and backed away. It was hardly a hand at all. The skin was rough and scarred. A short nub extended above his knuckle where his ring finger ought to be. The other fingers curled inward. His left hand, hanging idly at his side, looked similarly misshapen.

  Her stranglehold on her pillow and bedclothes tightened. The stories were true. Lepers’ fingers and arms and legs just fell off. Would they find body parts strewn and decomposing about the facility? Would her limbs shrivel and fall off in the same way?

  “Quite a sight, no?” he said, raising both of his hideous hands to eye level. “Claw-hands, we call ’em here. Makes it tricky to hold a pen, but don’t challenge me to a crawfish eating contest.” He made a twisting gesture with his claws.

  Hector chuckled. Mirielle backed away.

  “Mais,” Frank continued, his drawling voice still light. “Happy to meet ya, Mrs. Marvin.” He started down the screened walkway and waved a claw for Mirielle and the others to follow. “Say, sure do like your name. Puts me in mind of a serial I watched years back.”

  He stopped and gestured to a T-shaped building. Windows ran the length of every side, each shaded by a canvas awning. Like all the buildings and walkways, brick piers raised it several feet above the boggy ground. “That there’s the dining hall and kitchen. Meals served up at seven, eleven, and four thirty. You’ll hear the bell. If not, you’ll see the line. We line up at Carville for just about everything from soup to soap.” He turned and smiled at Mirielle and Olga. “Feel free to grab a tray and cut in line, ladies. We do try to be gentlemanly here. Most of us, anyway.”

  They continued on, Frank pointing out the tennis court and laundry, the laboratory and operating room. Not only were his hands fit for a sideshow, but he talked funny too. Fast yet lazy-sounding, as if he couldn’t be bothered to enunciate his vowels or bring his tongue forward to make a th sound. It was different from the Southern drawl others spoke with. Creole perhaps. Or Cajun. Was there a difference? Mirielle didn’t know and didn’t care. She only wished she didn’t have to pay such damned close attention to make out what he was saying.

  Other residents passed them on the walkways, some in wheelchairs, some on bikes, some on foot. All gawked shamelessly at Mirielle and her companions. Frank seemed to know everyone and belabored the tour with needless introductions. Mirielle didn’t listen to the other res
idents’ names or reach out when they offered her a hand. She’d been promised a room somewhere in the long quadrangle of bungalow-style houses surrounding the dining hall and just wanted to get there. Wanted to close the door and block out this place.

  “Pauline Marvin?” one of the passing strangers asked when Frank introduced them. Lumps of various sizes crowded his face such that she could barely see his lips and eyes. “Like in that old show?”

  Frank slapped the side of his leg. “That’s what I was thinking. You remember the name?”

  “Nah,” the man said. “Had Pearl Sutter and Charlie Wes—”

  “For Pete’s sake! My name’s got nothing to do with those old pictures,” Mirielle said.

  “Sheesh,” the man said, eyeing Mirielle before taking off on his bike.

  “Sorry, chère,” Frank said, though in his hillbilly way of talking it sounded like sha. “Didn’t mean to get your feathers up.”

  “My feathers are not up. I simply want to get to my room.”

  “I hear ya. We’re almost there.” He started walking again, leading them deeper into a web of covered boardwalks. “What a howl those shows were. The Pitfalls of Pauline? Nah, that ain’t right. Pauline’s Perils? . . .”

  The Perilous Pursuits of Pauline. Mirielle had snuck out every week the summer she turned nineteen to watch the latest episode. Her grandmother found the whole moving picture industry intolerably common, but Mirielle loved it from her first glimpse at a nickelodeon on the pier. Pearl Sutter was at her best in The Perilous Pursuits of Pauline, and her handsome costar wasn’t too shabby either, though at the time Mirielle hadn’t recognized his name. The films were shot in New Jersey. It wasn’t until the following spring that Charlie switched studios and came out to Hollywood. They’d met at a party—one, like the pictures, she’d had to sneak out to attend—but she always joked that their first meeting had been a dingy theater on Adams Street during a screening of The Perilous Pursuits of Pauline. No one here needed to know that, though. Certainly not Frank.

  The tour stalled again at the recreation hall and attached canteen.

  “You can usually find me here behind the counter working the soda fountain,” Frank told them. “Or sorting the mail. Letters have to be dropped off by ten a.m. sharp so it can go through the sterilizer before the postman comes.” Frank paused. “Don’t hurt to offer a little prayer that it ain’t incinerated in the process.”

  “The mail is sterilized?” she asked.

  He brushed a strand of dark, wavy hair away from his face. Clearly, he didn’t know the fashion nowadays was for short hair, parted at the side and slicked back à la Valentino. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And sometimes letters get incinerated?”

  “Not too often,” he said with a wink.

  She pursed her lips and looked away. The canteen consisted of little more than a counter and stools; a few shelves stocked with cigarettes, candy bars, and canned goods; and a spattering of mismatched tables and chairs. A mousetrap with a moldy bit of cheese sat in one corner. Gold and green crepe paper bunting hung from the walls, torn and drooping, with a hand-painted sign hanging askew. HAPPY MARDI GRAS! it read. A few flecks of matching confetti littered the floor.

  “Ready to move on?” Frank said as if she’d been the one holding them up.

  She brushed past him to the exterior walkway, but couldn’t go any farther on her own. One white building looked so much like the next, interconnected with what must amount to over a mile of caged-in walks. Mirielle felt like a rodent in a maze, the kind tortured with experiments until it lost all its hair and gnawed off its own tail.

  The tour stopped at another intersection. “There’s Union Chapel for those of ya of the Protestant persuasion,” Frank said, gesturing with a claw-hand to a plastered building with a square belfry and amber-tinted window. “Got your regular services Sunday mornings and Bible lectures Wednesday evenings.”

  He pointed out the Catholic chapel too, not more than a few dozen yards away. Both buildings faced away from the colony toward a narrow dirt road and smooth-sloping levee. The Mississippi River bounded the reserve on three sides, Frank told them, but the levee blocked any view of the water. Between the chapels and the road rose a cyclone fence crowned with several strands of barbed wire. It marched link upon link as far as she could see.

  Frank was saying something about the daily mass schedule, but she interrupted him. “Is this a hospital or a prison they’re running here?”

  He looked from her to the fence and back. “Ain’t you heard? There are lepers here.” He waited a beat, then chuckled at his own pathetic joke. Mirielle tightened her hold around her pillow and bedsheets for want of strangling him. They continued down the walkway, Mirielle last among them. She no longer bothered to glance up when they passed other patients. She didn’t nod or offer her fake name in reply to theirs. She was afraid of what she would see if she looked at them—more scaly skin and sunken noses, more missing legs and shriveled hands, more reddened and despondent eyes.

  They rounded a corner and stopped before a long line of houses. She prayed the tour was over and one of these houses were hers.

  “Don’t forget to come out for our next meeting of the What Cheer Club,” Frank was saying, walking backward to address them, his awkward gait slower than her daughter Helen could crawl. “We host holiday parties and social—”

  “Enough with the jokes!” Mirielle slammed her foot down on the walkway. “We’re tired and just want to get to our damned rooms.”

  Frank stopped. Olga and Hector turned and looked at her.

  “My God,” Mirielle went on, the dam of her rage breaking. “The lines, the mail, your crippled hands”—she swept her arm toward the cottages and walkways and hospital buildings—“none of this is funny. And this What Cheer Club. Do you take us for saps? What does anyone here have to be cheerful about?”

  Frank looked down, ran his craggy fingers through his untamed hair, then raised his chin. His ice-blue eyes met her gaze squarely. “We’re alive. That’s one thing.”

  “Alive? You said it yourself, we’re . . .” Her mouth struggled to form the word. “Lepers. We might as well be dead.”

  “That ain’t how I see it.”

  She picked up her luggage and brushed past Olga and Hector to stand directly before him. “Well, maybe you should get your eyes checked—there’s a joke for you!—now, what number is my room?”

  He shook his head, then muttered, “House eighteen. Irene, she’s your orderly, her. She’ll show you which room is yours.”

  Mirielle stomped past him. The cottages butted up to the walkway, each with a number painted above the door. Most had their doors propped open, rocking chairs and potted plants cluttering the porch-like nook that jutted beyond the walkway.

  An old woman sat hunched in one of the weathered rockers outside of house eighteen. Lesions marred her face, and a gauze bandage covered her left cheek. Pink fluid had bled through the fibers and wept from beneath the edges down her face.

  “What you lookin’ at?” she asked as Mirielle approached.

  “Are you Kathleen?”

  “You mean Irene, and no, I ain’t.”

  When she didn’t say anything more, Mirielle shimmied around her and went inside. A hallway ran the length of the house, with doors lining either side. The floorboards creaked beneath her. The wall paint bubbled with rot.

  “Third door on the right, newcomer,” the woman called after her.

  The room was empty save for a narrow, iron-framed bed, a side table, a straight-back chair, and an unvarnished wardrobe. A cast-iron radiator hummed alongside the wall. Mirielle’s luggage sat in a heap in one corner. The day’s gray light spilled in through an undressed window. Mirielle stepped inside and closed the door. She dropped everything and stared at the tiny room, too shell-shocked to cry.

  CHAPTER 8

  A few hours later, a knock sounded on the door. Mirielle didn’t bother to get up from her undressed bed to answer. “Go away.”
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br />   She hadn’t unpacked anything except the framed picture of her family, which she’d set on the rickety bedside table. Everything else lay untouched—her luggage a towering pile in one corner, her bedclothes and pillow a heap on the floor.

  The knocker entered uninvited. “Welcome to Carville!”

  She was a tall woman, thick through the waist, with henna-dyed hair graying at the roots.

  “Are you Iris?” Mirielle asked.

  “Irene. Orderly of this here palace.”

  “Are you a . . .”

  “Leper?” She reached out and patted Mirielle’s shoulder. “Baby, we’re all lepers here.”

  Mirielle jerked back so quickly she fell off the narrow bed, landing on her rear on the opposite side. “I’m not a . . . a . . . I don’t . . . I can’t possibly have the disease.”

  Irene walked around the bed and held out her hands to help Mirielle up. Save for a few red patches on her face and neck, her skin was unblemished and her limbs whole. Reluctantly, Mirielle took her hands. With surprising strength for a woman hot-footing it toward fifty, Irene hauled Mirielle to her feet.

  “I know it’s hard, baby. Took me months to accept it. Cried myself to sleep two weeks straight and then some.” She gave Mirielle’s hands a squeeze before letting go. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

  “Is it dinnertime?”

  Irene cocked her head to one side, revealing a large ear with a scarred, drooping lobe. As if on cue, a bell tolled somewhere off in the colony. “It is now. That’s the supper bell. Come on.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “ ’Course you are.” Irene took her arm and dragged her from the room.

  After several twists and turns in the walkway, they arrived at the dining hall. Irene yapped the entire way, but Mirielle didn’t register a word. They cut in near the front of a long line and shuffled with their trays down the food counter. Kitchen staff heaped peas and fried potatoes and roasted chicken onto a plate and deposited it on Mirielle’s tray. Bread and butter, a glass of milk, and some gummy substance she guessed to be cobbler soon followed.