The Second Life of Mirielle West

by Amanda Skenandore

  With their trays brimming, she and Irene crossed the dining hall toward a crowded table of women. Heads turned, and people stared as Mirielle passed.

  “Folks don’t move fast here, except at mealtime,” Irene was saying. “Once you hear that bell ring, you’d better watch out.” She nodded for Mirielle to take the last seat at the table, then squeezed in another chair for herself. “Listen up, ladies, this is Pauline.”

  After a chorus of hellos, Irene introduced each of the women, most of whom lived in house eighteen, including the old, bandaged woman Mirielle had met on the porch. None of their names stuck in her addled mind. All she noticed was their disease. A few had islands of lesions across their skin—dry, thick patches more or less circular in shape. One had pea-sized blisters up and down her arms. Another hadn’t any eyebrows, only thickened, red skin in their place. The woman to Mirielle’s left had trouble grasping her fork as several of her fingers curled inward like Frank’s. The woman across the table couldn’t fully close her eyelids, while her cheeks and lips drooped pendulous and flaccid, giving her a strange, doleful expression. Still others had no discernible marks of the disease at all.

  “Is it true you’re from California?” a woman with only a few pale rings scattered across her skin asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You ever meet any of them moving picture stars?”

  Mirielle choked on a sip of milk. “No.”

  “Too bad,” the woman said, and turned back to her food.

  The women asked other questions too. Personal ones. Was she married? How long? Children? Boys? Girls? How many? How old? Did any of them have the disease?

  “Of course not,” Mirielle said to this last question.

  Several women at the table snorted and smirked.

  “All right, that’s enough with the questions,” Irene said, scraping the final bits of chicken and potatoes onto her fork. “Let the poor gal breathe, will ya?”

  Their conversation turned to speculation about Hector and the other newcomers to which Mirielle offered nothing. Instead, her thoughts wandered back to her examination. How many times had Doc Jack brushed her with cotton that she didn’t feel? Had the numbness in her burned finger spread? Her entire body felt fuzzy, as if she were a figure in one of her daughter’s drawings—one hand and half of the body messily erased, the rest without definition or adornment, abandoned before completion in favor of a tea party with her dolls.

  She looked down at the fork buried in her untouched food. If she jammed the tines through her hand, would she register pain? What about through her heart? Never mind Doc Jack’s tests and microscope. A few tiny—what had he called them? Bacilli?—wouldn’t keep her from returning home.

  “There you are,” Irene said loudly, drawing Mirielle from her thoughts. “What did I tell you about being late for supper?”

  A young girl approached their table. Her stockings slouched around her ankles and her black and white saddle oxfords were speckled with mud. The air left Mirielle’s lungs. There were children at Carville too? Several seconds passed before she remembered to breathe in again.

  The girl squeezed in between Mirielle and Irene, setting her supper tray down with a thud.

  “No radio privileges, that’s what I told you,” Irene continued. “Remember?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Good. You gonna be late again?”

  She shook her head and forked a heaping bite of potatoes into her mouth.

  “Polly, this is Jean,” Irene said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Mirielle managed after another shaky breath.

  Jean turned and looked at her. She chewed loudly, her lips smacking. Her dark hair was plaited in two braids, one of which had started to unravel. Freckles dotted her nose and cheeks along with reddened patches Mirielle guessed to be the disease.

  “How old are you?”

  Jean swallowed and flashed a wide smile. One of her molars was missing and another partially grown in. She held up nine fingers.

  Mirielle’s ribs contracted around her heart. Her son would have been nine years old too. “When’s your birthday?”

  In lieu of answering, Jean took another bite of potatoes.

  “She can’t talk,” one of the women across the table said.

  “That ain’t true,” Irene said. “She don’t talk. There’s a difference.”

  Mirielle’s ribs squeezed even tighter. How awful for a child so young to suffer like this. She looked around the dining hall for other children and spotted nearly a dozen. Were their parents lepers too? Thank God her own children were hundreds of miles away, safe and sound in the nanny’s capable care.

  With an unsteady hand, she picked up her glass of milk and took a sip. As she set it back down on the table, a flash of movement within the liquid caught her eye. Something brown and slimy writhed inside the glass. Mirielle screamed, pushing away from the table so quickly her chair nearly toppled.

  “What is it, baby?” Irene asked.

  Mirielle pointed at the glass, then grabbed her napkin and wiped her tongue.

  “Milk gone sour?” Irene picked up the glass and sniffed.

  “There’s something in there.”

  Irene frowned and plunged her fingers into the milk. A moment later, she withdrew a squirming, bug-eyed tadpole.

  The other women at the table laughed, Jean the loudest.

  Irene grabbed Jean’s hand and dropped the slimy creature into her palm. “You take this out to the fountain right now then get Mrs. Marvin another glass of milk. And don’t you even think about going to the rec hall tomorrow to hear the radio.”

  Jean pouted and rose loudly from her chair.

  “Sorry, baby,” Irene said to Mirielle. “Jean can be a little ornery sometimes.”

  A little? Mirielle wiped her tongue again, then balled up her napkin and threw it onto her plate. Good thing she wasn’t hungry. Who knew what else the girl had put in her food.

  Conversation continued around her. Jean brought her another glass of milk, but Mirielle wasn’t about to drink it. She knew it would be rude to leave while the rest of the women were still eating, but Mirielle didn’t care. She grabbed her tray and had started to stand when one of the women asked, “Say, were all them trunks and bags the orderlies carted in this morning really yours?”

  “Yes. Only the barest necessities. I won’t be staying long. I’m not . . .” Not what? A leper? Doc Jack’s tests had proven she was. Mycobacterium leprae, he’d said, when he might as well have handed her a bell and shouted Unclean, unclean! “I’m not sick.”

  “You will be.” The woman with the bandaged face sneered. “We were all pretty once, dollface.”

  “Hush, Madge,” Irene said, and then to Mirielle, “Don’t pay her no mind. The disease gets on differently for everyone.”

  “My doctor back in Chicago told me I’d be here two months tops,” another woman said. “So alls I brought was one lousy suitcase.”

  Mirielle sat back down. The doctor in California had told her and Charlie the same thing. A few months at most and she’d be home. She was glad to hear it confirmed. Two months in this wretched place without Charlie and her daughters seemed a terrifically long time. But this woman gave her hope. She, like Mirielle, had few outward signs of the disease, and was surely now nearing the end of her sentence. “How much longer do you have?”

  “Have for what?”

  “Of your two months?”

  Everyone at the table laughed.

  “Honey, that was five years ago. And I got no hope of leaving anytime soon.”

  “Five years?”

  “That’s nothing,” another woman said. “I’ve been here seven.”

  “If I’d have known then what I know now,” the woman from Chicago said, “I’d have brought my whole house with me.”

  Irene patted Mirielle’s knee. “It’s not as bad as all that. Every month Doc Jack and the sisters will scrape a little of your skin onto some slides and look at them under the microscope. If you go twe
lve months in a row without any signs of the germ, they hand you a diploma and you’re free to go.”

  “A diploma?”

  “A certificate from the public health office that says you’re no longer a public menace.”

  Mirielle frowned. Menace? That was almost as ugly a word as leper. “If you only need twelve negative tests, how come you’ve all been here so long?”

  Several of the women smirked. Jean giggled around a mouthful of cobbler.

  “Twelve in a row,” Irene said.

  “How long you’ve been waiting for your diploma, Madge?” the woman from Chicago asked before turning and whispering to Mirielle, “She’s a real old-timer.”

  Madge spat a piece of chicken grizzle onto her plate then turned her mean, watery eyes on Mirielle. “Twenty-one years.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The next days passed in a blur. A visiting dentist inspected Mirielle’s teeth. A technician in the laboratory took blood samples. A nurse vaccinated her against smallpox. She met again with Doc Jack, who told her more about the disease and prescribed her twice-weekly injections of chaulmoogra oil and the same putrid medicine taken in capsule form with meals. The capsules made her stomach roil and, more often than not, came back up just as quickly as she swallowed them, leaving her throat burning and her mouth tasting of rotten fish.

  In between meals and appointments, Mirielle kept to her room. The conversation she’d first had with her housemates played round in her mind like a worn-out record. We were all pretty like you once . . . no hope of leaving anytime soon . . . If I’d have known then what I know now . . . Twenty-one years Madge had been at this wretched facility. A lot of good it had done her. No wonder she had the disposition of a boiled lobster.

  Mirielle couldn’t stay for one year, let alone twenty more. She had her daughters to raise. How many times in the months before coming to Carville had she brushed Evie off her lap and told her to go play? How many times had she heard Helen cry and waited for the nanny to soothe her? What kind of a mother had she become? It would take twenty-one years and twenty more, just to make it up to them.

  * * *

  At lunch on her fourth day, Mirielle felt the familiar stirring in her stomach and hurried outside to vomit. All three of her pregnancies combined hadn’t made her as sick as those awful chaulmoogra pills.

  Next to the dining hall sat a sunken tea garden and fountain. She hurried over and splashed her face with water. A chill spread over her skin, but her nausea slowly subsided.

  Just as she was about to go back inside and brave a few more bites of lunch, a low whistle sounded from behind her. She startled and turned around. A middle-aged man was seated at one of the concrete tea tables nearby.

  “Ain’t you a choice bit of calico,” he said, eyeing her without compunction. The skin on his face was thick and coarse. His nodulous forearms reminded her of a Gila monster. He stood, and Mirielle backed away, bumping into the lip of the fountain.

  “Don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure of meeting. You must be new around here.” He took a step forward and extended his hand. She let it linger in the air between them.

  “What, you afraid I’m contagious?” He kept his hand outstretched a moment more before letting it drop to his side. “Got news for you, doll, so are you or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Mirielle raised her chin and started to walk away.

  “What’s your rush?”

  “I’d rather sit and watch my hair grow than talk to a man as fresh as you.”

  He chuckled. “My apologies. Been in the can the last four weeks so my manners are a bit rusty.”

  Mirielle paused halfway up the steps that led back to the dining hall and turned around. “There’s a jail here?”

  The man seated himself again on the bench beside the tea table, stretching his legs out before him and crossing his ankles. “You betcha.”

  She couldn’t help but snicker. “Whomever for? Residents caught speeding their bikes on the walkways? Patients who refuse to take their chaulmoogra pills?”

  “Stay awhile, and I’ll tell you.”

  Mirielle hesitated, then descended the stairs and sat on the lip of the fountain. “Well?”

  The man smiled. His teeth were the color of urine. “What’s your name?”

  “Miri—Pauline Marvin.”

  “Perdy name.”

  “So, why were you in jail?”

  “Whoa, slow down, doll. You’re supposed to ask my name now. It’s only polite.”

  “Maybe I don’t care.”

  He leaned forward. “Gonna tell you my real name, not the made-up name the nuns call me.” He paused, smiled again, and leaned closer. “My real name’s Samuel Hatch. Ever heard of me?”

  Mirielle scooted as far back as she could without falling into the fountain. “No.”

  “I’m the reason this whole joint exists. Caused such a howl a few years back in Washington, D.C., they had no choice but to make a national leper home to lock me up in.”

  She thought a moment and remembered her father mentioning something about a leper who’d snuck into some ritzy Washington hotel to get the attention of Congress. He’d been an avid reader of both the Times and the Examiner, her father, and often read the most sensational stories aloud at breakfast. It surprised her now that she recalled the story. Most mornings, she’d come to the table half-asleep, her hair still smelling of cigarette smoke and last night’s perfume.

  “That was over a decade ago. You’ve been here ever since? In a jail cell?”

  “Nah. Been here since seventeen, but that ain’t the reason I was locked up.” He patted the concrete bench. “Why don’t you come sit next to me?”

  Mirielle frowned. He could be crazy. Dangerous. And no doubt his breath smelled as awful as his teeth looked. But curiosity got the better of her. She sat not beside him, but on the opposite bench so the concrete tea table was between them. He swiveled around to face her.

  “Go on,” she said. “I haven’t got all day.”

  He laughed. “All we have here is time. Years of it. Time to sit and rot and wait for our deaths and ponder over our lives before.”

  Mirielle suppressed a smirk. A leper-philosopher, wasn’t that just dandy.

  “I noticed your wedding band. Do have children, Mrs. Marvin?”

  The sudden earnestness in his eyes disarmed her. “I do.”

  “Me too. Three daughters and a son.” He looked down. “They’re grown now. Married, I expect.”

  “You don’t keep in touch? Don’t they know you’re here?”

  “Oh, they know.”

  He told her how he and his family had been chased from one town to the next as soon as anyone learned about his disease. For years they’d drifted, living hand to mouth on the outskirts of society. Eventually, the health authorities would catch up with them, and he’d be locked away in an isolation ward. All the while his disease was getting worse and harder to hide.

  “No one in your family got sick from you?” she interrupted.

  “This gazeek ain’t as contagious as they’d like you to think. Youngsters are especially susceptible, they say, but none of my kids ever came down with so much as a bump. Didn’t matter none, though.” His once earnest eyes turned mean. “Did you know our condition is lawful grounds for divorce, Mrs. Marvin?”

  Mirielle touched the silver bracelet around her wrist. That might happen to others, but she and Charlie were different. They’d already endured the worst kind of hardship. If anything, her illness had brought them closer together. She stood. A breeze ruffled the garden’s sculpted hedges and overarching palm fronds. Foolish to have let his pitiful ramblings waylay her.

  “I ain’t told you why I done it yet,” Mr. Hatch said.

  “Done what?”

  “Raised such a fuss in Washington.”

  She started for the stairs. “I don’t care.”

  “No one wanted me, see? Everyplace I went, every devil’s den they locked me up in just wanted to pass me off to someone else.
Let the leper be someone else’s problem. If they’re gonna insist we be segregated from the rest of the world, least they can do is take care of us.”

  “Is this why they locked you up in jail here? Because you yap so much?”

  “Got a gal I see on the outside. She don’t care who or what you are so long as you leave a few clams on the nightstand.”

  Mirielle stopped. What did he mean, on the outside? She turned back. “You see her where?”

  He flashed his yellow teeth. “Why? You wanna come along?”

  “Not a chance, buster. What I mean is does she come here, or do you go there?”

  “If you think them sisters allow whores in during visiting hours, you’re dumber than you are pretty. ’Course I go to her. At a bawdyhouse outside of Baton Rouge. That’s why I was thrown in the can.”

  “For sneaking out?”

  “For not coming back.”

  “They let you out?”

  “No, but I could of made it back before the pinhead watchman realized I was gone. Nah, I snuck out to see my Lulu and stayed gone three months this time till some chump in the city turned me in.”

  “This time? You’ve snuck out before?”

  “Lots of times. I get so sick of this place, I start to go a little mad and forget how shitty life is on the outside. Hell, half the time I get to wherever it was I thought I wanted to go and end up just turning myself in.”

  He seemed half-mad right now, but Mirielle returned to the table and sat down beside him. “How do you do it?”

  CHAPTER 10

  That night, Mirielle waited until after she heard the heavy thud of the night watchman’s boots atop the walkway in front of the house before sneaking out. She carried a bulging valise in each hand and another tucked beneath her arm. It had taken her several hours to pick through her belongings, deciding what to take and what she could bear to leave behind.

  Light streamed from beneath a few of her housemates’ doors, but no one stirred as she crept past. She exited the house out the back where a screened porch opened to a short flight of stairs. The ground was damp and boggy from afternoon rain. Mud suctioned onto her patent leather shoes. But the covered walk was too noisy and well lit to traverse. She tiptoed behind the houses toward the front of the colony. Clouds blotted out the stars and muted the moonlight.