The Second Life of Mirielle West

by Amanda Skenandore

  Mirielle scooted as close to Jean as she dared, leaving several feet yet between them. “Do you climb up here every Sunday?”

  “Nah, usually I’m down there with mon père.” She jutted her chin toward the lawn. “He comes to visit just about every Sunday. Our house ain’t but a few hours south across the river. He’s a boat maker.”

  She’d heard Jean speak so little, Mirielle had never noticed the faint Cajun sway to her speech. “You’re lucky to get visitors,” she said, even though she knew Jean was lying. “What about your mother?”

  “Maman’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry. My mother died when I was young too.”

  Below them, two of Carville’s other children—black girls a few years younger than Jean—scampered over picnic tables and around tree trunks, giggling and hollering. The man who’d come to visit them ran after them in a game of tag while a woman looked on, smiling and fanning herself with her hat. One of the girls had pale lesions up and down her arms. The other had lost most of the fingers on her right hand, giving it a mitten-like appearance. Otherwise, they were identical.

  “When they find a cure, we’ll all leave and go home to our families,” Mirielle said.

  Jean snorted.

  With the man sweating and clutching his side, the twins stopped their game and skipped over to the woman—presumably their mother—who produced two red lollipops from her handbag. The twins squealed.

  “They have lollipops twice that size at the boardwalk in Los Angeles,” Mirielle said, seeing the longing in Jean’s eyes. She inched her butt along the branch, fearful of another cracking sound but determined to get closer. When she made it to within an arm’s distance, she reached for Jean’s hand, but Jean leaned away.

  “I hate lollipops.”

  “Oh? They have all kinds of flavors. Cherry, orange, lemon-lime, even cola-flavored. I’ve asked my husband to send some for the July Fourth party.”

  “Really?” Jean’s face brightened.

  “Fireworks too. And there will be music and dancing and even a frog race. But you’ve got to cut out your antics and do your schoolwork, otherwise I’ll tell Sister Verena not to let you attend.”

  Jean wadded up the last bit of straw she’d been chewing and tossed it to the ground. “What good is it if I can write my letters pretty and add up a bunch of numbers if I’m just gonna be stuck at Carville all my life?”

  “You’re going to get out,” Mirielle said, feeling a renewed sense of determination. Her work wasn’t just about proving Sister Verena and Charlie wrong; it was about stopping the disease. For all of them.

  Below them on the shaded lawn, many of the visitors were taking their leave. The twins’ parents hugged them, then shooed them toward the colony’s maze of houses and walkways. An elderly woman kissed her husband goodbye. A mother, her son.

  Absentmindedly, Mirielle reached again for Jean’s hand. To her surprise, Jean took it. “Someday the both of us are going to make it home,” Mirielle said. “But first, you’ve got to show me how the devil we’re going to get down.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The week of rest Doc Jack prescribed Mirielle before she was allowed to return to work passed more slowly than a dry dinner party. Though she’d bemoaned the hectic hours and grizzly sights, the stench of urine and chaulmoogra oil and unwashed feet that went along with her position, she’d never stopped and thought about what she might otherwise be doing to fill the time. It took less than two days to reorganize her wardrobe, buff her shoes, polish her dresser set, trim her hair, and manicure her nails. Irene coaxed her into helping weed her garden. Madge taught her how to play penny-ante poker. Jean came to her each night with a book. But that still left her with far too many hours for her mind to wander. To wander back to Charlie, Evie, Helen, and, inevitably, Felix.

  Without a gin rickey or champagne cocktail to blunt her thoughts, they spiraled downward until Irene barged into her room, gardening shears in hand, or Jean called to her from the living room for help with her schoolwork.

  On the fifth day after Mirielle’s discharge from the hospital and their talk up in the tree, Jean asked her bluntly, “How come you always fingering that bracelet?”

  “It was my mother’s.”

  “And you been wearing it since she died?”

  “No, I put it on after . . .” She couldn’t very well tell Jean she’d put it on after her accident, after the bandages came off and the red scar haunted her. “I wear it as a reminder of my son.”

  “Can I have it when you die?”

  Mirielle winced, then laughed. “No. But tell you what, I’ve got a necklace you can wear to the July Fourth celebration. If you’re good.”

  That was enough to turn Jean’s attention back to her arithmetic sets. When Mirielle reached for her bracelet again, she caught herself and folded her hands together instead.

  * * *

  On the last afternoon before returning to work, Mirielle went to the canteen to await the mail delivery. Her letter to Charlie requesting candy and fireworks for the July Fourth celebration had gone out two weeks ago. Surely she ought to have a reply by now, if not a box of goodies.

  She sat at the counter and ordered a Coke. Frank grabbed a glass between his palms and set it beneath the soda fountain’s spout. After adding a few cubes of ice, he pressed down on the lever, and fizzy soda spurted into the glass. He’d poured her dozens of drinks in the months since she’d arrived, but the dexterity he managed despite his crippled hands never failed to amaze her.

  Grunts and shouts sounded from the far end of the adjoining rec hall, where several of the patients crowded to gamble. She sipped her Coke and watched them.

  At home, she’d been the best mahjong player of any of her friends and left their afternoon games with a full purse. But those afternoons had been civilized affairs. Cake and tea—or a mint julep if she were lucky—and dulcet-toned gossip. A few of the women smoked. But not these rancid-smelling Murads sold in the canteen.

  How many games had she missed in the months she’d been gone? What kind of gossip had been spread around about her hasty departure? She imagined they’d discussed every possible ailment the sick aunt Mirielle was caring for might have, from consumption to syphilis.

  They might have written her, Mirielle’s friends. Perhaps Charlie had forgotten to forward their letters. They worried after her, surely. Or had their luncheons and garden parties and mahjong games gone on the same without her?

  She glanced at the wall clock and checked the time against her watch. The canteen’s clock was four minutes slow, and the mailman nine minutes late. Everything else at Carville ran with military precision—the thrice daily meal bells, the once-a-week afternoon call for laundry, the ten o’clock curfew—why should tardiness be permitted with the mail?

  She drank down the last of her Coke and rolled the empty glass back and forth between her palms. Frank began to whistle as he polished the bar with a damp rag. It was a slow, swinging melody, the notes clear and silvery. She didn’t recognize the song but felt its sorrow in her bones. She stilled her hands and listened. Frank was taller than most men at Carville. His dark wavy hair would look swell if smoothed down and parted in the center or slicked back in a pompadour. Either he didn’t know the latest fashions or didn’t care. Even so, were it not for his hands and the lumpy skin on his forearms, he could pass for handsome.

  The gamblers’ shouts and laughter rose and fell behind Frank’s whistling the way the crowd’s chatter underscored the orchestra at the downtown cabarets. When they first started going around together, Charlie would whistle in between songs when they were dancing, stepping and turning as if the music had never ended, keeping any other fellows from cutting in. Mirielle would laugh and follow his lead, even hum along if she knew the tune.

  Now, she shivered. “Can you cut that out?”

  “Huh?”

  “The whistling.”

  Frank turned to her, his blue eyes guileless. “Sure. Sorry, chère.”

  But the
silence was worse. Mirielle pushed her glass to the back of the counter. “Frank, I’m—”

  The arrival of the mail cut short her apology.

  “Howdy,” the mailman said, setting a fat stack of letters, magazines, and catalogs on the counter alongside two paper-wrapped packages. She snatched up the letters and scanned each of them for her name, flipping those of other residents into a messy stack for Frank to sort. The fewer letters remaining, the more her ribs squeezed around her heart. When she got to the end, she splayed the half-sorted letters out haphazardly across the counter and looked again.

  “Mais!” Frank said. She knew he liked to sort them into neat, alphabetized piles—A’s at one end of the counter, Z’s clear down at the other, each letter facing the same way.

  “I’ll be done in a second.”

  None of the letters and neither of the packages were addressed to Mirielle West. Then she remembered Charlie would be using her silly Carville name. She scoured the letters again, playing tug-of-war over the last of them with Frank until she could plainly see that none were addressed to a Mrs. Pauline Marvin either.

  “Sorry,” she said, handing over the last envelope, which was now crumpled at the edges and slightly ripped. “It’s just that I’m expecting. . .” Heat crept over her skin from beneath the collar of her dress and up into her cheeks.

  “Ain’t news to me,” he said.

  She helped him sort and straighten the letters, again regretting the silence. After the magazines and envelopes and catalogs were stacked in tidy piles, Mirielle lingered at the counter. “You’ve got a real swell whistle. I’m just in a bum humor today,” she said.

  “Wanna talk about it?”

  Mirielle shook her head. “But I wouldn’t mind another tune.”

  Frank smiled and started whistling again, a faster, more cheerful song. Mirielle’s mood lightened with the airy notes. A letter or package from Charlie would come tomorrow, and she’d laugh about how manic she’d been today.

  She listened to that song and half of another. As she turned to leave, the coverline of a magazine snagged her eye. She brushed aside the stack of letters atop the magazine. Picture-Play. A young, familiar face stared back at her. She always did take a lovely photo, Vilma. Beneath the main coverline—MISS BANKY’S GOT IT. HAVE YOU?—ran several others. The last line, the one that had caught Mirielle’s attention, read, WIFE OF LEADING MAN CHARLIE WEST SENT TO NUT FARM.

  Mirielle’s lungs froze mid-inhale. Her eyes leaped from word to word a second time. A third time. A fourth. She grabbed the magazine, flattened the face of Vilma Banky against her chest, and ran from the canteen.

  CHAPTER 25

  The next day, Mirielle arrived at the dressing clinic early, hoping the bustle of unwrapping bandages and changing water basins and scrubbing feet would prove sufficient distraction from the horror she’d read the day before. If she wasn’t careful and attentive, she could peel a man’s skin off with his bandages, or reopen healing wounds. The disease left many patients without feeling in their limbs so they couldn’t tell her if she was hurting them. Once, on her second day in the clinic, she’d looked down after cleaning the old and crusted ointment from a woman’s legs to find the basin water bloody from too hard a scrubbing.

  Today, it took more effort than most to focus her attention, though. She felt on edge and constantly breathless, as if her lungs hadn’t fully expanded after yesterday’s events.

  As the morning progressed, the clinic grew hot and crowded. The air smelled like week-old laundry, and Mirielle’s uniform clung sticky to her skin. But for once, she hid her worries behind a smile and embraced the busyness. Unravel this dressing, clean those feet, fetch more ointment from the cupboard, more gauze, more soap. Crouch down, stand up, hurry out to the hopper.

  Not until after lunch did the clinic slow down. The hair about her face was frizzy and her damp apron smudged with remnants of liniment and blood. She leaned against the wall before an open window and let her head loll back, hoping to snatch a breath of fresh air and cooling breeze.

  “I hope I have not come too late, señora,” a voice said.

  Mirielle raised her head. The smile she’d been trying at all day came easy to her face. “Of course not, Hector. Sit down. I’ll get some warm water.”

  She unwrapped the gauze from his legs and helped him lift his feet into the basin to soak. The nodules that had covered his legs like a mountain range were shrunken now, the ulcers scabbed over. Even the long gash he’d suffered in Arizona had finally knit together.

  Her next pull of breath came easier than the one before. So many patients came through the dressing clinic each time she worked, it was hard to remember one’s ailments from the next. The missing toes, weeping lesions, and infected wounds that had so horrified her at the beginning no longer made her flinch or gape. If some got better, others got worse, and for all her careful undressing and gentle scrubbing, for all the ointments and medicines the sisters applied, Mirielle had never been certain they were making a difference.

  But clearly with Hector they had. And Mirielle, with her small, monotonous ministrations, had helped. A strange feeling settled over her. Pleasant and uplifting.

  “How good your legs look.”

  “Si,” he said. “Every step they used to ache. Now I feel as if I could run a race and win.”

  He looked above her head at the window, and she wondered if he too were thinking about the Yuma desert and how he might fare against those heartless railwaymen today. But healthy as his legs had become, he still hadn’t the advantage of youth or wagon. What hope was there then if you could outrun the disease but not the hate and stigma?

  As quickly as it had come, that pleasant feeling fled. She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her blouse, but a few tears slipped past and dropped into the basin, rippling the water like rain on a lake.

  “¡Ay! What’s wrong, señora?”

  “It’s nothing.” She looked up at him and tried to find her smile again.

  “You must miss your family. Tell me about them. Your girls.”

  Mirielle hesitated, then sat upright and wiped her hands on a clean corner of her apron. “Evie, she’s seven, and such a sweet girl. Helen’s fourteen months this Friday.” She told Hector about Evie’s inquisitiveness, how every day since she was two, she’d had a new question. She liked butterflies and earthworms and the sea anemone they found in tide pools at the shore just as much as she liked her dolls. She told him Helen had Charlie’s hazel eyes and had laughed and crawled before any of her siblings.

  “She’ll be talking soon too, I suppose,” Mirielle said. Though likely not the word mama.

  She didn’t tell Hector about Felix. Or the many times in the months since his death when she’d brushed Evie off her lap and told her to go play in the nursery or heard Helen cry from her crib and waited for the nanny to soothe her.

  Hector sighed, thinking about his own children, she imagined. The children who’d grown to wish him dead.

  “And your husband?” he asked after a moment. “He must be missing you, no?”

  A fresh wave of tears overtook her. After a bleary glance around the room to be sure no one else was within earshot, she said, “Those goddamn scandal rags! Someone told those gossipmongers that I’ve been committed to an insane asylum. Charlie must be terrifically embarrassed. And what can he say? The truth is worse.”

  Hector pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “You think it could hurt his career?”

  “Think of Roscoe Arbuckle or Mabel Normand. Their careers were never the same.”

  “But this is madness we’re talking about. Not murder.”

  “In Hollywood, it’s all the same thing.” She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose, too embarrassed to admit it was her reputation she was concerned with as much as Charlie’s. No matter how quickly she was cured or granted parole, she could never tell people the truth about where she’d been. So instead, they would think her a lunatic, whisper about her when she left th
e room, point and snicker behind her back. Los Angeles’s beloved society gal who’d lost her marbles, been whisked away in a straitjacket, and—gasp!—confined to a padded cell.

  Her friends, if she could even call them friends anymore, would keep their distance. Their neighbors in the Hills would think twice before inviting them to parties. The publicity folks at Paramount would forbid her from attending Charlie’s premieres, lest talk of her madness overshadow the picture’s debut.

  She tucked Hector’s hankie into her pocket, promising to return it once she’d laundered it, and grabbed a towel to dry his feet and legs. With each careful pat, she tried to rekindle the joy she’d felt earlier at seeing his wounds so much improved.

  When she finished, he laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “Lo siento, señora. Someday this too will be behind you.” He glanced down at his healing legs. “We cannot survive without hope.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Mirielle tried to carry Hector’s words with her over the next few days. If he, a man who’d lost everything to this disease, could still have hope, so could she. Each day after her shift in the infirmary or shot clinic or pharmacy, she went straight to the canteen, steeling herself against what Charlie’s letter might say about the rumors of her madness. Was this the final straw? Would he blame her for this too?

  Whatever he said, whatever damage the story had caused, she would make it up to him. Just as she would somehow repair her reputation. It was an easy lie to believe. She’d been so blue after Felix’s death, so indifferent, one could easily suppose a mental breakdown would follow. When she returned from Carville, she’d make a great show of being her old self, fun-loving and serene. Little by little the story would fade. A new scandal would take its place. People might not forget, but their interest would wane.