The Shadow Wife - Diane Chamberlain [17]
“Of course, but…” She shook her head. “I doubt people can just call her up and ask her to heal someone.”
“But if you told her who you were,” her mother said. “If you told her you were that baby she saved in Big Sur thirty-four years ago, I bet she would—”
“Although,” her father interrupted, “she might not want to be reminded of that time.”
“Why not?” Joelle was puzzled.
“Because of the accident,” her mother said.
“Oh.” Joelle had heard the story any number of times, but she had never really listened. She knew what she was risking by asking her parents to repeat it to her once again—they would go on and on and on—yet suddenly she had a real desire to know.
“Remind me,” she said. “What happened, exactly?”
“Carlynn and her husband—”
“Alan Shire.” Joelle recalled his name from the previous recitations of this tale.
“Right. They were both doctors. And Carlynn had the gift of healing. Alan Shire didn’t, but he was very interested in that sort of phenomenon. So they founded the Shire Mind and Body Center to look into the phenomenon of healing.”
Joelle knew the center still existed and was somewhere in the vicinity of Asilomar State Beach. It was viewed with skepticism by the medical establishment and with total credibility by California’s alternative practitioners.
“Yes,” her mother said, “but they didn’t call it that back then. What was it called?”
Her father looked out toward the new birdhouse for a moment. “The Carlynn Shire Medical Center,” he said.
“Right,” said her mother. “It was just getting off the ground then. Penny Everett showed up at the commune one day, without a voice. She came there to get away from stress, because her doctor said that was what was causing her hoarseness.”
“She went on to be in Hair,” her father added.
“Who did?” Joelle was getting confused. “Carlynn?”
“No, Penny,” her mother said. “And she knew she couldn’t get a part in Hair if she had no voice. She’d been an old friend of Carlynn’s, and so she called Carlynn and asked her to come heal her voice. Carlynn dropped everything and came down to the commune.”
“Of course,” her father added, “we always believed some other force brought her there right at that time, because it was just the day after she arrived that you were born. If she hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t be here now.”
The thought made her shudder despite her skepticism.
Her father continued. “So, she’d been there a few days when—”
“A whole week,” corrected her mother. “That’s why Alan Shire and her sister were so freaked out.”
“Whatever,” her father said. “She’d been there a while, and of course we had no phone or any way for her to reach her family without leaving the commune, so I guess her husband and sister got worried about her and drove down to Big Sur to find her.” He looked at his wife. “What was the sister’s name?” he asked her.
“Lisbeth.”
“Oh, right. Alan Shire and Lisbeth, the sister, got a cabin over near Deetjen’s Inn—remember Deetjen’s?”
Joelle nodded quickly, wanting him to get on with the story.
“They checked into the cabin,” he said, “then started looking for the commune. We weren’t the only commune in Big Sur, as I’m sure you remember, and they probably didn’t know where to start looking. It was dark, I guess, by the time they got to the right one.”
“Actually, it was only Alan who got there,” her mother said. “The sister had stayed behind in the cabin.”
“That’s true. And Carlynn was in Penny’s cabin then, but she’d been in our cabin just an hour or so earlier. Rainbow.” He grinned. “Remember it?”
“Sure.” She smiled at the memory of the small, dark cabin. She could smell it right at that moment—the scent of ashes mingled with the earthy, musky odor inevitably present in a wooden cabin surrounded by trees and fog. What a strange existence she’d had for the first ten years of her life!
“We’d had her come over to Rainbow a couple of days after you were born because we thought you were running a fever,” her father continued. “You thought she had a fever,” her mother corrected him.