The Shadow Wife - Diane Chamberlain [4]
“The cord was wrapped around her neck,” Felicia said to Carlynn.
Carlynn nodded. She leaned over the infant and puffed into the baby’s nose and mouth. Johnny waited for the cry, but it was only the sound of Ellen’s weeping that filled the room.
Carlynn puffed some more, and then Felicia sat back on her thick haunches, tears in her eyes.
“She’s gone,” she said, touching Carlynn’s shoulder. “She’s gone.”
“No!” Ellen wailed, and Johnny leaned over to press his wet cheek to hers. “No, please.”
“Shh,” he said.
Carlynn lifted the baby, and for the first time Johnny could see the infant, her tiny arms flopping lifelessly at her sides, her skin a pale, grayish blue. Carlynn held the baby in a strange embrace, her hands flat against the infant’s chest and back, her lips pressed against the bluish temple. The woman’s eyes were closed, her lashes fluttering slightly against her cheeks, her breathing slow and deep, and the room grew still. Ellen stopped crying. She lifted herself on her elbows to be able to see better, and for a moment, Johnny wondered if Carlynn were mentally ill. What was she doing?
Carlynn drew in a long, deep breath, then let it out in a slow wash of warmth against the baby’s temple. Within seconds, the infant let out a muted whimper. Johnny listened hard, praying for another sound from his child. Carlynn breathed again against the baby’s temple, and suddenly a cry filled the room. Then another. The baby grew pink between the woman’s hands, and in the hushed room, she wrapped a piece of an old flannel blanket around the infant and handed her to Ellen.
Johnny leaned over to nuzzle his woman and his child, a wrenching ache of love and gratitude in his chest, while outside the cabin, the fog rose into the sky, and for the first time in a week, Big Sur was bathed in sunlight.
1
Monterey Peninsula, California, 2001
THERE WERE NIGHTS WHEN JOELLE THOUGHT SHE COULD actually feel the fog rolling in outside her window, cutting her off from the rest of the world. She had trouble sleeping on those nights, and they were frequent during the summer months. She would awaken each morning in the dim interior of her condominium, every window coated in white. She’d moved from Carmel Valley to the seaside village of Carmel two years before, when she was thirty-two and newly divorced, and although she loved the beauty and quaintness of the storybook town, she thought she would never adjust to the closed-in feeling she had in the mornings.
It was more than the fog keeping her awake on this early-June night, however. Joelle turned from side to side in the bed, bunching her pillows up beneath her head, then flattening them again, wondering, as she had for the past couple of weeks, if every twinge low in her belly might be the start of her period.
She had never been regular. Sometimes she could go months without a period; other times she would be surprised by two periods only a week or two apart. The capricious nature of her cycle had made getting pregnant problematic, if not impossible, during the eight years of her marriage to Rusty. The absence of a period would give them hope, which would be dashed when the pregnancy test came up negative. Her failure to conceive eventually led to the end of their marriage. Two years ago, after medical tests had revealed no clear reason for either of them to be unable to procreate, Rusty had told her he’d met someone else and wanted a divorce. Joelle supposed she should have been angry, but in a way it had been a relief. Their marriage had been reduced to one focus, and she was tired of the temperature taking, the urinating on test sticks, the probing of impersonal doctors. The mechanical and regimented nature of their marriage had eaten away at their love for one another.
All the speculation about which of them was the cause of their infertility was answered when Rusty’s new wife had gotten pregnant. He now was the proud father of a little boy, and Joelle knew that she, herself, would never have a child.
Laughter rose up from the street