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.”
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.
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 twelve 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.”