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 the 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.”