Shadow Woman

6

Jane sat on the couch and stared around her at the baseboards in the living room. There were nicks that her father had patched with the best synthetic wood mixtures they had sold at the time, then painted over, but she knew where they were twenty years later. The one by the kitchen door was from the new refrigerator he had bought as a surprise for her mother, which was still on the other side of the door running right now. Jane remembered seeing the man pushing the two-wheel hand truck it was strapped to miscalculate and nick the doorway. The man who was supposed to be guiding him saw it, spit on his finger, and rubbed the spot, trying to believe it was just a dirt mark but feeling the groove.

The imperfections in the surfaces were events. Her great-grandfather had built most of the house himself, and her grandfather and father had painted and varnished it, and her grandmother and her mother had rubbed every square inch of it clean a thousand times, so if she put her hand here, or here, she was touching their hands.

She said aloud, “I got married yesterday,” as a test, and it failed. The words didn’t sound convincing, because they didn’t have behind them the resonance of wonder. All of the people who would have come rushing in from the kitchen and the dining room, making noise and smiling—or maybe looking worried—were just memories now. Birth, marriage, death. That was all they put on tombstones, and that seemed to be about all anyone wanted to know unless you were pretty remarkable. Jane Whitefield had spent the past twelve years straining every nerve to keep from being remarkable, because attracting attention was dangerous. It seemed she had succeeded, and now she would have to succeed some more, because she had Carey.

Jane turned her attention to the pile of mail that Jake had left for her, setting the bills beside her and the advertisements on the floor for the wastebasket. She came to a stiff white envelope with no return address. Probably it was another wedding card. It would have the usual flowered bower with bells, and beneath it would be the archetypal stiff little people, one in white and the other in black. There was no way anybody could be expected to obtain one that was remotely evocative of a marriage between actual human beings. For some reason there was no market for such a thing. But this mail was old. It had come while she was in Las Vegas, and she had forgotten about it in the rush and excitement of getting married. This couldn’t be a wedding card.

She tore it open and saw that it was a plain white folded sheet. Printed in ballpoint pen was “You told me I would be thinking of you just about now. So here’s a present. Chris.” Inside was a cashier’s check with the purchaser listed as Christine McRea. The stub attached to it said “Repayment of Principal.” Jane glanced at the machine printing on the check: one hundred thousand and 00/100 dollars.

Christine McRea had come a long way since the night when she had knocked on the door of this house. Her name had been Rebecca Solomon then, and she had made the mistake of assuming that when a judge said the names of people serving on a jury were confidential, that meant an enterprising reporter wouldn’t be able to find hers and print it later. When Jane had met her, she had already used all the money she had saved on her secretary’s salary just to get as far as Cleveland, and had hitched a ride the rest of the way with a pair of itinerant heavy-equipment operators who had begun to hint at things she could do to repay their kindness.

Jane tore up the note, slipped the check into the pile of bills, and got up off the couch, determined to accomplish something before Carey got here. She would need the address book in her office for the thank-you notes. A few of the people Carey had invited were reachable only through his secretary’s computer, but almost everybody else was in her old book. She had known him for so long that their friends were nearly all shared. Most of Jane’s relatives lived on the roads along Tonawanda Creek—Sandy Hill Road, Sky Road, a few on Judge Road. She could have sent all of those notes in care of the reservation, but the older ladies would not have approved. She set the floppy old leather book by the door and went upstairs.

She took a few favorite outfits and laid them carefully on the bed, then heard the front door open and close. “Carey?” she called. “I’m upstairs.”

Jake’s voice called, “Are you decent?”

Jane laughed. “No, Jake. But I’m married now, so I can be as indecent as I want.”

“I mean am I invited up?”

“If you can make it up the stairs.”

Jake came along the hallway toward her room. “It was a near thing, but I rested frequently and phoned my doctor for advice on the landing. Where is that quack, anyway?”

“He’ll be here in a few minutes. He’s helping me move a few things, so I thought we’d need both cars. Now that I look at it, I don’t think we will.”

“I wanted to tell you that I had a good time at the wedding.”

“That’s because your daughters came. Thanks for giving me away, though, Jake. There was never a man who looked as relieved to get rid of anybody as you did. Everybody make it to the airport on time?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Jake. “The kids will make it to their final exams and the husbands will be at work Monday morning to keep my girls wearing the latest fashions and a bit too broad in the beam to fit them. The reception reminded me of when your parents got married. All the food and everything, a lot of the same faces, too, but of course we’re all a bit the worse for wear.”

Jane selected some of her shoes and set them in a cardboard box. “Last night wasn’t really a reception. It was another wedding. In the old days you just asked the two clan mothers if it was okay, and then everybody had a feast.”

“I wish your parents could have seen it. God, I remember your mother in her white gown. She was probably the most beautiful woman I ever saw, close up. You’re a pleasant-looking female citizen from a thousand yards out on a cloudy evening. But she could knock a rooster off a full henhouse with a veil over her face. She could have been an actress.”

“She was an actress,” said Jane. “She made herself up.”

Jake was silent for a moment. Little Janie had gotten those arctic-blue eyes from her mother, but that penchant for saying the unexpected, like dumping a bushel of apples in your lap to show you what the bottom ones looked like, that came from Henry Whitefield without any dilution. He backed away from that part of it. “She was a wonderful woman.”

He had never figured out how much Jane could have known about her mother’s past. She had somehow found herself at the age of nineteen in New York City without visible means of support. No, that was exactly the wrong term. Spectacular, sure-fire means of support were still visible on her, well into her forties. Jake had never heard anything specific about how she had spent the years from one to nineteen, or even what part of the country she had started in. Maybe that was the deepest secret of all, and maybe his wife, Margaret, had heard all of that from her too, and found it too ordinary to repeat to her husband.

But she had spent the next few years downstate in the company of a succession of men who were accustomed to having their pictures taken twice—head-on and in profile. Maybe she had not made a choice. Women had a way of dancing with the man who asked, and a lot of the natural-selection business that determined who was first in line, or even who considered himself worthy, got settled among the men themselves.

Jane smiled. “She was a very smart woman. She had figured out that your life is pretty much what you decide it is. She picked the right person to be and spent the rest of her life being that person as hard as she could.”

It was true. Whatever had happened to Jane’s mother in the first years of her life, it had taught her something she never forgot. Whatever decisions she needed to make were all behind her before Jake had met her. Henry had a wife and Jane had a mother who could have come out of the television shows of the time—house neat and clean, something hot bubbling on the stove, and her looking fresh and crisp and reassuring.

Jake watched her daughter bustling around in the same house, and he unexpectedly had a vision of the future. It wasn’t a vision he could take credit for. It was more like a prophecy that he had merely overheard. She was busy inventing Mrs. Carey McKinnon, the way her mother had invented Mrs. Henry Whitefield. He guessed the perfect wife wouldn’t act the same these days as she had thirty years ago.

On that score alone, he expected that watching Jane over the next year or two would provide a supplement to his education. And Jane wasn’t the same woman as her mother. Henry had made sure she got raised in the old Seneca way, where you didn’t waste much breath telling kids what to do, so their self-reliance didn’t get stifled. God knew the Whitefields had gotten a whopping return on that investment.

And Janie had a different order of determination entirely. She had consciously chosen to do something with the first part of her life that was more than heroic, because if you saved somebody’s life once, that was bravery. When you did it a hundred times, that was pure stubbornness. If she had now chosen to be somebody else, the perfect wife, then letting your feet get in her path on her way to it would be a good way to lose a foot. This new person, this Jane McKinnon, was not going to be somebody you faced down eye-to-eye.

He heard the sound of Carey McKinnon’s tread on the front porch and looked down at him through Jane’s window. Henry would have been pleased. Jake could see Carey’s head beginning to shine through the thin, sandy hair, so he was no kid anymore. Jake hoped he had enough sense by now to understand the nature of the gift he had been given, but he supposed he probably didn’t. It often seemed to Jake that wisdom had settled on his own head like a wreath from heaven some time around age sixty, after it was too late to do him much good and was more of an irritation than a pleasure. He said, “Well, I’ve got to move on, or the damned dandelions will get a foothold on my lawn again and I’ll spend the whole summer on my knees digging them out with a knife.”

“Good. I thought you were just hanging around to get free medical advice.”

“Not me. I want mine duly recorded in an office in front of witnesses so I can sue for malpractice. See you, Mrs. McKinnon.”

“See you, Jake.”

Jake met Carey carrying boxes up the stairs. “Take good care of her,” said Jake. “I’ll tell you why at your fiftieth anniversary, if you’re not senile by then.”

“Better write it down, Jake. Don Herbick keeps calling me from his mortuary to ask about your health. I say, ‘Not yet, Don. But keep the motor tuned up.’ ”

“I suspected you probably worked closely with an undertaker, Dr. McKinnon. But I won’t desert you now that you’ve got a wife to support.”

“It’s always good to have your unqualified endorsement, Jake. I could hardly ask for anybody more unqualified.”

“It’s a pleasure to serve.” He walked out and closed the door.

Carey set the empty boxes on the floor and put his arm around Jane. “He’s right about you. When I walked in, I could hardly believe it. You actually married me.”

She smiled, craned her neck, and leaned back against his chest to give him a gentle kiss. “I’m glad to know that you’re not here about a refund. But don’t assume everything Jake has to say about me would make you happy. He’s got no excuse left for illusions about women.” She stepped away from him, picked up the dresses on hangers from the bed, and slipped the hooks over his hand. “To business. Take these down and hang them on the pole I’ve got across the back seat. Do not toss, crumple, or otherwise render them unsuitable for wear. Then report for further orders.”

He walked off down the hall and clomped down the stairs. She looked around and began to pull things out of her dresser drawers and put them into boxes. Carey came back and stood in the doorway. “It just occurred to me,” he said. “What are you going to do with this house? Sell it?”

She paused and looked at him. Why did she have to be the sort of person who already had calculated everything and made the decisions? “Come sit with me,” she said.

They sat together on the bed. “This is one of the conversations we should have had before. I’m through being a guide. I will never take another fugitive and slip him to a new place with a new identity. But for a while, this house is going to be a problem. I can’t place an ad in the paper announcing that I’m going out of business. It’s more than a little likely that one or two people are going to arrive here in the next year or two expecting to find that kind of help. I know that ahead of time, and I’m prepared to accept the way I’ll feel if I find out one of them tried on his own and didn’t make it.”

“How can you?”

“That’s not going to be an issue between us. It’s like what the insurance companies call a pre-existing condition. My problem.”

“So you’re going to keep it here, empty?”

“If we sell it, then maybe—no, probably—one night the new owners are going to be sitting downstairs watching television, and somebody is going to arrive and tell them things I don’t want them to hear. Or even worse, one of the chasers will have followed him here. This isn’t theoretical. It happened once.”

“It’s going to be a hard place to unload. I suppose you don’t want the phone company reassigning your number either.”

“I can afford to keep paying the bills. In a few years there will be fewer people who remember the address. The ones who do will know that it’s not the solution to anybody’s problem anymore. Then we’ll cancel the phone, sell the house, and use the money for a trip around the world or something.”

He laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to use up your money. We should have had that conversation before, too. I will support my wife. Keep whatever money you have safe, in case of an emergency.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “This is the emergency, tonight. Things are happening fast that will get set in cement, so we have to do all of them right. We take each other on, unconditionally. What I used to do has put you in jeopardy: not much jeopardy, but some enterprising F.B.I. agent could still stumble on somebody I helped, and you could wake up one morning to the smell of tear gas and the sight of men in bulletproof vests and baseball caps knocking down the door with a battering ram. There are also some very slimy people out there who still want to find some victim they didn’t get to torment enough, and would be very happy to step over your body for the privilege of asking me questions.” She paused to let the two unpleasant possibilities settle in his imagination. Then she smiled. “However. I did make a lot of money at it. You’d better share the rewards, because you’ve already taken on the risks.”

He shrugged. “We can use it to buy a lot of life insurance.”

She laughed and kissed him. “I’m serious. About once a month or so, you’ll see a lot of mail from my two business managers. One is Stewart Hoffstedder. He’s fictitious, basically just a mail drop in New York I use to pay bills for imaginary people, so you don’t want to know about any of that. The other one is named Michael Mesnick, and he’s real. He’s a former I.R.S. agent. If you ever fall into the morass of my finances, call him or his assistant, Kim Henmi, and they’ll straighten it out. Do not say anything about how ill-gotten my gains are. They think I’m a career consultant who spends too much money on travel and not enough on pensions.”

He gave her a hug and stood up. “I’ll try to remember.” But she was still sitting on the bed. “That’s it, right?”

She sat quietly for a moment. “Here is the rest of it. I don’t think I want to have to say this twice, because it’s a little … embarrassing. What I intend to do with the rest of my life is be your wife. I’m not reserving anything, holding anything back. This is the only life I expect to have, so I’m not willing to let it go wrong by little increments because I wasn’t paying attention. I will always be available to you, at any hour of the day or night. If you want to talk, I’ll talk. If you don’t want to talk, that probably means you should try even harder to talk. I’ll be listening.”

Carey sat on the bed hard, as though his legs had given way. “The sweet old-fashioned girl? Jane Whitefield?”

“Jane McKinnon. Older than old-fashioned,” she said. “Primal, actually.” He hugged her again, but as he smiled at her, he saw she wasn’t smiling. “The only thing I won’t do for you is play dumb.”

The supple, gentle touch of his arm around her seemed to stiffen, and after a second the arm dropped away. “I hope this is because you’re getting everything out of the way at once—housecleaning day.”

“It is.”

“Then I guess I don’t have any grounds to feel insulted. So I’ll just say that I love you. I married you. If I had any reason to imagine I couldn’t live up to the agreement, I would have to be insane. I don’t expect to ever give you any reason to feel … insecure. Okay?”

She gave him a peck on the cheek. “Thanks. I’m sorry to bring that up again. Maybe we just know too much about each other. You’re a very attractive man, Carey. And you’re getting better instead of worse. You like women, and we all sense it, and so we all nuzzle up to you. And you’re also a very successful doctor in a provincial town. Everybody likes to be around men like you. None of that is going to change just because you’re married. What I’m saying isn’t ‘Watch your step because I’m onto you.’ I’m saying, I know you like women a whole lot. And I like you a whole lot. You’re used to variety and excitement and … whatever. I understand it. So here I am. I’m not everybody in the world, but I’m going to try to be everything to you. Just ask. No, you don’t even have to ask, because I’m saying yes now, for all time.”

“The strawberries,” said Carey.

She threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him hard, rocking him back and forth. “I’m so glad. You don’t know how relieved I am.”

“About what?”

“You’re nowhere near as dumb as you look. It’s just the cheap haircut, after all.”