Wife Without a Past

Dear Samantha,

Today is your mother’s birthday. She’s been gone for a little more than a year, but sometimes it seems like she just stepped out yesterday. And sometimes it feels like it’s been forever.

I want to tell you about your mother, while it’s still so fresh in my mind, but you’re too young to understand it all right now. So I thought I’d write it down and give this to you when you’re older.

Where do I start? Your mother was the most beautiful and intelligent woman I ever met. The day we got married, I truly felt like the luckiest man on earth. If she were here, she’d probably tell you that she chased me until I caught her—she used to say that all the time—but the truth is that the minute I laid eyes on her, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

You know, I’m finding that even as I write this, I feel strange talking about her in the past tense. In my mind I know she’s gone, but, as crazy as it sounds, sometimes I could swear she’s nearby. There are days when I even catch myself looking out the window at the front walk, as if it were just a matter of time before she came home…

Love,

Daddy

Chapter One (#ulink_ed4d968b-ec20-5832-adb4-6558359c462f)

Laura!

Drew Bennett froze midstep on the sidewalk of Broad Street in Nantucket. His heart gave one mighty bang, like an ax cutting into solid oak, then fluttered, like leaves spiraling to the ground.

Impossible. Still, he didn’t move. He couldn’t move.

His eyes were fixed, practically burning, on a woman by the old bank building. It was her familiar stance that caught his eye first. In the midst of a crowd she looked untouchable. She was tall and slender—more slender than she’d been before—with a chin-length swish of glossy red hair. It used to be long, he thought vaguely. Past her shoulders. But that vibrant color was unmistakable.

Drew tried to see her face but it was difficult. The light breeze pushed tree shadows back and forth across her, alternately illuminating and hiding her face in darkness. He was too far away. But he was afraid to take a step toward her for fear that she would disappear, a spirit in the mist.

Again.

So he stayed at his vantage point, studying her. He didn’t have a lot of experience with hallucinations, but it struck him as odd that he didn’t recognize the clothes she wore. Faded jeans and a bright blue T-shirt that read Ozone Or No Zone. A threadbare green sweater was knotted around her waist.

The wind lifted again, and she raised her chin and flipped her hair back out of her eyes. His stomach lurched. It was a gesture he’d seen her do a thousand times before.

Laura. Drew swallowed hard and closed his eyes. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. It felt real, but his thundering heart, burning eyes and the chill grinding down his spine were proof of nothing. Surely it was all a figment of his weary imagination. But when he opened his eyes she was still there. Only ten yards away at the most. A memory, seeming to live and breathe like everyone around her. He could barely breathe.

She was looking at something in her hands. A street map? Of all people, she wouldn’t need one. Drew squinted his eyes to see better. It was a street map. He frowned. Why would Laura—even his own hallucination of her—need a map of the town she’d lived in all her life?

His pounding heart gave no promise of calming, so he took a moment to gather some strength and moved toward her. One step. Still there. Two steps. She hadn’t disappeared yet. She hadn’t even moved. Three steps closer made him three times more positive that it was her.

No. It had to be a ghost.

Before he could take a fourth step, she turned away. Not vanished—turned away. He took a moment to catch his breath as she ambled up the street, pausing occasionally to look in a shop window. Drew followed, watching, slowly closing the gap between them. She stopped in front of Addy’s Attic, a store featuring the paintings of local artists. Addy’s had always been one of her favorite haunts. Now it appeared that was literally true. He watched for her usual enthusiasm to draw her in as it always did.

But as she stood there, her stature took on an odd stiffness. She pressed her lips together and leaned in, laying her hand to the window glass. Her stillness was unnerving. Then she gave a small shake of her head and walked away.

Moving with the slow hesitation of a dreamer, Drew continued following.

When she stopped at a bookshop a block up, there was no more than fifteen feet between the two of them, but he stopped, too. After what he’d been through since she’d…gone…he didn’t want to take any chance of spooking her before getting some answers from her. How can you be here? Can you speak? Can you hear?

Can you stay?

A crowd of people milled around them. May was busy enough on Nantucket, but add lunch hour to the formula and you had a real mess. Drew had to step aside once or twice just to keep his eyes trained on her.

She must have felt his gaze because she turned suddenly and faced him.

Bam! It was a sucker punch to the gut. Even though he knew the face well, the impact of seeing it, albeit from a slight distance, pulled his stomach straight into his empty lungs.

“It’s you…” His voice trailed off and he reached an arm out toward her, even though she was too far away to reach, or to even hear him.

He realized quickly, though, that she wasn’t looking at him but at something behind him. Her eyes seemed to search the crowd, as if she was looking for someone else, before she turned and walked away again.

Drew was dazed for a moment; then he moved to catch up with her. “Wait!” he called, but she only picked up her speed. “Laura!”

She didn’t even turn around.

“Laura, answer me!” he yelled, heedless of the curious stares of passersby. “What’s going on?”

A beefy hand grabbed his arm. “Looks like the lady wants to be left alone,” a gruff voice cautioned.

Drew jerked his head toward the interloper. It was a construction worker. Part of the crew that was patching the sidewalk in an effort to keep the historic district in top form. His big face was seared a menacing red by the sun, and his forearm was the size of a small tree trunk.

Drew shrugged him off. “You saw her? A woman with red hair?”

The man’s face went slack. “What are you, some sort of nut? Of course I saw her. I’m not blind.”

Then she’s real. She’s not a figment of my imagination.

“Go home, buddy. Sleep it off.” The worker walked off, shaking his head.

Drew barely heard him. The man’s words had a certain ring to them. Was she running away from him?

No, these thoughts were crazy. If she was a ghost, which she surely was, she would have better ways to get away than by running. And maybe she didn’t realize he was calling to her. After all, the noise of the crowd created a dull roar.

Drew picked up his pace. She’d be glad to see him. Of course she would. He just had to catch up to her. He lost sight of her for a moment, then saw her again by the menu outside the Cobbler Restaurant

“Laura! Here!” In three strides he was there, and turned her by the shoulders.

The woman who faced him was unfamiliar, and bore little likeness to Laura. For one thing, she couldn’t have been older than twenty and she was shorter and a little on the plump side. The hair was similar to Laura’s, the cut was the same, but nothing else was.

She smiled a big toothy grin at him and winked an amber eye. “My name’s Gert,” she said in a broad Australian accent. “Will I do?”

“I’m sorry,” Drew said, trying to shake his mind clear. “I thought you were someone else.” Was this the woman he’d been following for the past twenty minutes? Was he that far around the bend?

That was a more comfortable explanation than anything else he could come up with.

He flicked a glance across her. No, it wasn’t the woman he’d seen. Gert wore a gauzy tie-dyed outfit one of the stores by the wharf was selling, not the jeans and T-shirt he’d seen Laura in. He gave a brief, distracted smile. “Sorry, my mistake.”

“If you want to make another one, I’m staying at the Driftwood” the girl called after him.

He walked away, scanning the crowd for Laura. It wasn’t long before he spotted her standing at the counter in the drugstore across the street, signing a check and tearing it out of the book.