Wife Without a Past

This was getting creepy. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now if you’ll excuse me, I see my friend waiting for me over there.” She gestured vaguely toward a group of people. Her voice, which was supposed to be confident, was as weak as a child’s. She looked into his eyes to see if he’d noticed her lack of conviction.

“Laura…How can this be happening?” He looked lost, she thought. Lost. Utterly defenseless. She knew how that felt.

“My name is Mary Shepherd,” she said, like that would clear up all the confusion. “I’m visiting from Connecticut.”

“Mary Shepherd?” He repeated the name as if repeating a foreign language on an audiotape. He gave a humorless spike of laughter. “No, you’re not. You’re home.”

The simplicity with which he stated it almost made her laugh. Almost. Instead, she felt her breath catch in her throat. Home, he’d said. You’re home. A slow tingle moved down the back of her neck.

“I’m…not Mary Shepherd?” She tried to smile but it was tremulous at best. “And who do you think I am, then?” It was meant to sound light, as though of course she knew who she was and this man was a fool if he thought she was someone else. But the possibility that he knew more than she did was just too real. A thin vibration ran through her chest, like a single violin note strung out to a trembling finish.

Maybe he knew who she was.

“Is this a joke?” he asked, his tone rising.

Ridiculous, she thought. He doesn’t know who I am. He’s just a madman. Evidently Nantucket is full of them.

“Are you kidding?” he prodded. His brown eyes searched hers desperately.

It was the desperation that spooked her the most She had to get away. “Am I laughing?” She took a step back.

He laid a hand on her shoulder and she could feel it shaking. It was like fifty thousand volts running through him to her. “Laura! What the hell is going on?”

She looked around for help—a policeman, anything. A psychiatrist.

“Laura!”

His pleading exclamation turned her attention back to him. She straightened her back. “I told you, I’m not—”

“Good Lord, do you think I don’t know my own wife when I see her?”

A blow to the gut couldn’t have impacted her more.

He continued in a softer voice. “My God, Laura, it really is you.”

She stood frozen, looking at him. “You’re mistaken.”

“Do you think I could possibly forget? Your hair.” His fingers tickled through the shoulder-length ends of her hair. “It’s shorter but the same color.”

A tickle skirted her neck and, for reasons she couldn’t begin to understand, she imagined him kissing her there.

“And your face.” His thumb traced a burning line across her cheekbone. “My God, do you think I could forget that face? It’s been over a year, but there wasn’t a day I didn’t think about it—”

Over a year. Her eyes closed and she fought the urge to lean into his touch.

“Your mouth.” He traced the line of her lips with his finger.

Without thinking, she parted her lips and his finger nearly touched the tip of her tongue. A lightning bolt shot straight into the pit of her stomach. He caught her eye and cocked his head slightly. The movement was small, but meaningful. Familiar? No. But electrifying.

He put his finger to his own lips, then dropped his hand as if he’d touched something white-hot. “I thought I would die without you.”

She swallowed but a hard lump remained in her throat. When her voice came out it was barely more than a whisper. “What—what happened to your wife?”

He lowered his brow and a hardness returned to his eyes. “Great question. Why the hell did you let me believe—let all of us believe—that you were dead?”

Suddenly she remembered coining to at St. Joseph’s. The thundering head injury. The doctors had said that someone had hit her. It had taken a full year to grow the hair back to a decent length after the surgery. And the rope burns on her wrists and.ankles, burns that had burrowed right through her flesh and left scars she could see to this day. She couldn’t ignore the obvious question.

Had Laura wanted this man to find her? Or had she fled him to save herself—only to end up losing herself completely?

The thought was terrifying in its blindness. She pressed past the man whom, only a moment ago, she’d felt desire for. “I think you’ve got the wrong person,” she said. She had to find a place to be alone and think. “I’m really sorry you lost your wife, but I’m not her.”

He made no move to follow her, as far as she could tell, but his voice rang clearly behind her. “Okay, you’re not her. You just have her face, her eyes, her hair, her voice, and her scar on your chin.”

She stopped, but didn’t turn back. Her heart was banging so ferociously, she was sure he could hear it eight feet away. She did have a scar on her chin; it had always been there. She’d wondered a million times where it came from. Without really thinking, she raised her fingers.to the small bumpy spot

He spoke again, but he hadn’t made a move toward, her. “Laura, why did you come back if you were going to hide from me?” He let out an exasperated sigh. “Never mind that, why did you leave?”

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t

“Okay, forget me.” She heard him take two or three steps toward her on the pavement. “Forget me altogether. How could you leave your child?”

Child!

Her knees went weak. It had never occurred to her that she might have children. That seemed like something a mother couldn’t forget no matter what happened to her. Her heart twisted inside out and she thought for a moment she might get sick. Then she turned, very slowly, to face him.

“Child?” she repeated faintly.

He gave a curt nod, his eyes mere slits. “Or had you forgotten—”

“As a matter of fact I had.”

“That, along with the rest of your family?” He stopped and frowned. “What did you say?”

“I said…” She swallowed. She didn’t know who she was but she believed she never would have left a child behind with a physically abusive man. “Well, anyway, I meant that if I am this Laura you’re talking about, then I have forgotten. I’ve forgotten everything. There was…an accident.” She smiled but it felt like baring her teeth.

His featured hardened. “And you’ve forgotten Sam as well as me?”

Sam! The word hit her like a slap across the face. Could this be the Sam she’d been trying to recall? It had to be. Her heart raced. “Sam? Do I—do you— have a little boy?”

“What are you talking about? Sam? Samantha is your daughter.”

Her breath caught in her throat. Daughter. Sam was her daughter.

“Laura? What’s going on here?”

She returned her gaze to him, still barely able to breathe. “That name…I’ve…” She stopped, realizing how difficult it would be to explain when she herself understood so little. “I’m afraid I don’t remember you, either.”

He lowered his chin, considering, then seemed to dismiss the thought. “What are you talking about? Amnesia?” he scoffed. Then he muttered, “That’s a hell of an excuse.”

“It’s not an excuse” she said. Why would she need an excuse to not find her identity? Her eyes began to burn. Sam. Finally one fact in the months of confusion was starting to make sense. She wanted to spill her whole story and have him fill in all the missing pieces. She wanted to remember. But she didn’t know this man from…from any other and, without really knowing anything about him, she would have to be an idiot to tell him she was a woman, alone, with no real identity.

“Maybe you can tell me why you’re so convinced I’m Laura,” she said. It was a pathetic attempt at detached curiosity.

“Tell you? How about I show you?” He whipped his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans and fumbled through it until he produced a small stack of photos and handed them to her.

Some of them were wallet-size portraits, some snapshots, but all of them had one thing in common. They were unmistakably her. Her with him; her in a graduation cap and gown; her with a blond woman on the beach, in a pink swimsuit; her smiling and resting her hand on her own pregnant belly; and one of her holding hands with a small girl…

“Oh my God,” she whispered. She ran her finger across the little girl in the picture. She had light auburn hair that gleamed in the light of the flash. Her eyes were wide and clear blue, and her uninhibited smile was pure happiness. She was a beautiful child.

Oh, how she would have missed her if she were her child, Mary thought “How old is she?”

He hesitated. “Sam is four.”

So young. She needed her mother still, but was that Mary? It was difficult to fathom. “She’s lovely.”

“I agree.”

She met his eyes. “I’ll bet she’s sweet.”

“She’s the greatest kid ever.” He laughed harshly. “Come on, Laura, you know that.”

“I know that,” she echoed without recollection. After another moment, she slipped the photo to the back of the pile and removed the graduation picture of Laura. She examined it closely. The scar on her chin was clearly visible, even a little bigger than it was now. She raised her hand to her chin again, then turned to him.

“How did I get it? The scar, I mean.”

“You fell off a horse,” he answered slowly, studying her with a different look now.

“I ride?”

“No.” He was looking so deeply into her eyes that she felt naked. A tiny smile played at the corner of his mouth. “Not very well.” The smile disappeared. “You know that.”

“No, I don’t.”

He cocked his head to one side. “Come on.”

“That’s fairly cynical.”

“I’m not a fool.”

She smiled wanly. “Then do I bring out this cynicism in you?”

“I’m not cynical,” he protested. “I’m wary. You always did have a way of blowing things way out of proportion. Are you trying to tell me you don’t remember anything? Nothing at all? Not your name? Your first dog’s name? Zero?”

“I remember what I had for breakfast this morning, and where I bought my shoes, but I can’t remember anything beyond the last year or so.”

He opened his mouth, then closed it and shifted his weight. When he spoke again, his voice registered absolute bemusement. “This isn’t a put-on? You honestly have some sort of amnesia or something? Does that really happen?”

She paused and studied him with the impartial eye she’d developed at Sisters Anonymous. “You’ve got a lot of questions, but let me ask you one.” One that might answer a lot of questions about what happened to me and why, if I’m your wife, I’ve spent the last year with no identity, hundreds of miles away. She kept her gaze steady. “Is your wife the kind of person who would lie to you?”

Chapter Three

He eyed her steadily without speaking at first. “My wife,” he said slowly, “is the kind of person who was so scared to trust the people who loved her that she turned away from them.”

“From them? Or from you?”

“From all of us. Especially from me.” He swallowed. “She was so sure that I didn’t love her that she distanced herself from me. To protect herself from the pain of…I guess of losing me.” He looked hard into her eyes. “Isn’t that crazy?”

He was obviously expecting her to take umbrage. “Maybe so, but that sort of thing doesn’t usually happen without a good reason.”

“A good reason,” he scoffed. “You mean like having parents who didn’t love each other and who didn’t trust each other? I’m sorry I don’t think that’s a good reason to re-create that atmosphere for your own daughter. I don’t think that’s a good reason to treat your husband like a criminal because he doesn’t…” He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good reason to retreat from your life so much that you eventually have to fake your own death in order to be alone.”

“Hey, maybe your wife had reasons to try and get away from you and maybe she didn’t, but I don’t know anything about that.”

“Laura, this is insane!”

“If this is truly me we’re talking about,” she began in a cold tone, noting how absurd her words were, “then I’m telling you for the last time, I don’t remember. All I know is that I woke up in a hospital a year ago with no idea who or where I was, and I’ve had to struggle through worse hell than you’ve probably ever known to try and make sense of it.”

They stood face-to-face like boxers. Then she added, “And if you cared so stinking much about me, how is it that you never came to find me?”

“Because you were dead!”

She splayed her arms and looked down at herself. “Apparently not.”

“I thought you were.”

“Oh, I see. You thought I was. Well, that’s good enough. That makes up for it.” She shook her head. “If that’s the sort of dumb faith you expected of your wife, then no wonder you thought she didn’t trust enough. Who could?”

“It wasn’t dumb faith. Your car was wrecked, there was a body wearing your jewelry, your wedding ring.” His voice weakened over those words. “All your identification was there.”

“Did you identify the body?”

“Yes—no. I mean, it was burnt beyond recognition.”

“Did you check the dental records?” She noticed how defensive she sounded, but she couldn’t help it. She felt a little sorry for him, but she felt even sorrier, not for herself, but for the woman she had apparently been.

The woman who had been allowed to disappear as “dead” when she was alive and struggling to go from day to day.

“No,” he answered. “It didn’t seem necessary to check the dental records.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Did you check the hospitals and police stations for Jane Does in the area?”

“Of course not. We thought we had you!” He was clearly losing patience.

So was she. “Then that’s dumb faith.”

He thumped his head with his palm. “God, if that isn’t just like you. You know there are two sides to this, not just yours. Don’t you think if there had been an ounce of doubt, I would have investigated? No, of course you don’t You never did think I loved you.”

“Obviously there was reason enough to investigate further.” She shrugged, but his words had thrown her. You never did think I loved you. “If I’m Laura, I mean.”

“I give.” He shook his head, and let out a long breath. “I can’t argue with that. But who would believe this?”

“I have no choice but to believe it,” she said simply.

He was obviously still wrestling with believing her. “It’s just so farfetched. Amnesia?”

She folded her arms in front of her. It was a classic self-defense mechanism and she knew it. “You want my medical history?”

“Yes.”

She considered this for a moment. “Me, too.”

He almost laughed, but sobered quickly. “What am I supposed to say, Laura? What do we do?”

She straightened. “I don’t have a lot of experience with this, either.”

When neither of them spoke, she said, “Let’s try this again. I guess we should get acquainted. I don’t even know your name.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but…”

“Drew,” he said. “Bennett. Drew Bennett. You’re—you’re Laura Bennett.” He looked around. “This is unbelievable,” he muttered under his breath.

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