Wife Without a Past. Elizabeth Harbison

shoulder and Drew jumped.

      “Whoa! Didn’t mean to scare you, buddy,” Drew’s friend and co-worker Vince Reese said. “What’s going on? What are you doing out here?”

      Drew turned to face Vince, whose clownlike orange hair on his tall, lanky body was like a flame on a matchstick. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. You’d think I was nuts. Hell, I think maybe I’m nuts.”

      “Try me.”

      Drew hesitated, then shrugged. “I just saw Laura.”

      There was a long silence.

      “Laura?” Vince echoed at last.

      Drew nodded and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger.

      “As in…your Laura?”

      Drew tightened his lips and nodded. “Yup. Chased her all the way across town. Ready to commit me?”

      Vince’s screwed up his brow. “You just saw Laura. Uh-huh. What was she doing?”

      “Window-shopping mostly.” Drew thrust his hands into his pockets. “And then she went for a ride in a cab. So—” he puffed air into his cheeks, then blew it out “—ready to get back in to work?” He started to walk toward the office building.

      Vince put a hand up to stop him. “You just saw Laura shopping and riding in a taxi and now you want to go back in to work?”

      Drew raised his shoulders. “I considered chasing the cab but I’m not as fast as I used to be, you know. I can hardly ever run fifty miles an hour anymore.” His flippant tone belied the trembling in his chest

      Vince shook his head and fell in step beside Drew. “I don’t get this. Is it April Fool’s Day?” He looked at his watch. “No, it’s May. What’s going on, man? Do you need a visit with the old head shrinker, or are you pulling a joke on me?”

      “Neither.” Drew clapped Vince on the shoulder. “I saw a woman who looked just exactly like Laura. Exactly. But she slipped away before I got a chance to see her up close.” Or I let her slip away, he thought. I let her slip away all afternoon because I was afraid to know for sure one way or the other.

      “But you do know it couldn’t have been Laura. I mean, it’s been more than a year since—”

      “A year and three months.” Drew nodded. “I know. I haven’t totally lost my mind. It was obviously a case of mistaken identity.”

      “That’s it.” Vince’s voice was just a little bit too patronizing.

      Drew ignored it. “I probably just need a good long rest. I thought maybe Samantha and I would go up to Vermont for a while.”

      “That’s not such a bad idea,” Vince said. “You’ve always been a major workaholic, but over the past year you’ve been killing yourself working here and at home. Tell you what, I’ll go with you guys. How about Disney World?”

      Drew stopped. “I appreciate the offer, but I was thinking of the mountains. Samantha’s been making noise about seeing them.” He sighed, thinking about her, then shook his head. “I owe her something special. She’s the most precious thing in my life. If it weren’t for her, I don’t know what I would have done this past year.”

      Vince gave him a dismissive slap on the back. “Well, you got through it, man.” Obviously he was eager to brush Drew’s momentary lapse in sanity under the carpet.

      Did I? “I guess I did.”

      “And today you just saw someone who looked a lot like Laura. Not actually Laura herself.” Vince tried to give a little laugh, but it sounded to Drew more like a dismissive cough. “Because, you know…”

      “I know.” Their eyes met. Yes, Drew knew. He knew all too well. He’d had more than a year to get used to the idea, to accept it and go on with his life.

      Laura Bennett, his beautiful young wife and the mother of little Samantha, had been dead and buried for more than a year.

       Chapter Two

      The rest of the day passed slowly for Drew. He got nothing done in the way of work. Instead, he spent most of his time looking out the window at the breezy May afternoon. The brilliant sun shining through the old mottled window threw prisms of color across the floor.

      He could picture the exact color of Laura’s hair in sun like this—it was the color of a copper penny, gleaming as if newly minted. And her eyes, almond shaped, were the palest of blue. Not the emerald green of Irish stereotype, but blue like the sky on a clear summer morning.

      It wasn’t her, he told himself. It couldn’t have been. That’s impossible. But the truth was he found it harder to believe it wasn’t her. He’d never been one to experience hallucinations or to imagine things. And his eyesight was perfect, though he was hardly likely to assume someone was Laura, no matter how great the similarity, without some good solid detail.

      He closed his stinging eyes tightly, then opened them and looked out the window again. He couldn’t stop picturing Laura in the sunny spring day. It had taken more than a year to stop thinking of her every hour of every day. Now there was a look-alike out there somewhere. It made him want to barricade himself in his house and never go out again, never take a chance on seeing that woman—whoever she was— again. He wasn’t sure he could survive another delve into that sort of grief.

      He wasn’t the only one who couldn’t go through it again. His eyes fell on a picture on his desk. It was a little girl with auburn hair and blue eyes, smiling into the camera and right into his heart. Samantha, his daughter. Sam, Laura had called her. Like in Green Eggs and Ham, the Dr. Seuss book. “I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them, Sam I am.”

      He could still hear Laura’s musical voice, like a ghost in the hall, reciting the words.

      He remembered every word of the book even though he hadn’t picked it up since the day of the accident. She’d left it on the kitchen table after reading it to Sam at breakfast. When he’d come home that afternoon, after a tinny voice on the telephone had informed him that she’d been killed in a crash on 1-95 just over the Connecticut state line, the book had still been sitting open on the kitchen table.

      For some reason, that had struck him as proof that she was coming back. It was all a bad dream, of course. Laura was coming back; she hadn’t finished reading Green Eggs and Ham to Sam. It was impossible to imagine that she wouldn’t come back and pick it up right where she’d left off. And something in his mind told him that if he just left the book there, didn’t touch it, she would come back to it.

      That had only lasted a few hours, though. When he came back from the coroner’s office in Connecticut late that night, his secretary, Mindy, had already tidied up and put the book back on the bookshelf with hundreds of others. That small fact alone had clinched it for him. The spell of shock and disbelief that had suspended his grief was broken.

      Laura was dead. She’d walked out on him without warning or explanation early, one February morning. That alone was baffling enough, but she hadn’t just left Drew, she’d also left their three-year-old daughter behind. She’d read the book to her, taken her to preschool and then kept on driving. It was so unlike Laura that to this day he couldn’t figure it in to his acceptance of her death.

      But during those last few months, she’d done a lot of things he would have thought were unlike her. And there were insecurities, accusations, suspicions. He’d realized she was upset, but he’d had no idea she was upset enough to leave her family.

      But she had. And only hours later she was pronounced dead in a hospital two hundred miles away. There was never an opportunity for explanations or restitution.

      The long months