Wife Without a Past. Elizabeth Harbison

been so young when it had happened—barely three. At first she’d felt the loss constantly. It had been hell having to explain to her over and over again that, no, Mommy wasn’t coming back. Sam seemed to think that was a concept that had flexibility. Mommy wasn’t home one day but maybe the next—when she really wanted to show her a new drawing—she would be back.

      Drew picked up a pen and started sketching absently on the ink blotter in front of him.

      Gradually Sam’s memories seemed to have faded. Now she merely asked questions about Laura. What was she like? Was she nice? Was she pretty? Drew never knew if she’d truly bounced back and lost those young memories, or if she didn’t remember because she didn’t want to remember.

      Just like Drew didn’t want to. Because remembering was too painful.

      He added a couple of lines to his sketch. A cloud. He couldn’t blame Laura for leaving, though. Not entirely. He’d had a lot of time to think about it, and had realized many regrets of his own. There were too many things he should have said but didn’t. Perhaps worse, there were too many things he shouldn’t have said but did. Sometimes he felt he was as responsible for her death as the car accident had been.

      If he had it to do over again, he would have done things so differently.

      But he didn’t have things to do over again. That had been the hardest lesson to learn over the past year; he had to accept that she wasn’t coming back and that his regrets were useless.

      Drew looked back down at what he’d been doodling. It was a very rough sketch of the children’s beach, near the Port Authority. He added a few lines to the water. Laura had always liked to go there and watch the boats come and go. He hadn’t been there in months, hadn’t even thought about it until now. Of course, he hadn’t drawn anything other than lines and angles in as long, either. He started to sketch her into the picture, then slapped the pen down on the desk. Laura was dead, and like the rest of the dead population, she was going to stay that way. He had to accept it.

      Mary Shepherd fingered the ring on the street vendor’s cart. It was an Irish Claddagh ring. She knew because one of the women at the shelter had worn one when she’d arrived. She’d come in with it symbolizing attachment to a man who abused her. By the time she’d left, healed and renewed, she’d turned it to symbolize a woman alone. The ring and its meanings had always appealed to Mary in some strange way that she couldn’t quite name.

      Of course, there were a lot of things Mary couldn’t quite name. Herself, not the least of them.

      For a year now she’d been Mary Shepherd because she’d woken up in St. Joseph’s Memorial Hospital in Connecticut with a horrendous head wound, rope burns on her wrists and ankles and no memory of how any of it had happened. No memory of her life before. She wore no wedding ring, but her left ring finger was creased as though she’d worn a ring there for a long time and only taken it off recently. But she didn’t even know her name, much less what sort of ring she might have worn.

      “Psychogenic amnesia,” the doctors had called it. Her reaction to a trauma so great she couldn’t bear to remember it. Could last a month, could last forever. There was no way to tell.

      Mary’s money was on forever. Because in fifteen months she’d had no memory—good or bad, recent or distant—beyond small instinctive pulls. Like the one that had brought her to Nantucket. She had such an affinity for water that the women at the shelter where she lived and worked had teased that she was probably a navy captain in charge of hundreds of men at sea, and who wouldn’t want to forget that? But when she’d seen the pictures of Nantucket in the travel agent’s window, she’d known that she had to see it in person. It had to be Nantucket, not Cape Cod, not Bayville, but Nantucket.

      So her co-workers had pooled their money and sent her north on a bus. A well-deserved rest, they called it, for the hardest worker at Sisters Anonymous.

      She looked back at the ring. Turn it one way, you’re one thing. Slip it off and turn it around and you’re something else altogether. Maybe that was why it had always appealed to her. The idea that she could just turn a magic ring around and be the person she was before the accident would have been so wonderful.

      Sam I am. The odd little phrase came to her, as it sometimes did, without warning or explanation. Sam I am. She’d twisted it around and analyzed it every way possible. Was her name Sam? Was there a man in her life named Sam? Did the letters stand for something else? It had even occurred to her that she might have been in the armed services, thinking of “Uncle Sam,” but none of that seemed right.

      The sun glinted in her eyes from the silver in her finger. Yes, magic would be wonderful whether it was in the ring or in the air. Too bad it didn’t exist. She set the ring back in its place on the cart, looked at it for a moment and asked the vendor, “How much?”

      The wizened old proprietor scratched his chin. “For you, ten dollars.”

      She smiled. Most of the pieces there were marked ten dollars. “Will you take five?” He hesitated and she added, “It’s all I have and…I really want the ring.” She didn’t have a lot of money and virtually no budget for extras like this, but the magic she’d attributed to the ring didn’t seem as absurd as it should have. When she’d slipped it on her finger, she’d had the feeling that something exciting was about to happen.

      “I could never resist a pretty face,” the man said, accepting her money.

      She slipped the ring on and marveled at the comfortable way it settled at the base of her finger. In some small way it made her feel a little more whole. It was like another piece in the puzzle this week on Nantucket had become.

      As she walked down Federal Street, she listened intently to her inner voice, trying to hear some tiny murmur of recognition, some small explanation of why it had brought her to Nantucket. But there was nothing beyond a strange feeling of comfort and safety in the quaint, winding streets and tall, narrow houses.

      She stopped in front of a linen shop and looked at a children’s bunk bed in the window. Something stirred inside of her. Her eyes scanned the other objects for something else that might make her stomach do that small flip. Then she realized the feeling had come not from what she was looking, at but from the fact that someone was looking at her. Someone at her side.

      She turned her head sharply and caught the eye of a tall, thin man with vivid red hair sticking straight up and out. His wide pale eyes stared at her as if she were a ghost. His mouth was agape.

      For a moment, her heart pounded with terror, then she glanced at the throngs of people milling around them, and relaxed. Safety in numbers. When she looked back at him, his face was unchanged. Clearly he was just an unbalanced person, she decided.

      She gave him a polite half smile, then cast her eyes down and walked farther down the sidewalk. The feeling that he was following her clung to her back like a cold, wet towel. Every once in a while she was tempted to stop at a shop window, but she kept catching glimpses of the man in the corner of her eye, following her with that comical expression of some sort of shock on his face.

      A thought came to her, so absurd that she tried to dismiss it. But she couldn’t. Was it possible that he recognized her? She met his eyes but his expression didn’t change. He didn’t move to speak to her, which he surely would have if he knew her. Instead, he just stared with that weird expression.

      Good Lord, did he recognize her for some dark reason? Was she on a wanted poster in the Nantucket post offices? Had she done something terrible, then returned to the scene? Was she, even now, frightening the citizens as she passed?

      No! The word echoed within her like the voice of a guardian angel. She hadn’t done anything criminal, she knew it. Of course, she had no facts to back her up, no alibi for anything before awakening in the hospital, but she just knew she wasn’t wanted for any crime. The very idea was laughable.

      This guy following her was just some nutcase. As soon as he looked away, Mary slipped into one door of a corner kite store, and out the other. Best to stay away from nutcases. Just before she ran