“Nanni nanni, Lizzie!” Link gloated. “Now you’ve helped him.”
Lizzie jumped up and threw what was left of her dinner into his face.
A not untypical evening at the widower’s house ensued.
But I was sure we hadn’t seen the last of “my friend, Harley Adamson.”
We hadn’t.
The trouble was, I liked Harley Adamson. He wasn’t at all like I’d imagined my other widower to be. Yet it could have been written on the wall by a flaming hand. Harley Adamson was my other widower. The villain. The money hungry slime. The pits.
The man who sold his dying wife’s body. The body a different woman now lived in. Me.
But he didn’t fit that picture at all.
He kept coming around. Court encouraged him. Fool of a man. Fool both of them. To me, Court was my husband of sixteen years, the man I loved for all his virtues (and he had many) and even his flaws. The man I knew, thought I knew, even better than myself.
Something else was happening. I was attracted to Harley.
No. My body, that is, the body my mind was now living in, was attracted to Harley. Our chemicals meshed too well.
Why not? He was a fine man, moderately good looking, and, as he had proved the first night, as sweet inside as his outside was pleasant. (There had to be a reason beyond the obvious for the sale of his wife’s body for the transplant. Because, if nothing else, Court would never have brought him if he really was a bottom feeder.)
If my mind flinched every time Court politely but firmly gave me a good night peck on the forehead before walking away from the guest room (how I was beginning to hate it) my body thrummed with pleasant anticipation around Harley.
Our marriage, Court’s and mine, had lasted sixteen years, until it was legally dissolved by my “death.” Before my rebirth, after the transplant, in another woman’s body. I knew exactly what I was feeling. One night, when Harley left me in a very unpleasant state, I decided to Do Something.
I didn’t give Court a chance to land his damn peck and slip away. I put a hand on his shoulder, and said, “We need to talk. Your room or mine.”
Sixteen plus years. I didn’t have the voice I had had twelve months ago, but he recognized, perhaps subconsciously, the under note. “No, Mary. Whatever it is can wait until tomorrow.”
Between my teeth: “It can’t, dammit. Either come in here, or I’ll follow you to yours.”
I could see my darling number-cruncher computing the odds. The king-sized bed we’d shared for so many years still lived in the master bedroom. But the guest room had a queen size, for when we had a couple for guests.
Our room held too many memories. The guest room none. “All right. I’ll come in. Just to talk.”
I could have killed him. Talk. That’s all we had done. Since.
There was only one chair in the room, a comfortable easy chair by a small table and bookshelf. He sat gingerly, like a cat lowering itself to a hot stove. “Well, Mary. What’s so important it can’t wait until we’re less tired?”
“Several items, Court. Let’s start with your mysterious new friend Harley.”
He shrugged. “His company got trashed by a computer glitch from one of my clients. I met him while straightening it out. I liked him, that’s all there is to it.”
Oh, Court. I know when you lie. All the normal telltales are missing, but I’ve always known.
I tested the waters deeper. “I don’t think he’s good for the children. Why don’t you start meeting him for guy’s nights out, instead of bringing him here.”
It was a mistake.
“Why don’t you like him, Mary?”
“I do like him,” I protested, too quickly. “It’s the children that—”
“His big advantage is, he didn’t know us before. You think that’s so bad?”
“Court.” He was still wearing his office suit. I wanted to rip it off him. The question was, would trying to beat the starch out of him make him angry… or get him ready for action? We weren’t legally married anymore. But sixteen years is a long time.
Not for him, apparently. Of course, he’d only known the body I now inhabited a few months. For me, I didn’t feel different. You go to sleep, you wake up. So once it’s anesthesia putting you to sleep. You still wake up feeling the same. Except you’re in a whole new body, and legally a new person. You still feel the same about your husband, family. But they see a new person, a different person.
Dammit!
He stood. “If that’s all, I think we consider it settled. If you object to Harley, I’ll cut back on bringing him home.”
I had never sat down. “It isn’t just Harley, and you know it. Court, I can’t stand this. Being around you and not—not.” I ground my teeth. Of all things in the Universe, I didn’t want to say, It isn’t fair. After all, I was alive when I should have been dead. The woman whose body I now wore, the woman whose brain had been destroyed in an accident that left her body intact was really, permanently dead. I was alive. But talk about Tantalus. I was with my husband; and he flinched away from me. Because what he saw was a strange woman, not me. Not his wife.
“I’m sorry.” And I knew he was. “But there are some things a man just can’t do. Intellectually, I know you’re still Mary. But I look at you, and—”
I couldn’t help what I said next. “Then strip off, get on that bed, and close your eyes!”
He sputtered, somewhere between anger and amusement.
I felt hot liquid in my eyes.
“Don’t cry, Mary.” Suddenly his arms wrapped around me. I relaxed into that so familiar aura, body smell, firmness, everything right, so right.
Only for him, I knew, I was now wrong, so wrong.
“It’ll come, in time,” he said softly.
I reared back and glared. “How much time?”
He was so… Court. “That’s my Mary. I can’t know. Just—” a very wry grimace, “—not as soon as you’d like.”
“She was almost ten years younger than I was. Must I wait until this body has aged to where you remember mine?”
He jerked slightly. “You know, I think that’s part of it. She’s so much younger, I feel like a cradle robber.”
“Well, just remember, inside this fat young person is a thin old person!” She wasn’t fat. Nor had I been thin. She weighed a few pounds more than I had, but she was taller.
“Oh, Mary.” He slumped a little against me, gave me the first honest hug. “You sounded so—you, then.”
“I am me. That’s the problem.”
“I know, love.” He sighed. “I know. But you don’t look like you.”
Of course not. They had matched the body donor to me by a lot of chemical, subtle criteria. Size, features, none of that had been taken into account. The best you could say was, we were both brunettes. Big deal.
I almost had him. There we were, inches apart… and I lost again. I got my peck on the cheek, as he slipped out of my room.