The Almost Widow by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Author:Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2023-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Wednesday

20

I slept fitfully, sliding in and out of dreams. Dreams of water, of sinking, drowning. I woke gasping and sat up. The room was dark, though the drone on my dresser glowed green, indicating it was charged. I threw back the blankets to sit on the edge of the bed, thinking I would use the bathroom. But as I stood, I saw a dark figure silhouetted on the deck outside, a shadow, the black shape of a man. I knew him immediately.

“Ben?”

He just stood there, staring across the lake to the far shore.

I slid open the door, expecting he would disappear, as he had in my past visions, but he remained.

“Ben.”

He looked at me over his shoulder. “Find me,” he said, his eye glazed, dead, as my father’s had been in the dream I’d had so many years before. Then he was gone. Just gone.

I sat up in bed and gasped, my heart hammering in my chest. I half expected Ben to be there, on the deck, as he had been in my dream. It all felt so real.

Find me.

I flung off the covers and staggered over to the patio door to step, barefoot, out onto the snowy deck where Ben had stood in my dream. His presence was so tangible that when I closed my eyes, I knew he was with me.

“Ben,” I said out loud.

Was he still alive? Or was his spirit simply asking me to find his body?

Or was I losing my mind?

The sky, just before dawn, was clear and crisp, the air achingly cold. The stars above shone so brightly over the snow-covered landscape. An idyllic winter scene. But in a few hours the RCMP dive team, the recovery team, would be here to do their grid search of the lake, using a boat equipped with sonar, scanning for Ben’s body. His body. The truth was, I didn’t want them to find Ben’s body. If they didn’t find him, then I could believe he was still out there, alive. I knew, now, that the thought was irrational. Jackson, the other members of the search and rescue team, the RCMP, the whole community believed Ben was dead. I had seen his ghost. So why couldn’t I shake this feeling that he wasn’t gone?

Denial, my mother had told me. A stage of grief. That’s all.

And yet, Ben had said Find me. I had seen him at the Hourglass. He was there, somewhere.

I marched back inside, closing the patio door behind me, and clicked on the light to dress quickly, gearing up in my thermal underwear, my wool sweater, snow pants and jacket, and pocketed my ski gloves.

I put on a pot of coffee, threw together a few snacks and hastily scribbled a note for Noah and my mother: Searching the Boulders again for Ben. I’ll be back before dark. Always leave a travel plan, Ben had told me. I knew they would send Jackson after me. But maybe I could put in a few hours of searching before he arrived to stop me.

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