Coming Home for Christmas

by RaeAnne Thayne

  Luke appeared shocked at the suggestion, as if it had never occurred to him.

  The DA looked intrigued at her suggestion, though Elizabeth suspected she still thought her a brazen opportunist.

  “All right. That sounds like a reasonable idea. I’ll play your game for now because I’m interested in seeing how far you can take it.”

  “Will you...test my DNA?”

  “Oh, undoubtedly. Meanwhile, if you are indeed Elizabeth Sinclair, why did you leave, why did you change your appearance and where the hell have you been for seven years?”

  She sighed. Here was the moment she had been dreading, if not for those entire seven years, then at least for the last few, once she was back in her right mind.

  “That is...a very long story.”

  Christina Torres sat back in her chair, a pen in her hands. “I’ve blocked out a half hour. You’ve got that long to convince me you are Elizabeth Hamilton. Starting now.”

  The words tangled in her head, chasing each other around and around. Her dysphasia of speech always hit worse when she was under stress and she could imagine few things more stressful than this moment in her life, when she had to confess everything.

  Telling her story to this woman with the cold, appraising eyes was not nearly as difficult as having to tell her story to Luke.

  “I don’t...know where to start,” she admitted, hating that her voice sounded so timid and weak.

  “Why don’t you start with the night Elizabeth Sinclair Hamilton disappeared.”

  “The night I...left, you mean.”

  Ms. Torres frowned. “All right. For the sake of argument, let’s go with the assumption that you’re Elizabeth. Tell me about that night. Why did you leave? Did your husband hurt you?”

  “No,” she declared firmly. “Never.”

  The woman’s eyebrows rose. “Never? Explain to me, then, what that police report was all about. Neighbors said they heard shouting and officers showed up to find you bruised and bleeding?”

  Shame burned inside her for the woman she had been, lost and hurting. It seemed another lifetime ago, that depression that left her feeling like she was alone in huge, deep waters, treading with all her might but still unable to keep her head from slipping below the surface.

  “We...fought. Or rather, I yelled and he just stood there. That’s...what the neighbors heard. Me yelling. I threw a plate and...cut myself.” She hitched in a breath, hands folded tightly on her lap. Oh, this was so hard.

  “Luke didn’t hurt me. I...hurt myself. I was in a very dark place. It is hard to find the words to describe how...dark.”

  “The files indicate Elizabeth, er, you, had postpartum depression.”

  “And...clinical depression. Neither responded well to...drug therapy. I was...a mess. Suicidal. I was convinced my family would be better off without me. I tried to tell Luke to...divorce me.”

  And now that he was actually going to, she didn’t know how she would bear it.

  She couldn’t look at him but could feel the tension radiating off of him. Oh, this was hard.

  “That night, the night I left, I hit a...breaking point.”

  Christina Torres still looked skeptical. “What was different about that night that made you feel like you had to leave?”

  Oh, she didn’t want to talk about this. She gripped her hands together so tightly, she could feel her fingernails gouge into skin. “Have you ever felt...completely hopeless, Ms. Torres?”

  The woman looked startled. “We’re not talking about me.”

  “It’s hard to explain...to someone who’s never experienced how...debilitating a deep depression can be. It can lead you to think...horrible things. And to do them.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Things you would never think about in your...in your right mind.”

  She looked down at her hands, wishing she could stop now. But Luke needed his life back, the one she had taken from him, and she had to purge her conscience of this.

  “I almost harmed my baby. Our sweet son. Bridger. I... He was teething and had a cold and was crying. Luke had been dealing with the children and...his business and...and everything for months and he crashed that night. I...I got up with the baby. I couldn’t comfort him. He didn’t want me. Why should he? I hadn’t...bonded with him. He was almost a year old and I’d been...struggling that whole time with depression.”

  She had spotty memories of everything that had happened that night, impressions mostly, but she clearly remembered the terrible despair that had come over her as she tried to make Bridger stop crying.

  She had stood at the window of his nursery watching the snow falling and thinking how easy it would be to walk into the night with him, to take him into the mountains where Luke couldn’t find them. They would simply go to sleep, she and her child. It would be peaceful for both of them and would be far better off than living in this world that held so very much pain.

  “I was...a threat to my own child. My sweet boy. I was out of my head but I kept thinking...the world would be better off without me and I didn’t want my...my baby to have to grow up without a mother. I was...was going to carry him into the mountains and go to sleep with him in a...in a snowbank somewhere.”

  Luke had grown rigid beside her. She could sense his shock and horror. Oh, how he must hate her.

  She couldn’t look at him, not ready to see it.

  “Yet you didn’t take the child when you fled,” the attorney pointed out.

  “No. I started to. I was...almost to the door when he...he made a little sound and fell asleep. I looked down at him and...something broke inside me.” Her eyes felt hot, wet with the tears that dripped out despite her best efforts. “I...couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hurt him. Not my sweet little boy. But I knew how close I had come and that...that next time I might not stop.”

  The district attorney said nothing, her features inscrutable. “So you ran.”

  “Yes. I...managed to...to set him into his crib without waking him. Then I...I stumbled out of the house, intent only on getting away. I don’t even know if I...thought about where to go. It was cold that night. So cold. I fell twice but managed to make it to the highway.”

  “That’s five miles from here.”

  That walk was hazy, too. She only remembered feeling so ashamed and so afraid of her own actions. She had been a coward, even then, too afraid to walk into the mountains and let the elements take her.

  “You expect me to believe you walked five miles in the dark, in the winter?”

  “I’m only...telling you what happened. You can believe it or not. I...I managed to get a ride with a truck driver who was very kind to me. She was young, with dark hair and a tattoo of an...angel on her arm.”

  Her memory was so strange. She had remembered that angel, even when she didn’t remember so many other things.

  “I...I guess I fell asleep. When I woke up, we were in Oregon at a truck stop. I...I knew immediately I had made a terrible mistake. I wanted to go home. That was all I could think about. Home. My babies. Luke.”

  More tears leaked out and the district attorney finally handed her a tissue from a box on the credenza behind her.

  “The truck driver let me out. I was...I was going to call Luke but I was...so ashamed. The waitress let me sit in a booth and even...even gave me coffee. I sat there for an hour trying to figure out what to do next. A...a man at the table next to me...noticed my distress.”

  This memory had come back later than many of the others, though it had been blurred around the edges, as if she had rubbed petroleum jelly around the window in her mind.

  The only clear thing had been John Davis’s kind smile and the pain in his eyes, though that might have been from the pictures of him she had seen later.

  “He was heading to...Boise and offered a ride.”

  “Let me get
this straight. You would rather take a ride with a stranger than call your husband, admit you’d made a mistake and ask him to come and get you?”

  The doubt in Christina Torres’s voice made her flinch. “I don’t expect you to understand. I wasn’t thinking...clearly. I suppose I was...too ashamed to face him. To tell him I was a threat to our son and maybe to Cassie, too.”

  She heard him hitch in a breath at that but still couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Facing him now, seven years later, was harder than she’d ever thought it would be.

  “If you thought you were a threat, why were you going back?”

  “I...knew running off wasn’t...the right way. Neither was ending it all. I needed help. A different med, a different therapist. Maybe an inpatient program. Something. I...I wanted my family back.”

  Christina Torres shifted in her chair. Had her features become less harsh or was Elizabeth imagining that?

  “But you didn’t go back. You disappeared for the next seven years.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m still not saying I believe you’re Elizabeth Sinclair, but if it’s true, you apparently decided during that time to have extensive plastic surgery. What happened during those missing seven years, from that diner at a truck stop in Oregon and a man offering to give you a ride to this moment?”

  So much. A dozen lifetimes.

  Again, she didn’t even know where to start.

  “I...I don’t remember this part well. Only bits and pieces and what I’ve been able to stitch together from what the...the doctors have told me.”

  “Doctors. What doctors?”

  So many. Did this woman want an alphabetical list by surname or by specialty?

  She released a long, unsteady breath and wiped at her eyes with the tissue so that the world wasn’t so cloudy.

  “You took a ride with a man you met at a truck stop,” the attorney prompted.

  Luke remained stubbornly silent, his features hard, closed.

  Elizabeth nodded. “I do remember that part. He was...very nice. His name was...was John Davis. I remember sensing great pain in him.”

  He had been sweet and kind, genuinely concerned for her. She remembered that much from their brief acquaintance. He had also appeared to carry a heavy burden. Perhaps that was the reason why he had stopped at her table to try offering her some comfort.

  That fateful moment and her decision to accept a ride with him had changed everything in her life.

  She had often thought about the strange corkscrewing twists of life, how a single instant in time could dramatically alter a person’s life. Waiting three more seconds at a red light, changing an airplane flight, deciding at the last minute to drive a different route home.

  Or climbing into the vehicle with a stranger for what should have been an easy ride home.

  “What happened?” Ms. Torres asked.

  “About an...hour into our journey together, we encountered a storm. On a...lonely stretch of road, we hit a...patch of ice and the car rolled several times down a steep embankment. I found out later that John Davis was...was killed instantly. I was unconscious from a...head injury. No one saw the accident happen and...and no one found me for about eighteen hours.”

  She thought she heard a sharp intake of breath beside her but Luke’s expression didn’t seem to change.

  Did he believe her? She couldn’t tell. She supposed it didn’t really matter. It was the truth, which was all she had.

  “I was...badly injured. Unresponsive and stuck in my seat belt. Frostbitten. A snowplow operator finally spotted the wreckage.”

  That alone had been a miracle, as by then the car was close to being completely covered in snow.

  “When rescuers found me, they thought I was dead, just like John, until...one felt a faint pulse. I had no...identification on me because I had left in such a hurry. They treated me as a Jane Doe at first, until...John’s family arrived and assumed I was his wife, Sonia.”

  “His wife?” The attorney looked stunned. “Why would his own family immediately jump there?”

  “I had...extensive facial injuries. My face was swollen, bruised, cut up. Unrecognizable.”

  “Still. Wouldn’t his family know the difference?”

  “She had only been married to him for a short time and his family didn’t know her well. They met online and she had...come over from Russia to marry him.”

  “A mail-order bride?” the attorney asked, intrigued.

  That assumption always made her feel sad for John Davis, whose letters and journals indicated he had genuinely loved his wife. She wasn’t as certain about Sonia’s feelings for him in return. The woman had left him after less than a year, ostensibly only for a visit to her family in her home country but it had stretched into several months by the time Elizabeth’s path crossed with John’s at that Oregon truck stop.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me, at least not that I... remember. Regardless, I was badly injured, in a coma with little...chance of survival. John’s sister assumed I was his wife and doctors had no reason to...to doubt her.”

  That had been another twist of fate. What if everyone hadn’t jumped so quickly into believing that she was Sonia, John’s Russian bride? What if John had swallowed his shame and sadness and told his sister that his beloved wife had left him weeks earlier? Would authorities have made more of an effort to find out Elizabeth’s true identity?

  She had tortured herself over and over with what-ifs.

  “I was the same height, approximate weight, with the same hair and eye color. My...facial shape and eyes were similar. They had no reason to think anything else.”

  “You’re saying the doctors mistook you for another woman simply because you were in the car with her husband and didn’t have any identification of your own?”

  “Yes. It was an understandable mistake. I can’t blame them. They thought I was her and for a...long time after I finally regained consciousness, I had no reason not to believe them.”

  “You also thought you were this Russian woman, Sonia. How do you explain that you didn’t speak the language?”

  The attorney looked intrigued, rather than skeptical. Was it possible she might actually believe her? Elizabeth was afraid to hope.

  “I didn’t speak any language. Not at first. I told you, I had a...severe brain injury.”

  Beside her, Luke made a sound that might have been doubt or might have been anguish. She couldn’t be certain.

  “I started coming out of the coma about a month after the...accident, but it took me several more weeks until I was...fully aware of what was going on around me. People were telling me I was...Sonia Davis. They were calling me that name. I answered, because they seemed to expect me to, but it never felt...right. The name never felt like my own.”

  “When did you remember us?” Luke’s voice sounded rusty, gruff. Did he believe her? In the end, that was all that really mattered to her.

  “Always,” she said quietly. “Somewhere inside me, I remembered...I had another life. It was...just out of reach. I didn’t know if it was a dream or a memory, but you...you and the children were there. Always.”

  “You said you were badly injured.”

  “I had to relearn everything. Walking, yes. But smaller things, too. How to...hold a pencil. Use a telephone. Talk. Speech was...hard. I still struggle to find the right words. It’s called dysphasia of speech and isn’t...uncommon in those with brain injuries.”

  “How long were you in therapy?” Christina Torres asked. She had gone from being openly hostile to interested.

  “More than...a year. I went to live with John’s sister about...eighteen months after the accident. She was...unfailingly kind. Like her brother had been. We became...dear friends. Sisters. While I was there, memories came to me a little at a time. A baby in my arms, laughing. Hiking in mountains so beautiful th
ey took my breath away. A...a man.”

  Her voice caught and she swallowed, sneaking a look at Luke. He looked completely stunned, color drained from his features and his eyes a deep and murky green. “A man who...who looked at me with love in his eyes. I had no idea who he was. Where he was. I only...I only knew we had...once been together.”

  And that she had loved him, with all her heart. She couldn’t say that to this strange, intense woman she had only met a short time ago.

  “It was a long and...difficult process. It took me another year before all the memories fully returned. Before I knew for certain...I was not Sonia Davis but Elizabeth Hamilton.”

  “All right. Let’s do the math here. You’re saying you knew approximately four years ago you are living another woman’s life and you had a husband and children here who might be looking for you. Four years! Why didn’t you come back then?”

  At the question, Luke rose as if he couldn’t remain seated any longer and paced to the window, where he looked down at the cars driving past.

  Elizabeth wiped at the tears she could no longer control that were now falling freely down her cheeks. Oh, how she wished she had a better answer for this.

  “I left because...I thought that was best for my family,” she said, her voice small. “I stayed away for the same reason.”

  The district attorney leaned back in her chair, resting her chin on her steepled fingers as she studied Elizabeth. “This is a very far-fetched story, Mrs. Hamilton. Car accidents. Russian wives. Comas. Sounds like something out of a bad soap opera. How do you expect me to believe any shred of it is true, that you are indeed who you say you are?”

  “In the end, does it matter whether you believe me or not? A simple DNA test can...prove I’m Elizabeth Hamilton.”

  “True enough. That’s the only thing about this whole convoluted story I can verify.”

  “Not...the only thing. You can speak with... John’s sister. Alice Davis. Look at my...medical files. Speak with my...rehab physicians. To be...frank, ma’am, I don’t care if you believe me or not. All I care about is that you clear my husband of any wrongdoing in connection with my disappearance and drop your...idea of charging him with...anything.”