The Dead Husband by Carter Wilson (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

telling his mate to find shelter because the rain is exceptionally fierce and unrelenting.

The pang of emotion has subsided, but I know it sits close to the surface. I wait for it as I would a hiccup, in anxious anticipation. Nothing comes. Breathe in, hold, breathe out, then glance around me. Passengers file in, and each who passes leaves a trace of energy behind, like a dust mote of dried skin, clinging to me. Collecting. This woman is pleased with something. That man is frustrated. A child is scared.

All this emotional noise. I can’t escape it.

Last year, I wouldn’t have noticed a thing.

A sudden flash of Em’s face in my mind. Strange, in my mind, I don’t see the scar.

Thunder rumbles deep in my ears. The sound of a steady, digital downpour. I look out the window at the tarmac, where actual lighter rain falls. Cold, steady drizzle. Not common for Boston in October.

I give myself another memory test. What was the weather yesterday? I close my eyes and think about it, feeling the tendrils of panic swipe at me as my brain freezes. Then it comes. Cloudy. Maybe sixty degrees. Okay, good.

The accident with Em isn’t the main reason Abby and I separated, though the stress of her continuing recovery finally broke us. No, the real issue is I’m losing my goddamn mind, yet a part of me embraces the process. Abby’s been trying to help, but I keep her at a distance. She’s worried about my memory loss and my mood swings. I’m too young for a midlife crisis, she says, and too old for puberty. She Googles my symptoms, reporting back to me dismal potential diagnoses like early-onset Alzheimer’s, or even borderline personality disorder.

Abby thinks the accident caused my behavior change, but the accident was in January. She knows this all started happening a good month before that. Besides, the accident barely hurt me, just a bloody nose from the impact of the airbag. It was my little girl who took the brunt of the damage.

She shouldn’t have been in the front seat, Jake.

I know. I know.

What were you thinking? What’s wrong with you?

I don’t know.

She could be dead, Jake. Dead.

Goddamn it, don’t you think I know that?

No, the accident isn’t the cause of the things happening to me.

I look down, aware that I’m doing it again, sliding my wedding band back and forth along my finger. What’ll happen if there’s no longer a ring there? Maybe it will be like a phantom limb, something I’ve lost but can still feel. An itch of regret.

A woman standing in the aisle is talking to me. I lift the left cup of my headphones.

“Hi, that’s me,” she says.

My seatmate. 2A. She smiles and points to the open seat. She seems nervous.

“Of course.”

I stand and let her in, and as she passes within inches of me, I catch her scent, thin traces of flowers layered within something I cannot at first identify. It’s distinct, and it takes me a moment to place the other smell, and while I’m not positive, I think it smells like mosquito repellent. But it’s not the actual smell that jolts me. It’s the memory of the smell, fleeting but visceral, a déjà vu so powerful, I could be in a waking dream. I try to hold on to it, explore it until I can pinpoint the memory, but it washes away within seconds.

Isn’t that something they say? Smell triggers memory more than any other sense?

As she sits, I try to look at her without staring. About my age, I’m guessing, midthirties. Perhaps younger. Kinked red-brown hair, which falls well past her shoulders. Slim and rather pale. She seems out of time, as if her looks would be better suited for a character in Les Misérables.

I return to my seat, buckle in, then edge up the volume on my headphones. The rumbling thunderstorms drown out the safety demonstration and the roar of the engines as we take off, but my attention is focused on 2A the entire time. I don’t talk to her; she doesn’t talk to me. I order whiskey; she gets water.

I reach for my drink as I remove my headphones, no longer wanting to hear the rain or anything else. The cabin lights are dimmed. My seatmate and I both have our reading lights on.

She’s writing in a journal. Left-handed. I steal sideways glances from two feet away. She seems unaware of her audience.

The sense of memory slams into me a second time, more powerfully than before. This is especially jolting because memories have been sliding away rather than appearing lately.

I look at my arm, which is suddenly washed in goose bumps.

Jesus, what is happening?

There’s something else I never would have done a year ago, and that’s start a conversation with the person on the plane next to me. But the familiarity of this woman is so intense that I’m barely aware I’m speaking before I actually hear the words coming out my mouth.

“Excuse me, do I know you?”

The Dead Girl in 2A

Available now from Poisoned Pen Press

Reading Group Guide

1. Rose insists she’s different from the rest of her family, but by the end of the book, we learn that’s not quite true. Do you think we have any say in what we inherit and whether we have control over it?

2. Characterize Logan Yates. What seems to be his main motivation?

3. Compare Rose’s marriage and Detective Pearson’s marriage. How are they different? In what ways, if any, are they similar?

4. Think about Detective Pearson’s mother. How does she act at night versus during the day? What makes her spiral out of control?

5. Put yourself in Rose’s shoes. If you witnessed a horrific crime committed by a family member, would you turn them in? Why or why not?

6. Describe the Yateses’ position in Bury. How are they treated by people in town? How do they treat others?

7. List the ways Rose tries to cope with the memory of Caleb’s murder. What activities do