The Shine Journal

I Will Not Forget You

by

James Hartley

Roberta was my first wife. The last words I said to her before she died were "I will not forget you," and I had that inscribed on her tombstone. Today I went back to look at her grave, and the inscription was just barely visible. It's been a long time since I have come back here. A very long time.
  
When Roberta and I married we were both in our twenties. I had a job doing scientific research. We bought a house, had three kids, we were living a reasonably normal life as we approached our tenth wedding anniversary. All very ordinary, until one of the experiments went bad.
  
Everyone else in the building was killed, everyone but me. I don't really know what happened, attempts to recreate it have all failed. I blacked out, woke up in the hospital a month later. The doctors had no idea why I was in a coma, nor did they have a clue why I woke up again. I just know that one moment I was in the lab, the next I was lying in a hospital bed, feeling very weak, with Roberta sitting in a chair watching me.
  
It was no surprise she was there. After the accident she had arranged for her sister to take care of our kids, and she spent the next month in that chair. When she saw I was awake, she came over and kissed me, and only after that did she ring for the doctors.
  
They kept me in the hospital for another week before they let me go. The doctors, although baffled by my case, said I appeared perfectly fit when they discharged me. The lawyers didn't agree, though, and wouldn't let me go back to work ... not that there was much of anything to go back to.
  
The building was closed down, condemned, cordoned off, for fear of what had happened. Speculation ranged from deadly radiation to a plague. The company was rapidly spiraling into bankruptcy, with billions of dollars in damages awarded to surviving relatives of those killed ... and to me, so I had no real need to work. In fact, I had enough money that I could live quite as well as I had before, and still shovel truckloads of cash into savings and investments that would make me richer and richer as time went on. So I settled down to living the life of Riley. A bigger house, new cars every couple of years and a cruise every year, no worries about college for the kids.
  
Some people age faster and more obviously than others, some don't appear to age much at all. I was in the latter group,after ten years you'd have had trouble telling if a photo of me had been taken that day or at the time of the accident. Roberta still looked good, but you could see a few gray hairs, a few wrinkles. Neither of us worried about it then.
  
But after another ten years, with Roberta obviously older and me still looking like I was thirty-five, it was becoming more worrisome. And after yet another ten tears it was becoming a real problem. The Social Security folks seemed to think we were running some kind of a scam when we went in to register, we left without finishing the paperwork to avoid drawing attention to ourselves. We didn't really need the money, anyway, but it did get me wondering if I might run into problems in the future, somebody refusing to believe my identification.
  
The underworld will always be with us, ready to serve those with plenty of anonymous cash, and it wasn't long before I had a new identity, papers that matched my apparent age. I laundered most of my money through offshore banks into new accounts using my new name, leaving just enough to live on in the old accounts. I didn't tell Roberta about this, I still loved her but she was getting a little forgetful. We moved to a different part of the country where nobody knew us, and sort of vaguely implied that I was her nephew.
  
We lived happily for another fifteen years after that, until Roberta contracted her final fatal illness. Rather than deal with a hospital, or worse yet a hospice, I had an addition built on the house with all the facilities needed to care for her, and hired a crew of nurses and a doctor. Money was no problem, I had accumulated enough that I simply couldn't spend it as fast as it was earning new money.
  
Roberta died at age 81, and my last words to her were "I will not forget you." I had that put on her tombstone. Her will distributed the last of the money I had left in the old name to cildren and grandchildren, and never mentioned me. I burned the last identification in the old name and moved on.
  
Since then I've changed my name every thirty years or so, moving my money to the new identity each time. I don't even remember some of the names I've used by this time, nor the names or faces of some of the women I have been married to. The human brain has a finite capacity, and whatever strange accident gave me this long life couldn't change that. There's no way I could remember every detail of thousands of years. It must be that long, the erosion of Roberta's tombstone to the point where it is almost unreadable couldn't have taken any less.
  
But I told Roberta as she was dying, "I will not forget you."

And I never have.

Motivation: "I had an idea so I wrote the story."

Bio: James Hartley is a former computer programmer. Originally from northern New Jersey, he now lives in sunny central Florida. He has published a fantasy novel, "Teen angel" and stories in Illusion's Transmitter, Written Word Online, Clonepod, KidVisions and many others. He is working on a second novel, " The Ghost of Grover's Ridge". He's a member of IWOFA and the Dark Fiction Guild.