Bury the Children in the Yard (12 page)

She took a gulp of the wine. “I’m still kind of wet.” She set the glass back on the counter.

He polished his wine off and put his hands around her upper arms, leading her to the one bedroom in the back of the house. This room was the smallest and was already pleasantly warm. He turned her to face him and leaned her toward the bed until she lay on her back. This was going to be like unwrapping a present. He wanted to do it a little at a time.

He parted her knees and lifted up her skirt. She wore boy brief underwear, black and trimmed in white. He slowly pulled them down. She had absolutely no pubic hair. He didn’t mind this at all, although it was the first time he’d actually seen it in the flesh. He kneeled between her legs.

“So what do you think?” she asked. “It looks like a peach that’s been sliced open, doesn’t it?”

He looked at it and considered. Then he nodded. “But let’s hope it tastes like you.”

He kissed all around it, gently sucking and biting in certain places, before running his tongue along the labia, teasing the clitoris, and eventually plunging his tongue inside of her. Her moans seemed to come from very far away. She writhed her hips and he cupped her ass with his hands. He alternately tongued her and sucked away the excess come. Her hands were gripping the back of his head.

He pulled back and said, “I want to watch you play with yourself now.”

He pulled her skirt the rest of the way off and moved one of her hands between her legs. She slowly began massaging herself with her fingertips. He stripped off his clothes and went to the head of the bed. He slowly unbuttoned her shirt and unfastened her bra. Her breasts were full and perfectly formed, the nipples an innocent shade of pink. He took one of them in his mouth, massaged the other one with one of his hands, and stroked himself with his remaining hand. She moaned and said his name. Eventually they got under the covers and he slid into her for the first time. They went slow. He was gentle at first. As he approached orgasm, he grabbed her behind the knees, forcing her legs to either side of her head while he pounded into her and she continued moaning that gradually escalated into screaming.

They lay in bed and held each other for a while before getting up to get something to eat. She checked her phone again and typed off a message in return. Before going back into the bedroom, he made her leave it in the kitchen.

“I notice you didn’t bring any kind of bag,” he asked.

“Well, I didn’t think I’d really need the clothes and I wasn’t sure how long we’d be here. I figure you have a shower.”

“That I do.”

“I’m a light packer. I don’t like to be responsible for a lot of stuff.”

When they went back into the bedroom, he spanked her until her skin was hot and red, and then he fucked her in the ass. Afterward, she went to the bathroom and he dozed off. Had the dream.

Obsession and Insanity

He woke up momentarily disoriented. Once he realized he was in the cabin and remembered
why
he was in the cabin, everything seemed to become even more of a dreamlike blur. His eyes were open but it was so dark they may as well have still been closed. He reached over to feel the other side of the bed. Ashley wasn’t there.

He hadn’t bothered setting the clock in the room, never wore a watch, and didn’t have a cell phone so he had no idea what time it was. He was still completely naked. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, felt around for his pants, and slid them on. He pulled on his sweater and socks, remembering it would be pretty chilly outside the room.

He went out to the main part of the cabin, expecting to find a light on, Ashley maybe sitting on the couch and reading or something. It was dark and he didn’t see any sign of her.

The porch light shined in through the front door. He didn’t remember turning it on so he opened the door and leaned out. Ashley sat in one of the wooden deck chairs, texting something and smoking.

“There you are,” he said.

She looked at him. It looked like she’d been crying. “Yep.”

He looked out over the dark lake. It had warmed considerably, not at all unusual for Ohio, and a fog was rolling in. There probably wouldn’t be any visibility come dawn.

“You going to be out here a while?”

She held up her cigarette for an answer.

“Let me grab some shoes. Need anything?”

“I’m okay.”

He slipped his shoes on, went to the kitchen to grab the bottle of wine, noting that it had been depleted considerably since their earlier glasses, and grabbed a fleece blanket off the back of the couch.

He set the blanket on Ashley’s lap and said, “Thought you might be cold.”

“Thanks.”

He uncorked the bottle with his teeth and sat down in the chair beside hers. A chill went up his spine. This was too familiar. He wanted to tell her to go grab her things, they needed to go, and then he remembered she hadn’t brought anything. He thought maybe that made it even weirder. Like she could just move right in and take Heidi’s place. Like that was what he’d been waiting for for the past twenty years. The dream still rode his brain hard. He took a healthy slug of the wine. It would either help the dream fade or set the bear trap his mind had become, waiting to obsessively snap down on the littlest thought and stay clamped until it twitched its last.

But it would never twitch its last. Steve knew that.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Steve asked.

“Didn’t try.”

“You’re being very laconic.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

He chuckled. “I’m not sure I do either.” He took another swig of the wine and passed her the bottle. She took it without protest.

“How’s your ass?”

“Sore.” She smiled, but still looked like she was ready to cry.

“You look like you’ve been crying.”

She looked out toward the fog gathered on the lake. “Why do they call this place Furnace Lake?”

“Obsession and insanity.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Well, this is Ohio’s idea of a resort town. Resort towns don’t happen unless there are people to visit them and spend money there. As it happens, there’s a town about twenty miles to the south called Milltown. Its main industry, at one point, was steel. So one of them came to this lake while the sun was setting and glowing orange like a blast furnace and they decided to name it Furnace Lake. It’s a totally horrible, unromantic, disgusting name.”

“I agree. It does sound warm though.”

“But most people are only here in the summer. It seems like a furnace is the last thing you’d want to think about on a sweltering summer day.”

“You might be right. Do you stay here in the summer?”

“Usually. Unless I’m teaching summer classes.”

“Do you plan on doing that this year?”

“Probably not. I don’t really need the money like I used to. That’s really the only reason any professor gives up his or her summer.”

“Doesn’t sound fun.”

“So, yeah, I’ll probably head up here the week after finals. Would you be interested in joining me?” He didn’t even know why he asked that.

She rolled her eyes. “That’s a little too far in the future.”

“I know. I don’t even know why I asked. I’ve had a lot of fun today. I guess that’s why. You’ve been very ... kind to me.”

“You act like that doesn’t happen much.”

“Well, not in that way. It’s been over twenty years since I’ve had sex.”

She reached out and patted his knee. “No it hasn’t. It’s only been like two hours.”

“True. I guess I can’t argue with that. Now the clock starts all over again.”

“You did good after that long of a layoff.”

“Thanks.”

“Actually you did good period.”

“Thanks more.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“About what?”

“You fuck the same way you seem to live.”

“What does that mean?”

“Like somebody who has something really wrong with them.”

“Hm ... what about you?”

“This isn’t about me. Besides, I’m just a nineteen-year-old girl with a healthy sexual appetite. I could have landed some boy from the school and convinced him to come back to my parents’ empty house for the weekend and fuck my brains out like a nineteen-year-old boy and it would have been like getting fucked by a nineteen-year-old boy. I like someone who’s seen a little more. Thought about it a little more.
Planned
for it a little more. See, I didn’t really have to tell you anything I wanted and you gave me a pretty nice day. So ... wanna talk about it or not?”

He took another drink from the bottle. Followed by another. And suddenly he was almost blubbering. It seemed difficult to draw his next breath. He’d spent so much time just trying not to think about it that it never really occurred to him that he might actually talk to someone else about it. There was a period of time when he felt like he should probably go see a psychiatrist but he thought he was coping with it well enough on his own.

“Maybe.”

“It’ll make you feel better.”

“I doubt that.”

“Then it’ll make you feel something.”

“Where do I start?”

“Start with where things started to go bad.”

That Was the Beginning of Bad

The miscarriage or the accident. Where to begin?

Start with the miscarriage. That was the beginning of bad. The accident was more of a worsening.

Heidi was pregnant and they weren’t ready for it but they were still happy. The doctor told them she was pregnant with twins – one girl and one boy – and they knew they definitely weren’t ready for it but, in a way, they were even happier. They had talked about having children, although they thought it would be something that would happen around the time they turned thirty. When Heidi got pregnant, she was twenty-four and Steve was twenty-six. They’d only planned on having two children and, ideally, they would be a girl and a boy. This would, in a way, be like getting it over with in one fell swoop. Then they could focus on their academic careers and child raising.
Focus
. It was something they’d both been lacking. If they had kids, they could stop trying to figure out who it was they wanted to be. They would have it handed to them. They would be parents and everything else would be secondary.

She was seven months along when Steve took her to the emergency room with swollen feet and bleeding. She’d had a couple of scares earlier on and had always been told everything was just fine. They were just overreacting. Their doctor had assured him that was perfectly normal for first time parents. Steve wasn’t very worried.

From the moment the doctor inspected Heidi’s stomach for the heartbeats their was nothing but worry. The next several hours were a steady ratcheting of that worry until it escalated to panic and then soul crushing grief.

He supposed the acceptance never came for either of them.

Heidi was in the hospital for a couple more days to let her recover and make sure everything was physically okay with her. From the day they returned home, to the tiny apartment Steve still lived in, he felt like he was in the unique and terrible position of trying to make Heidi feel better while dealing with his own grief. Meaning he tried not to be very open with his grief. Maybe it would have been better if he had but there was part of trying to feign normalcy that he liked. If he hadn’t been the one to do it, life would have become unbearable. To Heidi, this was seen as something cold and callous. He didn’t care about her. He didn’t care about anything.

They argued a lot. He tried not to. He did a lot of tongue biting. But there were only so many attacks he could take before breaking down and fighting back. And maybe, sometimes, his return attacks were overly vicious. He was doing everything he could.

Heidi dropped out of the master’s program.

Not to worry. She needed a little more time before dealing with that kind of mental strain.

She stopped going to her job at the library.

Not to worry. He was an assistant professor so they had a steady income. It wasn’t much but their living expenses were almost non-existent and their parents helped out, probably because they felt sorry for them.

She stopped getting out of bed. Stopped cleaning the house or herself. Steve suggested she see someone. She accused him of calling her crazy. Asked why he’d married her if he thought she was a psycho. Arguing was pointless. He would just leave. Go to a bar for a couple of hours while she cooled off or drive the half hour to his parents and sleep in his childhood bedroom. Few things were more humiliating than that.

The next spring he returned home from his last class of the semester and it was like Heidi had become someone else. They had a good summer. She smiled more. Was completely manic, in a good way, on some days, and they had lots and lots of sex. There was an almost frenzied quality to it. Toward the end of the summer, he realized she wasn’t her old self at all. She had merely filled herself with some kind of obsessive optimism. Many times she mentioned “trying again.” Steve told her there wasn’t anything wrong with him and she wasn’t using any birth control so, as far he was concerned, every time he came they were “trying again.”

But nothing happened.

He was secretly relieved by this. He felt like, if there was anything good that came from the miscarriage, it was that they weren’t ready for one kid, let alone two. It was a reprieve. He wasn’t really one to believe in signs. He knew it was just biology and rotten luck but if either of them was the type to believe in signs, that would have been their mantra: “It was probably for the best. Maybe we weren’t ready anyway.” And while that kind of belief was something Steve had always seen as a sign of mental weakness, he was starting to realize that was exactly
why
people believed in those sorts of things. To keep themselves sane. Shouldering all of the knowledge, all of the
burden
of something like that was maddening.

Once he realized she didn’t see it as sex, just babymaking, he started to lose interest.

They started arguing again.

She started going out with friends, girls she’d gone to high school and college with.