Bury the Children in the Yard (13 page)

Steve felt like things were falling apart all over again. He was going to work to fix the relationship but the miscarriage was a trauma he didn’t want to have to go through ever again. He made an appointment with a urologist, lied and said he was ten years older, told him he already had three kids, and got a vasectomy. He wasn’t going to tell Heidi about it. If he could get her through this “trying again” phase then maybe they’d go to a fertility doctor and, if she were able to have children, he would be sterile. Therefore he could be the one to feel guilty about it. Maybe talk her into adopting a child.

Who was he kidding? She had been staying out all night and he was pretty sure she was fucking at least one other person, possibly more. He wanted to either start over with the old Heidi or someone else completely. Or not at all.

Less than a week after getting the vasectomy she changed again. Less frenzied. Less manic. More like her old self. And affectionate. She stopped mentioning anything about trying again. Maybe Steve’s plaintive attempts to wait had finally taken hold. He thought she had even started taking her birth control pills again.

That winter – Friday, December 7, specifically – they went to dinner in Cincinnati. On the way home they hit a patch of black ice and crashed into a tree. Steve remembered sliding off the road clearly, but everything that came after that was a combination of hazy memory, his police report, and the newspaper articles he’d read against his better judgment.

The car slid off the road and into a tree. The car was totaled. He and Heidi were nearly totaled. But conscious. The car’s engine was completely silent, the interior awash with beeping sounds and flashing lights. He looked over at Heidi. Her head was covered in blood. Her breath was shallow. He kept asking if she was okay. And she kept looking in the back seat and saying they had to take care of the kids. Telling her she was delusional or crazy was the furthest thing from Steve’s mind. Yes, yes, he said, we’ll take care of the kids but we need to find someone. We need to get help. And she said that wasn’t what they needed. They didn’t need help. The children needed to be buried. They were beyond help. There was a brief moment where he wondered if she was talking about the miscarriage. Maybe she was confused. He told her that they had already buried the children, didn’t she remember? She told him that wasn’t right. They never saw what happened to them. Anything could have happened to them. And besides they weren’t buried they were cremated. That’s right, Steve remembered. They were cremated. We have the urn in a kitchen cabinet. Yes, she said and wiped blood out of her eyes. And we need to make sure these get taken care of by us. She told him to get the boy and she would get the girl. He was amazed they were able to get out of the car. Amazed they were able to move at all. Heidi opened the back door and feigned taking a child out of a car seat. Steve did the same. She took off walking through the woods, through the slushy mud that was winter in Ohio, and it occurred to Steve that they were much closer to the cabin than they were the apartment and that was quite likely where they were going. The coroner would later say he thought it was nearly impossible for them, especially her, to do what it was they had done. Even the police report was free of any description of them wandering through the woods, as though he had completely blacked out during that period. They arrived at the lake and continued to walk to their cabin. Once at the cabin Heidi demanded he go retrieve a shovel, two if they had them. He went to the small utility shed, unlocked it, and removed a shovel. There was another one in there, but the thought of Heidi digging anything made him nauseous. He returned with the shovel and she said they didn’t need to dig two holes, they could just bury them together. He began digging. Told her she should go up to the porch and sit down. She said she was okay, she wanted to hold their babies. While he dug, she stood in the moonlight of the crystal clear night and stared out at the lake. What was she thinking? He knew she wasn’t in her right mind, but what was going through her head at that moment? He dug quickly. The ground wasn’t frozen and it was still damp which made it that much easier. He dug down maybe a little more than a foot. His head was swimming and spinning and he felt like he could collapse at any moment. He told her he thought it was ready. She bent down on her knees and placed the imaginary children in the hole and said something that sounded like a prayer. Then she collapsed face first in the hole. He pulled her out, lay down beside the hole, and cradled her in his arm, her head resting on his shoulder. The way they used to sleep when they had first gotten married.

Just Gone

“Can I have one of those?” Steve pointed at Ashley’s pack of cigarettes. She handed them to him. He lit one, fought back a cough, and said, “The next thing I remember was sitting in the back of an ambulance. I kept asking them what happened to Heidi and they wouldn’t tell me. That’s when I knew she was dead. By the time we got to the hospital, she wasn’t even hooked up to anything. Just gone. She was probably gone before they even got there.”

Steve thought he would cry if he ever told that story but he wasn’t.

“Was that the first time you’ve ever told that to anyone ... besides the police?”

He nodded slowly. “I think it felt good. I never realized how crazy it sounded.”

She kind of laughed. “It did sound pretty crazy. And sad.”

“Definitely sad.”

“And your life just stopped then, huh?”

“Well, I didn’t think it had at the time but now ... I guess looking at all the wasted years, you could probably say that.”

Then he did cry. She took the cigarette out of his hand and crushed it out on the arm of the chair. She placed a hand on the back of his head, pulled him up out of the chair, and walked him to bed.

When he woke up the next morning she was gone.

He Found Himself Completely Enervated

He went back home as soon as he looked around and waited long enough to know she wasn’t there and wasn’t coming back.

For the next four months, he divided his time between his apartment and the college, just like always. He pulled her file at school and noticed she hadn’t enrolled for the second semester at all. He emailed her. He didn’t feel comfortable calling the number he had for her and didn’t know if she would really want him to call her anyway. The cynical thought would have been that she got what she wanted and then decided to disappear but what could she have possibly gained from their encounter? He had certainly had a good time but their last bout had nearly left her in tears. He hadn’t given her any money or promises or anything. Maybe he’d just freaked her out. Or maybe she had realized she’d made a big mistake and decided to take off. She could have had someone come and pick her up or maybe she took a bus or something. He couldn’t exactly ask around about her at school without looking like a creep. Maybe he would have approached one of her friends but he hadn’t really paid attention to who she hung around with, if anyone. He was usually focused on her.

For the first month, the elation of their meeting and the hope she would contact
him
sustained him. In February and March – the last couple months of guaranteed cold weather – he found himself completely enervated. This was usually a bad time of year for him anyway. One can only take so many months of gray, miserable weather. He used to come home from class, make a small but tasty meal from scratch, and spend the evening reading and listening to music. If these things didn’t make him authentically happy, they at least got him very close to the real thing. Representations of happiness. Then he would usually find some pornography on the Internet or jerk off to the thought of one of his students before falling asleep. But now he didn’t even feel like doing that.

He told himself he had had something and let it get away but he knew he was kidding himself. What did he have? Ashley was just a girl who wanted to sleep with one of her professors. They did that for a few hours, she probably realized it wasn’t what she thought it would be, and decided to bolt. Probably even had her boyfriend from back home pick her up. In a way, it was hard not to be mad at her, but he knew if she called or contacted him, he wouldn’t show her any trace of anger.

By the middle of April, a gorgeous spring had finally arrived. When classes ended at the end of May, Steve was looking forward to packing up and heading to the cabin for the summer. The week before he left, he had the dream every night. There were minor variations. In a couple of them, Heidi was Ashley. In one of them, Steve dug the grave and the grave became a bed and he fucked Ashley in it but halfway through she became Heidi and Heidi was rotting and wearing her bridal veil and ejaculating sperm from her nipples. Steve decided when he came back, if the dreams hadn’t gotten any better, he would finally see a psychiatrist, to see if he could prescribe something to help him sleep more than anything else.

Most of the essentials were already at the cabin so all Steve had to pack were some clothes and groceries.

The Twin Dimples Just Above Her Waist

Steve opened the cabin door and stood there with a grocery bag in one hand and his keys in the other, thinking he hadn’t had to unlock the door but also thinking maybe it was something he’d done so many times in the past he just didn’t remember doing it. He pocketed the keys. The cabin didn’t seem as stale as it usually did. Maybe that was because of his winter tryst. That was how he had decided to think of it. A “tryst.” It made it sound more festive, which he guessed it was. It was the fallout that was depressing. Of course even that was relatively small compared to the fallout that had been the last twenty plus years of his life. He’d decided to let the lease on his apartment go when it ran out this October. He had plenty of money to buy a house. Maybe he’d even join a dating site or go out to bars or something. Hell, maybe he’d even grow the balls to ask one of the several single female professors he knew out. Opportunities like Ashley were not going to come around every year. So far the odds, apparently, were more like once every twenty years. He didn’t know if he’d be around when another presented itself.

He sat the bag of groceries on the kitchen table and felt bad about having relegated Ashley to an “opportunity.”

He heard footsteps and turned around quickly.

Ashley stood in the door of the bedroom.

“Don’t be mad,” she said.

Steve didn’t know
what
to say. He felt like he was blushing, trying to find the right words before opening his mouth. He’d thought about Ashley so much over the past few months, that his emotions had spanned the entire spectrum more than once.

He gripped the counter and looked away from her. “I’m not sure what to say. Why...?”

“Why am I here?”

“Um ... yeah, I guess. And how?”

“I thought I would surprise you.”

“I’m ... definitely surprised.”

“And happy?” She smiled and approached him.

Fuck it, he thought. He opened his arms and accepted her, pulled her into him and wrapped her tightly. “Very happy.”

“We can pick up right where we left off.”

He didn’t waste any time. He walked her over to the couch, bent her over the arm, peeled down her jeans and underwear, and pushed himself in. It didn’t last long. He tried to force all the questions out of his head. Looking down at her back muscles writhing under her skin tight t-shirt and the twin dimples just above her waist made it not that hard at all.

They Already Acted Married

When they finished, she stood up, pulled up her pants, and adjusted her bra. Steve went to the car to grab the rest of the stuff. Out by the car, he took a second to stop and look around. Summer was finally here. The woody smells and sounds immediately made him feel more restful. He saw other families in the distance, in the yards of their cabins, some of them barbecuing. There were even a couple of boats out on the lake. Steve liked it here. If he didn’t he would have probably sold the place immediately after Heidi died.

He went back into the cabin and found that Ashley had already put the groceries in the refrigerator.

“Very domestic,” he said.

She shrugged. “Well, you know...”

He looked at her for a second. “No. I really don’t. I have a lot of questions for you.”

“But you
are
glad I’m here, right? Even after shooting your wad in me? Which is running out even as we speak.”

“Lovely.”

“It’s mostly your fault.”

“Agreed. Hungry?”

“Starved.”

Steve decided to save the questions for dinner. He didn’t feel like dragging the grill out so he just decided to make something in the kitchen. Maybe some kind of chicken stir fry. He reached into the pantry and grabbed the bag of rice.

“What do you need from the fridge?”

“Maybe just the chicken. Unless you put the teriyaki sauce in there too.”

She handed him the chicken. “The sauce should be in the cabinet.”

Steve turned back to the cabinet and was overcome with a case of the shakes. It was eerie. They’d spent one day fucking and had now been together only a few minutes and they already acted married. He liked that feeling. It surprised him.

He poured some water in a pan, dumped in a couple handfuls of rice and a bit of olive oil, and set it on the stove. She put a bottle of beer in front of him.

He chopped the onions and the peppers and then didn’t really have anything to do until the rice started boiling. He couldn’t wait until they were sitting down. If he did, he wouldn’t ask her at all. He’d just fall into whatever groove she wanted him to fall into.

“So how long have you been here?”

She was cutting the chicken and looked up. “Huh?”

He nodded at the bottle of beer. “That’s a Budweiser. I brought Heineken. Also, the stuff I brought wouldn’t have been this cold.”

“Just since last night. I promise.”

“What made you want to come back? I notice you dropped out of school.”