Orchard Grove (11 page)

But that’s not right either.

Lust was one thing, but hatred was another. If hatred was her motivation, then lust was simply a tool or a weapon that she used for seizing power over a pathetic man like me. I’ve lived long enough to recognize pure hatred when I saw it, and Lana Cattivo possessed more than her fair share of it. I could see it in her blue eyes, smell it in her lavender scent, see it in the way she chewed and swallowed that apple. And the hell of it is, it made her all the more attractive and alluring. For her, hatred wasn’t just a base emotion, it was a physical substance that, if need be, could be manipulated, like clay or, in this case, blood. You could feel it and taste it. Like the apple she made me bite, you could ingest it and digest it. It was the force behind her, her motivator, and in some ways, it was the primal source of her charm and ultimately, my unstoppable attraction to her.

It didn’t come as a surprise when she set the half eaten apple back down onto the table, dropped slowly down to her knees, helped maneuver my legs out from under the table so that she faced me directly. I spread my legs apart a little to give her the room she required, and she began to undo my belt and unbutton my jeans.

Pulling her up, I began to unbutton her shirt and pull down her bra, exposing her suntanned breasts. Lifting up her skirt, I felt for her panties but she wasn’t wearing any as if she’d scripted it that way.

I pushed her back onto the dining room table, but I didn’t enter her right away. Instead I became filled with an insane desire to taste her first. Kissing her breasts, I shifted my way slowly down past the area where her jean skirt had gathered. I never moved an inch as her hips gyrated, the warm wetness pouring out of her body and into my mouth. My world was Lana and nothing mattered at that very moment in time on Orchard Grove.

Or did it?

Out the corner of my right eye, I sensed movement immediately outside the big living room picture window. I managed to steal a quick look. There was a person standing in the window watching us.

I couldn’t be entirely certain. But for a brief and frightening instant, I swore that person was my wife, Susan.

S
ometimes you can’t help but believe your own lies.

Especially the ones that you tell yourself over and over again. Like when you purposely distrust your eyes, accuse yourself of seeing things, all because you’re getting your rocks off and holy Christ almighty, you just can’t seem to stop yourself. Maybe you think I stopped myself as soon as I saw Susan in the picture window, looking in. That I immediately jumped away from Lana. Maybe you think I grabbed hold of my crutches, told Lana to get dressed, get the hell out, and never come back. Maybe you think I put my tail between my legs, hobbled to the front door, and opened it to face not an angry Susan, but a seething Susan. Maybe you think I’d beg for her forgiveness. Do it from down on my knees, if only it were physically possible.

But I did no such thing.

I just kept going. Kept making love to Lana like my life somehow depended upon it. Such was the power Lana had over me. Such was the serpent’s spell.

But something else kept me going. When I took a quick second look at the window, the person was gone. Vanished. It led me to believe… rather, it made me
want
to believe… that a person wasn’t there in the first place. That the face I had taken for Susan’s wasn’t hers at all. That I’d only imagined my wife standing there outside the picture window, seeing everything we were doing only a few feet away on the dining room table. Imaged her perhaps, out of fear.

Yes, the lies can be sweet sometimes. But they are still lies.

But I’m not so sure I would have stopped even if I hadn’t been lying to myself. I wasn’t going to stop until Lana had enough of me and I’d had enough of her. That moment came just a few seconds later when she let loose with a scream that would have woken up the entirety of Orchard Grove if this were the middle of the night. Raising herself up onto her elbows on the wooden table, she demanded that I enter her, her voice deep, throaty, and insistent, like I had tapped into the beast that lived in her soul, and only now was being swallowed up by it, becoming one with it.

Regardless of who or what witnessed me selling myself body and soul to this beautiful Satan, I proceeded to do exactly what she insisted.

I
t didn’t take long to finish.

Didn’t take me long anyway. When it was over, we paid no mind to hugging, kissing, cuddling, or engaging in pillow talk of any kind. The sexual act or should I say, process, at that point, was an academic fact. Nothing more. What we were left with was shared bodily fluids that needed to be wiped away and the feeling of having sunk so low, that not even hell would take me. But I knew the feeling wouldn’t last. That soon, I would want Lana all over again. And when I did, the want would be as obsessive and overwhelming as it ever was.

I stood up, more or less balancing myself on one leg, and she slid off the table, pulling her jean skirt back down with all the clinical indifference of a patient immediately following a physical. It was all very business-like and ordinary for her, which I suppose should have scared me to death.

But then, what the hell was I saying?

Lana was too good to be true, and too bad to be believed. It’s not like I was in danger of falling in love with her. It’s not like I was about to leave Susan, regardless of our problems, and declare my undying devotion to the new girl next door. I was in lust with her, and in lust I would remain, until whatever it was I was going through, ran its horrid course.

More lies?

Maybe.

As she continued gathering herself together, buttoning up her shirt, straightening out her hair, applying a fresh coating of lipstick, she suggested that perhaps it would be prudent if she took her leave through the back sliding doors. I knew that if she stayed even a minute longer, the demon would return and I would want more of her. I was just about to tell her what a good idea it would be to go now, when the mechanical sound of a key being inserted into the front door lock snared our collective attention, as if a bolt of heavenly lightning had just burst inside the front vestibule.

We both nearly broke our necks turning to see the door open and a woman step inside.

The woman, who was my wife, smiled.

“I didn’t know we had company,” she said.

T
he memories come to her in snippets and flashes, like a vaguely remembered dream. Rather, the remembrance of only part or parts of the dream. The most important part. The part that woke you up from out of a sound sleep, your body covered in a sheen of sweat, your breathing labored, your heart pounding.

Sex was always the catalyst for these vivid interior snapshots, as she liked to call them.

Snapshots that, to her, were a lot like speeding through the old pictures pasted to the pages of a photo album, back in the days before everything became digital, and you looked at your life on a computer screen.

Brian (or was it David?), was so shocked when she cut off his hand at the wrist, the stub spurting crimson blood, he never uttered so much as a peep when she took the other hand and then, of course, his head.

She met the truck driver who delivered heating oil to the farmhouse at the hotel-no-tell of his choosing at a time when she could not have been more than thirteen to his forty or forty-five. He cried real tears when she Maced him, and when she struck him with the cleaver smack dab in the forehead, he made the gentlest of exhales, like a little baby having just fallen into a deep, peaceful sleep.

She added a little variety to the mix as she grew older and the apple trees were all cut down to make way for the houses. For instance, there was the grade school principal who hid from the student body and the PTA his affection for young women or, more accurately, girls. She consented to sex with the principal in the back seat of a Subaru wagon in the after-hours school parking lot with all the triviality and coldness of performing an everyday chore like carrying out the trash. The next morning, when the maintenance man found the body in the car in two separate parts, no one would ever suspect that the cute, innocent, athletic, peppy blue-eyed, blonde-haired step-daughter of the still missing man who once owned North Albany’s last apple orchard could possibly be to blame.

For the longest time, it seemed as if she were free to seduce and murder anyone she wanted. In a word, she was God.

S
he was all smiles.

My wife of a decade was bright-eyed, friendly, and eager to greet Lana… the woman she sometimes shared a ride with to her P90X class. A neighbor whose sunbathing habits she was well aware of since she too had witnessed Lana in action out on the back deck during the occasional day off from her work at the pre-K. The neighbor who might be communicating with her on WhatsApp. The neighbor who could be sending her presents. Or was that just my imagination getting the best of me? My writer’s mind scripting out a nefarious plot. What did Hemingway once say? You wanna beat fear, you’ve got to learn how to turn off your imagination.

As Susan stepped from the vestibule into the living room, I could almost feel the anxiety pouring out of Lana’s pores. Correction: the nervousness was coming from me and me alone. Because even if Lana was sweating bullets, she was doing so with the utmost grace and casualness, which told me, she really wasn’t sweating anything out at all. The casualness of a professional maybe. She held out her right hand while approaching Susan.

“Hey there, Susan,” she said with a friendly face befitting that of a true, God-fearing Orchard Grove neighbor. “I was just trying to get your famous husband to sign his novel for me. How exciting it must be to be married to such a gifted artist.”

Susan brushed back her brunette hair, crossed over the living room floor into the dining room, and politely took Lana’s hand in hers.

Her big brown eyes focused on me, she said, “Well, like I might have already mentioned, Lana, it’s not always that exciting.” She laughed. “Ethan writes scripts for a living, and his hobby is writing scripts, and in his free time, he likes to write scripts.”