Orchard Grove (16 page)

“No P90X?” I said.

“I’m quitting the class,” she said. “And I wish not to talk about it further.”

Balancing myself on my crutches, my body felt electric with a nervousness I’d never before known. Maybe I’d changed since Lana moved in two months ago, but what I was now witnessing was a profound sea change in my wife, and it was an unnerving experience.

“Don’t you want to talk about anything?” I said. “I mean, later on. When you come home?”

She sipped more coffee, pursed her lips.

“Let’s not talk about anything anymore,” she said. “We talked it all out last night. Right now, I have a kid’s summer program to run.”

And with that, she set her coffee cup down on the counter, grabbed her car keys, and left for work without a goodbye.

S
he can’t very well afford a hotel room on meager babysitting earnings.

So she decides that the next best thing is to invite her dates (as she’s come to call them) to take walks with her in the thick, wooded areas that line the banks of the Hudson River. The bike path that also parallels the river where once a now abandoned rail-bed existed, is now used by joggers and bicyclists. But at night, the path is deserted and as quiet as a cemetery.

It’s also deserted on the warm summer night she walks hand in hand with a boy she went to grammar school with not too many years ago. A boy, now seventeen, named Ted. On the shorter side, Ted sports a thick build, like the champion wrestler he’s become. She holds his hand tightly while they make their way through the brush to the riverbank where they can get a view of the lit-up buildings that line the banks on the Troy side of the Hudson. From where they stand, she with her leather bag slung around her shoulder, the water lapping up against the gravel bank, they inhale the gamey fish smell of the river. They also make out the occasional bass that breaks its surface in its hunt for low flying insects.

When the wrestler starts to kiss her and feel her up, she pretends to enjoy it, just like she always does. And in a small way, she does enjoy the touch of his hands on her bare skin and on the patch of soft hair located below her belly button. But then the touching soon becomes clawing. The more he claws and paws at her, the more the enjoyment gives way to revulsion, and revulsion to white-hot anger. At the same time, she feels energized and confident. If that makes any sense. She experiences a real conviction for what she’s about to do…for what she’s done in the past. Not an ounce of guilt could be mined from her bones. Not after almost four years of enacting her revenge. Not after all those bodies that lie on their backs, headless and soulless.

She no longer bothers with the Mace. Now it’s just she and the cleaver.

Pulling herself away from the wrestler, she grabs hold of the blade, which is stored inside her bag.

“Ted,” she says, “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

She pulls out the blade.

“Beaver Cleaver meet Ted,” she says. “Ted meet Beaver Cleaver.”

The wrestler stands paralyzed with confusion, his young eyes locked on the big axe-like blade.

When she swings the blade into his neck, all he manages to do in his defense is work up a near silent gurgle. It sounds almost like the air that suddenly escapes a punctured inner tube. She’s just about to finish him off when a pair of bright headlights cut through the night and shine on them through the trees and the scrub brush.

I
resumed my usual spot in front of my typewriter. Stared at the white paper, positioned my fingers on the keys. My mind was spinning with memories of the previous night. My blood still boiling. I replayed them in my brain like a videotape. Lana, shirtless, opening her legs. Susan, leaning into her, kissing her, the barrel of John’s gun pressed against the back of her head, the mechanical metal-on-metal noise of his thumbing back the hammer.

Why the hell wasn’t I calling the cops right now?

Why the hell wasn’t I screaming to having the bastard arrested, his threats be damned?

Maybe because he was the cops, and the cops would never believe my story over his. Or perhaps that’s just what I wanted to believe. I needed to be honest here. If I wasn’t going to the cops over what happened on my back deck last night, it was because of one thing and one thing only: Lana.

If I went to cops I’d risk losing Lana.

Losing Lana was the last thing I wanted to do.

I’d do anything to be close to her. To smell her, feel her, kiss her all over.

I’d do anything, even if it meant letting her husband get away with murder.

Writing even a word was an impossible fantasy. Knowing that Lana would be outside right this very second made it impossible. My temples pounded and my stomach ached because I only desired one thing.

Lana.

I love you… I lust you… I loathe you with every fiber in my body…

I got up, went into my bedroom, hobbled to the window.

She knew I was watching her. I knew it because instead of laying herself out on her lounge chair, she was standing on the sun-drenched deck, facing me straight on. A full frontal. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, and she was back to wearing those big square sunglasses. She was also wearing her red kimono. Watching her, I felt my heart pound and my head grow dizzy. How was it possible that this woman possessed so much power over me?

I was spellbound by her… Bewitched.

After a moment or two passed, she did something that took me by surprise but something I should have expected. She raised up her hand and waved at me in a manner that told me she wanted me to come over. Needed me to come over. I couldn’t be sure if she actually saw me standing in the bedroom window, but I was certain that, regardless of vision, she knew in her flesh and bones that I was standing there admiring, lusting, bleeding.

Turning on my crutches, I sat down on the bed, put on the jeans and T-shirt that had been tossed there earlier. Lifting myself up, I hobbled to the back sliding doors as fast as my crutches would take me, and exited the house.

The flesh was weak that day.

In just a few moments, I would discover just how weak it was, and how willing I would be to do anything in exchange for Lana’s love.

Even kill for it if need be.

A
s I entered into her yard through the open gate, I spotted her standing on the edge of the deck. Almost immediately I sensed that something was wrong. Something besides the obvious anyway. Something that went beyond the boundaries of sexual perversion and voyeurism. Like I’d mentioned before, her breasts were uncharacteristically covered up by her kimono, and as she held out a cup of coffee for me… a cup I couldn’t possibly take hold of while operating the crutches… she used her free hand to tighten both ends of the robe together in order to hide every trace of bear skin. As if modesty was now as important to her as breathing.

I gestured for her to set the coffee cup on the table, and then I made the step up onto the deck, and sat myself down, leaning the crutches on the table beside me.

“How is Susan?” she said, sitting down across from me.

“She’ll live,” I said, John’s ugly round face flashing in and out of my brain. “That was some game we played last night.” Taking a sip of the still hot coffee. “Seems to me you and the husband have played it before.”

She stared up and into the hot sun with those thick sunglasses shielding her eyes.

“You have no idea. We’ve played a lot of games and to be honest, last night was one of the more tame experiences.”

“Tame,” I said, cynically. “He put a fucking gun to my wife’s head.” Then, “Why’d you invite me over here?”

“Calm down,” she said. “I’m only talking.”

“Oh, so that’s what this is. You’re only talking. I should have known. Did you know that I now suspect that my wife is actually falling in love with you?”

She grinned. “She told you that?”

“No she hasn’t come out and said it,” I said. “But I have eyes, Lana.”

“Why would she fall for me, Ethan? Do you think I’m her type?”

“Is it your habit to send all the neighborhood women perfume and sexy underwear?”

I might have mentioned the WhatsApp message on her phone. But then, I didn’t want her to have the satisfaction of my admitting to sneaking a quick look at it behind her back.

She cocked her head, maintained that long stare up at the sun, as if the radiant heat that bathed her face and warmed her blood was never enough.

“I’ve had girlfriends in the past. Some were in love. Other were in lust. I believe Susan falls into the latter category.” She licked her thick lips. “You’re not jealous, are you?”

“Are the emotions of an enchanted if not bewitched human being categorical?”

“There you go answering a question with a question again,” she said. She inhaled and exhaled. Then, “All things can be explained, until they can’t be explained or trying to explain them takes too much out of you…too much pain and sweat and blood.”

“And anyway, who’d be willing to explain last night?” I posed with all the sarcasm and acid I could muster. “After all, a proper explanation might scare us to death. It would be one hell of a problem for all of us, now wouldn’t it?”

For the first time since I sat down at the table, she pulled her face away from the sun, and locked her black-shielded eyes on me.

“My husband is the problem, Ethan,” she said with a blunt coldness that made my spine shiver, like the sun had suddenly been shut off with a light switch. She removed her sunglasses then to reveal a black eye. “But I’m sure you’ve gathered that by now.”

The fine hairs on the back of my neck perked up like the bristles on a frightened cat. There was something in her voice. This wasn’t the voice of a frustrated woman or a sad woman at her wits end. It was the frigid, mechanical, calm voice of a woman who was not just now plotting something, but who had been plotting it for a long time. And looking at that shiner, I couldn’t blame her one bit.

“The gun thing was a dead giveaway,” I said. “Holding my wife at gunpoint while forcing her to perform sexual acts with a woman she hardly knows.”

She slipped the sunglasses back on, picked up her coffee, drank some, then set it down again. After a beat, she raised up her hand, pointed to something beyond the fence.

“Look,” she said.

I turned.

“You see that tree?” she went on. “The one that’s smaller than the others. The one that’s not a pine tree.”

I noticed it. It was pretty much the only tree that wasn’t a pine, and it was partially full of leaves, and there were a few pieces of fruit hanging from the crooked branches. Apples. Small, odd looking apples.

“An apple tree,” I said. “What about it?”

“This entire area was once an apple orchard,” she said. “But then, I suppose as a resident, you already know that. When I was a kid, I played here. In this very spot. I picked the apples, filled the bushels, helped my family sell them during the fall.”

I was a bit shocked to hear what she was saying.

“You grew up right here?” I said. “On Orchard Grove when it was a real apple orchard?”