She laughed to herself as she thought of how once again she'd believed him, taken him on his word. When would she ever learn! When would she wake up and smell the coffee and realize that Stephen was playing her for a fool?
She sipped at the last of her now-cold coffee and reached for the pack of Sobrané. They had both given up smoking years ago but she liked it that their will power afforded them the luxury of indulging themselves on a special occasion. As she lit the cigarette, she felt herself growing angry again as she thought how things might be better if his self-discipline was applied to his time-keeping a little more.
Now she started reliving all of her fears of how he might be tempted to stray. She remembered how that hot little minx from across the way had made a pass at him at their last New Year's Eve party. Stephen had been very, very drunk that night (not that it gave him any excuse) and all evening that bitch Carrie Goldman had gone out of her way to let him know how much she wanted him. It wasn't just the way she'd been dressed, with her skirt-hem and her low-cut figure-hugging top threatening to meet in the middle. It was the way she'd looked at him, spoke to him, almost laid down on the floor before him and cried out "TAKE ME!"
Of course, he'd pretended to be oblivious to it all, making out that it was it all a figment of her over-active imagination and that nothing had happened. He told her that he'd never stray and certainly not with his best friend's wife, especially when Brian Goldman (Carrie’s husband) was also the principal at the school where he taught.
Heather knew better of course; that there is never any smoke without fire as her mother used to say. In the end, he'd refused to talk about it anymore. He'd said that nothing that he could possibly say would make her change her mind as to what was or was not going on and he wasn't even going to try. Since then, there had been an unspoken moratorium on the subject, but the air had never been cleared. Here it was in May, on the eve of their 18th wedding anniversary, and those voices were starting up inside her head again. All those fears and reservations about his faithfulness (or lack of it) were raising their ugly head once more.
She found herself standing by the window. Her hand cradled the phone as her fingers repeatedly keyed in the Goldman’s number. Over and over again, her fingers hovered over that last key and each time she stopped herself. Each time she canceled the call and replaced the handset before starting to step away. Each time, within seconds, she turned around and started all over again.
Deep down, she knew it was pointless, she knew that they wouldn't be there. When she had first challenged Stephen about Carrie, hadn't he told her there was no way that he would ever do anything like that on his own doorstep? No, instead they'd be balling each other senseless in a cheap motel room somewhere right now, the sort of place where taking the room for the entire night would be seen as indulgent and an unnecessary expense.
A cruel smile lingered on her lips as she considered her long experience of Stephen's sexual prowess (or lack of) and how they'd surely be entitled to a rebate if they'd taken the room for anything more than about five or ten minutes. The smile faded as a vivid and graphic image of their two bodies locked together in hot and sweaty passion forced its way into her head. Unable to block out or turn off the images (complete with slow-motion replays of all the intimate action from each and every conceivable camera angle), she could do nothing but watch as their hips bucked and thrashed endlessly, their cries and moans of passion ever mounting and intensifying.
Stephen had kept himself in good shape over the years and what she had seen of Carrie's body that night (as had everyone there, whether they wanted to or not) had painfully reminded her of the heavy toll that motherhood had levied on her. She caught sight of herself in the long mirror over the fireplace and studied her reflection carefully. While most women would kill for her sylph-like figure, Heather saw only a world-weary soul staring back at her, worn down by carrying, giving birth to and nurturing three children. She could only compare her body with Carrie's more curvaceous frame and conclude that the price that she'd paid was not one that could be glossed over by encasing herself in some diaphanous silk nothingness.
Stepping across the room to get another cigarette, she found the movie in her head starting its second reel. She found herself watching helplessly as they indulged in every sexual act and explored every sexual position that she had ever known of and some that she instinctively knew must be downright physically impossible in the real world, the world of empty conversations, broken promises and overcooked dinners.
As her fertile imagination raced to position them in each new combination (like some lewd and lascivious sideshow that one might find in the back-streets of Amsterdam or some game that boys and girls who are outgrowing their childhood toys might be caught re-enacting between Barbie and GI Joe, with Crystal Ken being forced to look on voyeuristically), she saw them always turning themselves to look at her, inviting her to watch them, inviting her to take pleasure in their coupling. She listened to her body and felt guilt as she acknowledged the pleasure she took from their carnal activities. Her discomfort deepened as she realized that she was more excited and turned on by this imaginary voyeurism than she had been by anything that Stephen and her had done together for a long, long time.
The "click-click" as the turntable arm found the center of some of Frankie's finest vinyl moments brought her back to her senses. She lifted the arm and started to turn the disk over when suddenly the phone rang. Startled, she dropped the record to the floor and stood frozen to the spot. She turned and looked through the window at the house across the street, not quite knowing what she expected to see out there. She was surprised to find her gaze met by glaring light. It seemed as if every single light was blazing, lighting up the entire yard and roadway.
The phone continued to ring and somehow she just knew that the call was coming from that house. It would be Brian, she told herself. He would have just got in and discovered a note from Carrie declaring her love for Stephen and telling him that they had gone away to start a new life together. Either that or Stephen had broken his golden rule after all and Brian had come home and caught them in the act. She pictured Brian's violent rage and saw her husband's futile attempts at defusing the situation, all the time trying to hide his nakedness. She saw Stephen with his nose bloodied and one eye bruised and almost closed, begging for Brian to stop hitting him. She felt good inside at that; maybe it would teach him to keep in line and keep his fingers off what wasn't his.
Still the telephone went on ringing. Slowly she moved towards it until finally she held it in her hand and raised it to her ear. She was not at all prepared to hear Carrie's little-girl lost voice at the other end; she thought that was reserved for other women's husbands only. "It's Stephen. Oh God, it's Stephen!" she heard before the voice broke off and descended into deep and pitiful sobs. All of the tension that she'd been carrying for the last five months exploded at that moment.
"You bitch!" she cried. "Are you satisfied now; are you? One man isn't enough for you, so you have to go and take mine too!"
She let out a scream of sheer anguish at that point, spittle dropping from her lips, her fingers tightly clutching the receiver as if it was Carrie's throat that they were wrapped around, squeezing and squeezing.
"Well, you can keep him" she raged. "I don't want him back after he's been around you. Whatever Brian's done to him, he deserved every bit of it! I only hope that when he's finished with Stephen, he'll give you what you deserve too!"
She went to put the phone down but something stopped her, something told her that she'd got it all wrong. She lifted the phone to her ear once more. The noises that were coming out of it did not sound like anything that she'd ever heard another person make before; they sounded so primal, like those of an animal caught in some terrible trap. She tried to elicit some response from Carrie, to find out what had happened but she knew that it was to no avail. Without even considering what she was doing, she calmly put down the receiver, switched off the turntable and walked out of the house and across the street.
The door to the Goldman’s house was open. She took a deep breath and walked in to find Carrie huddled in a fetal position on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. She thought that she would hear angry words being flung around but there was only silence, an unworldly silence that she would remember for the rest of her life. Just as she was about to ask Carrie whether she was hurt, she saw the handgun clutched to her chest, nursing it as if it was a newborn child. She looked around the room and saw no signs of a fight.
"Where are they, Carrie?" she asked. Carrie didn't answer in words but the upward movement of her eyes told her that she needed to look upstairs. It was in the master bedroom that she found Stephen and Brian, locked together in their final loving embrace, their faces frozen into masks of terror as their lifeblood slowly drained away from the matching wounds in their chests, forming a growing red stain on the beige carpet.
She never knew how long she stood and looked at the bodies, knowing instinctively that the services of the paramedics would not be called for. Somehow she got back downstairs, convinced Carrie to give her the gun and called 911. As the police arrived, she collapsed into their arms and the next few days were spent in a chemical-induced haze.
The funeral was a very quiet affair, at the wishes of the family, although that didn't stop the tabloid press from trying to milk yet more from a story that had already sold a great deal of newspapers. It had all come out in the days immediately after the shooting; how Stephen and Brian had been having a homosexual affair for years, how Carrie had suspected her husband of cheating on her for a while but never thought that it might be with another man. She had returned home unexpectedly early that day to find the two of them in the marital bed and something had just snapped within her.
At the trial, Carrie told the court how the men had been so carried away by their lovemaking (enhanced by the traces of amyl nitrate that were found in the bodies, no doubt) that they weren't even aware of their unwitting audience. Unfortunately for them, their ignorance of her presence continued while she went downstairs and retrieved one of Brian’s shotguns from his gun cabinet. Noiselessly returning to the bedroom, she'd waited patiently for their mutual and noisy climax before calmly emptying both barrels into their spent bodies.
Heather had breathed a sigh of relief when the jury accepted the defense attorney's plea of diminished responsibility. She didn't think that Carrie deserved to die for her actions. It wasn't that she was a liberal who was opposed to the death penalty, more that she knew that if the roles had been reversed (and it had been her finding them in her bed) that she might well have done the same.
She didn't hate Carrie, she realized. No, she almost felt a sort of empathy for her, some shared bond formed by their husband's violent deaths that would remain with her forever. She resolved to write to Carrie often while she served her sentence and that she would do whatever she could to hasten her release. Much to the disgust of her family, she also decided that if Carrie did ever get released, she would offer her a home too. She felt that Carrie needed her to make sense of all that happened; she knew that she needed Carrie too.