Chapter Three
Helen raised the gun and pointed it right at Wade’s chest, but for a moment, she didn’t see her husband in his maroon pajamas.
For a moment, she was standing face-to-face with the masked man once again, gun in her hand, life or death stakes. Split-second
choice.
Wade put his hands up, open palms imploring. “Helen!”
Helen blinked. Wade. Her husband. Her new husband, that is. She lowered the gun.
“Don’t do that.” Helen shook her head. “You startled me.”
She pointed the gun at the ground and uncocked the hammer.
“Did you have that cocked? Jesus.”
Helen didn’t respond. Wade already knew the answer.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I heard something.”
“So did I.”
She lifted her head, alert again. “You did?”
“Yeah. My wife outside, shouting.”
She stared at him. This man had been curled up under blankets in his cozy flannel pajamas while she’d been the one making sure their home wasn’t under attack.
This time it was nothing. Next time it could be something, and if it was, she’d be ready.
But apparently her vigilance was a nuisance.
Perhaps he wanted an ax driven into his skull.
“There’s no one out here, Helen.”
“I heard something.”
“Because we’re surrounded by one thousand three hundred and fourteen acres of wild.”
One thousand three hundred and fourteen acres. A perfect place to hide.
Wade extended his hand, and at first Helen thought he was reaching out to comfort her. Then she realized he was demanding
she hand over the gun.
“There was no one out here last time,” he said, “and there’s no one out here this time.”
Wade was a man who kept score. He couldn’t just say thirteen hundred acres like a normal person. No, he had to say one thousand three hundred and fourteen acres like some kind of accounting maniac. And he couldn’t just reassure her that she was safe. He had to remind her that she was
wrong, yet again.
Seeing her expression, he softened his tone. “Come here.”
He opened his arms and she stepped into them, an automatic response. In the beginning, Wade’s protective embrace had reassured
her.
“You’re safe with me, Helen.”
He gently removed the gun from her hand.
In the living room, Wade put the gun back into the box on the mantel and explained to Helen how her lack of sleep was putting
her on edge. “If you can’t sleep, the last thing you should do is get out of bed.” He was using his patient voice that belied
his actual impatience with the situation. “No one ever fell asleep standing in the middle of their kitchen.”
She wanted to say “Have you ever considered opening a fucking sleep clinic?” with extra emphasis on fucking. Instead she said, “I know that,” with no emphasis on any syllables.
Wade had met Helen when her mind was in tatters, when she was washing down a doctor-prescribed pill each morning with a glass
of orange juice and trying to ignore the dry mouth and dizziness it gave her. That first night in a sticky neighborhood dive
bar, she’d told him she kept thinking she was seeing her dead husband in the streets, in the stairwell of her apartment complex,
at the grocery store, but Wade hadn’t really understood. People who have never lost their mind don’t really comprehend it
when you tell them that you have.
The gun safely stowed away, Wade turned back from the mantel and approached her with a sympathetic look. “You just need to
stop thinking so much.”
He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed tenderly.
She nodded. He wasn’t wrong.
So far, reading poetry was the best method Helen could come up with to get rid of unwanted thoughts. Wine just made her feel
like openly weeping, and cookies and cake stuck in her throat and settled like cement in her stomach. Words took her away
from her body.
In some ways, words had also brought her to this place.
In 1854, Henry David Thoreau had written, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.”
Helen had seen it quoted on the side of a Seattle city bus that was idling while she waited on the corner. She had been on
a lunch break from the marketing job she was barely holding on to in the months after Tyler’s death. The bus exhaust had been
acrid in her nose. Not very romantic, but the message had been so blatant that she couldn’t help but wonder if Tyler had sent
it to her from the afterlife.
And so she had thought to herself, Maybe I could do that. Maybe I could get away from the city and the memories that hurt too much.
After Thoreau’s sentence had found her, she began to repeat it in her mind. Whenever she’d been struck hard with flashbacks to the violence or whenever she felt the ache of despair, the recitation distracted her.
Only two weeks later, she’d met Wade at the bar, and it felt like a second sign. Wade was new to the city, but he was a man
who wanted to live off the grid, who wanted to revert to an old-fashioned life. She had looked at him and imagined that his
angular jaw equaled persistence and sincerity, so when he’d told her his dreams, she’d listened to them with an unguarded
curiosity. He was only a few years older than her, but his aspirations made him seem worldly and wise. He’d painted pictures
of it in her mind, and she’d been able to see it so clearly: planting a garden, sewing her own dresses, stitching his work
shirts, and cooking over a cast-iron stove. He was planning to power a few necessities with a battery system and generators,
but otherwise, there’d be no reliance on modern technology. It was the farthest thing she could imagine from the fast-paced
city life she’d once shared with Tyler. The idea was so radically different that it had seemed like it might be the only thing
that could make sense of the mess.
Wade was salt of the earth. A little handsome, a little more gruff, and when he’d kissed her at the end of their first date,
she’d felt the protection in his callused hand against her cheek. He wore a Carhartt jacket like he’d been born in it and
was built like he’d been destined to be a college linebacker. He told her he’d never played any sports, though.
“No time,” he’d said. “Not with how busy I always was working the family farm.”
The family farm? In that moment, Helen had barely even realized people still were farmers.
Of course, yes, she held a vague notion that the food she bought at the grocery store was grown in the earth by farmers, but she was such a city girl that sometimes it seemed like the whole world was run by machines.
If any real people touched the crops, that was something special that happened in faraway places with faraway people.
Farming felt like a thing of the past, something from the History Channel documentaries that she watched about Depression-era people fighting the grasshoppers and the rabbits.
But Wade was a real farmer, and he’d been right there in front of her.
That curious man had looked at her with hooded hazel eyes and said potatoes like he was talking about something godly.
It was so enchantingly different that it made her forget herself for a while,
and she felt the first sparks of something like attraction. All she’d known since Tyler’s death was the tight coil of grief,
and the possibility of feeling something else had overwhelmed her with relief.
Even now, Helen knew that when Wade looked at her, he saw the damage there but only the surface of it. Mostly, he saw pretty
and he saw creative. The dark circles under her eyes were just a sign to him that she needed a little saving, while the vintage
furniture she’d refinished herself that he had seen in her city apartment signaled to him that she was resourceful and artistic.
So Helen had gone. Into the woods of the Pacific Northwest. Eighteen months ago.
She’d stopped mentally repeating Thoreau’s sentence about living deliberately and started doing it instead. And then she’d
started searching for other sentences to fill her head when the past tried to creep in.
Edgar Allan Poe was her favorite now. He understood darkness.
She was sure that if Poe were here today, he would have marched into the woods tonight to see the coyotes. He would have howled
along with them, lain down on the muddy ground and let them pick his bones clean. She was no Edgar Allan Poe though. She was
just a woman who was once full of fire and was now tired of being tired.
And these days, Helen never felt more tired than when Wade tried to touch her, like he was doing now.
As his hand moved from her shoulder into her hair, he smiled at her, and she knew exactly what that hand and that smile meant, and she wanted to shrink away from it.
She couldn’t, though, because it seemed like a great unfairness that the same touch that had felt good to her a year ago felt like an intrusion now. Unfair to both of them, really.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said, and again, she fought the desire to move away.
In moments like this, she tried to remind herself that there had been a chapter in her marriage to Tyler where she’d lost
the thread to him temporarily. He had been the wind chimes to her wind, playing a song for her that lasted their whole eight
and a half years together. Even still, there’d been a period of time when she had felt so far away from him, so far away from
their marriage. She had found her way back to him though.
Maybe that was happening again.
Maybe she could afford Wade the same consideration she’d once given Tyler.
Helen also knew Wade would be tired tomorrow, and when he was tired, he was grumpy. Though he didn’t like to talk about it,
she knew he missed farming. Their livelihood was instead in the timber on their property he’d bought shortly before they married.
Wade managed the timber alone. Tomorrow, he needed to go out and mark more trees for thinning, and if he was tired while he
worked, he’d be awful when he came home for dinner. He’d say that the potatoes were too hard and the broccoli too soft. If
she could make tired worth his while he might not be so awful tomorrow evening.
So Helen melted into, not away from, his hand and smiled softly. “Okay,” she said.
In their bedroom, the air was crisp. The room was in the very back of the house, and only a little heat drifted down the hall
during the daytime from the kitchen wood stove and the living room fireplace.
Wade stripped off his pajamas. Helen kept her nightgown on but stepped out of her underwear.
She left the triangle of light blue cotton discarded in the middle of the hardwood floor.
For a fleeting moment, she wondered what he would do if she wadded them up and shoved them in his mouth.
Sex with Wade was always very ordinary—almost proper.
She’d never done a single strange thing, nothing to provoke him or test him.
The truth was, she had no desire to try anything of the sort with him, but sometimes she was curious how he would react.
Probably he would get angry. He only ever referred to sex as “making love.”
Helen climbed into bed, straddling Wade, and leaned down to kiss him. His hands gripped her face and his lips pressed against
hers, not so hard as to hurt, but enough that she could feel his hunger.
Then he rolled so he was on top, and his lips moved to her neck. His kisses felt empty on her skin, practiced, as he played
the part of a man who kisses a woman’s neck, and she played the part of a woman who was getting more turned on, not less.
She moved her hands to his hair, searching for something to bring her back to the place she used to find with him in the beginning.
His hair was soft and it reminded her that he’d been a little kid once upon a time, and that made her feel sad. No boy wants
to grow up to marry a woman who loves him only a little. Maybe she wasn’t capable of loving anyone fully anymore. Maybe the
small window in which she had felt passion for Wade had been a temporary trick of Mother Nature.
Helen pressed her body up into his.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
She could feel he was hard.
“Not quite,” she said.
He put his hand between her legs and could feel she wasn’t wet. He started to make a circular motion with the tip of his finger,
but he was in the wrong place. She reached down and pressed his hand against the spot, showing him the right place and the
right amount of pressure. It would be so much easier if he’d just put his mouth on her, but he only ever did that if she asked.
Helen didn’t have the energy tonight to make requests.
So she let Wade use his hand until she was just wet enough to take him inside of her.
What followed was another faded performance of something that had once felt promising enough it had actually prompted her to run away to the woods and plant carrots and strawberries.
To move things along, she pretended to come, and then she wrapped her arms and legs around his body because she knew that would help him finish.
Afterward, Helen lay in bed next to Wade’s sleeping form, comforted by the fact that her IUD was good for at least another
six months. She had no business being anybody’s mother.