Page 5 of Call Off the Dark

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.

Chapter Four

Helen didn’t feel like killing worms today. As she peered down at her Brussels sprouts in the garden, she couldn’t find the energy for it.

It was such a dreary morning. Gray clouds blotted out the sun, and the wind rattled a loose board on the farmhouse. The dirty white paint was peeling away in places, revealing the old wood siding beneath. Maybe I should do chores inside instead, she thought and looked toward the empty house. It had been built for a husband and wife shortly after World War I, and Helen wondered if she was staring at the same siding they had stared at a hundred years ago.

Wade always boasted how he got a “real deal” on the farmhouse. The son of the original owners had died in a nursing home without a will or next of kin, so Wade had scored the property at a state auction. Helen was pretty sure he got a “real deal” on it because the redbrick chimney was starting to tilt slightly to one side, and the land was in the middle of nowhere: a half-hour ferry ride across Puget Sound and another two hours by car. People came out this way to hike and ride horses in the nearby national forests more than they came here to make a life.

It was very peaceful though. That is, if you measured peace by quietude and nature and not by one’s thoughts. The house’s best feature was its wide front porch with the shaded overhang held up by thick columns. Helen rarely sat in the porch rocking chairs though, because that’s what she would have done with Tyler when they were old together, and now she didn’t want to do it with anyone else. Most days she floated across the porch and went straight to her garden.

The Brussels sprouts were getting close to harvest, and she had planned to check them for cabbage worms yesterday but had forgotten to do it. Neem oil could only do so much, so the worms needed to be picked off by hand, and you would think the more she had to do that, the less it would bother her, but it was the opposite. She’d come to closely associate Brussels sprouts with the squishy little caterpillars, and she cringed at how they hid in the folds of the vegetable. Eating the sprouts made her feel like she was eating worms. She used to love them. In the city, she’d walk into the grocery co-op and say, “One pound of Brussels sprouts, please,” and a lady in a cheerful apron would give her a container full of Brussels sprouts that someone else had planted, harvested, cut, cleaned, salted, and roasted. All she had to do was stick a fork in them and open her mouth.