The beatings continued.
For Stephen the days passed working at his shop in town or out in the garage. Gluing down veneer, repairing legs of chairs and tables, finishing and polishing old wood. He created a pine bookshelf, a nightstand, an oak desk. He was fast and efficient and charged reasonably for his work and time. He brought each job in on schedule which was a rarity these days. He was affable, friendly, listened carefully to his clients’ needs and was good at what he did. No master craftsman but then this was not New York City either. He had no lack of customers.
Either he was working with wood or he was working on Sara.
He wasn’t sure if it was Sara or the shop or the struggle with McCann that had given him the case of tendonitis. But the elbow was swollen into a little marble at the joint and twinged constantly. He was left-handed and now his grip was considerably weakened and the elbow hurt miserably if he used the hand too much. There were mornings he’d have a hard time digging his keys out of his pocket and an even harder time locking the door behind him. He was popping two ibuprophen every four hours and one progesterone a day, the latter on Doc Richardson’s proscription. If it didn’t help in two weeks, the doctor said, if the swelling didn’t go down he’d have to inject a steroid directly into the tendon. It wasn’t a prospect he looked forward to.
Every time he used that arm to swing the whip or drive a nail it hurt him.
He began to have fleeting headaches and strange, frequent memories of his mother’s funeral.
At the service they’d set six metal folding chairs at the grave site, one for each of her chief mourners. His father, his mother’s sister June and brothers Bill and Ernie plus himself and Kath. Kath had a stomach virus that grey September day so she elected to stand behind the chairs and he to stand with her. At eighty-two, with heart disease and emphysema Uncle Bill found it easier not to sit only to have to stand again so he stood too. Which left three of the six chairs empty.
His father sat in the middle. Aunt June and Uncle Ernie sat together to the far left. There was no love lost between his father and either of them. So that one chair remained open to the left of him and two remained open to the right. The minister invited any other members of the assembly to have a seat but not a soul among the twenty-five people or so attending really wished to sit with him. The mourners were there for his mother, not for him. He realized his father had not a single real friend among them and no family of his own left and thought with some amazement that he’d never seen anyone look quite so lonely.
That his father should sit unattended wasn’t right, wasn’t even proper and disconcerted by this, embarrassed, the minister asked again.
Again there was hesitation. Why he didn’t sit with his father himself he didn’t know but instead he stayed with Kath. Finally two old women Stephen had never seen in his life took pity on him or perhaps they took pity on the minister and filled the vacant seats on either side. The sixth chair remained open throughout the ceremony as though for some departed guest.
Why this memory should come back to him now so frequently puzzled him. But it came at the strangest times. When he was going for the whip. When he was emptying her bedpan those few instances Kath wasn’t around to do it. When he manacled her to the X-frame. The time they allowed her upstairs for a shower. He would see his father sitting alone and stony in that folding chair.
One day over dinner he realized that he was disappointed with Sara in some ways. Or disappointed with his own responses. It seemed to him that his fantasies were never quite matched by reality when he acted on them. Her sufferings were never quite as provocative as he’d imagined, her helplessness and nudity never quite as stimulating, her submissiveness never as fulfilling. He probably needed to be more spontaneous, he thought. To plan less and imagine less. That way he wouldn’t always be forced to match his thinking to reality.
He also recognized early on the need to escalate. At least for now.
To push his limits as well as hers. That was what the strangling was about and heat-lamp and the studded whip.
He’d promised Kath he wouldn’t fuck her but he didn’t say anything about her using her mouth. No promises there. Even so she’d been angry about the blowjob and he thought that telling her was probably a mistake. But for some reason he couldn’t help but tell her. He needed her to know. It was part of being Kath’s master as well as Sara’s. So was having her sit on Sara’s face. She hadn’t wanted to do it. He’d had to threaten a whipping.
Escalate.
It was actually a little scary. On the twelfth day he had her on the X-frame and inside the headbox and he’d taken a Swiss Army knife off his worktable. His idea was to use the corkscrew on her clit. See what it did to her. But instead he automatically opened to the long blade. He always kept it sharp. He thought, fine, I’ll use that first on her nipples and then the corkscrew on her clit but when he approached her with the knife in hand he started to shake. He started circling the areola which seemed to be darkening as the pregnancy advanced but the shaking got worse. He had to stop.
You’re afraid you’re going to kill her, he thought.
You really could some day, you know that? You could go too far much too soon if let yourself.
Which made him a little afraid of her.
Not that she’d get away somehow because that was damned unlikely and besides, the Organization stories were working, he could tell. No, you’re afraid of her because she might just make you want to kill her one of these days just by being available for the killing and that would be very spontaneous and very much an escalation, wouldn’t it?
Then he thought about the baby. It would be terrible to harm the baby. She was just beginning to show.
He felt sure she’d have made a good mother.
In some ways he actually admired her. She had guts and will and stamina. The will he’d have to break, was already breaking but he wanted to let her hold onto the stamina. She’d need it for what they had in mind.
He folded the sharp blade back into the Swiss Army knife and pulled out the corkscrew and when the shaking stopped finally he went to work on her the way he’d planned to.
Kath wished she could call Gail. Her best and oldest friend. They’d met way back in nursing school and stayed friends even though these days Gail lived in the City working at Bellevue. But Stephen was always afraid of somebody dropping by unexpectedly. She wasn’t going to be allowed to encourage friendships for the duration. The duration was turning into a damned long time.
It wasn’t fair.
She hated the isolation.
She thought that Sara wasn’t the only one imprisoned here.
Sure she had work at the hospital to get her out of the house five days a week but she didn’t really have any friends among the staff there. He wouldn’t let her go to any meetings or rallies either. He didn’t want them to be seen, he said, till it was over. So she was stuck with the house and the basement and the television and that was it.
He’d almost completely stopped fucking her. That was another thing.
On the sixth day she drove home from work in a blinding summer rainstorm and ran directly upstairs to run a good hot shower and change out of her drenched clothes and when she came back down toweling her hair, wanting to get a coke from the fridge, she saw that the door to the cellar was open. She felt a moment’s panic thinking that somehow she’d managed to get out of the Long Box, to get free. Until she looked out the window and saw that Stephen’s pickup was parked behind her own car in the driveway.