Grimm Memorials

by R. Patrick Gates

  "Of course they're real," she said with a smile, turning back to Linda. "All fairy godmothers have wings. I thought you knew that"

  She reached out her hand and touched Linda's shoulder lightly. Her words echoed in Linda's head like a soft, soothing lullaby. The more they echoed the more sense they made. "I've come to help you with the children, dear. Isn't that your secret wish, to have help with the boys? I've come to grant that for you" Her hand moved up Linda's shoulder and caressed her cheek.

  Yes, that would be nice, Linda mused, but thought she had spoken out loud. She realized suddenly that her lips weren't moving. The funny thing was that when her fairy godmother spoke, Linda didn't remember her lips moving either, yet she heard her voice clearly.

  Just relax, Fairy Godmother said soothingly. This time Linda looked closely at her mouth and confirmed that her lips never moved. The voice was a sensation in her mind, like listening to stereo headphones where the sound seems to come from the middle of your head. The still-rational part of her brain tried to explain the phenomenon away by insisting that the woman was a ventriloquist.

  Yes, something like that, Fairy Godmother's voice spoke up inside Linda's head. But never mind that now, she added. You're tired, aren't you? The children wore you out.

  Linda immediately felt an immense exhaustion, worse than the weariness she usually felt from chasing the boys about. It permeated her being, making her head feel as heavy as a bowling ball. She looked up into her fairy godmother's eyes and saw that they were big enough for her to fall into. "Yes," Linda said aloud, softly. She was swimming in the deep sparkling blue of those eyes.

  Very tired.

  Linda's arms and legs felt as though they were encased in wet concrete. She felt giddy and her vision became blurred.

  I'll take the children. You rest.

  That sounded to Linda like the best suggestion she had ever heard. The woman's eyes continued to swallow her up as her bowling-ball head got heavier and heavier and her eyelids slid closed. Moving slowly, Linda lay back on the bench, putting her feet up, and curling into a fetal position. She fell into a deep sleep. The last thing she heard was her son Mark saying something. "Okay, boys," she heard someone else say with her voice. "Be good"

  Eleanor led the boys, one on each hand, out of the mall to her car. As they exited through the glass doors she could sense that Mark, the boy on her right, thought something was wrong. She slipped into his mind and distracted him with an image of the hearse as a huge coach driven by twelve beautiful white stallions. She led the boys to it and opened the back while they patted the horses and gazed enthralled at the coach's velvet finery. She called them to her and, in the guise of Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee, held out an ether-soaked cloth to each boy, making them appear as rare and beautiful flowers which she invited them to sniff. When they were quite unconscious, she piled them into a coffin in the back and closed the lid.

  As Eleanor got in the car, she smiled at a mall security guard strolling past. He smiled and tipped his hat to the kindly, small woman he saw in her place and walked by. Within minutes he wouldn't remember seeing her at all.

  Several hours later, the same security guard would finally notice the twins' mother lying all curled up on the bench in front of the Dixieland band. He would walk by her three times during the afternoon and not until early evening would he actually see her. When he did, he would find her very hard to wake.

  At first, the security guard, whom everyone called "Murph," figured she was a drunken bag lady. It had happened before, and just last summer a young guy from the university had OD'd on the bridge by the waterfall. But the more Murph looked at this woman and inspected her bags filled with children's clothing, the more he realized she wasn't a bag lady at all. It was obvious that she was a mother. Murph just hoped her kids hadn't been with her because now they were nowhere to be seen.

  An ambulance was called and an E.M.T. revived her with an ammonia capsule broken under nose. She sat up straight, blinked several times at the medic, looked at the small crowd of security men, police who'd come with the ambulance, mall officials, and shoppers, and spoke to them with her mind the way she had with her fairy godmother. She was disappointed when she got no response.

  "Where's my fairy godmother?" she asked, impatient with these clods who couldn't read minds. Several people, mostly the shoppers, but several of the cops and security men, too, laughed loudly until they saw that she was serious.

  "Where's my fairy godmother?" she asked again, a kernel of panic present in her voice. When no one answered her, she stood up and grabbed the E.M.T. by the shoulders and shook him. "Where's my fairy godmother, damn you, she got my children!"

  Initially, officers from the sheriff's department treated Linda as though she were a drunk. They put her, screaming for her children and fairy godmother, in the ambulance and sent her off to the local detox tank at Amherst Hospital. They realized there was more to it when they called the woman's husband and found out that their children had been with her.

  When the hospital reported that the woman was alcoholand drug-free, Deputy Sheriff Ken Vitelli thought it sounded like another child abduction. He was head of the investigation into the Hall and Torrez boys' disappearances. Linda Lafleur's losing her kids in a shopping mall seemed to fit the pattern.

  The sheriff didn't agree. During questioning Linda Lafleur admitted to having taken hallucinogenic drugs in college and said that she thought she was having a drug flashback at the mall. She also admitted that she and her husband smoked pot on occasion. A neighbor came forth to tell police that Linda Lafleur had complained to her on several occasions that her twin boys were driving her crazy and, jokingly at the time, had said she'd sometimes like to wring their necks. The sheriff figured the Lafleurs for drug dealers. His theory was that she had had a drug flashback that, combined with her children's hyperactive behavior, had driven her to kill the children and dump their bodies before she ever got to the mall. When one of the boys' sneakers was found on the Hadley River bridge (thrown there by Eleanor when the Machine told her to do so), the county prosecutor, looking for a sensational case along the lines of Hedda Nussbaum! Joel Steinberg trial to boost his political aspirations, readily agreed. The sheriff's department began dragging the river, and Linda Lafleur was arrested and charged with the double homicide of her two children.

  CHAPTER 10

  Dance to your daddy ...

  Steve parked the car in the driveway and got out. He immediately went around the car and helped Diane get out the passenger side, then went and unlocked the front door. Neither of them said anything; neither had spoken for the past hour. Their lunch had passed in heavy silence with them picking at their food and avoiding looking at each other.

  Steve hadn't been able to stop searching for the young woman from the parking lot. He felt certain that she would return; his aching, boner-that-wouldn't-die kept the hope alive. But she did not return, no matter how much he wanted her to.

  Diane noticed Steve's looking everywhere but at her and remembered what her father told her. She was in a minor state of shock from having seen him alive again and all through lunch felt as though she'd just wakened from a dream; a dream that had seemed so real, but was just bizarre enough that she knew it couldn't possibly have happened. Her father was dead. Dead many years. He couldn't come back. Could he?

  Suddenly Diane wasn't sure. She had never been one to believe in the supernatural, or the kind of weird-phenomena stories that paint the headlines of the gossip rags, but after her father's visitation, leaving her exhilarated and very frightened, anything suddenly seemed possible. All the strange things she used to laugh at while standing in the checkout line at the supermarket and reading the headlines of those newspapers (ALIENS HOLD TOP GOVERNMENT POSITIONS; WOMAN MARRIES BIGFOOT-GIVES BIRTH TO MUTANT) became possible-more than possible. An unshakable feeling began to grow in her that her father had come back; and he had done so to warn her.

  He must know that something bad is going to happen to the baby
and he came to warn me and protect it, she thought. She looked at Steve unlocking the front door and remembered what her father had told her. Would Steve (could Steve?) cheat on her, or hurt the baby? The rest of what her father said came to her as if in answer: Don't let him put his thing in you.

  Diane suddenly knew, irrevocably, that the reason her father had warned against letting him put his thing in her was because Steve had caught some kind of disease, maybe even AIDS. Here she'd been thinking that she was just having a bout of pregnancy paranoia in thinking that Steve was fooling around on her, and all the time it was true.

  He wouldn't do that; that's crazy, a small part of her still insisted, but after her father's visit, Diane found it too easy not to believe it anymore.

  Steve got the door open and went inside, hanging his coat in the hall closet. Diane followed him in and went down the hall to the kitchen. She tossed her pocketbook on the kitchen table and went to the sink. From the right hand cabinet, she took a bottle of Tylenol and a drinking glass. She scooped two pills out and into her mouth, following them with water. The faint beat of a headache was starting in the back of her head. From the way it throbbed with every pulse of her heart, she knew it was going to swell into a doozy.

  Steve came down the hall, stopped in the kitchen doorway, and watched Diane as she rested a moment against the sink. His penis, throbbing maddeningly against his shorts, had remained semi-erect since the incident in the parking lot. Now, ogling his wife's swollen belly and equally swollen breasts, he felt it growing fully hard again.

  Though Diane thought her body was fat and ugly and growing fatter and uglier with each passing day, Steve found her pregnant belly and milk-laden breasts extremely sexy. He crossed the kitchen and snuggled up behind her, reaching around and caressing her belly with his right hand while lightly grabbing her breast with his left.

  Diane pulled away immediately and went to the table, picking up her pocketbook and coat. "I have a really bad headache. I'm going to go lie down for a while," she said to Steve without looking at him. She left the kitchen through the front hall and went upstairs.

  She had been lying there for only a short while when Steve came into the bedroom. He closed the door and the window shades, then began undressing. Diane rolled over on her side away from him. He lay on the bed next to her, wearing only his T-shirt and boxer shorts, and snuggled up against her, putting his arm around her and cupping her left breast. She patted his hand and put it off her.

  "I told you I have a headache," she said quietly. She moved away from his body and the uncomfortable feel of his hard cock in her back.

  "That's okay," Steve said gently. "We don't have to do anything." He sat up and leaned over her. "Do you want to practice your breathing?" They had been enrolled in a Lamaze birthing class at Mass. General Hospital in Boston, finishing the course just before they moved. They were supposed to be practicing once a week the special breathing she would do to get through labor contractions, but they had been very lax.

  "No," Diane murmured, softening.

  Steve put his hand on Diane's ankle. "How 'bout if I massage your feet?"

  A feeling of guilt washed over Diane like a cold sweat. Could this kind, gentle man cheat on her?

  Steve began massaging her feet, rubbing the instep and heel of each foot hard with the ball of his palm. It sent delicious tingles all the way up her legs. Steve gave the best foot massages and she let herself be rubbed limp by him now. Deliberately, he worked every inch of both her feet, then started on her ankles and moved up to her calves. By the time he got to her thighs, running his hands alternatingly light and heavy up under her maternity dress and over her inner thigh and crotch, she was breathing heavily. Her panties were moist and clung to her labia, outlining them like an orchid for Steve to see under her hiked-up dress. Though she had left her clothes on when she lay down, she had removed her bra. Steve could see that her nipples were hard and excited.

  Sliding his hands up over her crotch sensuously slow, he began unbuttoning her dress. When he had it laid open to her waist, revealing her ballooning breasts, he smiled and sighed. He cupped her breasts with both hands and leaned over, licking each hardened nipple lightly. He glided his tongue over her skin to her belly and down to her extra-large pink panties. He slid the bottom of her dress up higher, piling it on her stomach and slid a hand between her legs as he kissed her thighs. His fingers quickly sought out and rubbed the warm wet object of his desires through her flimsy underwear.

  Don't let him

  The words came out of nowhere like a gust of wind behind her eyes. She stiffened just as Steve's gently probing fingers slid her panties down and found her clitoris, rubbing it softly, sending electric thrills through her bowels.

  put his thing in you

  The words settled in her mind like a heavy snowfall blanketing all else. Steve's fingers searched deeper but the electric pleasure of his touch was cooling under the white noise of her father's voice.

  -or he'll hurt the baby!

  The words became an irresistible command. With a groan of anguish and pleasure, she pushed Steve away just as he was slipping a finger into her.

  "No, I ... I don't feel like it. I ... don't feel good," she stammered. The voice in her head was rolling around like thunder, causing her headache to swell its beating so that now she felt like there were bass drums pounding in unison at her temples. "My head hurts," she whimpered tears springing to her eyes.

  "Okay. It's okay, babe," Steve said, pushing away the feeling of resentment that had at first rushed in upon him when Diane pushed him away. He got out of bed and went around to her side, sitting next to her and leaning over, hugging her firmly with both arms. "It's like I said. We don't have to fool around. It's okay."

  Diane put her head back, covered her eyes with her hand, and began to sob. She began trembling and the pain in her head throbbed stronger, almost to the point of nausea. For one fleeting moment, she thought of blurting out to Steve what had happened at the restaurant, but the pain became so unbearable in that instant that she nearly fainted from it. The next moment, when she thought that if she did tell Steve he'd think she was crazy, the pain let up until it was completely gone.

  Without consciously thinking it, Diane knew that if she ever told Steve, or anyone, about seeing her father, the pain would come back and this time it would kill her, baby or no baby. She also knew, like an unwritten law, that she must keep her promise to her dead father and protect the baby.

  Diane let Steve prop several pillows behind her head and shoulders, and a couple under her knees. He then tucked her in with just a sheet over her. He stepped back and slid off his T-shirt and shorts. His erection didn't appear to have been dampened by her rejection.

  "Steve, don't, please," she said in a tired voice.

  "Hey, it's okay," he said slowly, a hint of annoyance in his voice. "I'm not going to do anything. I just want to cool off. It's muggy today." His hard-on throbbing, he climbed back into bed next to Diane. "Are those pillows helping your head? Does it feel any better?" he asked.

  "No," she whined, lying. At the sight of his rigid penis, she had felt another flash of excitement which was quickly answered by a stab of immense pain in her temples. Immediately, the hot, pleasurable itch between her legs and in her nipples, disappeared. When it did, so did the pain.

  "Do you want anything?" Steve asked, lying with his head propped up on his bent elbow.

  "No," she said softly.

  Steve slid closer. "Is it okay then if I just rub your belly and talk to little Stevie?" He placed his right hand on the lower part of her stomach and began massaging in big gentle circles. As he did this, he leaned close and kissed her belly just above the navel, through the sheet. "Hello, little Steve," he said, pressing his mouth into her belly through the sheet. They'd known they were having a boy since the fifth month of her pregnancy when she'd had an amniocentesis done.

  Diane's skin grew hot from his breath as the sheet muffled his words. She could feel his voice
vibrating in her stomach, and felt the baby move, responding to his father's voice.

  "This is your daddy speaking," Steve said, and wet the sheet with his tongue. At the same time, he began rubbing her belly below her navel, widening each stroke so that he was soon rubbing the top of the inverted triangle of her pubic hair that felt like steel wool under the sheet. "I'm waiting out here for you, little guy," Steve went on, moving his lips up her belly and closer to her breasts while his left hand pulled the sheet slowly down. "Your momma's not in a good mood today," he pouted, his lips grazing the underside of her left breast. The sheet slid over the nipple and his tongue darted out, flicking snakelike at it. The aureole tightened and the nipple became erect. "Her lips say, `No, no, no,' but her nips say, `Yes, yes, yes.' " He giggled into the cleavage of her breasts.

  "Steve, stop it!" Diane shouted suddenly. She yanked his hand from between her legs and flung it off her. Pulling the sheet up tight to her neck, she turned away. The feelings he was arousing in her had brought the pain back like a boomerang. When she pushed him away, she pushed it away.

  Steve was miffed. He looked at Diane with a mixture of puzzlement and anger on his face. Diane had been increasingly moody throughout her pregnancy, and her sex drive had decreased considerably, but she hadn't shut him off totally, unlike the horror stories he'd heard from other guys whose wives wouldn't even let their husbands touch them for nine months, much less make love to them. At times, she had even been quite amorous, but lately, ever since the move, Diane had been colder than usual while he had become hornier.

  It was obvious to Steve that his advances were arousing her, he had felt the viscous wetness oozing from her widening vagina, had seen her nipples blossom rigidly. For some reason, she was fighting it. Though he could think of nothing he had done (the girl in the hearse popped into his head, but Diana couldn't know about that-he wasn't even sure if she was real), he surmised that she was angry with him for something.