Damaged Beyond Repair

George Anderson, who has given permission for many efforts to reimagine his excellent "February Sucks" story, graciously blessed my request to offer this one. I'm not sure what inspires so many writers to add their voices, even though I am among them. The high quality of Anderson's original telling is surely part of it, along with its heartbreaking depiction of the implosion of a loving marriage in just an instant.

The original more than deserves a re-read at https://www.literotica.com/s/february-sucks for proper background, although what follows here can stand alone.

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THE BACKSTORY

Jim and Linda, the happily married parents of Emma, 6, and Tommy, 4, joined friends to greet spring with a Friday night dinner at the Madison Hotel and dancing at the nearby Iris Club. Mrs. Porter, a babysitter, would keep the kids. A room at the Madison awaited the couple for a night of passionate reconnection.

Instead, football star Marc LaValliere swept Linda onto the Iris dance floor and then quietly out a back door to his waiting car for a night of passion. Linda's friend and enabler, Dee, explained to Jim that his wife went willingly, deserved the thrill, and would return tomorrow to be the same loving spouse as before. Crushed, Jim left the club.

THE NIGHT CONTINUES

Jim never returned to the hotel room. There was nothing there worth retrieving. He trembled uncontrollably, as if a gland had burst and flooded him with adrenaline, the fight-or-flight hormone. Of course, he never had an opportunity to fight. Nor was he going home in flight. There just was nowhere else to go. His body was revved to maximum speed but his brain was stuck in idle. He never more desperately needed to do something, yet never been less sure of what it could be.

He considered trying to retrieve Linda. But did where did Marc take her? Even if Jim could find them, he would never win in a fistfight with a top athlete. It would be as humiliating as facing his friends after she left the club.

Disjointed thoughts fleeted in and out, but he recognized for certain that this was Linda's fault and he never had a chance to fight the real battle: To try to stop her from abandoning him. He lost to Linda, not Marc. It was she who betrayed his love. She who was ending their happy life. She who deserved the consequences. He owed it to himself, and even to Linda, to try to make her suffer as deeply as he had. But how?

Jim's time was limited by two things: He would have to pick up Emma and Tommy in the morning, and Linda would come home, well, sometime Saturday. Noon, maybe? At least, he presumed she was coming back. He could no longer count on her for anything. The woman he thought he knew never would have gone in the first place. Maybe she wasn't ever coming home. But, no, LaValliere was a renowned master of the one-night stand. Jim knew that Linda would be returning whether she wanted to or not. And while she might have realized that she already sacrificed her marriage, she probably still loved her kids. Yes, the kids. He might not matter to her anymore, but they did.

LINDA COMES HOME

It was about 1 p.m. Saturday when Linda gave Marc a passionate good-by kiss and climbed out of his red Ferrari in front of her house. "I'm home!" she called out cheerfully as she swept confidently through the front door. "It's still just me, the same old me as always." There was no response.

She searched the house. No Jim. No Tommy. No Emma. Something felt eerie. Her blood chilled. Linda dialed Jim's cellphone and followed the sound of its ringer to where it sat on the kitchen counter. The case was caked with dirt, as if Jim had dropped it into loose soil. She checked the log and found only one call since she left the Iris. It was at 11:57 p.m., to Mrs. Porter.

Had he run off and abandoned the kids with the sitter? A quick call provided some comfort. Mrs. Porter said Jim rang her about midnight and announced that he needed to retrieve the children immediately. He did not seem to be himself, the sitter told Linda, and did not explain the abrupt change of plans. He had rebuffed Mrs. Porter's concern about waking the kids in what was the middle of their night. He seemed highly distracted as he carried the dozing children to his car and sped off into the dark.

Surely, Linda thought, Jim would not take the children and run away. She raced through the house to seek reassurance, calling out their names and searching for clues. If anything was missing, it wasn't obvious. Their clothes were still hung on the closet rods or folded in the drawers. Jim's laptop computer sat on his desk. The family checkbook was in the desk drawer. But it didn't appear that anyone had slept in their beds.

Increasingly desperate, Linda called Dee, who saw the name pop up on the screen and answered lasciviously, "Hey girl, can you talk? So, dish. What was he like?"

"I need your help," Linda cried. "The kids are missing. Jim is missing. His phone is here. Maybe they just went to Chuck-E-Cheese or something, but my imagination is running away with me."

"You mean Cuck-E-Cheese?" Dee responded with a giggle, tickling herself. The sick joke sent Linda over an edge. "I'm fucking serious!" she declared. "Something is wrong. Come help me, please."

TERROR IN THE YARD

Dee and her husband, Dave, arrived in minutes, now better appreciating the gravity of Linda's fears. Dave, largely left out of the women's commiseration, was roaming the house for ideas when he spotted something out a back window. It was a spade leaned haphazardly against the house. The ground was thawed from the harsh winter but it was too soon for Jim to have started any lawn work. Dave wandered outside to look for an explanation and it didn't take long to find one. Near some big trees in the back yard were two rectangles of freshly-turned dirt, side-by-side, each about four feet long and two feet wide. Dave's knees shook until he thought they would collapse.

Linda was working her phone in the kitchen when Dave pulled Dee aside and whispered that he was afraid he had just found two child-size graves. Dee's knees started buckling too, and her husband had to hold her up. Linda's eyes read her friends' panicked expressions and cut off a call in mid-conversation. "What!?" she demanded.

Dave broached the subject gently, asking Linda if Jim had been doing any digging. "No," she replied, her anxiety building. "Why?" Dee slipped a chair behind Linda as the couple carefully explained the shoveled areas. "They could be anything, we don't know," Dave said, clinging to optimism he wasn't certain about.

Shrieking, Linda bolted out the back door with Dee in close pursuit. Dave pulled a cellphone from his pocket and dialed 911 before joining the women in the yard. "No! No! No! God, no!" Linda screamed, alternating with "Tommy, Emma!" She threw herself on the ground and clawed at the fresh earth with her fingertips, sometimes pounding with her fists and then clawing again. Neighbors were beginning to watch. The first in a succession of sirens grew louder.

Two patrolmen pulled the trio away, declaring the yard a "crime scene" and trying to make sense from three people shouting at once. "Why do you think your husband would harm your children?" an officer asked as Linda's open mouth abruptly ran out of words. "Has he ever hurt them or threatened them before?" Dave took a sergeant aside and explained about last night and Linda and Marc and the devastated Jim. As officers began stringing yellow "POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS" tape from tree to tree, Linda fainted into Dee's arms.

Linda awoke after a few seconds, in time to join everyone else in awareness that some kind of commotion was sweeping through the side yard and toward the back. "What in the hell is going on here?" bellowed Jim, whose words were drowned out by two much younger voices yelling, "Mommy! Mommy!" Emma and Tommy broke into a run and nearly knocked Linda over. "We were at Denny's," Emma explained. "Where were you? We wanted you to come with us."

The children had no idea why their mother was crying, or why her hugs were almost suffocating, or why there was a crowd of strangers gathered behind their house. A stern-faced officer pulled Jim out of the others' earshot and asked accusingly, "Did you dig those graves?" Jim, indifferent to the havoc he created, explained, "They're not graves. I can't help it if my whore of a wife and her fucking friends jump to stupid conclusions."

"Where were you and the kids overnight?" the cop continued.

Jim presumed that someone had already explained the background story so he saw no reason to be particularly detailed or discreet. "My wife slipped away from me at the Iris Club to fuck Marc LaValliere all night," he told the officer. "So I picked up my kids early at the babysitter and brought them home to sleep. This morning, we made the beds and took an early ride through the countryside before stopping at the Denny's up on the parkway. I figured it would be easier on everybody if Tommy and Emma and I didn't have to watch the asshole LaValliere drop Linda off."

"And the graves?"

"They're not graves, officer. I don't know why people keep calling them that. And I don't understand all this commotion. Is it against the law to bury your wedding album and wife's bridal dress?"

"No, sir. No, it is not," the cop replied, realizing that some moral law may have been breached, but no statute. Police finished rolling up their yellow tape about the time paramedics determined that Linda's hysteria had calmed sufficiently for them to leave. The sergeant checked back in with Jim, sternly asking, "You're not going to do anything else stupid, are you?"

"Absolutely not," Jim replied. "Hey, I'm sorry for causing so much trouble."

THE CONFRONTATION

As the last patrol car pulled away, Jim quietly asked Dee and Dave to take the kids for an hour so he could talk privately with Linda. He said he would send Linda to retrieve Tommy and Emma later, and that while she was gone he would pack up his things. "Linda will need your help again for a while," he explained. "Last night, you supported her when she walked out of what I foolishly believed was a wonderful marriage. Now, she will need you to help her grasp what I'm about to tell her. That there is no going back. I'll file for a divorce this week."

"Come on, Jim," Dee responded sharply. "It was one night. It didn't mean anything." Without uttering a word, Jim flashed an expression that pushed her back a step and left her uncharacteristically silent.

Then came his hardest part. Jim was about to face a reality that was unimaginable only 15 hours ago -- severing his heartstrings with the woman who until last night had been the nucleus of his very being.

Linda's anger made his job much easier.

"Damn you, Jim!" were her opening words, delivered in a breathless shout. "Do you have any idea what your little tantrum did to me? You almost killed me! You ripped the heart out of my chest! You shredded me! Crushed me! I thought I had lost my children, the most important thing in my life. Can you hear me, you bastard? I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. I was betrayed by the man who had sworn to love me and protect me. To love and protect our children. But you didn't even consider the consequences, did you? No, your ego meant more to you than anything else. You inflicted more pain on me than I thought was possible. More than a human can bear. You bastard, you cannot imagine how much you hurt me!" Then she slumped into a chair, spent.

Jim let her words hang in the quiet air for 10, maybe 20, seconds.

"Yes, Linda," he answered in almost a whisper. "I know exactly how much it hurt. Exactly." He paused again, and stared down at his feet as he continued. "It was you who did not understand that kind of pain, that level of betrayal. Not until this afternoon. At least I was compassionate enough to release you from your agony after a couple of minutes. You will never be able to free me from mine."

She wailed, "No! It's not the same thing. You know me. You knew I would be back. Nothing would change. We'd go on with our lives and our plans. Just a bump in our happy road. But you let me believe you killed our kids. I would never have believed you could do something this cruel. I'm not sure that I can ever forgive you."

Jim inhaled deeply and took his turn. "I don't expect you to forgive me. In fact, I don't want you to forgive me. That is the beauty of my little tantrum, as you called it. Yes, it paid you back for the pain. But that was not the main purpose."

"What?"

"It was insurance, Linda. Yesterday, I loved you more than any man ever loved a woman. Today, I hate you almost that much. Tomorrow, uh, I'm afraid of how I might feel tomorrow. I don't want to be with you ever again. It would poison my soul and ruin my life. I could never forget how you chose him over me -- without even giving me a chance -- in front of our best friends. I could never trust you again. But I'm afraid that someday, in a moment of weakness, I might be tempted to try.

"So I need you to hate me, too. To hate me too much to ever take me back." He paused for a few seconds and continued, "When you think of me, think of how I laughed in my parked car up the street while I watched you clawing at the ground. Laughed, Linda. Out loud. It was the only thing to relieve my pain from last night, when you found pleasure in a stranger's bed with no regard to me. Not even a passing thought about me while you were fucking him, right?"

Linda sobbed, then tried to find her words. "Jim...."

"Shhh," he interrupted. "The time to save us was last night, before you slipped out that door, leaving your dignity and marriage behind. It was both of us, not just me, who suffered when I had no opportunity to warn you of what you were throwing away for a cheap hump with a playboy who won't even remember your name tomorrow. No more words now. Just go pick up the kids and please don't be back home before 5. I'll call them tonight. I will file for a divorce sometime this week."

Linda sat keening, out of ammunition. It was the first moment when she truly saw it all through Jim's eyes. Recognizing defeat, she left.

A SURPRISE CALL

Little was said between the two during the ensuing months. After a few weeks, Linda had stopped begging for forgiveness. She stayed in the house with the kids. Jim reliably took them to his new apartment one night a week and every other weekend. The couple spoke civilly but only when necessary. Probably because Linda dragged her feet, the divorce case moved slowly on the court docket into the next year.

Jim never anticipated the call that came late one night from Linda, asking, "Can we talk for a few minutes?"

"OK."

"Jim, I met someone who might interest me. He's a nice guy from work. We went out for lunch a time or two. We have not been intimate, and may never be. But I don't want to start something with him if I have any chance at all of getting you back. I'm so sorry for what I did to you, to us. We were so much in love before. Please, don't you think we can be in love like that again?"

She did not find it encouraging that Jim sighed before answering. "No," he said. "No, and the reason is precisely because we were so much in love. True love is rooted in caring and respect. I trusted you with my everything, and in an instant you decided it meant nothing. I will never trust you again. I will probably never trust anyone again."

She pleaded, "Jim, you can't mean that."

"Besides," Jim added, "Have you forgotten what I did to you? The cruelty of what I did? The way I laughed at the worst moment of your life? You should hate me as much as I hate you."

"I drove you to that," Linda said with a whimper. "It was all on me. I forgave you for that a long time ago."

Crap, Jim thought. He didn't expect to be forgiven. Didn't want to be. That was part of the point of his cruel revenge. He was deeply ashamed of it. Linda's forgiveness just made his shame worse. But it didn't change his heart.

"This wasn't an office flirtation that went too far," he scolded her. "Not an ill-considered rekindling of an old flame. This was the singularly most disrespectful thing a spouse could do. You left me heartbroken and humiliated just so you could have bragging rights and the hottest fuck of your life. Of course, he would automatically seem like the greatest fuck because of his fame. I can never compete with that and I won't try."

"No, no, no," Jim, It was a terrible mistake. I would take it back if I could. He was not better in any way."

Jim laughed out loud. "If he wasn't better, tell me this. Why not just fuck him once to find out and come home? Why over and over all night, and then more in the morning?"

Long silence.

TELLING LINDA THE REST

"There are some things about that night you never knew, Linda. Things I never wanted to admit. Hear me out, and then decide for yourself if you think I can ever be with you again."

"Go ahead, Jim," she said, haltingly, set back that there could be any details she did not already know.

"I wanted to kill you," he said, in an emotionless tone "That night. I wanted to kill you and that asshole both, together or separately, and then kill myself. I even made plans, for maybe five minutes. But then I thought about Tommy and Emma as orphans, and that got me thinking straighter. Straighter, but hardly straight.

"Picking up the kids was not the first thing I did after you abandoned me. Remember that little park out off Route 3? The one where we used to enjoy romantic picnics before we had kids? The one with the big, beautiful oak trees? I drove out there that night and used my flashlight to find the trunk where we carved that big heart and our initials so long ago. You were probably still giving Marc his first blowjob while I was using my pocket knife to scratch the carving away."

Linda sobbed.

"On the way out, I noticed that one of those trees sat pretty close to the pavement. On flat ground, not far off the shoulder. It was tall and strong, while I was bent and weak. How fast, I wondered, would a car have to ram into such a tree to overcome the protection of the airbags? I could only think of one way to find out."

"No, no, no," Linda moaned.

"So I got into my car and drove back down to that gas station by the interstate. I sat there and cried for a while, and started writing you a good-by note. Halfway through, I realized that my actions would explain themselves. I crumpled the paper and threw it out the window. I remember wondering what position he was using to fuck you at that point, which renewed my resolve.

"I pulled out and headed up the highway with my foot planted hard on the gas pedal. You know, I almost forgot to take off my seat belt. Anyway, I was doing better than 100 miles an hour when my high beams picked up the tree in the distance. I took a tighter grip on the wheel and started to veer right when suddenly all I could think of were the faces of Tommy and Emma. My mind was going a lot faster than my car. I had thought it was a perfect plan. It would end my pain and dump it all on you. But, at best, it would devastate our children. At worst, if my slut wife didn't come back, they'd still end up as orphans."

Linda interrupted, "I'd never abandon my....."

Jim cut her off. "How would I know that? The wife I'd have bet my life would be loyal and faithful to her dying breath had just back-stabbed the man she always said was her soulmate. I no longer knew you, or what you were capable of doing."

As Linda digested his logic, Jim continued. "So I sailed on past the tree, slowed down, and made a U-turn. I stopped at the park and sat and cried for a while under the oak that once meant so much to us. You were probably on fuck three. I paused to hug that other tree, the one beside the road. Then I called Mrs. Potter.