3 Is a Magic Number Ch. 18 - Original Ending

The Original Ending

All Characters are 18+

Author's Note: I thought that I would share this for the people who haven't read it. It is an overhaul of the original last chapter. It is a bit dark, but I feel that it wraps up the series better than my second attempt at the ending.

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I sat in a well-worn, but comfortable brown chair. All in all, it was a pretty nice office, this place being what it was. The décor was plain; the walls were painted eggshell white, and the only things hanging on the walls were diplomas and certificates.

"What happened after you got caught with Katie?" The female voice that was speaking to me sounded as if it was coming from another room. I was still in the mode of thinking back, and I wasn't quite present in the moment. Her voice was calm and smooth, with just a little bit of Texas twang. She was educated, but wasn't one of those types that try to use big words to show you how smart that they are.

"I never went back to the house. My mother let Katie and Julia inside to pack up our belongings while my dad was at work. They had everything cleared out in two days, and we stored a bunch of our stuff in Julia's mom's garage."

"What did Julia's mom think about your relationship? Did her mom resent you staying in her house with her daughter and your sister; her niece?" The doctor fidgeted with papers on her desk, but I knew that she really wasn't taking notes, she had been entranced by my monologue for quite some time, and hadn't written anything in at least half an hour.

"Julia's mom was probably the coolest with our arrangement. She was a bit of a free spirit, and I suppose that her self-imposed loneliness probably made her a bit more tolerant when Julia found happiness; no matter what form it took. She already knew about Julia and Katie having sex. I was just one more factor in a big messy equation; besides, we left for school soon after."

"So how long did you attend Northwestern University?" She leaned back a little in her chair.

"We were in our second semester." I answered, my voice falling flat on my own ears. We were getting to the really hard topics now.

"How did you like it? Were you happy?" I didn't even take a second to answer.

"It was the happiest time in my life. When we all moved into the apartment together, it felt a bit like we were playing house at first. We were all on our best behavior, this lasted for a week or two; and then we settled into our routine. Things were good; they were better than that, they were excellent. Julia and I would go to class, and we would come home, and Katie would be cooking dinner for us. I would walk into the house, and the smell of cooking pasta sauce, and garlic, would be in the air. My sister would be dressed in a tank top and panties, and wearing an apron. Her cheeks would be flushed from the heat of the kitchen, and her baby bump had the front of her apron pushed out. Honestly, she had never looked more beautiful than she was at that time..." My emotions temporarily cause my voice to shudder to a stop. The doctor pushed the Kleenex box towards me again. It had been a new box when we started. I guessed that I had been speaking for five hours at that point. Lunch had come and gone, and neither one of us wanted me to stop talking. We had talked on other days, but I could never get to the end of my story: of 'Our Story.' I had to tell this.

"How about Julia? How did she adjust to the situation?" Her voice always sounded interested, but to me it always seemed like the kind of interest that someone would have looking at rare animal in a zoo.

"Julia thrived in the environment of college, and she loved our home life. I think she fell deeper in love with Katie just like I did. She would come home, and have the same reaction that I did." I looked at the doctor, and she didn't quite frown, but it seemed like it took a lot for her not to have a disapproving expression show on her pinched face.

"You say that she fell more in love with your sister, what about with you? How was your relationship with Julia?"

"Julia and me? The more we got to really know each other, the harder we fell for one another too. Katie was my rock, she kept me grounded. But Julia, she made me want to soar with the eagles."

"And the sex? How was it when you could do it anytime that you wanted? When it was no longer forbidden, per se. Better? Worse? How frequent did you three have intercourse?" I laughed at the tight-assed terminology.

"We fucked like bunnies, doc. We fucked like bunnies on coke and Viagra. We were at it several times a day. Katie and I, Katie and Julia, Julia and I, all three of us at once. We almost got kicked out of our apartment in the first month because of all the noise that we made. We finally soundproofed the bedroom with those acoustic tiles, and bought a different bed. The tiles really helped. We would go at it at the weirdest times. I would wake up in the middle of the night with one of them riding my cock like they were in the Kentucky Derby. It was wild like that all the time." I laughed to myself.

"Was Julia on birth control at that time?"

"Jules? Hell yeah. She got the implants in her arm. She got them put in right after we got back from vacation. I still can't believe that she lied to my sister and me about having a morning after pill. I guess she was just trying to keep me from freaking out after I came inside of her like that."

"So there never was a morning after pill, and she continued to have unprotected sex with you the entire vacation?" There was no mistaking the judgement in her voice this time.

"Yeah, we went at it raw the whole time. I didn't know anything about the morning after pill, so I thought that we were safe. I suppose that she could have ended up knocked up too, but we just got lucky, if you want to call it that." I paused, thinking of Julia's wild past. I had never heard even the half of it, and it put my sexual escapades prior to being with her and Katie to shame. "I think it actually excited her. I think that she got off a bit on the whole danger of it. I think that was why she agreed to my sister's crazy plan to begin with; that and she was bored."

"That sounds very irresponsible of her. To risk her entire future for sex with her cousin." I could tell that this was one of those 'you had to have lived it in order to understand it' subjects.

"C'mon, doc. We were all eighteen, and thought that we would live forever, and that nothing bad would ever happen to us. Bad shit just happened to other people. And if I had to choose a word to describe Julia, the word would definitely not be responsible." The doctor paused, lost in her thoughts. I just let her think, and closed my eyes to relax. These were some really good drugs that she had me on.

"What word would you use to describe your lover; maybe not now, but then." I thought for a minute or so before I answered.

"Unrestrained, unbroken, wild, free. There are a lot of words that would have described her. She was like a horse that had never seen a saddle. When you begin to break a horse in order to ride it, you don't start with the saddle; you start with the bridle. The saddle comes along later. Katie was the bridle. I doubt that she could have ever got the saddle on her alone, though." I chuckled at the memory of wild cowgirl sex with Jules. "I put the saddle on her." I choked up at that point, and the doctor got up and pored me a glass of water from a filtered carafe.

"Jack, we have been talking for several days now in elaborate detail about your adventures, and how you fell in love. I am sensing that you seem to be winding down, and coming to the end of your story." It was my turn to pause. I had been talking to this therapist for days about all of the most intimate details of my life. The story, sadly enough, was hurtling toward its inevitable conclusion.

"Doc, when you are telling a story, it isn't about the ending. Every story has an end, just like every story has a beginning. The real magic of a story isn't in the beginning, or the ending; but in whether the story was worth telling in the first place."

"And your story is worth telling, in your opinion?" she asked. I smiled at her pinched, makeup-free face.

"Of course. This story has everything that anyone could ever want in a story. It has love, it has plenty of sex, and it has interesting people with problems that they must overcome." She let my last words hang before she spoke.

"And it has tragedy and loss." Her words cut like a knife through my heart.

"Yeah, and there is that. And the very happy ending of how I ended up in here, talking to you. Fucking Shakespeare couldn't have written it any fucking better." I couldn't have kept the bitterness out of my tone, even if they had given me a hundred Xanax.

"Take your time, Jack. You don't have to talk about anything that you aren't ready to talk about."

"Yeah, doc. Thanks. I know. There isn't a whole lot more of the good parts of the story to tell. Now all that is left to tell is mostly the end." I paused, but figured that the best way to handle a painful subject is just like taking off a band-aid; rip it off quick, and just get the wound out into the open.

"So, Katie took care of all the household stuff, because she wasn't taking any classes. She cleaned the house, she cooked all the meals, and she did all the grocery shopping. We had a good deal of snow that weekend in Chicago. It was a Saturday night. Julia and I were both working on term papers that were due at the end of the semester, which was about two weeks away. I was doing research for a paper for American history.

"It was a Saturday, like I said before. Katie always liked to do a special dinner on Saturday night. It was kind of like our family date night at home. She was making lasagna, and didn't have enough mozzarella cheese. We had used some of it the night before on something, I forget what now." I paused. My breathing was getting tighter as I led up to the topic at hand. It was like a little kid was sitting on my chest, constricting my air flow. Anxiety is a bitch sometimes.

"Katie decided to run up to a local grocery store. It was only a half mile from our apartment. She took Julia's Subaru Impreza, because it had all-wheel drive. We had maybe three inches on the ground, and traffic had been churning it up all day, and the Impreza ate weather like that for lunch. Julia and I both worked on our research papers. It must have been an hour and a half later that we realized that Katie still hadn't returned from the store.

"Julia noticed first. That I clearly remember. After assessing that she wasn't home, she tried to call Katie on her cell. She got no answer, and it went straight to voicemail. The only reason that her phone would do that was if it was off. I felt a mild case of panic building inside of me, and I could tell that Jules felt the same. There was no logical reason that she would have been gone so long; and if she has decided to make a detour, she would have texted or called. I suggested that I would take Katie's Malibu up to the store, and that Julia would stay there in case she came home. It was a good plan. Maybe she just got sidetracked, and her phone died because she forgot to charge it last night. Shit happens. Right?

"I promised Julia that I would call if I found my sister, and she said that she would call if Katie came home. I used the auto-start to start my sister's car, and then I bundled up in my big green parka and headed out into the snow. The weather was worse than I had imagined from inside the warm confines of our apartment. There was a thin coating of ice underneath the snow; and there was about three inches of snow on the ground. Julia's car had been parked under the single car port, because in this kind of weather, we were likely to opt for the all-wheel drive. I pulled out Katie's ice scraper, and cleaned the windows, and hopped into the nicely heated interior.

"I drove several blocks before I realized that something was wrong. I kept heading in that direction until traffic slowed down. The road at an intersection about four streets ahead was blocked off by police cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance. All four corners and part of a side street looked like it was cut off by caution tape, and police were re-routing traffic at the intersections before the one that was blocked off. I was frustrated for about thirty seconds before a sudden horrible realization set in. I cut the car off next to me in the right lane, and pulled onto the sidewalk from the first available space big enough for the Malibu to fit through. I hopped out of the car, and ran full speed toward the intersection. I hadn't even bothered to turn the car off first.

"I knew what had happened in my fucking bones while I was still a block away. I knew why Katie wasn't answering her phone, why it was off; Katie was up there in that intersection. I slipped as I stepped up onto a curb, and took a header into the snow. I heard something in my left wrist snap as I tried to break my fall, but was so focused that I felt nothing. I lurched to my feet, the police tape looking so much to me like the finish line of a Triathlon.

"I finally reached the intersection, but was halted in my tracks by a middle-aged officer who told me that I could go no farther. He looked cold, and vaguely bored. I searched the intersection, and down the cross street I saw what I feared to see. It was Julia's blue Impreza. It had been broadsided when it had been crossing this intersection by a semi-truck. The semi must have really been speeding. The entire driver's side was crushed, and was smashed practically all the way into where the passenger side normally would be. The firemen were trying to cut the car holding the love of my life open with the jaws of life."

"I fell to my knees in the snow. The bored cop asked me something. If I was okay, or needed help. I held my left hand up with my wedding band, and I told him that 'my wife is in that car.'"

"Oh son," the cop said. His face was stricken. He helped me to my feet, and braced me so that I was standing, with his assistance. "Son, I'm sorry. Your wife was killed instantly on impact." Pain beyond description tore my heart into shreds. "If it is any comfort, it was so quick that she never felt a thing." I pulled away from the cop, and sat down hard on a big snow bank on the curb, where the snow had built up from plowing.

"No sir," I said to the policeman. My voice sounded wooden in my own ears. "That shit doesn't fucking help at all. What about the baby?"

"She was pregnant? I'm sorry, son, but I don't know anything about the baby."

"The cop looked like he was about to be sick, and he ran, shouting about the baby, towards the rescuers that were cutting open the Subaru. I had initially felt pain beyond anything I ever imagined. It had built, spiraling in on itself; doubling, and redoubling. It built like a crescendo, until I felt like what was the "me" part of myself shatter into a million pieces. Now I simply felt nothing. I was as cold inside as the snow that I sat on. The next thing I knew I was being mostly carried by two policemen through the yellow tape, and placed into the back of a fire department ambulance. Mercifully, it faced the opposite direction than the car that my Katie was in. There were two paramedics that were examining me. They were asking me questions. I couldn't really understand what they were asking. It was just gibberish. What did any of it matter when the woman that I loved more than life itself lay dead twenty-five feet away? My child was dead. It would never get to feel the sun on its skin, or to pull its mother's wild red curls.

He pushed an oxygen mask into my left hand, and raised it to my face. I must have winced, because the mask got switched to my right, and he examined my left, while the other guy covered me with warm blanket, and shined a bright light into my eyes. They muttered to each other, and one produced a syringe, and swabbed my arm. He said something incomprehensible. He kept repeating himself. I finally got it. He was asking, 'Do you understand?'

"I looked at him in disbelief. 'No, I don't fucking understand. I just want to die. I just want to be with Katie.' He injected me with whatever was in the syringe, and the world went black.

"I awoke in a hospital emergency room, restrained to the bed. The bed was a narrow cot, and had safety bars on either side. My wrists and ankles were bound with two-inch nylon shackles. Apparently, they thought that I was a danger to myself. I tested the bonds by pulling against them, but they were strong enough not to give any, and tight enough not that I couldn't slide my hand through them. I felt pain in my left wrist, and realized that it had some kind of a splint on it. It went from mid-forearm all way onto my hand, and was attached with Velcro.

"My struggling noises must have attracted the nurse, because she came through the closed curtain. She was wearing a teal set of scrubs with the name of the hospital stenciled along the side. She informed me that the doctor had been alerted that I was awake, and that he would be in to see me momentarily. The doctor asked me a bunch of questions, and to be honest I was still in too much shock to give them much thought. I answered each one honestly, and quickly. That is how I found myself in the Howard Treatment Center later that day.

"Before I got to Howard, I had to wait in the emergency room, strapped to the bed, until they could find me a placement at a treatment facility. I tried for a half hour to talk the E.R. nurse into letting me call Julia to tell her the news about Katie. Unless she saw it on the news, she still had no idea what happened to either of us. Judging by the content of Chicago's newscasts, I highly doubted that any double fatality accident would be newsworthy. The nurse finally told me that she would have a doctor call Julia, and give her the bad news. He was a professional, and he was trained for those type of situations. He would also tell her that I was being held for treatment because I was a danger to myself, and that she could contact them tomorrow morning for the details on where I would be treated. I guess that I felt a little relieved by this, because I was not totally sure that I could have told her myself. More than likely, it would have just ended up with me crying on the phone.

"Howard was an in-patient treatment center that specialized in severe depression, and chemical dependency. It was set up like a minimum-security prison. It was organized into wards. Each ward was separated from everything else by a set of steel bars, just like you would see in a prison. Each ward had twenty bedrooms, each occupied by two people. There was a security station in the central corner, with ten rooms running down each of the corridors. There were always three techs, and a nurse on duty, and every foot of the facility was covered by security cameras, even the bathrooms. Across from the security station was the day room. It had a TV, and plenty of books and magazines, and that was where group activities took place. I realize that this is a lot of detail, but I had plenty of time to memorize it.

"I had arrived at Howard, and was immediately seen by one of the staff psychiatrists, who immediately put my on a strong dose of antidepressants, and anti-anxiety meds. I lay down in my bed, figuring that I wouldn't ever sleep again in my lifetime; only to immediately fall asleep because of the sedatives. I awoke to a bell ringing, just like the ones in school. It rang promptly at seven A.M. I guess that I had slept for maybe a half hour.

"The entire day all of the patients were kept busy. We were escorted to meals, and the activity directors tried to interest us in doing crafts in the day room, or therapists encouraged us to do group therapy. For my part, except for meals, I lay in bed curled in the fetal position, just wishing that the world would end so that I could just stop hurting. I thought that the medicine they were giving me was supposed to help; but after the initial shock wore off, then pain came back with a vengeance, and I cried until I could shed no more tears. I got up for meals, and for meds, but only because I was forced to do so. I ate almost nothing, and the meds seemed to do nothing but make me tired. I would have paid any amount just to be numb like I was when I was in shock.