06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (11 page)

Still, Sirles was worried, and he ordered Swartz to keep a special eye on the young IC man from Houston. He wasn’t sure when or if James Bergstrom’s buckling veneer would crack again. For his part, James was acutely aware that his superiors now had doubts about him. “For the rest of the time on the boat, they had someone looking out for me at all times,” James told Linda. When the
Ohio
neared port, a concerned Sirles ordered Bergstrom to leave early with the mail drop and issued orders for him to report to the psychiatric unit of the naval hospital “for a checkup.”

Jim Sirles was reassigned to other duty, and that was his last patrol on the
Ohio.
If he had stayed, he wasn’t certain how he would have felt about taking Bergstrom out to sea again. “I had some doubts about letting him continue on-board,” Sirles said later. “I felt he had some real problems. Though he seemed to settle down after that night with the knife and he did do his work, I wasn’t sure he should continue to serve on a nuclear submarine.”

The day after James’s unexpectedly early arrival, Linda drove him back to the naval hospital for a second appointment. She was worried, about both James and his future in the navy. Again she waited in the hallway for nearly an hour, but this time the doctor called her into his office, where James was seated quietly on a chair.

“Your husband is all right,” the boyishly young navy doctor in the white coat assured her with a smile. “It’s just anxiety from being out on patrol.”

The doctor went on to discuss their marriage and the importance of sticking together to work things out. “I couldn’t get over the feeling that James had blamed all this on me,” Linda would later say. “But I didn’t care, just as long as he was all right and things were going to be okay.”

As far as leaving the navy, the doctor didn’t recommend it, but the decision was up to James. “It could mean you won’t get an honorable discharge,” he cautioned. “That can make it tough to get a job later.”

James looked at Linda and asked, “What should I do?”

“It’s up to you,” she said quietly, holding her breath as he decided. “It’s your call.”

After a moment’s hesitation, James said, “I’ll stick it out. I’ve just got two years left.”

Although she tried to look noncommittal, Linda was relieved. She had no desire to return to Texas, at least not yet. Since arriving in Washington, she’d felt progressively stronger and freer. Even the occasional turmoil of her marriage wasn’t enough to cloud her new enthusiasm. It was as if the crisp mountain breezes had blown away the old Houston cobwebs that had imprisoned her. “For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid,” she would later say. “The nightmares were gone.”

After that second doctor’s appointment, James settled into his regular routine onshore. It took almost a month for the
Ohio
to go through refit before the gold crew set sail on October 14. Then there was school each morning, and in the early afternoons he’d leave the base and head home to be with Linda.

For her part, Linda treated James as if he were in a fragile, hand-blown glass bubble. “I would have done almost anything to make him happy,” she would later say. “I wanted so much for our marriage and his career in the navy to work out.”

In some ways as the months passed, James seemed changed. There were small things, little indications that something preyed on his mind. Often he disappeared in the afternoon or at night, saying he wanted to take a walk. “I just need to be alone,” he explained. Later he became obsessed with emptying the wastebasket in the kitchen. Even on nights when it held nothing more than a single sheet of paper, James would be gone for fifteen or twenty minutes until he walked up the steps to their apartment dangling the empty basket in his hand. Though the complex’s heavy
brown metal Dumpster was less than two hundred yards away on the side of the complex, Linda wasn’t too worried. “I figured he was just outside thinking,” she later explained.

But what she did find disturbing was days when she found James staring vacantly out the front window at an apartment opposite theirs. Startled by her presence, he hurriedly planted himself in front of the television. Curious, Linda went to the window and glanced down as her husband had moments before. There in an apartment catty-corner to theirs, she saw a young woman, a navy wife, sitting alone in her own living room.

Days later, James disappeared with the kitchen wastebasket, and when he didn’t immediately return, Linda followed him down. She couldn’t help being curious.
What could he be doing?
she wondered. Linda rounded the end of the complex near the Dumpster, and James wasn’t there. As she turned the corner to the back of the apartments, she thought she saw him, on his tiptoes, peering through one of the bedroom windows that lined the building, five feet from the ground. Perhaps sensing her presence, James immediately bobbed down and picked up a window screen that lay nearby on the ground. Standing up, he smiled at Linda as if he’d just noticed her. “Look what I found,” he shouted, holding up the screen. “I bet it’ll fit the bathroom. We can have cross ventilation.”

Linda wasn’t sure what she had just walked in on, but she had the unmistakable feeling that until she arrived, her husband had been watching someone through a bedroom window. When she confronted him, he only laughed. “Why would I want to look at anyone else when I have a wife as gorgeous as you?” He smiled. “Come on. Let’s go upstairs and have some fun.”

By the end of October, Linda had set aside most of her fears as James acted more like himself. They played tennis again, took long walks on the shoreline. If it weren’t for his
continual disappearances in the evening—always saying he just needed to be alone—and his obsession with emptying the wastebasket, he was nearly the old James, with a sex drive as strong as ever. It was as if he couldn’t keep his hands off her.

Then something happened that she had half expected ever since that night in Houston. One afternoon when he called her in to make love, James held two long, white athletic socks. Tentatively he asked, “Can I tie you up?”

Linda considered for a minute before answering. She felt a sense of dread welling up inside her, yet James had been so volatile in the past few months, she hated to refuse him. “Okay,” she said, solemnly. “I guess it would be all right.”

Linda kneeled on the bed in her bra and panties and, as he had that first night, James cinched her wrists, then her ankles, together, but this time he didn’t stop there. Before she realized what he was doing, he reached down and grabbed a balled-up third sock and jammed it into her mouth, binding it in place with a fourth.

A sense of apprehension settled over Linda.
My God, what is he doing?
she wondered, as James began mechanically fondling her, running his hands over the white lace of her bra. He seemed stiff, robotlike, almost disengaged from his actions, but it wasn’t until he leaned over to unhook the back of her bra and let it droop softly from her shoulders that she saw his face. Inches away, his breath hot against her flesh, James gazed down at her and smiled. The man she saw above her was the other James, the James with the blank eyes of that night in Houston, the dazed and transfixed James who leered at her from the balcony the day he’d returned from sea. Unable to cry out, she swallowed, hard.

As before, James ran his hands over the sensitive skin of her inner thigh, downward to the arch of her foot until her leg muscles contracted. Linda recoiled, shrinking away from him, and shook her head,
No.
James smiled noncommittally at her, intensely caught up in the game. He laid her down and leaned over her like a cat eyeing its prey. Smiling, he
pulled a pillow from the bed, and placed it over her eyes. She attempted to draw away from him and shook her head, harder. “No, no,” she shouted, her cries muffled by the gag.

“It seemed like it lasted forever,” she’d later say. “I could see him from underneath the pillow. His eyes were dead, cold. He kept running his hands over me. It gave me the chills, and I began shivering, so I couldn’t stop. I was sobbing under the pillow.”

James appeared as if nothing were wrong, fondling and stroking her though she pulled away, showing not a glimmer of understanding. Finally, when she’d given up hope, he noticed tears running down her cheeks. He wiped them away with the back of his hand, untied the gag, and gave her an embarrassed smile.

“Not the gag, okay?” she pleaded. “I can’t stand the gag or the pillow.”

“Okay, not the gag,” he answered sheepishly, untying her hands and her feet. Still frightened and confused, Linda lay beneath him trying not to cry as James satisfied himself and then rolled over and fell instantly to sleep.

Splotches of red and gold dotted the forests, and on Halloween day, Linda’s twenty-fourth birthday, they carved two pumpkins. James fashioned one with long, pointed triangles for teeth. Linda’s had a big smile and one winking eye. That night they drove through subdivisions of one-story houses not far from their apartment. Goblins and witches and gypsies and pirates were afoot, the neighborhood children trick-or-treating. As they circled the quiet neighborhoods with porch lights lit and saw neighbor after neighbor answer a doorbell with a bowl of candy, James talked about going back to Houston. “I can’t wait to go back to the plant to work,” he said. “Just to be able to spend a night with Sam and Eddie again. I can’t help thinking about all the great times we used to have.”

“I wish we could stay here,” Linda said sadly. “I love it so much.”

“Well, we can’t,” said James, angrily. “We’re going to finish the four years and get out. You’ll see, I’ll get out of the navy and we’ll go back to Houston. Everything will be all right again.”

By mid-November, the leaves had all dropped, exposing skeletal trunks and branches against the green of the towering pines, when James came home from the base one afternoon and, as usual, called her into the bedroom to make love. He had the drapes pulled and two pairs of Linda’s leg warmers in his hands. “Strip and lay down on the bed,” he said excitedly.

“You want to play this game, we’ll do it, James,” she said, firmly. “But no gag.”

“Okay, no gag,” he agreed.

She undressed, then kneeled on the bed, expecting him to tie her as he had in the past—arms and legs together—only instead he pushed her onto her stomach and straddled above her. He laid the leg warmers beside them on the bed and then held the first one by the ends, its weight sagging between his grasp, until he snapped it between his hands, the weave tightening like a child’s finger snake. He knotted one end tightly around her left wrist, as he had before, and cinched her right wrist to it. Then he rolled her over.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“You’ll see,” he answered. “Relax. You’ll like it.”

As Linda wriggled her hands behind her, James turned his attention to her legs. One at a time, he bound her ankles with one of the leg warmers, then tied them individually to the bed frame, awkwardly anchoring her to the bed, helpless to move more than inches in any direction.

“What’s this?” she asked, fighting the panic she felt welling inside her.

“It’s just a little different game,” he said. “You’re too uptight, Linda. Just settle down and you’ll like it.”

Once he had her tied, he lay beside her and fondled her breasts, then looked down at her quizzically, cupping his
hand over her mouth. Glaring at her as if he didn’t have his creation right yet, he recovered a rolled-up sock from between the mattress and bed frame and forced it solidly into her mouth. As Linda felt alarm rising within her and struggled to spit it out, James retrieved a second sock from its hiding place and banded it around her jaw, tying it above the nape of her neck, fixing the gag in place.

Linda protested, shaking her head, no, and pulling away from him, but she couldn’t move, bound as she was to the bed. James laughed quietly at her predicament, then became sternly serious, running the back of his hand along the soft curve of her breasts and lightly down her belly. She shivered and he smiled complacently at her.

“You really don’t like that, do you?” he asked, grinning down at her.

She tried to answer, but the gag strangled her words. Instead she shook her head again, more sternly, insisting, No.

James gazed vacantly at her. She could have been a stranger, someone for whom he had no feelings and to whom he had no ties. As amusing as a mouse winding its way through a fickle maze. To her surprise, he then coolly stood up and pulled on his jeans.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, nonchalantly walking out the apartment door and, without further explanation, closing it behind him.

Linda lay there, she wasn’t sure how long, staring up at the ceiling, cold and alone. As minutes ticked away and James failed to return, she could no longer keep the fear from rising up inside her.
What if someone sees me like this?
she thought.
What if he never comes back? Why is he doing this? What is he going to do to me?

In a panic, she pulled at her bindings until the cloth dug into her flesh, but her efforts only wedged the knots tighter around her wrists. Calming herself, she tried to relax, working her hands one fold of flesh at a time through the knotted leg warmer that immobilized both. They were bound tight.
If she pulled, the cloth cut into her skin, denying the circulation in her hands, but if she moved slowly, the knit had some play in it. Finally her right hand broke free. She pulled off the gag and began gulping in the air, her body heaving. She was untying her legs, her hands trembling, when James walked through the door.

“Where were you?” she asked, her voice breaking with pain.

As before, he appeared detached and preoccupied. “I just had to go outside for a minute,” he said with a shrug.

Indifferently James leaned against the doorframe and watched as she untied her ankles.

“Where the hell were you?” she demanded again, this time shouting between sobs. “Why are you doing this to me?”

James looked like he had on the balcony the day he’d returned from sea, distant, as if through a fog. His expression was blank. Finally, in a toneless voice devoid of emotion, he explained, “I just wanted to see if you could get out.”