SUSAN THE ONLINE WIDOW

SUSAN, THE ONLINE WIDOW

Susan gasped in horror, she began to breathe convulsively. She couldn’t believe her eyes, she couldn’t believe her ears. The door of their home office was ajar, she could see the screen of the PC and the side view of her husband jerking away. She froze, and her eyes couldn’t blink. On the screen was a nude sexy blonde gyrating obscenely. Her husband moaned and groaned. then he flopped down on the chair. Susan quietly and quickly jumped into their king sized bed and pretended to sleep.

Pete went to their ensuite bathroom, flushed the toilet, brushed his teeth, and lay down his side of the bed, and in no time, he was snoring away like a runaway train. Susan stared at the man who has suddenly become a stranger. She had married him for thirteen years, with whom they had two beautiful girls, Amelia eight, and Lena five and twin boys Lenny and Johnny aged two. She thought they had a perfect marriage. They were university sweet hearts and they married as soon as they graduated. He worked in business management and her in pharmaceutical sales.

She remembered the first time they met. It was a Saturday and they were at the university gym fountain queuing to quench their thirst. He had just finished his basket ball practice and she, her aerobics session. They were both dripping with sweat but they didn’t mind. He was just ahead of her, and as a perfect gentleman, let her drink the ice cold water first. It was like magic, they were drawn together like a magnet. He swept her off her feet. He was a six foot alpha male, ash blonde and blue eyes. She was five foot seven, long blonde hair and blue eyes. They were a Barbie and Ken pair. If they went on a beauty and a man hunt contest, they would win first prize. But Susan was a church going small town girl.

“What do you do tomorrow?”

“In the morning, I go to the Baptist Church, and in the afternoon, the young people hang out doing various fun things.”

“I am new to this town, and am looking for a home church.”

“You are welcomed to join us.”

Soon, with spending lunch together in the university, Saturdays in the gym, and Sundays in church and young people’s activities, they became an item when their infatuation combined with the right chemistry with stars sparkled in the sky. Susan had not dated anyone before, and she was over the moon and she rang home to tell her parents and siblings about Pete.

“He’s got such gorgeous looks to die for, he’s got charm, he’s got charisma.”

“Does he go to church?”

“Yes, mum, I made sure of that.”

Pete gave Susan his college pin and proudly showed off her to his mates like a prize trophy.

Susan was a member of the new wave movement of committing herself to one partner and only after she was married. She signed a pledge with her group of young friends. However, she was blown away by love, at one of their dates, with their car parked in a secluded corner of a public park along the Detroit River, she succumbed to the temptation when he touched her and kissed her on the lips. She gave herself to the testosterone pumping Pete. She loved Pete and she wanted to make him happy. Susan went through a period of dilemma, she had done something out of character, went against her pledge. But now she has tasted the fruits of romance, she loved it and she didn’t want to stop. She was also afraid of losing Pete. All the girls were envious about her.

“Hey! You didn’t tell me that you are a virgin.”

“I thought you knew, everyone in the group have pledged himself.”

“You like it, did you?”

“Yes, “

“Go down to the family planning clinic and get the pills, this way, you won’t get pregnant, and if we don’t tell, nobody will know.”

Susan and Pete continued to go to church on Sundays, but they stopped going to the afternoon group. Susan felt hypocritical going. They told their friends they were busy with university work. They went on long drives and always making out in the cars before they left for their respective flats. Susan drew the line about Pete sleeping over in her flat because she didn’t want her flat mates to be suspicious. If they kept her bedroom door shut, her prude flat mates gave her scorching looks.

As soon as they finished their last examinations, Susan suggested they got married. Her burden of feeling guilty was taking a toll and she felt that getting married was the best solution. Pete was a little reluctant, it wasn’t that he had a footloose and fancy lifestyle. He said, he was just too young to be tied down.

“I don’t want any salacious gossip.”

Eventually Pete agreed to the wedding. He gave Susan an engagement ring with a small solitaire diamond. They went to Susan’s small town of Kingsville, and her parents arranged for a small town wedding. They drove across the Niagara Falls to New York for their honeymoon. Susan enjoyed the shows at the Broadway, they took a ferry and went to the Statute of Liberty, went up the Empire State Building, the Twin towers and the Times Square.

They both got jobs in Toronto, Pete in a small business firm as a trainee manager, and Susan in a pharmaceutical company. Susan was in marketing and she had to travel the whole of Canada to meet her clients of chemists and supermarkets and departmental stores. Three out of four weeks in the month, Susan was out of town, and she was very tired and heading for a burnt out.

After such a hectic five years, Susan was ready to throw in the towel and was glad Pete got a new job as a manager of a factory that operated twenty four hours a day. With his steady income, they decided they were financially well of to start a family. Pete often had to be called away in the middle of the night if there were problems in the factory.

Amelia came, Susan and Pete chose the decision for Susan to be a stay home mum.

“I earn enough for my wife to take care of the family.”

Susan was busy with Amelia, and also having cups of coffee with other young mums at play group. Then Lena came, and Susan started taking Amelia to a dance and movement class. Then unexpectedly, she got pregnant with the boys Lenny and Johnny. The pregnancy was arduous, Susan had high blood pressure and placenta previa. She had to be hospitalized and be in complete bed rest from the sixth months. Her mum Kelly came from Kingsville to help baby sit the girls. The boys were born cesarean section and Susan took a long time to recover. With the busyness of two toddlers and two little girls, Pete took a back seat in Susan’s life including her romance life. It was too hard to get a baby sitter to come in because not many people wanted to be responsible for four little kids. So they hardly went out as a couple. Pete went to the bar with the boys on Friday nights. Anyway, he was very busy and was always having work at home in the office.

After settling the kids to bed, Susan was usually too tired to do anything but to hit the sack by her self because Pete was busy in the office. That fateful night, Susan woke up thinking Lenny was crying for her, but it wasn’t. It was Pete’s groaning noise as though he was having sex. The door was ajar, and she crept quietly. Shock! Horror! He was masterbating whilst watch hard core pornography. Susan froze for a moment. She felt sick in the stomach.

“No wonder he has not been intimate and sleeping with me,” thought Susan.

He was always saying,” You are tired! Or I am tired.”

Susan stayed up tossing and turning that night, wondering how long he had been doing this. The next morning, after Pete had gone to work, and the girls to school, Susan went to the office. As she was not a computer savvy person, she had hardly gone to the computer. By clicking the mouse, she found hundreds of pictures and videos. She couldn’t believe the monster she had married. She wondered if it was her who was partly responsible.

Susan didn’t know how to confront Pete, so she decided she would observe Pete’s pattern. It was his nightly escapade, at around ten pm, when he thought that Susan was sound asleep, he would be watching the sick hard core pornography and masterbating at the same time. He had not bother to shut the door because it was stuffy in the windowless home office which was a small space for a walk-in wardrobe.

One night, Pete had a phone call from the factory and had to leave urgently. He left the computer on, he was chatting online with a “lover”. Susan found old chats of seductive chats and also nude photos of his “lover”. This lover, Crystal was a brunette and didn’t look any much better than herself. But she talked dirty and Susan was appalled by the cyber sex they were having.

Pete came back to find Susan sitting in front of the computer. When Susan confronted him, he denied any knowledge and said, such sites popped up when he was surfing information for work. Then Susan said, she knew everything, he got mad at her and raved and railed.

“All men watch porn.”

“What about your cyber lover?”

“Cyber lover, that is exactly that, cyber! There is nothing physical”

“I have talked to our pastor, Porn is bad news.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Even Oprah and Dr Phil say that porn is bad. You have a big problem.”

“How long have you been watching?”

“From the time you were pregnant with Amelia.”

“You are a sick whacko!!!”

“I will delete them and not watch again.”

A leopard doesn’t change its spots. Pete was so addicted and he continued to have his escapades. Susan knows because he locks the office in the evening. But during the day, when Pete is away, Susan went to the community college and learnt to become computer savvy. Susan finds out Pete was still indulging in his dirty habit. She issues an ultimatum, Choose your cyber sex or the kids and me.

A cold war developed between Pete and Susan. When he finished his dinner, even before kissing the children good night, he hides himself in the office. He knew Susan would never leave him because of the children. Susan cried herself to bed every night.

From one evil to another, Pete’s bestiality had degraded himself so much that he was viewing child pornography and other sadistic pornography. Susan stared at the obscene images and the innocent little children abused by pathetic men and women. She was wondering how she would report Pete’s illicit activities. She knew Pete might be hauled to jail if she reported him, and she won’t want that. How would she and the children survive if he went to jail.

One day, Pete left his cell phone on the Tall Boy chest of dressers in the bedroom when he went to shower. Susan was tempted to check his cell phone for text messages. She was petrified, among the usual I luv U texts, there was one extremely disturbing. I luv the tight pussy of Ur little girl. 

“The bastard! How am I going to confront him?”

When Pete got out of his shower, Susan confronted Pete about the text messages.

“These are just part of the cyber sex, I told you before!”

“But what about the one about our little girl?”

“You are just being paranoid, it is nothing!”

Susan was at her wits end. She didn’t know what to do? She rang her mum Kelly at Kingsville. When she picked Amelia and Lena back from school, after giving the children their cookies and their glass of milk, she took Lena, Lenny and Johnny to her next door neighbor, Alice. Alice had often babysat for free because she understood how hard it was for a young mother of four.

In the privacy of Amelia’s room, Susan asked Amelia if anyone had touched her in a way that she didn’t like.

“Yes, mummy, remember the day you had a bad stomachache and Alice babysat Lena, Lenny and Johnny and Daddy took me with him to pick up your medicine?”

“Yes I remember.”

“Well, Daddy took me to this place with a bed and got me a big ice cream cone.  Then when I was eating the ice cream, a woman came with a bag of marsh marrow for me.”

“What happened next?

“First they kissed, and they took off all their clothes and went to bed. They told me watch TV.”

“After that?”

“Dad said, be a good girl and join them in bed. They took off my knickers and started to touch me down there.”

“Oh My God!!!! What else?”

“They kissed me down here and touched more. The woman rather hurt me, Dad told her not too deep.”

“After that, they washed me and gave me a mars bar. They told me that this was our secret.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to tell you but when I got home, you were asleep so I didn’t tell you.”

“Oh my God!!!! Oh my God!!!!”

When the children were in bed, Susan confronted Pete about what Amelia had told her.

“She’s a lying kid.”

“Explain how she got to describe so vividly?

“She came into the office one day and saw me watching child pornography. I didn’t realize she was there until she watched for about ten minutes.”

“You sicko whacko!”

“I am leaving you, and I will report to the police about you and your child pornography.”

“Do that, and I will kill you.” Pete threatened and yelled at Susan.

Susan couldn’t sleep a wink. The next morning, Susan quickly packed her bags, and the children’s clothes. She wrote a note, “You will never see us again.” and left it by her dressing table. She had intended to go to her mum’s and get settled before she decided what to do.

They never made it to Kingsville, not too far along the freeway, Susan’s station wagon veered to the incoming lane and had a head on collision. The impact was so bad, there were a million glass crystals lying on the road. The cars were in a mangled heap. All the occupants in Susan’s car were killed on the spot. The driver of the other car was killed too. Only his front passenger lived to tell the tale of how Susan’s car for no rhyme or reason veered to their lane after she got out of the coma.

The police went to Pete’s office to inform Pete. Pete lying in his teeth told the police that  since the birth of the twins, Susan had been suffering from post natal depression and was doing things out of character. He produced the “You will never see us again.” note and the police initially took it as a suicide note and Susan had deliberately made the collision to look like an accident.

Susan’s car was taken to the crimes scene unit. Detailed investigation showed that external reasons were not the responsible factors: the weather was fine, the traffic was fine that morning. There were no drugs or alcohol in both drivers’ blood. The mechanics found that the braking system in her station wagon was tampered with. Some one had deliberately wanted to cause an accident that day.

The Toronto police went down to Kingsville to interview Kelly. Kelly confirmed that Susan had rang her to tell her about Pete’s addiction to hard core and child pornography and how he had threatened to kill her. She also suspected that Pete and his lover had sexually molested her grand daughter Amelia. They confiscated Pete’s personal computer. Pete thought he could fool the police and destroy all evidences of his pornography. Little did he know that though the images were deleted, they remained in the hard disk and could never be destroyed.

Crystal was arrested and in her bargain for amnesty, agreed to testify against Pete.

“It was Pete’s idea to molest his daughter Amelia. He arranged to take Amelia to the motel and Crystal just went along. Pete is a very sick man, he got worst and worst, at first, it was just soft core, then hard core then child pornography. I am very sorry I tagged along and indirectly caused the death of five innocent lives. Pornography is evil.”

When the head of the jury read his note, “GUILTY” Kelly and her husband Raymond said, “The monster should be locked in jail with the key thrown away.”

Kelly and Raymond went to the city cemetery. In the snow covered grounded, five new graves stood up like a sore thumb. They were covered with fresh flowers. Friends and starngers have come to mourn for these five innocent lives, plucked away by the evilness of a man.

“Susan, Amelia, Lena, Lenny and Johnny, if you are looking down from heaven today, you will know that though your deaths were avenged, I will never be the same again. Too many pieces of the puzzles have been snatched from me. I should be the one lying in the grave instead of you. It is not right, it is too cruel. Friends tell me they admire me for my courage and fortitude at this sad time, but what do they know? My heart is broken a million pieces, it is as if a zillion arrows are piercing into it.”

“Rest in peace, my darlings. I will make sure the beast will never come out of prison.” Wiping his tears away, Raymond helped Kelly up from kneeling in front of the graves.