Free SHUDDERVILLE FIVE by Mia Zabrisky

 
Episode Five
The Judge
    December 23, 1965—Boston, Massachusetts
    Large ornate flakes swirled through the air, reminding Will Ballard of the randomness of the universe. He thought about his adulterous wife and how much he wanted to kill her. He held up his hand to catch a few flakes, each one unique, and they melted on his palm. He shivered and checked his watch. Her class was almost over. Any minute now. He glanced up and down the sidewalk and smoothed his fingers over the stubble on his chin. He’d forgotten to shave that morning. He’d been forgetting a lot of things lately.
    Charlotte came strolling out of Randall Hall with a young male student, and Will’s breath froze in his lungs. She looked incredible—her coat was apple green and her cheeks were apple red. She was slender and beautiful with blue-green eyes and long auburn hair, and her young male student was tall and handsome and athletic-looking, a guy of about 20, and hell, they were laughing. They appeared to be exchanging cynical wry comments, and his wife seemed blissfully happy—and that shocked him, because he remembered a time when he used to make her laugh. Will liked it when his wife laughed; her whole face lit up, and she reminded him of the girl on the bus with the shapely legs who’d picked him up eight years ago, the girl with the prim mouth who’d spoken with such hopefulness and energy about her “embryonic career,” the girl who’d taken him home to her apartment and had led him into her bedroom and knelt down in front of him and slowly unzipped his pants. Her head lolling back. Those prim lips promising things.
    Now he burned with jealousy. He waited until they were a few yards away before he stood up and met her impenetrable gaze. They were supposed to be in love, but maybe they’d never been in love? Maybe these past eight years had been nothing but self-delusion on his part? In what universe was this okay?
    Charlotte stared at her husband as if she’d been hit in the stomach. “Will? What are you doing here?”
    The young male student watched them nervously, while snow drifted down around them, creating white scribbles in the air.
    Charlotte said, “Owen, this is my husband, Will. Will, this is one of my students, Owen Landry.”
    “Hello.” The boy held out his hand. Adorable as a puppy. Anxious to please.
    Will turned and loped away—like Frankenstein’s monster loping and staggering off into the blizzard.
    “Will?” Charlotte cried with genuine anguish. “Where are you going?”
    Three days later, they were a thousand miles up in the sky.
    She had promised to love him forever. Him. Only him.
    They had already booked their flight to Santa Barbara for the holidays and didn’t want to cancel. They were spending Christmas with the in-laws.
    “As long as we’re there, let’s rent a car and drive to Solvang, okay?” Charlotte said soothingly, still trying to make it up to him. “I want to buy a bottle of that burgundy that Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman were always drinking in Notorious .”
    Great. Now he was jealous of Cary Grant.
    Will didn’t remember the movie, only his wife’s detailed recounting of certain scenes. He’d fallen asleep twice while watching Notorious .
    “Sure,” he said.
    “Okay.” She nuzzled against his shoulder.
    He knew that she’d once loved him. Truly loved him. Life was a series of moments—and Charlotte had loved him for many of those moments, but at some point she had stopped loving him, and the moments kept slipping away. Life was liquid—Will knew that now. Time was fluid. You couldn’t control what happened. The only constant was change. Except that he was developing a theory about how to reverse that. How to alter time and space. He was working on a quantum project with his partner—a secret project. Not even the boss knew about it.
    Charlotte had the window seat, and she kept turning to look at the clouds with such intensity on her face, he suspected she wasn’t over Owen