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After The Train

Part 6, Chapter 2: After The Trains - Until Death Do Us Part

As I mentioned previously, when we were looking through Catie's purse and keys, I brought up the need to vacate Catie's apartment. No one had gotten to that idea yet.

She had two sets of keys. They asked me if I knew what the various keys went to.

"This key ring has the keys to my house and my cars," I told them. I think that surprised everyone sitting at the table. "Because I travel," I explained, "I gave them to her so that when she was coming to visit me, she could find my car at the airport, drive to my house, let herself in and not have to wait for me if I was coming back from someplace else in the country." I also pointed out we had planned for her to move in with me (before we had found out she was pregnant and were discussing marriage plans), so she would have a set of keys anyway.

"What about these?" asking about the other key ring.

"Well, those are her car keys (pointing out the two car keys). And these three keys are the ones to her apartment and apartment building. I'm guessing these other keys are for her office."

"Do you know where her car is?"

"Yes, it's right in front of her building," I said. "I had a friend of ours go check to see if it was there."

They gave me back my wallet sized X-rated pictures of me that Catie had been keeping in her wallet. Abby later asked me for them and I gave them to her.

I also mentioned that New Year's Day had some appearance of normalcy, though there was nothing normal about this. There was some planning around Friday and Saturday and there were calls to and from friends and family members. But there were all the parades and football games to watch on television. I remember them being on the TV but not the games themselves or anything particularly notable about any of them. It was a mindless activity that served to divert somewhat from the pain and grief.

At times, Abby stayed relatively close to me when we were watching television and commented on how she missed having her sister cuddled up next to her or with the three of us cuddled together, something that everyone had seen previously. It was just being close to each other. There weren't any sexual overtones. Even when she came to talk with me earlier in the morning, there didn't seem to be anything sexual about it even when she knew I was naked under the covers.

The combination of all the emotions and the relative lack of sleep began to take a toll and as the last football game concluded, I headed to bed. Again, one of the advantages of being in the Pacific time zone was that those west coast games like the Rose Bowl completed at a reasonable hour. I prepared the bed in a similar manner as I had the previous night with a pillow and one of Catie's shirts. I drifted off to sleep, tearful, feeling terribly alone. The shock was wearing off.

I had been sleeping for a while when I was awakened by the covers being lifted. At first I was disoriented and felt the fog of a deep sleep. Then I snapped out of the fog when I realized that someone was getting in bed with me. It was Abby.

I think in that moment I said "What?"

"Can I sleep with you?" Abby asked very quietly. I told her that I didn't think sex was something I wanted at the moment (much less in a house full of family).

"I just need to feel close to someone," she said. I certainly understood that and I allowed her in the bed with me. She took off her pajamas and slid in behind me while I stayed on my side wrapped against the pillow and Catie's shirt. She placed her arm over me as she pulled herself close. I must admit that it felt comforting to have her close to me like that and I drifted back to sleep. A few hours later, Abby got out of the bed, put her pajamas back on, gave me a kiss and thanked me. She left and I went back to sleep.

On January 2nd, the real work began. Contacting the company's HR to formally notify them of Catie's death was handled by her dad with my help. We had to fax a copy of her death certificate. In addition, there were incomplete issues associated with the hospital that had to be handled. There were personal items in her office that would have to be recovered. I contacted her apartment complex management to find out if Catie had rent due by the end of the week (she didn't as she had paid before she left for Christmas) and I let them know that she had been killed in a traffic accident. I indicated that arrangements would be made to vacate her apartment, though the schedule was not clear when I was on the phone.

Catie never tried on the lingerie I gave her. She was going to wait until I came to Portland to model them for me and maybe wear one set during New Year's Eve. They were a too small for Abby (Abby had wider hips and larger breasts than Catie). I asked if I could return them to the store where I had purchased them and was told that I could. Abby did not want to go with me. Instead, she wanted to spend some time with her friends. That was understandable, and she ended up spending the night with one of them.

When I returned the lingerie to the store, the main after-Christmas rush to return items had diminished and returns went back to the departments they were bought from. I had the three lingerie sets in the box that they had been wrapped in. One of the women whom was there when I bought them was there and remembered me. Had they been worn? No. Are there any issues with the item(s)? No. Reason for return? Not needed. Death of the recipient. Without going into a lot of details, I told her that my girlfriend had died in a traffic accident. She told me how sorry she was for me.

When I returned to the house, I called Jody. She and Mark were planning to fly to Portland the next day as were several of Catie's friends from her office and Chicago. Her previous boyfriend was not planning on attending the funeral but I thanked Jody for contacting him.

Her brothers and I planned on meeting in Chicago the following weekend to clean out Catie's apartment. They asked my estimate of how much needed to be moved. I told them that it depended upon how much of her furniture they wanted to bring back. I could list out what was hers in the apartment and what we had talked about her giving away or selling in Chicago before moving to NC. I told them it would all fit within a large trailer or a mid-sized rental truck. They would also be driving Catie's car back to Oregon. During that visit they would be getting Catie's personal items from her employer while they were in Chicago.

This was much harder on the immediate family members. They had lost both their mother and their sister. And their dad had lost his wife of more than 30 years as well as his oldest daughter. Late in the afternoon, after calls back to the Central time zone had been completed, I sat with Catie's dad.

I knew that Catie's pregnancy was as much a surprise to him as it was to me. And I didn't want it to be an issue between us over the next couple of days I was going to be there. I told him that it really was a complete surprise to me even though Catie and I were already looking to the future and had been talking about and planning for a family. He knew that Catie loved me, both from what Catie had said to him AND from what Marianne had said about Catie and I. He knew that I was "really good for Catie" and how good to her I was.

"I wasn't kidding when I said that we were going to tell you together and that we wanted your consent in our getting married. If she hadn't gotten pregnant, we probably would be asking and announcing our plans to get married sometime late this year, things were moving that fast." Either way his grandchildren, our children were going to be "legitimate." It was a really good conversation about how we loved both our partners in life. He shared some of the experiences of his marriage with me in how it was for them to be married for such a long time.

Late in the conversation, his two sons joined us and it was just us four guys talking, bound together by our love within family and our loss, as well.

Friday was a day where the minutes and hours seemed to drag. We had an evening to spend at the funeral home greeting friends and family. It was quite a gathering. Many of the people knew one or more of the family members and didn't know that Catie and I had been dating (and why should they know?). Some were people that Catie went to school with. And there were eight or nine people that were her coworkers and/or friends that had flown from Chicago. Of course, there was Jody and Mark. I knew or had met some of the other people previously during my visits to Chicago.

Carol came up to me and introduced herself. I did remember her from the party back in September. We had a somewhat inappropriate conversation (and quiet given where we were) about our "phone sex encounter" and the conversations that followed. Catie had told me that she had shown Carol my x-rated photos and it was part of their encounters where I was an object of the fantasies. She told me that I looked different "dressed." A little bit of unexpected levity related to our sex life.

It was also an emotionally draining experience. People expressed sympathy and empathy for what we all were going through. At some point in this, I remembered thinking that the family and friends of the driver of the truck were probably going through something similar in both the loss and all the steps that were needed for them to go on. Other than wondering what happened and why, I hadn't experienced any anger at him for what he had done. He was dead too, and there was nothing I could say or do that could or would affect the outcome.

We were all glad to be finished with this first step. All I could really do is listen since I knew so few people and so few people knew who I was. The Chicago contingent asked me how I was doing and chatted with me for a while before leaving and heading to their hotels. When we arrived back at the house we all commented on how many people had come to the visitation (and for the family, how many hadn't been seen for a while). It was time to decompress as best we could.

Abby and I sat in Catie's bedroom and talked for a long while. The door was open and others wandered in and out and joined and left the conversation. It was mostly about how things were going to change in the near and the long term. I told her that although her brothers weren't far away, it was really going to be just her and her dad and the house was going to seem very, very empty. There was a certain reality that was starting to settle in.

The funeral was on Saturday, January 4th. The day started off mostly sunny and with a strong breeze blowing down the Columbia River Gorge. I said a few words at the funeral about Catie, reciting a passage from Richard Bach's book, The Bridge Across Forever. The words always touched me, but never so much as with Catie in the short time we were together. That closure of our relationship has always been the hardest. The sense of love and love lost is what remains.

I also said a few words about Marianne and the some of the things I had learned about her as a mother and a wife. Somehow, I did manage to hold myself together. There's a place within myself where I "go" in these times to bring the words. After the funeral there was a traditional buffet style luncheon and a chance to socialize one more time on a sad occasion and to celebrate the lives of the people we knew.

With the funeral complete, the immediate family returned to the house for the afternoon. Some of the extended family came by for a while, as well. At one level, it felt good to have this task completed. It was draining. I went upstairs to change into some more comfortable casual clothes. I was in the bedroom when the door opened and Abby slipped in. She had brought some clothes with her and set them on the bed.

"I want to show you something," she said as she slipped off her blouse and skirt. Underneath was one of the camisole and tap pants set that I had given her for Christmas. She started to say something about how she and her sister were going to model them for me before bursting into tears. I held her for a few minutes until the wave of tears passed. She regained some composure, finished undressing and then putting on the clothes she had brought into the bedroom. I finished dressing as well. I left the bedroom and went downstairs. A few minutes later Abby also came downstairs.

After a long and tough week, we all would be "returning to the world" that was now very different for each of us. I would be leaving on Sunday morning to head back east. The oldest brother and his fiancée would be heading back because school started again on Monday. Same was true for Abby as her school year would also resume. Her younger brother would be sticking around the following week before flying to Chicago with his older brother to clean out Catie's apartment.

Over the course of the week there had been numerous short and private conversations / discussions between Abby and I about what was next. I think Abby was still looking for or hoping for something with her and I. It had been a bit of a competition between her and her sister and I knew that. So did Catie. The events of the past week had shaken that. It wasn't only Catie's death, it was Catie's pregnancy.

I pointed out that Catie sensed her "biological clock" was ticking away as she approached the age of 30. It wasn't the dominant issue in her life (yet) and she knew that at some point she wanted to take on the commitment of being a mother. We talked about the role models of her mother and father. And best of all, from Catie's perspective, was that she got to see what I was like in the parenting role. The reality of my divorce gave Catie the opportunity to see me in a way she wouldn't have gotten to experience.

"And we talked about it. A lot," I said.

Even though it was scary from the perspective of upending "plans," it was a role that we had talked about stepping into with one another later in the year. I told Abby that was why it was such an easy "yes" when it really came down to having this child or children. The message I giving Abby was simply this: although she had real-life experience about how quickly a life could be taken away, that didn't mean that she shouldn't or couldn't plan for a series of life experiences consistent with her progression in age. She had things to experience that her older sister had already experienced.

"Like what?" she asked during one of our conversations.

"Prom, high school graduation, first day, week, month, and year of college. Graduation from college. That first job associated with your education. Love interests, new and lost. Maybe finding someone you love deeply."

I did ask Abby what the "plug" was all about when I was here at Thanksgiving. Was she trying to get pregnant? She told me no.

"Okay?" still trying to figure out the use of the plug.

"I really love the feeling of you cumming in me, knowing that it's you cum that's dripping out of me."

"Your sister said the same thing to me."

"I just wanted to show my friends how much of your cum was inside me." It was some sort of badge of honor among her friends. More like proof of having sex and the relative novelty of sexual experiences.

Abby told me that she still wanted to feel me inside her again. I had held her off all week telling her that I really didn't feel like it under the circumstances. I had let her sleep in the bed with me a couple of times just to feel some closeness and had limited the encounters to that. She really tried to convince me on Saturday night before I left and I declined. I told her that maybe some other time in the future because I knew I would be back in Portland again in the spring of 1986.

I said all my goodbyes to the extended family members on Saturday as they departed. On Sunday morning, I was up early preparing to depart. It was a tearful departure for all of us. I drove to the airport, turned in my rental car and boarded a plane to Chicago. I had told Jody, Mark, and Carol that I was flying to Chicago to go to Catie's apartment to pickup some items and I would be spending the night. Jody and Mark would be going to the NFL playoff game that was happening in Chicago but told me that they'd call me at Catie's apartment and come by after the game.

It was a quiet flight in that I was lost in my thoughts. The flight crew gave us updates on the score of the football game and we arrived before the game was over. I rented a car and drove to Catie's apartment. I had my own set of keys to her apartment. I let myself in and turned up the thermostat. It was quite cold in Chicago though not abnormally so. The game was just ending as I arrived at her apartment (the Bears won).

Besides it actually being cold in her apartment because the thermostat had been turned back, I was struck by the sense of being cold and lonely. The immediate shock of being told of Catie's death had diminished. Seeing her on that table in the morgue was tough and I realized (later) that it made her death real for me. But like my home, Catie's room in her parents house in Portland, and now her apartment, there were only "things" associated with her that were left for those of us dealing with her death. I played the unplayed messages on her answering machine and noted that some of these people probably didn't know that she had died.

I took my suitcase back into her bedroom and placed it one the bed. The first order of business was to collect the videotapes. I got them all, including the one that was sitting in her VCR. I knew where Catie stored her journals, or at least her most recent ones. I collected those (most were already boxed). I looked through her desk and various drawers to see if there was anything else that I should probably collect before her brothers arrived the following weekend. There were a couple of 5 x 7 X-rated photos of me and of us that I had given her. She had placed one of them on her nightstand in a simple frame and I decided that should probably go back with me. I left the less x-rated "selfie" images to be collected a week later.

The phone rang and I listened to outgoing message and then the beginning of the incoming message. It was Jody. I picked up the phone.

"I'm here," I told her. She and Mark would come over to Catie's apartment. By the time they arrived, it was already dark outside. Even though I had seen them just the day before in Portland, each of them gave me a hug when they came into her apartment. The apartment had warmed significantly and I had the lights on. I told them that the apartment was still cool and if they wanted to go somewhere warmer, we could do that now rather than waiting until later as we had planned. They decided that they wanted to stay for a while before going out and we talked.

I told them that I was going to spend the night in Catie's apartment and that it was probably the last time I would get to sleep in her bed since her brothers were coming the next weekend to either pickup or dispose of some or all of her furniture and packing her other belongings and taking them and her car back to Oregon. I told them that I planned to be back the following weekend to help as needed.

After dinner, they came back to the apartment with me. We talked about a lot of different things associated with Catie (and I) and just some of what we did in the short time I knew her. I remember telling them that her family was probably going to be surprised just how kinky she was if they started going into her background and history because I never expected it at the beginning.

Jody asked me about the pregnancy (something we hadn't really had a chance to talk about). All I could tell her was that it seemed accidental and that Catie and I had talked about a future where she and I had children together. Jody told me that Catie had shared some of those thoughts with her and that she was aware of that. I told Jody that I was just guessing but I figured that Catie had gotten off her pill schedule somehow when her dad suffered his stroke (at least that seemed to be the implication from her doctor and from some familiarity with birth control pill management during my previous marriage).

"I guess it was going to put a real limitation on your swinging lifestyle," Jody said.

"She told you about that?" I asked.

"Yes, at least some of it," Jody said.

That diverted the conversation onto the topic of multiple sex partners and I explained how all of that happened.. It suddenly made some sense to Mark why Jody had asked him or trying to gauge him about interests in a threesome/foursome with Catie and I. Jody reiterated something I already knew: that I provided a great deal of freedom to let Catie be who she really was while providing her the safety of being there with her and for her. I told them what Catie and I had said about our relationship and other sex partners: "We belong to each other."

"How was it?" Mark asked.

"It was very erotic," I said. "At one level it's purely sexual. And sensuous. But I also knew that it was something that Catie wanted to experience and it was something that we had agreed on before we got involved."

"Oh, and you really can't afford to be turned off by being in contact with another guy in that situation. It comes (or cums) with the territory."

I came back to Jody's original observation that pregnancy might put a crimp in the swapping/swinging scene.

"But we'll never know. Pregnant sex can be intense. Some women really get off having sex knowing that they're already pregnant. And some guys get off knowing that they're fucking a pregnant women, particularly when it's obvious she's pregnant."

"If she had wanted to continue through the pregnancy, would you have let her?" Mark asked.

I thought for a moment before I answered him.

"Yes, I think I would have within certain safety limits."

"Why?" he asked.

"Let's just say it's something I learned from my first marriage. The most difficult issue to deal with was the perception, not the truth, that I somehow limited my wife from doing things that she wanted to do. Either by herself or as a couple. I was supposed to 'mind read' and then do something. Even if it's not true, it can be deadly in a committed relationship."

Our conversation carried on for a bit longer before they said that they needed to go and they left about 8:30 PM. I told them that I'd call when I flew back in on Friday night.

I was looking through the closets trying to decide what to take with me. I had some clothes hanging in her closet that I had left from previous trips. And then there were Catie's two enema bags that I was considering taking back with me on this trip. While I was standing there looking in the closet, there was a knock on the door. I wasn't expecting anyone though a few of Catie's friends knew that I was coming back to her apartment after her funeral.

I went to the door and looked through the door's peephole. I recognized the woman standing at the door. She was about to knock on the door again when I opened it.

"Hi, Carol," I said.

"Sorry I didn't call before dropping by," she said.

"That's okay. I was just deciding what to take with me when I leave in the morning. Mark and Jody left just a few minutes ago."

"I'm sorry I missed them. How are you doing?" she asked. I invited her in.

"The fact that Catie's gone is starting to sink in."

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

I really wasn't sure what she was asking. I replied "I guess I'm going to go on with my life. It was looking like we had a very promising future. Some things won't change for me, though."

"No, tonight and tomorrow?" she asked.

"Tonight I'm going to sleep in her bed."

"You had some fun times with her in her bed," Carol said. She said it as a statement, not as a question.

"Yes, we did. It sounded like you did, too."

Carol blushed. "How much did Catie tell you?"

"Enough," I said. "I knew about Catie's interest in women in addition to men, and I knew about some of her female partners...including you."

"Does that bother you?" Carol asked.

"That she liked to play with women? No, not really," I said. "It wasn't what I expected when I met her. I guess I'm fortunate that I got to play with her partners when the opportunity was right."