by Annie Ward
On the wall across the room, an oval wooden African mask with holes carved for the eyes and mouth stared at her with an expression of horror.
Diane looked anxiously over her shoulder at the table laid out as if for an indulgent wine-and-cheese feast among friends. Then she looked ahead, at the nightmarish slop of a human spill beckoning her to come see; come see what unspeakable thing has happened here.
MADDIE
Ten weeks before
Her eyes keep coming back to the top left corner of my face. She looks away toward the window, out over the man-made neighborhood pond visible from her home office, but then it’s right back to the place where I’ve been sewn back together.
I don’t know how this is going to work. On her website she says she is “above all a nonjudgmental, compassionate and discreet psychologist accomplished at using writing therapy to address anxiety.” For fuck’s sake then, stop staring. I’ve told her I’m here because I’d like to feel less nervous.
She smiles at me. That’s better. She says, in a lilting infomercial voice, “There are many, many extremely helpful exercises used in writing therapy. What I love most about it is that you can explore as far and wide and deep as your imagination and inhibitions will allow. We’ll try a variety of approaches and see—” she tilts her head to the side in a way that is at once obviously rehearsed and yet strangely attractive “—see what works best for you, Maddie.”
I nod, and the hair I wear pulled over the left side of my face must move a little. She’s playing it very cool, but her fascination is evident. I’m not surprised. The bruise has faded but the whole mess is still pretty shocking.
I feel discouraged. I need this to work, but this woman is not what I expected. It was important to me that I do writing therapy, and there were not all that many choices in my area. When I chose Dr. Camilla Jones, with her private practice in Overland Park, I pictured a lady in a sophisticated suit and some grandmotherly pumps. Kind eyes. Silver hair.
This woman, this Camilla, has told me that her name rhymes with Pamela. What? Instead of Dr. Jones, she wants me to call her Cami J. She is dressed in a loose, floral off-the-shoulder T-shirt, yoga pants and a baseball cap. I hate to be shallow, but I have to point out that there are rhinestones all over the front of her cap. All over. Everywhere. It’s probably as hard for me not to gawk at her cap as it is for her not to gawk at my face. The focal point on this cap is a giant rhinestone fleur-de-lis. This troubles me. She’s got be in her early sixties even though she looks fucking great. Honestly, though, I just didn’t want my psychologist to remind me of a Zumba instructor.
Finally she is looking me in the eyes. “Maddie?”
“Yes?” I don’t know why but I am clenching my fists, then opening them, then clenching them again. I used to get carpal tunnel syndrome from all the writing, and I would do this when my wrists were sore. I stop.
“Let’s cut to the chase and start easy. I want you to write down twenty things that set off your anxiety.” She passes me a piece of lined notebook paper and a pen. “Try not to think too much about it. Just what scares you or makes you sad or nervous. Write the first things that pop into your head, okay?”
“Okay.”
When Charlie cries. Anything bad happening to Charlie.
When Ian drinks vodka in the basement. Or when he won’t wake up.
When someone shoots kids in a school, or really when anybody goes and shoots a bunch of people randomly, but especially kids. I don’t like the guns in the house either.
When someone drives a gigantic eighteen-wheeler through a beach parade in France and mows everyone down.
ISIS.
It sounds silly but I get scared when I go somewhere to meet new people and they want to sit in a circle and have me tell them about myself. I don’t go to the Meadowlark mom’s brunch thing anymore.
When the angry man with the beard on the treadmill in front of me gets off and walks away and leaves his big backpack sitting there.
When I call the dogs and they don’t come and I can’t find them. (Probably just because this happened last night. They dug under the fence but they didn’t get hit by a car. I patched the fence where they got out.)
When my parents or Charlie get sick. Deadly new strains of the flu.
When Ian goes to dangerous countries to work. All the things that could go wrong.
Funerals. Hospitals and lakes.
When Ian gets angry at Charlie.
That an alligator can lunge out of the Disney lagoon and snatch a little boy right out of his father’s arms.
When my heart races uncontrollably. This happens usually when I start missing Joanna and thinking about how she probably still hates me.
Drowning, especially little Syrian kids that wash up dead on the shore, I can’t even cope, sometimes for days, and I dream about Charlie drowning and sometimes I worry about the dogs drowning. Tidal waves.
When I take Charlie to the park and then suddenly he’s gone and I can’t find him.
The darkness in some people. Like, that guy in Germany who paid some other guy to cut him up a little bit at a time, cook him and eat him.
When Charlie cries.
When I have to leave Charlie with Ian.
That something is wrong with me.
I slide my paper across to Cami J, who, now that I have gotten a better look at her in very tight seventies-style flared yoga pants, I am tempted to privately think of as “Cami Toe.”
She begins to read silently. I say, “I think I repeated myself. I think I wrote ‘Charlie crying’ twice.”
She nods, concentrating on my list. “Repetition can be informative.”
After a few minutes she looks up at me, and this time she doesn’t even bother with subtlety. Her eyes take a little trip up and down the wrecked and winding road from my lip to my brow. “Does it still hurt?”
“When I smile. A little.”
“Is that why you don’t smile?”
“I don’t? I’m pretty sure I smile.” Then I smile, to prove it.
“Have you been to see a plastic surgeon?”
“No. I probably will eventually, though.” The truth is, I have always been what my grandmother called “jolie laide.” Beautiful ugly. My eyes are peculiar and pale gray. My smile is asymmetrical, and there is something fox-like about the shape of my face. I’ve never lacked for male attention, but I know that whatever appeal I possess lies in my oddity. I have not decided yet if I like my developing scar or not. Sometimes when I look at myself in the mirror I think it is a far more honest cover for the book that is me.
Cami J nods, her eyes moist with motherly empathy. She taps my paper. “You are doing a lot of what we call ‘catastrophizing.’”
“That’s a new word for me.”
“It’s more and more common now that we have the constant stream of bad news. The irrational fear of catastrophe. It’s easy to overestimate the possibility of an extremely rare tragedy befalling you or a loved one.”
I think about telling her about my intimate knowledge of rare tragedy, but I decide to save it. I say simply, “Accidents happen. Anything at any time.”
“Anything? Alligators?” She smiles, leans forward and winks. “German cannibals?”
I shrug and then I can’t help it. I laugh. German cannibals.
“There is something else going on here, though,” she says, and the whole Zumba vibe is gone, and she is deadly serious. “Would you like to tell me more about your relationship with Ian? Is he Charlie’s father?”
I nod, and to be clear, I would love to tell her all about Ian. Really, because it’s a great story. But for some reason I suddenly can’t speak, and the thought of what’s happened to Ian is too much. I find myself paralyzed, my tongue a slimy fish crammed in my mouth, swampy water in my nose. This happens sometimes. I remember being held un
der, my face just inches under the surface, eyes bulging and air so close and inviting that I opened my mouth to breathe...
The water poured into my mouth and down my throat. It took over and that was that. Everything was different.
“Which way is your bathroom, please?” I manage, standing up. “I’m going to be sick.”
MADDIE
2001
Charlie’s father. The love of my life. Ian.
Wait. Let me start at the beginning.
I was a “do-gooder.” A lot of my friends were do-gooders, too. Back then I lived in a part of the world that most tour guides didn’t bother to mention. If they did, they used words like war-ravaged. Impoverished. Lawless. All three of those adjectives would have held quite a bit of appeal for me. I found it thrilling to live in, as it was sometimes called, “The darkest, most forgotten corner of Europe.” So, I was smack-dab in the middle of my do-gooder phase teaching poor students English in one of the isolated former Soviet Bloc countries known collectively as the Balkans.
I was based in Bulgaria, and my best friend, Joanna, lived one country over from mine, in a little-known but very combustible place called Macedonia.
I first met Ian at a fund-raiser. That sounds boring, doesn’t it? He was far from boring.
We were in Ohrid, a touristy resort town a few hours south of Macedonia’s capital city of Skopje, not far from the Greek border. Picturesque in a run-down way, its stone villas were stacked on a hill overlooking the sun-dappled lake water. At the highest point, looking out south toward Greece, was the domed, post-card perfect thirteenth-century Church of St. John, so lovely and tranquil that it belied all the discord in the village over which it presided. If it weren’t for the tangible tension among the people milling about the twisty alleys and plazas, Ohrid might have been comfortably charming. Instead, it was a holiday destination packed with people of two warring religions, and it seemed to me that everyone was eyeing everyone else with a mixture of bloodlust and suspicion. The country was on the brink of civil war.
The benefit for the Red Cross was “dinner and a show” in a ramshackle tavern perched precariously on waterlogged wooden beams, hanging over the muddy edge of a lake. Joanna worked with women and children in refugee camps around Macedonia. Her boss, Elaine, in Washington, DC, had asked her to attend the charity event and given her two tickets. She’d begged me to come visit for the weekend and go as her “plus one.”
Jo had a habit of plaiting her hair when she was bored or nervous. Now she was hunched over her vodka tonic, fingers weaving, her hazel eyes on the handful of mousy intellectuals milling around the communal dinner tables trying to decide where they should sit. “And to think,” she said, “we could be somewhere else watching paint dry and having so much more fun.”
“Free drinks,” I answered. I was indifferent.
“Should we just leave?” she asked, sitting up bright-eyed and suddenly enthusiastic.
“If you won’t get in trouble,” I answered, openly encouraging a runner.
She wilted. “I might, though. If you help me kiss a few of the more important asses, I think it would be okay to leave in an hour.”
At that moment three men walked in, one of whom was very tall and, at least from a distance, shockingly handsome. I leaned in to whisper, “Is he on the list? I might be willing to volunteer.”
Jo leaned back and laughed. “Uh, no. I can guarantee you I’ve never seen that man before in my entire life.”
“Wait,” I said, noticing the man’s companions. “Isn’t that your friend Hillbilly Buck? From the American Embassy?”
“Holy shit, yes, it is,” Joanna answered, standing up and waving the trio over to our table.
Hillbilly Buck was our name for Mr. Buck Snyder, the whiskery, rabbit-toothed military attaché to the American Embassy who Joanna sometimes called to discuss the security of her refugee camps. We had christened him with the nickname Hillbilly Buck one night after he’d spent a long drunken dinner bragging in his Southern twang that, “All these Balkan women, man, they don’t care. You can say anything. Man, you can do whatever. If you’re riding with big blue you’re still gonna get your dick wet.” “Big blue” was Hillbilly Buck’s name for his American passport.
As we pretended not to be watching their every move, Joanna and I waited to see if the men would actually come sit with us. Jo reached over, touched my arm and said, “Thank you for coming. I’m so glad I’m not here alone.”
I’d been slightly reluctant to get on that horrible bus on this particular occasion. A clash between Macedonia’s Christian majority and the growing Muslim minority had resulted in a recent escalation of violence, and like everywhere else in the region, a fog of hatred and fury hovered over the quaint mountain villages like an industrial cloud. Macedonia was no longer safe for anyone.
However, Joanna hadn’t exactly twisted my arm to get me to come. I really loved visiting her and felt lucky that we had both ended up living in Eastern Europe after graduate school. It was, however, an uncomfortable five-to eight-hour bus ride for me, depending on how long I was detained at the border separating our two countries. Also, I was tired from work.
I was at the tail end of a fourteen-month Fulbright Scholarship in Bulgaria that involved teaching English classes at the University of Sofia while working on a nonfiction book. My days were comprised of writing, travel and teaching, and I was mostly happy.
I’d met Joanna Jasinski when we were both high school students on a summer exchange program in Spain. We’d had a shared interest in linguistics, making out with Spanish boys at discos, Russian and German philosophers and The Cure. At the time we met, we had both wanted to “grow up” to be interpreters, and we often spoke to one another in a hodgepodge of the various languages we were studying, infuriating and alienating others. For a long time, we were one another’s only friend.
She majored in international studies and became an aid worker, and I went into journalism. We were eventually both drawn to work and study in the former Soviet Bloc where we could put our Slavic language training to use, and over the past year we had visited each other more than a dozen times. We kept the wolves of loneliness growling just outside the gate.
After stopping to speak to a few people, Hillbilly Buck and the other two men began crossing the restaurant. I was able to get a better look at them as they moved out of the shadowy entrance and toward our table. Hillbilly Buck was never a handsome man, but next to these two he looked positively rodent-like. They were tall, broad at the top and slim in the hips. One was blond and angelic, with curls and cartoonishly huge blue eyes. The other man was the one Joanna and I had both noticed at once. He was strikingly shaped, with a cleft chin and shoulders like rolling hills. He walked with his eyes on the view of the lake outside, lost in thought or as if he were alone. Unafraid.
His brown hair was short on the sides and tousled on top, and he wore dark, neatly pressed jeans. His chest. I paused there for a second. His chest. It was a showstopper even beneath that horrible apricot-colored dress shirt. There was something boyish about his outfit, like a kid dressed up for his school musical. His classic features were more suited to a black-and-white photo, him seated at an outdoor French café with an espresso. His youthful attire looked wrong on him, and I remember thinking that if he showed up in my hometown of Meadowlark, Kansas, dressed in that apricot getup, he would be beaten to a pastel pulp just for walking in the door.
Hillbilly Buck bellowed introductions so loudly that I concluded he was already drunk. “Ian and Peter, meet Joanna and...”
He snapped his fingers repeatedly in my direction.
“Madeline,” I said, pointing to myself helpfully.
“That’s right. I remember you now. Ian and Peter work for the British ambassador. Part of his new close-protection team. They’ve just arrived.”
An elderly accordion player in a ragged suit suddenly started making
a musical racket on the other side of the restaurant. Joanna said loudly, “I take it your bosses also made you drive down to this nerd-fest on your night off?”
Hillbilly Buck nodded irritably, but curly blond Peter leaned forward and said, in all earnestness, “I was told there’s going to be a folk dance show after the food!”
Joanna laughed out loud, her pretty face pink with delight. “Ahh. No one’s prepared you for the number of folk dance shows you’re going to have to sit through living here. The good news is not all of the singing sounds like a lamb being sacrificed.”
Peter looked perplexed. He was adorable. Massive, yet cute. Powerful but pleasant. Not smart.
Joanna touched his arm and said, “Sit down next to me. You’re officially my new favorite person.”
I sneaked a few glances at Ian, who had taken the seat across from me. He appeared wholly engrossed in his menu, and took no interest in me or Joanna whatsoever. He was reading it like he had eaten poison and on it was written the formula for the antidote. No Macedonian fish tavern menu could be that interesting.
I resolved to appear unimpressed with him as well. A couple of minutes later, Ian had a little chuckle to himself. He leaned back, lit a cigarette and laid his plastic menu down open on the graffiti-scratched wooden table. (The Balkans had nothing against cigarettes, not in a restaurant or even a hospital, for that matter.) After pensively raising his eyebrow, Ian sat up and said, in a charming English accent, “Well, I think I am going to go for the crap.”
Jo didn’t miss a beat. “In America we say ‘go take a crap,’ not ‘go for the crap,’ and what might be even more helpful to you is knowing that we would almost always keep that information to ourselves.”