by Annie Ward
Behind the frosted glass of the front door was the indistinct, bulky outline of Detective Shipps. Diane let him in. His gun was ready, and he was already breathing fast. “You should have waited for me.”
“I’m sorry.”
She wasn’t. Adrenaline coursed through her, and she wanted to take the stairs two at a time. Perspiration was gathering at her hairline. Her words tumbled out awkwardly. “Bleeder downstairs. I’ve just seen someone upstairs. I need to go after them.”
“Slow down, Di. Who did you see?”
“Just a glimpse. Someone small. A woman or a child.”
“Okay then. You take the upstairs, and I’ll take the basement. Bill and CJ should be here any minute.” Shipps left then, following the path of blood through the basement doorway and down.
As badly as she wanted to race, Diane forced herself to proceed with caution. With one wrist resting on the other, she was able to point both the flashlight and the muzzle of her gun at the darkness above. She was sweating more now, and a small drop rolled along her nose and fell to the hardwood floor. She glanced down as she took her first step onto the stairs and suddenly realized that though Shipps had followed the biggest blood trail, he had not followed the only one.
Her flashlight illuminated a few tiny red droplets. There was something in the middle of the staircase. Maybe a pile of dirty clothes? Diane moved her flashlight up to reveal a fluffy yellow blanket with a satiny border, wadded up and tossed aside. It was smeared with blood.
Diane paused. Depending on who was upstairs, they might try to jump from a window. “Arriving officers? Secure the perimeter.”
CJ responded first. “Copy that. I’ll take the northeast.”
Bill came over her mic a split second later. “Copy. I’ll be southwest.”
Diane advanced against the wall, gun ready and flashlight creating a circle of light to follow. She could see that there were three doors and a turn at the end of the hall. The first door was on her left. It was open. She shone her light through the crack between the door hinge and the wall. There was no one hiding behind. She lit up the room. It appeared to be a spare. Three places to hide. She checked underneath and on the other side of the bed, and then the closet. Empty.
Diane moved out of the room and continued down the hall to the next open door on the right. Again, she looked for someone in the darkness between the door hinge and the wall. No one.
Someone was crying. Diane swallowed and waited. Was that crying? Or night sounds? This damn lurid house, breathing. No, it was crying. It was coming from behind a closed door. She crept nearer. In a very small voice, a boy was repeating a phrase over and over. It was a mumbled accusation said with devastated disbelief. “You hurted me! You hurted me!”
MADDIE
Seven weeks before
“Charlie, you cut that out!” I shout, but he knows me too well. He knows I’m not really mad at him, and he and his new little friend will continue wrestling and throwing their Happy Meal toys down the slide. I make the “I’m watching you” hand gesture, and this sends him into giggles. I return to my phone and iced coffee.
There’s a six-hour time difference between here and Nigeria. That, along with the fact that Ian can’t text when he’s out in the oil field, means I usually only hear from him once a day. Today, however, a vehicle has broken down, and he’s stuck at the hotel. He’s suddenly being very chatty.
My phone beeps again.
More than halfway through this assignment now, he writes.
I type, Yay!
Is Charlie being good?
I look up, and there he is with his hands splayed in the window of the little airplane at the top of the McDonald’s PlayPlace climbing structure. He is making fish faces against the clear plastic and probably licking it, too. Nice, Charlie. Schedule in strep throat for next week.
Yes, I type. He’s being perfect. He even ate most of his Happy Meal.
Well, I’m jealous you two are at McDonald’s. That tells you a bit about the quality of the food here. I miss you, Petal. Give Charlie a hug from me. X
I stir my watery McCafé iced coffee and frown at the brown apples left on Charlie’s tray.
Ian, I type. Please don’t act like everything is normal. We are not okay. I know what’s going on with Fiona. And there’s the night of my accident, and the argument we were having just before. You are keeping too much from me and I am not happy living like this. I love you but look how damaged we have become. Something has to change. I am scared for Charlie.
I stare at my text and my finger hovers over Send. Will this help us? Will it change anything? Perhaps.
I delete it all.
“Charlie?” I call, standing up. “Come down and get your shoes. Let’s get out of here.”
MADDIE
2001
I’d never seen Joanna act like this.
I hadn’t yet caught my breath when she burst into my room, and the sight of her standing there staring at me so malevolently didn’t help. I was in the grip of terror. Helpless, I could only think that to use my incapacitated state to my advantage was the best way of defusing the situation.
“I’m sorry,” I managed to whisper. “You scared the shit out of me.”
She rolled her eyes, which I found somehow comforting. Suddenly I very much wanted to remember her as the boy-crazy sixteen-year-old I’d taken advanced language classes with in Spain. My nerdy BFF.
“No, really,” I went on, using the time to pull my thoughts together. “You did.”
“Sorry. But seriously. What the fuck were you up to in my room?”
My first impulse was to tell her the truth. There was no harm in what I’d done, only harm in what I’d found. But if I told her the truth, she would immediately surmise that I had opened the cabinet and seen the blood-soaked towel. And what of it? Surely there was a reasonable explanation and it didn’t matter.
But for me suddenly, it was not just a towel soaked with more blood than what would come from an ordinary wound. It was her recent strange behavior. It was her defensive and aggressive attitude about participating in shady deals with corrupt policemen and criminals for the sake of the greater good. It was, more than anything, this growing nastiness fed by the very existence of Ian. Plus, I hated the way she was staring at me. She was still pale from her illness. Pale with dark half-moons dragging down her beautiful eyes. Those eyes. Now cold, motionless and accusatory.
I said, “I went in to see you. So I could say I was sorry. I was going to say good-night, but you weren’t there, so I decided to just go to bed.”
She stepped into the room, crossed her arms and leaned back against the dresser. I was suddenly able to swallow and breathe. The fear was fading. I could see that she believed me, and that we were going to be okay.
“Well,” she said, suddenly inspecting her nails in a bourgeois way that did not suit her. Instead of addressing any part of the actual argument, she said nonchalantly, “We both had too much to drink.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding vigorously. “Too much to drink and we said things we didn’t mean.”
“Except...”
“Except what?”
She looked up at the ceiling, and for a split second I thought I saw her lower lip tremble. And then she was fine. “I don’t want you to think I’m just jealous. I liked Ian at first. A lot. That’s true. But, Maddie, he’s not a nice guy. He just isn’t. He’s a crazy, heartless fuckwit. I wouldn’t wish him on you. On my worst enemy? Maybe. But not on you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“I mean it. He’s different than us. He’ll only hurt you.”
“He’s not going to hurt me if I don’t let him.”
She gave me a questioning look with a slight smile. “All right, Maddie. Good night.”
She switched off my light and started to slip out the door.
“Jo?”
“Yeah?”
“Are we good? I don’t want us to be mad at each other anymore. I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep unless I know that we’re good.”
“It’s still you and me, Mad,” she said, sounding like the Joanna I remembered. Warm. Loyal. It was pitch-dark, so I couldn’t see her when she whispered one last thing before shutting the door. I think she was crying. “Just us. Us against the world.”
* * *
Jo and I made up, but something had changed. We were not so easy to laugh, and when we spoke, one or both of us averted our eyes. A selfish, weak voice in my head told me to stay despite the awkward aftermath of the fight, just stay and hope to see Ian again. I might have listened to that voice, had it not been clear that Joanna had no intention of running into the British bodyguards out and about in Skopje. After a couple of days, I told Jo I needed to go back to Sofia and work.
I kept busy finishing my project for Fodor’s. I traveled and researched for two weeks and then went home to my apartment to write. Back in Sofia, sitting on my little balcony with my laptop, I was suddenly very aware that I was almost completely alone. I thought about Joanna and Ian constantly.
When Joanna and I first met, it was as if we both contained a seed of anarchy inside us lying dormant, waiting to be watered by the other. We’d had ten good years. Lovers. Adventures. Success. Devotion. Chaos. And then that thing inside us that had made us gravitate to one another changed its course. We became two helpless skittering magnets, and Ian a dark heavy block of iron.
I started to call Jo twice but changed my mind, and I didn’t have Ian’s number. Just when I thought I couldn’t bear Jo’s silence a minute more, she called.
“Hey, it’s me.” Her voice had a flat effect that scared me. Had she called to argue?
“Hey.”
“Panda had her kittens.” She tried to sound upbeat, but I wasn’t fooled. She wasn’t happy.
“Yay! When?”
“Two weeks ago. They’re just starting to open their eyes and crawl. They’re so cute. You have to come see them.”
Kittens. The excuses we come up with to swallow our pride.
I think it took me under an hour to shower, pack, catch a taxi, buy a ticket and board the bus. This time Potbelly at the border was not surprised to see me. He stamped my passport with a lecherous grin and a wink that implicitly wished me many mind-altering Balkan orgasms. “Enjoy your visit, miss.”
* * *
As if nothing had ever gone wrong between us, Jo had bought two bottles of red wine, cheese and crackers and set it out on the back patio. We fussed over Panda and her six tiny babies in the patio cat-birthing palace that Joanna had constructed out of a giant cardboard box and blankets. Eventually Panda started transitioning from pride to agitation. We left her alone and moved to the patio off the kitchen.
“How is your work going?” she asked me, looking into her wineglass instead of at me. She seemed a subdued version of herself. I wondered if maybe she’d started smoking weed with the Vengeant quartet.
“Pretty well,” I answered. “I’ll meet my deadline.”
She swirled her wine around in her glass and didn’t look up. “And I suppose after that you’ll be packing up and heading home?”
“I’m in no rush. My mom is, but not me.”
“Good,” she said, but her voice was robotic. I realized that even when we were playing with the cat and the kittens, she hadn’t smiled once since I’d arrived.
“What about you? I know how hard you’re working and what you’re up against. Are you doing okay?”
I will never forget the expression on her face when she answered. There was defeat, hopelessness and confusion. “No. Not really. I think we’re losing, Maddie.”
She took a big drink of wine. “I’m sorry. I forgot that I have to check on something.” Then she got up and walked away.
* * *
Looking back, I think I know the last moment when Joanna seemed herself, seemed the outrageously outspoken and confident teenager I’d met in Spain. It was a brief glimpse of who she used to be and would never be again. She told me she had a business meeting with someone important in Greece. Someone who might be able to help her get a large batch of first-aid kits to the families that would soon be leaving the Macedonian refugee camps and returning to an apocalyptic reality in their old villages across Bosnia. She had to drive to Neos Marmaras over the weekend, and she would love it if I would come with her to the little beach town for one night.
We drank iced coffee from the gas station as we drove toward the Greek border in her SUV, windows down, singing over one another and the wind.
We stopped at a rustic tavern overlooking the Aegean outside Kalamaria for a late lunch and sat at a wooden picnic table on the terrace. Greek music played over a speaker in the garden and a group of Polish tourists were dancing the horo in a circle with some locals and restaurant employees. It felt briefly like a real holiday.
We ate tzatziki and char-grilled octopus with chickpea salad and shared a bottle of rosé. Joanna laughed at my imitation of Potbelly at the border checking my passport, and we retold each other a bunch of old stories about Spanish boyfriends we had back when we first met. Our bedroom-eyed, long-haired Greek server who was named of all things Earl, brought us a complimentary shot of ouzo and after we drank it, Jo looked at me with regret.
“I’m sorry about what happened the last time you came to visit.”
“Me, too. Really sorry.”
“He won’t come between us anymore.”
“Ian?”
She made a noise like pfft and drank from her shot glass again even though there was nothing left. “Yeah, Ian.”
“Of course he won’t,” I said. “Anyway, we never see him anymore. It’s been almost a month.” Three weeks and four days.
She was tan already. She crossed her arms and rested her chin on one pretty, thin, bangled wrist. Her smile was enigmatic. “I heard something the other day. I think Ian might be sent home to England.”
“What? Why?”
“The team leader found out about him letting Fiona spend the night with him at work. Hillbilly Buck told me. That’s a big deal. I imagine they’ll have to let him go.”
I nodded silently. She stood up and said, “I’m going to the ladies.” I watched her walk through the garden, where she invited herself to join the horo and linked arms with the Polish tourists. She danced with them to their delight for a full circle before extricating herself and disappearing down the path.
Waves crashed down below, and the Polish tour bus began boarding. I stared at the water, remembering how it had nearly finished me all those years ago. I couldn’t help but wonder who it was who’d told Ian’s boss about his indiscretion with Fiona.
* * *
That evening Jo had dinner with “someone” at the Miramare Hotel. When she came back to our little rental where I was reading in bed, she went into the bathroom saying, “I’m so tired. Aren’t you?”
She ran a bath with the door closed. I knocked after an hour, and she said, “I’m okay, Maddie. You go to sleep.”
I tried. Twice I slipped off, and twice I jerked awake from a nightmare in which Joanna emerged from the bathroom, walked over to me and covered my face with a blood-soaked towel. I finally drifted off with the light on. I have no idea if she ever came to bed.
* * *
I had no reason to go back to Bulgaria. Joanna seemed happy to have me, and I could do my work on my laptop sitting on her couch. She left at half past eight every morning and came home at five, and we always stayed up talking, walking or watching television until midnight. We rarely went into town. Sometimes the thought flickered through my mind, I’m not leaving until I see him.
Even with the beautiful summer weather, Jo showed little interest in socializing around Skopje the way we had previously. I cooked pounds of past
a. We took after-dinner walks through the parks. I napped sometimes during the days when she was at work, the hum of the air conditioner softening the sound of the helicopters coming and going overhead.
I was asleep in my room on the second Saturday of my visit when I woke up to voices coming from downstairs. Someone started yelling. A man.
“Crap,” I whispered, scrambling for my clothes. I cursed more as I tripped pulling on my jeans. I opened my bedroom door slowly and quietly. I crept across to the balcony overlooking the living room, and down below I saw Joanna and Ian. His jaw was clenched, and her hand was out as if to push him back.
I was just above them and could hear the words they spat back and forth. “I know it was you,” Ian was saying.
“No way.”
“But I also know what you’re dealing with. And I do feel for you.”
“Bullshit. Stop it.”
“Look. It didn’t work. I’m still here. My team leader values me enough to know it wasn’t worth it to sack me.”
I ran down the hall and halfway down the stairs. “What’s going on?”
Joanna looked up at me and said, “Go back to your room, Maddie,” as if she were my mother.
“She tried to get me fired,” Ian said, looking startled to see me. “Tried to ruin my whole life.”
“Oh my God,” she said, her hands on her hips. “Ruin your whole life? Please.”
This made Ian go wild. “I’ve got no education! What else am I supposed to do? The only thing I’ve ever been good at is close protection, and it’s the only way I’ve got to make a decent wage. I pay for my mum’s nursing home. If you’d gotten me fired it would have been the end of my career. No more deployments. That would have been it for me and my seventy-six-year-old mum!”
I walked down the last six steps to the foyer and turned toward Joanna, who was standing in the doorway to the living room, now ashen and slouching. “It’s not true, is it?” I asked.