by Annie Ward
“Absolutely.”
My assignment was to choose three photographs and bring them to our session. They didn’t necessarily have to be the best photographs in the world. It made no difference if they were photographs of people or places. What was important, Cami J had said, was that they be photographs that, when I looked at them, “impacted me emotionally and made me really feel.”
The first one I pass to her makes her smile. She taps a glossy fingernail on Charlie’s face and then raises her eyes to mine. “Now there’s a cute kid.”
It’s a piece of paper with a red Chuck E. Cheese border and a black-and-white sketch of the two of us in the center. The photo booth had cost two dollars, and it was the best two dollars I ever spent. He’s on my lap, looking up at me with wide eyes and an open mouth as if I have just told the most hilarious joke ever. I’m grinning so big I have a dimple.
Cami J passes me my kitty cat notebook and a pen and says, “What made you choose this picture?”
I chose this picture because this was the first of many amazing moments with Charlie. I did want a child. I wanted him in the worst way.
But...
He was a hard baby. He was loud and angry and not sweet like we’d thought he’d be. Ian and I fought a lot about him. I was always tired and Ian didn’t help me much—if at all. Charlie was not a happy camper. He cried if I put him down. He cried if I stopped singing. He cried if I stopped bouncing him or swinging him or God forbid, what if I closed my eyes for just one second? He cried, he cried, you know what, he SCREAMED. I didn’t feel like he really loved me, just that he needed me to do things for him. Ian never wanted to go out anywhere when Charlie was a baby. The few times we did, Charlie would throw a tantrum and Ian would stand up and say, “Let’s just go home. I don’t know why we bother.”
But when Ian took the really long assignment in Afghanistan when Charlie was two, it started to feel like we were totally on our own. Charlie and I just started going everywhere. We went to McDonald’s PlayPlace. We went to Oak Park Shopping Mall and rode the carousel. All the baby things that moms figure out to do. Jumpin’ Jaxx and Little Monkey Business. The park. The playgrounds. Chuck E. Cheese. And that day, when we took this picture, I knew that we had fallen in love with each other. It was the most important day of my life, discovering that my child was my soul mate. It had taken almost three years to get all the way to where we needed to be but we had clicked and it was perfect and I was officially the mom I had always wanted to be. Smiling and loving and so happy that Charlie and I had each other. It was a day that changed everything because I felt that we were safe and normal and fine, and that life would only get better.
“You have two more minutes if you want to keep going,” Cami J says.
“No. I’m good with that.”
She reads for a second and says, “Very sweet. That’s a special bond. We’ll talk more about it next week after I read it more carefully.”
I nod.
Cami J makes a copy with her printer and hands it to me. “All right,” she says. “May I see the next photo?”
This is one of my favorite photographs. Black and white, eight by ten, with the stunning Orthodox Church of Sveta Nedelya behind us, Jo and I look, quite honestly, beautiful. Neither one of us is model material, but this photo is flattering to the point of being almost an outright lie. Back in the day we both dressed in the same sort of Eastern European Urban Outfitters shoddiness; wide-leg corduroys, tiny strappy tanks, gobs of cheap jewelry and big black boots. We wore our wavy brown hair the same way also, in un-styled cascades around our shoulders. We could have been sisters. I had the fuller lips and better cheekbones (thanks to my mom, who is a quarter Comanche), but Jo was tall and rail-thin with striking wide-set eyes. In the photo our hair is whipping around our faces as if we’d hired a wind machine for a photo shoot. Plus, we were young, reckless and ready for anything, and that kind of fearlessness is irresistible.
I put my pen to paper and say, “Do you want me to write why I chose this?”
“Let’s do something different with this one,” she answers. “I want you to tell me about the person in the photo with you.”
This is Joanna. She’s the old friend who I wrote the letter to in our last writing-therapy session. When I look at her I feel loss. I feel sadness because I went home and she was left there all by herself. I feel shame. Guilt.
Also, I feel anger. She was wrong. I was the real thing. It wasn’t just about him, it was about us. She always was better than me at everything and the one time when it seemed like I had won, when Ian liked me better, she completely turned on me. She wasn’t able to step back and see that she was the successful one, the funny one. She was smarter and more interesting and she had the great body and she was always the first choice. She had the amazing job and she’d always been better at languages without even trying. She had it all. Why begrudge me one little triumph?
I don’t know why Ian didn’t fall for her. Every other guy did. I can’t explain it, there was just something unusual between Ian and me. If she had just let me have that one thing for myself rather than lashing out about it, we would still be friends. If she had been able to do the right thing instead of bursting into tears and hanging up on me when I told her I was going to have a baby and I wanted her to come visit.
But she was furious with me.
I push the notebook away.
“You didn’t write for very long.”
“I’m done.”
“Can you write for another minute?” Cami J asks, and I shake my head no.
“Are you all right, Maddie?”
“Yes. I am. But I feel...”
In my head I have images and thoughts circling. The bats and the blood and the lake and the lies.
“What? You feel what?”
“Just like I want to finish and go home.”
“Okay,” she says kindly. “If you feel like it later, write about your last photo and email it to me, okay?”
“All right,” I say standing. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Maddie. Don’t be sorry for anything.”
I promise to try.
MADDIE
2001
I took the bare concrete stairs up to my apartment two at a time, and at one point I stumbled and fell. I could barely make the numbers on my rotary phone go around with my finger. The shopkeeper had told me to call my family immediately, and I was calling Jo. I was not thinking of the horrible things she’d said to me or even that she might hang up. My only thought was to call the person who mattered the most. I knew that for Joanna, this would be unfathomable news. It would be for anyone. But she was in a hostile, lonely, dismal place already.
To my relief, she answered straightaway. “Maddie, oh my God, Maddie! What is going on?”
I knew without a doubt that this was something that transcended and bridged the rift between us. I started crying. She was being nice.
“I’m going home, Jo,” I said. “Home home. Back to the States. Can I come and say goodbye? I want to see you before I leave, if it’s okay. Please. I want to apologize.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she said and I knew she was crashing. “Of course you can come. I don’t want you to go without us seeing each other, okay? Please come. I’m falling apart.”
Everyone was.
* * *
I arrived in Skopje on the twelfth, the day after. That night, some kind Macedonians held a candlelight vigil outside the American Embassy. It didn’t last long because the vigil was interrupted by other, less kind Macedonians, throwing rocks and screaming that we’d gotten what we deserved. Those with the candles ran for their lives, and the others, the enraged ones, smashed windows with bricks and threw trash and Molotov cocktails over the security fence.
Islamic terrorists had just attacked America, and the radical nationalists in the Balkans were attacking us becaus
e we sided with the Muslims in Bosnia, but apparently that alliance made no difference to the Middle East. As Ian said to me afterward, “You know, I don’t think the Middle East and the Balkans are talking.” It was confusing, but one thing was clear. We were damned.
I was supposed to visit for four days before returning to Bulgaria to pack up and fly home, but in the end I stayed two weeks. Not a word was spoken about me overstaying my welcome. The deadline for the travel guide had been pushed back, and I planned to finish it in the States. I thought about Ian constantly but didn’t try to get in touch with him. He’d made it clear that he was going to stay with his girlfriend, and I wanted no further problems with Jo anyway. The sky had just fallen. So I’d had a crush. Maybe it had felt like love, but it had been unrequited. It was depressing and painful and hopeless. In what way did that differ from everything else at that moment? I persuaded myself that I didn’t care. I fed my seed of anarchy. Grief. Scorn. Indifference. Fury. Total and complete disillusion. Ian was nothing. What did he really matter?
Jo and I spent most of that time slumped in front of the news, trying to make sense of our changed world. At one point she called in sick to work four days in a row. This was unheard of for Jo, who was notorious for calling Stoyan in the middle of the night and having him drive her to the camps when there was an emergency. She’d stopped going down to curl up on the plaid couch in the basement to cry. Now we cried silently together, watching desperate people jump to their death from the top of the towers. The news showed it over and over, and it never stopped feeling like the end of everything.
* * *
It was late on my last night, and Joanna and I had decided it was time to walk home from the Irish Pub. As I was paying the bill a bald man wearing faded army fatigues brushed up against me and grabbed my ass. I swung and missed. “Fucking bitch,” he said, loud enough to grab Joanna’s attention. She stormed over.
“What happened?” she demanded. The man and I stared at each other.
“Nothing,” I said. Things in this part of the world went very wrong very quickly, and the best thing to do was leave.
I told Joanna I was just going to use the bathroom, and I’d be right back. When I came out Ian was there pacing furtively in the corridor, looking distraught.
“Peter just told me you were here,” he said angrily.
I didn’t know what to say.
“How long are you staying?”
“I’m going home tomorrow.”
“Christ!” he said, looking shocked. “Can you stay a little longer?”
“I can’t, actually. I’ve got a flight to catch in Sofia.”
“Where are you going?”
“Home,” I said, feeling a lump rising in my throat. “I’m going home.”
“What do you mean? The States? Are you coming back?”
My eyes filled, and I shook my head no.
“Oh hey there.” That was Joanna, who had walked up behind us. “Sorry, Ian,” she said, almost sweetly. “Are we leaving?”
“Yes,” I answered, and I sounded dutiful even to myself.
Joanna turned to walk away, taking my arm.
“Maddie?” he said, imploring.
Joanna responded by giving him her middle finger.
Outside the Irish Pub, we turned up the main road and headed home. I looked down the alleyway and saw the silhouettes of two men. One had the other by the throat. He wore a long coat. A long coat like the one Stoyan, Joanna’s friend and driver, always wore.
“Jo,” I said, clutching her sleeve. “I think that’s—”
“The guy who grabbed you? Yeah, it’s him. Don’t stop,” she said. “That douchebag deserves it. He needs to learn to keep his hands to himself. Stoyan’s only going to scare him.”
“Okay,” I said, cringing at the tiny squeak of my voice. Was it fear? I wondered. No, I decided. It was an uncomfortable awe.
When we were almost to her house Joanna suddenly asked, “It doesn’t bother you? Going back to the States?”
“No,” I said truthfully. “I finally want to go home.”
“What will you do?”
“Get my apartment back from my subletter. Eat some decent Mexican food. Sleep. Get a job.”
We walked in silence until I finally said, “What about you?”
“There will be a few months of inventory and paperwork after we get the tents down. And then... I’ll continue to work for Elaine, I suppose. It will probably be in Africa somewhere.”
“I thought,” I said carefully, “that you told me you don’t want to do this anymore.”
“I did say that. But...”
“But what?”
“Then I realized that this job is all I have.”
I started to respond and she cut me off. “Something happened, Maddie. Something happened that would have meant I had to leave my job. I tried to make myself believe it was all for the best. But it didn’t really happen after all. And it’s okay. I’m good at what I do.”
She took a giant hitching breath. I hugged her, and I was much shorter than her, so when she spoke it was into the top of my shoulder. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”
“What was it? What happened?”
“I promise to tell you. One day I will. I’m just not ready to talk about it quite yet.”
* * *
It was ten the next morning. Joanna had long been at work, and I was preparing to leave for the bus station. The doorbell rang. I expected it to be the taxi driver I had called some time before. When I opened the door, there stood Ian, in the suit he had told me he wore while working but which I had never seen. He looked so serious, and so handsome, that I was kicked in the stomach with that now-familiar flutter that made me helplessly want to reach up and pull him down.
He nodded hello, his lips pressed together, his eyes downcast. After a second he tried to smile. Suddenly I was afraid I might come completely unglued and grab him by the jacket and yank him into me. I was out of my comfort zone, and felt light-headed. I needed a sign that I was not alone in this, that I was not imagining how we felt about each other.
Neither one of us moved or spoke. After a long, steady, regretful gaze that traveled across every part of my face, he touched my cheek and then trailed his fingers back to tuck my hair behind my ear. I shivered and felt the onset of the emptiness that was sure to be agony. I almost said out loud, God no. This can’t really be the end.
“I came to say a proper goodbye, Petal.”
“Is that all?”
“And to get your phone number in the States.”
I told him, and he typed the numbers into his mobile. I blinked and felt paralyzed. I waited stiffly, holding my breath.
“I’ll call you.”
I’ll call you? I covered my mouth with my hand and must have looked like I was about to be sick. I’d known this was coming, but I hadn’t anticipated what it would feel like to have him standing there, so close, knowing that whatever it was that we’d had was over. He spun around and then walked away.
I watched him, trying not to scream, waiting for him to pull out his cigarettes and look up as he made his way down the street, past the Roma house where children, dogs and broken appliances blanketed the yard. Trying not to throw a tantrum like a two-year-old. His steps were slow and measured, his face turned down. Turn around, I thought. Stop and make this okay. You motherfucker, turn around and make this okay. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave this way! Will I ever see you again? Say something. Turn around!
I stood there, my eyes locked on his stooped shoulders until he disappeared around the corner at the bottom of the street, into the woods and the winding path that would take him to the city. He never once looked up, and though I held my breath and willed it, though I stood on tiptoe, craned my neck and prayed for it, neither did he ever once look back.
* * *
As I was wait
ing in line to board the bus back to Sofia, Jo called me. I didn’t pick up. In my seat and waiting for the bus to depart, I leaned my cheek against the dirty glass and looked out at that bleak place, wondering if and when I would return.
My eyes strayed to the stone wall outside the broken door of the café where the corkboard was papered in obituaries, the edges and corners of the photocopies rustling in the breeze. There were so many little black crosses next to the cherished portraits and beautiful Cyrillic writing, all to honor and remember the deceased. One set of eyes seemed particularly familiar, and I wondered where I might have seen that oddly beautiful middle-aged woman with the full lips and Roman nose. There was something predatory and hawkish in her eyes; a startling and familiar intensity that made me sit up. She looked a bit like me.
I was dead after the encounter with Ian. Dead and angry and done. Ian had been right when he’d said I was just a petal blowing through his nightmare. “You’ll be gone before I know it.”
Joanna’s call went unreturned. I never even listened to her message.
* * *
A few weeks later, at my parents’ house in Kansas, I got a text message from Jo in the middle of the night. It said, So that’s it? Okay then. You’ll regret this.
Years would pass.
MADDIE
2002
After deciding I wanted to return to America after the 9/11 attacks, I visited my family in Kansas for a few quiet, solemn, restful weeks.
Then I returned to New York and took back my apartment from the subletter. It was a tiny studio on West Fourth Street right on the corner of Jane, over a popular burger bar called The Corner Bistro. On most nights my entire building smelled of blood, beef and grease from their kitchen. It was a combination that never failed to take me back to Joanna’s house in Skopje and the smell of the towel under the sink.