Beautiful Bad

by Annie Ward

  “Interesting.”

  “It’s very interesting, Madeline, how the disruption of impulse control in the frontal lobe can affect all kinds of behavior. Gambling. Promiscuity. Substance abuse. Violence. It’s always fascinated me.” He turns and reaches for the door handle, but stops.

  “Do you feel...a lack of restraint at all? Any difference from before the fall?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What about your refusal to go to the ER, even though Dr. Jones insisted? Was that unusual for you?”

  “Not really. After going to the ER for my accident in Colorado I would quite happily never step foot in another ER again.”

  “So you feel confident your impulses are ordinary?”

  “I’m not sure my impulses were ever ordinary.”

  He finds this very witty and treats me to a wide white smile as he opens the door. “Just call Betty when you decide how you want to proceed regarding the tests. Best of luck to you, Madeline.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Roberts.”

  * * *

  After driving to the Plaza I sit at a wrought-iron table on the back patio of the Classic Cup with a glass of Far Niente chardonnay. The little courtyard is surrounded on all sides by hanging baskets dripping with lavender trailing petunias. With my enormous black sunglasses covering most of my face and my hair pulled forward around my cheeks under a pretty white sunhat, I feel anonymous and content. I decide that I will, after all, go shopping.

  My grandmother had often called her Plaza home “The City of Fountains,” and as I walk down Forty-Seventh Street toward Anthropologie I pass several. I stop at a small sculpture embedded in the stone wall on the corner at Broadway. A bronze piece called Quiet Talk, it is a kneeling mother holding her son close as they seem to search each other’s eyes. I think of Dr. Roberts. Maybe I should have told him about yesterday.

  Charlie had spilled his Goldfish on the shag rug under the dining room table. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he had not decided to use the heel of his sneaker to crush all the bits and pieces down into the carpet until it was just a dusty orange stain. He’d said he thought if he “smashed it good” I wouldn’t notice. I’d pulled him over and made him lean down with me, both our noses nearly to the floor and shouted, “I can see it, Charlie? Can you see it?” Negativity. Intolerance. I turn away from the beautiful, sensitive mother with the kind eyes and continue walking.

  In the window of Anthropologie there’s a gauzy, black patchwork peasant dress that catches my eye. It’s the kind of thing Ian likes for me to wear. My mom said to get something cute to cheer me up. I take it back to the dressing room and have just finished tying the sash when a young salesgirl parts the curtain and pokes her spiky white-blonde head into my room. “How’s the—”

  She has the wrong room, but it’s her expression when I spin around that makes me want to punch her. My hat, glasses, purse and clothes are littered across the floor. She sees my startled, naked face and says, “Oww. Fuck!” before looking horrified by her own outburst and letting the curtain fall back into place.

  I turn back to the mirror. I pull my hair back and bend toward the glass. The morning after the fall, the entire left side of my face had been a combination of green and purple with a raw red scrape across the whole discolored mess. The black stitches stuck out like tiny housefly legs from where they were knotted in several places. My eye was swollen completely shut under a bump the size of a golf ball on my eyebrow. My cheek puffed out like a grotesque chipmunk, cleaved into two sides by the deep wound. It had been repulsive, and Charlie had cried uncontrollably until he could barely breathe when he woke up and saw me. I rocked him and whispered, “It’s okay, shh, it’s okay, shh.” It went on like that forever.

  I’ve been healing for a while now, and I’ve stopped noticing it every time I look in the mirror. But I’d seen her shock. And disgust. I saw it through the salesgirl’s eyes. The middle of my eyebrow is missing, as if singed. The lightning-shaped zigzag between the two halves is a motley combination of varying skin colors ranging from purple to white. The corner of my eye is the worst part. It is pinched together, with a thumb and finger-like web in between where it was sewn just a tad too tight, making my left eye a quarter smaller than my right. Down my cheek, like an afterthought, the scar casually strolls this way and that, until it stops a half inch above the corner of my mouth.

  The patchwork peasant dress is a wisp of a garment, priced at $275. It is beautiful and I no longer am. I rip it off over my head, and it tears and that feels good.

  My phone keeps ringing inside my purse, and I ignore it until it hits me that someone needs to reach me. How do I have four missed calls? What if it’s my parents? My heart races. I have two voice mails. My thoughts crumble into little pieces of meaning. Charlie. Something has happened to Charlie. Something big, my intuition tells me. Something huge has happened.

  It’s Joanna.

  I sent the email after all. The letter I wrote to her in Cami J’s office. I got up the courage to send it. Now she wants to talk.

  IAN

  2003

  Ian sat in his cubicle in the opulent conference room of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palace. Surrounding him was glitz and its antithesis. There were molded ceilings, chandeliers, polished wood, marble and mosaic. There was also body odor. Sand on the floor. Soldiers with dirt-stained faces and the general beleaguered atmosphere of an overtired office filled with worker bees, stress and barely concealed anger.

  Ian tried to tune it all out with his headphones as he bent over his laptop, frowning, sweating and typing.

  From: Ian Wilson

  To: Madeline Brandt

  Sent: Friday, 8 August 2003

  Subject: Hi Petal

  Hiya, Maddie, it’s Ian.

  I know I have a lot to explain. The day before you were due to arrive in Croatia, my brother John got a call from an American company called Atlas. They wanted to hire John for a very important role in Iraq. He was chosen to be the head of security for the transitional government in northern Iraq. He got me hired as well. The problem was that they needed my position filled immediately. That’s why I had to leave. Had I not gone when I did, they would have simply hired someone else in my place.

  I had to go, Maddie. But it wasn’t what you think. On the phone that day, you thought I was going to say, “I have to do what’s best for me.” That’s not it at all. I was going to say, “I have to do what’s best for us.”

  I wanted to see you so badly. I never wanted to hurt you. My feelings for you in Macedonia have never changed.

  You think it was about money. Yes, it was. I won’t lie because it’s true. I never had any. When I realized that I really wanted to be with you the first thing I thought was that I was not good enough for you. I didn’t go to university. I couldn’t give you the life you were used to and that you deserve.

  I’m not daft. I know you liked me. But back then as a soldier, was I the sort of person you would have taken seriously for the long haul?

  Maybe now I can be. That’s what’s keeping me going.

  The job is not exactly what I expected. The company is not very good and I’m guarding a VIP General who doesn’t seem to give a shit about his bodyguards. He keeps eating night after bloody night at this downtown hangout of Westerners and it’s just a matter of time before a teenager strapped with explosives comes barging through the door shouting “Allah Akbar!”

  I’ve started daydreaming about shooting the General myself, ha ha.

  But the money is good.

  John arrives next week or I would have quit by now. Once he’s here I’ll leave Baghdad and become his partner in charge of security for the coalition in the north.

  That will be much better, I think.

  For a while I gave up on us. But I can’t live that way. I’m going to get through this. I’m going to find you and make up for what I did to yo
u. I’m going to tell you how I feel and we will make this work.

  I just need a little time.

  Ian never sent his message to Maddie.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Ian joined his brother John in northern Iraq to become his right-hand man and second in command of the security of the regional coalition.

  The heat slithered in waves over an undulating hillside. Looking ahead was dizzying, like squinting at the bottom of a swimming pool through gently lapping water. The wind stunk of burning tires, and there was the occasional drone of helicopters, which appeared in twos and threes on the horizon, buzzing like bugs, and then dipping out of eyesight.

  The brothers drove at a treacherous speed past the monotony of cardboard-colored countryside, and the occasional charred remains of a battered car or warning sign for minefields. Along this road they also passed palm trees, mud huts, starving sheep and cattle, and three of Saddam’s former prisons, huge, nightmarish and lonely brick constructions in the middle of a sea of dead, sand-colored grass.

  Ian had been quiet for a long time. Eventually he tipped his head to the side. “We don’t have to keep working for these wankers. We could work for ourselves.”

  John made a noise. “That again.”

  “What?”

  “I told you in Bosnia,” John said brusquely. “I’m not starting a company.”

  “Makes more sense now than ever. You think we couldn’t run a better operation than these guys?”

  “It’s not that. I’ll accept that a bunch of monkeys could probably do a better job. But where would we get the money? How would we get our first contract? Who would we employ?”

  “We know tons of guys from our time in the military.”

  “Yeah, we do. Now name five guys you would want working for our company that you could trust with your life and a multimillion-dollar contract.”

  “Okay. Andy Fremont. Vick Davies. Brent Halifax.” Ian paused, his fingers raised as he ticked off names. He had been throwing out the idea of working for themselves on and off for two years. Each time they talked about it, John reminded him of how huge an undertaking it would be.

  Nevertheless, Ian daydreamed about becoming the CEO or vice president of a successful international private security company. He had a vision of himself with a Breitling watch sparkling on one wrist and olive-tinted Cartier sunglasses holding back his hair. Wearing a fitted Armani suit, he pictured himself stepping out of a Mercedes SL convertible. The transformation from military bodyguard to international businessman would be complete. He would no longer be just a soldier. He would be good enough to shake Maddie’s father’s hand and feel confident as he smiled and said, “Nice to meet you, sir.”

  Out loud he said, “Did I say Andy Fremont?”

  “Yes. You said him first.”

  “Okay. I’m still thinking.”

  “You’ve got three so far.”

  “I know. Give me a second.”

  “You can’t come up with five. Neither can I. Three trustworthy guys? That’s hardly a company.”

  Ian dropped his hands, defeated. “Okay. Maybe you’re right. It wouldn’t be easy.” John nodded knowingly, and they drifted into silence.

  After five minutes of monotonous desert and sweltering heat, Ian cleared his throat and spoke suddenly. “For fuck’s sake, man. Whether I’m in Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq, it doesn’t matter. This job is ninety-nine percent mind-numbing nothing. Sitting around waiting for something to happen. Then the other one percent is chaos and anarchy. Cats and dogs living together.”

  “Yep.”

  “I hate this place.”

  “You’re talkative today.”

  “I just want to get away from people sometimes. You know? Completely away. A cabin in the woods somewhere.”

  With Maddie, he thought. Under a quilt with snow-tipped mountains visible through a little wooden-framed window. “If I could find a place where I could be alone with some vodka, cigarettes and my computer I wouldn’t fucking care if I never saw another human being again. Seriously,” he lied. Except for Maddie.

  “You know what I think you should do?”

  “Shut up?”

  “No. I think you should get back in touch with the American girl.”

  The American Girl. Ian felt the hair on the back of his neck bristle. Had he spoken out loud? Did his brother know him so well? It felt almost like an invasion of privacy, like John had been reading his mind. “As if things didn’t go badly enough last time. You think maybe I should invite her to Iraq? This time she might throw a rock at your head instead of a phone at your leg.”

  “She struck me as being worth a second try.”

  Ian went serious. “Yeah. She is.”

  “Have her meet you in Cyprus.”

  Ian stewed on this. “She’s a journalist. I gather her family may have some money. Both her sisters are doctors. Just look at it from my point of view. The fact that things didn’t work out in Bosnia simply sped up the inevitable. You think a girl like that would really go for me?”

  “No, I don’t. But what do I know about women? Monica says anyone would be lucky to have you, and I think she’s got pretty good taste.”

  “Let’s not forget that your wife is seriously biased and secretly in love with me. Anyway, it’s not that easy.”

  In a separate car accompanying the Wilson brothers were an ex-Gurkha captain and his driver. Soldiers from Nepal who had fought for the British army since the turn of the century, many former Gurkhas had offered their services to private security companies. The Gurkha Captain Rai was in his early sixties, and had probably not been in a wartime deployment since the Falkland Islands in 1982.

  Offhand, Ian said, “I like Captain Rai. Nice guy.”

  “Yeah. He’s all right, isn’t he?” John said, nodding.

  “Far too old to be here, though. He needs to go home and retire while he still has some limbs.”

  “You know how far Rai’s pay probably goes in Nepal?” John asked and then whistled. “Jesus.”

  “I bet. It’s just that he’s so polite and friendly and little. He’s someone’s granddad. I’d like to see him at the park, smoking a pipe and scowling at the young folk. Or at trivia night at the pub with his buddies.”

  “There’s a car overtaking us on the left,” John said.

  “Yeah. I see it.” Ian leaned forward to check the right-hand mirror. “Will you look at that?” he asked, watching the dusty Volkswagen Passat speeding unapologetically forward. “What the hell is he doing?”

  “Who’s in the car?”

  Ian looked back. “Driver’s a man. Someone small in the passenger seat. It’s not four young thugs with ‘we hate the coalition’ flags hanging out their car.”

  “Imagine that!”

  “I know. Some cell leader somewhere is slacking off.”

  “Ha!”

  Ian turned around in his seat and squinted as the car drew even nearer. The driver was grizzled, bearded and gray, and the small passenger had two little hands on the dash, as if he or she were leaning forward curiously to get a better look at Ian and John.

  “Let ’em pass,” said Ian, continuing to observe the car through his mirror. “I might be losing my mind, but I’m not quite ready to run a grandfather and a little girl off the road in the name of the Queen.”

  “Blasphemer,” John said as he pulled over slightly to allow for the car to pass. Just as it pulled up level with the brothers, a deafening explosion rocked the desert. A geyser of dirt shot into the air from the median, where a roadside bomb had been buried. Ian and John were both whipped sideways as the explosion blew the safety glass out of their windows. Pieces of the civilian car rained down on their hood and windshield in chunks and shards.

  John slammed his foot on the accelerator, anticipating small arms fire to follow. He looked in his
wing mirror and saw what was left of the Volkswagen, a grayish-black frame consumed by flames, careen off the road and into a ditch. Ian ran his hand down the side of his face and neck. His skin was bubbled and bleeding. Was he alive? Yes. He looked at John and saw there were tiny pieces of safety glass stuck in his brother’s arm, cheek and temple.

  Ian contacted Captain Rai to make sure he was all right and the Gurkha’s absurd response was, “We okay! Car go bang! Drive, drive, drive!”

  “Okay,” Ian said. “Okay, Captain Rai. I’m here. We’re all good.” But it wasn’t true. Like the flying debris following the bomb, he was untethered, sailing, losing precious little pieces of himself as he tumbled across Iraq.

  After that it was a blur. Ian’s memory kicked back in miles down the highway when John stopped the car, stumbled out onto the roadside to throw up repeatedly and then got back in and drove, drove, drove.

  MADDIE

  Two weeks before

  Cami J has filled the pockets of her black Aerosmith hoodie with fish pellets and we are standing at the muddy edge of the man-made pond out in the back of her house.

  She throws some food into the water and the carp come and eat it up with their giant blow-job mouths. Look at those giant blow-job mouths, I almost say but I stop myself. I don’t just say whatever pops into my head. I may be glitchy, but I’m mostly in control.

  Except for yesterday at the gym. That was weird. Of course, it’s annoying when you drive all the way into Overland Park from Meadowlark to show up thirty minutes early at Lifetime Fitness for a Cardio Kickboxing class. It’s annoying to take the time to calm your inconsolable three-year-old before leaving him in the day care that smells of poop and bleach, get your bench and mat and weights and towel and water, only for some arrogant, entitled woman who walks around with her back arched to show up two minutes into the class. It’s annoying when she sets up an inch from you and leaves her Fabletics bag and vitamin water right where you are supposed to be doing your goddamn grapevine. Everyone would agree. Fucking annoying.