by Annie Ward
He switched off the light and went downstairs and back out to the pool. The sun had gone down while they were arguing, and he lit a mosquito candle. He thought about going for the vodka, but already the lights of the fishing village down below were bleeding into one another, something like cars moving on a highway.
It was almost completely quiet, but it was not a cabin nestled in a bucolic valley between forested mountains. It was not the sanctuary Ian wanted. While it was isolated, perched amid empty buildings and unfinished construction projects, the villa still had neighbors. Tala, the closest town, was a fifteen-minute drive away, but there were Cypriot families scattered across the hillside. Down the winding road that traversed the dry, dusty mountain, unfinished white adobe villas baked in the Mediterranean heat. Far below, where the parched hills gave way to the turquoise blue water, there was festive Paphos, a bustling vacation spot popular with Brits and Germans. Though Fiona had pleaded with him to take her into town for a meal or a drink at one of the holiday pubs, Ian refused to go anywhere near the crowds. He sat on his hill alone and looked down at the town teeming with people and their speedboats, jet skis, sandals and sunburns. He wanted nothing to do with them.
When he and John decided to start delegating the majority of Bastion’s administrative work, they moved their base of operations to Cyprus. Ian had just signed the lease on the cookie-cutter villa oddly placed in a graveyard of half-finished holiday housing projects on a derelict plot of land overrun by cats and lizards.
Shortly before Fiona’s surprise arrival, he had driven down to the Tala supermarket and filled a shopping cart with alcohol and meat.
Looking down on the Mediterranean below, and out toward the mainland where Syria separated him from his men and his work in Iraq, he marveled at the fact that he was alive at all. Time for another vodka.
Plodding through the kitchen toward the liquor cabinet, he glanced at his computer and noticed that his email was open. When he looked closer, he saw that it was his “Drafts” folder. It was a folder he didn’t use. He had never saved his emails as drafts but simply closed them without finishing them and forgotten them. But there they were. Over a hundred unfinished letters to Madeline. No wonder Fiona had told him he was pathetic and crazy. Quite honestly, he agreed. He wondered how far Fiona had gotten with his seemingly endless cache of love letters to Maddie before she’d started doing shots and trashing the house.
He stood up and walked outside to the shallow end of the pool. He nearly fell in, trying to lower himself to a seat at the edge.
Of all the outcomes he had imagined, this was not one of them. When his school counselor had asked him years ago how he saw the future, he would never have answered, “I plan to protect the supposedly good people from the supposedly bad people, and then I plan to make a lot of money off of a tragic war. The coalition will never coalesce and the countries that refused to help will be angry that they weren’t given any spoils of war. After none of it is over, none of it, I will just go and sit by my pool with a woman who I have stuck by for years for no other reason except I didn’t want another person to die. So I will be with her, instead of with the woman I love. And then I will spend most of my time drunk, wondering if tomorrow will be the day I don’t wake up.”
The first time he nearly died had been when he’d just turned twenty. He hadn’t exactly laughed it off, but neither did he mull it over with the morbid curiosity that he felt now. Since then the close calls had been getting more frequent and more serious, and it was harder to brush them off with a soldier’s sense of humor.
On a pitch-black night on a lonely road outside an army barracks in Bielefeld, Germany, there had been the wild-eyed, drunk giant whom Ian had been chasing down in his police car.
Pumped full of alcohol and adrenaline, the man propelled himself through the driver’s-side open window and wrapped both meaty hands around Ian’s neck. Ian had no choice but to step on the gas and go careening down the street with the man’s lower body hanging out of the window. He smashed the man’s legs against a row of cars parked on the side of the road, setting off alarm after alarm. Eventually the man fell off and rolled like a log until he came to rest facedown.
Not long after, there was that unusually quiet night working in Burundi. Normally, Ian read his book while trying to ignore the sporadic gunshots of yet another attempted coup. The team had eaten their evening meal together and discussed what was happening in the country with a modicum of hope. Afterward, Ian stepped outside for his last cigarette before bed. Seconds later a huge blast shook the ground. Smoke curled in front of the moon from behind the palm trees lining the driveway. Ian stared toward the explosion, his hand on his gun, waiting and breathing hard.
It had been a land mine just outside the ambassador’s residence, and it had been meant for the first car on the road the next morning. Some unlucky, unknown person had made the fatal and arbitrary decision to drive that road past curfew. The first car on the road the next morning would have been Ian with the ambassador, and that unlucky person had just saved Ian’s life by swapping it for his own.
Ian waded out to the pink plastic horse bobbing up and down in his pool. “Why am I still here?” he asked. “Me? I’m nothing.”
The horse looked at him with giant, white uncomprehending eyes.
Ian was quiet for a long time. Finally he climbed out of the pool and trailed water through the kitchen and up the wooden stairs. He needed to check and make sure Fiona was okay.
At the top of the stairs he could see that the bedside lamp had been turned back on, casting a long path of dim light through the door and across a section of the hallway. He could not hear anything. He walked quietly to the door and looked inside.
Fiona had propped herself up against the headboard and she was slumped over, hair hanging down, her arms to the sides, palms up on top of the covers.
Ian felt an icy gush down his spine. “Fiona?”
She didn’t move.
He threw up in his mouth and swallowed it down. He took a step forward. “Fiona?”
She raised her head and looked at him from underneath her hair. “If it weren’t for her, you and I would be married by now. With a little baby.”
Ian let out a great gasp and felt his legs nearly buckle. He grabbed on to the doorjamb and began mumbling under his breath.
“What?” she asked. “What? I can’t hear you.”
“Just that I dodged a bullet there, didn’t I?”
Fiona laughed. A barking sound. “You better pray to God that I never get my hands on her.”
“Yeah. I’ll do that. And while I’m at it, I’ll thank him for telling me to kick your arse out of my house and never speak to you again.”
“Nice, Ian. You know what? You can both go rot in hell.”
MADDIE
2010
Eventually I found my way back to my former cheerful self. I stopped tutoring spoiled jerks who had been expelled or suspended and started tutoring regular, bashful, silly kids. My focus had changed and I had enrolled at Hunter College to get my master’s in education so that I could apply for a full-time job at the Upper East Side school most of my students attended. Finally, I had wholeheartedly embraced the role I believed I was destined for in the world, that rare single friend of married people, who is popular with and kind to their kids.
I was visiting an old college friend upstate, and the exhausted single mom had fallen asleep while reading a bedtime story to her young daughter. I sat with a glass of wine on the chaise longue by the window. Alone.
The apartment was in an old mansion which had been quartered to create four three-bedroom apartments, and my friend had the back-patio view of the lake. It was breathtaking. Rows of warm spheres of light around each streetlight reflected off the water, and the tree branches drooped toward the ground, heavy with the last of the fall colors. Above everything was the crisp, clear black sky. It was a night when
anything could happen, and the unexpected did.
I walked across the living room and sat down at the desk to use my friend’s computer. I had five emails. Suddenly disbelief and a feeling of frantic joy rushed through my body. One of the emails was from Ian. Years of heartache welled up in me and caught in my throat. The screen blurred in front of me as my eyes filled.
I wasn’t able to read it right away. I went to the kitchen and splashed water on my face. I hugged my stomach and said, “I’m good, I’m good.” After a few minutes I stood up and walked back to the computer. I didn’t sit down. I read it from a distance, my arm outstretched to scroll down, in case I needed to get away quickly from how it made me feel.
From: Ian Wilson
To: Madeline Brandt
Sent: Friday, 19 November 2010
Subject: Sorry
Hiya, Petal,
I hope this message finds you well and happy. I can’t apologize enough for the fact that I have been out of touch for so long. Suffice it to say, my life has flown by me these past years and I don’t know where the time has gone, except down my throat in the form of vodka. My brother and I started our own business in Iraq and it became my whole life, but it’s time to close it down. My mum passed away and I haven’t seen my family in a long time so I’m going home for the holidays, but I’ve got some free time after that. I don’t know where you are or what your situation is, but if you’d like to see me, I’ll have my minions make the arrangements.
Love, Ian
p.s. I am so, so sorry for not writing. If you will see me, I can explain. I wanted to write you the perfect email when really all I should have done was write you to tell you I was thinking of you.
Maddie, I was thinking of you. All these years. X
I stood up, walked to the window overlooking the lake and laced my hands together. He had been thinking of me all these years, even though he’d left me. Twice.
I was angry. But I was also over the moon. He was alive. If I wanted to berate him for what he’d done, I could...and then I could forgive him. I could love him, be with him, I could do anything because everything was possible. I whispered, “Thank you,” to the beautiful starry night over and over, probably fifty times, until I collapsed on the chaise longue again, smiling so big my face hurt. I might have my happy ending after all.
* * *
Two days after Christmas, I exited the subway at Columbus Circle and walked hesitantly, nervously up Fifty-Eighth Street toward the Hudson Hotel. I wondered if I would even recognize him. I was frozen with fear as I rode the escalator from the street up to the lanai lobby. I walked underneath hanging ivy and sparkling chandeliers to the east wing of the hotel. Ahead to my right was the Library Lounge. It was a bar, but it was a quiet, grown-up place where I’d met friends before. You could sip a glass of wine and enjoy a book. There was a chessboard in the back and a billiards table to one side, and many plush comfortable chairs in a living-room-type setting. This was where I had said I would meet him. I was trying to send a message. I was a woman now. Not a brash and hot-tempered girl.
I stopped in the long hallway, halfway between the lobby and the lounge next to the elevators. I needed to take a deep breath. Then another.
I entered the lounge with what I hoped was a bright, excited look on my face. I turned this way and that, expecting to meet his familiar flashing eyes, see his smirking grin or hear him greeting me with, “Hiya, Petal.” The atmosphere was austere and alarmingly quiet.
A middle-aged couple played chess, a stunning woman read a newspaper and a shaggy-haired young man sipped a beer while texting on his phone. Also, a very drawn-faced man sat in the corner on a bench with his elbows resting on his knees staring down at the floor. His hair was badly dyed, with random spots of blond sticking out of the brown. I looked away from him and scanned the room again. When my eyes traveled back in the direction of the tired man, he was looking up at me. He had circles under his sunken eyes, and his mouth was tightly turned down in a frown. Between his knees he played with a Zippo lighter, but his hands looked lonely and helpless without his cigarettes. It was Ian. Suddenly his lips parted, and his eyes widened with recognition. He raised one hand slightly, unsure.
I stood up straighter. I waved and forced a smile. His eyes searched my face with trepidation, and I hoped he could not read what I was thinking. The years apart had been too many. Our experiences in those years had changed us too much.
Then he stood slowly, his long, powerful body unfurling to his full height. His features passed out of the shadow into the light, and I could see that, yes, he was older and careworn, but the gaunt hollows under his cheekbones had given him a strange and rugged elegance. He faced me in that rigid military stance of his. His shoulders were immense. Both the bartender and the shaggy-haired young man gave Ian a glance, looking away quickly in some animal vestige of urban male deference. At fortysomething now, Ian still had that British bad boy, Trainspotting gleam in his eye. Then, there was that smirk that I remembered. It felt like I was walking through water as I went to him.
“Hiya, Petal,” he said, tucking my hair back behind my ear just like he used to do at the Irish Pub. “It’s been a while.”
I was back in Macedonia, at Jo’s door, the last time I saw him, the day he walked up from the city to say a proper goodbye before I got on my bus to Bulgaria. Neither one of us had made a move to touch the other. I had rewritten that moment in my mind a thousand times. Now, my arms moved without my permission. They reached up and my hands rested on the backs of his shoulders. I pulled him to me and leaned my head into his chest. His heart was beating as fast as mine.
* * *
We walked in awkward silence across the street to the Time Warner building with its plate glass wall of windows looking out over Central Park. I led him to a bar called the Stone Rose on the fourth floor with a view out over the tops of the trees, and at two in the afternoon there were only a handful of people sprawled about on the banquettes.
Ian took a seat at the bar rather than at one of the more intimate tables, and I sat stiffly next to him, trying not to run off at the mouth like a nervous teenager. He cleared his throat. “My room actually isn’t all that large,” he said. “Or I would have invited you up for a drink.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “New York isn’t known for the size of its hotel rooms. They’re all tiny.”
“It’s supposed to be a bloody suite,” he said, looking at me apologetically. “I was quite shocked to open the door and find myself practically staring down at my own bed.”
“It’s a very jam-packed island. Lots of competition for real estate.”
“I’ll admit I don’t like crowds much anymore.”
“I promise not to take you to Times Square.” I laughed but he didn’t get my joke.
Ian gazed out the window, considering the Columbus traffic circle and its buses, honking taxis and shuffling pedestrians with confusion and disapproval. “Why do so many people want to live here?”
I gestured at the panoramic window framing the maze of trails, snow-covered hills and glistening ice-coated trees of Central Park opposite. “Isn’t it obvious?”
He considered this and said, “Well, no, actually. I’ve seen parks before. They all have trees and benches. I’ve still booked a deluxe suite and wound up in a room the size of a shoebox. So far this city is just like London, and I’m not too keen on London either. Would you not rather be somewhere beautiful, peaceful and safe? With lots of space and trees and privacy?”
“I grew up in a place like that.” I looked down at my hands and resisted the urge to start picking at my nails.
He touched my chin and tilted my head up. “Are you all right?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“Would you like some champagne?”
“That would be nice. We’re celebrating, aren’t we?”
“We are,” he confirmed although w
ithout the slightest trace of merriment. He leaned forward to chat quietly with the waitress.
She beamed at him and nodded. “Absolutely, sir. I’ll be right back with a bottle of Cristal.” She glanced at me in a curious way and gave me a little “well done” wink.
“Are you crazy?” I said. “That bottle is as much as the suite you were just complaining about.”
“Not nearly as much, actually.”
“That’s two weeks’ rent right there.”
“Really! Well, thank God, I don’t drink champagne.”
“What do you mean you don’t drink champagne?”
“I don’t drink it. I don’t like champagne. I’m having a vodka orange.”
“So I’m about to have my first taste, I mean bottle, of Cristal—by myself?”
“I’ve been wanting to buy you something nice, and now I’ve had the opportunity. Are you complaining?” He smiled, but the question still stung.
“No. I’m not complaining.”
“What’s wrong then?” he asked. Not smiling this time.
“Nothing.”
He stared at me. I stared back. “You seem angry,” I said. “You don’t like your room and you don’t like New York and you don’t seem too thrilled with me either.”
The waitress mumbled an apology as she awkwardly served us his screwdriver and my four-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne.
“How is it?” Ian asked, after I’d had my first taste.
“It’s lovely. Thank you.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s better.”
I put down my glass. “Why are you being so mean?”
“Mean?” he asked, taken aback. “Is that what you think? Nervous, maybe, okay. Listen. If you don’t like this, if you don’t like me, there’s nothing I can do about it, can I? I told myself, life is short, just go see her. Here I am, and it is what it is. I can’t take away the last nine years. I can’t go back to Macedonia and tell you how I feel about you instead of walking away. I can’t go back to Bosnia and meet you at the bus station with flowers as I’d planned. I certainly can’t take back all the fucking awful things I’ve seen that have turned my hair gray. I never thought you would want to be with me and I still don’t, and there you have it. I’m sick of worrying about it one way or another. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen whether I like it or not. I’m not being mean, Maddie. I’m waiting for you to have your little visit with me and then walk out of here with no intention of ever seeing me again, at which point in time I’ll go up to my room and get drunk.”