Beautiful Bad

by Annie Ward

  I started picturing topless beaches in Spain or Greece.

  “Let’s go to Kansas!” he said.

  “Kansas?”

  “When do your students have spring break?” he asked.

  “April twelfth. So, in just a week.”

  “Let’s rent a car and drive cross-country to Kansas. It would be fun. You can show me some of your country. Plus, I want to meet your family.”

  This was not what I’d been expecting. But I missed my mom and dad, and it was time for them to meet the man I’d been living with for more than a year. It took me so long to respond that he finally asked if I was still on the line.

  “I am, Ian,” I said. “I’m still here.”

  * * *

  Two weeks later, he and I woke up together in my old bedroom in my parents’ farmhouse in Meadowlark.

  When I opened my eyes I was tangled up with him in the bed where I had once spent long hours dreaming about distant countries, castles, nightclubs, foreign boys and various means of escape from the countryside.

  Ian’s body was curled into me comfortably, his dark, scratchy beard pressed into a demure lacy pillow, his tattoos oddly vibrant and beautiful against my mom’s eggshell sheets. I felt a pure, deep love for him as I watched him snore surrounded by the quaintness of my mother’s interior decorating scheme, which included many a ceramic vase filled with colorful fake flowers, not one without its own useless little china saucer centered atop an antique doily. I’d always wanted something different. I’d brought home someone who fit the bill.

  I slipped out of bed without waking him. I went quietly downstairs hoping to get a cup of coffee with my dad before he left for his morning run, but I was too late. There was a light fog hovering over the ground toward the back of the property, and three deer were grazing just down the hill, where the lawn turned into forest. Blue jays and cardinals swarmed the bird feeder over by the rope hammock, and the older pair of my parents’ four Irish setters were sleeping in dog beds in the kitchen while the other two rooted around in the yard for the ever-elusive moles.

  I took my coffee out to the screened-in porch and stood, looking out at the land where I had played tag when I was little, and where all four of my grandparents’ ashes had been spread. This was where my sisters and I had chased lightning bugs and set off fireworks, camped out with a stolen stash of beer from the garage, and brought our dates home for long X-rated romps in the woods.

  My parents had sold about twenty-five acres, but the farm was still big enough that you couldn’t see anything but trees and hills and fence and sky.

  I jumped when Ian appeared behind me and slipped his arm around my waist. He had helped himself to coffee, and he was already smoking his first cigarette of the day. He looked happy and relaxed, as calm and content as I had ever seen him. The weariness seemed to have lifted. His eyes were brighter and clearer, and his skin had some color, like back when I first met him.

  “How did you sleep?” I asked.

  “It was so quiet,” he said. “No bloody bin trucks beeping and honking, no drunks shouting at three in the morning.”

  “Good,” I said, leaning into him.

  He ran a hand though his hair. “This morning I could hear birds singing. In Iraq where I lived, Saddam had all the trees cut down so the Kurds had nowhere to hide other than the mountains. It’s been a long time since I heard songbirds.”

  “And crickets, too, right? Did you hear the crickets?”

  “Yeah. I wasn’t sure at first, but wait—look there.” His arm around me had tightened and his mouth hung open. He jabbed his finger against the screen, gaping out at the fog. “What is that? Holy shit!”

  “What?”

  “Are those deer? Those are deer!”

  “Yes!” I was caught up in his enthusiasm.

  “Right there. Eating your mum’s tree!”

  “I know! She hates it.”

  The dogs finally spotted the deer as well and began growling. The deer were far too fast to be in danger, but the dogs took a celebratory prance around the property after the deer had loped lazily into the woods.

  “And they’re gone. A mum and two little babies!” Ian exclaimed. At that point I had to turn and study him to make sure that all the vodka and cigarettes had not caused him to suffer some sort of personality-altering stroke in the night. “Do you think?” he asked me cheerfully. “Do you think it was a mum and two babies?”

  “I do.”

  Ian pulled me in for a long hug against his chest. Eventually he leaned back so that he could see my face. I was startled to see that his eyes were glistening. “This is such a pretty, peaceful place.”

  “It is peaceful,” I answered. “Nice and quiet.”

  He laughed suddenly, and surveyed the backyard appreciatively. “It’s very relaxing,” he continued, turning his head from left to right and looking out over the acres of my parents’ land. “It’s so green. And hilly. I never imagined Kansas being so green and hilly. That’s a motherfucking hummingbird, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. That’s a motherfucking hummingbird.”

  “I prefer this to any place I’ve ever been,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and looking royally around as if he had just discovered Kansas and planted his British Empire flag.

  My jaw dropped. “Any place?”

  “Granted, I’ve been mostly to war-torn, terrorist-ridden, third-world countries.”

  “Right. Well, I can see how this is better than that.”

  “Maddie.” The glistening eyes were back. He looked almost overcome. He took my hand. “We would be happy here.”

  “Here? What do you mean, here?”

  “It would be so much cheaper than New York. Think of how much money we could save and use to travel.”

  I was quiet. He plunged ahead.

  “I’ve told you that I want us to be together and I’ve told you that I love you. But what I’ve never said is that I want this to be forever. Our whole lives, you and me. I want to give you a complete life. All the things that normal people do, the things that make them happy. A home. Kids. Maddie, let’s come here to this quiet, safe place and get married and be a family.”

  I couldn’t breathe.

  Suddenly he dropped to one knee and said, “I’m so sorry, I haven’t got a ring. That all just hit me like a ton of bricks, and I had to say it.”

  “No, that’s not it,” I managed to say. I didn’t care about a ring. I’d suddenly realized that all this time I had been afraid. He walked away from me in Macedonia. He wasn’t there when I went to be with him in Bosnia. All this time I had secretly, deeply known somehow that I would end up alone, but here he was saying the word I needed to hear: forever. He said forever. He was going to stay and make pancakes and fall asleep on the couch and tinker in the garage and we would take lovely vacations to the beach and we were going to be normal. I pictured Ian with a child hoisted up on his strong, broad shoulders, the two of them watching fireworks out over my parents’ front field. When I left the farm, it had been a lonely place. My sisters had cleared out years before me. But before, when we were a big family, it had been the scene of picnics and parties, hayrides and Easter-egg hunts.

  He was offering me permanence. Though I’d known that I loved him, I hadn’t had a clue how magnificent it would be to feel safe in that love.

  I said yes.

  We kissed like it was the first time and ended up tiptoeing back up to my bedroom, where we fell on one another like wolves. Ian dozed afterward.

  It was wonderful just to lie in my bed. The sheets smelled of my mother’s lavender fabric softener. I kept my eyes closed and pretended to be asleep for over an hour. I would have to leave Hunter College and my students, but I could always go back and work on my master’s in education elsewhere. Why not try this tranquil place where songbirds sang and Ian slept and smiled real smiles? As
I lay there next to the man I loved, I came to terms with moving back to where I had vowed never to return. I had what I had wanted for so long—unconditional love and an ally in the long fight. I was bringing the great wide world home with me. Ian had been through enough. I would do whatever was necessary to help him heal.

  MADDIE

  2012–2017

  That autumn, a little less than two years after he and I found each other again in New York, Ian and I were married on my parents’ screened-in porch, facing out over the sloping farmland that I had left and that Ian had instantly loved. My mom and dad held hands like teenagers as the justice of the peace pronounced us man and wife, and my sister Sara laughed and wiped tears from under each eye with her thumb.

  It was a last-minute event designed to gain him residency, and the airfares had been too expensive for most of Ian’s family to attend. My other sister Julia was there with her husband and two children, as was Ian’s brother Jimmy. John was doing a security assessment for ExxonMobil in some sweltering and dodgy desert, and Robbie couldn’t get out of work, but Jimmy had come from England at the last minute, and he fidgeted in the suit we had bought him at Oak Park Mall a few days before.

  Ian’s charm, sense of humor, lack of pretension, good looks and “better than Sean Connery” accent won my mom over immediately. At the rehearsal dinner, under fire from my mom and sisters with questions about Princess Diana’s lovers and Kate Middleton’s marriage to Prince William, Ian said, “You know, ladies? You want to know who’s really the best of the bunch? I will tell you who’s a lovely person, and that’s Prince Charles!”

  I had not yet heard this story. “I’m sure I’d know if you had guarded Prince Charles!”

  My mom and sisters looked like a trio of statues, all leaning into Ian with their chins on their fists. We were in a private room at the Capital Grille, an upscale steakhouse on the Plaza. Ian got up from the table, ambled around to the other end, and plucked himself a fresh slice of bread from a basket. “I was guarding the royal family’s doctor, and following him around with this giant red rucksack with all the medical supplies inside. It was a long day and Prince Charles had been to a number of different events and ceremonies, and there was food and champagne and lots of people.”

  Ian walked back to his seat, grabbed his vodka and leaned toward my mom and sisters. “Now, at some stage Prince Charles must have noticed me and wondered what the hell I was up to. Eventually we finished his schedule and pulled up at his castle. The doctor and I went into a small side room by ourselves and began to relax. Not thirty seconds had gone by when the door to this little room opens and Prince Charles walks in, totally by himself.” Ian went on in a more royal, nasal accent, ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I noticed you have been following me around whilst carrying a huge—red—rucksack!’

  “Well,” Ian said, “the doctor straightened up and said, ‘I’m Captain So-and-So. I’m the army doctor, and this is Corporal Wilson. It’s his job to assist me and carry around the medical equipment that may be needed in an emergency.’”

  Ian took a long sip of his drink. “Prince Charles said, ‘Ooohhhh! How fascinating! Do you mind if I have a look at what kind of equipment you have in there?’

  “The doctor went awfully pale and kept looking from side to side as if he wanted to make a run for it. He opened up the rucksack so slowly that Prince Charles and I couldn’t help but dart a glance at one another. And then, there nestled neatly on top of all the supplies were two bottles of very expensive champagne that the good old Doctor Klepto had nicked from an earlier engagement.”

  Ian reached into his pocket to whisk out his cigarettes. “The doctor blushed! And I thought my military career was over. Right? We’d bloody nicked the Royal champers! But no!”

  Ian wagged his finger at us all. “Prince Charles looked in, like so, and then looked back up at us. His hands were clasped behind his back. After a second he nodded and said, ‘Well, then. Gentlemen. I can imagine that would come in very handy in a medical emergency. Thank you and good night.’”

  My sisters erupted in a middle-aged version of girlish giggles, and my mom couldn’t stop dabbing at her eyes with her napkin, mopping up tears of sheer hilarity.

  Ian said to my mom, “Judy. Would you care to pop outside for a ciggie with me?” As she accompanied him away from the table, she looked back at me over her shoulder with such pride and smiled at me as if I was the luckiest woman on earth.

  My dad, Jack, a former air force pilot, accepted Ian with the warmth and gravity of a new son, and the two of them often rambled off together on walks about the farm to discuss ancient battles, famous military commanders, foreign wars, guns and the business of being a bodyguard. Once a month they went to the range for a friendly comparison of shooting skills and later to Panera, where my dad regularly insisted on treating Ian to a soup-in-a-bread-bowl lunch. For Ian, who’d lost his own dad when he was so young and whose mother had passed away just before he left Iraq, it was as if he’d gained another set of parents as well as a wife.

  * * *

  It was with ease that Ian staged his coup. He pronounced our neck of the woods in Kansas to be the greatest place on earth with a finality and devotion that most people reserved for their birthplace. Everyone who met him in Meadowlark, everyone who sweltered and froze through the extreme seasons and who had been told all their lives that they lived in a place reputed to be one of the most boring anywhere, all these people were able to walk away from meeting Ian feeling good about their life. This witty British chap who had been all over the globe just declared their hometown of Meadowlark, which they had always been secretly a little ashamed of, the very best place he’d ever been in his many travels.

  * * *

  Eventually Ian and I moved into a house ten minutes west of my parents’ farm, in a brand-new subdivision in Meadowlark called Sweet Water Creek, built in the middle of a former pasture where I once went to isolated field keg parties in high school. We’d seen probably thirty houses at that point, but he knew which one he wanted. He chose the unusual house with the huge open lower level because it reminded him of a renovated old English barn he’d once dreamed of buying. From the upstairs window we could see herds of Angus cows and an algae-covered farm pond where a heron regularly swooped in to perch on one leg and rest in the shadow of a giant sycamore tree. Behind all that were some large but lackluster wooden houses that looked more or less like ours, along with a stable, a grain silo, unfurling modest hills and the western horizon. This space and privacy is what Ian needed.

  For Ian it was love at first sight.

  He was especially happy with the fact that all houses in tornado alley had basements, which are mostly unheard of in England. He had ours finished with his own little pub built in the back, a movie screen and projector, a pool table, and an L-shaped desk in the corner for all his computers. Down there it was always dark, cool, quiet and safe. It smelled of cigarettes, licorice, Coke and liquor, spilled and soaked into the chairs.

  Ian told me that things would be different here. He would have his own house to work on and care for, and that the quaintness and calmness would draw him out into the world, for walks and talks and dinners and dates, away from the recurring thoughts and memories that made him need his time alone.

  Things didn’t change in the way that he told me they would. He outfitted our four-bedroom house with security befitting a Beverly Hills palace. It was truly a fortified sanctuary, one that made Ian comfortable and content. He spent most of his time blissfully in his basement, surrounded by machinery, technology, man-toys and distractions.

  He purchased six hundred “Warhammer” miniature models to paint. I cringed with too much love and a mixture of regret and fury as I watched him hunched over his worktable. With trembling hands and squinting eyes, he gathered up the tiny parts of those dismembered soldiers and carefully glued them together. Hours and days and nights crawled by as he put his gray plas
tic pieces of warriors together and painted them with bright colors to bring them to life.

  And then splattered them with blood.

  * * *

  I’ll give him this. He tried. He tried very hard.

  As that first year slowly rolled in and out, we had some blissful times. As long as I was content to stay home and cook meat-centric meals and watch movies and make love, he was happy. One of his very favorite things to do was to drive over to my parents’ farm and have fried chicken and potato salad on their enclosed back patio at twilight as the fireflies started flickering. His initial delight at discovering the deer never seemed to diminish, and my mom and dad never grew tired of his war stories, opinions on the European Union, global terrorism and of course, the offspring of the royal family.

  We would sit on the patio for hours talking with them. The Irish setters visited us often, begging for treats. Then they trotted off to play and hunt moles down the hill. One night I turned to him and said, “We’re settled enough, don’t you think? We should get a dog.”

  He reached over and took my hand. He smiled and said, “Let’s get two. So they’re never lonely.”

  There had been a raid at a puppy mill in Missouri a few days earlier, and our local shelter had taken in a lot of the rescues. I knew that Ian particularly liked big dogs, but again, I could see him trying. He immediately spotted the girl siblings that would steal my heart and we took our tiny black-and-white big-eyed babies home with us then and there. We named our puppies Skopie and Sophie in honor of the lives we were living when we first met. I adored them, and it was me who walked and fed them, but I suspect Ian may have loved them just as much or even more. He would lie down on the couch and let them climb all over his body as if it were a giant play structure. He let them lick his face and fall asleep with their bellies stretched over his neck or with their tiny heads nestled in the crook of each shoulder.