by Annie Ward
* * *
Ian called that the year we “lived in one another’s pockets.” We had been in tight quarters in New York, but I had left every day to go to work. In Kansas, I was free to spend my time with Ian. My parents invited us to use their spare tent and camp with them at their favorite spot outside Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Ian absolutely loved the quiet of the lush forest, the footpaths, stone bridges and glassy water. He said to my dad, “One day I’d like to have a cabin in a beautiful place like this.”
In the meantime, he had been transformed into an outdoorsman and spent a small fortune at REI to jump-start his new life’s hobby with top-quality gear. “I didn’t realize,” he said, “that camping in the forest would be such a great escape.” He spent hours looking at websites and images of America’s national parks. We packed up the car and hit the road whenever the mood struck him, which was often. We had no jobs or children. It was la-la land.
* * *
Until one night in the fall, when we’d been married for about a year. I was woken by loud wind and thunder. It had been one of those long days that should never have started the way that it did. One of my old high-school friends had a Sunday brunch with tons of delicious food and an entire table covered with the fixings for mimosas and Bloody Marys. Ian had started mixing his first vodka orange at eleven. I persuaded him to come home with me about four, but when I suggested a sobering walk with the dogs, he waved me off and poured a drink.
I watched him happily dancing around in the kitchen to a song that was only in his head, and I knew that I didn’t want to be around when his private party turned in on itself. In recent months he’d started to occasionally mock me for having grown up in such a sheltered, privileged place. It was as if he was angry at me for having grown up where he wanted to have grown up. Sometimes when he drank he ridiculed me for being pampered and naive.
When the storm woke me, I found myself upright in the recliner in my bedroom. I had fallen asleep while reading. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was a little after ten at night. I got up and walked down the hall and then the stairs. I could see Ian across the house in the kitchen, rifling through the pantry. I walked over quietly. I watched as he wrestled with the plastic packaging on some candies as if the packaging were fighting back.
“Hey, baby,” I said softly. I was hoping to entice him up to bed.
When he turned and I saw his eyes, I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I had the distinct feeling when he looked at me, that I wasn’t there at all. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I thought you’d gone to bed ages ago,” he said in a way that insinuated I had become old, boring and an altogether puritanical party pooper.
“Never mind,” I said. “I can see you’re not okay.”
“Why? Because I didn’t want to go on a walk with you and the dogs earlier?”
“I just wanted your company,” I said, backing away. “The neighbors never see us together. They never see you.”
“Who cares? You and your bloody walks! You don’t have a clue. I can’t just ‘go for walks.’ I can’t ‘chat’ with the neighbors. I can’t watch my feet taking step after step when I’m not trying to get somewhere. I can hear the bones snapping beneath my boots. Those poor people. They had shitty lives and then they were fucking massacred and then what did I do? I trampled over their bones. Helena and I both did.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Rwanda. I’m talking about the church we were told to visit.”
“What happened there?” I asked, feeling spooked. I had a very distant vague memory of him starting to tell me this story in Skopje. He hadn’t been able to finish it.
“We took a shortcut through the woods. We didn’t realize we were walking over bodies until we were in the middle of the meadow. We were standing on top of a family. There was a baby. His footie pajamas and his sippy cup.” Ian’s eyes appeared more lost and unfocused than before. “It’s the reason she killed herself and the reason I can’t bloody sleep! You can’t even imagine it! How could you know?”
“Ian.” I took another step backward, my flannel pajama pants tripping me as I stumbled away from him. “Please calm down. It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right and don’t tell me to calm down. Calm down? Calm down! Tell that to the people in Belfast, in Bosnia, in Rwanda and in Iraq,” he shouted, counting on his fingers. “Just before they were slaughtered. I suppose you never heard of World War II either. You think it can’t happen here? It can happen anywhere! Even to you, princess. Fuck walks, fuck the neighbors and fuck you.”
Aside from Wayne and his reclusive disabled wife, our neighbors were the widowed mother of one of my former schoolmates and some newlyweds with a cat. I tried to stop myself, but I couldn’t. “I should have listened to Joanna.”
“What?” Those unhinged eyes were boring into me now.
My voice trembled when I said, “Maybe...maybe Joanna was right about you.”
“Really? In what way?”
“She said you were different from us. That you’d hurt me.”
“I’d like to hurt you right now.”
I started crying and retreating toward the stairs. “She called you crazy and heartless.”
He was usually unshakable but this threw him. “Heartless?” he singled out, apparently oblivious to crazy. He crossed the room in a few large strides. “What? She said I’m heartless?”
“Yes.”
“That bitch. I should’ve let her kittens die.”
“What?” I stopped crying. I stopped backing away.
“I saved those fucking kittens. I took them to Jason’s girlfriend. Joanna had already tried to get me fired, and still I took her dead cat’s babies away so she wouldn’t have to watch them die after what she’d been through. Me, heartless!”
It was dawning on me then. “And what had she been through?”
“Aww! She didn’t tell you? Her best friend in the whole wide world? I thought she told you everything.”
“Just tell me. What had she been through?”
“Joanna lost a child there, in Skopje. She had a miscarriage.”
I was gritting my teeth. “And she told you. And not me.”
Ian’s drunken eyes seemed to slide sideways, and he suddenly looked disturbed. “You’d already gone home,” he slurred, turning away. I think he realized he’d crossed a line.
“No, I hadn’t.” I was only sure because now I finally understood why there’d been a blood-soaked towel underneath her bathroom sink. I finally understood why she’d failed to meet me at the bus station that one and only time. She’d been home sick for days. Oh my God. Joanna.
Ian was trying to think. “Okay. Maybe not. Then I guess you must have been in Sofia working.”
“Still, I find it very hard to believe she confided in you of all people.”
“Don’t forget that Joanna and I were close once. It’s not like she had a lot of people to turn to, what with her being practically on her own out there. And the two of you had already fallen out.”
“Over you. We only ever fought over you.”
“Should I be sorry or honored?”
“It’s true. We’d never had anything more than an argument. In ten years. Then you came along and she tried to tell me things about you, and I wouldn’t listen.”
“Thank God you didn’t listen! We wouldn’t even be together if you had. Anyway, she’s a liar. She was then, and she probably still is. An angry, selfish liar.”
“Why would she lie?”
“She wanted you to hate me.”
“Why?”
“She had her reasons.”
“What?”
“You want to keep talking about this, do you?”
“Yes. What reasons?”
“Maybe she didn’t want you to know that we’d been fucking.
”
And there it was, and I was suddenly aware of how blind I’d been. But I was not blind any longer, and now my vision warped and bent, and I could see every angle and implication of this drunk confession. He was the father of Joanna’s baby. He was the reason she’d said, “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.”
What must it have been like, to have Ian go back to Fiona, when Joanna was pregnant with his child? I was so ashamed of the way I’d behaved toward her. And embarrassed. Blood rushed through my head. I’d tried so hard to seduce him.
“You wouldn’t touch me back then, and you said it was because of Fiona.”
“I didn’t want to fuck it up with you! I never wanted you to think I was a cheater. I didn’t give a damn what Joanna thought.”
“But you are a cheater.”
“Christ!”
“And you had an affair with a woman you say you despised! Which makes me think you’re a liar, too.”
“See, this is why I never told you before. You never struck me as the type to really get the whole hate-fucking thing.”
“You’re actually sicker than I ever realized.”
“Really? I thought you had already diagnosed me. You think I haven’t found your little PTSD library?”
It was true. I had read book after book on PTSD, looking for cures and finding only warnings and tragedies, accusations and injustices. There were no fairy-tale endings. Just horror.
“I’m sick. Right? Aren’t I?” he said, smacking his chest. “I meet the criteria, don’t I? Yes, I lost friends. Tick. Yes, I almost died. Tick. Not just once but a number of times. How many of those close calls took someone else’s life and left me to walk away? All of them! Tick, tick. Yes, I felt betrayed. And, yes, I feel like I deserve to be dead. Tick, tick, tick.”
Despite my anger I reached for him. He batted my hand away.
“You’re always asking me what’s wrong.” He began imitating me. Speaking in a clownish version of my voice. “‘Oh! Are you in a bad mood? Not again! You’re no fun.’” He laughed suddenly. “You want to know the reason I shut down a company that was making me millions? I’ll tell you. Those six guys? Where was I when they were executed? You want to know?”
This was the first I had ever heard about six murdered men. I covered my mouth with my hands and waited.
“Ask me. I was in Cyprus. In the pool. Paddling around on a floatie with a vodka orange in the cup holder, smoking a cigarette, listening to my music. I was waiting for the barbecue to get hot. And I never returned John’s or Abbi’s calls because I didn’t even bother to check my phone. I should have been the one to go to the families and tell them and apologize. I should have been there, grieving with them over the death of their sons and husbands and fathers. It should have been me who told them, me who knocked on the door and said how sorry I was. But I was by the pool! Can you imagine how outraged their wives and children would have been if they saw me there? Lying in the sun while my guys were pulled over and executed?”
“Ian,” I said, again trying to touch him and again him having none of it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He leaned against the wall and slid to a sitting position. “There’s so much I haven’t told you, Maddie. So much.”
* * *
Ian and I didn’t speak for days. I crept around the house like a mouse, walking on eggshells, trying to avoid him. I scuttled to our bedroom when I heard his footsteps coming up the basement stairs. I spent long stretches of time at my mom and dad’s house. At last he appeared at my bedside in the early morning. He said, “I’m going back to work.”
Atlas had offered him a position as an independent contractor, carrying out security assessments on business compounds around the world. Within weeks he was given a two-month overseas position reviewing the security at several oil-processing facilities in Kazakhstan.
Ian came to me a few nights before he left and put his arms around my waist. He kissed the top of my head. “Petal,” he said. “We can get past this. We got past me walking away in Macedonia and standing you up in Bosnia, didn’t we? This is no big deal.”
I thought about saying, Yes, look at how I let you treat me, and still, here I am. Look at how many times I’ve forgiven you. But I didn’t. I loved him still, and we’d only been married a year. It was too early to fail.
We stayed up late the night before he left. He liked to tell me again and again how he had fallen for me at once, but believed I was too good for him. I would always respond with my own story of wanting him desperately all those years we were apart. This was our routine and we strutted about our own private stage reenacting our parts in the magical romance for one another. That night we re-created those initial days at the Hudson with a marathon binge of Game of Thrones broken up by wine, vodka, cigarettes and bouts of circus sex on the couch. I would find out that I was pregnant before I saw him again.
And then...
Charlie was born.
* * *
I fell into an exhausted sleep for a while after the delivery. When I woke, Ian and a nurse were shouting at one another nose to nose, and I remember thinking, Oh my God, Ian’s fighting with her!
I tried to sit up, and it felt as if the stitches in my Caesarean incision had ripped open. I must have made a horrible noise because Ian and the nurse both froze and turned to look at me. I could see what they were fighting over. It was a tiny white card, the kind that accompanies a delivery of flowers.
No one was handing me a bouquet.
Ian grabbed for the card again and said softly yet firmly, “I don’t want to upset her.”
The nurse, a formidable red-haired lady who looked like she’d be willing to meet Ian outside on the street to settle things, replied, “She deserves to know that someone has threatened her baby. We should call the police!”
My pain was severe. I saw little floating spots of white before my eyes. It felt as if I’d been stabbed. The floor was a mess. It was confusing. Everywhere I looked I saw shards of glass, fake moss and black petals. Ian was clinging to the nurse’s hand. For a second, through the twinkling stars and agony, it sounded like he was crying.
No. Ian doesn’t cry.
* * *
After waking up in my hospital room and discovering Ian and a nurse wrestling over a card that had been stuck in a smashed black floral arrangement addressed to me, I felt very ill and sad and afraid. I was heavily medicated and weak, and I honestly lacked the will to argue with him over that damn card. I saved my voice on the way home. I alternated between squinting out the window at the cornfields and glancing back every few seconds to look at the frustratingly uninformative gray back of the rear-facing child seat. I desperately wanted to get home and see my baby’s face.
Ian chattered incessantly. “It’s nothing to worry about, Maddie. That card. Honestly, Maddie, I’m telling you. It was someone’s idea of a joke. Probably someone who doesn’t like me and wanted to ruin our special moment. We won’t let it, though, will we, Petal? We won’t let someone do that to us.”
“What did it say?”
“The card?”
“Yes, the fucking card!”
“Oh it said something like, ‘I hope your stupid baby keeps you up at night.’ Something like that.”
I hope your stupid baby keeps you up at night. I shook my head. “You’re lying. That’s ridiculous.”
“No, I’m not. It was something like that.”
“It was Fiona,” I said, while wondering, Was it Joanna?
“No, it wasn’t. It was someone’s idea of a joke. Forget it.”
But the card? It had gotten to him, too. I could tell.
* * *
Ian had turned down an offer of ninety days’ work in Saudi Arabia to be with me for Charlie’s arrival. It was a good thing,
too, because after the incident in the hospital room I didn’t get better. Three days after leaving the hospital I was running a temperature, and alternating Tylenol and Advil. I assumed my incision had gone from being infected to being badly infected. I had an appointment to see my doctor the following morning. I wasn’t sure I would be able to wait.
I woke up to reach for Ian knowing he would not be there. My hand ran across the sheets where he had tried fleetingly to stay put, feeling the sweat left behind after his stunted rest by my side. My fever had spiked. Charlie was not in the little bassinet by my bed. They were both gone. I felt a surge of adrenaline and jumped up in a panic. I tried to reason with myself. Surely Charlie was with Ian. And yet this thought gave me no comfort at all.
In the past, before Charlie arrived, I would sometimes get out of bed and go look for Ian. Usually I found him sitting alone in the basement, cigarette between his lips, eyes on the ceiling, just staring. Every once in a while, I would go and place my chin over his shoulder to kiss the roughness of his scarred jaw. Other times I would decide to let him be, quietly turn around, and head back up to bed without disturbing him.
That night, burning up and feeling an awful, overwhelming need to find Charlie, I tiptoed halfway down the stairs. I could hear Ian in the kitchen humming. I heard the light whistle of the teakettle. I continued down to the bottom, and I could see Ian at the refrigerator. Charlie was in his basket on the couch making wah wah noises, one little clenched fist waving back and forth in the air. Relief flooded through me. Ian was making Charlie a bottle.
My head hurt so badly that suddenly all I wanted was to be back in bed. I leaned on the railing a second before pulling myself together and retracing my way up the steps. A wave of nausea and vertigo nearly toppled me, and I put my hands down on the stairs. I crouched like a cat, all paws on the ground, bowing my head. I stayed like that, trembling on all fours, until the dizziness passed. When I stood back up in that fog of fever, I remember something like a lucid dream, or a vivid hallucination. As I walked back to the burning, vacant spot in my bed, the house around me shimmered, as if I was looking through a dappled glass. For those ephemeral few minutes as I walked up the stairs and down the long hall, I could see through Ian’s eyes.