Beautiful Bad

by Annie Ward

  This beautiful place of ours was also a house of horrors. How could it not be? Look who had followed my husband home. There, in the alcove by the Juliet balcony, I saw a bowed figure. A Rwandan boy soldier in tattered clothes was hunched down hiding in the corner, tossing a grenade up and down, up and down, meeting my eyes with a menacing, lopsided smile.

  Through the French doors, under the streetlight where the shadows were bunched and monstrous from the overhanging trees, a car was parked in front of Wayne’s house. I could just make out the soft outline of two bodies resting against one another. The heart-shaped form of the Iraqi grandfather and the little girl were melted together in an unintended but intimate ashen embrace and were intertwined and asleep for always.

  The silence loomed as large as the great golden moon outside. This endless house was both labyrinthine and dead end. It took forever to walk from one side to the other. There was a sliver of light at the end of the hall. Down the far end of the upstairs corridor, off the unused bedroom in the untouched bath, there would be a mess. If I were to reach out and touch the door, swing it open just an inch, I knew what I would find inside. A tiled floor stained with bloody circles like clouds in a toddler’s finger painting. The towel used to mop up the mess. And somewhere hidden to the eye, whatever remained of the child.

  Before returning to my room, I stopped beside the door to the upstairs laundry. I saw a pair of Charlie’s tiny footie pajamas. They lay there, light blue and fuzzy, and I was glad that I found them first, because if Ian were to see this he would likely collapse. Mumble. Pace. The church, the sippy cup, the toy car. Helena and the meadow of bones.

  I slipped back into bed, took two more Advil, and wondered about his six murdered employees. I could only guess that they were down there in Ian’s basement. I imagined their hands were tied behind their backs and they wore blindfolds. I pictured them being in their midtwenties, handsome and swarthy with olive skin that was now leathery and partially devoured, with neat round bullet holes through the backs of their heads. They were down there in the dim, lined up, all wearing tennis shoes, gold wedding bands and stiff blood-crusted dress shirts. There was duct tape stuck in the short hairs at the base of their necks. They waited, as I did, for Ian to finally bury them.

  My God. What he had seen. I finally understood. He would never recover.

  * * *

  When Ian came home from his assignments he was always happy to see me and Charlie the first few days. “I have gotten better, don’t you think?” Ian would say, hugging me from behind, his mouth against my hair. “We’re happy, aren’t we? Petal?”

  I always answered yes, because we were, but it was more complicated than that. We were haunted in our happiness. That shadowy bastard of impending doom which followed Ian home from Iraq had now taken up residence in our home, cryptically leaving clues for me: an empty half gallon of vodka hidden under half a dozen crumpled Coke cans, a broken glass beside his computer, weeks’ worth of cigarettes overflowing in the basement ashtrays, angry, almost illegible notes jotted down on receipts and Post-its, our overgrown yard across from Wayne’s picture-perfect garden—and cobwebs. Real cobwebs down in the dark, looping and swaying and dangling like dramatic curtains all around the basement I avoided, dotted with dead bugs.

  Those clues told me that impending doom was planning on impending for some time. Those clues made me fear that I was not doing everything that I could to keep my child safe. What would Ian do if I were to tell him that this was not what I wanted?

  When Charlie was nine months old, Ian came home from Somalia and was so excited to see us. He and I made love within minutes of him walking in the door, and then he went and picked Charlie up out of his Little Tykes Activity Center and gave him a huge hug and a kiss. The following day Charlie started running a fever. By that night it was 101. By early the next morning, his fever was 103. We were new parents, and we didn’t know what to do. Ian drove us to Children’s Mercy, and Charlie was seen by a kind woman doctor whose face is a blur because I was so upset. There is nothing about the visit I can remember except Charlie’s hot skin against mine and how limp his little body felt in my arms. My fear and rising hysteria made the room fade to black along with the doctor’s words. “This probably sounds like a silly question, but has anyone traveled to Africa recently? We have to ask.”

  I remember thinking, Ian has brought home death to our baby.

  Eventually Charlie got better, and it was nothing to do with Ian at all. But I knew. He may not have brought a tropical virus into our house, but he had brought other dangers. He still saw things he wished he didn’t have to see. Ghosts. He spent more and more time in the basement. Things between us, they would get worse and then they would get better. Worse and then better. And then worse.

  Until Charlie was about two, whenever Ian was home he and I walked into his little room together every night to look at him sleeping in his crib. On the bookcase was a soft pastel pyramid of pillow blocks and on the wall there was a colorful mural of a wind-rattled tree. The room smelled of baby lotion and hope, and we squeezed each other’s hands. Each night we then crossed the hall and walked into the room where I slept. We kissed good-night and told each other that we loved each other, because we truly did. Then I would slip under the down comforter in the massive chilly master bedroom, tiny on the veritable continent of our enormous California King, and Ian would slowly make his way back down into the basement.

  MADDIE

  Eight days before

  I tumble her clean bedding with a scented dryer sheet. I fold and refold her towels. Fresh flowers. Just a small bouquet, in a slim vase by the window. I place a bottle of Aquafina and a pretty glass cup on her bedside table, along with a box of tissues and the remote for the television. Out of nostalgia I place a good-quality merlot with a bottle opener, two wineglasses and a giant Toblerone on a tray in the middle of her bed. This visit is going to change everything.

  Between cleaning the house, preparing the spare room for Joanna’s visit and trying to throw in some fun activities (television mostly) for Charlie, I’ve finally found a free moment to do my homework assignment for Cami J. I’m ready. Charlie is just down for his nap, and I probably have at least an hour.

  Homework for Dr. Camilla Jones

  The Bad Accident

  By Madeline Wilson

  My mom, dad, and my sister Julia and I had been visiting Grandfather Carl and his new wife, Vickie, at the cabin she owned on Lake Tapawingo in Missouri. Julia was nine years older than me. She was home for the summer from Brown University where she was quietly transforming from my secretive, sweet older sister into a very skinny and serious marathon-runner planning to be a doctor of infectious diseases.

  Vickie collected ceramic dogs. As I pulled on my pink one-piece suit with the ruffle over my nonexistent ten-year-old chest I was surrounded by dead-eyed shih tzus, poodles and Yorkies. Her bedroom smelled of rose and menthol. An open box of Russell Stover’s chocolate cherries sat on the bedside table, the whole forgotten mess turned dusty white. Outside the window, a wind chime fluttered frantically. I was the first to head barefoot down the hill into the fishy, sticky warmth hovering about the fetid lake.

  Everyone else was still in the house changing into their swimsuits. I stood on the dock as my frail and defiant grandfather backed the speedboat, which with its dull gray hull looked to be his contemporary, away from the shore. It had belonged to Vickie’s first husband, and I doubted that it had been used much, if ever, since his death five years earlier. My grandfather frowned darkly as he looked over his shoulder at the shuddering rear of the stubborn old boat while his knotty, spotted hands struggled with the controls.

  “Come on down, the water is fine,” my grandfather yelled to my parents and Julia, who were picking their way over gravel and skirting spiky blue grass on their way down to us. Rotten wooden cabins collapsed toward the water, dragging with them dream catchers, decorative yard ducks, wi
cker chairs, hummingbird feeders and terra-cotta turtles. Crushed Coors cans floated in the algae and weeds.

  Julia was the first to ski. She skimmed across the lake with her strong legs gracefully together, her hair waving crazily in the wind and spray. I went next. I was a decent water-skier, but it took me a couple of tries to get out of the water because my grandfather’s driving was choppy. I waited for him to bring the boat around to pick me up, watching the outdated propeller blades toss up lake spit like a frightening pinwheel, each eroded petal bloody brown with rust.

  My mom was smiling at me from the boat, and my dad was nodding encouragingly, his chin bobbing up and down. Julia’s face was tilted upward, taking in the sun. My grandfather gave me an A-okay sign with his fingers, just before he swung the boat toward me and accelerated.

  He had dementia. To be honest I’m not sure he even knew my name. Why my mom let him get behind the wheel of that boat is anybody’s guess and probably the main reason she never got over the accident.

  He ran me over. He hit me in the shoulder and it hurt but not bad. I dropped the rope and surfaced, filled with relief. That was when I saw the outboard propeller blades churning toward me. I was being pulled toward what suddenly appeared to me as teeth in a monster’s mouth, the rope being sucked in like a piece of spaghetti.

  “Stop the boat!” That must have been my mom, though it sounded nothing like her.

  “I did,” barked my grandfather. He was wrong. What he had done was put it in reverse. That was why I was being sucked into the mouth.

  My dad yelled my name. I saw terror transform his face before he jumped. My dad leaped from the back of the boat and threw himself between my body and the propeller, but he sank. He tried to exchange his life for mine, but he was too heavy and I was too light. Just as my dad’s body dipped down below mine in the water, I was sucked toward the blades and jerked back and forth until I was restrained. The rope had cinched around my waist. When my dad surfaced, it was too late. I had not been cut at all, but the rope was wound many times around my body, strapping me to the propeller and the boat.

  My head was only six inches under the surface. My mom was leaning out over the back of the boat, looking down. I could see her face upside down and backward. She was shouting and pointing. I still can’t say whether it was the distortion of the water or really her expression, but I remember her face melting and her mouth an O as if she was that poor person in Edvard Munch’s, “The Scream.”

  My dad was next to me by then, scrambling, choking on the lake water himself, his hands pulling at my life jacket. My sister was there, too, her eyes open underwater to watch and meet mine, her silhouette backed by the sun, rippling gold through the muck.

  I waited to be rescued. I was ten. My capable and loving mom, dad and sister were there with me. Of course, I waited to be rescued.

  When my desperate mom yanked my arms out of my shoulder sockets trying to pull me up out of the water—that was when I realized how bad it really was.

  Twelve years later, the weekend of my grandfather’s funeral, my mom and sister dredged up the memory of the boating accident. They began to talk about it, and my father took out his hearing aid and mumbled something about coyotes and a broken fence. He had a hangdog slump to his shoulders as he left the house with a tool belt in one hand and a hammer in the other, off to fix or save something.

  Julia sat in the kitchen with a Diet Coke. I was twenty-two, drinking wine in the afternoon because on that day it was acceptable in front of my family. Someone had died.

  Julia recounted to me in a distant, technical manner exactly how she had rescued me. “Dad couldn’t get you out. I guess I assumed he would save you. But, I had water-skied first and I had the advantage of having already operated that particular life jacket, so I was able to free you.”

  Julia spoke clinically, but I knew she loved me. She was not indifferent, just resigned. She’d become a pathologist who sifted through human body parts daily. She was intimate with our butchered collective fate. “When we got you out I saw that you weren’t eviscerated.” She paused for a sip of Diet Coke. “So...that was a good thing. I hoped that you wouldn’t be brain-dead.”

  “He never apologized,” my mom said quietly, forcefully from the ground. She was preparing the house for the funeral guests, crawling around on the floor, picking up whatever had been left behind after vacuuming. “He never apologized,” she said louder, wanting a response. “And never offered to help with the medical bills.”

  “Come on, Mom,” I said. “I forgive Grandfather. You should, too. Everything is okay.”

  “Is that what you think?” she asked, wide-eyed, looking up at me, pinched fingers holding a tuft of auburn dog hair. “Everything is okay, Maddie? Really? You’ve never been the same!”

  I suppose she’s right. I spent two minutes kicking and flailing and another four minutes not breathing and dangling before my sister accomplished the methodical and time-consuming act of untangling the rope from the propeller. Only then could she open the life jacket to pull me out into her arms.

  Something had changed down below. Something profound had happened to me just before I lost consciousness. At the exact second that I gave up all hope of surviving, my mind sparkled with unhinged, ecstatic, unbridled euphoria, a joy of such magnitude that I was instantly captive to it, and of a replete and searing sensuousness so irresistible that I opened my mouth to take it all in more deeply. I knew with utmost certainty, as if it were as simple as two plus two or the sky is blue, that there was nothing at all to fear.

  Then came the rescue. When I woke up on the dock, my pink ruffled suit was in tatters around me. I saw the anguished faces of my family, and the gape-jawed stare of half a dozen gray-haired gawkers in Tommy Bahama shirts. My dad stopped pounding on my chest, his face a mixture of wonder and disbelief. There were sirens. I was naked and in shock. As I vomited the lake out of me I remember a strange recurring thought. I’m free. A horrible taste in my mouth, grit and sludge on my tongue. I’m free.

  Then there was the hospital, the whispering doctors and the drip of sedatives followed by a sensation eerily familiar to the bliss I had felt underneath the water. Finally there was the long sleep to the quiet whirr of the rhythmic metal machines. I spent six days in the intensive-care unit with a tube inserted in my neck, winding down into my lungs where filthy water from Lake Tapawingo pooled.

  My mom was right. Of course she was right. I changed, and it was only then that my eccentric grandmother began to take such a keen interest in me. From my recovery on, I wanted to suck in the world, the whole world, with the same gasping desperation as the moment I gave in and sucked in that miserable crap-filled lake. I wanted to live. I wanted to live as if I had invented the word and it meant ten times more than it does. LIVE.

  To be fair, I admit that I felt invincible after my accident. If there existed out in the unknowable beyond some sort of cosmic ledger keeping tabs, I had been crossed off, released. I’m free. Free to leap, free to fly close to the flame, free to gamble, free to make mistakes, free to go recklessly to places from which others had not returned.

  I wanted to live so badly. I had to live! I had to run in the dark. That’s what I was doing, running away in the dark at the campground. I had to escape. If I didn’t, what would happen to Charlie?

  So that’s it then. That’s it, Cami J. Oh my God. I was being chased. And maybe I didn’t fall.

  I finish with a gasp and a shiver. It takes me a second to realize that Charlie has already woken from his nap. He is halfway down the stairs, holding on to the rail and taking one stair at a time, rubbing his sleepy eyes. “Mommy? Mommy?”

  “Here I am, Charlie.” I am trying to breathe and allow my racing heart to slow. I’ve done it, I think. I’ve done it now. I’ve written the most important part.

  “Can I have a snack?”

  With shaking hands, I make him his favorite meal of Kraft ma
caroni and cheese with two round hot-dog eyes and a sliced hot-dog mouth. I give him apple slices and green beans, too, knowing he probably won’t eat them. I turn on Jack’s Big Music Show because now I need to call Wayne about the sump pump.

  Just as I am dialing, our doorbell rings. My trusty neighbor.

  I open the door and slap on my suburban mom expression. Bright eyes and an apple-cheeked smile. “Yay,” I say, clapping. “Wayne to the rescue.”

  “I knew you were home. I saw you drive in.” Wayne politely takes off his shoes as he enters and waves to Charlie. “Cheerio, young man!”

  Charlie waves, but says, “Cheerio is goodbye,” before popping a hot-dog slice into his mouth.

  “You need to come over and see what I’m building in my garage!”

  Charlie nods, mouth full.

  Wayne turns to me with an exaggerated look of excitement, clapping his gnarly hands. He is such a hackneyed, funny old man. “I bet he’d like to help me build a birdhouse. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “That would be so fun,” I say. “What a neat idea. I really appreciate this, you know. Thank you, Wayne.”

  “Ah, it’s nothing, Maddie. Now, the sump pump is going to be in your basement.”

  “Charlie,” I call across the room. “Eat your dinner and watch your show and don’t answer the door for anybody, okay? I’m going to be downstairs with Wayne for a little bit.”

  Charlie looks worried. Wayne looks thrilled.

  We walk down the stairs to the finished part of the basement, with Ian’s computers, the pool table and the bar. I lead Wayne to the door in the back corner. “I’m not positive, but I think the sump pump is in here.”