Beautiful Bad

by Annie Ward

  “Oh so now you want to hire a stranger to raise Charlie for us. Who the fuck did I marry?”

  I stared at him, furious. I played my best card. “Well, I married someone who is keeping a very big secret from me.” He was probably worried I’d found out about his gross Fiona fetish porn stash.

  “I know about the place in Montana, Ian.” I had his attention. “You got a letter from Survival Shelters and I opened it. It thanked you for your inquiry. It said that it would cost sixty-five thousand dollars to build the survival shelter you want, with oxygen generators, on your land in Montana. Since when do we have land in Montana?”

  “Maddie—”

  “Oxygen generators?”

  “I was waiting for the right time to tell you about it.”

  “Before or after you had a bunker built and locked me and Charlie up inside?”

  “That’s ridiculous. I would never do that.”

  “You didn’t let me leave the Hudson Hotel! Remember that first winter? You told me, ‘Keep your arse right here in this hotel room with me! I don’t want you to go out there! Why would you want to go out there when we can stay right here and order everything we need?’ Maybe you want me and Charlie locked up, too. That’s something we’ve found out that men do, right? Build little prisons in their backyards and keep women and children in them?”

  “Maddie, please.”

  “Explain.”

  “The way I behaved at the Hudson Hotel was terrible. I’d just gotten out of Iraq. I know that was crazy. Look. I don’t want to lock you up. I was hoping one day to build us a cabin.”

  He took in the look on my face. “Not just a cabin. A really beautiful house! I figured if I work a few more years our savings will be enough that I can actually retire early and we could just...just...escape.”

  “Okay. You want to know who the fuck you married? I’ll tell you who. Someone who doesn’t want to escape. I never asked for A River Runs Through It, Ian. You told me that if I agreed—against my wishes—to settle down in Kansas that we would travel to the places I like to go. Spain or Bulgaria. Portugal or Croatia. Not eventually move to an even more isolated ranch where Charlie can get home-schooled by his bitter, alcoholic mom and turn into some freak who’s into taxidermy and making his own butter. Who did you fucking marry? Someone who is not going to stand for this shit anymore!”

  “Oh your life is so hard. You really are a spoiled little bitch. Stop drinking and go to bed.”

  I stood up and stormed off toward the brick bathroom up the road. I hated him. With every pounding step I thought, I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.

  Let’s not beat about the bush. I was wasted. Then, out of nowhere, the ground came flying up to meet me, and my hands were useless and the blow to my face was staggering. Smack. Down. Staggering. Darkness and stars. Down. I was out. I drowned again, and I swum in my murky death. Inky comfort. Swirling silence.

  When I woke up, it was just that. Gasp. Like coming out of a dream, except the dream was my life. Stars and dust descended around me. A wrecking ball had just hit my house and broken down the wall to my safe hideaway. My room with the lights turned off wasn’t a room anymore. It was flattened. There was smoke and emptiness. And corridors. New corridors that I’d never known existed. Secret doors and passageways that had been closed. I imagined black ink bleeding into my eyes, it felt so much like a curtain falling. My mind was like a paper towel. The feeling, seeping through and taking over, felt for thirty luxurious seconds like tripping balls on the world’s best Ecstasy. And then, just like with the near drowning, there was the beauty of what came after. The realization, so obvious that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before.

  Charlie needed to live. I needed to get away from Ian before he reached out, grabbed our hands and pulled us down into the grave he was digging. He was going to imprison us in his bunker made of misery and anger under dirt.

  What if I just left him? a small voice, the old me, asked. Leave him! It’s what’s right.

  And another voice answered, Yes. And lose. Lose everything. And Charlie would still have to spend half his time with a man who brings home deadly viruses from Africa and sits his little boy in front of horror films and feeds him limitless butterscotch candies and will one day take him to England and talk up getting pissed with your mates and then on to a discussion of which tattoos to get and where. I should have thought about the son when choosing the father, but I wasn’t just in love, I was conquered. And I was not who I am now. Now my desire is for my son.

  Suddenly, Ian was the enemy. He was my spoils of our war. If he had almost enough money to retire, then it would be enough for me and Charlie to have a sparkling future. Without him.

  As soon as those two police officers came in and sat down across from me and started asking questions about Ian, I knew that I was the good one and he was the bad one. It was evident that no one would ever blame me for anything that happened. I had no criminal record. I’d never even had a parking ticket. Ian? Fuck. Those policemen distrusted him from the moment I said British. From the moment I said military. Security. Private contractor. Iraq. Aggressive. Angry. PTSD. One arrest that I knew about. They were frothing, I tell you. They hated him even more when I told them how successful he had been.

  What could I do about Ian? He wasn’t going to travel with me. He wasn’t going to stop drinking all night. He wasn’t going to start mowing the lawn. He wasn’t going to take Charlie to England or even to Chuck E. Cheese for that matter. No, what Ian was going to do was collect dusty old power cords in boxes all over the basement. He was going to shop online for antiviral masks, hunting knives and fishing kits. He was going to amass more and more survivalist bullshit, take us to the wilderness and make me and Charlie track scat, eat edible weeds and kill animals. He was going to remain broken, and do so mostly in his disgusting hoarder’s basement. We were not eventually moving to a beach bungalow in Marbella, we were eventually moving to an underground metal box with an oxygen generator in Montana.

  And guess what? That part of me that always before, every single time, ended up feeling badly for him? It was gone. It had escaped when the wall came down. Like bats, my pity had gathered, black and beating, and scattered in the sky. The poor soldier, he’s seen so many terrible things that he really needs to sit and smoke and mull it all over instead of getting off his ass and taking out the fucking trash. No. Not anymore. Ian and I, we put up the good fight. And we lost to the world. But I would not go down, not with Charlie. We would cut our losses and move on. Charlie and I had a world to experience, and it wasn’t going to happen in Kansas, and it wasn’t going to happen with Ian.

  I knew what had to happen. I’d already decided what I was doing and how I was going to do it when Dr. Roberts, out of the blue, unknowingly and ever so nicely, explained to me the one thing I didn’t know. Why? Why was I suddenly able to maneuver my mind in ways that previously would have been unimaginable? That day in Dr. Roberts’s office, he told me that it’s not uncommon for a traumatic brain injury to alter a person’s personality. That didn’t surprise me, but I was very interested when he told me that in one case, a man hit his head, went into a coma and came out able to play the piano. I, too, had gained a new ability. The ability to proactively defend my future and Charlie’s future from a potential source of harm. I was lucky, I decided, that I’d been altered in such an advantageous way. I was given new eyes. I could see ahead, and ahead, so far, so clear.

  A single injury rarely results in an irreversible transformation. But the more times you suffer a head injury, as in the cases of football players and boxers, the more you run the risk of finding yourself a changed person. I told Dr. Roberts that I’d never had a head injury before, but that was incorrect. Strapped to my grandfather’s boat, parts of my brain had been without oxygen long enough for the electricity to flicker and fade away. Ironically, that experience of bondage was what left me untethered to the human l
eash.

  In a way, my grandfather is responsible for Ian’s death. Had it not been for the transformation underneath, I wouldn’t have gone looking for a man like Ian, and even if we had met, he would have found the normal me unpalatable. Ian was a damage junkie, and I was out of order in a way that got him off. So in a way, it’s Ian’s fault, too. Grandfather Carl and Ian. Not me. That’s what I tell myself when I wake up screaming, after the recurring dream in which my grandmother Audrey is hissing at me, “People like us? We don’t play by the rules.”

  It’s her fault, too.

  Charlie calls to me. “Mommy, look!”

  He’s incredibly proud of his hole in the ground. I give him a thumbs-up and take a giant drink of my Macuá. More than anything, I wish I could share this new development with Joanna. I know that she’d be able to calm me down because she’d already succeeded in calming me down a dozen times. In Meadowlark, before we were sure it was over, we huddled upstairs in the bedroom and she told me, “Don’t worry. Are you kidding? No one will ever think it was you that strangled me.”

  I whispered back, “The woman officer was staring at my nails in the station.”

  Joanna said, in a voice that sounded a lot like the one I use for explaining something to Charlie, “Yes, you cut your nails. But if you hadn’t there may have been nail marks against my neck. With a choice between real evidence and a curious lack of evidence, we’ve taken the right route. She can’t do anything with nothing.”

  “And the vodka bottles?” I asked, needing all the answers to be on our side.

  “Stop it about the bottles,” she said. “You don’t fingerprint bottles when no crime has been committed. No one will ever know that you poured the vodka down the drain. Seriously, Mad. They have better stuff to do than think about a closed case. They won’t bother.”

  A few weeks later, once we had the house up for sale and had already checked into the Holiday Inn Express in Raleigh, we sat drinking wine in our little living room while we watched Charlie playing in the tub through the open bathroom door. I got the dry heaves a couple of times, and she demanded to know what was wrong.

  “I’m afraid,” I said. “I’m afraid someone will put the ballpoint pen together with the knife and know something about medical emergencies. They’ll figure out how we got him into the right position.” I panicked. “Why didn’t I pick them up? I left them there, the pen and the little knife. Why didn’t I pick them up and put them away? Why didn’t I? It was part of the plan! Jo! Listen to me.”

  “Maddie,” she said, her eyes wide almonds of pity. “If an emergency tracheotomy was a stretch of the imagination for me to come up with, and I have an IQ of a hundred and sixty, no one will ever put it together. No one. Ever.”

  Once we left the States, we swept through Frankfurt and onward to a lovely Flip Key on the beach in Bulgaria with an infinity pool overlooking the Black Sea. There, we really finally celebrated the fact that we were free.

  “It’s over,” Joanna said, clinking her glass of Bulgariana Cabernet against mine.

  But for me, it was never over. I thought about my plan obsessively, looking for places where I may have gone wrong. I couldn’t share everything with Joanna because the plan started long before she arrived. There were always tiny details taunting me, telling me that I should be looking over my shoulder. “Jo,” I said. “What if they ever go back to the 911 recording and there’s a problem with our timing? We took too long to call because I had to go search for the phone.”

  Sometimes when I look in Charlie’s big brown eyes I see it all over again—him, sweetly asleep in his bed and waking to find Joanna’s dark form hunched over him, her fingers on his arm. Squeezing. Twisting.

  “Forget it. Listen, Maddie. Ian got what he deserved. Do not look back. It’s done.”

  Of course she’d think he got what he deserved. Not only did I tell her that he did this to my face, I also said, “I know about the baby.”

  * * *

  It was the night she arrived in Kansas City, before I’d confided in her about my plans. My mom and dad were babysitting Charlie and I had taken her to Louie’s Wine Dive for dinner. We were drinking martinis, and she nearly knocked hers over in her shaky haste to set it down.

  “Ian told you?”

  I nodded solemnly. “I’m so sorry.”

  She started plaiting her hair nervously, and she looked just the same to me as she had back in Lake Ohrid at the fish tavern. The night everything changed. “That was such a bad time for me. I hate even thinking about it.”

  I caught her hand and her eyes and I held them. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to. That moment of peeing on that stick and seeing the double lines? Oh my God. Holy shit. But first of all, I felt stupid. I mean, I speak eight languages. You would think I could switch brands of birth control without getting pregnant. And then, I wasn’t sure at first what I was going to do. I mean, it’s not like I could have kept my job and been a single mom. I didn’t want to tell you until I knew what my plan was. And by the time I had decided that I just wanted to quit my job and go home and, I don’t know, become a dog walker, you and I were fighting all the time. And then what happened happened and I didn’t want to talk about it. And then you were gone.”

  Was that a tear? No. Maybe.

  I nodded sympathetically and waited a beat before going on. “And was Ian the father?”

  She looked up sharply, that pointed chin of hers jutting out and her eyes flashing. The vein in her forehead. It was like a beating heart. “What?”

  “I know about you two.” For once she was speechless. “I don’t understand, Jo. Why would you not tell me about that? You knew everything about me, and I thought you told me everything, too. Why keep that from me?”

  She drew in a quick breath and looked up, trying not to cry. “I wasn’t going to keep it from you. It started right after we all met, and you had gone back to Sofia. I was going to tell you on your next visit but then—then—”

  “What?”

  “You came to visit, and before I could tell you, he started flirting with you.” There it was. A single tear rolled down her cheek, and she whisked it away quickly. Adept at hiding her pain. “And it was humiliating. So I didn’t tell you after all. What would I have said? ‘Oh guess what, I’ve been shagging this guy for a month and look at that, it turns out he likes you better.’ I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I even tried. In the bathroom at Club Lipstick? He and I were already finished, and I took you in there to tell you the whole story, and then I lied. It just came out. And so you never knew any of it. And you left.”

  “I’m so sorry, Joanna. I really truly am. He was the father, wasn’t he?”

  I sat quietly. I needed to know where this suggestion would lead. After a second she semi-collapsed and said, “He came to see me afterward. He brought me some medicine and soup. I didn’t even tell him anything about whose it was. He couldn’t have known. It’s not as if you and I ever pretended to be pure as the driven snow. I suppose he thought I’d been with everyone.”

  “But you hadn’t.”

  “That spring? No. Only with the guy from Vengeant and that was after.”

  “But you knew it was Ian’s,” I pressed, just to confirm. Before I said the rest.

  “Yes, I knew.”

  “Jo, Ian did know. He told me he was sure it was his. He told me how relieved he was when you lost it. Because after you lost it, he thought it would be all right to pursue me. ‘Not so awkward,’ I think he said. Oh God, Jo. It’s horrible.”

  “Not so awkward?” she repeated, losing color in her face. She dug her hands into her hair and her eyes were blinking so fast her lashes looked to me, for a fleeting moment, like the flapping black wings of a dying moth.

  “He only just told me before he left this time. He was drunk. Had I known, I never would have...” I trailed off sadly.

 
; At last she let out an inhuman sound. She grabbed the sides of our little two-top and lowered her head. She said, “I want to murder him.”

  “Me, too.”

  Good old Jo.

  Of course Ian didn’t know he was the father, and he never said any of those disgusting things about being happy she lost a baby.

  I made it up.

  He had slept with her. And he’d gotten back together with Fiona. Joanna was hurt and angry and went on to have a miscarriage, but for all Ian knew she’d slept with the entire Balkan Peninsula along with the Albanian king of black market tampons and each of his underlings. I imagine a man like him would have at least considered the possibility that he might have been the father, and it didn’t surprise me much to know that he’d shown her some kindness in the aftermath. He felt sorry for her. He took her some painkillers and soup and he carried away some kittens. End of story. Except...

  I needed it to be much worse than that.

  It’s important to recognize one’s limitations, and I quite simply could not have done it without Joanna. I required her old but loyal black market contacts in Albania, and I needed a witness. I’d done my research and the truth is, most women who kill their husbands go to jail whether they’ve been abused or not. If a woman has been getting beaten up for two years she’s supposed to divorce the prick, not kill him. In that scenario she probably loses half of her time with her kids. I considered faking a history of abuse, but my research made me change my mind. That would give me motive for murder, and I would be arrested. I needed there to be little to no history of abuse—aside from one very vague incident on a camping trip that poor little wifey can’t even remember. It worked in my favor to have signs that he was spiraling out of control and losing his mind before—out of nowhere—he attacked me and my best friend. No premeditation. That would be a clear-cut act of defense.

  Even then, our idea was tricky. A woman is only able to defend herself or another until the attacker stops being a threat. I wasn’t able to stab him ten times to be sure. Just the two. Just the two, well done and deep. With the blade pointed downward, as Ian had taught me that night at Club Lipstick after the fight with the dunce who didn’t know how to use his knife. “You’ve got to hold it like this,” he’d explained, “if you want to hurt someone, if you want to get the blade between their ribs and puncture the lungs.”