“Helena Parks?” I almost flinch at the use of my married name, one so rarely used. “My name is Charlotte Blanton. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
I’d like to ask you a few questions. The police officer, his eyes grim, the smell of October in the air. I have just a few questions. The mortician, his thin fingers, the tap of them against a display of coffins.
I stay hidden behind the door and watch the movement of her throat as she swallows, her hands flexing around a stack of papers.
“Are you Helena Parks?” She is less sure of herself, and I enjoy the unease. Maybe she’s a fan, a reader who hunted past publishing records and marriage licenses. It’s happened before. The last one required the police. This woman, her thin shoulders jutting through a cardigan, I can probably handle.
“I’m not interested in visitors.” My words are scratchy, and I clear my throat.
“It will only take a moment.”
“No.” I start to shut the door and she places her palm on it. I pause, and I really need to amend the rules and add Visitors will not touch the door. Then again, this girl obviously has no regard for authority, her eyes skipping right past my laminated list in her ring of the bell.
“Please,” she says. “It’s about your husband.”
My husband. I hate those words falling from another person’s lips. They are so bland, so weak for everything that he was. My fingers tighten on the knob. I made my statements to the police, answered hundreds of their questions. I had passed that test. To go through it again now, with this new woman, isn’t something I am interested in. Especially not today, the giggle of children still scraping on my nerves.
I say nothing, avoiding her eyes as I close the door and flip the deadbolt, the click satisfying as it locks her outside.
I turn away from the door, hurrying toward the stairs, intent on getting away, to my office where I can shut the door, turn up my music, and drown out the sound of her intrusion.
She knocks, a rap-rap-rap that stabs at my psyche, my breath coming hard as I attempt to jog up the stairs, my muscles resisting, my body’s weakness showing.
Over four years since that day. What loose thread could this woman have found?
My oncologist has prescribed me fourteen different medications, a mountain of orange pill bottles that cover every symptom my body could think of producing. Not one of them treats the pain in the ass which I currently battle. Marka Vantly: International Bestselling Author. She sucks, and in more than just the biblical sense. I inhale deeply, and stare at her latest email.
Helena,
I just had the displeasure of reading Drumbeat. It’s interesting what passes for successful literature in this day and age. I’m so sorry about your Publisher’s Weekly review, though I certainly understand their opinions on the novel. Congratulations on your release!
Marka
The bitch. This email has taken longer to come than the others, two months passing since my pub date. Marka had probably been too distracted by gangbangs and shopping sprees to bother with something like reading. In her last interview, she’d been stretched out naked on a pile of her paperbacks, her blonde hair tumbling over their covers. For an author, she doesn’t have a spare ounce of fat, no dark roots showing, her eyes lazy and seductive as they’d stared up into the camera. It had been disgusting. So disgusting that I’d called The New Yorker and cancelled my subscription. Writers aren’t supposed to be sex objects. We’re supposed to be valued for our words, our stories, and the impact that we leave on a reader’s heart. Then again, Marka’s books don’t quite have that effect, their target focused more on arousal and less on emotional resonations. I rip off the head of a banana and chew, my fingers a bit slimy as I fire back a response.
Ms. Vantly,
I’m not going to take criticism from someone whose last book was titled The Fireman’s Hose. Please return to your trashy smut and let the real authors work in peace.
Helena Ross
Ha. Short and deadly. I send the email and smile, returning to my inbox, my mouse quick as I scroll past the other emails. A collection of uselessness. I unsubscribe to several solicitors, then chide myself for wasting my time. Three months left, and I’m cleaning up my inbox now? Stupid.
I take a final bite of the banana and toss the peel in the direction of the trash, watching as it settles into the white plastic bag. My headache, one that began this morning, is getting increasingly worse, a vise grip tightening on my temples. I let the email fester for a moment and stand, heading for the Vicodin upstairs in my desk, the banana enough food to keep it from hitting an empty stomach. I climb the stairs, and when I reach the top, the landing spins. I grip the banister for a moment and wait for everything to refocus. Maybe I should sit.
Lightheadedness, as of late, has become common. As has vertigo and blurred vision, the combination a bitch to my productivity levels. Another wave of lightheadedness hits and my hand loosens, not listening to my brain. I try to re-grip the banister, stumble hurriedly up the final steps, but everything becomes a kaleidoscope of gray and white and slick polished stairs.
My knees buckle.
KATE
Kate opens the door to her Manhattan condo, pulling off her flats as she enters, the dark room filling her with a moment of fear before her hand hits the switch and the space flickers to light. Two years since her divorce, and she still hasn’t gotten used to the eeriness of living alone, the feeling that someone is there, hiding and waiting.
She opens a can of soup, dumping the thick mixture into a small pot and turning the burner on, her mind filled with thoughts of Helena. She put off calling the publishers, hoping that Helena will call her back, her sanity restored.
Of course she hasn’t. Helena isn’t the type to waffle over a decision or change her mind. The minute she gave Kate the order to pull out of Broken, it was done. Game over. Dead book walking.
It hasn’t always been this hard. With Helena’s first novel, she’d been almost pleasant to work with. Of course, she’d been younger then. A nineteen-year-old baby, one with big eyes and a solemn face, one who had driven from Connecticut for the sole purpose of terrorizing the Big Apple with her words. As a favor to a friend, Kate had met her at a coffee shop in Brooklyn. She’d watched the mousey brunette pick at a muffin as she’d described her novel… a second-chance romance that sounded exactly like half of Kate’s slush pile. Kate had grown distracted, eavesdropping on a fight brewing at the next table, when she realized that the girl had grown quiet. Kate had flipped over the top page of the manuscript, her eyes sneaking down to her watch.
Then she’d read the first line.
The first paragraph.
The first chapter.
She, like all of America eventually would, devoured the words. From that plain, pale creature, one with ears and eyes a bit too big… came magic. She had forced herself to stop on the fourth page, her gaze darting up to Helena’s. “You wrote this?”
Helena had nodded, then asked if she liked it.
“Yes.” The answer had been too weak, and she had run her hand, almost reverently, across the page, trying to contain her excitement. “I need to read the rest of it. Tonight.”
The girl had produced a CD-ROM from her messenger bag, pushing it across the table at Kate. “I’ve given this to five other agents.” She’d said the words as if they were a gift, relieving the pressure off Kate, no need for her to pretend to like the material. But they’d had the opposite effect, the innocent information a threat, each minute that passed a possible opportunity for her phone to ring, the opportunity snatched from Kate.
“Okay.” Kate had smiled weakly, her fingers lingering on the pages as she passed them back to the girl, the loss one she could feel in her chest. In contrast, the receipt of the CD had felt hollow, the case too light for the words which had already stamped themselves on her heart.
Kate had known, even before she opened the file, that she wanted it. She read the manuscript at her kitchen counter, peering at the screen over leftover Chinese and hot tea, her mouse constantly scrolling, the file re-saved and sent to her boss by ten PM. At ten-fifteen, she’d called Helena and left a voicemail. The voicemail she followed up with an email, one that promised a ten percent commission rate, a five percent discount that would risk her job but was worth it. She’d also guaranteed that the novel would go to auction in the six figures, another lofty promise that she couldn’t back up, a figure she had never managed before. But she’d never represented a book like it before. This book could make her. This book could fix everything—their struggle to pay rent, her looming unemployment, the weak shelf her marriage balanced on.