by Julie Frayn
She pitched her pen on her desk. It skittered across the surface like the perfect skipping stone across a mirror-flat lake and landed at Katherine’s feet.
Katherine stooped to retrieve it, placed it on top of the manuscript, tossed her Coach bag over her shoulder, and left the building without a word. She didn’t need to speak. Her one arched brow, lips clamped into a thin line, and loathsome glare spoke volumes.
It was all Billie could do not to yell “bitch” at her back. But Billie would never say that aloud. She was already swirling the profane drain with all of the damns and bloodies, and even the occasional F-bomb she’d been screaming in her head. Plus all the fantasies about Katherine’s demise and Jeffrey’s undoing. She hadn’t had those thoughts about anyone before, except the men who’d murdered her parents and took her leg. But God would forgive her those transgressions. It was only imaginary. She’d never hurt a soul in real life.
She snatched the pen from her desk and wiggled it across Katherine’s retreating back. She drew a red gun in the air, shot a couple of rounds into the kidney region. Red ink blood spewed and spattered and oozed from the wounds, drenched Katherine’s Holt Renfrew skirt and dripped from the hem.
And yet, she kept walking.
Billie clutched the pen in her fist. She plucked three more of them from the old NaNoWriMo mug on her desk — the one she bought to commemorate her excitement four years ago, the only year she tried to write fifty thousand words of a shitty first draft of a novel in one short month. Epic fail. But it did make a lovely pencil cup.
She tossed the pens into her purse, dog-eared the page she was working on, stacked the bloody sheets and fastened them together with one giant binder clip. It was only Monday, but she felt the need for a good sweat. She needed to clear the cobwebs and let the proofreading juices flow.
Thursday the Fourteenth
PEG LEG CURLED UP against Billie’s thigh. His bodily warmth and moral support gave her the strength to push through the final chapter of Morse’s future flop, a work she had unofficially subtitled “Dreckula.” She turned the final page, laid her head against the soft cushions of her grandmother’s old sofa, and heaved a massive sigh. One day to spare. Job saved.
Sanity?
The jury was still out.
She ran her fingers between Peg Leg’s pointed ears and slid away from his heat. She refreshed her email, surprised to find three new messages. Her eyes widened as she scanned the subject lines. Potential clients. Her very own clients. She glanced at the clock. Too late for her usual Thursday treadmill time. She sat at the breakfast nook and clicked on the first email.
I’m a indie author, so I’m not making much money and can’t afford you’re full fee. What services you could give me for under a hundred? Or I could pay you out of future royalties. The book is awesome. Its sure to sell a million copies in no time.
Billie ground her teeth at each error and composed a reply in her head. Dear Indie Author. Screw off, you moron. I’m not running a charity, for Christ’s sake. I have to eat, too. For under a hundred I can offer you some advice. Don’t quit your day job.
Her actual reply was polite, concise, and grammatically perfect. One potential client down, two more to go. The second was no better, offering to trade his “excellant” writing abilities for her “excellant” editing. Pass.
She stared at email door number three and sighed. She was going to need Earl Grey reinforcement before reading it.
Minutes later, a steaming, sweet, milky brew in her hand, she clicked the message open.
Dear Ms. Fullalove,
I am seeking a professional editor for my first novel. It is a psychological thriller, in the range of 325 pages. The fourth draft is almost complete and I feel it will be ready for a professional’s eyes within the month.
The indicative rates on your website are competitive. If you are interested, please provide a firm quotation for a full edit (proofreading and content) of an 82,000-word document. I would also appreciate two references. I am attaching a brief sample of the book.
Sincerely,
Annabelle Wright
Well, hells bells. An actual prospective client.
Billie sent emails to four authors in her roster that she knew and trusted. Authors to whom she had secretly offered editing advice outside her lowly proofreading role. Authors who had rewarded her with their silence and more than one gift card to her favourite coffee shop as secret compensation.
She acknowledged Annabelle’s message and promised pricing and references to follow. She grinned and picked up the warm teacup, held it in both hands and leaned back in the chair. Step one in extricating herself from proofing-pool obscurity underway. No more Edward Morses. No more typewritten manuscripts. Unless Katherine was already planning the next roadblock in Billie’s quest for freedom. To heck with Katherine. She wasn’t going to dampen the mood tonight.
Billie gathered Peg Leg into her arms and headed to her room. She set the cat on the bed, sat beside him and dismantled her at-home prosthesis, a simpler form of the one she wore to work, with a smaller foot and fewer layers of socks. Usually she didn’t even bother with that. Just hopped around the apartment on one leg, or used her grandfather’s cane for support, the one with the brass horse’s head for a handle.
She pumped baby lotion into her palm from the bottle that was a fixture on her nightstand and massaged the emollient into her stump. There were other choices, unscented, with aloe vera, with vitamin E. Too many choices. The hospital used baby lotion during her recovery. The baby powder scent was soft and soothing to her eleven-year-old self, and calmed her now. Now that she knew recovery wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t a point in time. It was an evolution. A journey without end. Her own never-ending story.
Each night, when that lotion hit her nostrils, she regressed to a time when she felt reborn. A new baby learning to walk. Learning to live. Learning to forgive.
She had learned to forgive her parents for dying on her. For leaving her to grow up without their guidance. For abandoning her when she needed them most. The hardest was forgiving God. She’d had many discussions with Him. Had sworn at Him, sworn off Him. If He was everything, was everywhere, why, why, why did He kill her family? Why did He leave her on her own with only an old grandmother, far past her prime and exhausted by daily life, let alone life with a mutilated young child, a recovering lost soul? Heck, grandmother was messed up too. She’d lost her son, after all.
But Billie could never forgive those murderous men. Some things were unforgivable.
No matter how often she strayed from His side, Billie always found her way back to God. They had a complicated relationship. And a silent understanding — as all understandings with God are. She agreed to be a good girl on the outside. But on the inside, if she kept it to herself, she could think bad thoughts. Swear and curse and imagine a tortuous revenge inflicted on the evil beings of the world. The evil that God couldn’t control.
God agreed to let her have those silent indiscretions. So that she could survive her wretched life.
Friday
THE COOL, PRE-DAWN AIR brushed Billie’s cheeks. She blinked hard, failing in her attempts to focus on the twinkle of light to her left. She stared at the soft beam, followed the illuminating ray it offered until her eyes finally connected with her brain and she recognized the graffiti-tainted trash bin under the light standard half a block up from her apartment building. She wavered, her balance off. She grasped the wrought iron post of the fire escape and looked at her foot. One foot balancing on the railing, her stump dangling mid-air.
Billie drew in a sharp breath. What the hell had her deranged nighttime brain planned to do? Plunge her three stories to her death? Well, guess what, night brain — that would have only crippled her. Again.
Next time, get up to the roof.
She took hold of the pole with both hands, eased her quaking body down, shifted her butt onto the railing, and hopped to the grated floor. Her window was wide open, the gauzy curtain blowing int
o the apartment. Peg Leg sat on the window ledge, his head cocked to one side. He meowed at her, gave her a withering glare, and disappeared into the living room.
Sleepwalking. She hadn’t done that in three years. A full year after her last episode, she’d stopped seeing Dr. Kroft. Billie shut her eyes and conjured the doc’s voice. Dissociative fog. Or something or other. Coping mechanism. Resulting from trauma. Triggered by anything that triggered the memories attached to her trauma.
Years ago, Billie would awaken, or have her conscious brain take over, and find herself in the park a couple of blocks from her grandmother’s house. Sometimes she’d have only ventured out into the yard. But often she’d be gone for hours, come to on the subway, or in a part of town she was unfamiliar with. It was when she was fourteen, after her night brain took her on a field trip to a dark alley, the heavy beat of loud music vibrating the asphalt, that her grandmother made the first appointment with the doc.
Billie rubbed her hands against her arms to ward off the morning chill. To heat the ice that always replaced her blood when the adrenaline of waking from a walking dream raced through her body. She crawled through the window, righted the potted petunia, and brushed dirt from the ledge into her open palm. She stared at the dirt, balled her fist and squeezed. She looked out the window at the horizon. A purple dawn overtook the darkness. Peg Leg poked at her clenched hand with his head and rubbed her knuckles between his ears.
Billie swallowed. Maybe she needed to get back on the psychology train. Before her night brain did something crazy. Something permanent.
“Wilhelmina!”
Katherine screaming names from inside her office was never a good way to start the day. Especially when it was Billie’s name.
She gathered her skirt and her courage and stood. She took a deep breath, eyed the beautiful day outside the window where everyone was free. She chided herself for her envy of the birds, envy of the wind, envy of the clouds. That was her reincarnation wish — to return untethered and in full control of her every choice. To take flight. Not be anchored by one lost leg. Or anchored by legs at all.
She touched her fingertips to her hair to ensure everything was in place, straightened her shoulders, and marched to her doom in the chamber of horrors.
At the threshold, she tapped her knuckles on the doorframe. “Yes, Katherine?”
You bellowed?
Katherine stood at her own window, the six-hundred-page albatross in her hand. She turned and lifted it in the air.
Billie held her breath. If Katherine dropped that bomb, binder clip be damned, red-stained pages would explode all over the office. And Billie would be the one putting the unnumbered pieces back together.
“What the hell is this?” Katherine’s eyes burned, her laser stare piercing Billie’s bravery.
“It looks like Mr. Morse’s manuscript.” Billie glanced at her feet. She’d chosen the black pointed-toe flats with the faux snakeskin texture this morning. But there was only one. In her haste to make the train, she had failed to change the shoe on her prosthesis. It remained the dull brown ballet flat with the rounded toe and the teardrop-shaped holes cut into the leather. She couldn’t help but grin at the dichotomy worn on her feet. A perfect match to her internal courage — pointed, black, reptilian, overwhelmed by, and contrary to, the dull brown reality of the terror manifesting in trembling hands and the threat of tears.
Goddamn tears.
Katherine slammed the document onto her desk.
Billie jumped, her heart hammered. This was it. She was done for.
“Just what is your role here, Ms. Fullalove?”
“Proofreader?”
Katherine nodded. “Yes. Just a proofreader. Only a proofreader.” She tapped one finger on the pile of pages. “And in what universe did you think that proofreader extended to editor, huh? Did I miss the memo that you got a promotion?” She cocked her head and tapped that same finger against her cheek. “Oh, wait.” She turned the finger on Billie. “I’d be the one writing the damn thing.” Katherine took a step forward.
Billie braced for impact. But Katherine wouldn’t hit her. Couldn’t hit her. That was crazy. It was just intimidation. A tactic she excelled at. Stand your ground, Billie. Stand your damn ground. “I just thought, since I’m already editing —”
“Proofreading.”
Billie bit her lip. “Proofreading. And I can see issues with the plot, with consistency. And the characterization?” Billie furrowed her brow.
“That is for the editor, not for you. If I wanted to know if you could edit, I’d ask you to damn well edit. You’re just another minnow in the proofreading pool. Now I have six hundred pages with your shitty red chicken scratch marring the manuscript. How is the editor going to sift through entire paragraphs slashed out, through your puny thoughts scribbled in the margins?”
“I added some pages of notes, cross-referenced with —”
“Not. Your. Job.” Katherine punctuated each word with a poke to Billie’s shoulder with that offending, pointing, crimson-lacquered finger.
Billie swallowed. “Katherine, please don’t touch me.”
Katherine’s right eyebrow arched so high even her Botoxed forehead crinkled. That brow was the harbinger of doom. The forecast of the storm to come. Shit was going to hit the publishing fan.
“Get out.”
It was a whisper, but one so menacing, Billie thought her heart had stopped beating. “Yes, ma’am.” Billie turned to the door, hesitated, turned back to face the tempest, her gaze on her mismatched feet. “Do you mean out of your office. Or out of the building?”
Katherine’s heavy sigh blew her caramel macchiato breath across Billie’s face. “Get your gimpy ass to your desk and do your job. Only your job. Understood?”
Billie swallowed the urge to scream, “Fuck you, bitch, I’m no goddamn gimp,” and simply nodded. She turned, strode to her workstation, sat with purpose and a straight spine. She double-clicked on a file icon, opened a manuscript, the priority work of the day, and began to proofread. And edit. Couldn’t help herself. But she kept those edits off the digital page, hidden away in her mind. Right next to Katherine’s dead body.
May 21s, Thursday
BILLIE PICKED A LILLIPUTIAN piece of fluff from her skirt and flicked it into the air. It floated and swayed on the stillness before the evil forces of static electricity dragged it back down to the floral polyester. She sighed and looked up into the sagging face of Dr. Kroft. The past twentyish years hadn’t been kind to the old broad. What was she, pushing sixty? The crevasses around her eyes and canyon-deep laugh lines parenthesizing her dry lips made her look closer to seventy-five.
The doc pushed her Sally-Jesse-Raphael-red glasses up higher on her nose and glanced at her lilac notepad. Not a book, never white paper. Lilac. Only lilac. Billie had always wondered why. Had never asked. But at that moment, the question burned a hole in her thoughts. “Why lilac?”
The doc sent one eyebrow into space. “What’s that, now?”
Billie gestured to the notepad. “Lilac paper. Always lilac. Twenty plus years of lilac. Did you buy them in bulk back in 1994 or something?”
Doc’s eyebrow landed back on earth and the corners of her upturned lips disappeared into folds of old skin. She shook her head. “I like purple. When you were gone, I tried yellow. Even plain old white. But lilac is calming.” She tapped the rim of her glasses with her pen. “It’s kind on the old eyes. Now enough about my quirks. Let’s discuss your messed-up psyche.”
One thing Billie could always count on was Doc Kroft not pussyfooting around her crazy.
“So you awoke on the fire escape. You think you were going to jump?”
“Either that or fly. Maybe my night brain thinks that’s possible. I can run with one leg, so why not fly without wings?”
“Have you had any new trauma?”
“Nope.” Katherine’s pokey finger and crimson face came to mind. Is being mistreated at work, being intentionally held back from any opportuni
ty to move up, to be promoted, to find any nuance of job satisfaction, trauma?
“No public teasing, no verbal abuse.”
Billie squished the piece of skirt fluff under her thumb and pushed it around. “That’s not trauma. That’s life.”
Doc tossed her lilac notepad on the coffee table between them and lobbed her blue pen at it. “Billie, we’ve talked about this. It’s not the same as witnessing your parents’ murder, or having your leg shot off. But for someone who has been traumatized in that way, it can be a trigger.”
Billie sighed. “Yeah, I know. You being pissed at me doesn’t help.”
“Darling, Billie. I am anything but pissed. I’m worried. You’ve not been to see me in more than two years. Are you taking your meds?”
Doc had her scrunched-up concerned face on. Did she practice that in the mirror? Billie liked that face. It was endearing. It reminded her of her grandmother.
Billie fidgeted with her skirt, made eye contact with the curtains, cleared her throat.
“Billie. You stopped again.”
“Yes, I stopped. I think it’s the meds that make me crazy.”
“No, it’s not. There are side effects, but without them, things end up worse.” She tented her fingers.
Billie often wondered if there was a special class for that at psychologist school. Finger tenting one-oh-one.
