Goody One Shoe

by Julie Frayn

  “You’re drenched!” A woman in a too-pink and too-stained polyester tunic came from around the cash desk, a roll of paper towels in one hand. She stripped of several squares of absorbent paper and handed them to Billie. “Didn’t your mama teach you to come in out of the rain?”

  Billie dried her face and squeezed her hair through the towel. Cinnamon and vanilla and grease filled her nose. “My car broke down. Can I borrow your phone?”

  “Sure thing, honey. It’s on the wall around the corner. How ‘bout I get you a cup of coffee to warm up?”

  Billie patted her pockets. “Thanks. But I left my purse in the car.”

  “On the house. Maybe a nice piece of pie too.”

  Billie’s stomach roared in approval. “Bless you. That would be wonderful.”

  She found the telephone, its buttons sticky with strangers’ fingerprints. Billie reached for the handset but froze. Fingerprints. She couldn’t leave any fingerprints. She glanced toward the door. How would she wipe the handle down without looking suspicious? Or more suspicious.

  She pulled the sleeve of her hoodie down and picked up the receiver, balanced it between her cheek and shoulder, and pressed the buttons with her finger poking the hoodie sleeve.

  The phone rang two, three, four times. Damn it, please don’t go to voice mail. She needed to hear his voice. Needed to know this wasn’t a dream. Or better yet, discover that it was.

  “Montoya.”

  She gripped the phone in both hands. “Bruce?” She could barely muster a whisper.

  “Billie? Is that you? Where are you calling from?”

  “Some diner in a gas station. I — I think I’ve done something terrible. Can you come?”

  “Yes. Give me an address.”

  She looked around. A stack of menus sat on a table. She stretched the cord and snatched one with her hoodie-covered hand. “Gloria’s Diner, Highway Seventeen and a Hundred and Ninety-Eighth Street.”

  “I’ll Google it. Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Shit, Billie, you’re damn near all the way to Ivy Valley. That’s thirty clicks south of town. How did you get there?”

  Billie swallowed. Salty tears combined with the remains of muck on her face and dripped onto her lip. “I have no idea.”

  Billie stood on the cool tile of her bathroom floor, one hand on Bruce’s shoulder for balance.

  He peeled her clothing from her limbs. The soaking wet fabric had transformed to a sort of frozen glue. Even the oversized cargos stuck to her skin and caught on the drenched stockings of her prosthesis. He cranked the faucet to hot, and steam soon billowed from the bathtub.

  Bruce laid a towel over the toilet seat lid and had Billie sit. He dismantled her leg, stripped her of the filthy, stinking, sopping trappings of her misadventure, lifted her, and set her in the warm water.

  Her red, icy skin was lit on fire by the first touch of hot bathwater. Billie winced, but sank into it; inhaled the lavender bath salts Bruce had scooped under the stream of soothing heat pouring from the tap. It cleansed the runoff from her body and calmed the frenetic pace of her mind.

  On the drive home she’d told him how she awoke in the culvert. About the gloves and the clothes and the knife, the sirens and ambulance and police.

  “That could be for anything. Car accident. Heart attack. Shooting.”

  His deep timbre soothed her soul, but did nothing to ease the possibility that a monster lurked within her, waiting to take over her conscious mind on a whim.

  Bruce sat on the edge of the tub, dipped a sponge in the scented water and ran it over her shoulders and arms. “So,” he cleared his throat. “This ever happen before?”

  Billie nodded. “A couple of months ago. I found myself on the fire escape in the wee hours of the morning.”

  “What were you doing out there?”

  “No clue. It looked like I was going to jump. I had climbed onto the railing. Woke up there.” She wiped sweat from her brow with trembling fingers. “What if I hadn’t come to?”

  “Don’t even think about it.” He kissed the top of her grimy head. “You did. And you didn’t jump. So it must have been something other than a suicide attempt.” He reached for the shampoo bottle and squeezed a blob into his palm.

  Billie inhaled the citrusy scent and closed her eyes, mesmerized by the gentle massaging of his strong fingers against her scalp. “It wasn’t the first time.” Or the last. But she didn’t want to share the impromptu panhandling episode.

  The massaging stopped. “What do you mean?”

  Billie held her breath and disappeared under the water. She rubbed the suds from her head and surfaced, wiping both hands over her face. “I mean, I’ve done it before. Woke up somewhere unfamiliar, completely confused and unaware of my surroundings. But it hadn’t happened for a long time. Not since after Grandmother died.”

  Bruce slid off the tub’s edge and sat on the floor. He took her hand, enlaced his fingers with hers. “Holy shit. You sleepwalk?”

  She laid her head on his arm. “Not exactly. Dissociative fugue. Like sleepwalking. But more rare, and much worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  “Sometimes I go a long way. Sometimes I’m gone for hours. Sometimes I lose an entire day.” She glanced at him.

  “Like when you missed the movie? Was that this fugue thing?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. If it was I didn’t wake up in the middle of it. So I can’t know.”

  He rested his cheek against her head. “I see.” He reached for a towel, stood, and pulled the plug. “Come on. I’ll make you tea.”

  She took his offered hand, climbed from the tub, and balanced on her leg. “I’d rather have a drink.”

  “Then let’s see if you have any wine.” He wrapped the towel around her, wiped her face dry with one corner, and rubbed his hands up and down her back.

  An odd memory crept in, of her mother after bath time when Billie was little, maybe four or five. The big towel, sitting on her mother’s lap. The good times before she reeked of booze and before Billie knew that the other smell was cigarette smoke. Billie would lay her head against her mother’s shoulder and her mother would rock her and hum a lullaby.

  Billie leaned into Bruce’s body and rested her head on his shoulder. He engulfed her with his arms. “It’s all right, Billie Sunshine,” he whispered into her wet hair. “I’ve got you.”

  Billie held the teacup in both hands, the heat easing the remaining chill from her bones. In retrospect, she was happy to be out of wine. Chamomile was working its magic, warming her from the inside out, letting her shed most of the panic. But not all of it. Nothing was that magical.

  Bruce breezed about her tiny kitchen, setting about to fry and boil some of her meagre refrigerator offerings into something edible. He manoeuvred the cupboards and countertops with such ease. He reached to pull a knife from the dusty block that Billie’s grandmother had given her when she moved out on her own.

  Billie froze. Her gaze focused in on an empty slot in the wood. A missing knife. Her gut turned to stone and she fumbled the teacup. It crashed to the floor and sent shards of kiln-fired pottery scattering about.

  Bruce swung around, a chef’s knife in his hand.

  The room spun and Billie’s vision blurred. She wavered on the stool and tipped to the side.

  Bruce raced around the breakfast counter and grabbed her before she hit the ground. He carried her to the sofa, laid her down, and tapped at her cheeks. “Billie, are you all right? Did you faint?”

  She brushed his hands away and sat up. “I’m fine.” She looked past him to the knife block, now with two empty slots. She stood and hopped to the kitchen. “Where is it?”

  “Where is what?” Bruce was behind her.

  She pointed to the knife block. “The knife.” She pulled each knife from its allotted space and dropped each to the counter. “The long skinny one. It has a curved blade.” She yanked the dishwasher open, but it stood empty
. She scanned the sink, shoved plates and mugs aside.

  “A boning knife?” Bruce put the other knives back into the block.

  “I think so.” Billie pulled drawer after drawer open and rummaged through them. Only steak knives and dull dinner knives to be found.

  She gripped the counter’s edge. “It was my knife.” She turned to Bruce, searched his face for answers.

  “You mean the one today? The one you dropped in the culvert?”

  She nodded with vigour, her dizzy spell creeping back in.

  “Come on, sit.” He guided her back to the sofa. “You’ve cut your foot on the cup.”

  She sat in a haze while he tended to her injury, cleaned the broken glass, and wiped splotches of her blood from the floor. When everything was returned to normal, he sat beside her. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  She blinked. “What makes sense?”

  “That it was your own knife. If it wasn’t, where would you have gotten it?” He brushed hair from her forehead.

  She swallowed. Yes, that made sense. If anything that happened this crazy day could possibly make sense. She touched his cheek. “Thank you.”

  His face scrunched up. “For what?”

  “Are you kidding me? For reassuring me. Cleaning up after me.” She leaned forward and kissed him. “For rescuing me. Again.”

  “My beautiful Billie, I didn’t rescue you. I just drove out to get you.” He settled in beside her and picked up the phone. “I’m ordering Chinese. You okay with that?”

  “If that means you stay beside me and we don’t use any knives, then I’m thrilled with that.”

  “How about I come to church with you tomorrow?”

  She pulled back and eyed his face, searching for signs of sarcasm. “You hate church.”

  “Yeah. But maybe it would do you good. I can be there for moral support, so to speak.”

  She snuggled into his side and pulled his arm over her head and around her shoulders. “I don’t want to go.” The instant she stepped inside the door, she’d probably burst into flames.

  Sunday the 9th

  BILLIE SAT UP IN BED and gasped. She wiped sweat from her brow and out of her eyes, but couldn’t wipe the dream from her mind. Spewing blood and a flailing knife, the open mouth of a screaming woman, all of it drenched in a lake of sewage and ooze.

  Bruce moaned and snorted sleep through his nose.

  Billie dried her hand on the comforter and reached for him. She hesitated, didn’t want to wake him, but needed to know he was real. She touched her hand to his chest and let the rise and fall of his breathing ground her back to reality. She breathed in time with his heartbeat, tried to satisfy herself that the images in her head were just that. Images.

  Maybe satisfied was a stretch. She scanned the floor for a mound of her father’s clothes. The coast was clear. Besides, Bruce had washed them, boxed them up and put them in a closet in his apartment.

  She glanced at the bedside clock. Four forty-five. Bruce would be out for a couple more hours, but she knew the thrum in her own veins all too well. She may as well get out of bed and do something useful. Sleep would not be coming back.

  She slid from beneath the covers and hopped to the chair where her cane rested its horse’s head against the upholstered armrest. One touch of her warm flesh to the cool brass and a new wave of pseudo-memories rushed at her. The dirty smell of rain on pavement and the shush of rubber tires racing past.

  Billie dropped to the chair, her head swimming and spinning, her stomach hard and ready to jump out of her throat. She put her head between her knees and struggled to breathe.

  “Billie, what’s wrong?” Bruce’s bare feet thumped onto the carpet and scurried to her side. He lay on the floor at her foot, his head under hers. “You all right?”

  She giggled at the sight of this grown man, burly in all the right places, lying on her floor just to get a good vantage point. “I just had a dizzy spell.”

  He bounded to his feet and rubbed her shoulders. She sat up slowly and leaned against the backrest, one hand on her forehead, her other still gripping the head of the cane.

  “Why don’t you come back to bed.” He eyeballed the clock. “Shit, love, it’s not even five.”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m too awake. You go back. I’ll get some work done. I promised that manuscript to Annabelle before the fifteenth.” She patted his arm.

  He leaned in for a kiss. “Okay. I could use a couple more hours. When I get up, I’ll make pancakes and bacon.”

  Her mouth filled with saliva. “Sounds perfect.” Billie eyed the cane. “Will you hand me my leg?” She rested the cane against the wall. Releasing it let go of the sensation of being thigh-deep in freezing water that smelled like asparagus farts. She fitted her apartment prosthesis over her stump and kissed Bruce on his morning-breath lips. At the threshold, she admired the view of him climbing back beneath her comforter and stuffing her pillow under his curly hair. Peg Leg meandered across the room and weaved his way between her legs, rubbed his inky fur against her bare flesh, and the fake flesh too. Billie pulled the door shut with a quiet click.

  On her way past the breakfast counter, she poked the power button on her open laptop. Peg Leg crawled onto the couch, stepped over the end table, and made the short hop to his morning perch on the window ledge. His tail flicked about, side-to-side, up, down. He mewed at the line of orange and lilac on the horizon and demanded the sun hurry up and rise already.

  Sunday was coffee day. But she was going to edit, so that demanded tea. What a conundrum. Which ritual would she uphold? She hedged her bets, put a pot of her favourite dark roast on to brew, filled the kettle with water, lit a burner, and put it on to heat. Once they were ready, she’d make her choice. Or maybe just have a cup of both. The extra caffeine might clear her brain.

  She turned the television on with the volume down. A years-old habit she learned from her grandmother. The voices kept her company and provided white noise as if she were in the office. It helped focus her thoughts on the task at hand. Silence drove her bonkers.

  Billie checked her email while water burbled through the coffee filter and into the pot. By the time the teakettle whistled, she’d cleared her inbox and opened Annabelle’s manuscript to the last page of completed edits.

  Coffee smelled of Sunday, rich and heady, with just a hint of cinnamon. The thought of tea bored her silly. Coffee it was, with too much half-and-half and a generous spoonful of brown sugar. Her other Sunday ritual had taken a backseat to more exciting pastimes of late. But sweet, creamy coffee won out every time.

  She set the mug and adjusted the angle of the handle, interlaced her fingers and popped her knuckles, twisted her neck until a crack crunched in her ears. She re-read the last few paragraphs to get her bearings, then carried on. It wasn’t a bad little story. The construction was good, the plot decent. Grammar and spelling were passable. Some punctuation issues, but heck, nobody was perfect. Least of all authors. They focused on the story and left the grunt work to the professionals. Maybe that was best.

  The newscast in the background kept spouting words that interrupted her focus.

  Murder. Stabbed. Ivy Valley.

  Billie froze, her fingers hovering above the keyboard. She trained her ears on the low volume of the television but couldn’t bring herself to turn around.

  “Janis Jones, recently found not guilty of charges that she murdered her son by drowning him in a bathtub, was pronounced dead en route to Grantham General. Police are canvassing the area, but without an eyewitness account, have little to go on.”

  Billie shifted in her chair and turned to the television.

  “Mrs. Jones’ husband, Harold, showed little emotion when the police delivered the news,” the female anchor read from the teleprompter. “He was questioned in connection with her death and released due to a solid alibi. He was in his office in downtown Grantham on Saturday afternoon at the time of the attack.”

  “Mrs. Jones,” the male anchor to t
he woman’s left tapped the desk with his fingertips, “is predeceased by all three of her children.” He turned to the woman.

  “With any luck, this incident will spur the construction of the new hospital,” she said. “Perhaps if there were a rural location, she could have been saved.”

  Billie pointed the remote at the set and pressed the mute button. She stared at the silent screen, at a commercial for a cooking show, a close up of chef’s knife slicing a rack of lamb into chops, followed by a scene with young children eating hamburgers. “I’m loving it,” scrolled across the screen.

  Her fingers numb, her eyes unblinking, Billie turned to her computer. Ivy Valley. Wasn’t that where Bruce had said she was? She Googled it, Googled the diner. There it was, on the outskirts of that tiny town in the rural ‘burbs outside Grantham.

  She left her computer and flopped onto the couch; grabbed a pillow to her belly and rocked. The image of a woman’s face, her mouth twisted, her eyes contorted in pain, popped into Billie’s head. She felt the wooden handle of a knife in her hand. Her body reeled at the sensation of plunging it into the soft folds of the woman’s flesh, and the flow of her hot, crimson blood.

  Nausea rolled up Billie’s body, but before she spewed coffee into the air, it quelled. She was overcome by a new sensation.

  Power.

  “You make any progress?” Bruce padded out of the bedroom, his hair askew, pillow lines etched into his face.

  Billie tossed the pillow aside and jumped to her feet. She threw her arms around him and inhaled the musky odour she so loved, reveled in the warmth of his ruddy skin, sticky with sleep sweat. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heartbeat in her ear, closed her eyes as his arms closed around her body. “Yes.” Her blood coursed through her veins and delivered its energy to every extremity. Even the missing one. “Yes, I think I did.”

  Monday the 10th

  “I WANT TO GO BACK on meds.” Billie took a long gulp of her caramel macchiato.