in the corner of the hotel room. Kass has enough of that Sheridan guilt plugged in to worry about showing up naked on YouTube, someone’s Facebook page or on TMZ. He’s also smart enough to make sure any girl he’s photographed with would come up clean on the government database. No arrest warrants, no outstanding charges, not even a parking ticket. Disappointing my parents is not an option; even as adults we do what we can to keep them happy.
Is that love? Or flat out fear of being cast out of a position of good-standing. Either way it’s not a place you’d like to be. It is always cold and icy, and your feet can’t get traction to climb back up.
I adjust my sunglasses, thinking that if our eyes are the windows to our souls maybe that’s why I’m so good at hiding mine from the world. Under my sunglasses, or below the brim of my hat, no one sees that I’m just average and make a lot of mistakes. No one can see my cancer, or my fear, or the fact that I’ve come up short, yet again.
Maybe Kelby knew something I didn’t all those years ago when she bought me my first pair of obnoxiously oversized Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses. Maybe she knew that one day I would be carrying a burden so large it would look like a billboard.
I grab my plastic CVS bag and leave the store. The sun is just starting to break along the horizon, brilliant enough to warm my face before my shades dim it down to a soft gray. I check my watch and realize I have to pick up my step if I’m going to catch my taxi to the airport on time. My bags are packed and ready to go at my apartment. I have two manuscripts packed into my carry-on, just in case the paperback doesn’t hold my attention. I don’t feel much like editing, but I chose two that are demanding a lot of my time right now and I feel guilty setting them aside.
One is from a woman in Las Vegas who has already signed on with Hyde, more because of her potential than her actual progress. She’s under contract to send me her work in progress chapter by chapter. Instead, I am getting bits and pieces that lately seem to have no rhyme or reason. When I called her gently out on the carpet she explained that her three-year-old son was recently diagnosed with autism and her heart just isn’t in it at the moment. I have chosen to keep that potentially deal-breaking morsel from Alan and give her some space to deal with life. I know I can’t keep her protected for much longer, because in this high pressure world if you don’t produce you get kicked to the curb. As much as they pour out their hearts in their written words, authors are still a commodity and when their stocks take a dive, the market cleans house.
Amanda Southerby, personal disaster aside, is skirting dangerously close to being sold off.
The other manuscript is one I am helping the author tweak almost page by page which is unheard of, but I have a soft spot for him, too. He has an enormous gift but is kind of like Jim Carrey, a rubbery artist with a raging case of ADD. His tale of a Boston detective caught up in a murder for hire investigation manages to hook the reader almost immediately with violence and such disturbing human behavior I’ve had to ask him if he was tortured as a child. He has assured me the horrific twists and gory turns are purely the result of an overactive imagination. He rounds it all out with an ending that readers will dissect word by word because they just don’t want it to end. Sam Burton may be skilled with his words, but he’s reckless with everything else. I feel like I’m correcting the work of a brilliant second grader. Sure, he’s clever, but his crayon just can’t seem to stay inside the lines.
Sam’s grammatical minefield and Amanda’s family crisis notwithstanding, my work is like the angel on my shoulder right now. At times, with my glasses perched at the end of my nose and my pencil wound around my ponytail I completely forget I will soon become a fixture in the chemo room of New York General Hospital. When I’m reading about Sam’s mobsters making back room deals in some greasy old North End Italian restaurant with plush red leather seats and checkered tablecloths, cancer doesn’t even register. There just isn’t room in my cerebral vortex, and that is like happiness on a stick.
I can totally ignore the ache along my chest wall when Amanda tells me how the doctors began to suspect her son was on the spectrum when he couldn’t muster more than one word by the time he turned three. I feel her pain, rather than my own when she tells me he can’t look her directly in the eye and tell his mommy that he loves her.
Maybe this is why I tuck these two particular manuscripts inside my bag.
My gift in return for theirs.
But really, how can you ever properly thank someone for giving your brain a moment of peace, when it is otherwise fully engaged in the fight of its life?
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