Читать книгу Last Flight Out - Jennifer Psy.D. Vaughn - Страница 12

There are days when I flat out adore New York City. I often get up early in the morning, taking a stroll during the time when the fog is still sticking to the sidewalks. I can be a gypsy here, free to float around the city at will, nameless and faceless and unrecognizable under my broad shades and torn jeans.

There’s nothing I can’t do here. Broadway glows twenty-four hours a day, and there is always a spotlight if you’re interested in standing under it. People follow their dreams to get here, and many times, they lose all hope during their stay. A dichotomy of life greets you at every corner. The stretch limo double-parked along the Avenue, idling in park and blowing through gas like water. Just down the way is the drunken bum who has not a penny to his name and no desire at all to do anything more than just watch people walk by. Every now and again, the elegant businessman hustling out to his awaiting car catches the eye of the poor downtrodden sucker laid out in his own vomit. They look at each other, but right through each other. Their lives intersecting for a moment in time, before one goes back to abject poverty and the other to his penthouse on the Upper East Side.

That’s New York for you, the best and brightest a heartbeat away from personal disaster.

I have a little time to kill before I have to head to the airport. I’m traveling pretty light, just a few pairs of jeans and t-shirts, couple of bathing suits if Lauren has enough time for a trip to the beach. There are no cute little dresses or stilettos included on this trip, I doubt either one of us will have the heart to leave her house once I suck out all the joy like a wind turbine in reverse.

I didn’t sleep all that much last night, my thoughts slamming around my head like marbles on a driveway. I tried to focus on the noises of the city, the coughs, the laughs, the blaring horns all rising through the air.

Lauren is under the impression I just needed a break from New York, some space to spread out and just chill. I wasn’t very generous about the details of my quick trip, basically just telling her I wanted to see her and catch up. This is the part that still tears me up inside. Aside from the chance that my boobs are about to be whacked off, and that horrifying feeling I’m trying to prepare for, when I run my fingers through my hair and it’s not there anymore, it’s the full disclosure I’m dreading most. Lauren will get an instant impression that something is wrong. She is so intuitive it’s spooky, especially about me. One look at my drawn face, and she’ll know all is not well. History will have her assuming it has something to do with my family. She knows they are a load and dealing with them is exhausting.

I walk with my head slightly angled down, lost in my own thoughts. It’s still early so the sidewalks are quiet as I stroll down to the twenty-four-hour CVS to grab a few things I need for my trip. As always, I am tucked away from my fellow streetwalkers by sunglasses that cover half of my face from my eyebrows down to mid-cheek. I’ll admit my sister has taught me one valuable thing as my family’s fame grew. For some odd reason, and one Kelby has a fiery anguish about, I was blessed with some rather unique eyes. “Blessed” is not the word I use, it’s hers, and it’s always preceded by “fucking, fricking, or goddamned” depending on how foul her mood is at the time. Kelby is herself one hot piece of ass, but apparently my single blessing really stings. I guess in her reluctant attempt to love me in spite of it, she has insisted I wear big dark sunglasses whenever I’m out alone to keep the ever-present and always annoying paparazzi off my heels. When my face is partially covered, my hair tucked under a hat, I can pretty much carry on unnoticed. Besides, New Yorkers are hardly the type to look at one moving object too long. My coworkers at Hyde still get a kick out of walking out the front door with me and getting a flashbulb in the face. Sometimes they even find themselves featured alongside me on Page Six, but being the most boring member of the Sheridan clan, that doesn’t happen all that often.

I’m careful to keep my eyes low as I pay for my travel size toothpaste, Excedrin to ward off my all for certain migraine when I land in L.A., and a new paperback to keep my mind off being suspended too far up in the air for six hours. I hope that the flight won’t be fully booked and I’ll have the entire row of first class to myself. In reality, there is a fat chance of that ever happening. Almost every single flight headed from New York to Los Angeles is packed tighter than Kelby’s ass in her True Religion jeans. That’s one of the reasons I splurged on my first class ticket, to lessen my chances of having to make small talk or even worse, get recognized and gawked at.

My travel attire would make my mother’s jaw drop in disgust but it is a great way to stay unrecognizable. I always follow the same routine. I stuff my hair deep under a baseball hat with a dark brim; wear my famous face-shielding sunglasses, and my oldest pair of worn jeans with a long nondescript sweater. With half my body covered, I can usually pull off a clean break from airport to airport, with only a small flicker of recognition from an alert flight attendant.

On this JFK-to-LAX route heavily traveled by celebrity types, the flight attendants can be your best friend or worst enemy. Get a young giddy one, star struck and skittish, and you’re swarmed by the time you hit cruising altitude. The more seasoned attendants barely even blink in your direction, and my secret is always safe with them.

To make sure Kelby was not going to tattle to my mother, I had to do some hard negotiating. I agreed that if she kept my trip under wraps I would talk to my parents about their boycott on Harris. Not that I ever really will, but at this point I’d agree to just about anything to keep Kelby’s trap shut.

Sometimes I feel like I’m still ten years old, getting caught with a cigarette lighter or muttering a forbidden word under my breath. The wrath of my parents is still fearsome for all three of us, often used as a bargaining tool for one of us to get what he or she wants from the other. Probably not at all healthy and somewhat immature, but it always does the trick. For Kass, it’s always a plea for us to help keep his penchant for sleazy women a secret, even though I’m certain my father at least is well aware of this. After all, he’s been there. Did not partake quite as much as others, but at least watched the strange and seductive dance of the beautiful people from afar for many years.

One day, I’m sure Kass will meet the perfect girl who is just the right mix of sexy and smart. It’s not like I think it’s fabulous he’s acting like a major player, and I tell him all the time to steer clear of the really dirty girls who just might be hiding a Flip-cam 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?