Chapter 8
“You told her you were going to loathe this? You are so dramatic, Bryony. Only you could declare you would loathe this .”
Jack sits back, leaning against one of the many large windows where behind us the cars fly past. Pretty much every single
passing vehicle includes somebody pressing their face to the window, angling up for a picture of the bus with Amelia’s massive
face along the side.
I am sitting just where Amelia’s teeth are.
Jack is sitting on her hand perched on top of a load of books. At the center of the table is a cauliflower-crust pizza left
over from lunch. Apparently, our stops are not dictated by the need for gasoline but by five-star gluten-free restaurants
and how quickly they can deliver boxes of goodies inside. Whether or not it turns out that the restaurant is incredibly remote
and the bus ends up having to see how far it can squeeze into one-way streets before hitting a parked car.
The food is, I’ll grudgingly admit, very good.
Amelia is in the back bedroom. Lying on her massive bed. In a massive robe. Wearing some glowing red light mask on her face.
The mask’s box declares, “This revolutionary treatment is guaranteed to take off ten years!”
Apparently the “shocking reality” of having two more people on her giant tour bus led to a migraine only red-light treatment
will soothe.
But where is my migraine-reducing, face-smoothing red-light treatment mask? Where?
Everyone around me is busy. Penny sits in a chair by the farthest back window, her face screwed up as she painstakingly practices slow loops on sheets of paper. Calligraphy, apparently, is going to be Penny’s homework assignment now because, as Amelia put it, “Your one single task is to write things down, Penny. The least you can do is make it pretty . If I wanted chicken scratch, I would have hired a chicken .”
Garrett, Amelia’s publicity tour manager, sits on the other side of the aisle, arguing in panic-level mode with somebody on
the phone over misplaced book orders and declaring that if “we don’t have four hundred copies of The Seven-Year Holiday on that table by four o’clock, somebody is going to get fired .” Possibly (probably?) him.
Electronic equipment litters the table in front of Jack: laptops, phones, some electronic planner to track all the information
on his laptops and phone. Even an electric sort of candle warmer to keep his electric-looking coffee mug at a perfect 132
degrees.
Jack is a frenzy of movement, making jumps from one electronic device to another, all with a phone pressed to his ear. I haven’t
caught all that’s going on, but from what I can gather, the book of one of his newer clients, Tess Cray, has gone to auction
and three publishers are in the game, fighting for it. Even his laptop has some sort of time-bomb clock on it, ticking down.
Thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds left. Twenty-one. Twenty. He’s jumping from phone call to phone call, telling publishers,
“Schmidt just offered exclusive World English rights on a two-book, 200 a book. Ben, you’re up. What can you do?” and “Pennington
just offered 230 each for three books. Where are you?”
I sip my cold coffee and watch him with mild interest.
Every couple minutes he pauses from his mad finger tapping and phone talking to look over at me and wink.
I can’t help it.
He makes me smile despite myself as I watch him living for the adrenaline of this. It’s responsible gambling, that’s what
it is. I bet he killed everyone on the block in Monopoly as a kid. He was definitely one of those kids who owned the bank
and all the properties and gleefully loaned out money and kept tabs on their growing debts just to keep the game going.
“Look at you,” he says, waving a hand at my stack of books. “Cheer up.”
When I got on the bus earlier, Mona gave me an overly aggressive squeeze on both shoulders and slipped a company card in my
hand, saying, “Take this. Spare yourself nothing—I don’t care if it’s a coffee mug or a chandelier in an antique store. You’re
a lifesaver to us all.” When I told her I was most certainly not, she said, “Look up that interview from the other night on
YouTube. Just... look it up. Thank you .”
I was not, ever, going to sit on Amelia’s bus next to her giant face, with her real face in the other room, watching her make
a fool out of herself on YouTube. But I got it.
Susanna, in true Susanna form, placed in my arms a stack of books that she stole from the ARC room at the office and said
in a small, soft voice, “Farewell.”
As if I was on a brave journey toward certain death.
“You have hours to read.” Jack, in a pause on his call, points to my books. “You like reading. Read .”
“Can’t,” I say with a frown.
“Then write. You say you need to write.”
“Can’t. I have to kill off the boys from this book.” Because, according to Amelia, I can no longer include terrible small
human beings who make the world go round.
“Then for goodness’ sake, call your Goody Two-shoes boyfriend,” Jack spits out, waving his hand in the air.
Geez. I must look quite broody.
Jack never goes to such lengths as to mention I actually call the man he’s never met.
“It’s three in the morning in Russia.”
“Then—” Jack’s interrupted by the person on the line. “Bill? Yeah. Just got your email.” His eyes jump to the timer and back.
“No, that’s not going to be high enough. We’re going in ten-thousand-dollar increments.”
I take another sip of my coffee and glance around.
Yes, I do need to get to writing. I do have an AMSI (Advanced Marketing and Sales Information) Word document sitting on my laptop about my current work in progress that Susanna begged me to turn in by the end of the week. And yes, I do have a stack of papers from students I need to go over and correct.
And yes, there is a phone call to Gloria I missed.
But the thing that’s been at the forefront of my mind, playing over and over again, is the conversation with Gran. More particularly,
how to make that miracle happen pretty much immediately.
It’s an excruciating thing, sitting on a bus worth the cost of a year of programming, working with these magic fingers and
yet completely stuck as to how to make them work magic in my own life.
I glance to the countdown clock.
Three minutes and forty-five seconds left.
To my surprise, Jack is actually speeding up. Wow. I didn’t know he could operate this fast. For a man who ties his bowling
laces at the speed of a tortoise, he looks positively manic.
He’s quite the auctioneer, isn’t he? Bouncing around to publishers reminding them of what a good deal this is. Typing into
spreadsheets and spouting off stats about his author.
Meanwhile, I’m the sloth in the background, taking slow sips of my first cup of coffee for the day, the one poured six hours
ago, with an untouched stack of books before me.
I don’t really know how he does it.
“Time’s up,” he says happily, shutting off the clock and dropping the back of his head against the window.
He grips my hand and gives it an excited squeeze before tapping off an email to all.
“Happy?” I say.
“Extremely.” His phone call to the winning publisher is jovial, as is his phone call to his author Tess, and soon enough he’s
winding down the emails with a big smile on his face.
Perfect.
I’ve been waiting for a moment precisely like this. When he’s in a good mood. And this is a top-notch one.
“All good news?” I say in a light voice. A voice peppered with little red candy sprinkles.
“ Excellent news,” he returns, snapping one of the laptops shut and slipping it into his laptop bag. He rubs his temple with one hand.
“Everyone at The Foundry will be thrilled .”
“Great.” I clasp my fingers together beneath the booth table, then power on in my most prepare-to-pay-attention-to-me-because-I-am-important voice. “Jack, we need to talk.”
Then I realize that was a little too sober, so I flash him a bright smile—keeping optimism and self-respect perfectly balanced—and add in an equally bright voice,
“I have some news.”
Clearly I didn’t nail down the balance, because a crease forms between his brows. “What’s up?”
“Well,” I say in an upbeat tone, “I want to talk about my book.”
The way his shoulders droop tells me everything I need to know about how seriously he’s planning to take this. Already his
hand starts roving toward one of his laptops. A subtle sigh laces his voice as he speaks. “No, I haven’t heard from her yet,
Bryony. You know how publishing takes off for the summer.”
“And in a little over a month from now, they’ll be taking off in preparation for Labor Day, and let’s not forget that the
holidays are, at that point, almost upon us, I know.”
I’ve heard it all from him before. The whole publishing world is off for Thanksgiving. They’re off through Christmas. Actually,
all of December. It’s icy in January. It’s too hot in the summer. Fridays are just hard. You’d think from his responses publishers
never turn on their computers.
“Right, well, I think it’s time we stop using bait to try to catch one fish. No more waiting on Florence Peters. It’s time
we cast out the whole net.”
One brow tweaks up, evidence that he disagrees. “Bryony...”
“Jack!” Amelia calls from the back room. “Do you have a place to put all this luggage ? I’m tripping all over these suitcases to get to the bathroom .”
His attention shifts to the hallway, where his three gray suitcases of various sizes rest.
There’s a swoop sound on his computer, informing him of an incoming email. His phone buzzes with a text, vibrating on the table. “Bryony,
let’s talk about this later—” He pulls out of the booth to stand.
“The Bridge is planning to close end of the year,” I blurt out.
He pauses.
“We have a matter of months left unless, unless something happens... Unless we find some kind of, of miracle... Gran
says it’s over. And I just”—I throw out my hands—“I can’t let that happen. It can’t happen. I have to do something , and this is the only possible something I’ve got. So please , Jack. Let’s cast the net.”
His gaze holds mine for a long moment, his hand touching the table.
His eyes soften.
“Jack! Seriously! ” Amelia calls in the distance.
“Bryony. You wrote a book. About your grandmother and this organization. And that was sweet. Honorable to her legacy. But
have you considered that this is just too big a burden for you to bear alone? That this is just impossible to accomplish without something, somebody, else?”
“Of course I have. But I have you. I’m not alone.”
Jack’s lips press together and he squeezes his eyes shut. Throws his head back with an inhale. A particular vein in his neck
is pulsing quicker now.
I’m driving him crazy.
I know I do, I know.
I didn’t mean to make my voice wobble at the end like that. I didn’t want to give away the earnestness of how I feel about
it all. In fact, I feel like I’ve been found in the streets wearing nothing but a sheet and it slips off, and there I am—naked.
Completely vulnerable.
“Fine.”
I feel his hand on mine.
And with that word it’s like he’s handed me a coat. Tucked it around my shoulders with one single word. Fine.
“I’ll do what I can, Bryony.”
“Right away?”
“Right away,” he says, and slips his computer into his arms. “But please, do me a favor. Two.”
“What?”
“Don’t get your hopes up. Like I say every time, it’s not easy selling a book. Particularly a speculative, quasi–magical realism,
quasi–women’s fiction, fifty-thousand-words-too-long one like yours. Even with you at the helm of this story.”
There is no way I’m not going to get my hopes up.
This is all I can do now.
Hope.
“And second?” I say.
And to this he points to my computer. “Go back and edit the manuscript.”
I’ve done that. Three thousand times. Two years ago.
I looked at those words so many times I probably have them memorized.
“How many people will you message?” I call after him. How many people does Jack Sterling know? How many contacts does he really
have in the world of publishing? Dozens? Hundreds? “Will it be today?”
There’s a tightness in his jaw as he grimaces. It’s obvious, oh so obvious, he is doing this solely for my sake, not really
because he believes in this.
He believes in me , I know. Just not the story .
What will this do to his own reputation? I wonder suddenly. Sending off for consideration a manuscript he doesn’t really believe in?
Because he doesn’t really. It was obvious during that first pitch session. He liked my eye for Amelia’s story. Not my own.
“I have to do something first.” He avoids a direct answer to my question, a direct ask for a worldwide outreach. “And then I’ll do what I can... today.”
“Jack!” Amelia calls. “I’m about to pitch these out the window if we can’t get this cleared out!”
He slips out of view and I open my laptop, feeling a breath of relief for the first time in ages.
My mouse slips over to hover on the folder for Water Under the Bridge . Something in me hesitates.
It’s a nauseating feeling, actually.
The old, familiar sensation of opening that folder. How many times have I opened that folder? Thousands over days. Weeks.
Months. Years. And with it the rush of those old, familiar feelings that came coupled with those days, weeks, months, years
of waiting for an email back from agents that never came: Longing. Hope. Embarrassment. Shame. Second-guessing.
Oh, so much second-guessing.
Even fewer people knew about my writing then.
Writing was my little plan. My little secret.
They say you never forget how to ride a bike as soon as you feel the pedals beneath your shoes. Well, right now the mouse
hovering over the folder is my little jolt back in time, to a cluster of chaotic feelings I’d rather forget.
My mouse slips over to my current WIP and I click it open. Click the “Welcome Back” bubble on the side where it drops me down
to the four-thousand-word mark where I was six hours ago.
I highlight the section, a painfully massive 75 percent chunk of the page. Then tap Delete. Watch the whole beautiful section
of the two boys disappear. A day’s worth of work. Gone in a blink.
I take a sip of my cold coffee and begin tapping, all while the wheels in my brain begin turning, working to fill the missing dominoes I just deleted to get the story from point B to point D. Shifting the point of view from two parents of two beautiful children to two parents. Single. Painstakingly slashing through meaning to give what Amelia wants.
Fluff.
Still. It’s better than revisiting the old folder and old wounds.
I’ll go back to it.
Edit later.
But right now, it’s time to reach the masses using Amelia’s mighty pen.