Beckett
December 3rd
I stepped out of the steamy bathroom the next morning to find coffee made again. It was only twenty minutes after five, but Zelda was at the desk scribbling away, bundled in a sweatshirt and scarf.
“Does your new job start early?” I asked, pouring myself a cup of coffee.
“No, but I couldn’t sleep any more. I had one strange dream after another, and woke up full of ideas. Not sure what to do with them, but it’s a start.”
She smiled at me briefly and went back to her sketches. I felt the weight of our talk last night hanging between us, like a strange, combined energy that didn’t know whether to stay or go. Divulging personal pain in the dark had drawn us closer, and the light of day now wanted to push us away.
I drank my coffee, grabbed a protein bar, and headed out. “Thank the coffee fairy for me,” I said from the door. “And have a good first day at your job.”
She turned on the chair, her knees pulled up to her chin. “You too,” she said with a faint smile. She looked small and fragile from across the apartment, and the regret for not having been more comforting to her last night swamped me again.
But I must’ve stared a moment too long. Slowly, Zelda’s hand rose to lower her glasses and her eyes crossed until they were perfectly, frighteningly, pointing straight at each other.
I laughed. “That’s disturbing.”
“Shoo,” she said, turning back to her work. “You’ll be late.”
I smiled to myself, kept smiling down the stairs and out the door. For the first, and possibly last time, I was grateful for the cold, bracing air of New York City at 5:30 a.m. I didn’t have someone to slap me in the face so it was the next best thing.
You’re getting too close and you know it.
I rode my bike in the morning gray to the Clinton-Washington Avenue station. The whole ride on the packed train, my thoughts kept straying back to Zelda. To our conversation. Her pain and mine. And her smile right before she’d fallen asleep…
I almost missed my stop.
Apollo Courier operated out of a small, cluttered office in Two Bridges, Manhattan; with industrial carpet streaked with the mud and grime of hundreds of bicycle treads. Wes Young and Nigel Brooks were already there, their bikes resting against their hips as they plugged their first assignments into the their phones’ GPS. Wes was a shorter guy than Nigel, dark where Nigel was light. Both were dressed in the warmest and most flexible biking gear they could afford.
“Copeland,” Wes said, bumping fists with me. “Supposed to rain today, and then sleet off and on over the next week. You ready for this shit?”
“Can’t wait,” I said, and clasped hands with Nigel.
Nigel, an Australian, gave me a look through narrow eyes. “You got laid last night.”
“I…what?” I half-stammered, half-laughed. “Not even close, but thanks for playing.”
Wes, my best friend, was now scrutinizing me too. “You do look…different.”
“I’m putting more fiber in my diet.”
“No, no, no,” Nigel said, tugging on his gloves. “Wesley is right. You look different in a freshly fucked kind of way.”
Our receptionist, Ramona, rolled her eyes as she handed me my first assignment. She was sixty-two and had long learned to tune most of the messengers out.
“That’s definitely it,” Wes said with a laugh. “Spill. Who is she? Any chance it’s someone we know?”
“Any chance you bozos will get to work some time today?” Ramona inquired without looking up from her computer.
We took our rides outside and saddled up. We each wore small CB devices attached to our messenger bag’s cross-strap, and we all tuned to Apollo’s frequency for jobs that came in on the fly.
“Lunch time, mate,” Nigel said, heading out. “I want to hear details. Porno-level details.”
“Fuck off,” I said.
Nigel coasted away, scratching his back with his middle finger in farewell.
I snorted a laugh and caught Wes’s knowing look.
“I didn’t get laid,” I said, “Sorry to disappoint.”
“I believe you,” Wes said. “Nigel’s the gutterbrain, not me. But you do look different. Like all the heavy shit you carry around got a little lighter.”
“That’s deep, man.”
He laughed. “I’m serious. You got some good news or what?”
“I got a roommate.”
“Oh yeah? In your dinky-ass place?” Wes said and held up his hands as if it ward off my dark look. “Hey, I live in an art commune. Against my will.”
“You live there for Heidi,” I corrected. “Because you’re whipped like a dog.”
“Don’t change the subject,” he said. “We’re freezing our nuts off talking about your situation. Not mine. And I’ll bet cash money, your new roommate is of the feminine persuasion.”
“Yeah, she is. Don’t get all excited, Wes. You had a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.”
He ignored my sarcasm. “And her name is?”
“Her name is Zelda. She draws comic books.”
“No shit?” Wes pursed his lips and nodded approval. “So she’s already too cool for you.”
I burst out laughing, a white plume in the chill air.
“Yeah, that’s the truth. She’s pretty fucking cool.”
“Okay, she’s cool but is she hot? Cool and hot?”
“And smart,” I said. “She’s got a great sense of humor, which helps to survive in my dinky-ass place.”
“Uh huh, you dig her,” my best friend said, just as his CB chirped a caller. He paused to listen, his eyes on me, then leaned his chin into the device and hit the outgoing button. “That’s a ten-four, good buddy, over and out,” he said in an exaggerated Southern drawl. He adjusted the chin strap on his helmet. “Welp, I give you my blessing for this arrangement. And everything that might come out of it.”
“Nothing’s going to come out of it,” I said. “She’s only staying with me for a few months to work on a project. It means a lot to her. I’m not going to risk messing that up. My place is too fucking small to have anything go bad.”
“Yep, this all sounds like your typical Beckett bullshit,” Wes said airily. “When I said you looked different before? I meant you looked happy. Whoever this Zelda chick is…maybe she’s worth taking a chance on.” He chucked me on the shoulder. “You’re not in prison anymore, bro.”
Wes rode out to his first delivery and I realized I was three minutes behind schedule to get to mine. I spent the next nine hours of my shift fighting bracing winds, watching the road for black ice patches and idiotic drivers making right turns without checking their blind spot.
By the time I got off the train in Brooklyn, my resolve to keep my distance from Zelda Rossi was frozen into my bones…
…and began to melt the instant I opened the apartment door.
She was cooking again—meatloaf by the scent of it—and hunched over her work at the desk.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, yourself,” she said brightly, and swiveled in the chair. Her hair was piled on her head and she wore those damn glasses that made it hard for me to think. “Meatloaf should be done in twenty.” Her smile slipped a little. “God, you look like an icicle.” She kicked the radiator at her feet. “Curse you.”
“Sounds like you had a good day,” I said. “How was your first shift?”
“The manager reminds me of Cruella DeVille but one of my co-workers, Anthony, more than made up for it. I laughed all day, and the money looks like it’s going to be good. Win-win.”
“Awesome.”
I wanted to ask her about the graphic novel but thought I’d done enough damage yesterday, thanks very much. But Zelda’s green eyes were bright behind her glasses, and she was electric with restlessness.
She bit her lip, touched her fingers to her chin. “So. After work, on the subway back, I had this flash of an image. For Mother, May I? And it wouldn’t leave me so I drew it the second I got back.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” She twisted a lock of hair around her finger. “You want to see it?”
“Sure.”
I joined her at the desk. The sketch was of Mother with one of her victims on the ground at her feet, begging for his life. But a dark-haired guy in a trench coat was there in a halo of electric light, staying her hand from blowing the perv’s brains out.
“See this guy?” Zelda said, tapping the sketch. “I don’t know who he is, but he’s jumping out of a rip in the space/time continuum, from the future, to stop Mother. He’s going to stop her from killing that guy.”
“I see.”
“Stopping her from taking vengeance isn’t something I ever wanted for her. But yet here this guy is. I think his name is Ryder. And he won’t leave my brain.”
“Okay.”
“He’s not a love interest, I can tell you that right now.”
I forced a smile. “No?”
“No.” Zelda looked up at me, her eyes searching mine. “Kira has too much shit going on to be any good to a guy anyway.”
“Gotcha.” I rubbed a sore spot on my chest where my messenger bag must’ve been pressing too hard all day.
“I don’t know what he is yet,” Zelda said, “but I think…” She glanced back at her work. “I think this is the right direction. And I wondered… If maybe you…?”
I blinked at her. “What are you asking me, Zelda?”
She huffed irritably through a hint of a smile. “Do I have to spell it out? Clearly you’re some sort of muse because I hadn’t had the first clue on how to fix this damn book until our little revelatory discussion last night. So maybe you’ve got something, Copeland. And Darlene says you’re a writer. That true?”
“Not even close.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I write letters sometimes and that’s it.”
Zelda picked up the utility bill I was going to mail off the desk.
“Is this tiny, perfectly precise penmanship yours?”
“Yes.”
She tossed it down. “Okay, so here’s how it works: a comic book is drawn and inked. Sometimes by one person, but there’s also a person called the letterer. She—or he—does all the dialogue, any written text, et cetera. And often times, both artists collaborate on the story itself.”
My eyes widened. “You want me to work on your graphic novel with you?”
She bit her lip. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not a sharing-is-caring kind of gal, especially when it comes to my art. But what you said last night about the story…” She spun a colored pencil on the desktop. “It makes sense for Kira to have a foil. Because I think, maybe, the way people learn about themselves is to have someone challenge their beliefs, right? I’m not saying she’s going to turn into a pacifist and stop wasting sick fucks who prey on little children. But maybe having someone asking hard questions will help reveal more of who she is. And that will help me find what the publishing houses want. The heart of the story. Her heart.”
I couldn’t believe what she was entrusting me with. It was overwhelmingly flattering. And exactly contradictory to my plans for keeping my distance.
“Zelda…”
“And on a practical level, this might—if it turns out well—make some money. If the assistant editor at BlackStar Publishing likes it. I think if I—if we—can deliver the revisions she wants, we can get a contract out of this.”
“It’s your book, Zelda. I don’t want to take money out of your hands for scratching a few letters on the page.”
She snorted. “You have no idea the care it takes to letter properly. I hate it, which is why I’m thrilled your handwriting looks like goddamn typeset. But more than that, Beckett, you’d be helping to craft the story. And splitting whatever money it happens to eke out, fifty-fifty, because getting this book out in the world means more to me than hoarding the payday.”
I rubbed the stubble on my chin. “I used to write pretty good stories in high school. My teachers always seemed to lose their shit over them.”
Zelda’s face lit up like a flare of green and gold. “And did you like writing stories that made teachers lose their shit?”
I grinned. “Yeah, I kind of did.” I shook my head a the weirdness of it all and heard myself say, “Yeah. Sure. I’m on board.”
Zelda narrowed her eyes at me. “Now hold on, Copeland. Don’t do it because I'm asking for help. Don’t do it because you feel sorry for me or because you think you need to fulfill some sort of cosmic obligation. Do it only if you want to. Otherwise I’ll be super pissed off at you.”
I laughed. “No, I want to. Really. I’m honored you’d invite me into your work like this.”
She gave me another sharp look but I could see the light in her eyes and it was beautiful.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” And that was the truth. I was surprised to find I wanted the job. To create something instead of delivering someone else’s messages or cleaning up after their meals.
“And no quibbling about money shit,” Zelda said. “We split anything this sucker makes, even if it’s only enough for one meal off Micky-D’s dollar menu. Then we split that too.”
I laughed harder. God, this girl. “Yes, for God’s sake. Yes.”
Zelda’s smile unfolded until it matched the brilliance of her eyes. She stuck out her hand and I shook it. “Welcome aboard, Copeland,” she said. “And now, before my meatloaf burns, this is your first assignment.”
She tapped the empty space above the guy—Ryder—as he burst out of the ether to stop Kira.
“What does he say?” Zelda asked, her voice turning soft. “What could he possibly tell her that might lead her to a different path? One that’s not just vengeance and hurt and pain?”
I looked at this beautiful, smart woman sitting beside me. I didn’t deserve a shot at happiness, but she did. I couldn’t imagine what it must’ve felt like to have seen her little sister snatched before her eyes, and the guilt of not being able to stop it. I could tell her a thousand times it wasn’t her fault, and I knew she’d never believe me. It would never sink in.
But maybe I can help her move past the rage and pain to something else. Some peace.
I set my fingertip by hers, in the empty space above Ryder. “He tells her, ‘There’s another way.’”