The Thunder Beneath Us

by Nicole Blades

  “Okay,” Robot says. “But what would the feature be about?”

  Keep eyes gazing just past Robot’s shoulder, take a beat, and go. “Right. So there’s this really horrible news story, a crime story, out of Scarborough, Ontario—which is basically Toronto. Canada.” (This is the only moment I look over at Miyuki.) “This father, Bashir Imam, a Muslim, stands accused of killing his four daughters. He drug-poisoned them first, then drowned them in the vacationing neighbor’s pool. And the son helped.”

  “Oh my God,” Miyuki blurts out. “That’s so awful. This happened?”

  “Yes. Anyway, the newspapers called it an honor killing. He did it, they said, because the daughters brought shame on the family, picking up grubby Western habits, that kind of thing. One of them even had a Portuguese-Canadian boyfriend.”

  “Best, I don’t think—”

  “There’s more. One of the sisters survived. She was pretty beat up, obviously, but she made it. She survived this horrific thing. This horrific thing brought about from shame. I think if we interviewed her, maybe an as-told-to or something, we could really dig into something meaty and meaningful and powerful.”

  “I don’t—”

  “She wouldn’t talk about the crime of it. That trial is long over—it was practically a lock on guilty from day one. We’d talk to her about what’s left behind after a crime like that.”

  Miyuki looks at the Robot and at me and over at her again.

  “Look, Best, I don’t think that this story works for our girl. It’s not a good fit for James. At all.”

  “Yeah, I have to agree with Joan here,” Miyuki rushes in. “I mean, even if there was some part of it that might work for James, why would she talk to us? Why would she talk to you? I mean, that totally sounds like the Canadian newspapers and media and stuff would’ve been all over it already. Especially an interview with the survivor.” She looks at the Robot, who’s of course giving deep nods. “But that poor girl, though. Oh my God, seriously, I can’t even imagine. Is the mother not around? Or did he kill her too? Sick.”

  “No, he didn’t kill the mother, Miyuki. She died some years back, before they moved to Scarborough.”

  “Awful. This story gets more awful by the minute,” Miyuki says. She puts her hand to her chest and gasps. It’s all overdone.

  “In any event, this won’t work, Best. I’m sorry.” The Robot’s top lip is crimped. I want to rip that glossy, gummy sneer clean off her—Jesus, be a fence! And that gaping asshole over there, I want nothing more than to sink my five-inch heel square in her face.

  “But I think there’s something there, Joan. Even if we don’t get to the daughter for a face-to-face or even a phoner, a story on her—on what happened—could be really gripping.” I’m trying the locked gate again. It’s what my father would do. “We’ve covered heavy, heady stories before—the breast-cancer spread, for example. That was pretty unsettling. Those photos? We could do that again. We should do it; do serious, disturbing, pivotal stories. These readers are ripe for that shit.” Miyuki shifts in her seat, shoots a look at the Robot, like this is church. “I’m sorry. I just think that this is the kind of story that we should be doing, and I feel very strongly about it.”

  “While I agree about us taking deeper dives on the serious topics, this one is not it,” the Robot says. She glances down at her note cards, as if there’s anything remotely original and honest on them. Did I mention that? She puts everything on large index cards. Blue ones, like she’s a talk-show host. I can’t decide what’s more annoying: the pretense we’re all adopting that whatever she has written on her crutch cards matters or having to stare at the sloppy parts at the top of her braids-head while she looks down to consult them.

  “Let’s keep going,” Robot says. “Is there anything else?”

  “Maybe we could do something about mental health, depression, and how the shame around it usually stops people from getting help,” Miyuki says. “We can come at it from Best’s other beat: relationships. Like how you can help your best friend or sister or girlfriend or something step out of the shame and get help. We could use Lana Scott as our angle.”

  I want to roll my eyes and maybe spit.

  The Robot is clearly lost. She’s frowning. “Lana . . . Scott?”

  “Oh, she’s that model-turned-writer. She’s beautiful, just stunning. She’s African-American too,” Miyuki says, nodding at the Robot and me. “Back in January, she tried to take her own life. It was everywhere. So shocking and sad.”

  I knew Lana Scott, but just on the margins. The handful of times that our lives crossed and we spoke, I thought she was gorgeous, exceptionally so. Then everything that held up that beauty began to seep through her perfect nutmeg skin. By the third meet-up, Lana started to sound a little lost or lonely or a sad mix of the two, and we both knew she—not only an It girl, but a black It girl—wasn’t really allowed to be any of those things.

  “I see,” Robot says. “But if we were to tackle depression, we’d have Ashley get one of her top-shelf health writers on it. Now that I say that, I’m thinking we should move the Heidi Morrison story over to health too.” She turns to Miyuki. “Be sure to tell Isabelle of this change.” The Robot returns her lukewarm interest to me. “For you, maybe something on sex—sex and shame. Do you have anything there?”

  “Story ideas about sex and shame?” I bite the inside of my cheek. I taste the blood and bite again. It’s strangely soothing, in that weird can’t-stop-touching-a-hangnail way. “Just general shame around having sex?”

  “Oh, totally. There’s like so much seriously crazy stuff happening in the boudoir,” Miyuki says, only her syllables are all fucked up and she rests hard on the “r”—Boo-DWAR—com-pletely oblivious to how dumb she sounds. Miyuki also says IN-surance, in case you’re keeping notes. Tiny ants spread across my skin, pinching as they race-crawl to their final destination: my last nerve.

  “Really? Crazy stuff, you say.” My brand of mockery is so nuanced; don’t worry. It’s way over the head of hill folk like Miyuki Butler.

  “No, really. I was watching this thing, ”—it’s never reading this thing with her—“about sex addiction last week, and they were talking about how the American Psych Association wanted to add it to the DSM as a legitimate thing: hypersexual disorder.”

  “Actually, that proposal was rejected. By the APA. It’s not considered an official psychiatric disorder at all, so . . .” Get that shit out of here.

  “Right, but the whole show was about the shame around sex addiction. And honestly, having the APA totally deny you as legitimate probably adds to things, you know what I mean?”

  “Good point, Miyuki. Why don’t you go back to the boards, Best, and put together three to five story ideas around sex and shame. We can circle back end of week and call some shots from there. And on your way out”—dismissed without a second breath—“just set time with Kristen for Friday and we can hash it out.”

  “Should I check with Trinity for JK as well?” I’m nodding, but Robot’s face is twisted.

  “No,” she says, still squinting. “Just you, me and Miyuki.”

  “Miyuki?” Now I’ve got sour-face.

  “Yes, she’s going to run point,” Robot says.

  I’m blinking, or at least I think I am. “Oh, when you said ‘run point’ I assumed that meant—wait, Isabelle always does first edits on my stuff and moves it to Susie . . . which is you, now.”

  “Miyuki’s the new Isabelle for you, now.” She gives me that curdled half-grin. It’s clear that I’ve angered her. But fuck that. I’m angered. Miyuki Butler editing me? In what fucking Marsas-the-sun universe does Miyuki Butler edit me? I take a breath and focus on Miyuki. I let my eyes blur and like that, she’s nothing but shadows.

  When I was a child, I had this keen ability to stare at someone for just a short time and they would start to fade away, as if a thick black curtain was drawn before them. I did it mostly at home, when one of my brothers was annoying me or my mother was g
oing on about the indignities of her geriatric patients and I couldn’t bear to hear another sound leaving her mouth. A few times I was able to pull this off at school, but I needed to be extremely agitated, and that wasn’t easy to do back then. I was a pretty calm kid, especially for the baby of the family. Miss Carter, my grade-five teacher, called me phlegmatic. She wrote it in the parent-teacher notes section on my report card. I looked it up, of course, before handing the thing over to my folks. My dad told me it was a good thing for me to be, but as an adult.

  “You’re too young to be phlegmatic,” he said. “Children need some emotion close up, right on the surface.”

  I nodded, but didn’t really understand what he meant. About a month after that report card, I got into a fight at school. My first one. My only one. It was with Jean-Luc Caron. He called me a black shit. Actually, he called me an ugly nigger black shit. I punched him directly in his pointed nose, not because I was insulted. Clearly, that dumb Québécois kid just grabbed a bunch of words and hurled them in my direction. I punched him because it just seemed like the right thing to do right then in the frosty schoolyard. I also did it to show Miss Carter that she shouldn’t be so goddamn presumptuous.

  “Was there something more?” the Robot says. “You look confused.”

  It’s a side effect of the blackout trick. I hadn’t faded anyone in so long, I forgot about the stupefied look that takes over my face afterward.

  “Oh, no. Not confused. Just thinking about ideas.” I make that silly clucking sound with my tongue, the one that usually goes along with a wink or thumbs-up.

  “Good.” The Robot’s eyes are bouncing between the door and me. Subtly is not easy for these droids.

  “Right, so I’ll check in with Kristen.”

  “Good.”

  “Open or closed—the door?” I know I’m pushing it, but it’s fun. A little.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she says. Her displeasure is palpable.

  “Great. Thanks for the meeting, ladies.” Before she has time to deliver another exasperated squint, I quickly spin on my high heels, to the point that I wobble a bit, but keep it moving. I just need to get back to my foggy little cube and start making some calls. Top of the list: my father. I know he still has his hands swishing around in the crime-reporter pools. Of course, this means going through my mother first. I’m going to need a day before I make this call. Maybe three.

  Both my desk phone and cell are ringing when I get back to my office. I answer the work one; mute my mobile—both calls are from the same person. “Kendra, why do you insist on doing the double call? It’s so—”

  “Best.” She’s using her flat and serious voice. “You need to see the breaking news on Tell Me More.”

  I jiggle the mouse, wake my computer, but the quiet new-mail chime is clinking along on loop and I watch as my new e-mail counter cycles up in number. I glance down at my phone monitor. The voice-mail notification is lit up and keeps blinking: fourteen missed calls, all unknown numbers.

  “Listen, it’s not good,” Kendra says. “Actually, it’s a fucking mess. They know about Grant’s whole mental snap situation . . . and they know about you too.”

  I heard her, but I didn’t hear her. More than anything, what I heard was my heaving breathing through the phone—panting, really. My brain started to go down the line of possible permutations: They know about me and Grant? They know about me and Grant and Connecticut? Or, they know about me?

  “You still there?” Kendra says.

  It clicks right then. Kendra wouldn’t be this chill and gathered if the Tell Me More story was about me-me. She’d have way more shit to say to me than you still there?

  “Yeah . . . yeah, I’m still here. I don’t know . . . I guess, I’m just kind of over the vulture-ing of Grant’s story. When does it stop? Give the man a minute.”

  “I know,” she says. “But they’re going to keep digging—you know that, right?”

  I shake my head. “I guess.”

  “That’s why maybe it’s better to live your life out in the open. Just keep it real. No surprises, no secrets.”

  My chest tightens a little, and the quiet building on the phone begins to feel heavy. “I should bounce. I’ll see you there?”

  “Hells-to-the! Sex-shop galas are always a good way to end the workday. Don’t gotta ask me twice. Finishing up two things and I’m out of here. I’ll cab it over. Catch you later, sk—”

  I hang up before Kendra can get the full word out: skater. It always low-key bothers me when she calls me that. Of course, she wouldn’t know why it stings me, and I want to keep it that way.

  CHAPTER 4

  Eye contact. Always maintain eye contact. If I had a dollar for every time my father told me that, I could buy a small studio overlooking the promenade. (It’s Brooklyn Heights—do the math.) The eye-contact thing was important to him, to his job. But then, as a crime reporter, he was usually interviewing liars, people who knew something about what had occurred behind the yellow tape, but who were either too frightened or foolish to speak up about it. Eye contact is a reporter’s way of letting the subject know that you’re listening beyond the words, he would always say.

  “It’s also our most accurate lie detector,” he said. “The truth lights up in the eye like a strobe.”

  I wonder what he’d say if he saw me now, struggling to do anything more than squint at Candace Collins, the owner of Sexistential, as she strokes the demo anal massager debuting at this elaborate press event tonight. What color is her strobe light, Dad?

  But it’s more than the massager or even Candace’s inflated excitement about it that’s rooted under my skin. It’s that shitty Tell Me More post. Yes, it’s ridiculous and out of line, mean and sloppy, gotcha-style gossip, but I can’t shake it. I know those girls near the coat check were talking about me when I came in—all the sideways glances and high school whispering. It’s only a matter of time before I walk out of a bathroom stall to a set of slightly shamed faces of some dummies talking about the post—about Grant, about me. I can’t even begin to consider the idea of Grant having read it. He’s already trying to process enough hard truths up there; he doesn’t need this. And there’s my own rock-hard truth: I should have broken up with him before all of this, back when it made sense for me to just do what I always do and push him far away with both hands.

  I’ve tried to Sherlock this thing. There were only a handful of people—seven, max—who knew about Grant and me, and by extension, about his Connecticut “getaway.” Each one of them—from Kendra to Tyson—is a total vault. On Grant’s side, he’s so used to people prying into his private life; he’s fiercely quiet about it. He had to tell his agent that he needed time off, but didn’t really get into any deep details about it. His best friends, the two of them, are galaxies away from the Hollywood bullshit: Luke’s a physical therapist in Toronto and Big Kev’s living large as an eighth-grade math teacher in Vancouver. They’ve been keeping Grant’s secrets since elementary school. No leaks there.

  Trying to think who would gain from pushing him—us—off a cliff like this, and I’ve got nothing. Unless . . . unless this is some long-game payback for The Mistake. I knew that all was not truly forgiven. Maybe water under the bridge really means let’s set the whole fucking bridge on fire, with Best standing on it.

  Candace pats my arm a few times and looks around the full room. “Where are those men when you need them? Anyway”—she returns to the gleaming toy that’s shaped like a very poorly thought out—and possibly painful—spinning top—“you can meet the manufacturing team later. Back to the good stuff.” She lolls out her tongue. It has the required piercing as well as an obscene, weird white coating. I go back to avoiding any significant eye contact with her.

  I don’t dislike Candace. She’s on my short list of people I’m barely tolerating. She always smells like fruity lube, but she’s one of the less creepy sex-shop owners I’ve met in the last two years of being on vadge detail. Although, there was that time she shared
how much she enjoys penetrating her then new boyfriend Glen, with her big toe. “He gets a real kick out of it,” she said, before breaking into her throaty cackle. I ended up transcribing that phone interview on my own. I couldn’t bring myself to ask some clean, green summer intern to do it. Their eyes are already like saucers.

  “It’s compact, phthalate-free, has a dual motor,” Candace shouts above the K-pop pounding our eardrums. “We called it”—she rolls her tongue out again and runs it along her top lip—“The Pepper Grinder. Isn’t that fucking fabulous?”

  “Dead fucking fabulous,” Kendra shouts from behind my shoulder. She slides over to Candace and rests her hand at the top of her broad back. “Honey, do you mind if I steal this one?”—Kendra tilts her head my way—“She’s a star, as you know, and in high demand. The people want their Best.”

  Candace smiles, nodding like a new puppy. “Of course, of course, sugar. Just don’t keep her all to yourself, now. I want to introduce her to our manufacturing partners—all men, and they love themselves some hot chocolate.” Candace winks. Her affected Southern-belle routine grates. “And don’t you dare leave without getting a special gift bag. Oh, my word. You are gonna love all of it.” She wiggles the top of her body and leans hard on Kendra, who plays right along, pouting and shimmying to the hammering beat. Candace loves Kendra. She’s become my instant plus-one at any event Candace puts on.

  “Oh, we don’t want to miss out on that good-good,” Kendra says. She is talking over the music without sounding like she’s yelling. One more spot of shine to the golden, enviable life of Kendra Singh. Gorgeous and endlessly fabulous, the example of easy charm; it’s almost preternatural. Almost, because it isn’t truly singular: there are two of them, identical twins. But even Lindee—born first by a full two minutes—covets her sister’s life. If I believed in things like luck, I would say that Lindee was robbed of all of it. She’s almost blighted; the shadow twin. Example: Six years ago, the sisters were sharing a taxi. Kendra got out of the cab a block before it crashed into a double-parked FedEx truck. Lindee smashed face-first into the Plexiglas divider and shattered almost everything inside of that beautiful nutshell. It was a horror show, right there in Midtown. Lindee attempted to sue everyone in a ten-mile radius of the accident, extending her vendetta to include two of her facial-reconstruction doctors. (She felt they weren’t up on the latest developments in plastics, and left her with a “forever-fucked-up” nose.) Much of Lindee’s face is held together by bits of bones borrowed from her hip and lower leg. She still walks with a slight limp and can get a headache from chewing too much.