Florida Heatwave (12 page)

By the way, I think you’ll find that the boy who ran, he was faking his death, playing possum. People do that. It’s a common enough behavior in these massacres, if you study them. It’s not so much a cowardly response as a shrewd tactic. Play dead and hope for the best. If the boy survived, so be it. I say more power to him.

And then I heard sirens and realized that someone on the beach, someone I couldn’t see, had called the cops on a cell phone. I considered reloading both weapons, stepping out of the sea grapes and opening fire, but then that would not have been arbitrary like I wanted it. So I stood up and drained the swollen lizard. I heard the police helicopter. I raised my arms, stooped under the sea grapes, and walked out onto the beach. I knelt and then lay face down in the sand and locked my hands behind my head.

If you tell me eight people died today, then I’ll take your word for it. Guilty as charged. I want to be punished. I want to pay the price. I deserve to die. But I won’t apologize because I’m not sorry. I won’t lie. I honestly wish I felt sorrow, but I don’t. I feel nothing, just a big empty. If I told those eight grieving families, those sixteen devastated parents, that I was sorry, would it help them in any way? No, it would not. Would it be like spitting in their faces? I think it would. Words don’t mean anything. Words are noise. They are cheap and pointless when it comes to this kind of atrocity. Words will not deliver solace. Words will not bring those children back. Words will not turn back the clock.

I’ve heard folks say that it was a miracle, an act of God, that more people weren’t killed on the beach today. But that’s insane. There was no divine intervention; there was me, like I told you, me laying down my carbine and surrendering. This ain’t about God. This is about me. I did it. I took what wasn’t mine to take. And I don’t regret that I did. I regret plenty of things. I regret going all the way back to kindergarten. I regret my old man left us. I regret I married Patti. I regret my meanness to Dorie. But that’s all water under the bridge. I don’t live in the past.

BY CAROLINA GARCIA-AGUILERA

Miami Beach, July 2010

“Listen, Arlene, there’s a hell of a lot of money riding on your getting this right. I’m not going to let you screw it up.” Susanna was in her office in New York, and I was in my apartment on South Beach.

“Susanna, please calm down.” As my literary agent, her fate and mine were intertwined. There was a lot of money involved—that, and both our reputations.

I could easily picture Susanna in her cluttered office, holding a cigarette in one hand, and a Diet Pepsi in the other, pacing around the room. I had never seen her eat anything—to her, cigarettes and diet sodas seemed to satisfy all food group requirements.

Susanna was not about to calm down. “If I have to come down there myself and babysit you until you deliver the kind of manuscript that Tom Albion is expecting, I swear I’ll do it.” Susanna inhaled sharply, then, a few seconds later, exhaled.

“Your career is finished, Arlene—in the toilet—if you don’t fucking fix this manuscript. You’ll go back to writing bodice rippers, and dressing up like Little Miss Bo Peep at Romance Writers conferences—you won’t even be assigned a panel—you’ll just be part of ‘gen pop,’ sitting in the audience silently criticizing the panelists; your career will tank so fast that being described as a mid-list writer will seem like you’re on the upswing.” There was no stopping Susanna when she was on a roll. “No more ‘Mary Mahoney’—you’ll be published under some pathetic pseudonym.”

Susanna kept calling me by my real name—Arlene Frumkes—something she only did when she was truly upset with me. I was in deep shit, and we both knew it.

I sat back in my chair and looked out at the Atlantic Ocean in the distance. Even though it was close to noon, I was still in the workout clothes I had worn for my two-hour session of “sweaty yoga” on the beach below. Susanna was relentless when she wanted something, normally a wonderful trait for a literary agent, but one that could be very trying if one was on the receiving end as I was just then.

Everything Susanna was saying was true, so there was no point in trying to defend myself. Even though the book hadn’t yet been in the best shape, I had emailed her the latest draft of the manuscript that I’d been working on for the past six months. Susanna had wasted no time in making it crystal clear that it just wasn’t good enough shape for her to pass it on to Tom Albion, my editor at the Edgar Press. I’d already received (and spent) close to two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars—the first payment under the contract. No wonder she was screaming at me.

The image of Susanna in her office kept getting clearer and clearer. Dressed all in black (the uniform for literary agents in New York), surrounded by piles of manuscripts and books, Susanna would be sitting in the broken down dark brown leather chair that she had owned for thirty years. There would be a half dozen opened cans of warm Diet Pepsi as well as packs of cigarettes within arm’s reach. The one window in her office would be partially cracked open to allow the smell from the Marlboro Lights that she chain-smoked to escape—she had dismantled the fire alarm in her office years before.

Susanna, who was quite tiny—I don’t think she even hit five feet, or weighed a hundred pounds—liked to wear loose, baggy clothes that made her seem even more elfin. Susanna was rather unfriendly looking, with beady black eyes that missed nothing, a thin slash of a mouth, and sharp, birdlike features. She wore her hair cropped close, less than one inch in length, and had lately taken to dyeing it an unfortunate shade of red. I wasn’t sure how old she was, but I had heard her describe in vivid detail what she had been doing when President Kennedy was shot, so she clearly was deep into AARP territory.

“You don’t have to come down here, I promise I’ll get you a manuscript you can send on to Tom.” If the stress of having her down here didn’t kill me, the second hand smoke from her Marlboro Lights surely would.

“Look, Arlene, I know you can do it—actually, the book is pretty good—I like the scenes with Miranda—how you introduce her—but, the actual murder scenes that you describe—well, frankly, those chapters are shit—they read as if you just went on the internet and researched how to shoot someone and then carve them up.” Ouch! That had been exactly how I’d done the research.

“I’ll rework the murder scenes—I know what I need to do.” I lied.

“I hope so—because if not, Tom won’t accept the book, and, of course, you won’t get paid. They’ll probably sue you to get back what they already paid you, too. Money I know you already spent,” Susanna reminded me, rather unnecessarily. “Word in publishing circles gets around fast—I don’t have to tell you what that’ll do to your reputation when people find out that Tom Albion rejected the first book of a multimillion dollar three-book contract.” Susanna took a drag of her Marlboro Light. “You’ll go back to writing the kind of shlock you were writing before I found you.”

Susanna, to her credit, seldom brought up the subject of what my life had been like before she entered it, but it was clear that had it not been for her, I would still be Arlene Frumkes, with a life in shambles, and no prospects to change it.

“I’m so grateful to you, really I am.” I hurried to assure her.

I had started my writing career pretty much by accident. After graduating from college, I had gone on to get my Master’s degree in elementary education and had accepted a job as a teacher here, in Miami, at an inner city school. Although I enjoyed working there and the benefits were great (hell, I could have even been able to have my great-grandmother’s teeth fixed on the dental plan), the salary for teaching second grade was miserable. Slowly but steadily, I had been incurring more and more debt, but, not having any other options, I had stayed there, at the school.

Then, while on a break at the faculty lounge, I had come across an announcement inviting teachers to enter a short story writing contest. I had never really thought about becoming a writer before, but the five thousand dollar prize the first place winner would get was just too tempting. I wrote up a story about my dog Daisy, a mutt that I had saved from a certain death at the pound, and how, dying of cancer, she had taught me about the important things in life, sort of a canine version of
Tuesdays with Morrie.
(I had made up the dog.) Three months later, on the very same afternoon the check cleared, I quit my job, and turned to writing full time.

I found out that the easiest way to break into publishing was by writing romance novels, so I had started off by writing the cheesiest novels ever— bodice rippers that featured damsels in distress, heroines who, after serious setbacks—physical, and/or emotional (two were penniless orphans; one was blind; one was in a wheelchair; one was gay but wanted to lead a straight life; one was bipolar, and off her meds; one, an adoptee, had fallen in love with her birth brother, etc.)—managed to triumph.

The covers (mass market paperbacks, unsurprisingly) of my eight books said it all, featuring photos of drawings of the naked, golden haired heroines—all lusty, busty, and slightly dusty—with that “just-been-fucked-within-one-inch-of-my-life” look in their impossibly crystalline blue eyes. In three of them, the hero was standing off in the corner, staring at the heroine with a sexual predator look in his eyes; on another three, the heroine was riding (side saddle, of course) an excited stallion who was standing on his back legs; in the last two, the heroine was lying in bed, naked, naturally, with the sheets artfully arranged around her voluptuous body.

I was never going to get rich writing those kinds of books, as in total, I had earned less than a hundred thousand dollars in ten years. My lack of income—plus four marriages to shiftless, no good, chronically unemployed and unemployable men—ensured that I would never be able to support myself in the style to which I aspired.

Susanna had come into my life at exactly the right time. My career was in the toilet and my credit cards (the ones that had not been canceled) were maxed out. I had just handed in the last book of a two-book contract, and my editor had just told me the house was not interested in offering me another. I wasn’t even a lower mid-list writer—I was more like upper lower list—not exactly the kind of author whose books made it into the Sunday
New York Times
Book Review section.

I wasn’t doing much better on the personal front: I had just served husband number four with divorce papers—the rat had forged my signature on some credit card applications and had taken out cash advances for thousands of dollars.

During that particularly bleak time, I had been living in a studio apartment over the garage of an estate of a very wealthy German developer in Miami Beach. My landlord had, in exchange for me performing a few menial tasks around the estate, given me a break on the rent—otherwise I would have been on the street.

Susanna had called me completely out of the blue one day, and, after identifying herself as a literary agent, stated that she had been following my career and thought I was not writing in the correct genre. She said that the way I laid out the stories and developed characters had convinced her I would make an excellent mystery writer. However, it was my attention to detail—critical in a mystery writer—that had convinced her I would be successful in that field. She ended by telling me she’d like to meet me, and asked me to come to New York, to her office.

Never having been represented by a literary agent, I immediately accepted her invitation. That same afternoon, I sold the most valuable of my wedding rings—gold, thank God, was over a thousand dollars an ounce—and bought a ticket to New York on Jet Blue for the next day.

At her office, Susanna again told me that she thought I had enormous potential as a mystery writer, but that in order for that potential to be realized, I had to put myself in her hands. I would not only have to reinvent myself both professionally and personally: I would have to work my butt off, but that if I did as she said, I would soon be a “literary star.” I promised her that I would never let her down.

When Susanna had told me I would be “working my butt off” she wasn’t just referring to my writing, but also to my physical appearance. In order for a writer to be successful, they had to develop a “writers’ persona” and be physically attractive, telegenic, charming, and interview friendly. She would put me through the kind of training that the Marine recruits underwent at Parris Island.

To show how serious she was, Susanna had even fronted me ten thousand dollars. Now, just when I was on the verge of breaking out, I had delivered a sub par manuscript. The promise I had made to her in her office, that I would never disappoint her, sounded hollow. I had to fix the manuscript, unless I wanted to go back to being Arlene Frumkes, the failure, living on a financial edge.

“Susanna, I told you that I would not let you down, and I stand by that promise.” I spoke in a firm tone of voice. “I will deliver the kind of manuscript you expect.”

“You’d better, Arlene.” Susanna said ominously. “I’ll call every day to check in on you. If I don’t like what I’m hearing, I’m flying down to Miami and staying with you. I’ve worked too fucking hard for the past thirty years to have it all go down the tubes because you can’t write a decent death scene!” Susanna spat out the words. “I’m giving you ten days to turn in a manuscript that I can pass on to Tom.”

“You’ll have it in ten days—probably even less.” I hoped my voice sounded more confident than I felt. “I can do this. Trust me.”

“And may I remind you again that you have to give the money back to Edgar Books if Tom turns the manuscript down.” Susanna was relentless.

I had already thought of that, of course. How could I not have? “Susanna, I meant it when I promised you you’d have an acceptable manuscript, and I will.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.” Susanna announced before hanging up.

I got up, and headed to the terrace. As I looked out over the brilliant blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean, I knew that I was in real danger of losing my beloved apartment—the one I had given the down payment with the money from the advance of the book. I thought about the long, difficult journey I had taken to get to where I was.