Magdalena's Shadow, page 19
“Well, I guess I’ll be looking elsewhere for representation.” When she rose to stand a second time, her heel was kicked out from under her and she fell to the marble floor.
“Oh, pardon me,” Mr. Blackwell said smoothly. He bent over Coco, took her by the arm, and pulled her to her feet. “These old stone floors can be so slippery.”
His hand dug into her arm as a large red welt bloomed across her right cheekbone where her face had struck the floor. Her body convulsed in panic, her breathing reduced to short gasps. Blackwell stared quietly down at her, his fingers crushing where he gripped her.
“It’s funny how quickly these accidents happen. Your poor pretty face. Oh well, we’ll just have to wait until you are all healed up before you can go out again.”
Coco felt herself recoil when her strength returned. She fought against his grip. He freed her instantly, but as she turned to run he kicked her feet out from under her again. Coco stumbled, tried to catch herself in her stilettos, but landed knees first on the stone floor. Behind Blackwell the door opened and two models walked in.
“Are you okay?” Blackwell asked with feigned concern.
Coco staggered quickly to her feet, feeling Blackwell grasp her around the waist, lifting her from the floor.
“Fight me and I’ll kill you.” His words were no more than a hiss as he guided her to the elevator.
When the doors began to close, Coco lunged away from him. She made it two feet through the doors before he caught her. The doors closed as Blackwell smashed the unblemished side of her face into the mahogany wall until Coco went still.
“I haven’t had to do this in ages. With the way the market runs I generally have my pick of the girls. They’ll do literally anything to sign with me – and I mean anything. But not you. We’d have made a fortune together. Now I’m afraid your pretty looks are all spoiled. No one will pay to look at you now, Coco – maybe in a month or two but not now.”
The elevator continued up, rising further than Coco had ever taken it. The doors opened onto the snow-covered rooftop patio.
“I’ll just leave you here,” Blackwell said, ripping Coco’s fur coat off her shoulders, “while you take some time to think. And remember, you owe me as much as your goddamned mother owed me. I made her career and I’ll make yours, even if I have to torture you, your kids, and your beloved old housekeeper to do it. And don’t think I’ll overlook that cradle robbing lawyer who knocked you up. No one you love is safe, little girl. You will sign with me or I’ll rain hell down on Robert Banks and everyone you love.”
Only when the doors slid closed did the shock wear off. Coco hit the elevator button several times but the car didn’t return for her. A harsh northern wind tore at her thin, blood stained dress while white flurries swirled around her feet. The world blurred and contorted, hardly visible through puffy, tear-stung eyes. The wind picked up to a frigid screeching gale.
“Oh, my God. Oh, my God!” Coco cried.
Taking a step, her legs gave out and she landed in the snow on hands and knees. “Please help me, someone, please help me!” Her hair fell forward around her shoulders, long black tendrils glistening with white flakes. In that instant, the gold cross she wore tickled her chin. “Someone!” Coco screamed, her hand moving unconsciously to grasp her mother’s necklace. “God help me! God, I’m here. Someone please help me!” she screamed, watching the snow continue to fall. Coco prayed aloud, her eyes searching the rooftop for another way out.
When her skin turned blue and she stopped shaking, Coco knew she was going to die. Blackwell hadn’t come back for her and the sun hadn’t yet risen. As she gave into the cold she stopped thinking about how badly death hurt. She stopped fearing the darkness and forgot about the amount of snow that had gathered around her. She listened only to the city, to distant noises now more easily heard in the stillness of the abating storm. Soon the sun would rise. Soon she would be dead. Soon she would never need to worry about anything ever again. Each noise that echoed through the city brought with it a memory: Bebe with her ducks, James with his rattle, Tia with her chrome handcart trundling down the hall with a bushel of vegetables. When her eyes closed on the world Coco felt a powerful love swell in her chest. It was the same love she had once felt for her mother. It was a warm healing love that swelled each time she looked at James or heard Bebe’s voice. This love had guided her through life, through loss, and through every tragedy and every joy she had ever experienced. Now it filled her with soothing warmth, her heart rate slowing until she fell unconscious.
“Get up,” a voice commanded loudly. Coco snapped awake; she felt as if electricity had passed through her. She tried to lift her head but found she couldn’t. “Get up now, Coco.” The voice was not coming from any one place; it was all around her – in the snow, in the ensuing silence, everywhere and nowhere like an echo. “Get up, NOW!” It spoke with such authority that Coco couldn’t help but obey.
Coco staggered to her feet, her legs feeling like dead wood underneath her. She was alone on the expansive rooftop, the white snow adding an ethereal light to the scene. “Come here,” the voice ordered. Again, the sound came from everywhere at once. Coco took a tentative step forward, looking first right then left. To her shock, a shadow stood at the northwest corner of the building, a hand extended, waving her forward.
Slowly and with great difficulty, Coco stumbled forward, the snow drifts coming up over the top of her shoes while her hair hung in frozen ropes around her. I’m dead, Coco thought, staggering still closer to where the shadow waited. I’m dead and this is my angel. Even her afterlife was a cruel joke. No tunnel of light came to lift her from her misery. Oh no, that would be too easy. When the thought crossed her mind she almost laughed like the lost soul she was. As punishment, she envisioned a hundred years of solitary wandering, a hundred years of waiting for God to notice her. I should’ve been a better person, she lamented silently when she reached the northwest corner. The shadow was gone but the voice returned, everywhere at once. “Go down,” it ordered with the same authority.
Coco looked out over the edge at the tiny world below. No, she wouldn’t just have to walk the world for God to notice her; she would also have to scale large buildings. As her bitterness rose, she leaned over the side of the building, and noticed a thin metal ladder coated in snow. Again the humor of the situation struck her. “Go down,” she repeated to herself though her lips could hardly form the words. Lowering one foot and then the other, she stepped onto the ladder, her toes feeling for each rung as she went. The funny thing about being dead, Coco thought as she lowered herself hand over hand down the side of the building, was that she stopped bothering to be scared. Too bad I didn’t do that a long time ago, she thought, passing the first of nine sets of windows.
She was long past the place where her fingers should have stopped working. Far past having legs that could support her, and yet she moved on slowly and solidly, down the side of the building simply because her angel had told her to. She imagined all the other places she would wander in her hundred years of solitude, never stopping for rest. No sooner did exhaustion take her than the voice would call her back into motion. “Okay, okay,” Coco said, lowering herself down another rung “You keep talking and I’ll keep walking.”
She lost track of how long she had been climbing when the ladder suddenly ended. She hung there, her foot feeling for a rail that didn’t exist. The ladder should have slid to ground level but it was frozen in place. No voice echoed through the gloom to guide her. When she looked down she saw the shadow standing on the ground some fifteen feet below her. But Coco knew what she had to do. She had to let go.
Hitting the ground was like landing on a dozen feather beds. It should have hurt, she knew, but nothing hurt now, absolutely nothing. She laughed as she staggered to her feet, the shadow never wavering in its stark contrast of dark against white snow. Coco smiled at her angel, wondering if it would lead her to heaven or somewhere else completely. Suddenly it didn’t matter so much. Nothing mattered except when she thought of Bebe or James, Tia… or Rob. But the shadow moved on, down the alley, always six feet ahead or more so that Coco had to hurry to keep up with it. Every time Coco stopped to rest or lost sight of the guiding apparition she would hear the hollow voice say, “Walk,” and Coco walked.
“I’m tired,” Coco called but it never slowed the pace, never said, “Rest, we have all eternity.” Coco wished it would. If she could sleep for a little while she knew she would be able to follow this thing wherever it called. When she fell against a strange low slung tunnel wall, so heavy with darkness she could see nothing, the need for sleep became too great. Her knees buckled and she began the slow slide down the stone to the pavement below.
As her eyes closed, the voice said, “Get up,” and she did.
The tunnel was an endless expanse of blackness that ended in a treed, snow-white wasteland filled with the frost covered remains of an ancient cemetery. The scene made sense; this was where she would rest. Hallowed ground was the sanctuary of the spirits, the place where you rested when you were dead. But the shadow didn’t stop. It crossed the bracken filled, stone laden yard at the same swift pace, stopping only when it reached the wrought iron fence that marked the boundary. As Coco approached the figure she was struck by an odd feeling. Somehow, she knew this person. Now just five feet from the form, Coco tried to make out the face, so familiar yet so strange.
“We’ve met before!” Coco whispered.
“Keep walking. You’re there.”
Coco gave a slight nod, stumbling past the figure toward the only thing that lay on the other side, an old white granite building with just a few lights on inside. The moon hung full overhead when Coco stopped and turned back toward the cemetery. There in the gateway, on the perimeter that marked the place between life and death, stood Magdalena, her heavy dark hair framing her face and shoulders, her eyes alive with a light Coco had once known.
“Oh, Mama,” Coco whispered, wanting so desperately not to lose her again. But the voice sounded all around her, everywhere at once, “Keep walking,” and Coco walked.
Chapter Thirty
Coco remembered Rob as a dream. He was one of the four people who had made her life good. In the dream, he took off his jacket and wrapped her in it. Gently, he pulled her wet frozen hair away from her body and laid her on the atrium sofa with such loving care that somewhere inside, her heart broke all over again. The first sob was hardly more than a shiver, the second rattled her chest, making her convulse with pain. Rob kissed her forehead, holding her to his chest as they waited for the ambulance to come.
“Rob,” Coco whispered through cracked lips.
“Yes?” Rob leaned over her, peering down into her disfigured face.
“I found you.” She tried to smile, her swollen lip cracking with the effort, a sliver of red blood filling the crack. Slowly her eyes slid closed and she went still.
“Coco!” Rob yelled, shaking her. “Don’t go to sleep.”
Coco’s eyes flew open suddenly. She smiled what reassurance she could offer. “I’m okay.” She looked into his worried eyes. “I’m okay.”
Rob nodded, tears sliding down his cheeks as Coco went still again.
Hazy memories of fluorescent lights and numbing pain created the surreal experience that made up Coco’s hospital stay. She could have sworn she had seen her mother. She remembered Magdalena leading her to Rob’s law firm. She remembered Rob sitting beside her bed, sometimes talking to her in a whisper, sometimes quiet, but always there. Now when she woke it was Tom sitting by her bed, Tom who talked, and Tom who never left her side. Now when he looked at her his eyes filled with tears. Coco smoothed the hair from his forehead, yet even this small action exhausted her.
Tia arrived in a flutter of anxious tears to sit with Coco. She arrived alone, having left Bebe and James in Chicago with Deborah.
“Why are we doing this again?” Coco spoke quietly one afternoon when she felt well enough to talk. “It hasn’t even been a year since the last time you had to sit by my bedside. I need to stop all this drama; it’s turning into a habit.”
Tia tut-tutted, petted, and reprimanded her until she felt loved and cared for in every possible way. But Tia wasn’t her only visitor. Police officers arrived to question her. She told them everything she could remember, but some of the memories were too strange to recount. In the end, she chose not to mention the fact that her dead mother Magdalena was the one who had led her off the building.
In the second week a young lawyer in a perfectly cut gray suit sat beside her bed and quietly informed her that on top of criminal charges, Coco had every right to a civil suit against Blackwell. The man read the proposed suit aloud. The wording bothered Coco in a way she couldn’t understand. There was something poignantly familiar in the language. When the lawyer finished, Coco signed her name, never reading the law firm’s letterhead which read Foster, Robinson, Allen, and Banks.
After three weeks Coco felt well enough to fly back to Chicago, no richer but far wiser than she had been before her brief modeling career. When the plane taxied down the runway, Coco had a sudden thought. “Who called you, Tia, how did you know I was in the hospital?”
“Rob called me. He called me the same night he found you.”
Coco leaned her head against the plane’s window feeling two realities collide. The dream wasn’t a delusion. Rob had found her in the snow. Of all the millions of people in New York City, why Rob? The answer was simple. Coco’s guiding angel was no stranger to the dramas of her life. Magdalena had led Coco to Rob because he was the only person in the city Coco both loved and trusted.
Coco lay in bed and tried to ignore the pain. Her back and both legs had been badly injured when she had jumped from the ladder. Her right ankle had sustained several hairline fractures, while her right leg had not only broken but had also twisted, its tendons and ligaments tearing with the spiral break. Even after seven weeks of rest, the joints remained stiff, swollen, and painful.
James lay in her arms, his little face closed in sleep while Bebe played quietly at the foot of the bed, flatly refusing to leave Coco’s side. If Coco moved to the sofa, Bebe and her dolls were only steps behind.
“How are you feeling?” Tia lifted James out of her arms, placing the infant in his crib.
“Like I was beaten and left for dead.” Coco closed her eyes remembering every punch Blackwell had thrown. She felt Tia’s arm slide under her pillows lifting her to a sitting position. A tray of pills and food were set across her lap.
Two large white pills were the only thing that helped with the pain. Two massive pills every five hours made moving possible. The breaks and fractures had healed, yet the damage to muscle and tendon screamed through her body every time she tried to do more than lie still.
The one activity she could manage with little pain was to draw in her sketch book. She drew a new dress for Bebe and an evening gown that quickly led to a whole new line of women’s wear. Sometimes when she was feeling less depressed she would sketch a dress for herself while she waited for the day when she could sit at her machine and sew again.
When she was feeling very weak and alone she thought of Rob. His voice echoed through her memory telling her to stay awake. Without him she would have fallen into a heavy sleep and never woken again. She wanted to thank him, to apologize for the past, for everything that had happened. Again and again her mind recalled the moments of brief consciousness in the hospital when he had sat beside her and held her hand.
At around three in the afternoon, Coco sat in her white bathrobe on the sofa listening to James laugh as Bebe bounced a toy giraffe before him. Coco loved watching them play, loved the fact that her son and her sister were already so close. Tia was out grocery shopping when the intercom buzzed, the lit button on the side of the phone indicating a first-floor lobby call. Coco rose slowly off the couch, walking like a broken spider toward the intercom, her stiff legs hardly able to carry her.
“Hey, Benny.”
“You have a guest, Miss Rodriguez,” Benny said. “Her name is Angie Thompson. Shall I send her up?”
“Put her on the phone first, Benny.”
“Hi, Coco, this is Angie Thompson. We met at the Ford party in New York City last month. I heard about your accident and I was wondering if you’re up for a quick chat.”
Coco riffled through her memory, trying to remember one face and name out of the dozens of new acquaintances she had made in New York.
“Okay,” Coco tried to sound confident. “I’ll buzz you up.” She had decided she would remember the woman when she saw her. Coco opened the door to #2 before she hobbled back to the sofa.
“Come in,” Coco said when she heard Angie’s footsteps in the hall. When the petite woman walked in, Coco instantly recognized her. Angie Thompson was the journalist who had covered the Ford party. In a panic Coco looked from Bebe to James, quietly realizing there was no way to hide either of them.
“Mama, there’s a lady in my house!” Bebe shouted, pointing a finger at Angie. The toddler ran to Coco, jumping heavily into her lap. Pain shot through Coco’s legs. She moved Bebe quickly to her side and tried to catch her breath. Slowly the pain lessened.
“It’s okay,” Coco soothed, “she’s a friend.”
“I can’t believe what happened to you.” Angie smiled while sitting down on the sofa next to Coco. “How are you?”
“Mama’s taxi crashed.” Bebe said, parroting the lie she had been told. Coco glanced down at Bebe and then back at the journalist.
“Taxis are so dangerous. You have to be very careful.” Angie smiled at Bebe who continued to watch her with apprehension. James, feeling suddenly ignored, began to holler from his swing.
