SPOTLIGHT Read online

  SPOTLIGHT

  By Dora Desden

  Copyright © 2013 Blue Ribbon Books

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  For questions and comments about this book, please contact us at [email protected]

  Chapter One

  The first real view that Abigail Dawes had of New York City was of its sizzling skyline as her taxi emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel. The city rose up before her on that hotter than hot June day, the sun glinted off the windows of the mammoth buildings and the light dazzled in her wide eyes. She was in awe, amazed by the sheer brilliance of the place and the reality of her situation. She had finally arrived.

  “Wow, it’s really how it looks on TV,” Abby said then laughed quite a breathless laugh at herself. “That sounds so dumb, but it really is.”

  “It really is, ma’am,” Her cab driver said politely adding his throaty chuckle to hers. He seemed fresh out of a TV show too, with his thick New York accent and his beaten up Yankees cap.

  “First time here?” he asked her.

  “The very first,” Abby replied.

  She was glued to the window, drinking in the people, the sights, the sounds with all the fervor of a true tourist. But I’m not a tourist, she thought gleefully to herself, I live here now. This is home. She even briefly considered whipping out the camera she had nestled somewhere deep in her suitcase but decided she better not instantly brand herself as the bright-eyed, small town girl that she admittedly was. Besides, the car was whizzing down the crowded streets far too quickly for her to get any good snapshots in.

  The taxi turned a sharp corner, the driver eager to beat the light while Abby and her two suitcases rocked and slid in the back seat. A chorus of car horns bleated in their wake and Abby tried in vain to still her over-anxious heart. Her stomach somersaulted with a familiar fear that she knew was irrational but couldn’t help it.

  “Can you slow down a bit?” She called up to the driver. “I’m not in any rush.”

  The driver met her eyes a moment in the rear view mirror. “No problem. My apologies ma’am. I’m too used to my passengers being in a big hurry. I’ll slow it down so you can go ahead and take everything in.”

  “Thank you,” Abby breathed out in a small relieved squeak.

  She turned back to the window and take everything in she did. New York City did not disappoint. The city had a pulse and it beat all around them, alive with speeding cars and the daring pedestrians who didn’t hesitate to walk in between them. The sidewalk beside them was just as busy. Bodies weaved past each other in front of shop windows and bright store fronts lit up, even in the middle of the day, with garish neon signs.

  And the people were just as colorful! Abby actually spied an old woman in a cross walk with pink hair, and not the pink hair of old age, but real dyed blazing pink hair. Businessmen in immaculate three-piece suits shared the same space as teenage boys in ripped t-shirts and basketball shorts. The women were glamorous in sundresses to beat the heat and every one of them seemed to strut, tall and thin and self-confident, as if life was a never-ending runway.

  Abby suddenly felt rather plain in her jeans and an old retreat t-shirt. She didn’t have on her sky-high heels, only a well-broken-in pair of sneakers. On her head, to shade her from the sun, she wore her mother’s wide-brimmed gardening hat. The hat smelled faintly of her mother’s favorite perfume and Abby had decided to wear it as a comfort for her big move-in day but suddenly she felt that it made her look dowdy.

  Stop being so vain, Abby told herself. None of that matters. You don’t need a pair of expensive shoes to follow your dreams.

  The taxi turned down a narrow street that was only slightly less congested with people and slowed to a stop. Abby looked up, across the street and into the window of the narrowest pizza parlor she had ever seen.

  “Here we are ma’am,” her taxi driver said.

  “This is it?” Abby said doubtfully. “Are you sure this is the right address?”

  “This is it,” he said and pointed to a small door just to the right of the pizza parlor’s large picture window. Etched in white on the door’s glass pane was the street address she’d been given by her landlord for her new apartment building.

  “You rented an apartment in this city sight unseen? You’re a brave girl.” The cab driver chuckled.

  “I am,” Abby said back. She decided to take that particular comment as a compliment. “How much do I owe you?”

  Abby paid the hefty price on the meter and added as generous a tip as she could afford. She gathered up her cross-body purse and grabbed a suitcase in either hand before pushing open the left hand door. Immediately a burst of sweltering summer heat rushed into the car. She stepped out and the humidity greeted her like a thick brick wall, so strong that it made her head swim. Abby stepped forward dizzily, trying to balance her heavy suitcases and stay on her feet, and it was only dimly that she heard the cab driver’s gruff voice call out, “not that way!”

  But she only had time to vaguely register the sound before the cyclist came barreling towards her. In surreal slow motion she saw herself in the path of oncoming traffic, saw the look of dismay on the cyclist’s face, saw the glint off his helmet and the metal of his bike as it all came barreling treacherously towards her.

  Then she felt strong hands gripping her arms so tightly she would bruise, a swirl of cologne engulfed her and all at once she found herself tumbling, suitcases and all, towards the sidewalk.

  The cyclist whizzed by undeterred, but not before yelling a string of curse words that thankfully dissipated before they reached Abby’s ears. She sat sprawled and stunned on the curb, her hands cut and covered in New York City grime.

  I’m okay, Abby thought, her heart racing. Thank you Lord. I’m okay.

  The large, strong hands reached down for her and Abby found herself looking up at her hero. Handsome, she thought at once, even as she was pulled to her feet, and she felt her pulse begin to race all over again. Insanely handsome.

  The man was slim and impossibly tall, she realized as her face became level with his chest. Up close his face was smooth and chiseled. His eyes were such a light blue they might have been clear, and as a neatly cut fall of dark blonde hair fell across his brow he pushed it back in one frustrated, movie star-like sweep. His lips were perfectly plump and pink and Abby belatedly grasped the fact that those lips were moving and he was speaking to her.

  “Are you alright?” She realized he was saying as her sluggish mind finally caught up with reality. “Miss? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine.” She looked down at her cut hands, trying to collect her thoughts which was hard to do with the gorgeous stranger staring down at her. “I’m not hurt. Just a little roughed up.”

  The stranger stepped away from her and Abby felt suddenly bereft. The cab driver had gotten out and stood by his car. Leaning on the passenger door, he glared at her with a healthy mix of concern and irritation.

  “I told you not to get out that way ma’am. Never get out on the traffic side,” he chastised.

  “I’m sorry,” Abby said, feeling completely mortified. She glanced across the street and even the diners in the pizzeria had paused in their meals to watch the commotion occurring in the middle of the road. She felt herself blush even deeper.

  Her handsome hero stepped in front of her again blocking her view of the audience they’d earned. This time Abby noticed the dress shirt and tie he wore. He was unruffled despite the heat and the ac
tivity. She also noticed the bemused smile he wore as he approached her. In his hands he held her mother’s hat. Abby rubbed her bare head, further mussing up her ponytail. She never even realized the hat had fallen off.

  “Are you sure you’re not hurt? I’m sorry I pushed you so hard. I didn’t mean to. I just had to get you out of the way of that bike,” he said.

  “You saved me,” Abby murmured, knowing she sounded like a goofy, love-struck teenager. She couldn’t help it. Everything was on auto-pilot. “Thank you so much.”

  He stepped towards her and placed her hat gently back on her head. She looked up at him and their eyes met for a moment that seemed to stretch on for eternity. Abby watched as the smile slowly faded from his face and suddenly he looked stricken. His brow furrowed as though he was in pain and Abby felt all at once that he was searching her face for something that she could not give him.

  “Really. I’m tough,” Abby said, trying to joke. “I’ll live.”

  “You will.” He leaned towards her, so close that she could see each one of his impossibly long curling eyelashes above those cornflower-colored eyes. He reached out and incredibly gently, tucked a stray hair behind her ear.

  He knelt to pick up her suitcases which thankfully had stayed shut. That’s just what I’d need, Abby thought, all my clothes strewn across New York City for everyone to see.

  “Thank you,” she said as she took them from his hands.

  “Do you need help with those?” Suddenly he wouldn’t look at her. He seemed to be focusing everywhere else but on her, looking instead at the impatient cab driver, or across the street, or straightening his already straight shirt and tie.

  Did I do something wrong? Abby wondered.

  “I can take it from here. I got them this far,” she said. He was certainly handsome but she wanted to display better sense than letting a strange man follow her up to her apartment with her bags, no matter how good-looking he was.

  “You’re sure?” he asked, looking at his feet.

  “I’m sure,” she said, sensing suddenly that he wanted to get away.

  Gentlemanly duty taken care of, her stranger-savior nodded at her politely, the dark blonde hair falling in his face again and shielding his expression.

  “Thank you again!” Abby called to his retreating back as he turned to the cab driver. In a strange, clipped tone he requested an address then climbed in through the door from which she had just exited.

  The taxi sped off a moment later and Abby found herself alone on the sidewalk, bags rubbing at her raw hands. Even across the street the diners had returned to their meals and she was no longer a spectacle, but just another blip on the huge radar of New York City.

  I didn’t even have the sense to ask for his name, she thought with a sigh as she made her way to the crosswalk and on towards her new life.

  Chapter Two

  Abby stood, hands on hips, in the only part of her apartment where there was room for a person to stand.

  “It’s really not that bad,” she said aloud to no one in particular.

  It wasn’t that bad at all. The little apartment on the eighth floor of the building was claustrophobically narrow certainly, but it was clean and the big bolt lock on the door looked sturdy enough and her little sputtering air conditioner was doing its darnedest to keep the one-bedroom apartment a livable temperature in the summer’s oppressive heat.

  It had come pre-furnished, which was a blessing in Abby’s opinion because she had not relished the idea of furniture shopping by herself and couldn’t have afforded it anyway.

  How would I get it up here anyway? She wondered at the floral, grandmother-style three-person couch and then at the little breakfast table with its two tall back chairs. They certainly hadn’t traveled up there in the little rickety elevator she had found in the building’s narrow lobby. Abby imagined the baby grand pianos hefted on strings that dangled above foes in old cartoons and laughed to herself. She was already getting too used to being her own source of amusement.

  But the apartment was in truth a one-person apartment and Abby didn’t really envision herself entertaining much. Two people in such small a space would be kept in awkwardly close quarters, especially if they both aimed to walk through the apartment at the same time.

  Even now, Abby looked around at the boxes that had been stacked around the combined living room and dining room area and wondered if she was breaking some fire code she did not yet know of. The various cardboard boxes contained the belongings she'd had shipped ahead of her arrival. Her landlord, Len, had been kind enough to receive them and stack them up precariously in her apartment for her.

  Len had met her in the eighth floor hallway as soon as she’d texted him that she had arrived. He was an amazingly large man in his mid-forties and the thin wisps of black strands across the pale pink expanse of his scalp where all he had left on his head to call hair.

  Abby had asked him if his full name was Leonard by way of conversation. He said no and offered nothing further on the topic. He sweated profusely in the narrow un-air-conditioned hallway and was more likely to grunt than to give full sentence answers but Abby chalked this down to New York sensibility. Other than that he was fairly amiable, offering her a brusque verbal tour of the building and the neighborhood, telling her where she might buy her groceries or do her laundry and telling her which streets she might want to avoid, at night, alone.

  Len had even been so polite as to not question the cuts on her hands or her rumpled clothes.

  “I kind of fell,” Abby offered when she caught him looking at the scuffs on her jeans. He grunted but said nothing more about it and Abby decided he had probably, over the years, learned not to ask too many questions. Instead of questioning her, Len had told her where she could find a first aid kit under the sink of her new bathroom.

  Now she moved from the living room to that bathroom, adding her toothbrush and other toiletries to the metal rungs hung on the wall over the toilet. The bathroom was just as narrow as the rest of the apartment, the toilet very nearly touching the edge of the shower stall. The whole place was very awkwardly laid out and it needed an occupant with a certain amount of grace to not trip themselves up maneuvering through it.

  “I can be graceful. Despite recent events,” Abby said to her reflection in the dingy mirror that hung over the sink. The mirror was rusted over on the sides and it had a partition down the center where one side could be slid open to reveal a small medicine cabinet behind it.

  Now though, the partition fell just over Abby’s face and her reflection was split in two halves that didn’t quite meet to form one cohesive whole.

  Split in half, Abby thought, one part of a whole, one part that can never be two again. She felt the usual tightening in her chest, the twisting in her stomach that always rose up when she caught her reflection and didn’t see herself.

  Angie, she thought as she looked at her own limp brown hair. She watched her own dark brown eyes well up with tears that shimmered and shook but did not fall down her pale lightly freckled face. There it was again, the guilt, the sadness.

  “Angelica,” she said to the mirror. She squinted her eyes a little, puckered her lips just the slightest bit. Different, but the same. Still it wasn’t right. None of it was right.

  Angelica Dawes, Abby’s twin sister, had been the beautiful one. They weren’t identical twins scientifically speaking but they had always looked near enough alike that everyone back home in the close-knit community of South Meadow had a hard enough time telling one from the other.

  They had shared everything growing up together being their parent’s only children, and when they were younger they could just about read each other’s minds and finish each other’s sentences. At one point they had been inseparable much to the chagrin of their parents who insisted that they had to learn to make friends of their own. Every night they’d lie awake discussing their shared dream: to be famous actresses in New York City. However, as they’d entered their teenage years, things had dras
tically changed between them.

  Where Abby was meek and shy and awkward, Angelica was boisterous and free-spirited, a natural-born performer. Never was this more apparent than when they reached high school. They had spent less and less time together, understood each other less and less, and every conversation between them would eventually turn into a misunderstanding. The simple fact was they had reached an age when they were trying to define themselves as individuals, Abby would understand later, but everyone in South Meadow viewed them as an interchangeable two-some. Eventually they barely spoke, the rift between them was so great and it was then that tragedy struck.

  They had been gifted a new car for their sixteenth birthday and the car crash had happened only two weeks later. Angie had been driving alone, they’d told her, on a winding road in the rain, too fast. The officials had said she must have lost control and driven into the divider, but no one could really say why. Angie had died on impact.