Thank You for Listening(7)
Fans who, Sewanee discovered as she scrolled through the page, could listen to a book a day. Fans who made devotional videos to their favorite narrators. Fans who impatiently waited for a narrator’s next book because they had already listened to their whole catalogue.
Sewanee knew how popular Romance novels were (it wasn’t just a category, it was a pavilion, after all), but she was surprised to see narrators had their own following. The fans loved the women . . . but they revered the men. And it seemed one in particular, Brock McNight, was the reigning king. The lack of subtlety in the comments made it obvious. “All hail!” and “our resident unicorn” and “Brock McNight! I want you to read this section to me while I go down on you!”
Hokay then.
Sewanee knew there was no way Brock McNight was his real name. The explicit nature of these books led many narrators–much like the books’ authors–to use pseudonyms. It was an industry norm and everyone had his or her own reasons for doing so but, like a society of magicians, they were all sworn to secrecy. A pinned post at the top of the page promised that any listener who “outed” a narrator without their permission would be kicked out of the group.
Good.
Mark was the person who’d first suggested Sewanee do audiobooks. They’d been seated next to each other in a thirty-seat black box theater at a mutual friend’s showcase and seemed to be the only two people in the audience not impressed by the tortured writhing onstage. After a two-minute conversation at intermission about audiobooks, he gave her his card, said she’d have to start in indie Romance, and that she should pick an alias. She’d chosen her stripper name. Using the classic middle school algorithm, she combined her first pet (Sarah, a black Lab as loyal as she was stupid) and the street she grew up on (Westholme, a half mile from the UCLA campus where her father taught). Sarah Westholme sounded realistic. Some narrators went the other way. Fluffy Foxtrot. Dick Long. And in the case of a very gay, very Liberal narrator she adored who only recorded queer erotica, Lindsey Graham, because “let the bastard come after me, I dare him.”
The industries–both audiobooks and indie Romance–had grown so much since she’d “retired,” Sewanee was sure Sarah had faded into obscurity. But she put her old alias into the Facebook group’s search bar to see if she existed.
Boy, did she. She was an enigma. The White Whale of Romance. The posts told her as much:
Why isn’t she narrating anymore?
What happened to her??
OMG, she was my absolute favorite, why ???
No one does guy voices like her! Shadow Walkers?! It doesn’t get better than SW reading June French!
Shadow Walkers was the last Romance series she’d done and she’d loved those books. But, then, it was June French. What was there not to love? In the ’90s, June had been an iconic Romance author helping to define the category. When she went indie with the Shadow Walkers series, she’d hired Sarah to do the audiobooks and they’d exploded.
June was the one Romance author Sewanee had felt bad about abandoning. They’d worked well together, exchanged thoughtful e-mails that made Sewanee feel they probably would have been friends in real life. She recalled even telling June–in abstract terms–about what had happened to her, why she wasn’t acting on-camera anymore. When she’d heard only a few weeks ago that June had died–a shock wave still working its way through the audiobook community–the news had hit her in an unexpectedly tender place.
The knock on the door startled her. For a moment–brief, but still–she imagined herself in a June French novel. What adventure might she find on the other side of the door?
Oh, right. Food.
She snapped the laptop closed, popped up, and adjusted her eye patch before opening the door to a man who would never grace the cover of a Romance novel, not even in his prime thirty years ago. He wheeled the food into her room, she signed the bill, tipped him well, and closed the door.
She uncovered the plate and found cold French fries, a day-old bun, a possibly older burger, and garnish she suspected had been taken off another, discarded dinner.
Fantasy over. Reality had arrived.
Chapter Three
“The Stakes”
THE NEXT MORNING, AS SEWANEE DEBATED HER LIPSTICK COLOR FOR the panel, she found herself staring into the bathroom mirror, eye patch off. It didn’t matter how accustomed she’d become to it, she couldn’t help looking at it. Every time as if it were the first and every time hoping it were the last.
The space where her right eye had been was curtained with skin that looked as if it had been burned. It hadn’t. It was simply the effect of not enough skin to cover too much surface. The long, jagged scar that accompanied the drape went from the middle of her right eyebrow down over the highest point of her cheekbone. Like the mouth of a river, it dumped itself into the estuary of her cheek’s hollow.
She looked down again at the lipstick. Red. Definitely red. Be bold.
Her cell phone, resting on the counter next to her, rang.
She glanced at the caller ID: Seasons. Her grandmother’s assisted living facility. No matter how many times she had seen “Seasons” on her screen over the years, her stomach tightened. In recent months, the tightness had worsened in tandem with Blah’s mental state. “Hello?” she answered.
“Sewanee?” the familiar voice asked.