In recent weeks she had come to rely more than ever on her friend and deputy, Lucy Friedman, the magazine's resident style guru. The cover they were now discussing was tied to a piece Lucy had commissioned on lounge lizards and featured a grinning photograph of a perennial rock star whose wrinkles had already been contractually removed by computer.
Sensing, no doubt, that Annie's mind was elsewhere, Lucy was effectively chairing the meeting. She was a big, pugnacious woman with a wicked sense of humor and a voice like a rusty car muffler. She enjoyed turning things upside down and did it now by changing her mind and saying the background shouldn't be pink at all but fluorescent lime-green.
As the argument raged, Annie drifted off again. In an office across the street, a man wearing spectacles and a business suit was standing by the window, doing some kind of t'ai chi routine. Annie watched the precise, dramatic swooping of his arms and how still he kept his head and she wondered what it did for him.
Something caught her eye and she saw through the glass panel by the door that Anthony, her assistant, was mouthing and pointing at his watch. It was nearly noon and she was supposed to be meeting Robert and Grace at the orthopedic clinic.
'What do you think Annie?' Lucy said.
'Sorry Luce, what was that?'
'Lime-green. With pink cover lines.'
'Sounds great.' The art director muttered something that Annie chose to ignore. She sat forward and laid her hands flat on the desk. 'Listen, can we wind this up now? I have to be somewhere.'
There was a car waiting for her and she gave the driver the address and sat in the back, hunched inside her coat, as they wove across to the East Side and headed uptown. The streets and those who walked them looked gray and dreary. It was that season of gloom, when the new year had been in long enough for all to see it was just as bad as the old one. Waiting at some lights, Annie watched two derelicts huddled in a doorway, one sleeping while the other declaimed grandly to the sky. Her hands felt cold and she shoved them deeper into her coat pockets.
They passed Lester's, the coffee shop on Eighty-fourth where Robert used to take Grace for breakfast sometimes before school. They hadn't talked about school yet but soon she would have to go back and face the stares of the other girls. It wasn't going to be easy but the longer they left it, the tougher it would be. If the new leg fit alright, the one they were going to try today at the clinic, Grace would soon be walking. When she'd got the hang of it, she should go back to school.
Annie got there twenty minutes late and Robert and Grace were already in with Wendy Auerbach, the prosthetist. Annie declined the receptionist's offer to take her coat and was led down a narrow white corridor to the fitting room. She could hear their voices.
The door was open and none of them saw her come in. Grace was sitting in her panties on a bed. She was looking down at her legs but Annie couldn't see them because the prosthetist was kneeling there, adjusting something. Robert stood to one side, watching.
'How's that?' said the prosthetist. 'Is that better?' Grace nodded. 'Alrighty. Now see how it feels standing.'
She stood clear and Annie watched Grace frown in concentration and ease herself slowly off the bed, wincing as the false leg took her weight. Then she looked up and saw Annie.
'Hi,' she said and did her best to smile. Robert and the prosthetist turned.
'Hi,' Annie said. 'How's it going?' Grace shrugged. How pale she looked, thought Annie. How frail.
'The kid's a natural,' said Wendy Auerbach. 'Sorry, we had to start without you, Mom.'
Annie put up a hand to show she didn't mind. The woman's relentless jollity irritated her. 'Alrighty' was bad enough. Calling her 'Mom' was dicing with death. She was finding it difficult to take her eyes off the leg and was aware that Grace was studying her reaction. The leg was flesh-colored and, apart from the hinge and valve hole at the knee, a reasonable match for her left leg. Annie thought it looked hideous, outrageous. She didn't know what to say. Robert came to the rescue. 'The new socket fits a treat.' After the first fitting, they had taken another plaster mold of Grace's stump and fashioned this new and better socket. Robert's fascination with the technology had made the whole process easier. He had taken Grace into the workshop and asked so many questions he probably now knew enough to be a prosthetist himself. Annie knew the purpose was to distract not just Grace but also himself from the horror of it all. But it worked and Annie was grateful.
Someone brought in a walking-frame and Robert and Annie watched Wendy Auerbach show Grace how to use it. This would only be needed for a day or two, she said, until Grace got the feel of the leg. Then she could just use a cane and pretty soon she'd find she didn't even need that. Grace sat down again and the prosthetist bounced through a list of maintenance and hygiene tips. She talked mainly to Grace, but tried to involve the parents too. Soon, this narrowed down to Robert for it was he who asked the questions and anyway she seemed to sense Annie's dislike.
'Alrighty,' she said eventually, clapping her hands. 'I think we're done.'
She escorted them to the door. Grace kept the leg on but walked with crutches. Robert carried the walking-frame and a bag of things Wendy Auerbach had given them to look after the leg. He thanked her and they all waited as she opened the door and offered Grace one last piece of advice.
'Remember. There's hardly a thing you did before that you can't do now. So, young lady, you just get up on that darn horse of yours as soon as you can.'
Grace lowered her eyes. Robert put his hand on her shoulder. Annie shepherded them before her out of the door.
'She doesn't want to,' she said through her teeth as she went past. 'And neither does the darn horse. Alrighty?'
Pilgrim was wasting away. The broken bones and the scars on his body and legs had healed, but the damage done to the nerves in his shoulder had rendered him lame. Only a combination of confinement and physical therapy could help him. But such was the violence with which he exploded at anyone's approach that the latter was impossible without risk of serious injury. Confinement alone was thus his lot. In the dark stench of his stall, behind the barn where he had known days far happier, Pilgrim grew thin.
Harry Logan had neither the courage nor the skill of Dorothy Chen in administering shots. And so Mrs Dyer's boys devised a sly technique to help him. They cut a small, sliding hatch in the bottom section of the door through which they pushed in Pilgrim's food and water. When a shot was due they would starve him. With Logan standing ready with his syringe, they would put down pails of feed and water outside then open the hatch. The boys would often get a fit of giggles as they hid to one side and waited for Pilgrim's hunger and thirst to get the better of his fear. When he reached tentatively out to sniff the pails, the boys would ram down the hatch and trap his head long enough for Logan to get the shot into his neck. Logan hated it. He especially hated the way the boys laughed.
In early February he called Liz Hammond and they arranged to meet at the stables. They took a look at Pilgrim through the stall door and then went to sit in Liz's car. They sat in silence for a while watching Tim and Eric hosing down the yard, fooling around.
'I've had enough Liz,' Logan said. 'It's all yours now.'
'Have you spoken with Annie?'
'I called her ten times. I told her a month ago the horse ought to be put down. She won't listen. But I tell you, I can't handle this anymore. Those two fucking kids drive me nuts. I'm a vet, Lizzie. I'm supposed to stop animals suffering, not make them suffer. I've had it.'