Goody One Shoe Read Online Free PDF Page A

self, and calmed her now.
Now that she knew recovery wasn’t a thing. It wasn’t a point in time. It was an
evolution. A journey without end. Her own never-ending story.
    Each night, when that lotion hit her nostrils, she regressed
to a time when she felt reborn. A new baby learning to walk. Learning to live.
Learning to forgive.
    She had learned to forgive her parents for dying on her. For
leaving her to grow up without their guidance. For abandoning her when she
needed them most. The hardest was forgiving God. She’d had many discussions
with Him. Had sworn at Him, sworn off Him. If He was everything, was
everywhere, why, why, why did He kill her family? Why did He leave her on her
own with only an old grandmother, far past her prime and exhausted by daily
life, let alone life with a mutilated young child, a recovering lost soul?
Heck, grandmother was messed up too. She’d lost her son, after all.
    But Billie could never forgive those murderous men. Some
things were unforgivable.
    No matter how often she strayed from His side, Billie always
found her way back to God. They had a complicated relationship. And a silent
understanding — as all understandings with God are. She agreed to be a good
girl on the outside. But on the inside, if she kept it to herself, she could
think bad thoughts. Swear and curse and imagine a tortuous revenge inflicted on
the evil beings of the world. The evil that God couldn’t control.
    God agreed to let her have those silent indiscretions. So
that she could survive her wretched life.

Friday
    THE COOL, PRE-DAWN AIR brushed
Billie’s cheeks. She blinked hard, failing in her attempts to focus on the
twinkle of light to her left. She stared at the soft beam, followed the
illuminating ray it offered until her eyes finally connected with her brain and
she recognized the graffiti-tainted trash bin under the light standard half a
block up from her apartment building. She wavered, her balance off. She grasped
the wrought iron post of the fire escape and looked at her foot. One foot
balancing on the railing, her stump dangling mid-air.
    Billie drew in a sharp breath. What the hell had her
deranged nighttime brain planned to do? Plunge her three stories to her death?
Well, guess what, night brain — that would have only crippled her. Again.
    Next time, get up to the roof.
    She took hold of the pole with both hands, eased her quaking
body down, shifted her butt onto the railing, and hopped to the grated floor.
Her window was wide open, the gauzy curtain blowing into the apartment. Peg Leg
sat on the window ledge, his head cocked to one side. He meowed at her, gave
her a withering glare, and disappeared into the living room.
    Sleepwalking. She hadn’t done that in three years. A full
year after her last episode, she’d stopped seeing Dr. Kroft. Billie shut her
eyes and conjured the doc’s voice. Dissociative fog. Or something or other.
Coping mechanism. Resulting from trauma. Triggered by anything that triggered
the memories attached to her trauma.
    Years ago, Billie would awaken, or have her conscious brain
take over, and find herself in the park a couple of blocks from her
grandmother’s house. Sometimes she’d have only ventured out into the yard. But
often she’d be gone for hours, come to on the subway, or in a part of town she
was unfamiliar with. It was when she was fourteen, after her night brain took
her on a field trip to a dark alley, the heavy beat of loud music vibrating the
asphalt, that her grandmother made the first appointment with the doc.
    Billie rubbed her hands against her arms to ward off the
morning chill. To heat the ice that always replaced her blood when the
adrenaline of waking from a walking dream raced through her body. She crawled
through the window, righted the potted petunia, and brushed dirt from the ledge
into her open palm. She stared at the dirt, balled her fist and squeezed. She
looked out the window at the horizon. A purple dawn overtook the darkness. Peg
Leg