The Night Before the Flight
Packing was one of my least favorite activities. Ironic, given how much I traveled. Oh, sure, I always had a small bag of toiletries ready, travel-size shampoo and conditioner from my favorite brand, a bar of moisturizing soap in a pink plastic container, a sample of my favorite perfume (floral and airy), but it was the organizing of clothes that had always been a chore for me. Now it was 10:30 p.m. and I couldn’t put it off any longer.
I had promised my team I would work a half day the next morning before leaving for the conference. You know, get them going on the right foot before the boss was gone. It was going to be a long travel day: Madison to Denver. Denver to San Diego. The News Coverage Summit started Thursday morning.
In attendance would be a hundred news directors, none of whom had ever met each other, all coming together to hear from experts and share opinions. Television stations across the country were trying to make local TV news better than it was. Viewers wanted something different—declining ratings proved that—and we were all attempting to figure out exactly what.
When I looked over the clothes in my closet, a dark green silky blouse caught my eye, and I slid it off the hanger, pairing it with some tan work pants; that would work for outfit number one for the first day.
Now for outfit number two. My eyes scanned the rows of professional clothes. I had tried to organize my closet by work and play, half on one side and half on the other. The play side was a mess: yoga pants and sweatshirts haphazardly strewn about, jeans discarded on the floor. But the work side I kept fairly well organized. Had even arranged it by color. Green was taken care of with the blouse, so how about a pop of something else? I spotted a bright pink blazer and found a fitted black shirt to go under it with some black pants. Those could go with black pumps. For outfit number three, I dialed it back a bit and chose a navy blue sweater and houndstooth pants with shoes that looked like sneakers with a heel.
Now that the main outfits were taken care of, I could add the supplementary ones. A long floral dress and a shorter black one, pajamas, workout shorts, running shoes, my favorite pairs of underwear, several bras ranging from practical to lacy, Spanx of various configurations, and a mix of socks.
Adding my prescription sleeping medicine, Ambien, and a flat iron and curling iron for options, I packed up a travel jewelry box with short and long earrings and a selection of necklaces. Finally, around 11:15, the duty was done. Heaving a sigh as fatigue started to creep up behind my eyes, I was zipping the suitcase closed when Fred came and rubbed against my leg, purring softly.
“Hey, Freddie boy.” I picked him up and cradled him on his back like a baby in the crook of my left arm. He blinked at me approvingly and purred more as I continued to pet his belly with my other hand. “Yes, Mama is going away, but I’ll be back soon. And Robert will feed you.”
Mama had to go away too often. My boss, Dave, was always asking me to represent the station at conferences, seminars, workshops, and our quarterly meetings at corporate headquarters in Cleveland. I had been feeling for a long time like he probably thought I was the easy button to push. Maybe I was. A divorced woman with a grown child and only a cat, I could drop everything and go, that much was true, but the travel was wearing on me. None of it was fun travel. It was work, and I had to be “on” all the time, schmoozing with others and talking corporate-speak. This was the fourth work trip in the past six months I had been asked to go on.
Kissing Fred on the top of his head, I put him back on all fours. He sniffed the suitcase, rubbed his cheek against it twice, and jumped on my bed, walking in a slow circle to find his spot, ready for sleep.
Changing into flannel pajamas and pulling on some slippers to combat the relentless January cold, I headed down to the kitchen, took out several cans of wet cat food and a bag of dry food, and put them on the counter, scribbling a note for Robert.
Hi Neighbor. Thanks again for feeding F. I’ll get you a present from CA. Good luck on your date! Also, I decided to get that alarm clock that wakes you up with light, the one you told me about. It’s coming Friday. Can you bring it in?
I was so thankful for Robert. We had become good friends since he moved into the townhouse next door to me two and a half years prior. Our relationship started on a summer day when he was unpacking. We both had windows open, and I heard him blasting the soundtrack to Fiddler on the Roof. As a former high school theater kid myself, I started humming along and smiling. Later that afternoon, I was out front watering the plants on my side when he came out with a load of folded cardboard moving boxes in his arms.
“Oh, hey there. Are you my neighbor?” he asked cheerily. Quickly, I sized him up. Silver hair, black-rimmed glasses, and a smile that was slightly crooked. He was wearing a T-shirt that said “Gay and Gray. Wanna Stay?”
“Yes, hi, I’m Stephanie,” I said, trying to put on my best cheery-neighbor voice. “Stephanie Monroe. Welcome.”
As I extended my hand, he put the boxes down and took it. The grip was firm and confident, and his eyes sparkled as he pumped my arm.
“Thank you. Happy to be here. I’m Robert Tayburn, the new and obviously obnoxiously loud person next door to you. I hope you don’t mind. The first thing I do in a new place is hook up the Bluetooth. I can’t unpack without a little fun music to bop around to.”
“No, I don’t mind. In fact, I love Fiddler,” I said and then added some of the lyrics for good measure in a singsongy tone: “To life! To life! L’chaim!”
“Oh. My. God. You know the words!” He threw his head back and laughed.
“I was in the cast in high school.” I smiled. “Just the ensemble, but I loved it.”
“I may have died and gone to neighbor heaven!” Robert cried out.
From there, we just kept talking. Since we were a pair of self-professed musical connoisseurs, Robert suggested “Broadway and Bubbly” nights, and we took turns at each other’s townhouse, eating from charcuterie boards, drinking champagne, and singing along. He also had a cat, and soon Evita and Fred were a shared conversation topic.
Robert had never been married. He told me about dates he went on and new men he met, and he encouraged me to get out there more. I told him about my time-sucking job and the crazy television news business I was in. He never watched the news unless there was a storm coming and he needed to see the weather. The rest he considered too negative or too fluff. More than once, he chided me for my profession in a joking way. Eventually, though, he became my confidant. Because he didn’t care that our anchors or reporters were locally famous and because he was a good listener, I found myself downloading things that happened at work.
“So you’re telling me this anchor was acting like the evil stepmother in Cinderella?” he would ask. “Just turn ’em into a pumpkin and move on, sister! You’re the boss!”
He helped when I complained about the still male-dominated field. Sometimes at awards banquets or events, other news directors in town, who happened to all be male, would sit together in what appeared to be a good old boys’ club.
“They’re jealous,” Robert would counsel. “Because you’re kicking their ass and they feel threatened.”
At least I had a good boss. Dave treated me with nothing but respect, and Robert liked him for that.
“But don’t tell Dave that you don’t watch local TV news,” I had laughed one night during Broadway and Bubbly. “You’re part of the problem that every station is trying to fix.”
“Don’t worry, I’m an excellent liar,” he said, giving me his full crooked smile. “He’ll think I’m the biggest Channel 3 fan out there.”
Robert felt like a brother. He worked from home for a local tech company, so he was happy to feed Fred when I was out of town. I could trust him with a key to my place, which was why he always had one on his side of the townhouse.
Back upstairs after writing the note for this latest trip, I brushed my teeth, washed my face with an apricot scrub, wiped it with exfoliating pads dabbed in witch hazel toner, applied under-eye night eye cream, and put on way-too-expensive face moisturizer that Gwyneth Paltrow claimed in an Instagram ad was a miracle product. I had clicked on it in a moment of weakness when my forty-five-year-old face looked closer to fifty than forty to me. It smelled like roses but had done nothing so far to tighten my skin.
Spritzing my pillow with lavender sleep spray that also smelled nice but didn’t seem to induce instant sleep very often, I climbed into bed next to Fred and reached for my phone on the bedside table. Yes, I knew the blue light was bad for me. Yes, I knew I should be reading a book instead, but the lure of a digital hit before bed was too great.
My order of checking items was always the same: texts, Teams messages, work email, personal email, Facebook, Twitter (I refused to call it X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and my news app. As news director, I had to be constantly up on what was happening both here in Madison and also across the country.
Thankfully, there were no texts. You never knew what you might get when you oversaw a newsroom full of young journalists. People were always asking questions, feeling the need to text me or my assistant news director at any time of day or night, especially the overnight crew, who arrived at ten p.m. and worked to produce the morning show. They were fresh out of college and fearful of making mistakes, so they asked a lot of questions.
I was glad to see that it appeared to be a quiet night in Madison. That was one of the reasons I liked being a smaller-market news director. Shootings were rare. Our biggest events were tied to the university or state politics. We still covered things like the opening of the RV show or the Little League tournament that brought out thousands.
I had done the big-city thing, had gone to college at DePaul and worked in Chicago, moving up the ladder from intern to executive producer. The long commute from our suburb to the NBC affiliate in downtown Chicago was just about killing me, though, ninety minutes each way on a good day, so when an assistant news director job opened in Madison, my then husband Jason, our son Evan, and I packed up and decided to give smaller-town living a try. Two years in, the news director left and Dave promoted me. I had been in the role ever since.
Evan was just out of college now and working his first career job doing marketing for a soccer team in Minneapolis. Jason and I had lasted only a year past Evan’s empty-nest departure for college. We found we just didn’t have much to say to each other without the hustle of a shared child, and we drifted further apart, watching our favorite TV shows in separate rooms, finding excuses to stay late at work, and exercising, shopping, and eating at different times.
I would steal glances at Jason around the house and try to find the young guy I met at DePaul, but everything seemed to have changed. His face was older, of course, as was mine, but I couldn’t identify the handsome kid I had fallen in love with. Instead, things he did annoyed me: the way he never rinsed out his coffee cup but instead left it sitting next to the sink so that a dark brown film hardened on the bottom; his obsession with football and how he seemed to think he was part of the game himself as he rocked and swayed with each play; the way he not only snored but snorted when he fell asleep on the couch; the way he always left the grocery shopping and laundry to me, even though I worked longer hours. When we took walks, we walked at different paces. His stride was much longer than mine, and I noticed he didn’t slow down like he used to in order to let me keep up. Even a simple walk showed how out of sync we were. We were so young when we had Evan, and Jason had been a good father, but I was just bored and increasingly irked by him.
Finally, one night, I built up the courage to ask him if he thought we were still compatible. He sat up from his reclined position on the couch, looked at me without speaking for a solid thirty seconds, and then said, “I guess we’ve both been feeling the same thing, huh?” My stomach dropped. When he added, “Maybe we should try living apart,” I felt an equal amount of relief, hurt that he had been the one to propose it, and sadness that a partnership that had raised such a solid kid was coming to an end. We never even tried counseling. It was an amicable divorce and it was fast. Thankfully, he told me he had no problem with me keeping Fred. I would have fought hard for my Freddie boy.
Jason remarried sooner than I would have thought, which gave me a few pangs when I saw the wedding pictures with his new wife and her daughters, plus Evan, looking so dapper in his suit, but a part of me was happy for Jason. Truth was, I just wanted the same. I liked my life, but I longed for the sort of easy companionship I had with Robert, just with someone who found me physically attractive. Maybe I’d meet a guy this weekend—dark and handsome came to mind. A new romance would be so exciting. I longed for adventure, change, a vacation, and a life partner. None of it had been happening in my life for way too long. When I suggested to Dave that my assistant news director, Bruce, be sent to this conference, Dave said that Bruce would have a hard time getting away because he had two younger children still at home. I tossed a few other names from the newsroom out to Dave, saying that they might enjoy a conference, but Dave shut them all down. They either also had families, or they were too young and inexperienced to represent the station. So I just kept going on a hamster wheel I seemingly had no control of. It was long past time to step off, even briefly.
If someone looked at my life from the outside, they might be impressed. I had money and a career and a healthy adult son. I had never had a major disease, and while my body could stand to tighten up a bit—the little bat wings under my arms especially bothered me—I was still in decent shape. My brown hair had a slight natural wave. Grays were creeping in, but I went to the salon to have it dyed every other month and wore it in a professional cut below my ears and above my shoulders. I had my eyebrows microbladed twice per year and my fingernails and toenails gel-polished every three weeks. This month both were a soft pink. I had a Peloton that I didn’t use nearly as much as I used to, a treadmill, yoga mats, bricks and bolsters, Pilates balls, and a home weight set, all in a spare room in my townhouse. Clothing arrived in a box from Stitch Fix, meals in a box from Hello Fresh, anything else I wanted in a box delivered within twenty-four hours from Amazon. Sometimes I felt as if my life was a series of boxes. Robert joked that I was “boxed in.” He preferred shopping in actual stores.
I guess I was just a normal American female executive. But I felt a sameness to my days, a lack of camaraderie outside of Robert. Even my relationship with Evan seemed like it was slipping out of my control. He appeared to be upset with me, not Jason, over the divorce, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, and now he usually said he was too busy to talk. Our once-per-week conversations were becoming more like every other week or even less frequent. He had chosen Jason’s house for both Thanksgiving and Christmas this past year, saying it was more fun with his stepsisters in the house. I practically had to beg just to get him to meet me for lunch the day after Christmas.
At night, when I lay awake staring at the ceiling, I would sometimes wonder if all the times I had missed school events when I was working nightside or pulling a double in television news had hurt our relationship too. Jason’s normal day job let him be there for everything. Could Evan harbor resentment about me pulling those late hours and not being able to slip away to all of the band concerts and soccer games of his youth? Or taking a phone call from a young staffer during dinner, stepping away and telling Evan I’d be right back as I answered some urgent plea about something? He had never said so, but the thought gnawed at me. The thing was, we had needed the money, and those were my hours and duties in a 24/7 business, so I didn’t regret it from that standpoint, but my son’s recent coldness had ripped a small seam in my soul that seemed to be expanding.
Sometimes I thought that Evan might need a reminder of how important I was to him. Nothing tragic, of course, but if I were diagnosed with a disease that would scare him just enough but I would recover from, maybe he’d feel some sympathy for me and get back into my corner. Or if I got lost in the woods for a few nights and returned as the conquering hero—would that make him respect me again? Would he come running into my arms like he did when he was a toddler? Maybe that would be the kick in the butt he needed. I had been a good mother, damn it, and launched him into full adulthood with every tool he needed, and now he largely ignored me. I vented about it to Robert one night, and he chuckled.
“So … are you telling me you’d be willing to be kidnapped?”
“I mean, maybe, as long as I’m not hurt in the process.”
“A kindhearted kidnapper, got it,” he said. “I’ll put an ad on Indeed for you.”
I punched him in the arm.
But truly, Evan wasn’t my only issue. I longed for the old me when I used to be a rebel in college. I had been the one willing to skip class or use a fake ID to get into a bar. I was known for playing pranks on others in the dorm, or dressing up as a professor and doing an imitation of their style. Sadly, those days seemed another lifetime ago. I was a professional woman now and had appearances to keep up. Secretly, though, I ached for something fun and rebellious.
At least I would be meeting Diana, a new friend, in San Diego. We had a lot in common. I had just recently connected with her, and she seemed as interested in having an adventure as I was. She didn’t work in news, but she would be a good help to me in having just a little bit of excitement this weekend.
I had been dreaming of just running off, starting a whole fresh and invigorating world for myself in Mexico, getting out of the news business and retiring to a life of wine and good books. Maybe that would make Evan want to visit me just to be living at my beach shack, checking out the girls down at the surf. This life-as-an-expat fantasy came more and more often lately. I found myself watching House Hunters International and making a list of places I could move to in Mexico due to its warmth and easy proximity to the US. What was keeping me in this cold northland other than Robert? He was a great neighbor, but I couldn’t pin my whole world around that, could I?
I sighed as I put my phone back on the bedside table. My long-term future was too much to ponder at 11:45 at night. I just needed sleep. Clicking the light off and closing my eyes, I tried deep breathing to slow my heart rate. In for four counts, hold for seven, out for eight. The lavender scent from my pillow drifted into my nostrils, and I focused on letting it wash over me.
But it wasn’t working.
As I lay there with my fluffy flowered comforter surrounding my body, and Fred by my legs, I felt myself becoming more alert instead of more tired. The fatigued feeling I’d had just forty-five minutes prior was disappearing. I felt like I had missed my window of sleep. There was anxiety poking at me about the trip ahead.
Opening one eye and peeking at the clock, I saw that it was almost 12:30. I had to be fully functional as the boss of a TV newsroom in less than eight hours, up in six and a half. Fuck. This wasn’t good. Go to sleep, I told myself. Go. To. Sleep. But my mind fired back and said no.
At 12:45, I gave up. Heaving myself out of bed, to the annoyance of Fred, who lifted his head and gave a meow, I zipped open my suitcase, dug around in the dark until I found the bottle of Ambien, twisted the cap off, and swallowed one pill whole, washing it down with the water in a glass at my bedside table. My doctor had warned that I shouldn’t drive within eight hours of consuming Ambien, and now I would have to be on the road in just over seven, but I needed to sleep. Sorry, Doc.
I hated nights like this, and they came too often, my mind whirring with a variety of worries—personnel issues, viewer hate mail, viewer love mail for some of our anchors and reporters that bordered on stalking, declining ratings, social media shenanigans by our staff. The list went on and on.
Crawling back under the flowered comforter and fumbling for my phone, I typed “ASMR” into the search bar. One of my girlfriends from an annual girls’ weekend had turned me on to this years ago, and when I really needed sleep, I leaned into it. There were thousands of videos to choose from, mostly women but also some men. They did things like role plays where you were visiting a doctor or getting a facial. The soothing sound of their low talking promised to give you an autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR)—or, in other words, a tingle in your head. It was my secret weapon for relaxation. I dialed up an oldie but goodie: a woman pretending she’s giving you a consultation in a tattoo shop. Between that and the Ambien, I was finally getting sleepy a little after 1:15 a.m. As I drifted off, I kept thinking that maybe a change of scenery this weekend would be just what I needed. Maybe I’d actually have fun. Or have a fling. Maybe my life would never be the same again.