I’m a news producer at WCCC News 14. On normal days, the job is a never-ending bug-eyed stress-fest of research, writing, and hard deadlines. Office chitchat in the break room? An occasional leisurely lunch? Ha! Never. Then there are the berserk days—the ones when our satellite truck has mechanical issues or a major story breaks. Sometimes I don’t leave my desk for hours. I once got a UTI because I didn’t have time to pee for six hours.
Inside the sprawling one-story building, it’s frigid as usual. Rows of messy desks flank the dusky-violet walls. A bank of boxy TVs runs the broadcasts of our local competitors. The clickety-clack of fingers on keyboards is muffled by the never-ending buzz of police and fire scanners. Over the airwaves, operators speak to each other in staccato shorthand. I’ve learned quite a few codes over the years: 10–56 is “intoxicated pedestrian,” 10–45 means “dead animal.”
In the time it takes my computer to boot up, my left pinkie toe has gone numb in the newsroom’s polar air. I swap my flip-flops for the wool socks I keep on top of a wool blanket in my drawer.
My phone buzzes. A new text. “Hey there. It’s Paul.”
Paul, from last night. Paul had a testosterone-saturated confidence, a sexual bullishness that scared and excited me. He’s not my type, but the thrill of his attention deepened that growing chasm between me and my impending marriage. I let him buy me that second glass after I gave him my phone number. As a friend, I told myself. That’s all I can remember.
I put my phone into my drawer, push it shut. It’s about time for the morning meeting. Every workday at 9:28 a.m., I leave my computer to join the news team in a circle of chairs at the base of the Desk. Our lead reporter, Justin, looks up from his iPhone and flashes me a TV-ready smile. He wears a silver ring on his right thumb; his fingers are slender and tanned.
At 9:32, Angela lumbers toward us. She wrestles with a couple of empty wheeled chairs to make room in our circle. Her medium-length brown hair is always clean but never styled; she wears it loose around her shoulders. A pronounced wrinkle rises from the space between her eyebrows. She’s middle-aged, average height. She wears baggy clothes and constantly dusts pale strands of dog hair from her chest.
Like so many transplants to the Lowcountry, she named her dog after the river on the peninsula’s east side: Cooper. (Some people name their dog after the river on the west side: Ashley.) She keeps framed photos of him on her desk: Cooper in a bandana at the beach, Cooper dressed in a Santa hat, Cooper obligingly raising a paw.
“We’re starting at the top with Judge Boykin’s little trip to the pokey. We’ve got some decent footage of his car backed into a utility pole. Gonna tease the hell out of it,” she says.
Sonny Boykin? His daughter was on my volleyball team at Crescent Academy. He lives somewhere on South Battery, up by the Coast Guard station. He must be nearly seven feet tall, his shoulders as wide as a refrigerator. Sonny is personable like all the men of Battery Hall, but I’ve always felt he stands a little too close. He went to jail?
I don’t ask because I don’t want to draw even the slightest connection between him and me. If Angela understood the deep-rooted, entangled connections of the locals here, she’d know that of course I know him. And because even the loosest of acquaintances has a better chance of catching a sound bite than a stranger, she’d make me knock on his door to get the scoop myself.
I see Sonny at holiday parties, and I’m pretty sure he goes to the same church as Mom and Dad. Even if it was an innocent wreck involving a utility pole, questioning him assumes some sort of guilt. Like it or not, Sonny is part of my tribe. I don’t care to protect him, but I know on some level Dad and Mom would be embarrassed if I were to question him. Someone else can do it. I hide my face, pretending to take notes.
Angela shakes her chocolate drink. “What have you got, Justin?”
Justin wiggles his pen between his long fingers. “A homeless man’s body was found on Nassau Street. I’ll interview his neighbors—”
“He’s homeless, Justin. He doesn’t have any neighbors.”
“Yeah, well, I mean I’ll interview the people who live near where his body was found.”
“What else?” I can’t see her feet, but I know she has crossed her legs and is bouncing her top foot. It’s the same at every meeting. Her body vibrates with wild, nervous energy fueled by caffeine, stress, and probably too many years in New York.
“The Army Corps put out a news release on the seawall, saying that the pump stations shouldn’t fail,” I say. “How can they know they won’t fail?”
“Math.”
“Angela, if one of those systems goes down, Charleston will become a toxic bathtub.”
“When that happens, we’ll have a story. Just run a B-block voice-over on Spoleto.”
Spoleto? It’s a great arts festival but hardly front-page news. “It could be a feature—”
“Everyone is sick of hearing about the wall. Nothing has happened yet.”
“Okay, fine, I’ll do the Spoleto story, but one day Charleston is going to drown, and building a giant wall around the peninsula without wetland restoration and surface water storage is only going to sink it faster.”
Angela smiles and rolls her eyes. We get along, but she makes it clear who is in charge.
* * *
At 5:40, it’s time to head to the control room, which looks like a cave constructed from televisions. Justin once counted all the monitors: forty-two. I take my seat in the producer’s chair and face dozens of talking heads from both local and national stations. I adjust my headset to check in with the talent. “Dan, you good?”
“Yep,” he says in his usual cheery manner. Dan the Weatherman, like all TV weather presenters, is an agreeable guy. They’re the heroes of live television, making sure our broadcast runs precisely twenty-three minutes and fifteen seconds. If breaking news happens, which can cannibalize precious minutes of our show, I speak through his earpiece to tell him he’s got only eight seconds for his spot, when normally he’s allowed three minutes. When the photog’s camera breaks and we lose footage for a story and we suddenly have extra time that must be filled, Dan pleasantly yammers on about uneventful weather for as long as we need.
“Hi, Jasmine, doing okay?”
“Ready to roll.” As Jasmine looks into a compact to check her teeth for lipstick, I make a mental note to ask her what toothpaste she uses. Jasmine normally anchors on the weekends, but one of our lead anchors took today off.
She was the runner-up for Miss South Carolina. Turns out, all those years of competitions prepared her perfectly for a career on camera. The problem is, she’s stuck as a weekend anchor until one of our regulars dies. It’s the same at all the channels. Weekend anchors can end up waiting decades for their turn. A few lucky ones get a big break—a local story that has national legs—that can land them in the major networks. That’s where Jasmine dreams of being. Though she checks the anonymous tip-line hourly, she still hasn’t found her break. And while the Sonny story will be interesting to the locals, it won’t make national headlines. I hope to find her a story that will.
A digital clock in the corner of the studio counts down to the start of the show. I press the “WEATHER” and “ANCHOR 1” buttons simultaneously. “All right, y’all. We’re live in five, four, three, two.”
The show starts with footage of Sonny’s car, hazard lights flashing in the dark. Jasmine speaks over the video. “This morning, a judge was released from jail. At 4:12 a.m., troopers responded to a vehicle collision involving property damage just outside of the Coburg Community Apartment Complex in West Ashley. The car belongs to Judge Sonny Boykin. According to the jail log, Judge Boykin failed a field sobriety test. He was taken to the Charleston County Detention Center under suspicion of Driving Under the Influence. He was not administered a breathalyzer test and was released after a few hours.”
We roll into the homeless man story, then after some national headlines, show the Spoleto festival coverage. Jasmine starts the C block with box-office hits and tosses to Dan the Weatherman. Camera Two pans wide as Dan covers every possible weather scenario. While he rambles on about the remote possibility of a tornado in the Upstate, my mind wanders back to Paul’s message. Should I text back?
After the show, I check my phone and see a call from Trip. I phoned him Thursday afternoon when I knew he had a meeting. Somehow, I’ve managed to avoid speaking to him for almost five days now. I can’t not talk to him for another eight hours.
I walk past the makeup room and through the kitchen to the break room. A fake flower arrangement collects dust on one of the tables. The old couch smells of burned popcorn.
“There you are,” he says in his mild southern drawl. “Can you come up next weekend?”
“I’ll be working,” I say, suddenly grateful for my funky schedule.
“Then I’ll come down. I’ve barely seen my fiancée since we got engaged.”
“We really wouldn’t get to see much of each other.”
“That’s okay, Cinnamon. We knew it would be like this for a while. I’ve got to finish this case anyway, so I’ll just hole up in the library while you’re at work.”
“Sounds good,” I lie, forcing a smile. I once read that if you smile while talking, your words can sound more positive.
“Did your mom find out if the William Aiken House is free that weekend? We’ve really got to secure a venue.”
I was supposed to tell Mom to book our reception for the second weekend in May. Trip thought a party in that restored mansion, built in the early 1800s, would be the perfect place. “I’ll talk to her.”
* * *
Hours later, I return my socks to the drawer, pack my purse, and push the heavy door to exit the chilly, fluorescent-lit office. Outside, a wild night welcomes me to the natural world. Clouds sprint overhead, scudding across an endless indigo sky. A pop-up shower, by now out at sea, soaked the ground. The stirred, loosened earth smells like wild garlic and copper pennies, just the way it smelled in childhood when we excavated the backyard, digging for porcelain shards, old apothecary bottles, and sharks’ teeth.
The rain revived the tree frogs that live in the massive oaks. With no inhibition, no self-consciousness, they call raucously to each other. Animals don’t fake smiles. They don’t use subterfuge. They do as they want; they communicate what they mean. It’s time for me to start living more like a wild, natural being, to start living in the moment, like Martha does. If I feel like texting Paul back, I should, right?