The newsroom is nearly anarchic. Multiple phones ring at once. The normally silent TV monitors are on full blast, making it seem as though the anchors from different news channels are in a yelling match. Police and fire scanners screech like herring gulls fighting over a chicken bone at the beach.
In my peripheral vision, an object is ballooning in size and headed right for me. Before I can step out of the way, I’m nearly run over by a photog the size of a linebacker. He pivots just in time to keep from knocking me flat on my back, but he still somehow manages to stomp on my foot. Ouch. He might have crushed a tiny bone.
“Shoot, I’m sorry,” he says, but keeps on running. He shoves open the door to the parking lot and bolts into the sunshine.
“Simons!” Angela hollers for me from her desk. Making my way to her, I walk on the outside of my right foot; it minimizes the pain. While the rest of the newsroom swirls in chaos, Angela is cool—a black hole among comets.
She brushes crumbs from her chest. A few remain on the shelf of her bosom, caught in the pilled ribbing of her sweater. “We already had our morning meeting. Everyone came in early. I just sent Justin and a photog to the courthouse. If there’s no traffic, they should make it in time.”
At least that explains why the photog was in a mad dash. My right big toe throbs, but the pain is nothing compared to the knot in my heart that tightens each time I think of Laudie and my supreme idiocy. I saw the signs. Any sane adult would have known it was foolish to push a fragile person beyond her limits, and all for what?
* * *
The press conference starts at 5:30, when most people are commuting home. In the control room, Angela stands next to me, her arms crossed. She smells like coffee and dog. We watch the wall of monitors. All the stations, even the national ones, aim their cameras at an empty lectern with a dozen microphones propped up along its rim. People milling in the background of the frame look awkward and self-conscious, like strangers in a crowded elevator waiting for their stop.
My mind wanders to the hospital. When Mom entered the room, she stopped abruptly as though blocked by some invisible wall—a force field generated by her reaction to the scene. Laudie lay asleep in the bed; the overhead fluorescent lights heightened the contours of her face, accentuating her hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. Her lips looked as rubbery and dead as chicken skin. A clear tube ran across her face just beneath her nose.
She was dressed in a blue-and-white hospital gown so voluminous that it swallowed her. Laudie would never wear anything so ill-fitting. I had tucked the fabric around her shoulders in an effort to give the gown some shape. I readjusted her socks and gathered her sheets neatly around her legs, trying to make her look more like the real Laudie, the strong-willed young woman who ran off to Atlanta to dance, not some feeble old sack of bones who just suffered a stroke.
Mom raised her hand to her mouth as two fat tears slid down her face. After a long moment, she spoke. “Oh, Simons.”
I started to get up from the chair, the backs of my bare legs sticky from the nylon cushion. “Mom, I’m sorry.”
Mom put a hand up, signaling me to either stop talking or stay put. I wasn’t sure, so I kept quiet and stayed in my corner.
Mom walked over to Laudie and took her left hand from beneath the sheets, revealing more tubes. “Mother, it’s Carry Ann.”
Laudie opened her eyes. They were still a crystal blue. She patted my mother’s arm and turned to me. “It’s okay,” she said weakly. “It’s okay.”
Those two words are all that have kept me going the past seventy-two hours. It’s okay.
Sonny Boykin approaches the podium, snapping my attention back to the newsroom. He’s assailed by the rat-ta-tat-tat of clicking lenses and the blinking strobe of the cameras’ lights, but he doesn’t react. A tiny American flag is pinned to his lapel. I strain to see his cuff links, with the telltale mark of “BH,” but it’s impossible to make them out. Before he speaks, he furrows his brow like men do when they want to look intelligent.
He begins in medias res. No opening statement. Just chitchat about his boyhood in Beaufort, South Carolina. “As many of you know, I backed my car into a utility pole. It seems this little incident has made headlines across the state.” He smiles ingratiatingly, chuckles even, implying we are silly for all the fuss. “There’s all this talk about the failed field sobriety test. I was so shaken by the wreck, I couldn’t see straight. Once we got to the station, they came to their senses and let me go.” His tone grows stern. “I’m not a perfect driver, but mark my words, I’m also the victim here. For whatever reason, that woman wants to drag me through the mud. It’s a smear campaign. And the media is so desperate for content, they’ll broadcast anything, even disgusting pictures.” He shifts his gaze; I’m sure he’s scowling at the bank of reporters in the back of the room. “Shame on you. And shame on her. Her story is false. It’s completely untrue, ridiculous.”
“Total denial. I should have guessed.” Angela spins on her heels, heads back to her desk.
* * *
With clips of Sonny’s press conference dominating the news rundown, it was easy to write a script for the seven o’clock broadcast. My draft has been cooling in Angela’s inbox for nearly a half hour—eons in the news world. She reviews each script daily, one of her myriad duties as news director, and normally she can never get the scripts early enough. When I go to check on her, she’s staring at the wall.
“Angela?”
“I just got a call back from the vet,” she says finally. “Cooper has cancer.”
“Oh, no. I am so sorry, Angela.” Pictures of Cooper surround us. Cooper at the beach. Cooper sacked out on a divan. Cooper with trick-or-treaters. Cooper shaking hands with a fireman.
“He’s not that old. He’s only eight.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Make this summer go away.” She absentmindedly scrolls over the script. “Or help me sell my house so I can move back home.”
She’s my boss, but she’s also human. Unsure if it’s what she wants, I dip low to hug her. She stiffens at first, but then she lets her head fall on my shoulder for a moment. “You want to leave Charleston?”
“There’s nothing for me here.”
The beaches, the ocean, the historic houses, the secret gardens—how could anyone ever move from Charleston? “Sure there is.”
“You’ve got to go, too, you know.” I must look bug-eyed, because she tells me not to look so surprised. “Listen to me. I believe in you. You’re actually a really good producer, and you’d be even better if you got to write about puddles and fish or whatever it is you want to write about. Charleston has never been your market. You have to go to a bigger market for an environmental science reporting gig. You can’t get anywhere here, at least not yet.”
Leave? I can’t leave Charleston.