Lyon straightens his suitcoat and fixes his eyes on camera one, anticipating the red light.
“Good evening. At the top of our report tonight, an announcement of a new twist on an old peace proposal that has some United Nations negotiators cautiously optimistic for a settlement to the latest round of hostilities in the Middle East. Here’s Michael Barnes reporting from Jerusalem. Michael.”
When Lyon first resumed newscasting, the ratings set records for all the wrong reasons: people wondered if he would cry again and there was also a morbid curiosity about watching someone who had killed a man with his bare hands. But Lyon’s former cold-bloodedness was warmed now by a certain vulnerability and as he continued on-air over the fall of that year, viewers stayed with him.
The special, called “Bring Me Children,” aired in mid-September and earned a decent thirteen rating points and twenty-three share. Everyone at the network was saying Emmy, and in the spring of the following year it proved true: Lyon became one of very few journalists ever to have won both a Pulitzer and an Emmy.
Killing Quinndell didn’t save their lives. Claire, Randolph, and Lyon were still tied to the posts, the fire was spreading throughout Randolph’s shack, the smoke became blinding and then made breathing dangerous, the baby still crying in the back room.
It was Claire who got them loose. She managed to reach Carl, pull the knife from his neck, and use it to cut the ropes from her wrists. Then she freed Lyon and he pulled Randolph from the shack while Claire ran into the back room and saved the infant girl.
The men Quinndell had hired showed up just before dawn. They watched the fire, honked the car’s horn, called for the doctor, talked between themselves, watched the fire some more, and then left.
While Claire, Lyon, Randolph, and the baby were off in the woods, hiding and waiting for the men to depart, Lyon whispered an explanation of everything that Quinndell had told him.
“I don’t know if Quinndell was ever a good doctor. When he did that awful thing to you, Claire, when you were fourteen, he was already falsifying the deaths of those babies, arranging for their adoptions to wealthy couples, already thinking of himself as God. But it wasn’t until he lost his sight that he went truly insane. He believed his blindness was God’s punishment, and he reacted by trying to punish God. Leaving those babies to die in a cave, killing others who were powerless. There’s no way to explain it except for what your grandmother said. He’s a monster. And what you said. Evil exists.”
Randolph kept nodding. See, he thought — this is exactly what I wanted someone to do, explain everything.
As the sun finally began to backlight the eastern ridges and with only a stone chimney remaining of Randolph’s shack, Claire carried the baby to the rental car and then half carried, half dragged the hermit there. When she came back for Lyon she told him he couldn’t report what Quinndell had done with those twenty babies, faking their deaths and then arranging their adoptions.
Leaning on her and limping his way to the car, Lyon was incredulous.
“What’s it going to accomplish?” she asked. “The twenty women who were told their babies died all those years ago will be devastated. How does a mother even begin to think about something like that? The adoptive parents will be horrified that now someone is going to take their children away from them. And the only innocent parties in this whole mess, the kids, they’re going to be pulled apart. It’ll be a circus, no one’ll come out of it with any dignity.”
Lyon said he had no choice: he was a reporter.
“Of course you have a choice. Report Quinndell’s murders, just leave out the part —”
Lyon insisted that you can’t leave out parts. And even if he didn’t report it, someone else would. “People are going to be all over this story.”
“Doing something because if you don’t someone else will,” Claire told him, “is an immoral argument.”
But it was an argument they continued to have even after Lyon told the police the entire story, even after they returned to New York and Claire moved into Lyon’s apartment, even after the Quinndell horrors were written about in newspapers — even after Claire’s prediction turned out to be true: a troupe, a circus troupe, of lawyers and reporters converging on the twenty children whose deaths had been faked by Quinndell, some of the biological mothers suing for the return of their now teenage children, some of the adoptive parents fleeing the country with those children, no one coming out of it with any dignity.
She was never angry with Lyon for betraying her hiding place to Quinndell; in fact, the only time Claire ever mentioned it was to tell Lyon that betrayal under torture is not betrayal. But her opinion on the reporting of what happened to those twenty children was absolute. “You don’t have to be a part of it,” Claire kept insisting.
So when Lyon began working on the special that August, she moved out of his apartment.
“I’m John Lyon and that’s our report for this Sunday evening. Thank you and goodnight.” He keeps smiling until the red light goes off.
After the newscast he attends a meeting to discuss future assignments, deciding not to participate in another special the network is planning, this one on the adoption of foreign-born children. The producer says she’s disappointed but understands Lyon’s position.
After that meeting he has a drink with his director, who points out that it was exactly one year ago today that Lyon broke down and cried while reading that story about murdered children. “And now you’re back on top, got an Emmy and all — who would’ve thought, huh?”
“Certainly not me.”
He takes a cab home.
When the doorman, Jonathan, sees who it is limping up to the doors, he rushes to open them.
“Good evening, Mr. Lyon. Scorcher, huh?”
“That it is, Jonathan, that it is.”
The doorman walks with him through the lobby, always unsure whether he should take Lyon’s arm or not. “You need some help, Mr. Lyon?” Jonathan asks, wincing a little with each pained step Lyon takes.
“No, no, I’m fine, thank you. Some days it hurts worse than others, I don’t know why.”
The doorman stands there until the elevator arrives. As Lyon steps on, Jonathan tells him, “You’re a hero, Mr. Lyon.” He’s said this maybe twenty times since Lyon’s return.
And Lyon never knows how to reply to it. On this occasion he nods and smiles, pressing the button for his floor and waiting for the doors to close.
I don’t feel like a hero, Lyon thinks on the way up. Claire’s grandmother was a hero. And Randolph Welby too. Lyon paid to have a new cabin built for Randolph, who was pestered by reporters for a mercifully short time primarily because interviews with him consisted exclusively of Randolph replying either “I bewieve so” or “I tink not.”
To Lyon’s credit, in the “Bring Me Children” special, he tried his best to make sure people knew who the real heroes were.
He limps off the elevator, opens the door to his apartment, switches on the lights, and lowers the air-conditioning’s thermostat. After listening to the messages on the answering machine, Lyon makes a sandwich and opens a bottle of beer. He eats, reads awhile, then goes to the bedroom and undresses, throwing his shirt over a thirty-five-pound concrete frog. Lyon’s in bed by eleven.
The last thought he has before falling asleep is that his shin hurts worse than ever. Primarily psychosomatic, the doctors keep telling him. Yeah, Lyon thinks, that’s what they said in retrospect about my emotional breakdown too — but just because it’s all in your head doesn’t mean it hurts any less.
He sleeps until a few minutes past midnight when he is awakened by a baby crying, Lyon bolting upright in bed, instantly awake.
He grabs his robe and limps into the living room.
His wife is on the couch with their two children. Lyon’s treatment of her grandmother in the news special is the reason Claire began speaking to him again. She moved back into the apartment a week after that program aired; they were married at the beginning of October and because of the extraordinary circumstances involved were able to adopt the baby girl, the one who had been crying in Randolph’s back room, by Thanksgiving. But it’s not the little girl who is crying now; she is, in fact, fast asleep.
“You’re late.”
“You know how my sisters are when they get their hands on these children,” Claire says. “I told you not to wait up.”
“I didn’t.” Lyon takes the girl from Claire. “The crying woke me. How can this one,” he says, patting the girl’s back, “sleep through all that noise?”
“She can sleep through anything,” Claire replies, laughing as she rearranges the howling baby boy on her knee. He was born in April, three months ago.
Lyon sits on the couch next to Claire and pulls the edge of a tiny hat away from the infant’s face. The baby considers Lyon only briefly before scowling all the harder and then squalling all the louder. “I keep telling you, Claire, every day he looks more and more like a café au lait Winston Churchill.”
“And I keep telling you, John, that every day he looks more and more like his father.”
Recognizing the truth when he hears it, John Lyon doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.