All Stories Are Love Stories (23 page)

After the first storm, a little sunbeam stole down the steps and made a bright spot upon our floor. I sat down under it, held it on my lap, passed my hand up and down in its brightness. I gathered up a piece of it in my apron and ran to my mother. Great was my surprise when I carefully opened the fold and found that I had nothing to show.

—
ELIZA DONNER
,

Winter 1846

The morning was lifting the night away slowly, all around them a gray light coming in where there had been no light at all.

“You must go very, very carefully, do you hear me?”

Tia eyed them, raising an eyebrow.

Phil tried to walk away casually. The priest frowned at his back, upset.

“What are you doing?” Tia was suddenly behind him. Phil didn't answer. She walked over and looked boldly up at him. “What,” she said, “are you doing?” She was almost a foot smaller than he was. He hadn't realized how small. There wasn't much light, but he could see her well enough to take in her developing beauty, the soft angles of her nose, the deep color of her black-lashed eyes, the skin on her cheeks still smooth as a baby's, the tiny breasts budding. She took his breath away even when she was glaring.

“I'm, well, I was just going to . . .” Her stare penetrated his as effectively as a needle might a balloon. He began to deflate rapidly.

“Tia,” the priest said. “Let the poor boy alone.”

“I'm going in there.” He indicated over his shoulder the space he'd been babysitting all night. “I was just thinking,
that if the animal came in. I just thought . . .” He threatened to wilt again.

“He's going to help, Tia!” Ally exclaimed persuasively.

“That's right,” Phil said, daring Tia to contradict him. “I'm just going to go in there a little farther and block its way while I'm at it.”

In there? Tia tore her eyes away from her sister's hopeful face and peered doubtfully into the small crevice.

“I really did see something,” Ally went on. “A dog, I think.”

“You can't fit in there.”

Phil shrugged. “Don't know if I don't try.”

“No,” she said. “It's stupid. Don't go in.” Her hand was on Phil's elbow before he could speak. “You'll get crushed.” He looked down at her helplessly. “Don't be stupid.”

If he leaned forward just a few inches, he would be able to smell her hair. “I'm not,” he said. “I won't be.” Phil lifted her hand gently. “If I don't go . . .” he said, looking to the priest for confirmation or a challenge. Now that the daylight had come in through the cracks in everything, they could see some of what had trapped them. But the smoke was also creeping in. He lowered his voice so Ally would not hear, “. . . we might not get out, Tia. You know that.”

“That's not true,” Tia insisted, turning to the priest. “Tell him. They're coming for us.”

Their earnest faces were waiting for his answer. He took a breath.

“Tell them the truth, Jon,” Willie said, suddenly awake, her voice as startling as a prophet's or a ghost's, so that they
all turned to her expectantly. “You're right,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward Tia, “they'll come for us.” She locked eyes with the girl, who did not look away as she continued. “It's just a question of whether they can come in time.”

“Wake up, Max,” Vashti said. “Do you hear that?”

He didn't.

“I'm sure I heard something.”

“You probably did,” he said, wondering if he thought he'd heard something, too.

“You know,” she said a moment later, “I do have another story, but it's not a made-up story. It's a true story.”

“Tell me.” He no longer felt pain, just cold.

“When I was about seven years old, my family and I went to the beach in August. Ocean Beach, I think, for a family reunion. What a ridiculous idea! Ocean Beach in August. It was windy and chilly, with a blanket of fog so thick, I kept trying to reach out and touch it. We met what seemed like a zillion relatives when we went there. I guess it was my father's family. It must have been. God, there were so many cousins, Max! I wonder what happened to them all.

“Anyway, there were too many people around for anyone to really watch the younger kids, and I ended up climbing out onto the rocks, much farther than I meant to. I played for a while. It was nice. There were things to find out there. Nothing anyone but a child would think was treasure—just colorful rocks and shells the ocean had turned up. It was only when my pockets were full and I looked around for a place to
put another shell that I realized I was much farther out than I'd thought. I think it was just at that moment that my father noticed I was gone.

“The truth is, I hadn't been scared until my dad started yelling, but as soon as I heard him, I was totally petrified. When I could move again, I stumbled and got cut. It hurt so much and the wind was so bad and I was so afraid of my father shouting that I thought to myself,
Maybe it's better if I never go back. I could just disappear when the waves come, like a fish.
I used to pretend I was different animals after my mother died. Animals with abilities I could never hope to have. Gills. Wings.

“Then, from out of nowhere, Javi was next to me, looking at me as if I'd already left her. When I told her I was scared, she knew I meant of our dad, but she was still so mad to have almost lost me that she didn't say anything, just walked me to shore, rock by rock, showing me how to come back.”

“Vashti,” Max began. The smoke had gone from being a scent to being a quality of the air itself, hard to breathe and thick with heat.

A moment before the small tunnel he'd managed to forge collapsed on Phil, he was marveling at what he'd found: a fox kit, dead at his feet. He narrowly missed stepping on or beyond it. He tried to ease himself into a crouch, but the space was too close. From where he stood, he couldn't see its face, buried in its belly. Maybe it was only sleeping, curled so well into itself, as if its last posture had been intentional. But he knew that a small mammal would never have chosen such a
dangerous place to rest. He was bending down farther, trying to know for sure, when the careful balance over his head creaked and tilted. He froze, holding himself as still as possible, as if to reverse the charges of accidental movement. He heard a scream, possibly his own, before it came down on him.

“I can't read this, Si.”

“I don't get your meaning.”

She held out the copy he'd handed her. “It's all about the president's state of emergency, all the rescue efforts. It's just a bunch of acronyms: AMR, FEMA, HHS . . .”

And?
his expression said.

“What about the fires? All the buildings going down? We have good footage of the city now. Where does that fit into all of this? You want me to talk about fixes before the damage is even done?”

Si frowned at her. “When did you last eat?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Eat,” he said loudly. “Put something in your mouth that isn't coffee or cigarettes.”

It had been . . . she didn't know how long. The realization made her feel dizzy.

“Come, we'll talk while we walk.”

She followed him down the sand-colored hallway—everything here was the color of sand, every wall and floor and upholstered chair—toward the vending machines.

He fished a bill out of his pocket and fed it into the brightly lit machine, taking a second to choose peanut butter crackers
for her. “You aren't allergic, are you?” he asked, his finger on the button. She shook her head.

Her mouth was so dry that it was hard to chew.

“Listen, Ellen,” Si said, unwrapping the Snickers he'd selected for himself and leaning against the machine, “lots of young girls—I mean women—think they want to be a star until a day like today comes around. A story like this one? It isn't for the faint of heart.”

“I'm not backing off, Si, you know that. If anything—”

He held up a hand to stop her. “How badly do you want this, Ellen?”

Her look told him he shouldn't have asked that. He, more than anyone else, the one who signed her time sheets and answered her 3 a.m. e-mails, knew how badly she wanted it.

“I thought so. So I can't emphasize this enough: we have a responsibility to uphold here, to give people the information they want. That's what gives us a job, Ellen. You're not just a talking head, there to spit out what's delivered to you. You're there to deliver a story, a good story, one people think they need to hear. We can't just front-load with the fires and expect them to stay with us. People turn the channel when they see too many bodies. You know that instinctively, El. You guided Peter right into that spin, and he danced beautifully.” The chocolate smeared on the side of his mouth, and he used the back of his hand to wipe it away.

“This is no different. If anything, the right spin is more important than ever, considering the magnitude of what we're dealing with. What you say might mean the difference between getting the people in San Francisco the kind
of support they need and encouraging a mass exodus from Washington to Cabo San Lucas. You don't start with fire, with Americans losing their lives in real time, unless there's a better story behind it. That's not the case here. It's just a free fall, and it's our job to find that better story to latch on to. So you start with the president and the powers that be, let people know they're being taken care of, that the guys in charge are on top of it. Then we can ease into some of the footage, but most of it we keep off the screen until the city's looking better.” He wadded up the candy wrapper and tossed it into a sand-colored garbage can.

“I'm sorry, Si. But aren't we here to tell people the truth?” she demanded, an uneaten cracker still in her hand. He gestured toward it, and she took an obedient bite.

Si smiled indulgently. “We both know there's no such thing, ever, as the truth, Ellen. There are truths, plural, in the news world maybe more than anywhere else, and they need to be selected judiciously. If we lead with the worst of the worst, sure—it might be the most immediate truth we'll come across today, maybe in our careers, but people will tune us out if we don't filter it. They'll change the channel. And don't think for a minute that they won't find what they're looking for on one of the other networks scrambling for ratings right now. If it's not you delivering what they want, it'll be someone else.”

She shook her head, hesitant, about to object.

“Let me ask you this: Why is every other news story on global warming or the Middle East crisis or organic farming, for God's sake, so goddamn important?”

“Because they're current events?”

“Wrong. Only people who live under a rock don't know that global warming is a problem. Jesus Christ, you think we're actually here to wake people up? Hell, if we had footage of a burning bush and Moses coming down Mount Sinai, we couldn't wake people up. People take the information they want and do what they want with it. Ever notice when a group of girls goes missing we hear about it for only a few weeks, whether or not they're found? Ever seen something terrible happen with your own eyes that never makes it to the nightly news? When was the last time you saw a major network lead with the shit that's still going on in Darfur? Or Congo? Or eastern Chad? Hell, there are enough human rights violations going on every day in
this
country to fill a year's worth of airtime, and hardly any of it will make the news. People don't want to hear about things they can't or won't do anything about. They don't want to be terrified by the real water situation in California, or the truth about the state of education in this country. Things none of us can probably do anything about. And you can bet your ass that they don't want to see someone's grandma trapped on the twentieth floor of the Mark Hopkins with no one in sight. They don't want to see the dogs people had to leave behind, the abandoned fire trucks, policemen shooting first and asking questions later because they're panicking about crowd control. People only say they want to know everything because it makes them feel good about themselves, eyes wide open and all that. So we make them think they're getting an edge on information without bringing them too far out.”

He jabbed money into the machine and pulled out a soda for her and then one for him, handing over her can to pop and swallow, letting her wrap her head around what she needed to do.

“Let me ask you this,” he continued. “How much do you love this job?”

“You don't need to ask that, Si.”

He nodded. “Right. So if you want to keep it, you've got to bide your time, ride the waves. You've got to get people to love you as much as you love this job, Ellen, and they won't love you if you scare them shitless. They don't want the truth half as much as they want a face they can take information from and walk away feeling like they've got someone in their corner out there in news land, someone who gives them what they want when they want it.”

“So we lie?”

“We shape the truth appropriately. We don't lie. We never lie. But the facts can be told in lots of different ways. We just choose the way that will keep viewers with us.”

“But all this time . . .” she said.

“Different ball game, different plays.”

“Jesus, Si. What about objectivity? Integrity?”

“Objectivity's a myth.” Si slugged back the rest of his soda. “Or rather, it depends on how you look at it. You choose the object to present, and you do a damn fine job of it. Integrity isn't just about speaking your mind. It's also about looking out for the folks who'll be listening to what you have to say and take it to heart. C'mon.” He gestured to her food and the garbage before steering her back down the hall. “Let's get
you back on air, then in for another rest. I'll make sure you get thirty minutes, twenty at the least. It'll make more sense to you once you've slept.”

At the news desk, another layer of makeup freshened up the old, and Ellen scrolled through her iPad, confirming her notes.
How had it come to this?
she wondered. Si was now staring at her.

“You ready?”

She nodded.

A spot of makeup near her eye stood out. Si reached over and smudged it in gently with his thumb. “San Francisco's not any safer if people feel it can't be saved. In fact, a miracle's much more likely to occur if folks have a little hope. With every good story, there's a little hope, Ellen. You've just got to help people find it.”

She nodded again.

“On in ten!” the PA shouted. She'd stopped making eye contact hours ago, exhausted herself.

The on-air light was on a full five seconds before Ellen began all over again.