In Plain View (10 page)

“Exactly.” The word resonated in her lovely voice as a sort of challenge. She looked down at her watch and said, “I’m sorry. I have another appointment coming in a few minutes. You’ll have to excuse me.”

Ainsley interrupted with some polite noises and smoothed the moment over. Interview over—and I was three for three. Strikeout.

We wound our way out of the place as fast as I could follow the signs.

“You okay?” Ainsley said.

“Fine,” I lied. My face felt hot. The curse of fair skin is transparent emotions. The doctor’s words had shaken something that my sister’s death hadn’t even managed. I’d spent my whole life alerting adults to the trouble ahead—behind, everywhere.

I’d never doubted that work.

“Now what?”

I put my sunglasses on before we stepped outside. “We make some more calls. See if someone else is willing to do an on-camera.”

Ainsley looked confused. “But the doctor said it could be dangerous.”

“There’s always somebody who doesn’t want you to tell the story, College.” The artificial cold of the hospital lingered in my voice. “Always. Sometimes they sound so reasonable.”

The doors swept open and we walked out, shoulder to shoulder. Cold, hospital-scented air-conditioning evaporated into the dusty afternoon heat. I sucked in a lung full and tried to warm myself inside.

The boy didn’t give up. “But…what if she’s right?”

4:35:29 p.m.

By the time we returned to the station, I’ll admit, I was looking for an excuse to drop on somebody. Two days on the job and I had barely ninety seconds of air time covered. No photos, no sources, no cooperation from anyone—except my Boy Wonder.

I sent Ainsley to get us an engineering booth so we could load my stills in the computer and went to find out about my new office.

Barbara, Gatt’s opposable thumb, greeted me with the carefully neutral face of someone who knows a lot more than she’s telling you. I stood still for another once-over and she showed general approval of the absence of leather. When I asked about my office, she blinked her Raggedy Ann eyelashes, frowned and unwrapped herself from her phone headset.

“Follow me.”

Swear—we walked three and a half, four minutes, tramping all through the building until we finally arrived somewhere deep in the old tape library. She pointed her finger that away. Crammed in a niche between two eight-foot tall stacks, at the farthest end of a corridor, was the ugliest work cube in the Midwest flatland. No chair. No computer. Oh, and no phone.

“Mr. Gatt said you needed something private. They’ll install the phone next Monday or Tuesday,” she assured me, all practicality. “PC should come in the week after.”

“Great. Sure they will. You want to lead me back to Gatt’s office, or was I supposed to drop a trail of bread crumbs?”

She looked at the ground, got the smirk under control and executed a sharp turn. “Right this way.”

I banged Gatt’s door wide while knocking, and called out over his voice, “I got a problem here.”

The door rebounded shut behind me.

“I’ll call you back.” Gatt slammed the receiver down. It didn’t ring again, although the lights started twinkling frantically; Barbara must be holding the line, so to speak. “What the hell’re you thinking? You don’t knock?”

“I knocked. What the hell are
you
thinking? I told you, I need an office.”

He did a quick paper shuffle. “I told them to set you up.”

“Yeah, they set me up, all right. Whichever wise-guy had the idea to make me Bob Cratchit in the tape dungeon gets a big hee-haw, Gatt. I need a desk and a phone and a door I can fucking close.”

“Oh, Christ, not again,” Gatt whined. “I’ll try and talk to operations.”

Both palms flat on his desk, I leaned in toward him. I could feel the grit of spilled sugar under my hands. “You do that.”

“You get me anything to look at today?” he asked.

“No.”

“You want to be a pain in the ass, O’Hara, you’d sure as hell better come across with something I can sell.”

“No pain. No gain.” I stood up and brushed my hands clean. “I’ll get you a story. You get me an office.”

Climbing your way up television’s mythical ladder of success to the point you are—
ta da!
—someone is a hell of a lot of work. The effort it takes to hold your ground, continue being Someone, is worse. I wanted an office to get my job done, but I
needed
the office to rate some respect.

Flashbacks of Schmed’s killer handshake and the good doctor’s voice and Sheriff Curzon’s death-ray eyes all spliced into one lousy day, and the paranoia started kicking in. Was everyone in this suburban backwood salivating at the thought of my crash and burn?

Barbara was doing some life-or-death typing as I passed her desk. I noticed the extra-large jug of ibuprofen sitting beside her elbow.

“You mind?” I asked, reaching for the bottle.

“Help yourself.” She opened another drawer and passed me a packet of soup crackers. “I like four on a saltine this time of day.”

“Tasty. Thanks.”

She raised her hand to wave away my gratitude.

So. Not everyone was rooting against me.

All right then. Back to work.

The minute College and I finished logging photos, my cell phone rang. Jenny’s teacher, a Mrs. Horner, was calling to ask if I would stop by her classroom. “I’ll be here at school until six tonight. I’m very concerned, Ms. O’Hara. Please make sure to stop in and see me this evening.”

Of course, I told her.

Ainsley must have seen me blanch because he chucked me on the arm and said, “It can’t be that bad. It’s Friday, remember?”

“And what exactly does that fact mean to you, College?”

“Beer.” He shrugged. “All night videos. All day nap.”

The blue glow of the monitors in the darkened room made it harder to read facial expressions. I leaned back in my chair to make sure he didn’t miss mine. “We have ninety seconds of usable material, to fill six minutes of national air time, on a story I don’t even know is gonna
work.
”

“No problem. It’s not due ’til Wednesday—that gives us both Monday and Tuesday to work on it.”

“And Saturday. And Sunday.”

“Oh.”

“That’s right, College. Beer and video all night if you want, but I want you in the truck, in my driveway by—” he looked so horrified, I decided not to ruin both our days completely, “—noon tomorrow. We’ll start by picking up Melton’s research on our mysterious Amish fireman.”

5:46:60 p.m.

School was the one place I didn’t have to worry about Jenny. Or so I thought.

“The art teacher didn’t take attendance. Jenny wasn’t missed for almost an hour. I think she was sitting in the girls’ bathroom the whole time. Jenny refused to talk to me about it.”

“I don’t get it.” My sigh was embarrassingly loud. “She ditched
art?
”

Jenny’s school was a bright white labyrinth of wide halls and darkened classrooms. I’d found her teacher, Mrs. Horner, before collecting the kid from the after-school gig. Had to leave my driving gloves on to shake the woman’s hand; my palms went slick the minute I walked through the front door. Catholic school didn’t leave a parade of fond memories through my elementary education.

“I don’t really understand either, Ms. O’Hara. She told the art teacher she didn’t want to make pictures. This kind of defiant, secretive behavior isn’t like Jenny. She’s always been a pleasure to have in class.” Mrs. Horner was a third-grade teacher straight from central casting: the careful coif, the Talbot’s wardrobe, and the friendly, direct manner—sort of a cross between Martha Stewart and a Zen Buddhist—a rigorously satisfied, female perfectionist. She offered me another pained smile. “Is everything at home…all right?”

“Her mom died a few weeks ago. I don’t see how anything could be right.” I rubbed my forehead where the pounding was the worst, mostly talking to myself.

“Ah. Yes, of course.” Mrs. Horner discreetly studied her hands. “Is she getting any kind of counseling?”

“Counseling?”

“With a therapist. Grief counseling can be so helpful.”

“Uh, no. Not right now.”

The woman nodded, her expression so concerned and earnest, I felt like sticking out my tongue at her.

“I appreciate the head’s up. I’ll talk to Jenny.” I pumped reasonable-ness into my voice, until it was thick as sugar syrup. “Believe me, Mrs. Horner, Jenny is priority-one right now. I’ll do whatever it takes to make this right.”

Maybe if I kept saying it, somebody would start believing me.

She nodded again and finally agreed to lead me through the school to find Jenny.

The after-school program was held in the gymnasium. It didn’t look that bad. The kids had games and craft supplies. There was a low din of hustle-bustle to the place. Nobody was making them sit in perfect rows with their hands folded and their heads on their desks or anything.

We found Jenny sitting by herself at one of those plastic mini-picnic tables, watching the other kids play. I still couldn’t understand the problem. The kid ditched
art?

“Hey, Jen. Time to go.”

She dug her backpack from the bottom of a sloppy pile against the wall and trailed me out of the place without making eye contact once.

“Heard you had a bad day.”

I got the slantwise nod. We walked to the parking lot and I tried draping my arm over her shoulder. She was so small. I expected the gesture to pull her closer, but it felt like I had too much arm to make it work.

“Thought you liked art.”

Jenny sighed. “We were making flowers.”

“Huh,” I said, as if I knew what the hell she was talking about.

“Caryn said she had to have the pink paper because that would match her mother’s wallpaper. She just like, took mine.”

“Yeah?”

“Caryn was like ‘’cause you don’t need it.’”

Little bitch.
“Huh,” I grunted again.

“I didn’t care,” Jenny tossed at me, her voice clear and fragile as glass. “I didn’t feel like making flowers anyway.”

We’d walked all the way across the parking lot before the girl managed to spill those five sentences. I handed her a helmet and balanced the bike between my legs, while Jenny scrambled onto the buddy seat.

“Watch your legs.”

“I know.”

The pipes were still hot. I’d burned myself plenty of times riding behind my dad, but my warnings were redundant to Jenny’s cautious soul.

The neighborhood got pretty lively this hour of the day. Kids screaming all over the place with the joy of Friday’s freedom, driveways suddenly sporting Dad’s shiny four-door beside Mom’s dinged-up van, and drifting on the breeze, the hungry smell of barbecue grills firing up the last of summer’s feast.

I took the long way home, feeling Jenny’s hands wrapped around my middle, her helmet pressed hard between my shoulder blades. It’s too noisy to talk while riding. The kid’s head barely clears my elbows.

“Hang on,” I shouted, as we leaned into the last turn. “Hang on tight.”

What else was there to say?

6:19:42 p.m.

Jenny followed her aunt into the house and went to hang up her jacket. She noticed what was wrong right away. It made her feel creepy. “Aunt Maddy?”

Her aunt popped her head around the kitchen door. She’d gone straight in there to pull something from the freezer for dinner.

“The door’s open.”

“Yeah? I unlocked it.”

“No. Mommy’s door.” Jenny tried to say it loudly but her throat was too tight. “Mom’s door is open.”

“Lasagne or chicken?” Holding two boxes of Lean Cuisine, her aunt walked into the hall. She saw Jenny staring.

The door at the end of the hall, the one that led to her mother’s bedroom, was standing wide open.

“That’s weird,” Aunt Maddy said. “Did you go in there?”

Jenny shook her head no. “Did you?”

“No,” Aunt Maddy said.

They both stared at the open door. Her aunt frowned.

“It must have blown open or something. I left a window cracked in my room today. That’s probably it. Pull it shut for me when you go down there, would you?” Her aunt went back to the kitchen.

Jenny walked down the hall toward the room. She stopped in the doorway. Her heart was beating fast. She looked around. Empty. The room looked…ordinary in the daylight. Not the way it did at night. She took hold of the door knob, feeling calmer.

As she turned her head, she noticed it. The drawer was open.

Her mother’s picture drawer in the bedside table was hanging open. Empty. All the pictures were gone.

“What’s wrong?” Aunt Maddy asked. Like magic, her aunt was suddenly standing right behind her.

Jenny felt her body fly out in all directions at once.

“Whoa.” Aunt Maddy touched her shoulder. “Easy, kiddo. I didn’t mean to scare you. What’s up?”

Guilt stuck in Jenny’s throat. Where did the pictures go? If she told her aunt about the pictures, she’d have to tell her about being in the room. She didn’t want to talk about that.

“You haven’t been messing around in here, have you?”

“No. Not me,” Jenny answered.

She wasn’t lying. It was more like a wish.

9:55:00 a.m.

“She’s here!” Jenny called.

I heard the door open and my friend, Tonya Brown, made her usual entrance.

“Mmm, mmm. That’s what I needed this morning. How does someone so tiny give such good hugging? Your auntie awake yet?”

“She’s awake. Did you bring polish?”

“I did.”

Their feet clomped above me, then echoed on the wooden steps down into the basement.

“Hey,” I called from the treadmill.

Tonya marched over and clicked off the CNN. “Non-business hours, honey. It’s music time.” She popped a best of En Vogue CD into the player and winked at Jenny.

The first time Tonya Brown made the trip out to my little ranch was the day after my sister’s funeral. She’d brought her gym bag and my entire free weight set, scavenged from my north side apartment. The suspension on her drag-ass POS car would never be the same.

God, was I glad to see her.

Every Saturday morning since, she’d come to work out and hang out with Jenny and me. Jenny liked her, too. A lot.

Tonya was an ER nurse at County Hospital when I first met her. I’d been hired to develop a story on inner-city emergency-room medicine. It wasn’t that far from my usual material. The executive who did the hiring had used me several times that year. Maybe he liked my eye for stills, or maybe someone tipped him off that I needed down time after Afghanistan. That was the summer I drove Peg into a sidewalk mailbox near the intersection of Sheridan Road and Jonquil, two days before the Fourth of July. Kids were playing with fireworks; I thought somebody was shooting at me.

Anyway, Tonya and I hit it off. Whenever I was home for a few days, T and I got together at my apartment on Saturdays. We lifted weights in the morning, drank margaritas until dinner and spent the rest of the night in a quiet restaurant complaining about work or men, or work and men.

When my life changed, Tonya found a way to keep the healthy part of our tradition going. We still worked out on Saturday mornings, Jenny fiddling with something nearby. Lately, the two of them had bonded over hair and nails. Tonya is the only weight lifter I know who maintains her relaxed grip on the bar by virtue of three-inch fingernails. Today, they were painted electric green.

Jenny was impressed. “Tonya, could you bring the green nail polish for me next week? It’s awesome.”

“Sure, baby.” The bar clanged as she finished a set. “This girl’s got sophisticated taste, Maddy. Not everybody appreciates my green.”

Or her chartreuse unitard. Or the matching beads clackety-clacking as her extensions swung above her shoulders. Of course, only an idiot would fail to appreciate the entire package.

“Huh,” seemed a safe enough answer. I timed it to an exhale on my leg press.

Tonya twisted one elbow high beside her ear for a triceps stretch, while fishing around in her giant bag with the other arm. She grabbed a handful of something prescription level and chased it with water. “Don’t eyeball me, Maddy O’Hara. I’m clean and legal here.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.” I shifted the pin on the weight stack for my last set of reps, cleverly looking the other way. “How’s the back?”

“Oh, just shitty. Sorry, baby, don’t listen to that nasty talk.” She must have told Jenny not to listen fifty times a day. “I may have to take another promotion if it keeps acting up.”

“Why are you lifting if your back is bothering you?”

“Please,” she cut me off in her Top Administrator voice. “I’m a trained professional. Bicep curls are good for me.”

“What’s with the meds?”

“Pain slows healing.” She winked at Jenny, who was trying not to be noticed watching us. “I take a couple of these and feel no pain at all.”

When T left the ER to become Director of Nursing, part of the reason was the added challenge. Most of the reason was the disc she’d blown rolling a road worker off a bed onto a gurney. Another reason T and I were friends—she understood pushing harder than made sense.

Sweat popped everywhere as I cranked out my last two presses.
I can do this. I can do this.

“I think I’ll need two coats of purple,” Jenny announced. “I like them really dark. Next time though, I want to try orange and green.”

“I think that’d be very…autumn. Now I’m going to do one more set of curls, baby, so I can still beat your auntie arm wrestling, and then we’ll see about braiding your hair. Sound good?”

Jenny gave Tonya a pressed-tight smile, the one that always seemed to me as if she was hoarding her happiness.

I swung my legs around the bench and sat up. Exhaustion hit me hard.

All Tonya had to say was, “Would you go run and get me some more water, baby?” and we had a moment to speak privately.

“Thanks for coming out today and hanging with the kid,” I offered.

“Daylight hours are no problem. It’s those midnight runs that kill me.”

“Uhn,” was the best answer I could manage.

“Any more bad nights?”

“Not since the last time I called.”

Things had calmed down since the school routine had gone into effect. Midsummer, I’d had a bad spell. I started slipping out at night when the kid was sleeping. At first, I’d walk to the mailbox and come right back. Then I went all the way to the corner and back. One night I walked all the way to the highway and back. That night, I got back just before dawn. Jenny was still sleeping peacefully.

But I knew we had a problem.

The next time I had the urge to walk away, I called Tonya after Jenny fell asleep. She came, no questions asked. I always returned before Jenny woke.

“Work’s helping?” Tonya asked.

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“Talk to me, Mad-dee.” Tonya teased my name out.

I had hung a clock on the wall across from my treadmill, so I didn’t have to feel the clock in my head while I worked out. It’s always there, :60, :30, :10, bumper, commercial, joiner. Out. How much time did we have to talk privately? Minutes, if I was lucky. I usually worked myself up to these kinds of conversations, over hours and an entire pitcher of margaritas. Another lifestyle change: pruning my emotional life into the time limit that fit around Jenny.

Tonya leaned back against the wall and patted her face with a towel, as if we had all the time in the world.

“This story I’m working on. It’s got something. At first, I was afraid it was pretty run-of-the-mill creepy sex stuff, you know. But there’s something else there.” I tried to shake it off. Make it seem less significant.

She gave me her careful eyebrow look, the one that indicates concern mixed with you-crazy-white-girl.

I don’t know why I tried to explain; I’m sure she’s right. “I spent the last few years in the field doing nothing but war and disaster. Half the time, I’d end up talking to the head guys because nobody worried about talking to a girl.”

We shared a long suffering eye-roll.

“And even though I sucked at first, figuring out how to ask questions and get answers, wearing masks to hide my disgust, hiding my fear—I wanted to do it. I believed.”

She nodded and picked up the barbell I’d just finished using, adding ten pounds to either end. She needed all the strength she could muster. Cynicism and hope were the left and right ventricles of a nurse’s heart and soul.

“Sometimes, I was so afraid.” Muscle memory caused a familiar burning roil below my diaphragm. “But I didn’t want to stop. The stories mattered. They mattered to me.”

Tonya gave me the blank look. “You are going to have to spell this one out. You’re losing me.”

“I’m just saying there’s something in the stuff I get attached to that kind of worries me. You know—with Jenny around now.” I popped my last three curls, breathing fast. My skin tingled, warm from the effort. “Damn. I’ll shut up now.”

“No. Say it.”

“In my head, I hear my J-school profs yelling, ‘You interview experts, you aren’t the expert. You report the news, you aren’t the news.’ So I try not to get involved, but there’s something underneath the stories I want to do that scares me.”

“Sounds normal to me. You want to know what’s under the rock. Remember how you obsessed about Dr. N?” Dr. Norman was part of my emergency-room story. He’d been in and out of recovery programs. He was good at two things that should have been mutually exclusive, high pressure healing and drinking. My theory was he used them both the same way—full body forgetting. “And it made a great story.”

“If I was in a hurry, I could do something with the lead I’ve already got on this story. Splice in some network research on deviant sex and I’m done. No brainer.”

“So why don’t you?” The words puffed out as Tonya curled.

I shrugged.

The weight clanged back into a resting position. Tonya took one deep breath, studying my face the whole time. “Then be about your business. Investigate. Report. Figure it out, baby. Figure it out. For yourself and the rest of us.”

Upstairs, the doorbell rang.

We both looked up, listening to Jenny’s feet run across the floor upstairs. Her voice filtered down to us. “I’ll get it.”

“How’s she doing?” Tonya asked softly.

“Okay, I guess.” I dropped my bar and everything sagged. Resistance was the better part of what kept me upright lately. “She ditched a class yesterday. Teacher asked me if she’s getting any ‘help.’”

“Like a shrink?”

“I guess.”

“Shit.” Tonya sighed. Therapists would not have been widely utilized in Tonya’s childhood neighborhood. Too hard to do therapy on somebody who doesn’t eat regularly. “You know any shrinks?” she asked.

“No.”

“You want me to ask around? Get you the name of someone good?” People who work in a hospital know better than anyone that they call the guy who finished last in his class at medical school “doctor,” the same as all the rest.

I sucked a long swallow of water. “I think she just needs some time. Her mother
died.
She ought to feel shitty. I do.”

“Yeah.” Tonya plopped her butt on the bench press and looked at me. “How bad is it?”

I stalled to get the bite at the back of my throat under control. “I got a six-minute story due in four days, jack-all in the can and my back-up is Opie the Boy Wonder. Jenny still wakes up screaming once a week. This house I’m living in is triggering flashbacks to my misspent youth and my prescription for Xanax has expired. I’m great. Just great.”

“I can help you out with the Xanax.”

“You’re a pal.” The only towel I could find this morning was embroidered with daisies. It made my sweat feel especially dirty.

Tonya smiled. “There’s always boarding school.”

That got a grunt.

One of those nights I’d run for it, I returned with a half-baked plan to sell my sister’s house and pack Jenny off to boarding school. My frugal sister had managed to build some decent equity. In the current market, I figured I could get the kid all the way through high school on that money. Summers, I’d let her stay with me, or she could go to friends. She’d make lots of friends at school, right?

Tonya had listened to the whole plan, one eyebrow cocked, television on in the background rattling on some typical morning news about a kid who’d gone missing and parents who were frantic. She’d clucked her tongue and dragged me up the hall to look in at Jenny dreaming. The room was warm with sleep, and smelled of what I knew to be Jenny and thought might be my sister, or even mother.

“No boarding school, yet. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Tonya answered. “Only one of us allowed to have a breakdown at a time.”

“I’m not having a breakdown.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m fine.”

“Fucked-up. Insecure. Neurotic. Emotional. Yeah, you’re
F-I-N-E,
all right.”

There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs and who should appear? Ainsley’s happy head popped around the corner. “Hi there.”

Jenny hadn’t followed him. I could still hear her feet shuffling around upstairs.

“Hi yourself. Who’s this?” Tonya drawled. Her posture altered and her chameleon-colored unitard suddenly took on that queenly nonchalance that only black women can pull off in lycra. Ainsley was suitably impressed.

“Meet my Boy Wonder,” I grumbled. “Ainsley Prescott. Tonya Brown.”

He reached out to shake her hand. Ainsley’s version of weekend casual wear consisted of a gray T-shirt—tucked in—and ironed blue jeans. The shirt hung loosely across his shoulders, his collar bone and shoulder blades cutting into the drape of the cloth at the back. Ah, young boy bones.

“And what a wonder he is. Very pretty. He gay?”

“Not sure,” I said to rile him. “Never came up.”

“Not,” Ainsley replied dryly. “I give demos, if you’d like to resolve any doubts.” He pressed a palm over his heart and smoothed it down his chest, stopping when his fingertips tucked in his waistband.

Tonya cackled, “Ooh, I like him.”

Uncle Rich would not be amused.

“Back upstairs, College.” I inserted my sweaty self between them, herding him toward the steps. “You’re early.”

“No beer. No videos. I woke early.”

As I hit the top of the stairs, Jenny came stumping out of the kitchen with a can of pop in her hand and cotton stuffed between her toes to protect her polish.

“Give me five minutes to change,” I told Ainsley. “Then we can run and meet Melton.”

“Are you going somewhere?” Jenny’s voice stretched to a squeak. Lately, even walking out to the road to get the mail out of the box, I’d heard that same question, in the same tone of voice.

Come on, kid. Keep it together.
I answered slow and steady. “I’ve got to go pick up some stuff from the local newspaper. Tonya’s going to stay here with you.”

“How long will you be gone?” Tonya stepped behind Jenny, using her whole body to soothe. No hands, just a solid presence at the girl’s back.

Why couldn’t I do that, give her comfort automatically? How do you learn that?

“Not real long.” I saw the raised eyebrows of skepticism. T had offered to stay all day, if I needed it. Until that minute, I hadn’t realized how much I did.

“Okay,” Jenny mumbled. She wrapped her arms around her ribs and her shoulders rolled forward into two sharp points. Her chest seemed to cave in at the center.