The God Particle (19 page)

“Nothing,” Steve says. “Watching television. Reading. Trying not to go crazy.”

“Have you been in contact with anyone? Friends? Family?”

“No. I don’t want to alarm my parents yet. They wouldn’t understand. Besides, I’ve kind of felt like being alone.”

“I urge you to invite someone to your house. Inject a little human interaction into your life. It’s probably not helping to just sit there by yourself.”

“Okay,” Steve says, although he doubts he will take the doctor’s advice.

“In the meantime, with your permission, I’d like to contact this Dr. Dobbelfeld. Perhaps we can clear the air on the issue of your hospital stay and even talk to the nurse. If those two incidents can be explained satisfactorily, then all we’re left with is Svetlana’s death. And maybe one coincidence is something we can live with.”

“I know the likelihood of conspiracy is remote, but if somehow I turn out to be right, contacting Dobbelfeld means he’ll know I’m suspicious of him.”

“If you’re really being followed, Steve, it means they already know you’re here with me. All I’m going to do is contact him like any physician in my position would. If anything, it would make him
less
suspicious, since you obviously would have green-lighted the call.”

Steve smiles. Whether or not Dr. Taylor believes him, her attitude is reassuring. “Maybe, just to humor me, you could wait a little while before you contact him. Give me a chance to get used to the idea.”

“What do you say we meet a week from today?” she says. “Maybe we can call him together, here in my office. Do you think you’ll be all right until then?”

“I think so. I feel better already having talked to you.”

She walks him to the door and then offers her hand to shake. He notices a wedding ring on her left hand and wonders if she’ll ever tell her husband about the girl.

“We’ll see you next week, then. If you need anything before that, please don’t hesitate to call.”

2

Mike McNair is sitting beside her in the car, his right hand (the one not attached to a somehow-invisible steering wheel) tapping musically against his thigh. Kelly is watching him out of the corner of her eye, evaluating his silhouette against a backdrop of impossible colors, when his hand reaches and covers her own. He splays his fingers over hers, working between the gaps until their hands are interlocked. She smiles and turns toward him.

But it’s distressing somehow, the music, though she can’t quite say why. U2 sometimes does this to her, calls forth images from high school, a time when she hadn’t yet learned how to be comfortable with herself, when Bono’s tormented voice somehow validated her own angst. For no particular reason she happens to look in the back seat. James is there, mouthing silent words to her. She doesn’t really see his lips but she understands him anyway. Warning her. She’s late for work. But that’s silly because she knows this is a dream, she knows she’s asleep, and her workday doesn’t start until two-fifteen in the afternoon. Then the U2 song ends and INXS comes on, and the sound must be coming from her alarm clock, and she wonders how long the music has been playing and why she might have set the alarm in the first place, she
never
uses the—

She’s got that stupid staff meeting at nine, that’s what it is. The meeting to officially welcome Jeff Pearson, the new general manager. She’s afraid to open her eyes and look at the alarm clock. Her drive to the station could be fifteen minutes or it could be an hour. The traffic in this city. Maybe it’s only eight o’clock. If she’s lucky, seven thirty.

It’s 8:49.

Kelly grabs across the nightstand for the telephone. Dials Frank’s direct line and listens to the unanswered rings, to his voice mail greeting. She leaves a quick message explaining her situation and then tries his cell phone. He doesn’t answer that one either. She swears and hangs up and runs to the bathroom with the phone, and naturally it rings just seconds after she steps into the steamy waterfall of her shower.

“Kelly, where the hell are you?”

“I’m in the shower, Frank. I’ll be—”

“The
shower
?”

“Didn’t you get my message?”

“No, I didn’t. You need to get up here, Kelly. Now.”

“Frank,” she says. “You know I’m never late. Hell, I’m the
only
one who’s never late. I must have slept through the—”

“Just get here, Kelly. Okay?”

“Okay, I will. But what the hell is going on? Why are you so—”

“It’s Pearson. He was already here when I got in at eight. He’s been in a foul mood all morning.”

“Jeff Pearson?” Kelly asks. “In a foul mood?”

“Yes. Why?”

She stands there, wet and naked and cold, trying to picture the fist-pumping, wide-eyed Jeff Pearson in a bad mood. “When we met him in August, all he could talk about was how he let the employees run themselves and left decisions to the people doing the work and all that crap.”

“Maybe he woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”

“There isn’t anything I can do now except get there as quickly as I can,” Kelly says. “Try to cover for me, okay?”

“Just get here. I don’t like this guy’s attitude.”

Kelly hangs up and steps back into the shower. Frank must be overreacting, she feels sure, because it doesn’t make sense that Pearson would come into the station on his first official visit as GM and act like a jerk. For one thing it doesn’t fit his personality. For another, the relationship between general managers and on-air talent is usually an agreeable one, because a cast of smiling, familiar faces helps make for a successful evening newscast.

She quickly finishes her shower and then steps back into the bathroom, hopping from carpet to carpet to avoid the cold tile floor. Cringes at her reflection in the mirror, at her smallish breasts and wide hips. Pinches the roll on her stomach.
That’s just skin,
James always told her.
If you tried to tell anyone else but me that you were fat, they’d think you had an eating disorder.
He always said things to her like that when she complained about her body.
Your ass is perfect,
when she thought it was too big.
Big boobs age badly,
when she longed to be a C, even a D.
Guys love wide hips. They’re childbearing hips.
He was so charmingly innocent. She should have been mortified at the description of her hips as “childbearing,” but instead it made her feel special. Like a human being.

Kelly knows she should just put on sweats and go, but she’s never been able to leave the house without at least a little makeup. She pulls her hair back and works on her face for a couple of minutes, thinking about all those men who lust after her because she reads the news. All those men who think they know her and don’t.

She’s never felt like a pretty girl, after all, at least not compared to the standards set forth by royal princesses in her hometown of Augusta, Georgia. Raised among southern aristocrats who regularly rubbed elbows with celebrities and CEOs and golf legends, Kelly’s modest upbringing placed her squarely in the high school realm of nobodies. Her mother didn’t have money for the proper clothes and on top of that she developed late. All she wanted was out. Out of Augusta and out of Georgia, away from debutantes and garden weddings and the never-ending race struggle. So she worked her ass off in school. Skipped social functions and pretended she didn’t want to go on dates. Since no one was asking her anyway. Skipped the prom and even her own graduation ceremony.

In her closet she finds a blouse and a pair of jeans, adds a blazer, and then grabs a pair of shoes. It’s already 9:15. Hurries to the garage now and zooms out of her neighborhood, praying she doesn’t accidentally speed past a traffic cop.

At UVA she lived at the library and study halls. One day a preapproved Discover card arrived in the mail and she went out and bought some clothes. Good clothes, like the girls in sororities wore. It didn’t take long to realize that trivial enhancements to her appearance produced dramatic changes in male interest. Boys smiled for no apparent reason when she passed them between classes. They opened doors for her. They sat with her (sometimes asking, sometimes not) in the library, in study hall, on the lawn in front of her dorm. Sometimes they even asked her to share coffee or a sandwich over lunch.

If she was surprised how much of a difference real clothes made, nothing could have prepared her for a life in television. The love letters and death threats. Marriage proposals, underwear (from both men and women), and, on one occasion, sixteen dozen red roses spread over the floor of her tiny gray cubicle. She couldn’t understand why so many people cared about her makeup and hair, why men seemed so interested when all she did was stand in front of a blue screen at 6:30 in the morning and tell people to stay away from I-95.

She still doesn’t understand it.

The traffic on Highway 75 isn’t so bad after all, and Kelly makes it to downtown in a little less than twenty minutes. She squeals through the parking garage and then sprints to the elevators. By the time she reaches the office it’s almost 9:45, and she can tell by the sprinkling of staff in the newsroom that the planned welcome meeting is over. Kelly spots Ted Janzen, her co-anchor, frowning over a printout of some kind, but before she can ask him what’s going on, Frank leans out his door and beckons her over. She joins him in his office, still somewhat out of breath, and finds herself standing in front of Jeff Pearson.

“Hi, Kelly,” the new GM says, rising to greet her. He’s dressed in an expensive navy suit and smells like aftershave. “Nice of you to drop by this morning.”

“Hi, Mr. Pearson. Sorry I’m late. I must have slept through my alarm.”

“Oh, well. No big deal.” He beckons to the second visitor’s chair. “Please, have a seat.”

Kelly does, her heart beating even faster than during her run through the parking garage. New GM. Big meeting. Frank’s terse phone call. She wonders again about the likelihood of reorganization. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s not unheard of for a new GM to bring radical new ideas to a station. Maybe even a new pair of weeknight anchors.

“Kelly,” Frank says, “Jeff has some ideas for the evening newscast.”

“Oh,” Kelly replies. “What sort of ideas?”

Pearson clears his throat. “To be honest, I hate it when my main anchors come across like talking heads, and after watching the six and ten for a few weeks, that’s what I see from you and Ted.”

Kelly bristles. The “talking heads” stereotype is something particularly annoying, as if news anchors are simply robots smiling and reading stories written by someone else, as if she hasn’t worked ten years for the opportunity to sit in that chair and read that scrolling text.

“I see,” she says, glancing at Frank, whose bland expression tells her absolutely nothing.

“Now, I know that isn’t true. I know you and Ted put in hard years as reporters. You’re here for a reason. You’re among the top journalists in your field and paid well for it.”

“Thank you.”

“So what I want is for you two to spend more time in the field. I want each of you guys—we’ll start with one day a week—to do a story on location. Something relevant and lively to showcase the talents that got you here.”

Pearson turns to Frank as if to ask him something, but apparently thinks better of it.

“Which means,” he says to Kelly, “two nights a week, we’ll either have just one anchor on the set, or maybe we’ll bring in one of the weekend guys. I haven’t decided yet.”

Kelly sits there, not quite sure what to say, since what Pearson just announced isn’t anything like what she expected.

“I would love to do more hands-on reporting,” she tells him finally. “To tell you the truth, I kind of miss the rush of it sometimes, the chance to interact more with the subjects of our news stories.”

“Great,” Pearson says. “Then we’re on the same page here.”

“One question, though.”

“Sure.”

“Well, I guess this is a question for Frank, or both of you, I don’t know. Will I get to choose my stories? The features I do now, the softer stuff, are pretty much at my discretion. Within reason, of course. Will this be sort of the same thing?”

“Sometimes,” Pearson says. “I mean, if you’ve got something good, then by all means you should go out and do it. But this is something Frank is going to coordinate, at least at first. In fact, I’ll probably have a hand in it myself for a while. You already do ‘soft’ stories, like you said. What I’m thinking is more the breaking news. Harder stuff. That’s where we need our talent, where you can prove to Dallas that you’re not just a pretty face.”

“I didn’t know Dallas thought that.”

“Come on, Kelly, that story in
People
turned you into a national celebrity. This morning I searched your name on Yahoo! and came up with eight fan websites.”

Kelly offers a diplomatic smile, but there is no smile in her voice. “I know people in this city find me attractive. That’s not what I meant. I meant I didn’t know our viewers think I’m a talking head.”

“Hey,” Frank says. “I don’t think—”

Pearson’s own smile cracks, but doesn’t break.

“Let’s not get into a semantic argument, Kelly. You said you miss the rush of reporting, and I’m giving you the opportunity to experience a little of that again. There isn’t anything wrong with that, is there?”

“No, there isn’t. I just wanted to be clear about how you perceive my reputation, that’s all.”

“Okay, well, let me clear the air. I think you are a great news anchor, and I know our viewers agree. I just want them to see you flex your journalistic muscles a little more. How is that?”

“That’s fine.”

“Great,” he says. “Frank and I have discussed some ideas I’d like to roll out this week. Thursday and Friday. You’ll find them on your desk. Thanks for your time.”

“Thanks for yours,” she says, and finds her way out of Frank’s office. As she walks away, Pearson stands and shuts the door behind her.

3

Ted is hunched over his keyboard, right hand maneuvering the mouse as he clicks through stories on the wire. Kelly stops near his chair and grabs the memo, the one he was reading when she first walked in. Her eyes skip past a couple of introductory paragraphs that outline in black and white what Pearson just told her in person, and then she arrives at the details of the next week’s field assignments: