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  I had good reason to be thinking about mothers and children.

  Everything about the Cross-Crane story got dropped with news of the disappearance and possible kidnapping of Vice President Courtney-Phillips’s son. Reagan (Ray Gun to his friends) left school as usual the day before at half past three, driving the six-year-old Corsica he’d bought with his own money to the antiquarian bookstore where he’d earned that money, but he never arrived. Dialing home to check her messages, the vice president listened to a call from the store’s owner, Rob Rosenfeld. Reagan had never before missed a day’s work; Rosenfeld was concerned.

  “I thought these kids had Secret Service protection,” Mickie asked.

  “They used to. I guess not anymore,” said one of the researchers.

  “You’re looking into that, right?”

  “Of course.”

  Now they would be.

  We were all sitting around the long table in the conference room. Monitors fore and aft piped in news from the major networks, audio dialed out. Talking heads, grave expressions. Their hair was perfect.

  “So what do we have?” Mickie asked.

  She looked at Luis, our news director.

  “Bupkis,” he said.

  “The head of a pin would be too big.” This from his assistant. Luis came up through the ranks, OJT cameraman to editor to manager; his assistant had a degree in communications from the state university.

  “Great. So we’ve got a basket the size of Texas and not a single egg in sight.”

  “Yep,” Luis said.

  One of the anchorpersons was scribbling in her notebook.

  “Care to share, Lori?” Mickie asked.

  “I was just writing down what you said.”

  Mickie shook her head in amazement.

  “Here’s the plan, then. Every half hour we come on with a spot announcement. That’s it. Lori, you and Dennis put your heads together and work the spot up, twenty seconds tops. The vice president’s son is missing under suspicious circumstances, blah, blah. That’s it. Until we actually know something, there’ll be no speculation, no background, no interviews with experts—we don’t do puffed wheat.”

  Like a schoolchild, Luis raised his hand.

  “May I be excused to work on my résumé?” he said.

  “I know. I know.” Mickie’s eyes swept over us. “The backers and bean counters aren’t going to like this.”

  No one spoke.

  “We done here?” Luis finally said.

  Mickie nodded.

  “Back to our jobs, then,” Luis said. “While we still have them.”

  For me, until we had more on the boy’s disappearance, the big story of Cross-Crane now having gone small, that meant getting back to the Helton affair, i.e., trying to find some way to make viewers sit through three to four minutes about the controversy over which versions of a mostly forgotten film star’s movies would be burned onto DVDs and thereby immortalized. Studios had done their own cuts at release, but there was no archive of these. Who could have imagined the future would care? (No one was at all sure it did.) Back then studios ground this stuff out and put it on the road. Extant reels had been cut and spliced by two or three generations of projectionists, either to conform to time or gloss over lost frames. Hoping to be remembered, in his final years the star had ordered up his own versions, paying for them out of pocket. Unfortunately he’d left behind no will and six children who couldn’t agree on so much as today’s date.

  So he was remembered, and would have another spark of fame, albeit for the controversy and not for his movies.

  What I came up with was intercutting discussion of the controversy, plus interviews with his children and reminiscences from fellow actors, with brief scenes from the star’s movies that reflected back on what had just been said. A couple of times the overlaps were spooky, way too close to the bone; a couple more were funny as hell.

  Straw into gold. I’d taken a dull story and turned it into this small, polished wonder. That’s what Mickie said, anyway, right after she viewed the rough cut and said Holy shit!

  And here I figured I’d just found a way to kick a dead horse back up on its feet for one last quick run.

  “It’s a pretty obvious idea,” I said.

  “Ideas are worthless. What this is about is the things you’ve chosen, the way you’ve put them together. Individually, they’re nothing. Together … We’re not going to have you much longer, are we?”

  “You’ll have me as long as you want me.”

  Smoky gray eyes met mine and held. “You’re an exceedingly strange person, Jenny Rowan.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  The story broke three hours later, Lori’s twenty-second spot having run five times in the interim. It was indeed a kidnapping. A group of evangelical Christians (“We are soldiers for God”) claimed to have him. What did they want? Not money. (“We’re well funded, thank you.”) But they were concerned, mortally concerned, that America had strayed from its moorings. No one who read the Constitution could fail to recognize that it was little more than a mirror image of the Ten Commandments. We had to get back to basics. That’s what Jesus wanted.

  “Okay. I’m scared now,” Mickie said.

  “Before you ask—we tried,” Luis said. “Jesus wasn’t returning calls.”

  “So where are we going with this?” the station manager asked. I couldn’t remember his ever before having put in an appearance at the conference table.

  “Has anything like this happened before?” Mickie asked.

  “There’s nothing in our files,” Luis said. “I’ve got Sam and Lee hitting all the major databases.”

  “Evangelical Christians? What are they going to do if their demands aren’t met—baptize him?”

  “Christians are scary.”

  “No scarier than anyone else trying to tell others how they have to live.”

  “I’m Catholic,” Luis said.

  “We need a special, broadcast-ready within the hour,” the station manager announced, holding up a hand to ward off the protestations that began immediately. “Not me, folks. Word came down the line. From the top.”

  “We’ll have something,” Mickie said. “It’ll be crap, but we’ll have it.”

  So we went to work. This time I remembered to call and let Cheryl know I was going to be late. As I hung up, the first material started coming in from researchers.

  Work is good. I understand how few people manage to find their way to work that they love, and how fortunate I am to have done so. When I think about this, I always remember a man back at Westwood Mall. He had to be pushing fifty and there he was, minding the grill at a Greek fast-food place. But every sandwich he turned out, every plate of fries, every salad, it was like this was the only one, the one he’d be known by. He took that great a care. I remember him standing by the grill in slower moments looking out, watching people seated on the arcade as they ate his food, and smiling. Even then, stupid and eleven years old, I knew enough to know that he was a man to be envied.

  It turned out that the religious far right had nothing to do with it, of course—just a crackpot group making the claim to draw attention to the nation’s spiritual and moral shortcomings—and we wound up junking a lot of the work we did that day and night. Not uncommon in a newshawk’s life. Things like that happen when you’re hanging out at the edge of the world watching.

  Chapter 9

  It was 3:52 A.M. and dark as the inside of a sheep’s stomach, not a star in sight, when I came streaming out of the sky and crashed onto my bed. Sound of splintering trees, screech of metal, steam rising. In the distance a bird, perhaps a monkey, screeches tentatively. One by one the jungle’s noises start up again.

  I’d been hard at the loom, weaving truckloads of videotape, still photos, fragments of documentaries, and archived newscasts into digital information. We now had three thirty-minute spots on Vice President Courtney-Phillips, the kidnapping, and religious fundamentalism. Rough spots, but they�
��d do.

  “Go home, get some sleep,” Mickie told me.

  “Hey, I slept through most of that last edit.”

  One of two phones stashed in her blazer pockets rang. She answered, listened, broke the connection.

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “I never sleep much anyway. An hour or two and I’m okay—and I can do without that. Two or three days from now, I’ll start worrying about it.”

  Mickie had taken what the researchers and techs gave her and done preliminary cuts before passing them on to me for the edit. But my chief contribution was a composite of prior interviews with Courtney-Phillips. At one point Mickie stood in the doorway watching as I ran old interviews on four screens, jotting notes; after a moment she shook her head and left. The result looked good. If it hadn’t been for background, clothing, and hairstyle changing from frame to frame, you could easily believe it was a single extended interview. We’d have to run a disclaimer.

  Less than an hour after my head hit the pillow I was awake again. When I opened my eyes, swirling images gave way to elemental language: phrases and strings of words that bore no connection or meaning. Then these cohered to thought.

  Moonlight fell in a slant, a slab of marble, across the bottom half of my bed. For a moment I had the irrational fear that when I tried to move my legs they’d be held in place. Outside the window the silhouette of a tree stood, like something cut from black construction paper and pinned against the night.

  I closed my eyes again and lay perfectly still. Looking for that ever rarer sense of safety. Hoping to find, even for a moment, passage out of myself and into the world. Sometimes I can still recapture that, still manage it.

  But not tonight.

  How long had it been?

  A change in the quality of light caused me to open my eyes. Cheryl stood hesitantly in the doorway.

  “I heard what happened. With the vice president’s son. Reagan?”

  “Reagan, right. We don’t really have anything more, at this point.”

  “I knew that’s what you were working on, why you weren’t home.”

  I patted the edge of the bed. She came and sat.

  “I couldn’t sleep either. Can I get you anything?”

  I shook my head.

  “Jack Collins came by earlier. To see how I was doing, he said.”

  “He’s a sweetheart.”

  “He said to tell you hello. You should call him, Jenny.”

  Outside, a helicopter flew just above rooftop level. Its searchlight swept across the yard and struck the tree, bringing it to sudden, startling life, then moved on.

  “I will.”

  “Good.”

  We tried again for sleep but within the hour found ourselves sitting across from one another at the red-topped table in my red-and-white kitchen drinking tea. We could still hear the helicopter thwacking back and forth in the distance—or maybe it was another—as daytime sounds, passing cars, chittering, insistent birds, a neighbor dragging his recycle bin out to curb, began to aggregate.

  “What do I do, Jenny?”

  “What we all do. Put together a life for yourself. You’re just getting a late start.”

  Cheryl turned her face back from the window.

  “I’m supposed to be making life decisions, right? So I go to Stephano’s with a list of things to pick up and half an hour later I’m still standing there by the condiments. There are three dozen kinds of pickles on the shelves, a dozen different breads. I can’t decide what kind of pickles to buy, can’t choose a loaf of bread, but I’m supposed to plan the rest of my life?”

  “But you did it, you did decide, that’s the thing. And it was a great meal.”

  Before she ducked back out of sight, I caught a momentary glimpse of the twelve-year-old peeking from within.

  “Thanks, Jenny.”

  “More tea?”

  “Sure.”

  I drained the pot. She dumped three spoons of sugar into her cup.

  “Ever watch a bird build its nest?” I said. “It’s got part of a vine, a clump of matted hair, maybe a piece of cloth, some twigs and grass, God knows what else. But somehow it all gets plaited together, turns into this place she lives. That’s what we all do—it’s no different.”

  Cheryl finished her tea and went back to bed, again. I called in to let the station know I’d be late. Mickie answered, saying there was no way she’d expected me till afternoon if at all.

  “Tell me you haven’t been there all night.”

  “Tell me you got some sleep.”

  “Why are you answering the phone? Where’s everyone else? Where’s Grace?”

  “Everybody else is just about where you are, one way or another. Lost between. As for Grace, her husband went bad again last night, he’s back in the hospital.”

  “Grace?”

  “Okay, I think. Not like she hasn’t been through this before.”

  “She’s at home?”

  “With the phone off the hook. Her daughter’s on the way in from Iowa. I had a bunch of food sent over.”

  “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Coming on nine?”

  “I’ll be in within the hour.”

  “No hurry. We’re pretty much on automatic here. The first two spots you put together have aired twice. Response is phenomenal.”

  “What about the third one?”

  “On hold. Sources now suggest that the kidnapping claim was fraudulent.”

  Try as I might, I couldn’t remember a single thing about the mini-documentary on religious fundamentalism I’d assembled only hours ago.

  “Anything more?”

  “Nothing we credit.”

  I showered, slid into black jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of Rimbaud on it, well-worn hiking boots I’d bought the day I got my GED. Hair tied back and keys in hand, I checked on Cheryl, who was sound asleep, and put food on the back steps for the neighborhood cat who came to visit most days. Snake was slipping in next door with a package of Snuggies; I waved. Stopped for a banana muffin and coffee at Sweet Beans, a local hangout for cops; then, after starting the car, turned off the engine and went back in to order two dozen bagels and assorted spreads. We’ve all been trampled underfoot. We’re all just kind of wandering around. Neighborhood cat or news pro, someone’s gotta put food out on the steps for us.

  Bloated and blimplike, the day went by in a blur of empty updates via e-mail and fax, talking heads on national and local stations, snippets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered caught on the run, plow-down-sillion finishing work on a number of upcoming spots. Fine cuts and sauces might be in the offing; meanwhile our audience required its meat and potatoes.

  Around three I called Jack Collins. An operator or receptionist answered and put me on hold. I’d almost given up when Jack’s voice came on the line, replacing what sounded awfully like a commercial Hawaiian take on Schoenberg.

  “Miss Rowan. WAAT, isn’t it? I’m afraid I have no comment for the press.”

  “Good—since the press isn’t looking for a comment.”

  “Hang on, Jenny.” He spoke to someone there by him: a rapid, coded exchange. “Sorry again.”

  “No problem.”

  “I’ve been calling. Spoke to Cheryl last time out. She tell you?”

  “She told me.”

  “I knew you’d be crazy busy, too. With all this.”

  “You’re right. Been a rough couple of days for all of us.”

  “That it has.”

  “And I really don’t want to just go on working with the hammer down, getting home halfway into the next day to eat shit for food and half pass out, then go back in for more of the same.”

  “Perfectly understandable.”

  “Thought maybe you and I could meet after work, have a drink somewhere.”

  “Presumptuous of you. But if by some chance you got hungry, I might even be willing to spring for dinner. Have to check at the ATM first, of course, be sure
I have funds.”

  “Always push it, do you, Collins?”

  He laughed. “Guess I do. I was six weeks early—just not willing to wait, my mother said. Started college the summer after I graduated from high school at seventeen, finished my degree in two and a half years.”

  “Whoa!”

  “Took the detective’s exam the very day I qualified and passed. Full-tilt boogie, as a friend of mine, a Southerner, put it. So maybe it’s time for a whoa.”

  He was waiting outside the station a little after six. Gray slacks, blue blazer, open-neck pearl-gray shirt. Rubber mask of Nixon looming above.

  “One of your heroes, I take it.”

  He tugged off the mask and threw it into the back seat where, collapsed upon itself, its smile became obscene.

  “Not really. Interestingly enough, it’s a hands-down favorite among robbers.”

  Shutting my door, he leaned down to the open window.

  “Is this pushing, too?”

  “Absolutely. But it’s a nice push. Where are we going?”

  To a neighborhood bar, as it turned out, Billy’s Daylight Lounge, owned and run by a retired cop though inhabited by locals. Walls hung with photos of patrons in police blue and military dress. American flags everywhere, even perched atop the toothpicks.

  “White wine.”

  “Bourbon, beer back.”

  Though neither of us had anything material to offer or add, we talked for a while about the kidnapping, then over nachos and second drinks fell to serious negotiations. Collins could pay for the drinks and nibbles, no problem there, but I insisted on handling dinner.