“My mother died when I was five,” Debbie said, putting the same strength in her voice she heard in Ellen’s.
“I hardly remember her at all. Some man hit her car. He was drunk. Dad told me that the man had never done anything wrong in his whole life, except hit my mother.”
“That’s a bitch,” Ellen said.
They both sat without speaking, moving their legs in the water.
“You know what I’d really like to do?” Ellen broke the silence.
“What?”
“I’d like to go sit on a pier and stare at the ocean and drink piña coladas until I fell over dead.”
Debbie giggled and kicked a soft splashy beat.
“And, that’s why I’m here,” Ellen sighed, “as far from the ocean as I can get. Sitting in the middle of a fucking desert.”
Debbie laughed.
“I know what I want to do,” she stated. “I want to be this great reporter, pounding out stories on an old typewriter, smoking a cigarette, my hair all messed up. You know?”
Ellen reached for her cigarettes. “You could be,” she said, “if that’s what you want.”
“What do you really want, Ellen?”
Ellen pulled her legs from the pool. The water and the night felt cold to her now.
“I want to go someplace where they don’t know what the Today Show is,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean a couple of years ago I went to Cape Cod with my mother. We were staying in this small inn right on the ocean. The first morning I woke up and I could smell the ocean and I heard the sea gulls. It was fantastic. A few days before I had been in New Mexico and now I was in a completely different world. Then, you know what I hear?”
Debbie shook her head.
“I hear the Today Show. That’s exactly what I heard every morning in Albuquerque when I was getting ready for work, the Today Show. There is no place you can go anymore. Everything is the same everywhere.” Now she was cold.
“Let’s go in and have some wine,” she said.
“Ellen, how old are you?” Debbie asked as she got to her feet. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ellen said. “I’m thirty-two. That makes me the oldest reporter in the newsroom. Any newsroom.” She gave her snort of a laugh.
“Yeah, but you’re the best,” Debbie said and smiled. She had found a friend.
20
Jason Osner thought the hospice was damn creepy. That wasn’t the way Debbie saw it at all.
“It’s all happy and bright and everyone is so positive,” she said. “They give them all the drugs they want so they don’t have to die in pain.”
Fine, but nodding patients weren’t his idea of great pictures and the only thing he wanted to do the two days they were at the hospice was to leave. And, there she was, talking about how happy the whole thing was, dying the way you wanted to die, dying with dignity. He wasn’t getting that on tape. He wasn’t seeing that at all.
To top it off, in every interview they did, somebody had to say that one thing about how their work at the hospice helped them accept their own death. And, after they said it, they all gave this open-mouthed grin. Fucking creepy.
“What about living?” he demanded on the drive back to the station. “I’d rather think about living than dying. That’s going to come no matter what I do, so why spent the rest of my life thinking about it?”
“That isn’t the way it was,” she argued. “They’re helping people.”
“You’ll see the tapes,” he told her. “You’ll see. All those patients were gray. They weren’t happy. And those other people weren’t that happy either. You’ll see.”
She watched him as he drove, the strong profile, the strong hands on the steering wheel, the muscular arms and the long lean thighs tight in blue jeans. He was wrong, she thought. It was a happy place.
She stopped at a drugstore before going home. She saw an old man moving slowly along the aisles. He reached for each rack, not so much to steady himself but to touch. He wore a light-blue golf sweater, fawn-colored slacks and a white baseball cap.
She watched as he bent close to the rack of thick, gold-wrapped candy bars and let his small, white hand touch them. She could see his blue eyes searching from behind the thick glasses. His fingers ran lightly across the gold foil. The tears caught in her throat.
It was that way all weekend. She was filled with tears and she knew what Ellen would say. She would say it was the hospice.
“What did you expect, Debbie?” she’d say. “I told you it was a depressing story.”
“And don’t tell me it was the hospice,” she begged when she finally did make the call.
“All right, so it wasn’t but it was,” Ellen said with a laugh. “Who wouldn’t come back depressed as hell, and then you go chasing some old guy around in a drugstore who probably has more money than God. Why do you have to worry about stuff like that?”
“I don’t know,” she sniffed back the tears.
“Listen to this, if you want depressing,” Ellen said. “I decided to take Brown at his word and do something light and happy for my series. That’s what he said he wanted, light and happy. I decided to do a series on local comedians. Last night I went to a comedy club to set it up.
“Talk about depressing, you don’t know the meaning of the word until you talk to comedians. Those guys are miserable. Now, what can I do, circus clowns? Talk about depressing.”
“I thought I might see a doctor,” Debbie said. “A therapist.”
“For what?”
“Well, I used to see one and sometimes it helps to have sort of a tune-up. What do you think?”
“Some of the guys I met last night could certainly use a few visits but I don’t see it for you. It was that story, Debbie. That’s all.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she agreed quickly.
“Why did you see one before?”
“I had some problems. No big deal. I saw one for a couple of months, that’s all.”
*
“A shrink? No way,” Jason told her. “You’re fine.”
They sat in the editing booth putting together the second part of the hospice series. He switched off the machines when she started telling him how she had been feeling.
“And when I was coming to work today I saw this little boy and he was all dirty and he was sitting on the curb and he had this scruffy little dog with him and he looked so unhappy and I started to cry. I started to cry all over the place.”
She bowed her head and clasped her hands tightly together in her lap. “It’s stupid, I know.”
“Christ, come on,” he rushed to say. “We’ll finish this and go for a drink. Okay? Two drinks, twelve drinks.” He patted her knee. “Okay?”
Jason was moved by the sound of tears in her voice. Until this moment he saw her as too cheery, too full of smiles. He had no problems working with women but he had never been entirely comfortable around any woman who matched him in height. This one was a big one, he smiled as he turned back to his machines, but there was definitely something about her.
“I’m sorry about breaking down,” she told him.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I cry all the time,” she said and laughed. “I do, really. I cry when I see some old lady using food stamps. I cry when I read the newspaper.”
“You are what is known as a blubbering fool,” he said.
“I guess so.”
“Hard to be a reporter crying over everything.”
“I do okay. Don’t I? Well, most of the time.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Yes, well, I wish I could be more like Ellen. She wouldn’t get all weepy about anything.”
“She’s a pain in the ass,” he commented as he shuffled through the box of tapes.
“Not Ellen,” Debbie said firmly.
“Oh, yeah? Nobody likes working with her.”
“That’s not true,” she argued. “She’s grea
t.”
“Okay,” Jason said, pulling a tape out of the box. “If you say so.”
He didn’t have much to say about Ellen Peters, not much at all. She was too much in charge, too much knowing what she wanted and how she wanted it. Christ, the thing she had about earphones.
“Don’t forget your earphones,” she said every time he started taking his equipment out of the van. Earphones? Who the hell wanted to carry those damn things around with everything else you had carry? So what if a couple of times you came back with some Mexican radio station jabbering all over your interview? It never happened on the big stories or the spot news.
No, he didn’t like Ellen. He heard her yelling at George one of those times when the audio wasn’t up to her standards. Who the hell knew why? Maybe it was his fault. Maybe not. Who knew?
“You tell that son of a bitch to use his earphones, George. He does this to me all the tine,” she was yelling.
It was easier working with the guys. You felt more like a team, the two of you against George. You could joke around, turn off the car radio. Harold Lewis was the funny one with those radios. He’d do the static bit.
“This is Unit Seven,” he’d start to answer one of George’s nagging calls. He’d roughen his voice and run his fingers across the microphone. At George’s end it sounded as though the connection was breaking up. Along with the scratching and some finger tapping, Harold would start dropping words.
“This is … to .. mayor’s …”
George would keep calling and demanding and Harold would say, “George? George?” while he scratched his nails across the mike.
“I don’t know what happened,” he’d tell George when they got back. “Something must be wrong with it. Better get it looked at.”
His eyes would be all innocent with that little boy face of his. What could George do? Harold was great and those art stories of his weren’t bad.
“Want to get something to eat?” he asked her.
She hesitated. “Why don’t we buy something and I’ll cook.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Sure I do. I love cooking and I don’t have anyone to cook for.”
“Okay,” he said. Why argue. He liked the idea. He liked her. She was a big ‘un but she was cute.
21
“How long has this been going on?” Ellen asked her.
“Oh,” Debbie started to blush, “a couple of weeks, but don’t say anything.” She glanced toward the other cubicles. “I don’t want it to get around.”
“It will. Everything does,” Ellen said.
“I don’t want people talking about it,” Debbie insisted. “I won’t say anything,” Ellen assured her.
Debbie nodded and smiled.
“He’s really nice, Ellen.”
“Not a doubt in my mind,” Ellen said.
Debbie hadn’t filled up with tears in the three weeks she and Jason had been together. She was too happy. Jason was happy as well, a contented laid-back happiness that would, at strange hours during the day, grow into a reaching, demanding passion. Jesus, why hadn’t he seen her before?
She was easy to be with and so relaxed about herself. Right after the first time, she was as comfortable as hell sitting cross-legged on the bed, naked. She walked around the room naked, the apartment. She didn’t grab for a towel or his shirt or the corner of the sheet to cover herself. She got up and paraded away. Boy, he liked that ass, that big apple butt. The breasts were small, yeah, and that made this strange for Jason. He was a breast man but with this girl it didn’t matter.
Sometimes she’d put on one of those nightgowns you could see through and he would watch her from the couch. She’d stand there, the curtain filtering the light from the window behind her and he would see her body beneath the gown. That would be enough to take him right off the couch.
The sex was good and he hadn’t been with anybody since Ashley and her big tits left for Washington. Damn her. He had planned on making the move too, but it didn’t work out. She was going to keep her eyes open and he was sending tapes, but nothing came through.
“What’s wrong with my stuff?” he shouted on their weekly phone call.
“I don’t think anything is wrong with it, Jason. I can’t tell them to hire you. I only got here myself and there isn’t an opening right now. Not now.”
“Maybe I should fly out there and look for a job.”
“Give it some time,” she suggested. “Give it a few months.”
“You’d be crazy, man,” Frank Kowalski told him.
“Don’t go following some bitch anywhere,” Jack Benton said.
“Whatever,” said Steve Kramer.
Ashley used to say, “We make magic together.” Back then he thought she was right, Now, he wondered. Who had done most of the work? He had. He worked hard on her stories and series, fighting to edit them. He showed her how she could tighten her writing to let his video tell the story. He worked with her in the audio booth. And who gets the big job? Not him. Had he been used? Could be.
He told Debbie about her. If he didn’t, somebody else in the station would.
“Right now I am damn glad I didn’t get a job in D.C.,” he told her.
Yeah, he liked this one, this big girl, right there to be grabbed. Right there for him.
He hinted to George that he liked working with her. Couldn’t hurt. That didn’t mean George would schedule them together. It might mean when there was a problem with another crew, some other photographer or reporter yelling that they wanted to work with anyone but the bastard assigned, George would remember that Jason and Debbie never gave him trouble. He might send them out together more often.
Everyone in the newsroom knew they were sleeping together, or thought they knew. Jason told Charles Adkins he was seeing Debbie. Adkins passed it on, not thinking much more abut it. Ellen told no one but when the story got back to her she said, “Yeah, I know.”
Nobody cared. What Debbie and Jason were doing didn’t affect their jobs or their stories. Still, they filed it away. You never knew when something like this might come in handy. Now it was worth only a few words, a nod, but later it could be important, grown to something that could affect someone. They might need it someday. Everything was worth knowing.
*
“So what do you think about this Debbie and Jason thing?” Clifford asked Ellen as they sat in the noonday traffic.
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s not my favorite.”
“He’s a good photographer.”
“Sure, if you don’t want to actually hear your story.”
Clifford chuckled. Things had been going well for him, real well. He was doing less and less of the grunt shooting and more medical shooting with Richard Ferguson.
“Specializing is where it’s at,” he told Ellen. “Ferguson says I’m a natural.”
Even when they warned him to look away at the first incision during the kidney transplant, that thin red slice when first timers hit the floor, he held steady. He pointed that camera right down at the place where the knife was going and he held steady.
“Good work,” Ferguson told him later. “You’re a natural. I threw up at my first operation.”
“Ferguson is going to tell George to keep putting me on the medical stories,” he told Ellen.
She could hear the pride in his voice.
“You’re right,” she said. “If you get to be a pro in one area, you can write your own ticket in the big markets.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. But, I don’t know if there’s a big call for medical stories.”
“Medical stories? Are you crazy? Everybody is doing it. You’ll be able to go anywhere you want. You’ll have the expertise plus the balance. You can do sports, spot news, anything, plus the medical.”
“Yeah,” he agreed happily. “You are right. Hey, look at that.”
He pointed to her window. A man stood on the sidewalk babbling to himself. He wore a long, tattered, gray coat. His eyes and ar
ms moved wildly as his lips kept up their constant, one-sided conversation.
“Now, that is something nasty,” Clifford moaned and shook his head.
The man’s trousers stopped well short of his ankles. On his feet he wore high-topped black sneakers without laces, the tongues hanging out, flapping as he shuffled and gossiped with the air.
“That’s what happens to old assignment editors,” Ellen said.
“Hell no, baby,” Clifford said. “That’s what happens to old photographers.”
They both gave snorts of laugher mixed with pity for the man and for themselves.
22
The diaphragm turned into a fiasco.
“You’ll like this lady,” Paige Allen told her. “She’s not a doctor but some sort of nurse or midwife. She fits you and shows you how to use it.”
She hadn’t used anything the first few times with Jason but she had been at the beginning of her cycle so she considered herself safe. She wouldn’t use birth control pills. She used them with Michael and they made her gain weight. She also believed, half-believed, they might have had something to do with her breakdown.
The woman who measured Debbie chatted as she worked.
“You see, most doctors, most male doctors anyway, don’t take the time to measure correctly. That’s why there are so many pregnancies with diaphragms, but if they are fitted correctly …” Her voice trailed off as her fingers poked and probed Debbie’s vagina.
“I haven’t had one unplanned pregnancy and I have been fitting diaphragms for three years.
“Here, you want to look?” she asked, her fingers still inside Debbie.
“No, not really,” Debbie said. She was sweating with embarrassment.
“You should, you know,” the woman said. “And remember to examine the diaphragm for thin spots or breaks before you use it.”
Arranged by size, a line of diaphragms was displayed on the counter. Debbie giggled at the largest one.
“No, it has nothing to do with that,” the woman said with annoyance. She picked up the diaphragm from the middle of the line.
The Best in the West Page 12