Hot Mic!

by Jamie Collins

  Unfortunately, in addition to being a talented dance teacher, Charlotte was also a heavy smoker. In spite of this, Robert was loath to make her quit, as she derived, he would say, more pleasure from a single cigarette than anyone he had ever known. Regrettably, just three months later, at the crest of spring, unaware of the repercussions of the toxic effects of the nicotine and carbon monoxide mix on her already high-risk pregnancy, the fourth Courtland baby came prematurely, just shy of seven months—and lived only one day.

  Chapter 6

  1965

  The first time that Hannah ever saw her father cry changed her life. In the quick second it took to skip down the basement stairs and come upon him, head bent and weeping into his hands, glued her to the floor. He hadn’t seen or heard her. The transistor radio perched on the shelf was blaring the Stone’s tune “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” and the workbench tools dotting the pegboard were vibrating to the three-note guitar riff emanating from the tinny speaker. His massive shoulders were bent over and lifting and falling with his sobbing gasps. This was her hero—a man who could withstand anything. Who never showed fear or weakness, and who could fix everything that was ever broken. The death of baby Grace, as the infant had been named, reduced him to a mere mortal in a single, raw second, when everything that Hannah had thought she knew about being a ten-year-old in an otherwise flawed but bearable world, had changed in an instant. Dreams crumble, heroes fall, and life can rip one’s dreams in two. The worst of all evils had come and descended onto her once-pleasant world and took what was right, and beautiful, and true. No amount of prayers would bring her baby sister back or restore her vision of her father as infallible. Ever.

  She ran, crying, as fast as she could and as far as her legs would take her, all the way to the overhead pass of the freeway that curved above the pavement at the end of an empty lot a block away from their house. She pounded her fists into the dirt and stones until her pink knuckles bled as she cried into the wind. It was the end of everything that was ever safe and sure in her universe. It was the end of innocence.

  The newborn was buried in a cemetery that had a section for young souls. It took an eternity to drive to the cold, grassy landscape dotted with stone markers. First, was an elaborate ceremony that started with what her mother called a wake, in which relatives and friends came to view the tiny casket in which her little sister was placed on display in a strange house with several living rooms that were all filled with flowers and people streaming all about and who were speaking in hushed tones. No one really spoke to her or her siblings, who were ushered to the front of the room and told to sit on a worn-down couch that faced the baby’s casket. The whole ordeal felt creepy and daunting. Later, there was a Catholic Mass, which Hannah was grateful for, at Immaculate Conception of Mary Church, seeing as how by that time she was sure that it was Jesus who had taken her little sister to heaven, and she was certain it had been for some good reason, even though she could not imagine what that might have been. Giving little Grace back to God seemed like the right thing to do, at least according to her catechism. She knew better than to question what was better left to faith—a faith that now was pointedly shaken and had taken more from them all than just one perfect new life. Still, in that moment, her thoughts were no longer about her own grief. She only cared about her parents and her brother and sister.

  What about them, God? she had asked, as she watched her parents cling to one another in the pew, solemn and silent, huddling the family in close as the church bells pealed on that cold, gray day, an eerie and unnerving sound that she would never forget.

  It is a sweet notion of belief, as well as a sense of relief, in such a moment when a pure heart receives a revelation. It was then clear to Hannah in that instant that her path—her vocation— was decided. She would vow to comfort those in need. This would be her calling.

  Chapter 7

  Cuyahoga Falls

  2003

  The nurse wound the tiny music box that had been the woman’s favorite, hoping that it would soothe her restless thoughts and remind her of a sweeter time, in spite of the storm rolling in from the east and the darkness that fell like a shroud across the window where the snow had begun to fall. No matter. There was a man in a flannel shirt sitting still in the chair across from her. He was tall. He drew long, even breaths. Sitting there, she could tell that he could reach a vase from the tallest shelf or carry in a six-foot pine for the Christmas tree decorating. She liked the way he filled the room with a calm presence. He was vaguely familiar, she thought. Like the pretty melody floating from the bureau.

  Then a bluebird landed on her lap, but vanished when she reached to touch it.

  Chapter 8

  Cleveland, Ohio

  2003

  “Two minutes to air!” someone barked.

  It was hard for Hannah to believe. An innocent gesture had landed her a guest spot on a major market radio show. It was a listener who had tipped off the morning show producers to Dr. Hannah Courtland-Murphy’s unorthodox methods of counseling—and the rest was history.

  Two weeks later, she was plunked in the middle of one of the most significant turning points of her entire career.

  The show producer, Randy, a stringy-haired twenty-year-old with painful-looking acne and fifty-watt braces on his teeth backed Hannah safely in a spot near a corner desk. “Wait here, please.” He wore a black concert T-shirt with cut- off sleeves revealing bony white shoulders and a concave chest. All in all, he looked no older than Marc, her second-born, who was safely studying away at Virginia Tech getting an engineering degree. Thank God for that, Hannah thought uneasily, as she stood glued to the floor in horror.

  A few technicians whizzed by, taking no notice of her as she gazed curiously at the peculiar control panel; a labyrinth of blinking lights and twisted cables looking as if it could launch Sputnik into orbit.

  I must be crazy to be doing this! she thought, frightfully taking note of the large, glass-walled studio behind her with suspended microphones and equally foreign control panels and equipment looming. A white light box above the steel door, pronounced audaciously in screaming red letters: “ON THE AIR.” It glared so threateningly, she could barely breathe.

  Through the glass window, she could see them—Kip and Sidney of the famed Kip & Sidney Morning Show, seated across from one another, engaged in wildly animated conversation. They were WCLK’s morning show team, who took the fine art of bantering to new heights.

  On the set, they were fierce rivals, constantly debating opposing views on everything. In real life, they were loving husband and wife. A former lounge show act run out of Vegas for singing too little and talking too much, the duo found their calling in broadcasting. From time to time, the listeners were treated to Kip’s commanding mastery of the keyboards and a saucy rendition of a Lionel Richie tune. It was always good for a gag bit.

  Kip and Sidney were forty-year-old hippies. Engaging, smart, funny, and entertaining; appealing to audiences from fifteen to fifty, although primarily capturing the middle-aged, intellectual set and homebound housewives, signing on the airwaves at six a.m. on Cleveland’s famed “Click Talk-AM.”

  They started their day at the ungodly hour of two thirty a.m., reviewing newscasts from the prior day, poring over dozens of national newspapers, press releases, rag, entertainment, and trade magazines, and all manner of online gossip and fodder. After finishing their four-hour show at ten a.m., they would then eat what would be equivalent to a full course dinner; have a few hours to wind down, then draw the black-out curtains in their bedroom in order to simulate nighttime and “turn in” for the “day” at roughly four p.m.

  They would sleep for five hours and then wake to watch the evening newscasts at nine p.m. They ate “breakfast” at ten p.m., while taping the other networks simultaneously on five DVRs set throughout their house.

  Sidney enjoyed the quiet midnight hour for meditating and doing Hatha Yog
a, while Kip cooked gourmet meals he would freeze and store for the week. Free weekends were a commodity and usually reserved for camping down at Beaver Creek. It was a blissful, twisted existence. And they loved it.

  Sidney had received the tip from a listener about a woman in the community nick-named, “Dr. Mom,” who volunteered at their local wellness center, counseling wayward teens and battered women in the most unusual way—showing up in a mini-van with a baby in tow! Hannah, back then, was indeed unorthodox in her practice. She was known to follow each and every counseling session with a note of encouragement to the client written on the back of a homemade business card that included her personal phone number and email address if the recipient should need it, with an invitation to “write or call” anytime. Hannah would always include a cookie recipe printed neatly on an index card and a cellophane-wrapped parcel of peanut butter or sugar cookies, stating that nothing helped heal the soul quite like home-baked goodies.

  “Find me this woman,” Sidney charged, and greasy-haired Randy was on it.

  Within two days, he had dug up the “cookie lady’s” name and phone number.

  “We’ll have her on the show’s human interest segment,” Sidney had said. “Isn’t it darling how she gives all her client’s little pink cookie cards? What a hoot! Is she for real?”

  The Wellness Center verified that Hannah was indeed in excellent standing as an accredited family care counselor, offering her services—free of charge—one to two times a week. She was especially well-skilled at manning the crisis hotline, and was quite effective with the suicide calls.

  A busy mother of three grown boys and now a three-year-old toddler, Hannah still managed, nonetheless, to offer her time and expertise volunteering her services where she felt she could do some good for the community, as she had done after her boys were first born. Hannah still chaired on the hospital fundraiser, maintained the Murphy household affairs, including all finances for her husband’s medical practice—all in between baby yoga classes, PTA meetings, and running a home-based counseling practice of her own.

  Back in 1995, when her two eldest boys, Ty and Marc, were in high school and Broderick was eight, she had attended night school to pick up the remaining credit hours needed to complete her Bachelor’s degree in psychology and family counseling accreditation. Then, in spring of 2000, she earned her doctorate from Ohio State—after having learned that she was pregnant with baby number four just at the beginning of her final year. The news nearly floored her and the family. She had considered the idea of putting the degree on hold, but Peter convinced her to finish out the term. The miracle and surprise of a mid-life pregnancy at a time when Hannah believed her body to be well past its childbearing prime, was a sign of blessings yet to come.

  So, she embraced the miracle, and on a sunny day in June, at the quarter hour past noon, while Hannah’s entire graduate class was assembled in the auditorium to receive their prestigious doctoral degrees, she was giving birth to and seven-pound, four-ounce baby girl. She named her Olivia Grace.

  Chapter 9

  Cuyahoga Falls

  June 2000

  Hannah held the little pink bundle, still unable to believe that her body was able to bring such a miraculous wonder into the world. At age forty-five, and with things as they were in her marriage and with both of their hectic schedules and commitments, she’d wondered how on earth it even happened. But, ecstatic she was, beyond words—a sentiment shared by the entire ward at the hospital that viewed the eighteen-hour delivery as nothing short of miraculous. Remarkably, this had been, by far, the easiest child for Hannah to birth, but the labor was a cakewalk compared to the pregnancy.

  Her doctor was optimistic yet cautious and had warned Hannah of the potential issues associated with a high-risk pregnancy—high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, and a host of genetic risks, namely having a child with Down syndrome. As potentially expected, Olivia was born at thirty-seven weeks instead of the normal forty-week gestation period, attributed to Hannah’s advanced age. Hannah would later laugh that her new little daughter wanted to upstage her mother’s graduation by choosing that exact day to be born. “She’s going to be academic,” Hannah said slyly. “It’s a sign!”

  Luckily, Olivia was a completely healthy and perfect newborn.

  Hannah had been so certain that her early signs of pregnancy were that of pending menopause, since she had begun to miss her monthly periods on a semi-regular basis. She even took one home pregnancy test early on that came up negative. Still, she atypically had to use the bathroom constantly, had mood swings, headaches, bouts of nausea, fatigue, and backaches. The day that her OBGYN confirmed the true underlying cause, she nearly fainted.

  Getting used to the idea took some time, but Hannah secretly couldn’t have been happier. Carrying this incredible secret around and keeping it to herself was one thing, but telling Peter and the boys was going to change everything, so she decided to make it interesting. Just after the first ultrasound had been taken, she arranged to have the family together for dinner and game night. Having everyone together at one time was not an easy feat to pull off. Luckily, it was the Christmas holiday, and the boys were home from their schools. Peter had been evasive all week, as usual, and Hannah was already prepared for the possibility that he might not be able to join them. If so, she would wait until they could all be together. She wanted the element of surprise to be there for everyone equally. Plus, she wanted no chance that Peter would raise concerns. She fully knew the risks and was one hundred percent ready to face them.

  After dinner, Hannah had suggested that they play a game of Scrabble. “First, you are all going to get the same set of tiles and will need to rearrange them into a message. First one to do it is the winner.”

  She handed the boys and Peter a small felt satchel, each with fourteen tiles. She watched as they laid them out on the table. Broderick scrunched his freckled nose as he spied over at his brother Marc’s work. He, too, was struggling with the last part of the phrase. They both had: W-E and

  A-R-E and P-R-E-G . . ..

  Peter stood up, nearly knocking over his chair as the light bulb went off in his brain. “What! Are you serious?” He locked eyes with Hannah, who was smiling. It took her exactly a split second to see that he was not.

  “I got it! We are pregnant!” Ty announced, late to the game. “Who’s pregnant?”

  Hannah sheepishly grinned and raised her hand. The boys burst into shouts and laughter.

  “Oh my God!” Broderick kept saying over and over, wagging his head. “Is that even possible?”

  “Apparently so, dickweed,” Marc said smacking his little brother in the head. “Yikes! I hope it’s a girl. It would be really rad having a baby sister.”

  “Well, we will see,” Hannah said, feeling the cool indifference coming from Peter, who feigned happiness. She knew that it was the last thing in the world he wanted to deal with, and the sentiment simply crushed her heart. “Come on—I made a cake for dessert. Let’s celebrate!”

  Hannah had long ago decided that she was a one-woman show when it came to her marriage and matters of parenting. Why should this be any different? She would roll with it, just like she had come to do when coping with the curveballs that life was sure to throw at any given moment. The truth being, she could not have been happier to receive what was clearly a miracle.

  Chapter 10

  Cleveland, Ohio

  2003

  “Yours is quite a remarkable story,” Sidney greeted as an assistant fitted Hannah’s headphones, which kept slipping off her head. A few adjustments rectified the problem. She leaned forward into the microphone that loomed in front of her dauntingly. It was much smaller than Kip and Sidney’s microphones, and it did not have a fuzzy foam sock over it, either, like theirs did. She was seated on an uncomfortable high stool that wobbled when she moved. So she tried not to.

  The red light over the door meant
that they were broadcasting to God knew how many thousands of people at that very moment. It could have been hundreds of thousands for all she knew. The thought of it made her palms sweat. She wondered where the intern went with her purse.

  Sidney’s voice was sweet and melodic. She was so cool and poised, saying something to Kip that Hannah could not hear. He was scanning a page of copy. They both laughed at something amusing. Hannah was straining to hear through the muffled headphones.

  Sidney startled her. “Hannah. What is it they call you again? Dr. Mom, is it?”