Hard News

34

Wrestle with it, fight it. Standing in front of Claire's hospital bed, Rune wore a white sleeveless

T-shirt and black miniskirt. Beside her was Courtney – who was no longer New Wave preschool. No more black and Day-Glo and studs. She was in her new Laura Ashley cornflower-blue dress and lopsided hair ribbon (it had taken Rune ten minutes to get the navy-blue satin to impersonate a bow).

A sharp, sweet smell was in the air. Rune didn't know whether it was disinfectant or medicine or the smell of illness and death. She didn't like it; she hated hospitals.

"Where's your mom?" Rune asked Claire.

"At her hotel," the girl said. "She was with me all night. That's something about mothers, huh? Abuse 'em all you want and they keep coming back for more."

Courtney clumsily set a paper bag on the bed. "I got this for you."

One-handed, Claire shook it open. Out fell a stuffed dinosaur. Courtney made it walk across the bed. "Rune helped me buy it," her daughter told her.

"How'd I guess?" Claire examined the plush face with serious scrutiny. "He's like sensitive and ferocious at the same time. You can really pick them."

Rune nodded absently. "It's a talent."

Fight it. Fight it down…

Claire didn't look good. She could sit up okay, with some help, but otherwise she was pretty immobile. Her skin was paler than Rune had ever seen it (and Claire was somebody who went as a vampire on Halloween the year before and hadn't bothered with a costume).

"I won't see in my left eye," she announced matter-of-factly. "Ever again."

Rune looked her straight in the good one and was about to offer something sympathetic when Claire moved on to another subject. "I got this job. At a department store. It's kinda bullshit. I have a couple bosses and they're like, 'Well, we'll try you out,' And I'm like, 'What's to try?' It's not, like, the best thing in the world but it's working out okay. Like listen to this – I've got health insurance? I got it just before I left to come down here. Man, they're going to get some friggin' bill."

This room was better than the Intensive Care Unit where she'd been for a few days. From here Claire had a view of rolling Jersey hills and the Hudson and, closer to home, one of Rune's favorite hangouts: the White Horse Tavern, the poet Dylan Thomas's hangout, where Rune had spent a number of afternoons and evenings with a literary and artistic crowd.

Hospitals were pretty icky but here at least you got a view and sunlight and history.

Claire was talking about her mother's house in Boston and how weird it was that nobody in the neighborhood wore black leather or had shaved heads and how she hadn't met any musicians or short-story writers but the one guy she met who she liked was a salesman. Wasn't that the craziest thing you ever heard?

"Crazy."

Rune nodded and tried to listen. The muscles in her abdomen clenched against the crawly feeling, like she was possessed by a space creature that was getting ready to burst out of her. Fight it down… Fight it!

Then Claire was into a travelogue, telling Rune and Courtney about Boston – Faneuil Hall and Cambridge and Chinatown and the lofts and antique stores around South Street Station. "There's this one really, really neat place. It sells old bathtubs that must be three feet deep."

Rune nodded politely, and a couple times said, "Wow, that's interesting," in an uninterested way, which Claire seemed to take as encouragement to keep rambling. Rune found she was holding Courtney's hand tightly. The little girl squirmed.

Fight it…

Rune didn't say much about Boggs or Maisel or theCurrent Events story. Just the bare bones. Claire must have known Rune was the reason she'd been shot and Rune wanted to steer clear of that. Not that she was racked with guilt – you could also say that Claire got hurt because she'd abandoned her daughter. But that got into the way gods or fate or nature worked and if you started thinking too much about cause and effect, Rune knew, it'd drive you nuts.

There was silence for a minute. Then Rune said, "I bought Court a new dress." Nodding at the little girl.

"Look, Mommy."

Claire twisted her body as far as she could so the unbandaged eye got a good look at the dress, and the way the young woman's damaged face blossomed with love as she looked at her little girl clearly answered the single scorching question that had been consuming Rune since Claire had returned.

When she considered it now, of course, she realized there really had never been any chance that Courtney could stay with her and she was mad at herself for hoping things might turn out otherwise. After all, she'd readThe Snow Princess. She knew how it ended. This business about fairy stories having happy endings -that was bullshit. Sometimes people melt. People go away. People die. And we're left with the stories and the memories, which, if we're lucky, will be good stories and good memories and then we get on with our life.

Claire was reaching forward, awkwardly, across the bed with her good arm, saying, "Did you miss me, honey?"

"Uh-huh." Courtney let go of Rune's hand and tried to climb onto the bed. Rune boosted her up.

Rune said, "So you're going back to Boston, huh? The two of you?"

Claire said, "Yeah, like, we'll live at my mom's until I can get some money saved up but apartments are cheap there. It shouldn't take me much time."

Fight it…

Rune swallowed. "You want, I can keep Courtney with me until you get settled. We're pretty good buddies, huh?"

The little girl was playing with the dinosaur and didn' t hear what Rune said. Or didn't want to. In any case she didn't answer. Claire shook her head. "I kind of want her with me. You know how it is."

"Sure."

"Look, Rune, I never said it but I like really, really appreciate what you did. It was a pretty bad thing, just leaving like that. A lot of people wouldn't have done what you did."

"True, they wouldn't," Rune said.

"I owe you."

"Yeah, you do. You owe me."

"The doctor says I can be transferred to Boston in a couple of days. And, guess what?"

Rune's face burned. "A couple of days?"

"I'm gonna take an ambulance, like, the whole way. Is that cool, or what? My mom's paying for it."

And with that Rune realized it was no good fighting it anymore. She'd lost. She took a deep breath and said, "Well, ciao, you guys."

"Aw, come on," Claire said, "stay for a while. Check out the doctors. There's this cute one. Curly hair you won't believe."

Rune shook her head and started for the door.

"Rune," Courtney said suddenly. "Can we go to the zoo?"

Pausing to hug the girl briefly, she managed, somehow, to keep her voice steady and to hold back the tears for the time it took her to say, "Before you leave, honey, we'll go to the zoo. I promise."

Rune remained steady and calm for the few seconds it took her to say this and walk out the door.

But not an instant longer. And as Rune walked down the corridor toward the exit the tears streamed fast and the quiet sobbing stole her breath as if she were being swept away, drowning and numb, in a torrent of melting snow.

"Look at this. Like a damn dragon burned me out."

Piper Sutton looked at her. "You and your dragons."

They stood on the pier, where the glistening, scorched hull of the houseboat floated, hardly bobbing, in the oily water of the Hudson.

Rune bent down and picked up a soggy dress. She examined the cloth. The collar was a little scorched but she might be able to cover it up with paint. She thought about the lawyer, Fred Megler, an expert at repairing clothes with pens.

But she sniffed the dress, shrugged and threw it into the discard pile, which looked like a small volcano of trash. Both the fire and the water from the NYFD had taken their toll. On the deck was a pile of books, pots and pans, some half-melted running shoes, drinking glasses. Nothing real valuable had survived, only the Motorola TV and the wrought-iron frames of the butterfly chairs.

"The 1950s were indestructible," Rune said, nodding at the frames. "Must've been one hell of a decade."

It was a stunningly gorgeous Sunday. The sky was a cloudless dome of three-dimensional blue and the sun felt as hot as a lightbulb. Piper Sutton sat on a piling she'd covered with a scrap of blue cloth -one of Rune's work shirts – before she'd lowered her black-suede-encased thighs onto the splintery wood.

"You have insurance?" the anchorwoman asked.

"Kinda weird but, yeah, I do. It was one of those adult things, you know, the sort that I don't usually get into. But my boyfriend at the time made me get some." She walked to the water and looked down at the charred wood. "The policy's in there someplace. Do I have to have it to collect?"

"I don't think so."

"I'm going to make some serious money there. I lost some really hyper stuff. Day-Glo posters, crystals, my entire Elvis collection…"

"You listen to Elvis Presley?"

"That'd be Costello," Rune explained. Then considered other losses. "My magic wand. A ton of incense… Oh God, my lava lamp."

"You have a lava lamp?"

"Had,"Rune corrected sadly.

"Where're you staying?"

"With Sam for a while. Then I'll get a new place. Someplace different. I was ready to move anyway. I lived here for over a year. That's too long to be in one place."

A tugboat went by. A horn blared. Rune waved. "I know them," she told Sutton, who twisted around to watch the low-riding boat muscle its way up the river.

"You know," Rune said, "I've got to tell you. I kind of thought you were the one behind the killings."

"Me?" Sutton wasn't laughing. "That's the stupidest crap I ever heard."

"I don't think it's so stupid. You tried to talk me out of doing the story then offered me that job in England- "

"Which was real," Sutton snapped. "And got filled by somebody else."

Rune continued, unfazed, "And the day of the broadcast, when you ad-libbed, the tapes were missing. Even the backup in my credenza. You were the only one knew they were there."

Sutton impatiently motioned with her hand, as if she were buying candy by the pound and wanted Rune to keep adding some to the scale. "Come on, think, think, think. I told you I was on my way to see Lee. He asked me if you'd made a dupe. I told him that you had and you'd put it in your credenza. He's the one who stole it."

"You also went through my desk after Boggs escaped. Danny saw you – the electrician."

"I didn't want any of that material floating around. You were really careless, by the way. You trust too many people. You…" She realized she was lecturing and reined herself in.

They watched the tugboat for a few minutes until it disappeared. Then Sutton said abruptly, "You want your job back, you can have it."

"I don't know," Rune said. "I don't think I'm a company person."

A brief laugh. "Of course you're not. You'll probably get fired again. But it's a peach job until you do."

"The local or the Network?"

"Current Events, I was thinking."

"Doing what? Like a script girl?"

"Assistant producer."

Rune paused then dropped a pair of scorched jeans into the trash pile. "I'd want to do the story. The whole thing. About the Hopper killing. And I'd have to include Lee this time."

Sutton turned back, away from the water, and stood up, looking over the huge panorama of the city. "That's a problem."

"What do you mean?"

"Current Eventswon't be running any segments about the Hopper killing. Or about Boggs."

Rune looked at her.

"Network News covered it," the woman said.

Rune said wryly, "Oh, that's right. I saw that story. It was about sixty seconds long, wasn't it? And it came after the story of the baby panda at the National Zoo."

"The powers-that-be – at the parent – decided the story should go away."

"That's bullshit."

"Can you blame them?"

"Yes," Rune said.

In her prototype Piper Sutton voice, Piper Sutton snapped, "It wasn't my decision to make."

"Wasn't it?"

Sutton took a breath to speak, then didn't. She shook her head slowly, avoiding Rune's eyes.

Rune repeated, "Wasn't it?" And surprised herself again by hearing how calm she sounded, how unshaken she now was in the presence of this woman – a woman who wore suede and silk and bright red suits, a woman richer and smarter than she'd ever be. A famous commentator, who now seemed abandoned by words. Rune said, "You'd rather the competition did the story? Prime Time Tonight orPulse of the Nation?"

Sutton stepped up on a creosoted railroad tie bolted into the pier as a car barrier. She looked in the water; her expression said she didn't like what she saw. Rune wondered if it was her reflection.

She said simply, "The story won't run onCurrent Events."

"What would happen if it did?"

"If you want to know I posed that exact question. And the answer was if it does the parent'll cancel the show." Then she added, "And I'll be out of work. You need a better reason than that?"

"I don't think I want my job back, no," Rune said. She'd found some of her old comic books; they'd miraculously survived both the fire and looters. She looked at the cover of a 1953 classic – "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle," who swung out of a tree toward a startled lion. The cat stared at her spear and radiant blonde hair and leopard-skin-clad hourglass figure – a physique that existed only in the luxurious imaginations of illustrators. "That's me." Rune held up the book. "Queen of the Jungle."

Sutton glanced at the picture.

Rune stacked the books in the small to-be-saved pile and asked, "Your conscience bothering you yet?"

"I've never had trouble sleeping at night. Not in forty-three years."

"You want my opinion?"

"Not really."

"You're caving, just to keep your paycheck."

Rune expected a tirade but what she got was a surprise – a small, hurt voice, saying, "I think you know it's not that."

And after a moment Rune nodded, understanding that Sutton was right. Sure, she'd bowed to the wishes of the executives. But the reasons were complex. She'd caved partly because she was hooked on the prestige and excitement that went with being a prime-time news anchor. Partly to keep a job that she'd fought hard for.

And partly – mostly – because Piper Sutton felt the world of journalism, and her ten million viewers, needed her.

Which of course they did. They needed the news handed to them by people like this, people they recognized, trusted, admired. An old boyfriend had once quoted somebody – a poet, she thought – who said that mankind can't bear too much reality well, it was the Piper Suttons of the world who cut reality into manageable little bites and set them out, pleasantly arranged, in front of her viewers.

"I put it in context." Sutton shrugged. "Boggs was innocent and you got him out. That's a good deed. But it's still a small story. There's a lot of news out there, a lot bigger news. Nobody says I've got to cover everything."

"I'll produce it independently." Rune sounded more threatening than she meant to.

Sutton laughed. "Bless you, babes, and more power to you. All I'm telling you is the story won't run on the Network. Not on my program."

Rune turned to face Sutton. "And if I do it, I'm going to mention the part about how they wouldn't do the story onCurrent Events."

Sutton smiled. "I'll send you the files and all backup, the stuff I saved from your desk. Give us your best shot. We can take it."

Rune returned to her pile of salvage. "It'll be a son of a bitch to do by myself."

Sutton agreed, "Sure will."

"You know, I could use a business partner. Somebody who was smart and knew the business. And was, like, abrasive."

"Likeabrasive."

"You wouldn't be interested, would you?"

"Wait – you mean quit my job and go to work with you?" Sutton laughed, genuinely amused.

"Sure! We'd be a great team."

"No way in hell." The anchorwoman walked over to the messy pile and began to help Rune pick through it. She'd hold up an object, and Rune would give her instructions: "Save." "Pitch." "Pitch." "Pitch." "Identity unknown pile." "Save." "Save."

They worked for a half hour until Sutton straightened up and looked at her smudged hands with a grimace. She found a rag and started wiping them clean. "What time you have?"

Rune glanced at her working watch. "Noon."

Sutton asked, "You interested in getting some brunch?"

"I can't today. I'm going to the zoo with somebody."

"A date, huh?"

"Not hardly," Rune said. "Hey, you want to come?"

Sutton was shaking her head, which Rune figured was probably her reflex reaction to invitations of this sort. "I haven't been to the zoo in years," she said, laughing.

"It's like riding a bike," Rune said. "It'll come right back to you."

"I don't know."

"Come on."

"Let me think about it." Sutton stopped shaking her head.

"Aw, come on."

"I said I'll think about it," Sutton snapped. "You can't ask for more than that."

"Sure I can," Rune said adamantly. The anchorwoman ignored her and together they crouched down in front of the pile of mystery artifacts and began picking through it, looking for more of Rune's damaged treasures.