Day Three

by Patricia Spencer

  He worked through the day, preparing a list from which he would assign work to Marga and the research staff. He would start writing, cross-referencing his topics to the available footage and roughly identifying the segments he could assemble to illustrate them.

  The big challenge was how to portray savagery without using footage that was so brutal it caused psychological damage to viewers. Though he could issue warnings at the outset and after commercial breaks that the material was intense, he couldn’t control what happened in peoples’ living rooms. What if parents were watching, and children wandered into the room?

  What had Aya been thinking, picking such a topic? Had she, with her gifted intellect, actually believed she could make sense of Kavsak—or any other war? That she could rationally explain inhumanity? He slid open his right lower desk drawer and plucked out the folder she had started on the project. Most of her notes were typed, but there were margin notes—afterthoughts, new ideas—added in her meticulous handwriting. He re-read the familiar pages.

  Late in the afternoon, he went to the kitchenette and brewed a cup of coffee. Peeling back the lid on a creamer, he poured it in and stirred, using two stir sticks, which were only marginally less ineffectual than one.

  A man’s voice carried down the hallway. “And this is the Documentary Production area.”

  A tour? On Sunday?

  He picked up the hot mug in one hand, a couple paper napkins in the other and stepped into the hallway.

  He narrowly avoided colliding with Sol Esterman, who was with Nancy Portway, Jim Lance, and three other EBS board members. He recognized the other board members from corporate photos although they had not personally met. Sam Chisolm, trailing the cluster of execs, stepped into view.

  Along with Hugh Driscoll.

  Daniel froze. Looked from one to the other. Shot Sam a questioning look.

  Sam returned a discomfited glance.

  “Oh! Uh…” Sol sputtered awkwardly. He turned to Driscoll. “Daniel. Ellsworth. He’s one of our Executive Producers. You know each other, I believe?”

  Driscoll nodded, aimed a smug look at Daniel, and buried his hands in his pockets.

  “Hello, Daniel.” Nancy Portway stepped forward and offered a warm handshake. “It’s so nice to see you.” She introduced the other board members. Collectively, they looked like a bouquet of self-importance.

  Tucking the paper napkins into his pocket, Daniel shook hands with the board members he hadn’t met before and nodded to the known ones, not too noticeably omitting Driscoll.

  Sam stepped forward, clapped his shoulder. “Hard at work, are you Daniel?” He turned to the others and described the new Human Condition series and the pilot on Kavsak.

  “Well,” Daniel said in the lull afterwards. “If you’ll excuse me…”

  The board members bid farewells and nice-to-meet-yous.

  A few steps down the hall, Sam caught up to Daniel. “I’ll come by later, when—”

  Daniel gave him a clipped nod, went into his office, and closed the door. He set his mug on the desk and slumped in his chair.

  Stunned.

  His fear was confirmed. Sam hadn’t started handing his work off for a reason. The board was interviewing other candidates for Senior Vice-President of Programming. They were swinging candidates through on Sundays when he wasn’t there. Showing them the turf that he had expected to inherit.

  His brain pinged from thought to thought like a steel ball in a pinball machine.

  How long had this been going on? Since Sam announced his upcoming retirement? Or had the board been dissatisfied with him longer than that? Who else knew? Had he been standing obliviously tall among his staff while they whispered behind their hands that the board had yanked the cord on the chain saw and was ready to topple him?

  Sam had been with them. Had he defected? Was he no longer an ally? Did he not believe in him, either?

  Christ. Hugh Driscoll. The man who feared Aya’s sharp mind, her drive, her talent—and crushed her. Relegated her to the shadows while he gave himself top billing and claimed her successes as his own.

  What if Driscoll got the job, and became his boss? Even if Daniel could find a way to hold his head up despite the humiliation of being passed over for the promotion, he couldn’t work with him. Driscoll had hurt Aya. That wasn’t something Daniel could get past. If Driscoll got the job, Daniel would have to leave EBS. This development wasn’t just about a promotion. His livelihood was at stake.

  Sam’s characteristic tap at the door interrupted his thoughts. The old man’s cowboy boots clip-clopped across the hardwood floor until they were muffled by the rug in the conversation area.

  Daniel pushed his legal pad aside and took the wing chair across from him.

  Sam waited for Daniel to speak first.

  “Nothing like an ambush,” he said. “Are you one of the sharpshooters?”

  “I wouldn’t piss on Driscoll if he was on fire.”

  “Care to tell me why the board is recruiting outside the company?” He didn’t want to ask, didn’t care to hear his shortcomings enumerated, but the issue needed to be addressed.

  “They want a horse that can cross the finish line by more than a nose.”

  “I’m an also-ran, in other words. Or damned near.”

  “You’re drifting out to the side of the track, Daniel.”

  True to his Texan origins, Sam called the race as he saw it. No amount of tact could have made his statement easier to swallow, in any case.

  “You’ve been drifting,” Sam added. “Since Aya. They’re not convinced you can get back in the race.”

  He stared at his shoes. It didn’t feel good to be found wanting.

  “They’ve given you time, son. It’s been two years.”

  He nodded, too mortified to trust his voice. All his life, he had worked hard to never find himself in this position. Put in ninety-hour weeks. Arrived at six, worked through lunch, left at midnight. Smoothed things over with difficult clients. Hired people, fired people. Unraveled snafus. Pinch-hit. Followed-up. Resolved. Prodded. Delivered. Weekends, he took work home, or came back in, only to plow through the Monday-to-Friday that followed.

  He had traveled extensively. Weeks out of the same month, he was gone from home. Slept alone in hotel beds—so often that he sometimes forgot what city he was in. He glad-handed strangers, attended conferences, promoted EBS, its content, its mission, its programming. And then he boarded other planes home, spending hours aloft, squeezed between more strangers, working on his laptop the whole way.

  Arriving, exhausted, to a dark home and his sleeping wife, he had put his head on his pillow for six hours, and started again—despite the jet lag, the prolonged absence from the woman he loved, and his yearning to spend time in the beautiful home he rarely saw.

  In return for all this, awards poured in. Promotions. Pay raises. Larger offices. Reserved parking spots.

  He remembered the criteria of corporate success.

  But for the life of him, he could not recall what he had been working on that was so important on that last morning of his life with Aya and Joseph Alden in her belly, that he had plucked his half-warm bagel from the toaster, not even stopping to butter it, and only called upstairs to say goodbye. What had he been doing that was so critical—so crucial—that he couldn’t take two minutes to properly embrace his family as he left the house?

  He looked up, suddenly runny-nosed, and saw Sam silently watching him.

  If he had spoken his thoughts aloud, Sam could not have been more surprised than he himself was. For all these years, he had made EBS’ goals his own. He had lived his career but not his life.

  “You ever look at the awards gallery?” Daniel asked.

  Sam looked perplexed.

  “The one outside my office, Sam. Do you ever stop there? Do you remember which shows we got them for? Do you remember any of them changing the way you lived as a man?”

  “Son. I don’t spend much time staring at dying embers. I’m
more concerned with building fires. And that’s what—”

  “No, Sam. I know what you want. What I don’t understand is why. Why be so hell-bent on winning awards when all you do is walk past them, and forget what they were for?”

  Sam’s gaze sharpened. “This is business, Daniel. It don’t matter what they mean. It just matters that there be a wall-full.”

  He leaned against the seat-back. “Is that what Driscoll has? A wall-full?”

  “And fresh ones. He looks good on paper. Cleans up well for interviews. Got folks so dazzled by the big hat, they forget to look for cattle.”

  “So where do you stand on this, Sam?”

  “I’m holding a fistful of bets that you’ll cross the wire ahead of him. I’m out there boasting,” he said. The doubtful look he gave Daniel, however, said he feared he was holding worthless chits.

  In that moment, Daniel saw himself as Sam must. An old gelding, plodding out of the barn, standing in place of the thoroughbred that had once pranced with excitement.

  Sam stood up. Looking down on him, he said “I’m advancing the deadline. I want to see a rough cut by the end of the month.”

  “What?”

  What the hell was Sam thinking? The time frame was impossible. The finished program would be ninety minutes long, but the running time of the camera-originals and other source materials was ten times that. It all had to be reviewed, catalogued, assembled. A script had to be drafted. Even a rough cut required hundreds of hours of collective effort.

  Why was Sam imposing an artificial deadline? What was the point of that?

  In a sudden humiliating rush, the explanation came to him. To give himself time to scratch you from the race and bring in someone else who could finish. A wave of heat burned through him. The sheriff hadn’t drawn his pistols, but he had his hands near them.

  He never thought he’d see the day he might be asked to resign and be escorted out by corporate security guards.

  Brenna stayed up listening to music and playing a desultory game of Scrabble with Gary while she waited for Daniel to get home. James was in the armchair, nose stuck in an issue of The Economist. Between overdoing it on her two a.m. expedition up the stairs, and taking two pain killers, she had slept through breakfast.

  When she finally woke, she had used the walker to get to the bathroom by herself. She was sore and unsteady, but didn’t call Gary. She wanted to see Daniel’s private space just as he had seen hers in her hotel room in Kavsak. His suits hung neatly in the built-in cherry wood closet, through which one accessed the bathroom. His freshly-starched work shirts—white, blue, gray, striped—were piled on open shelves. His collection of silk ties was conservative, except for a Superman tie that by its gaudiness declared itself a gag gift.

  The marble-topped vanity had double sinks in front of a fully-mirrored wall. One side had toiletries, and a bottle of Old Spice aftershave beside it. The second sink was unused. It had probably been Aya’s side. She pictured them, the tall American and the petite Japanese woman moving around each other in a smooth dance as they got ready for work, or prepared for bed at night.

  Her mind slipped to an image of them, freshly-bathed, making love in that big bed she had just slept in, and felt a shiver of jealousy. There were people who knew how to maintain long-term relationships.

  Not like her, already thirty years old before she stumbled across Ari. The three years they’d been together seemed like a fluke, an outlier in the data set that could only be explained as an error. Their success as a couple, she often thought, had been more his doing than hers. She’d just awkwardly hung on, eyes shut tight, hoping nothing was coming at them.

  Of course, it did. In the form of 125 kilos of explosives, sitting in the trunk of an old Toyota parked at a curb in Tel Aviv.

  “Your turn,” Gary said, picking up fresh tiles, not bothering to add up his word score. She didn’t play for points. Points meant nothing. She picked an A, U, and E off her rack and set them on the board, creating ‘PAUSE’. “What time is it?”

  Gary turned his wrist. “Almost ten.”

  “Do you think he’s all right?”

  Daniel had called around five, told James he had to stay late and not wait dinner. At around eight, Daniel’s mom called. Gary chatted her up, filled her in on the day at the ‘Ellsworth Estate’ and after half an hour of easy conversation, hung up, conveying her greetings to Brenna and James.

  She glanced at the French doors. She and Daniel hadn’t spoken since her early-morning appearance in his room, and all day she kept thinking about the mix of emotions she had seen cross his face when she asked if she should go. In the end, he had addressed her with the innate grace James had identified in him. Of course she was welcome, he said. But she feared that the sub-text had really been his misgivings: Sure, stay. Break my heart. Drag me through more.

  When he came home, would he treat her coolly? He had apologized for interfering with her family—withdrawn himself from a category of assumed involvement in her life, exactly as she had demanded. Now, irrationally, she fretted she’d be cheated of the very thing she had spurned. She was worried he would be true to his word. And it was Daniel, after all.

  “God,” she mumbled, thinking about her behavior. How did the man put up with her?

  She heard his car purr into the driveway. The door closed with a soft thump. The backyard lights came on. He climbed the deck steps and crossed to the door, walking like he didn’t trust his body.

  Her breath caught.

  He had that stunned look she had seen on men’s faces in Kavsak as they stood in the ruins of everything they had built. Daniel lifted his face, looked in at them, and smiled. It was not a false smile, but a shift, an effort to leave behind whatever had brought him home looking as if his life had turned to ashes.

  “Gary,” she said.

  He lifted his head instantly, alerted by her tone of voice, and saw her nod in Daniel’s direction. Gary shot him a quick glance, muttered “whoa” and jumped up to open the door. Daniel had his keys in his hand but couldn’t seem to find the right one.

  Gary swung the door open for him. “Hi, honey. You’re home.”

  “Yes,” Daniel glanced around the room, forcing a smile, acknowledging each of them in turn. “At last.”

  James set down The Economist and stood up. “We saved you dinner. Did you eat?”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “We’ll nuke it. Come on, Gary. Let’s set a place for him.”

  The two men headed for the kitchen.

  Brenna studied Daniel intently as he crossed the room. She lifted her face for a kiss. He pressed one against her forehead. Sliding the Scrabble board aside, he sat on the coffee table, facing her, cupping her knees with his hands. “Good day?”

  The emptiness in his voice, the muted life force, shocked her. She ignored the question. Reached out for him.

  He leaned forward, circled his arm around her waist, thinking she was the one who needed the embrace.

  She felt a snap when he touched her, an arc of his pain into her own viscera. A dark, amorphous hurt permeated her. Her own spongy tissues absorbed his desolation. She felt her entrails, her limbs, her spirit darkening with the stain of his injury.

  A hard jolt jarred her. Fear. For him. It raced through her, a brilliant spark following a thin line that burst into a cavern, flashed, and died, plunging her into near-darkness. Daniel lay on the floor. Face bleeding. Body shaking. Life waning. She felt the bone-deep chill.

  All she could see was the muzzle at Daniel’s temple. She panicked, covered his head with her hands. No, no, no, she babbled. My beloved Daniel. Last good man in the world. Nothing bad must happen to him. She could not bear it.

  Cold dark eyes locked on hers. She whimpered. Madman’s impulse, channeled down from broken soul, twitched upon the trigger. No, Maric. I beg you. He hated whimpering. She choked it down. Felt it writhing in her throat like a nest of snakes. Don’t shoot.

  “Brenna.”

  Choose now. />
  “Sweetheart?”

  She fought his restraint. He was holding her back. She had to decide. No, Maric! Don’t shoot! I trade you! My soul for Daniel’s life.

  “Honey, open your eyes.” Sweet man’s voice at her ear. Tender. Calm. How could he be calm?

  Come. She laced her fingers through his hair, put her lips to his ear and whispered so Maric couldn’t hear. Come with me, I’ve paid for you.

  “Shh,” he said. She felt his hands on her back. “Shh-shh-shh. It’s all right. We’re home. We’re safe, my love.”

  “Maric mustn’t get you,” she said, tugging frantically at him, panting with the effort of budging him. “Come. He’ll change his mind.”

  “Look at me, darling. Open your eyes. We’re fine. We’re okay.”

  He sounded so steady, so sure. She unclenched her face, glimpsed the room through a creased eye. Golden light. Soft, soft music. Daniel’s face before hers, unharmed. Unharmed?

  “That’s right. All the way. Open your eyes.”

  In a daze, she opened them, took further stock of her surroundings. James, in the kitchen. Gary at the dining table, setting down Daniel’s steaming dinner plate. The two of them, frozen in place, staring at her, horrified looks on their faces. Slowly, she felt two images becoming one, as if she were focusing through an old rangefinder camera. The image sharpened, and she realized what had happened. On a spark, she’d crossed some bizarre time-space warp. Relived terror—vivid and true as this room, and been called back.

  She covered her face with her hand, dropped her chin to her chest, mortified. She couldn’t control her mind. Lunatic. Crazy. Insane Brenna Rease.

  “It’s okay,” Daniel said, cupping the back of her head, surrounding her with his gentle arms. “Shh,” he murmured. Shh, even though she was already silent.

  He was wrong. It wasn’t okay.

  But she collected herself, sat up and swabbed her face with the back of her hand. “Your dinner’s getting cold.”

  “It can wait.”

  She didn’t want him to wait. She wanted him to go away. She’d just had the mental equivalent of diarrhea and she hadn’t made it to the bathroom. Stop looking at me, she wanted to hiss. Stop noticing. She wanted to disappear. Leave. Never be seen by anyone she knew. “Just go, okay?”