by R. G. Belsky
Because I was the one who had missed the real lead of this story.
“We need to talk about you now,” my daughter said.
“What about me?”
“The gene is passed down from your parents. I have it. I may have passed it down to Audrey. But that means I got the gene from my parents. I either got it from you—or from my biological father. Whoever he was.”
We had never talked much about Doug Crowell, the man I had sex with the night she was conceived. He never knew he was the father of a child, because I left college right afterward without telling him. I found out many years later that he had died in a traffic accident. But Doug Crowell didn’t seem important to me. Now suddenly he was.
“Men can carry the gene too,” she said. “And they can pass it on to their children. Because I have it, that means it was my parents—either him or you—who carried the BRCA1 gene and passed it on to me. So you need to get tested. Remember what I told you about the risk factor increasing as you get older? It gets worse in the thirties—but a woman in her forties or fifties has the greatest chance of it developing into breast or even ovarian cancer. That’s you. So please get this checked out with a doctor right away.”
“I had a complete physical earlier this year. They give it to us as part of one of the health plans we have here at work.”
“That’s not good enough. The BRCA1 gene doesn’t show up in routine blood tests. You need to take a specific test for it if you think you might be at risk. That’s what I did. And you should do the same thing.”
All I could think of was that I didn’t have time for this. I didn’t have time to go to a doctor and deal with a blood test or whatever else was involved. Suddenly having a daughter—and having to deal with the problems that went with it—didn’t seem like such a good thing anymore.
“There’s something else,” my daughter told me. “If it turns out you don’t have the BRCA1 gene, then it means that it came from my father. If he had any other children after me, we have a responsibility to notify them about this. And what about your own parents? I know they’re both dead now. But do you know anything about their medical history? Can you find out if they might have had this gene? I want to know about my family—I want to know everything. For better or worse, I want to find out. Don’t you?”
I mumbled a response, but I’m not sure what it was.
I kept thinking about that long-ago night when I got drunk and jumped into bed at a fraternity party with a good-looking guy who I would never see again.
I’d thought it was just a one-night stand.
But I’d paid a hefty price for that irresponsible moment a long time ago when I was very young.
A price that has haunted me for my entire life.
And a price that I was still paying …
CHAPTER 24
THAT NIGHT I had a lot of trouble falling asleep. I lay in bed for a long time thinking about the conversation I’d had with my daughter.
About the potentially deadly gene she—and maybe Audrey too—were now carrying.
About the questions she had concerning her biological father, who might have put people at risk too.
And especially the part she’d brought up about my own mother and father.
“I want to know more about my family,” she had said. “I want to know everything. For better or worse.”
Well, good luck with that.
Me, I already knew too much about my own damn family.
I hadn’t thought about my mother and father for a long time because … well, it wasn’t a pleasant memory.
I got out of bed, poured myself a soft drink in the kitchen, and turned on the TV. There was a situation comedy on one of the channels. I tried to watch it for five minutes or so, but the words didn’t mean anything to me. There was a good-guy father, a smart, attractive wife, and a couple of wisecracking kids. Seemed like a decent enough family. But then so did the Huxtable family when I was growing up in the eighties. And look how things turned out for Bill Cosby.
I switched off the TV and walked into the study area I have in my apartment. There’s a desk, a computer, bookshelves, and a filing cabinet. In the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet was a large brown manila envelope. I’d stuffed it underneath a lot of other stuff and hadn’t looked inside for a long time. But I fished the envelope out now.
There were maybe twenty-five or thirty snapshots there. They weren’t mounted or anything. No one in my family had ever gotten around to doing that. Many of them were a bit worse for wear—curled up at the corners and bent in a couple of places—because of the years that had gone by since they were taken.
But you could see them well enough—that is, if you wanted to.
There was a little girl in all of the pictures. That would be me. Then my mother and father. They looked young and vibrant and attractive in those days—the way people look when they still believe that the future holds good things ahead for them.
A few of the pictures show me as a baby growing up inside the house where we lived. In others I’m a little older and playing in the backyard. Then there’s all of us at a summer vacation cottage on a lake. I was nine years old then. My favorite picture shows me standing between my father and mother next to a sailboat on the shore of the lake. God, I still remembered that day. In the picture, my mom and dad were looking at my Uncle Mike—who was taking it with his camera—but not me. I was looking up at my father. It was the look of a little girl who thinks that her father is the greatest person in the world. A lot of little girls think that. But then they grow up.
For me, the growing up culminated when I came home from college and told my parents that I was pregnant. “Hi, Mom and Dad, here I am back from college. I got drunk and wound up having a one-night stand with this good-looking fraternity guy named Doug Crowell. Jeez, it all happened so fast that I barely remember it now. But guess what? I’m pregnant.”
Okay, the conversation between me and my parents didn’t go exactly like that, but it was just as bad. My father ordered me to have an abortion. Most young women in that situation would have done that, and I might have too. Except the more he yelled and screamed at me to have the abortion, the more I resisted. Looking back on it now, I suppose that was the reason I did not have an abortion. Because my father wanted me to so badly.
I had the baby, gave her away for adoption at birth, and she grew up to be Lucy Devlin first, then Linda Nesbitt—which is how I got to where I am today.
My father died without us ever repairing the rift between us over that incident. My relationship with my mother was a bit better, but still never what it was before because she always supported my father in whatever he said and did. I never was able to totally forgive her for her lack of support when I needed it, just like I was never able to forgive my father for his demands. Now they’re both gone, taking with them whatever secrets they might have had that could be a life-and-death medical clue for me, my daughter, and my granddaughter. Did they pass on the potentially deadly cancer gene to me, and did I then give it to my own daughter—and possibly my granddaughter?
The guy in the fraternity house, Doug Crowell, was never a part of any of this drama for me. To him, I was nothing more than another roll in the sack with a naive young coed.
There was a picture of Crowell in the envelope too. A couple of pictures. I’d found them online from a college yearbook and printed them out a few years back. One of the pictures showed him goofing around in front of the fraternity house in a sweatshirt and shorts. The other one was of him in his ROTC uniform. He looked very handsome, very sexy—and I could see why a nineteen-year-old me had jumped into bed with him.
He went into the Air Force after college, then became a commercial pilot. He survived all that, but died in a senseless car accident several years back. Yep, I looked that up online about him. Not sure why. I guess I was just curious.
I put the pictures inside the envelope again and stuck it back in the filing cabinet where I’d found it. Every time I did this,
I told myself I should throw the damn things away. Get rid of the memories. Make a clean break with the past. But I’d never done that. Not yet.
And now I had to go back in time and search for answers amid these memories. About my parents. And about Doug Crowell. To find out if any of them carried the deadly gene that threatened my family today. I’d found out from the obituary I’d looked up on Doug Crowell that he had been married and had a son and two daughters. My parents still had relatives too. I needed to find these people and open up the past—theirs as well as mine—all over again.
My apartment is on the 11th floor of a building overlooking Union Square, which runs along 14th Street between Broadway and Fourth Avenue. I looked out the window next to my desk. Even though it was late, there were still people out there. Sitting on the steps on the edge of the park. Walking along the streets. Straggling out of the clubs and bars in the area.
I looked north and saw the Empire State Building and the skyscrapers of New York City. The lights twinkled brightly from them in the clear, crisp December sky. The city that never sleeps. I thought about how much I loved the bigness of New York. A person can lose themselves in it.
I’d run a long way to get away from the memories of my past.
But not far enough.
The past always catches up with you.
CHAPTER 25
THE TOUGHEST THING—AND maybe the best—about running a TV news operation is that you never know what’s going to happen.
I mean you spend all day figuring out what your top stories are going to be, the order you’ll put them on the air, what the reporters and anchors will say about them—and then in a few seconds everything changes.
Because big news breaks.
The best-laid plans and all that …
Maggie burst into my office just as I was wrapping up my schedule for the 6:00 p.m. newscast.
“Carmen Ortega is dead,” she yelled.
“Who?”
It took me a second or two to recognize the name.
“Carmen Ortega,” Maggie said. “The maid for the Hollisters.”
“The one who found Charles Hollister’s body?”
“With Laurie Bateman there.”
Damn.
Carmen Ortega had been a part of the story from the beginning, but a small part. I’d never paid much attention to her. She’d showed up for work that morning, seen the dead Charles Hollister on the floor with his wife trying to leave the apartment—and called the police. End of story. There didn’t seem to be much more to say about Carmen Ortega than that. The other players in this story had been much more interesting to me. Hell, I hadn’t even included her on my list of people to talk to about the case.
But everything was different now.
Now I had a million questions about Carmen Ortega.
“How did she die?” I asked Maggie.
“She was hit by a subway train.”
“Accident?”
“At the moment. That’s what the authorities are saying. But the timing is pretty incredible. Key prosecution witness dies before she can testify in court against Laurie Bateman. That’s a big story.”
The details went like this. Carmen Ortega had been waiting for a subway at Grand Central Station. She was standing on the platform when a #7 train rolled in, the one that took her to her home in Woodside, Queens. The platform was crowded, and there was a lot of pushing and shoving from people trying to get into position to get aboard the already crowded train. No one was sure exactly what happened next. But suddenly there were screams, and witnesses saw that a woman—Carmen Ortega—was lying on the tracks. It was too late for the driver to stop, and the train hit and killed her.
It’s not uncommon for people to be hit by subway trains. The platforms are close to the tracks and they can be dangerous—especially with big crowds. It is normally a news story when someone dies like that, but not necessarily a big news story. Except this time, it was different. Because of who the victim was and the fact that she was about to be a witness in a high-profile murder case.
At a hastily called press conference after Carmen Ortega’s death, the police commissioner—flanked by transit police officials as well as a stunned-looking William Carstairs from the DA’s office—faced the media.
“We are pursuing three different possibilities in our investigation,” the police commissioner said. “1) Carmen Ortega’s death was accidental—she either fainted, was inadvertently pushed by the crowd, or fell onto the tracks accidentally for another reason; 2) she committed suicide by jumping in front of a subway train; or 3) someone deliberately pushed her onto the tracks to kill her. At the moment, we are leaning toward ‘accidental death’ as being the most likely scenario. But our investigation is continuing. So if you were on that subway platform and saw or heard anything, please contact the police immediately.”
Carstairs spoke to the press next and he tried to put the best face on the shocking news of his star witness’s death. He said that they still had a strong case against Laurie Bateman; that they did have Carmen Ortega’s account of what happened that morning on video; and that he believed they still had overwhelming evidence—even without Carmen Ortega’s courtroom testimony—to get a conviction of first-degree murder.
But there was no question that his case against Laurie Bateman had suffered a significant blow with the death of the Hollister maid who claimed she’d confronted Bateman running out of the apartment with her dead husband’s body inside.
I did the story myself on air.
I’d decided I wanted to report everything about this case myself.
That’s the way I am on a big story—I make the story my own, even if I am supposed to be the news director.
Jack Faron wasn’t happy with me reporting this story myself—he rarely is when I do it. When I told him my plan to continue reporting about Laurie Bateman until the story was over, one way or another, he asked me if it wouldn’t be better for me to hand the story off to one of the other reporters. I said no. He asked me if there was any way he could get me to change my mind. “Have we met?” I asked Faron. He gave up after that.
We followed up the original report with a dramatic interview with Ortega’s family. I did assign a reporter to do that. Ortega had a husband and three children—between the ages of seven to fourteen—who lived in Woodside. The husband cried on camera when he talked about how he had kissed her goodbye that morning just like any other day. The three children were crying, too.
The husband also talked about the day his wife found Laurie Bateman with Charles Hollister’s body. He said she’d gone to work at the Hollister apartment an hour early that morning—she didn’t usually start until ten a.m.—but she wanted to leave early to help celebrate one of their children’s birthdays. He said sadly that someone else might have discovered the Hollister crime scene if she’d gotten there later at ten. And then she wouldn’t have become a key person in the murder investigation. He said he didn’t know if that had anything to do with her death now, but he couldn’t help wondering if she might be alive today if that hadn’t happened. It all seemed so senseless, he sobbed.
Yes, it was all very sad.
But it was also great television news.
CHAPTER 26
A GROUP OF us from Channel 10 were sitting in a bar next to the station after the 6:00 p.m. newscast was wrapped up. Maggie, Brett, Dani, Wendy Jeffers, Steve Stratton, and other on-air reporters and production staff. We were telling stories about how crazy the TV news business is, inspired, I guess, by the latest announcement from Jack Faron about another consultant being hired.
I said that one of my favorite TV news stories ever was the one told by Linda Ellerbee in her book And So It Goes.
“They tell a woman news reporter at this station that they want her to cover cooking stories,” I said. “Not as fluff, the producer tells her. But they had come up with the concept of ‘hard news’ cooking stories—food as news. Did she understand? She said that she did.
“‘If
a 707 crashes this afternoon, you want me to take a video crew to the pilot’s house, and when his wife comes to the door, you want me to ask her what she would have cooked him for dinner if he was coming home. Is that right?’”
Everyone around the table laughed. Maggie talked about another book on TV news—Too Old, Too Ugly, and Not Deferential to Men, by Christine Craft, a TV reporter in Kansas City.
“This consultant shows her a tape of women anchors from around the country to show her the way she should look and act on the air. They’re all interchangeable—almost identical in appearance, same hair, same clothes, same way they all talk. Finally, there’s a woman who appears on the tape that seems different, Craft says. She’s insightful, streetwise, spunky. ‘Oh no,’ the consultant says, ‘I don’t want you to see her—she’s too assertive.’”
It was fun to be out of the office with Maggie; she was always so serious at work. Nice to socialize with Brett and Dani too. They sat there holding hands and seemingly having a good time, even though most of the rest of us were drinking. Dani wasn’t drinking, of course, because she was pregnant—and Brett said he didn’t want to make her feel bad by drinking in front of her. But it was also because they still had to go back and do an 11:00 p.m. newscast. I worked at a station once where the anchor was fine on the 6:00 p.m. newscast, but was wobbling and slurring his words a lot of nights by the 11:00 p.m. show. I couldn’t even imagine what Brett and Dani might be like on the air after drinking. On the other hand, it might be a lot of fun.
Steve Stratton had worked at quite a few TV stations over the years. He’d seen a lot of consultants come and go. He remembered one of them who liked to write memos to the on-air people. One of the memos to a woman reporter said she needed a “new look”—something fashion wise that would make her stand out to the audience. So she went out and got a $300 perm at a fancy salon and bought a hat. A big white hat that made her look like a cowgirl or a female country singing star. She figured the hat would be her trademark—her new look.
