In the fall of 2000 I deliver Sofia. It’s a quick and easy delivery, but it’s a game changer. For the first time in my life of rushing, I feel trapped. I have entered the land of the great American equalizer, motherhood. My child is so darn cute I race home to be with her. I want to be with her all the time. I’m in love like I’ve never been in love with anyone, not my parents or Brad. I also want to run. I can’t tell if she is a tough baby or if I have no idea what I am doing. Motherhood is really difficult. She is a lazy eater. I can never tell if she’s fed. She falls asleep nursing. I call my sisters constantly and tell them I can’t do this. I tell them I’ve lost all control. They tell me I am right on schedule with motherhood. I have the perfect gig for having a baby because I’m basically working a three-day week. But I feel like I have no time! I suddenly feel a kinship with everyone who has ever given birth. I smile at total strangers. She falls asleep. I clean. I fall asleep. She wakes me up. I feed. I clean. She falls asleep. I can’t fall asleep, so I clean some more until she wakes up and wants to eat all over again. I clean.
On weekends, Sofia is with Brad, who is so calm and level-headed as a parent. It’s unnerving. I walk through the door and pick things up as I go through the apartment. But at the end of the line of empty bottles, spent Pampers, and assorted clothes, there he is rocking her gently. She is basically his clone in all ways. The child looks nothing like me, except for maybe the temper. The whole thing is insane, but sixteen months later I give birth to Cecilia. She has pitch-black hair that is frizzy and sticks straight up. Over time it will turn curly blond. She smiles at everyone and has a sunny disposition.
I am so tired I’m dizzy. I can’t even tell if I’m happy, but I feel like I must be because I have two kids who are crazy cute and this husband whose devotion fuels me. All my partners in life are so on my side. Kim is my executive producer at Weekend Today and she is my pal, a ball of energy and ideas. My family is rooting for me weekly, sitting down in front of the TV set as if Edward R. Murrow himself is about to do a segment on fall fashion.
It is a gloomy time in my adopted city, after planes lance the Twin Towers like spears. My positive energy feels a bit out of place. I was walking down the street running some errands when the whole thing began to unfold. I ran home a few blocks and turned on the TV Brad calls me, and we watched the second plane hit together. I’m called into work to report on the triage center set up along the West Side Highway. The ambulances are lined up and ready to be dispatched at a moment’s notice, but the reality is brutally clear—there aren’t that many people to save. I’m one of the fortunate ones. I really didn’t know anyone who died in the World Trade Center towers. I didn’t lose anybody close to me, but I looked out on my city and hurt and knew there were others who had lost so much that day.
After that, a little bit of me feels like I’m ducking reality, losing myself in my kids and the comfort that my family survived the shocking destruction of September 11. We are doing so well. I thank my God. We are a family religious enough to know it’s not just luck. But the noxious cloud that hovered around downtown Manhattan has never left our country. I report it on air every day in so many ways. Ours is a country where people often fail to forge a link, like some frustrating puzzle. Then all of a sudden something unites us and we come together to form this picture. I just wish that unity wasn’t forged so often by our tragedies. In the aftermath of 9/11, America looks like a nation stricken, gray and black. We claim boldness when we’re all feeling a little broken. I push back at the sadness around me. The world is spinning in the wrong direction. I sit on my desk and report stories that have nothing to do with morning news—funerals and flight plans and almost endless stories of individual grief with a live shot of a burning pile of American steel continually showing in the background.
David and I have to keep a tone that is morning TV comfort in the face of all this. I walk in after the attacks and he and I reset each other’s mood. He has twin girls and a baby daughter. His wife looks like an anchor’s wife is supposed to look: gorgeous and fresh-faced. We can relate to what we’re each facing at home, keeping life moving for small children when so much around us seems uncertain. On air, we look like an all-American team, me with my multicultural persona and him traditional like apple pie.
The anchor duo is a relationship only understood by pilots and figure skaters and other folks in symbiotic work relationships. You can’t fake TV chemistry. If you hate each other, everyone can tell. When David and I go on air it’s a continuation of the conversation we’ve been having overnight as our morning show came to fruition. We lighten the mood. It’s a weekend morning. And slowly we lift ourselves, and others, ever so briefly, from the tsunami of bad news that rolls in over 2002 and 2003. We find each other interesting. We’re like a couple that just woke up and are starting their day, except we have a million kids watching us racing around in our pajamas. As coanchors we laugh and fight and bicker and banter.
The only time there is a hint of tension between us is when assignments roll in that we both want. We argue like siblings. His hefty reporting credentials often win. He has done his share of hurricanes and biting investigations, won an Edward R. Murrow Award and an Emmy. He covered the president. He’s steps ahead of me in the credentials race. He is also eager to do stories that downright scare the crap out of me. He is practically in his Kevlar vest when war breaks out in Iraq. NBC has this great idea to strap a satellite dish to an army tank so David can charge into Baghdad with the troops and report on the advance. I am sad when he goes and I’m also immensely proud of him. I talk to him through the airwaves but he sounds so far away, so unreal. It’s April and spring is consuming New York. In Baghdad David’s reporting is remarkable, and I’m worried about him. I wish he’d come back. His wife and kids miss him. The viewers miss him and I miss him. We are a good team.
David calls his wife, Melanie, one day and says he is on the border of Baghdad. He whispers because they’re fearful of an ambush. He is sleeping atop his tank and she demands to know why if they think someone might come shoot them. He complains that his legs are cramping up and he wants to stretch. The flights from New York to Kuwait are endless. He talks to doctors by phone and tries to find ways to make himself feel better. They don’t have enough water and they are riding in the back of a tank, unable to move for hours on end. I watch him on air with his hair pleated by the desert dust and his cheeks cracked by sunburn. He looks bold and dashing, like the hardworking war reporter making huge sacrifices. His face looks red on the screen but I barely notice—is it sunburn or a dust storm or poor reception? I still want him to come back and race me across the ice rink on live TV.
It’s April 6, 2003, at one a.m. I am the weekend morning anchor so I’m just two and a half hours shy of waking up for work. The phone rings that way phones sound when someone calls at an early hour: jarring. It’s the NBC operator asking me to hold for the boss. The first thing I think is that all our predictions about a Saddam Hussein chemical attack have come to pass and David has been hurt. “Soledad,” Neil Shapiro says, “David is dead.” A blood clot has traveled from his cramping legs to his lungs. He is thirty-nine years old with three young children. He is the 153rd journalist to die in this war we are waging abroad, cut down by his own body.
I walk into work like a zombie to join Matt Lauer reporting on our own colleague. This is a guy who used to bring his little girls to play around on the very set we’re sitting on. We have a half dozen two-dollar bets still unresolved. He had written a letter to his wife just a few hours before talking about how his love of his family and his God outshined his work. I sit on the set, our set, untethered and all alone, a half orange stuck in a half skin. The energy has been sucked out of the newsroom. The camera-men are openly weeping; the production assistants are sobbing in the stairwells.
There is a memorial on the third floor of NBC—near Nightly News—showcasing journalists who died on the job. There is gear from Don Harris, a reporter who was shot at the Jonestown massa
cre in Guyana in 1978, and a few others. David’s helmet gets added to the stuff in the glass case. He died joining Americans together for life’s most climatic moments. With David, the viewers traveled to the ravages of Bosnia and Somalia, the agony of Ground Zero, the clashes in Israel and Pakistan. He was on a mission. He had something to say.
I come in each weekend now heavy with his memory, feeling like there must be more to life than this. I think of all those Sunday mornings back in Smithtown when my parents would pack us in the car for a 7:30 a.m. trip to church. We were so lucky in life and it was time to say thank you to God, then have chocolate-covered cream-filled donuts and milk and a lazy afternoon with our parents. David relished life and risked everything to make his full and important. Somehow his death put the value of all that into sharp focus. I run home to embrace my kids more tightly than ever. But I couldn’t go back to work and sit on our half-empty set anymore joking about relay races on Rockefeller Plaza. Something was missing in more ways than one. A few months later I am offered a job anchoring American Morning for CNN, a hard news program where the anchors spend a lot of time digging into stories in the field. I push away from a fifteen-year career at NBC and an anchor desk that’s missing an anchor. I want to go out and report on the world.
CHAPTER FIVE
AN AX TO BREAK OUT
My plane cracks through a bank of clouds. We descend into Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on September 2, 2005. The sky is silent, hot. The air is rich. I have enough baby wipes to wash with for a week. Rain jacket, pants, boots. A cap. PowerBars. Water. Plastic everything. I have all I need to slog through the receding waters of Hurricane Katrina—except maybe the stomach for it.
A wall of wind and rain had fallen on southeast Louisiana on August 29. There was a last-minute call to evacuate. Chaos erupted. Levees failed. Much of New Orleans went underwater. So did a slice of the state of Mississippi. People died by the hundreds. The deluge of water unleashed a flood of evacuees. They raced up 1-10 from New Orleans by the tens of thousands, arriving in Baton Rouge.
I am landing a few days later in a city unhinged, kneeled not by a storm but by its aftermath. The airport terminal resembles an enormous indoor campground. People of every race, class, and age roam around lost. They seem to be looking for a way out. The air rumbles and squeaks from the sound of roller luggage. I walk through crowds that move aimlessly in four directions. The airport employees have their mouths half open, their hair askew. The air smells like laundry left wet in a broken dryer. Old black ladies who look like my mom push through the crowd. Handbags dangle from their wrists. Kerchiefs clamp down their hair. Loud military planes push warm air down onto the runway as they land one after the other. An evacuation is under way. People board planes bound for unknown destinations. I wonder what is in their tiny bags. What do you take when you leave behind a lifetime of belongings that is underwater ? I look at their eyes. They are too tired to cry, too dry for tears, swollen, purple, pained.
The hurricane hit on Monday. It’s Friday. This all makes no sense to me. By now this place should be abuzz with rescue services, with government relief from a storm. I feel like I am in another country. All week I’d seen the images, seen the pain as I anchored from New York. This is what an American city might look like the day after a storm. But now it’s four days later. How can this be? I see the fear, the panic. Anger rises into a tight knot behind my forehead. CNN has set up a live location outside the airport. A tent tries to block the sun but the wind off the runway blows it over every time a plane lands. I join a clutch of exhausted CNN staffers. No one says more than they have to. I begin to report.
I left NBC in July 2003 because I wanted to be a serious news reporter again. I become the coanchor of American Morning on CNN. Everything I want as a journalist comes together at once. I’m at a place that values hard news and lets me report on people left on the sidelines of life. I also get to anchor the big show. Sitting next to me is Bill Hemmer, a wheat-fed bespectacled guy with a sunny disposition. He looks much younger than he is. He has a patch of gray hair on the back of his head, but from the front he’s boyish. He is also devoted to being out in the field. Bill had covered Kosovo and done marathon live shots from Tallahassee during the 2000 Florida recount and September 11. He adores his family. We have our family ties in common. Bill is from Cincinnati and he oozes Midwestern charm and good manners. Little Sofia is in love with him and calls him “Billhemmer,” as if it is one word. I ask her why she loves him so much and she says, “I don’t know. I just love Billhemmer.” I am buoyed by his niceness; it gives our show a friendly feel that is totally genuine. But that is not enough. The network also wants more viewers.
CNN has been in perpetual news mode since it launched in 1980 in hopes of tapping into America’s need for constant information. Our viewers are like people eating peanuts, unable to resist but sealing the can every so often because they think they’ve had enough.
My show rides the news highs and lows. When there are lows, the fallback position is always more hard news. The stress level rises constantly. Then I do something that makes things even harder. I get pregnant again, with twins. I race to the rest-room to throw up during breaks as Bill sits there smiling away in my absence, picking up my reads on the TelePrompTer. I insist on keeping up the same pace I had before the pregnancy, faster even, in this ridiculous effort to prove it makes no difference at all that you are carrying two babies in your belly. I move about slowly. I am the size of a zeppelin.
Then one day, as the summer is nearly ending, I deliver Charlie, who smiles and cuddles like a puppy, and Jackson, who looks like a duplicate of his father. They are perfect. I am utterly in love and uniquely overwhelmed. I cry almost every day from exhaustion, fear, and panic. I suddenly have four children under four, a reality that is so amusing to my colleagues. I get a full-time baby nurse until I realize she is raising my boys, and I ditch her. I walk out one day with four kids stuffed in a double stroller—two are hanging off the back—and I realize I’m truly acting like a nut-case. I buy my way out of all sorts of problems, but money can’t buy a good night’s sleep.
Brad is as driven in parenting as he is at work. His point of view is we need to just set a high bar for behavior. We have full-time help, but when we are not at work we are going it alone. Brad is a big believer in limits. We take all four kids to restaurants with us. It works sometimes, but they are all still babies so it often doesn’t. They mesmerize me when they are all good at once. But mostly my life is a blur of chaos. I feel like I am constantly responding to one emergency or another. And then a real one rolls in. One day Bill and I are smiling from atop the anchor desk; then suddenly I’m off to Phuket, Thailand, to cover the tsunami, and everyone is watching. I leave Brad with four small children racing around untethered. But his eyes light up and he says “Go go go. This is a big deal; this is a big opportunity.” I head out the door.
December 26, 2004: A plate shift deep in the sea has caused a mountain of water to slap the coastlines all around the Indian Ocean. Countless people have died along the shores. The world turns to CNN for news. I sit aboard the plane bizarrely relaxed, able to get more sleep on this ride to human disaster than I’m getting at home. In Phuket, a massive watermark about a mile inland separates the living from the dead. The smell of decomposing bodies makes me wretch. This is my first experience of a major international disaster, on the ground for CNN. They deploy scrappy reporters and technicians from around the world, everyone arriving alone, just like me, and regrouping like a small army. We gather at a chaotic, smelly, hot hotel, where people surround us expecting news of missing relatives.
CNN is remarkable at these disasters. Every hour resources seem to appear from out of nowhere—from no food, to bad food, to packaged food, to water and PowerBars, and crates of medicine and fans to fight the heat. We sleep on a wood floor in sweltering heat with images of death swirling inside our foreheads. But there is something impressive about the international relief effort, about the united nations o
f rescue groups corralling survivors, organizing the searches, feeding people, and dropping supplies on remote places like Banda Aceh in Indonesia mere days after such an enormous disaster.
We set up a live location in the middle of the chaos and suddenly I am anchoring American Morning from the other side of the world. My insides are in agony when I’m asked how it feels to me as a mother to be seeing so much grief. I can’t even answer that because the heartache is inconceivable. The 6:00 a.m. show is on at 6:00 p.m. local time, so in the morning I grab a cameraman to go off and report. My photographer is from our Bangkok bureau but was in Phuket vacationing with his wife and baby. The morning of the event they had been spared because they’d moved inland when the baby got sunburned. That saved their lives. We head off to the center of town, where people are posting photos of the missing, and it seems to be a version of what happened near Ground Zero after September 11.
A man shares a story of how he lost his grip on his three-year-old son as the waters rushed through and lifted them through a thicket of palm trees. He shows me the picture of a cute, blond, chunky little boy and recounts over and over again how he shifted his hand to get a better grip on him, then lost him when the boy, slathered in sunscreen, slithered out of his hands. His face is etched with grief and guilt. My frustrations with being a working parent suddenly seem embarrassingly idiotic. I tell myself I have to get a grip on what is important.
I take a small boat for hours out to Phi Phi Island, where a mostly Buddhist population is gathering its dead on pieces of rock, tin, and wood. Robin and Ingrid De Vries had come to Phi Phi because their twelve- and seventeen-year-old daughters had fallen in love with the sandy beaches outside the Kabana Hotel. Isabelle, the younger daughter, had seen the tsunami rolling in at them in the distance. Ingrid called the girls in from the beach. The girls ran but they were laughing because they thought it was an ordinary wave. In an instant, the wave’s pace quickened and swallowed the girls. Isabelle stayed afloat at first but Dominique panicked. The parents were also torn apart by a second wave that wrenched them from the balcony of their hotel. They were forced through the sliding glass doors, across the room, out the back door and under the water, where they gasped for air.
The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities Page 8
