How Far She's Come

by Holly Brown

  I wish there was someone I could talk to, but the only one I absolutely trust is Dad, and if he knew what’s going on, he’d be having sleepless nights too. With his health, I can’t risk that.

  I hope I can trust Reese, but hope is not knowledge. Then there’s Edwin, who I’ve barely seen this week. Where does he go? Off with Daphne? Or, if Chase’s intimations have any validity, is it somewhere more sinister?

  Googling “Edwin Gordon and Daphne” or “Independent News Network and Daphne” yields nothing. It would be helpful if I knew Daphne’s last name or any other information, or if I had the training to do a real search.

  It’s possible there are no mysteries at all, that this is a wild goose chase meant to keep me sleep deprived and unraveling. I need to throw these pages out. I swore I’d never let anonymous people have this kind of power over me again.

  Yet I can’t walk away. I want to know the parts of the story I can’t readily learn online; I want to know how Elyse felt each step of the way. Sick voyeurism, perhaps. Or maybe it’s that I do believe that original letter that said Elyse and I are linked, that we’re kindred spirits. That there’s something Elyse can teach me. That there’s something here in these pages that could one day save me.

  July 17, 1991

  Dennis says that the way to counteract A Current Affair is to let the viewers at home see more of me. Conveniently, Trish was chaperoning her kids’ school field trip, so I stepped in.

  “Break a leg, Sam,” Scott whispered to me right before the show, and after flushing with pleasure at having a nickname, I felt myself going white. The show Rebecca Schaeffer had been on—her big break, where her stalker first saw her, the last that anyone would see her—was My Sister Sam.

  Meanwhile, I was about to increase my exposure to the world. Millions would be watching, and they would see me in a different, more personal way than they had so far from my newsreader chair. People are going to feel like they know me now, and that intimacy can backfire.

  I pushed those thoughts and feelings as far down as I could. As Glinda the EP likes to say: “The red light goes on, and so do you.” Since that’s practically the only advice she’s ever given me, I need to take it.

  Fortunately, anchoring really was like riding a bike, and I was happy to flex my muscles. In the segments with Scott, I was careful about my sexual cues, just like Dennis (and my mother) told me. I showed myself to be a girl’s girl, occasionally poking at Scott in that annoying-kid-sister way, taking a page from Katie Couric’s book. We were having fun, which meant the viewers watching were too.

  The cooking segment was the first one I tackled alone, and by then, I didn’t feel the slightest nerves. I was making a fifteen-minute pasta primavera in a five-minute segment with the energetic chef du jour. “Now we’re just going to turn down the heat,” she said, giving the pan on its burner a final stir. She lifted up the lid from the counter, revealing a small piece of paper with large cut-out magazine letters. She kept talking, but I couldn’t hear. I was reading those familiar words.

  YOU’RE MINE

  I tried not to show my panic. What I was thinking was: Lyndon. Not again.

  I couldn’t fathom how a psychopath like him could have known I was filling in for Trish today, and even if he did find out, how he could get on-set. But I couldn’t let him screw this up.

  The red light was on, and so was I.

  I refocused on the chef, who was talking about her cookbook. “Every single recipe can be made in fifteen minutes or less,” she said, “and you never sacrifice flavor. Here, try this.” She put the pasta on a plate and offered it to me.

  My stomach was in revolt, but I took a bite. “Mmm, delicious,” I said, because you never say anything less. I gave the cookbook one more plug and sent it to commercial.

  I looked around the set. There were multiple cameramen, the sound guys, one of them holding the boom mike, the director, the assistant directors, the producers . . . so many people. It’s like the whole city has access. Could it be one of them, and not Lyndon? But that was Lyndon’s MO, the ransom-type notes, the wording.

  Maybe Lyndon asked some staffer to leave the note. He could have said he was my boyfriend, that it was a way of supporting me on my big day, reminding me that I’m loved.

  No, no one would believe he was my boyfriend. He looks deranged.

  So if someone did that “favor” for him, it would be because they wanted to help him hurt me.

  The red light was off. My shoulders slumped, and the chef asked, “Is everything okay?” She spied the paper. “I assume that’s for you?”

  I forced a laugh. “They always prank the new girl.” I picked up the paper and was about to ball it up when I noticed the letters on the other side. ALWAYS.

  As in, YOU’RE MINE, ALWAYS.

  As in, it doesn’t matter where I go, I still belong to him.

  It wasn’t just his actions that were a nightmare; it was dealing with law enforcement and the legal system and having to justify my own actions. “Why were you out so late alone?” a police officer would query, and I would look down, ashamed. So much judgment, as if I’d asked for all of it by putting myself on TV. And that was just the campus TV station.

  I’ll never forget being up on the stand, where my job was to make my terror plain, in front of my terrorizer. My terrorist. That’s how the system works. You have to explain yourself all the time—why you wore that skirt, why you went here or there, who you kept company with, how much you had to drink. It had been far worse for Marla Hanson, with her destroyed face.

  The more appalling the perpetrator’s actions, the greater the victim’s crime must have been, because otherwise, why would this have happened to her?

  When it was time for the next segment, I took my place on the couch beside Scott so we could interview one of the stars of fall’s most hotly anticipated new sitcom (according to the teleprompter). Conveniently, that sitcom is airing on this very network!

  See, this is what happens to me when I’m stalked. I get cynical. I monitor myself ceaselessly. Stalking changes how I walk, what I wear, which places I’ll go, where I’ll position myself (only at tables with full views of the room and an exit strategy). That’s if I go out at all.

  So many questions: Is it safer to be with someone, even someone I don’t particularly like? Should I bother calling the police, when they’re not going to do anything anyway? There’s no one to trust. The world becomes ugly, and frightening. I am not myself.

  No, I was not myself. Now, I am.

  He cannot take this away from me. He cannot turn me into someone else ever again.

  So I got through the rest of the show, and at the end, Scott gave me a big hug and hearty congratulations. Glinda shook my hand. Dennis called down to my dressing room to tell me that I had exceeded his already high expectations. It was a roaring success. I should be proud and happy.

  But instead, I’ve been sitting in the dark, curtains drawn, writing by a small bedside lamp. That way, if anyone’s watching my apartment window, they’ll think I’m out. When the phone rings, I jump.

  I let the answering machine pick up. “Elyse, it’s Dennis. I just wanted to tell you again what an excellent job you did this morning.”

  I’ve got to get that.

  Okay, I’m back. I scrambled to pick up the phone and found out he was in my neighborhood and wanted to stop by. He was slurring his words.

  I don’t really want Dennis in my apartment. That feels like a different sort of danger. What would my mother say?

  But I can’t say no. That could be career suicide.

  Okay, Diary, I’m back again.

  I’d turned on every light until the place was ablaze. When he came in, he asked if I had anything to drink, even though his face was ruddy and his birthmark looked positively inflamed, practically Gorbachevian. I lied and told him I have only water and soda.

  I have to keep vodka around for emergencies so that if I have a man over, I can top off whatever I’m drinking and put mys
elf in the mood. No, that’s not exactly accurate. I don’t get in the mood to have sex; I get in the mood to be sexy. I lose my self-consciousness, and I can give men what they want. It’s funny because I always thought that men would be the ones with performance anxiety, but really, it’s me.

  No vodka tonight, that was for sure.

  Dennis blinked in this exaggerated manner, almost a wince, as if he were a vampire and the light was painful. I sat far away from him on the couch in the loose clothes I’d put on, my hair still up in a scrunchie, the opposite of alluring. But he was looking at me like I was in a negligee, and he went on way too long about how America’s going to fall in love with me. Then he flopped back against the couch like a dying fish. “I’m seeing someone, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.” But I was glad to hear it.

  “I’m not sure if it’s going to work out. I’m afraid she doesn’t care about me. The real me. It’s all about money and power.”

  He started to talk about his manipulative ex-wife, their ugly divorce, and the sense that she’s turning his son against him while I made sympathetic noises.

  “I’m good at my job, and I’m successful,” he said, “but I’ve got this fear all the time. It tells me that if I let up for more than an hour or two, it’ll all come crashing down.”

  “That sounds tough,” I murmured.

  “Everyone’s trying to get power, or be with powerful people, and then you’re there, and you’ve got to make decisions all the time. Big decisions, with big consequences. But you, Elyse, are the obvious decision. I’m going to make sure everyone sees in you what I do. I’m going to take care of you.”

  Maybe that’s what did it, his choice of wording. I told him about the note under the lid, and about Lyndon.

  “Have you called the police?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Good. That means we get to control this story.”

  It’s not a story; it’s my life. But he was off and running.

  “I’ll have a talk with the security staff, don’t you worry. Heads will roll. I’ll give you your own bodyguard. Meanwhile, there are a lot of ways to handle this. I’m going to come up with just the right one.” He grinned. It was like he’d just done a line of coke.

  “You don’t ever need to worry again,” he said, and I’m lying here at three a.m. trying my hardest to believe him.

  Chapter 22

  If what’s in the Until story is true, it’s worse than I could have imagined. But if Chase is right, and I’m just drinking the Kool-Aid . . .

  I want to think Edwin’s nothing like Dennis, but if you don’t count the sexual harassment, there are some disturbing similarities. Elyse did what she was told, because she was supposedly getting what she wanted too. Meanwhile, her boss was manipulating her life for ratings and for ego strokes.

  Edwin didn’t even give me a heads-up as to the topic of my series. Elyse didn’t ask questions, but I need to.

  “What happens if I don’t report this story?” I ask Albie.

  “You’d have to take that up with Edwin.”

  “Before I do, I want you to tell me, hypothetically, based on thirty years of experience, what’s likely to happen.”

  “I can’t. Edwin’s unpredictable.”

  “Chase is at my apartment right now. I need to confront him and see what he says.”

  “You do that and your career is over.” Albie stands up and moves so that he’s behind the camera. It’s the weekend, so we have the studio all to ourselves. INN is in reruns until Monday.

  “Then, hypothetically, I want to talk to Edwin. Is he in his office?”

  “No.”

  “Is he in New York?”

  “I have no idea. He doesn’t text me his itinerary.”

  I feel like Albie could at least be sympathetic. He could show some appreciation for the quandary I’m in. It’s not likely, but it is possible that Chase doesn’t know any of this about Until, and that he just happened to show up this weekend to fix our relationship. If that’s the case and I go forward, he’d be devastated. He’d be losing his mission and me in one fell swoop.

  But Chase isn’t just an employee. He’s not a cog; he’s a unicorn. If this story is true, he has to have known.

  “Did Graham contact Until for a quote on the story?” I ask.

  “He’s very thorough. He follows protocol.”

  “Does that mean he contacted Until?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  I could try to reach Graham and confirm, but I don’t even want to hear his voice if I can avoid it. What I know is this: Chase chose to work at Until rather than a more established tech company because he would be privy to everything, and Until was almost certainly contacted about this story, and Chase showed up unannounced the weekend he knew I was preparing.

  What I don’t know is whether Edwin handpicked this story for me because Chase is my boyfriend, if it was in the works before I was hired, if it was even part of the reason I was hired.

  Edwin said he was playing chess, but that doesn’t mean I want to be his pawn.

  Albie releases a deep sigh. I can tell he hates the drama; he’s about the work. “Let’s shift the focus from Chase, shall we? This report will be the first in a series. A series, Cheyenne. You’ll be on Ty’s show, repeatedly, breaking news. That’s Ty, the big cheese.

  “Then let’s talk about the story itself. It’s an incredible piece of reporting. Well researched and sourced, as close to airtight as I’ve seen in a long time. Plus, it’s important. It’s in the public interest. It’s what INN is about, and it’s what you’re about. It deserves to be told. So you have to decide if you’re the one who gets the privilege of telling it.”

  I hate the idea that Edwin is manipulating me into the story, but what a story it is. If I decide not to do it, I might just be trading Edwin’s manipulation for Chase’s. Chase is here to work me over. He’s been alternately romancing me and creating all sorts of opportunities where I can tell him about my series, so maybe the plan isn’t for me to simply refuse the story, at which point it would be given to someone else. More likely the plan is for me to feel guilty and tell Chase what’s in the story ahead of time. Perhaps Until would leak strategically and begin putting their own spin on the story. They could start the damage control ASAP.

  It seems so far-fetched, and yet, people do strange things when their livelihoods are on the line. Chase has a lot invested in Until, and not just stock options.

  Chase has been issuing numerous warnings about Edwin, and yes, Edwin has both patriotic and profit motives, but he’s never pretended otherwise. He told me point-blank that he was going to use me to get the male millennials. Chase is the one trying to use our relationship against me, knowing it’ll destroy the biggest opportunity I’ve ever had.

  I’m not his errand girl. And if even half of what’s in my script is true, if that’s what he’s mixed up in, then he and the rest of his cronies at Until deserve to have their company blown up.

  “Let’s do this,” I say.

  As we practice, my heart is pounding in my ears. It doesn’t help that Chase is texting me messages of love interspersed with requests to come to the studio, to meet Albie, and to “see what I’m up to.”

  “Again,” Albie says, “and you’d better do it a hell of a lot better. This isn’t the time for cold feet.”

  “I’m trying here, but I’m torn. I know someone at INN is going to report this. I just don’t know if it can be me.”

  “Get your head on straight, okay?” Albie stalks away.

  I reach for my phone. Sorry to bother you on the weekend, I type. I didn’t know who else might understand this dilemma I’m having, and I don’t know why, but I get this feeling you would. I don’t have your cell phone, which is why I’m emailing. If you have a few minutes, could you give me a call? My cell is . . .

  WHEN BETH CALLS late that night, after an entire day of demoralizing rehearsal, after dodging Chase’s texts and then dodging his questions abou
t my bad mood, I jump up. “It’s work,” I tell him. “I really need to take this.”

  I step out onto the balcony, shutting the door firmly behind me. I whisper, “Thank you so much for calling me back.”

  “Happy to help. What’s up?”

  I hesitate for just a second. I know very little about Beth. I don’t even know whether she has a husband, or a wife, or kids, or a life. I don’t know for sure that I can trust her, except that my gut already does. And if I can’t trust my gut, what do I have?

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I say, “but I could really use your advice, off the record.”

  “Sure. This is just between you and me.”

  I launch in, concluding with, “So either he’s been lying to me all this time, or he just doesn’t know what his company is really up to. If it’s the latter, and he learns it from me, on TV, he’ll be destroyed. But honestly? I really feel like it’s the former, in which case he’s not only a liar but he’s involved in something that’s—well, let’s just call it what it is. It’s evil. Or it’s got a strong potential to unleash evil, and he’s smart enough to know that.”

  “But perhaps arrogant enough to think he can control it.”

  “He could be that too.”

  “So in the best-case scenario, he’s ignorant, or arrogant, or both. If that’s the case and you break the story, can you live with that?”

  I pause a long minute. “What does it say about me if I can?” I think of what Graham said about ruthlessness. I’d be his dream girl, the same as I was Edwin’s twenty years ago.

  “Sorry to answer a question with a question, but do you believe the public should hear this story?”

  “Yes. That doesn’t mean I have to be the one to break it. Albie didn’t even want to talk about this, but I could just tell Edwin no, couldn’t I?”

  “The story will break regardless. You can’t really protect Chase.”

  “If I tell him first, if I warn him—”

  “Then you’d be out. You give up your career, and for what? Are you really going to end up married to this guy?”