The Gossip: New Wave Newsroom

by Jenny Holiday

She turned and resumed marching down the trail toward the creek. “Looks like a duck. Walks like a duck.”

  “You can’t think this is your fault, Dawn,” I said, trying to gentle my tone.

  “What part of it isn’t my fault, Arturo?”

  I didn’t miss that she’d called me by my first name. It pleased me more than it should have. “All of it isn’t your fault. You wrote a true, thorough, important article. It impressed the hell out of me when I read it.”

  “Yeah, well, it also killed an innocent girl.”

  Arguing wasn’t going to help. I’d brought her out here because I’d had a hunch she wasn’t talking to anyone, and that she needed to. I disagreed—vehemently—with her interpretation, but I didn’t need to harass her about it. She’d heard my point of view. “You should call me Art,” I said. “That’s what my friends call me. Only my mother calls me Arturo.”

  She paused for the tiniest instant in her walking, so slightly that I almost missed it. “So it’s not Officer Perez anymore?”

  “Not in this context,” I said, praying she wouldn’t needle me about exactly what “this context” was, because then we’d be back to blah, blah, blah, and I wasn’t really on the moral or logical high ground there.

  Mercifully, she didn’t say anything. After a few more minutes of walking, we emerged into a little clearing on the side of the trail where you could walk right to the edge of the creek. She did so, stooping and picking up a handful of rocks and throwing them into the water one at a time. I stood next to her, hoping that the natural scene might somehow prove soothing.

  “What do you think it feels like to die?” she asked, her voice so low I could hardly hear her over the rushing of the creek.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” I said, my voice breaking a little, because I knew how much her heart was breaking, too.

  “I mean, I think you should know, right? Being a cop? Have you killed anyone, like I have?”

  God. Every word out of her mouth was a lance to my chest. “I haven’t killed anyone,” I said, forcing myself to ignore my impulse to argue with her some more about her supposed culpability in Julianne’s death. “I’ve had a couple incidents in my career where I’ve been called to the scene where someone was already dead. One was a homeless guy who froze to death, the other a domestic violence situation.” I didn’t say that I remembered them both like they had happened yesterday, that they stayed with me pretty much all the time.

  “Right,” she said, turning and shooting me a grin that was clearly forced. “Because you’re here at Allenhurst College instead of where the real action is, in Boston.” I knew she was referencing what she’d overheard between my brother and me that night at the Allenhurst Tap Room. “Why haven’t you left yet?”

  My first impulse was that there was no way I could tell her the truth. But as we stared at each other and the silence between us stretched out, growing tauter, I revised my original take on the situation. Sure, I could tell her some version of what I’d told Manny and my dad, that I liked it here. That I felt like this was my community, and I wanted to serve it. That was true. But that wasn’t all of the truth, not since I’d crossed paths with Dawn, anyway. And maybe the real truth would help her, the same way me telling her “I see you,” seemed to have that night at Delta Chi. Dawn seemed to think she was alone in the world, and given what she’d told me about her asshole parents, maybe she had been. But she wasn’t now. So I took a deep breath and told the truth.

  “Because I can’t leave you here alone.”

  She inhaled sharply, and tears gathered at the corners of her eyes, but she smiled through them. “That can’t make your family happy. They seem…important to you.”

  She had hit on the central dilemma of my existence, the stupid conflict that kept me awake at night. My first impulse was to toss off something casual, dismissive, but that would have been the height of hypocrisy given that I’d taken her out here in the hopes of getting her to talk—to really talk. I hadn’t expected to have the tables turned. “They are important to me,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “We didn’t have a lot growing up. I mean, we were fine, but four kids and a wife on a cop’s salary didn’t exactly mean we were living large. And we stuck out because we were pretty much the only Latino family in an Irish neighborhood. So we were tight. We made our own fun. My parents were always saying ‘family first.’”

  I looked down at her. She was staring at me with a wistful expression. “That sounds…pretty gnarly, actually.”

  “Yeah, so I’m the one who’s perpetually disappointing them, by being out here.”

  “Because it’s so far from Boston or—”

  “You heard me talking to my brother.” She had the grace to look embarrassed. “It’s the distance, but it’s also that they don’t respect what I do.” I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration. “It’s hard to explain. My grandfather was a security guard. He immigrated to Boston when he was in his twenties. His dream was for my father to join the Boston PD, and I guess my father expanded on that dream. My brother fell in line—and so did one of my sisters, which I think my dad considered an unexpected bonus—but I did my own thing. I got really interested in community policing when I was in school, but they think it’s policing-lite. It embarrasses them, I think. They see it as a step backward for the family, somehow.”

  “It sounded like you were going to go back, when I overheard you at the bar.”

  “Yeah, well, I was. And I still will—eventually. After my dad’s heart attack, I took a leave of absence and went home for a month. I even had a meeting with a someone in HR on the Boston force.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Julianne killed herself, and I was afraid of what it was going to do to you,” I said, knowing more truth was a risk. I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea about what was possible between us, but I wanted her to know that she mattered—enough to inspire people to change their plans, anyway.

  She turned to look at the water again, and if I wasn’t mistaken, she blushed a little as she did so.

  “We should turn back,” I said, feeling like I’d accomplished what I set out to do.

  She bit her lower lip, the way people do when they’re trying not to smile. She’d only just turned and begun trudging back the way we’d come when she said, “Blah, blah, blah.”

  Chapter Nine

  December 1983

  Dawn

  The semester had been awful. I began each day by getting up and going through the motions of getting ready, doing the minimum required to get myself clean and push myself out the door. I sometimes looked at my vast collection of makeup with wonder, as if I were an archaeologist from another planet. What was it for? How had any of these powders and paints mattered to the girl who used to slather herself with them?

  I attended my classes, sitting in the back and not making eye contact with anyone. I was the first one out of every lecture hall. I finished most days back home in my apartment, crying. I would hold it together until I burst through my door, and then a day’s worth of pent-up grief would come flooding out of me.

  It was like I was drowning, except not. Because if you were drowning, eventually, I presumed, it would be over. You’d succumb to your watery fate. That fall at Allenhurst, though, I kept flailing and gasping, my lungs perpetually on the verge of collapse, unable to get a grip on anything that might anchor me, much less pull me to shore, dry me off, and set me to rights.

  Except that wasn’t entirely true. There was an anchor, and his name was Arturo Perez. Art, he’d told me to call him.

  He was constantly checking on me, and he wasn’t even trying to be subtle about it. He must have figured out my class schedule, because he was almost always waiting for me after my Environmental Psych class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He was on duty, so he never did more than walk with me to the student center, where I usually passed the time until my next class. But it was a welcome break in the day, a pause in the assault I was perpetually enduring. The other students
had calmed down somewhat and were mostly leaving me alone. They looked at me funny, still, and no one spoke to me—or rather, I didn’t speak to them. But no one was outright calling me a murderer anymore. The DA was proceeding with charges against Daniels—some other girls had come forward with their own, similar stories—and I had cooperated when they wanted to interview me about Julianne, but I would be out of here before anything got resolved.

  I knew gossip. I knew how quickly people forgot things, their attention captured by something newer, shinier, more horrible. What I had less experience with was how long the voices in my own head were going to keep dogging me. The assault I was enduring was self-inflicted. And it felt like it would never stop.

  But then Art would show up, and it would. Only for a while, only until he left me again, but the reprieve was always enough to restore me sufficiently that I could get through the next little stretch. Every time felt like a small miracle.

  And God help me, I wanted more. More respite. More time with him. More of him. I understood all the reasons I shouldn’t want that—all the stuff I’d previously glossed over with the “blah, blah, blah” shorthand. I’d always thought he was hot, but now I knew he was kind, too, and I couldn’t help myself. He was the only thing that made me feel not bad. I began living for the times I’d see him, Tuesdays and Thursdays like clockwork, but he would also sometimes surprise me out of the blue. Judging by what he was wearing, sometimes he was on duty, and sometimes he wasn’t. An example of the latter was one time I was leaving my apartment early one morning in November, heading for an eight o’clock class, when suddenly there he was, falling into step next to me, two coffees in hand, one of which he silently passed to me. As he walked me to class, I found myself telling him about a research paper I was working on for my History of Psychology class. I smiled when I told him it was about the treatment of PTSD from the 1970s onward. We both laughed because we both saw the irony in it. It felt so strange to be laughing.

  “Did you know that most major police forces have psychologists on staff?” he’d asked me.

  “Oh, so maybe I could go join the Boston PD,” I’d teased. “Like, in place of you. Maybe you could tell your family that I’m the sacrificial lamb, and they’ll lay off.”

  His low laughter had rung out across the empty sidewalks, and I’d been flooded with something that felt like pride. The idea that someone like me could make someone like him laugh was strangely, sharply sweet.

  From there, we’d talked a little bit about my career options. I’d chosen psychology as a major for the shallowest of reasons—I’d thought it would help me understand people and improve my gossip column. But there I was, telling him everything that I liked about it. “People are so interesting, and there are so many ways they can sabotage themselves.”

  “You seem to have a knack for figuring people out,” he’d said.

  “Yeah, well, I think I’m going to go the journalism route,” I said. I had pretty much decided to take my father’s advice and go to journalism school after I finished my B.A. He kept saying that my story about Julianne would get me into some decent schools, and he’d promised to set me up with a job afterward.

  “Why would you do that?” he’d asked, visibly puzzled. “You told me before that you didn’t want to do journalism.”

  I could hardly tell him that I wanted to do something to make my father proud. Not that there was anything wrong with wanting a parent to be proud of you, but he knew me better than to accept that explanation at face value. I also couldn’t tell him the other reason. I’d barely articulated it to myself, but was clinging to a vague sense that if I went into journalism, maybe next time I was presented with an opportunity like Julianne’s story, I would…get things right. It sounded stupid even in my own head, so I settled for “I don’t think I’m cut out for psychology. It’s not a practical option for me.”

  He’d stopped then, right there on the sidewalk, and set his coffee on the pavement. Then he took me by the shoulders and looked into my eyes and said, “You don’t have to be a journalist if you don’t want to, Dawn. It’s okay to want what you want. Don’t let other people live your life for you—you’re smarter than that.”

  I hadn’t known what to say to that, except maybe that his idealism was all fine and good but no match for twenty-two years of life with my father. Or not even with him, but near him.

  Regardless, when we reached my class and parted ways, I was astonished to realize that, other than as it related to my reasons for considering journalism, I hadn’t thought about Julianne the whole time I’d been with him.

  So, yeah, I had my respite, was the point, and it was named Arturo.

  And I wanted more.

  One Saturday in mid-December, I was rattling around my apartment, and honestly, I wasn’t doing super well. Weekends were always hard. Whereas I’d always been a middling student before, this semester I was getting straight As because I filled my weekends with nonstop schoolwork. It meant less time for thinking. But now the semester proper was over. I had exams next week, and I was already over-prepared for them. I flipped on the TV for the evening news, just to hear some human voices.

  There was going to be a total lunar eclipse beginning shortly after midnight, the anchor informed me. Growing up in New York City, I’d never gotten to see that kind of stuff. Not that I’d cared back then, but…I wasn’t the same person anymore, was I?

  I hoofed it into the bathroom and threw on some mascara and lipstick, grabbed my coat, raced down the stairs, and pushed my way out the front door of my building. Gulping lungfuls of the cold, fresh air, I tilted my head back and scanned the sky until I found the big yellow grapefruit of a moon.

  I glanced at my watch. It was late. It was crossing a line. More blah, blah, blahs. But I didn’t care. The minute the anchor had said the words total eclipse, my mind had jumped back to that time he had come to my apartment. The words he had said to me then were still burned into my brain. “It’s there. You just can’t see it right now. But it’s there, I promise you. There’s something in the way—something blocking your sense of it, but it won’t be in the way forever.”

  We hadn’t been talking about the moon, of course. We’d been talking about my heart.

  I didn’t even go back upstairs for the car keys I’d forgotten to grab. I could do nothing that might make me lose my nerve. I just started walking.

  Arturo

  The doorbell rang at eleven-thirty on Saturday night, and my first thought was that it was Manny. Which was ridiculous, because I had spoken to my parents on the phone earlier in the evening and everything was fine—fine enough for my dad to lay into me for a good five minutes about coming back to Boston. When my father’s health returned, so, it seemed, did his crusade to get me to move. When I told him I was coming this spring—Dawn would be gone and I’d have nothing left tethering me to Allenhurst—he accused me of crying wolf. I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t. The resulting foul mood had caused me to beg off a poker game I was supposed to go to with some friends, friends who had threatened to come to my house and drag me bodily to the game.

  I hadn’t thought they would really do it. Damn it, I didn’t feel like human interaction right now. I didn’t want to see anyone.

  I swung the door open and barked, “What?”

  Correction: I didn’t want to see anyone except her.

  She looked different, more like her old self. It was partly because she’d done her hair and makeup, but partly because she was smiling, apparently of her own volition. I’d seen a few smiles in recent months, but I’d had to coax each and every one out of her.

  Her eyes slid down from where they’d been on my face. Shit. I wasn’t wearing a shirt. I’d taken it off during a bout of anger-fueled weight lifting earlier. Well, hell, it wasn’t illegal to be shirtless in your own house.

  Her smile grew larger, and I felt the tips of my ears heat.

  “There’s going to be a total lunar eclipse tonight,” she said.

  �
��I know.” I was relieved I hadn’t been scheduled to work. Rare celestial occurrences that happened at night did not mix well with college kids.

  “I was wondering if, um…” She grew shy then, her gaze dropping to the floor as she shifted from one foot to the other. “You seem to know a lot about nature and stuff around here, and I…was wondering if you knew of anywhere good to watch it.” She looked back up at me.

  The mere sight of her, standing in the dim light of my porch, putting herself out there, had my anger dissipating. I grinned—I couldn’t help it. “I do indeed.”

  Her answering smile was like a shot of adrenaline.

  “Give me thirty seconds to throw on a shirt.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, we were climbing the twisty stone stairway that led to Salter Tower. The two-hundred-year-old clock tower rose from the oldest building on campus and was locked up tight. After a rash of incidents in the 1960s, including one in which an acid-tripping kid had nearly jumped and had to be rescued by the fire department, the college got serious about security. Clock maintenance and repair were the only reasons anyone was allowed up there these days. At all other times, the massive wooden doors at the base were securely locked and armed with an alarm.

  But I had the keys, and I knew the code.

  “Officer Perez, I didn’t take you for such a rule-breaker,” Dawn said as I punched in another code at a second, alarmed door at the top of the stairs. She was panting from the steep ascent, and it did something to me.

  “It’s Art,” I said.

  “Art,” she repeated, still breathless, and it did something more to me. Damn it, I was trying to help Dawn. If I couldn’t prevent myself from thinking inappropriate thoughts about her at home, I could at least refrain from doing so in her presence.

  The tower was open to the night on all four sides, and she made her way to the western side of the enclosure, where the moon was most visible. “This is amazing!” she exclaimed. “I never even realized that people could come up here!”