Necessary People

by Anna Pitoniak

  Fazio came back in. Before he sat down, he closed the pocket doors that separated the living room from the hallway. The last thing I saw, as the doors squeaked on their tracks, was Oliver looking up at the sound in surprise.

  “I think we’ll want some privacy,” Fazio said. “So, Miss Trapp. Another call came into the tip line last week. And it concerns you.”

  My mouth was dry, my tongue thick and gluey. I nodded.

  “It was your parents,” he said. “They saw your name and picture in the news. They said they haven’t seen you, or spoken to you, in years. Is that true?”

  I nodded again.

  “Well, they had a lot to say. I won’t give you chapter and verse, but the gist is that they insisted that I couldn’t trust you. That you had been deceptive in the past.”

  He looked at me, squinting. “Does that sound like your parents?”

  I coughed. “Yes,” I said. “Unfortunately.”

  “They had no idea you worked at KCN,” he said. “They didn’t know a thing about you. At first, I thought they were like this bartender. Just making it up. But I ran their names through the system and, sure enough, they’re your parents.”

  I sat perfectly still, saying nothing.

  “You seem shocked,” he said.

  “It’s just…I haven’t talked to them in years.”

  “Look. They clearly have an agenda. They want to get you in trouble, or maybe they want to get on TV themselves. But they’ve got a long rap sheet between them, and you’re obviously a good kid.” He sighed. “I know how it goes. My father was an alcoholic. My mother left him, but he still managed to make our lives hell. Some people are just bad parents.”

  “Bad is an understatement,” I said.

  Fazio let out a gruff heh, and I took what felt like my first breath in minutes.

  “I’m sure this isn’t pleasant to hear,” he said. “But I thought you should know. If they’re looking for a spotlight, they might contact the media next.”

  “Really?”

  “People want their fifteen minutes.”

  My heartbeat was finally beginning to slow down. “Is that it, though? That’s all they said?”

  He nodded. “Can I give you some unsolicited advice, Miss Trapp? Maybe reach out to them. Try mending the fence. It could save you a big headache in the long run.”

  As we drove back into the city, I told Oliver about my conversation with Fazio. “Hmm,” he said. “Your parents? Weird.” And that was it. He spent the rest of the drive talking about the new case he was working on. He had to go back into the office that night, which was good, because that night was my dinner with Corey Molina.

  After a shower and change of clothes and a double espresso, and a walk through the cold spring air, I arrived at the restaurant feeling better. In fact, almost buoyant with relief. It was a sleek nouveau space in Chelsea, white walls and open kitchen and minimalist menu. Corey was already waiting at the table, a glass of wine at his elbow.

  “I thought you didn’t drink,” I said.

  He smiled. “Good memory.”

  “I guess things might have changed in—how long has it been?”

  “Almost eight years. You forget that I was basically a kid back then, too.”

  “Yeah, but twenty-six seems so grown up to a seventeen-year-old.”

  Corey pinched the stem between his fingers, moving the wineglass in tiny circles so that the liquid formed a whirlpool. “You’re probably that age by now. Do you feel grown up?”

  I laughed. “It depends on the day. I feel far away from high school, I can tell you that.”

  “The drinking thing,” he said, after I’d ordered my own glass of wine. “That was always Diane’s idea. She was Mormon, you know?”

  “I remember.”

  “I’d go out to the bar after work most nights. She never guessed. Sometimes I’d come home completely hammered and she was just—she had no idea.” He shrugged. “It seems obvious now, doesn’t it? That marriage was never going to last.”

  “When did you break up?”

  “Two years ago in June, but we’d already been living apart. I’ve been at the Phoenix affiliate for almost four years now.”

  “And now you’re ready for the big leagues.”

  “Ah.” He smiled. “I see you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid.”

  “What do you mean?’

  “KCN’s ratings aren’t exactly setting any records.”

  There was a pause as the waiter brought our appetizers, Corey leaning back in his chair to make room. I squinted at him. “You’re not taking the job, are you?”

  “I have a better offer from CNN. They’re putting me on a fast track to becoming a foreign correspondent, which is what I’ve always wanted. I played through with KCN to get leverage on my contract. Don’t tell Ginny.”

  He grinned. Rebecca was right. He was handsome. Broad smile, stubbled tan. He raised his glass toward me. “Although I had second thoughts when I saw you.”

  My heart was thrumming. “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I mean you’re brilliant, Vi. If KCN has managed to hang on to you for this long, they must be doing something right. How great would it have been for us to work together.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling diffusely disappointed. I had to remind myself that this was better than a come-on. You don’t want someone tripping over himself just because you look pretty that day. You want someone willing to alter the course of his career because of your talent.

  But there was a term for those who never married, who were wedded to the job instead: a news nun. There’s a reason they don’t write fairy tales about brainy career women.

  “They are.” I cleared my throat. “I mean, I guess they are.”

  Corey had warm brown eyes. “Are you happy?” he said.

  “I—of course, I’m…” But I floundered, and fell silent. I tried again, but I didn’t know what to say. It was such a simple question. How had I never answered it?

  “I’m sorry.” Corey reached for my hand. “I’m sorry, Violet. I didn’t mean to upset you. That’s a pretty personal thing for me to ask.”

  I blinked. “I just—I guess I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “Most of us don’t,” he said. “Until we have to.”

  After a pause, he let go of my hand. “Here’s what I meant to say,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t know if you’re happy until you go somewhere else. It’s a big world. There’s a risk to becoming a lifer. Even if you make it to the top of the ladder—they’ll still remember you as the person you were on your first day.”

  “But what if you love your job?”

  “Usually that’s more a reflection of you than of the job.”

  I drank from my water glass. It was satisfying to crunch the ice cubes between my teeth, the cool water rinsing away the salt of the appetizer, the tannins of the wine. “I like that,” I said. “But you are suspiciously wise.”

  Corey laughed. “I’ve been reading a lot of self-help lately.”

  “Post-divorce malaise?”

  “That, or maybe it’s impending middle age.”

  Hours later, the restaurant was nearly empty, the music cranked up in the open kitchen, dessert cleared and the check long since paid. Neither of us made a move to stand up. The conversation was effortless. This was part of what I loved about journalists. The news we reported represented only one small slice of reality. Beneath the official quotes and statements and statistics, there was so much more gossip and speculation—the hidden depths of the iceberg, teeming with life. Corey and I didn’t talk much about home, but I didn’t have to strenuously avoid the subject, either. It was the opposite of Oliver’s indifferent hmm when I mentioned my parents. Every question Corey asked was tinged with the knowledge of my past—my real past.

  When the waiter finally interrupted and said they had to close, Corey and I moved to the sidewalk. The glow of the restaurant dimmed behind the windows, and the staff clustered around the bar for
their shift drink. It reminded me of the end of a broadcast, when the director shouts “Clear” and the anchor exhales. If you hang around in the minutes that follow, you witness the rapid disassembly: the bright lights turned off, the stage swarmed with crew to reset for the next day. It always felt melancholy, the abrupt end to the magic, the resumption of real life.

  “What time is it?” I said.

  “I’m staying nearby,” Corey said. “Come back to my hotel for a drink.”

  “I really should get to bed.”

  “Really?” he said. That big grin. “Aren’t you having fun?”

  “Maybe this isn’t what you mean,” I said carefully. “But I should tell you that I have a boyfriend.”

  “Ah. The truth comes out.” He smiled, offering me his arm in a smooth transition to chivalry. “Then at least let me walk you home.”

  As we started walking, he said, “That was only half of what I meant. I actually do want to know what you think about the ambassador to the UN. But while we’re on the subject”—he bumped his shoulder against mine—“who’s the lucky guy?”

  “His name is Oliver. He’s a lawyer.”

  “Oliver the lawyer. How did you meet?”

  Corey had heard of Stella, of course. Everyone in the industry had. He went quiet, after I explained. “So you and Oliver have been dating since…?”

  “Since December.”

  “Right after Stella disappeared.”

  Corey glanced at me. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “What?” I said. “What does that look mean?”

  “Isn’t it kind of gruesome? Do you manage to talk about anything except her?”

  “We do fine.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “What?” I said. “What kind of a question is that?”

  “A valid one. You’ve been dating for four months.”

  “I have no idea,” I lied. But why should I lie to Corey? “No. I don’t love him.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  The truth, unutterable, was that I didn’t really know. “That family has been through so much,” I said, instead. “I feel like I have to be there for them. Or for Oliver, at least. For now.”

  “That’s what I was afraid you were going to say,” Corey said.

  “Is that such an awful reason to stay with someone? Compassion?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Our conversation, which had flowed so easily before, had become jagged. Short words spiking through the silence, like an erratic heartbeat in an EKG.

  “It’s going to be hard,” I said. “If I break up with him.”

  “You’ve done harder things than that,” Corey said.

  Another stretch of quiet. Corey was probably a very effective interviewer. Lies require noise and misdirection to blend in. Silence is the best way to draw the truth to the surface.

  “He does remind me of Stella, in some ways,” I finally said. “But I like that about him.”

  He smiled sympathetically. “You miss her.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “But she’s gone, Violet. You’re not going to get her back.”

  For a moment, I wanted to tell Corey everything. What I had done that night, in the name of self-preservation. He knew me. He knew how hard I’d fought, to get to this point. He knew how easy it was to backslide. He gets it. He’d understand.

  But did I really know Corey? On the sidewalk we passed a group of girls, NYU students most likely, shrieking and shivering in skimpy clothing. His up-and-down glance was almost imperceptible, but not quite. One of the girls, a baby-faced blonde with breasts quivering in her strapless dress, caught his eye and smiled.

  See, Corey was good at his job. He made you feel like you were at the center of the universe, like he was talking right to you. But there were so many other people who felt the exact same way. That’s what TV anchors were trained to do. I was just an old friend from his hometown. Someone he liked, but someone for whom he was willing to keep a horrible, incriminating secret? Not a chance.

  “What I’m saying,” he said, “is you can’t change what happened. Staying with Oliver because you feel bad for him won’t help anything. And even if he reminds you of Stella, he won’t ever replace her.”

  A few blocks later, we stopped in front of my building.

  “This is where I get off,” I said. “Thank you for dinner.”

  “You’re a good egg, Violet.” He hugged me tight. “I hope you know that.”

  When we stepped apart, he added, “We’ll see each other again, right?”

  “Of course,” I said, though I suspected the odds were low.

  He smiled. “Call me when you can have that drink, okay?”

  The office on Wisconsin Avenue was boxy and unremarkable from the outside. It might have contained anything: logistics companies, medical device sales, tax preparers. The inside wasn’t much better, with gray carpeting and poor lighting, and reporters who had to do their own hair and makeup. D.C. lacked the glassy glamour of the New York studio. It was a different beast entirely. But that’s why I was here.

  “I heard you’re good,” Trish said, as I took the seat across from her. The corner office was new to her, but she’d been based out of D.C. for many years, and her voice was familiar to me from the control room. “Eliza doesn’t say that about everyone. Although I bet she’d hate to lose you.”

  “She’s been understanding,” I said. “She knows there’s a ceiling for me at Frontline.”

  Two weeks after my dinner with Corey, it was announced that, with Bill of Rights now canceled, Trish had been hired as EP of the new Sunday morning show. She was looking for a senior producer to help revamp it. It took me a few days to work up the nerve to talk to Eliza about it, but she was unsurprised by the request. “I knew this day would come,” she said. “I won’t ask you if you’re sure. You look sure.”

  “It’s a long shot,” I said. “But I’d like to try.”

  “You’ll get the job,” Eliza said. She wrote, “CALL TRISH RE: VT” on a legal pad, circling it twice. “They’d be idiots not to hire you.”

  On the train to Washington, that Monday morning in mid-May, I reviewed my notes. I’d crammed like this was a final exam: watching tape of Bill of Rights, noting what worked and what didn’t, studying our competition to see what we could learn from them. The other Sunday morning shows had their advantages: NBC was slicker, CBS had gravitas, ABC was wonky and worldly. CNN was able to make everything feel like an emergency, and Fox and MSNBC just covered whatever their audience wanted. KCN had been lost in this shuffle for years. Bill, of Bill of Rights, ended every show with a monologue about treating the Constitution as a living document. It was interesting if you forced yourself to pay attention, but death for the ratings.

  KCN was ripping the show down to the studs. We had an empty hour, forty-two minutes of programming that wasn’t bound by any tradition. I started to think about how we might build it from scratch. I read the white papers and speeches of every halfway important politician in Washington. I studied the techniques of the great political interviewers, the Frosts and Walters and Russerts of the world. My current job kept me on my toes, but it had been a long time since I’d stretched my mind in a sustained way, forming new ideas and connections.

  I had gotten this far in life with the help of existing institutions. Places and people whose language I could learn. College, Frontline, even the Bradley family. But I wanted a blank slate. I wanted to prove that I could make something happen, something good and lasting, with my own hands and my own will.

  “So tell me.” Trish leaned back in her chair. “What should we do next?”

  “I knew you’d kill it,” Jamie said, the next day.

  “You know what you want?” the waiter barked at us, materializing next to our table with pen and pad in hand. Never mind that we’d sat down sixty seconds earlier, hadn’t even opened the laminated menus. We always ordered the same things.

  “Spinach and goat cheese
omelet,” I said.

  “Bacon cheeseburger deluxe,” Jamie said. “And a Coke.”

  Lunch was usually a maximally efficient affair, but on days when we could escape for a bit longer, Jamie and I liked to go to a diner on Ninth Avenue. After almost four years, we had finally achieved the status of regulars.

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. But I couldn’t help smiling.

  “The work paid off?”

  Jamie had helped me prepare for the interview, peppering me with mock questions, walking me through the hierarchy of the Washington bureau. Mr. King was not fond of D.C. and was never willing to allocate the bureau the resources they needed. “Everyone and their mother wants to be the next Woodward and Bernstein. Let them have it,” he was said to have proclaimed. “We can break stories where they aren’t paying attention.” Hence Bill of Rights lasting years longer than it should have. Hence the worn carpets and shoestring budgets. Apparently Ginny had pushed him to retrench in D.C. Why not just close the bureau entirely, if we truly didn’t care? He was so annoyed by her provocation that he doubled their budget.

  I nodded. “Although I never got the chance to show Trish my impressive grasp of parliamentary procedure.”

  He smiled. “It’ll come in handy someday.”

  On the walk back to the office after lunch, while we waited for the light to change on Eighth Avenue, Jamie tilted his head back and closed his eyes, and spread his arms wide. It was the first hot day of the year, July temperatures in May. “Man, that feels good,” he said.

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “Summer is the worst.”

  He laughed. “So says the girl who grew up in Florida.”

  As we crossed the avenue, a ragged-looking man walking in the other direction scowled at Jamie. One hand kept his pants hitched up, and the other hand pointed at Jamie’s checkered button-down. “Stupid shirt!” he shouted.

  “I am going to miss this city,” I said.

  “And me and my stupid shirt, right?” Jamie said.

  “You and your stupid shirt can come visit.” It felt reckless to talk this way, as if I had the job already. But I had begun to trust my own instincts. That’s what this work did to you.