“That’s a bitch,” Ellen said.
They both sat without speaking, moving their legs in the water.
“You know what I’d really like to do?” Ellen broke the silence.
“What?”
“I’d like to go sit on a pier and stare at the ocean and drink piña coladas until I fell over dead.”
Debbie giggled and kicked a soft splashy beat.
“And, that’s why I’m here,” Ellen sighed, “as far from the ocean as I can get. Sitting in the middle of a fucking desert.”
Debbie laughed.
“I know what I want to do,” she stated. “I want to be this great reporter, pounding out stories on an old typewriter, smoking a cigarette, my hair all messed up. You know?”
Ellen reached for her cigarettes. “You could be,” she said, “if that’s what you want.”
“What do you really want, Ellen?”
Ellen pulled her legs from the pool. The water and the night felt cold to her now.
“I want to go someplace where they don’t know what the Today Show is,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean a couple of years ago I went to Cape Cod with my mother. We were staying in this small inn right on the ocean. The first morning I woke up and I could smell the ocean and I heard the sea gulls. It was fantastic. A few days before I had been in New Mexico and now I was in a completely different world. Then, you know what I hear?”
Debbie shook her head.
“I hear the Today Show. That’s exactly what I heard every morning in Albuquerque when I was getting ready for work, the Today Show. There is no place you can go anymore. Everything is the same everywhere.” Now she was cold.
“Let’s go in and have some wine,” she said.
“Ellen, how old are you?” Debbie asked as she got to her feet. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ellen said. “I’m thirty-two. That makes me the oldest reporter in the newsroom. Any newsroom.” She gave her snort of a laugh.
“Yeah, but you’re the best,” Debbie said and smiled. She had found a friend.
20
Jason Osner thought the hospice was damn creepy. That wasn’t the way Debbie saw it at all.
“It’s all happy and bright and everyone is so positive,” she said. “They give them all the drugs they want so they don’t have to die in pain.”
Fine, but nodding patients weren’t his idea of great pictures and the only thing he wanted to do the two days they were at the hospice was to leave. And, there she was, talking about how happy the whole thing was, dying the way you wanted to die, dying with dignity. He wasn’t getting that on tape. He wasn’t seeing that at all.
To top it off, in every interview they did, somebody had to say that one thing about how their work at the hospice helped them accept their own death. And, after they said it, they all gave this open-mouthed grin. Fucking creepy.
“What about living?” he demanded on the drive back to the station. “I’d rather think about living than dying. That’s going to come no matter what I do, so why spent the rest of my life thinking about it?”
“That isn’t the way it was,” she argued. “They’re helping people.”
“You’ll see the tapes,” he told her. “You’ll see. All those patients were gray. They weren’t happy. And those other people weren’t that happy either. You’ll see.”
She watched him as he drove, the strong profile, the strong hands on the steering wheel, the muscular arms and the long lean thighs tight in blue jeans. He was wrong, she thought. It was a happy place.
She stopped at a drugstore before going home. She saw an old man moving slowly along the aisles. He reached for each rack, not so much to steady himself but to touch. He wore a light-blue golf sweater, fawn-colored slacks and a white baseball cap.
She watched as he bent close to the rack of thick, gold-wrapped candy bars and let his small, white hand touch them. She could see his blue eyes searching from behind the thick glasses. His fingers ran lightly across the gold foil. The tears caught in her throat.
It was that way all weekend. She was filled with tears and she knew what Ellen would say. She would say it was the hospice.
“What did you expect, Debbie?” she’d say. “I told you it was a depressing story.”
“And don’t tell me it was the hospice,” she begged when she finally did make the call.
“All right, so it wasn’t but it was,” Ellen said with a laugh. “Who wouldn’t come back depressed as hell, and then you go chasing some old guy around in a drugstore who probably has more money than God. Why do you have to worry about stuff like that?”
“I don’t know,” she sniffed back the tears.
“Listen to this, if you want depressing,” Ellen said. “I decided to take Brown at his word and do something light and happy for my series. That’s what he said he wanted, light and happy. I decided to do a series on local comedians. Last night I went to a comedy club to set it up.
“Talk about depressing, you don’t know the meaning of the word until you talk to comedians. Those guys are miserable. Now, what can I do, circus clowns? Talk about depressing.”
“I thought I might see a doctor,” Debbie said. “A therapist.”
“For what?”
“Well, I used to see one and sometimes it helps to have sort of a tune-up. What do you think?”
“Some of the guys I met last night could certainly use a few visits but I don’t see it for you. It was that story, Debbie. That’s all.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she agreed quickly.
“Why did you see one before?”
“I had some problems. No big deal. I saw one for a couple of months, that’s all.”
*
“A shrink? No way,” Jason told her. “You’re fine.”
They sat in the editing booth putting together the second part
