Linwood Barclay: Never Look Away

“Work with me.”

He pushed his lips in and out a moment. “I’d probably try to run the son of a bitch off the road into the ditch.”

I took the cards from him and ripped them, one by one, in half, then dropped them in the metal garbage bin. Dad sighed.

Jan came out the back door with Ethan. They walked up the side of the house to the Jetta and Jan started getting Ethan strapped into the safety seat.

“Guess we’re going,” I said.

“Your problem,” Dad said, “is you’re afraid to shake things up. Like that new prison they want to build. That’d be a real shot in the arm for the town.”

“Sure. Maybe we could get a nuclear waste storage facility while we’re at it.”

I got into the Jetta next to Jan. She backed out, pointed us in the direction of our house. Her jaw was set firmly and she wouldn’t look at me.

“You okay?” I asked.

Jan said nothing all the way home, and very little through dinner. Later, she said she would put Ethan to bed, something we often did together.

I went upstairs as she was tucking our son in.

“You know who loves you more than anyone in the whole world?” she said to him.

“You?” Ethan said in his tiny voice.

“That’s right,” Jan whispered to him. “You remember that.”

Ethan said nothing, but I thought I could hear his head moving on his pillowcase.

“If someone ever said I didn’t love you, that wouldn’t be true. Do you understand?”

“Yup,” Ethan said.

“You sleep tight and I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Can I have a drink of water?” Ethan said.

“No more stalling. Go to sleep.”

I slipped into our bedroom so I wouldn’t be standing there when Jan came out.

“Check it out,” said Samantha Henry, a general assignment reporter who sat next to me in the Standard newsroom.

I wheeled over on my chair and looked at her computer monitor. Close enough to read it, but not so close she might think I was smelling her hair.

“This just came in from one of the guys in India, who was watching a planning committee meeting about a proposed housing development.” The committee was grilling the developer about how small the bedrooms appeared to be on the plans. “Okay, so read this para right here,” Samantha said, pointing.

“‘Mr. Councilor Richard Hemmings expressed consternation that the rooms did not meet the proper requirements for the swinging of a cat.’” I stared at it a moment and grinned. “I should call my dad and ask if that’s actually written somewhere in the building code. ‘A bedroom must be large enough that if you are standing in the center, grasping a cat by the tail, its head will not hit any of the four walls when you are spinning with your arm fully extended.’”

“Stuff’s coming in like this every day,” Samantha said. “What the fuck do they think they’re doing? You saw the correction we ran the other day?”

“Yeah,” I said. The city did not actually own any barns, and no city employees had actually closed the barn doors after the horses had left. It was bad enough our reporters in India were unfamiliar with American idioms, but when they got past the copy desk right here in the office, something was very very wrong.

“Don’t they care?” Samantha asked.

I pushed away from the monitor, leaned back in my chair and laced my fingers behind my head. I always felt a little more relaxed when I moved away from Sam. The thing we had was a long time ago, but you started sharing a computer screen too often and people were going to talk.

It felt like the chair’s back support was going to fail, and I shifted forward, put my hands on the arms. “You have to ask?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “I’ve been here fifteen years. I asked the M.E.’s assistant for a new pen and she wanted to see an empty one first. Swear to God. Half the time, you go in the ladies’ room, there’s no goddamn toilet paper.”

“I hear the Russells may be looking to sell,” I said. It was the number one rumor going around the building. “If they can pare down the costs, get the place showing a profit, they’ll have an easier time unloading the place.”

Samantha Henry rolled her eyes. “Seriously, who’d buy us in this climate?”

“I’m not saying it’s happening. I just heard some talk.”

“I can’t believe they’d sell. This place has been run by one family for generations.”

“Yeah, well, it’s a very different generation running it now than ten years ago. You won’t find ink running through the veins of anyone on the board these days.”

“Madeline used to be a reporter,” Samantha said, referring to our publisher. She didn’t need to remind me how Madeline got her start here.

“Used to be,” I said.

What with papers shutting down all over the country, everyone was on edge. But Sam, in particular, was worried about her future. She had an eight-year-old daughter and no husband. They’d split up years ago, and she’d never gotten a dime of support from him. A former Standard staffer, he’d left to work on a paper in Dubai. It’s pretty hard to chase a guy down for money he owes you when he’s on the other side of the planet.

When she was newly divorced, with a baby, Sam put up a brave front. She could do this. Still have her career and raise a child. We didn’t sit next to each other back then, but we crossed paths often enough. In the cafeteria, at the bar after work. When we weren’t trading reporters’ usual complaints about editors who had held or cut their stories, she let down her guard about how tough things were for her and Gillian.

I guess I thought I could rescue her.

I liked Sam. She was sexy, funny, intellectually challenging. I liked Gillian. Sam and I started spending a lot of time together. I started spending a lot of nights at Sam’s. I fancied myself as more than a boyfriend. I was her white knight. I was the one who was going to make her life okay again.

I took it pretty hard when she dumped me.

“This is too fast,” she told me. “This is how I fucked things up last time. Moving too quickly, not thinking things through. You’re a great guy, but…”

I went into a funk I don’t think I really came out of until I met Jan. And now, all these years later, things were okay between Sam and me. But she was still a single mother, and things had never stopped being a struggle.

She lived paycheck to paycheck. Some weeks, she didn’t make it. She’d had the labor beat for years, but the paper could no longer afford to devote reporters to specific issues, so now she reported to general assignment, and couldn’t predict the hours she’d be working. It played hell with her babysitting. She was always scrambling to find someone to watch her daughter when a last-minute night assignment landed on her desk.

I didn’t have Sam’s week-to-week financial worries, but Jan and I talked often about what else I could do if I found myself without a job. Unemployment insurance only lasted so long. I-and Jan for that matter-was worth more dead since we signed up for life insurance a few weeks back. If the paper folded, I wondered if I should just step in front of a train so Jan would be up $300,000.

“David, you got a sec?”

I whirled around in my chair. It was Brian Donnelly, the city editor. “What’s up?”

He nodded his head in the direction of his office, so I got up and followed him. The way he made me trail after him, without turning or chatting along the way, made me feel like a puppy being dragged along by an invisible leash. I wasn’t even forty yet, but I saw Brian was part of the new breed around here. At twenty-six, he was management, having impressed the bosses not with journalistic credentials but with business savvy. Everything was “marketing” and “trends,” “presentation” and “synergy.” Every once in a while, he dropped “zeitgeist” into a sentence, which invariably prompted me to say “Bless you.” The sports and entertainment editors were both under thirty, and there was this sense, at least among those of us who had been at the paper for ten or more years, that the place was gradually being taken over by children.