Эбби Луби - Nuclear Romance

Jen blinked and slowly shook her head no. She waited for Diana to explain.

“Think about where you were when she got sick. How close the beach is to the plant, the flow of the river water that might have carried radioactive particles—particles Kaylee could have ingested. And if she did, her frail body wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Jen stood up abruptly and ran her hands through her hair, tears streaming down her face.

“We don’t know that—you don’t know that, Diana. It was a complicated death. That’s all. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

Diana rose and put her arms around Jen.

“Okay, okay. I didn’t mean to upset you. But I’m not the only one thinking like this. I’ve talked to some medical experts. It is a possibility. And by the way, there is something we can do about it.”

“Whatever it is, leave me out of it.”

Jen stepped away from Diana, and a buzzer rang signaling the end of the lunch period. In the hall, kids rushed back to their classrooms, and hoping to spot Ricky, Jen looked at the children. In the course of her conversation with Diana, the youngsters had innocently acquired a new vulnerability.

With the news Lou had just given her, Diana got busy. She wanted a rally to happen soon. Could they organize and make it happen in two days down at the riverfront? A perfect place for a photo op with the ALLPower plant clearly in view. She wrote up a press release and e-mailed it out en masse to local papers and radio and TV stations. She had become media savvy, right down to rehearsing sound bites for reporters craving simple explanations. She wanted to be the one they sought out.

She sent Lou a personal e-mail about the rally. If he wasn’t writing up the leak, would he consider covering the rally?

He read her e-mail late that night from home, after filing his sports story. He hit Reply.

Not sure about the rally. But are you free afterward to go for a ride?

Ride? She wrote back:

Rally first, then ride? The rally will be a great story.

Lou snorted at the screen. The woman was pushy—he didn’t make deals, especially swapping press coverage for the company of a pretty gal. He would stall.

I’ll check with my editor and see what I can do. Where would you like to go after the rally?

It was that kind of unresolved sparring that made her cranky and grit her teeth. He was being cagey and flattering at the same time. But she wouldn’t give up. She waited ten minutes before e-mailing him back.

I know your editor will want you to write this up, and after we could check out a wonderful Japanese garden just up the road.

Chrissy Dolan saw the crowd gathering around the podium at the riverfront park. She reached in her bag and pulled out a small camera and a reporter’s pad and made her way over to the group. A few years ago she’d graduated from college with a degree in journalism, a profession that now seemed to be in flux. After a few years of trying to find any kind of news work, she was lucky to get an internship at a local weekly paper in Westchester called the Register .

Her editor, Al Areva, liked her even though she was green. He wasn’t really sure what she had learned in college; she hadn’t figured out the shortcuts and it took her a long time to crank out a story. But she worked hard and always made deadline, and he saw potential. He liked Chrissy, and after her first summer he put her on staff, part-time. She was smart and attractive, and people liked to talk to her, a plus in the news business.

Al assigned Chrissy the dreaded school-board and town meetings. For a while he watched her work, shaking his head. Chrissy took notes on a large yellow legal pad, her scrawl plastering the page from top to bottom. She played and replayed the audio recordings from meetings or interviews, typing every word before she decided what to keep in the story. One day Al said to her, “You know, Chrissy, you’re a reporter, not a secretary.”

“What do you mean?” She brushed her long, light brown hair away from her hazel eyes.

“You’re taking down everything, not telling me in your own words what happened.”

She stared at him, her eyes widening.

“Look, Chrissy. What are you writing about right now?”

“Town board meeting.”

“Okay. Look at me and just tell me what happened at the meeting—as much as you can remember.”

She started to look at her notes, but Al came over and covered the dizzying scrawl with his hand.

“Just what you remember. Tell me.”

“Well, they want to fire the police chief. There was a whole to-do about that.”

“What else?”

“Let’s see. Um. The board wants a pay raise, but they didn’t vote on it.”

“And?”

“Some Boy Scout got a town medal for… something. I can’t remember. It’s here on tape.”

“Okay. Do you know what your story is here?”

“I’m just writing about what happened at the meeting, from soup to nuts. Aren’t I?”

“No. Your story is the police chief getting axed. That’s big. That’s a headline story. You should have left right after that and written it up immediately. Who was angry? Who was upset, what was said? Make sense?”

She stared at him. A lightbulb went off.

“What about the other stuff?”

“We’ll get the other stuff eventually,” Al told her. “Listen, reporters aren’t stenographers. I know this sounds corny, but think of us as foot soldiers of democracy. Sure, it’s a bit altruistic, but your job is to look, listen, take it all in, and then write it as you see it. Our readers don’t want the minutes; they want your take on what happened.”

It was a floodgate opening. Reporting suddenly took on a different meaning. Her particular view of an event was important, something that never before occurred to her. The idea was empowering.

“And another thing,” Al said. “Get rid of that damn legal pad and use what we all use.” He threw a package of small reporter pads on her desk.

In just a few weeks, Al saw an instant change in the way Chrissy worked. When he got ALLPower’s press release about the leak’s real danger, he assigned the story to her. Plant stuff was never too newsy, but this time it seemed to be a front page story.

As she left the office for the rally, Al called out to her, “Don’t spin your wheels on this one. Our readers don’t really think the plant is a problem, and besides, as a news story, it isn’t that sexy.”

When she got to the riverfront green, Chrissy could see speakers gathering at the podium, jockeying around, and rustling their papers. Signs popping out over people’s heads read “Leaks Kill the Hudson Fish!” and “ALLPower = Doomsday.” Someone started to speak: it was Diana Chase introducing herself to the crowd. Chrissy recognized her name from the press release about the rally.

“Welcome everyone! We are here because we live in the shadow of a nuclear power plant that is a safety risk of unimaginable proportions!”

Suddenly a bus pulled up and two dozen people poured out wearing new white-and-blue T-shirts with block letters spelling “ALLPower.” Some wore hard hats, others wore ALLPower baseball caps. The last to get off was Bob Stalinsky, who leaned against the bus and watched the workers approach the crowd. When they reached the perimeter of the group, the workers stood behind them and fanned out, almost like a barricade. Chrissy hurried over and turned her camera on. Working for a small paper meant that she was both writer and photographer.

Diana paused. “We also welcome workers from ALLPower. We are glad you can join us.”

“We wouldn’t miss this for the world, Lady!” a worker in a hard hat yelled. His cohorts jeered, angering the anti-nuke group. Fending off a possible shouting match, Diana projected her voice strongly into the mic.