Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

There was a pub around the corner from our hotel, which Jamie and I had passed on our way to breakfast that morning. A heavy wooden door, white walls and green shutters, old-fashioned lettering on the facade. “Check it out,” Jamie said, peering through the window. “There’s a fireplace. And a bed for a dog.”

As if on cue, a springer spaniel ambled toward us. The dog’s snout had gone white with age. Jamie squatted down and extended a hand. The dog sniffed, then licked Jamie’s palm a few times before disappearing through the propped-open back door to the pub. Jamie stood and brushed his hand on his pants, looking wistful.

“We can come back tonight,” I said. Jamie’s family had springer spaniels when he was a kid, dogs trained for duck hunting in the low country of South Carolina. It was one of the things he missed most about home.

The evening sky was still light when I arrived at the pub, but it was cool enough that there was a fire crackling behind the grate. The room smelled musty and old, in a good way. The springer spaniel was asleep in front of the fire, hind leg twitching. The young woman behind the bar put down her book and said, “What can I get you, love?”

I had arrived early. Jamie and Corey were coming straight from dinner with one of the legal scholars who had helped draft the Iraqi constitution, getting briefed in advance of that week’s elections. Ashley was delighted by this. Taking initiative, what a concept!!! she had e-mailed me. Honestly it is depressing how happy this makes me.

The table closest to the fire was occupied by an elderly couple, the man with his pint and the woman her glass of wine, each of them reading a newspaper, occasionally sighing in disapproval. “Dreadful news these days,” the woman said, setting the paper aside. “Quite enough for one night. Come on. Off to bed.”

I took the table after they left. Among the papers was a copy of the New York Times International Edition, carefully refolded. I scanned the front page, curious if the story merited international coverage. The sensational headlines had mostly died down after the police and coroner made it clear that they suspected no foul play. Still—the media loved cataloging turmoil in their own world.

It was tragic, everyone agreed on that. According to the coroner, the heart attack happened in the earliest hours of Saturday morning, not long after she returned from the office, but it took several days before the super finally broke into the apartment and discovered the body sprawled across the bedroom carpet. Her death was an eerie echo of her sister’s: the wealthy woman who lives alone, her absence unnoticed for far too long. The defibrillator in her bedroom was only ten feet away from where she collapsed, but no one was there to administer it or to call 9-1-1. And she was susceptible; she had a weak ventricle. The stories reveled in the details, the minutes and hours and days that ticked by before someone finally thought to ask, where is she?

There was a lengthy obituary, a star-studded funeral on the Upper East Side. By now, the story had migrated to the business section.

People in the office were sad, but not upset. There’s a difference. Solemn faces, teary eyes, lowered voices. But no one doubted that the ship of KCN would continue to run smoothly with Eliza Davis at the helm. Maybe even better than it had before. Big changes like this always happened suddenly. But within days, people forgot that it had ever been different.

The article described Eliza’s long tenure at KCN. She was known as an uncompromising journalist, a beloved mentor, the secret mastermind of Rebecca Carter’s career. She would be the first African-American president of KCN, or any cable news network. In her statement, Eliza said the right things: Ginny had left big shoes to fill. In the wake of this awful tragedy, she wasn’t in any rush to make sweeping changes.

It seemed Mr. King was, though. He appointed Eliza to King Media’s board of directors, a position Ginny had never held. Eliza was both glamorous and down-to-earth. Her husband was the chief of pediatric oncology at Columbia and they lived in a brownstone in Morningside Heights—things I never knew, and which I learned by reading the paper. Mr. King loved her. The media loved her. She was their new star. Everyone was rooting for her.

A jingle from the front door drew my gaze. “Sorry we’re late,” Corey said.

“Was it helpful?” I asked.

“Very,” he said. “Everyone’s drinking beer, right?”

While Corey went to the bar, Jamie crouched down and scratched behind the spaniel’s ears. “That’s a good girl,” he said. “Hey, so Corey’s no slouch.”

“Not just a pretty face, right?”

“I like him a lot.”

I smiled. “I knew you would.”

Corey came back with his hands triangled around three brimming pints, setting them down on the table among us. “What do we owe you?” Jamie said, taking out his wallet. But Corey waved a hand. “Never mind,” he said. “It’ll even out over the long haul.”

“I’m getting the next round, then,” Jamie said.

“And then me,” I said.

Corey lifted his beer. “Who would have thought? Three rednecks like us in London. We’ve come a long way.”

A long way. But there were still nights when I woke up in a cold sweat. Stalked by memories as vivid as reality. The slosh of waves against the boat, the arm reaching for the surface. I could soothe myself back to sleep with the thought that she’d done it to herself. Repeat it like a mantra: she did it to herself. She was sloppy drunk, standing on the bow in rough ocean waters, wild with agitation. I had merely done what I should have done much earlier: stand back and let her suffer the consequences of her actions.

But even I didn’t believe that. I had made an active decision that night on the boat, a horrifically cruel decision: that Stella didn’t deserve to be saved. That the world was better off without her. I was better off without her. In that moment, playing God, I had finally decided that there was no more room for forgiveness, that this was the last of her nine lives.

The perverse thing was, she would have been proud of me. Finally standing up for yourself. I could imagine the bemusement in her voice. Didn’t think you had it in you. My mother, too. Violence was something she could respect. Letting Stella drown: I thought that it would cleave me from the past, distance me from the person I had been before. But sometimes I feared that it had only brought me closer to my dark, twisted roots.

I watched Jamie and Corey talking excitedly about their upcoming trip to Baghdad, and thought about what they had done to get here. Jamie had given up a show he loved, a chance to become Rebecca’s EP after Eliza’s ascension. Corey had divorced his wife, moved from city to city, torn up a brand-new contract. It was naive to think that other people were perfectly happy. That other people didn’t feel compromise, or conflict, or sadness.

There were things they didn’t know about me. Things they could never know about me. But they knew me better than anyone else in the world. This was how I comforted myself. If it had been Jamie on the boat that night—or Corey, or Rebecca, or Eliza—I would have hauled him out of the water immediately. I would have administered CPR, raced back to land, called 9-1-1. I would have done anything to save him.

Food, water, warmth, shelter. These things are necessary to survive. It had taken me time to realize that people fit into this equation, too. Love fits into this equation, too. Jamie, in the empty office, holding me while I sobbed. Eliza, on my last day in New York, telling me how proud she was. There are people you cannot live without. To remember this is to remember your humanity.