Magnolia Wednesdays (3 page)

Despite her stomach, despite the ridiculousness of her situation, despite the fact that it was time to figure out how to actually apply the salve and put on a fresh bandage, she smiled. After three years together a part of her kept waiting for Stone to realize he could do better, get someone much younger or at least prettier. But when he was in the country, it was Vivien he came home to. “When he was in the country” were, of course, the salient words. As one of the network’s most experienced correspondents, he was more often gone than present. Which might explain why things were still so good between them.

“Seriously, Viv,” Stone said. “I could probably get back for a couple of days. I don’t like the idea of you being alone right now with no one to look after you.”

“I’m perfectly able to look after myself,” Vivien said, completely unable to tell him how much his offer meant to her. “This was just a freak accident. And it’s not like I’m mortally wounded or anything. If I haven’t already expired from embarrassment, it’s unlikely I’m going to.” She knew she was protesting too much, but she couldn’t seem to stop. Well-bred southern girls didn’t whine or sound needy; she was pretty certain that was on the list somewhere. “I’m fine. More than fine really. I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time. I think I can do it a little bit longer.”

“All right.” She heard the reluctance in his voice and was glad he wasn’t there to see how mightily she was pretending. “But I need to hear from you more often. I’ll pick up messages whenever I can, so I expect you to email or text me regularly to let me know how you’re feeling. If I don’t hear from you, I’m going to be on a plane. Do you hear me?”

Vivien couldn’t believe how tightly she was clinging to his words. Clearly, the whole shooting thing had completely unnerved her. She felt like a quivering mass of neediness; her emotions were churning almost as heavily as her stomach.

“Got it,” she said, all plucky glibness. “Now you stop worrying about me and get back to work. Or sleep. Or something. I’m absolutely fine.”

Or as fine as someone who’d been shot in the butt and humiliated on a national scale could be. As one of her well-wishers had put it, the worst was surely behind her.

3

V
IVIEN GOT TO work later than usual, then spent an inordinate amount of time getting to her office because everyone from the security guard in the lobby to the director of the nightly newscast had a pithy comment or observation about her wound and/or her anatomy. On her desk, she found a plaster cast of a set of buttocks. A blonde in her midtwenties stood next to it. Vivien wasn’t sure if the two were related.

“Are those yours?” Vivien nodded at the buttocks, which were clearly female and much perkier than her own. At the moment she was in no mood even for people she knew and liked, and she doubted the blonde belonged in either category.

“No.” The woman had professionally arched eyebrows the exact color of her hair and knew how to use them. “I assumed they belonged to you.”

Vivien sighed and walked around to sit gingerly behind her desk. Without being asked, the blonde took the seat on the opposite side. Vivien moved the buttocks to her right so that she could see the other woman. “I’m not in the best possible mood today. How can I help you?”

“Well, actually, I’m here to help you.”

“Oh?”

The woman smiled, but it was a smile reflecting triumph, not warmth. “I’ve been hired to help round out the investigative department.”

This was news to Vivi, who
was
the investigative department at CIN and had never considered herself in need of “rounding out.” “So you’re going to be my assistant?”

“Well, no,” the woman said. “I’m supposed to file stories. Like you do.” A different kind of smile lifted her unnaturally full lips. “Only without the gunplay.”

“So you’re a reporter?”

“Oh, yes.” The blonde leaned forward to extend a perfectly manicured hand across the desk, narrowly missing the buttocks. “I’m Regina Matthews. I covered politics and government for KCAL in San Francisco, and I uncovered and reported on a number of scandals in my three years there. I’ve been talking to Dan Kramer for the last few months, but I had some things I wanted to wrap up before I moved to New York.”

Her gaze didn’t waver. It carried the message, “I’m here for your job. I may not have it locked up yet, but it’s only a matter of time.” Vivien recognized the certainty in the younger woman’s eyes because hers had once telegraphed the same message to the reporter she had been brought in to ultimately replace.

Vivien shook the proffered hand and tried not to show her shock. Dan had been interviewing and recruiting for months and she’d never gotten wind of it? Some investigative journalist she’d turned out to be!

“Well, how nice for you.” It was impossible not to notice that the lovely Regina was right about the same age Vivien had been when she’d started at CIN a lifetime ago. Vivi realized she wanted to throw up, but then she always wanted to do that lately. She swallowed down the nausea, reached for the plaster buttocks, and handed them to her new colleague. “Consider these a ‘welcome to the network’ gift.” She enjoyed the grimace that twisted the blonde’s Angelina Jolie lips. “We’ll have to do lunch one day. But right now you’ll have to excuse me. I was out yesterday and I really need to get to work.”

She held her smile until the other woman left the office, holding the buttocks out in front of her like Vivien had once held her nephew, Trip, who at the time was wearing only a sagging, poop-filled diaper.

As she watched the younger reporter leave, shards of ragged emotion jabbed at Vivien from all sides, ambushing her with their intensity. At first Vivi resisted them. She had always prided herself on her calm and logic. She did not run off half-cocked like others did; she thought and planned and then she acted. She could and had spent up to six months nailing down the details on an important story, making sure she had covered every angle, that no possibility had been left unexplored. Even when pressure had been applied from higher up, she’d never agreed to run anything until everything was in place and the story was unimpeachable and complete. This was how she’d built her reputation.

But lately these overpowering surges of emotion had become more frequent. And they’d begun to cloud her judgment, to muddy her thinking. Like two days ago when she’d decided not to tell her FBI contact that she and Marty would be in the parking garage.

Like right now when they ricocheted inside her like pinballs. When she could feel the rage and indignation simmering in her veins like a pot of water coming to a boil.

Could it be perimenopause? Vivien wondered as she tried to rein herself in. Her period had been irregular, her whole sense of herself strangely out of whack. Should she go in for a checkup? Try to figure it out?

She managed to stay seated until she was certain Regina and the buttocks were gone. But she couldn’t think clearly enough to answer any of the questions she’d posed. Nor could she plot out her next move.

Instead, she got up from her desk and walked to Dan’s office at the opposite end of the hall. She didn’t knock as she normally would have, nor did she plan out what she wanted to say or the way in which she wanted to say it. She was a Vivien on emotional steroids, an utter basket case of conflicting urges and shocking impulses.

Dan looked up when she entered the room; a warm smile lit his face. “Are you sure you should be back so soon? I figured you’d take the rest of the week off.” If he was angry at her screwup, he didn’t mention it. He’d been a good boss, firm but evenhanded; generally willing to let her work in her own way as long as she delivered. But all she could see right now was the traitor who had hired a blonde behind her back.

“Where did that Regina business come from and why wasn’t I told?”

Dan’s expression changed from one of concern to outright shock. The transition might have been comical if Vivien had had even a shred of a sense of humor left.

“What did you say?” he asked.

She strode forward until she reached his desk. There she placed her hands on the polished wood and pressed closer. “What’s going on, Dan? How could you hire someone to do what I do without even mentioning it to me?”

There was a tiny voice in her brain that murmured, “Be quiet. This is not the way to discuss this.” But she shoved the voice aside even as she purposely leaned closer so that she could loom over him. “You’re invading his space,” the munchkin-sized voice said. “This is not the way to get what you want.”

But she didn’t actually know what she wanted. Or even, at the moment, who she was. She was aflame with anger and righteous indignation. She was every woman who had worked hard, pulled herself up, claimed her place. Only to have some younger, bigger-lipped woman brought in to shove her out of the way.

“I wasn’t aware that I needed to run hiring decisions by you.” Dan’s tone and face turned cold, frigid in a way she’d seen but never experienced. “We started looking earlier this year when the focus groups began to indicate that a fresher, hipper approach would hold more appeal.”

He rose so that she could no longer tower over him. They were practically nose to nose over his desk. Both of them knew that “fresher” and “hipper” were the legally acceptable terms for “younger.”

“Now you’ve done it,” the voice said. “There’s no way this can end well.”

And as the rage seeped out of Vivien with the speed of air escaping a balloon, she realized that the voice was right.

“Your numbers have been slipping, Vivien. Your stories just don’t grab viewers like they used to.” His tone turned wry and a little bit nasty. “You got quite a spike with that stunt in the parking garage, of course. But unless you’re planning to get injured on a regular basis, those numbers are not sustainable.”

She realized then that things were both further along and far worse than she’d realized. She was on her way out whatever she did; they’d just hoped they could get her to train Regina, acclimate her to New York, and maybe introduce her to her contacts before she left. So that their fresher, hipper,
younger
reporter would already be up to speed and familiar to the audience when she took over Vivien’s job.

Her fury returned in full flame. She couldn’t even imagine training someone else to take her place, couldn’t stomach pretending everything was fine while everyone in the business knew that she was on her way out. She simply wouldn’t stand for being a lame-duck investigative reporter. She would not do this.

“Oh, no,” the little voice said. “Please be careful. Have you taken leave of your senses?”

“I am not going to train someone else to do my job,” Vivien said, ignoring the voice. “I don’t care what color blonde she dyes her hair or how many collagen treatments she’s had on her lips.”

And then, because she had apparently lost her mind and control of her faculties, she looked him in the eye and shouted, “You’ll have to get someone else to train her because I quit!”

BACK IN HER office Vivien told the horrified little voice to shut up. She emptied a box of blank DVDs and began to fill it with her things. An ancient photo of her family. One of Stone and her at a recent industry awards banquet. The awards and plaques on her wall that she’d won over the years. The one plant that had managed to survive her sporadic ministrations.

Her contacts were on her PDA and her story files were already backed up on her laptop, so the whole process took her maybe ten minutes. She was ready to flounce out of her office, down the elevator, and out of the building when her phone rang. She paused.

If she was no longer employed here, was she required to answer the phone? Her secretary, Sara Spiegel, poked her head in the doorway, took in the stripped wall of fame and the box filled with Vivien’s things. “Oh.”

Vivien always hated it when someone felt compelled to state the obvious, but it was clear she had to say something. “I’m leaving,” she said.
Obvious, obvious, obvious
. Maybe she should mention that she’d completely lost control of herself in a way she never had before and hoped never to again, and was only just now starting to grasp the ramifications of what she’d done. “I quit.”

“Oh.” At thirty, Sara Spiegel was not the sharpest tool in the shed. But she’d been a good and faithful worker and had spent the last seven years in front of Vivien’s office. “You have a phone call. It’s your doctor’s office.” Sara was also a world-class hypochondriac and would never take a call lightly from a person entitled to wear a white coat.

“It’s probably just an appointment reminder or some bookkeeping thing. I’ll call them back later.” Vivien hefted her box onto one hip.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Sara asked anxiously. “My aunt Matilda didn’t return a call from her internist one time and three years later she was dead.”

“Your Aunt Matilda was ninety-one when she died.”

“Right. But her sister, Gertie, made it to ninety-five.”

Knowing better than to follow the thread of this conversation further, Vivien hugged Sara with her free arm. “Thanks for everything. You’ve been great.”

“Are you sure you have to quit?” Sara asked. “Couldn’t you change your mind?”

Good question. Now that all the emotions that had engulfed her seemed to have retreated, she couldn’t quite believe she was on her way out the door. Could she apologize and blame it on the pain pills? Post-traumatic stress syndrome? Where had all that rage come from? And where had it gone?

As frightening as the glut of emotions were, she would have preferred them to the knee-wobbling, gut-wrenching emptiness and sense of impending doom that filled her now.

As if everything had been yanked out from beneath her. As if she didn’t have a friend left in the world. She drew in a sharp breath of shock as her vision blurred with tears. Tears? Good God, she hadn’t cried in ten years, if you didn’t count her brother-in-law J.J.’s funeral. Now the waterworks kicked in at the smallest provocation.

At the nearest Starbucks Vivien ordered a chamomile tea instead of her usual macchiato and a biscotti in place of the beckoning carrot cake, in hopes of settling her stomach. At a vacant table near the window, she sipped the warm tea and nibbled the biscotti tentatively, praying it would stay down. Between bites she tried to focus on her situation, but she couldn’t seem to marshal the resources required. Each time she tried to analyze what had just happened, her brain skittered away from the subject like a mouse playing hide and seek with a cat. Checking voice mail, she saw that the doctor’s office had tried her cell phone, too. Not really wanting to deal with it, she pressed play and listened to the nurse/receptionist’s message. “Hi, this is Dr. Sorenson’s office. The doctor has reviewed the lab work they did on you in the hospital and there’s something there that he would like to discuss. Please call to schedule an appointment for this afternoon; he promised to fit you in.”