Magnolia Wednesdays (2 page)

Then came the long grueling years spent building credibility, honing her interview techniques, building her contact base, developing her research skills. Not to mention the endless hours spent smothering her southern accent, mercilessly shortening and clipping those lazy vowels and drawn-out syllables so that she could have been from anywhere, or nowhere, under the equally merciless tutelage of New York’s most expensive voice coach.

The years of working twice as hard as any man around her. Of always putting the job, the story, the next break before anything else. Before family, before friends, before lovers. She had worked with single-minded determination until the name Vivien Gray became synonymous with “inside scoop.”

All of it ground to dust by a ten-minute video of her butt.

Scooting on her side, she managed to swing her legs off the bed and lower her feet to the floor and ultimately to stand. Marty jumped up from his chair, concerned. “What are you doing? Are you allowed to get out of bed?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. They’ve poked and prodded me since I got here. And when they weren’t poking or prodding they were laughing. Or trying not to. One of the doctors actually told me I should have ‘turned the other cheek.’ ”

A snort of amusement escaped Marty’s lips, and she shot him a withering look. “Don’t you dare laugh. Don’t you dare!”

Wincing with each step, she carried her clothes into the bathroom and removed the hospital gown. Her body was bruised and battered. Her underwear and jeans had holes laced with blood where the bullet had passed through. Vivien pushed back the nausea she felt at the remembered feel of steel slamming into her flesh. Gingerly she stepped into the jeans, careful not to dislodge the dressing on her wound as she pulled them up, then tossed the underwear into the trash can.

She was about to slip an arm into the shirt she’d been wearing the night before when she noticed that it, too, had a hole in the same spot. Holding it up in front of her, she opened the bathroom door and reached out a bare arm. “Give me the T-shirt you have on under your long sleeves.” She held her hand out until she felt the cotton cross her palm, then pulled it on over her head and down over her rear end.

As she walked back into the hospital room ready to bully Marty into helping her slip out of the hospital and into a cab, it occurred to her that the well-bred southern girls’ code of conduct might be in need of an addendum. Because surely if such a girl should have the bad taste to not only get shot but
survive
, she’d better make damned sure her abject humiliation wasn’t captured on camera, aired on national television, or uploaded to YouTube.

2

T
HE CAB DEPOSITED them in front of Vivien’s apartment building on West 68th on New York’s Upper West Side around two P.M. after a quick stop at Duane Reade for salve and bandages and a liter of ginger ale that she hoped would settle her stomach. Telling the cab driver to wait, Marty carried her butt planter and the drugstore bag past the day doorman, Ralph, through the lobby, and up in the elevator to her apartment on the twenty-fifth floor. Inside, he set her things on the kitchen counter and turned to face her.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

“Well, you can stay and dress my wound for me, if you want.”

“Oh, um, sure.” Marty’s Adam’s apple did its thing. He pushed a hank of hair out of his eyes. “If you need me to, I can . . .”

“Just yanking your chain.” She went up on tiptoe and gave him a kiss on his cheek. “Thanks for coming to get me. I’m going to take it easy today, but I’ll probably be in the office tomorrow. I need to salvage something from this story, though I don’t know what at this point.”

He paused at the door. “What do you want me to tell your mother?”

“Nothing. She is
not
your responsibility.”

He shrugged, unwilling to admit that he couldn’t say no to Caroline Baxter Gray, former debutante and emotional steamroller, who’d pursued his cooperation as relentlessly as she’d ever campaigned for her husband’s political career.

“Just tell her I’ll call her later.”

He gave her a look.

“And I will. I will call her in a little bit.” When she had the strength. When she didn’t feel quite so . . . vulnerable. When she didn’t feel like she needed to throw up.

“Okay.” It was clear he didn’t believe her, but there was really nothing he could do about it. He’d never been able to refuse her, either.
Not
that she was like her mother, who believed the Gray political dynasty was similar to the Kennedys’—if, Vivien thought, the Kennedys had southern drawls and a penchant for pig pulls. “Call me if you need me.”

“Thanks.” She walked him to the door and locked it behind him, more relieved than she’d ever admit to be home. The apartment, a corner unit in a prewar brick building, was small even by New York standards. One bedroom, one bath, and a combination galley kitchen, dining room, and living room squeezed into six hundred fifty square feet. But the location just north of Lincoln Center was incredibly convenient, and her unit had large windows facing both north and east. She’d bought it ten years ago when her salary had taken its first big hike upward and in the ensuing years had refinished the original oak floors, gutted and redone the tiny bathroom, doing the same to the kitchen several years later. And in between she’d had built-ins built in everywhere humanly possible.

Vivi loved its compactness, felt safe in her hidey-hole when she pulled the door shut behind her at night. The windows made it light and airy but forced the central air to work overtime to try to combat the heat and humidity that smote the city during the summer’s final hurrah.

Her mother had compared it unfavorably to a hamster’s cage and declared it could fit inside their master bathroom back at Magnolia Hall in Atlanta. On her mother’s subsequent visits, which generally coincided with the opening of the New York City Ballet or an especially splashy Broadway play, they met in the lounge of the St. Regis where her parents invariably stayed or at whatever new restaurant was in vogue at the time.

In her tiny bedroom, which was just large enough to accommodate a queen-sized bed, a nightstand, and a dresser, Vivien stepped carefully out of her jeans and pulled off Marty’s T-shirt. Naked, she walked toward the open door of the equally tiny bathroom to stare into the mirror that covered it. Usually she avoided doing this. She was forty-one after all, and although she’d started out with pretty good genes—the females on both the Baxter and Gray sides of the family had long aspired to and held titles like Miss Cornpone, Tobacco Leaf, and Black-Eyed Pea—nothing about her was quite as high or tight or firm as it had once been.

Like her mother and sister, she topped out around five feet ten, six feet in heels, with long limbs and a neck that had been referred to as swanlike. Her short dark hair had been cut in long layers and her brown eyes were deeply set in an angular face that Vivien had discovered early on worked better in photographs and on camera than in person.

She might have been able to believe herself beautiful if she hadn’t been inherently clumsy and completely lacking in rhythm, despite having a mother who’d once dreamed of being a prima ballerina and a younger sister who’d majored in dance. And she might have felt herself a true Baxter or Gray, if she hadn’t always been such a square peg smashed into a round family hole; hadn’t been born with the uncontrollable urge to dig for the truth behind the simplest word or deed, which was not exactly a welcome personality trait in a family that had made its living in and from politics since the War of Northern Aggression.

Her legs were still pretty good and her stomach reasonably flat, though there was a slight swell that she suspected was yet another one of the hallmarks of approaching middle age. Her breasts, though lower, were still full. Swiveling, she took in the flare of her hip, then contemplated the source of her current problem and the stark white bandage covering it, and wondered how a brief and almost insignificant creasing of a fairly insignificant part of her anatomy could have garnered so much unwelcome attention. Surely those fifty thousand people who’d already raced to YouTube to see her take one in the rear, needed to “get a life.”

Reaching around the door, she lifted her robe from the hook and drew it on, tying its frayed chenille belt firmly around her waist. Her stomach heaved itself up into her throat and she froze, staring at her whitening face, while she willed it back down. When it seemed she’d won the battle, she padded through the living area and into the kitchen where she found a lone package of saltines from some long-ago take-out meal, mangled it open, and nibbled determinedly on one of the crackers.

On the counter, the blinking red light on the base of the phone indicated voice mail. Carrying the phone into the living area, she lowered herself gently onto the couch, then scrolled down to see who’d called. Resigned, she punched in her access code and brought the receiver up to her ear.

The unhurried cadence of her mother’s drawl belied the urgency of her message and the degree of her irritation, but Vivi had forty-one years of experience recognizing both. “Vivien, I have just gotten off the phone with Marty and he has sworn to me that you are all right. But I am fully prepared to get on a plane this moment and come up there to take care of you, if you would like. Please call me and let me know what is happening. It is completely humiliating to have to communicate with you through a third party. I am your mother and . . .”

Vivi hit delete; she’d heard the concluding part of that particular speech before. The next voice belonged to her widowed sister, Melanie, who lived with her two teenagers, Shelby and Trip, in one of Atlanta’s northeastern suburbs, close, but not too close, to their parents’ home in Buckhead.

Melanie, who was younger than Vivi by three years, had always been a pleaser, unwilling to so much as rock the boat that Vivien periodically tried to take out and sink in deep water. Right up until the moment Melanie set eyes on Jordan Jackson Jr., the handsome young
Republican
with political aspirations that she’d met in college and married soon after. Vivien still wasn’t sure if marrying a Republican and helping him win first a seat on the county commission and then in the Georgia House of Representatives had been Melanie’s singular act of rebellion or an impulse so powerful she’d simply been unable to resist.

Once the scandal had died down and her family had reluctantly absorbed their Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Gray dynasty had soldiered on. But the sisters’ relationship had never been the same.

Their mother maintained that Melanie couldn’t help but resent the fact that Vivien had left her behind, but the reality was that once Melanie married and Vivien fled north, the only thing they had in common was their shared childhood. And it wasn’t as if all of those memories were good enough to cling to.

On the occasions when they
were
together, Vivi stifled yawns while Melanie described the far too intimate details of pregnancy and motherhood as well as the brilliance of her children, the mind-numbing minutiae of suburban life, and the joys of campaigning for J.J., which didn’t sound all that joyful to Vivi. About three years before J.J. died, Melanie, who had first taught ballroom dance while in college, bought a dance studio, which she’d remodeled and renamed after the gilt and glass ballroom at Magnolia Hall. At that point the fascinating cast of characters who took lessons there became another topic of conversation through which Vivien smiled politely while her thoughts wandered to more pressing matters like the interview subject she hadn’t been able to pin down, the inadequacies of her current research assistant, and whether she was smiling and nodding in the right places.

“Vivi?” Melanie’s voice and cadence in her message were identical to their mother’s—and Vivien’s before she’d wrestled it into submission. The thing that set it apart was its lack of recrimination. “Shelby showed me your, um, video on YouTube. I can’t believe you were shot.” There was a catch in Melanie’s voice—most likely the whole gun thing made her think about J.J. dying on that hunting trip two years ago. “Anyway, I wasn’t sure if you were home from the hospital yet, but I wanted to make sure you were okay. You know if there’s anything I can do, if you’d like to come down here and recuperate, whatever. I’m here and you’re, um, always welcome.”

Vivien flushed with embarrassment. Her stay with Melanie after J.J.’s death had been cut short by an emergency at work—or what had seemed like an emergency at the time. She’d seen the shock in Melanie and her children’s eyes, noted the numbness of their movements, and known that she should stay and do what she could for as long as they needed her. Instead, barely three days after the funeral she’d muttered her apologies and vowed to come back soon. And then she’d practically raced to the Atlanta airport, away from their pain, back to the safety of her work and her life. Vivien felt the shame all over again, just remembering it.

On the couch, Vivi worked her way onto her side and pulled the old afghan up over her shoulder, scrunching the pillow under her cheek, too tired to bother looking for the remote in order to turn on the TV. Her body ached and her stomach still roiled, but she’d already consumed her meager stash of saltines. She could call one of her usual spots for delivery, but she didn’t think anyone would make the trip for a box of crackers, which was the only thing she could imagine allowing past her lips right now.

She dozed for a while and when she woke the light was fading outside and the traffic noises were no longer gently muffled but loud and aggressive. She guessed five P.M.; the digital clock on the TV stand read six fifteen. She was debating whether to go back to sleep or forage for something else in the cracker family when the phone rang. Caller ID said simply, “Out of Area.”

This time the voice was male and she was so glad to hear it tears formed behind her lids. “Vivi, are you there?” Stone’s voice was smooth and warm with a soul-deep resonance that was clearly a gift from the gods. Men trusted it; women got wicked little shivers in private places from it. He was big and broad-shouldered with an even-featured face and a strong jaw that came across well on camera; all in all a very impressive package. Though she would never say so to anyone else, Vivi thought what was inside was even better.

“I’m here.” She didn’t normally dwell on the distance that so often separated them, but right now she wished Stone were here sitting next to her giving her that look that said both “cut the crap” and “I think you’re fabulous” and not on the other side of the world in Kabul. “When the ID said ‘out of area,’ it wasn’t joking. What time is it there?”

“Two forty-five A.M.” She couldn’t hear anything in the background. When he’d called while he was embedded with a battalion in Iraq, she’d sometimes heard gunfire. Once there’d been an explosion that made her heart race in her chest until he spoke, but he said it was nothing, that he wouldn’t have been on the phone if he’d been under attack.

It was rare that they got to talk privately. With the eight-and-a-half-hour time difference Stone would usually lie low during his daytime, then do live “hits” during his night so that his reports were live during the network’s daily newscasts here. Sometimes the control room in New York would patch her in between Stone’s live shots so that they could speak, but there were often four or five other people standing by on the line.

“I haven’t had a chance to call since I reached Marty this morning. Are you okay?” he asked more quietly. And after she’d reassured him that she was, he added, “You’re up to sixty thousand views on YouTube.” She could almost picture the smile settling on his lips. “I’ve ordered you a pair of Kevlar underwear for Christmas.”

“I should warn you that I’m not finding anything about this at all funny,” she said stiffly.

“If it had happened to someone else, you’d be laughing your ass off.” There was a pause and a small chuckle. “Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.”

Vivien drew in a deep breath. Exhaled. Pretended to be irritated. “I don’t think I’ll leave reporting for stand-up comedy just yet.”

He laughed and she felt her mood lighten in response. “Point taken. But I was thinking maybe I’d come home and change your bandages for a while. Maybe do a little targeted physical therapy. I make a mean can of chicken soup.”