I am twenty-one, working a temporary summertime job as a general-assignment reporter for my hometown paper in New Jersey. I’m a substitute. The assignments depend on which regular staffer is off; you never know what you will be doing until you’re doing it. I ping-pong from town to town, from meetings to parades to ribbon-cuttings. I am a placeholder, writing stuff that anybody could write, once they’ve gotten a quick intro on the inverted-pyramid technique.
Sometimes I strive for cleverness and am rewarded with a $5 bonus for Best Lead. Here is one of my prizewinners: “It’s not what you say but how you say it that gets a heifer hoofing.” It was about a cow-calling contest at a county fair. The paper was too cheap to pay gas money for me to drive there, so I got the result over the phone from a contest organizer. First prize was quite a coup, considering.
But one day I come to work and I know instantly it’s not going to be the usual. I see the assistant city editor’s impatient hand waving and beckoning; I trot over to her desk and shuffle my feet while she barks into the phone cradled at her shoulder. Her hands busy at the computer keyboard, she pins me with a glare, a warning not to wander. Bang goes the receiver into the cradle.
There’s been a fatal police chase, she says.
A what?
A Fatal. Police. Chase. (Sharp sigh, eyeroll.)
Three towns away, the police had signaled for some teenager to pull over. Instead, the kid floored it. (Nobody ever knew why.) He drove faster and faster, hugging curves and swinging wide at the corners, the police car wailing and flying behind him. On they went, down a two-lane road through a nature preserve, where the kid lost control of his car, wrapped it around a tree, died instantly.
I ask if I am supposed to go to the crash scene. (My first dead body. I want to throw up.)
No, says the editor.
Do you want me to call his classmates? (That would be nice. I could do that.)
No, says the editor. I want you to go to his house and ask his parents for a reaction.
I want to throw up again. But I go. I find the right page in my Hagstrom’s street atlas, fold it open on the seat beside me, drive to the kid’s neighborhood.
I sit in my car at the curb, gazing at the kid’s house, which seems empty. Shades are drawn; it has a lost look. A mid-century, white split-level. There’s a tiny lawn, a short sidewalk up to red brick steps. A cement tub with some petunias, lavender and white.
I hope, as I sit. Scenarios unreel my mind that would let me off the hook: The family is at the police station. Or at the hospital. They are at a relative’s house, hiding out from assholes like me. Or at a funeral home, making arrangements, which might take lots and lots of time. They might not be back for hours. They might not be back until way past my deadline.
Eventually, I have to ring the bell.
Slowly I get out of the car, sling my purse strap over my shoulder, take up my reporter’s notebook and pen. Walking up to the house along the little cement walkway, past the pretty petunias, I hold my notebook hand down by my side, minimizing it, trying to merge it into the folds of my skirt. I watch my index finger waver in front of the doorbell, move in, push.
It sounds so loud.
And then, footsteps. A pause. More footsteps, coming nearer. The door swings open.
It’s a regular guy standing there, dressed in work pants and a work shirt, open at the throat. He stares at me, and I note his eyes are bloodshot, rimmed with red. The gaze is dull.
I am glad he is not screaming at me.
I say who I am, and what I want. The gaze remains dull. We stand there, eyes locked. I feel the race of the pulse in my throat and I wonder whether the man can see it. I ask for a comment again.
Slowly he shakes his head. He shuts the door in my face, quietly.
I am shaking, but relieved. I sit in the car, reveling in the blessed feeling that it’s over. I did my duty, rang the bell, asked the question.
But: I will go back empty-handed. The desk editor won’t be happy. I think this over, picturing her scorn, hearing in my head her tongue-click of disdain.
I decide I am still relieved. Fuck the story, I think. Fuck the front page.
This isn’t the movies, and I’m no Hildy Johnson.
-0-
I always have assumed the man at the door was the dead boy’s father, although he could have been an uncle or even a grandfather, I suppose. Whoever he was, I marvel now at the restraint he showed, so soon after the crash, the call, the loss. Looking back across decades of life and motherhood, of worrying about my own kids, I wonder why he cut me a break. I was only two years older than the crash victim, at most.
Maybe that was it. Maybe he saw just another kid standing there. Or maybe he was just too damned tired to ream me out.
Anyway, thank you, sir, whoever you were, wherever you are.
Edited For Clarity. 