Please Don't Come Back from the Moon (23 page)

"Wow," she said. "The thought of Hooters must have horrified you, if you're willing to offer that."

"No. No, I think I'm serious," I said.

"You think?" she said.

"This place is a shithole. It's not even safe. And Rusty loves me, you know? I mean, I pick the kid up from school when he's sick. That's a real dedicated stepfather."

"No way," Ella said. "Not under these circumstances. We shouldn't move in together out of desperation."

"Why else do people do anything?"

"That's poetic," she said.

"I've got that big house," I said.

"You've got a big, bleeding heart," she said. "Too big."

"It's a serious offer," I said.

"Michael, you couldn't even handle it when we dropped in unannounced last night," she said. "Do you know what it's like to have a kid twenty-four hours a day? It's a lot of work. Not a lot of down time."

"I know all that," I said.

"Let's go to bed," she said.

Ella was asleep in a few minutes. I stared at the ceiling for a long time. At three o'clock in the morning, I was still wide awake. I turned off the alarm before it could ring and wake Ella. I got out of bed. It was time to go to work.

A FEW DAYS LATER
, I went in to work with the flu. I'd caught it from Rusty, I figured. I had the chills and every muscle in my body was heavy and aching. I was thinking about how to get some sympathy from Gunderson, and maybe permission to go home early, but Gunderson wasn't in the parking lot smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. I went into the newsroom and the news desk was empty. Gunderson's desk was clean. Even the pictures of her kids were gone. Nobody had made coffee. Larry Miller, who usually did the afternoon production slot, was sitting at his desk, typing at his computer. He wasn't much older than me.

"Hey, Michael," he said. "Man, I don't know how you work this shift. It's not human to be up this early."

"Where's Gunderson?" I said.

"I don't know," Larry said. "I got a call last night after dinner. They said they needed me to cover the a.m. for a few days. I'm working double shifts for the next week. My wife is
not
happy."

"Did you make coffee?" I asked.

"I don't drink it," he said.

Larry's wife had just had twins, and she called the station for him every thirty minutes. Larry was a good guy. My first day as an intern, he had taken me aside and said, "Look, I know all the old-timers around here will complain to you—about the pay, the hours, the bad coffee—but believe me, this is a dream job. This is what I always wanted to do, I always wanted to be a reporter, and here I am, working my dream job."

I had just nodded. "Thanks, Larry. That means a lot," I said. I felt bad for him.

"You want to crank out some stories so we don't start the morning drive-time with dead air?"

"Sure," I said. "I'll crank something out."

We fucked up a few times. One time, the anchors got the wrong tapes and played the sound bite of the mayor talking about jazz instead of the story about Dick Cheney's heart condition. Later in the morning show, I'd written "President Clinton" instead of "President Bush," and neither Larry nor the anchor caught the mistake. These things seemed like big deals to me, but they really freaked Larry out.

Around ten o'clock, Roger Rhodes came into the newsroom, tapped me on the shoulder as I was typing and said, "My office. Pronto."

I thought he was about to give me the boot or chew me out for the mistakes on the newscast that morning. I followed him down the hall to his office. He had a little putting green all set up and he was using his putter to hit an imaginary golf ball.

"Sit down," he said, swinging at the invisible ball.

I sat.

"You're about to get two promotions in one month," he said.

"I am?"

"Let me finish. We had to let some people go, and we have some openings, including one for a new reporter. And your name has come up. You know, get out of the newsroom a little, stretch your legs..."

"Did you let Gunderson go?"

"She took early retirement," he said. "A few of the old-timers did."

"Did they have a choice?" I said.

"Look, I'm offering you a raise to twelve bucks an hour. I'm going to make you a reporter. You're young, you're single, you're good-looking and outgoing, and you're the kind of man who can work long hours out in the field and make a good name for this station."

"What about Larry?"

"Larry's a pussy. Larry needs to sit at the news desk. He'll be fine."

"Where's Gunderson?" I said.

"You know how many kids would kill for this job?"

"I know," I said.

"We take care of our employees here. We're CBS News. That's big time. A few people need a little nudging out of the nest. You, Michael, you have the chance to step into the spotlight. We'll have you out and about, getting tape, doing interviews. Heck, you can even file a few stories and get some real on-air experience."

"That all sounds good," I said.

"Don't thank me," he said. "You'll be in the prime-time world now. You'll need to put on a tie."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Thanks so much. This is a good thing."

"It is," he said. "You'll do great. You don't golf, do you?"

I didn't. I had never held a club, except for one time in a fight, when I'd swung a putter at somebody's head and missed. It seemed like a hundred years ago.

"Sure," I said. "A little."

"We should get on the course someday, then," Roger Rhodes said. "I'll bore you with some stories about when I was a green reporter."

Later, Larry came out of Roger's office and told me that he was stuck with mornings. He had been moved to Gunderson's old post.

"My wife will hate this new schedule," Larry said. "She needs me around in the morning to help with the twins."

"It's too bad," I said. "About Gunderson."

"I know," he said. "Good for you, though. I heard you got a fucking promotion."

I tried to find Gunderson's home phone number, but there were hundreds of Gundersons in the phone book, none of them named Gina.

I stopped of at my mother's house after work. I told her about the promotion. I wanted somebody, at least, to be happy about it.

"Well, that's amazing, Mikey," she said. "My little reporter."

"You know," Mack said, "most people are getting laid off right now, and you're getting a promotion. That's impressive."

"You have no reason to be depressed," my mother said. "See?"

***

ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 2001,
Gina Gunderson killed herself. I didn't find out about it until five days after it happened. The funeral was evidently a brief, private affair, and nobody from the radio station was wanted in attendance.

We found out about her death in a short memo from Roger Rhodes that didn't mention the suicide, just informed us of a random death, as if she'd gone in her sleep. It was Larry Miller who tracked down one of Gunderson's daughters and got the real story: she'd been running the car with the garage door closed. The car radio was tuned to our ridiculous all-news station when they found her. I wondered if the daughter had added that detail out of bitterness and anger, or if it really was the case, if Gunderson, in her last moments, was remembering her work and the way she'd lost it. It probably was true, I decided, and so did Larry Miller. We had trouble getting any work done that day, or that week. The newscasts were bland and perfunctory. Another memo listed an address where we could send donations to a scholarship fund the station was establishing to aid journalism students at Wayne State University, Gunderson's alma mater. Who had extra money to send to a scholarship fund? The memo ended with this line: "We are deeply sorry that Ms. Gunderson did not live to enjoy the full blessings of her much-deserved and long-awaited retirement."

ON NEW YEAR'S DAY
, Ella and Rusty and Lucky the Dog moved into my house. It had been my idea, and it took some real convincing. I pointed out what an unsafe and inappropriate environment the trailer park was for a young boy. I noted that Ella struggled to make her monthly payments, and would never save up enough money to move to a better place, no matter how many Hump Day Honey contests she won. I reminded her that the three-bedroom ranch had been given to me and that I lived there all alone. I said my brother's old room would be perfect for Rusty. I said that my room seemed to want two people in there at night. In my dreams, I said, I was always alone in vast open spaces.

When I told this to Ella, she said, "What do you think that means?"

And I said, "It means I need you there at night."

Ella didn't have that much stuff she wanted to keep, so Nick and Tom and I spent one Saturday morning carrying most of her old, beat-up furniture to the curb. Within minutes, somebody from another trailer made off with the couch or recliner or wobbly kitchen table we'd just dumped. Ella had been able to get $20,000 for the trailer and the lot, a little less than she and her husband had paid for it eight years ago, but she didn't care. It was as if she'd hit the lottery. She planned to pay off her credit cards and her student loan, and she'd dragged me to the mall to buy all sorts of new shit—toilet brushes and wastebaskets and curtains—for the house in Maple Rock.

We loaded the boxes of Ella's remaining belongings into the back of Nick's new truck and moved them to my house. It took three trips to get everything over there, but it was only a two-mile run. One of the trips was nothing but boxes and boxes of books. Another trip was for Rusty's bedroom furniture and
toys,
and one trip for Ella's clothes, kitchen stuff, and photo albums. By the end of the day, Ella's trailer was empty. To thank Nick and Tom for their help, Ella and I cooked up a big pot of chili and my two best friends and my girlfriend and her son sat around my table sharing a meal. My mom and Mack dropped by a little later.

My mother said, "It's nice to know that this house has a family living in it again."

After everybody had left and Rusty had gone to sleep in his new bedroom, Ella and I did our best to wash dishes, but we were so exhausted that we undressed and tumbled into bed without brushing our teeth or washing our faces. We did not make love, but in the morning, when I woke her up, she rolled over and said, "This is good."

I
T WAS LESS THAN
two years later when the moon finally called our names, and we found ourselves gathered in a familiar parking lot, staring at a familiar sky. The moon was flat and full above us, a silver nickel tossed into the night. We stood in silence for a long time underneath it, as if we were waiting for it to fall. We had not planned to gather here in this way, and it was apparent that we had nothing to say to each other, and no explanation for how we'd arrived there together. We looked down at each other only briefly, and made minimal eye contact, slump-shouldered, heads down, submissive as dogs. For the most part, we were sober and in sound mind. Some of us had not spoken to each other in weeks or months; in some cases, we had not seen each other for years. The air was hot, with the occasional gritty breeze that passes for pleasant in Maple Rock. Worried men, I think, have trouble sleeping on such brief, sad August nights. There we were, in the parking lot of what used to be the Black Lantern, some two dozen of us answering a mystical ringing that had sounded unexpectedly in the middle of the night.

A FEW HOURS EARLIER
, I had been driving around in the news truck, on the overnight beat. It was two in the morning. Three kids had been shot in a drive-by on the southwest side of Detroit, and I was standing on the patchy lawn across the street with all the other journalists, holding my notebook. Even though the sun was long gone from the sky, it was hot and I was sweating. I had a tape recorder slung over my shoulder, and the attached microphone shoved into the back pocket of my jeans. I was waiting for somebody to come around and give me the details and a sound bite, so that I could get out of there and go home to Ella. I could already picture her, asleep on the couch in one of my old tank tops and her underwear, three fans pointed on her, trying to stay cool. Rusty would be asleep upstairs in his bedroom, with the racing-car wallpaper I'd put up for him last weekend. Our newborn daughter, Nina, would be asleep in her crib, in an infant's deep-breathing slumber.

I often thought such long thoughts while driving around in the news truck that summer; I often imagined what my house was like with Ella and Rusty and the baby in it, what they were doing and thinking while I was working late, what Ella was wearing, if she would be awake when I came home.

I imagined that there might be some leftovers from dinner, and I would heat them in the microwave. Ella might get up and sit across the table, with lovely sleepy eyes and matted hair, and I would tell her about my night, about three wounded kids and all the reporters lined up at one end of the street, wanting and not wanting the story at the same time. That all might make it worth it, I thought, somebody—somebody beautiful—waiting for me at the end of the long night shift.

One of the sergeants came over. The reporters gathered in a semicircle around him. The cameras rolled, and we all held our microphones out as far as we could, as if the sergeant was some kind of god and we were his worshipers.

"One of the children has died," the sergeant said. "The other two have been airlifted to the University of Michigan Hospital and are in surgery."

We reporters called out our speculative, pleading questions.

"We have a suspect in custody," he said. "We believe the shooter knew the victims. He was the father of two of the children. The third was his stepchild."

And then, as if the sergeant needed to say something editorial about the whole, pitiful night, he added, "This is a great tragedy."

We begged for the names. Give us the names and ages of these victims! Let us tell the story to our readers and listeners and viewers in all its graphic, lurid horror, we said.

"Out of respect for the families involved, we can give out no further information at this time," the sergeant said.