Chapter 29
The New Job
ZOE
The brochure called it a “boutique long-stay experience in the heart of Capitol Hill.” The reality is beige.
I’m not exaggerating. Beige carpet. Beige walls.
Beige curtains over blackout curtains. The comforter is a darker beige, which I think is supposed to feel like a design choice.
The artwork above the bed is a framed photograph of a single fern leaf.
Beige, of course. The coffee maker is the kind that requires you to insert a pod and then wait three full minutes for it to produce coffee.
I take a sip. I make a face. I drink it anyway, because I’m a grown woman with a corporate credit card and a key card and a job that starts in forty-five minutes.
The grocery run last night was a shitshow.
I went down to the corner market—the kind of place with reclaimed wood shelving and a chalkboard menu and a scene that announces, before you even walk in, that you’ll pay for the vibe—and I came out with a single canvas tote of items totaling a hundred and twenty-three dollars.
Welcome to Seattle, where everything costs roughly twice what it does in Dickens and the rain is, I’m told, a personality trait.
I pull the blackout curtains. The sky is gray on gray, the Space Needle poking up over the rooftops, rain not falling so much as suspended in the air. It is genuinely beautiful, in a way that makes my throat tight. I chose this. I keep reminding myself of that. I chose this.
I put on the blazer. The one I bought with money I didn’t have, the one that makes me look like someone you would trust to fact-check a story. I do my hair and eyeliner. I look at the woman in the mirror and tell her she’s fine, she’s great, and she’s thriving.
The woman in the mirror doesn’t look convinced, but she’s wearing the great blazer.
KISL is four blocks from the hotel, which is exactly far enough that I’m going to have to come up with a system for hair maintenance because the rain in this city is a committed humidity that exists in three dimensions.
By the time I get to the building, my hair’s decided to be wavy today, which is fine, fine, totally fine.
The lobby is glass and steel and a living wall, and an espresso bar sits in the corner.
A sculpture sits in the middle of the floor.
The security guard scans my temporary badge and says, “Welcome, Zoe,” like he’s been briefed, and I’m embarrassed by how much my own name in someone’s mouth lights me up.
Mel meets me at the elevator and looks exactly the same as she did two years ago, but also somehow ten years more competent, hair in a high ponytail, blazer tailored to within an inch of its life, sneakers because that is the Seattle thing.
“Zoe Lane.” She grabs me in a hug that smells like very expensive shampoo. “Get in here. Oh, my God. Get in here.”
“I’m in,” I say into her shoulder. “I’m here. I’ve arrived.”
“You have arrived.”
She pulls back and looks at me with the laser focus of a woman who has approximately eleven minutes scheduled for our emotional reunion before the day swallows her whole.
“Come on. I’m giving you the tour. We have to walk fast because I have a budget meeting at ten, and I refuse to let them start without me. ”
She gives the kind of tour you give when you are proud of a thing, and want everyone to know.
Edit suites: six of them, each one a glass-walled cube with two monitors and a chair that probably has a name.
Morning block studio: cavernous, three cameras on tracks, a desk so glossy it reflects the lights overhead.
National feed desk: an entire wall of monitors, a clock for every time zone, two producers wearing headsets.
The control room has more buttons than a 747 cockpit.
I count, generously, fourteen people in it.
“This is Carl.” Mel gestures at a man hunched over a switcher. “Carl, this is Zoe.”
Carl raises a hand without turning around. “Hey, Zoe.”
“Hey, Carl.”
We’re moving again before I finish saying his name.
She introduces me to Shonda at the assignment desk, who shakes my hand while wearing a headset and typing.
Mel introduces me to a man named Devon who’s on the phone and waves.
She introduces me to a woman whose name I don’t catch because someone in the corner is yelling about a live shot in Bellevue that is, apparently, no longer happening.
By the time we’ve made it around the floor, I’ve shaken nine hands and not actually had a conversation with anybody. They’re all kind. They’re all distracted. They’re all already mid-sprint on something I haven’t been briefed on yet.
Mel ushers me into a glass-walled office that has my name on the door. My name on a door. There’s a plant on the desk, a small succulent in a white ceramic pot, with a Post-it stuck to it that says, in Mel’s loopy handwriting, WELCOME HOME, BIG SHOT.
I touch the leaf. The plant is real. The plant is on the desk. The desk is mine.
“You’re going to love it here,” Mel says in the doorway, half out of it already, eyes on the hallway because someone has just walked past who needs her. “It’s a lot the first week. I know. Just—dive in. Sink or swim. You’re a swimmer.”
“I’m a swimmer.”
“Also, breaking thing on the city council budget fight. Shonda is sending you the file. I need a two-minute segment by twelve-thirty. You good?”
I’m not good.
“I’m good,” I say.
She grins. “Knew it. Welcome, Lane.”
She’s gone before the door closes.
I do the segment. Because the good thing is I know how to do this. I’ve been doing it since I was twenty-two, and the muscle memory is honest, and the city council fight is the same one I’ve produced eight hundred versions of.
I cut it together in an edit suite that is so quiet I can hear the building’s HVAC.
Two monitors. A chair that, yes, has a name.
The keyboard shortcuts are different from what I’m used to, and the producer software is a newer version, and I figure it out in fifteen minutes because that is what you do.
The whole time I’m cutting, Eli is in the room with me. Jonah too.
I don’t know how else to say it. They are just—there.
In the corner of my eye. Eli, setting up the chessboard again, without a word.
Jonah, the way he could envelop me and make me feel like everything was going to be okay.
Great even. How he touched me like I was a masterpiece, and how I felt like we’d known each other our whole lives.
The councilman opposing the shelter expansion is talking, in my headphones, about fiscal responsibility, and I’m thinking about whether Gwen’s house has a six-inch closet rule.
I’m thinking about whether Gwen knows that Eli can’t sleep without the hallway light on.
I’m thinking about whether Gwen will let him keep Flash on the pillow, or whether she’ll decide nine is too old for action figures and put Flash in a box on a shelf where Eli can see him but not reach him.
I render the segment and then send it to Shonda. She replies within thirty seconds: thx, perfect.
I sit in the edit suite for a minute longer than I need to.
My phone buzzes. Ms. Hernandez, who’s been keeping me updated in the careful way of a woman who is bending several rules but is not going to admit which ones. The text is short.
Lily Hernandez: He’s in anger management now. He and his lawyer are fighting. Thought you should know.
Good. Great. I picture Eli in Gwen’s rundown house. In the old Buick that’s probably not that safe. I picture Gwen doing what she did to Rosie, and I have to push it out of my mind.
I type back:
Me: Let me know if the lawyer needs anything. Thanks.
I cut a second segment. Mel sends me a third one before I have finished the second. It is, technically, what I asked for.
This is behind the scenes, the place where I thrived. Except since I left W2Beaver, I’ve been doing Zoe Knows, and showing my face. And it’s been good. I’ve been good. Great even, and I’ve enjoyed it.
I get off shift at seven. The rain is still doing its thing, and I’ve not eaten since a granola bar in the edit suite at two p.m. My stomach is making noises and aching.
I walk four blocks back to my hotel, the city pulling me along, and eventually I see a ramen shop with steam fogging the front window and people sitting at the counter inside, and that decides it.
The menu is on the wall, and I order tonkotsu because I don’t have the energy to make a real decision. The cook nods. The bowl arrives in four minutes, steaming, perfect, the broth so rich it makes my eyes water.
The two women on my left are talking about a wedding. The man on my right is on the phone, laughing at something every twenty seconds. The cooks are calling out orders.
I eat my ramen. I taste, I think, about thirty percent of it.
Dickens has over eleven thousand people. My barista at the diner knew my order before I sat down. The woman at the gas station on Main called me Zoe-honey. The mailman at Jonah’s house waved at me through the kitchen window every morning.
I didn’t appreciate any of it. At least, not the way I do now. I wasn’t opposed to living in a big city, but I wasn’t dreaming about it either. I’d hoped to stay home, but then getting out felt like it was something that would be good for me.
And maybe it will be. But right now, it doesn’t feel that way.
I don’t like feeling anonymous.
The women on my left finish their wedding talk. The man on my right hangs up. Nobody looks at me. Nobody’s going to look at me. I am, in this room, invisible.
My eyes go hot, but I don’t let them do anything else because I refuse to cry in a ramen shop. I’m a professional woman with a glass-walled office and a succulent. I tip well and I leave.
It happens at the corner of Pike and First.
I’m walking back toward the hotel when I see a small boy on the opposite corner in a blue raincoat. He has the hood up. His hand is in his mother’s, and he’s jumping in a puddle with dedicated focus.
For a full second, all I see is Eli.
Of course it isn’t Eli. Eli is in Idaho, in an unfamiliar house. This boy’s shorter, and his hair’s the wrong color where it pokes out under the hood, and his mother is right there, alive, holding his hand.
The light changes. I cross the street and walk past them, not looking at the boy’s face.
I make it to the hotel lobby before I have to stop and stand by the elevator and breathe very deliberately for a minute.
In my room, I sit cross-legged on the bed with the curtains open. The city is doing the night version of itself now—lit up, soft-edged, rain-blurred—and from twelve stories up, it looks the way Seattle is supposed to look in a montage.
I call Maddie.
“Zo!” She picks up on the second ring, a noise behind her. “Hold on, I’m at—give me one second—” The noise gets quieter. A door closes. “Okay. Hi. Hi. How is it? Tell me everything.”
“It’s great.”
There’s a long pause.
“Zoe,” Maddie says.
I open my mouth to defend the great. I close it. “Okay,” I say. “It’s a lot.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a really nice newsroom.”
“Yeah.”
“And Mel is great. And the work is exactly what I wanted. What I think I wanted.”
“Yeah.”
“And nobody knows me, Mads.”
“I know.”
“Like, nobody. The security guard knows my name because he was briefed. A plant sits on my desk because Mel is a good person. Otherwise, I am, in this entire city of seven hundred thousand people, completely and totally—” I wave a hand at the window, even though she cannot see it.
“Anonymous. I’m the most anonymous I have ever been. ”
“And?”
“And I hate it.”
She lets out a breath, very gentle. “Yeah.”
“I miss my barista. I miss the mailman.”
“You don’t have a mailman.”
“I had a mailman at—” I can’t say his name. “I had a mailman.”
“Okay.”
There’s a long quiet. I look at the city. The city looks back.
“How’s the hotel?” she says.
“Beige.”
“Huh?”
“Beige, beige. The artwork is a beige fern.”
“Sounds very neutral.”
She makes me laugh. We talk about nothing for a while—Maddie’s new sublet in Dickens, which has a window that doesn’t close all the way; Maddie’s plan to do her MFA applications by the end of the month; Maddie’s doomed flirtation with a guy she met at the coffee shop who also turned out to be named Hunter, which we both agree is the universe telling her to take some time off.
She hasn’t started working at Jonah’s yet since they don’t need her right now with Eli at Gwen’s.
And selfishly, I’m glad. I don’t want her where I’m dreaming to be.
I don’t tell her about my phone, which has been sitting next to me on speakerphone the entire call, and which I have, between sentences, opened and closed on the same unsent message four times.
The unsent message is to him. Of course it is. The cursor blinks in the box. I have typed, and deleted, the following over the course of the day: hi; hey; how is he; tell Eli hi when you see him; hope you’re holding up okay.
I close it again.
“You should go to bed,” Maddie says, eventually. “You sound tired.”
“I am tired.”
“Drink some water.”
“Yes, mother.”
“Don’t call me mother.”
“Goodnight, Mad.”
“Goodnight, Zo. Hey.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
We hang up. The room is quiet in the way hotel rooms are quiet, which is not really quiet at all because of HVAC, the slamming doors, and the elevator dinging somewhere down the hall. Plus the soft thrum of a city outside the glass.
I find the remote and turn on the TV, which is a late-night show with a man at a desk being charming. I leave it on low and lie back on the comforter in my work clothes, blazer and all, and stare at the ceiling.
I never had to put the TV on for noise at Jonah’s house. The house had Eli flipping a page in the next room and Jonah rinsing a glass downstairs and the long, soft creak of the upstairs hallway that meant someone was coming to check on someone.
I close my eyes. The man at the desk is laughing at something on the TV.
Eventually, the tears come.
Tomorrow, I’ll try again. The segment. The newsroom. The plant. The name on the door.
Tonight, I’m devastated, exhausted, and lost in a city that doesn’t know my name.