The Summer of Lost and Found

Chapter 1

I’ve never been a big hat person.

And yet tonight, at one a.m. to be exact, as I pull into the WRTB parking lot, I’m wearing a rather jaunty straw fedora circled by a hot-pink hatband. No one will see me besides Kevin, so I could have skipped the hat, but maybe I need it. A little hot-pink confidence.

I’m not nervous, exactly, as I slam the car door and walk toward the employee entrance while hiking a tote bag up onto my shoulder, but perhaps skulking around like a thief in the middle of the night makes me think I should be.

I pad silently past darkened offices up a carpeted hallway hung with generic framed photos of the Cincinnati skyline, thankful it’s a quiet news night as we hoped.

No freak weather events or political scandals or twenty-car pileups in the Lytle Tunnel to keep people buzzing around the newsroom in the wee hours—we can execute Kevin’s grand plan in private, just the two of us.

Proceeding onto the set, I find it already fully lit, with just one large camera in place before the news desk where I’ve delivered so many stories over the years. It feels surprisingly odd to be back, but maybe that’s due to the darkness and the skulking.

“Jess.”

I turn to see Kevin walking toward me, wearing a tired sort of smile.

“Hey,” I say, trying to summon a smile of my own.

“Look at you! Love the hat!”

Ah, sweet hat success—I can always count on Kevin to appreciate a good accessory. “Thanks—I thought it seemed fun.” I turn my head this way and that, modeling it.

“It suits you. And check out your hair! Those curls are peeking out even more now.”

I shrug. “It’s growing.” My eyes get bigger as I speak—I’m trying to look happy about it.

And I am. I just wish it were growing faster .

Right now it’s a super thin, curly little helmet.

Enough that I’m starting to feel more normal when I go out; not enough that I feel even remotely like myself.

Hence the middle-of-the-night hat. But I don’t plan to let that stand in my way.

It’s just hair, right? Or that’s what people keep telling me.

“You look fabulous, honey—seriously.”

Before eight months ago, Kevin had never called me “honey” in our lives. He reserved “honey” for small children and his partner, Patrick. I kind of want to interrogate him about the change, but now’s not the time.

“Ready to do this thing?” he asks.

“Couldn’t be readier,” I reply, perhaps a tad dryly, eager to get this show on the road.

When his phone trills, he hauls it from his pocket and answers, not appearing the least bit surprised to be getting a call at one a.m., and I begin to wonder if his tired look is about more than just the hour.

We became friends almost twenty years ago when I was a field reporter and he was my camera guy, driving us both around Cincinnati to whatever flood or fire or traffic accident was considered newsworthy on that particular day.

We were so young and ambitious back then.

And that ambition paid off for us both—he’s long since risen through the ranks to become news director, and I’ve been the evening anchor for more than ten years.

These days his eyebrows are a bit bushy and his salt-and-pepper beard needs a trim. Lines bracket his eyes and cross his forehead. All through the winter and spring, he was my rock, and it hits me for the first time that maybe I’ve worn him out.

I use the opportunity to lower my tote to the news desk, then reach inside to extract the Styrofoam head currently sporting a wig.

My wig. It’s long and blond, and it looks at least a little like the hair I used to have—but I seldom wear it.

It’s ridiculously hot—the makes-you-miserable kind of hot, not the sexy kind of hot—and I’ve found I simply feel inauthentic in it.

Like I’m trying to fool people or be someone else, which is an odd emotion to suffer when you’re actually just trying to hold on to yourself .

And thus I’ve mostly become a hat person.

To return to my job, however, the wig is a must. It’s true for me—for my confidence and comfort level—and it’s also true for the WRTB muckety-mucks.

No one’s ever said that, but it’s a universal truth I instinctively know.

And the reason I’m pulling it on over my helmet of curls in a silent news studio in the middle of the night is because last week, when I told Kevin I was ready to resume anchoring the six-o’clock news after eight months away, he thought it was too soon.

He actually looked surprised as I sat across the desk from him in his office. “You only finished radiation last week,” he informed me as if I didn’t know. “Are you sure you’re up to it? You’re not tired?”

Radiation was personally much easier for me than chemo, of which he was already well aware, but I reminded him from beneath the bedazzled bucket hat I’d chosen for that particular meeting, “I took walks every day. I walked twice as much as they told me to in order to fend off fatigue. And it worked—I really feel fine.”

“I’m so glad to hear that, honey,” he said, but hesitation still floated in his gaze. “Even so, I think you should take some more time away, time for yourself. You’ve been through a lot.”

“I don’t want that,” I told him firmly. This job is my life.

That’s what I didn’t tell him. Because it’s one more thing he already knows.

I don’t have—or even particularly want—a Patrick of my own.

I have no family and only a few good friends.

My job is how I connect with the world, how I feel relevant.

Yet he continued to argue the point. “We don’t need to rush this, Jess. This job can mean long hours, stress at a moment’s notice, unpredictability.”

Upon hearing still more arguments that aren’t news to me, I started getting annoyed, and answered simply, “I can handle it.”

“I understand you’re ready to get your life back,” he said, “but honey, if I’m being honest ...”

“Yeah?” I prodded.

“You do look tired.”

I did? Because I’m really not. Or ... was he telling me I looked some other way? Maybe I looked like a person who shouldn’t be on the evening news, showing up on thousands of TV screens, because I have hardly any hair and am noticeably thin at the moment.

When I didn’t reply, he gave his head a thoughtful tilt to add, “Listen, why don’t you take a little more time off? Say ... the summer. Tiffany can keep anchoring for a few more months.”

That’s when I decided there was an elephant in the room, and it was the curly one under my sparkly hat. “Kevin, is this about my hair?”

His eyes went wide. “Are you crazy? Of course not.”

“Because I’ll wear the wig, you know.”

And even as he said, “I can’t believe you think this is about that,” sounding ultra-offended, I still knew it was about that.

I sat there, mulling things over. I’m a good anchor, and people like and respect me for more than my hair—but the truth is, before this, I was my hair.

People talked about my hair, openly admiring it.

My long, thick, flowing blond locks were a big part of my identity, both professionally and personally, and losing it was hard.

All the things people said about it not mattering didn’t fix the feeling of loss for me.

I was brave about it, though, handling it with courage and grace.

I even posted pictures—albeit carefully curated ones—on my social media, where tens of thousands of people in the tristate area follow me.

Yet despite people’s support, and despite living in a post-#metoo world where women are supposed to be just as respected as men for who they are and not what they look like, it became glaringly clear to me that for a woman, at least in some professions, looks still matter.

I should have known it all along, and maybe I actually did but simply wanted to believe something else.

And when I said nothing for a long while, I realized that I’d said ... everything. That Kevin, by virtue of how well we know each other, or merely because it’s the harsh reality neither of us wanted to acknowledge, understood exactly what I was thinking.

And in a low timbre, he finally leveled with me. “Jess, the truth is, management thinks Tiffany should stay in your spot a little longer. She tested well.”

The words plunged a dagger into my heart.

Tiffany is fifteen years younger—fifteen years newer, fifteen years prettier.

And even though she does a decent job delivering the news, she isn’t as good as me.

She isn’t as quick on her feet, or as smooth in her delivery, and she doesn’t have the same chemistry with Rob, my coanchor.

If she tested well, it’s because she’s “the new girl,” not because she’s better at the job than I am.

Our eyes stayed locked. I could have said so much more, like what a demeaning disappointment this was, in so many ways, but I didn’t have to. And he could’ve told me he was sorry, and embarrassed it was like this, but he didn’t have to do that, either.

I sat there seething inside as he went on, “Just so you know, though, as your friend and boss, it’s about more than just that. I really do think you might still need some time.”

“I disagree,” I said, indignant.

After which he met my gaze with a long, speculative look. “Tell you what, Jess,” he finally replied. “I’ll make you a deal.”

My just-starting-to-regrow eyebrows shot up in a mix of interest and suspicion. “A deal?”

“I’ll intercede with management on your behalf about you coming back now , on one condition.”

“What’s the condition?”

“Let’s have a run-through. A dress rehearsal of sorts. See how you feel back behind the desk. Wearing the wig.”

I found it a ridiculous request and said so. But it was also a no-brainer, a thing I could certainly indulge him on if it moved this process along and got me what I wanted. Easy-peasy.