Chapter 7
Jenna
The deadline does not care that I'm in love with the subject of my article.
I want to be clear that I have not said that word, the love word, not to him, not to myself, not out loud in an empty car at a red light. But the deadline doesn't care either way. The deadline is Thursday at noon, and Frank has started calling instead of emailing, which is how I know it's real.
"Where is it," Frank says.
"It's almost there."
"'Almost there' is not a thing that exists. There's there and there's not there. Which is it."
"It's the best thing I've ever written, Frank."
There's a pause. Frank has been editing me for nine years and he knows my tells better than I know his. "Why do you sound like that."
"Like what."
"Like you're standing on a ledge telling me the view's incredible."
I look at the document. It really is the best thing I've ever written.
It's about Cole Weston, a man the public thinks they know — the party photos, the cancelled galas, the two years of silence — and it's about the literacy program he's never told a journalist about, and the kid in the hospital waiting room, and the read he makes off his back foot that Russ says most of the league can't make on an empty net at practice.
It's fair. It's true. It's the picture, finally, instead of just the facts.
"It's nothing," I tell Frank. "The view is fine. I'll have it by noon."
"Jenna."
"By noon, Frank."
I file it at 11:52.
And then I do something that is not standard practice, that is in fact a little bit against the rules, that I have never done in nine years: I send the piece to the subject before it goes live.
I send it to Cole. With a note that says: This publishes tomorrow morning. I wanted you to see it first. You don't get to change it — that's not how this works — but you get to read it before the world does. I owed you that. I think I've owed you that for two years.
Then I sit in my apartment and I stare at my phone like it's going to do something.
It takes him a long time to reply.
I find out later why — find out the thing I don't know yet, that reading takes him longer than it takes most people, that the literacy program isn't only something he gives, it's something he understands from the inside, and that the reason he sat in plastic chairs reading dragon books one finger at a time is that somebody once did it for him.
I don't know this yet. I just know the gap between sending the piece and his name appearing on my screen is the longest forty minutes of my professional life.
He calls at ten p.m.
"This is fair," he says, no hello, Frank-style, which makes me want to laugh and also cry, neither of which I do.
"I know."
"It's more than fair." His voice is rough. "You wrote the picture."
"I wrote what I saw."
He's quiet. I let it sit. I've gotten good at letting his quiets sit, at not rushing into them with my whole personality.
"What happens to us when this publishes?" he asks.
And here it is. The thing I've been not-thinking about with the same energy I gave to not-thinking about the stove two years ago.
Because the moment this piece publishes, I am the journalist who wrote the definitive profile of Cole Weston — twice now, once wrong and once right — and he is the subject of the most personal thing I've ever written, and there is a version of professional ethics that says those two people do not get to be anything to each other, ever, full stop.
"I don't know," I say.
It's the first time I haven't had an answer for him. He notices. We both feel the weight of it land in the silence, the specific weight of a question that doesn't have a clean answer and won't pretend to.
"Okay," he says, finally.
"That's it? Okay?"
"It's a Weston family specialty. We say 'okay' when there's too much to say. Drives my mother insane."
"Cole."
"The piece is good, Jenna. It's the best thing anybody's written about me, including the bad one, which was also the best thing until this one." A breath. "Get some sleep. It's a big day tomorrow."
He hangs up before I can decide whether okay meant okay we'll figure it out or okay this was always going to end here.
The piece publishes at six the next morning.
By seven it's everywhere. I'm a good writer and it's a genuinely revelatory piece and the internet, which doesn't have a memory problem, suddenly has a brand new thing to remember about Cole Weston.
My inbox breaks. Three other outlets ask to syndicate.
A producer wants to talk about a longer thing.
Frank calls twice, the second time just to say, in the gruffest voice he owns, "It's a hell of a piece, kid," and hang up before I can ruin it by responding.
The piece wins the cycle. It wins the day. By every metric I have ever been measured by, it is the biggest success of my career.
Cole does not call.
I tell myself I understand. The piece is public now.
What we are — what we might be — is private.
I've watched him be protective of private things for six weeks.
I wrote two thousand words about exactly how protective of private things he is.
I know, intellectually, completely, that his silence is not the same as his absence.
I know that.
I still sit in my car in the parking garage for fifteen minutes on the way home, not driving, just sitting, my phone face-up on the passenger seat, doing nothing.
He doesn't call the first day. I expected that.
He doesn't call the second day. I tell myself I expected that too. I'm a worse liar than I am a writer, and I'm an excellent writer.
On the second night I do the thing where you talk yourself out of texting somebody by writing the text and reading it and deleting it, eleven times, a small private ritual of cowardice.
Hey. Delete. The piece is doing well. Delete.
I miss the press box, which is true and which I delete the fastest, horrified.
By the morning of the third day I have made a decision, the way I make all my decisions, which is by getting tired of not having made one.
Three days.
I'm going to give him three days. He gets three days to be protective of the private thing, to read the piece his slow careful way as many times as he needs to, to do whatever it is a man like Cole Weston does when something he didn't see coming arrives anyway.
And then, on day three, if he hasn't shown up — I'm going to the community center on Tuesday.
I'm going to sit in the back. And I'm going to find out, in a room with carpet the color of a 1994 committee, with a six-year-old somewhere nearby ready to argue that some dragon or other is bad, whether the best material I've ever had is going to turn out to be a person I get to keep.
I close my laptop.
I don't open the piece. I've read it enough.
I go to sleep, and this time, two years too late, I dream about Cole Weston, and in the dream he's reading aloud, one finger under the words, and I can't see the book but I can hear the words, and the words are mine.