realize were under way when she had been in the VIP lounge at the
airport after the crash.
She was never going back to the Portland Press She was never going to
work on a newspaper again.
She was finished as a reporter.
That was why she had overreacted to Anlock, the CNN reporter at the
airport. Loathing him, she was nevertheless eaten by guilt on a
subconscious level because he was chasing a major story that she was
ignoring even though she was a part of it. If she was a reporter, she
should have been interviewing her fellow survivors and rushing to write
it up for the Press. No such desire touched her, however, not even for
a fleeting moment, so she took the raw cloth of her subconscious self
disgust and tailored a suit of rage with enormous shoulders and wide,
wide lapels; then she dressed herself in it and strutted and seethed for
the CNN camera, all in a frantic attempt to deny that she didn’t care
about journalism any more and that she was going to walk away from a
career and a commitment that she had once thought would last all her
life.
Now she got out of bed and paced, too excited to sit still.
She was finished as a reporter.
Finished.
She was free. As a working-class kid from a powerless family, she had
been obsessed by a lifelong need to feel important, included, a real
insider.
As a bright child who grew into a brighter woman, she had been puzzled
by the apparent disorderliness of life, and she had been compelled to
explain it as best she could with the inadequate tools of journalism.
Ironically, the dual quest for acceptance and explanations-which had
driven her to work and study seventy- and eighty-hour weeks for as long
as she could remember-had left her rootless, with no significant lover,
no children, no real friends, and no more answers to the difficult
questions of life than those with which she had started. Now she was
suddenly free of those needs and obsessions, no longer concerned about
belonging to any elite club or explaining human behavior.
She had thought she hated journalism. She didn’t.
What she hated was her failure at it; and she had failed because
journalism had never been the right thing for her.
To understand herself and break the bonds of habit, all she had needed
was to meet a man who could work miracles, and survive a devastating
airline tragedy.
“Such a flexible woman, Thorne,” she said aloud, mocking herself.
“So insightful.”
Why, good heavens, if meeting Jim Ironheart and walking away from a
plane crash hadn’t made her see the light, then surely she’d have
figured it out just as soon as Jiminy Cricket rang her doorbell and sang
a cleverly rhymed lesson-teaching song about the differences between
wise and stupid choices in life.
She laughed. She pulled a blanket off the bed, wound it around her nude
body, sat in one of the two armchairs, drew her legs up under her, and
laughed as she had not laughed since she had been a giddy teenager.
No, that was where the problem began: she had never been giddy.
She had been a serious-minded teenager, already hooked on current
events, worried about World War III because they told her she was likely
to die in a nuclear holocaust before she graduated from high school;
worried about overpopulation because they told her that famine would
claim one and a half billion lives by 1990, cutting the world population
in half, decimating even the United States; worried because man-made
pollution was causing the planet to cool down drastically, insuring
another ice age that would destroy civilization within her own lifetime
which was front-page news in the late seventies, before the Greenhouse
Effect and worries about planetary warming. She had spent her
adolescence and early adulthood worrying too much and enjoying too
little. Without joy, she had lost perspective and had allowed every
news sensation-some based on genuine problems, some entirely
fraudulent-to consume her.
Now she laughed like a kid. Until they hit puberty and a tide of
hormones washed them into a new existence, kids knew that life was