When The Lights Go Out.... Barbara Daly

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      Blythe levitated out of her chair and ripped the last page out of the printer so fast the ink trailed down into the margin. “That’s it,” she said. “Now you’ve gone too far.”

      “Thanks,” Candy said, grabbing the pages out of Blythe’s hands. “Face it, Blythe, you needed a push.”

      “A push, maybe! Not my sad story laid before a total stranger! Not a date with a man who assumes I’m desperate to jump in the sack with him!” She held out her hands in supplication. “We should meet for lunch first, no, coffee first, then lunch. No, talk on the phone first, then coffee, then lunch. We should have e-mailed before he even called me on the phone.”

      “Blythe, Blythe…” Candy shook her head. “You’re too frigging conservative.”

      “I must have been born that way. It sure wasn’t parental influence,” Blythe said stubbornly, plunking herself back down in her chair. Her parents had died in an automobile accident before they’d had a chance to influence her one way or the other. Although losing them had had a profound influence on what she wanted out of her own life.

      “I know, I know,” Candy said, heaving a dramatic sigh of resignation. “Okay, we’ll do it your way. I’ll call him and tell him to ask you out for coffee tomorrow instead. Hope I can reach him.” She glanced at her watch, and her inch-long nails glittered as she moved them around in the fluorescent light of the newsroom. “God a’mighty. I gotta get outta here and cover a takedown in the Bronx.”

      As Candy took off at warp speed, Blythe took note of her working clothes—a shrunken-looking cream T-shirt, a natural linen skirt too short to bend over in and a pair of bone-colored, spike-heeled pumps that came to a sharp point well beyond her toes. She resembled a rope of taffy. Blythe chased her to the door of the newsroom. “You sure you want to take the subway up to the Bronx in that outfit?”

      Candy paused long enough to look down at herself. “Think I should take a cab? Nope, takes too long.”

      She took off again. Blythe gazed after her for a moment, then went slowly back to her desk. As sexually healthy as the horse that man was hung like. As sexually healthy as the horse like which that man was hung.

      She blew a nasty-sounding raspberry at the computer. Candy interfered because she cared about her. Blythe knew this, would never forget how Candy had become her champion the moment Blythe entered the freshman class at Wellesley with absolutely nothing going for her but her brains. She didn’t know why she’d awakened Candy’s sympathy, but under Candy’s wing Blythe had blossomed—at least, as much as she was ever going to blossom. She’d made friends, joined clubs, learned to girl-talk, learned to laugh. Still, at times she wished Candy would back off and let her be miserable. This was one of those times.

      Resigned, she picked up a stack of galleys and focused her gaze on them. Suddenly, with a flash of monitors going black as computers shut down and the grinding sound of air-conditioning coming to a halt, the world dimmed.

      From her cubicle Blythe could hear the newsroom catapulting into chaos. “What the hell?” somebody shouted.

      “I’ve lost my story!” came from the Obituaries editor next door.

      Blythe got up and darted around the corner to comfort him. “In a minute the generator will kick in,” she assured the hysterical young man who was still staring at his screen and jabbing at the enter key as if that would bring back his golden prose. “You won’t lose the whole story.”

      Everyone else in the newsroom seemed to have gotten up at once. Reporters and editors were milling around like a herd of sheep, consulting each other, wringing hands or trying to act blasé. Someone began raising the blinds they’d closed earlier against the searing sunshine, and the omnipresent dust of Manhattan swirled in the harsh rays.

      One by one the staffers picked up their phones to find them dead, then stabbed at the keys of their cell phones, only to slam them down in frustration.

      Silence fell just as suddenly as the chaos had erupted when their shepherd, Bart Klemp, plodded out from his office at the end of the room, a private office with a door and actual walls that went all the way to the ceiling.

      Blythe was reminded of movies in which the benevolent plant-eating brontosaurus moved across the landscape, making the earth tremble with each ponderous step. This was a very odd comparison because Bart wasn’t a particularly tall man and he was chunky rather than obese. It was something in his attitude. Bart always looked as if he and his entire species were about to go extinct, and the thought made him terribly sad.

      “I’ve been listening to the radio,” he said, “and the power’s out.”

      We know that much without listening to a radio.

      Bart’s face turned scarlet. Everybody must have been giving him the same “Duh!” look Blythe probably had on her face. “What I mean is,” Bart said, “that it’s not just us. It’s the power grid that serves the whole East Coast, Toronto south to Maryland and west into Michigan.”

      The buzz in the newsroom was like a crowd-noise sound effect on an old radio show.

      “Here on the home front, the generator’s not working, either, and the phone system’s down—they need electricity from somewhere, apparently. Anybody wants a briefing in electrical engineering, don’t look at me. All I know is nothing’s working at the Telegraph, and those of you still putting stories together, you’re going to have a hard time getting a circuit on your cell phones.”

      Blythe still didn’t have a cell phone, and while she reflected that it really was well past time to be the last on the block to get one, Bart paused to rest a beefy hand on a desk and go even more fully into collapse mode. “I don’t know who’s going to show up from the night crew, so I’d appreciate it if some of you guys would stick around, see what we can pull together for a paper tomorrow afternoon if we get the power back in time. We’ve got radios to get the news, find out if it’s a terrorist attack or a lightning strike or somebody just screwed up, so there’s no excuse for us not to have those stories ready to print just as fast as the Times will.”

      Blythe had her hand halfway up in the air. This was a dream come true—not that she was happy the entire East Coast had to suffer on behalf of one of her dreams—but this was her chance. Help get the paper out under impossible conditions. Save the day. Be a hero. Be indispensable.

      But Bart wasn’t asking for volunteers. He was reading off a list of names. Hers wasn’t on it.

      There it was, in actions that spoke louder than words. She wasn’t indispensable. Not that she didn’t know she wasn’t indispensable to the Telegraph, but it still hurt to have it confirmed. Gone, gone were her dreams of spending a few years being a latter-day Lois Lane, dashing about the city to uncover the facts for a front page story, always on a tight deadline while the entire newsroom waited with bated breath for her return, because if she didn’t get the story, the Telegraph would die a humiliating death in bankruptcy and all would be lost.

      That part of the dream she’d have to revise to suit the power outage, but the second part remained intact. That at the end of an endless day, victorious, having saved the paper, she’d go home to her own personal superhero.

      Crumpling inside, she turned toward her cubicle to get her handbag. In the background, she heard the political editor ask Bart, “When was our new guy supposed to land? I was counting on СКАЧАТЬ