For Alison. Andy Parker

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СКАЧАТЬ of sunlight streaming through the bedroom’s wooden blinds. I crawled out of bed, grabbed the T-shirt and shorts I’d left on the floor the night before, and tried to sort out this new information.

      A couple of months earlier, Alison had been covering a story on a meth lab bust in Jacksonville and someone had fired a warning shot to scare off the news crew. This was probably something similar, I thought; some story the locals didn’t want covered.

      But where was Alison, anyway? I rubbed the sleep from my eyes as I struggled to remember. The marina at Smith Mountain Lake? That seemed right. We’d spent a lot of summers at that marina when Alison was little, tubing and waterskiing behind the boat before retiring to the little Chinese restaurant nearby for some fried pork dumplings. The restaurant was gone, and I’d sold the boat, and since then, the marina had become a major tourist attraction replete with shopping and dining and minigolf for the kids. Why would someone at the marina fire off a warning shot? It didn’t make any sense. It was an unlikely site for a meth lab, to say the least.

      I figured the easiest way to get to the bottom of this mystery was to just text Alison. Hell, she’d probably already texted me. She was good about that. Ten minutes before her first live CNN report, she’d texted me to tell me to tune in. If she flubbed a word in the middle of a live broadcast, I’d hear about it by the first commercial break. There was little question that by the time I’d slipped on my flip-flops and shuffled into the kitchen to retrieve my phone, I’d have a text message waiting for me—probably two or three.

      I walked into the kitchen to find Barbara sitting in her usual roost at the terra-cotta–topped island in our kitchen. The whole house has a Southwestern-style, uncommon for our little town in Henry County. It was one of the reasons we’d picked the place when we’d moved in two decades earlier. The turquoise walls and bleached-pine ceilings reminded us of Texas, which we called home until the late 1970s.

      Barbara’s coffee mug was in the sink; this was a bit of comforting normalcy. She usually woke up about 6:30 to make coffee, take a stroll in the nearby park, work through a Sudoku puzzle, and watch the videos from Alison’s morning segments.

      The Sudoku book lay ignored on the kitchen island; Barbara was hunched over her iPhone, her chin-length blonde hair pulled back, working the phone’s digital keyboard with the speed and focus of a court stenographer. Her face was creased with concern behind her red-framed glasses.

      She momentarily broke away from the phone’s screen to glance at me over the glasses.

      “Alison’s last two hits never went up,” she said, then returned her focus to the phone.

      “Huh,” I said.

      When you spend half your life with someone, you learn all of their tells and cues, the subtle gestures that betray the workings of their mind. It might not surprise you to learn that of the two of us, my wife is the one more predisposed to holding her emotions close to the chest. Her eyes, however, never fail to tell the true story.

      I’ve always called Barbara my “doe-eyed goddess.” Her hazel eyes are large and expressive, easy to read, a window into her heart. They were one of the first things I loved about her. They’ve been my saving grace more than once, letting me know when I crossed a line without her saying a word. Alison had those same eyes, deep and rich as chocolate, far darker than you would usually find in someone so fair and blonde. They had that same power to draw you in, and I loved them every bit as much as Barbara’s. Alison was my other doe-eyed goddess.

      Barbara’s eyes revealed her true feelings that morning, and for the first time that day, I felt my heart rate kick into a higher gear.

      Alison was normally on the air each weekday morning for three segments ranging from three to five minutes each. The first of those segments ran at 5:45 a.m. After her first week at WDBJ, the sleep deprivation began to get to Barbara and me, and we told Alison that, proud as we were, we’d be watching her segments on the internet when we woke up instead of catching them live. She understood completely. Of course she did.

      The fact that the last two segments hadn’t dropped meant something was wrong. How wrong remained to be determined. It could be something minor, after all. The feed from the live truck had gone down a handful of times in the year and a half she’d been at WDBJ, which could delay videos for an hour or more. It was rare, but it happened.

      I unplugged my phone from the wall charger and checked my messages. Alison hadn’t texted me. That was rare, too. Alison always had her phone on her because the station needed to be able to reach her at the drop of a hat. She must be busy, unable to reach her phone. In the middle of an interview, perhaps, or maybe she left her phone in the car, or maybe she dropped it in a puddle and it gave up the ghost. There were a million reasons that she might not answer. There was no sense in jumping to conclusions . . . but then Chris had called, hadn’t he? Barbara had mentioned that. And that was unusual, too, because at the time, we barely knew him. Alison and Chris had moved in together just three weeks earlier. It wasn’t yet public knowledge, because Chris was an anchor at the station and Alison was next in line for an anchor position. When she got it, he didn’t want anyone to think their relationship had been a factor.

      Barbara and I knew that Alison loved Chris, and that was enough for us. We had all just celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday the previous weekend by kayaking through the Great Smoky Mountains, same as we did every year, staying in a rented cabin along the Nantahala River. He struck me as a good guy, but I didn’t think I’d ever spoken to him without Alison present. I didn’t even have his phone number, and I didn’t know he had ours. If the situation was bad enough for Chris to call . . .

      I pushed the thought from my mind. A man can drive himself crazy gathering up what-ifs. I’d just give Alison a call. As I tapped the icon to open up my recently dialed numbers (knowing hers would be at or near the top of my list), I imagined exactly how the call would go. I figured I’d probably be interrupting some important meeting, probably about how the live truck had lost its connection.

      “Oops,” I’d say. “Sorry, Scooter. Just your nervous dad. Heard someone was shooting, and I wanted to make sure it was just a camera.”

      “Oh, Dad,” she’d reply with an exaggerated sigh, the smile and the comically rolled eyes somehow audible through the phone’s speaker.

      “Just wanted to hear your voice,” I’d say.

      “Don’t worry,” she’d say. “I’m busy on location. You won’t believe what happened, but I’ve gotta go, so I’ll tell you later. Loveyoubye.”

      Immersed in that reverie, I pressed the “call” button. The phone rang once; twice; three, four, and five times, each unanswered ring adding to the uneasy, tingling sensation working its way across my scalp.

      “Hi, you’ve reached Alison Parker with WDBJ News,” her familiar, cheery voice-mail greeting said in my ear. I ended the call.

      Outside, I watched our nearly empty red plastic hummingbird feeder sway softly from the eave of the house. Beyond it, a bottle tree, an art project Barbara had assembled from some kit a while back, decorated with brightly colored wine bottles. When she bought the kit, she told me that the bottles were supposed to catch evil spirits and hold them at bay. Neither Barbara nor I are superstitious, but I sometimes wondered if those bottles ever needed to be emptied.

      What the hell was going on? Alison always picked up the phone, always, even if just to tell me that she couldn’t talk.

      I read once that before a tsunami hits, the tide rolls out, farther and farther, exposing sand and rocks and scuttling creatures that never see the light of day except СКАЧАТЬ