The Backup Plan. Sherryl Woods
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testily. She’d grown complacent about the network’s hands-off approach to most of her pieces.
“They want to know whether you shouldn’t be taking a break, you know, just until you’ve had time to deal with what happened,” Ray said carefully. “You’re due some time off, anyway. More than a little, in fact. No one can remember the last time you took a vacation.”
Her stomach sank. A break was the last thing she needed. Work defined her. It motivated her to get out of bed in the morning. Turning in one supposedly sub-par interview when she’d given them dozens of prizewinners and nearly single-handedly earned the upstart cable news operation industry-wide respect deserved better than this treatment.
“I don’t need time off,” she said flatly. “I need to keep working.”
“How about a different assignment then?” Ray suggested. “Go to the London bureau for a while. Or Paris. Maybe even Miami. Now there’s a cushy one. Sunshine, palm trees and beaches.”
The image didn’t impress her. In the days immediately following what she still thought of as the “incident,” she’d considered quitting. But then she had realized that this was the only work she truly wanted to do. If it was harder, if she was scared every minute of every day, she was determined to overcome her fears. Now when she walked out of the hotel and into uncertainty every single day she considered her actions a personal tribute to the bravery of every correspondent who’d died while making sure that the world had a close-up view of the action.
“Come on, Ray. I’d be wasted in London or Paris. And you can forget about Miami,” she said with a shudder. “Covering war is what I do. And I do it better than ninety percent of the other reporters around.”
He looked at her with concern. “Until recently you were better than all of them.”
“And I will be again,” she insisted. “I just need a little time to …” What? Adjust? Not possible. Go on? Maybe. That’s what she was aiming for, one day at a time.
“Wouldn’t it be better to take that time someplace else?” he asked, trying one more time. “You’ve paid your dues, Dinah. You were due for a break before any of this happened. We talked about it, remember? I thought you were planning to go home, see your folks. Why not do it now? People rotate in and out of here all the time because nobody can live like this without getting their heads all screwed up. You’re not Superman. Why should you be any different?”
Because if she left now, everyone would see it as a sign of weakness, she thought. They would think she’d folded in a crisis and she wouldn’t allow anyone to see her that way. She was used to commanding respect.
Ray went right on. “I’d think you’d want a chance to see your family, do something normal for a while. Weren’t you looking forward to that?”
She had been, but not any longer. Things had changed too drastically. Working was what she needed to do if she were to remain sane and maintain her self-respect. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go home until everyone there had forgotten whatever they’d heard about her. She didn’t want to face all the questions back home just yet.
“Not now, dammit!” she said more sharply than she’d intended. “Forget it, Ray! I’m not going anywhere.” Alarm flared in Ray’s eyes. “This is what I’m talking about. You never used to snap, no matter how tense things got. You’re not yourself, Dinah, and I’m worried about you. I don’t want you coming unglued on air one of these days.”
She stared at him with sudden understanding. “That’s why I’ve done so few live shots lately, isn’t it? You’re afraid I’ll lose it.”
He regarded her with obvious discomfort. “It’s a chance I’d rather not take,” he admitted. “For your sake, not the network’s. I don’t give a damn what they think.”
She suspected that much was true. Ray had always been an ardent advocate for his team. He babied his reporters and cameramen as if they were his own kids. He’d go to bat for them with the powers-that-be in New York whether it was in his own best interests or not.
Because she had faith in his motives, she deliberately forced herself to calm down before she replied. “You’re being an old fussbudget,” she accused lightly. “I’m fine. If that changes, if I think I can’t do the job anymore, I swear I’ll let you know.”
Ray looked doubtful. “You’ve never known your own limits, because you never had to set any for yourself. You did whatever it took.”
Listening to him, she felt guilty. If Ray knew what a struggle it was for her to walk out of the hotel on every assignment, he’d be even more adamant about sending her away.
“I still do whatever it takes,” she told him, knowing that much was true. It just cost her more. “Come on, Ray. Cut me some slack here.”
“That’s just it. I have been cutting you a whole lot of slack.”
This was another shock, and it was more humiliating than the first. She regarded him with dismay. “What are you talking about? Are you saying I’m not carrying my weight?”
He regarded her with discomfort. “Okay, here’s the plain, unvarnished truth. And listen up, because you need to hear this. We’ve missed some stories, Dinah. Things that never should have gotten past us. Everyone up top has been ignoring it, because of the circumstances, but they’re getting impatient back home. It’s been a few months now. I’m not going to be able to hold them off much longer. The decision of whether you stay or go could be taken out of my hands … and yours.”
Dinah tried to think of stories they’d missed. She hadn’t paid that much attention to the competition and what they were reporting. With her contacts, she’d always been so far out in front, she hadn’t needed to. Was it possible that the other journalists were taking advantage of her distraction? Maybe so, she admitted truthfully.
“Okay, that stops now,” she promised Ray, filled with a renewed sense of determination. “I’ll be back on top of things from here on out. If I’m not …”
He met her gaze. “If you’re not, you’re going home, Dinah,” he said flatly. “Whether it’s what you want or not.”
The unflinching warning shook her as nothing had in weeks. “It won’t come to that,” she said grimly.
All she had to do was push those godawful images out of her head and focus on the here and now. She’d put aside horror in order to do her job a thousand times through the years.
She could do it again, she told herself staunchly. She was going to get it together and come back better than ever. She owed it to the viewers who counted on her to tell an honest, objective story on the nightly news. She owed it to the network that had given her a chance when she was barely out of journalism school.
Most of all, though, she owed it to herself. Without this job, who the hell was she?
Two weeks after her conversation with Ray, the sound of her cell phone ringing at 4:00 a.m. sent Dinah diving under her hotel bed. It wasn’t the first time she’d become skittish over nothing, but the incidents were becoming more frequent and more dramatic.
So were the nightmares that woke her in a cold sweat. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks. It didn’t take a genius to tell her she was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, but she’d been convinced she could weather it on her own through sheer will. It wasn’t working.
Eventually, she crawled out from under the bed, still shaking, and sat on the floor in the dark with her knees pulled up to her chest, waiting for the worst of the panic to ease.
Maybe Ray was right. Maybe she couldn’t continue working right now. But what could she do instead?
Home. When Ray had mentioned it, she’d been dismissive, but now she recognized a surprising hint of longing whenever she thought of that simple word. She had always thought of home with a sort of detached nostalgia. Home was where she came from, not where