for me!”
Beep, beep. The cars demanded attention. Beep, beep.
Isabel’s parents glanced over their shoulders at their daughter, who was waving frantically from nearly a block away. Unfazed, they kept walking.
Why aren’t they listening to me?
Beep, beep.
“Mom!” Isabel was now shouting to them. “Dad!”
Beep, beep.
The honking was so close her head snapped from the parental dots in the distance to the car speeding directly toward her. Isabel’s eyes widened in fear but her body was immobilized. Swerving, the car was feet away and showing no signs of stopping.
Ten feet. Beep, beep. Eight feet. Beep, beep. Two feet.
She shrieked and bolted upright in bed. It took Isabel a few moments to realize it had all been a nightmare. She put her hand over her heart as if she could stroke the beat back down.
Beep, beep.
Startled again she looked over at the hotel night table and saw that the insistent car horn of her dream was the deceivingly harmless-looking tiny black pager.
She reached for it and instantly recognized the number screaming at her through the neon green glow of the LCD display. She picked up the phone and dialed.
“Hi, it’s Isabel returning my page.” She tried not to sound as panicked as she felt.
“We’ve been calling you but your ringer must be off,” Rob, the assignment editor, said.
“Oh, God.” Isabel remembered turning it off when she came in hours earlier. “I haven’t slept in three days and I wanted to get a—”
“We do need to be able to get a hold of you as quickly as possible,” Rob scolded. “We need you to get to Atlanta as quickly as possible. Can you call the airlines and call me back to let me know what flight you’re on? You don’t have a fax, right, so I’ll fax wire copy to the Avis counter at the airport in Atlanta. That’s the only way I can think to get you this stuff without holding you up.”
Rob paused as though he were trying to come up with a better solution.
“What’s the story?” Though she was fairly new at the network, Isabel was almost certain it wasn’t asking too much to inquire after the subject of the trip.
“Oh, geez,” Rob sighed. “I’ve been burning it on both ends tonight. Sorry. Um, we’ve gotten a heads-up that we could get a verdict in that police brutality case first thing in the morning. We want you in place so we’re covered if it comes down.”
“Okay. I’ll call the airlines and let you know.”
It would be only a matter of months until the excitement and intrigue Isabel felt upon hanging up the phone this night shifted into a howling bitterness, an exhausted dread that slowly ate away at her until she was nothing but a hollow shell mechanically moving through her formerly full life.
* * *
“Isabel! Time to meet!” The rapping on the door, coupled with the shrill announcement, cause her stomach to twist with dread.
Seven
“I love chicken wings,” says Ben, looking quite earnest. “Any kind, but in particular I love the barbecued ones at Bobby D’s near where I live.” Ben does not seem to care that there is a huge smudge of a chocolate-like substance in the middle of the right side of his thick glasses. He is wearing baggy camouflage pants and another tank top that barely covers his wiry chest hair. “If I could take you to Bobby D’s you’d see what I mean.” Ben is staring so intently at Isabel she cannot make eye contact with him without feeling uncomfortable. Her eyes dart alternately from his wide face to her lap.
This is hell. I’m in hell.
“Thirty seconds are up,” the nameless nurse excitedly announces. “Everyone on the B team get up and move to the right and sit with a new A partner. Remember, the A group stays put and lets the B group shift partners around the room so by the end of the exercise we’ll all have had the chance to visit with one another.”
Isabel seethes.
They explained the concept of this asinine group exercise four minutes ago. Is everybody so zoned out on tranquilizers they’ll forget what we’re doing here in four fucking minutes?
“The new topic is pets. Remember, no interruptions from your partner. Go!” The group leader seems orgasmic.
Ben lumbers away and a sad-looking woman named Lark lowers herself into his place. Lark is a forty-something woman who, because she always looks as if she’s one sentence away from bursting into tears, seems much older. She is too young for osteoporosis but she seems to know its calling cards: she hunches over and looks brittle, like if you hugged her too hard she’d break.
Pets. Hmm. Buck. And my little kittens.
Isabel’s mind is a slide show of the pets she shared with Alex.
You disgust me.
Stop it. Just stop.
Isabel is concentrating so hard on quieting the voices she is not able to explain that she has lost custody of her two cats and dog to her soon-to-be ex-husband. The group leader tells them to shift partners again.
Great. I now know that Ben loves Southern barbecue and that I never miss the chance to cry in public.
Lark looks straight at Isabel before she gets up to continue on. As Isabel blows her nose she realizes Lark is looking straight through her and as she stares, a single tear falls down her bloated face. After a moment and with considerable effort, Lark silently hoists herself out of the chair, making room for Isabel’s next partner.
“We haven’t met yet.” The woman who on Isabel’s first day had been in the jacket is smiling at her—extending her hand to be shaken. “I’m Regina.”
Isabel looks from Regina’s face to her hand and back to her face. Unfazed, Regina withdraws her hand and sits down across from Isabel.
“Fish.”
“Huh?”
“Fish.” Regina repeats the word and waits for it to make sense to Isabel.
“I don’t follow.”
“I have pet fish,” she says in a tone of exasperation. “They like to ride with me on my bike. Well, in the basket on my bike, actually. I keep a leash around their bowl just in case…”
Two weeks ago I was covering the Middle East peace summit at the White House. Two weeks ago.
“…people don’t stop at stop signs anymore so I say—you can’t be too careful. That leash gives me peace of mind, let me tell you.”
“Excuse me. Regina, is it?” Isabel asks. Regina nods her head, eager to hear her partner’s comments.
“Regina, I want to tell you something.”
Regina shimmies up to the edge of her seat.
“I don’t care about your fish,” Isabel says.
Not only do I not give a shit about your goldfish but I think you’re a freak. Everyone here is a freak—come to think of it. I don’t want to hear about everyone else’s pets or whether the barbecue sauce here can compare to some shithole in some godforsaken town in Minnesota or whether someone’s mother neglected them in early childhood—which, I’m sure, is a topic we’ll be covering in great depth in group therapy.
“I really don’t care about your fish,” she says again.
Regina stiffens in her seat.
Isabel continues. “I just want to get out of here, okay? I’m only here because I screwed up and didn’t take enough Tylenol PM—not because I want to talk