Terminal Break

Fiction Contest Finalist

“Nutshell” by Taylor Carson

It’s been a long time since I was you.

The breaking-news stories—explosions, terrorist attacks, celebrity interviews—rarely come to mind when I think about that era. I only note the gun battles when people ask me about the most harrowing assignments, when they’re hungry for action and gore. It’s the space in between that I recall most often, the times you were alone. And there’s this one day that comes up all the time when I think about you. June twenty-first, the start of summer. A day spent mostly in an airport. You had been staring aimlessly, apathetic, out a business-class window for three hours—back then, you could still claim the Wi-Fi didn’t work in the clouds—but as soon as your plane from Orlando hit the tarmac at JFK, the news desk called: we need you at another shooting. Philly. Your flight leaves at six o’clock. You have the information in your email. You’ll have a ninety-minute layover. Just go straight to the gate, B55, all the way at the end of Terminal 4.

Another one, you thought, and when you said nothing, the assignment-desk assistant went on.

“It’s a cop shooting.” He apologized then for eating while he spoke. The company had bought pizza, he explained, and he had to grab some before it was gone.

You grunted that it was fine.

“This one’s nothing like Pulse,” he assured you. “We don’t even know if it’s a thing yet.”

“I’m still going to London tomorrow for the Brexit vote?”

“That story you filed—the dad in Orlando? Damn that was crazy. It was like, do you realize your kid just died? And your son was totally gay, so no one’s believing you.”

“I’ll call Pauline.”

You were the first passenger off the plane, but before you reached the end of the jet bridge, your other phone—a different carrier, back-up—rang. Pauline reiterated that you were needed in Philadelphia. 

“Why am I flying from New York?”

“I don’t care,” your boss snapped. “Get a rental car if you want.”

“Is London still on?”

“They didn’t cancel Brexit because your assignment changed. London tomorrow from Philly.”

Off the phone, you considered the concourse.

You had run it many times, sprinting, hauling your black go-bag above your head, your combat boots and reflective aviators causing other travelers to glance down the hall for signs of danger. Your favorite lounge was in this terminal, too: low-lit and hidden, billing itself as a speakeasy and serving specialty cocktails at all hours. You would tuck yourself there in private booths, trying to avoid letches that roamed the business-travel ecosystem, men who would tell you that you looked like a spy with your sunglasses on, or suggesting you must have had a rough night. You would escape with only a slight movement, lifting your sunglasses, brandishing your eyepatch. The men would flinch, some excusing themselves, others pretending it didn’t bother them, insisting they buy your next round before they suddenly had to make an urgent phone call.

“My company buys me all the drinks I want,” you would say.

When you skipped the eyepatch—it could chafe—your left eye repelled the men even faster. White and cloudy, bubbled with permanent scarring where there should have been a brown iris.

You had only started wearing an eye patch at the beginning of your journalism career. It was decided in the name of transparency, one of your bosses told you. People should know you couldn’t see out of one eye, another boss had said, as if the scarred eyeball wasn’t a clue. You knew your eye could be off-putting, but until your news jobs, no one had interfered with your choice to expose it. In your small hometown everyone knew about the accident; it was just what you looked like, what made you unique. Then in college, you enjoyed the notoriety it brought you, and you came to see it as protection: it drew the kindest people and kept the wrong people away.

But in the newsroom, it had to be, as your bosses’ boss said, covered.

 ***

You nodded to a TSA agent as you stepped onto the escalator to the lower gates; he had let you through security fast the morning you were hustling to make the first flight to Orlando.

“How’d it go,” he asked in passing.

“Terrible,” you said.

“You doin’ okay?”

You knew he had been special forces in Iraq in the early years of the war—he had told you this one day as he commented on your boots, and he had expedited your security screenings many times since. His name was Martinez. I can’t remember his first name anymore.

“Fine for now,” you said that day, and he nodded and said he’d probably see you soon.

It had been a morbid few months that had kept you coming back into the bowels of the terminal: a string of mass shootings, natural disasters, vicious politics.

“It creeps up on you,” he had once warned, and you thought you knew what he meant. By that day, every sound and smell seemed to evoke some memory from the road. It was Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major that triggered you as you rode the escalator on your way to gate B55. It played over the loudspeaker as you descended.

 ***

That same piano music had slipped through the stillness of an Oklahoma prairie after a recent outbreak of tornados. You had pushed your aviators on top of your head when you heard it, scanning the ruined horizon with your right eye, then looking at your audio technician, Randy, who shrugged like he wanted you to know the noise wasn’t his fault.

You twirled your finger in the air to tell the crew to keep rolling—they were collecting shots of the debris, and you sprinted in the direction of the music, not because you were in a particular rush, but because it felt good to stretch your legs, to adjust your stride based on the contours of the land and the wreckage of the tornados: books and photos, chunks of furniture, scattered wet clothes. You breached the edge of a housing development through a break in a white picket fence, splintered from the night’s severing wind, then slid your boots down the edge of a muddy bank. At the bottom, you bounded through a shallow creek, then ran down a glen, stopping only when you saw the piano among a few cottonwood trees. An older man, greying hair and a beer belly under a stained T-shirt, was hunched over the keys of a walnut upright, playing the light, tinkling music you recognized because you used to play, too, a long time ago, giving it up callously for your transient work. His body rocked close to the keys with the melody. He played perfectly, but his posture was broken. He was crying. The moment of grief was heart-wrenching, sacred, private, miraculous in that the piano still had such great pitch. You backed away before the man could see you, then sprinted again to fetch the crew: you had to film him while he still played raw. 

That night, the whole country heard him—his name was Roger Steck—when they watched the news about the tornadoes in Oklahoma, and they heard how his only granddaughter, Chloe, twelve years old, whom he was raising alone, had died in the storms the night before, how she had played Nocturne in E-flat major at her recent piano recital—a song he had taught her, her favorite song to play.

Your colleagues congratulated you the next day—there would be award nominations. But you already regretted the story and wished you had left the man alone to heal with his piano by the cottonwoods, that the sacred moment had not been forced into the public sphere. You apologized to him when he wrote and told you the attention was a lot to handle. There was some money coming in, he said, and that had helped. Five-thousand dollars was really something, he admitted, but the neighbors hadn’t been too happy about the fame and the cash.

“I figure they think it’s more than it is,” he wrote.

 ***

As you stepped from the escalator, you saw a television screen set to a competitor station—some story about algae in Florida. Your network’s Miami bureau was covering that; you didn’t need to waste brain space. This weekend was the Brexit vote, and right after that, you had to get back to the States for a series of presidential-campaign events. The conventions would come next. Then the election. Your bosses said things would calm down after that. 

You told yourself everything was fine, at the airport, in that moment. The Pulse coverage was over. Brexit was just a voting story. You could allow yourself to feel still and at peace—but it was times like these that the news gods played their biggest tricks, you thought. Your back and shoulders tensed as you walked toward the gate. You braced for something jarring.

And then over the airport’s loudspeaker: “Micky Smith, please return to security. Micky Smith to security.”

There it was.

 ***

You had met Micky more than a year before, just as the last cherry blossoms were falling at the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., and springtime made it especially difficult to be alone. You passed each other as strangers, walking around the water in opposite directions over piles of pink petals washed off branches by a recent rain. You both wore light-weight trench coats the same color of khaki. 

You addressed her not because you were particularly attracted to her, but because of the matching garb.

“Nice coat.”

“Yours isn’t so bad either.”

You said thanks, and though you appreciated that she didn’t ask about your eye immediately, you gave her another opportunity to screw up: “All you need is an eyepatch,” you pointed out.

“Beautiful evening,” she said.

You both regarded the still water for a moment, and your breath caught with the dread of continuing the sunset walk by yourself.

Before you could suggest it, she asked if she could join you.

You became practical: “You just came from that way.”

“It’s a loop.”

You told her you were in town for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, that the president had given a decent speech, and that you were slightly hungover.

She said she was hungover, too, but with no excuse. 

You walked together, exchanging small talk charged with possibility. Where are you from? What do you do? Where do you live?

Your answers: Ohio, news, Manhattan.

Hers: Wisconsin, government, Washington, D.C.

“I probably should be more specific,” she added. “I’m an FBI agent.”

“Which division?”

“We aren’t really supposed to fraternize with you people.”

“Ohioans?”

“Journalists.”

“I need to run to a dinner anyway.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

You said you didn’t want to cause her any trouble.

She said, “Want a drink?”

Two hours later at a bar in her neighborhood, she finally asked about your eye.

“I’m impressed you held out so long,” you said, adding that Dad worked in a tear gas factory. “I think of him whenever I cover a protest.”

“You must’ve been to quite a few?”

“He brought home some hydrochloric acid,” you pushed on. “Something for the barn.”

You were just five years old and had run out to surprise him, jumping on his legs from behind without announcing yourself, just playing, and he lost balance, you explained to Micky. Dad’s boot hit the acid jug. It splashed a bit. Some drops hit his jeans, and some drops went straight into your left eye. You screamed and clutched his leg with all your strength; he tore you off his jeans like Velcro and sprinted to the faucet on the side of the barn, laid you over his knee, and held your head back under a gentle trickle of water, keeping you still with his strong hands, washing away whatever he could. You trusted him to fix it.

In that time when you were producing and met Micky, years before Dad passed away, you comforted him often. You would remind him that he had saved your eye from burning out and that he had kept the acid from permanently damaging the skin on your face. It only needed a few seconds to blind you, though, he would remind you, “and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

“That’s exactly right,” you would always say. “You really couldn’t do anything about it.”

“Just one of those things,” he would say.

Micky took a swig of beer and said, “A half-blind journalist.”

When you looked down at your bourbon, she leaned in and kissed you.

 ***

Hearing her name, part of you wanted to go to airport security immediately. You could find her and get some answers. 

Another part of you wanted to let it die. There was no time for relationships in your lines of work—let her go to hell with all the men you had dated.

Your phones rang simultaneously: the desk and Pauline.

You answered the boss, her gravelly voice spitting out, “Change of plans. Stick at JFK,” before you could say hello.

You asked why, but when Pauline said, “Guess,” you already knew.

You started to question why the candidate would fly into JFK instead of LaGuardia, like he usually did, but Pauline interrupted: “Don’t try to be logical.”

“What time does his plane get in?”

“Just find out where he’ll land, set up the shot, and wait. You might be the only network there in time—some wreck on the freeway. Make sure there’s sound. He likes you—he might give you some time.”

You reminded her that you had traveled from Florida without a crew and only had a small hand-held video kit, not a network-level camera.

“They’d take the shot from your cell phone if they had to.”

“What’s the story?”

“That he’s there, Nicole. Just that he’s there. And quit rolling your eyes. I can sense it.”

“What about the cop story?”

“Dropped. We need his arrival. We’ll take the cop shit from local. The other crew’s staying back to cover whatever the hell he’s doing here this week. He might head over for Brexit, too.”

You confirmed you would wait around for the candidate and asked if the public was aware.

“Who knows.”

You both hung up.

The decision was made. There would be no time to find out if the Micky Smith of the security announcement was your Micky Smith. Still, you told yourself one text wouldn’t hurt. You messaged her for the first time in months: “Are you at JFK by chance?”

 ***

Two months after you met Micky, you were assigned to a mass shooting in South Carolina at Charleston’s oldest African American church, Mother Emanuel. You would be there at least two weeks, and Micky said she had some time off, that she could come stay with you as long as you kept it quiet.

Your shifts would be long, you had warned. She said she understood long hours, but after a few days of sharing a hotel room, you knew it wasn’t what she had expected. Every morning you got up at four o’clock, reviewed the overnight notes and assignments from the network and began logistics calls within five minutes of your alarm. She would whisper for you to come back to bed, and before you could reply, one of your phones would go off, taking your full attention. At night, Micky would check to make sure you couldn’t join her for dinner, then apologize for passing out in the hotel hours before you got back from the news set.

You had dated men who chided you for getting calls at four in the morning, for not setting boundaries with your boss. Micky never did that. But by day four in Charleston, she suggested she go back to Washington. When she texted her flight information, you didn’t fight her but asked her to stop by the set before she went to the airport, to say goodbye for good, you assumed.

The television stages were built across the street from the church, and when she arrived, you took a fifteen-minute break to show her inside, flashing your network press pass as she held up her FBI badge.

The smell of books and flowers, perfume and polishing oil—it hushed you.

“It was downstairs where the Bible study was,” you said softly. “He joined them at first.”

She said she wondered what they were reading that day.

“Mark 4:16.”

She picked up a Bible from a pew, and you were surprised at how quickly she found the verse: “‘Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy.’”

You told her to read the next passage.

“Mark 4:17,” she said. “‘But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.’”

“I don’t know if it ties anything together or not,” you said.

“Sometimes this kind of thing doesn’t tie together.”

You were only inside a few minutes, but when you walked back onto the church’s front steps, the mood in the street had shifted. The crowd had parted and was fixated on a Black woman stomping her feet on the asphalt, pulling her hair, gnashing her teeth, yelling things about white people and the United States, things that could not be said on the television news.

The networks’ sets were quiet anyway: everyone but security had taken lunch.

You thought about running past the woman to one of the network cameras, filming, even though it would break union rules, but then you noticed something else: women all around the parameter—at the piles of memorial flowers, near the parking lot, beside the media platforms—began catching each other’s eyes. They were strangers—of myriad races and various ages. From the way they dressed, they seemed to be of different social classes, too, even from different regions of the country.

You reached for one of your phones, but before you could pull it from your jeans’ back pocket, Micky wrapped her arm around you, gently patting your arm down.

The women began to walk toward the breakdown, slowly, from all sides, communicating with quick eye movements how they would fall into place, like a pride of benevolent lionesses. They encircled the woman in crisis and held that position. One of them began to pray aloud, then another. They told her they loved her, some in whispers, some in shouts. She raged on and tried to resist them, but finally, the woman bellowed a long moan, hunched over, and sobbed. The circle moved in closer and placed their hands on her shoulder, hugged her. She let all of them hold her. Even the white women.

Behind your aviators, your eyes filled with tears, which you quickly contained.

Micky stayed the rest of her break in Charleston, and for months, you saw each other whenever you could. There were birthday parties, a roommate’s wedding, several holiday events, and New Year’s Eve at your place in the city.

Then, one day in February when you were staking out a presidential candidate in New Hampshire, she stopped replying to you. 

You tried calling. 

She never answered.

 ***

Pauline shouted over the phone, “Control just called and said you still don’t have a shot up?” You said you would grab a coffee and head out.

“We need the shot. Five minutes ago.”

You said, okay, you would skip the coffee and just freshen up quickly.

Pauline asked why the hell you needed to freshen up, and you said, “Make-up. For him.”

“Screw it. We have a terminal break at five o’clock. We’re wrapping the last panel and riffing on your shot ’til we have to hit the hard out at commercial.”

“There’s no good shot right now, Pauline,” you said, quickening your steps. “It’s just an empty tarmac.”

“Nikki, there’s a new Executive Producer in there who doesn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground, and we need something easy for her to cut from when we hit the break.”

“So I can’t get a coffee because someone doesn’t know how to do their job—”

“You act like this is a new thing.”

“—and an empty tarmac is the best thing in the whole world for America to watch right now?”

“We’d air it all goddam day if it involved this s-o-b. Last twenty minutes of the show—”

“Twenty minutes?”

“’Til they have the hard commercial out.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“The audience eats him up.”

“You’re making him a king.”

“They’ll wait and they’ll wait, and they’ll watch and they’ll watch—can’t get enough of this fucker. Too easy.”

 ***

You considered defying your boss—grabbing a drink, finding Micky, but you told yourself it didn’t matter what you wanted to do next. The network owned you, made your decisions, determined how you spent the minutes of your days. You would have to quit your job to veer from Pauline’s course.

You would call the airport’s media liaison, and you would go to the tarmac, set up the shot, and feed it to the network. The control room would have their steady, no-action view to stare at while an anchor and pundits talked about how the candidate had built his brand in real estate and reality television, how his fame was changing the political game, how he was still behind in the polls, how he was running out of campaign funding, and how he would certainly lose.

You pushed your personal life from your mind, but when you ascended the escalator and again surveyed the terminal’s long, bustling hall, you imagined Micky was there.

She would be talking to a man in cargo pants, hiking boots. Probably an air marshal. For work.

They would both notice you.

You would put your aviators on your head, so Micky would see your eyepatch and be certain it was you. The air marshal would flinch.

Micky would indicate to the air marshal that she needed a minute, then she would rush over to you.

Before she could say anything, you would slap her across the face. Hard. So hard that the air marshal would yell to see if Micky was alright. 

She would raise her hand to signal she was fine.

“I deserved that,” she would say to you. “I owe you an explanation.”

“Tell me now,” you would say. “Someone else?”

She would suggest you have a phone call later, but you would persist until she would admit: “You were an assignment.”

She would tell you that your coverage of the Michael Brown shooting, some sources you had cultivated with Black Lives Matter—it was suspicious. 

“We wanted to check you out,” she would say. “It was just supposed to be friendly. Nothing more.” She would apologize for everything she had done, say she would keep seeing you if there was any way.

An explanation. Months of pain would evaporate.

But your phones started ringing again, and your reverie snapped.

“What the fuck’s wrong with me,” you said aloud, ashamed of the juvenile daydream.

You answered the call from Pauline.

“Change again.”

“What’s up?”

“He’s not going to JFK.”

You pivoted and picked up your pace, heading toward the lounge.

“LaGuardia,” Pauline said.

“Is that not what I said?”

“Any minute. Should’ve known. He always goes there. The desk fucked up. Pizza party or something.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Stay there a few hours. In case his plans change. Who the fuck knows.”

“Still no Philly?”

“Fuck no. London. See if Brexit becomes a thing.”

 ***

When you arrived at the lounge, you asked for a top-shelf bourbon and sat in a leather chair in front of a television displaying a cable-news rival.

Within thirty seconds, a portly fifty-something man in a business suit approached you and asked if—

You flipped up your sunglasses, and he apologized and said he mistook you for someone else.

“I’m sure,” you said with too much venom.

His mouth went slack, and he shook his head earnestly and put his hand to his chest: “I thought you were my colleague. Kelley Reno? I’ve never met her in person.” He apologized, but then another man called his name from across the room: Micky.

As he turned to walk away, you stopped him. “Did I hear you called over security a bit ago? Micky Smith?”

Blush crept up his neck and into his cheeks. “I left my wallet on the conveyor belt. Blended right in.” He shrugged. “You really do favor Kelley—at least her photos. Without the eyepatch, of course. Kelley doesn’t have one of those.”

You wished each other safe travels, and as he stepped away, you took a sip of the bourbon, confirmed that the other Micky Smith had not texted back, and told yourself aloud that she never would.

You were right.

Then, on the screen, a breaking-news banner flashed, and the anchor solemnly announced that the candidate’s private airplane was about to land at New York’s LaGuardia airport, that their network was bearing witness to every urgent moment of the race to the White House.

The empty tarmac was projected nationwide. Camera crews and other journalists scampered around the shot, trying to get a clean angle, anticipating where exactly the ratings-boosting celebrity would disembark.

“Squirrels,” you said, wondering how every other journalist in the city had the correct landing information.

You gulped down the rest of your bourbon and smacked your glass on the side table, as your phones buzzed with an updated schedule. You were to fly to London that night with whatever clothes you had from your Florida assignment. There would be a briefing call in thirty minutes.

The bourbon seeping through you, at first you simply stared at the on-screen tarmac. Then you noticed the remote control sitting on a nearby glass-topped end table and realized how uncomfortable it felt even to consider changing the scene around you. In news, that was not to be done. You picked up the remote anyway and pointed it defiantly at the television. A smattering of other travelers had been staring at the screen as they drank, but you didn’t ask their permission. You just hit the power button, shut the broadcast off. No one protested. They just bent their heads to their phones. One called to the waiter for another drink.

Without the television chatter, the room seemed quiet at first, but in fact, it tinkled with silverware and chatter, brushed with sniffles and carry-on bags pulled across the carpet. Under all that, you heard the melody again: Nocturne in E-flat major. It must be on a loop, you thought, and realized that after that day in June at the airport, the last time you hoped to see Micky, you would never hear that song the same way again. Micky would come first. The man playing piano in the tornado wreckage? He would come a beat later, and the song would ever after be a reminder of people you would never see again, moments with them that were gone, like when you first saw Mr. Steck sinking into his music in the wake of his granddaughter’s death, his rawness making the moment beautiful, the beauty making it bearable. He told you in his interview—the closing line of your piece—that he would probably play that song every day for the rest of his life. You assured him that his grief would surely ease with time, but he wrote later that it seemed heavier as the weeks passed. Time piled on too much meaning, he said, and the meaning, you understood that day in the airport, and five months later as you drafted your resignation, it creeps up on you.

about the author

Emily Drew is a writer and television news journalist with Emmy Awards for coverage of the Flint water crisis, the George Floyd protests, and other stories. She has worked for VICE News, MSNBC/NBC News, and other national outlets and is a speaker with the State Department’s U.S. Speaker Program. Most recently, she was the visiting James K. Batten Professor of English at Davidson College. “Terminal Break” is her debut work of fiction.

about the artist

Taylor Carson is a multidisciplinary artist based outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Art from The University of The Arts in Philadelphia. Taylor loves all things dark and feminine and tends to represent a combination of those types of themes throughout her work. Through painting, she explores portraiture of female-presenting figures to touch upon a concept that explores the idea of female power, which can be both divine and demonic. Her work can also refer to the representation of women in art, religion, and culture, which has been both nurturing and destructive.