Not Jimmy.The new associate producer — Sarah — voice neat and impersonal in my ear.
"Where's Jimmy?"
A short pause."He's in the chair.He's — he's here."
Five.Four.Three.
The red light bloomed.
"Good evening.I'm Nelson Mackenzie.This is Beacon News Tonight.Joining us this evening is Republican Senator Thom Whitfield of Tennessee, who has spent the past forty-eight hours explaining to anyone with a microphone why a vote he cast in March is not the vote we have on tape.Senator.Welcome."
"Nelson.Always a pleasure."
"Mm."
In my ear: "Camera two."
That was all.Two words flat as a held note.No Nelson, no go deeper, no easy on him for thirty seconds and then end him — none of the small private things he said only to me, in the cadence I had been pretending didn't reorganize my entire nervous system every time he used it.Camera two.Like he was reading it off a card he'd never seen before.
"Senator, on March eleventh —"
"Camera three."
Jimmy's voice was wet at the edges, almost like he was forcing himself to speak.He cleared his throat afterward, small and apologetic, and I felt it land somewhere under my collarbone.
"On March eleventh you stood on the floor of the Senate and said, and I'm quoting —"
"Tighter.On him."Jimmy's voice trembled.What on earth was wrong?
I asked the senator my question.He gave me an answer he had probably rehearsed in the car on the way to the interview.
"Senator, that was Tuesday.I'm asking about Thursday's vote."
In my ear, nothing.A long, empty nothing where a direction should have been.I turned a page on the desk that did not need turning and counted, because counting is what I do when I am about to fall apart.
One.Two.Th —
"Sorry.Sorry — three on him.Hold on three."
He had never said sorry in my ear before.Jimmy did not apologize on the line.Jimmy gave the direction and moved on.The sorry came through small and frayed and entirely without armor, and I felt my hand close on the edge of the desk where the cameras couldn't see it.
I went to three.Held him.Watched the senator's pupils do the thing they do when a man realizes everyone knows he's lying.
"Nelson —"
That was the way he said my name.That was it — all the months of those two syllables in my ear, and he had not, in any of them, said them the way he said them now.
Then, immediately, smaller, more level, like he was hauling himself back over a wall: "B-roll.Run the b-roll."
The b-roll was not supposed to come for another ninety seconds.I knew the rundown.But the b-roll came up on the prompter and rolled, and I sat in the half-second of dark while the package took over, and inside that half-second, very faintly through the open channel, I could hear him breathing.Two breaths.Three.The third one caught.
I didn't move.I did not give the camera anything.But I closed my eyes for a count I knew was too long.I knew Sarah saw it on Monitor Three and did not say a word, and I knew Jimmy didn’t see it because he wasn’t looking at the monitors anymore.
When the package ended I came back on Camera One and interviewed a British MP on a live feed.There were no directions in my ear for nineteen minutes.Sarah picked up the slack at the back end — commercial in thirty, hard out at the half — a stranger's voice doing somebody else's job.Once, underneath Sarah, I heard the smallest sound.Not a sob.The sound before a sob.Then it cut, like a hand had gone over the mic.
The broadcast felt like it took a year and a half.When the credits ran and the red light died, I sat there with the earpiece still in, listening to a channel he hadn't bothered to close, listening to Jimmy breathe on the other end of it.
I stared through the glass, found his eyes, and lifted my chin a quarter of an inch.