Private Scandals

commented.
    “It’ll be better if you’d get out of my way.”
    He was used to hostility, but he liked to know its source. “You’re ticked because I kissed you? No offense, Deanna, but it wasn’t personal. It was more like primal instinct.”
    “I’m not ticked because you kissed me.” She spoke between her teeth and began to type again. “I’m ticked because you stole my story.”
    Hooking his hands around his knee, Finn thought about it and decided she had a small, if not particularly salient point. “Let me ask you a question. Which makes better film? You doing a stand-up, or me giving a play-by-play of the flight minutes after evacuation?”
    She spared him one heated glance, and said nothing.
    “Okay, while you’re thinking it over, we’ll print out my copy and see how it reads with yours.”
    She stopped. “What do you mean, your copy?”
    “I wrote it on the plane. Got a quick interview with my seatmate, too.” The reckless amusement was back in his eyes. “Should be good for human interest.”
    Despite her annoyance, she nearly laughed. “You wrotecopy while your plane was going down?”
    “Those portable computers will work anywhere. You’ve got about five minutes before Benny comes along and starts tearing his hair out.”
    Deanna stared after him when Finn walked off to commandeer a desk.
    The man was obviously a lunatic.
     
    And a damned talented one, she decided thirty minutes later.
    The edited tape was completed, the graphics set less than three minutes before airtime. The copy, reworked, rewritten and timed, was plugged into the TelePrompTer. And Finn Riley, still in his sweater and jeans, was seated behind the anchor desk, going national with his report.
    “Good evening. This is a special report on flight 1129. I’m Finn Riley.”
    Deanna knew he was reading the news, since she had written the first thirty seconds herself. Yet it felt as though he were telling a story. He knew exactly which word to punch, when to pause. He knew exactly how to go through the camera and into the home.
    It wasn’t an intimacy, she mused, worrying her earring. He wasn’t settling in for a cozy chat. He was . . . bringing tidings, she decided. Carrying the message. And somehow staying aloof from it.
    Neat trick, she thought, since he had been on the very plane he was describing.
    Even when he read his own words, words he had written while plunging through the sky in a crippled plane with its port engine smoking, he was removed. The storyteller, not the story.
    Admiration snuck past her defenses.
    She turned to the monitor when they switched to film, and saw herself. Hair dripping, eyes huge, face pale as the water that rained over her. Her voice was steady. Yes, she had that, Deanna throught. But she wasn’t detached. The fear and terror were there, transmitted as clearly as her words.
    And when the camera shifted to capture the plane skidding on the runway, she heard her own whispered prayer.
    Too involved, she realized, and sighed.
    It was worse when she saw Finn on the monitor, taking over the story minutes after escaping the damaged plane. He had the look of a warrior fresh from battle—a veteran warrior who could discuss each blow and thrust concisely, emotionlessly.
    And he had been right. It made better film.
    At commercial, Deanna went up into the control booth to watch. Benny was grinning like a fool even as sweat popped onto his wide, furrowed brow. He was fat and permanently red-faced and made a habit of tugging on tufts of his lank brown hair. But he was, Deanna knew, a hell of a producer.
    “We beat every other station in town,” he was telling Finn through the earpiece. “None of them have any tape of the landing, or the initial stages of evacuation.” He blew Deanna a kiss. “This is great stuff. You’re back in ten, Finn. We’ll be going to the tape of passenger interviews. And cue.”
    Through the last three and a half minutes, Benny continued to murmur to himself, pulling at his hair.
    “Maybe we should have put him in a jacket,” he said at one point. “Maybe we should have found him a jacket.”
    “No.” There was no use being resentful. Deanna put a hand on Benny’s shoulder. “He looks great.”
    “And in those last moments in the air, some, like Harry Lyle, thought of family. Others, like Marcia DeWitt and Kenneth Morgenstern, thought of dreams unfulfilled. For them, and all the others aboard flight 1129, the long night ended at seven-sixteen, when the