When The Lights Go Out...

Silence fell just as suddenly as the chaos had erupted when their shepherd, Bart Klemp, plodded out from his office at the end of the room, a private office with a door and actual walls that went all the way to the ceiling.

Blythe was reminded of movies in which the benevolent plant-eating brontosaurus moved across the landscape, making the earth tremble with each ponderous step. This was a very odd comparison because Bart wasn’t a particularly tall man and he was chunky rather than obese. It was something in his attitude. Bart always looked as if he and his entire species were about to go extinct, and the thought made him terribly sad.

“I’ve been listening to the radio,” he said, “and the power’s out.”

We know that much without listening to a radio.

Bart’s face turned scarlet. Everybody must have been giving him the same “Duh!” look Blythe probably had on her face. “What I mean is,” Bart said, “that it’s not just us. It’s the power grid that serves the whole East Coast, Toronto south to Maryland and west into Michigan.”

The buzz in the newsroom was like a crowd-noise sound effect on an old radio show.

“Here on the home front, the generator’s not working, either, and the phone system’s down—they need electricity from somewhere, apparently. Anybody wants a briefing in electrical engineering, don’t look at me. All I know is nothing’s working at the Telegraph, and those of you still putting stories together, you’re going to have a hard time getting a circuit on your cell phones.”

Blythe still didn’t have a cell phone, and while she reflected that it really was well past time to be the last on the block to get one, Bart paused to rest a beefy hand on a desk and go even more fully into collapse mode. “I don’t know who’s going to show up from the night crew, so I’d appreciate it if some of you guys would stick around, see what we can pull together for a paper tomorrow afternoon if we get the power back in time. We’ve got radios to get the news, find out if it’s a terrorist attack or a lightning strike or somebody just screwed up, so there’s no excuse for us not to have those stories ready to print just as fast as the Times will.”

Blythe had her hand halfway up in the air. This was a dream come true—not that she was happy the entire East Coast had to suffer on behalf of one of her dreams—but this was her chance. Help get the paper out under impossible conditions. Save the day. Be a hero. Be indispensable.

But Bart wasn’t asking for volunteers. He was reading off a list of names. Hers wasn’t on it.

There it was, in actions that spoke louder than words. She wasn’t indispensable. Not that she didn’t know she wasn’t indispensable to the Telegraph, but it still hurt to have it confirmed. Gone, gone were her dreams of spending a few years being a latter-day Lois Lane, dashing about the city to uncover the facts for a front page story, always on a tight deadline while the entire newsroom waited with bated breath for her return, because if she didn’t get the story, the Telegraph would die a humiliating death in bankruptcy and all would be lost.

That part of the dream she’d have to revise to suit the power outage, but the second part remained intact. That at the end of an endless day, victorious, having saved the paper, she’d go home to her own personal superhero.

Crumpling inside, she turned toward her cubicle to get her handbag. In the background, she heard the political editor ask Bart, “When was our new guy supposed to land? I was counting on him to get out the columns on this City Council scandal…”

Counting on him. When would anybody ever count on her?

Feeling useless and defeated, Blythe walked down the four flights of stairs and onto the street. The subway system wasn’t working obviously, but the buses were. Perhaps a hundred people were waiting at the first bus stop. Twenty minutes later, after several already-stuffed buses had passed them by, flashing the Wait for Next Bus sign, she decided to splurge on a taxi and moved to the middle of the block to flag one down. Fifteen minutes worth of already-occupied taxis later, she knew walking was her only option.

Walking was dangerous. It gave her time to think.

Her stomach lurched with worry. Poor Candy. Was she all right? Was she one of the terrified people stuck on subway trains in the dark and the heat? How would she ever get home? Candy’s poor friend, the shrink. Blythe hadn’t even wrung his name out of Candy, and now she might never meet him.

What was he like, Candy’s friend? You’d expect Candy’s friends to be dingbats, but the ones Blythe had met on those holiday visits had been quite nice people, Candy being the wild child among them. So he probably was nice. And sensitive.

If she’d let Candy have her own way and the power hadn’t gone out and her friend had arrived for his blind therapy session with Blythe—you could hardly call it a date—she would have handled it in her own way. She would have offered him a drink and explained to him that, as fond as they both were of Candy, he ought to know that his friend had grown up to be a nutcase, an instant-gratification freak, a steamroller with no brakes. Well, no, it wouldn’t do to criticize an old friend. She’d put the blame on herself instead.

“I’m delighted to meet you, of course,” she would have said, “but Candy overreacted to my little, ah, problem. You mustn’t feel any obligation to take me out.” And don’t even think about taking me to bed.

And he might have said, “Ha, ha. Candy overreact? You must be joking.” And they might have had a good laugh together and maybe met for coffee sometime.

But this pleasant little exchange wasn’t likely to happen. Blythe didn’t like thinking about what might have happened to Candy’s friend.

His plane might be speeding desperately toward an airport where the air traffic controllers had electricity and the runway had lights, knowing the gas gauge was sinking lower, lower, lower. He’d feel the plane begin to lose altitude and think regretfully of the wild affair he might have had with Candy’s little redheaded roommate, a spitfire, a hot-blooded sex goddess, cursing fate for what he’d missed out on.

Blythe took in a sharp breath. He might have crashed while he was cursing fate.

Now he’d never know the truth, that the only thing hot about her was her hair color. That and her passion for correct spelling and good grammar.

Or he might still be at Logan Airport, simply cursing because his flight had been canceled. Wherever he was, she felt he must be cursing. How could he have grown up next door to Candy without being a world-class composer of creative expletives?

Blythe stopped daydreaming long enough to take stock of where she was. She’d almost done the cross-town part of her journey home. Now for the uptown part. She’d keep walking while she watched for a bus or a taxi. Just thirty-five blocks. Thirty-five blocks was nothing more than a good morning walk. Good afternoon walk. What time was it, anyway? Her watchband had slid around on her sweaty wrist, and she scooted it back. It was nearly six. Okay, thirty-five blocks was a good evening constitutional.

She had plenty of company. The sidewalks were packed in midtown, then thinned out as she moved up Madison Avenue into the East Sixties, where limousine drivers were delivering their wealthy employers home to their town houses. The heat and humidity weighed her down, so she paused occasionally for rest and window-shopping at stores that were closed down, had probably closed immediately after the blackout for security reasons, or to give their owners and managers a slight chance of making it home. Sweating in her flowered skirt and coral T-shirt, shopping didn’t grab her attention.

She ought to look for another job, go somewhere she could feel successful, but she was scared to confront a break in her steady salary and benefits. She was alone in the big city.

She was alone in the big world was what she was. Or would be, if it weren’t for Candy.

If she got any more maudlin, she’d sound like a character in a soap opera. She’d be okay. She could take care of herself. She’d worked hard. That scholarship had given her an excellent education. She just hadn’t found the right job yet, that was all.

Her smile faded as she had a fleeting vision of herself in jeans and a sweatshirt, loading a host of bright-eyed children into a station wagon in the driveway of a spotless, warm and cheery white clapboard house in the suburbs that still smelled of the bacon and eggs she’d cooked for breakfast, the tuna fish sandwiches she’d lovingly packed in their lunch boxes along with rosy apples and bags of chips. This was her other dream, a dream far more important than the Lois-Lane-saves-the-paper dream.

What she really wanted was to be a wife and mother. In her spare time she might write a weekly column in the local newspaper, something on housekeeping. Or parenting. She’d volunteer at her kids’ school, of course, and might even run for City Council in a quiet little suburb in Connecticut or New Jersey where the major issues were fence height and lawn maintenance. She’d keep her brain active, but the children—and her superhero—would come first.

This was a secret she kept in her heart. She didn’t have a single friend, especially not Candy, who would understand. The aggressive, career-oriented women of Manhattan would view homemaking as a nightmare. To Blythe, who’d never had a home and family, it sounded like heaven on earth.

Unfortunately the scene needed a handsome, loving, sexy man to kiss goodbye while the kids piled into the car, a man who could understand and support her dream and even express his love for her and the children by boiling the eggs for the tuna fish salad. She’d find that man someday. Just not quite yet.

At long last, she stepped gratefully into the lobby of the building where she and Candy shared an apartment, expecting the relief of a delicious blast of air-conditioning when, of course, there wasn’t any.

Santiago, the day doorman, was still on the job. “Miss Padgett.” He sounded relieved. “You made it home.”

“Just barely,” she croaked. “All I want is a nice long shower—we do have water, don’t we?”

An uneasy look came over his face. “We have water.” He cleared his throat. “Not necessarily hot water, but water. What we don’t have is elevators.”

She and Candy lived on the twenty-third floor. “I thought the elevators had an emergency backup system.”

He shuffled his feet. “It’s not working. Guess it has to get electricity from somewhere.”

She’d already heard this from Bart. “I know,” she said kindly. “If I want a lesson in electrical engineering, I’ll have to get it from somebody else. Okay, so I’ll walk up.”

“It’s dark, and I mean dark, in the stairwells,” Santiago went on. “I bought all the flashlights the hardware store down the street had left. Take one. First come, first served. I’d walk up with you, but J.R. and I are the only staff here. We stayed on because the night shift didn’t make it in.”

She took a moment to send out hugs to people stranded on subways, stuck in elevators, hoping Candy wasn’t among them. “Have they closed the bridges and tunnels?”

Santiago nodded. “Eddie called in,” he said. “He can’t get out of Brooklyn.”

That definitely took care of her date-under-duress. “I knew we’d live to regret the age of technology,” Blythe said as she headed for the stairs that spiraled up through the building and ended closest to hers and Candy’s apartment. She opened the door and almost lost heart. With no windows in the stairwell, no light reached it at all. But it was the only way home. Grasping her flashlight, she aimed it up into the darkness and got her feet moving.

Second floor, third, fourth, fifth…

She’d never buy a StairMaster. Who needed one, as undependable as New York was.

Sixth, seventh, eighth…

When she’d trapped a wonderful husband and delivered numerous adorable children to worry about, she’d be grateful she’d opted for that house in suburbia. Two floors, three, max. She could hear some noise going on above her. It was comforting, knowing other people were in the building. She wouldn’t have that in suburbia, but then she wouldn’t be climbing twenty-two flights of dark stairs, either.