Truth Like the Sun Read Free Page A

divorced journalists finding true love again. During the past few weeks, Helen had been yanked off her five-part epic on the inexplicable rise and spectacular collapse of groceriesnow.com so often that the project had been postponed indefinitely. The latest edict from above was for her to produce
enterprising
retrospectives on the 1962 World’s Fair. She’d waded justdeep enough into the clip files to realize it was the worst assignment imaginable.
    The escalating indignation on the bridge sounded oddly misplaced in a city that was always bragging about its manners. As honks and shouts rose in the anonymous gloom, it sounded more like a hostile rush hour in Philly, D.C. or New York.
    “Come on!”
    Helen started collecting details so she’d have word pictures if the woman actually jumped and generated some news. Yellow caution tape. Dimpled water winking through the steambath. Three waddling cops: one twirling his flashlight like a baton, one on the radio, one small-talking the jumper in a gentle mumble.
    Then, during the longest lull yet, someone about ten cars back howled, “Just jump, bitch!”
    Whether the woman heard the taunt or not, she jumped or, rather, stepped.
    The falling body didn’t look like a full-grown woman, more like a shrinking child wheeling its arms, trying to regain balance, as if reconsidering the whole ordeal several times before audibly slapping the gray canal, her splash as curiously discreet as an Olympic dive.
    Helen tried to find the heckler but got only sheepish headshakes before the flashlight cop shooed her off the bridge. She phoned the newsroom, trotted back to her car, then rolled off into heavier rain. Her defroster was no match for all this moisture, so she rubbed the windshield with her forearm; and when she cracked the window, rain pelted her face. Stopping at a blurry red, she watched commuters on bikes. There were joggers, too, and a man in a suit on a skateboard being pulled by a black Lab. Even pedestrians glided by without hats or umbrellas in fleece jackets and ultralight hiking boots, as if they might scale Rainier that afternoon if the weather cleared. Back East, exercise junkies had the decency to do it behind health-club walls. Out here everybody was an exhibitionist, though she did marvel at their rain Zen, striding into it, not
away
from or
out
of it. Her own disarray swung back into focus. A cereal bowl on the dash. Newspapers, folders, notebooks and pens strewn across the coffee-stainedpassenger seat. Chipped mugs on the floor next to a toy dump truck and the cheapest of her violins.
    At times, she forgot that moving out here was her idea. The original plan was to write for a feisty daily in one of America’s last competitive newspaper markets as far away from D.C. as possible. They flew her out and seduced her with all the
ass-kicking
stories they couldn’t wait to assign to someone
with her talents
. The day she’d interviewed, a local billionaire christened a new rock ’n’ roll museum by smashing a glass guitar in a rebellious spasm that seemed to say,
Look, even our establishment is radical!
The job, the newspaper, the city, it all seemed irresistible, especially at vivid twilight with a congratulatory cocktail and all these skyscrapers jockeying for views of this freakishly scenic place.
    But like most of her dates, it quickly fell short of expectations. The
Post-Intelligencer
was in worse straits than anyone admitted, and not even a bona fide daily. There was no Sunday stage for her work. How had she glossed over that? And even the city turned out to be a two-faced tease, a chilling rain pissing on her by the time she returned with Elias to hunt for an apartment. Yet it was the pretension that annoyed her, not the weather. She’d never seen a city this full of itself. The most livable! The most literary! The best place to locate a business or raise a kid or have a dog or get cancer! The capital of the new world economy! And the locals swallowed all these