you. And I will if I may. I’ll let the vice president’s people know.”
And then the conversation was over. Jenna kept the phone to her ear after Ebbing hung up, savoring the request in silence for a few seconds because she was all but certain that as a member of the news division, she would be barred from taking any appointment to a governmental body. Those were the network’s rules.
After a breath, she cradled the receiver and passed the bulletin to Nicci and Cassie.
“Wow,” Cassie said. “Big, big wow.”
“The suits are never going to let me take it,” Jenna said to both women, shaking her head. “They don’t want us doing that kind of stuff.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Nicci said, “but you’re a meteorologist, and that’s a little different.”
“I doubt they’ll see it that way.” Jenna shrugged. But she could take solace, scant as it was, that someone had seen her as more than the morning weather bimbo. Not many years ago, the joke in male-dominated newsrooms was that a woman’s sole qualification for a weather job was whether her breasts reached from New York to Kansas when she stood next to the map.
The phones started ringing and Nicci went to work. Cassie took a message, hung up, and handed it to Jenna. “Just a guy who wanted to talk to you—”
Another one. It seemed to Jenna that half a dozen guys called after every show, most of them vowing to make her happy. Their means for accomplishing this were notably unmentionable.
“He said you almost landed on him this morning,” Cassie finished.
“Really?” A lilt colored her voice. “What did he want?”
“He said just to talk.” Cassie rolled her eyes.
Jenna stared at the name: Dafoe Tillian. Before she could do more than remember his rugged, pleasing appearance, Nicci cupped the receiver on her phone and said, “It’s Rafan on line two.”
“Rafan?” Jenna sat up. He was an old boyfriend, one of the few real loves of her life. “Where is he?”
“The Maldives, I guess. He says it’s pretty important.”
Jenna got on the line right away.
“I saw you on The Morning Show,” Rafan said in his accented English. “You do weather now.”
Had it been that long since they’d spoken? She’d been doing the show for three years. She told him this gently, as if she might break his heart all over again. They used to talk all the time: in bed, first thing in the morning, at the beach, the market—
“Here, the weather gets hotter. The islands, they will disappear.”
“I know, Rafan. It’s so sad.” She’d been aware of the threat to his country’s archipelago of twelve hundred islands since she’d started on her doctoral work ten years ago. The Maldives had been her home for several months of research. She’d look out and see nothing but islands and Indian Ocean all the way to the horizon. Now the Maldives was destined to become the first country to fall victim to global warming. Seas rising much faster than the U.N.’s predictions had already claimed coastline, and now had started claiming thatched houses. To see your homeland washing away must be heartbreaking, she thought.
In recent years, the Maldivian president and his ministers had strapped on scuba gear for an annual underwater cabinet meeting to dramatize the plight faced by his country’s three hundred thousand people. To no avail. Most Americans, Jenna had found, still hadn’t heard of the Islamic nation, much less of its highly endangered status.
She listened closely to her old lover, but knew that if he was pitching a climate story, he’d picked the wrong person. Especially in a political year. But no, he was pushing a story that always had traction.
“Muslims here, they are angry. It’s not like before. Remember? We would go to parties, have a good time. Here, it’s changing, Jenna. It’s changing very fast. People say the West, your country, is doing this to us. They say the decadence is killing us. Come see for yourself. I think they will strike back. Soon.”
“What do you mean, ‘strike back’? How?”
“How do you think? How do you think?”
Jenna looked out her window and saw another warm summer day not so many years ago.
“You should come. I can show you.” Rafan said good-bye.
She walked to the window and looked as far as she could see to the right. She didn’t do this often. It hurt too much. But she let herself stare at the smoggy sky where the Twin Towers once stood.