Every Wild Heart Read online

  Dedication

  For my mother and for my daughters

  Epigraph

  Love is a banquet on which we feed.

  —Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, “Because the Night”

  We know what we are now, but not what we may become.

  —William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .* About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Praise

  Also by Meg Donohue

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  The first threat didn’t rattle me. It was Monday, after all, and Monday was always the wildest show of the week, the phone lines jammed with callers who had been forced to put a cork in their unwieldy, increasingly combustible feelings for me all weekend long and were now set to explode. The show’s tone mellowed considerably as the week went on, but Mondays? Unpredictable, messy, raw.

  They were my favorite.

  “You’re on air with Gail Gideon,” I said on that particular Monday, leaning into the microphone. “Tell me everything, starting with your name.”

  On the other end of the line there was a woman crying, her hurried flood of speech so garbled that it sounded more like water rushing through a storm drain than words.

  “Deep breath, Caller,” I said. “I can’t help you if I can’t understand you.” A note of annoyance escaped into my voice, but that was fine. I wasn’t my listeners’ “Mommy.” They didn’t call me to be coddled, and if they did, they quickly realized their mistake.

  Through the glass partition, the engineering booth was now a beehive, disturbed. Simone, my producer, met my gaze and muttered something with bite to her assistant, Ann, who responded with a noticeable cringe. Ann was in charge of screening callers. Emotional callers made for a great show; incoherent ones did not. Whoever this was on the line, she was Ann’s mistake. Claire, my engineer, tried to pick up the slack by moving her hands over the audio board, apparently in search of a magical dial that could isolate the voice within the caller’s sobs.

  And there it was! Claire had done it; Ann was saved. The caller’s voice—still soggy, and hiccuping now, too—slipped through my headphones:

  “Is it really you, G.G.?”

  For most of my life only my family and friends had called me G.G., but when the press latched onto the nickname nine years ago, my listeners had quickly followed suit. Of all the many strange things that came along with being a public figure, this had proven among the hardest to grow accustomed to: strangers calling me by the nickname that my parents had given me forty years earlier. It was hard not to think of my father when this happened. I knew better than to wonder if he was listening; he had once told me that my show was not his “cup of tea.”

  “Yes, I’m right here,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  Abruptly, the caller’s wet breathing quieted.

  “You ruined everything, G.G.,” she hissed. I suddenly had the distinct impression that her anguish had been an act, her ticket to getting on air. Now, her voice honed to a glinting dagger and inside of me something leapt to life, sharpening in response. “And in return I’m going to ruin your fucking life—”

  I cut the call. There was a seven-second delay but even without it I knew that Claire—who claimed to have the fastest fingers in radio—would have managed to mute the word “fucking.” Claire had a fair amount of experience with this sort of censorship. For every one hundred generous, grateful listeners there was one crazy woman—or man; they were often men—who hated me with an intensity that I knew could not possibly, at its core, have anything to do with me. I was just an attractive target—a successful single woman with a lot of opinions about the power of women and a live radio show that welcomed call-ins. Radio, like the internet, offered a cloak of anonymity that suited harassers perfectly; add to that the dark hours of night during which I was on air, and The Gail Gideon Show had proven itself catnip for crazies.

  Simone and I usually let those sorts of calls roll for as long as we could, well aware that Martin Jansen, Talk960’s program director, loved angry listeners. Whenever Martin heard that we’d received a threatening phone call, he’d do this overexcited blinking thing, like he was having trouble seeing around all of the advertising money that was piling up in front of him. “Enraged is engaged!” he liked to say. To Martin, those types of calls were simply proof that the millions of women who tuned in to my show didn’t think of me as a disembodied voice on the radio; I was someone familiar enough to hate. “You’re not just the Gail Gideon,” he’d tell me. “You’re their Gail Gideon.”

  He was right about one thing: those calls were great entertainment. Often, I’d spar with the caller, never losing the upper hand, and later my listeners would phone in (and email, and Tweet, and post to Facebook) to voice their support. The fervor of those callers didn’t scare me. In fact, I’d say I thrived on it. I enjoyed showing off my strength, flexing my muscles. More and more lately, I looked forward to those kinds of calls, their unpredictability, their infusion of color. But if a caller resorted to threats, I cut the call. My house, my rules. My audience had grown to expect nothing less.

  From the engineering booth, Simone locked eyes with me. There was a deep crease between her brows. Jenny? she mouthed.

  I shook my head. Jenny Long had been one of my more troubling fans, but I hadn’t heard from her or seen her since I’d served her with a restraining order more than a year earlier. Besides, even during the stretch of time that she had camped outside of Hawke Media, it had always seemed that Jenny was dabbling in stalking out of desperation, not anger. This caller, on the other hand, was obviously pissed.

  I leaned into the microphone and let out a whistle. Then I laughed. I laughed.

  “Caller,” I began. “Oh, dear, rabid caller . . . under other circumstances, I think we might have been friends! All of the passion in your voice! The fire!” I let out a low, admiring whistle. “I salute your anger, Caller. Really, I do. Never let it go.”

  “Anger.” I repeated the word slowly, turning it into a growl. Journalists always described the rasp in my voice as distinctive, my signature, but when I noticed it all I could think of were the hours that I’d spent inside my headphones as a kid, belting out terrible accompaniment to Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux, and Chrissie Hynde. Those musicians, along with so many others, had dared me to be the person that I believed I was instead of the person that my parents kept insisting I become. Those women were my tribe and their music saved me, gifting me with visions of a rock ’n’ roll life. If you’d told that teenage girl that, instead, she’d have the number three talk-radio program for women in the country (number one if you didn’t count religious radio, thank you very much), she would not have believed you. Then again, Teenage Me wouldn’t have believed that someday she’d fall in love with and marry a man who liked to play golf. Or that in her twenties she’d ho
st Love Songs After Dark, a radio show that aired a stream of music so sappy that she showered each night when she returned home in an attempt to wash off the residual sugar. And Teenage Me definitely would not have believed that when her golf-loving husband left her five years after the birth of their daughter, her ensuing on-air rant would go viral thanks to a newly installed webcam and a charming little website called YouTube. That she’d wake up the next morning not only as a newly single mother, but also as the country’s latest controversial overnight celebrity . . . and with an offer to capitalize on said celebrity by leaving music-format radio in her dust and branching into talk. Talk, talk, talk.

  “Anger gets a bad rap,” I said into the mic, “but it’s one of my favorite emotions. Nothing motivates like anger. Anger is an engine. It moves people. It changes people. It propels people down new paths, away from the paths that they are too angry to stay on for one second longer.

  “So when you feel anger building, here’s what I say: Don’t push it down. Don’t ignore it. Don’t cover up your anger by being quiet and accommodating and polite. But do control your anger. Make it work for you. Harness all that energy and ride it toward a goal that’s worthy of you and your awesome fire.”

  The monitor in front of me was an ever-expanding list of the calls that poured in as I spoke. I already knew these callers’ stories—the bones of them at least. The women who called The Gail Gideon Show were mired in one of the many stages of heartbreak. The ones who called in tears were generally in the early stages. The ones with clear voices were soldiering on and calling in with stories of triumph, of heartache overcome. That’s what The Gail Gideon Show was about, after all: finding love again after the darkness of heartbreak. Not love with a man—or another woman, for that matter—but with yourself. The show was a rallying cry for the single woman, a bad-ass-platform-boot kick to the stigma of singledom. It’s never too late to reinvent yourself, I told my heartbroken listeners. It’s never too late to become the person you want to be, with or without a life partner. Happiness is an equal-opportunity state of being, available without regard to relationship status. My listeners took my advice to heart. My producer, Simone, liked to say that we were building an army, but then she’d always had something of a militant bent. It was one of the reasons why, despite thinking of Simone as an equal partner in the success of the show, I did the talking.

  In the engineering booth, Ann was on the phone. Simone was answering calls now, too. Claire was watching me, nodding, one competent hand adjusting her glasses while the other hovered over the audio board. Everyone looked pumped. We were on hour one of a three-hour show.

  “We’ve all been angry,” I said, thinking back to how angry I’d been when Tyler bailed on our marriage. I could laugh about it now, but the truth was that the prick of my anger, my hurt, still needled me all those years later. “You all know I’ve been angry. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t been so angry. Anger changed my life for the better. It helped me become the woman I was meant to be.

  “But that’s enough from me. You all know my story backwards and forwards. I want to know what’s making you angry. Let’s come up with a plan for harnessing that energy and riding it toward your goals.”

  The air in the studio was electric. We were all warmed up now and ready to rock. I pressed one of the waiting phone lines, the threat of the last caller so easily tossed aside, already a fading memory. New call, new adventure. I leaned toward the mic.

  “You’re on air with Gail Gideon. Tell me everything, starting with your name.”

  A STORM HAD moved in over the city while I was in the studio. Rain in September was an unusual sight in San Francisco. Lightning was rarer still. I watched, startled, from my office as a sudden flash brightened the nighttime sky above the buildings across the street. I usually loved storms, but now I thought of my daughter Nic, home alone. I turned my back to the window and quickly gathered my things.

  I’d texted Roy before getting in the elevator, and he was waiting for me with an umbrella when I stepped into the downstairs lobby of the Hawke Media Building. Of all the perks of having one of the most listened-to radio programs in the country, my driver, Roy, was my favorite. He knew the streets of San Francisco so well it was like he’d planned the city himself, and after nine years together, I’d say he knew me nearly as well. He kept the car temperature set at sixty-five degrees because he knew I always ran hot. He also knew that I liked chatting on the drive from my house to the studio in the afternoon, and listening to music on the way home after work. We shared a love of spicy food, the peculiar energy of San Francisco at night, and, most of all, my daughter, for whom Roy cared like a doting grandfather.

  “How was Nic?” I asked, slipping into the backseat of the car. It was always my first question. In the afternoon, after picking me up at home in Bernal Heights and dropping me off downtown at the Hawke Media Building, Roy collected Nic from her high school in Hillsborough, a suburb south of the city, and drove her to Corcoran Stables in Pacifica. The barn overlooked the distant ocean and abutted a large park veined by trails. There, Nic spent a couple of hours riding and caring for her horse, Tru. Afterward, Roy drove her home and then returned to the station to wait for me.

  “She seemed . . .” Roy hesitated, searching for the right word. He was forever walking the line between making me happy and telling me the truth. “Tired.”

  I nodded. The backseat of the car still held the lingering scents of the barn, smells that I’d developed an affection for long ago. I breathed them in and thought of Nic. I’d taken lessons at Corcoran Stables, too, as a girl, and though I hadn’t ridden in twenty-five years, I could remember the feel of swinging my leg around the back of a horse and settling into the saddle like I’d done it just that morning. Moving a horse from a canter to a gallop. Dropping my weight into my heels and holding myself off his back as he thundered around the ring. Riding was empowering; it had been my great hope that Nic believed that, too.

  She’d been a late talker, and when her first sentences eventually emerged they’d brought with them a stutter. At home, Nic was bright and affectionate, hardly seeming to notice when her tongue tripped over her words. At school, though, anxiety hounded her. On her first day of kindergarten, she held herself apart from the other children and barely spoke. (Late at night I worried—as it felt almost my duty, as her mother, to worry—that my big personality and comfort in the spotlight had done her some damage. Had I given her room to shine?) Her timidity worsened when her father, Tyler, moved out a few months into the school year. It was then that I decided to enroll Nic in riding lessons. She had always loved animals; I hoped the sport might instill confidence and, more importantly, bring her joy.

  During her first lesson, she’d started off standing three feet away from the half-awake palomino pony to which she’d been assigned, and nearly jumped out of her skin when the pony blew a gentle burst of air from his nostrils. But when Denny Corcoran, the owner of the barn, handed her a hoof pick and taught her how to ask the horse to lift his leg, Nic’s apprehension melted away. She leaned into the pony with her little body, he picked up his hoof, and she cradled it in one hand while clearing the dirt and pebbles with the pick in her other hand. The look on her face as she moved on to the second hoof was proud and serious. In the ring, before riding the pony, she stood on her tiptoes and whispered in his ear, and something about the act, her instinctual partnership with the animal, made my eyes fill with tears.

  From that day on, Nic was deeply in love with riding. Or, if not with riding, then with horses—she’d always seemed more drawn to the placid, poetic, communing-with-the-natural-world aspect of horsemanship than the physical act of riding. This was a shame, in a way, because Nic was a fantastic rider. Whenever I worried about Nic, I reminded myself of the strength that emanated from her when she was around horses. If music had been my lifeline in childhood, riding was Nic’s. She was a natural. Denny Corcoran had said as much himself. He’d even once used the word “exceptional”
to describe Nic’s ability, which I remembered specifically because it was the exact word that came to my mind whenever I thought of my daughter.

  Exceptional.

  “Tell her,” I’d practically begged Denny at the time. “Tell her she should compete.” But Denny had just given me a look that I couldn’t read. He’d been a kid when I rode at Corcoran, a few years younger than me. Now his parents were retired and he owned the place.

  “She’ll figure it out herself,” he said. Then he shrugged. “Or she won’t.”

  A font of wisdom, that Denny.

  WE WERE HALFWAY home from the studio, driving more slowly than usual due to the rain that hit the windshield as though tossed from buckets, when my cell phone rang. It was my agent.

  “Hey, Shayne,” I said, picking up.

  “Who was that asshole who called in tonight? I’d like to wring her neck.”

  “You listened. I’m touched.”

  “Listened? Of course I listened. I listen every night. Well, not every night. I’m taking a stab at having a life. But you know I’m your number one fan, Geej. And speaking of numbers . . .”

  I had to laugh. Shayne was always calling about numbers. Even when she wasn’t calling about numbers, she was calling about numbers.

  “I spoke with Lev Curtain tonight,” she said. There was a pregnant pause. “Lev Curtain at ZoneTV.”

  “Who is it? When?” Talk show appearances usually came through my publicist, but every once in a while a big one came through Shayne first.

  “G.G.,” Shayne said. Her typically dry tone couldn’t mask her glee. “That’s what they want to call your show. G.G. Coming this summer on ZoneTV.”

  A tremor of excitement moved through my body. “Wait . . . what?”

  Roy glanced at me in the rearview mirror and then pegged his eyes back to the road. He was an avid and terribly obvious eavesdropper, a fact that somehow made him all the more endearing to me.

  “I told you! I’ve always told you!” Shayne said. “You may have a voice for radio, but you have a face for television. It’s finally happening! You have one of the highest-rated shows for women in the country. You’ve written a bestselling self-help book. Television is your next frontier. It’s what we’ve been talking about for years and now we finally have the right offer.”