Cabin Fever (21 page)

With that she tumbled into her car, moving as quickly as she could, because she knew the tears were not far away and she didn’t want John to see her break down. She felt humiliated enough as it was. He didn’t tell her! He was leaving in a few days, and he hadn’t bothered to tell her! There was sadness in her tears, yes, but there was also anger, and Sarah could feel it rearing up inside her like a wounded beast.

The heat of her anger carried her all the way home, and it wasn’t until she heard the front door slam behind her that Sarah slowed down and tried to calm herself. She had almost arrived at the point of convincing herself that this was all for the best when she heard the crunch of a car’s tires outside. She didn’t need to wait for the knock on the door to know who it was.

She opened the door to see Brad standing on the front stoop. “Sarah, I know you’re mad…” he began when she cut him off.

“Mad doesn’t begin to describe how I feel right now.” Part of her wanted to slam the door in the face, to slam it hard and then open it so she could slap him across the face before slamming it shut again. She knew this wouldn’t be over until they had the talk, though, and so she turned without a word and walked into the interior.

He followed her in and closed the door. “I guess you’re pretty pissed off at me right now.”

She turned back towards him and stood with her arms crossed across her chest. “Yeah, that’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?”

She shook her head at the hopeless prospect of summing up her feelings – all of them. What she was feeling was a confused mess. Her head was like a bag of cats, and Brad wanted her to set her feelings out in a neat little row for him to examine. “Angry. Sad. Hurt. Disappointed. You name it, I’m probably feeling it right now.”

He sighed. "I know. I screwed up. You should have been the first person I told, but I couldn't figure out what to say."

"So you said nothing and left me to look like an idiot in front of your father."

"You didn't look like an idiot! I’m the idiot. And anyway, it's not like this came in out of the blue. You knew this was coming."

"Yes! I knew it was coming. And I also thought that I meant something to you, and that when the time came you'd treat me with some respect!"

"Sarah, you do mean something to me. Shit, you mean a whole lot to me! That's why it was so hard!"

"Oh please. It was so hard to say nothing? It was so hard to do nothing? You took the coward's way out."

From the widening of his eyes and the sudden flare of his nostrils Sarah could tell that she had wounded him, and she was glad. She was hurt and she wanted him to hurt, too – if not because he was leaving her, then because of what he had done.

"I'm sorry you feel that way," he said at last, with a stiff formality that spoke to how carefully he was trying to control himself. "I didn't mean any harm. I just ... I didn't know what to say."

There were a million things that Sarah could have said then, and in the days to come she would run through all of them, one by one, considering their merits and retroactively reconstructing the scene and the way it should have ended, but instead she turned away and hugged herself tighter. Somewhere halfway between tears and anger she heard Brad sigh and walk away, closing the door behind him. It was a long time after she heard his jeep pull away that Sarah finally gave into a gush of tears.

27

This was not a new place for Sarah. She had a script in her head for what to do when her heart ached so bad that she wanted to lay down and die. She could line up the failed romances of her past – the ill-advised crushes in high school, the tentative and painfully self-conscious disasters of college, the "we're both really to busy and self-absorbed to take this seriously" pseudo-relationships when she was getting started in business – and each time, after a short period of mourning, she arrived at the same remedy: work. Work would make her feel better, she knew, but only if she committed everything she had to one, titanic, all-consuming effort.
 

When she was done crying and had cleaned herself up, then, her first stop was the grocery store, where she filled her cart with coffee first – lots and lots of coffee – and then added in the sort of food that required next to no preparation. Cheese and crackers were always a good option, since she wouldn’t even need a plate to eat them, and she threw in a few cans of sardines and oysters for variety. A jug of orange juice took care of the hydration problem. She almost left it at that, but a quick mental arithmetic established that she'd barely get through two days on what she had in her cart, and Sarah was planning to put in a least twice that much time before coming up for air. She doubled back, then, and gathered an armful of microwave entrees. She knew how much fat and sodium would soon be entering her system, but at the moment she couldn't bring herself to care. Fitness would wait for tomorrow; what Sarah needed now was to feel better about the future and about herself.

Heading to the cashier, Sarah was relieved to see that Sam the grocer was not minding the station. In his place was an earnest teenage girl that didn’t take offense when Sarah gave her a quick half-smile and avoided eye contact for the rest of the transaction. Sam was nice and always had a smile, a pleasant word, and some random gift whenever Sarah came in, but today was not the day for pleasantries – not to mention the fact that she was starting to suspect that Sam had a crush on her. There was a small chance that she might break into tears at any moment, and to do it in front of Sam would be just too mortifying.
 

The drive back to the cabin was quick, and the roads were mercifully free of red jeeps that might belong to Brad. Sarah grabbed her groceries and hurried inside, locking the door behind her. She emptied the bags on the counter and started the kettle going for her first cup of coffee. It would not be the last – far from it – and already she was looking forward to the aroma. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee always meant business for Sarah, and business was what she intended to get down to doing. Relationships were hard. They were hard when they first were getting started, and they were hard (really hard!) to keep going. Sarah knew that she was not very good at that sort of thing. Business, though, was something that she understood from the inside out. She couldn’t do anything to the silence the sadness she felt in the depths of her heart, but she was glad to be getting back to the things she excelled at.

She spent that day at the dining room table, her laptop open before her and the iPad off to the side where she could use it to quickly run searches, look up figures, and play music when she needed the diversion. Ordinarily her workspace would have been a riot of papers and printouts, but Sarah didn’t have a printer with her and so she was forced to go entirely digital. She thought at first that this was going to bother her. She didn’t have papers at hand with margins for notes that she could scribble to herself, but in time she found herself enjoying how fast it was when all the material she was working with resided in windows on her laptop. She could flip from one to the other in an instant, never shuffling through a disorganized pile to find the one she wanted, and If she ever found herself with a paper or source that was close but not quite the thing she needed, a better match was only a Google search away. A thousand times that day she blessed the fact that technology allowed her to use her iPhone’s connection to the Internet on her laptop. Sarah felt fully plugged in. She was physically out in the middle of nowhere, but with the latest technology she could access everything she needed. For the first time in weeks she felt powerful. She felt herself again.

The work was cathartic. She compiled tables, developed spreadsheets, poured through whitepapers and newspaper articles, compiling a delicate structure of facts and conjecture that all fed into the vision she was developing. One cup of coffee followed another, and when she was hungry there were snacks or a frozen entree, whatever she needed to quiet her stomach and get back to answering the questions in her head. Morning gave way to afternoon that blended into evening, but she hardly noticed. Her neck grew sore and her fingers stiff from the typing, but she forged on. Eventually even the awareness of Brad and the residue of her anger and hurt drifted away, and she had intended, to be replaced by the project at hand and the wonderful puzzle that she was pretty sure she knew how to solve. Late at night, when sleep finally could no longer be denied, Sarah lay down under the covers and fell quickly into a sleep that was untroubled by dreams of beautiful men and the ugly things they sometimes do.
 

By the second day the plan had begun taking shape in its full dimensions, though some its parts were entirely speculative. By day three those parts were more fleshed-out, and Sarah knew that it was only a matter of time. The afternoon of that day she head a knock at the door, and her first impulse was to ignore it. What if it was Brad? She couldn’t stand the thought of seeing him there, having to talk with him – not the way she felt, and certainly not the way she looked. Peering through the view hole, though, she saw Sam standing on the front step with a box in his arms.

She opened the door uncertainly, blinking against the unexpected brightness of the midday sun. “Sam,” she said. “What is it? Why are you here?”

He looked at her with concern clearly etched on his face. “I was worried about you, Sarah. I brought you some things.”

He handed her the box, and in it Sarah saw fruits and vegetables, coffee and bread – a care-package for a broken-hearted woman. Something in her chest twisted and her eyes misted up, but she fought them back. “Sam, that’s very sweet, but how did you know…?”

He snorted. “There are no secrets in Tall Pines, Sarah. News travels fast here because we have so little to talk about.”

She looked at the box again, and then back at him. “I can’t accept this,” she said, handing it back to him.

He put up his hands to block the offer. “It’s yours. If you don’t want it, leave it out for the animals or something. I’m not taking it back.”

“Sam, you can’t keep giving me things for free! It’s not right.”

She hadn’t meant to confront him that way, and she was instantly sorry when she saw a look of shame and hurt flash across the friendly features of his face. “I don’t mean anything by it, Sarah. I would never do that to my wife. It’s just … I’m helpless in the face of beautiful women, and I always have been. I look at you, and I just melt. And I know you’ll never look at me that way, and it’s OK.”

“Sam…”

“It’s OK, and I understand, and that’s what I want, too – I want to keep my promises, I want to keep my family, and I want to be able to do nice things for you and give you things. It makes me feel good, Sarah, so please accept it.”

She looked at him a long time before putting the box down to take him into a tight hug. “Thank you,” she said at last, thanking him for many things, of which the groceries were only a very small part. Sam stiffened when he first felt her in his arms, but he relaxed into the hug in a way that told Sarah he would remember this day for a long time.

She ate better after that, and a better feeling in her body translated into better words on the screen. On day four she had what she thought was a good start: a business plan that described a market that was already large and still growing, with a product approach that she was pretty sure would be compelling to investors. It wasn’t perfect, but Sarah knew what she had. It was a new start for her. It was a way to get back into the game.

She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her hand over her tired eyes. There was still a question that bothered her and that she had not come close to answering: did she want this plan to succeed? Succeeding in the plan meant getting back into the startup scene. It meant gathering investors’ money and hiring a staff, working on cash flow and building her new business fast enough to gain market share before her competitors could muscle in. It meant returning to her old life, returning to the world that had chewed her up and spat her out without a single word of apology or regret. Sarah idly bit her lower lip while considering the most important question of all: now that she knew how to get back everything that she had lost, did she still want it?

She asked the question, but no answer presented itself. Eventually Sarah sighed and picked up her phone. Some things would just have to answer themselves in time. Pulling up her list of contacts, she located Vijay’s cell number and initiated a call. She was right at the point of wondering what she would do if she got his voice mail – leave a message or hang up and call back later – when she heard his familiar Southeast Asian lilt.

“This is Vijay.”

“It certainly is,” she said, smiling broadly. “And it’s great to hear your voice.”

“Sarah!” he called without a moment’s hesitation. “I thought you had fallen off the face of the earth. Where have you been?”

“Oregon. Middle of nowhere. I needed a quiet place where I could think.”

“Think about what? Have you been thinking about how far you have to drive to get a decent cup of coffee?”

“Actually the coffee is pretty good here. But I wanted to talk to you about an idea I had.”

“Oh?” Sarah could almost hear the gears turning as Friend Vijay transitioned into Venture Capitalist Vijay. “I’m always happy to hear your ideas, Sarah. But first I have some news for you.”

“What’s that?”

He paused dramatically in a fashion that Sarah knew to be entirely calculated. Vijay loved to be in front of an audience. “You might remember a man you used to work with, name of Dennis.”

Sarah almost spat at the sound of his name. “Is he dead? Please?”

Vijay chuckled. “No, not dead. Not physically, at any rate, but his career has seen better days. He’s been indicted for fraud.”

“Yes! That’s perfect!” she exulted. “How did it happen?”

“Apparently you were not the only business owner whose intellectual property Dennis tried to steal. Only with this other company, he got sloppy. He falsified some paperwork in an attempt to gain ownership of their patents, and he was found out. Now the patent office is investigating his entire portfolio. He’s out on the street, and he’s facing criminal charges. He’s probably going to jail.”