Left Neglected (25 page)

“Ideally, right away.”

I was hoping he’d say next month, giving me more time to recover, but I suspected from the urgency of this meeting and the number of bigwigs in the room that they need someone up and running in this position today. I think of all the balls I used to juggle every day—expensive, fragile, heavy, irreplaceable balls—barely able to keep them all in the air, loving every adrenaline-packed minute of it. And now here I am, back at Berkley, and Richard’s got an armful for me. My right hand is ready to catch them, but my left hand is pinned between my knees.

“Well, what do you say?” asks Richard.

Here I am, back at Berkley, and Richard has spoken the welcoming words I’ve been praying to hear every day for four months. I’m standing in the threshold of the door to my old life. All I have to do to reclaim it is walk through.

I’m going to turn it down.” Bob’s elated face unravels into fathomless wonder, like I told him in one breath that we won the lottery and in the next that I gave the winning ticket to the homeless woman who begs for change on the corner of Fairfield and Boylston.

“Have you lost your mind?”

“No,” I say, insulted. Well, I actually have lost some of my right mind, but now’s probably not the best time to be literal.

“Then why on earth would you do that?”

“I’m not ready.”

He rakes his fingers up and down repeatedly over his eyebrows and forehead, like he does whenever the kids have pushed him to the edge, and he’s trying to buy a calm second. Only the kids aren’t even home. We’re alone in the house, sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table.

“They think you are,” he says.

“They don’t know what we know.”

They don’t know how hard it is for me to read every word on every page, especially the words on the left side of the left page. They don’t know how long it takes me to find the letters on the left side of the computer keyboard. They don’t know that my office would need to be decorated in orange tape and signs reminding me to
LOOK LEFT
. They don’t know how long it took me to walk from my office to the Concord Room and that I crashed into several doorframes and one potted plant along the way, and they don’t know that Jim vanished mid-meeting because he was seated too far to my left. They haven’t seen me fall or drool or try to take off my coat.

“I really think you’re ready,” says Bob.

“I’m not.”

Bob’s encouragement since the accident has been unwavering, confidently walking the fine line between optimism and denial, determination and desperation. Some days, it’s exactly the morale boost I need to keep going, but others, like today, it seems more disconnected from reality than I am from the left side of the room.

Even part-time work at Berkley would be too much volume under too much time pressure, like having to read the Sunday
Times
in a day. I can only too well imagine the costly mistakes, the omissions, the embarrassment, the apologies. My ego and I could suffer through it all, but in the wake of my suffering, the consultants would suffer, the clients would suffer, and Berkley would suffer. No one would win.

“This is exactly what you said about skiing, and now you’re on the mountain every weekend,” says Bob.

“But I’m not skiing, I’m snowboarding.”

“The point is you got back out there. And it’s been the best therapy for you. I think going back to work will be so good for you. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I’d fail miserably.”

“You won’t. You’ve got to at least give it a try.”

“Would you?”

“Definitely.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t go back unless you could be at your best.”

“I would. And you’ll get there. You won’t know unless you try.”

“I know I can’t ski, and I haven’t tried.”

“This is different than skiing.”

“I know.”

“This is really important.”

“I know.”

He starts raking at his eyebrows and forehead again. And now he’s got that pulsing twitch in his temples that he gets when he’s trying to reason Lucy out of one of her tantrums, an impossibly futile goal, like trying to convince a hurricane to change its course or downgrade to a mild tropical storm. I can ignore her, but Bob can’t resist trying to do something. He talks and twitches. She wails and thrashes. Her tantrums can sometimes be tricked by distraction, but mostly they have to run their course before she’s calm enough to reach with words.

“I’m freaking out here, Sarah. I can’t do this alone. We can’t afford this lifestyle without you—the kids’ private lessons, day care, our school loans, the mortgages. And I don’t know how long your mother’s going to put her life on hold for us. We should probably start to look into selling the house in Vermont.”

“Or maybe we should sell this one,” I offer.

“And then where would we live?” asks Bob, humoring me but in a condescending tone.

“Vermont.”

He looks at me like I suggested we should sell one of our kidneys, but this seems like a reasonable idea to me, one that’s been fuzzy and fragmented but gradually coalescing in my mind for some time. Our Welmont mortgage and the cost of living here are our biggest expenses. It could take over a year to find a buyer for our house in Vermont, but even in this economy, Welmont real estate values have been holding steady. Our house here is a modest four-bedroom, and most people looking in Welmont want more space, but it’s well maintained and would show well. It would probably sell right away.

“We can’t live in Vermont,” says Bob.

“Why not? The cost of living there is practically nothing compared to here.”

“That’s because there’s nothing there.”

“It has plenty there.”

“It doesn’t have our jobs.”

“We’d get jobs.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it yet.”

But I want to. There’s not a lot going on in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. It’s not Corporate America. It’s rural New England, only sparsely populated, mainly by artists, skiers, mountain bicycling enthusiasts, ex-hippies, farmers, and retirees.

“I could open a coffee shop,” I say, brainstorming.

“What?”

“A coffee shop. B&C’s is closed, and Cortland needs a good coffee shop.”

“Maybe B&C’s closed because Cortland can’t support a good coffee shop.”

“Maybe it just didn’t have good management.”

“It’s a ridiculous business idea.”

“What’s so ridiculous about it? Is Starbucks a ridiculous business?”

“So you want to open a Starbucks?”

“No, I—”

“You want to compete with Starbucks?”

“No.”

“You want to be the Juan Valdez of Cortland County?”

“Not funny.”

“None of this is funny, Sarah. I love Vermont, too, but we’re too young and ambitious to live there full-time. It’s a place to vacation. Our life is here. Our jobs are here.”

I don’t see why they have to be.

“You know, we might both be out of a job here soon. I don’t see why we can’t at least look up in Vermont.”

“Again, doing what? You want to run human resources at Mary’s Maple Syrup Company?”

“No.”

“You want me to sell lift tickets at the mountain?”

“No. I don’t know what’s there.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“You don’t know that. We haven’t looked.”

“So you want to turn down your job at Berkley and look for a job in Vermont?”

“Yes.”

“This is a completely crazy conversation.”

“Maybe.”

“No, it is.”

“Okay, so we’re having a crazy conversation.”

Bob, a natural risk taker with a brilliant business mind and entrepreneurial spirit, should be open to this kind of discussion. He should also know that some of the world’s best ideas, biggest innovations, and most successful businesses were first resisted and perceived as crazy. He’s stopped raking his face, and his temples are no longer twitching. He’s looking at me like he doesn’t know who I am. His eyes are lonely and scared.

“I’m sorry, Sarah. I don’t want to have this conversation. And I don’t want to pressure you. I know you’re still going through a lot, but I don’t think you should pass up this opportunity. If you wait, they’ll have to find someone else, and they might not offer this to you again. This is your way back. We need you to go back to Berkley.”

His last sentence feels more like an order than an appeal. But just like he couldn’t order me back onto skis, he can’t order me back to work. My stubborn independence has always been a brick wall that Bob’s wanted to kick down. All these years later, it amuses me that he still tries. As much as he’d like to be at times, like now, he’s never been the boss of me. For better or worse, we’ve enjoyed a marriage of equal partnership. It’s usually a positive asset, something we’re both proud of, but sometimes it’s admittedly difficult having two captains of the same ship, with two sets of hands on the wheel. When Bob wants to steer left, and I want to go right, one of us has to compromise else we risk hitting the rocks dead ahead of us and sinking.

“I know you’re afraid. I’d be afraid, too. But you’re brave. Look at what you’re capable of facing and conquering. I’m so proud of you. If you can call up the strength and courage to do battle with your Neglect every day, then I know you have the strength and courage to go back to work. I know it’s scary, but I believe in you. They believe in you. You can do this. You’re ready.”

The thought of going back to Berkley now is scary. But it’s not scary like snowboarding for the first time, trying to walk without a cane, or Martha in a miserable mood. And it’s not the reason I don’t want to go back. Ever since business school, I’ve had my head down, barreling a thousand miles an hour, wearing the flesh of each day down to the bone, pointed down one road toward a single goal. A successful life. And not just run-of-the-mill success. The kind of success that my fellow elite classmates would envy, the kind that my professors would cart out to future students as a shining example of achievement, the kind that even the exceptionally prosperous citizens of Welmont would aspire to, the kind that Bob would be proud of. The kind of visibly successful life that would in every way be the exact opposite of the broken, shameful life of my childhood.

And then I crashed my car. For the first time in almost a decade, I stopped barreling a thousand miles an hour down that road. Everything stopped. And although much of the stillness of the past four months has been a painful and terrifying experience, it has given me a chance to lift my head up and have a look around.

And I’m starting to wonder. What else is there? Maybe success can be something else, and maybe there’s another way to get there. Maybe there’s a different road for me with a more reasonable speed limit. Whether it’s because I can’t, I’m too afraid, something inside me has changed and wants something different, or a complex blend of all three, I can’t say, but I don’t want to go back to Berkley. I don’t want to go back to that life. The same intuition that led me to Mike Green and snowboarding is leading me somewhere else. And I trust it.

“I’m not going back to Berkley.”

It’s early Saturday morning, before the black-backed woodpeckers have started playing percussion on the maples and pines and before the lifts open at the mountain. Linus has just hopped down off my lap and is now lying on the floor with a truck in one hand, Bunny in the other, sucking on his nukie, still in pajamas, watching a
Sesame Street
video with the volume barely on. Charlie and Lucy are, for the moment, playing quietly in their rooms. My mother and I are sitting on the couch in front of a gently crackling fire, enjoying this peaceful entry into the day. Bob stayed in Welmont, said he had too much work to do this weekend, but I suspect he’s still mad at me and doesn’t want to contribute one feel-good moment to my “cockamamie idea” of living here. I breathe in the smell of my latte before taking another hot sip. Mmm. I’d say he’s missing one right now.

I’m ostensibly doing a word search puzzle, but I’m mostly savoring my coffee, relaxing in front of the fire, and observing my mother. She’s knitting a bright red shawl, completely focused on her needles, every so often naming the order of the stitches under her breath. She stops to massage her shoulder.

“You okay?” I ask.

“I think my arm’s sore from holding Linus so much.”

She’s squeezing her upper left arm. I’m pretty sure she usually holds Linus with her right.

“Maybe you’re tensing your shoulders while you’re knitting,” I suggest, even though her posture doesn’t look tensed.

“I think it’s Linus.”

She rubs her arm, shoulder to elbow, a few more times and then resumes knitting. The shawl cascades down from her needles across her lap and onto the couch like a blanket. It appears to be almost done, and I imagine that it’ll look pretty on her, complementing her silver hair, her black-rimmed glasses, and the red lipstick she loves to wear.

“You must miss your Red Hat friends,” I say.

“I do,” she says without looking up or interrupting her clicking needles. “But I talk to them all the time
.”

“You do?”

I never see her on the phone.

“We Skype.”

“You
Skype
?”

“Uh-huh.”

This is the woman who missed the advent of the microwave, the VCR, and the television remote control, all of which still befuddle her. She doesn’t own her own cell phone or a laptop, and she doesn’t have a GPS navigation system for her car. But she skypes?

“How do you even know what Skype is?” I ask.

“I saw it on
Oprah.
”

I should’ve known. My mother’s three sources of all information come from Oprah, Ellen, and
People
magazine. The academic snob in me wants to belittle her, but I have to give her credit. She’s come a long way in four months. She uses Bob’s GPS like a pro and drove into Boston during rush hour every day while I was at Baldwin. She eventually manages to find the correct remote control (we have five) and press the right combination of buttons to switch inputs from cable to VCR to Wii (even Abby found this to be confusing). She answers the cell phone Bob gave her to use while she’s with us whenever we call her. And apparently, she Skypes on our home computer.

“What about your home? You must miss being in your own house,” I say.

“I miss parts of it. I sometimes miss the quiet and my privacy. But if I were there, I’d miss the kids’ voices and their laughter and all the activity here.”

“But what about all your things? And your routine.”

“I have a routine here and plenty of things. Home is where you live. For now, I live with you, so this is home to me.”

Home is where you live. I think of that sign at the end of Storrow Drive in Boston:
if you lived here, you’d be home now.
I look out the windows at the natural beauty of our open land, the gray morning filling with color as the sun rises over the hills. I would love living here. And I think the kids would love it. But Bob’s right. We can’t simply move here and uproot everyone without a concrete plan for our livelihood. I envision a sign at the Vermont border:
if you’re going to live here, you’re going to have to find jobs. Real jobs,
I hear Bob’s voice add in my head.

“I would like to be back for summer, though. I’d miss my garden and the beaches. I love summer on the Cape,” says my mother.

“Do you think I’ll be better by summer?”

“Oh, I think you’ll be a lot better by then.”

“No, I mean, do you think I’ll be back to the way I was before this happened?”

“I don’t know, honey.”

“All the doctors seem to think that if I haven’t fully recovered by the summer, I probably won’t.”

“They don’t know everything.”

“They know more than I do.”

She checks her row.

“I bet they don’t know how to snowboard,” she says.

I smile, picturing a scared and unsteady Martha strapped to a board on Fox Run, falling hard onto her bottom every few inches.

“Nothing’s impossible,” she says.

The doctors and therapists would’ve probably also told me that I couldn’t snowboard yet, that it wouldn’t be possible. And yet, I’m doing it.
Nothing’s impossible.
I sit still and absorb my mother’s words until I feel like they’ve penetrated the deepest part of me where they can’t be shaken loose. My mother clicks her needles, keeping focused on the construction of her shawl, so she doesn’t notice me watching her, loving her simple yet beautiful words of wisdom, proud of her for doing whatever has been asked of her to be here, grateful that she came at all and then stayed to help me even when I told her not so nicely to go home. Thank God she ignored me.

I reach over and squeeze her socked foot.

“What?” she asks, looking up from her stitch.

“Nothing,” I say.

She returns to her shawl. I sip my coffee and watch the fire, enjoying another feel-good moment. I’m home with my mother.