Left Neglected

Chapter 32





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.”