When I look back on everything now -- and I mean everything that happened, from that first meeting I got pulled into to fire Amy Crawford to the meeting I orchestrated to tender my own resignation and everything in between -- it is still the look on Mary’s face when I told her I was quitting that I remember most vividly. She literally looked like I had clocked her with a two by four. Although we have never spoken about it, I remained convinced that she had absolutely no idea that I was thinking about leaving her organization.
How could that be? I used to think that Mary was some kind of strategic savant -- playing a hundred different angles, pulling a hundred different strings, ensuring that everything and everyone around her was manipulated to whatever degree was necessary to pull off her diabolical schemes. And all of that in order to aggregate power and prestige for her over-inflated ego. What was happening to me inside her company was being done by design. It was calculated. Directed. For nefarious purposes.
But after that last meeting with her, and seeing the way she looked back at me like a bombed-out orphan, I began to question that assumption. It caused me to re-evaluate everything that I had been through, and I began to understand that none of it -- none of it at all -- had had any kind of directed plan behind it. Mary, like everyone else in this long and painful story, was a victim of her circumstance, turning from one crisis to the next not out of fealty to any set agenda, but simply on the same base survival instinct that drove us all.
Over the next two weeks I came back to the office only a handful of times -- once to collect those books that belonged to me and to better organize the files I would leave behind on my computer, and another time for a kind of awkward exit interview with Peggy Wilcox, the head of human resources. Truth be told, Peggy did most of the talking in that interview, expressing again and again how sorry she was to see me go, once even drawing from a box of tissues to wipe away her own tears.
I had prepared for the discussion, a page full of notes in front of me, detailing out all the things I thought were broken inside the company, and even ready to offer a few constructive suggestions for how to repair them, but I wasn’t able to get even halfway down the page, and I don’t think Peggy really understood anything I did manage to say. Like everything else inside that company, their procedures for collecting actionable intelligence from departing staff members were half-assed, seat-of-the-pants affairs. We do these things because we’re supposed to, not because we understand what value they might actually have for us and our organization.
Oddly, I thought, I received some phone calls from some of the volunteers I had worked with. Three, in fact. The first from Eleanor Rumford, the second from Paul Webster, and the third from Wes Howard. Eleanor and Paul were professional and somewhat defential, obviously fishing for information about why I was leaving and what was really going on inside the company, but professional enough to wish me well and to ask about my health and that of my family before launching into the real reasons for their calls. I rebuffed them the best I could. A better opportunity. If memory serves, that was pretty much my matra. A better opportunity had been offered to me, one I would be a fool not to accept, and I wished them and the organization the best of all possible successes.
But Wes Howard was a different story.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Alan?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re leaving? I don’t remember telling you that you could leave.”
He was insane. I distinctly remember that thought coming into my mind as he dropped those words on me, sounding exactly like a schoolyard bully who was still trying to exert his domination over the basketball court.
“Wes,” I said calmly. “I’ve resigned. I’ve accepted a new position. I’m moving on.”
“The fuck you are. I’ve still got that dirt on you -- about you and your romps with Mrs. Bethany Bishop. You are going to do exactly what I fucking tell you to do, or I’m going to rain that information down all over your happy little marriage.”
“Good-bye, Wes.”
“Don’t test me, Alan. Don’t you fucking test me!”
“Good-bye, Wes. Give my best to Amy.”
I hung up and immediately told my cell phone to block his number. Whether he ever tried to call me again, I don’t know, but I never spoke to him again and, as far as I know, he never made good on his threat to go public with his imaginary dirt about me and Bethany. In a way I had never fully realized before, I saw then that Wes Howard was far more afraid of the world around him than I was and, that, as long as I understood that as the source of his chaos, I could never possibly feel trapped by him again. I pitied him.
And through all these ups and downs, our new baby -- who we decided to name Eliana -- grew steadily stronger until she was first released from the NICU and then from the hospital altogether. Her total stay there was a little over four weeks, long enough for me to exit my old job completely and to start working remotely for the new one. Just as he had promised, Steve Anderson offered all the flexibility he could, with his assistant Julie going above and beyond to lend support and, eventually, to help us find permanent residence in one of the most agreeable suburbs of Boston.
Over those four weeks Jenny also recovered, slowly but steadily, from her c-section, but I saw her infrequently as she spent most of her days and all of her nights at the hospital to be near Eliana and to feed her with the mother’s milk that the baby had eventually learned to draw out of Jenny’s breast. During that time, Meredith also left us, going back to her own world, and I found myself living for several weeks more or less alone with Jacob, serving as his primary caregiver in between conference calls and spreadsheets. We spent a lot of time together, interacting in ways we mostly hadn’t before.
One colossal project we had decided on together was a kind of banner, anticipating the day we would welcome the baby Eliana home from the hospital. Using the computer and printer, I created a series of giant block letters, each one filling an entire page of copy paper, and capable of spelling out “WELCOME HOME ELIANA!” and Jacob spent a tremendous amount of time carefully coloring and decorating each with crayons and stickers and glitter glue. When they were finished, we strung them together with wrapping paper ribbon and hung the whole contraption with two anchors made of wads of transparent tape from the mantle in the living room.
I remember sitting there with Jacob standing between my legs, the two of us admiring the successful completion of a project that had been days in the making. Throughout, Jacob had shown both the perfectionism that was typical of him and a strange kind of happy persistence that was not. If he didn’t like the way one of his decorations turned out, he had simply asked me to reprint it, and we would then work together on the new one, him welcoming my input and participation. Like his train sets and his hidden picture books, he seemed absolutely absorbed in these tasks, but nothing seemed to set him back. Everything, every action, good or bad, he took as but one step in a journey that led inevitably to our shared destination. As I sat there, smelling the shampoo I had recently rubbed in his hair, I told him that I loved him. That I loved him as much as I could love anyone in the world.
“Daddy?” he said.
“Yeah, buddy?”
“When is Mommy coming home?”
THE END
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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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