Dragons - Part X

1

If I haven’t mentioned it before, it felt very much like things were accelerating on me. The meeting with Mary and Don had been a total mindfuck -- one wanted to fire me immediately and the other wanted to maybe fire me on Monday, and they decided by design or by dysfunction to have that argument with me in the room -- but I didn’t feel like I had any time to dwell on it, or even to prepare myself for its eventual, and inevitable, consequences. I remember talking to Jenny that night, while I was busily packing for Wes’s leadership meeting, first about the phone call with Steve Anderson, then about the meeting with Mary and Don.

“Do you really think Steve is going to offer you the job?”

I had the collar of a dress shirt tucked under my chin and I was folding its arms inward so I could better wedge it into my suitcase. “Yes. I mean, I think so.”

Jenny gave me a worried look. “Well, let’s hope so. You may find yourself out of a job on Monday. If not before.”

I tried to reassure her, knowing that anything was possible, but still pretty sure that I wasn’t going to get fired on Monday, and maybe not even then. I got the sickening sense that Mary wasn’t done sending me through the wringer yet, that she would never fire me, that she was trying to get me to quit by working me practically to death.

“Maybe you should start looking at houses in Boston?” I told her, trying to be cheerful, but checked by the tears that welled up in her eyes.

“Oh, Alan,” she said as she moved close and I put an arm around her shoulders. “How are we going to move to Boston? I feel like I’m going to drop this baby any day now.”

She was still a month or more from her due date, but I knew what she was talking about. A move to Boston with a pregnant wife or a newborn baby -- either way, it was going to be a challenge. It had already occurred to me that I might have to move to Boston and hole up in an extended stay hotel until all the difficult details could be worked out. But that, like a lot of other things going on at that time, seemed like too much to take on, too much to handle. When you’re running day-to-day, it’s hard to think about next year, next month, or even next week.

“It’ll be okay,” I told her, pulling her close, and feeling the solid weight of the baby pressed against my stomach. “We’ll figure it out.”

Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn’t. I didn’t have any idea. All I really knew was that I had to get on an airplane the following morning and help Mary manage what was likely going to be a raging tornado of a leadership meeting. As I lay in bed not sleeping that night, my mind was working double time on all the things that could go wrong and how I was likely to receive the blame for them.

But always there, running deep and dark like a sinister undercurrent to my thoughts, were the words that Mary had offered, telling me that it was Wes Howard -- Wes Howard! -- who had said favorable things about me, and that he was expecting to see me at his meeting. To praise me, I wondered? Was that what he had in mind for me? Was he going to give me a commendation? No, more likely he wanted me there so he could roast me in public.

I was still thinking about this when I met Mary at the airport the next morning. She was already at the gate when I arrived, and I was there at least an hour before departure. She was on her cell phone, sitting awkwardly hunched over on one of those airport bench-chairs, her body turned and twisted so that the charging cord on her phone could reach and connect to one of the few working and chronically over-used electrical outlets in the airport concourse. In the span of three seconds, she saw, recognized, acknowledged, and dismissed me, returning to the more critical discussion she was engaged in.

Sensing that she would want her privacy, I sat in a different section of the gate area, and immediately pulled a bulging file out of my briefcase. I had my own phone calls to make, coordinating more last-minute changes that Wes had left on my voicemail late the night before. I needed to talk to the venue, to some of the attendees, even to our keynote speaker. Some of it could have waited until we were together at the venue, but it would be better, I knew, to at least get some messages onto everyone’s voicemails.

I was still making those calls when my flight was called for boarding. Mary, flying first class, was able to queue up first, and as she walked by me in her business skirt and dragging her carry-on behind her, she offered me a few terse words.

“Good morning, Alan. See you in Denver.”

“Okay,” I said lamely, and it would turn out that those were the only words that we exchanged until our shared cab ride, on the ground in Colorado, as we were headed to the historic Brown Palace Hotel.

“Did you talk to Wes this morning?” she asked me, looking at me like I planned to panhandle her.

“No,” I said. “He left me a voicemail last night. I’m working on making his changes.”

Mary looked away from me and out the window. “Good,” she said, somewhat distantly. “There’s a lot riding on this meeting, you know. For him. And for you.”

“I know,” I said, looking at the back of her head.

When she didn’t turn back to me, or offer any other comment, like her, I turned and looked out my window. It had been a rainy morning in Denver, and the concrete was still wet as we moved off the freeway and onto the city streets.

This is so fucked up, I remember thinking to myself. She’s not even going to talk to me. She’s going to push me into the fire and stand silently by, watching me burn.

At the hotel we were too early to check into our rooms, so Mary planted herself in the lobby, quickly finding yet another often-abused electrical outlet and making more phone calls, and I went to meet with the conference service manager and make sure the meeting rooms for that evening’s opening dinner and tomorrow’s strategy session were being set correctly. I spent a few hours in the banquet room being set for our dinner, sitting at one of the yet-to-be-dressed rounds, doing what I could to prepare for the meeting.

Frankly, there wasn’t much more I could do. I had left my messages and a handful of those people called me back, confirming that they had received and would comply with their new instructions. Now, there really wasn’t anything to do until our attendees started showing up. Organizing these events was often like that. In the days leading up to the event there was always a frenzy of activity -- hundreds of tasks to complete and never enough time to complete them -- but once you got on the airplane and arrived at the venue, you typically spent a lot of your time sitting around waiting for something to happen. And usually, whatever happened at that point, it could only be bad.

Eventually, my sleeping room was ready, and I checked in, went upstairs, ordered some room service for lunch, unpacked my suitcase, and began ironing my shirts. It was a ritual I was well practiced at -- and a good use of the handful of slow hours that always existed before the rush of the meeting began. I was only going to be there for two nights, and had packed accordingly. I had three dress shirts -- for that night, the following day, and the day after that, two pairs of dress slacks, and a single sport coat that would work with any combination of shirts and slacks. They all needed the careful attention of an iron after their journey in my suitcase and I lined them up on the bed and tackled them one by one.

As usual, lunch came to my door in the middle of this task, and I ate it sitting at the well-appointed desk that had been provided for the busy traveling professional. It was probably some kind of soup and salad combo -- I don’t remember what exactly -- but that’s traditionally what I ordered in situations like this. A chicken caesar, or a cobb (hold the blue cheese), with a cup of cream of broccoli or French onion soup, the kind with the breadcrumbs soaked in the broth and the lid of crusted cheese over the top. Whatever it was, I ate it in silence, as I have a rule about never turning on the television when I’m traveling on business. 

There is a kind of loneliness that comes when you’re by yourself in a hotel room, and I have always had an unhealthy obsession with it. Even in a place like the Brown Palace, or maybe especially in a place like that, you can look around at the wallpaper, at the soft goods, at the furniture standing solidly on the manicured carpeting, and you can sense all the souls that have been there before you and all the souls that will come after -- a long, uninterrupted chain of humanity, dating back and forwards decades if not centuries -- everyone with their own hopes and ambitions, but all sharing the same basic needs for shelter, for sanitation, for sustenance. Everything provided for you -- the bed linens, the bath towels, the room service -- they are all both unique and eternal. Like you, they will have their existence, but each in time will fade away and be replaced by something or someone else that serves the same purpose and comes to the same end. 

These are the thoughts that would typically crowd in on me, and they probably explain why I hated being on the road so much. But after my lunch and after my ironing was finished I was able to put them all aside because it was time for me to dress in my work clothes and head down to the ballroom where that evening’s dinner would be held. It was still hours before any of the guests would arrive, but there were a lot of details to see to, and a lot of items to set up.

I had to get the boxes we had shipped in advance out of hotel storage and use their contents to set-up our registration table. For an event like our Annual Conference -- with thousands of attendees and hundreds of sessions, this was an elaborate process, requiring the work of dozens. For this leadership conference, it was similar but in miniature. The boxes we had shipped contained the name badges, ribbons, lanyards, and program books we would need to distribute to the various attendees, and they would need to be checked and doublechecked to make sure all the last-minute changes Wes had demanded had been incorporated.

I was deep into that task, my attention wholly consumed by making sure the badges I had made matched Wes’s final invite list, when a strange but familiar voice interrupted me.

“Hello, Alan.”

I looked up. Standing in front of my small table were two people. The first, the one who had not spoken, was Wes Howard, his unruly mop of brown hair framing his blazing and inquisitive eyes. The second, the one who had spoken, was a young woman, her hand clutched to the elbow crook of Wes’s left arm. She was young and thin and attractive, and I felt like I knew her but could not place her in my memory.

“Hello?” I said.

“Oh, come on, Alan,” Wes said. “You remember Amy, don’t you?”

The name was also familiar and the young woman looked at me like that clue should have been sufficient, but I was still not making the connection.

“Amy?”

She smiled and then I knew, the knowledge blooming in my brain like spores shooting off a fungus. 

“He knows, Wes,” Amy said. “He’s just pretending to forget. But really, Alan, how could you possibly forget me?”

It was Amy Crawford, the woman Don had fired for her inappropriate behavior at a meeting much like this one, whose cackling laugh I had heard bellowing from the basement of Club NOW the night I had tried to rescue Caroline Abernathy, and now, here she was, standing before me, dressed in what appeared to be designer clothes, and hanging onto Wes Howard’s very arm.

“Amy,” I said with renewed confidence, working hard to mask the heart attack I was experiencing inside. “Of course, I remember. Just didn’t recognize you for a moment. How are you? You’re looking well.”

“I’m fine,” she said, extending her left hand as if I was supposed to kiss it. I would have been a fool to miss the size of the diamond on her ring finger. “How are you?”

“Okay,” I said, limply shaking her hand and then turning to Wes. “Are you two… Are you… ?”

Wes deliberately put his arm around Amy’s shoulders and pulled her close to him. The movement caused the neckline of her blouse to spread, revealing her healthy cleavage. “Are we what, Alan?”

I felt like a child, not having the words for what I wanted to say. 

“Are you two … engaged?”

The word had magic. At its appearance Amy’s eyes seemed to light up and her face began to shine.

“Yes!” she said, jumping up and down in her excitement but held tight by the tether of Wes’s arm. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she said, extending her hand again, this time without any doubt as to her purpose of showcasing her ring. “Wes proposed last week while we were in the Bahamas.”

I looked at Wes, wondering which of the hundred of phone calls he had made to me had been done from the Bahamas. He looked back at me, smiling like an alley cat who had just eaten a pretty little songbird.

“It looks like you’re getting things in order, Alan, so we’ll leave you to your task,” he said to me, as if doing me a favor. “Just wanted to check-in and let you know we were here. Oh, and to make sure you can make room for Amy at our table tonight.”

“At our table?” I said.

“For dinner tonight. I think I may have neglected to mention that my fiancee would be accompanying me. We want to make sure that you’ll be able to provide a place setting for her at our table.”

I was nodding my head, understanding Wes’s intent long before he got to the end of his sentences. At dinner that night, there would be a lead table reserved, with its seats scrupulously assigned. Our current chair, our incoming chair, our keynote speaker, Mary Walton, me, and one or two other dignitaries. It wasn’t unusual for the spouse of the incoming Board chair to attend -- I remembered the dowdy and tired-looking man who had accompanied Eleanor Rumford last year -- but last I was aware, Wes Howard had been a confirmed bachelor.

And I remembered -- distantly like a sinking ship blaring its fog horn out across the unsounded sea -- a promise Mary had once mentioned, a promise that Wes would never bring Amy to one of our functions again.

“Of course,” I said, knowing there was nothing else I could possibly say. “It’ll be no trouble at all.”

“Super!” Amy said, as the pair turned to depart. She waved her jeweled hand at me with a backward glance. “It’ll be fun catching up!”

2

Later that night, I found myself at that lead table with Wes Howard and his blushing bride-to-be. There had been an onslaught of arrivals and even more last-minute changes, but eventually everything had settled into place. The room was full with ninety-eight guests, the entrees had been lain in front of each by the gloved-handed servers, and each and everyone was carefully splitting their chops into bite-sized chunks for their consumption between sips from glasses of Cabernet the stewards in their starched shirt fronts were attentively keeping full.

At our table, Wes sat in the place of distinguished honor. To his immediate left sat Amy Crawford, followed, working clockwise around the table, by Eleanor Rumford, a colleague of Wes’s named Dennis Duncan, who had agreed to be our keynote speaker for the evening, his wife Nancy, myself, and, rounding out the group and sitting on Wes’s immediate right, Mary Walton. Of the group, not a single one had reacted with anything other than delighted surprise at Wes’s introduction of Amy as his fiancee.

Not even Mary.

I had purposely not warned her in advance. I could’ve easily. I could’ve called the cell phone that had been glued to her head since the airport that morning, but I decided against it. Let her find out the same way that I did. I was sure that Mary’s reaction as she fell over herself at the shock would have been worth it for its pure entertainment value.

But I was wrong. Mary hardly reacted at all. Upon meeting Amy, she simply smiled and gave the younger woman a quick hug, almost as if they were sorority sisters or, more likely, that Mary had already known about Amy’s presence and her new relationship to Wes. And that, of course, made so much more sense. Mary had to have known about Amy’s presence in advance, which meant, obliquely, that in not telling me about it, she may have wanted to observe my reaction, for its entertainment or other kinds of useful value.

I thought about that a lot as we sat there sipping our wine and pushing small pieces of meat into our mouths, listening and laughing as Wes Howard held court and regaled us with stories both ribald and sublime. This was not normal. Not in any sense of that word. To think that the universe in all its infinite and seemingly random oscillations could have produced such a situation truly strained credulity. But everyone except me seemed oblivious to such an understanding of these events. Wes Howard, a forty-two-year-old serial harasser, was marrying his twenty-six-year-old former victim, a woman who had worked and who had been fired from the company that provided professional services to the organization that Wes was now about to chair. And, at an event hosted by that organization and organized by that company, Wes had brought this same young fiancee to witness his coronation, and she now sat in a place of both personal and professional honor, at his very left hand, while sitting at his right was the woman owner of the company, the person who had fired the fiancee only months before. The two women, once mortal enemies, had now, in fact, embraced each other. There had been no screaming, no angry threats, no scratching of faces -- just a calm and civilized understanding that the world worked in strange and wonderful ways and that, evidently, the affairs of the heart erased enmity and reigned supreme over one and all.

It was clearly bullshit, but like everyone else at the table, I knew enough to simply play along, knowing that those with power would always abuse it, and those who were attracted to power were as helpless as the rest of us.

I sat there and I smiled my way through three courses -- an appetizer of butternut squash ravioli with rosemary browned butter, followed by a salad of baby kale greens with asian pear, grapes, candied walnuts, and gorgonzola topped with a honey vinaigrette, followed now by an entree of balsamic glazed lamb chops with a white bean puree -- doing everything I could to both look interested and to stay out of any direct conversation. It wasn’t hard. In the eyes of everyone else at the table, I was clearly the least interesting thing going. If memory serves, there was only one question put to me the entire time.

“Alan,” Wes said between bites, “when should I go up and introduce Dennis?”

He was referring to his colleague, Dennis Duncan, an overweight bear of a man in a dishwater white shirt and a rumpled suit coat, and the timing for the keynote presentation he had been specifically invited to give.

“Right after the desserts have been served,” I said, knowing full well that this was a time that, like almost every other detail of the event, Wes had already dictated to me several times.

And sure enough, shortly after the servers placed our desserts down -- a honey yogurt panna cotta in a blood orange sauce -- Wes slowly got up from his seat, moved over to Dennis, and practically laid down on his shoulders as if he intended to put the larger man in a wrestling hold.

“Come on, Dennis,” he said, slurring his words after all the glasses of wine he had downed. “It’s time to get you up on that stage.”

Dennis hastily pushed half his panna cotta into his mouth before rising, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, and the two men, laughing, stumbled their way toward the steps placed just on the edge of the riser that dominated the front of the ballroom. In a moment, Wes’s voice was booming out across the ballroom as he spoke into the microphone hovering over the podium that had been long placed and ignored there.

“Good evening, everyone,” he murmured, and then, looking dismayed at the lack of appreciable effect his words had had on the ambient noise of table conversations and scraping of dessert plates, he said, louder and more insistent. “I said, ‘good evening, everyone!’”

Slowly people realized their attention belonged somewhere else, and they quieted down, some turning in their chairs, some actually turning their chairs to give themselves a better view of the stage and the person at the podium.

Wes was drunk. There’s really no other word for it. He slurred and slobbered his way through an overly long speech aimed at his own self-aggrandizement, the main act standing patiently behind him, idly brushing crumbs off his tie and shirtfront. There’s no way I can remember his exact words, but I clearly remember the impression they left on me. I’m great, he seemed to be saying, over and over again. I’m great, and now I’m in charge. 

I looked over at Amy while Wes was speaking, and I remember her sitting there in rapt attention, her hair up and a diamond earring hanging from the ear I could see. When Wes was done, the audience gave him a polite round of applause, but Amy clapped almost violently, crouching forward as if she meant to stand. 

“Oh, he’s wonderful,” she said, as she looked back at the rest of her tablemates -- me, Mary, Eleanor, and Dennis’s wife -- looking, I thought, for affirmation, and receiving it from everyone but me. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

In comparison, Wes’s introduction of his chosen speaker was shorter than the time he had spent on himself, and in a few minutes, he was bounding down off the riser to rejoin us at the table. Now Amy did stand, rising to meet him in her tight dress, embracing, and kissing him as if he had just won an Oscar. Mary, Eleanor, and Nancy Duncan also stood, applauding, but not approaching Wes. Sitting directly opposite from his position, I felt I could get away without also standing, but I knew I had to applaud if I didn’t want to bring undo attention onto myself.

Meanwhile, on stage, Dennis Duncan began his speech, focused, evidently, on the topic that was going to consume most of the evening. “Let me tell you a story about Wes Howard,” he said, breathing heavily into the microphone as he spoke. “This is back when we were starving undergraduates, but I think it typifies the character of the man that will be leading us for the next year. At that time, to help make ends meet, Wes and I both worked at the campus movie theater…”

I suddenly felt my cell phone buzzing in my pocket. Happy to have the distraction, I fished the phone out and looked at its glowing screen in the darkened room. There was a phone number there, from my home area code, but one I didn’t recognize.

Keeping my head as low as possible, I stood, held up the phone for the people at my table to see, mouthed the words “Excuse me,” and began walking out of the room as I flipped the phone open and pressed it against my ear.

“Hello?”

“Alan?”

“Yes?”

“Alan, where are you?”

I was out of the cluster of banquet tables, on the side of the room, and moving towards the closest exit.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Meredith. Where are you?”

Meredith. I only knew one Meredith. Jenny’s mother.

“I’m in Denver. Meredith, why are you calling me?”

“I’m at the hospital. Jenny’s gone into labor and the baby is breech.”

I pushed my way out of the ballroom and found myself in the mostly empty foyer. Two other dinner guests were there, both also on their phones.

“What? Say that again, Meredith.” I was out of the noisy ballroom but plugged a finger in my opposite ear anyway.

“Her water broke about an hour ago,” Meredith said, her voice, now that I could hear it clearly, sounding agitated. “We just got her to the hospital and they did an ultrasound. The baby hasn’t turned and they’ve taken her up to the delivery room.”

A thousand questions were flying through my brain. But none of them were able to settle on my tongue. “Meredith, she’s not due for another five weeks!”

“I know that!” she snapped at me -- something extremely unlike her. My mother-in-law was an attorney who I’ve debated over the holiday dinner table countless times. I’ve never seen her lose her cool. “But her water broke, and her blood pressure is rising, and they decided that they’re going to get the baby out of her.”

“But you said it was breech.”

“Yes, I know. They’re going to perform a c-section.”

It was too much. I felt faint, and I looked around for a chair to collapse in. There wasn’t one nearby, so I leaned against the wall, and struggled to keep my legs from buckling under me. Through the phone I could hear Jacob whining and Meredith telling him to be quiet.

“Meredith,” I said, knowing the truth of the next sentence that came out of my mouth, having been dragged along as Jenny had worked with obsessive intensity on her birth plan. “Jenny doesn’t want a c-section.” 

“I know that, but she doesn’t have much of a choice. The look in her eyes when they told her. My God, Alan, you should have seen it.”

“Let me talk to her,” I said.

“No, I mean it. You should have seen it. Why the hell are you in Denver? You should be here!” Her voice was laced with unspecified accusations. 

“Let me talk to her!”

“I can’t,” Meredith said. “They’re prepping her for surgery right now. I need to get up there. Get home, Alan. Just get home as quick as you can. Your family needs you here.”

And with that the line went dead.

I pulled the phone away from my head, told it to redial the last number that called me, and placed it back against my ear. I heard the circuits connecting and then a distant ring, ring, ring, with no answer.

3

Of all the many things I’ve done that I’m not proud of, here’s one that I absolutely am. I never even hesitated. Immediately upon realizing that Meredith was not going to answer my redial -- I imagined her calling, after all, from a pay phone in the hospital lobby -- I put my phone back in my pocket, went up to my hotel room, threw everything that was mine back in my suitcase, went down to the front desk, checked myself out, and then had a bellman hail me a cab to take me to the airport. 

It was only when I was in the cab, and on that long stretch of highway out to the Denver airport, that I decided to call Mary.

“Hello? Alan?”

I could hear the amplified voice of Wes’s keynoter in the background.

“Yes, Mary. It’s me.”

“Alan! Where are you? What is going on?”

I told her in as few words as possible. The phone call had been from my mother-in-law. My wife had gone into labor. The baby was five weeks premature. They were doing a c-section. I needed to get home as quickly as possible. I was very sorry. When I was finished there was an odd silence on the line -- a silence at least from Mary, the ambient noises of the ballroom still coming through loud and clear.

“So… You’re leaving?”

“I’ve already left, Mary. I’m almost at the airport. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry. And who is going to manage this meeting?”

A few choice words came into my mind, but I swallowed them down. “I’m sorry. The conference service manager there is a woman named Brandi Olsen. I have her card. I’ll call her and ask her to connect with you tonight.”

“Oh, Alan, don’t bother. I’ll find her myself.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

“You should be. Good-bye, Alan.”

And then the line went dead. I sat in the back of the cab looking at my phone as the driver pulled into the departures lane and began looking for a place to get to the curb. The surrealism of the situation was intense, but I remember the penetrating shockwave that Mary’s words had created in the otherwise psychedelic fog of the moment.

You should be.

Was she really going to fault me for trying to get home in time to witness the birth of my child? To be with my wife as she underwent and recovered from a (hopefully) successful surgery? What did she expect me to do after such a phone call? Come back to her table and finish my dessert? Or maybe collect all the dirty dishes that she and Eleanor Rumford and Wes Howard and now Amy fucking Crawford had created, and wash them so they could use them again and again?

Good-bye, Alan.

There had been a tone of finality in her voice, as if she was communicating something more than just the end of a phone call.

Good, I remember thinking as I threw money at the driver and bounded out of the taxi. Maybe I was finally free of her and all her bullshit.

The next several hours were a heart-pounding blur -- moments of self-induced terror punctuating long stretches of anxiety and inaction. At first I thought I would have an easy time of it, as the agent at the ticket counter, once I breathlessly explained my situation, told me there was a flight leaving in twenty-five minutes -- but that it had an overnight layover in another city about 90 miles away from my hometown. That’s okay, I thought hastily. I’ll rent a car when I get there and drive the rest of the way. When she took my credit card and told me the $900 ticket price, I didn’t even blink. That’s what plastic is for. In a few minutes I was running down the concourse, getting stopped by a security line unbelievably long for that time of night. I wasn’t bashful. I told people what was happening -- that my wife was having our baby and that my flight was leaving in twenty minutes -- and they let me skip, some congratulating me and others angry at the peer pressure that was being exerted on them. After security, it was another run down another concourse, and a waiting gate agent, literally holding the door open for me. Crushed into the absolutely last seat on the flight, I counted the minutes as we went through the preflight checklist and began taxiing out to the runway, certain that at any moment one of the engines was going to fall off the plane and we’d have to be called back to the gate. Once in the air I tried to sleep, but couldn’t. I tried to read my book, but couldn’t. I tried to slow my heart rate, but couldn’t. Stuck in a pressurized cabin at 40,000 feet with no way to talk to the outside world is sometimes a blessing to the business traveler, but on that trip it was absolute torture. Has our baby been born? Is it healthy and whole? Was my wife okay? More than likely, given the length of my journey and the tone of Meredith’s disquiet, the events that provided the answers to those questions had already occurred. Our baby had been born -- or it hadn’t. The baby was healthy and whole -- or it wasn’t. Jenny was okay -- or she wasn’t. Observers outside my hermetically-sealed box knew the answers, but I was stuck like Schrodinger’s famous cat, both alive and dead at the same time.

As soon as we were on the ground, I turned my cell phone back on, hoping that someone, anyone had left me a message. But after refreshing several times, I had to admit that no such communication was waiting for me. I deplaned and ran down to the rental car counters, discovering, to my growing frustration, lines of people at every company. Choosing the one with the shortest line -- only three people ahead of me -- I fished my phone back out of my pocket and started to make some phone calls. First, directory assistance; yes, please connect me to the hospital I knew Jenny was in; then, hello, yes, my wife is there having our baby, what, yes, please connect me with the Labor and Delivery Department; then, hello, yes, my wife is there having our baby, what, sorry, Larson, Jenny Larson, her name is Jennifer Larson; then, hold please, I was placed on hold.

I looked around, realizing that I could march forward one position in my rental car line, and that three people had already gotten in line behind me. I looked at my watch. It was 1:25 in the morning. 

“Hello, Mister Larson?”

“Yes, hello?”

“Your wife is sedated.”

“What? What did you say?”

“She is sedated, recovering after successful c-section.”

I suddenly started crying. The tears came unbidden to my eyes as my heart rose within my chest and tried to choke me. Jenny didn’t want a c-section. For a moment, it was the only thought that existed, expanding to fill my entire universe. Meredith had told me it was going to happen, but it hadn’t seemed real then. Now, with the voice of this unnamed triage nurse, it seemed overwhelming, permanent, irrevocable.

And I had missed it. 

I swallowed with some difficulty. “And the baby?”

I heard paper shuffling. “A girl. About five weeks premature. She’s in the nick-you.”

“The what?”

“The NICU. Our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.”

I didn’t like the sound of that, but I also had no idea what it was.

“Is she all right? The baby?”

The nurse said something but I didn’t hear her because the guy behind me in line told me to get my tail in gear. I stumbled forward, oblivious to whether there was a rental car counter or a yawning chasm in front of me.

“What?” I said. “Say that again, please.”

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said clearly. “I don’t have any more information than that. I can connect you to the NICU if you’d like.”

“No,” I said, more out of fear than reason. “No, that’s all right,” I continued, telling her briefly where I was and why I was there. “I’m renting a car right now. I’ll be there in two hours.”

“All right. Are you calling on your cell phone?” She then read off my cell phone number and asked me if that was a number I could be reached on.

“Yes,” I said. “Why?”

“I’ll get an update from the NICU for you and call you back.”

I started crying afresh, this time actually blubbering, overwhelmed by emotion evoked by this simple human kindness. The strangers around me, even the jackass behind me, could now see that something was wrong.

“Okay,” I choked into the phone. “Thank you, uh, thank you…”

“Eliana,” the nurse said. “My name is Eliana Alvarez. If you’re two hours away, I’ll still be here when you arrive. You ask for me when you get here, okay, Mister Larson?”

“Okay,” I said, distracted by the need to step up to the rental car counter.

“Okay. I’ll call you back in a few minutes with an update from the NICU. Good-bye for now, Mr. Larson.”

“Good-bye,” I said.

I put the phone down on the counter and wiped my tears away with the back of my hand. When my vision was clear, I could see the attendant sitting there on his high stool, looking at me like I was about to melt into the floor.

4

True to my prediction, two hours later I arrived at the hospital in my rented car. 

It had been a difficult two hours. There were only a handful of cars out at that time of night, with large trucks hauling their cross-country trailers appearing constantly as a series of obstacles for me to slalom through, pushing the speed limit as far as I thought wise. I tried to find something worth listening to on the radio, but quickly decided to turn it off. The unfamiliar lights from the car’s interior and my own dark thoughts were all that was there was to keep me company.

How much had I fucked up? That’s the question I remember coming back to. In trying to walk the line between professional and personal responsibilities I felt like I had failed in both domains. I shouldn’t have gone to Denver. But if I hadn’t, Mary would have fired me, and now Mary was likely to fire me anyway. I should have stayed home and taken care of my pregnant wife. But if I had, there’s no guarantee that she would have gone into labor. I still didn’t know what, if anything, had prompted that. Had Jenny fallen? Had Jacob struck her during a tantrum? Meredith hadn’t given me any clues in our short conversation, but it seemed obvious to me that some incident had prompted it. Women of Jenny’s age just didn’t go into labor five weeks early, did they? Like almost everything else that truly mattered, I realized, I didn’t know the answer. My attention, as always, had been elsewhere. On the urgent, never on the important.

At some point, the nurse Eliana had called me back, as she had promised to. In a few soothing words she had told me that my baby daughter was sleeping comfortably in one of the incubators in their NICU, and that the nurse administrator on duty that night considered her case “stable.” Not knowing entirely what that meant, I decided to assume that it was as good as things could be in the situation, and I thanked Eliana for her effort.

“It’s no trouble at all, Mister Larson. Are you on the road now?”

“Yes,” I said, juggling both the phone and the steering wheel as best I could. I looked at the digital clock on the dashboard and did some quick calculating. “I should be there a little before four in the morning.”

“I’ll be here,” she confirmed. “You call me back on this number when you arrive and I’ll come down and meet you in the lobby. Okay?”

“Okay,” I had said, and now, after abandoning the rental in one of the parking spots reserved for visitors, and pushing my sleepless and tottering frame towards the main hospital entrance, I was pulling out my cell phone and calling the last number it had received.

“Hello,” a now familiar voice said. “Labor and Delivery.”

“Eliana. It’s Alan Larson. I just arrived.”

“Okay. Wait for me in reception. I’ll be right down.”

The glass doors whooshed open and in I went. To my left there was a row of reception counters, to my right a large waiting area filled with modular chairs, coffee tables, and turned-over magazines. The place seemed deserted, not a single human form anywhere that I could see. I looked at my watch. 4:03 AM. 

“Can I help you, sir?”

I looked up and was surprised to see a young woman standing behind the left-most reception counter, knowing that she had not been there when my eyes had wandered over them only a few seconds before. Had she been crouching behind the counter? What had she been doing down there? Picking M&Ms up off the floor? I had no idea why my tired brain decided to conjure up that image, but now that it had I chuckled at the idea of multi-colored candies strewn all over the floor, as if the nurses and night shift workers had had some kind of food fight.

“Sir?”

I rubbed my eyes. “No,” I said. “No, thank you. Someone is coming down to get me.”

And just as those words left my mouth a double set of doors on the far end of the lobby began to open on their pneumatic cylinders, allowing a short, middle-aged woman to walk through. She was in scrubs, her black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, her shining skin a light sandy brown. She carried a clipboard and wore a stethoscope loosely around her neck. Her white sneakers squeaked on the freshly waxed floor. She made eye contact with me and immediately adjusted her course to close the distance between us.

“Mister Larson?” she asked, and then didn’t really wait for me to respond. “I’m Eliana Alavarez. Your wife is in the NICU now, trying to breastfeed the baby. Come with me, I’ll take you there.”

It was a lot of information for me to take in at once. I looked somewhat stupidly around at my surroundings, forgetting, for the moment, where I even was. As I did, I noticed the young woman behind the counter scowling at me.

“It’s all right, Cheryl,” Eliana said to the woman, clasping me gently by the elbow. “I’ll sign him in later. He’s been traveling all night to get here.”

I looked back at Eliana, feeling like a child, and like I had forgotten how to move my legs.

“Come on, Mister Larson. It’s okay.”

Slowly, gently, Eliana got me moving, leading me first out of the lobby, through the doors that she had come through, and through a maze-like series of hallways. At that time of morning, there were only a handful of other people we encountered on our journey, most of them obviously members of the hospital’s janitorial crew, two of them health professionals, and one of them, I remember, an elderly patient, seemingly wandering the halls by himself, in his robe and hospital gown, pushing his wheeled IV tower before him like a wizard’s staff.

Eliana ignored them all, attempting from time to time to engage me with some critical piece of information about where we were going and what would happen when we got there. I would need to gown up before going into the NICU. They had eleven babies there now, and mine was the largest of them all, being only five weeks premature. It might be a week or more, but they would try every few hours or so to get the baby to suckle, as that was an instinct that usually developed around this time in the womb, and that the baby would not be released from the NICU until it successfully latched on and had started gaining weight from its mother’s milk.

I’m sure I only understood a fraction of what Eliana was telling me, and I felt myself growing more and more anxious as we kept rounding corners and trudging down hallways. 

“What’s her name?”

“What?” Eliana said. “What was that?”

“The baby’s name?” I said. “Has Jenny named her?”

“Not that I’ve heard. But I’ve been down in Labor and Delivery all night. They might have more information up at the NICU.”

“Were you there?”

We had finally stopped in front of an elevator bank and Eliana had just reached out to press the call button. 

“What?”

“Were you there?”

“Where?”

The words stuck in my throat. I wanted to know if Eliana Alvarez had been there, had been present, had maybe even assisted, with Jenny’s c-section and the birth of our still unnamed daughter, but I was having a hard time forming the right set of words and getting them out of my mouth.

Eliana could tell I was struggling. Her face grew concerned, and she reached out to clasp my elbow again.

“At the birth,” I eventually said with some difficulty. “Were you… in the room when… the baby was born.”

The elevator car arrived, a loud bell ringing and the door opening with a clatter.

“No,” she said. “No, Mister Larson, I wasn’t. But everything went fine. There is really nothing for you to worry about.”

I looked at her, hoping that what she said was true, but feeling, knowing, somewhere deep inside, that everything hadn’t gone fine and that there was, in fact, a great deal for me to worry about.

“Come on,” she said, easing me into the elevator. “Let’s get you reunited with your wife. She can tell you herself.”

We got in, went up five floors, and were disgorged into one of the oldest parts of the hospital, a sign clearly reading “Neonatal Intensive Care Unit” hanging from the ceiling just outside the elevator car. Now there seemed to be a quiet flurry of activity, several nurses and other hospital staff on duty and ready to put me through several hasty processes and procedures. Under Eliana’s watchful eye, I showed my identification, I filled out a form, I was given a plastic bracelet to wear, taken to a room where I was helped on with a gown, a tight-fitting cap, a surgical mask, and a pair of fabric overshoes. I was then led towards a door at the end of a long hall, one wall of which was mostly glass, allowing a view into a large room filled with medical equipment, some of them obviously incubators, and some of those obviously housing small human beings, who had been taken or who had fled their mothers’s wombs before they had been expected.

On the very edge of the door, Eliana, who had introduced me to the other nurses and who had spoken gently to me throughout the process, stopped. 

“I’m going to leave you here, Mister Larson,” she said. “‘I’m not cleared for the NICU itself, but you’re in good hands with Valencia here.”

I looked at the nurse Eliana had mentioned, a large woman with black skin and voluminous braids under her cap, and then back at Eliana.

“Okay,” I said absently. And then, “Thank you. Thank you for all you’ve done.”

She smiled. “It was my pleasure. Be well.”

In a moment she was gone, and I turned back to Valencia who pushed a button that opened a sealed door and led me into the heart of the NICU itself. We walked along the very edge of the room until we arrived at a small curtained area, the curtain hanging from a series of small chains, each set into a metal track, giving the people inside, whoever they were, some small measure of privacy in the otherwise open floor plan. Valencia said a few words I didn’t quite catch and then slowly pulled back one section of the curtain to reveal a small room-like space with an incubator, a woman sitting in a wheelchair with her back to me, and another nurse, standing over the woman, crouching a little, as if helping her with something she was holding.

“Alan? Is that you?”

It was Jenny’s voice, and it took me a full three seconds to realize that it had come from the woman in the wheelchair, and then to realize that the woman in the wheelchair, her head bowed forward and the back of her neck visible because of the hospital cap she was wearing, was Jenny.

“Yes, Jenny. It’s me.”

“Well,” Jenny said, her voice more tired than I had ever heard it before. “Come and see our daughter.”

I slowly approached and, as I did so, Jenny’s head came up and swiveled towards me. She was masked like everyone else in the NICU, her eyes completely devoid of the sparkle that had first attracted me to her. She was wearing a robe over a hospital gown, both draped open to reveal her left breast, and she held in her arms the tiniest and skinniest baby I had ever seen, clothed only in a diaper that, in another context, could have been described as comically large, its spindly arms and legs moving lethargically in the air as if blindly seeking some essential purchase. The baby’s mouth was open, and it was mewling like a newborn kitten.

“She won’t latch on,” Jenny said, somewhat desperately, a different kind of sparkle returning with the tears to her eyes. 

“It’s okay,” the nurse in the small space said, reaching down to gently take the baby from Jenny. “She’ll learn. It may take a few days. We’ll just keep trying until she does.”

I crouched down next to Jenny and took her hand as she worked to cover herself up with the other. 

“Jenny,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Behind her, the nurse was placing our baby back in the incubator. Jenny gave me a long and sad look. “It’s okay,” she said. “When they told me you were coming up, I couldn’t believe you could’ve gotten here so fast.”

“Fast?” I said. “It felt like forever. I should’ve never left.”

Jenny put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, Alan,” she said, the tears beginning to streak down her face. “It feels to me like forever is just getting started.”

I choked up, falling forward to clasp her in an awkward embrace.

5

“Hello? Hello? Is anyone awake in here?”

I woke up with a start, my legs dropping heavily to the floor and almost tumbling out of the chair I was perched on. After the scene in the NICU, I had gone back to Jenny’s hospital room where, both of us exhausted from our individual ordeals, we agreed to try and grab an hour or so of sleep before the hospital itself began to wake up; Jenny in the bed and me in the adjoining visitor chair.

“Daddy!” I heard Jacob shout, and then saw him run into my field of vision. I was unable to fend him off as he climbed heavily up into my lap and gave me a desperate hug. I clutched at him both to steady myself and to keep him from falling, and looked around, still not entirely sure where I was or what was going on.

“Oh, hello, Meredith,” I said, dimly perceiving Jenny’s mother standing in the open doorway, dressed in her latest ath-leisure ensemble, and a big bouquet of flowers in her left hand.

“Hello, hello!” she said again, moving into the room and setting the flowers down on the bedside table.

Jenny was just beginning to stir. “Jesus, Mom, is that you?” she croaked. “What time is it?”

“It’s eight-thirty, my dear. I brought you some flowers to help brighten up this dreary room they’ve put you in.”

“Daddy!” Jacob was shouting, practically in my ear. “Gramma made pancakes for breakfast! And they were shaped like DINOSAURS!”

“Oh, yeah?” I said distantly, more interested but unable to hear the words Jenny and her mother were exchanging.

“I liked the STEGOSAURUS best! He had bumps on his back just like a real STEGOSAURUS!”

“Oh, yeah?” I said again, deciding that I needed to get up on my feet. “Let me get up, Jacob,” I said gently, sliding him down my legs as best I could.

By this time, Meredith had her hand on Jenny’s forehead, evidently feeling for a fever the way she must have been doing since her daughter was four years old. “It’s okay,” she was saying, her tone indicating that she was referring to something other than Jenny’s temperature. “I can only stay for another day or two. But, Alan is home now. He’ll help until you’re back on your feet.”

Meredith suddenly turned towards me, her earrings clinking with the movement. “Have you seen her, Alan? Have you seen my granddaughter yet?”

I was conscious of standing there in my stocking feet and wrinkled slacks, one shirtail untucked and hanging down. Jacob was tugging on one pant leg, and I had to grab the waistband to keep him from pulling them off.

“Ummm, yes,” I said. “Late last night, or early this morning, I guess.”

“Isn’t she an angel?” Meredith asked, her face beaming with a light like that of eternal life. “When I held her last night, she looked right at me and told me everything was going to be all right.” 

I exchanged a glance with Jenny. Meredith had always been a glass-half-full kind of person, but this seemed a little out of even her norm. 

“What do you mean, ‘she told you’?”

“The look in her eye,” Meredith said easily, turning back to Jenny and now caressing her daughter’s cheek with the back of her fingers. “There’s a fire there. You can see it, honey. She’s a fierce one. She’s going to grow big and strong. You’ll see.”

An awkward silence settled in among us, broken by Jacob.

“Can I see?”

“Hmmm?” I asked, turning to look down on his upturned face. “See what, buddy?”

“The baby!” Jacob said. “I want to see her fire eyes! PLEEEEASE?”

He continued to clutch and grab and I decided it would be easier to pick him up. “Not right now,” I said as I eased him into that somewhat comfortable position on the arm and hip. “She’s probably sleeping right now.”

“Nope, she’s awake,” a suddenly-appearing nurse said, her white sneakers squeaking on the floor as she moved quickly into the room and pulled the window shade up. “And she’s hungry. How’s mom doing?” she asked, weaving between me and Meredith to stand next to Jenny. “Are you ready to give breast feeding another try?”

Jenny sighed. “I suppose so.”

The nurse was a middle-aged woman with dark hair and wide hips. Now that she was standing still, I could see the tag on her smock, the name AUDREY prominent above everything else. “We’ve got the lactation consultant in this morning,” AUDREY said. “If baby isn’t ready, we’ll get you set up for pumping. That way baby can get her mother’s milk by eyedropper until she learns how to suckle. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll get a wheelchair,” AUDREY said, and then she was in motion again, quickly disconnecting Jenny from the multiple monitors that were checking her blood pressure, her heart rate, her pulse oxidation. “If you need to use the restroom, maybe dad or grandma can help you?”

She fluttered her way out of the room, leaving me and Meredith staring blankly at each other, neither one of us sure what had just happened and what we were supposed to do next. Jenny, however, was struggling her way up and out of the bed.

“Mom! Help me!”

Ten minutes later, we were all gathered in the viewing room outside the NICU, the long row of windows giving us a full view of the dozen or so incubators and their tiny occupants. I was holding Jacob up, his sneakered feet more or less standing on the bottom frame of the windows as he leaned back against my chest. To our right, Meredith was busily gowning up while Jenny sat, vacant-eyed, in her wheelchair.

“Where is she?” Jacob asked me, whispering like he was in a library. “Where is the baby with the fire eyes?”

I peered into the NICU and tried to determine the answer to his clumsy question. It was a challenge since, from our distance, all the incubators looked the same and it was impossible to tell even the gender much less the features of the little humans that lived inside. 

“I’m not sure, buddy,” I said. “Grandma will bring her over to us when Mommy is done feeding her.”

This is what had been discussed and agreed to in advance. Given the clean conditions that needed to be maintained in the NICU, only one mother and one additional person were allowed in at any single time, and that additional person, usually the husband or another relative, had to be masked and gowned. There was no way to bring someone as young and rambunctious as Jacob into such a quiet place, but the large windows offered an ability for close viewing when necessary.  

“Now you be good, Jacob,” Meredith said as she prepared to enter the NICU. “Give us just a few minutes and I’ll bring the baby over to the window so you can see her. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jacob said, as he began kicking his rubber toes against the window.

I decided to drop him slowly to the floor, knowing he was going to get quickly bored with waiting and not wanting him to cause a disturbance. The visiting space had a small play area for toddlers like him, and I gently nudged him there, towards the activity tables and coloring books. At first I was worried that he would resist, but he quickly saw the logic of the suggestion, sitting down on one of the kindergarten chairs and beginning to dig through an enormous tub of loose crayons. I lingered at the window a little longer, watching as Jenny, Meredith, and a nurse moved into the space, and then disappeared behind an encircling curtain.

“Look, Daddy,” Jacob said. “This book has babies in it.”

I went over and stood beside Jacob. The coloring book he had found indeed had a multitude of babies on its many pages, most of whom were already streaked with the angry color smudges of many previous artists. Eventually, he found a page not yet marked, a cartoon baby crawling across a toy-strewn rug, wearing nothing but a diaper, and smiling so wide that its eyes were nothing but slits.

Jacob picked up a purple crayon and began carefully coloring in one of the circles in the braided rug. “Where did you go, Daddy?”

“What?”

He did not look up or pause in his work. “Where did you go?”

It was such an odd question it took me a moment to understand what he was asking. I eased myself down onto one of the miniature chairs opposite him. “I was working,” I said. “In Denver. Remember? I showed you on the map before I left.”

Jacob nodded as if he remembered, but then repeated my words as if trying to reassure himself. “Daddy was working in Denver. But he’s back now. Now he’s back.” 

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m back. And I’m going to be staying home for a while now.”

“Is Mommy sick?”

“What?”

“Is Mommy sick?” he asked again, his little voice now sounding a bit frightened.

“No,” I said. “No, she’s not sick, buddy. She’s just tired. Having a baby makes Mommies really tired. She’ll probably need a few weeks to feel better. We’ll need to help her. Okay?”

“Okay.” He dropped the purple crayon in favor of an orange one and began working on another circle in the rug.

He was quiet for a few moments, and it gave me the first chance in a while to reflect on everything that was going on. It was hard to explain the details to Jacob, but the next several weeks were going to be a real challenge. Jenny and I had discussed much of it before falling asleep in her room earlier that morning, and neither one of us knew exactly how things were going to proceed. She was going to have to stay in the hospital for a while -- initially to recover from her c-section, but quickly (and maybe already) for the sake of the premature infant they had taken out of her. She would need her mother nearby until she learned how to suckle and began gaining weight. When that started to happen she could be released from the NICU, but would need to stay in a mom/baby room at the hospital until she was large and healthy enough to be released. The baby had been born six weeks premature, and it was likely that it would take at least four weeks before such a day would finally arrive.

And all of that meant that I would need to be home and taking care of Jacob. Meredith had done a tremendous amount already, getting Jenny to the hospital and making dinosaur pancakes for Jacob, but she couldn’t stay for weeks on end. Neither Jenny nor I would ask her to. She had her own life and her own obligations, and managing our household had never been one of them. 

And that meant that I would have to call Mary some time soon and see what kind of flexible accommodation could be made. That is, assuming I even still had a job there. The company, I knew, had no parental leave policy. It barely had any benefits at all. In fact, I wasn’t 100% sure that our extended hospital stay was even going to be covered by the company’s health insurance. That was something else I would need to look into.

I looked down at my little son, carefully coloring within the lines, and was suddenly overwhelmed by grief and terror. What the hell was I going to do? Until the call came in from Boston -- assuming a call was even forthcoming -- I needed the horrible job with Mary Walton. I needed it because my family needed it. I couldn’t see any way forward in my current circumstance without it -- but I also didn’t see how Mary was going to allow me to go forward after what I had done, and after I made the request I would be required to make. Yes, hi, Mary, how are you? Hope everything wrapped up well in Denver, but hey, don’t you know, I’m going to need a few weeks paid leave so I can take care of my wife, my 4-year-old son, and my premature infant daughter. Would that be all right? Hello, Mary? Are you still there?

In my despair, I became aware of a light tapping on glass and I looked up to see my masked mother-in-law standing on the other side of the viewing window with a small, partially swaddled bundle in her arms.

Jacob heard it, too, and in a flash, he was up out of his chair and dashing across the open floor to the window, calling for me to come, to follow him, to lift him up so he could see, so he could see. Swallowing back my fears, I rose and did as beckoned. Jacob seemed heavier than ever, but I lifted him up onto my hip and stood with him inches from the glass as Meredith carefully positioned my daughter in such a way that I and Jacob could more easily see her.

She was such a little thing, more like a kitten than a baby, loosely wrapped in a small blanket, with her fragile head supported by Meredith’s certain hand, her little arms extended, and tiny, gossamer fingers clenching and unclenching in the arm.

“There’s the baby!” Jacob said excitedly. “There’s the baby, Daddy!”

I softly reaffirmed that yes, indeed, there was the baby, but trailed off as she seemed to turn her little head towards what must have been the muffled sound of Jacob’s voice. Her eyes were open, and they seemed to widen and then squint in some unpracticed attempt at focus. Unlike the fire that he was undoubtedly expecting, her irises were the deepest midnight.

“She’s looking at me!” Jacob cried, placing his hand on the glass. “She’s looking at me, Daddy! Hi, baby! Hi!”

And then her eyes seemed to lose their focus, but the still-unnamed baby smiled, a toothless and joyful thing that momentarily lit up her little face. 

“I think she can hear you, Jacob,” I said. “She knows you’re her big brother.”

“I love you!” Jacob said suddenly, clapping his hands together in his simple joy. “I love you, baby!”

I was glad he did. Somewhere deep within my calcified heart, I knew that my family was going to need a lot of love if we were going to make it through the next few weeks.

6

A few days later it was Monday. And what a Monday it turned out to be. A Monday like none I had ever lived before. A Monday that, had I been writing a novel, I wouldn’t have had the courage to put down in writing. Mondays like this one just don’t happen in real life.

It really began while I was getting dressed for work, my mother-in-law, on what was likely to be her last morning with us, downstairs making breakfast for Jacob and maybe for me. I was buttoning my shirt, looking at myself with dread in the mirror on the back of our closest door, and almost didn’t hear my phone buzzing on the dresser behind me.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Alan? This is Steve Anderson.”

Yes, it was. And he apologized for calling so early, but he wanted to catch me before I went into the office this morning. He wanted to offer me the position we had recently discussed, at a salary almost double what I was currently making.

“Alan? Are you there?”

I was lucky my unmade bed had been so close, or Steve might have heard my head thump against the bedroom floor.

“Yes, yes, I’m here, Steve. Can you please say that all again?”

He did. And this time I listened more carefully, making sure I heard every single word. He offered me the position. At a salary almost double what I was currently making. And then he went on with several other details regarding the offered benefits, the relocation assistance, the support for professional education activities, and the other executive perks.

“We want to make this easy for you, Alan. We’re convinced you’re the right person for this job, and we don’t want to give you any reason to say no.”

I was flummoxed, but knew I had to say something, so I slowly thanked Steve for that vote of confidence and for the offer while my brain started working overtime in a mostly futile attempt to parse the information it had so suddenly been given. I thought desperately that I should maybe tell him about my wife, our baby, and the hospital, but quickly decided against it.

“I want to put all of that in writing,” Steve was saying, “and give you time to review it and the employment contract in detail. Is it okay if I send that to the email you listed on your resume?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing that this was my personal and not my work email. “Yes. That would be great. Please do that, Steve. I look forward to reviewing it.”

“My number will be on the email, Alan. You call me at any time if you have any questions. I hope we can bring this to a quick and mutually beneficial conclusion.”

“You bet,” I said, and then Steve said goodbye, and then the line clicked off.

And there I sat, in my half buttoned shirt over pajama bottoms and bare feet, wondering if what just happened had actually happened.

I finished getting dressed and then went downstairs and fired up our home computer. I could hear Jacob helping Meredith in the kitchen while I sat patiently through its long boot cycle, forcing myself to wait until it was complete before opening up our email program. And there it was. Right at the top of the inbox. An email from “Anderson, Steve,” with the little paperclip icon that meant it included an attached file.

I opened both the email and the document, and they were what Steve had just promised -- the email a faithful recap of the numbers and benefits he had verbally described, and the attachment an eight-page employment contract with a bunch of legal paragraphs and a pair of lines at the very end -- one of them already containing Steve Anderson’s signature.

I was halfway through reading it when Meredith appeared behind my right shoulder.

“Are you working from home today? I thought you had to go to the office?” In the corner of my eye I could see the twinkling of the diamond ring on one of the fingers holding her coffee cup.

“I am. I mean, I was. I mean, look at this.”

She leaned in closer, her matching necklace falling forward and its pendant swinging free. “What is it?”

I hit the print button, suddenly realizing the advantage of having an attorney for a mother-in-law. I gave Meredith a quick summary of what had just happened, and asked if she would take a professional look at the contract, already knowing that I was in over my head with it. In a few minutes we were sitting at the dining room table -- Meredith slowly turning pages, Jacob eating grapes and Cherrios out of two different bowls, and me placing another phone call.

“Hi, honey,” I said when Jenny picked up. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m tired,” Jenny’s voice breathed into my ear. “How do you think I’m feeling, Alan?”

I told her to brace herself and then gave her the news.

“OH MY GOD! WHAT? ALAN! HOW MUCH DID YOU SAY?”

I think it was hearing Jenny’s reaction -- the shock and the surprise, and then the joy and the laughter -- that I for the first time began to realize that my long and painful ordeal was, in fact, about to come to an end. I’m glad I was already seated, because the realization made me initially dizzy. It was thrilling -- almost dangerously so -- and yet, there was still so much to think about, and to plan for.

“What do you think?” I said, tongue-in-cheek. “Should I accept?”

“My God, Alan! Of course you should accept. You need this. WE need this!”

“But it’s in Boston,” I said. “We’ll have to move to Boston, you know.”

“We knew that going in,” Jenny said. “We’ll do it. We’ll make it work.”

“What do you think, Meredith?” I asked, seeking her legal opinion rather than her blessing.

“I’m still reading,” she said, understanding me. “And this isn’t necessarily my area of expertise, but so far, I don’t see anything unreasonable here.”

I looked up at the clock and saw that I was already twenty minutes late for work. An idea then entered my head, an idea that was both wonderful and terrible at the same time. Wonderful in its potential. Terrible in its finality.

“Should I quit?” I said back into the phone.

“What?” Jenny said. “I didn’t hear you, honey.”

“Should I quit?” I asked again, this time more forcefully, willing the idea into existence, giving it the freedom it needed to live or die on its own. “This morning? Without even going into the office? Should I just call Mary and tell her I quit? That I’m done? That I’m never going back there again?”

God, I wanted the answer to be yes. I would’ve done practically anything in that moment to do exactly what I had just proposed -- not so much so I could tell Mary off, but primarily so I would never have to go into her office again. I hadn’t been there since the day of the phone interview with Steve Anderson, the day that Bethany Bishop had left, the day of my painful meeting with Mary and Don. The next day, after all, I had gone to Denver and back, and then had spent the last two days of the previous week and the subsequent weekend shuttling back and forth between my home and the hospital. Mary and I had spoken midday or so on Thursday, while she had still been at the leadership meeting, and she had reluctantly agreed to allow me to take paid sick days for the balance of the week and I had reluctantly agreed to return to the office on Monday. What I would be returning to I didn’t have any idea. Perhaps a termination interview. Perhaps a firing squad. Perhaps a pair of leg irons and a demand that I just keep rowing their sinking ship. Now, the idea that I might have to return at all was seductive.

But cooler heads would prevail -- primarily Jenny’s and Meredith’s. They discussed it -- me actually putting the call on speaker so that they could do so -- and they agreed that I should wait. A day, or two, or however long it took for the contract to be signed and countersigned and for the deal to be legally struck. Cutting one cord before securing the next was a risk, perhaps a small one, but a risk nonetheless, and probably not worth taking. 

Except for the fact that I was drowning. And now, after the tantalizing prize of a life preserver had been dangled in front of me, the idea of returning willingly to the ship, and of continuing to bail the murky water with my leaky bucket while the sea kept rising relentlessly around me, it was almost too much for me to bear.

I told Jenny that I would come and see her at the hospital after the work day was finished and then we said goodbye. Meredith went back to reading the contract and so I got Jacob out of his booster seat and took his bowls to the kitchen, soaking them in the sink with the handful of other dishes that Meredith had created. She had brewed a pot of coffee, and I poured myself a cup, sipping it slowly while I stood in the kitchen and waited for my mother-in-law to finish her review of the document that would, I hoped, chart the next major chapter in my life.

“Alan?” she said eventually, calling me back to the dining room, sitting me down, and walking me page by page through the contract. She was strictly business, adopting a tone that I had only seldom heard her use, perhaps while she was on the phone at a family gathering, talking to a client or an opposing counsel. She explained each clause to me, stressing the items that were clearly in my favor and those that were clearly protecting the interests of the organization hiring me, and she did it all in a neutral tone, simply an umpire calling balls and strikes. When she finished, she scooped the loose pages up off the table, tapped them together into a short, neat stack, and slid them across the table to me.

“It all sounds reasonable,” I said. “Am I missing something?”

She gave me a long look, her painted lips pursing with only the slightest flicker of discomfort.

“Again,” she said, carefully, “employment contracts are not my area of expertise. But, yes, to the degree that I can make an informed opinion, it appears to represent a fair agreement between the two parties.”

Her speech was stilted. I tried to look at her compassionately. “You don’t want us moving to Boston, do you, Meredith?”

She paused -- a long and quiet moment passing in what was normally a whirlwind of our house -- and then slowly shrugged her shoulders. “What I want should not be the prevailing interest in your decision, Alan. You’ve worked hard for the offer that this contract represents. I wouldn’t want you to walk away from it out of some perceived loyalty to my preferences.”

She was like a robot -- a robot lawyer, spewing nothing but legalese, assessments of mitigated risk, and sound advice. But she was also my mother-in-law, the woman who had raised the woman I loved, who had cried at our wedding, who had accepted me as a son into her aura of protection, who had doted on her grandson from a respectable distance, who had done everything in her power to love, to celebrate, to clear the way.

I looked back down at the contract. “I’m going to read it one more time,” I said.

“I think you should,” Meredith said, pushing herself up from the table. “I’ll go get Jacob ready. We’re going down to the park this morning.”

“Are you staying?” I asked her suddenly.

She nodded. “A few more days. If you think you need me, that is.”

I thanked her, told her we definitely needed her, and then I turned to the document. I read it all the way through -- first the section establishing the parties and the intent of the agreement, and then onto the clauses detailing the offered compensation and benefits, and through to those providing guarantees and protections from liability for the organization. And by the time I got to the closing clauses on jurisdiction and indemnification, I realized that I had made a decision.

I picked up my phone and called Steve Anderson. He was surprised to hear from me so soon and delighted to hear that I was accepting the offer. I would be signing the agreement as presented and returning it as soon as I got to the office and could scan it and attach it to an email. We agreed that there were still a lot of details that would need to be figured out. I would, after all, need to give my current employer two weeks notice, and then there was the matter of relocating to Boston.

“Don’t you worry about any of that,” Steve told me. “We’ll provide you all the time and assistance that you need. What did you say your wife’s name was? Jennifer? Whenever she’s ready, have her call my assistant Julie. She’ll help in any way that she can to make sure you find a place and your family can settle in. You have a little boy, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, hearing the thumping steps of said little boy’s sneakered feet upstairs. “But that’s something else we should talk about. You see, we’ve just had our second. A little girl.”

“Splendid!” Steve said, with enough sincerity I thought I could hear his face beaming. “Congratulations, Alan. That is wonderful news!”

But there were complications. I told him in a few clipped sentences about the birth, about the NICU, about my red-eye trip back from Denver. I then held my breath, only knowing how someone like Mary would have reacted to such information from a potential hire.

There was a short pause on the phone, and then Steve’s voice was back, warm and gentle.

“My god, Alan,” he said. “I had no idea. Are you all right? Jennifer? The baby?”

“We’re fine,” I said. “At least I think we are. Honestly, Steve. Right now, I’m not sure I know what fine is supposed to feel like.” I was suddenly choking up, that last few words squeezing out under distress.

“Alan,” Steve said compassionately. “I don’t want you to worry. My youngest -- also a girl -- was born premature. I still remember the few tense weeks she spent in the hospital. But you know what?”

“What?”

“Now she’s a twenty-two-year-old young woman, about to graduate college with a degree in actuarial science. She’s strong and unstoppable, my Amelia, and so is your little girl. You’ll see. Okay?”

I had to wipe my tears away with the back of my hand. “Okay,” I said, sniffling. “Okay. Thanks, Steve.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Steve said. “You get that contract back to me like you’ve planned to do. You give your two weeks notice to your current employer, and we’ll get you on our payroll effective the following Monday.”

“Steve,” I said, “I don’t know that we’re even going to be out of the hospital in two weeks. I just don’t know when I can actually get to Boston and start working.”

“I doesn’t matter,” Steve said. “You’ve got enough things to worry about right now. I don’t want you worrying about money and health insurance, too. We’ll work things out as best we can over the next two weeks. If you need to start working remotely from your current home, we can manage that. Okay?”

At first, it seemed unbelievable that he could possibly be so generous, but then I realized how much things had just changed for me. Miraculously, I was no longer a slave to the dragon, heaping my body, mind, and soul upon her ever-growing pile of ill-gotten treasure. I was free. Punched through what was once an unstoppable barrier, and out in the clear unknown.

“Okay. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, a lot.”

“No worries. Congratulations again on your baby girl. Have you named her yet?”

“No,” I said. “No, we haven’t had the chance. But now I’m thinking Amelia may be worth considering.”

Steve chuckled. “It’s worked well for us.”

7

The clear unknown. I thought a lot about that phrase as I sat in my parked car in the office’s parking structure twenty minutes later. I was late for work -- almost two hours late -- and I had to circle all the way to the top, uncovered floor to find an open place to park. It was always cold and breezy up there, and I felt the winds buffeting the car as I slipped it into park and turned off the ignition.

The clear unknown. It really was an interesting turn of phrase. Unknown I understood all too well. Looking back to the soon-to-be old job or looking forward to the soon-to-be new job, either way there was unknown aplenty. But clear? Nothing was clear -- unless by clear you meant empty. An empty void surrounding you, like a tight-rope walker on the thinnest of wires stretched between two skyscrapers.

I suddenly felt dizzy. I could feel my heart racing in my chest, and my vision seemed to splotch and sparkle in the corners. It was another migraine -- it had to be -- coming on to debilitate me just when I needed to be most on my toes. And I had thrown the medicine away. In my fear and petulance I had thrown the medicine the doctor had given me away, and now I was going to sink deep into a terror I would never be able to climb out of.

I closed my eyes, placed my forehead on the steering wheel, and started taking some deep breaths. I was okay. I was going to be okay. I told myself that over and over, pushing the words out with every exhale. I was okay … I was okay … I was going to be okay. 

But was I? That, ultimately, was the question, wasn’t it? That was always the question, for every one, I supposed, throughout all of time. Was I going to be okay? In our world, and through all those ages, there were those who would always depend on things outside themselves to provide the answer to that question: to relationships, to status, to possessions. Those things, in some incalculable combination, would determine whether or not I would be okay. And that, I knew, was how I had always felt, always striving for some external validation that I was good, that I was smart, that I was okay. In those long and painful moments, perched at the top of a steel and concrete tower in my twenty-thousand dollar used car that needed new tires and was regularly leaking oil, I thought about all those external forces. They were people, yes, people, no doubt, forever asking themselves the same ultimate question that now debilitated me, but they were forces, too, forces interacting with me and the force I represented in ways that none of us could ever control or predict.

I thought about Jenny, Jacob, and the new baby, about Meredith, about Mary and Don, about Bethany, about Gerald Krieger, Michael Lopez, and Susan Sanford, about Amy Crawford and Wes Howard, about Caroline Abernathy, about Eleanor Rumford and Paul Webster, even about Steve Anderson, Pamela Thornsby, and Mister Richard Thompson -- all of them floating with me in my mindspace, and all of us orbiting and affecting each other in some impossible n-body problem that the greatest physicists in the world couldn’t solve with a hundred supercomputers.

It was overwhelming. So many expectations. So many ways of not measuring up.

But I knew there were others in this universe, seemingly few and far between, who did not depend on things outside themselves in order to resolve the ultimate question. To them, understanding whether or not they were okay was not something mediated by others, but by themselves, by their own sense of themselves and their purpose in the events and forces that surrounded them. To these people, being okay wasn’t something transient, something buffeted to and fro by the external winds of expectations. To these people, being okay was something stable, permanent, and internal. They did not have to chase others and take the feeling of being okay away from them. They were okay. Always. No matter what happened. They were okay just being who they were.

I’m not one of those people. I certainly wasn’t on that strange and difficult day, and even now, years later, I’m still not. But I’ve met people like that. They’re real. They exist. They prove it is possible to be okay, no matter what, or at least to act like you are -- and I think it was that knowledge that helped bring me down off the ledge I had suddenly found myself on. Slowly, I began to calm down and the migraine, if that is what it was, retreated into the background. I kept breathing deeply, my mantra never changing, and when I felt ready, I gathered the few things I had brought with me, exited my vehicle, and began making my way to the little glass alcove that surrounded the top level of the parking structure elevators.

It was deep in the middle of a busy morning when I emerged onto the office floor. I remember people being scattered about in their different workstations -- but fortunately for me, Mary’s office door was closed and Ruthie was not at her desk. That allowed me to slip through generally unnoticed and make my way down to my office.

There, I dropped my briefcase on my desk, fished out the contract that I had signed at my dining room table, and without any other preamble and flourish, took the eight pieces of paper down to the server room. 

Jurgis Pavlov was there poking around on a panel with more flashing lights than a Christmas tree.

“Hi, Jurgis,” I said.

“Da,” he said, without giving me a glance, absorbed in, or perhaps mesmerized by, the lights and the countless ethernet cables that seemed to feed them.

I went over to the copy machine, put it on the scanning function, and one by one placed each of the eight pages -- each with my blue-inked initials in the lower right-hand corner and the last with my and Steve Anderson’s bold signatures on it -- on the glass. In forty-five seconds I was done, and I hit save and with a few more taps on a few more buttons, had the machine send a copy of the saved file to my email address, my private one, not the one owned by the company. Then, I deleted the remaining file off the server.

“So long, Jurgis,” I said, scooping up my papers and leaving the small and poorly ventilated room.

“Da.”

I made my way back to my office, nodding to a few people that I passed along the way, only one of whom looked at me as if I didn’t belong there. Once back in my office I shut my door, sat down behind my desk, and fired up my desktop computer. I waited in silence for the sign-in screen to appear, and then I logged on and opened my personal email program. There I found a new message from the company scanner, with a single attachment, a fully executed and legally binding employment contract between me and my new employer.

I hit the forward button, and began editing the message to make it and its subject line and proper piece of correspondence to Steve Anderson, accepting his offer of employment and attaching the signed and countersigned version of the contract. I didn’t rush it, but I also didn’t overthink it. It was a short message, professional, conveying only the information that was needed, and finishing with an optimistic note on working together. I proofread it, made one small edit, and then clicked the send button. Then I closed my email program and went into the browser and deleted the session from its history.

After all that was completed, I took a moment to just breathe and sit quietly by myself. I was only a little surprised that no one had stopped me from doing what I had just done. I mean, no one, I knew, would be able to physically restrain me from taking these actions, but here I was, more than two hours late for work after abandoning one of my professional responsibilities the previous week, and not a single person had so far confronted me or even asked me what was going on. 

It gave me a strange feeling of disquiet, but I pushed it out of my mind. I had only one more thing I needed to do and then I would be leaving the office, maybe just for the rest of the day, or maybe for the rest of my life. 

I shut off my computer, extracted a sealed envelope from my briefcase, and then zipped the bag up and slung it over my shoulder. Almost as an afterthought, I looked briefly around at my office, and slowly realized that this might be the last time I would ever see it. I had just a handful of personal effects -- a few books that were technically mine and not the company’s and, in quiet violation of the company’s office decoration policy, a small framed picture of Jenny and Jacob that one would have to be seated at my desk to see in full. On impulse, I picked up that picture, studied the small and smiling faces for a moment, and then placed it in the outside pocket of my briefcase. 

I made my way down to Mary’s office with what felt like determination. Unlike earlier, Ruthie was back at her desk, guarding the inner sanctum as was her role. Behind her, also unlike before, the door to Mary’s office stood open.

“Hi, Ruthie.”

I startled her. She had been absorbed in some task and had not seen me approach. “Alan!” she cried out, looking up from an expandable file stuffed with more paper than it was designed to hold. “Oh, god, I didn’t see you. When did you come in this morning?”

I was about to give some glib answer, but before I could get the words out, we both heard Mary’s voice erupt from within. “Alan!” it said. “Is that Alan Larson, out there?” And then there was some shuffling of feet and then Mary herself appeared in the doorway behind Ruthie. She wore a tan skirt and white blouse and her eyes seemed to blaze with fury, at first unfocused, and then quickly sharpening on me. “Alan!” she said again, anger but also some measure of desperation in her voice. “Where the hell have you been?!”

Where the hell have you been. Six small words, but the way Mary said them told me a lot about what she had been thinking -- and not thinking -- since I had last spoken to her while she was still at the leadership meeting in Denver. What struck me immediately was that she was NOT surprised to see me -- as she would have been if she had spent any time since then thinking about the possibility that I might quit. After everything that had happened, with a wife and premature baby still in the hospital, she thought, as she had curtly instructed me, that I still should have been there at my desk at eight o’clock that morning. No, she was not surprised to see me crawling back into her lair. Instead, she was angry -- ANGRY -- that I was late returning for the abuse she evidently planned to continue visiting upon me. She was angry, yes, but her tone of voice said that she was also a little afraid. Afraid, I supposed, that, as this long Monday morning crept closer to afternoon, my lack of return had meant something other than what she had planned. That maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t planning to come back to her at all, that perhaps I had finally had enough of her shit.

In other words, I had her. She had no idea what I was about to do. She had never even entertained the idea that I would wriggle free of her grasp.

“Answer me!” she shouted, exactly as my father used to do when I was slow in responding to one of his inexplicable questions. “Where have you been? It’s almost eleven A.M. and no one has heard a word from you all morning.”

I held up the envelope I was carrying. “Mary,” I said. “I think we should talk in your office.”

She looked at me, her angry stare so focused on my face that I don’t think she even saw the envelope I was holding. She certainly didn’t give any indication that she suspected what such an envelope might hold.

“Fine,” she said, turned on her heel and disappeared into her office.

I looked at Ruthie, who still stood there like a sentinel, and her face wore an entirely different expression from Mary’s. She knew. Ruthie knew what I was about to do. She could see the bag draped over my shoulder, the envelope in my hand, the determination in my face. She knew -- and she gave me a bittersweet look and then stepped aside to give me full access to her boss’s office.

Once inside, I didn’t bother to close the door behind me. Mary had retreated and was sitting behind her desk, glaring at me through her steepled fingers.

“I’ll make this quick,” I said, marching across the thick carpet and dropping the envelope in front of her. “I’m quitting. That’s my resignation letter. I’m giving my two weeks’ notice.”

I hadn’t rehearsed anything. I had no speech to make. The three simple facts came out of my mouth in quick succession and seemed to lay as flat on Mary’s awareness as the envelope that I had just dropped on her desk.

“Huh?” she said, stupidly, like a stubborn old, deaf person long used to tuning things out. “What did you just say?”

“Open it,” I told her.

Her arms were down on her desktop now, laying uselessly on either side of the envelope containing my resignation letter. Her look of anger and frustration was now gone. To me, she simply looked confused, off her game, helpless.

“Open it,” I commanded her, this time pointing to my envelope. 

She slowly complied, slicing the envelope open with a shiny letter opener and unfolding the single sheet of paper she found within. I watched as her eyes skimmed over the handful of words I had placed there, her lips moving silently in tandem with the concepts that they were meant to communicate.

“Alan!” she cried suddenly, her eyes widening, but still down on the paper. “This is a resignation letter!”

“Yes,” I said viciously. “I’m quitting. I’m leaving to pursue a better opportunity for me and my family.”

I put special emphasis on that last word, and I saw from Mary’s now-upturned face that the message had gotten through.

“That’s right, Mary. My family. Half of which, by the way, is still in the hospital right now, thanks for asking. And I’m on my way there now. I plan to work my last two weeks from home or from the hospital, whichever is more convenient for me. Hope that’s okay.”

Mary was staring at me blankly now, utterly stupefied, and probably only hearing half of the sarcastic words I was throwing at her. But I didn’t care. Finally, gloriously, I was past caring. 

“Unless, of course, you’d prefer me to leave your employ immediately. Because, frankly, that would be just fine with me.”

She looked back down at the document I had given her. Somewhere, near the end of its solitary and short paragraph there was a date, two weeks into the future, which was my proposal for my last day of employment. I imagined that she was searching for that, and running whatever calculations her concussed brain could manage at this point.

“Which one, Mary? Today? Or two weeks from now? You need to tell me.”

She looked at me, eyes blinking and head shaking, likely in an attempt to understand how the tables had been so dramatically turned on her. “Um,” she said, softly and repeatedly. “Um, two… two weeks will be, um… will be fine… I guess.”

“Great,” I said. “You have my cell phone number. Call me if you need something.”

And with that I turned and left her alone in her office. Once outside, I headed immediately for the elevators, but could see a small gaggle of staff people who had gathered at a discrete distance, evidently to witness my departure. Ruthie, oddly, was among them, no longer at her desk, standing like a shepherd among her wayward flock. Fortunately for me, the elevator car opened immediately upon my calling for it. I gave the group a polite wave, and then left them all behind.

8

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 been any kind of directed plan. 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, him wearing a sweater with one of his beloved dinosaurs knitted into the front, 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?”

+ + +

“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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