by Anna Yen
“I don’t have to justify anything to you!” I yelled.
“Okay, okay. I’m just saying . . .”
My voice strained to reach a higher octave. “Stop being so critical of the way I live. You want me to learn things? Then hire some people to help me! I barely have time to go to the bathroom, thanks to the totally unreasonable amount of work you pile on my plate. Speaking of which, I’m ending this conversation so I can get my ass out of bed and into the shower so I can go do what you pay me to do.” I hung up the phone and wished that I had been on a landline. That would have allowed me to slam the receiver in his ear.
Melancholy washed heavily over me and took the place of my anger as I stepped into the shower. Unfortunately, Scott had broken through, and the words that had haunted me since I was diagnosed with diabetes came flooding back into my head. “Her life span will be considerably shorter,” the pediatrician had said to my parents, unaware that I could hear him from my seat in the hall. That’s when everything became so urgent—the day I began doing things that didn’t allow my mind to dwell on my longevity, or lack thereof. During my younger years, dance was my escape. In high school and college, I added alcohol to the mix. Then my focus was consumed with finding a husband. I was so relieved when work proved it could fill most of this void; solving friends’ problems took care of the rest. If I gave myself the time to think about my own life, or even to relax the way Scott suggested, I would go straight to a dark place and I’d never want to get out of bed. If I stop, I will die.
Chapter 14
It was 6:15 a.m., fifteen minutes before the stock market opened, and I was watching the round rainbow-colored circle spin on my screen, waiting for my computer to access the Treehouse network. When my MarketWatch home screen finally appeared, I scanned the headlines and my eyes caught one in particular that was buried toward the bottom of my news feed. I blinked, then blinked again, to make sure I was reading the headline correctly.
treehouse raises q2 estimates, Associated Press (Tue 2:38 a.m. EDT).
I clicked on the link and skimmed the article while saying to no one but myself, “Shit, shit, shit! We didn’t raise our numbers! How did this happen?” My fingers rapidly crafted an email to the AP reporter, which less than politely demanded a correction to her story. I mentioned something about the reporter being “irresponsible for starting this rumor just weeks before we announce our June earnings results.” But then I looked more closely at a quote in the article and saw a name that I knew well. Matteo. Our chief technology officer was in India doing press interviews to announce the upcoming release of our second movie, The Amazings, and he’d delivered a talk about Treehouse at the local university while he was there. I wondered what could have come over Matteo to make him say something like the headline suggested. He knows better. He must have included a financial snapshot slide about us and either misspoke or was misquoted. I looked at the clock on the top-right corner of my screen; the market would be open in two minutes. I pictured our stock price skyrocketing on the AP news and then crashing down when we reported our actual earnings a few weeks later—earnings that would be below what the article said.
I sighed, knowing my dinner with Peter would need to be rescheduled—again—and picked up the phone to call Jonathan. I wanted to show him and Scott that I could handle things on my own now, but then thought twice of it, knowing the consequences would be huge if I didn’t handle this one right. A sharp pain stabbed me in the stomach—shit, this stress is giving me an ulcer—as I dialed Jonathan’s number, but I focused on the article on my screen, which MarketWatch had now listed as one of the top stories for the day.
“Good morning, Sophia. You’re calling early.” Captain Obvious was trying to be polite but was probably wondering why on earth I was bothering him at this ungodly hour.
“Hi, Jonathan. Sorry to bother you, but I’m really not sure what to do,” I said, and then explained the AP article debacle.
“What’s the stock doing?” Jonathan asked.
I looked at the HOUS ticker symbol. “We’re up over fifteen percent on high volume and trading large blocks.”
“Have the analysts called?”
“Not yet. But I’ll call them—maybe they can issue flash reports that the article is wrong.”
“Good idea, Sophia, but any response to this needs to be disseminated publicly.”
“After all this time, I’m still learning from you,” I said to Jonathan. “I wish I could stay as calm as you under pressure.”
“Meditate, my dear. Meditate. As for the learning, my job is to help you grow. That is my primary responsibility.” He seemed too good to be real, but I knew he meant it.
Jonathan was quiet for a moment before he said, “Let me call you back.”
I hung up the phone, and for a split second, I forgot about the AP story and focused on my stomach pain instead. Hungry? Gas? Constipation?
My thoughts were interrupted by the ring of my desk phone.
“Ashley?” I asked as I picked up.
“I have Scott for you. Let me transfer you.”
“Scott.”
“WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?” he shouted. I wondered if this was the pre- or post-personal-spiritual-trainer-session Scott, because if it was the latter, I thought he should get his money back.
“I assume Jonathan told you. Maybe we should see if the reporter is willing to retract?”
“Get Matteo on the phone. I don’t care what time it is over there. Tell him to call me immediately,” Scott said before hanging up.
The phones began to ring, sporadically at first, but then constantly. I decided to ignore them and dialed Matteo’s cell phone instead.
“Hello?” Matteo answered groggily.
“Matteo? You need to call Scott right now. Get up, get yourself a cup of coffee, and then call him.”
“What? Why? What’s wrong?”
“You were quoted in the press. Did you say something about our upcoming earnings estimates?”
“No. I gave a presentation yesterday that included a slide about our . . . oh shit.”
“Uh-huh. Well, whatever slide you showed has us in a lot of hot water. You know you’re not supposed to talk about any Treehouse numbers. Period. And certainly not the wrong ones!”
I wondered if Matteo had been trying to play big man again by commenting on matters outside his scope of work.
“Oh, fuck.”
“Yeah. What the hell were you thinking?” I asked, getting angrier and angrier by the minute.
Before I could launch into an all-out lecture about confidentiality, though, I imagined Matteo running his fingers through his wild, curly brown hair the way he did when he was frustrated or deep in thought. I was certain he was already out of bed and freaking out in his hotel room, the slight bulge of his belly protruding from his T-shirt. It wasn’t uncommon for Matteo and me to clash, mostly because of his macho personality. But I felt sorry for him at this moment, so I stopped myself and then more calmly said, “I’ll do what I can on this end. Just call Scott, please.”
The sound of the helicopter got louder and louder; minutes later Scott was pacing back and forth in my office, his hands behind his back, eerily quiet. I stared at my computer screen and watched our stock erupt.
“Shit!” Scott finally shouted before kicking my filing cabinet. I could see how livid he was by the fire in his eyes. “LET HIM GO!”
Bemused, I asked, “Let who go?”
“Matteo.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You’re overreacting, Scott. No one’s firing Matteo. But if anyone is, it’s sure as hell not going to be me.”
“I am not in the right state of mind to do it. But it needs to be done. An example needs to be set. We’ve said this over and over again to employees: ONLY APPROVED SPOKESPEOPLE—that’s you, me, Jonathan—” he screamed, poking his finger at me, “are allowed to make any sort of statement about the business side of our company. EVER! I’m not upset over what Wall Street thinks; I couldn’t give a shi
t about that. What I care about is that in one fell swoop, Matteo’s accidental comment affects our long-term credibility and he’s single-handedly fucked all our employees, whose morale will drop when our stock comes crashing down. ISN’T THAT CAUSE FOR TERMINATION?”
He had a point. But the key to our success was, and would continue to be, the synergy between the three people in Scott’s office of the president: Jonathan, Matteo, and Dylan. If we lost one of them, we’d be done, so I tried again to calm Scott down.
“It was a mistake. He didn’t mean to do it. Did you speak with him?” I asked.
“Yes,” Scott answered somberly.
I imagined myself in Matteo’s shoes. God, it sucks to be you.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing particularly productive for the situation at hand,” he admitted.
Scott continued to pace in my office, walk out for a few minutes, only to return screaming creative expletives before exiting again. This went on for an hour until Jonathan walked in. Thank God.
“Where’s the stock?” Jonathan asked.
“We’re still up—well, down slightly from open, but up almost twenty percent now since yesterday. Where did Matteo get those figures, anyway?” I asked.
“He was remembering our internal targets, Sophia. There’s a slight chance we could make those, but we certainly don’t want expectations to be set there,” Jonathan said.
“We should fire Matteo,” Scott broke in.
“Well, that would certainly cause a distraction,” Jonathan said, “but we’re not firing him, Scott, and you know it.”
As I considered what I would need to do if we fired Matteo, the thought of a press release gave me an idea.
“What about issuing a press release simply reiterating our original Q2 guidance? We could word it in a way so we’re highlighting the old figures, not the ones in the AP story,” I suggested.
Scott stopped pacing and Jonathan smiled. “Draft it up and send it to me after Jonathan reviews it,” Scott commanded before stomping out the door.
Two hours and a press release later, Treehouse’s share price was only slightly higher than it had been before all this Matteo madness began. I read that as a sign that everything was as it should be.
With the crisis averted, I allowed myself to admit that something was wrong with my body. The stomach pain that had begun this morning had become constant, and worse. I texted Peter to cancel dinner anyway, then called my mom in Taiwan. She’ll know what to do.
“Wei?” she answered. Her raspy voice suggested I had woken her from a deep sleep.
“Mom,” I whimpered.
“Audrey or Sophia?” she asked, still unable to distinguish our voices after all these years.
“It’s Sophia. Mom, my stomach hurts.”
Mom was alarmed, and she did nothing to hide it in her voice, “Ai-ya. What kind of pain? Did you try sitting on the toilet? You always hold it until you’re about to burst. I’ve told you so many times not to do that.” My mother was obsessed with bowel movements, and I managed a smile at her unsurprising reaction.
I answered her list of questions, but stopped short of telling her I’d had a low-grade stomachache for weeks, maybe months. Mom decided the only thing to do was to go home. “Lie down and drink some ginger tea. I will call your sister and have her pick up some clear broth and apple juice. You probably just have a stomach bug.”
“Mom, the stock market is open here. She can’t leave the office right now.”
“Family first, Sophia. Isn’t that what we’ve always taught you girls? She’ll be there soon. Just get yourself home, can you do that?”
My breathing was shallow and I could barely move when I heard the sound of keys turning inside the front-door lock. Audrey. I was propped up on our family room couch because lying down hurt too much. The television was off and I was just staring out the window, trying to remain calm. Audrey’s footsteps got louder and I struggled to draw another breath—one of relief at knowing my sister was here to save me, again. I knew she was going to be angry and would blame me for interrupting her day. But I told myself not to worry; this wasn’t like the time I snuck out at night and rolled my parents’ car down into the creek. I had a feeling this was a real emergency.
Audrey’s shouts echoed through our parents’ large, empty house and I did my best to respond, but any attempt at exhaling seemed to set my stomach on fire.
“What’s wrong now?” she yelled as she came bursting through the kitchen door. I could still hear tiny traces of the hostile teenager she once was, resentful that her sick, coddled little sister took up so much of her parents’ attention. Then her voice came from behind me, her irritation barely disguised: “Hello? Are you going to answer me?”
“I have a stomachache,” I responded quietly. There were only two stairs down into our family room, but Audrey stomped loud enough to make them count.
“What? Mom called me because you have a stomachache? Go sit on a toilet or take Gas-X or something.”
“I tried all those things,” I said. “I even took the prescription antacid the doctor gave me last week.”
Now she looked slightly concerned. My sister perched next to me on the couch. I could see that she was trying to decide whether to believe me and how worried she should be. “This has been going on for a week? What did the doctor say?”
“It’s been around for months, really. But I went to the general practitioner last week. She took X-rays and said it might be scar tissue from something and that it’s around my kidneys.”
“You’d better call Dr. Levin and see what he thinks about the scar tissue,” Audrey said, referring to my favorite MD. He was a nephrologist who began monitoring me when I was in high school because my labs showed I had the beginnings of kidney disease. Thanks, diabetes! Although I had been stable for years, Dr. Levin (or “Steve” as he asked me to call him) still kept tabs on me and made himself available whenever I had any questions or concerns about my health. He always went above and beyond for me, and I often wondered if it was because I was so young compared to his waiting room full of elderly patients.
When I reached Steve on his mobile phone, he asked about the pain (stabbing, twisting knife, hurts-so-so-bad) and wanted to know where it ranked on a scale from one to ten (TEN!). I expected him to reply with something helpful, something doctorly and reassuring. Instead, he just asked, “Can you come up to see me right now?”
“Why? Are you worried?”
“A little bit,” he replied.
I was surprised at his reaction. “Do you really want me to come all the way up there?” Steve’s office was at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco—forty-five minutes or more away.
“Yes. I do. I’ll let the ER know you’re coming and I’ll meet you there.”
“The ER? Why the ER?”
“Stop asking questions and just meet me there.” He hung up.
Seconds later, as I struggled to stand up even with Audrey’s help, Steve called back. “Have you left yet?” I cracked a grin because he knew me too well, but the urgency in his voice told me he was really concerned.
“I’m dying,” I said. I didn’t truly believe it, but there was a small part of me that thought this feeling could be death—the kind of pain you would feel on your last day. Either way, I took advantage of the chance to be dramatic.
“We’re all dying, Sophia,” he said. “Just get up here.”
The purple rubber tourniquet was tight around my arm; my forearm throbbed while the nurse tried to find my vein. It was incredibly uncomfortable, but I was thankful for the pain, as it distracted me from what was actually happening. The nurse was dressed in baggy, seafoam-colored hospital scrubs, the kind that the ER actors wore on set. But she wasn’t an actor and this was not prime-time television. This was my life.
For the fourth time, the nurse tried to insert a needle into one of my tiny, child-size veins, which were scarred from years of monthly labs ordered by my endocrinologist, nephrolo
gist, and every other ologist. My veins didn’t want to cooperate today, rolling away from the sharp metal needle each time it was inserted. Honestly, I didn’t blame them; I’d had enough, too. I shuddered slightly and began to hyperventilate as she dug the needle in deeper, angled it to the left, then to the right. My head was turned away, but the aching pain in my arm painted the scene for me, blurred by the tears that rolled down my face. As soon as the needle was set, the nurse could start my painkillers, and it was clear she was desperate to do so, if only to quell my whimpering.
At last, I heard the snap of the IV’s flashback chamber signal that the catheter was in. “Got it!” the nurse said as she let out a sigh of relief. I disciplined myself to take as deep a breath as possible, and prayed for the morphine to kick in. Breathe, Sophia. Breathe. There was a frenzied tension in the room, but no one moved; the doctor and my sister stared at an X-ray of my abdomen that had been taken when I first arrived. My pain continued to increase, and when Audrey turned back to check on me, somehow she saw it in my eyes. Without taking her gaze off me, she cried to anyone who would listen, “The morphine isn’t working!”
Dr. Levin turned to look. When our eyes met, I knew he saw it, too. I licked my lips slowly and tried to gather enough saliva in my dry mouth to whisper over the metal taste on my tongue. “Help me, Steve,” I managed. It was dramatic, yes, but desperate times called for dramatic entreaties. His downward-sloping eyebrows suggested he was considering his next step—would he be risking an overdose if he gave me more, or should he try a different painkiller? Finally, unable to ignore my writhing on the gurney, he told the nurse to administer an opiate three to four times stronger than morphine, and faster acting. “Give her the Dilaudid.”