Cabin Fever

by Janet Sanders

  Heading to the cashier, Sarah was relieved to see that Sam the grocer was not minding the station. In his place was an earnest teenage girl that didn’t take offense when Sarah gave her a quick half-smile and avoided eye contact for the rest of the transaction. Sam was nice and always had a smile, a pleasant word, and some random gift whenever Sarah came in, but today was not the day for pleasantries – not to mention the fact that she was starting to suspect that Sam had a crush on her. There was a small chance that she might break into tears at any moment, and to do it in front of Sam would be just too mortifying.

  The drive back to the cabin was quick, and the roads were mercifully free of red jeeps that might belong to Brad. Sarah grabbed her groceries and hurried inside, locking the door behind her. She emptied the bags on the counter and started the kettle going for her first cup of coffee. It would not be the last – far from it – and already she was looking forward to the aroma. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee always meant business for Sarah, and business was what she intended to get down to doing. Relationships were hard. They were hard when they first were getting started, and they were hard (really hard!) to keep going. Sarah knew that she was not very good at that sort of thing. Business, though, was something that she understood from the inside out. She couldn’t do anything to the silence the sadness she felt in the depths of her heart, but she was glad to be getting back to the things she excelled at.

  She spent that day at the dining room table, her laptop open before her and the iPad off to the side where she could use it to quickly run searches, look up figures, and play music when she needed the diversion. Ordinarily her workspace would have been a riot of papers and printouts, but Sarah didn’t have a printer with her and so she was forced to go entirely digital. She thought at first that this was going to bother her. She didn’t have papers at hand with margins for notes that she could scribble to herself, but in time she found herself enjoying how fast it was when all the material she was working with resided in windows on her laptop. She could flip from one to the other in an instant, never shuffling through a disorganized pile to find the one she wanted, and If she ever found herself with a paper or source that was close but not quite the thing she needed, a better match was only a Google search away. A thousand times that day she blessed the fact that technology allowed her to use her iPhone’s connection to the Internet on her laptop. Sarah felt fully plugged in. She was physically out in the middle of nowhere, but with the latest technology she could access everything she needed. For the first time in weeks she felt powerful. She felt herself again.

  The work was cathartic. She compiled tables, developed spreadsheets, poured through whitepapers and newspaper articles, compiling a delicate structure of facts and conjecture that all fed into the vision she was developing. One cup of coffee followed another, and when she was hungry there were snacks or a frozen entree, whatever she needed to quiet her stomach and get back to answering the questions in her head. Morning gave way to afternoon that blended into evening, but she hardly noticed. Her neck grew sore and her fingers stiff from the typing, but she forged on. Eventually even the awareness of Brad and the residue of her anger and hurt drifted away, and she had intended, to be replaced by the project at hand and the wonderful puzzle that she was pretty sure she knew how to solve. Late at night, when sleep finally could no longer be denied, Sarah lay down under the covers and fell quickly into a sleep that was untroubled by dreams of beautiful men and the ugly things they sometimes do.

  By the second day the plan had begun taking shape in its full dimensions, though some its parts were entirely speculative. By day three those parts were more fleshed-out, and Sarah knew that it was only a matter of time. The afternoon of that day she head a knock at the door, and her first impulse was to ignore it. What if it was Brad? She couldn’t stand the thought of seeing him there, having to talk with him – not the way she felt, and certainly not the way she looked. Peering through the view hole, though, she saw Sam standing on the front step with a box in his arms.

  She opened the door uncertainly, blinking against the unexpected brightness of the midday sun. “Sam,” she said. “What is it? Why are you here?”

  He looked at her with concern clearly etched on his face. “I was worried about you, Sarah. I brought you some things.”

  He handed her the box, and in it Sarah saw fruits and vegetables, coffee and bread – a care-package for a broken-hearted woman. Something in her chest twisted and her eyes misted up, but she fought them back. “Sam, that’s very sweet, but how did you know…?”

  He snorted. “There are no secrets in Tall Pines, Sarah. News travels fast here because we have so little to talk about.”

  She looked at the box again, and then back at him. “I can’t accept this,” she said, handing it back to him.

  He put up his hands to block the offer. “It’s yours. If you don’t want it, leave it out for the animals or something. I’m not taking it back.”

  “Sam, you can’t keep giving me things for free! It’s not right.”

  She hadn’t meant to confront him that way, and she was instantly sorry when she saw a look of shame and hurt flash across the friendly features of his face. “I don’t mean anything by it, Sarah. I would never do that to my wife. It’s just … I’m helpless in the face of beautiful women, and I always have been. I look at you, and I just melt. And I know you’ll never look at me that way, and it’s OK.”

  “Sam…”

  “It’s OK, and I understand, and that’s what I want, too – I want to keep my promises, I want to keep my family, and I want to be able to do nice things for you and give you things. It makes me feel good, Sarah, so please accept it.”

  She looked at him a long time before putting the box down to take him into a tight hug. “Thank you,” she said at last, thanking him for many things, of which the groceries were only a very small part. Sam stiffened when he first felt her in his arms, but he relaxed into the hug in a way that told Sarah he would remember this day for a long time.

  She ate better after that, and a better feeling in her body translated into better words on the screen. On day four she had what she thought was a good start: a business plan that described a market that was already large and still growing, with a product approach that she was pretty sure would be compelling to investors. It wasn’t perfect, but Sarah knew what she had. It was a new start for her. It was a way to get back into the game.

  She leaned back in her chair and rubbed her hand over her tired eyes. There was still a question that bothered her and that she had not come close to answering: did she want this plan to succeed? Succeeding in the plan meant getting back into the startup scene. It meant gathering investors’ money and hiring a staff, working on cash flow and building her new business fast enough to gain market share before her competitors could muscle in. It meant returning to her old life, returning to the world that had chewed her up and spat her out without a single word of apology or regret. Sarah idly bit her lower lip while considering the most important question of all: now that she knew how to get back everything that she had lost, did she still want it?

  She asked the question, but no answer presented itself. Eventually Sarah sighed and picked up her phone. Some things would just have to answer themselves in time. Pulling up her list of contacts, she located Vijay’s cell number and initiated a call. She was right at the point of wondering what she would do if she got his voice mail – leave a message or hang up and call back later – when she heard his familiar Southeast Asian lilt.

  “This is Vijay.”

  “It certainly is,” she said, smiling broadly. “And it’s great to hear your voice.”

  “Sarah!” he called without a moment’s hesitation. “I thought you had fallen off the face of the earth. Where have you been?”

  “Oregon. Middle of nowhere. I needed a quiet place where I could think.”

  “Think about what? Have you been thinking about how far you have to drive to get a decent cup of coffee?”

>   “Actually the coffee is pretty good here. But I wanted to talk to you about an idea I had.”

  “Oh?” Sarah could almost hear the gears turning as Friend Vijay transitioned into Venture Capitalist Vijay. “I’m always happy to hear your ideas, Sarah. But first I have some news for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  He paused dramatically in a fashion that Sarah knew to be entirely calculated. Vijay loved to be in front of an audience. “You might remember a man you used to work with, name of Dennis.”

  Sarah almost spat at the sound of his name. “Is he dead? Please?”

  Vijay chuckled. “No, not dead. Not physically, at any rate, but his career has seen better days. He’s been indicted for fraud.”

  “Yes! That’s perfect!” she exulted. “How did it happen?”

  “Apparently you were not the only business owner whose intellectual property Dennis tried to steal. Only with this other company, he got sloppy. He falsified some paperwork in an attempt to gain ownership of their patents, and he was found out. Now the patent office is investigating his entire portfolio. He’s out on the street, and he’s facing criminal charges. He’s probably going to jail.”

  Sarah held the phone out away from her head while she did a dance of victory and joy on the living-room floor. Nothing could ever undo what Dennis had done to her, but at least she had lived long enough to see him get what he deserved. “Oh, Vijay,” she purred at last. “That’s just too perfect.”

  “I thought you might enjoy that bit of news. What goes around comes around, and I’m afraid that Dennis has a whole lot of stuff coming around right now.”

  “I hope you didn’t lose anything in the process?”

  “No, we were under no illusions where Dennis was concerned. Shortly after you left town we divested ourselves of our investment in your company. We sold our shares to a hedge fund and actually made a small profit on the sale, though I don’t feel great about that right now. We sold assets that we knew to be damaged, and that’s not the sort of thing I want to become known for. I’ll have to send them some business to make sure there are no lasting hard feelings. But what was this idea you were talking about?”

  So deeply was Sarah enjoying the image of Dennis behind bars that for a moment she didn’t know what Vijay was referring to, then it came back to her in a rush. “I should ask you to sign an NDA,” she began.

  “So why not fax me one?”

  She sighed. “Partly because I don’t have a fax machine, and partly because I just want to trust you. When I first came out here, I thought the lesson I had learned – the lesson that Dennis had taught me – was that I should trust no one. I should live my life as if everyone is a potential thief, and build walls around myself and everything that’s important to me to keep the bad people out. But now I think the real lesson is something different.”

  There was a pause while he waited for her to continue. “And what is that lesson?” he asked somewhat impatiently.

  “The real lesson is that there are more important things than succeeding at business. Like family. Like friends. Like the trust I feel in you. So I’m going to tell you my idea, and I’m not going to try to stop you from stealing it, because I like that I feel I can trust you and I don’t want to stop feeling that way. Even if I’m making a mistake, it’s the sort of mistake I want to make.”

  Vijay chuckled. “I think I understood that. I’m about 90% sure that I understand. But anyway, yes – you can trust me. You have good ideas, Sarah, but your brilliance is in the details, and if I were to steal your idea I would never see the wonderful things you would build on top of it. So please, keep me in suspense no longer. Tell me of your plan.”

  Sarah felt a surge of warmth, born of the affection she felt for her friend and mentor Vijay, of her pleasure at the compliment he had paid her, and at the excitement of finally sharing the idea that had been filling her head with someone else. This was a moment she had been building towards for a very long time, and she intended to savor it.

  “You’re familiar, I assume, with the situation of the newspaper industry?” she began.

  Vijay snorted. “I’m familiar with the fact that we soon will be speaking of the newspaper industry in the past tense.”

  “Yes, exactly so. The industry is on the decline, because the major players poured a ton of money into pointless mergers and acquisitions that built up mountains of debt but brought no value to shareholders, and because the Internet killed classified ad revenues, and because it makes no sense to deliver news printed on paper once a day to people who can read up on breaking stories throughout the world on their computers, tablets, and mobile phones.”

  “That sounds about right,” he said. “Though you left out the part about newspaper publishers being arrogant, entitled bastards who fiddled while Rome burned.”

  “Yes, true enough. But what occurs to me is that the least important thing about newspapers is the news. The need they fill – and it’s something I see as particularly true for small towns like the one I’ve been staying in– is it helps sustain the community. It contributes to a shared body of knowledge and gives people something to talk about. When everyone is reading blogs or surfing websites or watching Fox News or MSNBC, we live in siloes. If our neighbor happens to watch a different channel, we may have nothing to say to that person.”

  “That’s probably true, but what’s your point?”

  “My point is, where there’s a need there’s a market. When the traditional newspaper folds, something will come along to take its place – and whoever claims that position will have unparalleled market reach.”

  Vijay paused. “And I assume you have a proposal for a product that will claim that position?”

  Sarah smiled. “I do. I have a business plan here that I’d love to get your thoughts on. And, if you think it has promise, I’d like to give you first opportunity to invest in it.”

  Vijay laughed. “That’s my Sarah! Send me your plan, but I already know that I’m going to like it. We’re going to have so much fun!”

  28

  By the time Ellie arrived on her doorstep, Sarah had gone three days without changing her clothes. Vijay’s input had been invaluable; where Sarah saw only opportunity, he saw a mix of risk and reward that, while a little disheartening, also made it very clear what Sarah needed to work out before her big idea could become an actual business.

  Her mind and body were telling her to take a break. If she had been in San Francisco, she might have followed through on that impulse. She might have walked down the street to the Starbuck’s on the corner, and maybe she would have sipped her latte while flipping through the New York Times. Most likely she would have lost a day or two, not a lot in the grand scheme of things but still not ideal now that little aside from momentum, caffeine, and adrenaline were keeping her moving towards the target. Tall Pines had an unexpected advantage, she realized: now that Brad was no longer a part of her daily life, the small town had very little to distract her. Instead of taking a break, she decided to work even harder.

  Somewhere along the way she had forgotten about Ellie and her sister’s plans to visit, even though it was preparation for that visit that had led to her breakup with Brad. Somewhere the memory of the fact that her sister would soon be on her doorstep must have been in Sarah’s mind, but perhaps it was too much for her to deal with on top of everything else. And so it was with some shock that she stumbled to the door in her soft cotton pajama bottoms and a white tee-shirt to find Ellie standing expectantly with a suitcase on the other side.

  For a moment they both stared at the other in silent surprise. “Oh!” Sarah said, just as Ellie burst out with, “You forgot about me!”

  “I did not,” Sarah offered lamely, fully aware of how transparent her lie was. She hadn’t brushed her hair in days, and there were cracker crumbs cascading down her tee-shirt to collect in the lap of her pajamas.

  Ellie shook her head and shouldered past her into the cabin. “You forgot about me, and you
look like hell, which means something’s gone wrong.” She wheeled her bag into the living room, and then turned back to Sarah with her hands on her hips. “And you’re going to tell me what happened, right now!”

  Sarah looked at her sister in some dismay, then closed the door and followed her inside. She had been deep inside her head while she was working, and it didn’t occur to her to wonder what she must look like. Now she was nearly cringing in embarrassment. “I … we … yeah, a lot of stuff has happened,” she finished at last.

  Ellie took off her coat and tossed it on the couch. “Well, I’m here for three days at least, so we have plenty of time. Tell me.”

  And tell her Sarah did, at length and in detail, with a number of her statements punctuated with tears. The two of them huddled together on the couch, where Ellie could hug her or hand her a tissue before hugging her again.

  “The worst of it is I feel so stupid now.”

  “Why would you feel stupid?” Ellie asked. “He’s the lying bastard.”

  “But that’s the thing. He didn’t lie to me. He did exactly what he said he was going to do. But I guess that part of me was assuming – or at least hoping – that he wouldn’t go through with it, that he wouldn’t actually leave me. And then he did, and I got all angry and sad, and now I feel like a fool.”