“Doing what?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it yet.”
But I want to. There’s not a lot going on in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. It’s not Corporate America. It’s rural New England, only sparsely populated, mainly by artists, skiers, mountain bicycling enthusiasts, ex-hippies, farmers, and retirees.
“I could open a coffee shop,” I say, brainstorming.
“What?”
“A coffee shop. B&C’s is closed, and Cortland needs a good coffee shop.”
“Maybe B&C’s closed because Cortland can’t support a good coffee shop.”
“Maybe it just didn’t have good management.”
“It’s a ridiculous business idea.”
“What’s so ridiculous about it? Is Starbucks a ridiculous business?”
“So you want to open a Starbucks?”
“No, I—”
“You want to compete with Starbucks?”
“No.”
“You want to be the Juan Valdez of Cortland County?”
“Not funny.”
“None of this is funny, Sarah. I love Vermont, too, but we’re too young and ambitious to live there full-time. It’s a place to vacation. Our life is here. Our jobs are here.”
I don’t see why they have to be.
“You know, we might both be out of a job here soon. I don’t see why we can’t at least look up in Vermont.”
“Again, doing what? You want to run human resources at Mary’s Maple Syrup Company?”
“No.”
“You want me to sell lift tickets at the mountain?”
“No. I don’t know what’s there.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“You don’t know that. We haven’t looked.”
“So you want to turn down your job at Berkley and look for a job in Vermont?”
“Yes.”
“This is a completely crazy conversation.”
“Maybe.”
“No, it is.”
“Okay, so we’re having a crazy conversation.”
Bob, a natural risk taker with a brilliant business mind and entrepreneurial spirit, should be open to this kind of discussion. He should also know that some of the world’s best ideas, biggest innovations, and most successful businesses were first resisted and perceived as crazy. He’s stopped raking his face, and his temples are no longer twitching. He’s looking at me like he doesn’t know who I am. His eyes are lonely and scared.
“I’m sorry, Sarah. I don’t want to have this conversation. And I don’t want to pressure you. I know you’re still going through a lot, but I don’t think you should pass up this opportunity. If you wait, they’ll have to find someone else, and they might not offer this to you again. This is your way back. We need you to go back to Berkley.”
His last sentence feels more like an order than an appeal. But just like he couldn’t order me back onto skis, he can’t order me back to work. My stubborn independence has always been a brick wall that Bob’s wanted to kick down. All these years later, it amuses me that he still tries. As much as he’d like to be at times, like now, he’s never been the boss of me. For better or worse, we’ve enjoyed a marriage of equal partnership. It’s usually a positive asset, something we’re both proud of, but sometimes it’s admittedly difficult having two captains of the same ship, with two sets of hands on the wheel. When Bob wants to steer left, and I want to go right, one of us has to compromise else we risk hitting the rocks dead ahead of us and sinking.
“I know you’re afraid. I’d be afraid, too. But you’re brave. Look at what you’re capable of facing and conquering. I’m so proud of you. If you can call up the strength and courage to do battle with your Neglect every day, then I know you have the strength and courage to go back to work. I know it’s scary, but I believe in you. They believe in you. You can do this. You’re ready.”
The thought of going back to Berkley now is scary. But it’s not scary like snowboarding for the first time, trying to walk without a cane, or Martha in a miserable mood. And it’s not the reason I don’t want to go back. Ever since business school, I’ve had my head down, barreling a thousand miles an hour, wearing the flesh of each day down to the bone, pointed down one road toward a single goal. A successful life. And not just run-of-the-mill success. The kind of success that my fellow elite classmates would envy, the kind that my professors would cart out to future students as a shining example of achievement, the kind that even the exceptionally prosperous citizens of Welmont would aspire to, the kind that Bob would be proud of. The kind of visibly successful life that would in every way be the exact opposite of the broken, shameful life of my childhood.
And then I crashed my car. For the first time in almost a decade, I stopped barreling a thousand miles an hour down that road. Everything stopped. And although much of the stillness of the past four months has been a painful and terrifying experience, it has given me a chance to lift my head up and have a look around.
And I’m starting to wonder. What else is there? Maybe success can be something else, and maybe there’s another way to get there. Maybe there’s a different road for me with a more reasonable speed limit. Whether it’s because I can’t, I’m too afraid, something inside me has changed and wants something different, or a complex blend of all three, I can’t say, but I don’t want to go back to Berkley. I don’t want to go back to that life. The same intuition that led me to Mike Green and snowboarding is leading me somewhere else. And I trust it.
“I’m not going back to Berkley.”
CHAPTER 33
It’s early Saturday morning, before the black-backed woodpeckers have started playing percussion on the maples and pines and before the lifts open at the mountain. Linus has just hopped down off my lap and is now lying on the floor with a truck in one hand, Bunny in the other, sucking on his nukie, still in pajamas, watching a Sesame Street video with the volume barely on. Charlie and Lucy are, for the moment, playing quietly in their rooms. My mother and I are sitting on the couch in front of a gently crackling fire, enjoying this peaceful entry into the day. Bob stayed in Welmont, said he had too much work to do this weekend, but I suspect he’s still mad at me and doesn’t want to contribute one feel-good moment to my “cockamamie idea” of living here. I breathe in the smell of my latte before taking another hot sip. Mmm. I’d say he’s missing one right now.
I’m ostensibly doing a word search puzzle, but I’m mostly savoring my coffee, relaxing in front of the fire, and observing my mother. She’s knitting a bright red shawl, completely focused on her needles, every so often naming the order of the stitches under her breath. She stops to massage her shoulder.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I think my arm’s sore from holding Linus so much.”
She’s squeezing her upper left arm. I’m pretty sure she usually holds Linus with her right.
“Maybe you’re tensing your shoulders while you’re knitting,” I suggest, even though her posture doesn’t look tensed.
“I think it’s Linus.”
She rubs her arm, shoulder to elbow, a few more times and then resumes knitting. The shawl cascades down from her needles across her lap and onto the couch like a blanket. It appears to be almost done, and I imagine that it’ll look pretty on her, complementing her silver hair, her black-rimmed glasses, and the red lipstick she loves to wear.
“You must miss your Red Hat friends,” I say.
“I do,” she says without looking up or interrupting her clicking needles. “But I talk to them all the time.”
“You do?”
I never see her on the phone.
“We Skype.”
“You Skype ?”
“Uh-huh.”
This is the woman who missed the advent of the microwave, the VCR, and the television remote control, all of which still befuddle her. She doesn’t own her own cell phone or a laptop, and she doesn’t have a GPS navigation system for her car. But she skypes?
“How do y
ou even know what Skype is?” I ask.
“I saw it on Oprah.”
I should’ve known. My mother’s three sources of all information come from Oprah, Ellen, and People magazine. The academic snob in me wants to belittle her, but I have to give her credit. She’s come a long way in four months. She uses Bob’s GPS like a pro and drove into Boston during rush hour every day while I was at Baldwin. She eventually manages to find the correct remote control (we have five) and press the right combination of buttons to switch inputs from cable to VCR to Wii (even Abby found this to be confusing). She answers the cell phone Bob gave her to use while she’s with us whenever we call her. And apparently, she Skypes on our home computer.
“What about your home? You must miss being in your own house,” I say.
“I miss parts of it. I sometimes miss the quiet and my privacy. But if I were there, I’d miss the kids’ voices and their laughter and all the activity here.”
“But what about all your things? And your routine.”
“I have a routine here and plenty of things. Home is where you live. For now, I live with you, so this is home to me.”
Home is where you live. I think of that sign at the end of Storrow Drive in Boston: if you lived here, you’d be home now. I look out the windows at the natural beauty of our open land, the gray morning filling with color as the sun rises over the hills. I would love living here. And I think the kids would love it. But Bob’s right. We can’t simply move here and uproot everyone without a concrete plan for our livelihood. I envision a sign at the Vermont border: if you’re going to live here, you’re going to have to find jobs. Real jobs, I hear Bob’s voice add in my head.
“I would like to be back for summer, though. I’d miss my garden and the beaches. I love summer on the Cape,” says my mother.
“Do you think I’ll be better by summer?”
“Oh, I think you’ll be a lot better by then.”
“No, I mean, do you think I’ll be back to the way I was before this happened?”
“I don’t know, honey.”
“All the doctors seem to think that if I haven’t fully recovered by the summer, I probably won’t.”
“They don’t know everything.”
“They know more than I do.”
She checks her row.
“I bet they don’t know how to snowboard,” she says.
I smile, picturing a scared and unsteady Martha strapped to a board on Fox Run, falling hard onto her bottom every few inches.
“Nothing’s impossible,” she says.
The doctors and therapists would’ve probably also told me that I couldn’t snowboard yet, that it wouldn’t be possible. And yet, I’m doing it. Nothing’s impossible. I sit still and absorb my mother’s words until I feel like they’ve penetrated the deepest part of me where they can’t be shaken loose. My mother clicks her needles, keeping focused on the construction of her shawl, so she doesn’t notice me watching her, loving her simple yet beautiful words of wisdom, proud of her for doing whatever has been asked of her to be here, grateful that she came at all and then stayed to help me even when I told her not so nicely to go home. Thank God she ignored me.
I reach over and squeeze her socked foot.
“What?” she asks, looking up from her stitch.
“Nothing,” I say.
She returns to her shawl. I sip my coffee and watch the fire, enjoying another feel-good moment. I’m home with my mother.
CHAPTER 34
A classic winter nor’easter socked all of New England on St. Patrick’s Day, and while the foot of snow in Welmont for everyone over the age of eighteen was mostly an endured nuisance—school cancelations, flight delays, slow and sloppy roads, traffic accidents—the twenty-plus inches of snow here in Cortland was welcomed by everyone as a fluffy white blessing from heaven. The conditions on the mountain on this sunny, windless Saturday couldn’t be better.
I’ve been making all kinds of exciting progress on my snow-board. Last weekend, Mike removed my rider bar, and in its place I now use only a single pole in my right hand. The pole has a small, barely noticeable ski attached to the bottom, which gives me the security of additional stability and contact with the hill, much like an outrigger does for a canoe or my granny cane does for walking. But my outrigger pole is significantly cooler than my granny cane. There’s nothing grandmotherly about it.
I’m also tethered to Mike, who now snowboards behind me, by a cord that runs through a loop at the toe of my board to Mike’s hands. He must look like Santa Claus holding the reins to his reindeer, which would make me Dasher or Dancer or Rudolph, but I don’t really care what we look like to anyone else. From where I’m standing, I see a normal snowboard and a gorgeous trail of fresh packed powder. From his position behind me, he keeps my speed in check with the reins and calls out encouragement, reminders about technique, and warnings about anything happening on our left. He says that I might want to keep the pole, but by the end of the season, I should be able to snowboard alone, which is both thrilling and almost unbelievable to imagine. But for now, I still don’t notice icy patches, turns in the trail, or other skiers and snowboarders to my left unless Mike points them out (and sometimes even then I don’t), so I know I’m not ready to give up believing in this Santa just yet.
We’ve advanced past Rabbit Lane to my favorite intermediate trails, and I’m beyond happy to be off the Magic Carpet lift and the beginner hill and onto the real mountain. Right now, we’re in the middle of Fox Run. I’ve got my eyes and ears open for Charlie. Every so often I see him on his board, delighted to see me, then even more delighted to shred on by. He makes snowboarding look effortless. I don’t know what I look like doing this, but I’m guessing that the extraordinary effort and concentration I’m exerting shows. But again, I don’t care what I look like. I may not look like a cool snowboarder, but I feel like one.
Even though the conditions are pristine, I’m enjoying Charlie’s flybys, I have complete faith in Mike to keep me safe, and I feel like Shaun White, I’m not experiencing the pure visceral joy and tranquil hush I typically experience when I’m on the mountain. I’m concentrating on my technique and the feel of the board on the hill with extreme focus, but a small part of my focus is listening to a dramatic monologue running in my head, thoroughly captivated by the performance.
What if Bob is right? What if Berkley was the only way back? What if I’m giving up on my only chance at returning to a real life? Maybe living in Vermont is a crazy idea.
I sit back onto my heels and turn right. But I’m a little too far back on my heels when my edge catches, and I wash out, slamming down hard onto my bottom. Mike stops beside me and helps me up.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, even though I know both my tailbone and ego are bruised.
I point the toe end of my board down the mountain, and we’re sliding again.
What would Bob and I do up here? I don’t want to open a coffee shop, sell lift tickets, or open an art gallery (my mother’s idea). Maybe there isn’t anything here for us. Would living here mean abandoning our expensive and hard-earned educations, everything we’ve wanted to achieve and contribute in the world, everything we’ve dreamed about?
“Hey, Goofy!”
It’s Charlie. He calls me Goofy because I lead with my right foot on the board, which is called Goofy-footed. He thinks this is a riot. I think the nickname fits me perfectly. He doesn’t slow down this time, and I see only the back of his orange coat as he bombs past us. I smile.
“Show-off!”
Maybe I’m just disabled and scared and trying to drag Bob down with me. Maybe I’m trying to run away and hide. Maybe I’m crazy.
Am I crazy?
My board is aimed directly downhill, and I’m already going as fast as I feel comfortable going when the slope abruptly dips, and I accelerate. My heart jumps, and every muscle in my body tightens. Mike senses my panic and pulls back hard on the tether, and instead of tumbling into a pain
ful fall, I ease into a gentle stop.
“Everything okay?” Mike calls from behind me.
“Yup. Thank you.”
I wish he could similarly pull back on the reins of my out-of-control thoughts. We continue down the hill again.
I don’t want to go back to Berkley. There has to be another choice. Another dream for my life. I know it like I know snow is white. But what? Where? Can we have a full and successful life here? It feels impossible.
I shift my weight up onto my toes. To my own amazement, I don’t freeze up, and I don’t fall. I realign my weight over my hips and continue downhill. I just made a clean left turn.
Nothing’s impossible.
Maybe, but do I trust my intuition or Bob? Do I return to my old life or start a new one? Am I crazy to think that I could even go back to my old life? Am I crazy to want something else? I don’t know what to do. I need some sort of sign.
God, please give me a sign.
We finish our last run of the afternoon, my mind still un-spooling doubt and worry without offering any answers, leaving the whole tangled, messy, heaping pile on the floor somewhere just behind my eyes, giving me a headache. For the first time since I began snowboarding, I’m glad to be done for the day. Mike and I make our way back to the NEHSA building where I can return my equipment and retrieve my granny cane.
I sit on the wooden bench and remove my helmet. I find my boots and my cane.
“You felt a little tentative today,” says Mike.
“Yeah.”
“That’s okay. Some days you’ll feel braver than others. Just like anyone, right?”
“Right.”
“And some days you’ll see big improvements, and others you won’t.”
I nod.
“Don’t get discouraged, okay? You coming tomorrow?”
“First thing in the morning.”
“Good girl! Oh, I have that packet of literature for your friend. It’s on my desk. Can you wait here a minute?” asks Mike.
“Sure.”
I offered to pass along information about NEHSA to Heidi so she can let her patients know about it. I don’t have any scientific or clinical data to back this up, but I think snowboarding is the most effective rehabilitative tool I’ve experienced. It forces me to focus on my abilities and not my disability, to overcome huge obstacles, both physical and psychological, to stay up on that board and get down the mountain in one piece. And each time I get down the mountain in one piece, I gain a real confidence and sense of independence I haven’t felt anywhere else since the accident, a sense of true well-being that stays with me well beyond the weekend. And whether snow-boarding with NEHSA has a measurable and lasting therapeutic effect for people like me or not, it’s a lot more fun than drawing cats and picking red balls up off a tray.