Cabin Fever (2 page)

In the end there was a shockingly small number of items to take with her. In a way Sarah felt that this was an indictment of her life. Her business had been everything to her, so important that she couldn’t even remember the last time she went on a date, but she hadn’t ever taken the time to decorate her own office. Somehow that seemed wrong, but there were too many failures in Sarah’s day already for her to accept one more. She grabbed her few possessions and marched out of the office as quickly as possible. The last thing she needed right now was sympathy from her former employees, or what would be worse – having to tell them what happened.
 

Walking down the sidewalk, something like anger returned and filled Sarah with a new sense of purpose. Fishing her iPhone out of her pocket, her thumb followed a familiar path to Ellie’s number.

“Hello?” her sister answered.

“Coffee. Now. You know the place,” Sarah answered, and hung up. Suddenly she felt the need for massive amounts of caffeine.

2

Whenever Sarah entered a Starbucks, she felt like she was in her natural element. She knew that the coffee was often better at the other coffee shops, and she was aware that many people would look down on her allegiance to a massive corporate entity, but there was something about the ambience of Starbucks that just felt right to her. Especially this one, which was done up with a subtle blend of earth tones – browns melding into greens – and was softly lit with tasteful fixtures hanging from the ceiling. Sometimes in midday it could be hard to find a table in this place, what with all the freelancers parking out on the tables and pretending to work, but today Sarah was in luck. She slung her sweater over the back of a seat at a two-person table and went to the counter to order her customary latte.

It wasn’t long before Ellie breezed in, and Sarah was sure that there was an audible hush as every male eye in the room swiveled to drink her sister in. Ellie wasn’t particularly dressed up today, but she still looked perfect, with her makeup just so and her hair pulled back so that the bangs draped artfully over her eyebrows. When Sarah was younger it had been hard to have Ellie as a sister: Ellie, who so effortlessly overshadowed her older sister without even trying; Ellie, who had the perfect oval face that made Sarah hate her just a little bit when she looked at her own more angular face in the mirror; Ellie, who Sarah secretly suspected her boyfriends of lusting after, even though none of them had ever admitted it. Now, though, Sarah would not know even how to begin navigating through life without her little sister’s support. Ellie didn’t always have the best advice to offer, but she was endlessly patient when Sarah needed to talk something through, she believed in her sister more than Sarah believed in herself, and she had never once let her down.

“Hey sis, looking good,” Ellie said with the smile that made her eyes crinkle in a way that, Sarah knew from long experience, made men’s knees buckle. “I like you in that skirt. It shows off your legs,” she added with a mischievous lift of her eyebrow.

“Yeah, well that’s good. I could use a sugar daddy right now. Do you know anyone?” Sarah replied sardonically.

Ellie’s expression shifted as she became aware that something was up. “Why, what happened?”

“I trusted the wrong man and he screwed me,” Sarah said into her latte. “Well, he screwed me metaphorically, but he may as well have screwed me literally as well. That wouldn’t have been any more humiliating.”

“Sarah, look at me and tell me what happened. From the beginning.” Ellie spoke in a tone of command that might have seemed comical if it wasn’t so effective.
 

She’d recently picked up that skill in the lecture hall. Sarah still had a hard time believing that her little sister was an assistant professor at UC San Francisco. Ellie had never really been all that interested in classes when she was growing up. She was very interested in boys, though, and later her interest shifted to men, and as it turned out the man who interested her the most was a professor of English literature.
 

Under his guidance, Ellie had gone to graduate school, first for her master’s and then, to everyone’s open-mouthed astonishment, she had continued on to study for a Ph.D. Sarah had long suspected that the professor had been Ellie’s lover as well as her mentor, but she couldn’t deny that he had been a force for good in her sister’s life. Now Ellie was on the faculty at a major university, was beloved by her students, and the university was talking about granting her tenure. Even after having been there every step along the way, Sarah could hardly believe what a charmed life Ellie seemed to lead.

“I don’t know where to start,” Sarah grumbled before they were mercifully interrupted by Ben the barista. As far as Sarah could tell, no one got table service at this coffee shop except for Ellie. Ben made no secret of the fact that he had a crush on her little sister, and Ellie had no problem with sweetly taking full advantage of that situation. “Hi, Ben,” she said in a lilting voice, and gave him a smile that Sarah knew he would be drafting off of for days to come. “Could you get me a tall Americano? That would be just the thing.”
 

“Of course,” Ben said, jotting down the order, and stood with the hope of talking a little further with her. He was not a bad-looking man, tall and with strong biceps that bulged out of his short-sleeved shirt, but Sarah knew that he had no shot with Ellie. First, because he worked in a coffee shop, and second, because in some sort of hipster attempt at ironic fashion he wore dress shoes with a brown tee shirt. Ellie didn’t always have the highest standards with the men in her life, but she had very strong opinions about shoes, and running afoul of those rules was the sort of thing that she had trouble forgiving. The number of men who were always clamoring for her attention gave her little incentive to forgive.

After an awkward pause by which Ellie communicated, in effect, “The coffee order is all you’re getting from me today,” Ben drifted away, leaving the two of them to get back to their conversation. By then Sarah had collected her thoughts. “Dennis – do you remember Dennis? Short, paunchy, hair thinning on top? Dennis cheated me. I thought he was filing for patents on behalf of the business, but instead he was filing them on behalf of himself, and today I got thrown out of my own company.”

Ellie stared at her. “What? That’s not possible. How is that possible?”

“I don’t know, but that’s what happened. I woke up, brushed my teeth, came into work, and got thrown out of the business that I founded. That was my day. How was yours?”

“That bastard!” Ellie spat. “I never liked him. He was creepy. He was like some sort of nasty little insect in a bad suit. I could never even tell if he was gay or straight.”

Sarah shrugged. “I always thought of him as mostly sexless. He never spoke of a girlfriend or boyfriend – or friends of any sort. It seemed like work was his entire life. He was always there in the morning when I came in, and he would still be there when I left.” She shook her head in chagrin. “And now I guess I know what he was doing when no one else was in the office. He was always so helpful. Whenever there was something I didn’t want to do – because it was tedious or because I was busy with something else – I could always count on Dennis to do it. I thought it was great that he made everything so much easier. That was a huge mistake – it’s not supposed to be easy! I can’t believe I could be so foolish.”

“Oh, Sarah,” Ellie said. Her sister, who always knew what to say, seemed to be at a loss for words. “What are you going to do? What did Vijay say?”

“Vijay’s first responsibility is to the investors that he brought into the company. He has to protect the money they invested, and his judgment is that the best way to do that is to give Dennis everything he wants. As much as I hate to say it, I think he’s right. He has no choice. Dennis played this game perfectly, the bastard, and he won. I lost.” Putting it that way, in such final terms, made the situation feel real, solid, and final to Sarah for the first time. She could feel a shroud of depression beginning to descend on her. It’s over. It’s really, truly over. Oh my God.

“Sue him! Sue the bastard! He lied to you, and he cheated you, and now he should rot in hell – but first, sue him for every penny he’s worth.”
 

Sarah smiled sadly. “Sue him with what? I have some money salted away, but not enough to pay for lawyer’s fees during what would certainly be a long, drawn-out court battle. And, in the end, I’d probably lose. Possession is 90% of the law, and Dennis possesses the paperwork that says the patents are his, not mine. I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”

“Do you have enough money to pay for a hit man?” Ellie asked. For a moment it sounded like a serious question, but then they both laughed. If only it was that easy.

“Nah, I’ll save the money and do it myself. More fun that way, anyway.”

Ellie reached over the table and took both of her hands in hers. “What are you going to do?” she asked, looking Sarah deep in the eyes and pitching her voice low as if to say, “We’re all alone here. You can talk to me. You can tell me the truth.”

Sarah looked back at her for a long time, feeling for the second time that day as if she was on the point of tears. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Do I start looking for a job? Do I take some time off? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what do with myself, now that I don’t have a business to go to in the morning. I don’t even know who I am without that. Before, people would ask me what I did, and I’d say, ‘I’m an entrepreneur.’ I liked that. It was simple, it was succinct, and it summed up my whole life in a neat little package. I can’t answer that question anymore. What do I do, now that I no longer do what I used to do, which was the thing that I thought I’d be doing for the rest of my life? I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

Ellie gave her hands a squeeze and then brightened. “You should take a vacation! A nice, long vacation in some place that you’ve always wanted to visit but never had the time. Jamaica, maybe, or some other place with a beach. Just lie out on the sand in a sexy little bikini and let the men roll in! After a few weeks of that you’ll have trouble remembering that you ever knew some dumpy little shit called Dennis.”

Sarah had to laugh at the image, but she shook her head. “I don’t think I even own a bikini.”

“So buy one! I know you can afford that. Or you can borrow one of mine.”

“As if I’d fit into your swimsuit. You’re tiny, and I’m …”

“You’re beautiful, which I’ve been telling you ever since you were fifteen years old, but you never listen. You’ve got amazing eyes, a beautiful face, and I love what the highlights do for your hair! Besides, sometimes it’s better when you don’t quite fit into a bikini, if you catch my drift.”

That made Sarah laugh again, and suddenly it was like old times – just the two of them together and laughing and talking about boys. Ellie always made her feel better. Finally, her sister grew serious.

“Maybe this is a good thing. Actually no, forget I said that. Of course it’s not a good thing, but maybe some good can come out of it anyway. If you really don’t know what you want to do with your life, now you have all the time you’ll need to figure that out. So take the time and find what will make you happy. Maybe it’s a man – and God knows, you definitely can up your game in that department. Maybe it’s another job. Maybe it’s sailing around the world or climbing Mt. Everest. Find it, and whatever it is, do that thing.”

Sarah knew it was good advice, but she was very tired of talking about herself. She wasn’t ready to say goodbye and face the rest of the day alone with her thoughts, but she had to change the subject. “So enough about me. How about you? How are your classes?”

Ellie wrinkled her nose in disgust. “My classes are boring. Actually, no – the classes are fine, it’s the students who are boring. Arrogant little twits, all so convinced that they have life figured out at the ripe age of eighteen. I can’t stand how self-satisfied they are.”

“Sounds like a perfect description of you at that age.”

“Well, at least I was charming about it.”

Sarah laughed at that. It felt good to laugh. “Yes, your teenaged arrogance was very charming. How’s Jackson?” she asked over the rim of her coffee cup. Jackson was the man in Ellie’s life, a fellow professor at the university. Sarah had spent some time with Jackson, and she thought that he might be quite good looking if he didn’t always look like such a mess. Frankly she was surprised that Ellie put up with his personal and sartorial disorder; she could only assume that Jackson had certain other talents that only Ellie could attest to.
 

“Jackson is Jackson,” her sister replied mysteriously. “As he shall always be, I imagine.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Both, of course,” Ellie said, and then turned to the counter to wave for Ben the barista.

3

Go on an adventure, Ellie had said. Find what makes you happy and do it. It was good advice, and Sarah was still thinking about her words hours later as she drifted aimlessly through her apartment, a glass of red wine in her hand. What did she want? What would make her happy? She really didn’t know, and she wasn’t even sure that happiness was truly possible in this world. No one she knew was happy. Oh sure, some were content, and many of them were successful, but were they happy? They had challenging, complicated lives in which they could find satisfaction, but Sarah knew that few if any would describe themselves as happy. Happiness was a word that she applied to children or puppies, but it sounded naïve when applied to career women like herself.
 

She had almost talked herself out of the idea of even aiming for happiness when the phone rang. She answered, to find her father’s voice on the other end.

“Hey, kiddo, I heard what happened.” Of course he had. Sarah imagined that Ellie had called him approximately 30 seconds after they said goodbye at the Starbucks. “How are you holding up?”

“I’ve been better, Dad, but I’ll be OK. I just need some time to catch my breath and figure out what happened.”