Cabin Fever (10 page)

He was quietly nodding to himself, as if weighing her words and finding them to be just right. “Thank you,” he finally said. “You’re right, and I needed to hear that. It’s been a long time since I wasn’t one of the best at what I do. Coaching is a new thing, and I’ll have to learn how to do it. That makes me a little nervous, but you’re right – there’s no reason in the world I shouldn’t be really good at it. I was right to trust you, Sarah. Maybe you’ll make my dreams come true after all.”

Sarah was glad that it was dark inside the bar, because otherwise he would have seen her blush scarlet. Praise usually meant next to nothing to her, but coming from this man who she had just met, it seemed to mean a great deal. “Careful, girl,” she told herself. “You and he are only passing through this town. This may be the last time you ever see him, so don’t go getting any ideas.”

They continued to chat about this and that for a while longer, but Sarah didn’t even pretend to copy it down for the article. She had what she needed, now it was simply a matter of sitting at the keyboard and staring at a blank page until the ideas in her head were translated into words. But still she didn’t want the conversation to end. It was nice to talk to someone like her who was from out of town and used to a different rhythm of life than the one in Tall Pines. They were not exactly similar people, Brad and her, but she felt like they understood each other in a way that Sarah would never truly understand Duane, and vice versa. It was nice, and the more she talked with Brad the more comfortable she felt talking with him. By the end they were joking and laughing as if they were old friends, and Sarah actually found herself feeling a little disappointed when it was time to say goodnight.

“Well,” she said at the door, feeling suddenly awkward. “This was nice. Thanks for meeting with me.”

“It was,” Brad said, towering a full head’s height over her. Sarah found herself pondering the subject of his shoulders, and how high she’d have to reach up to place her hands around his neck. “Be nice to me,” he added. “In the newspaper article.”

“Oh, I will. Don’t worry. I’m nice to almost everyone.”

He smiled. “Good to hear. When do you think I can see it?”

“It should take two or three days for it to show up in the paper. Unless you want to see an advance draft?”

“No. I trust you.” Suddenly he reached out and drew her into a hug. “Goodnight, Sarah,” he said, and then turned and walked into the night.

Sarah stood and watched him go. She was surprised – she would not have taken him for a hugger, but there it was: he had hugged her. He had hugged her with very strong arms, and pulled her against a broad, strong chest. Sarah walked slowly back to her cabin, thinking about how it had felt to be in his arms.

12

Spectacular was not the word for the vista that stretched in front of Sarah from her perch under the shelter of a pine tree. The river was below her, stretching from right to left, and in the distance she could see an old metal bridge that looked much more scenic now, from above, than it had when she drove across it 30 minutes before. The forest hugged the river’s shore, growing right up to the water’s edge, and though the majority of the trees were the deep-green pines, Sarah could see a few patches of lighter green where deciduous trees poked through the canopy. On either side of the river gentle hills reached up to form a valley carved by the water over unimaginable periods of time, and in the distance lay blue mountains that even now were capped with snow, despite the summer’s heat. It had been some time since Sarah had hiked here, leaving her car in the parking area at the base of the trail, and since arriving she had done nothing but stare.
 

She knew what a forest looked like, of course – she wasn’t that much of a city girl. She had even been in the forest on more than one occasion, on the camping trips that her parents took their reluctant daughters on. Sarah could have painted a forest from memory, and it might not have been a bad likeness, but still there was something missing from her memory, something that she struggled to put her finger on now. It was something about how the whole place seemed so … alive.

It was ALL alive, every part of it. The trees glowed with life, and Sarah could hear the calls of birds and the buzzing of insects from every direction around her. If she listened she could hear the rustling of small animals, and she had no doubt that there were scary-big animals out there, too, if she knew where to look for them. As the wind blew through the branches, Sarah heard a sighing sound that sounded like the whole world breathing.
 

San Francisco was home. San Francisco was beautiful, and exciting, and everything she wanted in a city. San Francisco even offered spectacular views of natural beauty, but it had nothing that could rival this. This, this was something that she had no name for. This was something primal, meaningful, and true, and although Sarah drank in as much as she could hold, she knew that she could not capture it; as soon as she turned her back she would begin to forget it.

With some irritation she looked over at her bag, where she could see her laptop sticking up out of her canvas shoulder bag. The interview with Brad was almost complete, about 80% written, and this morning she had conceived of the notion of making a pleasant afternoon of it by finishing the article under the shelter of a tree out in the countryside. Only now that she was here, the countryside was making her want to forget all about the work still left to do.

She sighed and pulled her knees up against her chest, wrapping her arms around them and gazing out again to the magnificent view. Life could seem awfully simple in moments like this, she thought. When you’re looking out at eternity, the details of your life seem so small and manageable. She would go back to San Francisco and get a job with some up-and-coming startup: business development, or marketing. Or she’d go back and form another company, and this time she’d do it right. Or maybe she’d stay out here in Tall Pines and live a life in which there was always plenty of time to drive out to the forest and contemplate the meaning of life. All these plans seemed possible; all of them seemed completely reasonable. If only this afternoon could last forever. If only she could stop the sun in the sky so that this afternoon, with its gentle warmth and the easy buzz of the insects filling the air, would last forever and she would never need to step out from under the branches of this tree.

It was a fantasy, of course. She knew that all too well. This section of forest that she saw before her was merely a remnant of a much bigger forest that once had stood here. Off in the distance she could see the sun glinting off a set of rooftops, and further out was a section of lighter green where the trees had been cleared to make room for what – farmland maybe? The trees looked at once eternal and very, very fragile. “If I ever have a daughter,” Sarah mused to herself, “and someday she comes to sit beneath this same tree, what will she see before her? Will there be any trees left? Will the river even still run in its course? Maybe the whole thing will be a parking lot for some massive Wal-Mart nestled between the mountains.”

She thought of Duane. He was like the forest, in a way – his way of life was disappearing as well. Modernity took no prisoners; the sweep of change was so forceful that it could and would obliterate anything in its path. Sometimes that was good, and sometimes it wasn’t. For the first time in a long time – possibly forever – Sarah found herself thinking objectively about her life in San Francisco, both the good parts and the bad. She liked the excitement. She liked the pace of change. She liked the experience of being her own boss, and living in a community that celebrated the spirit that led a person to commit the somewhat insane act of starting up their own business. That was all good, and there had been plenty of good in the last few years.

There was bad, though, too, and Sarah knew that she hadn’t always been honest with herself on that point. It was bad that she had been so consumed with work that she barely had time for family, let alone friends or dating. It was bad that the startup scene put such an emphasis on success that it discarded failures and never thought of them again – some of those “failures” were good people who simply had bad luck or bad timing, and yet Sarah had been among the crowd of those who were ready to write them off if the market didn’t happen to break their way. It was bad, too, that the community focused on change as a good in itself. Change could be good, but it could also be bad, and the less time you spent thinking about what’s required for a change to be good, the less chance you had of actually achieving it.
 

Sarah had loved her life in San Francisco before it all came crashing down around her, and she was pretty sure that she could love that life again. She just wasn’t sure that she wanted to, or that it would be the best for her in the end.
 

What struck her as meaningful, though, was that her mind was beginning to turn towards the future. She was no longer rehashing the mistakes she made and mentally murdering the man who had stolen everything that she had worked so hard to build. The anger was still there, just as hot as ever if she chose to bask in it, but it was no longer what dominated her mind when she thought back to her life in San Francisco. Now she was starting to look at the city as the locus of new possibility, the place where she might take the first few steps of the next stage of her life. For the first time she was beginning to move forward.

With that thought she reached out, grabbed the laptop, and opened it on the ground in front of her crossed legs. Something had made her procrastinate about finishing the interview, but now she felt a new urgency to close the books on open projects so that she could start working on the next big thing. For the first time in weeks, Sarah was beginning to feel excited.

13

Sarah was opening the door in the gathering gloom when she felt the phone buzz in her pocket. She could easily have missed the call, since she had forgotten that she set the iPhone to mute – she didn’t want any electronic chimes disturbing the birdsong that surrounded her on that hillside. Even now she thought for a moment or two about letting the call go to voicemail – it was late, she was hungry, and she was pretty sure that there wasn’t enough food in the refrigerator to make a decent dinner. She needed to figure out what she was going to eat, not get pulled into a conversation, but eventually she sighed and pulled the phone from her jeans pocket.
 

Thumbing the phone open without looking at the caller ID, she offered a tired-sounding “Hello?”

“That didn’t sound too good. Is this a bad time?”
 

It took her a while to place the voice. “Brad?” she finally asked.

“Yep. I can call back later.”

“No, this is an OK time,” she said, closing the door with her foot and standing inside the dark cabin; with her phone in one hand and her bag in the other, she had no hands free to turn on the lights. “What’s up?”

“Well, I was thinking that I needed some air, and my Dad and I could definitely use some time apart, and I was wondering whether you’d like to meet me for a drink?”

“A drink? As in…?” Her mouth kept trying to form the phrase, “a date,” but something kept her from saying the words out loud. The big, tall, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered, curly-haired man she talked to yesterday wasn’t calling her back for a date. Right? He couldn’t be.
 

“As in a drink,” he finished for her. “Back at Jimmy’s? I could meet you there, or I could come over to your place and pick you up.”

“No!” Sarah burst out with much more feeling and volume than she had intended. Dropping her bag she ran her hand through her hair, trying to settle her thoughts. “No, you don’t need to pick me up,” she added. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll be happy to meet you there. At Jimmy’s. For a drink. What time?”

He chuckled in what Sarah could only hope was gentle amusement rather than dismay. “How about eight o’clock?”

“Eight o’clock. Right. I’ll be there.”

“OK.”

“All right, then.”

“Uh, yeah. Either one of us will need to say ‘goodbye,’ or else this conversation will continue until our phones run out of juice or we lose consciousness, whichever comes first.”

“Right,” she said, smiling to herself. “I’ll go first: goodbye, Brad.”

“Bye. See you soon.” He hung up.

Sarah remained standing in the dark for quite some time, wondering what had just happened. If she was not mistaken – and she still was not certain that she was not, in fact, completely deluded about the situation – she had just been asked out on a date by a professional athlete. And sure, he was a former professional athlete, and yes, they were in Tall Pines where the pickings were slim, or at least less robust than they would be in a larger city. But still, it would seem that she had just been asked out on a date by a tall, beautiful man, and Sarah was not the sort of woman that this sort of thing happened to. Ellie, sure. Ellie was always in high demand among the sporty men, in high school and later. Sarah, though, was more likely to draw the attention of the president of the Math Club.

A small voice in the back of her head noted that she should probably be worrying about her hair, clothes, and makeup right now. Everything in the situation seemed so unreal, though, that she still hadn’t bothered to turn on the light. She felt quite certain that any moment now the alarm at her bedside would go off and wake her from this dream, or a bunch of people would jump out of the closet and shout, “April Fool!”
 

Only it wasn’t April, and she wasn’t asleep, and it was past 7:00 already so she had to find something to eat otherwise she’d be drinking on an empty stomach. With that the rational, planning portion of Sarah’s mind took over and got her body into motion. Without really thinking about it, she decided that she wasn’t going to dress up for the occasion. He wasn’t really interested in her, so she wasn’t going to waste the lipstick on him. She would maybe brush her teeth before heading out, and she’d brush her hair because there seemed to be two or three burrs tangled up in the blonde strands, souvenirs from the forest this afternoon. She would check her breath and make sure that her armpits didn’t smell too bad, but that was it – that was all Brad was getting from her that night.