Any Minute (26 page)

He rocked forward in the chair and stood. “The world still goes on. The trading floor is still open.” He stared at the pelting rain, as if it might give him some answer. He stood for a long time, peering down, his expression granite hard. “All we’ve lost is one employee, not the whole company.”

When his phone rang, he grabbed it like a fish he’d banked, something that might get away. He banged it against his ear and winced. “Tom Roscoe here.” Then, “Oh. Maribeth.” He turned to stare out the window again.

Sarah didn’t want to hear what Tom had to say to his wife. She whispered to Wingtip. “Can’t we go now? This isn’t something I need to be a part of.”

“Shhhh,” Annie said into her hair. Then, over Sarah’s head to their guide, who was a kind man but who kept taking them to places that were harder and harder for her to see, “Wingtip, is it necessary that she see all of this too? She’s shaking like a leaf.”

“Ah, why are you afraid, child?”

The feeling went too deep for her to put it into words for them. She was desperately trying to outrun the familiar, tormenting fright.

“There’s nothing here that actually affects you.”

“Yes there is,” Sarah pleaded. “It’s everything.”

“Don’t you see? The Father wants you to see how you
made
it everything, Sarah.”

Sarah thought she couldn’t bear it any longer. She remembered how powerless and worthless she felt most of the time. The pain of it was overwhelming. This had been the place where she knew she could prove her worth. The harder she’d worked, the more she’d found favor. Sarah was admired by peers, complimented, and promoted. The more she’d found favor, the better she’d felt about herself. She felt worthwhile when she accomplished something and was honored for it. As long as she stayed busy working and accomplishing, she felt good. But when she got quiet, when she was home attempting to be a wife and mother, the sickening feeling of shame and worthlessness returned to remind her that she should have never been born.

Panic seized Sarah’s throat. “I’m sorry I prayed any prayer, Wingtip. I’m sorry Annie prayed for me when I was a little girl. Please just let it stop.”

“It’s too late,” he said, his eyes showing how much he cared about her. “There isn’t anything I can do.”

“I don’t want anything to change. I just want to go back to the way things were. I want to go home, and I want to get back to my life.”

But there was no possibility of that at all. Things had to change, and for her to go forward she had to deal with the past.

“It’s okay,” Wingtip said, encouraging her. “Look, Sarah, no matter how difficult it is, you must be courageous. The Heavenly Father wants you to see that things aren’t always what they seem. He wants you to know the truth because the truth will make you free.”

“I’m upstairs in my office, Maribeth,” Roscoe was saying. “Would you please come up? Rona’s not answering her intercom. It’s like everyone’s taken the day off for no good reason. You’ll have to let yourself in.”

Sarah didn’t have any idea how long it took for the woman to find the elevator and ascend twenty-four luxurious floors to burst into her husband’s cherry-paneled office.

The woman blurted the words the minute she rushed in the door. “Oh, Tom. Why don’t you come home? It’s just awful.” That’s as far as Maribeth moved. She didn’t rush across the room and take her husband in her arms. She stood on her side of the office, and he stood on his, his silhouette dark against the massive clouded window that, when the weather was clear, enabled him to see out across his entire domain.

“I wish the weather would clear up,” he said, crossing his arms. “I get tired of not being able to see anything on the street down there.”

“You know how these early autumn storms are,” she reminded him. “They stall over the lake for a few days and then they blow over and it’s back to normal again.”

“What is normal?” Tom asked with a deep sigh. “Is our life normal? Is it what it should be?” What could be normal when the financial world had turned upside down and no one could guess where the end would be?

Maribeth Roscoe dressed impeccably, in a red two-piece Armani suit and a necklace of gigantic pearls. Her hair had been recently coiffed and her makeup meticulously applied. She looked like she’d spent hours in a movie studio’s wardrobe department just to look presentable to visit her husband. One could easily tell that she spent a lot of time and money making the best possible appearance.

Sarah remembered that Tom liked to say, “The way things look can make or break a deal.” He made it clear to everyone that appearances were very important to him, and Sarah remembered soberly checking herself in the hallway mirror prior to each time she entered his office after being summoned. She remembered the fear she felt that he might find something to disapprove of, and she couldn’t let that happen.

“Tom. I’m so sorry.”

“What have you got to be sorry about?”

Her voice pitched a tone higher. “Wasn’t Sarah Harper one of your best employees?”

He shook his head. “She was good, but they come and they go, Maribeth. It’s always been that way. Someone else will come along that will be even better than she was. Until someone does, I’ll take care of things myself, just like I have in the past.”

One of the last pieces of Sarah’s pride, boulderlike and pendulous, crashed loose and plummeted.

“I will have to get on top of things right away. Heaven only knows what’s happening in the trading pits this morning. I could lose my shirt in one day in this company.”

“Tom.”

“I could lose everything I’ve worked for to pass down to my sons. I cannot believe Sarah was crazy enough to try to dart across a Chicago bridge after the barricade went down. Now her stupidity has put me in a position where I’m forced to take on an even heavier workload than I already have.”

But I did that for
you,
Tom!
Sarah wanted to cry out.

Someone spoke into her heart, the voice and its gentle nudge a sense of loving knowledge that didn’t come from either Annie or Wingtip. It was a voice that went straight to the core of her heart, her heart alone.
No, you didn’t, beloved. You did it for yourself.

The dark, plush room started to spin. This was the place she’d been most exposed to the danger of failing, the place she’d carried all her pain, where she fought to succeed. She’d paid a high price for every positive word this man had ever spoken to her. She had worked hard for him; she had been loyal to the company and available whenever he needed her. She’d sacrificed everything, even time with her family, just to gain his approval—the approval every child needs, but she had never received growing up. Every raise and commendation he had bestowed upon her had gone toward filling that empty place in a child who had never understood where true love and approval came from.

A child who had never realized she had a heavenly Father she could take refuge in, who would never put her to shame. Her self-esteem needed to come from her Creator, who’d made her exactly how he wanted her to be. Anytime anyone had told her she wasn’t worth much, Jesus, the one who had gone to the cross to show her what she was worth to him, had ached the same way she’d ached. His heart hurt along with hers because she’d been told lies and didn’t know the truth. She didn’t know that she was created in God’s image and that he fashioned her in an amazing way. That she was unique, one of a kind, and precious in his sight.

Tom didn’t take so much as a breath. He groused about how frustrated he was. He complained about how he’d felt sitting there with an important client while his employee missed such an important meeting. On his return to the corporate offices that bore his name, he grumbled, he’d passed some ruckus at the bridge without any inkling that the commotion might have anything to do with him. And when he’d arrived at his office and found out that it did, the thought never occurred to him that he ought to rush back there and see if he could help.

“You know what I’m thinking, don’t you?” he asked his wife.

“Of course I do.”

“That’s good. I knew you would understand me.”

“You’re thinking you need to get down there. You’re thinking you need to close up this office for the rest of the day and go support the family of someone who did a very good job for you.”

He couldn’t have looked more disappointed if he’d been a little boy and she’d just told him he couldn’t keep a new puppy.

“I’m thinking this is the perfect opportunity for Jonas,” Tom said. “This is the time for him to come forward and start his training. One day I plan for him to sit in this office and have his name on the door.”

Maribeth visibly flinched. “Oh, Tom. That’s what you want to do right now?”

“Think about the internship I’ve been offering him. Everything will be in disarray. He’ll be able to step into the job without interviewing with five different panels and officer boards the way that poor kid Leo did.”

“You ought to let this go, Tom. That isn’t what he—”

“Isn’t what he wants? Of course it’s what he wants. He’s just a kid; he doesn’t know what he wants. If he was my intern, he could walk right into the trading pits and start making a name for himself on the first day, just like I did.”

Very carefully Maribeth said, “I’m going to leave now, Tom. I can see you don’t really need me for anything.”

“And if Jonas would take the internship, Richard would see how it would be—”

Tom glanced up just as the door sighed shut on its heavy, expensive hinges. He was the only one in the room again. Or so he thought.

“Rona!” he shouted into the intercom. “Get my son on the phone, would you? Get Jonas. I don’t care what you have to do. Just find him.”

No answer.

“Hello? Rona
?
” He jiggled the button. “
Rona!
”

He rolled his eyes and sat down. Did he have to do everything around here himself? Outside, the clouds seemed to hover just above him. While he scrolled down the contact list in his Black-Berry, looking for his son’s telephone number, one of the amoeba-like clouds split apart. A dramatic ray of sunshine speared through. At last he could see the ground.

Beneath him the city shimmered. Which he liked. Maybe he couldn’t hear the sounds from down there, but he enjoyed watching the people swinging their computer cases, dashing around each other, pushing their way past the slow goers, sometimes almost trampling them to get ahead.

Finally. Everything moving along as normal. Tom Roscoe had gotten his bearings again. Perusing his cell phone with squinted brows, he saw he didn’t have the kid’s number in any of his contact lists. Had he always let Rona make these calls?

He planned to use familiar words when he spoke to his son Jonas about filling Sarah’s position at the firm.
It’s the chance of a lifetime, son. You couldn’t do any better than this.

Tom had been telling
her
the same thing. So how was it that, now, Sarah felt such emptiness? The chance Tom gave her wasn’t doing her any good now. Actually, she was beginning to see just what a waste of time and effort it had been.

Tom finally found Jonas’s number in his desk. “Hello?” he roared into the phone. “Hello?”

Tom pulled the phone from his ear and stared at it, his face smoldering with fury. A one-two count and Tom’s expression changed to rage. Was it possible?
Maribeth must have called Jonas when she left and told him what I was going to ask him
, Tom thought. Had he heard someone pick up the phone and then hang it up when he started talking? He raised the receiver again. “Jonas? Are you there?” Then one final time, “Jonas!” before he sent the phone skittering across the surface of his desk.

Sarah had visited a place where a Polish nanny to whom she’d never paid much attention clung to a daughter far away through a telephone line.

Next she’d watched a man she had admired offer his son the best thing he knew how to give, and his son had hung up on him. After seeing Tom Roscoe as he truly was, she understood why.

All this time she’d measured herself by what others thought of her. She had spent far too much time in her life trying to gain approval from people. People who had problems of their own, problems they were running from too.

Her work addiction had merely anesthetized the pain of being rejected by her mother; it had not healed her.

It stole her breath, thinking of all she’d let herself give away. All the time she had wasted and how she had devalued the people in her life by the way she treated them.