Numbers Don't Lie

300 297 294 Another sleepless night. Ellen expects them. Feels satisfied when three whole hours pass without stirring. On other nights, she wakes up after only twenty minutes and she knows. It’s going to be another one of those nights. Tonight, her mental screenplay of a son lost at sea and parents capsized with grief won’t make room for even those scant twenty minutes. 267 264 261 She studies the latest sleep expert’s advice. “Start at 300 and count backwards by threes,” he says, “it’s boring and will put you promptly to sleep.” But what does he know of an accountant’s brain, one intrigued by numbers, one seeking out patterns until her number-oriented self solves the puzzle, tires of the game, and the countdown runs tandem with her other swirling thoughts. 216 She sees it now. The pattern reveals itself. 213 210 Every thirty numbers the last digit is zero. The sequence repeats, another thirty float by, and the riddle is solved. Her analytical brain recedes and other commentaries grow louder until the numbers are just white noise droning in the back row. Her worries take center stage. Her doctor says to write down her concerns, to clear her head before crawling into bed. Easy to say for someone whose wife takes care of his every need, cooks his food, washes his clothes, attends to his children. All after his secretary and nurse have tucked in his office for the night. She knows men like that, works with them, watches their egos espouse things they don’t know, things wiser men would keep to themselves. She dreams about a life like that, one she could shut down when she closes her office door at night. But that’s not her. She packs her briefcase with unsolved mysteries the day’s numbers bring her way. She brings them home. Brings them to bed. Do her clients realize what they reveal when they share their finances? Do they know how they bare their hearts and souls when they sit across the desk? 96 93 90 No pattern of numbers will shut off the rumbling cadence from the day’s last call. Dr. Reynolds finally made an appointment to see her. She expected it and knew she’d face his tragedy and grief someday. She dreaded it and now it was here. In three hours, she’d feel what she only imagined. Tom and Lucy Reynolds’ son was dead. Their lives changed forever. 30 27 24 Why couldn’t she be the quintessential boring, number-crunching CPA treading traditional, well-worn paths instead of veering off to dig deeper to help solve her clients’ problems. Why couldn’t she hide her heart behind rock-hard facts and refuse to go where souls connect? They didn’t teach this at school or test for it on the arduous CPA exam. But this is what makes her practice different and what brings her special and beloved clients. Other CPAs are only about the numbers and sleep well at night. She does not. And neither does her staff. Tonight, she’d give it all up for a few hours of sleep. 9 6 3 Chapter 1 Ellen Ellen Hartmann’s sciatica plucked as she rolled over to glance at the intrusive red glow of the alarm clock. 5:27. Three minutes before the alarm. Again. Always three minutes. Whether 4:30, 7:30, or even the occasional 9:30, three minutes before, she’d be fully awake ready to face the day. But today she lingered. She pictured her three sons down the hall tucked in their snug beds, in their cozy bedrooms, in a warm home, while Tom and Lucy Reynolds woke each morning with an unused bed, in an empty bedroom, in a house flooded with grief. Their only son was dead. Ellen gave herself an extra five minutes to prepare mentally for the day before slipping out of bed, sliding into her walking jeans, and tiptoeing down the stairs. She opened the dog crate in the kitchen to release Random, the family’s Wheaten Terrier. The dog knew the routine and stretched before walking to the front door to quietly slip out with Ellen, leaving sleeping boys lie for another hour. With leash snapped on, they bounded down the six concrete steps from the front porch of the four-columned, red brick house and walked to the center of the road. There was no traffic and in the still brightening dawn, it was best to avoid the cracked sidewalks. Ellen crossed from South Portland into Cape Elizabeth. Had she lived there instead of South Portland, her property value would double. Cape was filled with doctors, lawyers, and CPAs like her, but it wasn’t her style. She was a townie from a tiny village in Wisconsin where girls like her were admired by the farm kids bussed in. Unlike her sister who thought Ellen had married (and divorced) beneath herself, Ellen knew she was a tiny fish in an even tinier sea. She moved through unlit neighborhoods and thought of her morning’s dreaded meeting with Dr. Reynolds. The last time she saw him was during tax season, when clients, like old friends, came to see her. For sixty minutes they’d share more life stories than tax information. She loved her profession, or at least the way she practiced, because it was about people, not numbers. Connections, not calculations. Money brought out the best or worst in a person and her job was to help clients through the twists and turns of their finances. She walked beside them in good times and bad. This morning would be one of the bad. Three months ago, Tom bubbled with pride for his son’s upcoming adventure. Ben, a twenty-one-year-old, top of his class, three-and-a-half-year college graduate, was embarking on a solo trip on the family sailboat, the Ocean Potion. Ben came up with its name by merging his father’s medical profession with the family’s passion for the sea, when he was young and thought everything coming out of his mouth was golden. They all agreed, and whenever the family boat was upgraded, the name came along. Together, the entire family, Tom, his wife Lucy, daughter Sarah, and Ben dreamed and designed the seventeen-hundred-fifty-mile voyage down the coast of Maine to the Bahamas where Tom would meet him. That day, Ellen tried to join in Tom’s excitement but her fear of the ocean made it tough. When Tom shared his worries about Ben’s one night alone at sea while he sailed from Miami Beach to Eleuthera, her anxiety resurfaced. She kept it all to herself. She climbed the six steps to her front door and paused. That same maternal trepidation that rose on a wave of uneasiness throbbed in her gut now and her cold, stiff fingers lingered on the latch as she relived that hushed premonition. She heard her three boys rustling (or was it wrestling) on the other side of the door and she packed it away. She breathed deeply and opened the door.