A week or so into our second month in Ojai, Lou and I were invited up to Napa, California to take a meeting with a winery owner Lou had recently met.
Lou was trying to broker a deal between a winery owner — let’s call him “Tony” — and a friend of a friend. Lou was always working on side deals while we were waiting for the LA group to get funded, and this winery connection was just one of the many irons he had in the fire. And even though this deal didn’t directly involve him, I remember how excited Lou was to explore the possibilities of marketing wine.
But a few days before we left for Napa, I recall being consumed with a gripping kind of fear. We were running quite low on money, and I was starting to lose heart that something would change for us. The LA group had just missed another deadline on their funding, and I was totally tapped out… On top of that, it had been ten days since Roy had made contact with me. I knew that Ira was scheduled to be in LA that week, and so I think I was hoping that Ira would read my pilot, and then be so inspired that the whole world would stop for him, and he’d have to contact me straight away!
Erg…
Like I said at the beginning of this blog: You can’t write your own life story. And clearly, that would be a trite and phony plot shift anyway… And, as you know by now, God doesn’t write those kinds of shifts into my life story. Ever.
However, three days before we were planning to drive up to Napa for Lou’s meeting, I did get a phone call from a Salt Lake City area code. When the number flashed on my phone, I immediately shoved the call into voicemail. I was afraid it might be a “lose end call” that was unraveling from the spool of my tightly wound life, and I couldn’t face that possibility directly. I needed a second or two to breathe first.
The caller left a message, and when I listened to it, I was immediately shaken.
It was a call from a bank, and the woman on the line was looking for Sam. She said Sam listed my number as his “secondary contact number,” and she was leaving a message to see if I could help her connect with him. My veins ran cold with adrenaline as soon as the woman said Sam’s name. I thought I had pushed him out of my mind and out of my life, but to learn that he had listed me as a personal contact with his bank felt super odd.
Why would Sam do that?
My whole reaction to the voicemail was brief, but it did create an emotional setback in my journey. I had already worked it out with myself — and with Roy — that anything involving Sam and the pilot would be between Roy and Sam. I had washed my hands of Sam, and I was moving on. We might have had some shared interest in the pilot, but I was done sharing other interests of any kind with Sam. Period. But that stupid voicemail triggered these ghost feelings inside of me that took me by surprise. The feelings were very confusing, and at first, I couldn’t figure out how to push them away.
So I indulged them a little. I allowed myself to remember things about Sam that I knew were a part of my fiction, but I think I hoped to find some comfort in recalling how it felt to be lost in the writing again. My thoughts didn’t seem to satisfy me in the same way that they did before, however, they did make me feel less alone in my mind as I waited on Ira to make a move. Even though we weren’t really friends anymore, Sam was probably curious about the status of the pilot, and that suddenly made my connection to him feel appropriate.
So two days before Lou and I were set to leave for Napa, I sent Sam a friendly email. I used the excuse that his bank called as my way back in. The email was pretty benign, and it didn’t reveal any emotions or anything heavy about myself. I just told Sam that his banker was looking for him, and that I was in Ojai, waiting on Roy and Ira. That was it. It was a short, well-worded email with no added emotions.
But as soon as I hit the send button, I regretted it.
It was wrong to email Sam. It was exactly like dropping a line with a hook in the water in the hopes that a “Sam fish” might take a nibble. If I didn’t want Sam in my personal life, then why was I sending him an email? The bank call was just a bogus call… Surely if it was important, they had other ways of contacting Sam.
Even if my email wasn’t laced with emotions, my being was clearly conflicted and confused again — and that reality sickened me the second after I clicked send. But the email was out in cyberspace by that point, and there was no way to take it back.
Sam was never one to respond quickly to my emails in the past, and so it was no surprise that he hadn’t responded by the end of the day. As I was getting ready for bed that night, I remember thinking how stupid it was to write to Sam. But, I couldn’t let it be a big deal. What was done was done, and I needed to let it go.
But the next morning, when I woke up, I stumbled into the kitchen of our little cottage, and Lou was holding my cell phone in his hand. When he looked up at me, I knew right away that he had snooped through my emails again.
At first, I was annoyed. But as soon as I snapped at Lou for “invading my privacy,” all I could feel was shame. I had wronged Lou again; and, I knew I had wronged him the moment I sent that email. To be fair, Lou probably shouldn’t be looking through my emails… Married couples are entitled to some privacy. But. In a trusting relationship, there shouldn’t be anything in my emails that my husband shouldn’t see.
Lou didn’t hide his anger. He told me that he knew that I had connected with Sam before he ever had the proof, but he had to see if he was right. Lou had developed an eerie sixth sense when it came to my connection to Sam, and he said it disgusted him to see this “slimy” side of me surfacing again all of a sudden.
And even though I felt like Lou was getting my true intentions all wrong, I knew that I could never play a self-righteous card in any discussion about Sam. Even if I would’ve had a good reason for my actions, there was nothing that could justify adding Sam to my personal life ever again.
I knew that…
When you’re a little kid, it doesn’t take very many experiences with a candle flame to learn that every time you try to touch it, your fingers will get burned. There are two sequential pictures of me in one of my baby albums on my first birthday making this startling discovering. In the first image, I’m smiling with my hand reaching out toward the flame of a single candle on a little white cupcake. The next shot is of me looking directly into the camera with a terrified look and tears welling up in my eyes. My mom is of course in both images. In the first one, she is just noticing my reach with a mild look of worry on her face; in the second image, my mom is leaning over me, ready to scoop me up so she can comfort her baby through her first brush with self-inflicted pain.
The next morning, Lou and I got up before dawn to make the eight-hour drive to Napa. We’d hardly spoken the day before — the hurt between us felt palpable, and I think we were both too exhausted to relive the pain of the past all over again. But I couldn’t help but feel the pain of touching something that I knew would burn me…
I vividly remember how the regret I had from sending that email nearly overwhelmed me. I wished that my mom could’ve been there to comfort me; but I wasn’t a baby anymore. I knew what I had done. It wasn’t a naive mistake. It was a foolish and very, very selfish one.
In my sadness, I realized that it was time to recognize how precious and fragile trust is between a husband and his wife. Trust has no compromise. It’s an unwavering belief you willingly bestow on someone else without caution or fear. But a betrayal of trust destroys everything, and if you’re lucky enough to have a second chance to restore the trust of someone you’ve betrayed, you better never touch dangerous things ever again.
California is honestly one of the most gorgeous places in the world, and as I watched the fog lift off of a vineyard about an hour north of Santa Barbara, I prayed for the fog of my emotions to lift off of me, too. I asked God to forgive me for being so selfish, and for harming the man He gave me to be my partner in life.
