Chapter Eleven
When Eliza got to work, she peeled off her jacket and hung it up, putting her handbag on the filing cabinet that stood along the wall, perpendicular to her desk. As she dug inside looking for a pack of Life Savers?—though she was having trouble eating and swallowing these days, sucking on the candies with their fruity flavors was soothing?—she pulled out the sixteen-year-old family photo. It was a little bent around the edges, so she propped it up on the file cabinet, leaning it against the sad African violet Amber had given her on her last birthday.
Just as she sat down at her desk, Vanessa appeared in her doorway.
“Bad news,” she said.
What can Vanessa possibly say to someone who just lost her second parent that would qualify as “bad news”?
“Peggy Devlin has cancer.”
Okay, that is bad news.
“She won’t be able to keynote the gala.”
As far as Vanessa is concerned, is the bad news the cancer or the disruption to her carefully planned program?
Eliza nodded. “Okay. So we need a plan B.”
“Let’s all convene in my office to discuss. Peggy will be hard to replace. Ten minutes.”
Peggy was a remarkable “get” for NOY. A former Miss America, she’d gone on to become a teacher on the South Side of Chicago while getting her graduate degree in education. She then developed a primary school curriculum used in hundreds of districts across the country?—districts that had seen remarkable improvements in reading and math scores. But beyond that, she was a dynamic speaker. Her TED Talk had been seen by millions. Vanessa had gotten to her through a friend of a friend of a friend, and she’d agreed to come to New York and speak at the gala. Eliza sighed as she headed down the hall.
Vanessa’s office was all sleek blond wood. Her desk was a simple table with Scandinavian lines. All that sat on it was a slim computer monitor and a telephone. The cordless keyboard lived in the pull-out drawer. It looked like an office in a magazine, not a place where someone actually worked.
Vanessa was seated in her ergonomic chair behind the desk when Eliza arrived. The two simple chairs that typically faced the desk were turned ninety degrees to face one another. With the small sofa on the far wall, this created a makeshift circle for staff meetings. Davin was already in one of the chairs, one leg crossed over the other, his tablet in his hand, ready for note-taking. Eliza took the chair opposite him, and Patrice and Bridget immediately followed.
“Does anyone want coffee?” Vanessa asked, her manicured finger poised over the intercom button on her phone.
“I’ll take some,” Davin replied as the others shook their heads.
“Amber, could you bring us two coffees? One for me and one for Davin? So.” Vanessa switched gears, her hands forming a pyramid. “We’ve lost our keynote speaker.”
Eliza glanced around; no one looked surprised. Clearly, their director had already informed everyone else.
“We need an alternate plan,” she continued.
“What about people who’ve already purchased tickets expecting Peggy?” Patrice asked.
“We’ll have to notify them?—but we need to have our solution in place beforehand. Most people are coming because they believe in NOY. But for those who were just coming for Peggy?—if we give them something equally compelling, we shouldn’t lose them.”
“It’s pretty bad form to withdraw a charitable contribution,” observed Davin.
“Why should that stop them?” Bridget rolled her eyes. “I’m still getting complaints about the tote bags. The free tote bags.”
At the prior year’s gala, each guest had received a swag bag of items, packed in a NOY tote bag. Unfortunately, the bags were from a defective run, with only one row of stitching on the handles. More than a few calls had come in purely to complain about the shoddy quality of the bags?—and they came up in conversation with donors and board members at least once a week. We just need to be sure to double-check the quality of anything we distribute. Do you remember those awful tote bags?
“Oh my God. We’re not doing tote bags again, are we?” Amber stopped just inside the doorway with the two cups of coffee. “Those were the worst !”
Bridget pointed at Amber as if to say Exhibit A of complainers .
Vanessa sighed as she took her cup of coffee from Amber. “Let’s not get distracted. This is not a meeting about tote bags. So. Ideas?”
“Well, if we’re thinking someone with star power, we could ask Senator Whatshisname?—the one who lives on Long Island. He’s on the education committee,” Davin suggested.
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “And what about our Republican donors?”
“Fair enough. No politics.”
“I’d love to bring in some young people who have been helped by NOY funding...” began Patrice.
Vanessa shook her head. “That’s what the video presentation is for.”
Eliza suspected that their director already had the “right” answer in mind and that this entire meeting was performative.
Davin drummed his finger on his tablet. “I was reading about this amazing principal out in Queens who has really turned her school around. She was written up in Metro News .”
Vanessa cocked her head to one side. “Hmm. We could look into whether there’s specific overlap in the programs we’ve funded and what she’s done.”
Davin tapped a few words into his notes app. “I’ll get on that.”
“So, this is what I was thinking.” Vanessa leaned forward, her hands flat on her desk.
Why couldn’t we have just started here?
“I’ve said before that we don’t do enough to build partnerships with the universities right here in the city. Teachers College, NYU, CUNY... There’s great work being done in education. I think NOY needs to be on the cutting edge of that research.”
Eliza’s heart rate sped up.
“I want us to launch an award.”
Davin was already shaking his head, and Eliza thought she might have a reprieve. “We don’t want to muddy our message. The gala...” he began.
“It won’t muddy our message. It will strengthen it. We won’t give the award this year. But we’ll announce it for next year. We’ll be recognizing education scholarship, and we’ll give the award at the annual gala starting next year. This year, we can work on cultivating relationships with faculty and invite one of them to speak. It will be okay if they’re not well known more broadly, because we’ll be billing it as the launch of the award.”
What are the odds? Eliza had been counting on work being a distraction from the tumult in her family life, and now the two had collided. She felt sick to her stomach and truly could have cried. How much more was the universe going to pile on her?
Patrice’s voice pulled her out of her thoughts. “I’m not sure I’m seeing your vision.”
“Look. NOY funds programs to support students. But how do we choose what to support? Shouldn’t we be making those choices in accordance with the latest research? It can be a differentiator for us in terms of getting donor dollars. And by focusing on the universities here and bringing in faculty to speak, we’ll probably get more people to come to the gala, even if they’re just at the base ticket level.”
Eliza couldn’t fault her logic. One of NOY’s problems had always been its scattered focus. But the last thing she wanted was to get involved with the education faculty at NYU. She forced herself to find her voice.
“Vanessa, don’t you think time is really short to do this now? Why don’t we wait until we get past the gala and then...”
“No, no, no. This is exactly the time. I’ve had several of our board members talking to me for a while about forming these partnerships. I don’t think we can put them off.”
Ah. Eliza was willing to bet they were the board members who were responsible for keeping the lights on.
They continued to speak for the next hour about logistics and timelines. Eliza scribbled notes and tried to push thoughts of Ross Sawyer and his research out of her mind, but they kept bubbling up. How many professors of education were there, anyway? How many experts in educational policy? Was Ross one of dozens? Or hundreds? Was it inevitable that they would cross paths now? Was the choice going to be taken out of her hands? She kept having to drag her attention back to her colleagues, whose words felt so much less important than the swirl going on in her head.
“Okay. So I’ll take care of Teachers College,” Vanessa was saying. “The board can connect me there quite well, and quickly.”
“I’m happy to reach out to CUNY,” Eliza jumped in, writing CUNY in large letters on her pad.
“I don’t think that makes sense,” Davin interrupted. “I went to CUNY. And I want to have some of these preliminary conversations so I’ll get an idea for how to build a story for the press around it.”
“Agreed,” Vanessa replied before Eliza could respond. “Eliza, you take NYU. Patrice, I’d like you to look into other area schools that we should potentially reach out to.”
“I could do that research,” Eliza interjected. “With everything else I have to do for the gala, maybe Patrice should handle NYU.”
“Fine by me,” replied Patrice agreeably.
“Okay. Done. We have a plan, people.” Vanessa pushed her seat away from her desk and stood. “Let’s get to work.”
Back at her desk, Eliza swiveled in her non-ergonomic desk chair and gazed at the family photo leaning up against the African violet. How strange was it that both she and Ross worked in education, in their own ways? Could there be something in their DNA? A shared desire to help children?
Maybe this was a good sign. Ross’s students weren’t big fans, but the fact that his chosen career was all about kids?—wouldn’t he be happy to learn that he had a child he didn’t know about?
Eliza tried to imagine getting a phone call from someone claiming to be her child. She rolled her eyes. No chance a woman could have a child without knowing it... What if Jack had gotten such a call? She really didn’t want to think about him having sex. It was bad enough that she now had to face her mom having sex. That imagery was disturbing enough. Not that she was trying to picture the actual baby-making. But what had Laura looked like at that reunion? Had she dressed up in anticipation of seeing Ross again? She had a toddler at home?—it must have been a rare weekend away.
The Laura she knew didn’t wear much makeup. What had she seen when she looked in the mirror that night? Eliza wasn’t far from her ten-year reunion herself. She’d seen some chatter about it on Facebook and had pondered going?—if they actually managed to get it organized. Her last years of high school were a matter of survival. Getting through each day. She knew everyone thought of her as “the girl with the dead mother.” The only way she was going to a reunion would be as a completely different person. One who was put together?—who wore clothes that fit properly and wasn’t prone to panic attacks and bursting into tears at inopportune moments.
The Laura she’d seen in the yearbook looked happy and well adjusted. Was she missing those days when she went to her reunion? Wanting to relive who she was? Or had it all been an act?—the armor so many teens wore? She’d never know. Unless perhaps she talked to Ross.