The Second Attempt

The document on Laura’s screen described a product that had changed twice since someone began writing about it. She could follow the sentences individually. Taken together, they appeared to promise three different things.

Across the table, Daniel was drawing on a whiteboard. He had explained the system once already and was now explaining it again with fewer words and more arrows. Laura watched him connect two boxes, pause, and erase the connection.

“Was that the part I understood?” she asked.

He looked over his shoulder and smiled. “Probably.”

She had known the company’s founder first as a client, when his ideas still arrived in her office in folders. Now she worked for him, and the ideas occupied rooms full of people. Some mornings she could feel the excitement before she had put down her bag. On others, she spent an hour discovering that a familiar word had acquired a meaning nobody had thought to mention.

Leaving her practice had involved more than handing over files and changing the address on her stationery. She had given up the daily assurance of knowing where she was useful. Here, she was useful too, but sometimes she had to ask three questions before she could begin.

The stock was part of the attraction. She had examined the terms carefully, understood how much remained uncertain, and still found herself imagining what success might make possible. The work had helped draw her toward the move as well. She liked the founder’s impatience with things everyone else regarded as settled, though she occasionally wished he would let a thing remain settled through lunch.

Daniel capped the marker and sat down. A folded sheet of paper lay beside his notebook. He moved it beneath the notebook before Laura could ask about it.

“Bad news?”

“Only if you think qualifications should involve knowing the answers.”

He had taken a professional certification exam the previous week. Laura remembered him leaving early for it, wearing a shirt with buttons instead of his usual sweatshirt.

“How close?”

“Close enough to be annoying.”

He tried to smile. Then he picked up the marker again, although there was nothing left to draw.

Laura recognized the elaborate casualness. She had once spent considerable effort making a piece of paper appear unimportant.

“I failed the bar the first time,” she said.

Daniel looked at her.

For a moment she thought he had not heard. Then he said, “You did?”

She nodded.

He glanced toward her office, where several cartons from the practice still stood against the wall. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

Neither would she, before the result arrived.

The letter had come on a warm afternoon. Laura remembered the heat in the apartment and the window she had opened that morning, expecting a breeze that never developed. She had carried the mail upstairs with a grocery bag against her hip. There was milk to put away, something frozen beginning to soften, and the envelope she had been waiting for.

She left the groceries on the counter.

The letter was brief. She read it standing up, then sat at the kitchen table and read it again. There was no ambiguity to resolve, no qualification farther down the page that altered the first sentence.

She had not passed.

For months she had been moving toward this result as if it were a door that would open when she reached it. There had been examinations before, difficult courses, long evenings when she had wondered whether she understood anything at all. She had worked through them. By the time she sat for the bar, she was tired enough to be frightened and prepared enough to believe the fright was ordinary.

Afterward, she had remembered answers she wished she had given differently. So had everyone else. They compared regrets, reassured one another, and began making plans.

Now she sat with the letter beside a loaf of bread.

She remembered the groceries only when water from the frozen package reached the edge of the counter.

That evening, a classmate called. Laura had known her through three years of law school, through shared notes and coffee that had gone cold while they argued over cases. Her friend had passed. Laura could hear the happiness in her voice before the question came.

“And you?”

Laura looked at the letter.

“No,” she said.

Her friend’s voice changed immediately. The care in it was almost unbearable. She offered to come over, to bring dinner, to help Laura work out what happened. Laura said she was tired and wanted an early night.

After hanging up, she stayed awake until well past midnight.

The calls she had to make were worse than the letter. She had to tell people who had followed her progress, people who had said they knew she would do well. Each conversation required her to produce the news again. She discovered how many ways there were to be encouraging and how few she wanted to hear.

Someone told her that everything happened for a reason. Laura thanked them and found an excuse to end the call.

When she told her mother, there was a silence long enough for Laura to hear a cupboard closing at the other end.

“Oh, honey,” her mother said.

Laura pressed her fingers against her eyes.

They talked for a while. Her mother asked whether she had eaten. Laura said yes, which was nearly true. Before they hung up, her mother asked when the exam would be offered again.

Laura gave her the date. She knew it already.

For several days, knowing the date was as far as she could go. Her books remained stacked beside the desk. She avoided them with the same care she had once devoted to reading them. She cleaned the apartment, answered letters she had neglected for months, and went for runs long enough to leave herself pleasantly incapable of thought.

One morning she returned from a run and found the exam letter where she had moved it beneath a magazine. She took it out and read it once more. Then she put it in a folder and opened her notebook.

The first page contained a schedule she had followed faithfully. Looking at it, she could remember the satisfaction of crossing out each day’s work. Entire subjects had been allotted to afternoons. Hundreds of pages had been read, marked, and read again.

She turned to a fresh page.

Her friend came over that weekend carrying practice questions and two sandwiches. This time Laura let her in. They ate at the kitchen table before opening the books.

“Show me one,” her friend said.

Laura began explaining what she would write.

“No. Write it.”

It was an irritating distinction. Laura wrote.

When they reviewed the answer, her friend pointed to a paragraph halfway down the page. Laura had spent so much time on a preliminary question that she had left herself almost none for the issue that mattered most.

“I knew that,” Laura said.

“I know you did.”

They sat with the answer between them. Outside, somebody was trying to start a car.

The weeks that followed were less orderly than her first preparation. Laura wrote answers against a clock. She finished some feeling competent and others feeling she had somehow misplaced three years of education. She learned to stop polishing a paragraph when the next question needed her attention. When she did not understand something, she asked, though asking still cost her more than she liked.

She continued running. She ate better. Occasionally she spent an evening with friends and discovered the examination had survived several hours without her supervision.

On the morning of the second attempt, she arrived early and found herself watching the other candidates. They seemed younger than before, although most were probably the same age. A woman nearby dropped a handful of pencils. Laura helped gather them.

“Good start,” the woman said.

“Plenty of time to improve.”

They smiled at each other, then went inside.

Laura remembered little of the room afterward. What remained was the clock, the paper, and the effort of moving on when she had done what she could. At the end she gathered her things without trying to decide what the result would be.

The second letter came months later.

She opened it beside the same kitchen counter. This time she called her mother before putting away the groceries.

Years of practice followed: clients who arrived angry or frightened, decisions made with incomplete information, work she could defend and work she wished she had handled differently. Eventually she had her own office, her own employees, and more people wanting her time than she could reasonably accommodate. The first result became something she rarely mentioned. She had never quite forgotten the pause before telling someone.

Across the table, Daniel was looking at the paper beneath his notebook.

“Did you do anything differently?” he asked.

Laura considered how much of an answer he wanted.

“I had someone look at what I was actually doing,” she said. “I wasn’t a very good judge of it myself.”

He nodded and pulled the sheet out. There were numbers printed beside a list of subjects. He studied them for a moment, then placed the page inside his notebook.

Laura turned back to the document on her screen.

“Now,” she said, “can we try your explanation once more?”

Daniel stood and uncapped the marker. He erased the whiteboard, leaving a pale cloud where the arrows had been, and drew one box.

Laura opened a fresh page.