“Realistic, then.”
“I see things for what they are. No candy coating.”
“What’s wrong with candy coating?”
“It’s a lie.”
“I’m guessing you don’t like jelly beans, then.”
“I don’t mind candy coating on candy. It’s everywhere else that it annoys me. Family pictures at Christmas. The smile on the barista taking your order…”
“What, you hate kindness?”
“Kindness is just another survival strategy.”
“Oh my god. That is such a sad thing to think.”
“Realistic is not sad.”
“You know what you need?”
“You at dinner?”
“No, you need some baby goat videos in your life. That’s what I’m getting here.”
“Baby goat videos? Is that a thing now?”
I snort. “Yes, and you so need them.” Of course he wouldn’t be on social media. I turn over. I should go. But I want to stay. I could stay on this call forever.
“Tell me something else,” he says. “Something small.” The way he asks, I think he feels the same as me. Needing to go. Wanting to stay. “Is there a man in your life? A significant other?”
“That’s not small, that’s invasive.”
“I have a code,” he says. “I don’t go for other guys’ women.”
My heart skips a beat. “Nobody’s going for anybody here. We’re voices on the phone,” I say.
“We’re more,” he says.
“Now who’s candy coating?”
“Tell me you feel it,” he says.
I swallow. “There’s no significant other,” I say, because I like that he has a code. It means something to me. “But you can’t be going for me. This isn’t that.”
“Tell me another little thing.”
“So demanding.”
“It’s one of your favorite things about me.”
He’s right. It’s weird. Mr. Drummond is a tyrannical scientist, oblivious at work, yet he’s so observant on the phone at the crack of dawn.
“You won’t let me see you,” he continues. “You won’t let me meet you. Give me this. What would you do today if you could do anything at all?”
There’s something about the way he asks the question that makes me feel sad for him. Like a prison inmate asking what the air smells like on the outside. Does he never get to do what he wants? Or is he just tired?
“No, my turn. What time do you go to sleep?”
“Midnight,” he says.
“What? So you get four hours of sleep a night?”
“Four and a half.”
“Jesus,” I say. “That’s not enough.”
“It’s fine. I drink a lot of bulletproof coffee,” he says.
“As if that makes up for sleep,” I say. Everything about him has such a hard edge. He’s stern to his people, but apparently he’s even sterner toward himself. “Hold on, I know what you need,” I say. I pull up Facebook and scroll around for something.
“Are you there?”
“Yeah, hold on.” I find what I’m looking for. I text him the link.
“Hold on, here. You can text me, but I can’t text you? You get to call me and text me whenever you want, and the rest of the time you block me?”
“Correct. You cannot text me, but I can text you. You cannot call me, but I can call you.”
I can practically feel him bristling at this. Nobody pushes Mr. Drummond around.
“This is a video,” he says.
“Hit play,” I say. “I’ll only answer your question if you watch it.”
“It’s baby goats,” he says. “Why am I watching baby goats?”
I click play on my end, too. Baby goats hopping back and forth over a sleeping dog. “I think you just need it.”
I hear him exhale. “Okay. They pranced.”
“Don’t you love it? How they kind of pop up into the air? Watch the whole thing.”
A soft sniff.
I smile, imagining him watching it. It’s a really sweet one where the baby goats play with each other, all prancey little legs and faces.
Silence.
“Come on. How sweetly they play?”
He says nothing.
“With their cute little faces,” I say. “You need to see that not everything is about grim survival.”
“Their cute little faces are exactly about survival. Baby animals all have large eyes and big foreheads because adult mammals are hardwired to consider it cute and feed them. It’s pure, vicious survival. Survival of the fittest. Practically mercenary.”
“Oh my god, are you ruining baby goat videos for me?”
“I’m telling you what we’re looking at. Over time, adult goats were more likely to nurture babies who fit the look you see here and the goats with those traits were more likely to survive to adulthood to reproduce.”
“Wait, how about this.” I send him a cat and a duck who make friends. He seems to like that one—I maybe hear him sniff-snort. And then I send him a cat riding a robot vacuum cleaner. I hear him chuckle softly. It makes me feel good in a way I can’t describe.
“Okay,” he says finally. “I think I did my time. Tell me the one thing you’d do today.”
“Bake,” I say. The truth. “I’d bake cookies. That’s what I’d do today if I could do anything.”
“Cookies.” This like it’s the stupidest thing he ever heard.
“There’s nothing like the aroma of baking cookies,” I say, remembering his ridiculous work rules. I suddenly can’t think of anybody I’d more delight in making cookies for than Mr. Drummond. “I’m sensing you don’t like cookies,” I say. “What the hell is wrong with cookies, Drummond?”
Seventeen
Theo
* * *
I can hear the smile in her voice. “What the hell is wrong with cookies, Drummond?”
I cross my legs and look out over the park.
I was glad she didn’t detect how relieved I was that she didn’t have a man. I thought a vein in my head might explode during the endless silence after I asked that question. I’ve never been the jealous type. And she’s just my wake-up-call girl.
“Who doesn’t like cookies?”
“They’re a useless food,” I say.
“It’s National Pug Dog Day,” she continues slyly. “Did you know that?”
I sip my bulletproof coffee, enjoying the rough sweet tone of her voice. Her smart, snappy cadence. Nobody talks to me like that. Except Willow, of course, but that doesn’t count.
“I would bake the cookies and frost them in honor of National Pug Dog Day. And get this—I would spend a lot of time on each cookie. Beautifully and meticulously frosting each for no reason whatsoever.”
I can hear the smile in her voice. Her smile makes me smile. It always does.
“A cookie that somebody would eat in a second for the most useless holiday,” she continues. “What do you think? What’s your opinion on that?”
“I think you’re taunting me,” I say. And I’m enjoying it. Far too much.
“Come on, tell me what you think.”
“What I think is that I can’t decide whether I want to shove you against the wall and kiss that smile right off your lips or move right into spanking you.”
“I’m sorry,” she says in a way that makes me think her smile just got wider. “I’ll be too busy baking useless cookies for that. And they will smell so amazing.”
I tighten my grip on the phone. I want her up close and personal. Need her up close and personal. I tell myself it’s just because I can’t have her. But it’s not that. It’s more.
“I would watch my favorite musical while I bake. Funny Face. Have you ever seen it? It’s a musical with Audrey Hepburn.”
“Musicals,” I groan. “You just don’t quit, do you?”
“I love musicals. The story goes along, and then they break into song and dance.” She lowers her voice like she does when she’s feeling mischievous. “For no reason what
soever.”
She’s killing me. Some wake-up-call girl, probably in some tiny rented room in Queens or something, is finding all my buttons and pushing them like a pro.
“And she wears this red dress and sings on the steps of the Louvre. It’s the best,” she says. “And cookies are a valuable food.”
I balk. “Hardly.”
“Did somebody slip you a bad cookie?” she asks. “Did somebody have a traumatizing cookie experience?” She pauses, and then, “Never mind. I’m sorry.”
Something in my chest deflates, because I know exactly what just happened here, exactly why she retreated. When you Google me, the top few results are magazine features that make much ado of my past. The boy whose parents died in a car crash when he was just fifteen. Sister adopted without him. In and out of foster care, all alone in the world, nobody can reach him. He invents the solution that would’ve saved his mother’s life, but he can never bring her back. Such bullshit. “Just don’t,” I say.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t do what you just did. Assume that my dislike of cookies is because of a tragedy that happened half a lifetime ago. Apparently there can’t be an article written about me without some armchair psychologist weaving that narrative about my never quite recovering from that. As if it drives everything I do. It’s ignorant…”
“Well, you did invent the one thing that might’ve saved her.”
“Yes, maybe it would’ve saved her, who knows, but this bullshit story that I heroically dedicate my life to Vossameer to spare others the pain and so forth…it’s simply not accurate. I promise you. It’s not how it was, and it’s not how it is now.”
“Okay.”
“It’s fucking annoying,” I bite out.
“Sorry.”
I suck in a breath. I’ve come on too strong, and I can feel her withdrawing. I’d kill to be able to reach out to her, grab her, pull her to me, make her stay. The world is full of people to do my bidding, but not the wake-up-call girl. Never the wake-up-call girl.
In desperation, I give her something—the only thing I can. The truth.
“When people say that about me, when they go on like that, it makes me feel…alone.” My blood races with the strangeness of saying it aloud after all these years. It’s not something I ever told anybody. Not even my sister.
It feels…liberating.
“Makes you feel alone,” she echoes solemnly. As though she’s really taking it in. Not pushing back. Not telling me I’m great.
She doesn’t flinch, this woman, and I have this sudden and exhilarating sense that I could peel back all my layers and she still wouldn’t flinch. For the first time in my life, I want that. Instead of hiding my layers, I want to show them.
“I don’t know why,” I continue in a rush. “It’s as if those fake stories that paint me to be a heroic phoenix, rising from tragedy or some such shit—it’s as if they’re about somebody else. They’re painting a picture of somebody else. And they leave me feeling alone. I want for somebody to not do that. One person.”
“Isolated,” she says. “The stories isolate you.”
“Yes, exactly.”
My heart pounds in the silence that follows. “I’ll do it,” she says. “It’s official, then. You’re no hero. Just Theo Drummond.”
I swallow. “Thank you.”
“Theo Drummond. Just some jackalope on my roster of calls.”
“Well, no need to go that far.”
“You and your innovations. Whatevs, dude.”
I smile. It feels so easy—so right—to confess things to this nameless, faceless woman.
I tip my forehead to the window. “You want to know what else is messed up about it?”
“What?” she asks. There’s rustling in the background. Where is she? What does she see when she looks around? What does she smell like? What does she dream about?
“A little-known secret about being a so-called hero,” I say. “When you go around saying you’re not a hero, people are even more eager to call you one.”
“Heroes are notorious for saying they’re not heroes,” she says.
“It’s like one of those finger traps that tighten the harder you try to pull out of them.”
“Maybe you need to walk around like, ‘yeah, I’m a hero, biotches. Screw you all. I’m the greatest hero in the world!’”
The window feels cool on my forehead. Central Park is a sea of brown, washing up against the stone building faces on the West Side. She’s somewhere out there. To the west, I’ve decided. Maybe just because my window faces that way, and I want to think she’s in my view. “I suppose that would do it.”
“Too extreme?”
I press my hand to the window. “Where are you right now? Kitchen, bedroom, office…”
She pauses like she does when she’s not sure whether to answer. Then, “Bedroom.”
“What does it look like?”
“I think I need to take a broom to the ceiling.”
“What color is your ceiling?”
“White. It’s got gorgeous crown molding, though.”
“You like a nice ceiling.” It’s a statement. It’s something I know about her. She would appreciate old buildings, this one. All the unnecessary flourishes around the windows and doorways. She’s so impractical.
“My favorite is the pressed tin ceilings. The real ones.”
Of course. I smile. “Come on, you’ll go out to dinner with me eventually. Why not just say yes?”
“Yeah, well, I hate to say this, but…” She lowers her voice. “I hear you’re not the hero everyone makes you out to be.”
“I’m something better. I’m an asshole.”
“An asshole, and you’ll make it SO good.” It’s almost a whisper.
I love that she remembers that. I’m pacing. When did I start pacing? She needs to tell me her name, give me some way to contact her, or at least stop blocking me, but if I demand it, she’ll retreat. Every time I push, she retreats. “I’m the asshole who’ll never candy coat things for you. But I can give you what you really want.” Then, “Tell me your name.”
I realize, in the silence that follows, that I’ve gone too far. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“The weather,” she begins.
“No.” But it’s too late. She follows through. I like that about her.
“The weather at JFK is forty-five and partly cloudy.” With that, she’s gone.
I stand there for a while, holding the phone. As if she might pop back in by some telecom magic. She’s probably blocking me now. Though on some phones, when you block people, you can still call and text them. Maybe she has that kind of phone.
As wake-up callers go, she’s effective. There’s no doubt about that.
I’ve barely slept for three days.
I walk across the parquet floor to the veranda. I step outside into the bracing morning air. The stone pleasantly cool on my bare feet.
I take in a deep breath. I feel energized. Alive. Good.
When was the last time I felt like this? I think back over the months and years, back to the moments when I made my biggest breakthroughs. The day my patent was finally approved. I was pleased in those moments, I suppose, but I can’t quite remember feeling like this. Happy. Excited.
This woman. I need more of her. I need to know her. I have to find her.
And the answer is out there. I’ll crack this puzzle like I crack every other puzzle. I’ll find her name. I’ll find her address. I’ll find her.
Eighteen
Theo
* * *
I head into work early, reviewing my notes and some of the lab’s data on the subway.
Nothing’s working.
I get off at my usual stop and take my usual route in. Even at six in the morning, the city is at full swing. I nod at the security guys and head up.
Chemistry problems are like jigsaw puzzles in a lot of ways. I’ve been working on making a specific piece fit, sure there’s a way to get it to work.
>
But the surreal mystery of this woman, the unexpected delight of talking to her, of directing her in the way I have, it’s as if it’s loosened something in me. Shaken up my world. Relaxed my white-knuckled grip—enough so that when I walk into the office, my vision is clear enough, or maybe my perspective is wide enough, that I see the problem.
One glance at the whiteboard and I see it.
I’ve been focusing on the wrong part of the molecule.
I put down my bag, stunned.
I was focusing so hard on the wrong part of the molecule that the shapes of the other pieces had become obscured. But now I’m seeing it all. And there, on the sidelines, is the right piece.
I shrug off my coat, never once taking my eyes from the board.
What. The. Hell.
I have to start over, but I don’t let myself despair. I have new information—I know what won’t work. I have a promising new direction.
I flip the board over to the side where I have the entire structural formula sketched out, and I step back. Cross my arms. Think loosely about synthesis. Back on the hunt.
Three hours pass like wildfire.
Willow arrives at nine thirty, and that forces me to take a break.
We go to my desk and I show her the email.
To whom it may concern;
I just wanted to let you know the wake-up-call operator with whom we contract here at Vossameer, Operator Seven, is doing a truly outstanding job. I’m extremely satisfied with her performance. Would still be interested in a long-term contract. Is that possible?
Yours truly,
Theo Drummond
“What do you think?” I ask.
“Good. Except you have two whoms. Who says whom anymore?”
“I do.” I hit send.
She rolls her eyes at me with the passion only a little sister can muster. “Whatever. I’m not making any guarantees here.”
“I know. Anything you can get,” I say. “Anything. Every shred of info. I want it all.”
“Of course you do.” She clicks over to the Craigslist ad. “I’m curious, too. This whole thing is weird. The discrepancy with the date, the fact the old versions of the ad aren’t present on any of the Wayback sites. Not that the caches are infallible, but come on. And I think it’s weird that they don’t have a site. If they’re a real company, they should have a site.”
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