This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Elisabeth Cohen Browning
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover design Rachel Willey
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Cohen, Elisabeth, author.
Title: The glitch : a novel / by Elisabeth Cohen.
Description: New York : Doubleday, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017054208 | ISBN 9780385542784 (hardback) | ISBN 9780385542791 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women chief executive officers—Fiction. | Working mothers—Fiction. | Humorous stories. | BISAC: FICTION / Humorous. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Satire.
Classification: LCC PS3603.O3464 G57 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054208
Ebook ISBN 9780385542791
v5.2
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part 1: Cap Ferrat, France
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part 2: Barcelona
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part 3: Northern California
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part 4: Penang, Malaysia
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part 5: California Again
Chapter 20
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To James
Part 1
CAP FERRAT, FRANCE
Chapter 1
Like a lot of successful people, I have problems with my sinuses. I was digging in my bag for a tissue when I felt my phone buzzing. It was work. And so between the call and my nose, I didn’t notice our child had gone missing.
First things first: we were in France, on the beach. We had stopped beside a little café with a red awning and a menu board advertising moules marinières and dorade grillée and a kind of wide-topped ice cream cone in which the two scoops sit side by side, competing for your attention. The café had an astonishing number of little tables on the pavement surrounding it, suggesting that its gross revenue per square foot was high for the local market, thanks to the competitive advantage of its beachfront location.
But nobody was eating there now. It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. People were catching up on email in their hotel rooms, or running out of their offices to do an errand, or coming home from nights out that had stretched into the next afternoon. And then there was us: Rafael and I, both on our phones for work, and our two little kids—well, one of the two. I was thinking, Nova would like those double ice cream cones, and I was about to show her, and then I thought, where is Nova?
Have you ever been to Cap Ferrat? It’s very nice. A little trashy, not exactly what I expected, but nice. We were beside the café and a parking lot, at the edge of the beach, with the sea beyond. Rafael had his phone against his ear and our baby, in a carrier, strapped to his chest. The baby looked placid and content as Rafe rocked from one foot to the other, murmuring in the soothing voice he uses to discuss leveraged buyouts.
Our daughter too had just been there with us, and all at once she was not there. I stood up and blinked, thinking that might rearrange things, rematerialize her. I hoped to reboot the situation.
She was not very tall—she was four, but even for four she was shrimpy. That comes from my side. She has dark hair, a pale dress, legs, feet, sandals, big pockets bulging with grass stalks and little walruses and pieces of sea glass, which get put into a bin in our laundry room. She’s not that musical, but she does sing. She plays soccer, though she hasn’t shown any special aptitude for it. She hasn’t mastered her Chinese tones. She likes drawing. She draws spirals that look like concepts for product logos, often going right off the edge of the paper. “You have to stay on the paper,” I’d told her just that morning at the hotel. “Look, you’re making marks on this table. Stay on the paper, don’t wander off.”
It was good advice. She was the type to hide under the tablecloth in a restaurant or fall behind, transfixed by a fountain. I thought she must be nearby, even if I couldn’t see her.
Tall, thin cypresses lined the road, and olive trees. There was a breeze off the water that smelled of fish and lavender. Unrealistically blue water slapped at the hulls of the sailboats in the marina.
It would have been very enjoyable had she been there. Planters with blue and yellow flowers. That strikingly legible European signage. Just a few minutes before, we had walked along the road and stared at the Plan du Port (I think I can translate that: Plan of Port) and a little sign pointing the way to the Ship Chandler.
“That’s the person who sells candles to pirates,” Rafael had explained, and Nova had looked up at him quizzically with her cloudy little expression, as if she wasn’t sure if it were true or he were joking. That cloudy look was often on Nova’s face. Earlier. Twenty minutes ago. Before we’d lost Nova.
The boats’ masts cast long pointy shadows across the pavement where we were walking. The shadows bobbed and dipped as the boats stirred. Nova, who had been in a good mood for once, had run along the sidewalk jumping over each one.
“Take a picture!” I’d said.
“Good idea,” Rafael said. “In a second. I have to take this call. It’s Zach.”
I was overwhelmed, as I often am, by the tidal currents behind my nose. My sinuses were giving me trouble. I dug for a tissue and from the depths of my bag saw the bright glow of my own phone trying to summon my attention.
“Yes?” I answered, cupping my ear. I struggled to maneuver the tissue out of my bag and deal with my nose without altering the crisp, resonant timbre of my phone voice.
I’m not sure how many moments later I noticed she wasn’t there. I got into Rafe’s line of sight and lip-mimed (because we were both still on our calls), Where’s Nova?
He gave me a distracted thumbs-up. Without missing a beat he said, out loud, “There’s a lot of opportunity there, yeah.”
I mimed confusion. Into my own phone I said crisply, “Brad, yes! I met with them just last week. They’re putting out feelers. They want to get in on the action. It could be huge for them. Haptics are an exploding field.”
I turned, expecting her to have appeared. She hadn’t. Rafe, I signaled, Nova?
Rafael put his finger into his ear and shook his head. He was on a call with an investor and he seemed to be straining very hard to hear and pull meaning in through the connection. Our eyes met and Rafe looked away; he had the expression he gets, slightly constipated, when he’s doing calculations in his head. Or also, when he’s in the bathroom.
“I think it’s undervalued,” he said into his phone. “For comparison, Mexbol’s up a little over two percent this year. I like what I’m seeing. I’m just sitting here looking at some numbers with Pete.” Which was not strictly t
rue. “I can just go back a page, hang on, the screen is loading…You having internet problems out there…?”
Nova! I mouthed, silently, hugely, inches from his face.
What? he mouthed back, with hand gestures. He began to look around, checking for Nova. His eyes widened.
“I agree completely,” I said abruptly into my phone. “I’ve framed out three different options. We could do it through a merger or acquisition, but a licensing deal could also work, if we could get favorable renewal options. I went over the details with Stefan yesterday, but I’m happy to lay them out to you or the committee—maybe we could do that this afternoon. I’m prepping to go into a meeting in about ten minutes.” Which was not strictly true either.
Rafe strode purposefully toward the back side of the café, showing confidence that he would find her. “Who wants to go down there? Not me. But yeah, it would be good to have a guy on the ground. A satellite office, even. I’m looking at some other numbers.” In fact he was looking at me, eyes wide, as he came back around the other side of the café, alone, still talking. “I have historical trends right here.” His voice was measured and exact, his face contorted with worry. He drew an exclamation point in the sand with his shoe.
Weren’t you holding her hand? His expression was reproaching.
I did, I silent-screamed back. Until the phone…
What?
Until a minute ago!
What?
A minute! I pointed at my watch.
How long?
I pinched my thumb and finger together to show a small bit and banged my fingers against the crystal of my watch. Unlike most executives in Silicon Valley, I do wear a watch. It may make me seem older, but I like knowing what time it is. It’s just another stereotype I’ve had to overcome. My fingertips were still stained from the raspberries I’d fed our son at lunch. A minute! I screamed it, silently, till my ears popped from the pressure on the tendons along the back of my neck. My Conch slipped out of position, and I pressed it against the back of my ear.
Rafael put his hand over the speaker of his phone. On the edge of audibility, he whispered, “Go that way, I’ll go this way.”
I nodded and set off. “Brad, sure, no, no trouble at all, sure I’d love to take you through the options, I’ll sketch them out for you right now, no, of course, now is fine, now’s terrific.” I took a deep breath. “So you’ve got the possibility of a turnkey solution through a straight acquisition of one of the smaller players in the thermoelectric energy harvesting space, say…and I think that’s a valid possibility for us…” Keep it slow, keep it calm, don’t give it away, don’t blow cred on this because you might need it more tomorrow, you might need it more in ten minutes—and I continued to speak in the same measured way, my breathing even, while I began sprinting along the sand looking for Nova’s little sprigged white dress, her red plastic bucket.
There was nobody on the beach or around. Above us, on the cliff that ringed the horseshoe beach, were houses, but could anyone have seen anything from so far above? My heart was accelerating. A little catch in it, like a diesel car on a cold morning. I concentrated on my voice, keeping it smooth and clear and even. You’re good at this, I thought. You succeed, every time, what’s one more. The previous night, I had set my alarm for 2:25 so I could get on a 2:30 conference call—2:30 a.m. Central European Time, 5:30 in the evening back in California where the main players were. I didn’t even have to set the alarm; these days I always wake when I need to. I didn’t mention I was away, or that I was at that moment sitting on a balcony with my fingers circling the cold metal railing, looking out into darkness where the sea pulsed invisibly beyond the dark fog, wearing both hotel robes over my pajamas for warmth. I added some vibrant insights to the directors’ call, pushed back against a subordinate’s idea, assigned some deliverables, clarified the next steps, and then clicked off, stumbled back in, dropped the robes on the floor, and climbed into our palatial bed.
Hang up the goddamn phone, a voice in my head said. It sounded remarkably like my own in a managerial moment. I countered: If I don’t find her in sixty seconds, I’ll say there’s a problem I have to deal with and I’ll call him right back. I’ll say I’m up against a hard stop. No, new approach, even better—I’ll say I can’t hear him, that my connection is breaking up. Don’t mention a problem unless you’ve formulated the solution, that’s a core principle of mine. Say I’m about to drive into the woods. Let him assume I’m talking about the ones down Page Mill Road. Let him make the excuses for me. Let him tell me the connection’s gone bad. That’s best. Give it sixty seconds, starting now, and then pretend the connection’s broken up. I glanced down at my watch. You can drown in sixty, the voice said. True. I appreciate your input and I’m going to act on it. I always appreciate smart suggestions, no matter who they come from. Let’s say forty-five.
I looked out over the water, so blue and beautiful, and still. Glimmers of light came and went across its rippled surface. I didn’t see any signs of a child, but would there have been signs? I looked for any trace of her. Had she already gone under? I waded out, my socks and shoes wet, hiking up my pants, but what did dry pants matter? With one hand I tried to pull them up, the other clutching the phone.
On the phone, Brad kept pressing for details. “Shelley…?”
I knew them cold but it was difficult to recite them, to keep going, to be responsive in the places where he paused and made little harrumphs, little assents. It felt—and I never feel this way about my work—beside the point. Birds flew overhead, their wings splayed wide exactly the way I would draw them, as Vs with the tops bent down. They made bird sounds. Narrow the funnel, I told myself. Fix this, then that. Keep your head in the game, stick to the plan, play your zone, stay focused. Nobody can manage ten priorities at once, or even two. The best managers know this and pick and choose. What to ignore is as important as what to address. Water slapped the hulls of the sailboats, sounding like a little call: no-va-gone, no-va-gone. I watched the sweep of my second hand. Thirty seconds. The connection was crystalline, perfect. How could it be this good, on the coast, beside the cliffs? Where was the mute function on this phone? There must be a button. Would it work with my international carrier? “Brad, I’d like to hear your feedback so far,” I said, riskily. There was a pause. Let it breathe, I told myself. Don’t fill it.
He didn’t want to talk, I could tell, but his voice moved into the silence the way human voices do, and footed itself, and one phrase led to another and he became temporarily, agreeably, boringly expansive. I saw the mute icon, and I punched. “Market call line!” I murmured experimentally and there was no response from Brad. Good. “Radicchio,” I said, just to confirm he wasn’t hearing me. And then, out loud, full throated, “Nova!” I screamed, the syllables breaking into the air, leaping out from my throat, spiraling out as if they had been crushed in there and were desperate to get out. “Nova! Nova! Nova! Where are you? No-va!”
Rafe turned toward me from up the beach, covering the end of his phone with his hand so nobody on the other end could hear my screams. He looked the way he did when I came into his home office when he was working, as if the interruption had temporarily thrown him off task, and he had forgotten who I was, and why I had just come through the door and was, bit by bit, like a character in a futuristic spy movie, gradually swiping in and assembling these pieces in the air. He had the same expression of panic, as if he had lost his moorings in space and time and was drifting by on a fragment of satellite. But then I realized it was not that same expression, it was a different form of it, a related panic, seldom seen in Rafael, and that it was not about me interrupting his call, but about his fear of what was happening now, and what would happen next, what had perhaps already occurred.
“Shelley!” Brad barked in my phone, in my hand. “I’m waiting!”
I noticed—rationally, as you notice things outside yourself—that my right hand was trembling as I moved it back up to my phone to unmute it, and that it took me sever
al stabs to hit the right button.
“…leading to dominance in the global market for wearables,” I said, breathless.
“What? What happened?”
“Sorry, was I not clear about how that last one is different? It’s not intuitive, I know. Took me a second too. Do you want me to take you through it again?”
“The phone cut out,” he said. “Bad connection. I got radio silence there.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “I was just going on and on, I’m so passionate about this idea I didn’t even realize. It must be on your end. Can I buzz you back from a different line? I’m just about to go into this meeting, but I can touch base following.”
“I’ll be out of pocket for a few hours,” he said, “but we’ll connect soon.”
It was four in the afternoon in Cap Ferrat, and eight in the morning back in the Bay Area, in the blond-wood and steel office where Brad Barsh swiveled in a leather-upholstered ergonomic chair, hunched over his calculator, figuring and plotting. Brad had a way of stroking his HP 12c when he talked to you, fiddling with it the way someone else would twirl a pencil. In meetings, he caressed the calculator with tender attentiveness, looking over to check its display, sliding it into and out of his pocket. It was like a lover. Except that his relationship with it had so far outlasted all his human ones.
The call cut off. Call Ended, my phone said, and with it a swell of hot worry flipturned in my stomach and I threw up on the ground, a thin hot stream of yellow liquid that made a little divot in the sand. Fennel salad and Chablis, reformulated into something bright and horrible that burned my throat. I coughed and screamed her name again, with the bitterness stinging my throat. Some shirtless men, shiny-shouldered and tanned above their shorts, looked over at me.
“A little girl,” I said, my voice choppy, wiping my face. “Une mademoiselle très petite. Have you seen her?”
They shook their heads slowly, and looked at me with concern, or perhaps incomprehension. The contours of their chest muscles glistened in the sun.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 1