“My daughter is lost,” I said, and they looked at me with amazement. They waited for me to say more. I shook my head, unable to waste time with them, and retreated. They went on with their conversation just as before.
There were boats and fishermen visible on the far horizon where the water met the sky. The tide was low and the sand wet and packed. I looked down at my footprints, fading out behind me. I ran lightly back across the sand looking at the dips and furrows, looking for my footprints, for Rafe’s, and for hers. It was hard to see any of them.
“Nova!” I yelled.
Maybe she went to pick up a sparkly rock, a shell, a leaf, a petal. Our nanny’s affectionate nickname for Nova was Hoarder Junior. The nanny called herself Hoarder Senior. Rafe and I prefer a minimalistic, well-edited, rigorously curated aesthetic.
Across the street from the beach was a tall pink hotel with white awnings. Rafe was silhouetted against it, tucking his phone back in his pocket.
I ran toward him and our infant son, facing outward from Rafe’s chest in his baby carrier. The baby’s placidity crumbled on seeing my face—his face reddened, his features slitted up, and his expression twisted into a wail. I reached out for his little gobbet hands and squeezed. His little eyes fixed on me, and I concentrated on looking calmly at him until his sense of serenity reconstructed itself, bit by bit. People need to know their leader is in control.
“Anything?” Rafe whispered.
“Not down that way. Should I call someone?”
“I think we should go up the road,” Rafe said. “Maybe she’s gone that way.” A forced optimism in his voice, unconvincing: “Maybe she saw a cat or something.”
I nodded, pretending this was a viable theory, using his attempt to reassure me to reassure him. “Maybe.” I looked out the other way, at the boats and the blue water. I couldn’t still the spinning disc of my heart. My chest felt tight and sore, as if my heart would break through the wall of my ribs. A liquid seemed to be seeping through me, and I could sense it, dark and molasses-thick, smothering me from the inside out.
“If she went that way,” Rafael said quietly, looking out at the water, “then it’s already too late. So we might as well both go look on the road.”
I looked out again at the sea, so unbelievably beautiful, so tranquil, like a cool solid-state drive withholding its secrets. A huge cruise ship lay like a brown thumbprint on the horizon. I stared at it, hoping it would tell me somehow if she were down there, underneath, if she had slipped through. She could swim a little. She had gone to lessons with her nanny, Melissa, and had a private instructor at the Stanford Aquatics Center on Tuesdays. I had taken her to a makeup class on a Saturday once—the pool didn’t look the way that Melissa had described it, which irritated me—and watched Nova scream at the instructor and not put her face in when they got to the end of the song, when she was supposed to. I changed her in the family locker room afterward when she was wet and smelled like chlorine, laying out her little clothes on the bench and trying, ineffectually, not to let them fall in the floor puddles. She shrieked as I dressed her. She shrieked when she got into the pool and then again when she got out. But she couldn’t swim very well. I wasn’t sure really how well she could swim. She was loud—that was something.
“Who are you calling?” I asked Rafe. “Should we call the police or…?” I was not ready to call the police. If I called the police it might be in the news, even if she were just eating one of those double ice cream cones in the company of a nice lady, just a dozen yards from here, or had found a narrow wall to walk along and was trying it out, again and again. But if I didn’t call the police, and Nova was dead…
“I’m calling Melissa,” Rafe said firmly. “Let’s get her back here.”
I tried to remember everything I knew about handling a crisis. Every quarter I did media training with an anorexically thin PR consultant whose stylish clothes were all several sizes too big—even her silver watch was sized for a girthier wrist. It slid down her arm to her elbow when she gestured, which I found worrisome but strangely seductive, though it was not a look I would try to pull off. On these occasions our PR director and I went to this firm’s offices and spent a morning in their boardroom, where the consultant, ever gaunter, took me through rehearsals of crisis communications scenarios, ever dicier, and what I would say to the board, the press, the police, the investors, the public. Honesty was part of it, and the Four Cs—I couldn’t remember, but they would come to me—Clarity (that was one) and doing all you could do to make the situation right (Correction), but making sure that first you’d secured the area, and kept people safe. Was that Care? Was Care one of them or was I just now thinking that it should be? Respond immediately, but defer important decisions until you have the information you need. That was what you were supposed to do. Although sometimes you couldn’t get complete information, and in that case you made the best call you could and were straight about why you made it (Candor). People forgive errors if you don’t try to cover them up. It struck me that my training, even the intense three days I’d spent when I first assumed my current high-visibility role, was mostly about press conferences, press releases, and staying on message with reporters. I knew it was crisis communications, crisis response, and not crisis handling or crisis prevention, but all at once it seemed peculiar to me that I had not had more training in how to fix a crisis itself. What if our product’s components melted down, or were found to be radioactive, or our servers were bombed and so were our backups, or hacked, or our manufacturer was lying about the ages of those rather slight young-looking women in blue smocks in our Malaysian factory? I had good people in place at work; I had the tools to go forth and convey how sorry I was, and even suggestions for what to wear to look suitably serious doing it (it was all in the tool kit the consultant had made for me, the outfit ideas, the reassuring notes, the mnemonics—but where had we put the tool kit?). I would say how seriously our company took this, how hard we were working to remedy it. Did I also have the tools to make it better? Who would do that? And where was Nova?
“Nova” means new, it’s the root of the word “innovate,” and it’s innovation that brought Rafe and me together, our shared passion for growing small tech companies into high-performing global leaders. Nova is our joint innovation, our first child.
Rafe and I walked along the main road, past a couple of kiosks that sold ice cream cups, inflatable rafts, rude T-shirts, and low, sling-backed beach chairs. We passed a building of pink plaster with an elegant fretwork fence. On its front porch, wicker chairs embraced the rumps of people much less stressed than we were, and above them stretched an awning with the hotel’s phone number—a very long set of digits—printed on it in blocky type.
I caught up to Rafael, who was walking faster, ahead of me. The toothpick shadows of boats’ masts were still bobbing on the pavement.
“How’d your call go?” I said helplessly to Rafael. You might think, how could I ask that at a time like this? But it was hard to know what to do, it was my reflex, and Rafe and I talked always about work. It was a self-leveling sealant that coated every surface of our lives, and seeped into the cracks and fissures of every moment. It was our hello, goodbye, how are you, I love you.
“Eh,” he said. He shrugged. He was laid-back and quick, nimble in business or on the squash court, someone who never worried or stewed, and he seemed uncharacteristically blank.
“Let’s focus,” I said. “Brass tacks. I’ll go this way, you go that way.”
He nodded.
“What’d you tell Melissa?” I asked.
He looked surprised, as if he had forgotten he’d called her. “That we needed her ASAP and not to bring anyone with her. That it wasn’t looking good. I told her to get the concierge to get a car and not use a taxi.”
I nodded. That’s standard procedure when you’re doing something in the gray zone—better to use a private contractor, someone you can track down later. Although, were we in the gray zone? This wasn’t our fault, r
eally. But I nodded. Rafe was a lawyer before he got into finance and you could tell—he was always thinking of ways to limit our future liability and he never put a damn thing in an email, ever.
We reached the end of the commercial strip, and we kept walking. There was nobody on this part of the road. The houses were small and pastel-colored, smack up against the edge of the road with no front yard or clearance at all. Some distinguished themselves with elaborate white plasterwork rosettes, some with rooftops edged in scalloped red tile. All the houses had a bleached-out look, as if all the saturation had gone into the sky and the water and the smoky-green low mountains across the water, and there was nothing left for the buildings except a bright, cool, glowing paleness. Everything was elegant except us. We so rarely wore casual vacation clothes, and the ones Rafe and I had brought with us didn’t look right. My shirt was the wrong style, too boxy—I realized I had been wearing it ten years ago, at a thought leadership retreat in Jackson Hole. My pants, loose, drawstringed, and chic in the catalog, were a little tight. My assistant still thought I was a size four. I had not found the opportunity to set her straight. We looked like any vacationers, which was OK, of course—this was our real life—but my view of the situation was beginning to widen, and I could suddenly see the photographs that might be taken, by the police, and the newspapers, and just how sloppy we’d look, how negligent and flummoxed and pathetic and guilty. How American—that too. I thought of calling Deedee, the crisis communications professional. But that would make me seem guilty, in the event that someone later pulled my phone records.
I could hear the baby, Blazer, whimpering and gearing up for a cry. I nursed Nova for the first few days of her life, until my schedule made it impossible, but for Blazer we used a gestational carrier, which was great because I didn’t lose any ground during the pregnancy. But some dormant mammary gland in my chest prickled hard, like an electrical shiver, as if a switch had been turned on, and I could feel my breasts swell into hardness from the core out. I rubbed the left one with the opposite hand, a quick massage to loosen things up and spread the pain around, and then the other. A shiver pulsed up my spine.
“Nova,” I muttered, in a slow, grunty, involuntary repeat. I stared at the front of one of the little houses, my eye jerked upward by the twitch of a white curtain in an upstairs window. I walked faster. The sidewalk, which did not deserve that title, which was only blue slates set erratically along the side of the road, ended. The road ahead narrowed. A wall made of stone blocks, like naturalistic Legos, ran along one side. Lichen grew out of the crevices. On the other side the road was open to the coast. I couldn’t imagine Nova walking up this narrow road. She likes to stick to the tried-and-true, as her preschool report put it. She’s not known for exerting herself. I turned around and ran back toward the town and Rafe.
Something choppered overhead. I looked up and saw a dark spot curve over the water and around the side of the cliff. Slightly strange. Perhaps headed to Nice. My phone buzzed and I looked down at it. I wouldn’t answer even if it were Brad. Not now. My assistant perhaps. But it was a new call from an unknown number. The number was long with too many digits to be American. I gazed at it—maybe from the organizer of the conference I was attending in a few days—and sent it to voicemail.
Rafe had gone a long way, but I could still see his tall, lanky shadow up ahead. He was moving away from me, down the road. I sprinted toward him. I hardly felt the effort; the ground surged by as if I were hovering above. I reached Rafe. My phone was ringing again, a buzz I felt spreading across my skin carrying a lidocaine numbness with it. I put my hand on his shoulder and he whirled around. I held up my phone. “Do you know this number?”
He shook his head.
I answered before I could stop myself.
“Hello,” a voice said. A male voice, European-sounding, unfamiliar, the kind of voice that evokes armchairs and mustaches. I did not say anything. I looked quickly to Blazer, still fastened into the baby carrier on Rafe’s chest. I put my hand over him, as if that would provide an extra level of protection to keep him in there. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ear and tightened my hold on the phone.
“Shelley Stone, yes?”
“Speaking,” I said. “Who is this?”
“Are you missing a child?” the voice inquired. I almost dropped the phone. It popped out of my hands and I caught it again. I pressed Speaker. I needn’t have bothered; Rafe was right there, his scalp pressed to mine.
“Who is this calling?” I asked, in a very credibly neutral voice. Rafe put his hand on my back to steady it. Shadows of horrors—ropes, rafters, knives—flickered in my mind.
I sensed this had not been what he expected and heard scuffling on the other end of the phone. “Ah, you can call me Enrique.”
“Let me speak to the child.”
“Of course.”
I gulped hard. The period of silence went on longer than it seemed it should have. I thought, I’ll count to five. But there was still silence. I felt hot shocks in my pelvis, like falling.
“Hello,” I said, to no response. “Hello. Hello? Bonjour?”
Finally the quality of the silence changed, as if someone else were breathing it in.
“Is that you, darling?” I said. “It’s Mommy. Mommy loves you. Sweetie, are you there?”
“Eggs,” Nova said calmly. Her voice on the phone was high-pitched and tinny. It sounded unlike her, like just one thread of her voice, as if the frequency at which she spoke was untransmittable by ordinary technology.
“Are you all right, sweetheart? Are you there? I love you.”
“Eggs,” Nova said.
“Did you say ‘eggs’?” I said, though I knew that was what she had said.
“Where’s Eggs?” she said.
“Eggs is at home,” I said, wiping the snot and tears off my face. “Way back home, many miles away. Where are you, sweetheart?”
There was no answer except a thud, as if she had dropped the phone. Rafe and I exchanged looks. Then the man’s voice came back on the line.
“I was out walking and who did I find in town but this tiny girl, all alone. Very small and all alone in this large town. Shall I give you our address so you can come to fetch her? Of course—why am I even asking? I know you will be right over. It’s not complicated but sometimes visitors have a difficult time, so I urge you to listen carefully.” His words rolled out, salted and seasoned, in very burnished though not quite idiomatic English.
“Sure,” I said, “of course, thank you.” I lip-spoke to Rafael: Call the police?
Why?
“What happened?” I asked. “Where did you find her? She was right with us and then suddenly she’d wandered off.”
His answer was mumbly, vague. I took down the directions.
I was distrustful, confused, but of course grateful to know she was all right, and holding out hope that my distrust was misplaced and that Nova had been miraculously rescued by this nice person. He hadn’t mentioned a ransom. There was nothing hostile about his tone. He seemed avuncular, friendly, possibly a valuable new contact. But it was all very strange and I felt the penny hadn’t yet dropped. “Thank you for keeping her safe. We’ll be right there.”
“Is this some kind of trap?” I asked Rafe.
“This is France, not Venezuela. I don’t think…but…you’re so suspicious.”
“It’s usually an asset,” I snapped. And then, and this is very unlike me, I burst into tears.
Chapter 2
We clicked Blazer into his car seat (laboriously, getting my finger pinched in the process), and the three of us sped off in our rental car, the windows down, the mood tense. Nova’s sticker book, bright and forlorn, riffled open on her empty booster seat. Blazer, thumb in mouth, eyed it with interest.
Enrique’s directions led us away from the coast, into a maze of roads. It was, as he had warned, confusing. We edged down a road wide enough to admit only one narrow car. Stone walls, tall hedges, and the backs of pink and white
garages tidily bounded each side, so close I could have reached out the window and touched them with my fingertips. I kept my hands inside the car, though, and tapped at my Conch to get directions, trying to call up something coherent on the GPS. I’d lost track of which direction the ocean lay. The map showed a tangle of blue spaghetti, and none of the roads was named what it should have been. We missed several turns. Then the street we were on ended abruptly with an iron gate and a sign: VOIE PRIVÉE SANS ISSUE ACCES INTERDIT.
“It means something about internet access,” I said.
“Nope,” Rafe snapped, throwing the gearshift into reverse. He’s multilingual. We wheeled backward toward the next turnoff and corrected our course. We went by a garage where cars were being repaired and a run-down commercial street where workers were loading pieces of debris into a skip. Across the street a cement mixer churned, as clean and glossy-white as one from Nova’s Playmobil set. I consulted the GPS, groaned, and shook my head and Rafe reversed again.
We passed a couple out for a stroll. She was in white linen; he had on a baseball cap and was eating an apple as they walked. I watched them with amazement and a pinch of scorn, and continued to dislike them even when we had driven well past. I could not remember the last time I had meandered around like that. Some people chose a very low degree of difficulty for their lives.
The address Enrique had given us turned out to be an apartment building from the 1960s or ’70s, pale brick striped with orange balconies. It did not look very nice. Motorcycles crowded the sidewalk in front of the building, and toylike little cars stared out from their shallow parking spaces with their bug-eyed headlights. I double-checked the address.
“This is it,” I said to Rafael.
I felt scared. You’d think nothing could scare me anymore, not after what I’d been through. But there was something off about this. Why, if he had found a child, would he have brought her back to his apartment rather than to the police station or a nearby café? How had he gotten my direct line?
The Glitch_A Novel Page 2