“Does Nova know my phone number?” I whispered to Rafael.
“I’ve just been thinking about that.”
“Text Melissa. Ask her.”
We glanced back at Blazer, asleep in his car seat, his little neck creased, his head fallen forward.
We got out of the car, dillydallying with the doors, the baby carrier, opening the trunk to gaze balefully at the stroller, which neither of us could reliably open since we never did it. I looked up at the building and on one of the balconies, about a third of the way up the building, a man was waving enthusiastically. He turned and pulled a little girl out from inside and she stepped out, shielding her eyes from the sun, carrying (but about to drop) a small white dog. Seeing Nova there, looking ordinary, unhurt, my breathing suddenly became labored.
“My baby!” I cried, quite involuntarily. “My baby!” Some shred of me was amazed by this display of emotion, by the fact that I was, quite completely, losing it.
“Coo-coo!” the man cried. “Fourth floor!” He was short and Mediterranean-looking, and wearing a flat cap, which he took off and waved at us.
“Enrique?” I said, and when he kept waving, “Enrique!” Strangely, seeing him waving his cap allayed my fear that this was a kidnapping scheme. It was too corny, and his joy at seeing us seemed too joyous. Rafe inserted a semiconscious Blazer into the chest carrier, threading each fat leg through the openings, and with bemused looks at each other we went into the building.
“Which floor?” I said anxiously, and pressed the elevator button. It did not light up, so I pressed it again and again, even after the elevator stirred into action.
A little way down the hall a door was propped open. Before we reached the doorway, she saw us. Nova shrieked, ran to us, and, as we tried to catch her up in our arms, ran past our legs and into the hall. “Where’s my Lissa?” she cried, discovering that the hall was empty. Reluctantly, she turned back toward us.
“It’s just us,” I said, with a controlled smile at the man in the room. I completely believe it is a good thing she has such a closely bonded relationship with her caregiver, and every child development expert has said that consistency and quality in child care are what create good outcomes. We have an excellent nanny, the best. But it pricks, I’ll admit it. There are trade-offs.
Enrique, on the other hand, seemed thrilled to see us. He welcomed us in. A woman brought out rooibos tea on a painted tray. I did not catch her name nor her relationship with Enrique, which they did not explicate. She had long dark hair and smiled warmly but said very little. At times she seemed his wife, at other times a maid, or perhaps a cousin or business partner or something like that. I like to square things away, but I felt like they might view this as an invasion of privacy. The room was so personality-less and sterile that it gave me this impression. There was one droopy leather sofa in the room, and a pole lamp of a type that I think was banned in the United States as a fire hazard, and a folding beach chair, and a woven blanket that had been spread on the thinly carpeted floor like a rug. Nova said nothing but, resigned to only having us, buried herself in our legs, and I held her across my lap on the sofa. But then we had to sit for a while and nod politely, while Enrique spoke at long length about how he had come across her in the middle of the commercial strip while walking his dogs and asked her where her parents were. He did a long, joyful imitation of her stony refusal to answer, of her constant reference to “Eggs,” a word he could not correctly pronounce, which caused me, each time I could feel it coming in his conversation, to squeeze my toes together proactively so I could stand to hear it. The way he said it brought to mind the way I felt about the hard-boiled eggs in the cafeteria salad bar during my pregnancy with Nova, staring at me with their devilish yellow eyes.
A white dog jumped up into my lap; two others yipped and raced each other from behind a louvered door and around the living room.
“Eggs is a dog,” Rafael explained. “He looks a little like these guys.”
“Ah!” Enrique said, “Eggs is your dog!” and he laughed and laughed while we smiled uncomfortably.
“No,” Nova corrected in a soft voice, but he did not catch it. Nova was correct—we didn’t have a dog, technically. Eggs belonged to our housekeeper, and since Jacqui lived in, Eggs spent a lot of time at our house, and for complicated reasons we paid the dog walker, which gave us a certain stake in her ownership. But Enrique was wiping his eyes with mirth.
“These dogs are named Gigot, Gage, Giselle. And in the other room Gevant, and Gillie, and that one, that, you see, is Georges.” He pointed.
“All Gs,” Rafael murmured instructionally to Nova.
“No accident,” Enrique said, and a flash of something in his “No accident” knifed me in the chest, seemed to slip, unresisting, deep into me, and made me straighten up for a moment as if it had hit a reflex between my shoulder blades.
“Why, do you like G names?” I said warmly, inanely, but with the genuine curiosity that is one of my vaunted traits as an executive.
“It was the year of the Gs,” he said.
Rafe nodded. “Excuse me?” I said. “What made it that?”
“They are littermates. They were all born the same year. In France it is traditional to name dogs for the year they are born. The year they were born was the year when all French dogs, by tradition, were named with Gs. The next year, it is Hs.”
“Really?” I said. “That’s fascinating. You know, in America we prize individuality. I can’t imagine us all doing that, can you?”
“In America,” Rafe said, “all dogs are named Max.”
“That’s not true,” I protested.
“Eggs,” Nova pointed out.
“We can’t ever adopt a standard,” I said brightly. “Not without debating it first. It must be part of our national character to dislike conformity and embrace rebellion. I once read a fascinating article about how America has a long history of ‘standards wars’—AC/DC, railroad gauge, Betamax versus VHS.” I gestured expansively. It was interesting to consider the cultural differences and the way they foster, or don’t foster, innovation in tech. Although nobody present, except me, seemed at all interested.
Rafe was pulling out an eyelash, his signal that he could not wait to leave.
The woman was trying to engage Nova. She had a little doll, orange-skinned and trollish, and was pretending to make it dance. “Do you like dolls?”
Nova’s heavy eyelids rose and she stilled herself to stare back. Her expression was cool and condescending. “I’m not that into dolls,” she said, clearly. I held her tight against me. I was proud of her. Dolls are so problematic: they reinforce stereotypes and beauty standards of race, sex, age, and body type, plus their hair gets stiff when you take them in the bath. People are always giving Nova dolls—white female dolls in flared dresses—and they are sprawled around like a sordid sorority recruitment party taking place under her bed.
While Enrique turned his attention to the dogs—and suddenly another trotted in, toast-colored but the same size—Rafe slid his phone out from the space between our thighs and turned it slightly so I could read the text. It was from Melissa, and it said, Nova doesn’t know your number. Apologies, will work on it.
“Really.” Enrique smiled. “It is excellent. Very—how do you say it?—pratique for studying the…genealogy of the dogs. When we walk the dogs”—he mimed walking by walking two fingers along the plane of his opposite palm, for Nova’s benefit, I suppose, although she was on firm ground with that concept—“we meet other dogs, and we know by their names if they are the same age, or how old. You see?”
“Interesting,” I said.
We all sipped our tea and contemplated.
“Thank God you were able to find us!” I kept my voice light, cheerful.
“The girl told me,” he said. “She is very smart.”
“Huh,” I said. “Very impressive, sweetie.” I patted her. It occurred to me that he had not used her name once, and I was avoiding giving it to him.<
br />
Enrique, despite his clownish exuberance, seemed to pick up on something in that exchange and suddenly became cannier.
“Perhaps it was not exactly like that,” he admitted.
“Oh?”
“You see, I asked her the name of her papa, and she told me but I could not understand it.” We nodded. Rafael’s name was not easy for Nova to say. “And so then I asked the name of her mama, and she told me. And when she said your name, I said, does your mama run a big company? It is called, um, Conch? With computers, machines?” He wiggled the fingers on both his hands out to the side, to simulate a kind of busy whirring, or perhaps typing on one of those ergonomic split keyboards. “Because I know that name, you see, and I thought you could be the same one.”
“It’s a very common name,” Rafael said, with perhaps a twinge of hostility.
“It is not so crazy that she, the one Shelley Stone, would come here. It is beautiful, yes? There are many meetings at the big hotels.”
“You recognized my name? Really?” I have occasionally been recognized in shops or restaurants, only in the Bay Area, usually only right after I’ve been in the news. Not terribly often. People do double takes, but they don’t take my picture. Nobody is that interested in me.
“I am very interested in business,” he said. “I read many American magazines.” He got up and went through the louvered door, which swung with a creak. Rafe and I looked at each other; I tried to read what he was saying with his eyes and couldn’t tell if he was exasperated or just hungry. The man returned with an armload of Forbeses and Fortunes with sticky notes poking out from the edges. I had a brief glimpse into the next room, which seemed utterly empty—not even a bed. An apartment with nothing but back issues of my magazines? It was like a stage set. My grip on Nova tightened. He held up an old copy of the Harvard Business Review, my favorite magazine. “You are inside, right?” He began flipping through it looking for the profile about me. I didn’t help him, though I did know right where it was. I just smiled with tense lips and held Nova close.
“I have a business I have started,” he said. “I have a business plan for this company. Would you review it for me?” He smiled very delightedly at this idea, and I, reluctantly, nodded. I was beginning to see what this was about.
“Sure,” I said. “Do you have a copy? Do you want to email it to me and I’ll email you back with some thoughts? I’m absolutely happy to do that for you. Let me give you my card and we’ll stay in touch. But we should be going soon. Thank you for your hospitality, and of course for finding Nova—our daughter.” I corrected myself quickly, but not before I saw an instantaneous look of confirmation cross his face.
“I’ll print you a copy now, and you read it, and then we can talk a little, OK? I think you might be very interested. Maybe you would want to buy the company?” he said. “Are you hungry? I have almonds and oranges for the little ones.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, rising from the couch, a firm hand on Nova’s wrist. “We must go. I have a very important meeting later. Très desolé.”
“I would like to speak to the Conch founder,” Enrique said. “He is young?”
“Yes, of course. I’ll give you his email. I’ll shoot him a message introducing you. We are sorry, but we have to be on our way. Please do send your business plan; we’d be happy to give it a look. Maybe I can even connect you with some potential investors. Oh, and, ah, I brought you a Conch,” I said, reaching into my bag and offering our signature ripple-patterned gold-and-white box. I keep a few in my bag to give out. He smiled and touched his ear, and bent toward me. I could see the edge of his Conch, small and curved, hugging the little hollow on the back side of the earlobe.
“Oh!” I said, confused. “You already have a Conch. You have your own Conch.” I withdrew the box, incompletely, as if I were disappointed to take it back.
“I love it,” he said. “I’ve had it about six months. What I love is how clearly it speaks and prompts me. I hear it right there.” He tapped his skull, behind his ear. “Wherever I go, it gives me interesting ideas. To do things I would not have thought of otherwise.” He smiled and I felt an unpleasant shiver. “Do you know, there is a feature where when it gets in your presence, it says, say hello to my friend Shelley.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “How do you know about that? Nobody knows about that. It’s just something an engineer built in as a little tease. An Easter egg—do you know what that is? Just something funny. It recognizes when my Conch is nearby. That was Cullen, he was just being cute,” I added, for Rafe’s benefit. He is jealous of my close relationship with Conch’s founder. He thinks Cullen is irritating and gets annoyed I won’t admit he is.
“First I’ve heard about it,” Rafe said.
“I must have told you,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. He threw it in a couple iterations ago.”
“I wonder something. I love my Conch. Perhaps I could see your Conch? Just, for a moment, to see the Conch of Shelley Stone?”
With a sinking feeling, I looked to Rafe, who rolled his eyes and tugged another eyelash. I hesitated. It wasn’t, I told myself, such an outlandish request. It wasn’t like he was asking to share a vibrator or a violin. I looked longingly to the door, and then back to Enrique. It seemed the quickest way to get out. I slipped my Conch off and offered it.
“Thank you,” he said, plucking it from my hand. “What an honor.” It lay in his palm, small and defenseless, the repository of all my data. A Conch is supposed to bioauthenticate its user to protect stored information, but we’ve had some problems with that functionality.
“Nova,” he said, motioning for her to come closer, “would you like to hold this very, very special Conch?”
I suppressed a groan. “We should be going,” I insisted. Rafe raked a hand through his hair and looked intensely pained.
“Have you been to the gardens?” the woman said, and I turned, surprised, toward her. I had forgotten she was there. Her voice was clear and confident, not what I had expected. “At the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild? The lilies are very nice when they’re in season. You wouldn’t want to miss them.”
I blinked, trying to start an answer. Maybe we would go tomorrow if work permitted, though I was secretly hopeful it wouldn’t.
“Nova!” Rafe chided. I looked over. Enrique was getting down onto the floor by the futon, looking for something. Rafe’s voice gave away that he didn’t care what had happened, he was just saying it to show he was a parent paying attention.
“It’s all right,” Enrique said, reaching under the futon. “I’ve got it right here.” He came toward me with an odd smile, my Conch held out on his palm.
I took back my Conch from Enrique and kept a tight hold on it as we shook hands and slinked toward the door. I made a mental note to dip it in hand sanitizer.
“It’s a great company,” Enrique said. “I can’t wait to see what you come up with next. I think you would be interested in my company too.”
“Thanks so much for keeping our daughter safe,” Rafael said, taking the initiative to open the door and let us out.
“I love to do small acts of heroism,” Enrique said. It probably sounded better in his first language. “Please don’t go yet. I have a gift for you too.”
“Um, thank you, but keeping our daughter safe, saving her—you’ve already given us the best gift of all, I can’t imagine…” And without allowing room for protest, as fast as we could, we piloted Nova down the stairs and out of the building to the car.
* * *
—
Back in our suite I felt exhaustion and soreness in my calves. We ordered room service.
“Nova, baby, do you want some dessert? A boule de glace—that’s ice cream? A soufflé citron? That’s, uh, citrus. Order whatever you want, all of it if you want to. Are you OK? Were you scared?”
I took an Ativan in the bathroom and washed it down with a third of a cup of red wine leftover from last night. It tasted like the side of a person’s tongue but it was fine
.
Nova was silent. “Why can’t we get six dogs?” she said petulantly.
“That would be too many for Jacqui to take care of,” I said. “How would she have time to make our dinner?”
That seemed to convince Nova, and she immediately began to dump her little plastic animals all over the bed.
Melissa came in and hugged me. I tried to explain what a terrible afternoon it had been. “Sounds like it,” she said. “But, look, ultimately…it worked out. Your heart must’ve been like this”—she rapped her chest. “But here she is. Safe and blessed and protected. Everyone has one of these stories. But you get to move on.” She sat on the bed and squeezed Nova. She reclipped Nova’s hair barrette, which was fine as it had been. “Hey, Supernova, are you feeling OK?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Nova said, not looking up.
“Were you scared?” I asked.
“Enough jibber-jabber!” Nova cried. She mussed up her hair, returning it to its usual state, and continued to line up her animals.
“There was something funny about it,” I said to Melissa, but I found thinking about it exhausting. Since it was not a decisionable situation, I stopped investing mental resources in analysis. Anyway, I like to tackle ambiguous problems in the morning.
Melissa got up to close the curtains, to move the shaft of sunlight away from Nova’s eyes. She came over and hugged me.
“Shelley, I have to say, I want to take responsibility. It was my fault. I should have been with you.”
“It was your afternoon off. That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I take full responsibility. Well, fifty percent. Rafe should have been watching her too.”
She snorted.
“I’m not apologizing, it’s true,” I said flatly. We are fifty-fifty parents, by which I mean that we equally split the percentage that Melissa and her helpers don’t do. But I have a closeness to Melissa that Rafe doesn’t—for example, when she texts me photos of the kids at their music lessons, I always text back, and I don’t think Rafe ever does.
The Glitch_A Novel Page 3