Dev grinned at the loving and perfect imitation of their daughter’s voice. “Was she?”
“She drew a great picture of your bike,” Mirabel said, going to the in-bedroom casual closet and pulling her white silk bathrobe off a hanger.
“Somebody’s angling for one of her own . . .” Dev said. His big heavy black Dutch city bike was a source of much amusement among his staff, most of whom couldn’t understand why he didn’t ride one of the ubiquitous Omnitopia golf carts around campus, or at least a bike with a little more class to it. But Dev had his reasons.
“Don’t think she wants her own just yet,” Mirabel said. “She wants a ride on Daddy’s. Did the new baby seat come? No way you’re sticking her in the old one. She’s too big now.”
“I’ll ask Frank if it’s in,” Dev said.
“You coming home for dinner?”
“I have no idea.”
Mirabel sighed and went into the little private bathroom. “I’m gonna call security and tell them that if they can’t show me video of you eating something decent by six o’clock, I’m gonna hunt you down and stuff a sandwich down your face. Don’t care what meeting you’re in, either.”
“Threats, idle threats.”
“Not so idle. . . . ” She stuck her head out the door. “Oh, when you go downstairs, would you leave a note for Maurice? We need more toothpaste.” Maurice was the concierge for their private quarters; he would be coming on duty in a couple of hours.
“Gotcha.” He grabbed her before she could head back into the bathroom and kissed her. “Call me.”
“Will do. Want to see if the baby’s up yet?”
“Next thing on the list.”
Dev headed out to the common room again and across it to his own bathroom and dressing room, where he plunged into the stacks of jeans and racks of polos nearest the door, grabbing one of each more or less at random. As he headed into the bathroom, his brain was already churning with what Milla had told him, tinkering with the priorities of what to handle first this morning, calls he had to make or have made, people he needed to remind that there was just one more thing that needed fixing.
The shower took place at its usual unconscious speed. Fifteen minutes later, scrubbed, shaved, and dressed, Dev was heading out of their suite and down the long antiques- lined corridor beyond the front door, wishing as he sometimes did that Mirabel’s schedule didn’t have to be quite so active, though this was a quieter day than some. Mirabel was all too aware that it was PR-smart for the wife of the world’s eighth richest man to be seen doing something to offset the fact that she didn’t need a day job.
Nonetheless, Dev knew that the PR issue would never have been what mattered most to her. She’d been the one, when they first started to get wealthy, who had insisted that with all the money they were getting, it was imperative to give a lot of it away. “What are we supposed to do?” Mirabel had said. “Just make a big heap and sit on it, and whoever’s heap is highest wins?” She had snorted in derision at one more of a spectrum of behaviors she routinely referred to as “billionaire gonad games.” “Other people helped us when we didn’t have bucks. Now let’s pass it on.” And she worked at least as hard at this as she’d worked at her old day job.
But the point of being unconscionably rich was supposed to be that I didn’t want her to
need
to work.
As he approached the heavy mahogany security doors at the end of the corridor, Dev made a face. This issue was something that he just had to live with whether he liked it or not. He went up to the left-hand door and laid his hand on the spot in the wood under which the biometrics scanners were located.
The door swung softly open. Lights were on inside. Dev slipped in and waited for the door to close behind him. Before him lay a big common room space like the one he’d just left, but this one was decorated in bright buttercup yellows and blazing pinks, spattered with giant flower and butterfly art on the walls and windows, and scattered with soft child-scaled furniture. The room was empty at the moment except for the usual scatter of toys and stuffed animals with goofy or startled expressions.
Dev headed over toward the left side of the common room, where another heavy door gave access to the private rooms, offices, and kitchen, and to the bedroom and bathroom suite that the staff called the LolaCave. Once through the door, he hung a left to the first office.
Sitting in the big comfortable office space at a computer desk was Poppy, a tall, big-boned, handsome woman who had been Mirabel’s doula when she was pregnant with Lola. “Hey, Mrs. Pops,” Dev said. “Good morning!”
“Morning, Dev,” Poppy said, not looking up from her typing for a moment. She finished, then smiled her sunny gap-toothed smile at him. “Like father, like daughter, I see.”
“Meaning she’s up already?”
“About half an hour ago. I swear, you two are wired up somehow.”
“She available?”
“Out of the tub, if that’s what you mean. Marla’s getting her dressed.”
“Great.” He headed down the hall to Lola’s bedroom.
The space was much like her mom’s and dad’s, if smaller, more intimate, and much more brightly colored. As he opened the door, he caught a glimpse of Lola sitting on a mushroom-shaped hassock near her bed, kicking her feet and singing something tuneless but cheerful, while Marla, a petite African American lady, tried to work with the kicking while fastening the Velcro straps on Lola’s shoes. Lola was wearing little blue corduroy overalls and a white T-shirt under it, looking very pert for this time of day.
At the sound of the door, Lola’s head turned and her eyes fastened on Dev’s like a scanning radar. “Daddy!” she shrieked and broke away from Marla, just as the latter held her hands up in the air with a pit crewman’s “done” gesture, the second shoe finished just in time.
Lola charged across the room at Dev. He scooped her up and swung her around. “Morning, Lolo!”
“It’s breakfast time!” Lola hollered in his ear. “I get an orange!”
“Absolutely you do,” Dev said. “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets!” He grinned past the headful of dark curls at Marla. “Morning, Mar. She behaving herself?”
“She’s very good today,” Marla said, getting up and dusting herself off. “She keeps telling me that.”
“And I was good yesterday!” Lola said in Dev’s ear, not quite loudly enough to puncture his eardrum.
“Oh?” He held her away, trying hard to look skeptical and certain that he was failing. “And why would that be?”
“So you’ll take me on your bike! I want to go on your bike with you, Daddy!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, carrying her toward her breakfast room and sitting her down on one of the seats by the low table there, where an orange, a boiled egg, and a piece of brown toast were waiting. “Everybody wants to go on my bike, Lola, there’s a big list of people who want to ride it. Uncle Jim and Uncle Tau, and Aunt Doris and Aunt Cleolinda . . .”
“Is Uncle Jim here?”
Lola shrieked. “Where’s Uncle Jim?”
“He’s not here yet, honey. He’s driving here. He’ll be here at lunchtime.”
“I wanna see Uncle Jim!”
“If you’re good,” Dev said, “maybe you will. I’ll ask him if he has time.” He looked at Marla. “Is she on the usual Tuesday schedule today?”
Marla nodded, bringing Lola her plastic-handled little-girl silver-ware and putting the knife and spoon down by the plate and bowl on the table. “Play school over at Kid City from ten to twelve. Then lunch back here.”
“That’s fine. Mirabel says she’ll take her over to school.”
“Perfect.”
Dev sat down on another of the low chairs and watched Lola rip up her toast, ingest it with single-minded speed, and then start working on her egg while delivering a matter-of-fact description of her previous day. “And Mattie said he was going to bite me, and I said if he did I’d bite him, and then he cried. And I was sad. And then I drew the bike. It was black! And Mattie stole the crayon! And I chased him until Mrs. Nowata said I was making him hipe—hyper—”
“Hyperactive?” Dev said, glancing over at Marla. “Who’s Mattie?”
“Her crush for this week,” Marla said, amused, starting to peel Lola’s orange. “He’s the son of a lady who works in human resources, I think. Sweet kid, but a little fragile sometimes. They’re always hugging each other, though, those two.”
“Crushes at four?” Dev said, shaking his head and looking in wonder at his daughter. “I would have thought not until six at least.”
Marla shrugged. “Everything seems to happen faster than it used to,” she said. “She’s okay.”
“I will do the orange!” Lola announced, in a tone that brooked no refusal.
Marla chuckled and handed over the orange. “What an autocrat.”
“Just like her daddy,” Dev said, getting up.
“Oh, sure,” said Marla, in affectionate skepticism. “How’re you holding up, Dev? Three days now, is it?”
“Almost three,” he said. “One minute past midnight on June twenty-first, the night the walls between the worlds are thin.”
“Well, you hang in there and don’t let the stress thin
you
out,” Marla said as Dev knelt down by the chair where Lola sat.
“Have to go to work now, punkin,” Dev said. “Gimme a hug.”
Lola turned her attention from the orange, now half raggedly peeled, and gave him a most piteous and calculating look out of those big brown eyes. “You’re going to ride the bike,” she said.
“Yes, I am,” Dev said.
Lola heaved a sigh and went back to peeling the orange. “I am being
very good,
” she said.
Dev stood up, grinning at Marla. “You have a good day.”
“You too, Daddy Dev.”
Dev headed out, once again filled with relief that his daughter had such super people around her as Marla, Poppy, and Crazy Bob (whose nickname was apparently the result of the second of his two Ph.Ds, the one in Greek philosophy). The three of them were more like PAs for Lola than nannies, and were always on call, in shifts, ready to cover those times when neither Dev or Mirabel were able to be with her for much of the day. And Lola, thank God, loved her life. She was a sunny child, independent for her age, fascinated by the (admittedly interesting) world around her, happy at the Omnitopia preschool, and completely oblivious to who her dad was, or why it should particularly matter. This blessed state wouldn’t last forever, of course. Sooner or later, Lola would have to go out into the great world, with all the dangers that entailed; she couldn’t stay in the Omnitopia play groups and crèche forever. But right now Dev was aware that he was party to a golden time in her life—and certainly in his—when every day he could break off work when he liked and come home to play with his daughter.
However, his next chance to do that was at least eight hours away. Right now he had to get to his main place of work and start putting out brushfires, some of which would have been kindled hundreds or even thousands of miles away, and some of which might turn out to be inextinguishable.
But you’ll never know if you don’t get busy.
Dev headed back to the elevator in the corridor and went downstairs.
There in the main- floor elevator lobby, standing against the polished marble wall by the guard’s desk, was a big shiny black city bike with saddle baskets, old-fashioned bull’s-horn handlebars, streamers coming out of the handlebar grips, and a big shiny brass bell. The uniformed guard at the desk looked up and said, “Anything you need, Mr. Dev?”
“Yeah, thanks for reminding me!” Dev said, went to the desk, grabbing a sticky pad and a pen. He scribbled on the pad. “Give that to Maurice when he comes in, okay?”
“No problem, Mr. D.”
“Thanks, Rob,” he said, and went to the bike, raising the kickstand. The glass doors of the downstairs lobby slid open for him. He walked the bike out, pushed it down the flagstone walkway, mounted up, and rode off across the little bridge that arched over the moat around the stucco-and-tile edifice that Omnitopia’s employees referred to as Castle Dev. Quietly, under the indigo twilight of an Arizona summer dawn, the CEO of the world’s fourteenth largest company pedaled off along the main drag of his main corporate campus, humming to himself as the third most important business day of his life began.
TWO
W
HEN DELIA HARRINGTON PICKED UP HER RENTAL CAR at Sky Harbor and headed out of the airport in the direction of the Red Mountain Freeway toward Tempe, her nerves were already on edge. The weather forecast for the Phoenix area this morning had been for clear, hot, sunny weather. But half an hour out from Sky Harbor, clouds had suddenly appeared and the plane had begun to shake. If there was one thing Delia couldn’t cope with, it was turbulence.
At least in the physical sense,
she thought as she got onto the on-ramp for I-10.
There’s going to be enough emotional turbulence before this is over. Ideally, not mine.
But turbulence in the air was another matter. “Oh, I’m sorry about this,” the flight attendant had said when Delia had asked her about it. “It’s just the monsoon. Though it’s kind of early this year. Climate change, I guess.”
Delia hadn’t thought that the words “Phoenix” and “monsoon” belonged in the same sentence. Yet, as she now discovered, every summer the people here endured a period during which in the morning or evening there would be a sudden peak in the humidity, immediately followed by a thunderstorm, which then cleared itself away and left the skies cleansed and the temperature a little lower. On the ground, Delia might have found such a thing pleasant. In the air, though, as the clouds curdled dark around the Airbus and the plane began to rattle around her like a cocktail shaker, it was another matter entirely. Delia had clung white-knuckled to her seat for the next interminable twenty minutes, gritting her teeth and trying desperately to concentrate on what she’d come all this way to do.
It was, on the face of it, one of those assignments of a lifetime—the kind of thing that, if you got it right, would follow you through your career. But getting it right was the hard part.
Especially since I’m still not entirely sure why they picked me. Time
magazine had hundreds of “stringer” writers that its editorial staff could call upon for articles, and a pool of twenty or thirty who tended to pull down the plum assignments. Sometimes a given writer got an assignment by dint of his gift with the written word, sometimes because of her seniority, sometimes because of a specific sensibility or slant that he or she might be expected to bring to a subject. But in Delia’s case—at least to her way of thinking, and throwing out any possible self-delusion on the subject—she had no idea how many of these factors might be operating. All she knew was that, a month and a half ago, she’d been asked to submit a list of questions she would like to ask and subjects she would like to investigate with the founder, president, and CEO of Omnitopia Inc.—if she ever got the chance.