The Mansion Page 15

  Whatever the twins had been saying, they were now done. They were looking at Billy, listening to him speak.

  “What do you suppose they’re talking about over there?” Emily said.

  Beth laughed, but it sounded hollow. “Who knows? They told me they don’t want to go trick-or-treating, because, and I quote, ‘Halloween is the night when all the dead things rise to walk the streets.’ ” She looked at Rothko. “The crazy comes from your side of the family.”

  “Hey, don’t blame me.” He reached down and scratched Rusty’s ear. “I was happy with a puppy. You were the one who insisted we have kids, too.”

  Beth turned and kissed Rothko. “I don’t remember you complaining about the work of making kids.”

  “Ah, thirty seconds of joy inside a tent. Maybe when we go out to visit Emily and Billy for Christmas we can re-create the moment.”

  “Re-create the procreate?”

  Emily was only partly listening. She was still watching her husband and the twins. Apparently they were all done talking, because now Billy reached out and shook the girls’ hands, an echo of the solemn ritual of greeting that had taken place in the front hallway the night before.

  On the way back to the apartment, when the girls complained that they were hungry, she hung back with Billy. “What was that about?” she said. “By the swings?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “You guys shook hands on it. That doesn’t seem like nothing.” She bumped her hip against his, gently, and in response he put his arm over her shoulder.

  “We made a deal.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  He laughed. “Oh, silly stuff from seven-year-old girls, but they don’t want me to talk about it. They made me swear to keep it a secret. I had to promise and promise and promise. And not just promise. I had to make ‘a pact.’ Seriously. A pact? I like them, but come on, they’re weird kids.”

  But the girls acted just like normal seven-year-old girls the rest of the time they were in Chicago. Sunday was the Field Museum and a trip to the American Girl store, where she and Billy bought each of them a new outfit for their dolls. Take-out sushi Sunday night and a goofy animated movie that they all watched. Monday, Beth took the day off work and kept the girls out of school, and they acted like tourists, going to the Art Institute and buying caramel popcorn.

  On Tuesday morning, Emily and Billy left early, to beat the traffic, Emily hugging the kids and Rothko and her sister good-bye and telling them all she was looking forward to seeing them for Christmas in Whiskey Run.

  FOURTEEN

  * * *

  AN ACCOUNTING

  He had the lights in his office down low enough so that when he stood in the window he could tip his head one way and see the harbor, and tip his head the other and look out over the new Eagle Technology campus, sprouting to life almost before his eyes.

  He heard the soft swish of Wendy behind him. She did that on purpose, landed her footsteps harder than she needed to so he would hear her coming up on him. She’d been with him for more than three—no, more than four—years now, and he paid her enough to make sure she had no intention of leaving. He’d hired her almost by accident. He’d agreed to let her shadow him during the spring break of her senior year of college as a favor to one of the board members, who was friends with Wendy’s father. His assistant at the time, Drew, a good kid from Indiana who’d been there for only a year, was leaving at the end of the summer to go to medical school—with Shawn’s blessing and substantial financial assistance—and he’d been taken with Wendy. She was sharp as hell. Not a surprise given her pedigree. Her mom was a senior VP at RisPRtiNo Futures Tech, and her dad was a full professor of chemistry at Berkeley. Which is to say, she had the kind of parents who could ask for favors. Like getting their daughter to shadow the CEO of Eagle Technology for a week. He also liked that nobody else seemed to realize how sharp she was when first meeting her. He wasn’t sure if it was because she was black, or if it was because she really did look like she’d stepped out of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, only, you know, in actual clothes. People constantly underestimated Wendy. It made her a secret weapon for Shawn. Anytime he brought in executives from other companies he always made sure that she was the one to give them a tour, to meet them at the airport. They’d tell her more than they would ever give up to Shawn, particularly the men, trying to impress, to seduce probably. Even when they didn’t talk too much, they let down their guard around her. And then she’d be a little bird whispering in Shawn’s ear.

  Oh, he knew everybody assumed that part of the reason she was his assistant was that he was sleeping with her, but the truth was he didn’t think he’d ever had a more chaste relationship. Sometimes, when it was advantageous to him, Wendy played up that angle to other people, hinting that there might be some sort of impropriety, but as far as he knew, she wasn’t sleeping with anybody. Or maybe she was sleeping with everybody. He honestly had no clue. Her business was her business, but really, her business was Eagle Technology.

  She handed him a cup of tea and a tablet.

  “Thanks,” he said. He took a sip of the tea. He hadn’t even realized he wanted it, but his throat was scratchy. A change in the seasons, or, more likely, a holdover from his trip to China last week. “Can you just give me the rundown?”

  “Campus construction is ahead of where we projected in March, and believe it or not, there’s a chance we’re going to come in under budget.”

  “Really?”

  “No. Just kidding. There is absolutely zero chance we are going to come in under budget, unless you added an extra zero to the original budget and didn’t tell me. The budget is a disaster. I mean, technically, I suppose it could be worse, but only if you decide you want to tear everything down and rebuild it out of gold.”

  He shook his head. That was another thing he liked about her. One of the reasons he’d been so successful was that he had a knack for reading a room. Five minutes and he could tell whose marriage was in trouble, who was in over his head, who had him over a barrel. But with Wendy, he could never get a clear read. At least once a day she made a joke and he missed it.

  “Projections?”

  “Six months to start phasing in, nine months to have the campus fully operational, and this time next year Eagle Technology will be all-in on Mobius Strip.” She relented. “Six times over initial budget, which will actually end up being a few hundred million less than what you told the directors the overrun was going to be at the last board meeting. If you spin it right, you’re going to look positively thrifty.”

  “It’s not like we don’t have more money than we know what to do with.” Which was true. He remembered that at the same time Eagle Technology first started gaining traction, Apple had been sitting on something like two hundred billion dollars in cash reserves, and there’d been real investor pressure on Apple to spend it; at the time, he daydreamed that maybe they’d drop a couple hundred million dollars on buying him out, but now he better understood the idea of hoarding cash. Eagle Technology aggressively acquired companies and reinvested in itself—the new campus was a case in point—but it had enough cash reserves to not bother selling products for a few years and still be fine. Investors bitched, but it meant that he could make long-term decisions for the company. And with as much cash as Eagle Technology had sitting in the bank, realistically, what did it matter if the campus cost five hundred million, five billion, or fifteen billion dollars?

  “Speaking of which,” she said.

  “How much?”

  “Are you asking me what my current salary and stock options are, what my current net worth is, or are you simply asking how much of a raise I want?”

  He looked out the window again and took another sip of his tea. Vanilla rooibos. Normally he drank a mint chamomile, but this was hitting the spot. “How did you know I wanted tea? I didn’t know I wanted tea. And how did you know I wanted this instead of chamomile?”

  “The same way that I know you’re
going to agree to the raise. It’s the first document for you to sign.”

  “You’re happy being my assistant? You don’t want a new title?”

  “First of all,” Wendy said, “we both know that next to you, I’m the most powerful person at this company.”

  “The next to me part might be debatable,” Shawn said.

  “Whatever. You can fire me, I can’t fire you. Though, frankly, I probably have a better sense of what’s happening, day in and day out, at Eagle Technology than you do. So yes, I am happy being your assistant, and no, I do not want a new title, because there are things I can get away with as your assistant that I couldn’t if I were an executive. But I would like more money.”

  “Because?”

  She looked at him. “Seriously? Because I like money, and you’d be lost without me.”

  Shawn walked over to his desk and sat down. She walked him through each document, page by page, including the one authorizing her raise. That figure was going to alarm the board, he thought. It was certainly more than any assistant had ever earned. Actually, it was probably more than most of the executives were earning. Then again, she was worth more than most of the executives. He listened and read and signed for fifteen minutes. When he was finally done, she sat on the other side of the desk and just looked at him.

  He stared back, but then realized he was bouncing his knee. “Out with it.”

  “I still think you’re making a mistake with Stafford.”

  He threw up his hands and leaned back in his chair. “That? Still?”

  “Still. My job is to protect you from yourself, Shawn.”

  “No,” he said, “your job is to be my assistant and do what I want.”

  “Really? We literally had a conversation fifteen minutes ago about how my job is significantly different from just being your assistant and doing what you tell me.” She crossed her legs, still looking at him evenly.

  He narrowed his eyes, somehow thinking that if he just looked a little closer, he’d be able to read her . . . Nope. Nothing. Even after all this time, it was still like staring at a mirror. He never got anything back that he wasn’t already expecting. He shook his head.

  “I know,” she said. “I drive you crazy.”

  “Seriously. Where did you come from?”

  “Grinnell College. Go Pioneers.” She paused. “That was a joke. I mean it about Stafford, though, Shawn. I think you’re making a mistake by setting him up in the Nest and letting him muck around with Nellie.”

  “No,” Shawn said. “I need Billy.” He was emphatic. He was sure of this. “It’s still his project at the core, his seed that’s driving her, and it’s been how many years of trying to crack it, of having the best and the brightest of Eagle Technology fail? Millions and millions of lines of code, and none of them are as good as what he wrote in that goddamned cabin. All of this,” he said, sweeping out his arm to take in the office and the campus being built beyond the windows, “everything I’ve built here, is based on just a part of what Nellie will be able to do. Eagle Logic is just a compromise. If Nellie works, we’ll be able to bury everybody else. Eagle Technology will be unstoppable.”

  “He’s an addict and a drunk.”

  “He’s clean and sober,” Shawn said.

  She didn’t say anything. She just raised her eyebrows.

  “Look, I’m done talking about this. You never saw him like I saw him. He was magic, Wendy. If anybody can figure out what’s wrong with Nellie, it’s Billy. Back when we were in the cabin, working with him was like watching God build the universe. Billy could dive into code like it was nothing, go elbow deep into the guts of the thing and come out an hour later with the heart of it in his hands.”

  She stood up. “Come on. You’ve got a date in twenty minutes. Ten minutes to shower and get changed. Clothes are hanging in the bathroom. Hustle up. You’ll like this one. Rochelle. She’s Italian and exactly your type.”

  Shawn smiled and stood, too. “Is she easy?”

  “I said she’s your type, didn’t I? Besides, you’re Shawn Eagle,” Wendy tossed over her shoulder. “For you, they’re always easy.”

  FIFTEEN

  * * *

  CORTACA

  Billy remembered the word palimpsest, because it had been the favorite word of his least favorite teacher in high school, but it was the word that served best for his return to Cortaca. How else to describe the town that he’d left behind as a young man? The past had been, at least partially, scraped off so that the present could be written. When he’d left, it never even occurred to him that a dozen years would fall away before he came back. He never thought of his departure from Cortaca as permanent. He’d spent four years there as a student, and then he and Emily had lived there together for only a couple of months after things had fallen apart in the cabin, but when they had driven west, he’d expected to be back in a few years, one of the new breed of instant billionaires who could command the attention of the Cortaca University president. He’d fantasized about pointing to a space of grass while wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and saying, “Right there, that’s where we’ll put the building.” But if this, his first trip back to Cortaca, wasn’t a triumphant return, neither was he coming back as a beggar, as he might have been just a few years ago. No, he was somewhere in between, on the threshold of having the world open before him. He thought of Shawn’s describing the placement of the airport in Whiskey Run, away from the actual mansion, exactly in the transitional world. A liminal space. Hilarious.

  Emily glanced away from the road. “What’s so funny?”

  It would have been quicker to drive up Route 11, past the strip malls and car dealerships, but they’d come instead on State Highway 78B. Less efficient but more picturesque. The highway rolled down the hill and into the town, the lake spilling north for miles and miles, thirty in all, though you couldn’t see that far; and straight ahead of them, still east, despite having driven east for six days in total, Cortaca University lay on the opposite hill, shining, lush, a memory of an earlier time. Traffic, such as it was, slowed them down as they drove into the downtown core.

  “Nothing really,” he said. “I was thinking that it’s like seeing a ghost. Like, over there, I was expecting to see that ratty pizza place, but it’s a coffee shop now. And over there, where there used to be a coffee shop, there’s a pizza place.”

  “There ought to be some sort of law,” Emily said, “where places you’ve lived have to stay frozen in time until you’re ready for them to move on without you.”

  They passed the mouth of the pedestrian mall. He remembered this end of it as a somewhat grim place. Dropout kids strung out and sitting in the doorways of shops with papered-over windows, the bars never able to completely rid themselves of the smell of puke. The other side of the pedestrian mall had been nicer, in a modest sort of way. There had been a row of restaurants and a few boutique stores, the kinds of places that catered to visiting parents and that booked graduation-weekend reservations four years in advance. But now the whole run looked bright and clean. It was almost shiny, even at night.

  The road curved around, taking them behind the pedestrian mall, and they drove a block up the beginning of the steep hill that led to campus before Emily turned into the parking lot of their inn, a huge white porticoed building that Billy had no memory of. As they got out of the car, he could hear music and the buzz of people talking coming from inside the inn, and he realized there was an attached bar. Emily glanced at him, looking worried, he thought, but he just opened the back door and pulled out the small duffel bag. They’d given the big Eagle Technology television to Beth and Rothko, and everything else they hadn’t shipped fit into the back of the Honda Pilot, hidden by the sliding trunk cover: the rest of the toys from Eagle Technology that Shawn had sent them, the clothes they’d worn between Seattle and Whiskey Run—they’d done a load of laundry in Chicago—and Emily’s single box of keepsakes.

  There really wasn’t much else once they’d thought about it. Their ap
artment had been full of junk: furniture that stayed on the curb for days after they’d carted it down the steps, too run-down even for their run-down neighborhood, chipped dishes that they’d gladly left behind when they moved to the hotel. Once that second check had come in from Shawn, and Emily had loosened up and let them do some shopping, pretty much the rest of what they had brought to the hotel felt like junk, too. The only things he’d kept that couldn’t be stored on a computer were his cowboy boots, which he’d had resoled, and his wedding ring. He’d gone to the Gap to get a new version of his old wardrobe—jeans and T-shirts and sweaters, socks and underwear—and Emily had gleefully stuffed all his old, ragtag clothes into a trash can by the hotel elevator. She’d barely kept more herself: a box the size of a milk crate with a couple of yearbooks, a few knickknacks of her mother’s, the scarf that Andy had given her, some books, a few pictures in frames, and their wedding album. They had planned to get more clothes and order gear for the winter—jackets and boots and hats and gloves, cross-country skis (even though neither of them had ever tried the sport), more clothes, whatever they could think of, all to be delivered directly to the mansion—but Shawn’s assistant, Wendy, had told Billy not to worry about it. She asked for their sizes and a sense of what they wanted and dispatched a personal shopper. By the time they got to Eagle Mansion, new clothes and gear and anything else they could think of, plus things they probably wouldn’t have thought of on their own, would be waiting for them, and if there was anything missing, the personal shopper would take care of that, too. In the end, the only things Billy had ordered on his own were a couple of obscure computing books that, ironically, he hadn’t been able to find digital versions of.

  It was weird to be traveling so light, Billy thought, to be leaving such heavy history behind with so few tangible things, but it also meant that he could walk away from the car at every hotel they stopped at without worrying too much. He liked this new life. He liked that he could walk into the Gap and buy things without looking at price tags, that he could wear clothes that weren’t from thrift stores or Walmart. He liked being able to wear a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that screamed the privilege of money instead of the trap of poverty.