Desperate (4 page)

I
returned home like a soldier shell-shocked from the war and parked my Charger in our narrow driveway. I appreciated not having to deal with my former tenant’s car and the constant inconvenience of tandem parking. I wondered if Lily had a car, and if we’d be juggling our vehicles.

Trudging up the front stairs, I found an envelope taped to the outside door with my name written on the front. I had forgotten all about Brad and his strange and ominous warning, although my brief contact with Max continued to cover me like a second skin.

I recognized Anna’s handwriting as I opened the envelope. From within, I removed a perfumed sheet of light blue stationery. My head was buzzing. I had taken a double dose of Adderall after leaving Brad’s, and it heightened all my senses. I could feel the bumps of the paper’s texture while my focused eyes traced each contour of Anna’s looping handwriting style.

Anna and I had a rule about fights. Whenever we wanted each other to feel good about returning home after a tiff—big blowouts or smaller disagreements—we’d leave a note tacked to the door. It always cleared the air and made reentry that much easier. The aroma of chocolate chip cookies baking hit me soon as I stepped inside. I followed the savory smell down the hallway like a floating cartoon character hooked by an alluring scent. I found Anna in the kitchen, her apron sprinkled with flour, removing the latest batch of goodies from the oven.

“You’re home,” Anna said, setting the piping-hot tray on the stovetop. She hugged me with her oven mitts still on. Keeping one arm draped around my neck, Anna let an oven mitt fall to the floor. Bending to reach the counter, she dipped her finger into the bowl of cookie batter and hand-fed me a hefty gob.

“Yummy,” I said.

She kissed my lips and I kissed her back with passion.

“Thanks for your note,” I said.

“I love you,” Anna said.

“I love you, too.”

I broke from her embrace and headed for the stove. I grabbed a hot cookie from the tray and bounced it in my palm until it cooled enough to eat. Taking a healthy bite, I savored the melted chocolate swimming about my mouth. Heaven. I even ignored the stab of guilt about my weight. Whenever I declined sweet treats, people said, “But you’re not overweight.” To which I’d respond, “Well, there’s a reason for that.”

“Did you see Brad?” Anna asked.

“I did,” I said, contemplating another cookie.

“What did he say, or . . . you know, what did you learn?”

“We’re going to have to make this decision on our own.”

“Did you talk to him? Was Max there?”

I nodded but couldn’t speak through the walnut-sized lump that had materialized in my throat. Anna never wanted Brad to connect her to Kevin. She was worried it would leave her shattered. Knowing what I knew, I couldn’t blame her.

My emotions settled. “What did you find out about Lily?” I asked.

“I ran an online criminal check and nothing came back,” Anna said. “I also did some Google searches and checked a few people databases, but not much there. Oh, and I did call Jillian’s, where Lily works, and asked to speak to a manager.”

I perked up at that.

“And?”

“And he said she’s a terrific worker, very dependable, never a problem.”

“Never a problem,” I repeated.

“I got him talking,” Anna said. “And he told me she’s one of the most levelheaded girls on his staff. She doesn’t party, is not into drugs. He wished more of the waitresses were like Lily.”

“We have Lily’s number,” I said.

Anna understood the subtext of my comment. Her eyes began to dance excitedly. I’d never forget that look of pure joy on her face—it was every Christmas rolled into one.

“Do we do this? Should we?” she asked, a slight squeal to her voice.

I ate another cookie. Hard not to. “Lily seems to be a reasonably put-together young woman,” I said. “Just in a tough spot. No drugs, not a drinker, she’s dependable at work.”

“That’s all positive.”

“But she’s not close to her family,” I added. “That could be a symptom of other problems.”

“That’s not so unusual. I don’t speak to my father.”

“That’s because he walked out on you and your mother.”

“And my mother doesn’t speak to her sisters,” Anna pointed out.

“Your mother wouldn’t recognize her sisters even if they did come to visit,” I said, feeling cruel. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“It’s okay, but that doesn’t give my aunts any excuse. Her cousin Gladys would come to visit if she could travel, but my aunts don’t have any good excuse.”

“Speaking of which, we should probably go see your mother.”

“Agreed,” Anna said. “But let’s make this decision first. Do we or don’t we?”

Anna’s mom, Bessie, was a resident of Carney House, a respectable nursing home in Brookline. At seventy-five, Bessie had late-stage Alzheimer’s disease and no memories of the cross-country trip she had made with her daughter four years ago. No recollection of Anna’s steady stream of tears as she left one life for another. Bessie lived each day anew, and in many ways I envied her for that.

“So we’re doing this, then?” I asked.

“If you think we should, I think we should,” Anna said. “I want this, Gage. It’s fate that we met Lily when we did. It was meant to be.”

This was the moment of truth. We had reached a decision point. If I said the word
yes
, we essentially were pregnant. I would become a father once again and Anna a mother. We would relive those sleepless nights bottle-feeding a newborn, changing tiny diapers, addressing every need, every cry, and feeling like we were doing something outside ourselves by taking a sacred and cherished vow to nurture and deeply love another life.

I said yes.

H
ere’s the most important thing to know about making a lithium-ion battery: it’s hard. The basic science is simple enough. Take two electrodes (the anode—or negative electrode—and the cathode, or positive electrode), combine them with an electrolyte that allows charged ions to flow between the electrodes, and voila, you’ve got yourself a battery. Well, there’s a bit more to it than that, but the essence is there. Putting it all together requires a lot of complex machinery: Automatic Desk-top Grinder with Built-in Agate Mortar, Electrode Cutter, Ultrasonic Welder, Slurry Viscosity Tester, Pouch Cell Case/Cup Forming Machine for Aluminum-Laminated Films, Compact Vacuum Sealer for Preparing the Pouch Cell—oh, this list goes on. The process requires a variety of skill sets. It’s a combination of advanced materials science, chemistry, applied mechanics, software, electronics; this list goes on as well.

Lithio Systems, my company, had been in the battery business for the past fifteen years. It was all we did. We made batteries. Might not be the sexiest thing to manufacture, but a lot of essential products don’t register high on the sexy scale. The batteries we made went into everything from telecom products to the electric grid, transportation, and all sorts of commercial applications.

I helped make batteries, and I loved my job. The hours could be exhausting, the politics maddening, the pace frenetic, but it was never boring. I always had a new challenge, some unforeseen obstacle to overcome. And we were important, too, at least in the eyes of the government. They ponied up a hefty $250 million grant to help fund several of our R&D initiatives, including the effort that eventually became Olympian. It just so happened that R&D was my division, so I directly benefited from this government funding. Our job was to push the boundaries of battery technology.

And push we did.

Everyone I worked with was in the supersmart stratosphere, even Matt Simons, whose jerkiness was proportional to his intellect. I reported directly to Patrice Skinner, the vice president of R&D for Lithio Systems. Patrice reported to a guy named Roger, who reported to a woman named Sarah, who reported to the CEO. So I was a mere four steps removed from the big boss. They were pretty giant steps, but still, I wasn’t on the bottom rung anymore. Lithio Systems had more than two thousand employees and a million and a half square feet of manufacturing facilities in Asia, Europe, and North America.

I was a player there and took a lot of pride in my work. In addition to my regular job responsibilities, I was also part of the highly selective three-member Security Breach Team, like SWAT for data security. All high-tech companies are worried about security, but when our lead scientists developed the first early prototype of Olympian, and it looked like we had something that would leapfrog us over the competition for years to come, Lithio Systems went to great extremes to protect our invention.

Even our IT folks didn’t have access to all of Project Olympian’s intellectual property. In addition to our daily responsibilities, the Breach Team looked for unusual network activity, followed up on unauthorized data requests, controlled access privileges for project teams, and implemented best practices for safeguarding our sensitive information.

Patrice’s universe held about thirty-five engineers, including us quality assurance folks. As the Director of Quality Assurance, I oversaw a team that took all the stuff everybody else had been developing and made sure the manufactured product actually worked.

What made Olympian such a special little battery was the supercharged electrode nanotechnology, more specifically our patent-pending carbon nanotubes. These tubes were about one ten-thousandth the size of a human hair, but harness a few billion of them in the proper way and a new generation of long-lasting, more powerful, superfast-charging battery was born. The secret to building these nanotubes was locked up and secured in our electronic vaults, safeguarded by the Security Breach Team as fervently as Google’s algorithms.

Not a big deal? Imagine if every cell phone manufacturer had to offer their customers the longest-lasting, fastest-charging battery just to stay competitive. Who would they buy their battery from? Well, it would be us, Lithio Systems, because we had the goods to sell.

Others had ventured into this territory, but thanks to those nanotubes, Lithio was the only company with a manufacturing process that wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive for commercial production. And first-mover advantage was the key to success. Some research wonks had predicted that the next generation of lithium ion batteries would become a $50 billion industry in just a few short years. Fifty billion! With all the products lithium ion batteries power—smartphones, wearable devices, electric vehicles, medical equipment, and more—it was a wonder that number wasn’t even larger. So it was a big deal, and my company was laps ahead of the competition in the race to develop the technology.

Now that we were in the home stretch of this multiyear project, everybody was on edge, quicker to anger than we were with a smile. The number of meetings rose proportionally with the level of panic. We used to meet with Patrice once a week, but now it was almost every day.

Four of us were sitting at the round conference table in Patrice’s spacious corner office. There was Adam Wang, our program manager; Matt Simons, senior scientist; Mamatha Joshi, a Bangalore-trained scientist and saint of a person, who was recently promoted to director of our R&D manufacturing process; and me. Mamatha, along with Matt Simons and me, comprised the three members of the Security Breach Team,

Patrice was a short, stout, Swedish woman with shoulder-length blond hair and bangs cut straight as a ruler’s edge. She wore the same style sweater vest to work every day. In our business, expending energy on what to wear was viewed as wasted effort. Like everyone here, she was brilliant: Columbia educated, with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University.

As Patrice’s trusted advisers, it was our job to present project status and reassure her we were on target for the upcoming big demo. We had just sat down when Patrice went to her desk and came back with some cupcakes.

“It’s Mamatha’s birthday today,” Patrice said as Mamatha blushed. “I thought we’d have a little treat while we went through the status.”

What followed was probably the saddest-sounding rendition of “Happy Birthday” ever sung, a tuneless, lifeless dirge that couldn’t have ended soon enough. Everyone laughed at how badly we had performed except for me. I hated that song. It made me think about Max’s last birthday cake—a soccer ball on a field of green frosting—and how it had seven candles on it, and how it would always have seven candles on it. That’s the thing about death—it’s permanent. Max and Karen had been frozen in time, while every minute I lived was one more minute I had spent without them.

I had days when it seemed the chasm of my grief would find no bottom. It always hurt to miss them, but the pain turned physical when I thought of my son, and pictured in my mind his tiny body fast asleep on sheets decorated with soccer balls and baseballs. My stomach would cramp, and my legs would begin to ache. I couldn’t drive past a playground, or see a school bus, without remembering him.

The meeting couldn’t start soon enough. I needed to focus on something other than my ever-present grief. I wished I had known it was Mamatha’s birthday. I might have doubled my usual dose of Adderall just for an added layer of protection.

“So let’s get going, shall we?” Patrice said after everyone devoured the cupcakes. “Adam, what’s the current status?”

Adam Wang checked his notes and returned a reassuring nod. “We’re looking good here. I think we’re on track. No major issues right now,” he said.

“What about my thoughts on the constant current threshold of the higher density nanotubes?” Simons asked. “I believe we can improve the degradation above our performance standards, and I’ve recommended several adjustments. Have those been integrated into your plans?”

Matt Simons worked on one of the largest teams in our division but rarely did anyone hear him use the pronoun “we.” In fact, his nickname was IMM, short for I, Me, Mine (also a well-known Beatles song).

Wang looked uncomfortable in his chair. “I saw your e-mail.”

“Which one?” Simons asked. “The one from yesterday or the one I sent at three o’clock this morning?”

Oh, give me a break,
I thought. Simons
would
have to work in a mention of the time of his e-mail. He was the sort who e-mailed at all hours just to prove he was more dedicated than everybody else. He was also the sort of officious jerk who would make sure everyone knew about his great sacrifice.

“I’m not sure,” Wang said, shifting in his seat. “But I did see it.”

“Well, I got the idea from one of Patrice’s papers on thermal conductivity in nanotubes. I practically have it memorized.”

Patrice perked up at the mention of her name (or the flattery), and Simons, arms crossed, looked impatiently at Wang.

Wang launched into all the reasons why we shouldn’t integrate Simons’s enhancement to try to increase conductivity. Simons rolled his eyes and laughed at most of Wang’s reasons in a mocking way. This went on for some time.

I tuned out, thinking about Max and Lily and becoming a father again. Would my new son or daughter be into soccer, like Max? Or would it be ballet, or horses, or art? I was daydreaming about having a yard with a play structure in it again, and it was at that moment I realized I wanted this as much as Anna.

“What do you think, Gage?”

Patrice’s voice only sort of pulled me out of my fog.

“I think it’s a great idea,” I said.

Wang looked appalled.

“That means you’ll have to redo all of your production tests before the demo?”

I shook my head. Obviously I was not fully engaged. “What? Oh, I’m sorry, guys. I guess I let my thoughts wander. I don’t think we should do anything different right now. We’re stable, and it’s too close to the demo to be fiddling with any formulas. No offense, Matt. But I say it’s an emphatic no, now is not the time.”

Mamatha agreed but looked curious about something.

“What’s a good idea then?” she asked.

I laughed at myself, embarrassed.

“My wife and I are going to adopt a baby,” I announced. “I was thinking about how excited I am, and well, it just sort of slipped out.”

Everyone broke into broad smiles—except for Simons, who apparently was still seething about not getting his way.

“That’s wonderful news,” said Patrice, who knew my history.

“Yeah,” I said. “It really is wonderful.”