Fire in the Firefly Read online

  This book is dedicated with love to my wife, Rennie Renelt, without whom, in so many ways, it would never have been possible.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part 2

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part 3

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  December 2010

  It’s snowing, and he’s tired. It has been coming down like this for days. Cursing drivers rock their chassis deeper into drifts; spinning tires drone like brumal cicadas even through the walls of this café. There seems to be a business meeting underway two tables over—young men in goatees and horn-rims, who rammed to the door a few minutes ago in a tangerine Hummer. The management has strung up decorations, strings of winking bulbs, which only reinforce that jolly, festive atmosphere that happens every time the snow dumps down like this. Tiny lights sparkle and dance in the room. The guys with the show truck might as well have swapped their lattés for shots of tequila. They could be quieter.

  He himself is not festive. His feet are soaked and frozen. He should have worn boots. He is an idiot for not having worn boots. But standing at the podium in snow boots would have looked even more ridiculous, apparently, than he sounded. Though no fault of his, half the audience stayed home. He should be grateful, realistically, that as many as did showed up. Even baby biz-heads love a snow day.

  He is wondering if he should have hailed a cab. But of course the taxis today are buried like everyone else. Besides which, he can use the exercise.

  On the way back from the counter, one of the young bucks leans back in his chair, the better to display whatever’s dancing on his tablet, and nearly upends his cup. They have not even registered his passing.

  He was expecting this. Fully. But even so, the change has rocked him. Monday night he nodded off again. No. Tuesday. Tuesday is taekwondo, so it had to be Tuesday. Story time, that much he remembers. And of course the reprimand. They haven’t talked about it, naturally—any of it—and in the way of things he is fairly sure they never will. It works. It works for him, and it works for them, and with a little luck, it all will keep on working. Children grow older, timelines get shorter. Snow falls and smoothes away irregularities.

  Part I

  March–April 2008

  Although mate choice in many animals favors the most conspicuous visual, acoustic, or olfactory signals, such signals may also attract attention from illegitimate eavesdropping predators.

  Sara M. Lewis and Christopher K. Crastley,

  “Flash Signal Evolution, Mate Choice, and Predation in Fireflies,”

  The Annual Review of Entomology

  1

  Novelty is the ultimate cliché.

  The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck

  It’s approaching midnight, and Roebuck is in his bedroom.

  He’d been puttering in the kitchen earlier, getting started on tomorrow’s lunches. But now he’s done all that he can do in that regard.

  The ritual of lunch-making is to Roebuck what yoga seems to be for Anne, at least according to his understanding—endless repetition of meaningless actions conceived to obliterate reason. Every morning he packs them and every evening they return to him, mostly uneaten. He’d be a rock star, he knows, if he sent his kids off with cookies and a can of Coke. But here at least Roebuck is old school, clinging to the antique notion that children’s food is meant to be nutritious. Tomorrow it’s chicken salad with chopped shallots and rosemary, sealed in the refrigerator overnight so the flavours will blend. Chicken is often acceptable to Morgan and sometimes to Zach, but will almost certainly go untouched by Kate, his eldest. He has made enough for Anne as well, if she decides she wants some. Anne at least has the courtesy to pretend she’s eaten hers.

  Roebuck is also aware that his views on this topic are sometimes dangerously out of keeping with the professional side of his responsibilities. Just last month, he pitched a product that he would never, ever have fed to his own family. Participants in every focus group engulfed it like a pod of whales baleening plankton. So did their parents and so would his kids, for that matter, if he let them get their hands on the stuff.

  Irresistibility. Is that a word? By design?

  Stop that.

  Most nights Roebuck will read for an hour before powering down, but tonight he thinks he’ll attempt a frontal attack straight into sleep. He has opened up his laptop to check his email one last time.

  “Oh,” he says. “I didn’t hear you coming in.” Anne’s room is on the other side of the adjoining bath. “How was dinner?”

  But his wife first wants the fundamentals. “Kids in bed?” She is standing by the door, dug in.

  Roebuck has tiptoed into each room on his way to the top floor. “Sound asleep, all three. Lunches in the fridge; chicken salad if you’re interested.” He tries again. “How was dinner?”

  Anne has been out with Yasmin. He knows that after evenings like this, she likes to sit on his bed and debrief. Roebuck has put aside his laptop so as not to give the impression he is anything less than wholly attentive.

  “She’s so miserable.”

  “Ah.”

  He also knows that very little in the way of input will be required of him. A natural talker, Julius Roebuck is a formidable listener, too.

  Anne removes her earrings and bracelet, returns to the bathroom where the two rooms meet. The renovation that permitted this arrangement was by far the most daunting to date. Brazilian cumaru floors, Afghan silk matting, Japanese soaker tub, Tuscan marble; the entire upper story ripped out and refitted. Most of that summer, Roebuck lived out of a hotel while Anne kept the kids at the cottage. But now that it’s done, she loves the look. Anne sets her earrings on the vanity and walks back toward his bed, unbuttoning her blouse. “I think she’s getting seriously depressed.”

  Anne and Yasmin operate an interior design studio that caters to up-market neighbourhoods like theirs. Several houses on this street, in fact, inhabit their portfolio. Anne drafts the architectural plans; Yasmin’s talent is for sourcing the rare and exotic materials that concentrate their fees. It was Anne and Yasmin who planned and executed the most recent renovations to this house. Roebuck remembers it as a time of paint chips and fabric swatches held up against an endless stream of brushed metal light fixtures.

  “How’s Chalmers Crescent coming along?”

  “Oh, you had to ask! The tile guy used quarter-inch spacers instead of eighth-inch and now the owner wants the whole wall replaced, so sh
e’s blaming herself for that too! She’s in such a bad place.”

  Yasmin is that variety of woman that even Roebuck, whose profession is women, admits he can’t decipher. She is beautiful. More than beautiful. The phrase smoking hot could have been coined with her in mind. As far as he can understand it, Yasmin’s problem is that she’s single. How a woman with her looks—one of their carpenters shot a nail through his hand when her blouse gaped over the blueprints—could fail to find a man remains beyond Roebuck’s scope of understanding. Anne reminds him that the problem isn’t that Yasmin can’t find a man. It’s that she can’t find the right man. “You know, she’s thinking about it more and more seriously.”

  “Thinking about what, more and more seriously?”

  “Going it alone.”

  “Going what alone?”

  Anne steps out of her skirt and regards him coolly. “We’ve talked about this before.”

  “I’m sorry.” Roebuck should not have been joking. They have indeed talked about this before. It’s just that he finds the subject too absurd to take seriously.

  “She can’t stop thinking about having a baby.” Anne has tossed her skirt into a hamper in the bathroom, followed by her bra and panties. “She thinks that if she waits any longer, it will be too late.”

  “How old is she? She can’t be old enough to worry.”

  “She’s turning thirty-five.”

  “Oh, well. That’s not old.” His wife has disappeared into her room.

  She returns doing up her dressing gown. “If you remember, I had both Katie and Morgan before I was that age, and the doctor was worried about me while I was carrying Zach. All those ultrasounds? Remember?”

  “Yes, but …”

  “But what?”

  Roebuck has realized, later than he should have, that his thoughts should remain unspoken on this subject too.

  “Why don’t we have her over for dinner?” he says. “She hasn’t been here in ages. I’ll make paella. That cheers everyone up.”

  “You just say that because you like paella.”

  “True. But so does everyone else.”

  “You make too much sangria whenever you cook Spanish. When people say they like it, it’s the alcohol talking. But you’re right. We haven’t had her over for a while. I’ll ask tomorrow.” Roebuck wonders for a moment if she’s about to kiss him, but she turns toward the door.

  “Hey,” he says. “Question?”

  Anne stops and folds her arms. “What?”

  “We’re pitching tomorrow. I was wondering if I could, just … run it by you. Briefly.”

  Anne sighs.

  “This one’s kind of fun.” Roebuck is aware that possibly he’s blushing. “Though we’re up against some pretty big agencies.”

  His wife examines the ceiling. Taps a toe.

  “What makes this one interesting is that they know already exactly who they’re going after. That’s why we’re on the list, of course, but …”

  “So let me guess.” She holds up a hand. “You’re rolling out your usual—”

  “Well, okay. But with this client …”

  “Know what I think?”

  Roebuck has the feeling he wishes he didn’t. “Please,” he says politely. “Tell.”

  “I think that’s just so you.”

  It takes him a minute to realize that’s it.

  “Good night,” Anne says, closing the door behind her.

  2

  Only women count.

  The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck

  Roebuck savours the room, savours the phrase and repeats it.

  His words smoulder with certainty, crackle with conviction, indisputably—with passion. No one at the table can doubt for a moment that Roebuck is unshakably, omnifically, committed to the truth of his creation. But that’s what they’re looking for, passion unzipped with conviction. “Look,” he tells them, “you want to grow your brand, not shrink it, so why would you even think about marketing to men? Men don’t make the decisions, they don’t spend the money. They’re just not relevant.”

  He’ll pause here, most pitches, and smile at one of the women.

  “Eighty percent of all consumer purchases,” he says, “are made by women.” He’s ready to prove the point with a fat deck of references and tables, but clients know this part already. What they want from Roebuck is the understanding behind the understanding. If he thinks they can absorb it, he’ll go so far as to tell them that this is the closest any of them will ever come to the ultimate creative brief, the Platonic ideal of a creative brief: the brief of which all other briefs are but dim and pale reflections. Packaged goods people tend to prepackaged thinking, though this account is definitely toward the outer edge. The girl in the white silk blouse holds his eye, unsmiling.

  “Maleness,” he says, spreading his arms like the marketing magus he makes it his business to be, “is, both literally and figuratively, petering out. We saw it on the news the other day: scientists are predicting that sometime up the road the Y chromosome itself will go extinct. Seriously folks, if you want to aim your brand toward the future, you want to aim it at women.”

  Now she’s smiling. Almost. Not so much a smile as a twitch of lower lip, a crinkle at the eyes. Her blouse is opened perhaps a button more than is traditional for clients in this category. Roebuck glances at his notes which are not notes—when Roebuck speaks, he speaks from the heart—but a list of who’s who in the room: Zhanna Lamb, product manager.

  Everyone will be familiar with the Ripreeler story; it’s passed into legend. But Roebuck is prepared to run through it anyway, because there’s no better narrative to get to where he’s driving. Also he thinks it fits with the girl in the blouse. So he smiles at the CEO, a middle-aged man with a shaven head who is already frowning at his Rolex, smiles at the VP of Brand Development whose shoes have been carved from the hide of some equatorial reptile, looks deep into each and every set of eyes around the table, and pictures Zhanna Lamb, product manager, naked with a Ripreeler Diving Minnow dangling from one pink and tender lobe, eagerly absorbing each and every word he is emitting.

  “Only women count,” he says again and launches his recital of how, ten years ago, he won that mighty piece of business.

  But the CEO is having is having none of it.

  Well before Roebuck gets to the part about the super-models, before he can invoke the famous Oprah segment and the fashion craze that started, before he even begins to outline the stratospheric shift in market share his client enjoys to this very day, Roebuck is asked to stop talking.

  “Right,” says the bullet-headed CEO, now distinctly pissed. “Skip the foreplay. We know all that ground-breaking work you’ve done for Ripreeler. That’s why we’re here. Tell us what you’ll do for Artemis.”

  “Did I say how much I like that name?” Roebuck elects, just here, to stoke that other kind of branding. “Some of us wondered at the wisdom of naming your product after a goddess of virginity. Counterintuitive, if you don’t mind me saying so. But she’s also the goddess of the hunt. Which is exactly where we want to go. And such an elegant antithesis to all that other Greek material your competitors go out with. Artemis. Brilliant. Whoever came up with that was right on the money.”

  He knows, of course, that whoever came up with it is almost certainly here in this room. But little freebies never hurt, at least at the outset. Altogether there are eight of them; four men, four women; split right down the middle. Interesting too. The CEO is twirling his finger for Roebuck to move it along. All right then.

  Roebuck spins his BlackBerry. “And you’re quite correct, time ticks. Let’s turn things over to Daniel. Daniel, as you know, has just joined the agency as art director. You are about to see why we’re all so pleased to have him.”

  A younger man rises and takes over the floor. He’s a little taller than Roebuck, though not q
uite so good looking—not, at least, as good looking as Roebuck was when he was that age. Daniel Greenwood nods politely, ambles to the front, and quietly begins placing foamboards on a shelf that runs along the wall. For the first few moments, his body blocks the view, but by the time he’s got his third board set, the messages are visible to everyone.

  The first one reads:

  When excuses Peter out.

  The next says:

  For all those rinky-dink excuses.

  Greenwood himself isn’t talking. Good, thinks Roebuck. Okay.

  Peter Paul Mary.

  His bun. Your oven.

  Don’t let the pricks get you down.

  “That one,” Roebuck says, “might step over the line. Still, worth a try.”

  What’s the difference between a sperm and a virus? Right.

  He says he wants to take the long view. But you know it’s only Tunnel Vision.

  Tunnel Vision: His vision, your tunnel.

  Someone snorts. Roebuck decides that now’s the time to make the jump. “What you’re seeing is the essence of a teaser campaign. Curious. Cryptic. Confrontational. Designed to pique interest. Think of this as the anticipation stage.”

  Greenwood has placed the last of his boards at the far end of the room:

  Like what socks are to your sock drawer.

  Yes, Virginia, there is a proper place for everything.

  “They’re transit ads,” Roebuck tells them. “We’ll show you dozens, but you get the picture. Snappy little one-liners. They’re not just unbranded; they don’t even name the product. People seeing them won’t have a clue what it means. But they’re curious. We’ll blitz these above the seats in subway trains and buses. Then they’ll disappear …”

  While Roebuck has been talking, Greenwood has worked his way back down the line, smoothly turning each board front to back. The reverse-sides show the same one-liners, but now the word ARTEMIS appears in eye-popping scarlet. Roebuck slows the pace. “These come next, right after the first collection vanishes. More mystery. Now our audience has the brand name, but they still don’t know what Artemis is. Roebuck nods toward a board at Greenwood’s left.