I pulled the violin and sprung-haired bow from the stand and bounced the bow across the violin’s empty middle, making a low thump in the air, then quickly put them down again when I earned Estella’s glare. Crawling onto the sofa, I wrapped the shawl about my feet, gathering stuffed animals around me like a moat, and watched her. I was always intrigued when she was still, when her eyes did not flit from point to point and her fingers weren’t tugging at each other. She never glanced back at me, and I eventually fell asleep.
I woke when she threw a stuffed animal at my head. We rarely fought, and I was shocked at the unprovoked attack. I began to cry immediately, but she shushed me from her position at the now-closed door. The moon had dipped below the skylight as though it had never been there, making the room dim as a movie theater. I searched for her eyes, hopeful that they could tell me what her heart was feeling, but they were in shadow.
“Be quiet,” she whispered. “Connie, you have to listen; you can’t tell anyone that we know.”
I snuffled, gingerly retrieving the fuzzy duckling she’d chucked at my forehead. I checked it for injury and sullenly asked, “Know what?”
There was a pause while Estella folded her arms over her chest, posing in a dramatic stance I recognized and always responded to. It was I’m the Older Sister pose, The Sun, commanding her planets to fall in line. I listened.
“I’m sick. I am probably going to die,” she said, solemn as a Siamese cat.
I could feel my mouth hanging open and shut it quickly, before she could say anything about catching flies. I slid off the sofa, the shawl tangling soft as sand beneath my feet. Estella held her hand up to stop me from running to her.
“Don’t. It might be catching,” she said.
My mouth betrayed me again and I gaped at her. Catching? I caught chicken pox from her so I knew what catching was. I leaned back against the sofa, my fingers clutching the velvet, and asked the only question my five-year-old mind could come up with. “But why?”
She frowned. “I have eyecue,” she said. “It’s bad. I have a lot of it, but I couldn’t hear everything. It has something to do with my brain, or my head.” She lifted a hand to her temple, gently brushed it, just a flutter with her fingertips, and then let it drop. “You can’t come near me in case I give it to you too.”
I fluttered my fingers against my own temple, checked in with my limbs for aches, remembered the bee sting from the previous week, my fever from the chicken pox. “But what if I already have it?”
She shook her head. “They said you were normal.”
I moved toward her again and Estella took a step back, her hand on the doorknob. “Connie, stop. You have to go to your room.”
I bit my bottom lip, gripped the fuzzy duck tightly to my chest. She didn’t look sick. She didn’t have any spots. “I don’t want to,” I whined.
“You have to,” she insisted. “You have to stay away from me.” She began touching her thumb to each of her fingertips in turn, running them faster and faster against each other as she did when she was particularly agitated.
And then it hit me, as I stood there staring at her, that yes, she was different. It hit me the same way complex issues always hit me after that, at once, with perfect clarity after a long period of fruitless effort. Now it glared at me: She was fevered, had always been fevered with disquiet. I started to cry again with the revelation, the sudden force of it, sobs beginning to hitch my stomach, the fuzzy duck jittering under my chin.
Estella’s eyes rounded with worry, and I was hopeful when I saw that they glinted blue, but then her mouth straightened into a stubborn line. She turned the knob and opened the door while I stood there, frozen in fear of her lethal head eyecue.
Then she, my sister, my best friend and protector, my dance partner and ruler of planets, was gone; and though I didn’t realize it that night, she took my father with her.
Estella Lianne Sykes
1979
I have been holding my own, but it is an uncomfortable feeling just the same. I am an impostor. I am not used to this absurd two-piece bathing suit. It is impractical and utterly useless for swimming.
And these boys, these beach-rat boys who’ve never given me a second look before, are suddenly drooling all over themselves, looking past Connie to seek me out, offering me beer, disgusting lukewarm pisswater beer.
The Gulf calls, offers to hide me, and I retreat to it, my comfort zone.
The water is warmer than the beer, and I stroke out, feeling the power in my arms, the flex and ripple of muscle and tendon pulling me through the water, sluicing through the waves. I feel the undertow around my ankles but it merely tickles, a weak river beneath the placid surface of the water.
I tread in place, waving my forearms and watching the beach rats in their faded cutoffs, knotty white strings hanging down their thighs, emphasizing their long muscles as they rush each other, proving their manhood to themselves, to each other, and to Connie.
Tate stands out, as he always does, as he always has. Towheaded, lean-muscled from the work on his father’s shrimp boat, already a man beside the boys. I am free to be honest with myself out here. About this anyway. He is beautiful.
Connie will have him.
I wonder what a young man’s body feels like and then flush, even out here in this salt-buoyed safe place of mine. I turn back toward the horizon, executing a gentle front somersault before popping up and treading again, facing away from the shore, away from the beautiful young people. Dolphins are feeding beyond the far sandbar, lifting, diving, lifting, diving, all fins and eyes and curious smiles. If I were braver I would join them, would grab a dorsal fin and allow the dolphin to take me down, my ears popping, exploding gases in my head.
Connie squeals and for a moment I think it is a dolphin. I turn back to shore to see her race into the water clutching a football, chased by the beach rats. And Tate. Darwin whispers in my ear, says he will outpace them, and he does, nearly catching her as they hit the first thigh-high waves. But somehow she eludes them, moving faster than I’ve ever seen her move in the water.
The beach rats quickly give up and return to the beach. And finally Tate gives up and returns to the beach. He flings himself down and shakes his wet hair out of his face. It stays where it lands on his last shake, pointing to the north, toward Little Dune Island. It would be absurd on anyone else. On him it only serves to underscore his confidence.
Something bumps my shoulder and I spin in the water, my heart leaping. It is only the football, bobbing in the waves. It is already several feet from me, the current carrying it farther than the others are willing to swim. I could retrieve it for them, but I don’t. Instead I search for Connie.
She is not far from me and I start to call out, but then turn away, realizing suddenly that the salt on my cheeks is not Gulf water. I duck beneath the waves, and when I come up, I don’t see her. Then I spot the top of her head. It disappears again. There is a flurry of hands on water, and the head appears again. She is calling out for me. I hear an edge in her voice and stroke toward her, feeling the undertow fight me, stronger this time.
She sees me. I am mesmerized by her frightened eyes, the Sykes eyes. They’re brown. Nothing special. Just brown. I stop swimming. I tread water and watch her Sykes eyes realize that I have stopped swimming. Out of the corner of my eye I see that Tate has leapt to his feet and is racing for the water, yelling to the other beach rats, who also fling themselves into the surf. Tate is moving fast, but Connie and I, we are moving so slowly.
When she goes under the next time, I will go under too. I will swallow the Gulf and sink to the bottom with my secret. It is me who needs saving this time. And as Connie disappears under the water for the last time, it is all I can think, all I can scream inside my head where there is now entirely too much space free of numbers.
Save me!
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Estella didn’t have a disease. Not one you could treat anyway. Estella was a genius. She had
an IQ of over 140, though I was never told the exact number. It has not given her a happy life, being a genius. In fact, of both our lives, mine is certainly the one most people would prefer to have.
Except perhaps right now. While Estella, now forty-three, was living her strange, secluded life in Atlanta, I was still in Florida, though far south of Big Dune Island, and on my way to our mother’s condo just across town. It was the last thing I felt like doing. What I really felt like doing was working myself into a good lather over Gib’s report card, which had arrived in the mail that morning. My oldest son was failing math. Obviously the number gene completely skipped my little branch of the family.
I checked the time as I turned into the condominium’s impressive entrance, determined to be back home before Gib returned from school.
“Afternoon, Mrs. Wilder,” Otto said, leaning down to peer in my car window. His little security guard hat was tipped back on his head, offering a view of a mile-long forehead speckled with age spots.
“Hi, Otto, how’s it going today,” I said with a smile—a greeting, not an inquiry. Last year, when nobody pulled in behind me for almost twenty minutes, Otto had given me a vivid account of his emergency appendectomy before he finally raised the gate.
But today he just waved me through, and I parked in the visitors’ lot of my mother’s building, carefully reapplying my lipstick before heaving a sigh of self-pity and getting out of the car.
The Gulf of Mexico was quiet. Little waves, barely large enough to break, piddled their way onto the sand, scattering the pipers searching for coquinas. The sun glinted off the windows of the building, and I wondered if my mother was watching. She had a perfect view of the parking lot and the Gulf from her fifteenth-floor condo, but spent more time gazing down to see who was coming and going than she did looking out at the water.
I came two days a week, but this had been a special summons, another putting my affairs in order meeting. My stomach always clenched in apprehension when she told me she’d been talking to Bob McNarey, her lawyer, financial advisor, and steady escort. And it irritated my husband, Luke, to no end that she chose to stick with Bob rather than placing her financial decisions in his capable hands, though she was never above scooping a juicy stock tip from him.
She opened the door dressed in a pink suit, her glasses perched on the end of her nose and a pen clutched in her hand. She pecked me once on the cheek before making her way to the office, with me trailing behind her.
“I’ve just gotten off the phone with Bob, and we’ve decided it’s time to sell the beach house,” she said. I stopped walking, my muscles forgetting how to move as I tried to process this bomb, dropped as casually as she might mention a new purse, or a change in manicurists. Her back was to me, as if my reaction did not matter. And why should it? The beach house on Big Dune Island was hers, though the move had been Daddy’s idea.
His intent had been noble enough. Estella’s tutors agreed, when she swallowed their knowledge whole and looked for more, that she should transfer to the college in Grantsville to study with Dr. Roy C. Pretus, the eminent mathematician. Big Dune, just an hour away, satisfied our father’s need for privacy, for the wild Florida he’d grown up with. It was a different sort of wild, but wild nonetheless, with salt-stunted scrub and massive dunes as far as his Sykes eyes could see.
Luke and I had honeymooned and vacationed there, but we hadn’t been back for more than four years. I had to do the math twice to make myself believe it had been that long. How had I let that happen? How had four years passed by without that beach, without that stretch of Gulf, without the escape from the moneyed heat of Verona?
My mother shuffled papers on her desk while I stood at the door, despair flowering inside me. I thought it would always be there. When I needed a fantasy, when I built a secret future in my mind where everything was exactly as I wanted it, I pictured myself there.
“But why?” I asked. I knew the answer. It was always the same answer. The money—the real money—was gone, the victim of several drawn-out lawsuits brought by distant Sykes relatives and the State of Florida. I’d had a small piece, my trust fund, which I’d used to buy and furnish our home and set up college funds for the boys. Mother was still wealthy by anyone’s standards, but it was not the kind of wealth that could ignore a home nobody used and could be sold for a hefty profit.
“Because I’m tired of paying the property taxes, the insurance, the caretaker. It just sits there, nobody uses it.” She turned her chair to face me, her beautifully preserved cheekbones in high color. “Do you have any idea how much the electric bill is? Your sister won’t get those damn books out of there, so the humidistat has to run all the time, and Tate’s fee is double what Len’s was and I don’t have any idea what he does for it. For all I know he’s living there.”
Her irritation at Tate, son of the home’s original caretaker and the first friend I’d made on the island, was false. She loved him like one of her own and kept in touch with him often enough to make me slightly, and silently, jealous. Tate had been scarce during my family’s visits to the island, for which I’d always been grateful. I didn’t want to relive teenage crushes with my husband and sons there, but I kept in touch through Mother and felt closer to him than I felt to Estella, so he was the nearest thing I had to a sibling now.
“Why don’t you rent it out?” I asked, beginning to feel panicky.
Mother waved her hand in dismissal. “I’m not going to get into that. Renters will ruin the place. It’s time to sell. That area has jumped in value over the past few years.”
“Sell it to us,” I said. “It will be an investment for us. Luke would love it.”
“Sweetheart, Bob’s looked into it and he thinks we can get over two. I’m not sure you’re in a position to take that on.”
“Two million?” I asked incredulously.
She shot me a wry smile. “Well, I wouldn’t be doing it for two hundred, and frankly, that’s not much for beachfront property these days.”
Defeated, I turned toward the windows. The dazzlingly bright sun was diffused through the thick tinted glass, and I could gaze out at the water without having to shield my eyes. The sound of the waves was diffused too, muffled by the hurricane-strength concrete and steel of the building.
When I was younger, Mother would periodically leave Big Dune to travel to New York. She said there was no decent shopping in Florida, but she always had the same pained look for days before she left, and I knew it was because of the pounding of the waves, the relentless whoosh and crash that got into her head. Here she could have the cachet of beachfront property without the invasive voice of nature.
“What’s the problem, Constance?” The resignation in her voice was heavy, more pronounced than it needed to be.
“I just . . . I guess I’d always thought about being there with the boys. It’s a surprise, that’s all.”
“You haven’t been there with the boys for years.”
“So your mind is made up? I have no say?”
She looked surprised. “It’s my house, Connie. I wouldn’t expect to have a say if you chose to sell your home. Now, if you want the boys to see it one last time, you can bring them along when we go to close it up.”
“When we go?”
“Well, we certainly can’t allow anyone to go through the house for us, and I can’t do it all by myself. I assumed you would want the rugs and your violins. And of course Estella will come for the books.”
I snorted and she looked at me sharply. “If you get Estella to come I’ll be there with bells on,” I said. Unfair maybe, bitchy definitely, but undeniably supported by past behavior. Estella didn’t drive, had never gotten her license, in fact. Her boyfriend, live-in life partner, whatever she called him, didn’t own a car either.
Estella had received the same funds I had when she turned thirty. She could certainly afford to buy a car. It was an affectation, or perhaps simply an easy way to avoid driving to visit her family. Even when a ride was offered sh
e said she couldn’t drive over bridges. She said she couldn’t fly. She said she had an inner ear disorder and it was too painful.
And she said all those things to my mother, because we hadn’t spoken for almost eight years. No one event, no big fight had caused our break. Rather, the years had simply eroded our already tenuous relationship. And after Daddy died there was nobody to fight over anymore, so even that died away until there was nothing to keep us together at all.
I didn’t believe for a second that Estella would go. In fact, I didn’t know if I was going to go. But I did want those violins, and the rugs, and if Estella didn’t take her books then I would damn well take those too, despite what my father’s will said. They should have been mine to begin with.
At least my father left me the rugs, proving he did still occasionally think about me: a kilim and two Bokharas taken—along with the piano—against his lawyer’s advice from the family home before its contents had been categorized for auction. I should have rolled them up and brought them home when he died, but they seemed to belong to the beach house.
My violins, the tiny Mittenwald and a full-sized Vuillaume, were safely tucked away in the library at the top of the house, shabbily preserved alongside the books and the piano in their controlled environment. The violins had been beautiful at one time, long before my father bought them. Neither my mother nor I had ever been able to convince him to have them restored.
He hadn’t wanted me to play them, he’d wanted me to appreciate them. He liked the names and histories, he liked the expense, and he couldn’t help himself at auctions.
And so the bows and fiddles remained in terrible condition to ensure that I wouldn’t actually play them. My high school graduation present had been a beautiful Stainer chosen by my mother, the same violin I play today. I hadn’t bothered taking the other decrepit violins with me when I’d left for college.
Catching Genius Page 2