Catching Genius

by Kristy Kiernan

  “I’ve already spoken to Estella,” Mother said. “She’ll be ready to go next month. We’ll drive to Atlanta, pick her up, and then go to the island.”

  “She won’t come,” I said. “She’ll drop out at the last minute, you know she will. And then I’ll be stuck doing everything again.”

  “I really can’t take the martyr routine today, Constance. She promised she would come. She wants the books. I told her that I would give them to the college if she didn’t take them herself.”

  I felt a little smirk twitch my lips, as much in glee at the thought of my mother threatening Estella as in irritation that she didn’t even think to offer the books to me. “What did she say?”

  “I won’t gossip about your sister with you. The important thing is that she’ll be coming with us. And I’d like you to be civil. I would like to have good memories of our last visit to the island. Now, when will you be able to get away?”

  “I don’t know.” Luke would be busy with work, Carson was leaving for music camp in a few weeks, and that left Gib. “We’re having a problem with Gib,” I admitted. It was always Gib. I felt my stomach tense again when I realized that I didn’t want him to come to Big Dune. The thought of an eight-hour car ride to Atlanta, then four more back to the island with his sullen silence was enough to make me clench my teeth. But I couldn’t let him stay home alone either.

  “What did Gib do this time?” my mother asked, but she was distracted, already turned back to her desk. She didn’t notice when I didn’t answer.

  “And I’ve got my students,” I said instead, “and the trio.”

  She rolled her head across her shoulders as though her neck pained her. “Connie, I think the bambinos can do without you for a few weeks.”

  “They’re not Italian, Mom. And that was a donation-worthy comment if ever I heard one.” I volunteered once a week at the Cowachobee Community Center, ostensibly teaching music to the children of mostly Haitian and Mexican immigrants, but I was little more than a glorified baby-sitter. I hit up everyone I knew for donations, especially my mother. Especially when she made comments about bambinos.

  She sighed and swung back around to her desk, opening her checkbook to atone. “Five hundred,” she said firmly as she signed her name. “Don’t ask again until we get back from Big Dune.”

  I smiled and plucked the check from her fingers. “Thank you. I’ll see what I can do. All we have on the schedule is the library series, and Alexander was talking about going on vacation too, so maybe we can coordinate it.”

  “You know he never called Cecilia,” my mother said with a frown.

  “Cecilia is thirty-five years older than he is, she’s going deaf, and she’s a woman.”

  “Yes, but she’s rich as can be.”

  “It’s not 1850, Mother, he doesn’t need a patron. Besides, he’s not struggling, he’s fine.”

  Alex, the cello player in the trio I played with twice a month, was, in fact, struggling quite a bit. He and my mother got along famously, but she never stopped trying to pair him up with her widowed friends, despite the fact that she knew he was gay. Alex had been my best friend since my freshman year of college when we met in the string ensemble, and I was fiercely protective of him. Mother always put me on edge when she insisted on discussing him as though he were a project.

  She arched her eyebrows and leaned back in her chair, studying me, but said nothing except, “So when can you go?”

  “Let me talk to Luke,” I said, the surest way to buy some time, and left after promising to call her with an answer.

  As I drove home, I tried to focus on Gib, tried to come up with some punishment we hadn’t tried before, something he might actually care about besides football. He’d taken the PSAT almost three weeks ago and we were expecting those results soon. I’d been so busy worrying about those scores that his report card hadn’t crossed my mind until it came in the mail.

  But as hard as I tried to concentrate on my son, my mind stubbornly returned to Estella. Despite my irritation, I wondered what it would be like to spend time with her again. I wondered if she would really come to the island knowing that I would be there, if she would brave the four-mile-long bridge. I wondered if I could stand to have her there, could bear the subtle and not-so-subtle slights and jabs that she managed to aim with disquieting perfection. Mostly I wondered if, when we were finally in each other’s presence, we could manage to remember that once we had both been valued by our father, had been friends, and had danced the shag as though our lives depended on it.

  Estella

  I have agreed to go back to Big Dune. It has been twenty-six years. Paul has urged me to go, and after what he’s done for me, I can refuse him nothing. It is for him that I am going.

  I’ve taken to responding quickly to his needs. I am almost psychically attuned to him, if I believed in that sort of thing. I’ve also taken to thanking him often, with the sort of verbal gymnastics I associate with my father, for the smallest thing—a glass of water, an adjustment of my pillows, making the bed. In other words, I’ve taken to being abjectly grateful.

  And I’ve taken to lying to myself about this trip.

  My hair is short, and I wonder if Connie will think I’m ugly. Jealousy over Connie’s honeyed curls, so unlike my own washed-out blond frizz, no longer exists. Hair no longer matters to me at all. Many things no longer matter to me.

  Like the books. Connie was the one who helped our father in the library, who listened to him when he talked, who climbed on his knee and read with him. I’d never been able to match her devotion, even after he’d focused solely on me. While he talked about our brilliant ancestors, I added and subtracted dates, I rearranged the numbers, I found the relationships between them. I gazed at him with what must have looked like adoration, but was in fact merely me turning my thoughts inward, my face a blank canvas upon which any onlooker could have painted their own longings.

  I never cared about the books.

  Connie did, and they should have gone to her. By the time he died it was too late to take the enormous, excruciating step of handing them to her. And yet I couldn’t take them with me either. So I left them, and now they’re my excuse to go back to Big Dune Island. For this chance, I should be grateful. Abjectly grateful.

  I look in the mirror and run my hand over my hair.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I passed Carson on his skateboard at the top of our street and stopped to say hello. He popped the board up into his hand and I hid a smile, knowing that he had done it strictly to impress me. And it did. He was a graceful child, not brawny like Gib, to the dismay of the Pop Warner football coaches.

  Carson could never compete with Gib when it came to sports, just as I could never compete with Estella when it came to academics. But it didn’t stop coaches from pushing Carson, hoping to tap a previously unknown talent, just as it hadn’t stopped teachers from pushing me. The disappointment when that talent didn’t materialize was thick enough to be palpable.

  “Hey, Mom. I know something you don’t,” he greeted me.

  “Benny Goodman’s birthday?”

  He grinned, a grin that grew more like Luke’s every day. “Yeah, that too. Nope, big surprise. B-i-i-i-i-i-g surprise,” he hinted.

  “An elephant?”

  He rolled his eyes, too grown-up for fantasy elephant talk, I supposed.

  “Your brother home yet?” I asked.

  “No, but Dad is.”

  “Really?”

  “Race you home,” he said, flinging his skateboard to the ground like a gauntlet.

  “No cutting in front of me,” I warned and then goosed the engine a little. He took off and I allowed him to go, only taking my foot off the brake when he was well ahead of me. I let the car pull itself along without hitting the gas and watched his slim figure bend and sway on the board as he bumped on and off the curb. He turned sharply into our driveway and I braked lightly, always fearful of hitting him during this little game of ours.

  I was wa
tching him so intently that I didn’t see it at first, though it certainly couldn’t be missed. I slammed on the brakes before I hit it and stared out the windshield at the massive Cadillac badge on the back of a black SUV. Only two explanations came to mind.

  Either Luke had gone over the edge and bought our oldest son a brand-new Cadillac—Gib had mangled his sixteenth birthday present, a brand-new Jeep, and his no-driving punishment was nearly at an end—or he was finally done screwing the twenty-four-year-old Starbucks barista. Luke spoiled Gib, there was no question, but even he had his limits, and so I was left with the alternative.

  Hello, Deanna, I thought as I turned off the engine. This was by far the most impressive atonement gift I’d received. It had started off with small jewelry, gone through a home appliance phase, and then moved on to larger, more expensive jewelry.

  Jocelyn was a locket, Colleen a sapphire-and-diamond bracelet, and Angela an emerald pendant. I rarely wore any of them. They burned my skin when he slid them on me. I did use the appliances, however, relishing Tina the vacuum cleaner sucking up dirt and Barbara the blue Kitchen-Aid mixer gooey with dough. And now I had Deanna the Escalade. An espresso machine might have been more appropriate.

  Carson rapped on the passenger window and I jumped, scowling at him. His face fell and he shrugged before dropping his skateboard back onto the drive and pushing off toward the garage door, which was rumbling up. That would be Luke. He never gave presents without a floor show.

  Just as I unbuckled my seat belt his expensive loafers came into view, followed by sharply creased slacks, and then a golf shirt. He was leaning against his own car, one foot cocked over the other, and before the door revealed his face I already knew the expression that would be on it. That self-satisfied grin, the grin that still made my knees weak, still made my rage at being this incredibly stupid cliché of a woman evaporate.

  I hated the Cadillac. I hated the barista. And I hated myself. But somehow I could not find it in me to hate Luke when I was faced with his smile and his charm and his undeniable adoration of me. Because make no mistake, I was the wife, and I was publicly adored. Or at least adorned. And my friends, despite the fact that I was positive they knew of Luke’s infidelities much the same way I knew of their husbands’ affairs, considered me very lucky. Alexander was the only one who knew that it was slowly killing me.

  This was part of it; this was part of this lifestyle and this town, and right then I was less angry than I was relieved that I could stop pretending it didn’t matter and that he would be in our bed tonight, present and thinking of me. I arranged a smile on my face and got out of the car, cautiously approaching the Cadillac as though I didn’t know it was for me or why it was for me.

  Luke met me beside the passenger door and kissed me on the cheek as I gazed in the window at the elegant, pewter-colored interior.

  “What’s this?” I asked, raising my eyebrows at him.

  Are you finished with her? Is this the last time?

  “What do you think? I figured it was time you had something a little more befitting your station in life,” he answered.

  Yes, it’s over, but just look at what I got you to make up for it. I swear it’s the last time.

  “I thought about one of those new Beetles,” he continued, “but it just didn’t have the dignity I know you crave.”

  I rolled my eyes and gave him a cheeky grin, scripted, expected reactions. “I think you made the right choice. It’s incredible,” I said, walking around the front, admiring the massive grille, the sheer size of the thing. He was right; all my friends had SUVs of one expensive sort or another. There were no gas shortages in our neighborhood, and escalating prices would not keep us from the pumps.

  I liked to think that I wasn’t that shallow. But Luke’s childhood had been so different than mine. He had never had expensive cars or houses, had never been envied. These things were important to him.

  He walked around the back of the Escalade and opened the driver’s side door for me, dangling keys in his hand. I raised myself on my toes to kiss him as my hand closed over the keys, sealing our deal yet again.

  “Ready to go for a ride?” he asked.

  “Gib failed algebra,” I blurted, offering up my child. I wasn’t quite ready for the ride.

  “Whoa,” Luke said, pulling the keys back into the palm of his hand. “Really? What about football?”

  I shrugged. “I guess if the school year’s over nobody cares that he failed. Maybe they won’t let him play next year if he doesn’t make it up. I don’t know. We’ll have to find out.” I pulled the report card out of my purse and handed it over to him. He studied it and gave it back to me without a word.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked.

  “We’ll get him a tutor,” he said with a firm nod, already decided, taking things in hand. “Don’t worry so much, Connie. The rest of his grades are fine; maybe the teacher doesn’t like him. Listen, I’ll handle it. I know what Gib needs. And I know what you need too. Come on, don’t you want to take that baby out for a spin? It’s got a big backseat.” He wiggled his eyebrows up and down at me and bounced the keys off the end of his finger again.

  “His PSAT scores are supposed to be coming in any day,” I said, ignoring his flirtation. “What if his scores are bad on that too?”

  Luke sighed and stuffed his hands in his pockets. I felt like a child suddenly.

  “First of all, I’m not worried about his scores. That’s your father talking. It’s not like Gib needs to rely on scores for a scholarship. I said we’d get him a tutor, didn’t I? Let’s hold on to the report card until we get the results and then we’ll see if this is a problem with math, or a problem with a teacher, okay? Now come on, let me worry about this. It’s time to break this baby in.” With his hands still in his pockets he moved his body up against mine, leaning down to kiss my neck.

  Subtlety had never been Luke’s strong suit, and he became more obvious, or I became more cynical, every year. The first car we bought together, a Ford Thunderbird Super Coupe, was the first car either of us had had that was large enough to comfortably fool around in. And we took advantage of it. Perhaps he took advantage of it with other women too, I don’t know. I didn’t believe he began screwing around until after Carson was born, our last try for another child after two miscarriages, but I could have been wrong.

  The next car was quickly christened in the same manner, and each car we bought after that brought the same lecherous act from Luke. It used to thrill me, and sometimes it still did. I wanted Luke back in my bed, to claim him, to punish him, to remind him of who I was again. To remind myself of who I was again.

  But doing it in Deanna the Escalade was too much like doing it with Deanna the barista, and I was certain that when I crawled in the backseat and wriggled out of my pants to straddle my husband, I would not smell new car leather, but slow-roasted coffee and milky latte. A ménage à trois with biscotti and a V-8 engine.

  He should not have bought this vehicle. It was Alex’s voice in my ear, but it was somehow becoming mine. Something was coming apart inside me. The thought of spending three weeks trapped with my mother and Estella in the beach house, of my ever-distant child sabotaging his future, of my husband’s shiny, gas-guzzling apology—they all snapped painfully inside me like rubber bands against my tender inner wrist, reminders that my life wasn’t what it was supposed to be.

  I stared at the keys winking in Luke’s hand, wondering what would come out of my mouth when I finally opened it. I was disappointed to hear myself say, “Let me freshen up,” as I stuffed the report card back in my purse and turned toward the house.

  I cried afterward. Luke held me in the backseat, his chin resting atop my head. I’d cried after sex before, but it had always been because of the release, the chemicals flooding my body. Luke chuckled at my tears, convinced they were badges of his prowess, as they had been in the past.

  He took the long way home. We passed Starbucks and I gazed out the window as we drove p
ast. Did he hope that she would see us, would know that the new Escalade was mine, his, ours? I turned my eyes forward again, those rubber bands still snapping—not your life, not your life.

  A month before that night in the music room, when Estella protected me from catching her genius, Mother went to New York to shop, and our nanny, Graciela, she of the mammoth thighs and Tabasco-tinged breath, was left in charge. She put us to bed early, which meant I had to lie there longer than usual before I could make swift down the hall to the music room.

  I had little games that I played to keep myself busy, to stay calm. I might recite the stories our father told us about his grandfather and great-grandfather under my breath, faster and faster, like a prayer. Or I might try to remember the order of titles in the library, moving shelf to shelf until I couldn’t remember what came next.

  I never wondered what Estella did during that odd half-light suspended time until I was years older. Did she lie quietly, rearranging numbers in her head until they formed whatever configuration she was looking for? It was hard to imagine her still for any length of time. I found it more likely that she paced her room like a caged panther, counting her steps over and over, figuring how many to her bathroom door, to her window, to her desk.

  My mother later told me that Estella’s inability to concentrate on one thing at a time was what led to them having her tested to begin with. Having me tested was just a bonus. One that paid no dividends except to let everyone know that I was not destined for greatness.

  When I finally broke for the music room, Estella was already at the banister. She held her hand up in a warning and I tiptoed the rest of the way, carefully keeping the hem of my nightgown from brushing the railing. I dropped to my knees beside her, noting with some concern that her eyes were a murky sea-grass green.

  I could hear my father at the dining room table, his voice low and soothing. And there was Graciela’s voice, arcing into a high giggle. I strained for a third voice and, finding none, was immediately bored. But then Estella grasped my wrist tightly in her hand and pulled me toward her, pointing with her other hand.