Her hands obscured the contents, and they shook as they hovered in the tissue, then stilled as she laid them atop whatever lay within the box. When she finally withdrew her hands, my breath escaped the astonished O of my lips, as though my lungs had been punctured along with my heart. Pinched between my mother’s thumbs and fingers were two tiny stained and creased pairs of shoes.
She thrust them toward me, and as soon as I held my hands out she placed the shoes in them, scraped her chair back, and left me there on the porch, the brilliant sun illuminating the ghosts of my aunts in heartbreaking detail. I didn’t follow my mother. I couldn’t do anything but stare at those little once-white Mary Janes, their warped and gritty soles resting as lightly on my palms as memories. The little metal buckles bled rust across the sides, and I bent toward them and inhaled. They smelled like time and water. I felt the tears on my cheeks, but I couldn’t put the shoes down to wipe them away.
When Mother returned she didn’t say anything, and I held my hands up like an offering to her pale, drawn face, where I saw the evidence of her own tears. She took the shoes and nestled them in the box, carefully replacing the tissue around them and snugging the lid down firmly.
“Well,” she said, shaking her head as if to ward the memories off, but clutching the hatbox on her lap to keep them safe at the same time. “None of that was supposed to be the point of this conversation. The topic was divorce.”
Incredibly, during her story I’d forgotten about Luke.
“Yes, Sebastian cheated on me. And yes, I was often angry and jealous enough to consider divorce, but I knew he loved me in his way. And I had you girls and a nice life, a life I certainly never believed I’d have. I probably would have gone on like that until he died, but then we had to move.”
I suddenly understood. “The island,” I said. “You didn’t want to live on the island.”
“No, I did not. I couldn’t imagine living on a tiny, stinking island again. All I could see were April and May, stuck naked in those roots, still holding on to each other. And I almost told your father then, I almost told him everything.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because of you.”
“Me?” It thrilled me to think that I might have had some influence on my family, after believing Estella had held all the power. But my thrill was short-lived.
“You and Estella. I had nothing to give you. All I had was my wits, and your father’s estate, which his father had been foolish with, and which was being pulled right out from under us. We would have had nothing left if it weren’t for me threatening to divorce your father, Connie. I went to Bob McNarey.”
“Bob! You knew him back then?”
“That’s when I met him. I was lucky. He was just out of law school and knew all kinds of things I didn’t. I made your father put as much as he could in my name, I made him set up the trusts for you girls, and I made him sign the deed to the house and land on Big Dune over to me. And I let him believe it was all because of his affairs, but it was really so that I could stand living on an island again, for you and Estella, for your futures, Connie.
“And I didn’t live on that damn island for fifteen years for you to get taken in a divorce because your husband can’t keep it in his pants.”
She glanced at me, angry now, and I saw the iron gray of a storm-buffeted Gulf in her eyes. “Do you know what people are saying about Luke, Connie? Do you know that he’s lost a lot of clients a lot of money?”
“What? What are you talking about?” I sat up straight in my chair, all warm sympathetic feelings for my mother forgotten, ingrained defense of my husband surging to the fore.
“I’m just telling you what I’ve heard.”
“From who?” I demanded. Luke was a lousy husband, but his work was his life and he took pride in it. I still took pride in it—it was the last bit of pride I had in him. “Bob McNarey? He just doesn’t want you to take your money out of his control. I can’t believe you’d even listen to that kind of—of nasty gossip.”
“First of all, I am in control of my money, not Bob, and I’ll remain in control of it until the day I leave this world. Bob is not the only one to mention this to me; for your information, most of the people who have mentioned it have done so out of concern for you, not to gossip. He’s losing clients left and right, Constance.”
“I don’t believe that for a second.”
I stood and pushed the sliding glass door back with a protesting rumble. I grabbed the box of paperwork on my way to the door, ignoring my mother’s footsteps behind me.
“Connie, stop. Just stop and let’s discuss this.”
I turned around with the box still clutched in my hands, my heart beating erratically. “It’s just mean-spirited gossip. I can’t believe you’ve been talking about us like this.”
“Calm down. Put the box down. I wasn’t sure before, and I didn’t want to hurt you with rumors. But since your last visit I’ve spoken with several people who’ve recently fired him. You have to protect yourself and the boys, Connie. You could wind up with nothing.”
I hesitated. I couldn’t help myself. After all, I was the one who’d said I was ready to leave Luke, I was the one who told Bob McNarey that my husband was unfaithful, I was the one who’d aired my dirty laundry. Who was I to turn tail and run when some of it was shoved back at me? Mother took the box from my arms and set it on the hall table before she took my hand and led me back to the living room. She’d left the sliders open, and the Gulf filled the condo with its incessant whisper of waves.
“Would you rather I hadn’t told you?”
“Yes,” I said softly, but of course it wasn’t true. Everything—my marriage, the person I thought my husband was, Gib, even what I thought I knew about my mother—was all crumbling around me, and I had no way to keep it together.
When I left my mother’s condo almost an hour later, I left the box, with her promise that she would drop it at Bob’s that very afternoon.
It took fewer than twenty-four hours for the first of the bad news to come in.
Estella
Fewer than twenty-four hours have passed since I left the photo on my nightstand, and Paul has already framed it in beautiful maple—which perfectly matches Connie’s hair, I can’t help but notice—and placed it on the shelf in the dining room. I haven’t said anything about it, but it looks inevitable there. There is no denying what is happening.
My mother and Connie will arrive in four days. Lisa, the quantitative sciences major, has generously agreed to move in with Chelsea, a statistics whiz who rents the room across the hall. On Friday I will blitz Lisa’s room so that Mother and Connie will have someplace comfortable to spend the night. They’ll have to share a bed, but unless one of them wants to sleep on the downstairs sofa, there’s no other choice.
The college students have been helping to clean the house, taking the broom from me as I sweep the tile, shooing me to the living room when they see me drop to my knees to clean the oven, which I’ve never done. Ever.
They leave me the smaller tasks, or talk me out of the impossible ones. Two days ago I decided that I should plant the flower garden I’ve been putting off for eight years and began drawing up a list of supplies.
When Paul suggested that it might be a bit late for it and stuffed the list in his pocket, I drew up another list with ingredients for beef Wellington and baked Alaska, which I’ve always wanted to learn how to make but never actually have. This list was also confiscated and spaghetti gently suggested.
And now it is four days away.
I have packed three times.
Fours and threes.
The easy answer is seven, of course.
Facts about seven:
Seven is the smallest integer that is not the difference of two primes.
Seven is the only prime that can be the digital root of a perfect square.
There are seven deadly sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, avarice, and sloth.
I force myself to stop
before I fall off the edge. I quiet my mind, limit myself to just the three facts.
And now, with all the nervous energy that I am not allowed to expend writhing inside of me, I sit at the front window looking for a distraction. The college students are out for the night and the young ones I tutor have eaten their dinners and retreated to whatever broken homes they come from. The house is quiet but for the steady, gritty sound of Paul sanding the curve of a new bowl, the door to his workroom propped open in case I need him.
The sound is the same swish, slow, swish of the Gulf of Mexico, and I close my eyes and imagine that I am already there.
The sanding stops, and soon I hear his steps in the kitchen and the vacuum of the swinging door as he pokes his head in to find me. I don’t turn around, and I hear the swinging door settle back in place.
Music, Van Morrison, streams through the living room. I cannot help but smile. Paul takes my hand from my lap and I allow him to pull me up and into him, easily lifting me and placing my bare feet on his boots. He sways in place, and then we move together, and we hit every inch of the floor, because I do not need to look down, because Paul has me, and he will not let my feet touch the ground.
Four days.
I have nothing left to do but dance.
CHAPTER SIX
I needed more time. Four days was not nearly long enough to get everything done. I had no time for the mundane chores of everyday life in our household, and yet I couldn’t escape them.
I was watering the orchids when the phone rang. Luke gave me my first orchid almost seven years ago, when he saw me reading The Orchid Thief. Good book. So was Seabiscuit, but I had no desire to train racehorses after reading it. Nonetheless, it was a sweet gesture, and perhaps I overdid the gratitude, because for every small occasion since that first purple phalaenopsis, Luke has given me another orchid.
I learned how to care for them, and even discovered, thanks to the local Orchid Society, that an orchid was named for my great-grandfather, Henry Louis Sykes. The ‘Sykes Spike,’ a cattleya with large, deep yellow flowers, a dark red lip, and a snowy white throat, was found in 1887 by Francis X. Gestain, a botanist who disappeared in Asia a few years later. Henry’s largesse allowed Francis to spend his time orchid hunting rather than cataloguing endless hybrids, though he might have been safer had Henry not been so generous.
Luke immediately acquired one, and when visitors exclaimed over the sunroom of orchids he would proudly point to the ‘Sykes Spike’ and recite the story. He was pleased to have ancestors he could tell a story about, even if they weren’t his own.
The orchids took up an astonishing amount of my time and I grew to resent them, like an older sibling forced to care for a brood of youngsters. But what I grew to dread the most was Luke’s presentation, running his fingers along the lips, caressing the throat, gazing at me slyly. Much like a new car, a new orchid was foreplay to Luke.
He also went through a Georgia O’Keeffe phase when we were first together and bought me several prints. After a while I couldn’t even look at an O’Keeffe without thinking sex, seeing swollen vulvas, delicately colored clitorises. Frankly, it pissed me off. I used to enjoy looking at Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. And now he’d ruined orchids for me too.
So there I was, surrounded by all the petaled sex, when the phone rang. The caller ID showed Bob McNarey’s name, and I snatched the phone up furtively, though nobody was home. He dove right in after my tentative hello.
“I don’t have good news, Connie.”
I stumbled backward into a kitchen stool and waited.
“Did you know that Carson’s college fund has been wiped out?”
No, I had not known that. My jaw was rigid, frozen in place, not allowing me to scream out What are you saying? the way I was screaming it inside my head. I managed a whisper.
“No.”
“And Gib’s has been dipped into recently, though the majority is intact. The house seems to be untouched, no liens have been attached, and it’s clearly and legally in your name. That’s all I’ve been able to get so far. Do you want me to continue?”
I fingered my wedding band—twist, twist, twist—a nervous habit I thought I’d conquered long ago. “Yes,” I said.
“Right. Okay then, I’ll be in touch at Big Dune. Keep things normal around there, just go on your trip like nothing is happening, okay?”
“Okay.”
He hung up. The whole conversation, only four words on my part—hello, no, yes, okay—was enough to leave me gasping for breath. I hung up the phone slowly and very carefully, as though it were crystal. My hands felt too large for the skin they were in, the muscles of my arms tight and ready to burst.
I returned to the sunroom, to the orchids. I gazed at them, all so different and yet alike: spiky, olive green, light green, bulbous bases, slender stalks, gracefully drooping over the rim, shooting straight into the air. I felt the flower of the one closest to me, the ‘Sykes Spike,’ in full bloom and velvety soft, even where the edges ruffled slightly. I pinched the lip between my thumb and finger and plucked it away from the rest of the flower before letting it drop to the floor.
The scarlet lip lay on the slate, quivering, like a drop of freshly spilled blood. It was more beautiful there on the floor than it had been on the plant; defenseless, shocked, shocking. I reached out, cupped the rest of the flower in my palm, and crushed it, ripping it off the spike, and then moved on to the other blooms.
I stopped for a moment, staring at the denuded spike, still rigidly, defiantly thrusting itself toward me. And then I tore it apart. I stormed through the room in a fury, smashing the pots on the slate floor, separating spikes from stalks, leaves from pseudopods, petals from throats, bellowing in rage. The massacre took less than five minutes and left me panting and trembling on my knees, my palms stained green, nursing a gash in my thumb that welled blood. Bits of petal clung to my hands, rolled against my cheeks as I wiped tears from my face.
All around me plants lay unrecognizable, a battlefield of awful dismembered limbs. My fury settled into something approaching satisfaction when I realized that at least I no longer saw sex when I looked at the orchids. And then I was horrified to realize that I preferred thinking of a battlefield to thinking of sex.
I had trusted Luke. Perhaps not with another woman, but certainly with our children. He could betray me with his body, but I would not let him betray Gib and Carson with their future. Bile rose in my throat when I remembered his glib reaction to Gib’s test scores and grade. Was that why he had taken Carson’s first? So he would have time to replace it?
But things must have been worse than I could comprehend, because he was beginning to dip into Gib’s too, savings we would need in just two years. That did not leave much time to replace the missing funds. Was he even planning on replacing the money? And if not, how did he think he would get away with it? By encouraging Gib to fail in school?
I couldn’t answer the questions. Only Luke could, and I couldn’t ask him. I slowly got my feet under me and stood, still panting, wiping my dirty palms on my shorts. I surveyed the littered sunroom and glanced at the clock too late to change anything. Carson would be home in minutes.
I grabbed a few trash bags and had one of them filled by the time he wandered in, stooping under the weight of his ridiculously large backpack.
“Stop!” I called, before he could step into the sunroom. “Got shoes on?”
“Whoa,” he breathed, slumping his shoulders to allow the backpack to slide down his arms and onto the floor. “Yeah. What happened?” he asked as he picked his way across the sunroom, crouching beside me to scoop up debris and dump it in the second open bag.
I sat back on my heels, gazing at my son. He simply pitched in, as though coming home to an orchid explosion was a regular thing. Gib would have looked in, shook his head, and then disappeared to his room without a word. I felt a sudden rush of love for Carson and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. He immediately raised his shoulder to wipe it off and conti
nued to gather up broken pots and scattered flowers.
“Well, I hit a bad note on my violin and the pots shattered, all at once,” I said.
He didn’t even bother looking at me, just said, “Mom,” and rolled his eyes.
“I don’t know, honey,” I said. “I was watering them, and it was bugging me that I had to do so much work on them, and I got careless and knocked one over. It broke, and I just sort of tipped over the rest. It was a little fun, you know? Like orchid hockey.”
He sat back, his hands cradling a smashed pseudopod, and scanned the damage as though assessing the validity of my story. “Well,” he finally said, resuming work, “what’re you gonna tell Dad?”
I didn’t have an answer. What, indeed, would I tell Luke? All the things I wanted to say to him were unspeakable.
I sighed. “I don’t know.”
“You could tell him it was a snake,” he said, matter-of-factly.
“A snake?”
“Yeah, like a big snake got in and you were trying to chase it out and knocked over all the plants. He’d believe that. Remember when you broke the table when the wasp got in?”
I did remember that. A wasp had landed on my arm just as I had been placing a heavy orchid on the glass-topped coffee table, and I dropped the pot to flail at the wasp. The pot had shattered the tabletop, bringing Luke, Gib, and Carson running. I was lucky I still had all ten toes. I felt a stab of guilt over my young son so calmly providing me with an alibi, and, even worse, instantly understanding that an alibi was called for.
We’d been confidants before, but I’d never felt guilty about it, perhaps because I’d always been the one protecting him. Now our roles had been reversed, and I was ashamed of myself. I felt as though I should retrieve my old journal, the one I hadn’t written in for well over ten years, and mark the day that I damaged my youngest son, the day he would remember and repeat in his thirties to a therapist as the day his mother made him lie to his father, the start of all his troubles.
Catching Genius Page 8