I step out onto the front porch, away from the laughter, away from the warm, spicy aroma of spaghetti sauce, away from Paul, who seeks me out with his eyes every few minutes to make sure I’m okay.
The magnolia tree on the corner wafts its scent all the way down to me. I inhale with my eyes closed and think I might like to have a few of the blossoms. The house on that lot is for sale and has sat empty for over a year. All the neighbors snip the flowers as freely as though it were their own tree, and we all harbor a little hope that the house will never sell.
My surrogate family’s laughter follows me down the block.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A private security car followed me on my third trip around Mother’s block, and I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to march back up to the condo. I waved to the guard and turned away from the expensive condominiums and toward the interstate. I still wasn’t sure what I was doing.
I looked down at the directions to Georgia, thinking of the time it would shave off my drive if I went straight to Big Dune. I could be installed in the house with a plate of shrimp by about the same time I would have arrived at Estella’s. I had six hours of steady driving ahead of me before I had to decide, before I had to make the turn left toward the island or veer toward Atlanta.
I spent the first two hours figuring out and refining all the things I could have said to Mother. I even said them out loud, turning the music down so I could hear my voice, righteously angry, admirably tough as it reverberated through the cavernous leather interior.
But as I calmed down, I began to wonder what her motivation had been. Had it been simple laziness? Did she just need me and Estella to close up the house and knew we wouldn’t go if she weren’t there to buffer us? Had she, feeling mortal and motherly, been trying to force us to deal with each other? Or could she simply not bring herself to go to the island again?
I couldn’t get the image of her little sisters snagged in the tree roots, two naked little girls, identical in their lives, identical in their deaths, out of my mind. I wondered if they knew how much their older sister had loved them. I knew how much Estella had loved me once. I had felt that fierce protectiveness, and at the age that April and May had died I would not have been surprised to have had Estella protecting me from a hurricane with her own body. I would have expected it.
But in the years after that night in the music room, I’d been a free agent. Estella was no longer my protector, my father was wrapped up in her rather than me, and my mother, I now knew, was ensnared in her own drama of learning how to be a wife and mother moving in educated circles.
After all those years of trying to win his attention by playing the violin, I had finally realized that I would not get my father back. He was lost to me. And so I turned my energy to Estella instead. Our relationship had finally achieved some common ground, based simply on the fact that we were growing into adolescence. I had lain awake nights scheming how to expand upon it, waging a quiet war to win my sister back.
I had been a pretty baby and was turning into a pretty girl. And my shopping trips with my mother ensured that I was always in style. My sister, however, got the Sykes crooked teeth and missed out on the shopping trips, an unfortunate combination. Add her appearance to the fact that she spent all her time with adults, and she was destined to fail in the popularity contests that all childhoods are.
I, on the other hand, was practically the center of the neighborhood. Except for Kimmy Kay and her damn horses. But fortune was with me that year leading up to Estella’s college entrance. Kimmy Kay’s guest horse came down with some horse illness that necessitated a quarantine, and the neighborhood kids congregated at our house. Estella hovered in the background and eavesdropped on conversations, like Fossey trying to fit in with gorillas, and it was a wonder to watch her exercise the social instincts that had been hiding for so long.
She was only a size larger than me, and I took great advantage of my mother’s generosity on our shopping trips by slipping clothes for Estella in with mine. I would casually toss them on her bed, muttering something about them being too big for me. She never thanked me, but whenever kids filled the house she would invariably show up on the fringes wearing something I had chosen.
I managed to get her braces by making fun of her teeth over dinner, forcing my mother to take notice without calling attention to the fact that I was trying to help. And truth be told, I was secretly pleased to make my father acknowledge that perhaps his prodigy might be flawed in ways that I wasn’t. It still pleased me a little, just a little, to remember it, his eyes flitting from her teeth to mine and back.
My interest in reading never waned, but without my father’s guidance, I moved from the classic and obscure tomes that filled our library to mainstream novels far beyond my years. Perhaps it was simply to spite Daddy, but I began to leave these books in Estella’s room. Stephen King, Danielle Steele, even Harold Robbins made their way onto her nightstand. They were never in sight when I looked in her room, but she never gave them back either.
But before she even had a chance to shiver with me over the creepy twins in The Shining, she left for college, to learn about complex variables and combinatorics. All my work had been for nothing. I may as well have spent my time deadheading roses and spraying aphids with my mother; my experiment at socializing Estella failed before I’d made a dent.
I was minutes away from having to make my decision to continue on to Georgia or turn toward the island when I picked up the phone and dialed my sister’s number with a shaking hand and my heart in my throat. With one hand I held the phone to my ear and with the other hand I steered, ready to flip my directional and take the exit that would carry me along Florida’s panhandle and out to Big Dune. But just as Estella answered, rather than taking the exit I kept to my lane, steering straight toward Atlanta. She said hello twice, and I hung up without a word.
I turned the radio up, allowing the music to take my mind off my mother, off Estella and Luke and my sons. But the flat length of Florida’s I-75 seemed designed for brooding, and by the time I arrived in Estella’s neighborhood hours later, I was exhausted and close to tears.
I slowed considerably when I turned onto her street. The house on the corner, a dilapidated old Southern monstrosity, boasted an extraordinary magnolia tree in the front yard. Its blooms were the size of dinner plates, and its leaves fluttered green and copper in the light wind.
I caught a quick glimpse of a dervish in a gauzy blue skirt twirling beneath the tree, magnolia-laden arms extended in a joyful, frenzied dance. Whoever it was must have seen me staring at her as I came around the corner, because the gauze quickly disappeared around the back of the house, bare feet flying, before I could get a glimpse of her face. I laughed out loud, thinking the woman was someone I’d like to know, or perhaps someone I’d like to be.
I glanced in my rearview mirror as I drove down the street, but she never reappeared, and I nearly missed Estella’s house. I pulled into the driveway, stopping behind a beat-up old Cutlass, surprised that they’d finally gotten a car. I stared at the house for a moment before I picked up the cell phone again and dialed home. It was an exercise in procrastination. There was no answer. I hadn’t expected one.
I grabbed my overnight bag and approached the porch, wishing I were visiting the magnolia dancer up the street instead. I felt naked as I stood there in the fading light, trying to compose myself before I rang the bell. I could hear music playing, and voices, lots of voices. I reached out to touch the doorbell, but the door flew open before I could, and I took an involuntary step backward.
Paul stood there, towering above me with his long wiry limbs tensed and worry creasing his face. “Connie,” he said, looking over my shoulder as though he expected someone else.
I silently cursed Mother before I stuttered a reply. “Paul, hi. It’s just me. Mother couldn’t make it.”
His eyes met mine again, and he stood back to allow me in, reaching to take the overnight bag I was clutching t
ightly to my side. “I know,” he said. “I hoped it was Estella.”
“Estella?”
He had been heading for the stairs with my bag, and he stopped and stood there for a minute before he turned around. “She’s gone.”
Before I could respond, a group of young people came around the corner in a smiling wave of chatter, engulfing me in their midst. Paul walked up the stairs and out of my sight as they reached toward me.
“—so cool, we’ve heard so much about you.”
“—and this is my boyfriend, Steve.”
“—long did it take you?”
“—check the spaghetti sauce.”
I shook hands with everyone, confused about exactly who they were and why they were here. They continued to talk to me and among themselves as they moved me toward the living room. One of the girls pressed a glass of red wine into my hand. I found myself in the corner of a long sofa, staring at Estella’s old Escher prints on the wall. Paul finally reappeared to make formal introductions, and I almost forgot that Estella wasn’t there, as a portion of her life completely unknown to me revealed itself.
She’d never mentioned that she tutored kids. Or perhaps she had and I simply hadn’t processed it. But I never knew that she had college students living in her home. I thought back to Estella on the fringes as an adolescent, trying to find her way in by the crumbs I’d dropped. And now I was the one flummoxed by the activity, stunned into a shy, bewildered outsider. Then I remembered that my sister wasn’t even there. I carefully set my glass of wine on the side table and stood.
“So, Paul, where is Estella?” I asked.
The group of students quieted and began to excuse themselves, moving out of the living room and into the front hall. I heard a swinging door and then silence. Paul shrugged, a sharp, quick movement of his shoulders.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She was on the front porch watching for you, and when I brought her a glass of wine, she was gone. I was about to go look for her when you arrived. She couldn’t have gone far, she didn’t even have shoes on.”
I felt loathsome tears at my eyes. Maybe I hadn’t been crazy about seeing her, but to think that she’d run away from home rather than face me hurt more than I thought possible. I suddenly felt like a child again, pushed away from the one person I wanted most to be near. The fact that she didn’t have shoes on struck me.
“What was she wearing?” I asked Paul, who was tying the laces of his boots, preparing to go search for Estella.
He didn’t look up at me. “Long skirt, short-sleeved shirt, that’s about it.”
“Long blue skirt, sort of full, gauzy?”
That got his attention. He looked up at me in surprise. “Yeah, did you see her? Where?”
“Close,” I said, placing my hand on his arm. “Paul, would you mind if I went to get her? Maybe she’d be more comfortable if I saw her alone first.”
He cleared his throat and finished lacing his boots. “No offense, Connie, but why do you think all these people are here? If you’ll just tell me where you saw her—”
“But she left,” I interrupted. “So maybe she didn’t feel as comfortable as she thought she would.”
I walked past him and out the door without waiting for his permission and heard him follow me. To my surprise, he stayed on the front porch while I walked down the steps and turned toward the big magnolia tree on the corner.
Had we waited a few more moments we wouldn’t have had to go through the little power struggle. A few houses from the corner I saw the blue skirt and white top slowly coming toward me, their owner’s arms filled with creamy magnolias glowing in the half-light. She stopped when she saw me, her features still indistinguishable, but she recognized me, and I was crying even before she dropped the flowers and ran toward me, like a child, her arms crooked at her sides. I started a half-jog too, and then her arms were around me, and mine were around her, and we were both crying, whispering each other’s names in the magnolia-scented air.
She felt tiny in my arms, so much smaller than I remembered her. It was like hugging a child. I loosened my hold, just a bit, afraid I was hurting her. We slowly let go of each other and stepped back without saying a word. Her hair was short, shorter than I’d ever seen it. But it suited her, framing her thin face, making her into a pixie of a forty-three-year-old.
She reached out to run a hand over my own long hair. “Still so pretty,” she said with a smile, and I laughed out loud.
“Well, it is getting dark,” I said, “and obviously your eyesight’s failing.”
As our laughter faded I felt a distance, a shyness come between us again, and Estella backed up a few paces as if she felt it too. She turned suddenly with a cry.
“I was bringing these for you,” she said, running back toward the magnolias scattered across the sidewalk. We gathered them together, avoiding each other’s eyes.
Her face was flushed when she stood upright, and she smiled warily at me before she glanced down the block. Paul was on the sidewalk outside their home, turned toward us, watching intently. She raised her arm, waving a magnolia at him, and he turned and disappeared into the shadows.
“He was worried about you,” I said as we began to walk back to the house.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sorry about that. I got—a little nervous.”
“I know,” I said softly.
When we walked into the house it was as though Estella had been gone for days. The students rushed her, but she batted them away with her thin arms and laughter. I watched in wonder. I’d never seen my sister so easy in the presence of others, and I’d never seen a group of people so obviously enamored of her either.
I stood to the side, with the scratchy magnolia branches in my arms, and felt as out of place as she must have around my friends. But then she turned to me, inclining her head toward the swinging door beyond a long dining table, and said, “Come on, let’s get these flowers in something.”
I followed her into the kitchen where Paul was stirring a huge pot of spaghetti sauce. A few of the students followed us in while the rest scattered around the living and dining room, as comfortable in Estella’s home as if it were their own. I felt a pang of jealousy for the easy feel of it. Estella dropped her flowers in the sink and then went to Paul, who bent down and whispered something in her ear. I studiously avoided looking at them as I dropped my flowers in the sink too, and moved out of the way when one of the college students nudged me with her hands full of containers for the blooms.
I looked around for something to do, but within seconds Estella had broken away from Paul, who glanced at me over her head and smiled. It was the first real smile I’d received from him, and I felt a warm blush of approval, as though I had been looking for it all along.
“Let me show you your room,” Estella said. I followed her out the swinging door and through the dining room, where two of the high school students were setting the table. Now that I wasn’t surrounded by students or worried about Estella, I finally noticed my sister’s home. The dining table was made out of one long, narrow slab of golden, highly figured wood, and a single wide shelf ringed the entire room, holding books and polished wood bowls, sculptures, and picture frames.
The floor throughout the downstairs was tile. Not surprising in South Florida, but a surprise to me here in Georgia, especially considering the age and style of the house. It was lovely, though, rustic terracotta with little animal pawprints every few tiles. Estella led me up the stairs, pointing out doors to me as we walked down the hall.
“This is Paul’s finishing room. You’ll get used to the smell. He put in a ventilation system and plastic around the door, so it’s not nearly as bad as before.”
I did catch a whiff of something pervasive—varnish? sawdust?—but not altogether unpleasant.
“And Lisa is bunking in with Chelsea for the night, so here’s your room,” Estella said, turning into a room toward the end of the hall. My bag was on the bed, and Estella walked around nervously, straightening a
lamp, pulling at the comforter.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, trying to put her at ease, and she flashed a smile at me.
“Well, be sure to tell Lisa, it’s all her stuff. We let them do whatever they want with the rooms. Would you like to freshen up before dinner? Nothing fancy, I’m afraid, just spaghetti and salad.”
“That would be nice,” I said, nervous now that we were in it, now that the rush of being greeted, inspected, acknowledged was over. I moved out of her way as she left the room and followed her to the bathroom.
“You’ll have to share with the girls,” she said apologetically as she handed me a stack of towels, but I waved her off. The girls. I still couldn’t process this Estella.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, and then we fell silent. She moved first, suddenly, as though shocked back to life.
“Okay, then. Take your time, dinner’s easy to put together. We’ll be waiting for you downstairs.”
“Great,” I said, a smile stiff on my lips. “I’ll be down as soon as I can.”
She was already walking down the hall. “No rush,” she called back to me as her head bobbed out of sight down the stairs.
Estella
Oh, God. I am clutching the banister, stuck between the upstairs and downstairs, between childhood and real life. I know I’m out of Connie’s sight, and I haven’t been noticed by the students or Paul yet. I wonder how long I can stand here in limbo, clutching this railing. I sink to the steps and just sit there. I would say that I was catching my breath, but my breath is caught just fine.
It’s my mind that’s racing.
I need to catch my brain, I think, and a manic giggle piles up in my throat.
She is as beautiful as she always was, those light brown eyes and dark lashes so striking with that thick sheaf of blond hair. But there is something different. Maybe it’s just age, or maybe it was that unguarded moment when we first saw each other. Maybe that stamped her with temporary uncertainty.
Catching Genius Page 11