Catching Genius

by Kristy Kiernan

  As I settled onto the bed, I wondered if I should go get Estella. But then Chelsea put the radio on softly, and Lisa set black and white game pieces on a board in the middle of the bed, and I thought about how lucky Estella was, and stayed right where I was. She was probably asleep anyway.

  Estella

  I hear Connie’s door squeak open, and my heart leaps in my chest. Paul snores lightly, naked, curled on his side away from me, the hill of his shoulder jutting toward the ceiling. Perhaps she is simply going to the bathroom. I listen hard, trying to tune my ears to the weight of her.

  The squeak comes, but it is to the left of her door, not the right, the way the bathroom lies. No, she is turned toward the stairs. She steps farther down the hall, and I levitate by degrees, careful to not wake Paul, until I’m sitting up.

  The late hour makes me giddy with something I struggle to define, a certainty that something is possible. I realize that I am hopeful, a pure emotion, unencumbered by resentment or anxiety as it might be in the light of day. I envision us meeting at the foot of the stairs and smiling conspiratorially before we make our way, silently, to the kitchen—there is no music room here—where we might finally ... what? Talk? Dance?

  There is no squeak of the first stair. But I am already out of bed, poised with one foot raised, stepping into my pajama bottoms. There is a soft rapping, and then silence. I ease my foot into the soft cotton pants and snug them up to my waist as I listen, actually moving my face forward, my neck elongating, as though this will help my ears to isolate the noise.

  Chelsea’s door. A click, pause, click, silence. Footsteps across the floor and the squeal of bedsprings. I remain still for a long moment wondering what the hell, and then I finally pad my way out of the bedroom, moving tile to tile, and then up the stairs, avoiding the squeaks I know by heart.

  The air outside Chelsea’s door is heavy with the musky sweetness of pot, and I smile to myself. It doesn’t bother me. They’re big girls, responsible. They might even be giggling about boys, though they’re more likely playing Go.

  I slide my feet past their room and peer at Connie’s door. It’s open. I poke my head around the corner and focus on the bed. It’s empty.

  “Con,” I whisper. “Connie?”

  No answer.

  I look down the hall to the open doorway of the bathroom. It’s dark; there’s no one there. I suddenly realize that Connie is in the bedroom with Lisa and Chelsea. In there. At the sleepover. Probably oohing and ahhing over the Go board, pretending, charmingly, that she’s too dumb to learn it, like she tried to protest playing the violin tonight and then dazzled.

  And smoking pot.

  At first, I am simply shocked. I lean against the wall and stare at the closed door. My perfect little sister. Forty years old, perfect mother of the perfect two boys, perfect wife of perfect financial planner Luke, was inhaling, or pretending to, perfectly, in the next room.

  And then I am pissed.

  Because she’s done it again. Somehow, she’s done it again, and I am an outsider in my own home. I would have been happy to crawl on the bed, to snort and hack my way through a few tokes while studying the black and white stones of Go. I would have been happy to giggle about boys.

  I walk back down the stairs. Passive-aggressively. Purposely hitting every squeak I know—there are six of them.

  Three facts about six:

  Six is the first perfect number.

  All numbers between twin primes are evenly divisible by six.

  Six is the product of the first four nonzero Fibonacci numbers.

  I reach the tile, step carefully to the center of each one. Every third one, I skip one to the right—forty-three in all.

  Three facts about forty-three:

  There are forty-three three-digit emirps.

  Forty-three is the smallest prime that is not the sum of two palindromes.

  There are forty-three verses in Beowulf.

  I finally gain our bedroom, where I remind myself to be wary of hope in the middle of the night.

  CHAPTER TEN

  My juvenile little middle-of-the-night party left me dry-mouthed, headachy, and nervous, and it was difficult to meet Estella’s eyes in the morning. When we finally left, both of us were buzzing with raw nerves and too much coffee. We spent the first hour talking about directions, although there had only ever been one way to drive to Big Dune. I pointed out the OnStar system as if it were an old friend who would get us out of any jam, be it directional, mechanical, or medical. She didn’t seem nearly as impressed as Chris and Phil.

  Once we’d exhausted the subject of interstates, exits, and the marvels of modern technology, Estella began to yawn. When I encouraged her to lean her seat back and close her eyes she didn’t protest, and we rolled along in silence. She woke when I stopped for gas and dug money out of her purse, but I waved it away, slamming the door while her arm was still stretched over the console. She was waiting by the car when I returned.

  “Would you like to switch?” she asked, and I laughed, but her face was completely serious.

  “I thought you couldn’t drive,” I said.

  She shrugged. “I don’t get much practice, but I can drive. I got my license a couple of years ago. Paul taught me. Although I’ve never driven anything this big,” she said doubtfully, looking at the Escalade.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s all right.”

  She set her mouth in a thin line, said, “Fine,” and climbed back in the passenger side.

  As the miles crawled by, the silence became oppressive.

  “So, I guess we’ll need to get boxes for the books when we get there,” I said after nearly an hour had passed.

  “Hmm.”

  “And our first stop should be the store. There won’t be any food there.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Plus we’ll need toilet paper and stuff like that.”

  “Connie, you don’t need to talk.”

  “Are we not going to talk for three weeks?”

  She was silent for a long moment, and then said, “What do you want to talk about?”

  “You haven’t even asked about the kids,” I pointed out.

  “How are the kids, Connie?”

  At least it would take up some time. “Gib is—well—Gib is not great. You’ll love this: He’s failing algebra.”

  That got her attention.

  “You’re not serious,” she said.

  “Oh, yes. He never told us he was having a problem. Got a twenty-seven on the math section of the PSAT. He’ll be going to summer school after I get back.”

  “But what exactly is the problem?”

  “He says he doesn’t get the x’s and y’s,” I said.

  She nodded. “Have you gotten him a tutor yet?”

  “No. By the time we found out, it was too late to help his grade. Luke—I’ll get him one when he starts summer school, though.”

  “Hmm,” she said. I glanced at her quickly. She was looking out the window again.

  “What?” I asked. “What did I do this time?”

  “I just don’t know why you didn’t call me, I mean, this is what I do, Connie. I teach math.”

  I was flabbergasted. It had never crossed my mind to call Estella. “What would you have done?” I asked.

  “I could have given you some names, suggested books, I could have worked with him online, I could have done a lot of things. You know, sometimes it’s just a matter of the teacher not understanding what the student is missing, or how he learns. Who knows? I might have made a difference with just a phone call to find out what the missing piece was for him.”

  I tapped my fingers against the steering wheel. “Well. I didn’t realize that,” I said. “You’ve never been particularly interested in his education before.”

  “He’s never had a problem before, has he?” she asked, her voice cold.

  “No, he hasn’t,” I said, matching her tone. I pressed my head against the backrest. She’d returned to stari
ng out the window.

  “How’s Carson?” she asked softly after a moment.

  “He’s great,” I finally said. And then I couldn’t help myself. “In fact, it looks like he got a few genius genes from you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing, Estella, nothing,” I said with a sigh. “He’s evidently a very talented composer.”

  “Really?” She shifted in her seat, placing her shoulder blade against the door and facing toward me.

  “Really,” I answered.

  “How did this come about?”

  “His music teacher called me—” I stopped when she suddenly bent over and rummaged in her purse, pulling out a pad and pen. “What?”

  “His teacher,” she said. “What’s his name?”

  “Why? You gonna have him whacked?” I asked with a laugh.

  “No, but I might have him checked out. You know, there are people out there, teachers, professors, who are just looking for kids like this—”

  “You think I don’t know that?” I asked vehemently.

  She looked startled.

  “I was there too, you know. You weren’t an only child. You didn’t exist in a vacuum.”

  “No, no, of course not,” she said. “I was only trying to help, Connie. Really. I—I don’t always say things the right way. I was only trying to help.”

  This was exhausting. It was as if we were both sunburned, flinching and shrieking at every touch, real or imagined.

  “Dan Hailey,” I said. She looked at me for a moment and then wrote it down. “Heron Pointe Elementary,” I continued before she could ask.

  “So tell me,” she said. I nearly sighed in relief. This, at last, was something we could agree on. Estella was an adult now, and though we’d never spoken of it—the jealousy, the anger, the ruined childhood—she’d obviously come to the same conclusion I had: It had been a mistake, forced upon us by a father more interested in living up to his ancestors than in creating a happy family. Here, finally, was someone who would support my decision to keep Carson’s childhood intact.

  “He started clarinet about two years ago,” I said, “and he was all right. You know, he practiced, but I never heard anything that led me to believe he was particularly talented. But he stuck with it, and then Hailey went over some composing basics this year, and I guess Carson caught on quickly. He’d already learned how to read music from me and he’d had a beginning music theory class. But it sounds as though it really came together when Hailey brought in some jazz records—”

  “Jazz?” she asked, looking surprised.

  “Yeah, jazz. Funny huh? He sort of got into Benny Goodman last year, went through a swing phase, but it was this one particular group, the Blue Wing Trio, that got him all excited.”

  She was nodding slowly. “It’s interesting, actually. I don’t think about jazz in a composing vein the way I do, say, chamber music. Benny Goodman? Big orchestra, lots of instruments, right?”

  I nodded. “Not all of his stuff, but it’s what he’s most known for, yeah.”

  “And this other group, it’s a trio?”

  “Right. Cello, piano, and clarinet.”

  “Huh,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Once he heard just the three instruments, he figured things out?”

  I looked at her in surprise. “Yeah, his teacher said something along those lines. Like, Carson had the clarinet part, and says he thinks he understood the cello quickly from watching me play the violin. Then Hailey showed him some things on the piano, and he said Carson just seemed to get it. Carson himself said something about suddenly getting how the instruments played around each other.”

  Estella sat up straight. “See, a lot of these kids just need that thing, that one thing that makes it make sense for them. It’s like a key that opens the door. Suddenly all this understanding pours out, and bam! They don’t just understand the one more thing, they get it, totally get it, the whole thing. It sounds like Carson just needed some of the extraneous instruments shut down.”

  “You think that’s what happened?” I asked, feeling something blossom in my chest when I thought of a door of understanding being thrown open in my child. It was rather amazing, and completely different from the panic that blossomed when it was labeled as genius.

  “It sounds like it,” she said. “And this is what I was talking about with Gib too.”

  “How’s that?” I asked, failing to see any correlation.

  “Well, the same way that just one piece of information can be the key to entire understanding, it can also be just a piece that holds back all understanding. Now Gib, he’s never had a problem before, so that leads me to believe that he’s just missing something. If I could discover what it is, then we could clear it up and the other basic knowledge won’t be held back anymore.”

  “The fate of the world might hang on understanding just one thing,” I said in jest. But she looked at me solemnly and nodded.

  “You’d be surprised. So now the real question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  I laughed. “What do you think? I already told Hailey that if he ever even mentioned composing to Carson again I would file a formal complaint. Now I’m just hoping that nobody at camp notices. I talked to Carson about keeping it low-key—”

  “You did what?” she asked, her voice full of disbelief and something else I couldn’t define but that sounded close to disgust.

  “I—I told him to keep it low-key,” I faltered. “What?”

  “You find out your son is a genius—”

  “Nobody ever said he was a genius,” I said. “And what the hell am I not getting? I thought you’d be the last person to encourage this.”

  “Me? Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Are you kidding? You’d want my son to grow up like—”

  “Like me?”

  “No,” I protested. “That’s not it at all.”

  “Oh, bullshit. Just because I’m not married and don’t have kids and didn’t join the Junior League doesn’t mean—”

  “I didn’t join the Junior League.”

  “Did you even think about what it would do to Carson to tell him to hide his genius? Do you want him to be ashamed of what he can do? Make him feel like a freak? Most people would think this was wonderful, Connie.”

  “Stop saying that. Nobody said he was a genius,” I nearly shouted.

  “You’re making this about you, Connie. And what do you know about classifying genius, anyway? What is he, then? Talented? Gifted? An ordinary genius? A magician?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? An ordinary genius? A magician? You’re not making any sense, and I’ll remind you that Carson is my son, not yours.”

  “Look, Connie, you need to figure out what’s going on with your son, and you’re going to have to let some people into your life to do that. Maybe he’s just talented, maybe he just has a knack. But if he has genius and a passion for it, then you won’t be able to control it. And if you try to keep him from it, he’ll just wind up hating you.”

  My breath was coming hard. This was not at all what I had expected from her. “And how am I supposed to do that, Estella? This isn’t a Harry Potter world. There’s no magician school to send him to.”

  “No, it’s not like that. Look, there are ordinary geniuses, people who sort of follow a logical path to doing something, something that other ordinary geniuses—really smart people—could do if they’d been so inclined, had the right tools, education, and so on. But then there are the magicians, people who just know. Their process isn’t clear; we don’t know how they manage to learn what they learn, produce what they produce. How their minds work is just . . . incomprehensible to the rest of us, no matter how smart we are.”

  “Is that you? A magician?”

  “You can’t be serious,” she said, and I saw at a glance that she was utterly taken aback by the question.

  “You did sort of seem to just know things,” I said.
<
br />   “That’s completely untrue. I had a knack, that’s all. I played number games.”

  “Estella, please; people with just a knack don’t go to college at twelve.”

  “Sometimes they do.”

  “Well, don’t worry,” I snapped. “I have no intention of disrupting my entire family just to further one child’s knack.”

  I could feel her staring at me, but I kept my eyes on the road and we passed the halfway mark without another word between us. After another silent hour passed, the previous night and the argument started to catch up with me, and I began to yawn. When Estella finally spoke her tone was soft, but it was still startling.

  “We only have a couple of hours left,” Estella said. “Why don’t you let me drive the rest of the way?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well, I’m a genius, right? I guess I can figure out the gas and brake pedals if you can.”

  “Fine,” I said, heading for the approaching exit. Let her run us off the road, I thought. At least it would put an end to this.

  I topped off the tank at a gas station and when I climbed into the passenger side, I made sure she knew where the directions were, then leaned back and pretended to sleep.

  But my pretense got the better of me, and I actually fell into a deep, surprisingly restful nap. Estella woke me gently, turning the music up a bit and placing her hand lightly on my knee. I opened my eyes and stretched, luxuriating in the space the Cadillac afforded. I popped the seat up and took a drink of water as I tried to figure out where we were.

  “We’ll be making the turn to the bridge soon,” she said.

  “You want to switch?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Can you drive over the bridge?” I asked in surprise.

  “Sure,” she answered. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Your inner ear thing,” I said, pointing to my own ear.

  “That’s altitude that affects it,” she said. “And besides, it doesn’t bother me anymore.”

  “Hmm,” I said, pressing my lips into a thin line. I knew it.

  We made the turn, and I could see the bridge stretching out in front of us, almost four miles of gentle slope. A curve to the right brought it to the island, but it was hazy and I couldn’t see the land on the opposite side.