Catching Genius

by Kristy Kiernan

  “Remember the bridge?” Estella asked, and I knew she was asking about the old bridge. Of course I remembered it. The original bridge to Big Dune had really been two bridges. Both had two lanes; one led to the island, while the other led off. They had been constructed close together, low over the water, and ran parallel to each other on barnacle-covered concrete pilings.

  The year before we moved to Big Dune a barge hit the off-island bridge, collapsing the center of it for almost two miles, sending concrete and cars filled with islanders into the water below. Eleven people died, and a year later the boat’s captain took his own life.

  During the construction of the new bridge, island traffic was forced to use the one remaining bridge—one lane on, one lane off—and that, combined with the new, horrific view of the damaged bridge, made traffic often slow to a crawl. It took three years for the new bridge to open, and the sight of the old bridge gave children more nightmares than the stories of pirate ghosts on Little Dune Island.

  Each end of the damaged bridge had survived, but their seemingly stable lanes led to nowhere. They were left as they’d been on the day of the accident, with huge slabs of concrete hanging from the rusty rebar embedded in the center of the bridge. Pilings that hadn’t collapsed entirely had been left standing, jutting out of the water at varying heights, holding up nothing but the salt-laden air.

  After the initial shock had worn away, the barricaded bridge became a favorite haunt for fishermen and pelicans. During the summer, teens with more time on their hands than sense daredeviled on the bridge, crawling over the end and shimmying down the rebar like circus performers, hand over hand, bare feet scrabbling for purchase, until they were standing on the chunks of concrete that swayed over the water. Some stopped there, paralyzed by fear, while others were brave enough—or stupid enough—to dive off the concrete into the dark water below.

  I remembered getting my first “real” kiss there, from Tate, the taste of beer and cigarettes foreign in my mouth, but the shape of his mouth perfect and familiar. I looked over at Estella, wondering if she remembered the one night she’d been there, but Estella was concentrating on the gradual climb up the new bridge and didn’t look my way.

  Once the new bridge was complete, they’d collapsed the center of the other span, removed the pilings, and turned both old bridges into fishing piers, complete with steel guardrails and a little bait shop. I could see people fishing out at the ends, and I rolled down my window to breathe in the air.

  It was tangier than the air of the Gulf farther south, redolent with the metallic scent of oysters and shrimp, and my mouth practically watered at the thought of popping a cold boiled shrimp, fresh off the boats and dripping with more horseradish than ketchup, into my mouth. A tingling joy rose up in me when we crested the top of the bridge and were greeted with a wave of dragonflies flowing around the car, taking me completely by surprise.

  We could see the island now, and the Gulf beyond it, calm and green, with the unmistakable silhouettes of trawlers coming in. The grin on my face was uncontrollable, the muscles stretched taut, and again I looked over at my sister, certain that nobody could possibly keep the smile from her face when confronted by the beauty of Big Dune. But I was wrong.

  Estella looked just as she had as a teenager, coming home to the island on the weekends. She looked like someone had taken her math away.

  Estella

  I can still see the old bridge as we drive over the new one. And in my mind, I can still see the rough edges of the concrete glowing in the moonlight as I’d hung my head over the edge of the shattered bridge. I can still see Connie and Tate walking toward the deeper shadows, bent toward each other. I never knew for sure if they’d actually become lovers; no one detail had revealed itself to me as the final clue. And she’d certainly never told me.

  But my imagination had been merciless.

  Connie draws her breath in as we crest the bridge, and I am thankful to have the excuse of keeping my eyes on the road when I feel her looking at me. She rolls her window down, and as soon as that gamy air hits my nose, my head begins to throb and my mind begins methodically picking its way through Zorn’s Lemma, equivalent to the Axiom of Choice and the well-ordering theorem. It soothes me for a moment.

  I grip the steering wheel tightly and feel the bottom of my stomach drop when the island comes into view, the Gulf backing it like an escape route, spreading green to the horizon, vast, so many places to swim out and disappear. A swarm of dragonflies engulfs the car like hundreds of hostile, iridescent dive-bombers and I almost panic, certain I will be blinded and will drive over the guardrail and plunge into the water below, but they clear almost immediately.

  The panic remains.

  I want to go back. To Atlanta, to Paul, even to the college students I’d been so disappointed in last night. I would marry Paul tomorrow if he could somehow transport me from this ridiculous behemoth of a vehicle back to my flawed but suddenly desperately beloved life.

  Connie is wearing the demented grin of a homecoming queen, and I cannot quite believe that she could possibly be looking forward to being here again.

  With me.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Tate met us at the end of the driveway, his near-white hair and tan the only recognizable reminders of the teenager he’d once been. Estella braked hard, and I leapt out of the passenger door and ran to him with a joyful scream. He caught me under the arms and swung me around. My flip-flops flew off, and when he set me down, none too gently, my feet sank into the sand and oyster shells that made up the path to the house.

  We both laughed out loud, barely audible over the waves, and I pushed my hair off my face to inspect him. He was no longer a child, that was for sure. The years had hardened him in places, softened him in others, as I supposed they did to all of us.

  “Well,” he said, drawing it out with his thick accent, “Connie Sykes, you get better every year, don’t you?”

  “Flirt.” I laughed, hitting him on the chest. Estella glided up behind us in the Escalade, and we moved out of the way as she maneuvered between the pilings and eased the car under the house.

  Tate raised his eyebrows over his sunglasses as the Cadillac passed. “Guess Estella’s done all right then.”

  I was embarrassed to admit that it was mine, but he merely appraised me again and nodded.

  “So how’d you know we were here?” I asked as we waited for Estella to pop the hatch.

  “Your mom called,” he said. “I missed her, but she left a message.”

  I laughed. “Dodged a bullet,” I quipped, expecting him to laugh with me, but he looked at me askance and shrugged.

  “I like talking to June all right,” he said.

  “Well, yeah,” I said, embarrassed. I turned away from him and rapped my knuckles on the back window. What was taking her so long?

  “What do I hit to open the back?” she asked, opening the door and leaning out. I walked up to the front and she got out. Rather than walking to the back to greet Tate, she leaned in with me and watched while I punched the button to release the back hatch, and then followed behind me.

  “Hello, Tate,” she said, stretching her arm out from a distance, as though afraid to get too close. He took her hand and pumped it once.

  “How you doin’, Estella?” Tate asked. It was an easy question, as easy as Tate himself was, but a forced current underneath it caught my attention and my hands stalled on the bag I was reaching for.

  “Good, and you?”

  “I do all right.”

  Tate reached out for a duffel bag at the same time Estella reached for a suitcase, and they both looked relieved to have something to do. I groaned as we struggled up the stairs to the front door. The house, built on stilts like most of the houses on Big Dune, was a nightmare of stairs. Six separate flights in all: from the ground to the first floor, where all the bedrooms were, then to the second floor with the living areas and kitchen, and then the third-floor library, another fli
ght from the library to the widow’s walk—never used because the humidity might damage the books—and then two separate flights outside on the beachfront side of the house, leading down to the boardwalk that skimmed over the dunes to the beach.

  Estella was breathing heavily when we reached the first floor. She turned away from me and headed down the hall toward her old bedroom. I watched her retreating back for a moment and then turned toward my bedroom with Tate following me.

  He dropped the bag on the bed and opened the curtains of my sliders. The room flooded with the golden light of the late afternoon sun, and I smiled as I took in the familiar view. When I came here with Luke we’d stayed in the master bedroom, but it was this room, the room of my teenage years, that could make me happy just walking into it.

  Gib had refused to stay in the girlish, lemon-yellow and white room, preferring the severe white walls and plain furniture of Estella’s old bedroom. Carson, by younger brother default, stayed in my room without complaint.

  The house was set behind the dunes and I couldn’t see the Gulf from this floor, but the strange, stark beauty of the dunes was as arresting a view in its own way. The porch, wide slats of unpainted wood, stopped at a waist-high railing; beyond that, great mounds of sand and oyster shells anchored a wild profusion of vegetation that would have horrified the average Verona homeowner.

  There were no manicured lawns here, no splashy rows of impatiens and hibiscus, no orderly ficus hedges for privacy or stately royal palms. Instead, pale yellow beach roses spread their runners through clumps of scrub and sharp-edged cabbage palms. Sprinkled throughout, sea oats tried to gain a hold, gracefully arching their grasses over everything, slender stalks topped with plumes shooting toward the sun.

  Pearlescent oyster shells gleamed in their backdrop of white sand; underneath it all, the invasive, impossible-to-eradicate sticker plants scattered their vicious, dun-colored pods. Crab holes, some large enough to house a cat, freckled the dunes, hinting at unseen lives beneath the sand.

  This untamed landscape was part of what had drawn our father to the island to begin with, perhaps thinking it would be a private haven from the hordes of homebuyers who had steadily moved in on his childhood property. He was only half right.

  Big Dune Island was wild, but it was still beachfront, and by the time our father built our home there, seventeen other wealthy families had already staked their claim to its changeable shore. Thirty-two houses on the island, most built of coquina tabby and plopped directly on the sandy soil of the interior, were owned by natives and had been passed down by generations of fishermen.

  The two groups avoided each other for as long as they could. As the island began to change with the advent of commercial fisheries, the hurricanes that reformed the shoreline, and the textile mill that polluted the bay, the natives saw what was happening long before the new families did. They saw the dead oysters, the sick fish, the ever-narrowing beach.

  The wealthy families, prepped from years of community service, banded together with the natives and did what they did best: made powerful people listen. Len, Tate’s father and caretaker of our property, had been unofficially elected to a leadership position representing the natives, and he found his counterpart in our father, a man with time on his hands and a desperate need to catch up to long-dead ancestors.

  Big Dune Island—and uninhabited Little Dune Island to the north, where an old lighthouse was slowly making its way out to sea—were brought back in the spirit that Henry Sykes would have been proud of. Parachukla Bay, the body of water between Big Dune and the mainland, became officially protected by the government. The world-famous oysters thrived again; the dunes were rebuilt and their sea oats protected from housewives who would cut them to grace their family rooms; the sea turtle eggs were protected from poaching, curious tourists, and porch lights.

  The lighthouse on Little Dune and its accompanying tender dwelling were shored up and stabilized, and the island became a popular day-trip destination. Canoes and kayaks regularly crossed the small inlet that separated the two islands, and though no homes could be built on Little Dune, braver souls occasionally set up tents and stayed overnight.

  I cared nothing about Big Dune Island when we moved there. All I cared about was the fact that, once again, my sister’s genius was changing my life in ways I had no control over. We could have gone anywhere after leaving the family home, but the college and Dr. Pretus, its esteemed mathematician, were in Grantsville, and since my father couldn’t stand the bustle of living in a college town, to the island we went. I didn’t blame the move on the lawsuits—those would have happened no matter what. I blamed it on Estella.

  She ended our sisterhood, she took my father, she blazed a path impossible to follow or live up to, and then she took all I’d managed to build in our hometown and swept it away, just when I’d finally gotten a foothold in my own life, out of her shadow.

  Though I’d had to start over, I eventually came to love the island. It just took me a long time to realize it. And now, as I gazed out at the dunes, I felt that open, raw feeling in the pit of my stomach again, the one that had started when Mother said she was going to sell.

  “Miss it?” Tate asked, making me jump.

  “I do,” I admitted. “I’m surprised, but I do.”

  “Gets to everyone,” he said. “People don’t even know what’s missing until they come back.”

  I turned away from him and cleared my throat. “That’s Estella’s,” I said, pointing to the duffel bag. Tate picked up the bag and headed toward Estella’s room, while I went downstairs to unload the rest of our things. They were on my heels before I made it to the Escalade, and we all made two more trips before we dragged ourselves up to the second-floor living room.

  Tate had turned the air-conditioning on before we’d arrived and the downstairs was cool, but the second floor hadn’t lost the stifling heat of the day yet. I turned all the ceiling fans on, flopping down onto the sofa and allowing their breeze to chill me.

  Estella walked over to the wall of sliding glass doors that ran across the beach side of the house and began to pull the curtains back. Tate started on the other side, and the wall soon became an expanse of glass. I squinted in the sun and rose to my feet, joining them as Tate opened a slider and walked out onto the screened porch.

  If the view downstairs had made me nostalgic, this one nearly made me cry aloud with its beauty. I couldn’t keep the grin from my face as I looked out over the deserted beach and the Gulf of Mexico stretching before me. The expanse of army green seen from the bridge became a hundred different colors this close: deep blues, light grays, jade, emerald, teal.

  I no longer cared that I was there to work. I no longer cared that I wasn’t sure Estella and I could speak civilly for more than ten minutes. And, for just a moment, I didn’t care that Bob McNarey was probably at that very second finding out some horrible new truth about my marriage. All I cared about was that I was there.

  Estella, with her arms crossed in front of her and keeping a distance from Tate, stared down at the water as Tate bustled around, checking the tracks of the hurricane shutters, jiggling the loose handle of the screen door.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I asked. “I’d forgotten. I don’t know how, but I had.”

  Estella didn’t look at me when she surprised me with her answer. “It is,” she said. “It really is. I think maybe I’ll go for a swim tomorrow.”

  “Well, right now I think we’d better get to the store and get some provisions,” I said. “I’m already hungry for some shrimp.”

  “I brought dinner,” Tate said. “Shrimp’s in the fridge, oysters too. I picked up some beer, hope you don’t mind,” he said, shooting a glance at us. Both Estella and I shook our heads. “And I picked up some supplies to get you started,” he continued, “so if you want to wait until tomorrow, you can.”

  Estella and I looked at each other and smiled. It could wait. At that miraculous moment we were in agreement.

  W
e ate on the screened porch, greedily slurping fresh oysters from their rough shells and moaning in delight over the three pounds of Gulf shrimp Tate dumped, steaming, across the newspaper-covered table.

  I leaned back in my chair and propped my feet up on the table supports, one hand on my satisfied belly and an icy beer in the other. Estella had leaned back too, her eyes closed, and I watched a smile play about her lips.

  “So how’s your father, Tate?” I asked.

  Tate frowned. “As well as can be expected, I suppose,” he said. “He doesn’t recognize me anymore. He thinks I’m still in Kuwait. Tells me all about myself when I go see him. I’m evidently quite a hero.”

  Tate’s mother had died of leukemia when he was only four. Len raised Tate by himself, taking him out on his trawler every day and teaching him the secrets of the island and the Gulf. A jaded veteran of Korea, Len was furious when Tate joined the Marines at the ripe age of twenty-five. Old enough to know better, Len told anyone who would listen.

  At twenty-nine, one year away from getting out and taking advantage of the GI bill to finally go to college, war broke out in the Gulf, far from our own peaceful Gulf of Mexico. Tate went to Kuwait, and two weeks before his return Len had a heart attack while winching up a net full of shrimp. The heart attack was quickly followed by the heartbreaking diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Tate took over the shrimp boat and the caretaking business for absent homeowners while taking care of his rapidly deteriorating father, before finally admitting defeat and placing him in an assisted-living facility on the mainland.

  I had good memories of Len, a gruff bear of a man, a Hemingway figure even to the island natives. Stories of him filled the nights around beach bonfires, and Tate had always been his most ardent fan. I couldn’t imagine the pain it must have caused him to place him in the facility, and worse, to not be recognized by him.