Catching Genius

by Kristy Kiernan

  “I’d like to talk to your sister a minute,” she said, and Estella left with a sympathetic smile at me. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched Mother work, placing her things just exactly so, color coordinated, long-sleeved to short, slacks to shorts. “Gib’s been looking forward to seeing you,” she said.

  “It doesn’t look that way,” I said.

  She finished and took a step back to make sure everything was hung to her specifications. She switched a blue shell for a green one, and then nodded in satisfaction before coming to sit beside me on the bed. She patted my knee, leaving her hand there, her rings sparkling in the sun coming from the sliders.

  “Try to understand, Connie,” she said. “His pride’s hurt.”

  “His pride? Luke didn’t cheat on him. How do you think I feel?”

  “Like a mature woman who had some warning. And of course Luke cheated on him. He cheated on your whole family. Gib is the one who saw it up close and personal—naked.”

  I sighed. “He doesn’t seem like he wants to talk to me,” I said.

  Mother looked at her watch. “I’m going to take Estella and Tate down to the beach. We’ll walk, we’ll catch up. We’ll be down there for an hour. Give it another try.”

  “Fine,” I said, feeling like a recalcitrant teenager myself.

  “Bob said he would call tomorrow to get the story.”

  “Fine,” I repeated. When I reached the doorway, my mother called to me.

  “Yes?” I said, turning, one hand high on the frame.

  She looked around the room, out the sliders, and then finally back at me. “I’m glad we came.”

  I smiled, but it felt as tired as I did. “Me too, Mom.” I trudged upstairs to help clean shrimp before I was left alone with my angry son.

  I downed a glass of wine after Tate, Estella, and Mother left, and then went downstairs and knocked on my old bedroom door. There was no answer, but I could hear the bass from the little stereo, and I knocked louder. The bass cut off.

  “What?” Gib called.

  “May I come in?” I asked, very nearly gritting my teeth.

  There was no answer, but in a moment the door opened a crack and Gib looked out the slim opening at me. “What?” he repeated.

  I pushed on the door, and he initially resisted but finally let me push it open. He turned away and sat down on his bed, turning the music up again, just a hair lower than it had been.

  “I think we need to talk about what happened last night,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s important. Because it’s going to affect our lives. Because you’re obviously upset and you have every right to be.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “Why did you leave Sean’s? Did you have a fight?”

  He avoided my eyes. “It’s no big deal.”

  I pressed my palms to my face and rubbed my eyes with my fingertips. My fingers still smelled slightly of shrimp. “I can’t do this, Gib. I can’t help if you won’t talk to me.”

  “I don’t need any help!” he shouted. I flinched, pulling my hands from my face and standing in one motion. “You’re the one who needs help!”

  I headed for the door, hoping I made it before my knees gave way. “You can stay in here until you’re ready to speak civilly to me,” I said without turning around.

  He responded by turning the music up loud, and before my foot hit the first stair the bedroom door slammed, making the house quiver. I grabbed the banister to steady myself, and then turned around and walked out to the beach. Tate, Estella, and Mother were far down the beach to the left, so I turned right, unable to face them.

  By the time I turned around I was calmer, but I felt as fragile as a sand dollar. I met Estella on the way back, and she joined me without a word. We climbed the stairs to the house, and before we walked in she touched my arm and said softly, “It’s going to be okay.”

  I wasn’t a genius, and she wasn’t a mother, and I didn’t believe her.

  Estella

  Seeing Gib is a shock. He towers over me, his shoulders are broad, and he moves with a strength and surety unusual in a kid his age. My sister is intimidated by him. And he knows it. Perhaps not consciously, but instinctively he knows it, and he uses it to his advantage.

  It pisses me off.

  Walking the beach with Mother and Tate, I remember the story Connie told me about Mother’s other island life—little April and May. I want to bring it up, but Tate is ambling beside her, entrancing her with stories of sea turtle nests and bald eagles, showing off in general. All the island boys had crushes on Mother at some point, and he is behaving in that way adults do when in the presence of childhood crushes.

  Oh, God. Tell me I haven’t been acting that way around him.

  But I’m afraid I have. I am mortified, and feel disloyal to Paul in a thousand different ways although he, of all people, would understand that our childhood places and people make us behave in ways we never would in our real, adult, well-loved lives.

  Tate blathers on to my mother while we walk the beach, the three of us pretending not to know that Connie is back at the house trying to get her son to talk to her. And he won’t. He will be silent and angry, because that is what teenage boys do.

  We finally turn around, and just as we reach the house, I see Connie coming from the other direction. She is alone. Neither Tate nor Mother see her; they are only paying attention to each other. When we reach the door, I allow them to enter ahead of me.

  “You coming in?” Tate asks.

  I shake my head. “I think I’ll stay out here for a while,” I say and hurry down the boardwalk to meet Connie.

  She looks relieved to see me, but it’s obvious that she doesn’t want to talk, and so I just walk beside her, wanting to tell her that it will be all right, that Gib will eventually come around and appreciate her, that one day this will be a distant memory. I want to tell her about me, and about Paul, and most of all, I want to tell her about that summer, because I am full to bursting with it, and I know that she should know.

  Or maybe I just want to tell.

  We shuffle up the boardwalk side by side, and just as she opens the door, I get the courage to reach out and say to her, “It’s going to be okay.”

  But it is too late, and I don’t think she believes me.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Luke called at five, just as I returned from the beach. I took it upstairs in the library, shutting the door, hoping the sealing might serve as soundproofing.

  “Did June and Gib arrive safely?” he asked. He sounded professional, as though I were a client. Not at all what I’d expected.

  “They got here fine,” I replied. “Is Deanna still there?”

  “No,” he said. “Are you going to tell me what Gib said?”

  “No,” I answered, unwilling to admit that I couldn’t get him to tell me anything. “Are you in love with her?”

  He was silent, and I felt satisfied that I had taken him by surprise, hit him hard, on the offensive. And then he took me by surprise.

  “Yes, I am.”

  All my bravado evaporated. My breath began coming in shallow gasps, as though I’d forgotten how to inflate my lungs. Neither of us said anything. I was stunned at the admission, so quickly given. I had expected a drawn-out fight; I’d planned to have him groveling, pinned, knuckled under; I’d expected to be the victor, the conqueror, all the metaphors for violent victory.

  This wasn’t our deal. I was the wife. The wife, dammit. The only reason I’d put up with this over the years was because my position afforded me certain protections and guarantees, and one of them was my right to leave him.

  I wanted the fight. I deserved the fight. I was owed the fight. I had things prepared, for God’s sake. Apparently so did he.

  “I want out,” he said.

  “You’re in love with her?”

  “Y
ou wouldn’t understand.”

  For some reason that made me want to smash the phone receiver into bits. Not that he was in love with her, but that I wouldn’t understand.

  “Try me,” I said, feeling acid rise in my throat. My hand was fisted so tightly around the old, gnarled cord of the phone that my nails dug into my palm. I squeezed tighter, feeling the blood pulse in my wrist with the pressure.

  “She’s simple,” he said, and I felt laughter bubble in my chest despite my rage.

  “Well,” I said, “she’d have to be, wouldn’t she?”

  He was silent and then said, “I didn’t mean it like that. She’s down-to-earth. She doesn’t need all the . . . the stuff, the big house, the cars.”

  “How lovely of her. And who exactly were those things important to? Not me, Luke. You’re the one with the poor-childhood chip on his shoulder. And if cars don’t matter to her, then how did she feel about her new yellow Beetle?”

  “I didn’t use any of our money for that car,” he said.

  “Our money?” I asked. “Our, as in you and me? Or our as in Gib and Carson’s college funds? Did you buy the Escalade or the Beetle with Carson’s? And why the Escalade? Was that a diversion? Trying to keep me quiet until you could get things set up?”

  Dead silence. I’d hit it.

  “Be careful with me, Luke,” I said, despite knowing it was unwise. “I know more than you think.”

  “What exactly are you threatening me with, Connie?”

  The venom in his voice matched mine, and I was suddenly fascinated, as though watching a stranger’s marriage disintegrate. How could two people who had loved each other, who spoke kindly to each other just days ago, suddenly be filled with such hatred? I took a deep breath and let it leak slowly from my pursed lips.

  “Luke? We’re getting divorced, right?” I said quietly.

  “I—well, yeah. Yes, I want a divorce.”

  “We have these two boys—”

  “I’m warning you not to try to hold me up for some insane support agreement, Connie.”

  “It never crossed my mind,” I said. “But we do need to think about how we’re going to treat each other.”

  “You’re the one who came out swinging with the threats.”

  “And you’re the one who’s been cheating on me for eight years and who stole our children’s money, Luke. I think I’ve earned the right to be angry.”

  He was breathing heavily, as though he’d been playing basketball with Gib. I wondered whether that would happen again.

  “I’ll be coming home in two weeks,” I continued. “I suggest you find somewhere else to stay in that time. And keep Deanna out of my big house. I don’t want to offend her down-to-earth sensibilities. My lawyer will be in touch.”

  “Your law—”

  I hung up, gently, took my hand off the receiver, and carefully unwound the cord from my palm. I sat in my father’s big oxblood leather chair and swiveled back and forth in the empty library.

  When I came downstairs for dinner nobody asked me how the phone call had gone. They were subdued to the point of mournful, and I didn’t have the energy to pretend that I was fine. I was shaky all night, my hands betraying me whenever I was asked to pass a dish at the table. Gib stayed in his bedroom through dinner. Nobody asked me where he was, and I didn’t offer any information.

  Tate and Estella flipped through albums on the living room floor and played music while Mother and I tried to remember the rules to the backgammon game we’d opened between us on the sofa. When Gib’s door opened downstairs we all raised our eyes and looked at one another, hands poised mid-move, sentences silenced mid-word.

  As his feet fell upon the stairs we all calmly went back to what we were doing by unspoken agreement. I put Mother’s white piece on the bar, Tate showed Estella an Etta James record, Mother rattled the dice in her cup.

  Gib topped the stairs and walked into the kitchen without glancing our way.

  “There’s a plate in the oven for you,” Mother said, and I shot her an irritated look. She’d offered to clean the kitchen, and I hadn’t seen that she’d made a plate for Gib. I didn’t want him to starve, but providing him with a ready-made plate made it entirely too easy on him.

  Mother had always had a way of spoiling the aggressor, harboring the fugitive. If the rest of the world were punishing a transgression, she would feed the transgressor. It used to make me crazy. Apparently neither of us had changed a bit.

  Gib pulled the plate out and banged it on the counter. I ignored it. Then he pulled a drawer open, rummaged for silverware, and slammed it closed again. I ignored that. When he opened the refrigerator door hard enough to bang it into the wall, I’d had enough. I leapt to my feet and walked to the kitchen with tight, controlled steps and tight, controlled lips. He didn’t look at me when I crowded in on him.

  “You get yourself under control right now,” I said under my breath. “Your family is here, and I will not have you making a spectacle of yourself and making them uncomfortable.”

  He looked right at me and stuck a shrimp in his mouth, then spat it out into the garbage can. “These taste like shit,” he said.

  “You watch your mouth, young man!” I snapped. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tate and Estella hustle down the stairs. Gib turned to me, and I involuntarily stepped backward. His handsome face was contorted, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a grimace I’d never seen before. I shrank before I could marshal my forces.

  “Now, Connie, the boy’s upset—”

  “Be quiet, Mother,” I said. I might have been afraid to be angry with my son, but I’d had plenty of practice being angry with my mother, and she proved a lightning rod just in time. “I’m sorry that you had to see your father in such an ugly scenario, Gib. But you’ll do well to remember that I am your mother—”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Gib shouted, spittle flying from his lips. He wiped a hand savagely against his mouth even as he made his next attack. “Maybe if you weren’t such a bitch he wouldn’t have had to—”

  Before I could react I felt my mother move. With a speed I hadn’t been aware she was capable of she flew around me and then between us, and then I heard the sharp smack of her hand slapping my son across the face. Gib cried out, clutching his cheek, and then she had him by the shoulders as he collapsed forward and sobbed. She patted him on the back for a moment, and then looked at me, standing frozen in shock, and motioned with her head for me to move closer.

  I stepped forward and she stepped back, transferring him to me like she had when he was a colicky baby and she’d finally managed to get him to sleep. I held my big son, whispering soothing noises, as Mother left.

  “Okay now,” I said as his sobs slowed down. He finally straightened up, hiding his face by bringing the bottom of his T-shirt up, exposing his stomach, making him as vulnerable as an overturned turtle. I wet half of a dishtowel and placed it in a hand I pried away from his face. He clutched at it and finally let the T-shirt drop, scrubbing his face with the towel.

  “Come on,” I said, taking him by the hand and leading him toward the stairs. He followed without protest. I led him through the library and up the stairs to the widow’s walk. He forgot his tears trying to figure out the best way to climb onto the roof, and I let him wander around the railing while I sat on a bench, watching the moon’s lacy silver path widen on the water.

  Eventually he sat beside me, leaning his elbows on his knees, breathing hard, but regularly. I rubbed light circles on his back and felt his muscles relax beneath my hand.

  “I didn’t mean it,” he whispered, and then, as though the words had been a cork, his shoulders started to heave again.

  “Shh,” I whispered. “Come on, now, stop. It’s okay, everything’s okay, Gib.”

  “How could he do that?” he asked, not looking at me.

  A hundred tart comments ran through my mind, but I held them. “I don’t know, honey,” I answered. “Do you think you can tell me what happened?”


  “You’re going to get mad,” he said.

  “I already knew your father was having an affair,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

  “No, you’re going to be mad at me,” he said.

  “Honey, none of this is your fault,” I said, pulling his shoulder back so he had to turn toward me. He looked at me quickly but dropped his eyes again.

  “I wasn’t at Sean’s,” he said. “Not at first, anyway.”

  “Where were you?” I asked, bewildered.

  “I was with Velvet,” he said, and I suddenly had a mental image of Gib astride a horse, jumping oxers.

  “Velvet?”

  “My girlfriend—my ex-girlfriend. We broke up.”

  I wasn’t sure what surprised me more: the fact that Gib had a girlfriend I’d never heard anything about, or that her name was actually Velvet. “Okay,” I said slowly. “How long have you been with . . . Velvet?”

  “Five, maybe six months.”

  I was stunned. “Six months? Gib, why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  He shrugged, and I could almost feel him pull away from me again, like a tide. I struggled to find the right note. “You cared about her? Obviously, you cared about her. I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

  He shot me a glance as if trying to judge whether I was really interested or not, but then he nodded. “I guess. She cheated on me. With Sean.”

  My heart broke for my son. To break up with his first girlfriend—the first girlfriend that I knew about anyway—because she was cheating on him with his best friend . . . cheating on him? The lightbulb went off.

  “So, you and Velvet were—intimate?” I asked. It had been a long time since I’d checked his wallet for that condom.

  “Jeez, Mom,” he said, avoiding my eyes.

  “Well, you said cheating, so I assume you were, were—”

  “Yeah, okay? Yeah.”

  “Did you use protect—”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Don’t cut me off. This is important. Especially if she wasn’t faithful. Protection isn’t just about preventing pregnancy.”