Catching Genius

by Kristy Kiernan

  “Come on,” Tate yelled over a low rumble of thunder, “we’ve got a fire going at the lighthouse. Gib, you bring up the back, make sure everyone stays together.”

  We stumbled after Tate, Estella first, Carson and I clinging together, and Gib behind us. Lightning forked brilliantly over the Gulf and thunder continued to make us jump, but once we were under the dense spread of palms the rain became less of a nuisance. By the time we arrived at the lighthouse we were all shivering. I was torn between going straight to the sputtering fire and getting Carson into the lighthouse and out of his wet clothes.

  The fire won, and the heat felt delicious as we caught our breath and leaned into each other.

  “How did you know?” I asked, as Tate draped a towel around Carson and me.

  He pointed toward Gib. “June called his cell phone. I knew which way the current would take the canoe, but I didn’t expect to see the two of you. My God, Connie, you could have drowned.” At this last he looked over at Estella, who was curled over, her head resting on her knees, her shoulders shaking. He quickly put his own jacket around her and she clutched it, looking up at him gratefully.

  “I almost did,” I admitted. “Gib, are you all right?” I asked my silent older son. His face was grave, his eyes alternating between Carson and me. He bit his lip and nodded, and I could see his chin quivering slightly. I held an arm out to him and he ducked into it. I held my two boys, Carson now the calmer of the two, while Tate led Estella into the lighthouse.

  By the time they returned, Estella dressed in Tate’s jacket and boxer shorts and Tate wrapped in a damp towel, the three of us were dry-eyed and silent, having run out of a rushed jumble of sorrys and forgivens and declarations of love. Luke and his problems had never been farther from my mind.

  We took our turns in the blissfully dry lighthouse, making use of whatever clothing we could scrounge together from Tate and Gib’s backpacks. I wound up in one of Gib’s oversized T-shirts, Carson in a sweatshirt and shorts that were still eight years away from fitting him. Gib wrapped his sleeping bag around himself.

  We were a ragtag exhausted bunch that met around the fire again, and Gib gave me his phone to assure Mother that we were all alive, though we couldn’t get back to Big Dune that night. The two police officers who patrolled Big Dune were already at the house, and I spent entirely too long convincing them that a full-scale helicopter and rescue boat operation was unnecessary.

  Mother was more difficult to calm down, but she finally accepted the fact that we were stuck. Tate and Gib shared the remains of their dinners, and we spent nearly an hour going over the night, from when I found Carson missing to the shock of Gib rising from the waves. But it wasn’t until Tate led Gib, carrying a sleeping Carson, into the lighthouse that Estella and I talked about what she’d done out there and what I hadn’t been able to do.

  The rain had stopped, but lightning still illuminated the clouds and low thunder rumbled through the trees. We were on opposite sides of the fire, and it was difficult to see her face. I scooted toward her, but she merely stared at the fire.

  “Estella,” I said softly. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t say anything.” She tilted her head to one side, and opened her mouth twice, as though about to speak, but the only things that escaped were small sighs.

  “You saved my life,” I said, talking over her when she tried to interrupt. “You did, and you saved Carson’s. My son, Estella, you saved my son’s life. And I don’t care about anything else. I don’t care about Daddy, or the books, or the house, or the violins. You can have it all, just—just—”

  My voice was shaking too much for me to get the rest of the words out, and I finally closed my eyes and gave in to the sobs I’d managed to hold back in front of Gib and Carson. I pleaded with Estella in my mind, silently entreating her to reach out and touch me, to put an arm around me or just place her hand on mine. But the touch didn’t come, which made me sob harder. I finally lifted my head, sniffing at the tail end of my humiliating breakdown, to find Estella staring at me.

  “Do you still want to know about Pretus?” she asked.

  “What?” I replied, unable to change gears so quickly. She looked away and then back, impatient with me.

  “Pretus. You wanted to know—”

  “Okay,” I broke in, suddenly impatient with her too. Impatient with her distance, her inscrutability. “Fine, yes, tell me about Pretus, Estella.”

  “Connie, that summer, I didn’t hate you. I wanted to be you. Not you the way you were every day—you drowning. You at that very moment. I wanted to die. I . . . Connie, I was pregnant.”

  I froze and it seemed that the rest of the island froze with me. The raccoons stopped shuffling in the brush, the fish stopped jumping in the Gulf, the palms stopped shifting in the wind. Even the fire seemed to stop crackling. Estella. Shy, strange, genius Estella. I saw her in my mind, remembered her as she’d been that summer. She’d become a woman, that had been clear, but exactly how much of a woman I hadn’t realized.

  “What happened, Estella? What about—the baby?”

  She looked at me in surprise. “There was no baby, Connie. Pretus paid for it. Do you remember that I stayed with them for the rest of the summer? He took me to Atlanta. I had an abortion.”

  I couldn’t have spoken then if I’d wanted to.

  I thought about my miscarriages, the little lives I’d wanted so badly, and for just a moment, a brief, horrible moment, I turned against her. She was making it up, trying to excuse her behavior. Somehow she knew what flashed through my mind.

  “Connie, I was young. It’s not a choice I would make today,” she said gently. “But it was the only choice then. I’d lost everything, don’t you see? Seventeen, and I’d lost my mind. I lost whatever everyone saw in me, I lost my gift, my genius, my big future. Pretus knew it. And he made sure that Daddy knew it. Daddy gave the books to keep me in school and to keep Pretus quiet. Daddy bought my way through my last two years, Connie.”

  “Daddy didn’t know, about the abortion?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You went through all that alone?”

  “I didn’t think I had a choice.”

  “So then, afterward, did it come back? The math?”

  “Sometimes. It comes and goes.”

  “But how?”

  She was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. The doctors all say it’s psychosomatic, that I have control over it. They say that in times of stress I either shut it off or turn it on depending on my needs.”

  “The doctors? You’ve been to a psychiatrist?”

  She gave a short bark of laughter. “I’ve been to psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists.”

  At this last I glanced at her. “That serious?” I asked. She nodded and looked away. “Then why, why would you want me to encourage Carson? You’re abused and then spend years in therapy because of it and you think I should let Carson follow in your footsteps?”

  “Connie, I would have spent years in therapy anyway. What happened to me isn’t going to happen to Carson, because Carson isn’t me, and because you’re not Daddy, and because we’re going to make sure it won’t happen. I might have been protected from Pretus, but I still would have run to the numbers. And Carson will run for his own gift. This is what I was destined to be. This is all I was destined to be.”

  “Are you really happy?” I asked. She nodded, and I believed her.

  “I needed to tell you this, because there’s something else.”

  “Oh God,” I said, dropping my head in my hands. “I don’t think I can handle anything else, Estella.”

  “I don’t think it’s psychosomatic. I think I lost it because there was something wrong with my brain,” she said, proceeding without my permission.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I had headaches, bad headaches, and that’s when the math would come back or go away.” She shook her head, and I remembered her headaches over the past three weeks.
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br />   “So, is it here or gone right now?” I asked, thinking I was getting a handle on what she was explaining.

  “It’s back,” she said, nearly whispering.

  “Isn’t that a good thing?” I asked, confused.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I had surgery last year, Connie. I had a cluster of tumors removed from my brain.”

  If the island had seemed to freeze before, now everything exploded. I heard every wave, every rustle, every drone of every hungry mosquito. They all assaulted my ears at once, making me dizzy, drilling into my core until I felt it in my heart. I pressed my hand to the center of my chest and stared at my sister, unable to utter a word.

  She reached out a hand, tentative, trembling in the glow of the fire, and I grabbed on to it as tightly as she’d clutched me in the water.

  “I’m—” She stopped, took a deep breath, and then continued, her voice trembling as hard as her hand. “Everything’s been clear so far, but it came back. The math, I mean. A month ago, and now the headaches are back, and I know—I know . . .”

  She began to weep softly, and I continued to hold her hand for a moment, unable to move. I finally broke myself out of it and moved to her, gathering her in my arms. She bent her head down to my shoulder, and I cradled the back of it, feeling her flinch.

  She sniffed, wiping her face savagely and pulling away from me. But she grabbed the hand that had been holding her head and guided it back up to her skull.

  “Here,” she said, pushing my fingers through her hair. I gasped, reflexively pulling my fingers back when they touched the ridge of scar across the back of her head, but she held fast to my hand and made me feel it. “You see?” she asked, finally letting go of my hand. “It’s back, and I know the odds, Connie. I know the odds.”

  “No, Estella,” I said, my words catching in my throat, unable to accept what she was telling me. “What do the doctors say? Do they say it’s related?”

  “The headaches? Sure, they tell me they’re a legitimate symptom. The math they want to laugh at. They don’t, but I know they don’t believe it. Maybe they’re right. It doesn’t matter, really.”

  “Oh my God, Estella, why didn’t you tell me? Why?”

  “I’m telling you now, Connie.” She sounded exhausted. And of course she was, we both were. She leaned against me again, and I held her to me, and we didn’t speak, we just watched the fire burn itself down until the sun began to rise behind us. Somehow the universe had moved along just as if the previous night hadn’t happened, as if it hadn’t changed everything.

  Estella

  We move across the cut in silence. Connie is paddling hard up front, nearly frantically, while I paddle and steer in the rear. Carson crouches in the canoe’s middle, gripping the sides tightly, though the water is so calm it’s nearly flat. Tate and Gib paddle along effortlessly in their canoe beside us.

  Everyone is somber, everyone is tired, and everyone—including me, I’m sure—looks exactly like they got less than twenty minutes of sleep on a desert island after nearly drowning. We can see Mother waiting for us on the beach of Big Dune, her feet in the water as though she just might wade out and meet us in the middle of the cut.

  She grabs our bow as we glide up and hauls us up on the beach, her mouth going already. She grabs Carson to her, scolding him, then forgiving him, and the rest of us smile wearily at one another. She hugs us all in turn and presses for details on the trudge back home.

  By unspoken agreement, Connie and I lag behind and allow Tate, Gib, and Carson to relate the events of the night before, and soon they are far ahead of us.

  “So when is Paul supposed to get here?” Connie asks.

  “Before noon,” I reply. “It’ll be good to get home.” I say this last hesitantly. It was all I wanted before; now it means I must face up to the neurologist, the tests, the next step.

  “Do you have to go? I mean, do you have to go today?”

  “Paul wants me home,” I say simply. I have fallen back to that, back to placing all of my decisions in Paul’s hands. A year ago I had to, and now I will have to again. It is almost a relief.

  “Couldn’t he stay the night? I feel—there’s so much more we need to talk about,” Connie says, and she grabs my arm, stopping me in my tracks, sending up a little rill of sand where she’s planted her stubborn leading foot.

  I shake my head. “I don’t know, Connie. Let’s see how it goes, okay?”

  She looks at me for another moment, squinting in the sun, making her wrinkles obvious, showing her age. I wonder how I look to her. I feel ancient. She nods and slowly lets go of me. We stare at each other a second more. A cloud slides across the sun, and for a moment, she is a teenager again.

  “I’ll try,” I say, but I know better. It’s time to go home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mother, unable to sleep the night before, apparently came to the decision that it was time to go home. Her bags were packed and by the front door when we walked into the house. I didn’t say anything, ignoring them until I had organized the boys, sending them to separate showers and gathering breakfast supplies together.

  Tate collapsed in the living room, and Estella began to haul her bags to the front door, stacking them beside Mother’s. I was feeling deserted already. Mother watched me from the other side of the counter.

  “You’re too quiet,” she said suspiciously, and rightly so, as usual.

  “It was a long night,” I said truthfully. “What’s up with the bags?”

  “I needed to do something to keep me busy last night. I was thinking—”

  “Uh-oh,” I murmured.

  “Don’t be smart. I was thinking that I might take the boys home a few days early—”

  I whirled around, an egg-covered spatula in my hand. “What? Why? They’re both fine, Mother. Everything is okay.”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “I’m trying to do a nice thing, Constance, now be still and listen to me. I thought I might take the boys back to Verona a few days early, get them back to their friends, maybe do some shopping—they’re both growing out of their clothes—and maybe give you a little break. You’ve been working nonstop on the house, and with Estella leaving, well, I though you just might like some time to yourself, to regroup, relax on the beach without worrying about those two.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Mother, Deanna called me last night.”

  “I know,” she said. “She called back after Gib called. Drunk. She told me about Luke. Let me take the boys to Verona, Connie. You just talk to your lawyer and do what she tells you.”

  I almost gasped at the thought of Deanna and my mother having a conversation, but right then I didn’t want to even know what was said. She was offering me a chance.

  I thought over my options. I’d taken the rental car back the day after I’d arrived on the island, and I had no way to get home. “If you take my car I don’t have any transportation.”

  “Take a cab into Parachukla and fly home. I’ll pick you up at the airport. For goodness sake, Connie, I thought you’d jump at the chance. Stay as long as you want, bike to the store if you need something. You wanted me to be on your side—well, here I am.”

  I looked around the living room. I still had the stereo and the television, still had the mattress upstairs, still had electricity and water. She was right, the small island store was only a few blocks away and we’d left the bikes in the storage closet downstairs for the next owners.

  “Okay,” I agreed, noting the relief that crossed over her face. “But are you really sure, Mother—”

  “Connie, if you continue to push me I’ll just give up and take the cab and the plane myself. I am leaving this island today. Now let’s go get the boys’ things together. We can have a nice breakfast and be on the road by this afternoon.”

  “All right,” I said. “Thanks, Mom.” She nodded, the tension in her forehead relaxing slightly. I watched her back as she walked slowly downstairs, holding tightly to the handrail as
though unsure of her footing. She seemed to have aged ten years overnight.

  I spoke with Angie, who did not seem surprised that Luke had been arrested. She assured me she would speak to his attorney and that I would be wise to simply stay where I was until more information came in. Then I had to sit down with the boys and try to explain, in some sort of matter-of-fact manner, that their father was in trouble and they might not be able to see him for a little while. Gib seemed to have aged overnight too. He held Carson to him and told him it would be all right, while he looked over his head and gave me the same message with his eyes.

  To my surprise, the boys wanted to go home, although I think that Mother might have bribed them after she’d spoken with me. Or perhaps they’d simply had enough of the island too. They left before Paul arrived, all of them anxious to get on the road.

  Gib gave Tate a manly handshake good-bye, and Carson gravely followed his lead, breaking into squeals of laughter when Tate swung him up and across his shoulders to carry him down to the car. Mother handed Gib the keys, with a small, challenging smile at me, but I didn’t say anything. Gib had already proven himself.

  I hugged my boys hard, promising that I’d be home in less than a week, and then they were gone, crunching away down the drive and puffing up a cloud of shell dust and sand as Gib spun the car onto the road. I stayed outside while Tate and Estella climbed the stairs, and so I was the one who first saw the old Cutlass slowly working its way down the road. I walked out to the mailbox and raised my arms over my head, waving Paul in.

  I’d hoped for a small break in the day, a chance for Estella and me to finally be alone. Paul exited the car wearily, with the shell-shocked look of somebody unused to driving the convoluted back roads of rural Florida.

  “Hi, Paul,” I greeted him, holding my arms out for a hug without thinking. We’d never embraced before, but the drive must have lowered his defenses because he immediately stepped into my arms, then just as quickly moved away and looked up at the house.