Catching Genius

by Kristy Kiernan

“Nice place,” he said. “How’s Estella?”

  “She told me, Paul,” I said quietly, placing my hand on his arm to keep him from gaining the stairs.

  He eyed me warily. “Told you what?”

  “About the tumors, the surgery. About the headaches.”

  He nodded. “Well, I guess I’m glad she finally told someone in her family. I did try to get her to tell you before.”

  “Thank you for that, and for everything else you’ve done. It couldn’t have been easy.”

  “She’d have done the same for me,” he said simply, and I knew he was right.

  “Paul, I was wondering, hoping, that you might be able to stay for a bit—”

  He began to interrupt, but I hurried on, suddenly seeing my opportunity in his concern for her. “For the night, at least. She just told me last night—last night! You don’t even know about last night.”

  He looked confused. “Should I?” he asked. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine,” I assured him. “But to be honest, I don’t think she should travel until she’s gotten a good night’s sleep.”

  “Maybe I’d better talk to Estella,” he said, pulling from my grasp and taking the stairs two at a time. I followed with a sinking heart. He was going to yank her off Big Dune so fast he’d pull the tide with him. He waited on the front porch for me impatiently, allowing me to open the door and precede him into the house.

  “Estella,” I called as I led him up the stairs. “Paul’s here.”

  I heard the thump of feet as she came running. I flattened myself against the wall as she flew past me and into his arms, nearly taking them both down the stairs. He held her tightly, her face pressed into his collarbone, and they murmured to each other, words I couldn’t—and didn’t want to—hear. I hurried up the stairs.

  Tate, ready to go home to his own shower and bed after once again finding himself in the midst of a Sykes family drama, sat on the steps to the third floor, yawning. I sat next to him, and he put his arm around my shoulders. I could have fallen asleep right there but for Estella one flight beneath me. The low thrum of voices had stopped, and then I heard steps, heading down, rather than up, the stairs. Tate groaned and fell back before hauling himself to his feet with a sigh when Estella’s bedroom door closed.

  “I want to do the polite thing here and stay to meet the guy—” he started.

  “Go,” I encouraged him. “Go home. Stop by tomorrow, I’ll make you dinner.”

  He looked uncertain. “Are you sure? Is she still leaving today?”

  “I guess so,” I said, hoping I could convince her otherwise.

  “Will you be all right here by yourself?”

  I opened my mouth to answer and then shut it without a word. I would be by myself. I was by myself. Not just for the night. My life stood before me like an empty bookshelf, waiting for me to choose and place and rearrange. I thought of the boxes of books my father had chosen, waiting downstairs to be claimed by Estella. Perhaps we’d been too hasty to judge him for his seemingly flippant choices.

  Violins and math, the sea and the South. He chose what was important to him and to his family. Perhaps he had seen how we’d fallen apart and it had been his own way of keeping us all together. Estella and I represented upon the shelves he gazed at every day, our mother and the island he loved protected by his carefully constructed jewel box at the top of the stairs, together with his ancestors rendered immortal in oil, languishing on the wall.

  I had nothing. I’d surrounded myself with nothing. No wonder my house in Verona no longer meant anything to me, while this empty house ached in me like an arthritic joint. Would I be all right here by myself?

  “I’ll be fine,” I said slowly. He gave me a half smile, and I shook my head. “Really. If I need anything I’ll call you.”

  “Okay then,” he responded.

  I followed him downstairs, but left by the beachside door while he left by the front, and I was down at the edge of the Gulf before the sound of his engine died away. The storm had scoured the island clean during the night, and the only footprints on the smooth sand other than ours were from shorebirds and an occasional beach cat chasing a breakfast of ghost crab. The top layer of sand crunched beneath my feet, mixing with the softer sand beneath, sending a shiver up the backs of my legs when it tickled my tender arches.

  It didn’t take long for Estella to join me. I heard the hollow thud of footsteps on the boardwalk and turned around to watch her move slowly down to me. Her face was drawn, recently wiped clean of tears.

  “Paul is taking my things to the car,” she said quietly.

  “Estella,” I pleaded. But she was shaking her head.

  “I can’t, Connie. Paul’s right. I need to get back to my support system, my family.”

  I flinched. “I’m your family. Can’t we start over? Won’t you let me just make you dinner?” My voice was rising, high and unnatural against the sound of the surf and the cry of the gulls.

  Estella sighed. “Connie, I have to go. We may have left this for too long. I’m not blaming you for that—”

  “I’ll take the blame if you’ll just give me a chance.”

  “You’re not to blame. I have plenty of share in it. But I can’t help what’s happening right now. We’ll work on it, okay? I’ll call, I’ll let you know what’s happening. And I want to know about Gib, and I want to help with Carson . . . and you. It’s—” She opened her arms wide in a shrug that encompassed everything—us, the beach, the Gulf—and then dropped them, her head drooping as she looked at her shoes. “It’s the best I can do right now.”

  I felt the fire leave me, seeing her look so defeated, seeing her shoes in the sand next to my bare feet. Maybe it was too late, maybe our parents had screwed it up, maybe we’d kept screwing it up. It happened. It happened to families every day. Maybe the last great Sykes had been hanging on that wall of paintings. Maybe there’d never been any great Sykeses at all.

  “Okay,” I said. “What about the books? Should I ship them to you?”

  She smiled. “Would you just take them, Connie? Please? I don’t want them, I don’t care about them, and they’d eventually be yours anyway.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said, but it was useless. “Will you call when you get home to let me know you got there safely?”

  She nodded, and then folded me into her arms. It was a start. We stood there on the Big Dune beach, me grounded to it by skin, Estella separated from it by thick soles. And then she left. Paul didn’t come say good-bye to me, but I didn’t mind. He’d taken good care of my sister, and he would continue to, and I would always be thankful to him for that.

  It was a restless afternoon. I couldn’t relax, couldn’t sink into any sort of comfortable feeling in my own skin. Late that afternoon I walked down to the cut and sat on the sand, gazing across the now-calm water to Little Dune. My eyes were drawn to the canoe tracks in the sand. Fresh tracks. I glanced back in the bushes to see that the big canoe was gone. Tate.

  After a moment’s hesitation I wrestled the small canoe from its spot and dragged it into the water. I was panting by the time I reached Little Dune, and I rested for a moment, allowing the little waves to rock the back of the canoe while its bow cut into the sand.

  I finally got out and hauled the canoe up to rest beside the larger one, looking for Tate’s footprints. There was a set heading north, toward the lighthouse, and drag marks of an indeterminate source beside them.

  I finally came upon him cutting chicken wire to lay atop a turtle’s nest just in front of a large bank of dunes. I watched him silently, his bare back muscles bunching and stretching as he cut the wire. He caught sight of my shadow and turned quickly, the wire cutters clutched in his hand as though he might have to defend himself.

  He relaxed as soon as he saw it was me, but I didn’t want him to relax. I was either going to break down or I was going to channel all of it—all my anger at Luke, my anxiety for my children’s future, my fear for what might be happening to my
sister—into a long-overdue surge of action.

  “Con?” Tate asked, tilting his head to the side. “You all right?”

  “No,” I said. “But I will be.”

  He only protested once as I led him to the lighthouse.

  “I’m not what you need,” he said. “I told you, I’m not fit for it.” He tugged me to a stop, and I whirled on him.

  “Tate, I’m only asking you to be fit for one thing. We’re adults now, aren’t we?” He stared at me and nodded slowly. “Then let me worry about what I need. Take me to the lighthouse and be what I need for now—just for right now. Don’t make me beg.”

  “No,” he said, and I nearly walked away from him then in disgust, but he held tight to my hand and I understood. He pulled me to him, and when he kissed me, he kissed me hard, with his hands holding my head, and even if I’d wanted to escape then I don’t think I could have.

  We hurried to the lighthouse, and I found exactly what I wanted there. And I did not cry afterward, not for Daddy and Graciela, or Estella, or Luke, or my children . . . or myself.

  Tate’s arm was beneath my head, and he too was staring up into the cylinder of the lighthouse, a faraway look on his face. Was he feeling determined, as I was, to change something? Or, more likely, was he determined that things would stay the same? It wasn’t in our deal for me to ask, so instead I posed a different question.

  “Tate? Can I borrow your truck?”

  He looked at me in surprise and tightened his arm, rolling me into him slightly. “Sure. What for?”

  “I need to go to Atlanta.”

  Estella

  BIG DUNE ISLAND SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

  Paul is waiting for me. I can just see him at the end of the boardwalk. He looks beautiful in the fading light, the moon rising behind him as a witness. I see him turn and I back away from the slider a bit, but it is not me he is looking at. It is Connie, who is nearly wrestling Mother down the boardwalk. Paul approaches them and they have a brief powwow, which ends in Paul walking Mother down to the chairs lined up on the beach.

  He seats her next to Gib, who is even larger and more grown-up than last summer. Mother and Gib lean their heads together conspiratorially, and I know she is complaining about being thrown out of the house. Both my mother and my sister are making me insane today, but Connie believes that it is only Mother. I let her believe it. I’m happy to let her believe it.

  It seems the sisterly thing to do.

  Connie arrives back upstairs, breathless and determined. Capable. She catches me looking at her and suddenly grins. I start to raise my hand to adjust . . . something, anything, because what could she be laughing at, but she is not laughing at me. She is simply happy.

  “Okay,” she says briskly. “Everyone’s here, let’s get you together.”

  And everyone is here, including my students Chelsea and Lisa, who are eyeing Tate in a way that might make Connie jealous if only she would acknowledge how she feels. Carson is there with his clarinet, prepared to serenade me down the sandy aisle with a composition he’s held closely guarded from everyone except the small group of musicians and instructors he’s studying with at the college this summer. Musicians and instructors heavily vetted by Connie and me, who are grouped around him now with their own instruments, ready to make his astonishing music come alive as the moon begins its ascent.

  And Vanessa is there with her son, who is visiting from Alaska and has been eyeing Connie in a way that might make Tate jealous if only he would acknowledge how he feels.

  I’m working on them both.

  And that, too, seems the sisterly thing to do.

  Connie begins her own sisterly ministrations, adjusting the straps of my dress though they need no adjustments. She reaches up to smooth a curl of my hair.

  “How do you feel?” she asks.

  “I feel wonderful,” I answer, and it is the truth. Yes, the cancer was there. But it was not nearly as bad as it could have been. The tests showed that it hadn’t spread, but that a tiny bit had been missed. The doctors swore that it was stress, not a fast-growing tumor, that caused my headaches, and wouldn’t even entertain the return of the math as a symptom. I’m getting there. Slowly.

  So, yes, I was right. The cancer was there.

  But so was Connie.

  Despite her own problems, despite the divorce, Luke’s arrest and subsequent conviction on fraud charges, and the sale of the house in Verona, Connie was there. And when I woke from a surgery to implant tiny radioactive seeds into the bit of tumor that was left, Connie was there, right beside Paul, telling me that everything was going to be all right.

  I believe her.

  I’d like to think I was there for her too. Paul has certainly been there, as though she were his own sister. This summer he helped Tate and Gib remove the shelves from the library—now Connie’s bedroom—and install them in the space she found for her bookstore and gallery in Parachukla.

  Paul’s bowls and sculptures form a solid core on pedestals in the center of the gallery, while Vanessa’s airy watercolors grace the walls that aren’t already filled with bookcases. Once a month the pedestals are pushed aside to make room for a recital by Connie’s string quartet. Occasionally they feature a solo by Carson, though she still keeps him heavily shielded.

  All of us helped her arrange the books on the shelves, even Mother, who, despite her inherent distrust of the island, still visits more often than Connie can handle. Mother chalks it up to checking in on her property, and Connie has little choice but to grin and bear it. Just like she bore Mother insisting on rent for the past year, even while Connie was still living and winding up her affairs in Verona. Mother will always be a businesswoman, will always have a head for numbers.

  Connie is still fussing with my hair. I gently push her hand away.

  “I’m ready,” I say.

  “Well then,” she says, holding her hand out to me. “Let’s go.”

  I take her hand and grab a bouquet of magnolias off the counter as we walk past the kitchen to the stairs. I count the steps as we walk down, but I count out loud and Connie joins me.

  “—nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen—” and we are in the foyer, opening the door, crossing the porch, and moving down the boardwalk. My math is back, but I’ve let it come, because the seeds have done their job and I am clear for now, and for now is good enough.

  We stop at the head of the stairs and Carson begins his piece. It blends perfectly with the music of the beach and the Gulf, and it has never been more apparent that he is destined for the kind of Sykes greatness our father had wanted for me.

  Connie will not screw it up. And I will be here as often as I can to make sure of it. Big Dune is in my blood. I tried to hide from it for too long, but now that I have given in, I will not allow it to happen again.

  Three facts about right now:

  I am healthy.

  I am being given away by Connie, willingly this time, because we have a choice now.

  I will always return here, to this island, under this moon, to dance with my sister.

  READERS GUIDE for Catching Genius

  Discussion Questions1. Catching Genius opens when Estella and Connie are still girls, just before Estella’s “genius” disrupts their lives. How does Estella’s mistaken assumption that her “eyecue” could be catching, like an illness, affect her relationship with her sister? Can Estella’s estrangement from Connie be seen as a way of protecting Connie? How is genius viewed as a gift in the story? How is genius viewed as a curse?

  2. When Carson’s composing talent is discovered by his music teacher, do you understand Connie’s initial reaction? Given her family history and the tension with her genius sister, how else do you think she could have reacted? How does Connie view herself as a musician in relation to her son? What makes Connie come to terms with Carson’s talent? How do you believe she will handle his future?

  3. Mr. Hailey, Carson’s music teacher, finds Carson’s musical talent a given once he learns that Carso
n’s aunt is a math genius. “Music is math, math is music,” he tells Connie (p. 107). And at Estella’s dinner party, the recurring debate over math enabling and supporting creativity comes up again. “Math is connected to creativity in all kinds of ways we don’t completely understand,” Estella tells Connie (p. 136). How do you see the two—music and math—connecting? How do they connect through the characters and plot of this story? Are Estella and Connie opposites, or more alike than they would realize?

  4. Discuss why Connie and Estella’s mother decided to keep her family’s history a secret from her husband and children. She said she did it for her daughters. Do you believe this was necessary, in the face of the Sykes family legacy and fortune? Are there ever times when large secrets are necessary? And does it ever become imperative that secrets be told?

  5. Connie had the Sykes eyes, “the eyes that said [she] belonged to [her father] and that divided [her] family down the middle” (p. 6). If Connie “belonged” to her father, why was her musical talent not encouraged in the way Estella’s talent with numbers was? Do you believe that Connie would have been considered a genius under different circumstances? Did the so-called “Sykes eyes” mean anything to Connie’s father, Sebastian? Did they mean anything to Connie? Why does Connie see Gib as Luke’s son, and Carson as her son? Does this still hold true at the end of the novel?

  6. At the start of the novel, Big Dune Island is a place both sisters don’t want to return to. What are they expecting to find there? What has kept Tate on the island, and why is he more connected to it than Estella and Connie? Estella hasn’t been to Big Dune in twenty-six years. Why has she physically distanced herself from the island? Do you think physical distance can keep away the memory of what occurred in a specific place? For Connie, the return may have been easier, but it takes her a long time to realize she wants to stay on Big Dune. What was holding Connie to her life in Verona? What makes her realize that Big Dune is really her home, and a home for her children?