Catching Genius (14 page)

 
 
I sat in my car in the parking lot, listening to the Gulf whisper against the sand while I tried to decide what to do. My choices were limited: Go back home and try to live with Luke as though nothing was happening, go pick up Estella, or take a vacation by myself at the beach house and leave the packing up for Mother to take care of herself after I returned home.

One way or another, sitting in the parking lot wasn't an option. I took one last look up at Mother's condo windows and then slowly drove out of the lot, with no idea of where I was going.

Connie is speaking urgently, but we, my father and I, are leaving and her words are lost as my father drives away. I am seated backward, so I am able to watch her recede out the rear window, a leather satchel that is larger than I am pressing into my thighs, and I read her lips grotesquely over-forming the words:
Watch for alligators!

My eyes fly open, and I swing my legs around under the covers so I'm sitting on the edge of the bed in one fluid movement. I look at the clock, certain that I've slept through the alarm. But it is still over an hour from going off, and I recline again, slowly easing my legs back onto the bed.

Paul snores softly, undisturbed. I listen to him and stare at the ceiling, regretting my decision to go now that the day is finally upon me.

I don't have much left to do. I'd done all the cleaning with the help of the students that week, and even the shopping for dinner tonight is done. I'd been in a panic to make sure everything was completed in time and now I regret it deeply. I wish for bathrooms to scrub, for floors to mop, grout to bleach, anything that will keep me from slowly going insane waiting for my mother and Connie to arrive.

Paul grumbles and turns over, taking the covers with him and exposing me to the chill of the air-conditioned room. I'm not going back to sleep, so there is no sense lying there, disturbing Paul with my unsettled aura.

I carefully get out of bed and turn the alarm clock off, padding to the bathroom to take a shower. The steam loosens me up; I take my time getting ready, as though I am going on a date. I even shave my legs.

I am wiping the counter and mirror with my towel when I hear the phone ring. I run to get it, hoping it won't wake Paul, but Chelsea already has it. She holds it out to me, smiling at my wet hair.

“Your mom,” she whispers, and I make a face and shake my head, pretending I won't take it. I imagine she's calling to tell me they've already left and are currently
x
hours away. My mother loves cell phones, and I'll doubtless get approximately eight of these calls today. Chelsea just grins and hands me the phone.

“Hello,” I say, trying to sound cheerful. “Where are you?”
Ha,
I think,
beat you to it
.

“I'm home, sweetheart, I won't be able to make it,” Mother says. Confusion floods me, and is then quickly replaced by clear, sparkling relief.

I am off the hook. A smile spreads across my face and my knees actually go a bit soft. I immediately begin to look forward to the house full of people who will be here tonight, the students, the people I love and who love me, whom I've invited tonight to distance myself from my own family, to insulate me, and whom I will now simply get to enjoy.

“But I don't want you to worry,” Mother says. “Connie left about an hour ago and should be there by five.”

So Connie is coming. Alone.

The hours pass the way hours do when waiting for pain medications to kick in: slowly, with a tension that infects everyone within range. By four o'clock, I am nearly quivering. I had hoped that Connie might call to tell me she wasn't coming, and in fact, the phone did ring this afternoon, but when I answered it, whoever it was simply waited for a moment and then hung up.

Almost everyone is here: Chelsea and Lisa; Chelsea's boyfriend, Steve, and his friend Hal; and three high school students I tutor, Chris, Phil, and Julia. They are all having a good time together.

I step out onto the front porch, away from the laughter, away from the warm, spicy aroma of spaghetti sauce, away from Paul, who seeks me out with his eyes every few minutes to make sure I'm okay.

The magnolia tree on the corner wafts its scent all the way down to me. I inhale with my eyes closed and think I might like to have a few of the blossoms. The house on that lot is for sale and has sat empty for over a year. All the neighbors snip the flowers as freely as though it were their own tree, and we all harbor a little hope that the house will never sell.

My surrogate family's laughter follows me down the block.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A private security car followed me on my third trip around Mother's block, and I finally admitted to myself that I wasn't going to march back up to the condo. I waved to the guard and turned away from the expensive condominiums and toward the interstate. I still wasn't sure what I was doing.

I looked down at the directions to Georgia, thinking of the time it would shave off my drive if I went straight to Big Dune. I could be installed in the house with a plate of shrimp by about the same time I would have arrived at Estella's. I had six hours of steady driving ahead of me before I had to decide, before I had to make the turn left toward the island or veer toward Atlanta.

I spent the first two hours figuring out and refining all the things I could have said to Mother. I even said them out loud, turning the music down so I could hear my voice, righteously angry, admirably tough as it reverberated through the cavernous leather interior.

But as I calmed down, I began to wonder what her motivation had been. Had it been simple laziness? Did she just need me and Estella to close up the house and knew we wouldn't go if she weren't there to buffer us? Had she, feeling mortal and motherly, been trying to force us to deal with each other? Or could she simply not bring herself to go to the island again?

I couldn't get the image of her little sisters snagged in the tree roots, two naked little girls, identical in their lives, identical in their deaths, out of my mind. I wondered if they knew how much their older sister had loved them. I knew how much Estella had loved me once. I had felt that fierce protectiveness, and at the age that April and May had died I would not have been surprised to have had Estella protecting me from a hurricane with her own body. I would have expected it.

But in the years after that night in the music room, I'd been a free agent. Estella was no longer my protector, my father was wrapped up in her rather than me, and my mother, I now knew, was ensnared in her own drama of learning how to be a wife and mother moving in educated circles.

After all those years of trying to win his attention by playing the violin, I had finally realized that I would not get my father back. He was lost to me. And so I turned my energy to Estella instead. Our relationship had finally achieved some common ground, based simply on the fact that we were growing into adolescence. I had lain awake nights scheming how to expand upon it, waging a quiet war to win my sister back.

I had been a pretty baby and was turning into a pretty girl. And my shopping trips with my mother ensured that I was always in style. My sister, however, got the Sykes crooked teeth and missed out on the shopping trips, an unfortunate combination. Add her appearance to the fact that she spent all her time with adults, and she was destined to fail in the popularity contests that all childhoods are.

I, on the other hand, was practically the center of the neighborhood. Except for Kimmy Kay and her damn horses. But fortune was with me that year leading up to Estella's college entrance. Kimmy Kay's guest horse came down with some horse illness that necessitated a quarantine, and the neighborhood kids congregated at our house. Estella hovered in the background and eavesdropped on conversations, like Fossey trying to fit in with gorillas, and it was a wonder to watch her exercise the social instincts that had been hiding for so long.

She was only a size larger than me, and I took great advantage of my mother's generosity on our shopping trips by slipping clothes for Estella in with mine. I would casually toss them on her bed, muttering something about them being too big for me. She never thanked me, but whenever kids filled the house she would invariably show up on the fringes wearing something I had chosen.

I managed to get her braces by making fun of her teeth over dinner, forcing my mother to take notice without calling attention to the fact that I was trying to help. And truth be told, I was secretly pleased to make my father acknowledge that perhaps his prodigy might be flawed in ways that I wasn't. It still pleased me a little, just a little, to remember it, his eyes flitting from her teeth to mine and back.

My interest in reading never waned, but without my father's guidance, I moved from the classic and obscure tomes that filled our library to mainstream novels far beyond my years. Perhaps it was simply to spite Daddy, but I began to leave these books in Estella's room. Stephen King, Danielle Steele, even Harold Robbins made their way onto her nightstand. They were never in sight when I looked in her room, but she never gave them back either.

But before she even had a chance to shiver with me over the creepy twins in
The Shining
, she left for college, to learn about complex variables and combinatorics. All my work had been for nothing. I may as well have spent my time deadheading roses and spraying aphids with my mother; my experiment at socializing Estella failed before I'd made a dent.

 
 
I was minutes away from having to make my decision to continue on to Georgia or turn toward the island when I picked up the phone and dialed my sister's number with a shaking hand and my heart in my throat. With one hand I held the phone to my ear and with the other hand I steered, ready to flip my directional and take the exit that would carry me along Florida's panhandle and out to Big Dune. But just as Estella answered, rather than taking the exit I kept to my lane, steering straight toward Atlanta. She said hello twice, and I hung up without a word.

I turned the radio up, allowing the music to take my mind off my mother, off Estella and Luke and my sons. But the flat length of Florida's I-75 seemed designed for brooding, and by the time I arrived in Estella's neighborhood hours later, I was exhausted and close to tears.

I slowed considerably when I turned onto her street. The house on the corner, a dilapidated old Southern monstrosity, boasted an extraordinary magnolia tree in the front yard. Its blooms were the size of dinner plates, and its leaves fluttered green and copper in the light wind.

I caught a quick glimpse of a dervish in a gauzy blue skirt twirling beneath the tree, magnolia-laden arms extended in a joyful, frenzied dance. Whoever it was must have seen me staring at her as I came around the corner, because the gauze quickly disappeared around the back of the house, bare feet flying, before I could get a glimpse of her face. I laughed out loud, thinking the woman was someone I'd like to know, or perhaps someone I'd like to be.

I glanced in my rearview mirror as I drove down the street, but she never reappeared, and I nearly missed Estella's house. I pulled into the driveway, stopping behind a beat-up old Cutlass, surprised that they'd finally gotten a car. I stared at the house for a moment before I picked up the cell phone again and dialed home. It was an exercise in procrastination. There was no answer. I hadn't expected one.

I grabbed my overnight bag and approached the porch, wishing I were visiting the magnolia dancer up the street instead. I felt naked as I stood there in the fading light, trying to compose myself before I rang the bell. I could hear music playing, and voices, lots of voices. I reached out to touch the doorbell, but the door flew open before I could, and I took an involuntary step backward.

Paul stood there, towering above me with his long wiry limbs tensed and worry creasing his face. “Connie,” he said, looking over my shoulder as though he expected someone else.

I silently cursed Mother before I stuttered a reply. “Paul, hi. It's just me. Mother couldn't make it.”

His eyes met mine again, and he stood back to allow me in, reaching to take the overnight bag I was clutching tightly to my side. “I know,” he said. “I hoped it was Estella.”

“Estella?”

He had been heading for the stairs with my bag, and he stopped and stood there for a minute before he turned around. “She's gone.”

Before I could respond, a group of young people came around the corner in a smiling wave of chatter, engulfing me in their midst. Paul walked up the stairs and out of my sight as they reached toward me.

“—so cool, we've heard so much about you.”

“—and this is my boyfriend, Steve.”

“—long did it take you?”

“—check the spaghetti sauce.”

I shook hands with everyone, confused about exactly who they were and why they were here. They continued to talk to me and among themselves as they moved me toward the living room. One of the girls pressed a glass of red wine into my hand. I found myself in the corner of a long sofa, staring at Estella's old Escher prints on the wall. Paul finally reappeared to make formal introductions, and I almost forgot that Estella wasn't there, as a portion of her life completely unknown to me revealed itself.

She'd never mentioned that she tutored kids. Or perhaps she had and I simply hadn't processed it. But I never knew that she had college students living in her home. I thought back to Estella on the fringes as an adolescent, trying to find her way in by the crumbs I'd dropped. And now I was the one flummoxed by the activity, stunned into a shy, bewildered outsider. Then I remembered that my sister wasn't even there. I carefully set my glass of wine on the side table and stood.