Catching Genius (2 page)

As we tired, we drew apart, to play our own favorite games. Sometimes I picked up my tiny, dilapidated violin with its fallen bridge and collapsed sound post and pretended I could play, but my stuffed animals commanded my attention more often. I arranged them in order of height, rearranged them in order of affection, or color of fur or eyes. I conducted wild animal chorales, and sometimes there was a vicious mauling and one animal would be punished while I gently nursed the victim back to life. Most often, I simply watched my restless sister at her game.

Estella loved numbers the way I loved my stuffed animals, and she arranged them in her own fashion the way I arranged my bears and elephants and monkeys. She always started at the door and stepped precisely along the baseboard on the outsides of her soles, her big toes tilted into the air, counting under her breath, always getting the same number when she reached the windows. And then her real fun began.

She snatched numbers out of the air—the date, or the number of the month, or the year, sometimes her age or mine, or all these things combined—until she reached some sort of critical mass in her mind, and then she searched for zero. She added and subtracted, or multiplied and divided, or otherwise manipulated the numbers, quickly, under her breath, eyes closed, until she got there. Sometimes it took her longer than others, and I would watch her face shining in the moonlight, her mouth working, until her eyelids finally stopped jumping, her shoulders relaxed, and a smile slid across her mouth.

Zero.

The windows that framed her looked out on the nature preserve named for our paternal great-grandfather, Henry Louis Sykes, black sheep son of Nathaniel Sykes, the man who had gathered his bootstraps in his callused hands and hauled himself, tree by tree, to the great heights that only oil tycoons and land barons could reach. Henry spent his life dedicated to replacing every tree his father felled from New England to Florida. They reconciled just before the elder Sykes' death at age ninety-four. Just in time for the will to be changed, bedeviling the other Sykes children by cutting them out completely and leaving the bulk of the wealth to Henry.

We were told this story night after night by Sebastian Henry Sykes, our father, in the beautiful language of a genteel South, liquid words and phrases that seemed born of some golden mother tongue. I loved to listen to him speak, loved that he used words that he naturally assumed I knew the meanings of, that caressed my ear with soft, multiple syllables and near-mythical imagery. As he spoke, he would point toward the land Henry had fought to preserve, the slash pines and live oaks and palms that signaled the end of civilization. Beyond them was the Everglades, where swamp took over and the alligators of our imaginations grew to preposterous lengths and water moccasins, thick as mangrove roots, lay in wait for careless children.

Then our father would gesture toward the old cracked oil painting of Nathaniel, pointing out how firm his mouth was, how proud his nose and strong his jaw. But it was his eyes that he always came back to, the same light brown that both he and I had inherited. They were Sykes eyes, the eyes that said I belonged to him and that divided our family down the middle. My mother and Estella shared the changeable blue-green of the Gulf of Mexico. My father teased that he could tell their moods by their eyes: anger showed as clear green, joy as blue, sadness a cloudy mix of the two. I often searched my sister's eyes, pleased to have this barometer of her soul that she could not hide behind numbers.

The Sykes eyes took everything in and gave nothing away, and Nathaniel's looked down upon us sternly every night in the music room, the same way I imagined he'd looked at Henry, until his disapproval turned to admiration.

My father's sensuous Southern outpourings of respect would end later, when the money and land slipped out of his too-little, too-late grasp, but there were many professions of admiration for our forefathers in those days.

I knew that he was passing down our history, trying to instill respect for our brilliant ancestors, but I enjoyed the stories simply for the sound of the language and for the intimacy it generated among the three of us. My father and Estella were my world, and when she left for school and my father went on one of his book-buying trips, I faded away like the moon when the sun rose, leaving me a tiny scrap of silver at my mother's side. I was only fully formed when snuggled on my father's lap or when watching Estella searching for zero in the music room.

Long before the moon gave way I began to nod off and my sister's agitated mind finally exhausted itself. We came together in the center of the back wall where a long pink velvet sofa stood, covered in an immense, moth-eaten shawl our father bought in Spain from a down-on-her-luck marchioness. Sometimes I dragged a stuffed animal with me; sometimes she brought hard little magnetic numbers from the slant-top desk in her room. We would curl together, me sucking my thumb, Estella clutching sharp-edged sevens and fours, and fall asleep.

 
 
One night, a night when our parents did not have a party but rather met across the long dining table under the stairs, everything changed. Suddenly, we might no longer be healthy. For two weeks we had been taken to doctors' offices, had dutifully filled out tests, had waited alone in chill rooms while our parents were spoken to in plush offices with closed doors. The only solace was that we were not stuck with needles, though that fact in itself did not reassure me of anything. The people had names with a
Doctor
prefix, and that was enough for me. But once home the worry slid from me as easily as I slid down our blue pool slide.

We met in the music room that night, but as I began to close the door, the moon bright as a half-dollar in our skylight, Estella stopped me. We did not dance. Instead, I pulled at the fluted hem of her nightgown as she listened just outside the door. She flapped her hand, quieting me as she strained to hear our parents' muted words over the clink and clatter of silverware. Hurt, I turned away. The doctor visits were over and we never got a shot. What else could possibly matter?

I pulled the violin and sprung-haired bow from the stand and bounced the bow across the violin's empty middle, making a low thump in the air, then quickly put them down again when I earned Estella's glare. Crawling onto the sofa, I wrapped the shawl about my feet, gathering stuffed animals around me like a moat, and watched her. I was always intrigued when she was still, when her eyes did not flit from point to point and her fingers weren't tugging at each other. She never glanced back at me, and I eventually fell asleep.

I woke when she threw a stuffed animal at my head. We rarely fought, and I was shocked at the unprovoked attack. I began to cry immediately, but she shushed me from her position at the now-closed door. The moon had dipped below the skylight as though it had never been there, making the room dim as a movie theater. I searched for her eyes, hopeful that they could tell me what her heart was feeling, but they were in shadow.

“Be quiet,” she whispered. “Connie, you have to listen; you can't tell anyone that we know.”

I snuffled, gingerly retrieving the fuzzy duckling she'd chucked at my forehead. I checked it for injury and sullenly asked, “Know what?”

There was a pause while Estella folded her arms over her chest, posing in a dramatic stance I recognized and always responded to. It was I'm the Older Sister pose, The Sun, commanding her planets to fall in line. I listened.

“I'm sick. I am probably going to die,” she said, solemn as a Siamese cat.

I could feel my mouth hanging open and shut it quickly, before she could say anything about catching flies. I slid off the sofa, the shawl tangling soft as sand beneath my feet. Estella held her hand up to stop me from running to her.

“Don't. It might be catching,” she said.

My mouth betrayed me again and I gaped at her. Catching? I caught chicken pox from her so I knew what catching was. I leaned back against the sofa, my fingers clutching the velvet, and asked the only question my five-year-old mind could come up with. “But why?”

She frowned. “I have eyecue,” she said. “It's bad. I have a lot of it, but I couldn't hear everything. It has something to do with my brain, or my head.” She lifted a hand to her temple, gently brushed it, just a flutter with her fingertips, and then let it drop. “You can't come near me in case I give it to you too.”

I fluttered my fingers against my own temple, checked in with my limbs for aches, remembered the bee sting from the previous week, my fever from the chicken pox. “But what if I already have it?”

She shook her head. “They said you were normal.”

I moved toward her again and Estella took a step back, her hand on the doorknob. “Connie, stop. You have to go to your room.”

I bit my bottom lip, gripped the fuzzy duck tightly to my chest. She didn't look sick. She didn't have any spots. “I don't want to,” I whined.

“You have to,” she insisted. “You have to stay away from me.” She began touching her thumb to each of her fingertips in turn, running them faster and faster against each other as she did when she was particularly agitated.

And then it hit me, as I stood there staring at her, that yes, she was different. It hit me the same way complex issues always hit me after that, at once, with perfect clarity after a long period of fruitless effort. Now it glared at me: She was fevered, had always been fevered with disquiet. I started to cry again with the revelation, the sudden force of it, sobs beginning to hitch my stomach, the fuzzy duck jittering under my chin.

Estella's eyes rounded with worry, and I was hopeful when I saw that they glinted blue, but then her mouth straightened into a stubborn line. She turned the knob and opened the door while I stood there, frozen in fear of her lethal head eyecue.

Then she, my sister, my best friend and protector, my dance partner and ruler of planets, was gone; and though I didn't realize it that night, she took my father with her.

Estella Lianne Sykes

1979

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I have been holding my own, but it is an uncomfortable feeling just the same. I am an impostor. I am not used to this absurd two-piece bathing suit. It is impractical and utterly useless for swimming.

And these boys, these beach-rat boys who've never given me a second look before, are suddenly drooling all over themselves, looking past Connie to seek me out, offering me beer, disgusting lukewarm pisswater beer.

The Gulf calls, offers to hide me, and I retreat to it, my comfort zone.

The water is warmer than the beer, and I stroke out, feeling the power in my arms, the flex and ripple of muscle and tendon pulling me through the water, sluicing through the waves. I feel the undertow around my ankles but it merely tickles, a weak river beneath the placid surface of the water.

I tread in place, waving my forearms and watching the beach rats in their faded cutoffs, knotty white strings hanging down their thighs, emphasizing their long muscles as they rush each other, proving their manhood to themselves, to each other, and to Connie.

Tate stands out, as he always does, as he always has. Towheaded, lean-muscled from the work on his father's shrimp boat, already a man beside the boys. I am free to be honest with myself out here. About this anyway. He is beautiful.

Connie will have him.

I wonder what a young man's body feels like and then flush, even out here in this salt-buoyed safe place of mine. I turn back toward the horizon, executing a gentle front somersault before popping up and treading again, facing away from the shore, away from the beautiful young people. Dolphins are feeding beyond the far sandbar, lifting, diving, lifting, diving, all fins and eyes and curious smiles. If I were braver I would join them, would grab a dorsal fin and allow the dolphin to take me down, my ears popping, exploding gases in my head.

Connie squeals and for a moment I think it is a dolphin. I turn back to shore to see her race into the water clutching a football, chased by the beach rats. And Tate. Darwin whispers in my ear, says he will outpace them, and he does, nearly catching her as they hit the first thigh-high waves. But somehow she eludes them, moving faster than I've ever seen her move in the water.

The beach rats quickly give up and return to the beach. And finally Tate gives up and returns to the beach. He flings himself down and shakes his wet hair out of his face. It stays where it lands on his last shake, pointing to the north, toward Little Dune Island. It would be absurd on anyone else. On him it only serves to underscore his confidence.

Something bumps my shoulder and I spin in the water, my heart leaping. It is only the football, bobbing in the waves. It is already several feet from me, the current carrying it farther than the others are willing to swim. I could retrieve it for them, but I don't. Instead I search for Connie.

She is not far from me and I start to call out, but then turn away, realizing suddenly that the salt on my cheeks is not Gulf water. I duck beneath the waves, and when I come up, I don't see her. Then I spot the top of her head. It disappears again. There is a flurry of hands on water, and the head appears again. She is calling out for me. I hear an edge in her voice and stroke toward her, feeling the undertow fight me, stronger this time.

She sees me. I am mesmerized by her frightened eyes, the Sykes eyes. They're brown. Nothing special. Just brown. I stop swimming. I tread water and watch her Sykes eyes realize that I have stopped swimming. Out of the corner of my eye I see that Tate has leapt to his feet and is racing for the water, yelling to the other beach rats, who also fling themselves into the surf. Tate is moving fast, but Connie and I, we are moving so slowly.

When she goes under the next time, I will go under too. I will swallow the Gulf and sink to the bottom with my secret. It is me who needs saving this time. And as Connie disappears under the water for the last time, it is all I can think, all I can scream inside my head where there is now entirely too much space free of numbers.