Catching Genius (11 page)

Four days.

I have nothing left to do but dance.

CHAPTER SIX

I needed more time. Four days was not nearly long enough to get everything done. I had no time for the mundane chores of everyday life in our household, and yet I couldn't escape them.

I was watering the orchids when the phone rang. Luke gave me my first orchid almost seven years ago, when he saw me reading
The Orchid Thief
. Good book. So was
Seabiscuit
, but I had no desire to train racehorses after reading it. Nonetheless, it was a sweet gesture, and perhaps I overdid the gratitude, because for every small occasion since that first purple phalaenopsis, Luke has given me another orchid.

I learned how to care for them, and even discovered, thanks to the local Orchid Society, that an orchid was named for my great-grandfather, Henry Louis Sykes. The ‘Sykes Spike,' a cattleya with large, deep yellow flowers, a dark red lip, and a snowy white throat, was found in 1887 by Francis X. Gestain, a botanist who disappeared in Asia a few years later. Henry's largesse allowed Francis to spend his time orchid hunting rather than cataloguing endless hybrids, though he might have been safer had Henry not been so generous.

Luke immediately acquired one, and when visitors exclaimed over the sunroom of orchids he would proudly point to the ‘Sykes Spike' and recite the story. He was pleased to have ancestors he could tell a story about, even if they weren't his own.

The orchids took up an astonishing amount of my time and I grew to resent them, like an older sibling forced to care for a brood of youngsters. But what I grew to dread the most was Luke's presentation, running his fingers along the lips, caressing the throat, gazing at me slyly. Much like a new car, a new orchid was foreplay to Luke.

He also went through a Georgia O'Keeffe phase when we were first together and bought me several prints. After a while I couldn't even look at an O'Keeffe without thinking sex, seeing swollen vulvas, delicately colored clitorises. Frankly, it pissed me off. I used to enjoy looking at Georgia O'Keeffe's work. And now he'd ruined orchids for me too.

So there I was, surrounded by all the petaled sex, when the phone rang. The caller ID showed Bob McNarey's name, and I snatched the phone up furtively, though nobody was home. He dove right in after my tentative hello.

“I don't have good news, Connie.”

I stumbled backward into a kitchen stool and waited.

“Did you know that Carson's college fund has been wiped out?”

No, I had not known that. My jaw was rigid, frozen in place, not allowing me to scream out
What are you saying?
the way I was screaming it inside my head. I managed a whisper.

“No.”

“And Gib's has been dipped into recently, though the majority is intact. The house seems to be untouched, no liens have been attached, and it's clearly and legally in your name. That's all I've been able to get so far. Do you want me to continue?”

I fingered my wedding band—
twist, twist, twist
—a nervous habit I thought I'd conquered long ago. “Yes,” I said.

“Right. Okay then, I'll be in touch at Big Dune. Keep things normal around there, just go on your trip like nothing is happening, okay?”

“Okay.”

He hung up. The whole conversation, only four words on my part—
hello, no, yes, okay
—was enough to leave me gasping for breath. I hung up the phone slowly and very carefully, as though it were crystal. My hands felt too large for the skin they were in, the muscles of my arms tight and ready to burst.

I returned to the sunroom, to the orchids. I gazed at them, all so different and yet alike: spiky, olive green, light green, bulbous bases, slender stalks, gracefully drooping over the rim, shooting straight into the air. I felt the flower of the one closest to me, the ‘Sykes Spike,' in full bloom and velvety soft, even where the edges ruffled slightly. I pinched the lip between my thumb and finger and plucked it away from the rest of the flower before letting it drop to the floor.

The scarlet lip lay on the slate, quivering, like a drop of freshly spilled blood. It was more beautiful there on the floor than it had been on the plant; defenseless, shocked, shocking. I reached out, cupped the rest of the flower in my palm, and crushed it, ripping it off the spike, and then moved on to the other blooms.

I stopped for a moment, staring at the denuded spike, still rigidly, defiantly thrusting itself toward me. And then I tore it apart. I stormed through the room in a fury, smashing the pots on the slate floor, separating spikes from stalks, leaves from pseudopods, petals from throats, bellowing in rage. The massacre took less than five minutes and left me panting and trembling on my knees, my palms stained green, nursing a gash in my thumb that welled blood. Bits of petal clung to my hands, rolled against my cheeks as I wiped tears from my face.

All around me plants lay unrecognizable, a battlefield of awful dismembered limbs. My fury settled into something approaching satisfaction when I realized that at least I no longer saw sex when I looked at the orchids. And then I was horrified to realize that I preferred thinking of a battlefield to thinking of sex.

I had trusted Luke. Perhaps not with another woman, but certainly with our children. He could betray me with his body, but I would not let him betray Gib and Carson with their future. Bile rose in my throat when I remembered his glib reaction to Gib's test scores and grade. Was that why he had taken Carson's first? So he would have time to replace it?

But things must have been worse than I could comprehend, because he was beginning to dip into Gib's too, savings we would need in just two years. That did not leave much time to replace the missing funds. Was he even planning on replacing the money? And if not, how did he think he would get away with it? By encouraging Gib to fail in school?

I couldn't answer the questions. Only Luke could, and I couldn't ask him. I slowly got my feet under me and stood, still panting, wiping my dirty palms on my shorts. I surveyed the littered sunroom and glanced at the clock too late to change anything. Carson would be home in minutes.

I grabbed a few trash bags and had one of them filled by the time he wandered in, stooping under the weight of his ridiculously large backpack.

“Stop!” I called, before he could step into the sunroom. “Got shoes on?”

“Whoa,” he breathed, slumping his shoulders to allow the backpack to slide down his arms and onto the floor. “Yeah. What happened?” he asked as he picked his way across the sunroom, crouching beside me to scoop up debris and dump it in the second open bag.

I sat back on my heels, gazing at my son. He simply pitched in, as though coming home to an orchid explosion was a regular thing. Gib would have looked in, shook his head, and then disappeared to his room without a word. I felt a sudden rush of love for Carson and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. He immediately raised his shoulder to wipe it off and continued to gather up broken pots and scattered flowers.

“Well, I hit a bad note on my violin and the pots shattered, all at once,” I said.

He didn't even bother looking at me, just said, “Mom,” and rolled his eyes.

“I don't know, honey,” I said. “I was watering them, and it was bugging me that I had to do so much work on them, and I got careless and knocked one over. It broke, and I just sort of tipped over the rest. It was a little fun, you know? Like orchid hockey.”

He sat back, his hands cradling a smashed pseudopod, and scanned the damage as though assessing the validity of my story. “Well,” he finally said, resuming work, “what're you gonna tell Dad?”

I didn't have an answer. What, indeed, would I tell Luke? All the things I
wanted
to say to him were unspeakable.

I sighed. “I don't know.”

“You could tell him it was a snake,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“A snake?”

“Yeah, like a big snake got in and you were trying to chase it out and knocked over all the plants. He'd believe that. Remember when you broke the table when the wasp got in?”

I did remember that. A wasp had landed on my arm just as I had been placing a heavy orchid on the glass-topped coffee table, and I dropped the pot to flail at the wasp. The pot had shattered the tabletop, bringing Luke, Gib, and Carson running. I was lucky I still had all ten toes. I felt a stab of guilt over my young son so calmly providing me with an alibi, and, even worse, instantly understanding that an alibi was called for.

We'd been confidants before, but I'd never felt guilty about it, perhaps because I'd always been the one protecting him. Now our roles had been reversed, and I was ashamed of myself. I felt as though I should retrieve my old journal, the one I hadn't written in for well over ten years, and mark the day that I damaged my youngest son, the day he would remember and repeat in his thirties to a therapist as the day his mother made him lie to his father, the start of all his troubles.

“If we get this all cleaned up quickly enough, I think I'll just tell him that I donated them to the Orchid Society,” I said, glancing around. Not one orchid in the sunroom had been spared. Not one sex organ had survived. A snake sighting just wasn't going to cut it. “Would you feel okay about that?”

“About what?”

“Actually, you wouldn't have to say anything at all. We'll just pretend that you weren't here, and the Orchid Society ladies came and picked them up.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said with a shrug.

I gave him a bemused smile and barely managed to stop myself from kissing him again. After the sunroom had been scrubbed clean of all orchid corpses, I took him to the ice cream shop before we went to the Cowachobee Center for my music classes.

Maybe one day I would tell him the story of the orchids that gave their lives so he could go to college. Maybe I could even get it in there before he went to therapy. I hoped I would come off better in twenty years than I had that afternoon.

 
 
Carson had a crush on one of the little girls at the center. A shy, beautiful little violin player named Luz. Her mother and aunt attended citizenship classes while she practiced scales with me on one of the violins I'd donated to the center.

Other than Luz, none of the children were very interested in music. They'd all spent the day in school and were restless, so time spent trying to teach them how to read music was most often time wasted, and instead I allowed them to blow off steam by wailing away on recorders and beating tambourines.

Carson had been coming to the center with me since I'd started volunteering, around his second birthday, and he was as comfortable there as he was at home, perhaps more so as there was no older brother waiting in the wings to humiliate him, or worse, to ignore him. In the past few months that I had been working with Luz, Carson had begun to sit and watch us rather than poke around the center looking for something to interest him.

He watched as I went over the notes to a beginning piece with Luz, and then sat down at the piano when I stopped playing to loosen Luz's wrist and adjust her fingers. When we began to play our awkward duet again, I was surprised to hear notes plinking from the piano behind us, but I tuned it out and trained my ear to hear only Luz and her fledgling efforts.

But on our way home that night I remembered Carson's fresh boredom with Luz and was pleased that he turned to music rather than searching out a new crush. I wasn't ready for either of my sons to have a love life, and it made me ache especially for Carson. Gib had started getting calls from girls as early as the fourth grade, all those young cheerleaders already impressed with the cocky athlete. But I knew that Carson would have a harder time with romance.

“I have a conference with your music teacher tomorrow after school,” I reminded him. “Do you want to wait for me or take the bus home?”

He grinned at me. “I'll be there,” he said, and I raised my eyebrows at him.

“I don't think Mr. Hailey is going to let you sit in on the conference,” I cautioned him, but he didn't seem perturbed in the least, merely turned the radio up and bobbed his head along with the music.

Luke bought the Orchid Society story, but was furious anyway and questioned me about my motive until I wanted to scream and show him the cut on my thumb and the garbage bags in the bin at the curb. He was especially upset over the ‘Sykes Spike,' his pride. It was only when I told him that they would all have died without constant care—which was absurd, they were fairly hardy plants despite their reputation—that he finally let up.

He needed to punish me, though, and he played computer games with Gib for the rest of the night, leaving me to pack for my trip and climb into bed without him. He woke me on purpose over an hour later, reaching for me, but I instinctively pulled away, breathing regularly, curling into my pillow, and he finally turned away.

I opened my eyes in the gloom, staring at my nightstand. An orchid stood there in a pierced ceramic pot. It was a young plant, and its green-tipped, searching roots seemed vulnerable to me, as though they sensed that an orchid murderer slept close by. It was right to fear me. Had I remembered it was up there I would have destroyed it too. I wanted to reassure it that it no longer had anything to fear from me. It had merely been one of many before. Now it was special, a fact I was suddenly envious of.

Its solitary existence seemed an omen. I'd never believed in omens before, but then I was doing many things I'd never believed I'd do before that Escalade showed up in my driveway. Confiding in my mother, agreeing to spend time with Estella, lying to my husband, and denying him my body as well.

I had been doing what I was told, keeping everything as normal as possible, keeping everything hidden from Luke, but it had not been easy. It went completely against my nature, as well as against the habit of simple daily disclosure I'd developed over seventeen years of marriage.