Catching Genius (13 page)

“Good-bye, Mr. Hailey. And if I find out that you've continued any relationship with my son, I will file a formal complaint.”

“You don't need to threaten me, Mrs. Wilder,” Mr. Hailey said, stiffening.

I stood, grasping my purse like a shield. “I don't see that you've given me any choice.”

I left him sitting in the auditorium, fairly vibrating with confusion and indignation. I hustled Carson out of the school as though the building were on fire and tried not to speed as I drove out of the parking lot.

Carson was jittery on the way home, flipping through a stack of music that Mr. Hailey had given him. I saw the names flash by out of the corner of my eye: John Lewis, Billy Strayhorn, Ornette Coleman. They rang distant bells, but nothing concrete came to mind.

When I felt as though I could speak with a steady voice, I said, “That was great, honey,” interrupting his inspection of a piece of music. He was humming and continued for a few bars before he stopped to acknowledge what I'd said.

“Did you really like it?” he asked, his cheeks and forehead flush with color, as though he'd been in the sun too long.

“Sure, it was good,” I said, my stomach clenching when his face fell at my faint praise. “Wasn't it kind of boring, though, writing it?”
Oh, God, forgive me. It's for your own good,
I silently pleaded with my son.

“No, it was so cool, Mom. I was watching you and Luz, you know, at the center, and I was thinking about how you showed her the notes, and then she did it real slow, and it just sort of came to me. I mean, I could figure out the clarinet part, but I didn't get how the bass would do it, except with the same notes, but then that wouldn't be very good would it, and then you were playing, and Luz was playing, and I just figured it out, how the sound was different, you know, and so the notes had to be different, they had to go around each other. And then Mr. Hailey showed me on the piano, how the notes would sound different too, and I just had this melody at first, but then with the other notes I figured out the harmony, and it was so cool. I like . . . I almost
saw
it.”

“Wow,” I managed to say. I was speechless and nauseous at the same time as I eased the car to a stop at a yellow light and looked over at him. He looked just like Estella when she'd tried to explain the Goldbach Conjecture to me, or the Banach-Tarski paradox, or any of the number of theories she'd tried to explain and would then give up on when I just stared at her.

The thing was, I did understand some of what she was saying, at first anyway, when I was still listening. I wasn't staring because I didn't get it, I was staring because she was transformed. Her words came fast, her eyes widened and shone, and she became short of breath in the mad rush to get the words out, as though they were piling up at the back of her tongue faster than she could roll them forward and out her lips. And now Carson looked, and sounded, exactly the same way.

“That's interesting,” I said, measuring my words, desperate to be delicate. “It'll be nice to take a break from it for the summer, though, huh?”

“But Mr. Hailey said I could work on my own whenever I wanted,” he said, looking up at me in surprise. “I was gonna write at camp. And he says I should have piano lessons too, Mom. Can I?”

I hit the brakes before I could stop myself, making us both lurch forward before I eased back up to speed. Camp. Pure music. Twenty-four hours a day with music professionals, all eager to find the next prodigy. Carson was slipping through my grasp as though my hands were oiled.

“Hey,” I said, ignoring his request, making my voice bright and happy. “Why don't you come to Big Dune with me instead. Wouldn't you like that?”

He looked at me in confusion. “But what about camp?” His voice was rising in pitch, a warning sign I ignored.

“Wouldn't you rather play on the beach?”

He shook his head emphatically. “We get to try different instruments, and Tim, he's from my class, he's going too, and we said we would ride together on the bus, and I want to try this one thing I was working on, and—”

“But we're selling the house up there. This will be your last chance to see it. Gib won't be there, and we can go swimming and eat shrimp and—”

“No! No, Mom, no!” Carson was nearly panicked. His voice trembled and his face turned bright red, tears already beginning. “I want to go to camp, please, I
have
to go to camp!”

“Okay, okay,” I soothed him. “It was just a suggestion. We'll talk more about it tomorrow.” He didn't look soothed, though, and I felt near panic myself. If I didn't let him go to camp he was going to have a full-blown, three-day fit, a fit impossible to hide from Luke. And I couldn't tell him about this, not now, not when I couldn't trust him with anything, not when he had already proven that he was willing to compromise Carson's future.

What if he was like my father? What if he thought Carson could give him the credibility he constantly strove for? And worst of all, what if he took him over? What if he took my youngest boy?

Carson was staring at me, his tears spilling down his face, breathing heavily through his mouth. It had taken Mr. Hailey a school year to figure this out, how bad could it be in four weeks of camp?

“Okay, sweetie, but remember, you're there to play clarinet, not write music. They don't even have classes in that.”

The change was dramatic. His face cleared and he rubbed the tears away, taking great gulps of air. “Okay, Mom, I'll get really better,” he said, ducking his head to his sheet music again, his breathing returning to normal.

“Much better,” I murmured, but he was already engrossed. The notes, the doubles and quarters and eighths, swam on the page as I stared at them, re-forming themselves into fractions and decimals and logarithms, a language I understood not at all, separating me from my son. A horn honked behind me. The light had turned green.

I drove home with a stranger in the car.

 
 
At least things at home were beginning to shape up. Gib had managed to get a job with his friend Sean, the son of a general contractor. The boys would be learning to hang drywall, and at first I'd thought it was a terrible idea. For one thing, I didn't like Sean. He flirted outrageously with me, and when he wasn't overtly staring at me, he was smirking behind my back.

But I hoped Gib might get something out of the hard physical labor, might feel some sense of pride in seeing something tangible resulting from his work, something concrete, unlike those numbers he swore he didn't get.

We enrolled him in the second session of summer school, so I would be back to make sure he attended after all. And Sean would pick him up each morning for work, so my Saab was safe again, though to be certain I wrote down the mileage on the odometer so I could check when I got back. There was nothing left to do for my oldest son.

Carson was already packed for camp and I was as ready to leave for Big Dune as I was going to be. That only left Luke—two more days of pretending.

We went out to dinner on Thursday night, but Luke was obviously distracted and blamed it on a meeting with a new client the next afternoon. I hated the lies. And now that I was lying myself, I hated them even more.

McNarey had cautioned me to be careful, but I couldn't help myself. On Friday I drove by Starbucks, looking for her car, telling myself that even if it wasn't there, it didn't mean anything. Luke could easily have a new client, though it had to be one who hadn't heard the rumors that had spread through my mother's group, and Deanna could easily have the day off for something legitimate.

It was not my first stakeout of the Starbucks parking lot. I knew she drove an old, light blue Celica with no rear bumper and a rubber Mickey Mouse head on the antenna. I steered the Escalade up and down the rows and didn't see the Celica. But there was a new, bright yellow Beetle parked at the end of a row, the dealer's paper tag still on it. With a Mickey Mouse head on the antenna. I parked in the next space, careful to hold on to the Escalade door to keep it from bumping the rounded front quarter panel, and peered into the Beetle. A top-heavy spike of orchid blooms tilted in the little vase beside the steering wheel.

Perhaps I was no genius, but neither was I an idiot.

 
 
That night Luke and I had sex. Going away sex.
Gonna be gone for three weeks
, he'd joked.
I'll be a maniac by the time you get home.

But I was the one who wanted to make love, and I concentrated on myself. How Luke's back felt under my hands, how the ends of his hair brushed against my lips, how my skin felt where he touched it. He'd had too much to drink, something that had been happening more often over the past year, and it took him a long time, but I was patient, even loving, oddly embracing the realization that I would be sore the next day.

When I woke in the morning I lay on my side and watched him sleep. He was still a beautiful man. A sadness washed over me, as inevitable as the tides.

He was awake by the time Carson and I drove away, waving to us from the open garage door. He'd turned around to go back inside before I'd taken the Escalade out of reverse at the end of the drive.

We picked up greasy breakfast sandwiches, eating them in the parking lot of the elementary school while we waited for the camp buses to open their doors. Kids greeted each other and clutched instruments, while their parents held duffel bags and looked either terrified or relieved. I felt both in alternating waves.

I chewed on the rubbery croissant, trying to decide if I was brave enough to simply take off, kidnap my child, and spirit him away to the beach where I could hide him. I wasn't quick enough. Camp employees taped signs to the bus sides, A-M on the first bus, N-Z on the second, then positioned themselves at the open doors, clipboards in hand, and began checking kids in.

“There's Tim,” Carson cried, pointing to a boy clutching a French horn case and waiting near the last bus. He reached out to open the door, and I put out a hand to stop him but connected with only an empty seat. I helped him with his things, and somehow managed to keep from falling to my knees and hugging him to me when he turned away.

When he disappeared into the bus, closely following Tim, a chill, clammy rush of air brushed the back of my neck, and I searched the windows for his face, seriously considering pushing my way onto the bus and dragging him out with me. He finally appeared toward the back and joined the rest of the kids in sticking their arms out the high windows and waving steadily.

The buses rumbled to life, and then they were gone. The deserted parents filed back to their cars in the silent, humid morning. I sat in the Cadillac and waited until everyone else had left the parking lot before I headed for my mother's.

On the way up in the elevator I wished I had someone with me to make a bet on whether Estella had called that morning to tell us to go on without her or not. Mother's door was cracked, waiting for me. I pushed it open and inhaled the scent of coffee.

“I'm here,” I called, noting the fact that her bags weren't waiting in the hallway as they usually were when she was leaving on a trip. “Are you ready?”

“In the office,” she replied, and I found her at her desk, dressed in a teal suit, hair coiffed and high heels waiting beside her chair. Not Mother's traveling outfit.

“Are you ready?” I asked when she finally looked up at me.

“I've had a bit of a change of plans,” she said briskly, closing her checkbook and sliding it into the file drawer.

“Okay,” I said, cautious, watching her as I would a wild animal. “Want to share them with me?”

“I'm afraid I've gotten myself too involved in the hospital charity, and with the fund-raiser only a month away I just won't be able to—”

“Oh, no,” I said. “No, absolutely not. If you're not going, I'm not going. You can't do this, Mother.”

“Don't be ridiculous. This is a perfect opportunity for you to get away from the Luke situation, to take some time for yourself—”

“How is packing up that entire house time for myself?”

“Well, Estella will be helping you.”

“You can't seriously think Estella will even go now?”

“Why not? Besides, it means so much to me that you and Estella are finally getting a chance to be together. She's so looking forward to seeing you. I absolutely insist that you go.”

“I can't believe you've done this,” I said, slowly shaking my head.

“I didn't plan it, Connie.”

“Of course you did. You knew exactly what you were doing. Come on, get your stuff together. I'm not doing this alone,” I insisted, and turned toward her bedroom to haul her suitcases out myself. I flung two of them onto her bed, then opened a dresser drawer and pulled handfuls of underwear and bras out, throwing them in the first case before I moved to the other side of the bed, where a tall chest of drawers held nightgowns and stockings.

I nearly tripped over the hatbox. The top was still on, but tissue hung raggedly out the sides, as though she'd hastily replaced the lid. I knelt and gently pulled the top off, carefully replacing the tissue paper around the little shoes, tucking them in as gently as I'd tucked my own children into their cribs. As I slid the box under the bed, my mother appeared at the door, but came no farther.

We regarded each other silently, me still on my knees beside the bed.

“This is completely unfair,” I said under my breath. Her eyes flickered over the underwear strewn across the bed, and she nodded slightly.

“Call me when you get to the island,” she said, then returned to her office and shut the door.