Matters of Faith

Available August 2008
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"A person will worship something, have no doubt about that."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chapter 1

The turning points in my life have always arrived disguised as daily life. I never get the opportunity or have the sixth sense to stop and examine them, to time-stamp them on my soul, whisper to myself that this, this thing, this simple boat ride in the Everglades, this phone ringing, this drive home twenty minutes late, was the thing that might do me in.

They never appear important enough to stop the things I'm already doing-- like sparring with my husband over the developing nothingness of our marriage, like mixing the right amount of black into the red of a fire sky painting, like sitting down at my computer and reading an e-mail from my son.

"He's coming home for spring break," I called down to Cal through the open window, scanning Marshall's message for more information. "And he's bringing someone with him."

"I can't hear you," Cal yelled back, the hollow, river rush of water beating against the house for a moment. I read the rest of the e-mail, committing the pertinent facts to memory as a flutter in my stomach began to make itself known, before I headed downstairs and out the kitchen door. The edge of the screen caught the back of my heel before I could get out if its way.

Cal, shirtless and browned, his shorts riding low enough to expose a strip of white skin, squinted at me as he hosed off two bright blue coolers. "What's up?"

"Marshall's coming home for spring break," I repeated, surveying the sparkle of fish scales caught in the crisp grass at the sides of the driveway like diamonds in straw. "And he's bringing company."

"The Dalai Lama?" Cal asked, flipping a cooler over and sending a rush of tepid water over my bare feet.

A girl," I said, and was rewarded for my timing with a squirt of water up my calves. Cal turned to me in surprise, a smile flashing quick and white across his face. I grinned back, raising my eyebrows, a joke, half-formed, about to spill out, before I remembered that we weren't joking much these days.

"Really? A girl?"

"Ada," I said, the unfamiliar name hard on my tongue, a good complement wrapped in the downy softness of Marshall. "She's pre-law."

"What else is she?" Cal asked, turning back to his coolers.

"He didn't say."

"That's new. And you didn't ask?"

I didn't answer the criticism, not nearly as subtle as his words suggested. The method our son took to find himself was a never-ending fracture, but it was a method I was open-minded enough to indulge, and one Cal barely abided. The possibilities of Ada's religious affiliation skated through my mind as I watched him move on to the next cooler, sluicing the remains of his second fishing tour of the day across the drive.

"What should I do about sleeping arrangements?" I asked.

"Put her in your office and let them sneak around."

"Nice. I'll ask Marshall. Good trip today?"

He shrugged and flipped the second cooler over before turning the hose on himself, talking behind the water cascading down through his hair and across his face. "Couple of idiots from Minnesota. Talked about ice fishing the whole time. They want to go out tomorrow, but they wouldn't put on any sunscreen so I'm pretty sure I've got the day off."

His words dimmed out, as Cal's stories about paper-white Yankees were destined to after twenty years of marriage. I imagine he barely heard my talk about warping Upson board or paint loss on a Highwayman painting these days.

I envisioned a girl named Ada. She would be sturdy, blonde, and no taller than I. Trying to fit Marshall beside this Ada in my imagination was harder work. He'd never brought a girl home before.

Boys, there'd always been boys. Interesting boys he sought out when he was tired of being Jewish, or Buddhist, or Methodist. Earnest-looking boys who wore various amulets and indicators of their faith, who Marshall engaged in fascinating theological discussions over dinner. Fascinating to me anyway. Cal, his fire and brimstone minister father never far from his mind, would leave the table, taking his plate to the living room, where he'd turn up the television loud enough that those of us left in the dining room would fall silent, intent on our food.

I was proud of Marshall. He was curious, about this world and the possibility of the next. Curiosity was an admirable trait, one my own parents cultivated in me. Meghan, our daughter, was as curious as Marshall and I were about the world. And she was due home any second.

"Did you pick up the EpiPens?" I asked.

"On the counter."

And we were done. Marshall, check. Fishing trip, check. Meghan's EpiPens, check. I turned to go back inside, the screen door catching my heel again. I'd asked Cal a hundred times to slow it down. If I didn't have to endure the pained sighs and protests that he had been just about to do it-- the implication that I was an ever-impatient, never-satisfied wife-- I would look up how to do it myself. It was just a screen door. How hard could it be? Maybe he would do it before Marshall came home.

But right now the screen door didn't bother me. Marshall was coming home, and he was bringing a girlfriend. It would be good to have someone new in the house.

For all of us.

* * *

Switching out Meghan's EpiPens that night, I told her about Marshall and Ada. She grinned as she handed me the old injector from her backpack and fit her new one in.

"I know," she said, with a coy look up through her lashes, something that had been happening a lot lately. Meghan had begun to flirt like a silent screen siren. With everyone. Me, her father, the UPS man. I was hoping it was a phase that would pass, though I'd hoped that with her fixation on Winona Ryder too.

"How do you know?" I asked.

She shrugged. "She e-mailed me."

I sat back on my heels in surprise. "She e-mailed you? You mean Ada?"

"Uh-huh. She's a vegetarian."

"Wait a minute. When did she e-mail you?" Meghan was twelve. I vetted all of her e-mail from anyone other than Marshall.

"A little while ago. She used Marshall's account."

"Oh. Well, what else did she say?" I asked, a little disgruntled at Marshall for allowing Meghan the first, albeit electronic, glimpse of his girlfriend.

Meghan shook her head and pulled brightly colored folders out of her backpack, arranging them carefully on her desk, preparing to start her homework. With Marshall I'd had to stay on top of homework or I'd find him studying some religious text or another; with Meghan I rarely even needed to remind her.

"Nothing. She sounds really nice. She said she'd stay in my room if you said she could. Can she?"

"I have the pull-out sofa in my office for guests, Meghan," I said, looking at her bunk beds doubtfully, finding it hard to imagine a college girl wanting to play sleepover with a twelve-year-old. Besides, what if Cal were right and she ventured out to visit Marshall? "I think we'll wait and talk to Marshall about this, okay?"

Meghan chewed her bottom lip and stared up at her Edward Scissorhands poster, but said nothing. I sighed. She was such a good child. And she followed directions. Always. Following directions might save her life one day. That had been drilled into them, her. And they'd had to drill it into everyone around them. They'd spent years educating themselves and Meghan's schools.

They now had a peanut-free zone for lunch in Meghan's middle school. Thanks to new laws, Meghan was able to carry an EpiPen, that ever-present, life-saving cylinder, with her everywhere in school, with a back-up in the nurse's office.

Unfortunately, with education came a certain amount of isolation in our small town, and so far Meghan was the only child to come through the local school system with a life-threatening food allergy. The lunch area was in a small room separate from the regular lunchroom and she ate alone. It all set her apart, and not in a way that made her the most popular girl in school.

It was no wonder she was looking forward to Ada's visit. I looked up at the Edward Scissorhands poster above Meghan's desk, with Winona partially obscured by the blades at the ends of Depp's delicate wrists, and wondered if she saw herself in Ryder's character, held safely behind sharp objects. I nudged her shoulder.

"You think she'd like the peony sheets or the Little Mermaid?"

"Mom!" she gasped. "Not the Little Mermaid--" She broke off when she saw the grin on my face. She threw her thin arms around me, and I'd have gladly attached blades to my own hands at that moment to keep her safe.

I e-mailed Marshall repeatedly over the next three weeks. Asking questions about Ada under the guise of making sure we were prepared for her visit. I asked about the food she liked (she's a vegetarian mom, very whole foods, i've stopped eating red meat and feel so much better, you should really think about restricting meghan's exposure to additives and stuff...), her sleeping habits (i don't know mom), and skirted around the issue of her religion with vague questions about her family (they're really close...some interesting ideas...their church sent her to school on a full scholarship).

I researched vegetarianism and whole foods and stocked up on tofu and grains, and in the week leading up to their arrival I stopped work altogether, closing the door to my studio with three paintings in various stages of restoration, and worked on cleaning the house.

Meghan's allergies had turned me into a late-in-life clean freak, and our home was spotless most of the time. After the first horrifying anaphylactic episode when she was two--a friend's daughter babysat and made Meghan homemade Play-Doh out of peanut butter--we'd gotten her tested for other allergies, and the results changed our lives. A whole host of airborne irritants threatened Meghan's airways: dust mites, an endless variety of flower pollens, dander, mold. And food allergies, peanuts and shellfish, threatened her systemically. Thank God she was fine with fish, or our entire livelihood would have been threatened.

Now our home was tiled throughout with only a few scattered throw rugs, no more drapes, no more overstuffed sofas. Marshall's two cats had been pressed upon neighbors, and I learned how to steam clean everything.

But this was different. This wasn't cleaning for my daughter's health, this was cleaning to impress. We didn't have many houseguests, and I was a bit surprised to find that there was a difference. Meghan and I got haircuts, and she talked me into buying her two new tops, several pairs of shorts, and flip-flops with rhinestones on them, all of them a clear maturity level above what she had been wearing.

Two days before their arrival, I put fresh sheets on Marshall's bed, smoothing his pillows, running my hands down the spread, tugging at wrinkles that weren't there. I missed him. His freshman year at college he'd come home as often as he could, called every other day, made me feel needed and missed. But this year I was lucky to get an e-mail once a week, and questions about his friends and classes that he used to answer readily had been met with silence.

All natural, of course. All the way it was supposed to be. And, in fact, Marshall's pulling away had probably come later than might have been considered normal. But then Marshall had never been a typical kid.

I dusted his dresser, picked up the large wood cross he'd hung all his necklaces on, and wiped under that as the pendants swung and clinked against each other --crosses, crucifixes, ankhs, and spirals and stars--mixing happily, without rancor, the way their representative religions seemed unable to manage in the real world. I fingered the gold Star of David that Ira's parents had given him after their son's funeral.

Poor Ira. At least his end had come rather quickly. There's not much time for suffering when you are, literally, hit by a train. It was Ira's parents who suffered, and Marshall, of course. Cal would say that was where all of Marshall's issues started, but Marshall and I had been having theological discussions for years before that.

True, it had escalated, more rapidly than I'd been aware of at the time. But he'd also been on the cusp of puberty, a natural time to start exploring the larger questions in life.

Marshall's first cross, small and silver, on a thin leather cord, hung between Ira's star and a red, knotted kabbalah string. I clicked it with my fingernail and looked around Marshall's room one last time, wondering what Ada would think of the lack of decoration, no posters, no sports equipment in the corners. Aside from the necklaces on the dresser and the religion books on the shelf above his bed, it was practically monk-like.

I gave the room one last glance as I backed out the door. The sun winked off a crystal pendant, throwing prisms across the otherwise bare walls, dagger-shaped rainbows as beautiful as any painting.

* * *

Cal had watched our preparations throughout the week with a bemused smile, but the day before they were due he came home with a fresh haircut and offered to make whole grain bread, something he hadn't done in years. The three of us worked in the kitchen together, music floating in from the living room, the windows open and the smell of the Gulf of Mexico and the bay filling the house, as soft as hope.

A rush of affection for Cal, something I hadn't felt in a long time, hit me when I saw him bent over the counter, kneading dough. He and Meghan were talking about fishing, and I studied him, seeing the young man I'd met when I was younger than Marshall was now.

He'd come out of the backwoods of middle Florida, land weary and religion exhausted, running from his mother, the reputation of his brother, the memory of his father. We'd met when my boyfriend, a fellow art major, took me on an airboat tour of the Everglades. Cal had been our boat captain, silent while our guide yelled over the engine, staring at me while everyone else stared at ospreys on their massive nests and alligators slipping into the grassy water.

I'd felt his eyes on me the whole time, and when I finally got off the boat, my knees weak, ears ringing, shaking wind-flattened bugs out of my clothes and hair, I was flush with more than sunburn. He handed me a phone number along with a warm can of Coke, and I'd slipped it into my pocket with a breathless glance at my boyfriend.

I called him that night and he picked me up at my dorm. We'd only spent a handful of nights apart since. He got me through college, he got me through the disappearance of my parents, on sabbatical in the Galapagos the year after we married when their boat went down, and he got me through the births of Marshall and Meghan.

And then somewhere along the line, he--the determined man who wouldn't take his eyes off me--had slowly disappeared, into work, into his workshop to tinker with engines and fishing gear, into the Gulf and the Everglades. Or perhaps I'd simply lost sight of him. Who knows how a marriage disintegrates, by what degrees, what its half-life is?

Now, as he shaped the dough into a ball and gently slipped it into an oiled bowl, I thought I saw him again. He looked up, and I didn't look away but smiled at him, feeling a laugh bubble up in my throat when he did a double take. He grinned and winked at me while our daughter's sweet voice splashed through the kitchen in bright, happy colors. And for a moment we were back, and I couldn't wait for Marshall and his first girlfriend to walk through that door and remind us of ourselves.

°°°°°

Marshall

He was letting Ada drive the last half. He was exhausted with the telling of Ira's story. He'd never told anyone at college about it before; he'd never wanted to take the chance that he would break down, maybe cry in front of people who had not known Ira, could not understand how close they had been.

But Ada was different. She was so very different. And she had been rapt as he'd told the story, gasping when he told her about the train, how massive it had seemed, how close, how fast. She placed her hand on his leg, rubbing his thigh sympathetically. To his surprise, he hadn't cried. Just her presence, just her listening to the most pivotal moment of his life, was enough to comfort him, and when they'd stopped to gas up the car and change places, she'd held him and kissed him right there in front of truckers and everyone.

And he'd let her drive, not just because he was tired, but because she'd asked so-- there was no other word for it-- she'd asked so damn cutely, he could not resist, and because now he could look at her rather than the road. Every time he looked at her he found something new, something more delicate, something more astonishing than the last thing he'd noticed.

Like right then, she downshifted into fourth gear, and when she flexed her foot on the gas pedal he noticed the line of muscle running down her thigh. His mouth suddenly got dry, and he wanted more than anything to lean over the console and run his tongue over that line of muscle.

He swallowed and looked out the window. Jesus. He swallowed again, reforming the unconscious epithet into a short prayer. She made him think in ways he'd never thought before, never knew he could think before.

They'd been weak. He'd tasted the skin over that muscle before, the night she'd teased him into inviting her home for spring break. He'd professed as much regret as she had. But it was all he could think about.

She shifted up to fifth and tossed her head, trying to get a lock of dark hair blown by the wind out of the side of her mouth. He reached for it at the same time as she did, but she got there first, hooking her index finger over it and drawing it out, and had she drawn her shirt over her head it couldn't have left him more breathless. He shifted in his seat and nearly groaned aloud.

His hands curled of their own accord, his fingers grasping the air beside his thighs the way they wanted to grab hold of her hair.

"So what else did your mom say?" she asked. "What should I call her?"

He shrugged, irritated to have the image of his mother sliding over Ada's, but relieved too. "Chloe, I guess," he said. His mother had always told his friends to call her Chloe. He didn't figure it would be any different for Ada.

"Chloe," Ada repeated, drawing it out, glancing at him sideways. "Chloe and Calvin. Cute. Chloe and Cal and Meghan. And joining them for the weekend, Marshall and Ada the vegetarian," she sang, squeezing his knee playfully.

He laughed, his irritation and bordering-on-violent desire fading, pride at the thought of walking into his house with this beautiful girl lifting his spirits and filling his lungs with something lighter than air. He went with it, praising God for the sheer miracle going ninety miles an hour in the driver's seat beside him.

Catching Genius

Now available
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"If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses."

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Prologue

1969

Constance Belle Sykes

Our real lives were lived in the dark. Late at night, every night, we met in the music room, stealthily avoiding the scarred legs of the piano, the stringless harp, the 1/8-sized Mittenwald balanced upon the violin stand as if waiting for a musically inclined fairy. No childish night-light cast shadows across the wallpaper, only the moon, streaming through the skylight to glow upon the yellowed piano keys, lit our play.

Some nights there was no moon at all--though Estella patiently explained to me that it was still there, we just couldn't see it because Earth had shoved its wide, round self between the moon and the sun, a social bully forcing its way into an ancient conversation--and we would reluctantly crack the door to allow the light of our parents' downstairs lives in.

We were precocious children, promising children, healthy children. At seven, Estella was tall enough to reach everything we'd ever need and smart enough to know what we could get away with. And I, younger by two years, was quick enough to flee, small enough to hide, and beguiling enough to lie convincingly.

And though we didn't know it at the time, we were wealthy children, the great-great-grandchildren of lumber baron Nathaniel Sykes. A soundtrack of important conversation accompanied those nights we left the door cracked for light. Illustrious people: politicians, university presidents, eminent board members of museums and cultural centers, all came looking for that old, rapidly dwindling money. They laughed too loudly at our father's jokes, exclaimed over our mother's beauty, greedily ran their eyes over the volumes of rare books filling the library shelves, and scuffed their shoes against the tight nap of the Bokhara rugs.

We had the run of the upstairs on those nights. The nanny, pressed into service in the kitchen, left us alone, and the noise of the dinner covered the drumroll of our feet as we rushed from the music room to the top of the stairs and back as proof of our daring.

Sometimes we eavesdropped, glancing at each other with big eyes when we heard our father swear or our mother tell a bawdy joke. And we heard things our parents did not, like remarks about our father's age and thinning hair, and our mother's youth and lush figure. The men were as guilty as the women, and we even heard our own names in those catty conversations, about how spoiled we were and how we would grow up without ever learning to appreciate hard work.

I knew what spoiled was. Kimmy Kay Watson down the street was spoiled. She got not one, but two ponies for her sixth birthday, one for her friends to ride and one that she never had to share. I asked for a pony for my fifth birthday and got a tattered first edition of Little Women instead. So I knew I was not spoiled.

Our eavesdropping never lasted for long; we had our own rituals to attend to. We always danced first, a childish shag that our mother taught us, twining our hands together and awkwardly flinging ourselves away and then toward each other, tethered by fingers gone numb. When we finally broke apart, panting, I followed her lead, as I had ever since I could crawl after her. Sometimes we played Alligators in the Carpet, sometimes The Witch in the Attic, sometimes Schoolteacher and Brilliant Pupil or, when I got my way, Superhero Twins.

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 soundpost 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 Austin Sykes, the man who had gathered his boot straps in his callused hands and hauled himself, tree by tree, to the great heights that oil tycoons and land barons would in later years. 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, the fearless patriarch of our great family, 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 as his and the same ones I had inherited. They were the Sykes' eyes, the eyes that said I belonged to him and that divided our family down the middle. My mother and Estella shared the same eye color, the changeable blue-green of the Gulf of Mexico. My father teased that he could tell their moods by the color of 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 between 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 that 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, 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 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 when I got chickenpox that summer. I caught chickenpox from her so I knew what catching was. "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.

°°°°°

1979

Estella Lianne Sykes

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 cut-offs, 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. Tow-headed, 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.

Save me!