Then Todd said, “I want to fly!”
“Yeah?”
“I waaaannaa flyyyiyiyiyyy!”
“Oh-kay,” he said, and gritted his teeth and spun faster, one more revolution, two, and then as he came around on the third he forced his right arm up, and Todd let go of it and he let go of Todd, and he had a stutter-second view of his son in midflight, arms up and back, hair wild around his face, and then momentum spun him out of sight. Katie clutched his arm as he slowed, one rev, Todd coming to the ground, two, Todd on his back laughing, three, touchdown, Cooper’s world a little wobbly as the revolution brought Katie down to bump gently against him. When he stopped he let go of her arm but kept close, waited for her to catch her balance, the endless parental quest to make sure his baby girl didn’t fall and crack her skull, didn’t run into sharp things, didn’t feel the rough edges of the world.
What if she’s tier one? They’ll take her from us. Send her to an academy…
Cooper shook his head and straightened his smile. He bent down, elbows to knees. His daughter stared at him with solemn eyes. His son lay on his back on the ground. “Toddster? You good?”
His son’s arm shot skyward, thumb up. Cooper smiled. He glanced up at Natalie, saw her look, the happiness a veneer on the fear. She caught him, touched her hair again, said, “We were about to eat. Have you?”
“Nope,” he lied. “Whatcha say, guys? Breakfast? Some of Mom’s famous brontosaurus eggs?”
“Dad.” Todd scrambled up and brushed grass off his pants legs. “They’re just regular eggs.”
Cooper started on the old routine—You ever seen brontosaurus eggs? No? Then how…and found he couldn’t do it. “You’re right, buddy. How about some regular eggs?”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” He gave Natalie a look no one else would have noticed. “Help your mom get started, would you? I’ll be right in.”
His ex reached down and took her son’s hand. “Come on, flyboy. Let’s make breakfast.”
Todd looked briefly baffled but followed Natalie as she led him inside. Cooper turned back to Kate, said, “You want to fly again?”
She shook her head.
“Phew. You’re getting so big, pretty soon you’re going to be doing that to me.” His shoelace had come undone, and he knotted it quickly.
Kate said, “Daddy? Why is Mommy scared of me?”
“What? What do you mean, honey?”
“She looks at me, and she’s scared.”
Cooper stared at his daughter. Her brother had been a restless baby, and many, many times Cooper had spent the ghostly hours of night rocking his son, soothing him, talking to him. Often he wouldn’t want to move once Todd had finally fallen asleep, certain that any shift, no matter how gentle, might wake his infant boy. And so he had played a game with himself, looking at his son’s thick dark hair—now faded to sandy brown—and the broad forehead and lips that looked like they’d been taken directly off Natalie’s face, and the ears that belonged to Cooper’s grandfather, big outward-facing things, and he had tried to find himself there. Other people said they could see it, but he never really could, at least not until Todd got older, started making expressions identical to his own.
Kate, though. He’d seen himself in his daughter since the day she’d arrived. And not just in her features. It was in the way she held herself, the way she observed things. It’s like the world is a system, he’d said to Natalie, years ago, and she’s trying to break it but knows she doesn’t have all the data yet. Kate had mostly been calm, but when she wanted something, boob or bed or fresh diaper, she had made it goddamn clear.
“What makes you think she’s scared, baby?”
“Her eyes are bigger. And her skin is more white. It looks like she’s crying but she’s not crying.”
Cooper put a hand on—
Dilated pupils.
Blood diverted from the skin to the muscles to facilitate fight-or-flight.
Enhanced tone in the orbicularis oculi.
Physiological responses to fear and worry. The kind of stimulus you can read like a billboard.
—his daughter’s shoulder. “First of all, your mom isn’t scared of you. Don’t you ever believe that. Your mom loves you more than anything. So do I.”
“But she was.”
“No, sweetheart. She wasn’t scared of you. You’re right, she was upset. But not because of you or anything you did.”
Kate stared at him, the corner of her lip sucked between her teeth. He could see that she was wrestling with the dissonance between what he had said and what she had seen. He understood that. It had been part of his life growing up, too.
Actually, it was still pretty much SOP.
Cooper dropped from his squat to sit cross-legged on the ground, his face a bit below his daughter’s. “You’re getting to be a big girl, so I’m going to tell you some things, things that you may not understand all the way right now. Okay?” When she nodded solemnly, he said, “You know people are all different, right? Some are tall and some are short and some have blond hair and some like ice cream. And none of that is right or wrong or better or worse. But some people are very good at things that other people aren’t. Things like understanding music, or adding really big numbers together, or being able to tell if someone is sad or angry or scared even if they don’t say so. Everybody can do that a little, but some people can do it really, really well. Like me. And I think like you.”
“So it’s good?”
“It’s not good or bad. It’s just part of us.”
“And not other people.”
“Some of them. Not a lot.”
“So am I…” She sucked her lip back in. “Am I a freak?”
“What? No. Where’d you hear that?”
“Billy Parker said that Jeff Stone was a freak and everyone laughed and then no one would play with Jeff.”
And thus are human relations boiled down to their essence. “Billy Parker sounds like a bully. And don’t use that word, it’s mean.”
“But I don’t want to be weird.”
“Sweetheart, you’re not weird. You’re perfect.” He stroked her cheek. “Listen. This is just like having brown hair or being smart. It’s just a part of you. It doesn’t tell you who you are. You do that. You do it by deciding who you want to be, one choice at a time.”
“But why was Mommy scared?”
And you thought you might dodge that one. Sharp girl. What do you say, Coop?
When Natalie had been pregnant, they’d had lots of conversations about the way they would talk to their children. Which truths they would tell, and when. Whether they would say that Santa Claus was a real person or just a game people played, how to answer questions about dead goldfish and God and drug use. They had decided that the thing to do was to be essentially honest, but that there was no need to dwell on things; that obfuscation was preferable to outright lying; and that there was an age when saying, Well, where do you think babies come from? was preferable to charts and diagrams.
Funny thing, though, they’d never imagined what it would be like if their child could see right through them. Dozens of studies had shown that a gifted parent wasn’t any more likely to have a gifted child, and that if they did, there was little connection between the parent’s gift and the child’s. In fact, young gifted children rarely exhibited a specific savant profile. At Kate’s age, it was usually more an uncanny facility with patterns that could manifest itself mathematically one day and musically the next.