“I know.”
“You like things neat. Look at this place.” He gestured to the framed photos, dustless and aligned, to the square edges of the rug and the couch, to the basket on the coffee table that organized remote controls. “She’s just trying to be like Mom.”
Natalie stared at him for a long moment. “Come with me.” She stood and started for the arch into the kitchen.
“Where—”
“Come on.”
Reluctantly, Cooper rose, bringing the wineglass. He followed her through the kitchen to the sunroom that doubled as the playroom. Three walls were glass; on the fourth Natalie had painted a mural, a scene from The Jungle Book, the big bear Baloo floating on his back in a river, Mowgli lying on his chest. She was a capable artist; she had once filled notebooks with sketches, back when they had been teenagers who thought love was a noun, a thing you could possess. Natalie flipped on the overhead light. Todd’s side of the room was chaotic, the lids of toy bins open, a train under attack from a stuffed panda, an unfinished Lego creation that might one day be a castle.
Kate’s side was neat as a surgery. Her toy box was closed, and the spines of her picture books looked as if they’d been aligned with a ruler. A low shelf held dolls and stuffed animals—Raggedy Ann, a brontosaurus, a plastic crocodile, a boxy fire truck, a stuffed Goofy missing an eye, a parrot, Tinkerbell, a pudgy unicorn—all in line like a Marine formation.
“I get it,” he said. “It’s neat.”
Natalie made a short, sharp sound. “Sometimes I don’t understand you, Cooper.”
It was never a good sign when she called him by his last name. “What?”
“You have these amazing abilities. You can look at someone’s credit card statements, what books they’ve read, their family photo album, and from that know where they’ll run, what they’ll do. You can track terrorists across the whole country. Can you really not see this?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Doesn’t mean—aren’t you the one who says that if you want to understand how abnorms think, all you need to know is that the whole world is patterns? That all the rest of it—whether a gift is emotional or spatial or musical or mathematical—is secondary to the fact that brilliants are more tuned in to patterns than everybody else?”
“Let’s just give her some time. There’s a reason testing isn’t mandatory till age eight.”
“I don’t want to get her tested, Nick. I want to deal with this. I want to figure out what she needs.”
“Nat, she’s four. She’s imitating. It doesn’t—”
“Look at her stuffed animals.” Natalie walked over and pointed, but her eyes stayed on him. “They’re not neat. They’re alphabetical.”
He’d known that, of course, had spotted it the moment the lights flickered on. But his little girl, tested and labeled? There were rumors about the academies, the things that happened there. No way would he let Kate end up in one.
“Look at the spines of her books,” Natalie continued, relentless. “They’re arranged by color. And in the spectrum, from red to violet.”
“I don’t—”
“Kate’s an abnorm.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, a simple statement. “You know that. Probably for longer than I have. And we have to deal with that fact.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe she is a twist—”
“Not funny—”
“—but maybe she’s just a little girl whose father is one. Maybe it’s not you she’s imitating. Maybe it’s me. Or maybe she does have a gift. What do you want to do? Test her? What if she’s tier one?”
“Don’t be cruel.”
“But what if she is? You know that means an academy.”
“Over my dead—”
“So then—”
“I’m saying that we need to deal with this. Figure out what her gift is and help her explore it. She might need help, tutoring. She can learn to control it.”