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.
And yet his daughter could read and interpret miniscule movements of interior eye muscles.
She’s tier one.
“There are some people,” Cooper said, choosing his words carefully and controlling his expression, “who like to know about people like us. People who can do the things you can do, and the things I can do.”
“Why?”
“That’s complicated, munchkin. What you need to know is that Mommy wasn’t scared of you. She was just…surprised. One of those people called her this morning, and it surprised her.”