The Prodigy's Cousin (19 page)

Josh's aunt and uncle volunteered their frequent-flier miles. Josh and his parents scrambled to find money to pay for the rest of the trip. Through a scholarship from the center hosting the seminar, an unexpected contribution from a family friend, and money donated by the Kiwanis Club in exchange for a painting, the Tiessens pieced together the funds to send Josh and Julie to British Columbia, and Josh attended the seminar.

Infused with the golden endorsement of Robert Bateman, Josh's career took off, and the media attention increased. His price tags shot up, too. Bateman advised Josh that work of his caliber could sell for much more than he was charging, so the fifteen-year-old upped the asking prices for his originals into the thousands.

Zac had constant exposure to the Josh Tiessen art frenzy, and, as Julie puts it, for years his “nose was kind of out of joint” about the whole thing.

Josh began pouring more and more time into his art. For him, that time was bliss. He prayed before he began and played music or listened to lectures on faith and art while he painted. Everything else was a distraction.

The common ground between Josh and Zac eroded: Josh frequently opted out of their hour-long daily allotment of TV; he lost interest in gaming. The brothers had previously played basketball together, but after they enrolled in a Catholic high school, neither boy made the school team.

At fifteen, Josh set up the Josh Tiessen Studio Gallery in the sunroom. It was a massive upgrade in work conditions. Josh had previously done a stint in the garage. As winter approached, he had moved a series of heaters out to his studio, but none beat back the frigid air. His next move had been to the basement laundry room. It was warmer, but paint splattered the Tiessens' washer and dryer. As collectors began visiting, Josh felt awkward bringing them down to his makeshift work space.

Just as Josh was turning sixteen, he graduated from high school. Over the next few years, the achievements rolled in. Josh pocketed a series of honors at local art festivals and competitions for teens. He nabbed the second most votes in So You Want to Be an Artist, a national Canadian contest for teens, for his close-up depiction of an intricate doorknob on a weathered door; the painting was then displayed at the National Gallery of Canada in a monthlong exhibition. The famed Canadian conductor Boris Brott invited Josh to create a piece to accompany one of his symphonies, an honor Josh performed twice. He was invited to join Artists for Conservation and the International Guild of Realism. He was one of sixty thousand Canadians to receive a Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, an award given to individuals with notable achievements or contributions to their communities.

That contribution included not just his art but also a striking benevolent streak that Josh shared with the other prodigies. He gave a portion of his earnings to charity, frequently donated artwork for
fund-raisers, and initiated an annual artists' event with a charitable purpose. He launched his own foundation, Arts for a Change, to coordinate his philanthropic work.

When others inquired about the source of Josh's talent, the source of his passion, Julie and Doug, two missionaries who had never considered themselves particularly artistic, always gave the same answer.

He just came this way.

Zac's childhood looked a bit different.

He was active from birth. The nurses at the hospital nicknamed him Houdini for his ability to escape from even their tightest swaddles. While a toddler-age Josh pored over art projects, Zac exasperated Lena by skipping from toy to toy, pushing around cars and trucks. He experimented with Lego bricks while his older brother mastered drawing with perspective. No toy was safe in his hands; playthings that had survived multiple other children broke within weeks.

He was always in motion, always on the verge of catastrophe. He loved to climb, and Lena was constantly rushing to pull him off things—ladders, chairs, tables—trying to grab him before he toppled. At a friend's apartment, Julie once found Zac perched on the ledge of an open ninth-floor window. Another time, he got his head stuck between the metal bars of a porch railing in Russia and screamed for twenty minutes before Lena, Julie, and Doug wriggled him out. When Julie and the boys joined some of their Russian friends for a picnic near the Black Sea, Zac kept trying to run off a cliff. Julie joked that if she could just keep Zac alive until he turned five, he would be fine.

He was a social creature and craved the company of other children in a way that was foreign to his older brother. Julie ran a one-room schoolhouse for her boys and a couple of other families during their last year in Russia. It was a torment to Josh, who had nightmares about other children destroying his toys, but Zac exalted in the mayhem.

Zac's parents always suspected he had a talent for music. He hummed when he was playing, eating, and falling asleep; he hummed in the car and in the bathroom. When Julie or Doug asked about the tune, Zac would cite the background music he had heard earlier in a restaurant or store or on a commercial—music Julie and Doug hadn't even noticed. He had an excellent sense of pitch and a good singing voice. Lena and Josh warbled their way through the Russian songs Lena taught the boys; Zac was the only one to hit the notes. Julie often wrangled Zac into sitting next to Josh and singing into his ears to help him stay on key.

Despite his seemingly natural gift, Julie and Doug could never pin Zac down long enough for him to develop it. Music classes at school repulsed him. As he would later recall, nothing sounded right. The other kids' singing was erratic; the piano was out of tune. When Julie began homeschooling the boys, she tried to integrate music into the curriculum, but Zac hated it. He fidgeted when sight-reading music or singing from hymnals. He couldn't be bothered to learn about the history of music or classical composers.

Zac's lack of interest frustrated Julie and Doug. Music, they felt, was a place Zac could excel—a route for him to develop a talent of his own. Julie and Doug took Zac to a music store before Christmas and tried to entice him into asking for an instrument. No dice. Someone gave him a toy piano, and his parents bought him a toy electric guitar. Neither took.

Zac flitted from activity to activity. If any project or pursuit lasted long, he lost interest. One year, Josh and Zac set out to build a large fort in a ravine, but Zac abandoned the project. Doug occasionally built model cars with Zac, who would help out at first but then leave Doug to finish the models alone. Zac and Josh joined a Bible quiz group, and Josh diligently memorized verses while Zac struggled to put in five to ten minutes a day. When Josh began devoting hundreds of hours to more complex pieces of art as a teenager, Zac watched TV and played video games. His parents suspected he had at least a borderline case of ADHD.

If there was fun to be had, though, Zac was in the thick of it. He
was at the heart of every group; he emerged from every activity with a new best friend. He passed long afternoons gaming or playing Ping-Pong with friends, and he issued a constant stream of invitations to the Tiessen home, always looking for someone to hang out with.

Until the day Zac slammed his head against a church floor. After that, he was different.

It happened when Zac was thirteen.

Zac's church youth group meeting ended, and most of the kids headed out to the foyer to wait for their rides. Zac and some of the others tracked down a few empty appliance boxes they had used as part of a game during the meeting. He and his buddies flattened one out. They took turns lifting it and jumping over it, raising the makeshift hurdle a bit higher each time.

On Zac's turn, he dove headfirst over the box. He cracked his head against the thinly carpeted concrete floor. For a minute, maybe a minute and a half, Zac blacked out.

When he regained consciousness, the youth group leaders helped him to the side of the room and leaned him against the wall. Someone brought him a glass of water and placed it next to him on the floor. Zac, still dazed, reached for it. He knocked it over. Someone ran outside to get Doug, who was waiting in the parking lot.

Doug had been through this before with Zac; the kid couldn't play Ping-Pong without making it look like an extreme sport. His stunts often landed him in the hospital, and he'd already had multiple head injuries and concussions (his parents joked that he had a “club card” for the emergency room). Doug trotted out his familiar list of questions. Zac didn't know his name. He didn't know his birth date or address. He insisted that five plus five was twelve. He was worse than Doug had ever seen him. Doug and Josh helped Zac out to the car. Zac felt overwhelmed with fatigue; all he wanted to do was sleep, but Doug made him stay awake for the drive back home.

Julie knew the drill. She checked the head-injury guidelines that the family had posted inside the medicine cabinet after Zac's previous concussion, a tobogganing injury that led to an overnight hospital stay. Zac's pupils were still dilated, and he was still nauseated. But he was a bit more coherent than he had been right after the accident. Julie and Doug decided to skip the trip to the emergency room. They woke Zac every couple of hours and observed him through the night. He woke easily enough, and Julie and Doug assumed that all was well.

The next morning, Zac seemed more low-key than usual. Julie and Doug wrote it off as the aftermath of interrupted sleep. They let him stay home from school for a couple of days.

When he went back, he was reclusive. Before the accident, he had always been friendly with his classmates. Afterward, he just wanted to be alone. Over the next couple of weeks, Julie noticed that Zac was quieter than usual; he went out less. At his youth group meetings, he wasn't as wound up, not so much the life of the party. Maybe this injury finally got through to him, Julie thought. Maybe Zac realized how serious a concussion could be.

A few weeks after Zac's accident, the family had Valerie, Josh's painting mentor, over for dinner. Valerie knew that Zac hadn't made the high school basketball team—the one activity he had stuck with for more than a short period—and she imagined it had to be difficult watching Josh's achievements from the sidelines. Hoping to raise his spirits, she had picked up a guitar for him at a flea market. “Maybe it'll be something for him to tinker on,” she had said to her husband.

When she gave it to Zac, he was intrigued. He took the guitar out into the living room and began strumming. He worked his way across the notes slowly, as if he were exploring the instrument. He kept at it all evening. “We were all laughing,” Julie said. “We had never seen him do anything this long.”

After dinner, Zac ran right back to the guitar. He harassed Julie, who had played as a teenager, for her old guitar books. When Julie couldn't find them, Zac searched for instructions online. After Val left,
Julie showed him some chords. Zac soaked up every movement. Hours passed; eventually, all the other lights went off in the house, and Julie told Zac to go to bed. The next day, Zac went straight back to the guitar. Julie was pleasantly perplexed by Zac's sudden diligence.

For a couple of months, Zac practiced for an hour or two a day.

He pestered his parents to let him use the money he made doing yard work to buy an electric guitar. Doug and Julie were skeptical. They had been through a laundry list of activities with Zac. They didn't want him to buy an expensive instrument that he would discard after a few weeks. But when Zac's interest didn't waver after three months, they relented. Doug helped Zac find an electric guitar and amp on a used-goods Web site. The next week, Zac bought the levels one and two FastTrack guitar instruction books at a used-books sale.

Julie helped him work through most of the level-one book; she still knew a dozen or so chords. But Zac quickly surpassed Julie's abilities. He raced through the second book on his own. “I felt really connected with the music and the instrument,” he recalled. “It just kind of naturally happened.”

He started practicing at least three or four hours a day.