A Theory of Relativity (15 page)

Gordon nudged him. “Isn’t it Friday? Don’t you have to go to work or something?”

“Three days compassionate leave,” Tim snorted, wakening. “I told my boss it was a relative.”

“We’re not your relatives,” Gordon said.

“Same as.”

“We . . . appreciate all you did.”

“De nada.”

Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 91

A Theory of Relativity

91

“I have to get home, now, Church. For real. My folks need me. And I need aspirin and peanut butter toast.”

“Absolutely,” Tim said.

Cleveland Avenue was as quiet as a Sunday morning. I’m a teacher, Gordon thought, I should be sleeping. There are three great things about teaching, said the fridge magnet his mother had given him—

June, July, and August. Tim parked the car. For a moment, both of them dozed against the seat, Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” gently vibrat-ing from Tim’s very good speakers through their arms and butts.

“Your mom is yelling on the lawn, Gordo,” Tim said sleepily.

Gordon jerked into consciousness. Horse-smelling sweat poured down his chin. The air conditioner was blasting.

His mom was indeed standing on the lawn, in her T-shirt and boxer shorts, her mouth snapping soundlessly. Gordon thought of a nut-cracker. He rolled down the passenger-side window.

“—don! Now!” Lorraine scolded.

To his shame, Gordon spotted the identical Dwors leaning out their porch window next door. He waved.

“I need you to come in right now, Gordon,” she said, “Right now.

Hi, Tim.” As if they were children and she were helping them out of the car, Lorraine began fumbling at the door handle.

“Take it easy, Mom,” Gordon struggled to open the door from his side. His Grandma Lena would always do this. You could never open the car door for her because she’d be wrestling with the handle on the inside all the while you were trying from the outside. “Let it alone, Mom! I can’t get out if you’re messing with it.” Finally, Tim was gone and Gordon and Lorraine stood face-to-face on the lawn.

“They have five hundred thousand dollars!” she practically yelled.

“Who?”

“The kids! Ray and Georgia! They have five hundred thousand dollars, and the insurance investigator just called me . . . they think it was a suicide!”

“Let’s go inside, Mom. Who’s here?”

“Your father. Nora.”

Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 92

92

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

“Okay, okay, let’s just settle down . . .” Nora and Mark were seated at the kitchen table. Each of them had a clean tablet and a sharpened number 2 pencil and a telephone book.

“We have to call a lawyer,” Lorraine told him. “Do you have any ideas?”

“Well, I know one we can’t call,” Gordon said. He leaned over and kissed his aunt’s soft forehead, and then, after thinking about it for an instant, kissed his father’s cheek.

It took him the better part of an hour to explain about Julius Liotis’s father, about Jurgen’s revelation about the Nyes’ meeting with the lawyer, about the revoked will. The process was halting, because Nora or Lorraine would interrupt about every fifteen seconds—“No!” or

“That’s impossible!”—so that he could not complete a sentence. They hadn’t suspected a thing.

“Why would they change their will?” Nora asked.

“I have no idea, I only know what the lawyer said,” Gordon replied.

“And Carl said they were meeting with the lawyer . . . today.”

“Son, did he say that they had signed a new will?”

“He said he was helping them prepare it. I assume so.”

“So they have a will,” Mark sighed, “that we don’t know about.”

“Diane Nye has convinced them to give her the baby,” Lorraine muttered. She had raked her hair into dreadlocks, the effect some of Gordon’s students achieved with dish soap.

“But, Lor, wouldn’t you do the same thing?” Mark asked.

“No”—Lorraine turned on her husband savagely—“I would not try to take a baby away from the only people she knows best and loves! I would not try to get control of all that baby’s money!”

“Lorraine!” Mark admonished her, “We don’t know anything about that.”

“Why would they think the children committed suicide?” Nora asked.

“Well, Auntie,” Gordon began, “cars are . . . car accidents are a common method people . . . use to try to cover up a suicide.”

“Like Porter Avery.”

They all lapsed into silence, thinking of the farmer neighbor of the Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 93

A Theory of Relativity

93

Nordstroms who had crushed himself with gruesome creativity under his own tractor. A cardinal whistled outside the open window, and they all jumped at the grinding of a truck’s gears.

“It’s garbage day!” Mark announced. “I completely forgot it!”

“Don’t you dare go get out those cans.” Lorraine warned her husband.

“It’s going to smell, Lor; there’s a bunch of that food in it.”

“I’ll do it,” Nora offered.

“No, I will,” Gordon interrupted.

Lorraine erupted, “Let the fucking cans sit! All of you! Am I the only one here who realizes we have to make a plan of some kind or Keefer is going to have a Southern accent?” Gordon had never heard his mother say “fuck.” He would not have imagined she knew how.

The telephone rang, but no one answered. They all listened as Diane Nye’s soft, lilting voice spoke into the answering tape. “We have a little appointment about ten, Lorraine. And then we thought we’d take Baby up to the inn to visit with the grandkids. I think they’re going home tonight. Is that okay? Okay. And then we can make arrangements for Keefer coming back home with us—home to Jupiter, I mean. For Raymond’s memorial. And, of course, you are invited. Are you all doing okay? I slept a little. Thank your doctor for me.” After the funeral, Diane had suffered a migraine, and Eve Holly, from Pine Grove Medical, who’d been in attendance, had given her an injection. “Okay. Well, ’bye all.”

They all watched the telephone as if it were a mad dog about to spring. Keefer wandered out into the kitchen, her diaper slung low like plumbers’ pants, her pink Elmo shirt pulled up over her belly, the terry-cloth frog she both cuddled and chewed under one arm.

“Dory!” she beamed, and climbed into Gordon’s lap, a warm spreading squish of pee immediately dampening his thighs. “Moobie?”

“She’s saying ‘movie,’ ” Lorraine explained.

“I know what she’s saying, Mom,” Gordon said sharply. “It’s because we watched
Wizard of Oz
last week.” Nora busied herself with the moosh of soaked Cheerios in the mer-Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 94

94

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

maid bowl that Keefer demanded every morning for breakfast and, stripping the baby of her weighty diaper, swept her into her high chair.

“Wed poon!” Keefer intoned, ominously.

“She’s saying she wants her red spoon, Mom,” Gordon snapped.

But Lorraine was leafing through the telephone book. Gordon caught sight of the page headings: Abortion, Adoption. “Do we need an estate lawyer, Mark? Or an adoption lawyer?”

“Well,” Nora said mildly, “Bradie’s older sister is infertile, from endometriosis. And she’s adopting a baby girl from China, did you know that? And I know they went through an agency in Morehouse. So I’ll just call her, is all . . .” Nora gathered up her pad and removed herself to Mark’s tiny sunporch office.

“It’s actually pretty obvious why they would consider it a suicide, Mom,” Gordon began.

“It’s an insult,” Lorraine replied.

“No, it’s pretty obvious. Ray was very depressed. It was more than Georgia. He had just given up the biggest victory—”

“Oh, Christ, if I hear one more word about the miracle at Coachman’s Hill I’m going to throw up,” Lorraine said “Ray Nye should have quit the goddamned tour the minute she got sick, Gordon.”

“They had to have the income, Mom.”

“I know that. But that wasn’t his only motivation. His . . . work distracted him. He couldn’t face all this. He counted on us. He knew we would take care of our child. How often did you see Diane and Big Ray here cleaning up the . . . taking care of your sister? Diane didn’t come here once. Diane sent her tree bark crap in the mail, and it was surface mail, Gordon. She didn’t even FedEx it.”

“Mom, wait—”

“I mean it! Now here they come, talking about baby, baby, baby, like she doesn’t have a name—”

“That’s just a Southern phrase—”

“And their son, the great hero.”

“Mom, Ray loved Georgia.”

“Ray loved Georgia, and Ray went on with his life, Gordon! We quit our lives! I took time off school, and you took time off, and your dad Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 95

A Theory of Relativity

95

barely went to work, and Mike and Nora, we all stopped our lives, Gordon. Even Lindsay and Tim interrupted their lives—”

“How could we have done anything else, Mom?”

“That’s the point! And now, they want Keefer because she’s their genetic link to Ray.”

“That stinks, Mom.”

“Okay, okay, it stinks. But I don’t have to be rational, Gordon. My child is dead. Your father’s child and mine is lying across the street under the ground.” Gordon thought, suddenly, Not your only child, Mom, but dismissed it. “And we have to figure out a way to keep what’s left of our family together.”

Nora came back beaming. She held up her notepad, triumphant, a good girl who had finished her homework before the rest of the class. “I found it!” she told them, “I got the name of Amber Dugan’s agency. It’s Adoption Alliance—”

“A . . . Aardvark,” Mark said. They stared at him, and he continued, flustered, “That’s why everyone does that. You know. A-One Auto Body.

They want to be the first in the phone book.”

“Thanks, Mark,” Lorraine said.

“Anyhow, I got the name of the lawyer, too. Greg Katt. In Merill.”

“Let’s get calling,” Lorraine whispered. “They’re going to be here in . . . what time is it?”

“Wait a minute.” Gordon, nauseated and baffled, panted, “Wait a minute. Can’t we all just talk this over? With the Nyes?”

“We have to find out how to secure custody of Keefer,” Lorraine explained, slowly, as if explaining to a middle-school child how to hold a pencil for shading. “We have to take the first step, before they do.”

“But as of right now, we already have custody of Keefer. I’m worried about it, too, Mom. I’ve been thinking about it twenty-four-seven. But I don’t think we have to get out the big guns yet.”

“Gordon, your father and I are almost sixty years old. Do you think a court is going to give us a toddler to raise? We’re not going to live forever,” Lorraine said, and then stopped, and went on more gently. “I don’t mean we’re going to die anytime soon. But we’re not wealthy people, honey, not like Big Ray, who builds all those instant communities, Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 96

96

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

every one with its own golf course, they’ll be golfing on the ocean floor next—”

“Mommy, you’re not saying this has anything to do with need-ing . . . the baby’s money?” Gordon glanced at Keefer, who grinned at him madly, poking the air in his direction with her spoon, as if to say, howsa about that? He felt his eyes start to burn and fill, “I mean need-ing the money to bring her up and stuff . . .”

“I mean, Gordon, that a . . . well, a court is not going to just say, here, let’s give this little baby to an old schoolteacher and her husband who sells vitamins.” She glanced at Mark. “Sweetie, I’m sorry, but you know what I mean. When they could give her to this rich developer and his preppie wife who had their first child when they were thirteen.”

“Stop exaggerating, Mom. You just hate Diane,” Gordon said. “That’s half of what this is about.”

“It’s more than that,” said Lorraine.

“It really is more than that,” Mark added, “though we’re probably biased—”

“Don’t go all fair and balanced on us, Mark,” Lorraine told him through clenched teeth.

Gordon was aghast. His mother and father were fighting. Comets would collide with the earth. The last time he had seen his parents fight was the time Mark let Gordon sleep over at Davey Ober’s house, where Davey’s two brothers shot crows with their .22s. Lorraine had come roaring up the Obers’ driveway and all but hauled Gordon out by the arm, grinning at Mrs. Ober and nattering about some family function they’d forgotten, tossing him into the front seat, practically breaking his tooth with the seat belt, zooming home down Q, up First and onto Cleveland Avenue, yelling at Mark
, don’t you ever, ever let him go to a
house where there are unlocked guns!

Georgia had come out and sat beside him,
I figure you’re grounded
for two weeks,
she’d said,
maybe more
, smiling. And he’d realized, right then, how his parents had found out about the Ober kids’ guns in the first place. Still, he hadn’t been grounded. Lorraine had come swooping out onto the porch, clasping him to her, telling him, I only have one Gordie, while Georgia watched in disgust.

Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 97

A Theory of Relativity

97

“You always knew you were the one, didn’t you?” his mother asked now.

“I was the one?”

“To adopt Keefer?”

He had known, of course. He had known. But he had known in theory. He had known in fact. But not in huge, present, demanding fact.

“Keefer has to have a real parent of her own, not just grandparents,” Lorraine said, sounding, to Gordon, faint and far off.

“I don’t know if I’m ready, Mom.”

“I don’t know if you’re ready, either,” Lorraine sighed.

“He’s ready,” Nora put in. “Gordie, it’s not like you’re going to be alone. We’re all here. And Georgia will help you.” Gordon looked into his aunt’s good, faded blue eyes and did not have the heart to speak one syllable about the afterlife, or lack thereof. “Listen. I wasn’t going to say this right now,” Nora went on, “but I called that adoption agency, too.

The social worker is sending the paperwork overnight, all the forms, the medical forms and such, and she said they can start the home study right away.”