A Theory of Relativity (19 page)

Bills began to arrive. Perusing the first month’s statements, Gordon decided that Katt, who’d spent fifteen minutes on a letter from the lawyer who prepared Ray and Georgia’s original will, was indeed a very slow reader. There were all these hearings, and the cost of a co-counsel expert in adoption—“She’s a big gun. From Madison,” Katt told them,

“and even if we don’t really need her, it’s better to have her on our side, huh?” This could run into a little money, Katt warned. Not huge money.

About the amount it would cost a couple to adopt a child, the lawyer supposed.

Gordon had some savings. He assumed that his parents had plenty of money. He’d not thought about his parents in economic terms—not since they’d point-blank refused to buy him a motorcycle—any more than he’d wondered how packages of socks and underwear had ended up in his dresser drawers when he was a kid or how checks in envelopes carefully marked “Tuition” and “Fees” and “Books” were tucked into his college duffels. Money was not going to be a big problem. If it were, they’d have told him by now. Gordon would need to submit to a psychological evaluation beyond Cindy Rogan’s cheerful home study. But not to worry about that, Katt said, it was just standard practice, to rule out any issues. A court-appointed private psychologist Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 119

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would do it for the county. Katt had set it for . . . days from now. July whatever, sometime.

Big deal. Gordon was more worried about the physical for the home study. About the AIDS test. There had been an AIDS test for the teaching job, and it was fine, of course. But one test didn’t mean anything considering that night more than two years ago. In the Galápagos—Christ, he hardly remembered it. The girl, a bewitching United Nations of a woman, black and Asian and green-eyed, the dance floor in that tumbledown hut beach bar, the ziggety music, the superoctane brew that tasted like Tang and fueled him so he was walking on Jupiter.

The condom hadn’t broken. He knew that. But it had been some kind of hellacious Third World condom, and she’d put it on with her teeth . . .

God. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t die on Keefer. Not even twenty years from now. He’d lain awake on his bed, listening to Keefer sing to herself, on one of only two nights she’d consented to lie down alone for more than fifteen minutes, thinking about AIDS and ebola and all the sweltering, ferally gorgeous places he’d let himself be thrown around in, getting cut and scraped and insect bitten and sunburned when he hadn’t thought of being a father to his little leaflet, his orphaned baby.

Like a psycho, he’d gone and picked up Keefer and rocked her in front of the window until he was dizzily sleepy and she was wide awake.

All these things were so . . . boring. They were always in the way, like box turtles in the road that could neither be rolled over nor hurried.

He was afraid of getting to be like his mother, throwing salt over her shoulder.

He caught himself thinking of stupid shit he hadn’t thought about in years, about his grandma McKenna’s brother, awful Harold, asking Lorraine, right in front of him—okay, Gordon had been a kid, but not a deaf kid—if there’d been “insanity in the family of that boy you got.” Not until now, had been his mother’s frosty answer.

What had he done to provoke his great-uncle’s remark? Some dumb kid thing, he and Pat Chaptman’s invention of the Barbie guillo-tine or something. A mean old man taking out his own stuff on a kid.

He still saw it as a teacher. Adults, in all their power, could dish out Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 120

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heavy grief. His teacher acquaintances did it all the time, dividing the town up into “house parents” and “trailer parents.” They thought the kids didn’t know, but the kids knew everything.

When he was little, he’d ridden his bike through the Wildflower Trailer Park, imagining every weary blonde he saw perched smoking on pull-down metal steps to be his birth mother. Not that he’d had any profound interest in her. His folks had made sure he knew the girl’s name—Heather. She’d only been fifteen or so when he made his appearance. When Gordon was still a toddler, Lorraine had told him, Heather’s trail went cold somewhere in Milwaukee. They’d done their best, Lorraine apologized, especially given that adoptions that took place in the sixties were supposed to have been “sealed” for reasons of pretense that held sway in a much less frank time. As if he cared. He didn’t care. It didn’t occupy him. Except to piss him off when someone drew attention to it. The occasional questions, in middle school,
You
mean Mrs. McKenna’s not your real mother? Who is, then? Olivia Newton-John
, he’d said to that lousy Reilly brat, Ryan.
Get out,
Reilly gasped,
for
real?
Ryan Reilly had the brains of a mailbox.
No,
Gordon said,
the truth
is, it was really your mother.

His first fistfight over that.

Gordon could not ever have foreseen how something like adoption, something so ordinary to him, could have become this boiling, fester-ing focus in his adult life. And not even his adoption, or Georgia’s.

Georgia had gone through the usual TV-movie silliness, imagining her birth mother as a famous Harvard researcher using all the scientific detective skills at her command to find her lost child, intent on bestow-ing a cache of jewels passed from generation to generation since Marie Vetsera. But they had never shared aching conversations about “who they were.” Had he been afraid to delve? Had he been afraid to insult his parents? Or just . . . who cared?

The current wrangling had nothing to do with him and Keefer. He and Keefer were as comfy as a boy with his puppy. He stood her on the counter and held her little hands while he played the Mambo Kings.

They flew the shark kite out his bedroom window. She cried the first time she’d run full tilt into the screen coming in from the terrace, but Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 121

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then let him know, endless times after that, using her few words and her fluent little chimp sign language, that she wanted him to close the screen so she could run into it and then fall down on her padded bottom, the two of them belly-laughing like drunks at the Wild Rose. She curled her arms around his neck and held on to fistfuls of his hair when they sauntered through Wilton’s Market, him feeling all the eyes on him. Yeah, I’m with the shortie. I’m her pop. She ate Pad-Thai from his outstretched index finger, making him feel for all the world like a mother bird. They mooed at every cow they passed and said goodnight to Georgia’s wedding photo when Keefer slept at his place. He’d started having her sleep over, at his mother’s urging, just one night a week. But soon they were up to three, the goal being that by the hearing, it would be Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house that felt like a fun place to visit and Gordon’s apartment in the Victorian that felt like home. He’d been intimidated at first by all the directions that accompanied her—wipe butt front to back, eyes from the outer corner in, hold on to the little wisp of hair close to the scalp and comb hair knots from the middle of each strand down, shoot Tylenol into the cheek (and then wipe it off his shirt when it spewed back out). It was all stuff he’d done before, but as an assistant, with his mother or Georgia the managing director. Now he was on his own. He’d mastered the gag when he opened one of the truly terrifying clay-yellow diapers—-how could a person have two entirely different kinds of bowel movements, pebbles and a mass of mush, in one diaper?—and was grateful for the many hours he’d spent dissecting ripe dogfish shark carcasses. He’d overcome the impulse to burst into tears himself whenever she cried, which was a good thing, since she cried often. First came what Mark called the “boo-boo face,” a pout so heartbreakingly fetching Gordon couldn’t believe Keefer hadn’t practiced in the mirror. And then, once the tears started coursing, she’d pop open the snaps on his shirts and press one wet cheek against his neck. He would be utterly powerless. He would feel as huge as Atlas, at the same time. “Baa,” she would say, when she kissed him good-bye,

“Baa.” He first thought she was reminding him to include her juice bottle in her pack, but he gradually got that she was trying to mimic the sound adults made when they blew kisses.

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Hour by hour, his barely twenty-pound niece was rearranging huge chunks of his life. Increasingly, when Keefer stayed at his parents’, Gordon would find an excuse to call and talk to her on the phone, as though it were not insane to talk on the phone to a baby—“Is she still there? Hello? Keefster? Is that you?” She made spitting noises and pressed the buttons. But when his mother took over and said, “She’s smiling really big now, Gordie,” he would become too choked to say anything. It was like the feeling he used to have as a teenager when he imagined himself doing the NBC commentary for his own stardom:
Fans of the tournament all over the world are turning their sights on Scotland
tonight and asking, who is this Gordon McKenna, a science teacher from Wisconsin
. . .
And the Nobel prize for biochemistry goes to
. . .
Gordon Cooper
McKenna!

It was absurd. If he were a woman, he would have considered it hormonal.

Nothing had tickled him more than the terrific bedroom he’d figured out for Keefer at the new apartment. There was a huge walk-in closet off his own bedroom, which he would never have enough clothing to fill. Shopping with Lindsay one night for a shower curtain, he’d come across this big sheepskin dog bed at the Sam’s Club—a dog bed for a Shetland pony, by the size of it, and it fit right in to one corner of the walk-in. With her Barbies and her embroidered “Queen of Almost Everything” blanket, she would be set, Gordon supposed. It was dark and cool in there, even when the rest of the apartment baked under that peaked roof. He had never actually tried putting her down in the bed—by the time Keefer gave up, he was so shot that they usually fell asleep together on the floor, with the TV still on.

Up until then, Delia and Craig had made only a few day trips, driving all the way from Madison to take Keefer to the McDonald’s for an hour. And then, suddenly, they phoned to request a sleep-over visit.

Agree, Katt advised—in custody, victory goes to those who share.

Their manner, when they showed up, was so off, so beyond the expected awkwardness, that he should have sensed the double cross.

By then, their custody petition would have already been prepared.

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Should he have known? Gordon would later be sure that he’d concocted as many cues and clues as he’d ignored.

You should have known, he’d think later, in Georgia’s exasperated voice.

“It’s better we not talk, Gordie,” Delia told him apologetically, when he carried Keefer out onto his parents’ lawn. Mark and Lorraine sat like matched mannequins on the porch swing. They didn’t want to use the new sheepskin bed. They had a handmade crib that had once belonged to Alexis. Mark reminded them that Ray and Georgia had never put the baby in a crib. Craig said Keefer would adjust—babies belonged in cribs.

There had been nothing anyone could do.

The worst moment came when Gordon tried to peel Keefer’s tenu-ous little fingers from his neck one by one, and Keefer began to pant and then to sob, “Dory, no no! Dory no!” Nora had driven up by then and was frantically offering everyone coffee, and Lorraine simply jumped up and walked straight backed into the house.

But Mark, and Gordon admired this, came down on the steps and stared steadily, piercingly, at the Cadys, as first Delia, then Craig tried to settle Keefer, who was by then well into one of her full-blown fits, shrieking as though someone were trying to filet her. In the end it was the kid, Alex, Delia’s teenager with hair the color of brass pumpkins, who coaxed Keefer into her arms with soothing promises of introduc-ing her to their two baby kitties, one white, one black.

To her credit, Delia was red faced, striking at the corners of her eyes, appealing to Gordon with her gaze, shrugging and shaking her head. Craig had gripped the wheel and squinted straight ahead as though he were trying to find an exit on the Santa Monica freeway.

Once they’d pulled away, Gordon didn’t fight his impulse to charge inside and crack open a beer. Lorraine was loading the dishwasher so fiercely she broke a cup. Nora was deep in her coffee, a ski hill of Kleenex at her elbow.

“All babies this age have stranger anxiety,” Nora remarked. “You did, Gordie.”

“She can sense something,” Lorraine said.

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“She cannot sense something, Lor,” Mark put in, “other than how we feel, is all. I’m sure she’ll be laughing in no time.”

“That little girl of theirs is a cutie,” Nora said.

“Clearly the brains of the outfit,” Lorraine muttered darkly.

Of course, in hindsight, it would all seem ludicrously civil.

Why had they been so foolish as to assume that the Cadys would bring the baby back at all? Diane was batty. Delia was no better. What if Diane had simply taken off for Tampa International? Or for the West Fucking Indies? It could have taken them years, literally years, to get Keefer back. People did it all the time . . . that guy in California hid his daughter from his ex-wife for seventeen years! And in the same state!

That doctor who skipped to the Netherlands with her son . . . American law could foam at the mouth, but what would it really avail if the relatives were ready and willing to give up their lives for the purpose and go to prison if they were caught? Why hadn’t they even talked about the risk? Because they, themselves, weren’t the kind of people who flew off to the Netherlands? Not the kind of people whose family disagreements ended up in tabloid publications? At least not then, not at that point. Mark would have considered such suspicions impolite if nothing else. They were still the kind of people who could at least pretend that good manners and goodwill would triumph in the end.