A Theory of Relativity (2 page)

Nora would be shattered.

It would be he, he realized, at twenty-four the youngest but one of his cousins, who would have to provide the strong shoulder, the steadying hand.

But everything he saw looked odd, looked unsettling.

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JACQUELYN MITCHARD

For everything looked like any other day. Gordon first thought that he had come to the wrong place. Or that this had all been a mistake. A prank. Where was Dale Larsen, after all? There was no sign of the familiar police cruiser. Merry, frank summer afternoon sunlight glistened on the river birches. And there was the insistent, melodramatic call of a grosbeak—a call Gordon could never listen to, not even at this moment, without thinking of his mother saying it sounded just like a robin who’d taken acting lessons. Cars bristling with bikes and camping gear boomed past. Gordon felt himself to be the only thing in the landscape at all out of the ordinary.

Even the rupture in the aluminum railing, a swinging wing, looked innocuous, fender-bender quality. He looked to the bank beyond. A half-dozen members of the Trempeauleau County Fire Department stood gazing into the shallow stream, doing, apparently, nothing. The car must have flown . . . the wreck must be over there. A county ambulance parked a few yards up the bank was not running, though the doors yawned wide.

He leaned over, and looked down and across the stream.

He could see it then.

The metallic stack of angles that was all that was left of his father’s beloved vintage car nuzzled shyly nose down in its nest of sand, river boulders, and concrete, encircled by a rainbow fan of slick oil and blood, with glass everywhere, more glass than it seemed a car could have contained, on the banks, among the water-sudsed boulders, in the trees.

And more, webs and strands of red and beige, in the water, in the willow branches. Gordon could never recall the next moments except as fractured vignettes, sequenced with periods of blindness, like slides shown in a darkened room. Vaulting the rail, he’d slip-walked down the hot grassy slope, past the policemen, an eerie dream-walk that felt in every exterior sense so normal that it could have been any sunny summer day of his childhood, a day he’d wakened feeling lucky that he lived on the verge of the big woods, where other kids only got to go for vacations. Sliding, nearly falling, recovering his footing, finally he was abreast of the car.

In the creek was a concrete abutment, a kind of dam meant to keep Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 5

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spring floodwaters off the road. The car had apparently smacked into the leftmost edge of it. The hood was bent back against what had been the front seat the way a child bends bread for a jelly sandwich. Nothing could have been extracted living.

The windows had popped outward and what Gordon could see through the collapsed driver’s side opening looked at first something like the sea wasps he saw when he dived deep, delicate parachute-like membranes veined with maroon and blue and golden threads. . . . Ray . . . oh Ray, and what the side pillar of the windshield had done. Ray. He could not focus on what bobbed on the shallow stream at the corner of his field of vision, the long strip of purple fabric embroidered with gold stars, his sister’s shirt.

Gordon began to cry.

Two of the officers ambled over, reached out, and in the stiff-limbed fashion of men of his father’s generation, patted his back, and Gordon fought down the strong desire to hide his face against their barrel chests and sob. Stay here, they said, an octave of basso voices, no one voice seeming to issue from any one man, no, son, don’t go any closer, nothing you can do for them now. Then Dale Larsen came mincing down the hill in the delicate, balletic way of some big older men, and his presence—representative of the safe, decent, obscenely unchanged atmosphere—triggered a collapse. Sheriff Larsen was part of the stable world. Gordon had once leched for Larsen’s daughter, the hot, wild girl who looked like Joan Jett, who’d been Homecoming Queen in Georgia’s year. Stephanie. How could he have forgotten her name even for a moment? Stephanie. Gordon grabbed two fistfuls of the sheriff’s starched blue shirt and clung. And in a gesture Gordon would always think of as encompassing both a terrible intimacy and a terrible restraint, Dale Larsen reached up and lightly covered Gordon’s hands with his own huge, dry paws.

“What we’ve got to do now is even harder, son,” he’d said. “We’ve got to go see your folks.”

Larsen led him back up the bank, and the perceptions that came to Gordon were again those of a child. Gordon was glad that Dad would never see the ruin of his cherished 1957 Bel-Air convertible, a big-bodied Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 6

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cream-colored dream with bright red seats, the honeymoon car, chosen in part, Mark McKenna once told his son—in a rare moment of blazing can-dor—for that big cushy backseat. Purchased from its only other owner, a university professor who was leaving the country, it had been kept like a trophy, yearly bathed in oils and glazes, swaddled during the winter in its own blanket, taken out occasionally for a spin, as Georgia and Ray had taken it today. It was, for Dad, a chariot of youth that trailed back to the time a tall, quiet guy had found himself courting an exotic dark-haired art major who grew up in an apartment on Chicago’s Gold Coast. Shown old pictures of his parents during those early days, Gordon thought they looked like movie stars, impossibly young and startlingly handsome, flirt-ing with the camera.

Oh, Mom, Gordon thought. Oh Mom, oh Mom.

Sheriff Larsen was talking, murmuring, about a cell-phone Samari-tan who’d happened along, headed up from Janesville to Burnt Church Lake for a fishing weekend with his two little boys. The man had wheeled onto the shoulder of the road only to roust the children, who’d slipped out of their seat belts and were beating on each other with life preservers.

“Poor guy,” Dale Larsen said. “It was his little kid, couldn’t have been more than six, he saw the car, and he said, ‘Daddy, there’s . . .’ ”

“What?” Gordon asked. Suddenly, he sat down hard on the roadside. He’d had to.

“Nothing,” Dale said. “It was just that the foliage was all piled around the vehicle . . . it was hard to see. The daddy thought at first it was one of those derelicts people shove off the road, on account of the car being so old and all. The guy was crying when we got here. He was holding both his boys in one arm so they couldn’t look down, crying on the phone to his ex-wife, he said. Shook up.”

“He saw the bodies . . . the kid did.”

“No, Gordon. Just the . . .”

“The blood . . .”

“Well. Leave it alone, son. Just know, that there was nothing . . . the medics tried. They got the jaws of life, and they were going in. But they were gone . . .”

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“I know. I know they tried their best.”

“It had probably been hours. The way the car was, no one would have noticed it.”

“They . . . Ray and . . . my sister . . . left really early. I was over at my mom’s. Georgia put the baby in bed with me and said, ‘Kiss me, so you don’t . . .’ Had he smelled of Georgia’s scent, the Sugar Cookie cologne they sold at the Soap Bubble? He had a brief, gauzy impression of the cologne washing over him.
Kiss me, so you don’t miss me.
The limp, dampish bundle of Keefer, in her terry-cloth footie suit, placed between Gordon and the wall.

“What?”

“No, just a thing my sister . . . my mom always said it to us, when we left for school. Just, it was how she said good-bye; I wasn’t even awake yet.”

“Oh. Anyhow, are you . . . can you get up, son? But take all the time you need. I could use a breather myself.” The big man, his eyes ringed and sad as a hound’s, was pouring sweat.

“I’m ready.”

“We should go see your folks, then. Ed Dean . . . my deputy called your uncle Mike. I’m guessing Mike went to get your dad at Medi-Sun.” Larsen drew a deep breath. “Gordon, you know I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart. Your folks, and Georgia, especially Georgia, meant a great deal to us. I know this is a helluva note. You’ve all had a time of it.

And this isn’t going to make things any—”

“It’s okay,” Gordon said. “Really, if you think about it one way, it makes things simpler for us.”

The sheriff fell silent so long Gordon at first believed the man had not heard him, but when he glanced up, he saw with a sinking heart, the familiar look . . . he’d seen it a hundred times before. He’d gone ahead and done it, cut to the chase when other people were getting used to the scenery. Done it, meaning nothing by it, nothing but a lead-footed attempt at assurance.

“You mean,” Sheriff Larsen ventured, “that it’s easier on . . . on Georgia.”

“Yes,” Gordon agreed gratefully. “This way . . . it’s just. We would have had to watch her . . . die.”

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But then Gordon realized—and he had to work at this a bit, his mind struggling to get around it as a small child struggles to hold a fat pencil—Ray’s death made things simple in other ways, as well. Ways that even he could never say openly, could barely even permit himself to think. Georgia
would
have died soon in any case; but Ray would have lived on. And probably sooner rather than later, he’d have taken Keefer and moved to the edge of some southland golf club. He’d want to be near his own parents, so they could look after her during the endless summer Ray spent out on his minor pro golf tour. Ray might even have remarried—he was younger than Georgia, Gordon’s age. And eventually, the McKennas’ daily immersion in Keefer, since the day of her birth, would dwindle to Christmas visits and thank-you notes markered in a childish hand. They would have lost Keefer as surely as they had lost Georgia, in a breathtaking one-two punch.

But now, the latter half of the punch was pulled. For Ray’s and Georgia’s will specified that the McKennas, he and his parents, would care for Keefer. If anything should ever happen.

And anything had.

What he had meant to say, and he had almost said it, was that losing Ray meant not losing Keefer.

Okay, it was horrible. It was shitty. It was cold and harsh.

But it was true, wasn’t it?

Life is not a lab, he heard his sister’s voice say. Gordie, you are the most
well-educated doorknob I have ever known. You always manage to have all
the facts and still miss the point.

The facts, he had always retorted, were the point.

And the facts, Gordie thought, as he got into his own car to follow the sheriff’s cruiser to his parents’ home on Cleveland Avenue, meant he would have to be, now, right now, a father. And so he would have to give an account of this day to Keefer to explain why her own parents could not raise her. He would have to take painstaking care to tell it true, just as his parents had told him the unvarnished truth—he would have, honestly, preferred a little varnish—about his own origin.

Keefer would be, Gordon realized, an adopted child, too, as he and Georgia had been. And she would, as Gordon did, tend to date her ori-Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 9

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gins not from conception but from inclusion. She was only a baby, after all. She would never remember this time. Gordon had himself always felt that before his parents claimed him, he’d existed in limbo, between lives.

He prized his story, the story his parents told him over and over.

How you came to be ours. And Georgia had prized her story even more. His sister, exotically enough, had been the birth child of a Hungarian medical student stranded pregnant in the United States. His own story was humbler, a teenage cashier’s vague recollection of tanned biceps, a moonlit night, and the guy who ran the Tilt o’Whirl. His mother had once told Gordon, who remained rueful about the comment for years, that when they’d heard of Georgia’s existence, “We thought we hit the genetic jackpot! Since the mother was both Hungarian, like my family, like Grammy and Grandpa Kiss, and a medical student, we’d have a baby who’d look like me and be smart like Daddy!” But Gordon had been the one who earned a bachelor’s in environmental science. Georgia, who could play chess at four and read the newspaper headlines at five, whizzed through high school without ever studying for a test or ever earning anything less than a C, perpetually running for something, some school office or club, making Lorraine paint posters, buying jelly beans for the whole student body on election day. Mark had predicted that he would walk into the parking lot at Medi-Sun one morning and find his daughter shaking hands: “I’m Georgia McKenna, your senator . . .” But Georgia had summoned up no greater ambition than managing a soap boutique in Tall Trees, two blocks from the house where she’d grown up.

And here, Keefer would grow up. Keefer’s story, beginning with this day, would include radiant, intentional parents snatched away by a grotesque twist of fate, which was horrible.

But it would be told her by the remains of her birth family, which was a plus.

They would have to explain to Keefer about that collision of forfeit and gift, the truth of all adoptions.

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her. He did love her so. Being around Keefer had made these past months bearable. That, and . . . well, he shouldn’t even think this, but . . . having his sister back. Half the time he was terrified and horrified by her illness, but half the time he was . . . happy. Happy in her company, which he’d missed since she’d gone ahead, zoomed into full-fledged adulthood, leaving him feeling like some absurd, overgrown kid. He’d enjoyed sitting up late with her when she couldn’t sleep, while Ray was out on the circuit or snoring like a rhino on the twin bed that had been shoved to one side to make room for Georgia’s massive hospital contraption, watching
Twilight
Zone
reruns, even playing charades.
You can’t always do
Rainman,
Gordie.