A Theory of Relativity (21 page)

Lindsay allowed her great eyes to go wider, as if something within had slackened. He had to move. He heaved himself out of her car on First Street, suddenly worn out, suddenly annoyed that he’d gotten up at five in the morning on a holiday; she put a hand out and stopped him. “Now, don’t worry,” she said.

“About what?”

“About . . . the evaluation. That’s just a few days from now, Gordie.

It’s like . . . next week.”

“You don’t have to remind me,” he’d said sharply.

Did they all think him a dunce? His mother would remind him at the fireworks that night as well. He’d been cuddling Keefer, who, to his delight, had scrambled off his father’s lap and onto Gordon’s when the first rocket exploded. Gordon wrapped her in his cotton sweater, and thought of the previous year, when he’d handed his tiny niece out the upstairs window to Georgia, and then climbed out after her, so they could watch the fireworks from the roof. Ray’d been gone, to some tournament in Mississippi or Alabama, wuffling around on some wretched, groomed piece of reclaimed swamp.

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baby? Lorraine didn’t know that they were Alpinists of the roof, that they’d flicked dozens of ashes from dozens of butts into the gutters.

He’d remembered, as Keefer squealed and patted him with her tiny hand as if to reassure him not to be afraid, Georgia’s face washed in green and gold . . . look, Keefer, diamonds in the sky . . .

Of course he’d remember the appointment. How could he forget?

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He had forgotten.

Faith was still dumbfounded when people forgot, just nipped out to buy nail tips at the Sam’s Club when she showed up on their doorsteps for appointments planned months in advance. The same people who vowed tearfully that their rights to their children were more important to them than their own lives—and she did not, for a single instant, doubt this (the ownership of a child was elemental to the majority of people)—then spaced out on the very interviews that could support their case.

It should not surprise her. Even self-aware people were prone to avoidance. And the self-aware were not Faith’s customary clients.

Gordon had been in the shower. She’d rung the buzzer politely, twice, then leaned on it, and then finally rung the other apartment. A fierce-faced woman nearly ripped the outer door from its hinges, spitting out a perfunctory “Yes?” When Faith explained her errand, the woman, who introduced herself as Judy Wilton, the owner of the house, quieted down and explained how fortuitous it was that she was there at all; she wouldn’t have answered either except for having come home from the store to shower off the cheese smell from the store before her annual gyn checkup, a little more than Faith had needed to know.

Gordon opened the door in his gym shorts, thankfully not his boxers, with Keefer toddling naked behind him.

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The stern faces of the two callers alarmed him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked sheepishly.

“You’re okay, then,” Judy Wilton said, ruffling her spiky hair. “You didn’t answer.”

“We were . . . busy,” Gordon said, “What’s the matter? Were we making too much noise? We were in the shower.”

“Evidently,” said the other woman. “I’m Faith Bogert?” He smiled and cocked a finger at her and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” But she saw the realization dawning in his face, even as he made his feeble joke, that this was the social worker and he had forgotten his appointment.

Judy Wilton, meanwhile, whirled and stomped down the stairs.

Faith reflected that people always said the same thing when they heard her name. “It’s with an
e
, not an
a
,” Faith said. She always said that. “No relation to the actor.”

That had the effect of relaxing him. Faith noticed his shoulders sliding down from their protective posture. Good. “May I come in?”

“Of course, I’m sorry. Well, the
C
in my name is for ‘Cooper,’ ” he said, blushing, suddenly aware of his clothing deficit, “not that anyone ever knows that. My dad was this big space buff.” Faith had no idea what he was talking about. But she nodded. “Parents,” she said, with a practiced sigh.

Gordon swept a pile of laundry from the sofa to make room for her.

He really was good-looking, Faith thought. The kind of man who never noticed her, who would see right through her if she walked down the aisle of the church stark naked. She was practical about men; her mother had seen to that. She didn’t even send prayers after the ones who wouldn’t be worth the effort. Pretty boys never went the distance; she’d known that since middle school, before she’d ever heard of a narcissistic personality. She stifled the reflex irritation with herself for having felt so fat that morning that she’d resorted to her stirrup pants and a tunic—stirrup pants were like a genetic marker for women who had something between their neck and their knees that they wanted to cover.

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more attention to her than to the little girl. He didn’t let the baby run past him out into the hall. There were stairs out there. He was probably a good guy.

Her job was to find out whether he’d be a good father.

Faith had been carefully named (her middle name, to her despair, was Angel). She’d been carefully raised by a mother few people thought had the gumption for it. That she’d gone to college at all, much less become a psychologist (and there were people who hadn’t thought she’d had the guts or the genes to do that, either), was a by-product of her own rearing. The single daughter of a single mother, she’d turned out better than anyone in Plano, North Dakota, had expected. That was a factor in her getting this job, a weighty job. She was only a twenty-seven-year-old whose ink hadn’t dried on her Ph.D., still in her postdoc supervision. But her boss gave her cases they called A Gees, their private code for “anybody’s guess,” evaluations mandated by nasty divorces or investigations into charges of neglect. Faith had already seen much during her internships, public and private—a pregnant ninth-grader with a baby and fifteen possible candidates for the lucky sperm; grandmoms who went to play bingo and left six-month-olds asleep, watched over by Dobermans who bit the sheriff’s deputy after she forced the door. And worse, much, much worse. A nine-month-old with gonorrhea of the mouth. One perfect five-year-old—the object of a feral struggle between two divorcing parents—who could tap dance like a Mouseketeer but screamed whenever she saw a cigarette.

Faith’s mother had been poor, a waitress literally until the day she died three years before, struck head on by a drunk while driving home from work. Faith had not only the credentials, but the chops. She could see past dirty hair and ragged pajamas to identify love unlearned but devoted, and past Baby Gap clothes to dirt that would never show in a photograph. She understood her prejudices and guarded herself against them.

She’d already visited the busy, sparkling interior of the Cadys’

condo—mermaid wallpaper already going up for Keefer; the older girl’s room plain white, no attempt to impose any decorating ideas on a teen, good job, there—it had turned her heart, she couldn’t deny. And Delia, Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 136

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who ran her own cosmetics business from the house. Faith admired her skill in making more money than her husband while still keeping up the impression of a wife at home, so important to both of them.

Delia was probably a little too organized, the kind who offered a coaster before the guest accepted a drink. But Faith knew Delia would offer the same drink to a bum or a senator. There was something in Delia of Faith’s own mother, that same combination of deep pride and caution. She had no illusions about the advantages of the two-parent family. All a child really needed was the absolute love of one relatively sane parent.

Craig didn’t really loom large in the Cady family unit. Craig was a little uptight. His relationship with Alexis Tyson, the child of his wife’s previous marriage, who lived with them except for two weeks each summer when she went to visit her motorcycle mechanic papa, was clearly a source of strain. The girl’s room was the typical cyclone scene, and Craig winced when he opened the door. Craig might have stayed at home with his folks just a couple of years too long—thirty-five was pretty late for a first marriage. And yet, despite their shared devotion to religion, neither Cady insisted that Alexis attend Cornerstone Community Church with them on Wednesdays and Sundays. The girl had no interest in Sunday school—“Why would anybody want more school?” she’d asked.

It was a sort of garden-variety rebellion, a lot less harrowing than others she could have chosen. Delia and Craig seemed to know that and took care to drop her off at the pool or the library with her own cell phone for emergencies. This pointed to a welcome flexibility that didn’t always go along with a big emphasis on organized religion, as well as an untutored wisdom: After all, the great majority of premature sexual experimentation took place when the parents of young teens were at work.

Both Craig and Delia would come up a little high on the inventories for obsessiveness. She would explain in her report to the guardian ad litem that the Cadys’ results on the MMPI-Inventory II weren’t exactly reliable, but no cause for alarm—they would not only be “faking good” the way everyone did who wanted the child, filling in all the most vir-Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 137

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tuous circles on those endless questions, but they would actually be

“too good.” As born-agains, they would have to be less suspicious about their fellow men than others.

For Faith, the most telling point in the Cady evaluation had been the play observation. That couldn’t be faked. Delia was a real mother who knew that playing with a toddler basically meant following the little person around, offering a sponge when the chubby fist closed determinedly around a fork, changing activities every ninety seconds, hanging loose when the kid kicked over the blocks. The outlets were covered but the cabinets that held the Tupperware were open.

Craig had done the right thing, too, during playtime. Nothing. He’d held back. He’d had no idea what to do with Keefer, so he’d watched his wife. The Cadys had no children of their own, he’d confided, because Delia’s health was delicate. Delia Cady had some muscle weakness, and suspected MS, which had disabled her mother’s sister. Faith would have bet it was stress.

Gordon’s house was also neat and safe, if not exactly child friendly.

There were half-filled glasses of water sitting around and a gymnasium’s worth of bats and rackets and golf clubs . . . yikes, and a jockstrap. The outlets in use were in plain sight at baby eye level, though the ones not in use had plastic caps.

Still, Keefer wasn’t yet in residence full-time.

Gordon began to show Faith around. He seemed very proud of the dog bed.

Faith had to smile.

She didn’t smile, however, when Gordon twice let his arm brush her shoulder for a trace of a second too lingeringly. He was checking her out, trying to figure out if she was unmarried and susceptible. Perhaps unaware that he was doing it at all. Faith offered to hold the baby while he got into some clothes.

“I don’t know if she’ll go to you.”

“Well, they usually do,” Faith told him, taking Keefer and turning, in one motion, to point out the robin tending to its nestlings in the fragile birch outside Gordon’s living room window. “Lookee. Baby birds,” she said, and Keefer—what a doll she was—made peeping noises.

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“I’m surprised,” Gordon said. He’s disappointed, thought Faith.

“Well, better get dressed before she decides against it,” Faith instructed him. He emerged in two minutes, still mostly wet, but at least decent.

“I’m sorry I was still in the shower when you got here,” he began.

“It’s right on the calendar. But she was up all night. She got a cold at the Cadys’ house. I know that’s prejudiced of me. I feel like, whenever she’s away from me, they don’t look after her as well.”

“What did you do about it?”

“Well, I can’t kill them.”

“I assume that’s a joke.”

He’d given her a sharp glance. “Of course. The Cadys are good people. They just don’t know the Keefster very well.”

“I meant about her cold.”

“There’s a routine. You have to feed her buttered noodles. That’s her comfort food. And then, I put her in the bed with me . . . that’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Plenty of people have their kids sleep in their bed with them.”

“And then we do the chant.”

“The chant?”

“Well, I make this noise, like a little motor. And then she starts to make it, too. And I pet her head. And she falls asleep. Of course, then I can’t move.”

“Move?”

“Well, then I have to stay there with her. So she doesn’t roll out.

Like, last night, I was going to do some lesson plans, but I didn’t put them by the bed before she fell asleep. And the chant can put me to sleep, too. I’m just a sleeper. So, I guess that’s how I forgot. Though my mother did remind me last night at the fireworks.”

“Did they scare her?”

“Nah. Nothing scares her,” Gordon told Faith, with a sniff of pride,

“except when you hand her to someone she doesn’t know.” The previous year, Gordon said, he and his sister climbed out on the roof with Keefer to watch the display over Rotary Park. “My sister and I used to sit out there and talk in the summer and flick the butts . . .” Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 139

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“You’re a smoker, then?”

“No, I don’t mean . . . cigarettes. We were kids. You know, in college. We weren’t . . . smoking when we were out there with the baby.