A Theory of Relativity (22 page)

We were just watching the fireworks. The other . . . What I was talking about was years and years ago.”

“Ahhhh, yes.”

“And it really wasn’t a hundred times. I didn’t do the drug thing much. Neither did my sister. Really.”

“I’m not thinking that,” Faith told him warmly.

“Good,” Gordon let out a long breath. “Keefer, Keefer. Your mama loved you.” Hearing her name, Keefer toddled over and leaned against her uncle’s knee.

“Oh, gosh,” Faith sighed, going for empathy, enlisting his coopera-tion, “we have a million miles of ground to cover. And these things.” She took out her sheaf of forms, the MMPI and the MCMI-III, the sentence completion sheet. “This junk takes hours to do. Who’s going to watch the baby?”

“Uh, well, I am,” said Gordon, his eyes popping. They were truly gray. Most people, Faith had observed from having to observe so many, described misty, changeable eyes as gray or green if they’d been to college, and blue if they had not. It was a weird artifact.

Few, however, no matter how they described them, really had gray eyes. She hauled her gaze back to the folders.

“I’m afraid this stuff is something you really have to concentrate on,” Faith apologized. “It’s like the SATs. If you even get a mark in the wrong place—

“I’ll end up saying I prefer killing animals to building birdhouses,” he said. “Or dressing up in women’s clothes and making phony nine-one-one calls.”

“Something like that. It’s a personality inventory.” Faith made quote marks in the air.

“I only have one.”

“What?”

“Personality.”

“Let us be the judge of that,” Faith replied, walking the line.

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“I’ll call my mom.”

“Is she . . . at work?”

“She’s home because it’s summer. She’s a teacher. We’re both teachers. My dad was a teacher, too. Now, he’s a vitamin butcher.”

“A . . . butcher?”

“He sells vitamins. Like, to all the health-food stores on the planet.

Sort of helps . . . plan them. He works at Medi-Sun.” Gordon picked up the phone and called Lorraine, who said she’d be over within ten minutes.

“Okay. We’ll just do a couple of things while we wait,” Faith went on, “stuff I have to cover. Turn on the big lights, you know.”

“Serious business.”

“The most serious.”

“Shoot.”

“You’re adopted,” she’d said, when they sat down, Keefer in a diaper and a onesie planted with her musical blocks between Gordon’s feet.

“I . . . I was adopted, yes,” he acknowledged. Faith picked up on the tense.

“Of course,” she said.

“I mean, as my mom always says, you know, it’s not a life condition.”

“Of course. What I meant was, do you think that’s going to give you any special insights into raising Keefer?”

“Well, sure. My parents always told me certain things. . . . Like, you were so wanted we had to . . . you know, go out of our way to get you, to have you . . .”

“And . . . well, that’s not true for Keefer.”

“No. Yes and no. I mean, I could have done the same thing as Caroline Nye and Alison Nye, Ray’s sisters.’ ”

“In choosing not to try for custody . . . but they already have families—”

“Caro doesn’t. And it’s still selfish.”

Faith could see him panic, wish for an air hook to reclaim the last word.

“I don’t mean selfish. I mean, she’s their brother’s child, too. But Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 141

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Caroline is apparently getting a divorce, and Alison, I don’t even know Alison. I guess they have their reasons.”

“Do you wish they’d shown more interest?”

“No. It’s not like I want the competition.”

“Did you always intend to adopt Keefer?”

“I guess so. Sure.”

“Still, raising a baby is a big deal. And facing a custody case.”

“Yeah. I guess it’s a big case now, for sure. I hope they pull out of it and it doesn’t get that far. It would be a disagreeable business. Delia and Craig are nice people. Not exactly people I’d hang out with but . . .” Gordon scanned Faith’s face, which she’d composed to look impassive yet interested. “Still, I mean, this isn’t my top idea of how to spend a summer.”

“What is?”

“Oh”—Gordon leaned back, stretching out golden legs—“traveling.

I used to work for this outfit that took families or corporate types on sort of semiscientific cruises. Really, vacations. But you’d end up seeing something . . . not like the Epcot Center.”

“Won’t be doing much of that now.”

“No,” Gordon sighed, “I guess not.” Faith waited, giving him room for the obligatory follow-up, that Keefer was worth it, of course. It didn’t come.

“I’m hearing that maybe this is all kind of overwhelming.”

“Well, it is kind of overwhelming. Not Keefer. I’ve always helped out with Keefer, because . . . her mom, my sister, was sick, and her dad was . . . away a lot of the time. We didn’t blame Ray. He played golf. He was just starting to make it pay, you know? Georgia accepted it. She wanted that for him.”

“But the whole parenthood thing. It’s huge.” Faith leaned forward, making a deliberate, visible effort to set her clipboard down beside her, as if she might neglect to take notes.

“Well, yeah. Being a parent. It’s . . . like full-time all the time. No overtime.” Gordon laughed. “I guess I had it kind of easy.”

“Not everyone would say that.”

“How so?”

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“Well, being adopted . . .”

“There’s no . . . you know, there’s no difficulty with being adopted.”

“But there are issues.”

“All I hear about is issues, these days.”

“Well, it’s one thing to think about that kids don’t ordinarily have to think about.”

“Are you adopted?”

“No.”

“Well, how do you know what people think about it?”

“The literature. It’s known.”

“Who does the literature come from?”

“I don’t get you.”

“Well, it comes from psychologists who were . . . studying people who were already having trouble with something, or else they wouldn’t have been talking to a psychologist, right?”

“No,” Faith said, “just ordinary, well-adjusted, normal adoptees, too.”

“I mean, look at that. That word.
Adoptees.
It’s like you had a limb removed or something.”

“Well, it’s a word for a way of being—”

“It’s a word like, you know, back when people started calling people

‘adult children of alcoholics.’ Then, it was just shortened to ‘adult children.’ Well, everybody gets to be an ‘adult child’ sooner or later, right?”

“I guess. But Mr. McKenna, the point is, I’m trying to learn what you hope to help Keefer understand about her background.”

“Well, it’s not like my own situation is. Or was.”

“How so?”

“Well, I am her birth family.”

“I see what you mean. Though, not technically.”

“Well, now I’m not following you.”

“I mean, yes, you’ve known Keefer since she was born, but you are not a member of her biological family, since—”

“Her mother was my sister. I don’t see how much closer you can get.”

Faith backed off, sitting back in the chair, trying to give him room.

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“I know what you’re saying, but Georgia and I grew up together. I was there when Keefer was born. I guess you could say I know first-hand everything you could know about being adopted and everything you could know about Keefer’s birth parents, and so . . .”

“And so?”

“And so,” Gordon said, revealing a smile of unnerving evenness,

“I’m perfect.”

Then, the doorbell sounded, and Faith thought, we’ll see. We’ll see.

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At least the other shoe had dropped. Any more pussyfooting around might have driven Lorraine over an irretrievable edge. Even Mark—who still maintained that he would not surrender to bitterness—could not contain his disdain for Craig and Delia after they made it clear they wanted to adopt Keefer.

To take Keefer, a child they barely knew, from the people who had raised her and, thus far, raised her well.

The outrage. To describe the Cadys, Mark had used phrases he had never used for anyone else in their three-plus decades of life together—

“deceitful finger-pointing” and “hypocritical ironies.” And when it came to Diane Nye, though Mark no longer said anything, his silence was ominous.

Lorraine could no longer think of Diane Nye without a wince of humiliation. When Lorraine had finally lost it, she’d said things to Diane Nye that made her ashamed. But Diane had been the one who turned up the flame.

She and Mark and Gordon, with only the occasional small teakettle shriek, had gone about all summer long with a tight lid on the simmer-ing kettle. They’d pretended to be strong and showed one another concerned, contained faces. They went out of their way to help each other out. Nora made only the slightest comment one day that the lavender was full in, and no one had laid a sweep on Georgia’s grave, and every-144

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one knew how much Georgia loved lavender. By sundown there was a foothill of lavender, their gently moving petals, to McKenna eyes at the plateglass picture window across the street, a profusion of violet butterflies. Each one of them had taken on the obligation to do it, out of consideration for the others.

In all their dealings with Greg Katt, they remained courteous, hoping not to come off as hysterical. True, lately he seemed to pull a new gremlin out of the custody hat with each phone call, each meeting, each pleading. True, he seemed bent on senselessly frustrating them by requiring them to witness endless proceedings at which they never spoke and barely understood what was going on.

They avoided people outside the family, and people outside the family avoided them, as if the freakishness of the McKenna disaster challenged ordinary interaction and might possibly be contagious. Natalie Chaptman, Karen Wright, Sheila Larsen, and others from the church abandoned their program of bringing over casseroles. Lorraine’s formal thank-you notes made it seem as though friends were demanding more of the McKennas by helping than by leaving them alone. Mark and Lorraine, sometimes with Gordon and Lindsay, had begun eating Sunday dinners out at the farm with Nora and Hayes. The head of the table was saved specially for Keefer’s high chair, even when Keefer was in Madison with the Nyes. Nothing was said to inaugurate a tradition. They simply were asked one Sunday, went, then went again the next. By the third Sunday, they were expected.

Privately, they burst. One bashed the hard bag. One beheaded the rhododendrons. One stood at the bedroom window in her room, watching the lazy moon rock onto her back, while on the chair lay an album open to photos of Georgia in Ojibway war paint at the county fair, Georgia with two teeth missing and her parakeet, Rhoda, perched on her head. One bit a pillow and cried hard, secret tears.

It was not Diane’s intention to blow the lid on all the restrained anguish. But that was the result.

To begin with, Lorraine couldn’t believe the gall. Diane came on her own to pick Keefer up for a weekend visit. This had to be on the advice of counsel. Either that, or the woman was a nitwit. She had to know she was like fresh kill in the lion’s den.

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After that day, Gordon said he wished they had some kind of pneu-matic tube through which they could whoosh Keefer back and forth, and goofy as that sounded, Lorraine knew exactly how he felt.

Keefer was to be available to her paternal relatives for twice-monthly visits at 5:00 P.M. on Fridays. It was more like 2:00 when Diane showed up.

Lorraine had been at her desk in the living room, halfheartedly concocting a pastiche of fall lesson plans from successful no-brainers of previous years. Before Georgia’s illness, she’d given herself the shakes brimming over with new ideas for upcoming terms. Her last years of teaching were to be her most daring. Mark had even begun helping her knock together a little darkroom in an unused closet in the art room so that she could do a three-week unit on black-and-white photography.

The
National Geographic
photographers who were working on the woodland people’s dig had donated three perfectly serviceable old cameras. One guy was even ready to show Lorraine the rudiments of hand-coloring photos. Imagine the gifts the kids could make for their parents!

But now she would only do her best.

She would earn her pension.

At least the early days would be easy. She’d do things like face-and-vase exercise, for training the sides of the brain to truly experience their reverse connection to the hands, asking the right-handed kids to draw a profile of a face on the left side of the paper, facing the center, and then leading them through the left brain, gradually teasing out of them the awareness of how their right brains could “feel” shape and line in a non-verbal way. She’d teach self-collages. Word collages. Scrapbook collages. Pinch pots and then thrown pots . . . art-school stuff. It would not be easy. It would murder a part of Lorraine to sleepwalk through her teaching. Lorraine had just gotten up to treat herself to peppermint tea and a Percodan when the doorbell rang.

It had done her heart good to see that Diane looked ten years older.

And had gained weight.

Hey, sweetie, Lorraine called to Georgia’s spirit, look at that big roll Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 147

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of dough over the waist of her Puritan shorts. Bet those shorts weren’t from the children’s department.

“Hello,” Lorraine had said. “Are you early?” Diane merely shrugged.

“Well, Diane,” Lorraine said then, “what are we going to do for three hours?” Trade recipes, she thought? Forget we’re embroiled in a bitter lawsuit and discuss new fall fashions?