A Theory of Relativity (23 page)

“I never know how long it’s going to take to get to somewhere,” Diane explained. “You-all seem to be fixing the roads all the time, and all the roads go in circles.”

Suddenly and utterly, Lorraine understood the sense in which her students used the phrase “Whatever.”

Diane offered to wait until five. She had to take her cleansing tea, after all. Or she could sit outside in the car.

Lorraine was flabbergasted. “Forget it,” she said, “you can take Keefer early.”

Lorraine had the car seat, so Gordie couldn’t bring Keefer over. She suggested Diane follow her in her own car, but Diane said she was sure she’d get lost. Diane assured her that “the kids,” by which she meant Delia, had everything Baby needed, a whole other set of toys and clothes (Diane-type clothes, Lorraine assumed, shiny patent-leather Mary Janes with no arch support, and teeny golf togs with flag and alligator embroidery, shelves of pouting, sultry, hideously buxom ballerina Barbies, pink plastic purses with toy lipsticks like sticks of lard, terrifying videos like the one Keefer brought home, about a family of cucum-bers who cried because their daddy was run over by the wheelbarrow).

Lorraine had seen the smudgy Polaroids tucked into Keefer’s diaper bag, tucked in as if to taunt her and Mark and Gordie with the largesse of that good ol’ Southern-fried Christians-R-Us upbringing. Fuming, Lorraine thought, why had Georgia, her finely strung, impatient daughter, ever suborned that Delia, anyhow? Because she was lonely, Lorraine answered herself, lonely and away from Lindsay and them and all the things of home, away from Gordie off on one of his goddamned save-the-world joy-sails, stuck on a sand spit, hungry for company and Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 148

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inclusion. That had forever been Georgia’s tender heel—wanting to be wanted.

Before they left, Lorraine called Gordon, warning him not to forget the flannel shirt of Ray’s that Nora had stuffed to make a pillow Keefer called “Day-doe.” Throw in her plain wooden blocks, too, Lorraine added, and her duck-family puppets. Let them see what toddlers ought to play with.

“She’ll be happier if she has the same things every day,” Lorraine told Diane. “I’m sure Delia knows that.”

“I’m sure she knows best,” Diane agreed, with exasperating complacency.

They’d set off, Diane perched rigidly on the passenger bucket as if she were on a roller-coaster ride. Lorraine caught a profile instant of Diane’s slack, powder-pale expanse of chin, its pert previous architec-ture still evident but wistful, like a ghost who doesn’t know about its demise, and she felt soiled, sorry. No good would come of a verbal broadsword battle between old broads, each with their favorite swords.

Lorraine could have demolished Diane—“Thank goodness, you’ve gotten your appetite back, Diane”—but it would have been too easy.

Then Diane said, “Don’t take it out on Delia. Say whatever you want to me. I know that you’re unhappy about how this has turned out.”

“You can hardly say things have ‘turned out,’ Diane,” Lorraine replied, deliberately staring ahead, braking a little sharply, aware that Diane’s head bobbed, “There’s been no decision made. And no matter what happens with Keefer, this is still an awful time for me. What’s going on between our families only makes it worse. Because my daughter is still gone.”

“And my son.”

“And your son. Neither of us can replace . . . our children with Keefer.”

“It’s a family issue.”

“It is, but the family at issue is Keefer’s family. It’s not what’s best for you and Ray or Mark and me. It’s not even what Ray and Georgia may have wanted, at any given time. It’s what’s best for Keefer. We all have to think of it from her point of view. “

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That sounded wise. Wiser than Lorraine felt. For all she knew, she had just put her mouth around a barefaced lie. In truth, she considered this battle her homage to Georgia half the time. She often thought of Keefer as Georgia’s miniature.

“I hope you aren’t going on about this as a personal thing, Lorraine,” Diane offered.

“It’s entirely personal, Diane. That’s all it is.”

“It’s not. It’s a matter of law. The law is the law.”

“The law is the law? There’s been no crime committed. No one’s breaking any law.”

“I’m really not free to discuss that.”

“Oh, good,” Lorraine snorted, “let’s not discuss it.” She’d been angry by then, and should have, she thought in retrospect, let it drop.

But Diane persisted, “All I was meaning to suggest was, I hope you don’t think that we, or that the kids mean this as any reflection on you-all, as people.”

Lorraine slumped. She did know that. “Of course, we don’t think it’s meant that way. And, by the same token, Gordon doesn’t mean this as a reflection on you as people, either. He just wants what’s best for Keefer.”

“If he does, then he will come to know what we already know. And I hope you’ll come to feel the peace of God in that way, too, Lorraine—” Diane had clearly been inhaling Delia’s vapors along with her cleansing teas—“because if this weren’t the way it was meant to be, God would have sent a message.”

“What if he has, and you can’t read it?” Oh, shut up, please, Lorraine reprimanded herself. She imagined Greg Katt sitting in his office over Tree’s Company Antiques, his ears getting red and hot as she blithely bandied words with an adversary who was probably wearing a tape recorder. No, Diane couldn’t have organized herself to record a conversation. Diane was incapable of buckling her own watchband.

Mark suggested that Florida women had lost the gene for autonomous dressing through natural selection during the antebellum era.

Or, Lorraine thought, was all that dependency just a social ruse?

What if Diane was here by design? Recording the conversation on Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 150

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advice of her attorneys? Katt had regaled them with the strange things people did during custody battles.

“Diane,” Lorraine said cautiously, slowly turning onto First Street, “I don’t know what God thinks about it, but I know we’re trying to do what we think is the right thing, just as you are.”

“But you have no idea how we feel!”

“How you and Ray feel?”

“All of us! Keefer Kathryn is our flesh and blood, Lorraine!”

“And ours, too, Diane.”

“But she’s not.” Diane’s carefully roseate lips met with an audible pop, a cartoon representation of sudden ruefulness.

Cold sweat broke out below Lorraine’s breasts. She considered whether she would actually hit Diane. Diane was larger, but Lorraine was fairly sure that she was stronger. Instead, she stopped in the middle of the deserted street and turned full to face the passenger seat.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. Let’s go get Keefer Kathryn.”

“What . . . did . . . you . . .
say
.” Diane sighed a windy sigh. “You force me, Lorraine. It’s not fair. You hear? It’s just that she’s not really your flesh and blood. Even if you feel that way. I know you loved Georgia, but she was an adopted child.

Keefer Kathryn is a Nye, Lorraine.”

The children had once, without Lorraine’s knowledge, filled paper cups with freshwater snails at the beach on Hat Lake. By the time their swim was over, they’d forgotten their treasures, which they’d left in the stifling backseat of Lorraine’s car on a breathless August afternoon. Two days later, she’d opened her door to a stench so potent it was like a shove in the face. Lorraine reeled back, literally having to stumble to the trash cans to throw up as the garage filled with the overwhelming reek of decay. What Lorraine felt, when she’d smelled that smell, was rage. She felt precisely this way now.

Diane had not noticed. Her accent grew deeper and wider as she rounded each bend of logic: Lorraine had never experienced a child growing in her body, and all that meant was that Lorraine could not see Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 151

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how a child could be a part of you. “We’ve tried our very best to understand, Lorraine,” she said. “But now you-all are going to have to understand the facts of life, the way things are in the real world.”

“The real world,” Lorraine said, her voice suddenly calm.

There was another Lorraine, a Lorraine damp and quaking, throwing open drawers and clawing out underclothes, tossing them overhead with clawed hands, delving for pill bottles, cracking the bottles, scrabbling for the contents. But that was another self, over there. The other Lorraine, who was driving the car, was looking down on Diane from a great height.

One thing was clear: Lorraine needed her wits about her. Every wit.

She would never take another pill living in a world among such dangerous fools. She would do what she should have done months ago. Cut out even coffee. Take gingko to sharpen her memory. She would train like a mental marathoner.

Diane jibbered, “Delia is just like my own daughter, and Delia is unable to have children, but do you think she would go to China or Peru or somewhere and adopt someone else’s baby? She would not do that. She would just as soon not have a child. And Craig? He feels just the same way. They’re willing to take Baby into their hearts because she is blood, Lorraine! They would not consider adopting a child who was not of their own blood. That is why this happened in this way, Lorraine.

This is not our ill will. It’s family.”

Lorraine had serenely parked the car and begun moving Keefer’s car seat. She had not answered Diane, though Diane kept talking; Lorraine could see her jaw working up and down. When Gordon walked out onto the front stoop with Keefer, Lorraine kissed the child, then silently walked past her son and went up the hall stairway into his apartment.

She picked up the telephone and dialed Greg Katt and insisted on speaking to him instantly.

After they’d finished speaking, she went home and flushed every pill in her house, all the bigs and the littles. She kept only a few painkillers, thinking, supersititiously, there might someday come a time when she had a pain she really needed to kill.

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*

*

*

“She said she would see that woman in hell,” Gordon later told Tim Upchurch, as they drove through the dark toward their morning tee at Blackwolf.

“It sounds like it was quite a brawl,” Tim said.

They’d stopped to grab a bite after softball, earlier in the evening, and Church had come back from using the phone, grinning, saying road trip. A member down at Blackwolf must have died or something—because, surprise!—they had a tee time at seven in the morning. Pleading a stroke of heaven-sent luck, pleading his one day to play golf of the entire lost summer, Gordon broke a dinner date with Lindsay, who was distant. Gordon tried not to notice. He was excited, primed. He would be good. He would feel as Ray had always told him it was possible to feel, no matter how long you had to furlough. There was no need to fear the first day out. It was like sex, it was like riding a bike; the hands did not forget. Church, wild as a cat under the sprinkler, would be firing them everywhere but down the center, terrorizing small woodland creatures and marketing executives parking their Beamers in the parking lot. It would not matter. Gordon would forget all about babies and lawyers and just play the game.

They had no idea where they were going to sleep, certainly not at the inn in Kohler, where a room cost what Gordon paid every six months for car insurance. They would figure that out later. Serendipity was the essence of a road trip.

“My mom said she’d see that woman in hell, and that the Nyes didn’t understand anything about us, and then she called Katt and we went over and officially filed my adoption petition. At like, five o’clock. The clerk was madder than hell. And then she said she and my dad were going to go camping. Camping! The last time they went camping, I was like, ten.”

“Jesus. Did she say why?”

“Why the adoption or why camping?”

“Why Diane in hell,” Tim said, glancing covertly around him before opening the bottle of St. Pauli Girl he’d nested between his legs. The highway was jammed with people in SUVs, all driving in the opposite Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 153

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direction, desperately heading north to camp and fish on the last long weekend of summer.

“She didn’t tell me why they were going camping. And she didn’t tell me what led to the fight. I was afraid to ask. My mom has a temper.

She always had a temper—”

“Well, Diane is an excellent bitch.”

“This brings it out in people.”

“What did she mean, Diane didn’t understand anything about you?”

“About our family.”

“Ray was great, though.”

“He was one of the greats.”

“How can people be so different from their folks?”

“I am.”

“Not so much. You and your folks are superclose. I don’t mean so much you’re like them, I mean you
like
them. I always thought that was weird, when we were kids, you were like, no, I’m going to stay home with my father because we’re going to do an experiment to turn cab-bage red or something. You’d stay home even if they didn’t make you.

Instead of going to the fort or something.”

“We did stuff that was fun. I used to think everybody paid as much attention to their kids as they did to us. But, you weren’t there for the great moments of Dad . . . like the time Georgia and I washed the basement stairs with the garden hose. This was my idea. I told her there were drains in the basement right at the bottom of the stairs, so the water would go right down—”

“You flooded the basement.”

“We flooded the yard. We flooded the Dwors’s yard next door. The water got so high it went right out the window wells. We were upstairs, like, watching
The Brady Bunch.
”

“He got mad, huh?”

“Georgia and I were down there swabbing until four in the morning. And then, when I got in bed, there’s Dad, shaking my shoulder. We have to go over and pick up everything for Bob and Mary next door.