A Theory of Relativity (27 page)

Look, let’s get back to Gunther’s point. If you were a little kid and you made a drawing of a man and a drawing of a chimpanzee, they would look almost alike, right? At least more alike then a drawing of a chimpanzee and a chicken? What does that tell you?”

“Well, why aren’t lizards evolving to be more like humans?”

“Because they don’t need to! Human beings aren’t the most evolved species on earth.”

“They are! They can think!”

“In fact, there are probably bacteria on the floor of the Atlantic ocean more highly evolved than human beings . . . because they’ve had more time.”

“You’re saying a human being is no better than a bacteria?” Woffling again.

“Not better at being a bacteria! Look, you guys, evolution is not a theory. It’s a fact. The theory part is about how exactly it happened, because we weren’t there to see it happen. I don’t know how. I’m not a Presbyterian minister. I’m not a cell biologist. I’m a science teacher—”

“Do you believe in God?” Reilly asked, adding, “Einstein believed in God.”

“Maybe God created evolution,” Kelly Rafferty sang out, “to give us something to do.”

The buzzer sounded. There was a God.

Gordon dropped his head on the shelf of his cupped hands. “Read chapter four for tomorrow,” he blurted. As they all thundered out the door, he could hear Gunther declaiming to all and sundry that he wasn’t no bacteria, and if a man wasn’t better than an ape, why was a man made in the image of God. There’d be a nice phone call from Mrs. Woffling tomorrow. And then he noticed, felt, a presence next to his desk.

Kelly Rafferty.

“Mr. McKenna,” she said shyly, “my mom told me about—”about that night at the lodge, Gordon thought; my career sinks slowly in the Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 176

176

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

west; this is the end; no more worries about day care—“about your little baby . . .” Gordon’s heart resumed ordinary rhythms. “I can’t baby-sit in Tall Trees because I bus. But Melinda Gallo and Kathy Zurich baby-sit all the time. And they said I could tell you they’d help you out, because you seem kind of tired.”

“How about two days a week after school and Sundays?” Kelly blinked. “Well, I’ll ask them.”

Gordon had to ask, too. He had to ask Hart Rooney whether it violated any policy, however obscure, to ask one of his students to baby-sit for him. Rooney had smiled, looking not one day older than he had when Gordon mowed his lawn. “Why, Gordon,” he said easily, “I never had a baby-sitter who didn’t go to this school. Where else would you find teenagers? Just be careful they don’t get into the beer or drive your car.”

And so they came, Melinda and Kathy, his saviors, his baggy-pants saints, Wednesdays and Thursdays after pom practice, and took Keefer to the park or helped her make towers of her blocks, for two hours, while he unplugged the telephone and threw himself across the first horizontal space he could find. So began another short, deceptive period of peace.

Before the night of the bloody nose.

Keefer had been tantrumming. What started it? She’d figured out how to work the nozzle on his shaving cream and he’d let her squirt it into the bathtub a couple of times, but then she’d started squirting it on the walls, on the floor, and he’d taken it away and given her one of her puppets instead. She hit the ceiling. Or more correctly, she hit the floor.

Dropped to her knees in the bathroom, screeching, and then slipped on the shaving cream and went down on the tile, and he saw the blood.

“Oh my baby, my baby seal,” he’d cried, snatching her up, cradling her against his shirt. The blood wouldn’t stop. Holding her in one arm, he fumbled to knock some ice loose from the glacier in his freezer, grab a towel. Keefer was in full cry when he heard a knock at the door. Three knocks. Sharp and loud.

“I won’t hesitate to call the police,” said Judy Wilton.

“What?”

Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 177

A Theory of Relativity

177

“I just want you to know that I won’t hesitate to call the sheriff, or call the welfare,” his downstairs neighbor went on. “Look at her!” He looked at her, at them. He was holding a baby whose face was smeared with blood, who was screaming and pounding on his equally bloody chest with all her might. “Judy,” he soothed, “she’s having a tantrum.”

“This is not normal. I hear this all the time. That baby crying as if her heart would break. I don’t know what you have going on here—”

“She wanted the shaving cream. She was playing with the shaving cream.” Of course he was lying, that was what Judy Wilton thought.

And he began to feel as though he were, indeed, lying. “This isn’t what it looks like. She’s just mad. She fell and got a bloody nose.”

“I’m not going to let you do this to a child.”

“Do what? Judy, I love Keefer. I’ve never laid a hand on Keefer. You know that. You see us together.”

“I hear you together. I hear how that child cries. I see the women parading in and out of here at all hours.”

“What?”

“That Snow girl. And those college kids.”

“Those are my students, Judy. They’re my baby-sitters. Lindsay has been my girlfriend for years, and Jesus, Judy. Get a life of your own.

What, do you sit down there making a list about who comes into my house?”

She’d given him one brief, bitter nod. An hour later, Sheriff Larsen hit the front-door buzzer, looking as though he were about to bawl.

“Now, Gordo, I don’t want you to get all in a sweat here.”

“She called, didn’t she?”

“She called.”

Sorrowfully, the sheriff explained the procedure. When an accusa-tion of suspected child abuse was filed, no matter if the person in question was Dale Larsen’s own mother, he was legally bound to alert the county. That didn’t mean anything bad would happen, but a social worker would come over and have a chat with him—

“And then there’ll be a record of that in some file, right?”

“There’ll be a record, Gordon, to say the charge was unfounded. It Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 178

178

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

happens to a lot of people, Gordon. Neighbors say things out of spite.

People think they’re seeing something they’re not seeing—”

“And what if it means the judge says I’m a child abuser and I lose Keefer because of it?”

“If the charge turns out to be unfounded, then that’s the end of it. A judge is legally bound, just like I am, to consider that investigation complete and valid, see?”

“I didn’t hurt Keefer! She bumped her nose on the floor trying to get the shaving cream!”

“Judy said there was all kinds of mayhem up here all the time.”

“That’s because she’s a crazy old bat who probably has microphones on the ceiling so she can have some diversion besides cutting up chickens for her father. She probably bites the heads off the chickens. Do you know her?”

Dale Larsen did know Judy Wilton. Knew for a fact she’d had a tempestuous lesbian love affair with Liz Kildeer, who used to be the women’s tennis pro up at Fidelis Hill, and that deputies had been called out to this very house more than once to quell some pretty intense sobfests and fisticuffs. He hated like hell to do this to Gordon, but the law was the law. And the social worker who dropped by the next day spent a compassionate fifteen minutes with Gordon and Keefer, assuring Gordon afterward that he saw no evidence of any abuse or neglect of this very loved child, who obviously trusted her daddy.

But Gordon remained certain that Faith Bogert would know about the complaint, would know and would use it against him in court, and even when Keefer began occasionally sleeping through the night, Gordon would never have slept at all if it hadn’t been for the sedatives his mother seemed to suddenly have in unlimited supply, which he used only once in a while and with terror, fearing Keefer would wake crying and he would not hear her, but Judy Wilton would.

In fact, Faith Bogert did not know about the complaint, not until much later. What she did know, when she arrived for the second observation, she saw things for which she would not have needed an MMPI or an MCMI-III, though the tests had validated her impression.

Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 179

A Theory of Relativity

179

She knew that Gordon was a highly functioning and seemingly optimistic person, who exhibited no overt pathology, with elements of what Faith would have described, if pressed, as characteristics of a mildly narcissistic personality, which was not in and of itself a problem. No more a problem than the fact that the Cadys’ test results were utterly unreliable, because their evangelistic Christian beliefs led them to a trust and belief in human goodness way off the scale for an ordinary person. The husband had a rather elevated score for aggression, but that was no big deal. Police officers, for example, often scored way too high in righteous indignation, which in another person, might signal paranoia.

Still, as she watched Gordon try to lead the baby back to her blocks until she finally leaned over and delicately bit him on the leg, Faith wondered whether Gordon’s self-centeredness—no, his self-involvement—-would prevent him from making the kind of sacrifices a single parent would have to make, that her mother had made. He was an I-guy. And a busy little bee, too. The phone kept ringing; he let it pick up. “Hey, Mr. McKenna, it’s Molly and Kathy, and we’re ready to start getting those straight A’s in Bio. Ready to hit the bed?” And twenty minutes later, “Gordie? Honey? Lindsay. Call me when she’s gone, okay? I’m going crazy.” And five minutes after that, “It’s firewoman Rafferty. You going to get that cute little butt out here for the tournament on Sunday? I think we can take all of them. Call you later.”

Red-faced, Gordon had hastened to explain, “Those are my baby-sitters. I sleep when they’re here. That’s what they meant. And my volleyball teammate.”

Faith simply said, “Don’t worry about it. Everybody’s life is complicated.”

“I’m dying of thirst here,” he’d told her then. “Want something?” He checked the refrigerator. “Got beer. Got water. Got frog blood. Got Pedialyte popsicles. How about Yoo-Hoo?”

“Thanks,” she said, “but no. I’m trying to quit.” She did look thinner, Gordon noticed, but still wearing the unfortunate stretch pants. Red this time. But . . . hell. He’d dressed Keefer spe-Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 180

180

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

cially, carefully—with much singing and anguish, dangling Georgia’s tinkly ankle bracelet in his teeth to distract her while she writhed like a python—in a cute little dress his aunt had sewn, each button a letter of the alphabet.

Now, she proceeded to pull the buttons off, one by one.

“Damn it, Keefer!” he yelped, without thinking.

Faith Bogert glanced out the window. And reached into her bag for a pen.

Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 181

The emotional hurdle for any judge was to avoid getting a swelled head. Ego was a snare Emily Sayward believed made people stupid. It was probably more poised to trip her up, Emily reasoned, here in Trempeauleau County than it would have been in the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin, because her presence as the word made flesh was so visible. All she had to do was stop for a root beer—or worse yet, a
beer
beer—on any street from Wausau to Morehouse to Conover to Tall Trees, and she parted the waters. Conversation shushed as if she’d waved a wand, only to close behind her in ripples. “It’s the judge,” she imagined them saying, “the lady judge,” even though she was only one of three. Emily prayed that the attention would have the sole effect of making her more careful and methodical, and she was careful by nature.

What didn’t help was that Emily Sayward was . . . cute. The face and form that gave her so much pleasure in her personal life was an annoyance in her profession. Since she’d left her family-law practice to come here, and especially since her appointment, something about her size compared with the psychic space of her role didn’t fit. Her robes looked like a costume. Her lipstick emphasized her habit of catching her underlip between her teeth as she was thinking hard.

Emily and her husband had come to live in their cabin on stilts, on Hat Lake, three years before, when Jamie, on a whim, applied and 181

Theory[113-221] 6/5/01 11:59 AM Page 182

182

JACQUELYN MITCHARD

somehow won the job of general counsel to Medi-Sun (having an His-panic mom had not hurt, Emily and Jamie privately believed). It was no robotic corporate stamper’s job. Vitamins and herbals were not the health candy people believed they were; and now that boomers were chugging handfuls of them daily, there were lawsuits of substantial pro-portions—the woman who chalked up her psychotic episodes to Valer-ian, the middle-aged man whose hopeful experiments with ManPower had prompted, or so he alleged, a perpetual and painful erection, and the cancer patients who had desperately forsworn their radiation and opened their arms to the health-food store. Disclaimers and directions were invisible to people, apparently. The work had demanded all that Jamie, a skilled and compassionate litigator, had to give, and the salary and stock benefits gave the Saywards more freedom and security to raise their son than they had dreamed of back in One-L, as they’d tried to visualize their futeres over Ramen noodles by candlelight.

Emily began as a county prosecutor. She had put Tom Collins, an unfortunate name for a woebegone drunkard, away for twenty years, revoked his driving privileges for life, and imposed an irrevocable condition of absolute sobriety upon parole. It had been a popular decision.

Though Tom Collins was a man with hundreds of distraught and influ-ential friends, the Redmonds’ lives had been erased. Just six weeks after the Collins trial, the conservative governor—no particular chum to Emily’s liberal leanings—had appointed her to fill the deceased Judge Crabtree’s unexpired term. Two years later, Emily cut her long hair to a brisk bob, taught herself to feel incomplete without a blazer, and ran on her own. She won.

But she knew her age and shape still made her look winsomely boy-ish. When the expressions of even habitual druggies and wife beaters she was sending to Wayadega softened as they listened to her, Emily could barely contain her chagrin.