A Theory of Relativity (3 page)

It’s like running the play up the middle. The other team catches on after a
while.

He wouldn’t have chosen this. But here it was.

He would take it as it came.

People would say he was being too . . . methodical or something.

They would say he shouldn’t even be thinking of the future at a time like this. They always said that. And it was always bullshit.

Well, he’d tried slowing down to the polite pace, and he had no tal-ent for it. Georgia loved to tell the story of Gordie’s first attempt at heroic sensitivity. Her name was Taylor, and for the first semester of college, a mere whiff of her Vanilla Bean sun lotion was a ticket to his instant erection. But fall melted into winter and then spring, and he’d got eyes for this peppery little New Yorker in his water-quality engineering lab, and that meant facing the inevitable kiss-off confrontation over caffeine. It seemed to Gordon an amazement of life: One day Taylor’s sleeping bag on Cocoa Beach was all he’d ever hoped of heaven, and the next day, it was like finishing off a pound of fudge. You just knew you would have to have time to forget the taste before you’d touch the stuff again. With what seemed to him great care, Gordon had explained to Taylor that he had hoped theirs would turn out to be a great year-long relationship, but instead, it had turned out to be a great three-month relationship. There was nothing wrong with them, nothing wrong with her, or with him. There was no reason to be sorry for the times they’d spent together; he would always remember them. She would always show up in his dreams, he said (and he’d liked this part), Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 11

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in Technicolor, and with the smell of vanilla. And in an instant, Taylor one-handed her heavy book bag across the table, knocking over his cup, burning the hell out of his thigh. . . . What? Why?

Don’t you get it, Gordo,
Georgia had asked him, back then, when he’d whined over the phone about the general unreasonableness of women,
don’t you get that you could have chosen a more sensitive way?

Gordon couldn’t believe it; that
had
been the sensitive way. The unvarnished truth would have been to tell Taylor that leaving him notes sealed with kitten stickers and insisting that the whorl of hair on the crown of a human head was an exact mirror of the solar system were things he could ignore only before the first full month they’d been sleeping together.

No, no, no
! Georgia had said.
No one could ever meet your standards
and still keep you from getting bored.
She told him that his intolerance for other people’s little quirks and weaknesses was really not integrity. It was a birth defect, a mental block that only tripped other people.

It had been only one dumb conversation. One of hundreds of impromptu brother-sister rants. But dying young, and leaving in her wake a raveled mess of intentions, Georgia had made all her words last words, and all her words prophetic . . .

It would finally come to him, long after the court proceedings were over, that he had—in innocence? in arrogance?—honestly thought that life could be lived like an experiment conducted in keeping with scientific method, that a certain set of results could be obtained and, once obtained, repeated. And it was not possible. Or it was possible only if you were a hermit. If your life was lived in contact with anyone else, contact changed the nature of the experiment. The uncontrolled variable intruded, the pressure of the human hand behind the instruments.

The day of the accident, the drive home from the bridge, would be the last time Gordon would be confident, stupidly confident, that he was well on the way to managing the most horrific surprise his life would likely ever offer.

In court just a few months after the accident, the facts, that which Gordon had always relied on as his best defense, would be turned to Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 12

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work against him. And they would seem poised to work against him decisively, elegantly, just as Georgia’s leukocytes, her body’s sworn defenders, had turned collaborators with her illness, doing just what cells should do, but more avidly, with more precision. The judge would suggest an interpretation of law that no one could argue was not literally true, but which might have the power to blight both the future and also the past for Gordon and his family. Love, like fear, might only be a thought, but love had blinkered Gordon. He had not seen it coming.

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Another half hour, and Nora Nordstrom would have been gone by the time the sheriff’s car pulled up to the curb on Cleveland Avenue.

She’d have made the turn off County Q onto Spirit Lake Road and been more than halfway home. Her sister-in-law Lorraine would have been alone when Dale Larsen came up that walk with the burden of his terrible news, Gordon trailing right behind him.

The Lord, Nora had to think, not without a shudder, works in mysterious ways. But some of the things he revealed were not wonders.

There was only one kind of grief that was unendurable, a child dying who was old enough to know what dying was. Nora had lost a baby boy born two months too soon, years before her eldest son. He’d lived only two days, and though she could still feel the leaflike weight of him in her arms, she still kept a white crocheted blanket she’d swaddled him in while he took his few, excruciatingly slow and shuddering breaths, she had known even then that she was young and strong enough to be able to convert this death to a sad memory instead of a tragedy. Nora imagined that the transition back between worlds had been inconsiderable, the only loss being her own. As for Georgia’s death, Nora feared that if she let herself think about anything but helping console her brother and Lorraine and Gordie, her rage would burn down these walls.

When she saw the police car, her first, silly thought was, there’ll be 13

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no berries boxed this afternoon. A police car never meant anything good. Lorraine, carrying Keefer, came into the hall where Nora was already standing, her big straw carryall at her feet.

“Lorraine,” the sheriff said, “may I come inside?”

“Of course, Dale,” Lorraine told him, pushing open the screen, admitting the sheriff into the gloom of the hall. She said then, “Look, I know it’s Mark. He had a heart attack, didn’t he? I know he’ll make it.

He’s been jogging every day for fifteen years—”

“It’s not Mark,” the sheriff said. “Afternoon, Nora.” He nodded, and carefully, as if it hurt him, removed his broad-brimmed hat. “Gordie’s right here, he’s just fine, and Mike is bringing Mark home from the plant. Mark is just fine.”

“Georgia’s in the hospital,” Lorraine said, her voice dull as a nickel dropping. “She had a seizure. Keefer Kathryn,” she nuzzled the baby.

“Your mama loves you with all her heart.”

“Lorraine,” the sheriff said.

“Mommy,” Gordon put in. His face was raw looking, blotched. “Let Aunt Nora take Keefer for a minute.” Lorraine obeyed, mutely opening her arms, eyes wide.

“There’s been an accident, Lorraine,” Dale Larsen said gently, reaching out to take Lorraine’s elbow when she swayed. “The car . . . Mark’s old car. Maybe the brakes went out. It was at Lost Tribe crick. They went through the guardrail. The car flew over to the opposite bank.”

“Where are they?” Lorraine asked. “Was Ray hurt?”

“Both Ray and Georgia were killed instantly, Lorraine. They never felt a thing. They never knew what happened.” Lorraine moaned and her head rolled back on her shoulders, that wild mop of hair unraveling. She looked to Nora like one of those Greek or Roman women in the paintings they put on the overhead pro-jector back in high school, mourning fallen legions on the battlefield.

Nora opened her arms and Gordie snuggled against her. “I saw the car,” he said.

“Are you sure there wasn’t a mistake?” Nora asked, thinking of the time her middle boy, Dan, was supposed to have been out with his friends at one of those drinking parties at Two Chimneys, and someone Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 15

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heard over their home scanner there was a wreck, and she and Hayes about went crazy until they found Dan asleep in the backyard ham-mock. “Are you sure it was them?”

Georgia? she thought, scanning the sunny distance for some hint of connection to her niece, to her niece’s consciousness. Georgia? Georgia, of all the seven McKenna clan children, the only girl, her auntie’s special angel, from the time she was a demanding, headstrong little girl in corkscrew curls to the luminous bride blowing an air kiss at Nora while she walked down the aisle, her train like a mermaid’s shining, luxuriant tail.

“The car was completely destroyed,” the sheriff said. “That car . . .

you couldn’t take the Chevy for anyone else’s car.”

“We brought her home in that car,” Lorraine said dreamily. “It was our lucky car. You know? We felt like, Georgia being born made us young all over again. It was kind of old even then, and I had my station wagon, which was probably a lot safer . . .”

“I’m going to put Keefer down,” Nora said, but she didn’t move, just stood there.

“Georgia was three days old. We’d never seen anything so tiny and perfect. Mark asked me if human babies had their eyes open when they were born! As if she was a kitten! People didn’t really use car seats so much then. But we got one, because we were afraid that if we didn’t do everything to the letter the social worker would take her back or something. Mark said she looked like an egg in a cup. But we got about one mile away from the foster parents’ house and I reached back and took her out. I knew it was dangerous, and she was fast asleep; but I wanted to
bring her home in my arms
. . .” Nora and the sheriff exchanged frowns. It would have been a relief if Lorraine had screamed or cried or even collapsed on the floor. Keefer whined, “Mama!” As if she knew.

Nora caught herself remembering. That sunny summer morning Mark and Lorraine had driven by the farm on the way home with the new baby, in that big, fancy sports car, she and Hayes just jumped in their truck and followed them back to town. It was like a parade, from the library to the University of Wisconsin Extension office, to the Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 16

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mechanic, the diner, Lorraine’s school, the Chaptmans’, the Soderbergs’, the Reillys’, the Upchurches’. Adopting a baby was not so commonplace then. People hardly knew how to stop themselves from blurting things like, she’s so beautiful, why didn’t her mother want her? They just let you have her? Is she all right?

Nora was still lost in that anguishing recollection of approving smiles, blessing hands, honeyed sunshine, when her brother Mike came peeling around the corner of First and Cleveland and drove his truck up onto the curb, he and Mark—both of them skinny as cranes—

loping up over the lawn, Mark, his big hands helplessly spread, reaching first for his wife, then his sister, and Mike angry,
what the hell had
happened? Wasn’t enough grief for one family, enough?

All at once, the phone started to ring, and over the next hour, the first wave of friends began hitting the front porch like soldiers landing on a beach. Nora ended up never going home at all, just sending word to Hayes and her daughter-in-law Bradie to turn off the soup she’d set to simmer that morning and leave it out for the fieldworkers to eat that night. She felt a twinge of guilt, glad the answering machine picked up, instead of her husband. She’d been spending so much time in town since Georgia’s illness that Hayes was beginning to grouse. On a truck farm this far north, hours of sunlight and warmth were gold, pure gold.

But she and Bradie had made the season’s last strawberry pies that morning, and Georgia had loved strawberry pie all her life. Even in the weeks before her wedding, when she was living on Grapenuts to squeeze into the wasp-waisted antique wedding gown from one of those Southern belle Nye relatives, Georgia could still not refuse her aunt’s strawberry pies. Tonight, the latest round of chemo would have kicked in and the vomiting would have begun. Nora had wanted Georgia to be able to enjoy one piece of pie before she would have to spend the next two days trying to swallow tea from a spoon.

“I’m only doing chemo because of Keefer, Auntie,” Georgia had told her. “If I get better, I really think it’s going to be from the minerals and the juices. The body really can heal itself. My mother-in-law is right about that. I know what they put in me at the hospital is just poison.” Nora held her tongue when Georgia, yellow, exhausted, gagged as she Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 17

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tried to swallow the oat-straw and cypress-bark tea Diane Nye sent up in freezer bags from Florida. It was all poison.

If dying in Georgia’s stead would have been worth trying, Nora would eagerly have done that. Since her from-a-passing-cloud, tumbledown birth, Georgia had been Nora’s pet, and when Keefer was born, Nora did the same thing she’d done for Georgia, sat right down in the middle of planting, no apologies to Hayes or any of them, and smocked a little gray cotton dress with ladybugs on the bodice, the whole thing no bigger than one of her husband’s handkerchiefs. And Georgia, tired as she was—so tired she could sleep right through the baby’s crying, and of course, at least then, nobody knew why—her niece drove all the way out to put some pretty soap in Nora’s mailbox as a thank-you.

The hours marched past and Nora’s exhaustion took on a plodding rhythm. She brewed so many pots she thought the coffeemaker would blow up, and scribbled so many phone messages from relatives about their plane flights and rides they needed from the airport that her hand got a cramp. She was grateful only that the work distracted her. All Nora’s boys left work and came, and so did Ray’s cousins, Craig and Delia, from Madison, who hadn’t seen Keefer since they’d stood godparents for her last fall. Mark’s and Nora’s cousins drove down from the Cities. Nora filled an envelope back with so many ranks of four-digit flight numbers they began to read like a code she could make no sense of at all. One of Ray’s sisters would fly from Tampa that night. Could she meet someone else in Madison and share a car? And could they hold off on making any more phone calls until she had time to inform her parents? Ray’s other sister was on a cruise in Alaska. Could she make it home in time? Nora had to call Fidelis Hill and even the Half Moon Motel to find places for everyone to stay once she’d calculated that the farm couldn’t hold them all. In her bustling about, she’d pass Lorraine and Mark at the kitchen table. Mark got up occasionally to walk out onto the porch and stretch his legs, but Lorraine never moved.