A Theory of Relativity (35 page)

“I think you should have your own babies because—”

“What?”

“Because what if you don’t get her back?”

“I have to think we’re going to get her back.”

“And you’re going to just be you and Keefer for the rest of your life?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well?”

“Well?”

“Well, what about me?”

“You mean, you want to have kids.”

“Of course I do.”

“That’s something we’re going to have to discuss—”

“Fine. Let’s discuss.”

“Not now. I’ve got a stack of labs out there I have to grade—”

“Now is a fine time.”

“Lins—”

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“Who’s Alicia?”

He felt a tingling in his jaw, his shoulders. “Alicia?”

“When I came in, there was a message from her on the answering machine.”

“You listened to my messages?”

“No, she was leaving the message right when I walked in.”

“She’s the mother of one of my students.”

“Well, she asked if you got the flowers.”

“She sent me some flowers with her daughter, when the bill passed the Senate.”

“And she mentioned the volleyball team.”

“You know I play on a volleyball team sometimes. Christ, Lins, it’s the only exercise I get anymore. I’m starting to look like pictures of my grandpa Kiss. The guy had legs like matchsticks. My dad can probably bench more than I can at this point.”

“There was . . . she said ‘cutie.’ ”

“She’s just being nice.”

“Did you date her?”

“No.”

“Did you date her, Gordie?”

“No! We’ve hung out a couple of times.”

“Hung out? Did you sleep with her?”

“No!”

“Did you fool around?”

Lie, he thought. Make it easy. Don’t lie, he thought then. Make it easy.

“A little, once. Drunk. A long, long time ago. I stopped because I was involved with you and I didn’t want to trespass on what we have.

Okay, Lindsay?”

“How much do you expect me to overlook, Gordie?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, do you want me to say it more slowly, how much do you expect me to overlook?”

“Lindsay, nobody forces you to be with me. I assume we’re both here because we want to be.”

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“All through college, I was your vacation fuck. You think I didn’t know that? And summers. If you were around—”

“Wait a minute here. Wait a minute. Neither of us ever expected that we were having an exclusive relationship then.”

“But that’s what I wanted, and you knew it.” He’d known it.

“Well, we are now,” he said. Lame, even to his own ears.

“So what’s going to happen to us?”

“I’ve thought about that, Lins.” He hadn’t thought about it, but it became clear to him, as the words formed. “It depends on what happens with Keefer.”

“How?”

“Well, I guess if I get to keep Keefer, I’ll stay here, in Tall Trees.

Maybe buy a house. Keep her where she can see my parents and my aunts and uncles and my cousins, and the Nyes, too, of course.”

“And if it . . . goes wrong?”

“Then, Lindsay, I don’t know what I’ll do. But I can tell you, I’m going to want to . . . take off. Go work for EnviroTreks again. Or find some hilltop in Montana and be a hermit who collects botanical specimens—”

“All alone?”

“That’s how I think of it, yes. But it’s probably crazy.” He lay back on his pillow, on Keefer’s “Queen of Everything” pillow, which he’d taken to keeping in the bed. “Maybe I’d go back to school.”

“For what?”

“My doctorate. Maybe in cell biology. I think about, you know, my sister, and her cancer. People don’t just get breast cancer at twenty-six unless they carry a gene for it. Which could mean that Keefer could be at risk for it. She’s already at risk for it. And the human genome project is under way, maybe I will work in research . . .”

“And you’d have to go to school alone, too.”

“Not necessarily. But since when would you want to leave Tall Trees, Lins? You almost fucking starved to death in college because you missed Laura and your parents so much. And pretty soon, Laura’s going to have kids, and you’re going to want to be with them, too.” Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 233

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“I would leave for you.”

“Think that over, Lins. Don’t just say it.”

“I thought that if you get Keefer, you’re going to need me, Gordie. A girl needs a mother—”

“So thought the psychologist, that dumb bitch.”

“A girl needs a mother, Gordie. And I would be a good mother.”

“I think you’d be a great mother, Lins. But think about whether you’d be satisfied raising my kid? Just my kid?”

“You make this impossible. You’re leaving if you don’t get her.

You’re going to be practically a . . . monk if you do get her. What is my choice?”

“It’s not fair,” Gordon pulled Lindsay down beside him, and her gorgeous hair spread like silk threads over his chest; there was no more luxurious feeling. He remembered Keefer’s delight in rooting her tiny, box shaped feet in his own hair. Keefer. What was she doing now? “It’s not fair, and I’m not asking you to wait. I change my mind about stuff every day now. I can’t plan and I can’t project. There’s the appeal next week and then the time it’s going to take to wait for the decision. If I were a decent human being, I’d tell you to get up and take your toothbrush and leave me to rot.”

“Yes, you would,” Lindsay told him, pouting. She struggled out of his arms and leaned on his bedroom window, studying the spangling of frost on the trees. He breathed in the scent of her leg, of their sex. Maybe all this talk of solitary specimen collecting was romantic horseshit.

“On the other hand,” he ventured, “maybe Keefer would love having a brother or sister. She’s crazy about that kid of Delia’s . . .” Perhaps there was even logic in it. If he reproduced, a child of his would grow up with Keefer as he and Georgia had grown up, a representative of his genetic endowment alongside his sister’s. And those children’s children would carry forth his sister’s traits and his own, their adoption being, then, a sort of clumsy macrometaphor for the double helix—unrelated strands notched with genetic messages looped loosely round one another in a braid generation after generation.

Lindsay flung herself across him, straddling him.

“Is that a yes?”

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“Lindsay, you look like Lady Godiva.”

“Is it?”

“It’s a definite maybe, and I feel like a piece of shit making you settle for that.”

“Oh, Gordie. Gordie, my Gordie,” she crooned, nuzzling him, wakening him.

It was time, he guessed, to make someone happy. If you made someone happy, like the old song said, maybe you would be happy, too.

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The governor was a small, powerfully built man whose hometown, he told Gordon and his parents, was no more than ten miles from Tall Trees. Ever spent a summer shearing Christmas trees, he asked Gordon, who answered, yes, sir, many. Hot work, the governor nodded, chuckling. They sat down in their assigned seats under the seal of the eagle amid the luxe expanse of Wisconsin cherrywood paneling at a table crafted from Wisconsin black walnut in chairs Lorraine assumed were padded with Wisconsin foam rubber. Jungles of cables and tent cities of tripods crowded the door and spilled out into the hall as the governor signed Assembly Bill 600, turning first to Gordon to hand him a pen embossed with his name and the seal of the state, then to pass one to Lorraine, to Mark, to Senator Hammersmith and Phil Kay. In chairs against the walls, Tim was wiping his eyes, Nora and Lindsay were sobbing outright. Two months and three days had passed since that first phone call, the one Phil Kay had felt summoned to pick up on his own.

“Are you a Republican?” one reporter asked, as Lorraine and her family made their way into the hall.

“No, a very indebted Democrat,” Lorraine answered. “This is a great day for all adoptive families, all families period. There are people all over the country who are going to sleep better tonight.”

“And will this law make it easier to resolve your own custody dispute over your granddaughter?”

235

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“It’s not my custody dispute,” Lorraine said. “It is our son, who is . . .

well, who nobody can doubt now is the equal of her ‘blood’ uncle, who hopes to adopt Keefer Kathryn Nye. But we’re going to stand beside him every step of the way.”

“Gordon”—a woman with corkscrew black curls that reminded him of Georgia’s untamed childhood do, worked her way to the front—

”Is this law going to affect the appeal?”

“We don’t know anything for sure,” he said, “because, you probably know, the appeal will deal with the decision Judge Sayward made before the law was changed, not taking into consideration the way the law—”

“Thanks,” she smiled.

“You went over the limit of the sound bite,” Mark told Gordon.

On a whim, feeling like stalkers, they drove past the Cadys’ spruce-colored condo, straining for a glimpse of Keefer. There was a pink play-hut in the backyard and signs of a wooden swing set under construction. “It’s a pretty neighborhood,” Lindsay said, and they all glared at her.

Delia and Craig had known full well, Lorraine assumed, that the bill would be signed into law today, Friday, the same day that their first visit with Keefer in two exhausting months was to commence. Lorraine had sent a note; they would be in Madison on business; they would be happy to pick Keefer up at noon and spare the Cadys a two-hour drive. Delia had left a message. No, Keefer’s time with the McKennas did not begin until that night—the Cadys would bring Keefer up on Friday night, as per the stipulations of the visitation agreement, and they would pick her up on Sunday afternoon. Routine, she added, was important for a child. They would be surprised, the message continued, how Keefer’s language had taken off. She was using three-word sentences almost overnight, and saying “Daddy” and

“Mommy” and “Lexie” clear as a bell.

Until that moment, as she played and replayed the message, Lorraine had not thought that Delia was mean-spirited. She had believed her righteous to the point of fatuousness, but not unkind. But she caught herself trying to reframe, reclassify incidents with her son-in-Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 237

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law, Ray. Even Ray bordered on boorish in his insistence that Georgia be . . . obedient. No, that was wrong. Ray had adored Georgia, and it had been her daughter who gratefully assumed the role of devoted ser-vant. Honey, want a piece of pie, it’s homemade? Honey, let me change her; she’s sopping, no you don’t have to bother with it. Honey, let me unpack for you.

Lorraine sharply stopped herself from following that train of thought.

No, there was no real malice in Delia, or how could Lorraine live knowing that she had the daily care of Georgia’s child, the responsibility to wash her and feed her and rock and read. Hadn’t the psychologist’s report noted Delia’s patience, her serenity? Delia was not a carbon copy of Diane, that smothering, pushy, self-pitying . .

On Saturday they would celebrate, all together, on Cleveland Avenue, the passage of the law and Keefer’s second birthday, which, though it did not fall until March ninth, would also not fall on one of the McKennas’ designated weekends.

They arrived home soon enough for Lorraine to teach her afternoon classes, but when she arrived in the art room, she was stunned by the silence. All the kids were there, but bent busily over their sketch pads, and Lorraine knew enough about seventh graders to look for ominous overtones in any kind of quiet. Without a word, Lorraine’s principal, Linda Fry nodded at Lorraine and took her leave. Gingerly, Lorraine approached her desk, where Linda had set up a mannequin, draped in scarves, for the unit in figure drawing they’d begun the previous week.

Not a peep from even one of them, though the little Rooney girl couldn’t help but flash a full-metal smile at Lorraine. Something was wrong.

Something was up.

“Attention,” the public address system, never state of the art, crack-led and guttered, “attention, students and faculty of Tee Tee Em Ess. We have an important announcement to make.” Linda. The kids were stealing out of their seats. “Among us right now is a woman of history. A woman of courage. A woman whose love and devotion has today single-handedly changed the law of the state of Wisconsin to protect the welfare of families and children everywhere. Let’s all proceed—in Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 238

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orderly fashion, please—to celebrate Assembly Bill Six Hundred and our own art teacher and lawmaker extraordinaire, Lorraine McKenna!” The kids galloped from the room, tugging at her arms, taking her hands. The banner reading “Way to Go, Mrs. M!” stretched from one end of the basketball court to the other. Not only were her fellow teachers there, but Dale and Sheila, Nina and Bud, the Wiltons, the Soderbergs and their banker son.

And when Lorraine finally arrived home, there was Nora in the doorway, beckoning Lorraine to a kitchen that looked as though a florist’s truck had unloaded its entire capacity on the table, and under the table, Keefer, who said, “Nana! Peep in poddy!” Keefer, whole and pink, thinner, but clearly healthy, carefully unpacking her dentist Barbie, her pilot Barbie, her Mozart blocks, her firetruck that made horrific blatting noises and flashed red and yellow lights, each for their amazed admiration. She was no longer interested in playing with the duck puppets. “One, one,” she told Nora with a pout, pushing them away, and though Nora was momentarily crestfallen, she responded with a hoot when Keefer twisted her chubby fingers together and nodded, urging Nora, “Itty bitty, itty bitty.” The “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” was the last thing Lorraine remembered saying as she drifted off with Keefer between Mark and her in their bed, and she awoke from a dream of Georgia climbing the drainpipe, tapping at the window, Mom, let me in, let me in . . . but it had begun to rain. Lorraine crept from the bed and to her desk, where she began to write a letter, “Dearest Keefer, What a year you’ve had! You have gone from a baby to a big girl who can talk and walk and only wears diapers for sleeping! You know many songs. You have been spending lots of time playing with your family, Delia and Craig and especially Alexis, and we are all excited to have you here with us tonight. The people who will come to your Tall Trees birthday are Gordon and Lindsay and Rob and Bradie and Aunt Nora and Uncle Hayes and Tim and his brand-new puppy named ‘Taxi’! Isn’t that a funny name for a puppy? Things have happened this year that Grandma and Gordon and all your family will explain to you when you grow up, but everyone loves our Keefer. . . .”