A Theory of Relativity (43 page)

I get that much, Gordon replied, deflated, wounded. And so, Ray went on, no sooner was one determining factor measured than it changed, and everything, including the nature of the entity doing the measuring, man or computer, was changed, too. If you tried to measure distance, speed made faces at you behind your back. Nothing could ever be truly real for more than a moment, and all variables must be reconsidered.

“Even this conversation is only real while we’re having it, and you’re having a different conversation from the one I’m having because you’re confused about relativity and I’m not; but you will remember it more clearly because you’re sober and I’m shitfaced.” Ray concluded,

“And if you wrote it down, it would be a third conversation, and if somebody read it, it would be a fourth conversation.”

“Even if I understand the words you’re saying, I don’t understand what they mean,” Gordon said. “And so this is a fifth conversation, a conversation that isn’t really a conversation because only one of us is having it.”

“Nobody understands what words mean,” Ray said. “But Bo, that’s not the point. There you go with the thinking again. What do I have to do to get you to stop it? Hit you one on the side of the head? All you have to be able to do is describe what you don’t understand better than anyone else. The only person who really knows what reality is, is my cousin Delia.”

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And she was not in court, Delia. She was not here present, embody-ing the Cadys’ reality, a reality of supercharged superiority because Jesus himself believed in their cause. Then there was the reality, according to the press. Judge Sayward’s reality, and Judge Kid’s. The Nyes’ reality of genetic entitlement. Delia’s biology, a curse when it had an impact on her vision, her headaches, her legs, and her balance, a hindrance when it prevented her from giving birth, but a great boon when it came to staking a claim to Keefer. His own biology, which gave him great teeth and funny hair and an estrangement from his parents he stead-fastly maintained was not real, was now the paramount reality to everyone else. His discarded razor was only another piece of disregarded landfill plastic in his bathroom wastepaper basket until Keefer glommed it in her seeking little fist; then it was a lethal weapon. An open window on the warm night a blessing until a hornet passed through it. And in all these competing realities, Gordon would not be allowed to do what he could do best, be a photon tracking down the electron and illuminating its evasive presence. He would not be permit-ted to shed light.

Delia was ill.

She was ill and pregnant.

Keefer’s “new mother” would be ill, not as her birth mother had been, but still sick, perhaps even after the birth. And deprived of the centering force of her own parents’ love, she would now have to share the love she had come to rely on with another, younger sibling.

“These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they do not add up to the optimum atmosphere for Keefer at this time,” Faith Bogert had written. “Delia Cady is under great stress, and that stress will necessarily have an impact on Keefer’s emotional stability. It may not be a permanent, damaging effect, but it is a stressor.” She’d also pointed out that Gordon’s parenting skill had developed substantially, and thus he and the Cadys now could be considered equally positive candidates, though the McKennas remained Keefer’s “psychological family of origin.” Still, she’d balked at recommending Gordon outright. She made noises about all the adults in Keefer’s life “working together toward many joint covenants about Keefer’s care and experiences.” And still, it wouldn’t be Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 289

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perfect. Keefer would never, in Dr. Bogert’s opinion, have an entirely traditional family experience, but would have “extended family patterns in common with many children in her peer group as she grows older. She would definitely need access to professional counseling as she reexperiences the losses of her infancy at each developmental stage.”

Only Nora had been blunt enough, when they saw the report, to say plainly what they were all thinking.

“I’m sorry for them, but shouldn’t this disqualify them? Aren’t they just going to put her through the same thing she already went through?” Nora asked.

Was he a brute, Gordon had thought, because his first hope was that Delia would be swiftly and irreversibly incapacitated? Disabled to the point that her active mothering of Keefer would be compromised?

His mind scampered forward with fully developed projections, Delia interviewed by Tammy Bakker or someone, for JCTV, in a wheelchair for life, cared for tenderly by devoted Craig, who would say that he didn’t mind that they’d never have marital relations again, Alexis brought to a conversion by her mother’s courage, all of them rooting for little Jessica Sunshine, the miracle baby, born four months premature and cheerfully stumping along in her own little pink leg braces . . .

Would that be so bad?

Why introduce a wiry little roughneck like Keefer? Better off with Gordon, down among the unsaved.

Gordon’s dark predictions for Delia had been the only thing that distracted Gordon from his fury over the pregnancy. It was a betrayal that filled his throat with acid liquors. It was a deliberate, sneering, personal insult, like finding Lindsay in bed with another guy. His baby was not enough for them. They’d wanted a big, selfish cowbird chick of their own—an even closer, more important blood relative—that would squeeze Keefer out. And yet this season! The baby was due in three months!

From the guardian’s point of view, of course, this would be ticked into the ledger as another wonderful plus for the Cadys, another brother or sister nearer in age to Keefer than Alexis.

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During the first hearing with Judge Kid, Alexis had sat on the floor at the back of the courtroom with Keefer, oblivious to Craig and the proceedings, her long legs in absurd canvas platforms making hurdles for the bailiff in his progresses. Keefer would venture one finger into Alexis’s mouth; Alexis would pretend to furiously bite it off, Keefer would withdraw her finger with a pout of mock terror, then bell out her full, teeming, deep-voiced laugh. Every time it happened, they were all forced to smile, all charmed except Judge Kid, who finally, exasperated, suggested that a courtroom was no place for a child. Alexis, on a nod from Craig, carried Keefer out into the hall.

“It’s encouraging that he seems to hate everyone else as much as he hates us,” Lorraine said to Greg Katt later, over tuna salad sandwiches at Hubbles.

“He’s just feeling the pressure,” Katt replied, mouth full. “Kid’s a law-first kind of guy. A real stickler for no leeway. He’ll do the right thing. He has zero options. But, and I mean this, we certainly do not want to antagonize him with any further stories in the press.”

“We won’t do that,” Lorraine said, aghast. “We haven’t talked to anyone in weeks, unless you count our e-mails.”

“Sit back on that, too,” Katt told her.

“People write who are afraid the same thing could happen to them, who don’t know the laws in their own states and are concerned about their own family’s circumstances,” Lorraine said.

“Well, there’ll be plenty of time to write to them when Keefer’s on your lap,” Katt said. “Just say you’re busy with your own legal process right now. We get our ducks in a row, and we hope the Cadys don’t appeal the appeals court verdict.”

“Do you think that’s likely?” Gordon asked, thinking of course it’s likely, it’s a virtual certainty . . .

“Not really. I think that if I was their lawyer, I’d advise against it. I think it would make them seem mean-spirited, if they did. If Wentworth is smart, she’ll tell them to sit tight. And I guess they’re in no shape for that.”

“Well, it was her choice to get pregnant right now,” Lorraine snapped.

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Katt looked embarrassed, and Gordon knew what he was thinking.

That his mother sounded as mean-spirited and obsessive as some people portrayed her. He’d wanted to hug his mother, to let her know that he understood she was just frazzled, not spiteful.

“I think we’re fine,” Katt said, leaning over to gather Lorraine’s small, and Gordon noticed, scrubbed hand.

The scrubbed hand was a clue. It meant she’d been working on her art again. In childhood, when their mother was at work on drawings, they would complain not only because it distracted her from their all-important demands but because it coarsened the skin of her hands.

When she came in at night to rub their backs, there were little cracks, irritating as emery boards, on the balls of her fingers. They would flinch away, annoyed. She would apologize. For one Mother’s Day, he and Georgia had brought Lorraine a basket filled with one of every kind of moisturizer they could find, including udder balm. Now, seeing evidence of Lorraine’s engagement with something in life apart from the case and her grief moved Gordon’s heart to a silent cheer. Good for Mom. Good job.

Gordon himself had been unable to turn his anger outward, into energy. He felt genuinely, physically ill, and he knew it all stemmed from the subversive work of his emotions on his body. Headaches, menstrual cramps, nervous stomachs, he’d always considered these things in the same bag with “panic attacks” and “motion sickness.” They were things anyone with the self-awareness of a cricket could overcome.

But he could not will himself to feel healthy. He’d begun to regret the scornful opinions he’d once held about psychobiological illnesses.

On the nights when Keefer was not with him, he lay horribly awake. Sometimes he could not relax even with the human security blanket of Lindsay, curled into a balletic sleep pose beside him. She was such a quiet sleeper, Gordon occasionally thought she’d stopped breathing, though both he and Keefer snored uproariously. He had such piercing, local headaches he felt as though he’d been battered on the side of the head with a garden trowel. He’d even asked his mom for more of her extra-strength aspirin, but she’d said it was a prescription, Theory[222-351] 6/5/01 12:11 PM Page 292

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and had run out. When he tried to do something as innocuous as a hammer curl, his neck caught and clamored. He was losing even more weight, becoming chickeny, a scrawny light man, like his great-uncle Harold. Rather than endure such interfering wretchedness for life, he would have chosen to die.

Nothing helped. Not the eye mask scented with eucalyptus that Lindsay had brought from the store. Not the white noise of the fan he ritualistically placed near the head of his bed. Not water or Benadryl.

He would drift close to sleep and then in would skip images of his Keefer. His combustible darling. Keefer, not there, but an apparition with a voice and a presence just beyond his reach.
Where’s Dory’s hair?

Where is Kipper’s hair? Dory’s eyes, Kipper’s eyes, Dory’s funny tooth, Kipper’s pretty tooth.
She was so fucking brilliant, and he wasn’t just saying that. She had the strutting, assured presence of a tiny Atlantic City mobster.

“Whose scrawny little kid are you?” he would demand.

“Mine!” Keefer would cry, jabbing her round belly with her index finger, and then relenting, and nuzzling his shirt. “Mine Dory’s.” He’d gotten up. A walk, maybe. He was too sore to really move, too restless to lie down. He could hear her chirps, her soprano variations and combinations: “Dory out dere! Whass at? Uh-oh. Baby go wah!

Doggy go ruff!” He could feel her smooth cheek, an orb filled with freshest water, as she nuzzled it along his chest when they lay in bed mornings, the belly farts she made so exuberantly, the sly looks she had taken to giving him from the corners of her eyes, her head feathered with fox-colored tufts of baby hair that somehow refused to grow long like other toddlers’, so that she looked like a punk rocker, the perfect globes of tears that spilled from her great marmoset eyes at will, the way she covered her face with the wings of his pant legs when they encountered a pushy stranger. He thought of Keefer and ended up stiff-armed over the toilet, bent double, heaving up nothing, especially not the dinner he had been too nauseated to eat. Steeped by proximity in his mother’s absurd rituals, he slammed the window closed at the sound of a whippoorwill, racing thoughts like imps of kidnapped souls.

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come, and he’d have to face it dry-mouthed, reedy with weakness. He’d been unable to overcome the momentum of knowing he’d lose her.

What he had to do was to construct a way to live without her. How could he live without her?

He would live, that’s all. He would do many interesting things with his freedom and include her in as many of them as he could. He would be an important figure in her life.

He would die.

He would live, a pithed, cored old man in his twenties.

The Cadys would mark her, sacrifice her, transform his renegade darling into a compliant, lumpen Jesus-freak baby. She would shy from him. He would bore her. She would complain about the turpentine smell in his mother’s house. She would grow up and wear mall bangs and tight T-shirts embroidered with Rich Girl in cheap sequins. She would marry early. She would never marry; she would be raped by the youth minister at the Foursquare Christian Church.

She would become a cosmetician.

He would die without her. He had never been alive before her.

When Gordon pictured his life previous to the inheritance of Keefer, he saw himself in a series of muscle-and-fitness poses, a buff mannequin with a hyperactive, grinning dick.

He could give Keefer up, with dignity.

He would eliminate his rivals. He would find a way to crimp Craig’s brake lines with pliers. He knew nothing about cars. He would plan a field trip to the State Hygiene Lab, and, while his students viewed gruesome forensic marvels, he would liberate a virus, a crumb of cyanide . . .