A Theory of Relativity (6 page)

Suicide seemed an awfully dramatic, athletic kind of thing to do.

But she was relieved that living was something she was no longer strictly required to do.

Any living she did from now on would be extra credit.

People would tell her to be strong. But she’d already been strong.

She had lifted her dying, leaking, groaning little girl out of her sweat-Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 31

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and-pee-soaked bed. She had stayed awake for eighteen-hour stretches, lying or pacing on the carpeted floor, listening to the thump-hiss of the oxygen apparatus and Georgia’s moans. Freezing one set of washcloths, soaking another set in hot water and oil, Rhuli for the lips, bag balm for the bedsores. She had left school for a month of “compassionate” leave (after twenty-two years of service, that meant “unpaid”) and so had learned to use rice creatively and to forget phone numbers of friends she’d known for twenty-five years. For a year, she had not picked up a brush except to paint cat whiskers on Keefer’s cupid mouth, not ventured beyond the baby and pajama department of any store for six months, learned to live on four hours a night of sleep, though that had been the one constant she’d craved in quantity as sustenance her entire life, gotten glasses to be able to read
Wuthering Heights
in the dark so as not to assault Georgia’s light-sensitive eyes, watched the beloved flesh of her daughter mutate from exquisite to china pale to clay, and smiled and sang . . . be strong?

What about those books she’d been discreetly slipped by Natalie Chaptman? By Karen Wright and Nina Upchurch? Hope and healing books. Live a full life after loss? Come to terms? Understand that bad things happened to good people?

What would Lorraine’s seventh-graders say to that?

In your dreams.

I’m so sure.

I don’t think so.

Not.

No hardened adult could ever talk so jaded as they: My world, your problem. Talk to the hand ‘cause the mind don’t understand.

Right they were. They had the balls not to be fooled. Adults were not mature, they were chickenshit and full of pretense. Not kids.

At first, when Mark called her from the oncologist’s office—it had just been a precaution by the obstetrician, to “rule things out”—she had wanted for Georgia to die. Right away. Before she got home. Lorraine had copied articles from the library, from the books about rational suicide, recipes for pill cocktails. Mark had had to take Georgia to work and the doctor, because Lorraine could not bear to look at her beautiful Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 32

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child. A copy of the
Golf Week
photo, the one from the feature story about up-and-comers on the minor tours, the ones with real PGA hopes, with Georgia crisp and slim wearing the obligatory chinos and loafers, gazing proudly at her Ray, was still propped on the mantel. And she had been sick then! It hadn’t been nursing that let her “get in shape” so quickly after Keefer’s birth. After that photo and the interview tension that went with it, Georgia had slept fourteen hours. That had been the beginning of the end. Weight had continued to peel off, and then the tenderness under Georgia’s arm, first attributed to a blocked milk duct, had worsened.

Not until months later, when Georgia was finally too sick to work, too sick to be alone, and Ray was away, did Lorraine finally take over.

Neither Mark nor Gordie could do the personal things. And it had been, to Lorraine’s surprise, like having a baby again.

Two babies, Georgia and Keefer.

Lorraine loved it. For the first time in decades she hadn’t been running off to her studio or to a conference or to get just one more phone call in before running out the door. She spooned applesauce into Georgia’s mouth. She cut up washcloths and froze them, as she had when Georgia was a baby and teething, to soothe the sores that pitted Georgia’s mouth. After Christmas, Lorraine’s prayers changed. She began to ask the Lord to allow Georgia to simply stay, disabled if she had to be, just as she was. Lorraine would adjust. Mark would adjust. Ray would find a way. They would be like those families Lorraine would see in the street sometimes lifting a child into a motorized wheelchair. She would wrench away her gaze thinking, how can they do it? But it had become second nature.

It had become a life.

A life, at least preferable to a death.

Twenty-four hours from now, Lorraine would have to iron a blouse.

Unroll new stockings from a package, and put on makeup. Look dignified and smoothed for a ceremony that would end with lowering her little girl into the ground and covering her with dirt. Do that, and then think about it and all the lovely years and unlovely months before it, until she got dementia.

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So.

She didn’t have to die, but she didn’t have to really live, either. She had the option of neglecting herself to the point of consequence, and it made her feel free.

She had a job. She’d had a job. She could no more do it than be a shepherd or run the honey wagon for Septic King. She’d loved her job, her small art shows, working with other teachers. Could she go back to school? Teach? Teach girls whose every gesture—even the absent tucking of a strand of hair behind one ear while reading—would make her shriek and keen for her daughter? Could she even go through the motions?

Think of Gordon, Nora would say. Think of Mark.

Think of Keefer.

She would not think of Keefer.

She would think of Gordon. But not protectively. Gordon adored her, but he was self-sufficient, even self-absorbed. He had copious things to keep him occupied, and with Keefer, he’d have things to occupy him without end. He’d had a markless life to this point. Co-valedictorian. The hallowed Florida State golf team. The credit for that was all Gordie’s, but true, he’d been raised by parents so grateful to have him and so determined to prove it, that they’d gone forth into family life with missionary zeal. The high school principal, Hart Rooney, had once confided to Lorraine that her kids were so great he would never have suspected they were adopted. Lorraine had never spoken to the man again.

Mark, well . . . she could not imagine ever again being his life’s most amiable companion. Mark would be lonely and bemused. But Lorraine was not responsible for him. She would no longer be able to tantalize him and surprise him, lead him on the lively chase for her approval that she had somehow been able to play for more than thirty years. Could she ever attend another Medi-Sun Christmas banquet, accept her stocking full of SuperC and B-Blasts with the smile all Mark’s coworkers told him was visible from Saturn? Mark would . . . oh, Mark would under-take good works, in Georgia’s name.

Perhaps he would remarry.

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In any case, Mark was making a bore of himself. In bed these past nights, he’d softly explained his boring intention to “process” Georgia’s and Ray’s death, like a kind of amino acid or cheese spread.

Mark wanted to understand the deaths, Nora to beatify them, Gordon to explain the mechanics. The Nyes, judging from Lorraine’s one brief conversation with Ray’s mother, Diane, wanted someone to sue.

Who knew what Lorraine’s own sister would have to say when she arrived in her neurologist’s wife’s Mercedes? Judy Reilly was on the Internet, researching getaway vacations for Lorraine and Mark. Karen Wright was embroidering a pall for the casket, with butterflies.

Butterflies.

Bullshit.

Only Lorraine wanted simply not to know.

She’d had an intestinal exam once, in which the doctor had used a curious sedative to put her in a gauzy state neither quite in nor out of consciousness. The drug apparently did not deaden what would have been considerable pain, but it made the brain unable to recall the sensation for more than a few seconds—which was virtually the same as not experiencing the pain at all. Wouldn’t it be fine to have a home line of that stuff, piped into the house like natural gas or water?

Just that morning, Lorraine had become dizzy and fallen getting out of the shower. She had no idea why. Perhaps the water had been too hot. Her ankle had collapsed with a huge, wayward, biting sprong, bringing her down hard on her hip on the ceramic tile. As she sat there, fascinated, dripping, the thing swelled, darkened. Sick-making as the pain was, Lorraine’s first thought was gratitude.

I won’t be able to attend the wake. I won’t be able to walk to the funeral.

“I won’t be able to attend the funeral,” she’d called from the bathroom. Mark suggested quietly that her unsteadiness might have something to do with all those painkillers and tranquilizers.

How had he known? Finding his own shoes was like a big-game hunt for Mark.

Lorraine shouted, “That’s ridiculous. Those silly things have no more effect on me than Ludens cough drops.” Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 35

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Mark winced. She felt nearly sorry for him. She never yelled at Mark. She could not remember more than half a dozen times in their lives that she’d raised her voice.

Eventually, Lorraine’s basic good health and an ice pack swamped her best intentions. The swelling subsided. There was no permanent damage. She could stand, although gingerly. She would be able to lean on Mark’s arm and no one would think anything of it. She would have to perform the whole ballet. To stay home would have invited more of those doleful half-smiles, more self-indemnifying sympathy. Let’s be ever so sorry for the McKennas, or next time, it could be us. She would have to come home from the wake, and sometime in the following week, wash a load of her daughter’s underpants and nightgowns, which still lay in the bottom of the clothes hamper, while Georgia herself lay in a cool room at Chaptmans. A few days later, Lorraine would fold the nightgowns and put the best away for Keefer to keep, while Georgia lay across the street under a blanket of earth.

“If only I’d knocked myself on the head instead of on the ankle,” she’d told Mark. He was staring, puzzled, at the lint roller, which was fuzzy and had apparently lost its tacky properties. His navy blue suit hung on the back of a door. Lorraine took the lint roller from him and peeled back the tape. He brightened, grateful.

Mark wanted to be grateful. He was glad, he said, that the ordeal was over. He seemed to think they’d summited. To Lorraine’s fury, he had said, “At least it’s not you.” And when she looked at him, saying nothing, his words had lost velocity, as if her look had pressed on some critical valve. Was he saying he would not have died in Georgia’s stead?

He would not have wanted Lorraine to die in Georgia’s stead? Simply that he could not bear this without his wife’s comfort? Was he made of wood? Had he no more tact than a drill bit?

Did he not think being dead would be so much easier than being marooned on this narrow peninsula of leftover years?

Twenty, certainly. Thirty maybe.

The self she no longer wanted still had a mind of its own. She had already caught herself noticing the milky luxury of the opening peonies. The air smelled good, poppy-baked, in the early morning.

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Oblivious as a queen, summer paraded its natural excesses, and, like a starving person set down in a marketplace, Lorraine was diverted. She still wanted her coffee. She still couldn’t feel clean unless she flossed.

Even the morphine, which Lorraine graduated to the morning after the accident—hoping to go drifting like a Beatle through gardens of chuckling flowers—only made her have an awful dream. Georgia, aged ten or eleven, was perched naked on a burning mountain, screaming for her mother, while Lorraine tried to make herself climb onto hot, rolling, sliding charcoal bricks, driven back by fear each time.
Jump, Georgia,
she would cry, but Georgia would simply go on screaming, as if she had not heard.

The real-life Georgia had never screamed. Winced, a little, but tried to hide it, pretending she’d been clearing her throat. She’d been stubbornly, stupidly optimistic:
I’m feeling stronger today, Little Mom. I think
Keefer said “Grandma.” She’ll be talking by Christmas. This time, she’s really
going to know about Santa Claus! I can’t wait!!
Only a single time had she cried out, when her feet flexed helplessly and her hands splayed during the first seizure
:
“I’m scared, Mommy! I’m so scared. Does this mean I’m going to die right this minute?”

After the morphine dream, Lorraine had not wanted to sleep again.

But sleep was the only thing that snapped closed her mind’s perpetually paging photo album.

Georgia at five.

Bold as the storybook child raised by wolves, tanned everywhere but chin and elbow creases, from her miniature athlete’s legs to the unselfconscious ellipse of her perfect belly, she threw off her clothes and ran screaming into Hat Lake. A sprite, a savage. Georgia sitting in the naughty chair straight-backed for three hours. “I’m not going to talk to you, Daddy,” she would tell Mark, “until you behave.” It had been Mark who’d finally broken, whispering words of caution and penitence into her soft little shoulder.

Georgia at six, dark and elfin, saying in her curiously deep voice,

“You’re too little to be a mommy; why are you so little?”

“I just quit growing in seventh grade,” Lorraine had told her. She still lied about her height, giving it as five feet two on her driver’s Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 37

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license when she wouldn’t have topped five feet stretched on a rack.

“You’re not so big yourself, short stuff.”

“I’m going to be bigger than you, Mom. In, like, a week.”

“I don’t think so. I’m a lot older than you.”

“Are you very old, Mom?”

“Real old.”

“Are you going to die soon?”

“No. Not soon at all,” Lorraine would tell her, thinking, panicky, I have to do regular breast self-exams from now on, I’m going back to the gym . . .