A Theory of Relativity

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “I mean, look at that. That word. Adoptees. It’s like you had a limb removed or something.”

  “Well, it’s a word for a way of being—”

  “It’s a word like, you know, back when people started calling people ‘adult children of alcoholics.’ Then, it was just shortened to ‘adult children.’ Well, everybody gets to be an ‘adult child’ sooner or later, right?”

  “I guess. But Mr. McKenna, the point is, I’m trying to learn what you hope to help Keefer understand about her background.”

  “Well, it’s not like my own situation is. Or was.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I am her birth family.”

  “I see what you mean. Though, not technically.”

  “Well, now I’m not following you.”

  “I mean, yes, you’ve known Keefer since she was born, but you are not a member of her biological family, since—”

  “Her mother was my sister. I don’t see how much closer you can get.”

  Faith backed off, sitting back in the chair, trying to give him room.

  “I know what you’re saying, but Georgia and I grew up together. I was there when Keefer was born. I guess you could say I know firsthand everything you could know about being adopted and everything you could know about Keefer’s birth parents, and so . . .”

  “And so?”

  “And so,” Gordon said, revealing a smile of unnerving evenness, “I’m perfect.”

  Then, the doorbell sounded, and Faith thought, we’ll see. We’ll see.

  CHAPTER ten

  At least the other shoe had dropped. Any more pussyfooting around might have driven Lorraine over an irretrievable edge. Even Mark—who still maintained that he would not surrender to bitterness—could not contain his disdain for Craig and Delia after they made it clear they wanted to adopt Keefer.

  To take Keefer, a child they barely knew, from the people who had raised her and, thus far, raised her well.

  The outrage. To describe the Cadys, Mark had used phrases he had never used for anyone else in their three-plus decades of life together—“deceitful finger-pointing” and “hypocritical ironies.”

  And when it came to Diane Nye, though Mark no longer said anything, his silence was ominous.

  Lorraine could no longer think of Diane Nye without a wince of humiliation. When Lorraine had finally lost it, she’d said things to Diane Nye that made her ashamed. But Diane had been the one who turned up the flame.

  She and Mark and Gordon, with only the occasional small teakettle shriek, had gone about all summer long with a tight lid on the simmering kettle. They’d pretended to be strong and showed one another concerned, contained faces. They went out of their way to help each other out. Nora made only the slightest comment one day that the lavender was full in, and no one had laid a sweep on Georgia’s grave, and everyone knew how much Georgia loved lavender. By sundown there was a foothill of lavender, their gently moving petals, to McKenna eyes at the plateglass picture window across the street, a profusion of violet butterflies. Each one of them had taken on the obligation to do it, out of consideration for the others.

  In all their dealings with Greg Katt, they remained courteous, hoping not to come off as hysterical. True, lately he seemed to pull a new gremlin out of the custody hat with each phone call, each meeting, each pleading. True, he seemed bent on senselessly frustrating them by requiring them to witness endless proceedings at which they never spoke and barely understood what was going on.

  They avoided people outside the family, and people outside the family avoided them, as if the freakishness of the McKenna disaster challenged ordinary interaction and might possibly be contagious. Natalie Chaptman, Karen Wright, Sheila Larsen, and others from the church abandoned their program of bringing over casseroles. Lorraine’s formal thank-you notes made it seem as though friends were demanding more of the McKennas by helping than by leaving them alone. Mark and Lorraine, sometimes with Gordon and Lindsay, had begun eating Sunday dinners out at the farm with Nora and Hayes. The head of the table was saved specially for Keefer’s high chair, even when Keefer was in Madison with the Nyes. Nothing was said to inaugurate a tradition. They simply were asked one Sunday, went, then went again the next. By the third Sunday, they were expected.

  Privately, they burst. One bashed the hard bag. One beheaded the rhododendrons. One stood at the bedroom window in her room, watching the lazy moon rock onto her back, while on the chair lay an album open to photos of Georgia in Ojibway war paint at the county fair, Georgia with two teeth missing and her parakeet, Rhoda, perched on her head. One bit a pillow and cried hard, secret tears.

  It was not Diane’s intention to blow the lid on all the restrained anguish. But that was the result.

  To begin with, Lorraine couldn’t believe the gall. Diane came on her own to pick Keefer up for a weekend visit. This had to be on the advice of counsel. Either that, or the woman was a nitwit. She had to know she was like fresh kill in the lion’s den.

  After that day, Gordon said he wished they had some kind of pneumatic tube through which they could whoosh Keefer back and forth, and goofy as that sounded, Lorraine knew exactly how he felt.

  Keefer was to be available to her paternal relatives for twice-monthly visits at 5:00 p.m. on Fridays. It was more like 2:00 when Diane showed up.

  Lorraine had been at her desk in the living room, halfheartedly concocting a pastiche of fall lesson plans from successful no-brainers of previous years. Before Georgia’s illness, she’d given herself the shakes brimming over with new ideas for upcoming terms. Her last years of teaching were to be her most daring. Mark had even begun helping her knock together a little darkroom in an unused closet in the art room so that she could do a three-week unit on black-and-white photography. The National Geographic photographers who were working on the woodland people’s dig had donated three perfectly serviceable old cameras. One guy was even ready to show Lorraine the rudiments of hand-coloring photos. Imagine the gifts the kids could make for their parents!

  But now she would only do her best.

  She would earn her pension.

  At least the early days would be easy. She’d do things like face-and-vase exercise, for training the sides of the brain to truly experience their reverse connection to the hands, asking the right-handed kids to draw a profile of a face on the left side of the paper, facing the center, and then leading them through the left brain, gradually teasing out of them the awareness of how their right brains could “feel” shape and line in a non-verbal way. She’d teach self-collages. Word collages. Scrapbook collages. Pinch pots and then thrown pots . . . art-school stuff. It would not be easy. It would murder a part of Lorraine to sleepwalk through her teaching. Lorraine had just gotten up to treat herself to peppermint tea and a Percodan when the doorbell rang.

  It had done her heart good to see that Diane looked ten years older.

  And had gained weight.

  Hey, sweetie, Lorraine called to Georgia’s spirit, look at that big roll of dough over the waist of her Puritan shorts. Bet those shorts weren’t from the children’s department.

  “Hello,” Lorraine had said. “Are you early?”

  Diane merely shrugged.

  “Well, Diane,” Lorraine said then, “what are we going to do for three hours?” Trade recipes, she thought? Forget we’re embroiled in a bitter lawsuit and discuss new fall fashions?

  “I never know how long it’s going to take to get to somewhere,” Diane explained. “You-all seem to be fixing the roads all the time, and all the roads go in circles.”

  Suddenly and utterly, Lorraine understood the sense in which her students used the phrase “Whatever.”

  Diane offered to wait until five. She had to take her cleansing tea, after all. Or she could sit outside in the car.

  Lorraine was flabbergasted. “Forget it,” she said, “you can take Keefer early.”

  Lorraine had the car seat, so Gordie couldn’t bring Keefer over. She suggested Diane follow her
in her own car, but Diane said she was sure she’d get lost. Diane assured her that “the kids,” by which she meant Delia, had everything Baby needed, a whole other set of toys and clothes (Diane-type clothes, Lorraine assumed, shiny patent-leather Mary Janes with no arch support, and teeny golf togs with flag and alligator embroidery, shelves of pouting, sultry, hideously buxom ballerina Barbies, pink plastic purses with toy lipsticks like sticks of lard, terrifying videos like the one Keefer brought home, about a family of cucumbers who cried because their daddy was run over by the wheelbarrow). Lorraine had seen the smudgy Polaroids tucked into Keefer’s diaper bag, tucked in as if to taunt her and Mark and Gordie with the largesse of that good ol’ Southern-fried Christians-R-Us upbringing. Fuming, Lorraine thought, why had Georgia, her finely strung, impatient daughter, ever suborned that Delia, anyhow? Because she was lonely, Lorraine answered herself, lonely and away from Lindsay and them and all the things of home, away from Gordie off on one of his goddamned save-the-world joy-sails, stuck on a sand spit, hungry for company and inclusion. That had forever been Georgia’s tender heel—wanting to be wanted.

  Before they left, Lorraine called Gordon, warning him not to forget the flannel shirt of Ray’s that Nora had stuffed to make a pillow Keefer called “Day-doe.” Throw in her plain wooden blocks, too, Lorraine added, and her duck-family puppets. Let them see what toddlers ought to play with.

  “She’ll be happier if she has the same things every day,” Lorraine told Diane. “I’m sure Delia knows that.”

  “I’m sure she knows best,” Diane agreed, with exasperating complacency.

  They’d set off, Diane perched rigidly on the passenger bucket as if she were on a roller-coaster ride. Lorraine caught a profile instant of Diane’s slack, powder-pale expanse of chin, its pert previous architecture still evident but wistful, like a ghost who doesn’t know about its demise, and she felt soiled, sorry. No good would come of a verbal broadsword battle between old broads, each with their favorite swords. Lorraine could have demolished Diane—“Thank goodness, you’ve gotten your appetite back, Diane”—but it would have been too easy.

  Then Diane said, “Don’t take it out on Delia. Say whatever you want to me. I know that you’re unhappy about how this has turned out.”

  “You can hardly say things have ‘turned out,’ Diane,” Lorraine replied, deliberately staring ahead, braking a little sharply, aware that Diane’s head bobbed, “There’s been no decision made. And no matter what happens with Keefer, this is still an awful time for me. What’s going on between our families only makes it worse. Because my daughter is still gone.”

  “And my son.”

  “And your son. Neither of us can replace . . . our children with Keefer.”

  “It’s a family issue.”

  “It is, but the family at issue is Keefer’s family. It’s not what’s best for you and Ray or Mark and me. It’s not even what Ray and Georgia may have wanted, at any given time. It’s what’s best for Keefer. We all have to think of it from her point of view. “

  That sounded wise. Wiser than Lorraine felt. For all she knew, she had just put her mouth around a barefaced lie. In truth, she considered this battle her homage to Georgia half the time. She often thought of Keefer as Georgia’s miniature.

  “I hope you aren’t going on about this as a personal thing, Lorraine,” Diane offered.

  “It’s entirely personal, Diane. That’s all it is.”

  “It’s not. It’s a matter of law. The law is the law.”

  “The law is the law? There’s been no crime committed. No one’s breaking any law.”

  “I’m really not free to discuss that.”

  “Oh, good,” Lorraine snorted, “let’s not discuss it.” She’d been angry by then, and should have, she thought in retrospect, let it drop.

  But Diane persisted, “All I was meaning to suggest was, I hope you don’t think that we, or that the kids mean this as any reflection on you-all, as people.”

  Lorraine slumped. She did know that. “Of course, we don’t think it’s meant that way. And, by the same token, Gordon doesn’t mean this as a reflection on you as people, either. He just wants what’s best for Keefer.”

  “If he does, then he will come to know what we already know. And I hope you’ll come to feel the peace of God in that way, too, Lorraine—” Diane had clearly been inhaling Delia’s vapors along with her cleansing teas—“because if this weren’t the way it was meant to be, God would have sent a message.”

  “What if he has, and you can’t read it?” Oh, shut up, please, Lorraine reprimanded herself. She imagined Greg Katt sitting in his office over Tree’s Company Antiques, his ears getting red and hot as she blithely bandied words with an adversary who was probably wearing a tape recorder. No, Diane couldn’t have organized herself to record a conversation. Diane was incapable of buckling her own watchband. Mark suggested that Florida women had lost the gene for autonomous dressing through natural selection during the antebellum era.

  Or, Lorraine thought, was all that dependency just a social ruse? What if Diane was here by design? Recording the conversation on advice of her attorneys? Katt had regaled them with the strange things people did during custody battles.

  “Diane,” Lorraine said cautiously, slowly turning onto First Street, “I don’t know what God thinks about it, but I know we’re trying to do what we think is the right thing, just as you are.”

  “But you have no idea how we feel!”

  “How you and Ray feel?”

  “All of us! Keefer Kathryn is our flesh and blood, Lorraine!”

  “And ours, too, Diane.”

  “But she’s not.” Diane’s carefully roseate lips met with an audible pop, a cartoon representation of sudden ruefulness.

  Cold sweat broke out below Lorraine’s breasts. She considered whether she would actually hit Diane. Diane was larger, but Lorraine was fairly sure that she was stronger. Instead, she stopped in the middle of the deserted street and turned full to face the passenger seat.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. Let’s go get Keefer Kathryn.”

  “What . . . did . . . you . . . say.”

  Diane sighed a windy sigh. “You force me, Lorraine. It’s not fair. You hear? It’s just that she’s not really your flesh and blood. Even if you feel that way. I know you loved Georgia, but she was an adopted child. Keefer Kathryn is a Nye, Lorraine.”

  The children had once, without Lorraine’s knowledge, filled paper cups with freshwater snails at the beach on Hat Lake. By the time their swim was over, they’d forgotten their treasures, which they’d left in the stifling backseat of Lorraine’s car on a breathless August afternoon. Two days later, she’d opened her door to a stench so potent it was like a shove in the face. Lorraine reeled back, literally having to stumble to the trash cans to throw up as the garage filled with the overwhelming reek of decay. What Lorraine felt, when she’d smelled that smell, was rage. She felt precisely this way now.

  Diane had not noticed. Her accent grew deeper and wider as she rounded each bend of logic: Lorraine had never experienced a child growing in her body, and all that meant was that Lorraine could not see how a child could be a part of you. “We’ve tried our very best to understand, Lorraine,” she said. “But now you-all are going to have to understand the facts of life, the way things are in the real world.”

  “The real world,” Lorraine said, her voice suddenly calm.

  There was another Lorraine, a Lorraine damp and quaking, throwing open drawers and clawing out underclothes, tossing them overhead with clawed hands, delving for pill bottles, cracking the bottles, scrabbling for the contents. But that was another self, over there. The other Lorraine, who was driving the car, was looking down on Diane from a great height.

  One thing was clear: Lorraine needed her wits about her. Every wit. She would never take another pill living in a world among such dangerous fools. She would do what she should have done months ago. Cut out even coffee. Take gingko to
sharpen her memory. She would train like a mental marathoner.

  Diane jibbered, “Delia is just like my own daughter, and Delia is unable to have children, but do you think she would go to China or Peru or somewhere and adopt someone else’s baby? She would not do that. She would just as soon not have a child. And Craig? He feels just the same way. They’re willing to take Baby into their hearts because she is blood, Lorraine! They would not consider adopting a child who was not of their own blood. That is why this happened in this way, Lorraine. This is not our ill will. It’s family.”

  Lorraine had serenely parked the car and begun moving Keefer’s car seat. She had not answered Diane, though Diane kept talking; Lorraine could see her jaw working up and down. When Gordon walked out onto the front stoop with Keefer, Lorraine kissed the child, then silently walked past her son and went up the hall stairway into his apartment. She picked up the telephone and dialed Greg Katt and insisted on speaking to him instantly.

  After they’d finished speaking, she went home and flushed every pill in her house, all the bigs and the littles. She kept only a few painkillers, thinking, supersititiously, there might someday come a time when she had a pain she really needed to kill.

  * * *

  “She said she would see that woman in hell,” Gordon later told Tim Upchurch, as they drove through the dark toward their morning tee at Blackwolf.

  “It sounds like it was quite a brawl,” Tim said.

  They’d stopped to grab a bite after softball, earlier in the evening, and Church had come back from using the phone, grinning, saying road trip. A member down at Blackwolf must have died or something—because, surprise!—they had a tee time at seven in the morning. Pleading a stroke of heaven-sent luck, pleading his one day to play golf of the entire lost summer, Gordon broke a dinner date with Lindsay, who was distant. Gordon tried not to notice. He was excited, primed. He would be good. He would feel as Ray had always told him it was possible to feel, no matter how long you had to furlough. There was no need to fear the first day out. It was like sex, it was like riding a bike; the hands did not forget. Church, wild as a cat under the sprinkler, would be firing them everywhere but down the center, terrorizing small woodland creatures and marketing executives parking their Beamers in the parking lot. It would not matter. Gordon would forget all about babies and lawyers and just play the game.