A Theory of Relativity

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “The judge isn’t going to give us the time of day,” Nora told him.

  “I’ll do the best I can,” the assemblyman told her. “I’ll think this over every which way.”

  She thanked him. And she thought, it can’t take years. Laws were changed all the time over tragedies. In California, it seemed like they changed laws once a day. Phil Kay wasn’t the only representative in the world. She’d call the senator. . . . What was his name? Hammersmith? Nora was full of refreshed zeal when Gordon and the others came home, but actually speaking Phil Kay’s words—a year, two years at most—punched a hole in her enthusiasm. They all looked shrunken.

  Gordon lifted Keefer out of her high chair and carried her out into the hall, holding her against himself while he slipped her feet through the legs of her purple snowsuit and into her bumblebee boots. “Mama,” Keefer said, waving to her grandmother and aunt.

  “She means they’re going to the cemetery,” Lorraine told Nora.

  “Good Lord,” Nora breathed, “you think that’s okay for her?”

  Lorraine shrugged, “No, I guess it’ll scar her for life. But I probably don’t care about that, because I’m the hysterical old woman who’s determined to put her own greed ahead of her grandchild’s welfare.”

  “That was one letter, Lorraine. Which they didn’t even have the guts to sign their names to.”

  “Maybe it is better for her. Maybe we’re all so warped by the grief . . . maybe she needs a new start.”

  “Well, I don’t think you should give up. The worst thing that could happen is that another family will never have to go through this.”

  “Nora,” Lorraine sighed. “You’re a better person than I am.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You are. Because I guess I’m not thinking of all the other families who could go through this. I’m only thinking of her. And I’m not even really thinking of her so much as I’m thinking of us. That letter writer, whoever she was, said Georgia asked every person who came to see her to take care of Keefer. I never thought she wanted anyone to do that but Gordie.”

  “Look at them,” Nora mused.

  Snow had begun to fall, huge, wet flakes tatting against the front window. The only speck of color against a milky sky was Keefer’s bobbing snowsuit.”Isn’t she just the picture of Georgia? That tough little way she walks.” Prickles like a bolt of electrical current shot up her forearms when Lorraine pushed the drift of envelopes they were stuffing onto the floor.

  “That’s just it!” she said. “That’s just it, Nora. No one ever thinks of family any way but that very way!”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “She looks like her. He looks like him. You’re the picture of your father. Mark’s the image of his grandmother!” Lorraine ranted, “Don’t you hear yourselves?” Nora was struck speechless. “Every time Mike’s boy Matt walks in the door, one of you says, ‘There’s little Mike, right there!’ And then someone says, ‘But Pete’s got Debbie’s eyes.’ And then someone else will say, ‘No, really he looks more like Debbie’s sister.’ It’s like this is an endlessly fascinating subject. Even if you saw them the week before, someone has to comment on how much more they look like someone in the precious family . . .”

  Did she do that? Nora tried to collect herself.

  “No one ever meant anything wrong by it,” she finally said.

  “But how do you think my kids felt? You know how they felt? They felt excluded; I would see Georgia look away . . . Georgia always wanted everyone to love her. She was always trying to please people, whether it was me or her lousy friends or teachers. And Gordon, he doesn’t look a thing like either of us. It was just so ignorant. Do you know what that Dr. Slater’s wife said to my son? When her boy was on the soccer team with Gordon? Not that I could ever imagine old man Slater being able to father a mouse, and how she could even sleep with a guy sixty years old.”

  “We’re sixty years old, Lorraine,” Nora said, struggling to keep up.

  “Well, we weren’t then! And she was always such a snooty bitch. She walked up to me and Gordie after a game and said, ‘Evan wants you to tell him why Georgia doesn’t look like Gordon, even though they’re brother and sister. And I’ve just told him that adoption was a very nice thing some people do for children who don’t have homes.’ I didn’t know what to say, Nora. And you know what she said to us, then? She said, ‘Well, Georgia could be yours, but Gordon sticks out like a sore thumb.’ ”

  “I don’t believe that,” Nora said. “Though Doc Slater was always a horse’s ass.”

  “Oh, Nora, it’s like that for everyone else, the whole world is just a mirror, and people just want their kids because they’re a reflection of themselves . . .” And then she added, “It was why we never came out with you.”

  “What?”

  “We kept to ourselves, Mark and me, because we just couldn’t stand it. It was as if nobody cared what the kids were doing at school or how they were growing, like the only value a child had was his McKenna chin or his big Nordstrom feet. It was like we’d brought something new into the family, a treasure to us . . . and nobody cared! I think it was half the reason Mark was against adopting. He knew you guys would never accept it.”

  “Our parents maybe, Lorraine. Old people set in old ways. When a woman couldn’t have children back then, she just accepted it. I don’t think our parents ever knew an adopted child.”

  “But you’re not old and set in your ways, Nora. We grew up in the fifties. People understood it as a fact of life when we grew up. We didn’t mind being different, but we minded having our kids’ faces rubbed in it all the time.”

  “That was why?”

  “Yes.”

  “We thought you didn’t like us.”

  “Didn’t like you? That’s outrageous, Nora.”

  “It is not, Lorraine,” Nora said, thinking, in for a penny, in for a pound. She was trading more cross words in twenty-four hours than she had in the previous twenty-four years. So be it. “You always had a way about you, of saying keep your distance—”

  “Don’t you see why, Nora? Even now? The whole world feels exactly the way you do. Judge Sayward feels that way. The legislators do, too. They think we feel like our children are . . . just guests in the house for eighteen years.”

  “How could you think I felt that way, too?” Nora stood up. Lorraine opened her mouth to speak. “If I felt that way, Lorraine McKenna, why would I be here?” Nora thought of Georgia’s orange sweatshirt, its arms animated, lifting, outstretched. “Georgia was dearer to me than my own life, Lorraine. Maybe you think Hayes and I are dumb hicks, and if I ever said things that hurt her, I’ll take that with me to my own grave. But if you think we ever set out to hurt you, or my brother, or your children, then I’ll get up and walk out that door and take my ugly ways with me. And if you don’t mean it, you’d better accept that there has been hurt on both sides and enough of it for a lifetime to go around.”

  Lorraine turned away, and looked out the window. “You can’t even see the cemetery, the snow is so thick,” she said.

  “But it’s warm out. They’re fine,” Nora replied. “It is coming down, though. Look funny going up, wouldn’t it? Remember how Rob used to say that?” Nora thought if she didn’t try to joke, she might cry, or run for the door.

  “Nora,” Lorraine said suddenly, “I never thought you were a dumb hick. You’re the smartest hick I know.”

  Nora snorted.

  “And more than that, you’re . . . you’re my friend. You’re my family. If I didn’t think that, I’d never have been so rude to you as I was just now. And Georgia loved you . . .”

  “That’s okay, Lorraine, that’s enough.”

  “No. She loved you as much as she loved me. You made her feel part of the family, Nora. You have to forgive me. I’m not . . . I don’t know how I can—”

  When the telephone rang again, Nora answered. She was the most composed, though her ears still rang with the words of Lorraine’s
wrath and sang with the words of her respect, words she’d been fearing and hoping to hear for thirty long years.

  So the words she heard next were at first confusing to her, like an extension of the conversation just completed, as if she’d wakened from a dream with dream narratives still in her head. It was Phil Kay’s aide, a young woman whose voice chirped and tumbled as she explained that she, too, was adopted, as were her two brothers, and that this could happen to her, too, and to her parents. And that Representative Kay had a very unusual idea, which might not work, but he was going to try to tack the amendment onto another bill related to adoption . . .

  Then the two of them, Lorraine and Nora, were running out into the snow, across the street to the cemetery, both shouting for Gordon, and it was Nora who got there first and was the one who was able to say, “Phil Kay is going to introduce the amendment now! Before the Christmas break in the legislature!”

  “When?” Gordon asked, tearing off his cap. “When?”

  “A week from Thursday!” Lorraine cried. And the three of them snatched up Keefer and whirled her around among the frosted monuments with snow filling in the carved clefts and swirls of names and dates. Nora would think later how mysterious it was, the way they gave Gordon the news right at that time, and right in that place, Georgia not a foot away.

  CHAPTER fourteen

  The last time Gordon had walked through the state capitol had been his eighth-grade graduation trip. He and Church and Sweeney had barely been able to hold their eyes open, caught in the otherworldly state they’d attained from spending most of the previous night throwing ice cubes from their seventh-floor room in the Park Towers at the heads of the girls sticking their heads out on the sixth floor.

  He felt not entirely different when he and his mother arrived at the dot of eight on the morning Phil Kay was to present Assembly Bill 600 to the legislature for approval. Giddy with delight on the night they’d first learned about the possibility, they’d been quickly sobered by a phone call from Greg Katt, who said he’d managed to schedule a hearing to halt the petition for adoption the Cadys had filed and to stop Keefer from being transferred to their care until the court of appeals could take up the case. He hadn’t had much hope. Judge Sayward would be on the defensive, Katt warned, and she had already refused, in substance, the same request.

  But that, Mark had insisted, was before all the publicity.

  “Judges don’t like publicity, particularly of that kind,” Katt replied, as they all listened in on the extension. “I imagine she’s feeling the heat,” Katt went on, “but we’ve got a shot, and let’s give it our best.” The hearing was set for Thursday morning, he said.

  But they would be in Madison to see Phil Kay make his presentation to the legislature on Thursday morning.

  Did they dare ask for another date?

  Did they dare risk the passage of the law by seeming unappreciative, by not turning out in person?

  Did they dare miss the hearing with Judge Sayward and risk giving her the impression that they didn’t care what she decided?

  They would compromise; Mark would stay home with Keefer. Gordon and Lorraine would rush home as soon as they’d finished testifying at the state capitol.

  Gordon had no idea what testifying would involve, but it sounded like something that would fall beyond his realm of aptitude. “I’m not a word person, Mom,” he’d dithered as they drove down, past the necklace of small towns that clustered on the periphery of the highway. “You tell them the story, and I’ll just sort of stand there supportively.”

  “The whole world already thinks I’m crazy, Gordie,” Lorraine said, “Even my friends have told me we should stop giving interviews because it sounded like we were trying our case in the press.”

  “I’m going to have to write everything down.”

  “It’s your life, Gordie. You don’t have to write anything down.”

  “I can’t ad lib like you do.”

  “You ad lib in class every day. Just picture yourself talking to your class.”

  He had shared a room with his mother for the first time since he’d been a teenager, and when he finally did manage to fall asleep, Lorraine first worked him with her snoring, then sat up and turned on the lights and began rummaging through her bag of newspaper clippings.

  “Mom, give me a break,” he’d finally groaned, and the light snapped out. A few minutes later, he heard her rustling through the closet. “What are you doing now?”

  “I’m going for a walk,” she’d said.

  “You’re not going for a walk in the middle of the night in the downtown of a city you don’t even know,” he’d told her.

  “I’ll be just fine, Gordie.”

  “You can turn the light back on. I don’t care.”

  They’d ended up watching MTV all through the small hours, Lorraine keeping up a running commentary on the disgusting treatment of women in modern music, the images of torture and sadism and simple misogyny, until he wanted to suggest they throw some ice cubes out the window for fun. At the stroke of 6:00 a.m. they called his father, waking Keefer, who’d cut her finger the previous night when she’d smashed a jar of Lorraine’s moisturizer on the bathroom floor.

  “Was it a bad cut?” Lorraine cried, making the sign of the cross in the air.

  It had not been serious, but had bled, Mark reported.

  “And where were you while all this was happening?” Lorraine asked. He’d been watching Keefer, Mark told them mildly.

  “Watching her cut herself?” Lorraine snapped.

  “Settle down, Lor,” Mark told her.

  Everyone wished everyone else Godspeed.

  Gordon still hadn’t written anything down and was nauseated by seven, when they were the first people to venture into the hotel dining room.Though the bill dealt with provisions that would hasten children’s transitions through the foster-care bureaucracy in the hopes of more easily securing adoptive homes, all the media could talk about was the Blood Relative Case. The McKennas had flipped to all three channels the night before Lorraine and Gordon left for Madison, listening with surreal calm as blond anchorwomen intoned, “Adoptive families all over the United States will turn their eyes to Wisconsin tomorrow, as our state may become a leading voice on behalf of adopted children, affirming that they are equal in every way. But for one family, the prospect of an amendment to Assembly Bill six hundred has a heartbreaking personal meaning. And for the McKennas of Tall Trees, Wisconsin, that story began agonizing months ago . . .” The past days had annealed the wince all three of them first felt when they saw their home videos displayed as feature footage; but Gordon’s father still hit the mute button when Georgia’s voice, reading Green Eggs and Ham. They couldn’t bear it. Perhaps Georgia had been right. For Keefer to see her as she had been then would be a cruelty, like some bathetic Victorian ballad about angel mothers and rose-wreathed graves. Even with the sound extinguished, they all knew when the piece turned to “the controversy,” because the camera zoomed in on footage of Delia and Craig.

  Finally, a little before eight, Gordon waited for his mother to straighten her stockings in an echoing corridor off the main rotunda. He studied the dome, the Renaissance-style ladies who floated in vegetal splendor on the ceiling overhead—Wisconsin, flanked by Miss Lake Michigan, Miss Lake Superior, Miss Mississippi, each voluptuous goddess holding some romantically rendered object of commerce, such as lead, or tobacco. The reporter was practically on his back by the time he noticed her, and it irked him that his shrug of alarm was being captured by her camera jockey, a bearded giant in an Outlaws leather cap.

  “I just saw you on TV,” Gordon said, and when the woman grimaced, he thought, Gee, she’s probably never heard anyone say that before.

  “I just saw you on TV, too,” she told him. “I’m Joy Bell, from Channel Four News?”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re Gordon. What do you think will happen here today, Gordon?”

  “I have no idea,” Gordon said, pos
sessed by an urge to wave to his father back home. “I mean, we hope that the assembly will consider this bill very carefully, because it means a great deal to a great many lives, not just ours.”

  “And Mrs. MacNamara”—the woman wheeled around as Lorraine stepped into the rotunda—“you’re angry, too?”

  “Mrs. McKenna,” Lorraine said. “And what am I angry about? On the contrary, I’m just grateful that our assemblyman, Phil Kay of Merrill, took it upon himself to speak for adoptive families everywhere. As he says, this should have happened long ago.”

  “Then you’ll be able to adopt your niece, Mr. McKenna?”

  “That’s a long process. We are in the process of appealing Judge Sayward’s decision, and that could take months, and then only if we’re successful—”

  “Thanks so much,” the reporter concluded.

  “Another piece of incisive journalism,” Lorraine grumbled. She’d been out of sorts when the previous Sunday’s Milwaukee Journal featured a two-page spread under the words “Family Bound by Loss, Shattered by Love,” which quoted Lorraine as feeling “hatred” toward the Cadys.

  “I never said that,” Lorraine told Gordon, astonished. “I said I hated what had happened, that I hated Keefer having to go through all this. I’m going to call that woman.” But the reporter had left a message the following morning, cheerfully swearing that she’d checked her notes and was sure of what she’d written down, and by the way, look for an interview in the afternoon paper with Raymond Nye, Sr.

  “We don’t feel any hatred at all, toward any living soul,” Big Ray was quoted as saying. “We just know what’s best for this little girl. And the court knew what was best for this little girl. I don’t really think it had anything to do with adoption at all. We wanted to carry out the wishes of our boy, and his wife, too, who wanted the same thing. We have proof of that. And that’s all we’ve done. End of story.” A photo of Big Ray, a doleful beagle, and of Ray laying down his putter at the Knockout so long ago.

  That day in school, Gordon’s boss remarked, “Knows how to stir things up, doesn’t she?” And Gordon, caught by surprise, nodded.