A Theory of Relativity

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Mary Ellen’s brief did not reflect the rancor she felt toward that fanatic witch, Lorraine McKenna, whose self-seeking fervor had forced them all through the hoops of a three-ring media circus. The McKennas might win, but they would not prevail. She and Victoria Linquist were utterly in sync, equally propelled by determination and disgust.

  June third, the anniversary of the accident at Lost Tribe Creek Bridge, was the last day of school, which ended for the term at noon. After lunch, Nora and Lorraine cut a double armload of lilacs from Nora’s yard and bought a couple orchid stems at Every Blooming Thing and drove to the bridge, where they leaned together over the shining segment of repaired railing and dropped the stems, one by one, into the gossipy current of the stream. A breeze came up, and kept blowing the flowers back into their faces, out onto the shoulder of the road, once onto the highway. The two women ran to recover them. “That’s Georgia,” Nora laughed, “she always wanted to get things stirred up.”

  Even Lorraine had managed a fragile smile by the time Greg Katt drove up in his car, slammed on the brakes and staggered toward them. Tears were streaming down his face.

  “Better go home and stock up on gummy bears, Grandma,” he said. “I think you’re going to have a little girl running around soon.”

  The Court of Appeals had reversed Judge Sayward’s decision, on a vote of two to one. A new hearing must take place. It was, as Nora later said, a whole new ball game.

  CHAPTER eighteen

  Nothing would ever make them forget that interval, when there was glory.

  They accepted congratulations as though they’d purchased the winning lotto ticket, then misplaced it, then found it in the pocket of a shirt destined for the Goodwill. Lorraine felt eyes approve her passage through the stalls at the outdoor produce market on Fidelis Hill, through the library, up the steps of the municipal pool building, where, after a year’s sloth, she’d begun taking a water aerobics class with Karen and Natalie. This, she thought, must be what it is like to be a movie star, the bath of approbation—first startled silences, then small murmurs of recognition.

  Yes, she thought, as she nodded in receipt of the smiles, we are the ones you recognize from the news.

  We are the ones who won. We are the good guys.

  There would be a new judge, probably Aaron Kid.

  Greg further told them that he would henceforth tremble at the mere mention of Judge Sayward’s name. Getting a judge spanked, no matter how resolutely impersonal both parties endeavored to behave, was playing with matches. Interviewed for ABC, Katt told Lorraine, he’d tried to be as gracious as David might have been, bending over backward to give all the credit to the design of the slingshot. Had this ruling not been provoked by the McKennas’ tragedy, it would inevitably have arisen from another family’s loss. That Gordon would now have the status to be heard was no recompense for that loss, but did offer the balm of justice, the rare sense of having been at law for a reason beyond profit or punishment.

  In the town at large, the victory spread like water under a door, mouth to phone, desk to desk, fence to rolled-down car window. For years afterward, people would tell new acquaintances how it had been that night with a kind of swagger not quite that reserved for low brushes with celebrities or being an eyewitness at historical tragedies, but close enough for a town of three thousand, north of Stevens Point. Heard of the blood-relative case? The one that was on 60 Minutes? Actually, they said, we know that guy. They’d seen him with the little girl, in the soap store. One of their boys took science in his class. The grandpa was that guy who used to talk about deer and bird feeders on the radio? Remember him? And they had that golf outing, too. Andy North came, yeah, that was right, because the baby’s father was a big-time golfer. Semipro. They would remember running into Mark or Lorraine or Gordon at the Dairymaid the day after or the week after the Court of Appeals sent down word. You know, they’d say, it was the art teacher’s son. The Supreme Court said, in the decision, that her son was as good as any other kid and no one dared say otherwise. Yes, it was the Supreme Court, the telephone versions reported to daughters whose husbands had been transferred to Seattle or San Antonio.

  Were you there, people asked each other, referring to the Friday night party, which started with a few hamburgers grilling on the McKennas’ front lawn and drifted out over to encompass the Dwors’s house and the street until it seemed that all the fireflies in Trempeauleau County had birthed multitudes in front of the house on Cleveland Street. Was it true, a few people who had been out of town asked, that couples waltzed in the cemetery, like black-cut paper dolls against a stainless sky? Did anyone get in trouble for that? Who was the guy who showed up with a violin? The husband of that wild girl, the sheriff’s daughter? You had to be there to understand how it was, others would say, because it was as if a party began without an invitation sent or a phone call made, a gathering that seemed reconstituted from long ago, not long ago in Wisconsin, but long ago, when the Woodland people now lying still in their plundered tomb on a rise ringed by new roads and backhoes were alive and congregating. You had to be there to see how it was, the first long night of June giving up its extravagant bath-warm air, the heavy, creamy scent of peonies in first bloom, people nipping back to their houses for casseroles they’d popped in the oven an hour before, someone carrying a keg all the way from the Wild Rose on Oakwood Street, down Main to Cleveland, someone else appearing with a cake covered in flowers, the blue-white veil of moonlight, the stars that fell, the children who fell asleep on lawn chairs, their chins iced with frosting and petals.

  Some would recount how they saw Craig Cady arrive that night, squealing too fast around the corner, sitting with the windows of his Jeep rolled tight while the skinny teenager with the magnificent hair carried sleeping Keefer up onto the lawn and delivered her into Lorraine’s arms for her weekend visit. Some would invent words Craig said, words of the John Wayne genre, “You haven’t heard the last of this!” or “It’s not over yet!” though Craig had in fact not even turned his head to look at any of them.

  The florist at Every Blooming Thing and the office manager at the middle school would be among those who slid a thumbnail down the spine of a magazine four months later, cutting out a story from Ladies’ Home Journal, a story they would post on their refrigerators for reasons they could not even explain to their husbands or children, a story naming Lorraine as one of the previous year’s twenty Women of Valor, women never to be underestimated, the profile of Lorraine under a headline that read, “Out of Love, Law . . . Her Daughter’s Legacy,” an honor that would mean a dizzying trip to New York for Lorraine and Mark, a check for a thousand dollars to the National Association of Adoptive Families, and lunch at the Four Seasons at a raised table only two seats from Oprah.

  Lorraine had danced with Mark that night on their lawn. She did not remember how many glasses of wine she drank, but she did remember having told Mark that she was going to let herself feel happy for one entire night. Guests, friends, neighbors simply seemed to materialize. She met Stephanie Larsen’s sexy husband, a Latin kid with that hair the color of hot tar, hair that begged to be rubbed between finger and thumb, and wilted with laughter as she tried to fit her arms around Stephanie, who had the girth of a sequoia and wobbled on her feet with her pregnancy like a dog on an old ladder.

  Then Sheila came strolling along.

  “Twin boys!” Sheila said. “It’s twin boys I’m going to be a grandmother to. I’m going to be grandmother for the first and the second time the same day!”

  “I feel like I’m trying to carry two buckets of water without losing my balance,” Stephanie laughed, “and I’m only eight months! Even if I don’t go to term, the doctor says they’ll be fine. They have to be huge! We’re going to name them Daniel George and Diego Dale; Dad hates it, he says they’ll sound like lounge singers. But I couldn’t name a baby Dale! For a first name! I mean, come on! And I couldn’t name a baby George for a first name, even though, you know it’s meant to be for Georgia
. . .” Her great brown eyes sparkled precariously. “I want him to be named after Georgia.” Lorraine’s own eyes brimmed. “I dreamed the other night that I saw Georgia climbing up the standpipe to my window, and I wasn’t scared. It wasn’t like, oh my God, there’s a ghost! It was like I’d been waiting for her to get there. And then, the dream changed around, and I was out there climbing up with her, like I could do that the way I am! But I looked down and we were both of us, like sixteen again. . .”

  This sweet, restored, bygone Georgia whom Stephanie had encountered was wild and windswept and roaring with health, unconquered by the rain that pelted cold around them. “ ‘We won’t fall, Stevie,’ she told me, that’s what she used to call me, when I wanted to be fragile and little and wear floaty dresses like Stevie Nicks. ‘We won’t fall.’ And we made it all the way up to her window, but it was locked, so we climbed on the gutters, kind of scrunched over to your window, which we did do, in real life, a few times, and it was open . . . and we sort of fell in on your sofa, that used to be right by the window?”

  “It still is.” Lorraine coached her on. “Then what?”

  “And she said, ‘Okay! We’re safe.’ That was the end of the dream. And I called my sister the next morning and said, ‘Trina, that appeal is going to go through. It’s going to be fine. It was a sign.’ ” She massaged her belly with its obscenely distended pancake navel and nodded sagely.

  Tim Upchurch stationed himself next to his cooler on wheels, passing out St. Pauli Girls to everyone who passed. About a dozen Reillys of various denominations piled out of a car, the highschool kid jumping on Gordon’s back, and Gordon going right along with it, though the kid made Gordon spill a full plate of Swiss steak on Lindsay Snow’s lap. Later accounts, passed along to those who missed the party, always mentioned that the coral dress Lindsay wore when she came back outside after the spill had belonged to Georgia Nye.

  Lorraine had given the dress to Lindsay to keep.

  She and Nora bounced Keefer on the bed in Lorraine’s room while Lindsay changed, talking to them through the open bathroom door.

  “I hope it fits you, honey,” Lorraine had said. “Georgia was much bigger than you.”

  “No, she really wasn’t,” Lindsay, muffled, answered. “She was so short she looked as though she weighed more, but we were exactly the same size, even after Keefer was born. We both had the big butts and no boobs.” Lorraine heard a gush of water in the sink. “I’m sorry, Lorraine,” Lindsay said then. Lorraine saw a crease of worry cross Nora’s face.

  “No, I’m okay, I’m really okay,” Lorraine told her sister-in-law, and raised her voice. “Is that true, Lindsay? You always look so slim—”

  “I only weigh about ten pounds less than Gordie,” Lindsay said. “He made me get on the scale one night. He practically had to lift me on it, and I was screaming, like, no, forget it! But he said you should tell the person you’re close to about everything, and that a woman’s weight was the last bastion of intimacy—”

  “So, you two,” Nora said then, “what’s up with you?”

  “What do you mean?” Lindsay trilled. “Nothing.”

  “Oh, I don’t think nothing. I think plenty,” Nora murmured.

  “We’re not, like, making plans or anything.” Lindsay said, “My dress is shot, Lorraine. It’s toast.”

  “Just needs a little stain spray,” Nora called, slapping her knees beneath the cuffs of her khaki shorts. Nora wore a white shirt, closed to the topmost button, and pearl earrings. She’d gone formal on them, Lorraine noticed, amused. “Do you have stain spray, Lor?”

  “In the cabinet over the washer.”

  “Come on, Keefer!” hollered Nora, “ponyback ride!”

  Lindsay emerged from the bathroom, tendrils of her red hair nearly indistinguishable against the rosy fabric.

  “That looks wonderful on you,” Lorraine said. “You can have it.”

  “It’s Georgia’s,” Lindsay breathed.

  “No, I want you to wear it. Will you wear it? I mean, more than tonight, if I give it to you?”

  Lindsay reverently stroked a fold of the gauze. It was really a pretty dress, Lorraine thought, a smocked yoke and a skirt that twirled. Georgia had worn it to Keefer’s christening. “I’ll love to wear it,” Lindsay said quietly, “but you don’t have to give it to me. I can have it dry-cleaned.”

  “It bothers me that I never gave you anything of Georgia’s,” Lorraine said, leaning back on her elbows, reaching for her wine glass, which she remembered, abruptly, she’d left outside. I’m tipsy, she thought, I could say much too much. But she continued, “Georgia considered you one of her best friends, Lindsay. I guess I just always thought I’d give you some of the things . . . some of her things . . . if you and Gordon . . .”

  “You know how much I love him,” Lindsay told Lorraine, sitting down beside Lorraine on the bed, reaching out, withdrawing, then reaching out again and lightly taking Lorraine’s hand.

  “I know,” Lorraine said, “and I know he loves you.”

  “I don’t know about that. I get the feeling, sometimes, that he’s looking over my shoulder, trying to see what else is out there. I don’t mean other girls. Though that, too.”

  “He’s got quite a knack.”

  “He does.” Lindsay looked about to weep. “But I don’t want to talk about my craziness. We’re probably happier together right now than we ever were when we were kids.”

  “The thing with Gordie,” Lorraine said, sitting up, swaying, steadying herself, “is that you have to let him be the one who comes to you. This is how he is. He’s like . . . some deer in the forest or something. You can chase him all day and you’ll never get him—”

  “Do you think I chase him?” Lindsay withdrew her hand, glancing about her, as if fearful of being overheard. The man who was playing the violin—who was he?—had begun to play “Georgia.”

  “I don’t think that at all,” Lorraine comforted her, “It’s just a manner of speaking. I only mean that while Gordie seems pretty devoid of the kind of male-pride thing you’re starting to see in young men again, which seems to have sort of skipped a generation with Mark, thank goodness, not that Mark ever would have been a macho man anyway . . .” I’m machine mouth, she thought. Shut up. She had never before discussed anything more weighty than Susan Lucci’s quest for an Emmy award with any of Gordie’s female friends. No, that was not true. She had talked many times with Lindsay about the most pitiable details of Georgia’s illness. She had discussed the case with Lindsay, even revealing her irrational hatred of Diane Nye.

  What she had never discussed, she thought then, was her son. She had never talked with a girlfriend of Gordon’s about Gordon. And she had never discussed a girl in any real detail with Gordon. Of course, she knew about his legendary eloquence in the clinches. Georgia had made sure of that. And Lorraine and Gordon were close enough that he would have brought her, as he’d brought her his snails and snakeskins, the husk of a love that had burned his wings. She’d expected it, the brokenhearted confidence, long distance, expected to be able to offer soothing words and affirmations. She had even planned it. She would never even have suggested that what Gordon had experienced had been trivial. She would have shared her belief that all love was significant, and failed or flourished on by degrees, and often through no fault of either of the partners . . . but it had never transpired. With Georgia, yes. The only way Lorraine was certain she had never failed her daughter was in having been a resolutely loyal listening force through dozens of deceptions and snubs, from male friends and female. Gordon had simply never seemed fazed. She’d no sooner master a capsule history of a mentioned woman than he’d blithely refer to someone else entirely. How many times had she even met girlfriends of Gordon’s? Six? Five? That little surfer girl in Florida, the one with the most extensive collection of navel jewelry in captivity. The woman from EnviroTreks, the zoologist, who’d had shorter hair than almost any man Lorraine had ever met. She tried, and failed, to summon images o
f others. Hopeless. They were forms blurred in the swirl of the revolving door. Susan. Andrea. Taylor. She was sure about Taylor. Or had it been Tyler? The girl from Apalachicola. Courtneys and Lisas and Lizas, Susannahs and Susans. Emily? No wonder poor Lindsay despaired. But then, her son, despite all of his experiences, losses, and responsibilities, was only twenty-five years old. At twenty-five, Mark had actually felt his teeth chatter when a woman breathed on him. Some people were late bloomers in one way, if not in another. Gordon was really only a boy.

  The thought satisfied Lorraine immensely. She did want her wine. She patted Lindsay’s hand.

  “Just enjoy each other,” she said. “This is a time to enjoy each other.” Lorraine tried to ignore Lindsay’s crestfallen look. Time enough, Lorraine thought, to be a mother-in-law again, if it comes to that.

  After everyone had drifted off that night, and Keefer was tucked into bed with her water ba-ba and her Day-doe pillow between her and Mark, Lorraine, restless, had got up in her nightgown and made a sweep of her lawn, picking up paper napkins and stray cups, allowing herself pleasure in the air on her nearly naked flesh. She’d raised the hem of her nightgown, letting the breeze stir up over her hips, her heavy breasts. If she had not thought she might frighten Mary Dwors, who suffered from insomnia, she would have let the breeze carry her across the street, between the brick gates of the cemetery to Georgia’s grave, where she had often sat, to cry or to read the classifieds. She had sent her thoughts on the wind instead. We’ve got her, honey. We’ve got her.