A Theory of Relativity

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Take your time,” Mark urged him. “You need to find an apartment that you can stay in for a while. You want to make it nice for you and Keefer.” He’d offered Gordon a loan, but Gordon refused. It was he who would have to help his father, down the line, with all the legal bills. He was sure he’d immediately find work subbing in Madison, even though the district was renowned around the state for its pricey clannishness. He was a man, and that was helpful, and he could sub phys ed and health as well as science. And a decision on the three-year doctoral program would be forthcoming by December. The forms, completed, lay on Gordon’s unfinished secretary desk. In three years, Keefer would be looking at kindergarten, and the provision the Cadys had accepted—to remain in the Madison area for at least five years—would still be in force.

  Though only a week of days and nights had passed since the last conference with the judge, he’d made his decision so quickly that all that was left for him to do was to pack up and leave.

  Overnight, Gordon’s immediate future had telescoped into a series of good-byes. Good-bye to his job; that had been easy. His relations with Hart Rooney had, he thought in retrospect, been traversed by unspoken resentment and obligation from the first. Gordon had put it down to a town-bound older man’s natural wariness of a former student who’d returned glossed with some mildly surpassing accomplishments—Hart had been a science teacher himself. The necessary pressure on the school created by his frequent absences during Georgia’s illness had been something Gordon hoped to repair after the conclusion of the case, and he had been comforted in the knowledge that his student and peer reviews were uniformly excellent. But Hart’s palpable relief at his resignation lent weight to Gordon’s suspicion that the aloofness between him and his boss had older, tougher roots, that it went back to the days when he’d outshone Rooney’s own stodgy, replicant sons, one year older and one year younger than Gordon. It went back to Lorraine’s not particularly covert resentment of Rooney’s well-meant comments about adopted children. That series of nasty letters, without postmarks, making reference to serial killers who were adopted, had come from somewhere: Gordon knew that there had never been love lost between his mother and Laurie Rooney, Hart’s shrill wife, who was the band director at the middle school. He would miss his classroom, its noisy, chaotic safety, and the daily interaction with kids he’d come to love, but he was glad to close the book for his own sake, and for his mother’s.

  The deal he had cut with the Cadys had broken her spirit, if not her heart. Nora had cried. His father had left the room. But his mother had said nothing. She had not disputed him, only looked up at him—she was so tiny—in a way that made him feel sorely the immensity of his role measured against the span of his immaturity.

  And now he would have to tell her that he, too, would be moving away from her. Tell her, knowing that this last choice of his would complete the demolition of the familial village Lorraine surely had dreamed of—peopled with her children and their children—so long ago when first Georgia, then Gordie, came back home.

  Coward that he was, he’d waited until a doleful dinner, a few nights after his conversation with Delia.

  Lindsay and he went together. It was not a festive feast. All of them were picking at a pork roast with apple glaze in silence, Lorraine’s and Mark’s appetites no keener than their guests’.

  Sure that one more hitch of the ticking clock would explode him into babbling hysteria, Gordon simply came out with it. Perfunctorily. I’m thinking of going back to school, to Madison, to be closer to Keefer.

  Shock yawned in the room. Lindsay was obviously angry at being flanked by this announcement, which was news to her; his father was both constrained and yearning, his mother suddenly very busy gathering up things to take to the kitchen before dessert.

  He was home alone later, after Lindsay had left frustrated by his feeble promises to discuss his rashness more fully, when the telephone rang.

  “It’s me,” Lorraine said, and she would not have had to say another word; the volume of her injury was so distinct in her voice, in her breathing, that he’d wanted to slam down the receiver and run to her, as he’d run to her every day when he was small, entering the quiet house after school, frantically searching for evidence of her presence, her purse in its customary place on the ledge, her honeysuckle scent in the hallway, throwing himself at her midsection, the fear he felt all day when he was a first-grader, a second-grader, melting in the beatitude of her greeting, in the rapture of their reunion. Georgia, who considered the short bus ride home a rolling recess, an occasion to plan and bicker and carouse with other kids, would come home later, after the endless series of stops at the end of graveled roads to eject dozens of farm and lake kids. More days than not, Gordon would manage to elude the bus, running through the parking lot behind Wilton’s, through the middle-school playground, holding his breath as he jogged through the cemetery so that he would get his wish, jiggling his pee-loud bladder on the curb as he looked both ways before rushing across Cleveland Avenue. Tell me every single thing that happened today, Lorraine would urge him, confidingly, and, over granola bars, he would lead her through his day, through his triumphs in spelling and in gym, his painful struggles in math, his suffering at the hands of the Reilly brat. It had been their protected time, the half hour before Georgia burst in, pulling them into the vortex of her demands and her energy. They talked and snacked, played long, archaically precious games, such as cat’s cradle and jacks—Gordon still played a mean game of jacks—or she held his hand while he drew a thousand elephants, the curve of the elephant’s ear that he could see, then a blind curve, with eyes closed, his hands taking over for his eyes, feeling the sweep and heft of the trunk, the tusk. They plucked overblown roses—“That’s right, sweetie, above the three-leaf”—in the front yard in June and sang, old rounds and rhymes, “Waters of Babylon” and “Wren, Wren, Little Wren,” and the old song that repeated, “Will you go, lassie, go?” the song about mountain thyme that played when Georgia walked down the aisle at Our Lady of the Lake. They rooted out the outlaw dandelions, Lorraine teaching him the chin test for telling if a boy loved butter, and searched for buttercups. They were utterly content and contained, in ways that Gordon, as a horny, irascible teenager would recapture only when he was fortunate to get a sore enough throat that Lorraine would not only let him stay home, but take a day of leave herself.

  Georgia had been able to take his mother’s love for granted, but he had not. He had never been able to bear to hurt her, and had been aghast at the casual way that even good kids, such as Kip, shouted at their mothers, called them “old bitch” behind their backs.

  The construction of the family had plainly been intended for Gordon to be Mark’s child, his boon companion, a little man doing complex male things at the side of his patient elder mentor; and Gordon had certainly acquiesced, but it had never been to Mark that he’d brought his treasures, his granite wedge with its grinning slash of glinting mica, his mummified mouse, and his nuggets of emotional pain. It was Lorraine on whom he counted to examine and proclaim or dismiss them, Lorraine whom Gordon strived to please. Though Georgia reserved, with the stately assurance of a firstborn, her space in Lorraine’s lap, the eminence of her drawings and certificates in the middle of the corkboard, Gordon had believed all his life that it was he his mother loved best. She might call Georgia her image, but Gordon was her jubilee. He gave her the most ease, the most uncomplicated pleasure.

  As he grew older, and ambivalent about his adoration, he’d made his withdrawal from Lorraine careful, gratified that it was not he, but Georgia, who made Lorraine cry, who kept the line of light under his parents’ bedroom door bright late into the night, who picked at Lorraine until his mother’s temper detonated and Mark had to intervene. Until he’d graduated high school, his mother had never, not once, forgotten to kiss him good night, reaching out, embarrassingly, to turn up his chin and give him a peck on the lips or cheek even when Gordon, buried in a book, would have offered her the top
of his head with a mere grunt of acknowledgment. When he was ten and brought her a muddy bucket of crawdads for her anniversary—he knew she’d loved lobster—Lorraine had made a big fuss, preparing a savory tomato broth she served that night over noodles. It had been Georgia who found the package of frozen lobster buried at the bottom of the trash can and brought it to him, pointing out how his mother had been unable to cook his crummy crustaceans and had deceived him. Lorraine had burst into tears, called Georgia a vengeful little shit, let Gordon stay up late, even though it was a school night, and watch Johnny Carson in his parents’ bed. It was still one of his most cherished memories. And though he knew nothing could be more excruciatingly boring than watching someone else play golf, Lorraine had patiently trekked through the mosquito-plagued twilights at public courses every time he played, driven him to the Kwik-Stop for raspberry slushies on the way home, displayed his lame trophies on the mantel long after he would have preferred she box them. Until he had been a . . . parent himself, he could never have imagined how tireless Lorraine had been, always working, always making her art around their many urgencies, always preserving a radiant face for them.

  That night, Lorraine had begun with tender questions, was he sure he wanted to move? There was his job. And what had Lindsay said? What about his friends? They would still have Keefer two weekends every month. Rendered mulish by her concern, Gordon had offered more certainty than he’d actually felt. Until then, the move had actually been only an idea, a possibility. But suddenly, he was certain he had to make a break. He was all there was left; he would be again that little boy, racing hammer hearted and short of breath through the cemetery. And he’d wanted, with fully half his heart, to relent and be that boy, but he was irrevocably grown. “If I can’t be her father, I want to be . . . sort of her stepfather,” he told his mother. “Delia and Craig have no idea how busy they’re going to be with a new baby and Keefer. I’m going to be there for her.”

  Lorraine had not argued. But Gordon could tell, from small, stifled sounds, that she was crying.

  “Mom,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes closed, hugging the phone with both hands, “Mom. I’m going to miss you guys—”

  “It’s like losing her all over again.”

  No, the voice in Gordon’s head cried! No! Foul!

  “You mean Keefer?”

  “I mean your sister.”

  “But . . . I’m going to be around. I’ll bring her up here all the time. And you and Dad can come—”

  “Dad said we could move to Madison when we retired. He said we could get a condo, on one of the lakes.”

  “But you live here, Mom! You and Dad have lived here a thousand years . . .” That hadn’t come out as he’d intended. It had sounded like a preemptory strike, a way to head them off from following him down there, something he almost felt but dismissed as his own fretful impatience. Why shouldn’t they move down there someday? He’d like it. It was just exhaustion, playing hell with him. He wanted sleep. He wanted for this to be concluded. “Not that it would be a bad idea or anything. Take it one step at a time. You have a whole life here. What about your friends? And Nora and Hayes?”

  “My friends are sick of me,” Lorraine said viciously.

  “Things are going to get back to normal.”

  “No, they aren’t.”

  “Well, what are we going to do, then? Just all of us curl up and die?”

  “You don’t know how this feels, Gordie.”

  Yes, he’d thought, I do. I’ve lost my child, too, he thought. “Take it easy, Mom,” he’d pleaded, his voice syrupy even to his own ears, patronizing, false. “Take it easy. It’ll all work out.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want you to have your own life.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want you to have what you want.”

  “Mom, you weren’t like this when I went to Florida.”

  “That was a beginning, Gordie! This is an ending. This is an ending. I don’t know how I’ll feel without—”

  “Without me?”

  “Without you, and without . . . the quest. Everything I had, everything I was went into trying to get the law changed, trying to make it possible to keep Keefer, trying to do what Georgia wanted.”

  “I think that this is what Georgia would have wanted. She would have wanted me to be there, going to the school play, taking Keefer to the museum, you know?”

  “It’s just that I don’t know what I’ll do with myself. Your dad and I, we hardly talk anymore. I don’t know him. Maybe you never know people.”

  Gordon had been blown back. His parents’ small circle of reliance on each other’s companionship had been the substructure of his entire life. He’d always assumed, watching them fold into one another, their backs turned to the outer world in the cozy declaration of their unity, that his folks rushed eagerly to one another when he and Georgia were gone. He’d overheard them, when he was in sixth or seventh grade, poring over travel folders Mark had picked up on the way home from work, chatting about bicycling through Ireland, backpacking in Italy, Lorraine pointing out with wry weariness that they’d started so late as parents, by the time the kids were grown, they’d be wheelchairing through Ireland.

  “There were always so many things you wanted to do,” he said after a pause.

  “We wanted to,” Lorraine sighed, “but it’s not the same now. We can’t just pick up and go on as if none of this ever happened. It’s . . . Gordie, it’s as if we were owed, and we ended up paying. We have a mountain of debt, and all for nothing. And we’re not young . . .”

  She sounded, Gordon thought in terror, whiny. Old. The burden of her need for him would devastate his resolve, and in giving in, he would give up, give up as she had. He could feel his very brain relent, softening.

  He could not leave her. He could not leave.

  He must leave. He must leave or they would all drown.

  “I have to do this,” he’d said.

  I have to do this, he’d told Lindsay, the following night, a Friday, when she opened the door of his apartment with her own key to find him sleeping among his cartons on the folded pillow of Keefer’s dog bed. He fought the instinctive pull to amend his statements, to make this somehow easier for both of them to bear.

  When Lindsay sat down, sobbing, on a taped box, he wanted to enfold her, cradle her. When her weight collapsed the top, and she fell backward, floundering, the helpless, undignified splay of her legs vanquished him, even as they laughed together. Gordon wanted to strip her, bathe and smooth her, bandage her against the wound he had caused, pet her not like a lover, but like a father.

  “I knew how upset you would be,” she told him, patting at her tears with the heels of both hands. Gordon saw plainly how badly he did love her, how he would never see a redhead, her curtain of burnished hair divided by one innocent ear, and not think of Lindsay, his dear and clean and loyal Lindsay.

  “It’s not that I’m upset, though I am,” he said. “It’s that I have to change my whole way of living now. It sounds as though I’m running away, and maybe I am. And if I am, I hope I’ll be enough of a . . . man to figure that out and come home. Come back.”

  “I’ll wait for that,” Lindsay wept. “It’s not as if I haven’t waited.”

  “You’ve waited way too long, Lins. Since we were kids. It’s not as though we’re old people, or anything. Maybe there was a time for us to get married, or whatever, and we missed it. I blew it.”

  “Or maybe it isn’t here yet.”

  “That’s possible. But I don’t want to offer it as a reality because I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure if you love me?”

  “Not sure if the way I feel is the way people should feel when they start a life with someone.”

  “How will you know? How will you know, in Madison? You’ll be all by yourself—though, knowing you, not for long—”

  “Don’t, Lins. Don’t cross us . . . what we have, with that stuff. Because that’s not at al
l what this is about. I’m not saying it wasn’t about that when I went to college. I’m not saying it wasn’t about that ever. But it isn’t now. This is first, about Keefer, and second, about me. What kind of person I’m going to be.”

  “You’ll be all alone. You’ll be all alone,” she said.

  “I’ll be all alone and I’ll be fucking miserable. But I think I need to . . . be miserable alone. In a way, having you and my folks has made it too easy for me.”

  “What will happen?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll grow up. Maybe I’ll realize I’ve already grown up. But I don’t think, I just don’t think marriage is in the cards for me, Lins. Not with you now, or with anybody ever. The way I feel now, I have one space in me, and it’s for Keefer, and that’s all I can handle.”

  “How can you know how you’ll feel in six months? In a year?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t want to let you think I’m doing this . . . on a whim. Just for a while. As far as I know, right now, I’m going, Lins. I’m going for good. If I didn’t think that was true, I would never hurt you like this.”

  She got up from the box, leaning on his extended hand. “May I touch you?”

  “I’m here,” he said, opening wide his arms. She sat on his lap, stroking his neck, until he felt himself begin to be aroused, and urged her to one side. There would be no farewell romp, though at the instant she stood, straight-backed, to leave, he desired her more than he had since images of her butt and her lower lip had frenzied his seventeen-year-old dreams. He pulled her back down, beside him. The light drained into a pewter afterlight—the days, Gordon noticed, were already diminishing; he could no longer pretend it was high summer. Neither of them moved to turn on the lamps. He asked Lindsay whether she was hungry. She asked if he had any wine. They drank a whole bottle of merlot, the last liquid he had in his fridge, and then slept, side by side, clinging together as chaste as a brother and sister. When Lindsay left in the morning, she had not wakened him to say good-bye.