A Theory of Relativity
And though Gordon didn’t feel dismal, precisely, it crossed his mind that their place might never be theirs again, in this way.
He had felt older by orders of magnitude in just the few weeks since the inevitability of death and legal struggle and fatherhood settled in. Try, he’d told himself. Glory in each bachelor day left. Each day that Keefer lived at his folks’ and he could get up and lazily shuffle off to his run, read the newspaper front to back, play pickup with Church and the guys in the VFW parking lot; each of those days should be a vacation in a room at the top of the universe.
But the ominous opening chords of everlasting responsibility wouldn’t be silenced. His mother had played for him the message that Diane Nye left on the answering machine after they’d fled Ray’s memorial—a move that in Gordon’s opinion had been a bit hysterical. Diane had been smooth, but clearly enraged. “We’re sorry you had to leave so quickly, Lorraine,” she’d said, “but we’ll see you soon. What we would have told you, if we’d had the chance, is that Big Ray is going part-time, and Delia and Craig found us a nice little place in Madison so I can come for the summer. At least for the summer . . .” Big Ray’s voice, unintelligible, boomed in the background. “And we’re going to file for permanent custody—I don’t care, Ray—it’s no secret, and you know that was what Raymond wanted, and Georgia, too, we have the notes Mr. Liotis prepared for the will they were going to complete . . . she’s a Nye, Lorraine. You know that . . .” More muttering, and then Diane’s sharp, “I said I don’t care, Ray. Anyhow, you folks take care, and kiss our baby for us.”
His mom must have played the message ten times, searching for signs and portents in the inflections. Lorraine had been doing the Grandma Lena stuff big time these past days. Don’t put a hat on the bed, Gordie, it’s bad luck. Don’t open the window, Gordie, when those birds are in the crab apple tree. When a bird flies into the house it means someone in the family will fly out. She was driving him around the bend. His only comfort lay in seeing that the “case” seemed to ease some of the lethargy that had possessed his mother since Georgia’s death. Her desperate energy at least made her behave more like the mother he knew.
It was she, in fact, who did most of the communicating with Greg Katt. Gordon didn’t feel old or mature enough to “have” a lawyer anymore than he would have felt “having” an estate planner.
In fact, he probably needed an estate planner. But whatever. So far as Gordon could tell, all the worry was misplaced. Now that the cards were on the table, it was clear that all the Nyes could really do was delay the inevitable. Gordon would be Keefer’s father by September. Madison condo or no, the Nyes, to Keefer, were older acquaintances from far away. The first will was the only will that had ever been signed, and it would have sway. Even when Katt phoned to tell Gordon and his parents that Delia and Craig Cady were making noises about filing a competing petition to adopt Keefer, Katt was quick to point out that this was actually good news. Friends, even if technically second cousins to a child, were not immediate family.
Flurries of documents began drifting down.
The Nyes filed, in Dane County, a petition for permanent guardianship. But Katt said the Nyes were not residents, so the McKennas’ petition, filed first, had precedence. Point, counterpoint.
Of course, Katt would have to motor on down there for a hearing . . . even meaningless petitions needed to be heard, and a hearing was one of those things lawyers never did for free. . . . Some driving, some paying, and things stayed just as they were.
Next, the Cadys turned up with their request to adopt Keefer. Gordon had felt a tick of concern: He’d only just had his home study; he hadn’t even had a chance to file! But, Katt reminded Gordon and his parents, at least Gordon had a home study. That showed intent. Once an uncle stepped forward, and he had, already, done everything except formally step forward, all those other appeals would fade into expensive, mute irrelevance. Advantage, McKennas.
Katt had called him one night directly, bypassing Lorraine and Mark. Gordon had known instantly, from the sound of the line, that it was not someone he knew. The only person who owned a cell phone who called him regularly was Church, and Tim’s cell phone (county-provided) was such an exalted product Gordon could never tell it wasn’t a land line. By contrast, Katt’s cell phone made him sound like the blub-voices during underwater knife fights on Sea Hunt, voices he and Georgia would imitate, in their rubber blow-up pool, making a game of trying to guess what the other person was saying with a submerged head.
Katt had asked about Gordon’s relationship with the elder Nyes. What was it like?
“Well,” Gordon said slowly, “first it was fine, and now it’s lousy.”
“I don’t mean how do you feel about them, Gordon,” Katt replied. Gordon could hear the thwap of paper; what, did Katt have a desk in the car?
Would he have objections, Katt continued, that he hadn’t had before, to Ray and Diane maintaining a normal grandparent bond with Keefer? After everything was said and done? Katt would understand, fully understand, if Gordon had reservations—on the other hand, those assurances of the willingness to “be open” on Keefer’s behalf would strengthen their position in the eyes of the court.
Gordon, appalled, stammered first no, then yes, then how the hell should he know . . . if they were going to act like monsters, they sure as hell couldn’t be around her. But if they were going to be the nice people they had been before, if things settled down once everyone began to recover from their losses . . . “We’d have to wait and see whether things could get back to normal,” he said. We who, he thought? He was talking the way celebrities talked, referring to himself in the plural.
“Things will never be exactly normal,” Katt reminded him.
“I mean, normal for the way things are now.”
“Well, sure.”
“Then, yes, I could see them having some . . . contact with her.” Gordon felt again huge, regnant, an impostor, as if he were a guy who’d worked weekends doing ten-minute lubes and woke up one morning to learn he’d inherited the whole dealership and people were humbly approaching him, calling him boss. It was hard for him to even imagine himself with the words “access” and “reasonable visitation” in his mouth . . . shouldn’t someone be calling his father? Or his mother? But Gordon swallowed on no saliva and kept his voice level as he assured Katt that, yes, theoretically—theoretically!—he’d want Keefer to have access to all her family. Katt said softly, “We’ll see, we’ll see.” And when he put the phone down, Gordon wondered, had he really meant it? Could this breach—deepening as precipitously as a sinkhole, sucking down family ties that had seemed immutable, as ruptured roads and houses and stores and telephone polls seem immutable—could it ever be filled in and covered over?
Could he trust—ever trust—Ray and Diane and Delia and her husband with Keefer?
Had he ever really trusted them with Keefer? Had he really—it stopped him physically, in the middle of the room, like a poke in the chest—given Ray his full due as Keefer’s father? It had been Gordon who’d done so many of the paternal chores. Had he thought of himself, long before Georgia died, as her father? As her surrogate father?
Bills began to arrive. Perusing the first month’s statements, Gordon decided that Katt, who’d spent fifteen minutes on a letter from the lawyer who prepared Ray and Georgia’s original will, was indeed a very slow reader. There were all these hearings, and the cost of a co-counsel expert in adoption—“She’s a big gun. From Madison,” Katt told them, “and even if we don’t really need her, it’s better to have her on our side, huh?” This could run into a little money, Katt warned. Not huge money. About the amount it would cost a couple to adopt a child, the lawyer supposed.
Gordon had some savings. He assumed that his parents had plenty of money. He’d not thought about his parents in economic terms—not since they’d point-blank refused to buy him a motorcycle—any more than he’d wondered how packages of socks and underwear had ended up in his dresser drawers
when he was a kid or how checks in envelopes carefully marked “Tuition” and “Fees” and “Books” were tucked into his college duffels. Money was not going to be a big problem. If it were, they’d have told him by now. Gordon would need to submit to a psychological evaluation beyond Cindy Rogan’s cheerful home study. But not to worry about that, Katt said, it was just standard practice, to rule out any issues. A court-appointed private psychologist would do it for the county. Katt had set it for . . . days from now. July whatever, sometime.
Big deal. Gordon was more worried about the physical for the home study. About the AIDS test. There had been an AIDS test for the teaching job, and it was fine, of course. But one test didn’t mean anything considering that night more than two years ago. In the Galápagos—Christ, he hardly remembered it. The girl, a bewitching United Nations of a woman, black and Asian and green-eyed, the dance floor in that tumbledown hut beach bar, the ziggety music, the superoctane brew that tasted like Tang and fueled him so he was walking on Jupiter. The condom hadn’t broken. He knew that. But it had been some kind of hellacious Third World condom, and she’d put it on with her teeth . . . God. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t die on Keefer. Not even twenty years from now. He’d lain awake on his bed, listening to Keefer sing to herself, on one of only two nights she’d consented to lie down alone for more than fifteen minutes, thinking about AIDS and ebola and all the sweltering, ferally gorgeous places he’d let himself be thrown around in, getting cut and scraped and insect bitten and sunburned when he hadn’t thought of being a father to his little leaflet, his orphaned baby. Like a psycho, he’d gone and picked up Keefer and rocked her in front of the window until he was dizzily sleepy and she was wide awake.
All these things were so . . . boring. They were always in the way, like box turtles in the road that could neither be rolled over nor hurried.
He was afraid of getting to be like his mother, throwing salt over her shoulder.
He caught himself thinking of stupid shit he hadn’t thought about in years, about his grandma McKenna’s brother, awful Harold, asking Lorraine, right in front of him—okay, Gordon had been a kid, but not a deaf kid—if there’d been “insanity in the family of that boy you got.”
Not until now, had been his mother’s frosty answer.
What had he done to provoke his great-uncle’s remark? Some dumb kid thing, he and Pat Chaptman’s invention of the Barbie guillotine or something. A mean old man taking out his own stuff on a kid. He still saw it as a teacher. Adults, in all their power, could dish out heavy grief. His teacher acquaintances did it all the time, dividing the town up into “house parents” and “trailer parents.” They thought the kids didn’t know, but the kids knew everything.
When he was little, he’d ridden his bike through the Wildflower Trailer Park, imagining every weary blonde he saw perched smoking on pull-down metal steps to be his birth mother. Not that he’d had any profound interest in her. His folks had made sure he knew the girl’s name—Heather. She’d only been fifteen or so when he made his appearance. When Gordon was still a toddler, Lorraine had told him, Heather’s trail went cold somewhere in Milwaukee. They’d done their best, Lorraine apologized, especially given that adoptions that took place in the sixties were supposed to have been “sealed” for reasons of pretense that held sway in a much less frank time. As if he cared. He didn’t care. It didn’t occupy him. Except to piss him off when someone drew attention to it. The occasional questions, in middle school, You mean Mrs. McKenna’s not your real mother? Who is, then? Olivia Newton-John, he’d said to that lousy Reilly brat, Ryan. Get out, Reilly gasped, for real? Ryan Reilly had the brains of a mailbox. No, Gordon said, the truth is, it was really your mother.
His first fistfight over that.
Gordon could not ever have foreseen how something like adoption, something so ordinary to him, could have become this boiling, festering focus in his adult life. And not even his adoption, or Georgia’s. Georgia had gone through the usual TV-movie silliness, imagining her birth mother as a famous Harvard researcher using all the scientific detective skills at her command to find her lost child, intent on bestowing a cache of jewels passed from generation to generation since Marie Vetsera. But they had never shared aching conversations about “who they were.” Had he been afraid to delve? Had he been afraid to insult his parents? Or just . . . who cared?
The current wrangling had nothing to do with him and Keefer. He and Keefer were as comfy as a boy with his puppy. He stood her on the counter and held her little hands while he played the Mambo Kings. They flew the shark kite out his bedroom window. She cried the first time she’d run full tilt into the screen coming in from the terrace, but then let him know, endless times after that, using her few words and her fluent little chimp sign language, that she wanted him to close the screen so she could run into it and then fall down on her padded bottom, the two of them belly-laughing like drunks at the Wild Rose. She curled her arms around his neck and held on to fistfuls of his hair when they sauntered through Wilton’s Market, him feeling all the eyes on him. Yeah, I’m with the shortie. I’m her pop. She ate Pad-Thai from his outstretched index finger, making him feel for all the world like a mother bird. They mooed at every cow they passed and said goodnight to Georgia’s wedding photo when Keefer slept at his place. He’d started having her sleep over, at his mother’s urging, just one night a week. But soon they were up to three, the goal being that by the hearing, it would be Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house that felt like a fun place to visit and Gordon’s apartment in the Victorian that felt like home. He’d been intimidated at first by all the directions that accompanied her—wipe butt front to back, eyes from the outer corner in, hold on to the little wisp of hair close to the scalp and comb hair knots from the middle of each strand down, shoot Tylenol into the cheek (and then wipe it off his shirt when it spewed back out). It was all stuff he’d done before, but as an assistant, with his mother or Georgia the managing director. Now he was on his own. He’d mastered the gag when he opened one of the truly terrifying clay-yellow diapers—-how could a person have two entirely different kinds of bowel movements, pebbles and a mass of mush, in one diaper?—and was grateful for the many hours he’d spent dissecting ripe dogfish shark carcasses. He’d overcome the impulse to burst into tears himself whenever she cried, which was a good thing, since she cried often. First came what Mark called the “boo-boo face,” a pout so heartbreakingly fetching Gordon couldn’t believe Keefer hadn’t practiced in the mirror. And then, once the tears started coursing, she’d pop open the snaps on his shirts and press one wet cheek against his neck. He would be utterly powerless. He would feel as huge as Atlas, at the same time. “Baa,” she would say, when she kissed him good-bye, “Baa.” He first thought she was reminding him to include her juice bottle in her pack, but he gradually got that she was trying to mimic the sound adults made when they blew kisses.
Hour by hour, his barely twenty-pound niece was rearranging huge chunks of his life. Increasingly, when Keefer stayed at his parents’, Gordon would find an excuse to call and talk to her on the phone, as though it were not insane to talk on the phone to a baby—“Is she still there? Hello? Keefster? Is that you?” She made spitting noises and pressed the buttons. But when his mother took over and said, “She’s smiling really big now, Gordie,” he would become too choked to say anything. It was like the feeling he used to have as a teenager when he imagined himself doing the NBC commentary for his own stardom: Fans of the tournament all over the world are turning their sights on Scotland tonight and asking, who is this Gordon McKenna, a science teacher from Wisconsin . . . And the Nobel prize for biochemistry goes to . . . Gordon Cooper McKenna!
It was absurd. If he were a woman, he would have considered it hormonal.
Nothing had tickled him more than the terrific bedroom he’d figured out for Keefer at the new apartment. There was a huge walk-in closet off his own bedroom, which he would never have enough clothing to fill. Shopping with Lindsay one night for a shower c
urtain, he’d come across this big sheepskin dog bed at the Sam’s Club—a dog bed for a Shetland pony, by the size of it, and it fit right in to one corner of the walk-in. With her Barbies and her embroidered “Queen of Almost Everything” blanket, she would be set, Gordon supposed. It was dark and cool in there, even when the rest of the apartment baked under that peaked roof. He had never actually tried putting her down in the bed—by the time Keefer gave up, he was so shot that they usually fell asleep together on the floor, with the TV still on.
Up until then, Delia and Craig had made only a few day trips, driving all the way from Madison to take Keefer to the McDonald’s for an hour. And then, suddenly, they phoned to request a sleep-over visit.
Agree, Katt advised—in custody, victory goes to those who share.
Their manner, when they showed up, was so off, so beyond the expected awkwardness, that he should have sensed the double cross. By then, their custody petition would have already been prepared. Should he have known? Gordon would later be sure that he’d concocted as many cues and clues as he’d ignored.
You should have known, he’d think later, in Georgia’s exasperated voice.
“It’s better we not talk, Gordie,” Delia told him apologetically, when he carried Keefer out onto his parents’ lawn. Mark and Lorraine sat like matched mannequins on the porch swing. They didn’t want to use the new sheepskin bed. They had a handmade crib that had once belonged to Alexis. Mark reminded them that Ray and Georgia had never put the baby in a crib. Craig said Keefer would adjust—babies belonged in cribs.
There had been nothing anyone could do.
The worst moment came when Gordon tried to peel Keefer’s tenuous little fingers from his neck one by one, and Keefer began to pant and then to sob, “Dory, no no! Dory no!” Nora had driven up by then and was frantically offering everyone coffee, and Lorraine simply jumped up and walked straight backed into the house.