A Theory of Relativity

  They had no idea where they were going to sleep, certainly not at the inn in Kohler, where a room cost what Gordon paid every six months for car insurance. They would figure that out later. Serendipity was the essence of a road trip.

  “My mom said she’d see that woman in hell, and that the Nyes didn’t understand anything about us, and then she called Katt and we went over and officially filed my adoption petition. At like, five o’clock. The clerk was madder than hell. And then she said she and my dad were going to go camping. Camping! The last time they went camping, I was like, ten.”

  “Jesus. Did she say why?”

  “Why the adoption or why camping?”

  “Why Diane in hell,” Tim said, glancing covertly around him before opening the bottle of St. Pauli Girl he’d nested between his legs. The highway was jammed with people in SUVs, all driving in the opposite direction, desperately heading north to camp and fish on the last long weekend of summer.

  “She didn’t tell me why they were going camping. And she didn’t tell me what led to the fight. I was afraid to ask. My mom has a temper. She always had a temper—”

  “Well, Diane is an excellent bitch.”

  “This brings it out in people.”

  “What did she mean, Diane didn’t understand anything about you?”

  “About our family.”

  “Ray was great, though.”

  “He was one of the greats.”

  “How can people be so different from their folks?”

  “I am.”

  “Not so much. You and your folks are superclose. I don’t mean so much you’re like them, I mean you like them. I always thought that was weird, when we were kids, you were like, no, I’m going to stay home with my father because we’re going to do an experiment to turn cabbage red or something. You’d stay home even if they didn’t make you. Instead of going to the fort or something.”

  “We did stuff that was fun. I used to think everybody paid as much attention to their kids as they did to us. But, you weren’t there for the great moments of Dad . . . like the time Georgia and I washed the basement stairs with the garden hose. This was my idea. I told her there were drains in the basement right at the bottom of the stairs, so the water would go right down—”

  “You flooded the basement.”

  “We flooded the yard. We flooded the Dwors’s yard next door. The water got so high it went right out the window wells. We were upstairs, like, watching The Brady Bunch.”

  “He got mad, huh?”

  “Georgia and I were down there swabbing until four in the morning. And then, when I got in bed, there’s Dad, shaking my shoulder. We have to go over and pick up everything for Bob and Mary next door. Right then. Not the next day. Sometimes he’s as tight as a clam.”

  “You can be like that.”

  “Not so much. I’m more like my mom. I say too much.”

  “About some stuff. But I don’t know. You can be . . . aloof.”

  “So Lindsay tells me,” Gordon sighed.

  “You kiss him, though.”

  “My dad?” Gordon hadn’t remembered that. He did kiss his dad on the cheek or the forehead, practically every time he saw him. “I guess I do. Don’t you?”

  “Don? Kiss old Don? Can’t think of the last time. The sisters do.”

  They drank in silence. Church rummaged in the console for Echo and the Bunnymen and seat-danced a little. “So what’s this all mean for you and Lindsay?”

  “What?”

  “You going to do the big deed, then?”

  “Get married? Hello! One thing at a time.”

  “But you’re together—”

  “We . . . play house. I’m like, I love you, Lindsay, you’re the best there is. But she wants . . . more.”

  “It seems like the two of you could be parents together. Keefer loves Lindsay.”

  “It could be a whole lot worse,” Gordon said, then swiveled at Tim’s groan. “What’s up?” Church didn’t answer, simply absorbed himself in rubbing at a knot of pine sap on the lip of the window. After long minutes, Church muttered something about Diane, and Gordon felt guiltily obliged to grab for the fluttering end of conversation.

  “They’re all going to try to make it hard for us.”

  “Why? It’s not like you’re going to take Keefer and move to Alaska.”

  “Well, they look at Keefer, and they see Ray . . . she’s all they have left of Ray.”

  “I don’t think she looks like Ray. I think she looks like you and Georgia. It’s like looking at Georgia, when you look at Keefer.”

  “Georgia, yes. But me? My sister didn’t look like me. Church, we were adopted. We don’t have a genetic relation.”

  “Right. I never think of you guys as adopted.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean it . . . like a compliment. You’re just McKennas. You remind me of your folks. Don’t you think of it like that?”

  “I do, but not because there’s some kind of big deal about being adopted. In mouse studies, if a mother mouse is given a litter she didn’t give birth to, those babies grow up to parent in the same style as the mother who raised them, not the one who had them. Some things are learned. Some are built in. You’d be surprised to know what’s learned.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like a bird learning to sing. They don’t just do it.”

  “Huh,” Tim drained his beer. “Still, you read these things about people who search for their real parents—”

  “Their birth parents.”

  “Right. And they always say they love the people who raised them.”

  “But I wonder what’s going on underneath. If they’re making such a big deal about it. I guess I wondered a little when I was a kid.” Gordon wondered, for a moment, what Keefer was doing. Probably saying the Congregationalist Rosary. “But frankly, I’m getting kind of tired of hearing about it. Especially now. It’s like you have to make excuses if you don’t have this big neurotic thing going on. The psychologist who came got off all over the place on it. It’s like she wanted me to say, ‘But I don’t know who I am!’ ”

  “Well, Keefer will know. She won’t really be adopted. Because she’s already yours.”

  “Yeah. But she’ll be adopted.”

  “Not really.”

  “Yeah, really! Church, get a clue here. It’s not that big a deal for her to be adopted . . . losing her folks, yeah, the way she did, that’s a big deal, but . . .”

  “But it would be weird to think of Keefer being really adopted, like by strangers.”

  “But they wouldn’t be strangers, if they adopted her.”

  “My brother Kevin used to tell me I was adopted, because I was the only one with brown eyes, and it was like this . . . I used to cry about it when I was a little kid. He said, well, Mom and Don only took you because no one else wanted you. The police brought you over. And anytime they want, they can come and take you back. It’s state law.”

  “And you were scared. Like you didn’t belong where everyone else belonged.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, that’s just it. People think you go around sweating that stuff all the time if your parents adopted you.”

  “But I bet there are families like that.”

  “There are people who hate each other who stay married for forty years, too.”

  “Like my grandparents.”

  “But they enjoy it.”

  “True.”

  There was a restaurant. Tim drove past, then circled back.

  “What kind of joint is that?” he asked Gordon.

  The sign said, FINE DINING IN A MUSICAL SPHERE. Gordon looked closer. It would once have said ATMOSPHERE. For the past few miles, as they neared the town, Gordon had been scanning the roadside for a place to eat, to ask about somewhere to stay, where he could get hold of a beer to chase the faint buzz upon him from the pair they’d brought. The long, low building they finally spotted was so jammed, cars and trucks straggled along the
shoulder.

  He consulted his watch. Nine-fifteen. Probably a band. They ventured inside.

  He would have noticed her anyway, even if he hadn’t recognized her from somewhere. She wasn’t beautiful, but she had that kind of what-the-hell body, dark tan, shirt too tight, jeans too loose, that would always make him think of Liza. She was dancing with four friends, all women, as if she were trying to unscrew herself from the floor, one long, fluid, endlessly repeating Mobius. Men would sidle up, and she’d just throw back her head and laugh and turn back to her girlfriends. When the band broke, she combed back her sweaty hair and walked up to Tim and Gordon.

  “May I have my drink?”

  “What are you drinking?” Tim asked.

  “Ice water, and it’s behind you.” Now that she was closer, Gordon could see she was older than she had appeared across the room. He glanced at her hand. Rings, but only on the index fingers, at the first joint. Tiny, sculptured hands. “I know you. From Tall Trees, right?”

  He nodded, measuring. How much older was she? Five years? More? There were tiny scallop shells of lines at the corners of her eyes. Obviously, she worked out. Everybody worked out. It was ridiculous. Everybody looked thirty now.

  “Well, are you?”

  “From Tall Trees? You bet.”

  “City of bait shops,” Tim put in.

  “I’m not. I’m from Merrill. We have a chalet,” she gestured at her friends, who were making a big elaborate show of delivering a foaming pitcher to their table. For his benefit, Gordon thought.

  The one blonde was very cute. But taller than him. “We’re at the golf outing. For the firefighters,” said the lady with the ice water.

  “Your husband is a fireman?”

  “I am.”

  “Get out of here.” Tim was baffled. Gordon, too. The woman was like, five-three. She rolled up her T-shirt sleeve. Biceps like a boulder.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked.

  They told her: the car.

  And then the rest of the women joined them, pulling her away. Her name was Alicia Rafferty. Rafferty, Gordon thought. He knew a Rafferty. Somewhere. He and Church sat down with them. The woman treated for beer. The band, which was called Midlife Crisis, started up again. She pulled Gordon out onto the floor. Thank you, Georgia, he breathed, for teaching me the swing. It ended with them offering to let the two men sleep on the floor at their chalet, if they promised to be good boys. Alicia got in the back of Tim’s car, guiding them past the little proper postcard of a downtown, out a long forest preserve road to a bluff overlooking a steep cliff. Lake Michigan growled and sighed below them. The sky loomed close, stars throbbing.

  The lights weren’t out ten minutes when she came for him. “Come outside,” she’d told Gordon, “I want to show you something.”

  She was a rogue, just dragged him up the bluff and, without a word, stepped out of her jeans. She had to be older. Girls his age either went at it like they were going to devour him or acted as though it were some big gift to even open their mouths, but she treated him delicately, teasing him with feather touches inside his thighs, then along the upper ridge, squeezing with those strong, competent little hands. And then she lay back, laughing, as he got ready to return the favor, to show her how it was done, Jurgen’s best lesson, pretend it’s sippin’ whiskey, he’d told Gordie long ago.

  Then he stopped. Like an exploding lightbulb, he’d remembered where he saw her name. On his class list. She was a relative of one of his students. A sister, a cousin.

  A mother.

  “Something I ate?” she laughed. Then, she sat up. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke,” Gordon told her.

  “Neither do I,” she said.

  “Don’t take this badly.”

  “Uhhh, okay.”

  “I just don’t have the . . . heart for it. You’re gorgeous and sexy and all that, but . . .”

  “I’m older.”

  “That is definitely not the problem.”

  “We don’t know each other.”

  “I’m a biology teacher. Kelly Rafferty is going to be my student in the fall.”

  “That’s my daughter, but it’s okay, and I’m single.”

  “And so am I. Well, sort of. There’s a really nice person who’d be really hurt by what I was thinking of doing right now. And I’m also . . . in a position.”

  “The lawsuit.”

  Gordon was shocked. She’s known exactly who he was.

  “That’s right,” he said finally.

  “You’re in father mode.”

  “All the time now.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “She’s pretty great. She’s the funniest kid. She just started being able to walk backward, you know? Gets this smile on her face, like it’s this big accomplishment to go backward? I taught her to make that beeping noise . . .”

  “Like a truck backing up?”

  “Right. Little kids can do the same thing over and over . . .”

  “Until the end of time . . .”

  “And she still thinks it’s hysterical. I can’t help but laughing, too. She has the personality of a tank, you know? The other night, I found her in the bathroom and she was just whomping on this tube of toothpaste. It was everywhere. And she looked right at me and said, ‘Dory! Ick! Mess! No, no Dory!’ As if I did it . . .”

  “Sounds like you’re raising her to think like a guy.”

  “I hope not,” Gordon said. “If I am, I can’t help it.”

  “You must love her.”

  “I love her more than . . .” Gordon said, surprising himself, “anything on earth.”

  “I like that in a person,” Alicia had said, and then yawned. “Do you mind if I put on my knickers here?” She’d raked her hair and then offered her hand, which Gordon took, gently. “Does my kid get straight A’s out of this?”

  “Nope.”

  “Do I get a friend?”

  “You sure do.”

  “Well, you can’t have too many friends in this long life,” she said.

  When he’d gone to the bathroom and she’d disappeared up into the loft, where her friends were snoring, Church had surprised him by unrolling himself from a blanket and sitting up. “What did she want?” he asked, something clenched in his voice that Gordon couldn’t identify.

  Gordon decided to take it light. “She . . . wanted to show me something.”

  “And you wanted to show her something.”

  “It wasn’t like that. We mostly just talked.”

  Tim threw the blanket off and slipped out the front door. Gordon could see him in black profile, his face set against the lightening sky.

  Jesus Christ, Gordon thought.

  Tim Upchurch looked deep into the frenzy of stars and thought about Lindsay Snow. His gut was sour. He imagined his heart dividing like a hollow chocolate, neatly, in halves.

  Mark McKenna lay on his pillowed arms and thought of his daughter. Beside him, in their tiny tent, Lorraine slept more deeply than Mark believed she had in months. He’d been surprised, but hopeful when Lorraine came barreling up out of the basement with the tent and bedrolls. It was to the handkerchief beach on Spirit Lake, the place no one else but they ever seemed to discover, the spot they skinny-dipped on moony nights when they were young, where they took Gordie to watch a great horned owl feed her nestlings, carrying the children from their beds after midnight one mild spring night so long ago. In the tent, Lorraine and Mark had made love for the first time since Georgia’s death. He had not felt the desire, and had not, in any case, felt good about mentioning it. It had been Lorraine who let him know, with the familiar wordless cues of a mate, that he would be welcome.

  It was because they were away from the house, he supposed. Its restraining web of memories. And for long moments, he had managed to let himself forget, to be caught in the scented tangle of Lorraine’s still-supple limbs, her skin looser, fallen, but no less soft to his hands than the first time.

  Now,
he felt terribly sad. All mammals felt sad after sex, but it was more than a physiological letdown. They had done so well, all their married life, at keeping the kids in perspective relative to their own union. They had given each other time. Even when Georgia was possessed, at fifteen or sixteen, they had managed to keep the circle of their respect and comfort intact. He had never told Lorraine a lie, except once, when he said that there had been another woman before her. A small vanity, from a shy man. That had been the only untruth he had told her until he’d said that he was grateful that it hadn’t been her—Lorraine—that he had lost.

  And that was a lie. Though he had set more store, as his sister would say, by Gordon, Mark McKenna’s daughter had been the radiant center of his life. All the comfort and cohesiveness he had taken and given growing up close to his brother and sister, that mattered greatly. His . . . passion would not be too strong a term . . . for Lorraine, for his work, all this combined could not approach the might of his attachment to Georgia.

  This had not been how he had believed it would transpire. Fear, real fear, had overtaken him when he finally agreed with Lorraine’s desperate wish to adopt. More than most, he knew that genetic characteristics were not suggestions, but destiny. They were a map, with all the points of interest clearly marked. The Minnesota twin studies had proven that twins raised in separate adoptive homes—the barbarity of that, separating twins for adoption!—still chose similar jobs, parted their hair on the same side, developed the same ailments within months of one another. He had known, with complete certainty, that the nature versus nurture debate was specious, that a child’s upbringing could only enhance or detract from that child’s predestined development. An adopted child would be unlike him. That child would be a mystery. Talents, personality quirks, diseases.

  Diseases.

  But then Georgia had been placed in his arms by the foster parent who’d been caring for her. The placement coordinator from Catholic Social Services had been late. A half hour had passed. An hour. Finally, Mark had insisted that they put the baby in the car and leave. What if there had been a problem, and they intended to take her back? They’d been driving up the road, on the way home, when they passed the social worker driving in the opposite direction. They’d had a few laughs about it. The foster mother, the placement worker, and Lorraine, at least. Mark had not laughed. He could only see Georgia, examine Georgia’s auburn fuzz, her piercing black eyes, her tender limbs.