“Yes. Quit your job. Take a leave of absence.”
“I took a leave last year.”
“Then, quit.”
His mother had lowered her reading glasses. “Gordie, I most certainly am not going to quit my job. In case you haven’t noticed, we are running up substantial bills around here—”
“Well, Keefer’s insurance maybe could pay for some of that.”
“They’re our bills, not Keefer’s. Even if that weren’t illegal, I wouldn’t do it. And, anyway, there’s no money, because they’re still investigating the accident.”
“How long can that take?”
“I don’t know.”
“I still think she needs to be with one of us.”
“Then you quit your job. I make more money than you do. I’m two years from being able to take early retirement, Gordon.”
“Mother, I can hardly quit my job. I’m adopting a child, in case you haven’t noticed. How do you think the judge would regard unemployment as a factor in my suitability?”
Lorraine sighed. “You have a point.”
“And, so. . . .”
“Well, she can stay with Nora, I guess. For the time being. They’re picking, though. Nora can carry Keefer on her back in a sling. Like a Pearl S. Buck novel.”
“Bradie’s out there. She just cooks and stuff during the day.”
“We can’t just assume they’ll take her on.”
“Aunt Nora would do anything for Keefer.”
“Well, call and ask her then.”
“You.”
“You call and ask her. You’re the one who wants the favor.”
“Favor?” What the hell was wrong with her, Gordon wondered? What had he done?
In the end, Nora had offered. But that only meant that Gordon had to get up in the middle of the night practically, if he didn’t want to go to school unshaven and smelling of Happykids Blueberry Cobbler. A couple of times each week, Mark volunteered to drive Keefer out to the farm on his way to the plant. Gordon didn’t know why his father couldn’t manage to do it every day; he was a vice president, after all. He didn’t start work until an hour that was practically late afternoon in Gordon’s world. But Mark insisted that he needed his run three mornings a week.
Run.
How come he didn’t get a run?
Gordon’s father would certainly outlive him.
Gordon was so out of shape and skinny his legs felt like sandbags the few times he could get up enough gumption to drive over to Merrill and play volleyball. Even looking at the shapely butts of Alicia and her teammates didn’t energize him. He’d shown remarkable restraint with Alicia, though it had helped to learn that she was thirty-seven years old. Still, he wished perversely he could boast about it to Lindsay. Lindsay helped him often, but it still didn’t feed the bulldog. When Lindsay did Keefer’s wash, he still had to pick it up and put it all away. He spent almost every night folding teeny shorts and dresses and socks. Keefer had at least seven hundred socks, no two of which matched.
Teaching, which had always been a breeze, had turned to stone. It had been easy to be a hotshot at work if all you had to worry about was your own care and feeding.
Keefer had been still in her sleep period when the term began. But within two weeks, he was out of luck, and out of patience.
What biology was mostly about, he’d said one day, was reproduction.
They who reproduce best laugh last, he’d said. They get to keep the marbles.
“In the beginning,” Gordon began, “before dinosaurs, before worms, before cats, before the guys who design the little silver strips on CD packaging, before DNA, even before Mr. Reilly here, there was RNA. Ribonucleic acid. And these RNA guys were pretty limited in what they could do for fun, back around four billion years ago. The planet was probably pretty new then, and nobody knew where the good hangouts were—”
“Where did it come from?” Reilly, of course.
Gordon would later review the tattered ribbons of that class day and admit that it served him right. He’d needled the kid, because Dennis was linked in Gordon’s back brain to the dumbass older sibling, Ryan, who’d once tormented him about adoption.
“RNA?” Gordon asked now.
“Yeah, where did it come from? Because, if cells can only come from other cells, where did the first cell come from?”
It was actually a decent question. “I don’t know. But we can presume that eventually these substances changed so that there was a bold new way of reproducing, a little more sophistication—”
“Like dinner and a movie first.” This from that big blond soccer jock, Kye Olstadt, a really sweet kid.
“Right. And once it tried and failed and tried and failed and tried and failed for a billion years or so, one of these RNA guys invented DNA.”
“I thought James Watson and Francis Crick invented DNA.” Reilly again. “And, news flash, Watson thinks man couldn’t have evolved from a single-celled creature so fast. Had to be aliens.”
“What he meant,” Gordon said, “was that it was possible that there was a life form that may have originated on a planet other than earth, like a supervirus. Not little green men. And, you know, evolution is just change. And it can happen really rapidly. Look how quickly bacteria become resistant to antibiotics . . . there’s microevolution taking place in front of our eyes every day.”
“Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong,” Dennis Reilly said. “I have a cousin in Georgia who can get excused from class when they teach evolution because his family doesn’t believe it.”
“That hardly counts as a place,” Gordon said. He did not want to go down this path, particularly in his febrile, combative state of sleep deprivation. Why didn’t he start this year with ecology—nice, clean streams, big, bad polluters, sweet, smiling dolphins—like the other biology teachers? He was stubborn about starting with evolution because he had this hunch that every human being was most concerned with himself or herself, and so he’d use the rise of self as the bait to set the hook of fascination in a student. And yet, he knew from last year that it was a mined path, where at any turn he could tread on the belief systems of any number of small-town folks. He did not have the strength today. The room was stifling. The kids all looked to be a gathering of the recessive gene pool.
“Well, some people think Darwin was wrong,” Gordon replied patiently, thinking, as he spoke, stupid people. “Some people think he did a pretty good job with the tools he had at hand a hundred and fifty years ago.”
Reilly persisted, “But there’s this one period of time, and it’s only like ten million years, when everything supposedly evolved from bacteria to complex animals. If you’re talking billions and billions of years—”
“It’s called the Cambrian Explosion,” Gordon said, “and, well, look at the AIDS virus. It was around in a limited way for forty years, but it wasn’t until after 1980 that it began to really take off—”
“That was because of airplanes,” Kye Olstadt chuckled. “The guy who spread it all over was a stewardess.”
“And where’s the fossil record of the missing link? The chimpanzee thing that decided to become a human?” Reilly asked.
“I’m not no chimpanzee,” said Gunther Woffling, who, Gordon would have sworn, had been asleep five minutes before.
“Well, no, but you’re ninety-eight percent chimpanzee,” Gordon told him.
“The hell I am! I’m not no goddamned monkey!” No, Gordon thought, as the Woffling kid began loudly slamming his books together and shoving them into his backpack, you’re an insult to chimpanzees.
“Class isn’t over, Gunther,” Gordon said quietly.
“If all this is true,” Dennis Reilly added, “then why aren’t chimpanzees evolving to be more like humans?”
“Because,” Gordon sighed, “they’re good at being chimpanzees. Look, let’s get back to Gunther’s point. If you were a little kid and you made a drawing of a man and a drawing of a chimpanzee, they would look almost alike, righ
t? At least more alike then a drawing of a chimpanzee and a chicken? What does that tell you?”
“Well, why aren’t lizards evolving to be more like humans?”
“Because they don’t need to! Human beings aren’t the most evolved species on earth.”
“They are! They can think!”
“In fact, there are probably bacteria on the floor of the Atlantic ocean more highly evolved than human beings . . . because they’ve had more time.”
“You’re saying a human being is no better than a bacteria?” Woffling again.
“Not better at being a bacteria! Look, you guys, evolution is not a theory. It’s a fact. The theory part is about how exactly it happened, because we weren’t there to see it happen. I don’t know how. I’m not a Presbyterian minister. I’m not a cell biologist. I’m a science teacher—”
“Do you believe in God?” Reilly asked, adding, “Einstein believed in God.”
“Maybe God created evolution,” Kelly Rafferty sang out, “to give us something to do.”
The buzzer sounded. There was a God.
Gordon dropped his head on the shelf of his cupped hands. “Read chapter four for tomorrow,” he blurted. As they all thundered out the door, he could hear Gunther declaiming to all and sundry that he wasn’t no bacteria, and if a man wasn’t better than an ape, why was a man made in the image of God. There’d be a nice phone call from Mrs. Woffling tomorrow. And then he noticed, felt, a presence next to his desk. Kelly Rafferty.
“Mr. McKenna,” she said shyly, “my mom told me about—”about that night at the lodge, Gordon thought; my career sinks slowly in the west; this is the end; no more worries about day care—“about your little baby . . .” Gordon’s heart resumed ordinary rhythms. “I can’t baby-sit in Tall Trees because I bus. But Melinda Gallo and Kathy Zurich baby-sit all the time. And they said I could tell you they’d help you out, because you seem kind of tired.”
“How about two days a week after school and Sundays?”
Kelly blinked. “Well, I’ll ask them.”
Gordon had to ask, too. He had to ask Hart Rooney whether it violated any policy, however obscure, to ask one of his students to baby-sit for him. Rooney had smiled, looking not one day older than he had when Gordon mowed his lawn. “Why, Gordon,” he said easily, “I never had a baby-sitter who didn’t go to this school. Where else would you find teenagers? Just be careful they don’t get into the beer or drive your car.”
And so they came, Melinda and Kathy, his saviors, his baggy-pants saints, Wednesdays and Thursdays after pom practice, and took Keefer to the park or helped her make towers of her blocks, for two hours, while he unplugged the telephone and threw himself across the first horizontal space he could find. So began another short, deceptive period of peace.
Before the night of the bloody nose.
Keefer had been tantrumming. What started it? She’d figured out how to work the nozzle on his shaving cream and he’d let her squirt it into the bathtub a couple of times, but then she’d started squirting it on the walls, on the floor, and he’d taken it away and given her one of her puppets instead. She hit the ceiling. Or more correctly, she hit the floor. Dropped to her knees in the bathroom, screeching, and then slipped on the shaving cream and went down on the tile, and he saw the blood. “Oh my baby, my baby seal,” he’d cried, snatching her up, cradling her against his shirt. The blood wouldn’t stop. Holding her in one arm, he fumbled to knock some ice loose from the glacier in his freezer, grab a towel. Keefer was in full cry when he heard a knock at the door. Three knocks. Sharp and loud.
“I won’t hesitate to call the police,” said Judy Wilton.
“What?”
“I just want you to know that I won’t hesitate to call the sheriff, or call the welfare,” his downstairs neighbor went on. “Look at her!”
He looked at her, at them. He was holding a baby whose face was smeared with blood, who was screaming and pounding on his equally bloody chest with all her might. “Judy,” he soothed, “she’s having a tantrum.”
“This is not normal. I hear this all the time. That baby crying as if her heart would break. I don’t know what you have going on here—”
“She wanted the shaving cream. She was playing with the shaving cream.” Of course he was lying, that was what Judy Wilton thought. And he began to feel as though he were, indeed, lying. “This isn’t what it looks like. She’s just mad. She fell and got a bloody nose.”
“I’m not going to let you do this to a child.”
“Do what? Judy, I love Keefer. I’ve never laid a hand on Keefer. You know that. You see us together.”
“I hear you together. I hear how that child cries. I see the women parading in and out of here at all hours.”
“What?”
“That Snow girl. And those college kids.”
“Those are my students, Judy. They’re my baby-sitters. Lindsay has been my girlfriend for years, and Jesus, Judy. Get a life of your own. What, do you sit down there making a list about who comes into my house?”
She’d given him one brief, bitter nod. An hour later, Sheriff Larsen hit the front-door buzzer, looking as though he were about to bawl.
“Now, Gordo, I don’t want you to get all in a sweat here.”
“She called, didn’t she?”
“She called.”
Sorrowfully, the sheriff explained the procedure. When an accusation of suspected child abuse was filed, no matter if the person in question was Dale Larsen’s own mother, he was legally bound to alert the county. That didn’t mean anything bad would happen, but a social worker would come over and have a chat with him—
“And then there’ll be a record of that in some file, right?”
“There’ll be a record, Gordon, to say the charge was unfounded. It happens to a lot of people, Gordon. Neighbors say things out of spite. People think they’re seeing something they’re not seeing—”
“And what if it means the judge says I’m a child abuser and I lose Keefer because of it?”
“If the charge turns out to be unfounded, then that’s the end of it. A judge is legally bound, just like I am, to consider that investigation complete and valid, see?”
“I didn’t hurt Keefer! She bumped her nose on the floor trying to get the shaving cream!”
“Judy said there was all kinds of mayhem up here all the time.”
“That’s because she’s a crazy old bat who probably has microphones on the ceiling so she can have some diversion besides cutting up chickens for her father. She probably bites the heads off the chickens. Do you know her?”
Dale Larsen did know Judy Wilton. Knew for a fact she’d had a tempestuous lesbian love affair with Liz Kildeer, who used to be the women’s tennis pro up at Fidelis Hill, and that deputies had been called out to this very house more than once to quell some pretty intense sobfests and fisticuffs. He hated like hell to do this to Gordon, but the law was the law. And the social worker who dropped by the next day spent a compassionate fifteen minutes with Gordon and Keefer, assuring Gordon afterward that he saw no evidence of any abuse or neglect of this very loved child, who obviously trusted her daddy.
But Gordon remained certain that Faith Bogert would know about the complaint, would know and would use it against him in court, and even when Keefer began occasionally sleeping through the night, Gordon would never have slept at all if it hadn’t been for the sedatives his mother seemed to suddenly have in unlimited supply, which he used only once in a while and with terror, fearing Keefer would wake crying and he would not hear her, but Judy Wilton would.
In fact, Faith Bogert did not know about the complaint, not until much later. What she did know, when she arrived for the second observation, she saw things for which she would not have needed an MMPI or an MCMI-III, though the tests had validated her impression. She knew that Gordon was a highly functioning and seemingly optimistic person, who exhibited no overt pathology, with elements of what Faith would have described, if pressed, as characteristic
s of a mildly narcissistic personality, which was not in and of itself a problem. No more a problem than the fact that the Cadys’ test results were utterly unreliable, because their evangelistic Christian beliefs led them to a trust and belief in human goodness way off the scale for an ordinary person. The husband had a rather elevated score for aggression, but that was no big deal. Police officers, for example, often scored way too high in righteous indignation, which in another person, might signal paranoia.
Still, as she watched Gordon try to lead the baby back to her blocks until she finally leaned over and delicately bit him on the leg, Faith wondered whether Gordon’s self-centeredness—no, his self-involvement—-would prevent him from making the kind of sacrifices a single parent would have to make, that her mother had made. He was an I-guy. And a busy little bee, too. The phone kept ringing; he let it pick up. “Hey, Mr. McKenna, it’s Molly and Kathy, and we’re ready to start getting those straight A’s in Bio. Ready to hit the bed?” And twenty minutes later, “Gordie? Honey? Lindsay. Call me when she’s gone, okay? I’m going crazy.” And five minutes after that, “It’s firewoman Rafferty. You going to get that cute little butt out here for the tournament on Sunday? I think we can take all of them. Call you later.”
Red-faced, Gordon had hastened to explain, “Those are my baby-sitters. I sleep when they’re here. That’s what they meant. And my volleyball teammate.”
Faith simply said, “Don’t worry about it. Everybody’s life is complicated.”
“I’m dying of thirst here,” he’d told her then. “Want something?” He checked the refrigerator. “Got beer. Got water. Got frog blood. Got Pedialyte popsicles. How about Yoo-Hoo?”
“Thanks,” she said, “but no. I’m trying to quit.”
She did look thinner, Gordon noticed, but still wearing the unfortunate stretch pants. Red this time. But . . . hell. He’d dressed Keefer specially, carefully—with much singing and anguish, dangling Georgia’s tinkly ankle bracelet in his teeth to distract her while she writhed like a python—in a cute little dress his aunt had sewn, each button a letter of the alphabet.
Now, she proceeded to pull the buttons off, one by one.