A Theory of Relativity

  “A hip-hop guy,” Carlson said.

  “No, a monk, even Mendel gave up in despair when what worked with yellow peas didn’t work with other plants on which he tried the same method of hybridizing. He quit and became an administrator.”

  “You should quit and become an administrator,” Kathy said. “This is way confusing. Do I have to do the calculations if I baby-sit for you extra?”

  The class fell silent. Gordon heard a siren’s brief whoop from somewhere west, near his parents’ house.

  “Shut up,” Carlson said.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Kathy whispered. “I wasn’t thinking. I forgot she was gone.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Gordon went on. “Now, you know that among all species, human beings are the only creatures to which natural selection does not apply. In other words, humans keep bad genes going. And I’m not necessarily referring to you, Carlson.” Laughter. “No, people, now listen. A good example is a baby born with PKU, phenylketonuria, a disease that means a vital conversion of amino acids can’t take place. If it isn’t converted, the child’s metabolism will be all messed up—that baby would be retarded, and then die.”

  “That stinks!” Melinda Gallo meowed.

  “That’s what perinatal researchers thought, too. So now, practically the first thing that happens after a baby’s birth is a urine test for that condition, that defective allele,” Gordon told them. “And if it’s there, the baby can be given a special diet and therapeutic support through all its life, and lead a normal life. So what happens?”

  “It grows up,” Carlson said.

  “He or she grows up and mates”—Gordon nodded—“and eventually there’ll be a pairing with another individual who possesses the recessive allele, and it will manifest again. And so, genetic traits that should have vanished go on. Now, at one end of that spectrum, you get some wonderful things out of this, like the great physicist, Stephen Hawking and Ludwig van Beethoven, who was also disabled . . .”

  “And at the other end, some other things like Carlson,” Kye Olstadt said. “Are freckles on the recessive gene?”

  “Let’s proceed to the third round now. You should be noticing some changes in the distribution,” Gordon continued smoothly. “More of your offspring are carrying recessive genes for certain traits, even if their actual appearance, their phenotype, doesn’t reveal that. But they are capable of passing on those traits . . . beware.” He turned on “Patience” by Guns N’ Roses.

  “Impressive herd of CDs there, Mistah McKennah,” said Dennis Reilly.

  “I’m sooooo dominant!” from Kelly Rafferty.

  “Listen, Olstadt, nobody said anything about love,” Ben Jones said.

  “Say you’ll call, be sure to say you’ll call,” Gordon reminded them, falsetto.

  “Here come the offspring! I’m in the delivery room now! Where’s the placenta?” Reilly asked. “Speaking of placentas, where’s yours? My brother Neal said you had a real one. Did you get it from the UW?”

  Gordon balked. “I wasn’t going to use it,” he said. “Let’s finish all the pairings and then we’ll talk.” He had, in fact, prepared a biohazard bag to dispose of the placenta. Keeping it had seemed like a lark at the end of last year, and now it seemed like a blasphemy. Half of that ruddy-colored, once vital, now only illustrative former organ had nourished Keefer. Half had come from his sister. He watched the kids, giggling and exclaiming over their cards, and then, slowly, opened the freezer and lifted out the placenta, in its steel roasting pan, and set it on the slate lab tabletop.

  “Last year, when my niece was born,” he began, “I asked my sister if I could keep this. Hell, I didn’t know if it was against the law or something. But she said sure, why not? Some carnivores eat the placenta. Some people, too, but not in Wisconsin. Lots of cultures customarily keep all kinds of relics from a birth, like part of the umbilical cord—”

  “Yish,” said Kathy.

  “Well, yeah, pretty gross,” said Gordon. He uncovered the placenta, which, even frozen, seemed to glisten. “But this is the sustenance of a baby’s life. This is how Keefer grew, entirely dependent on my sister’s body, and yet entirely separate. At no time during gestation does the mother’s blood ever mix with the baby’s. Anyway, I wanted to preserve this for my classes to see. But now, my . . . you know that my sister died.” Twenty-four heads dropped in unison. “It’s okay. I know that some of your folks must have talked about it with you. You saw the TV news.”

  “That you were adopted,” said Dennis, “by Mrs. McKenna at the middle school.”

  “But not last week. I was adopted when I was a baby,” Gordon said. “My mom is the only mom I’ve ever known.”

  “Do you know your real mom?” Kelly Rafferty asked.

  “I don’t know her,” Gordon said. “But it was from her, and my birth father that I received this . . . bad hair and these very excellent legs.”

  “Was your sister adopted?” Dennis asked.

  “You know she was, Den,” said Gordon.

  “I didn’t. I thought only you,” Dennis insisted. “I can’t imagine being adopted. With our family, it’s always, like, there’s a Reilly. That’s gotta be a Reilly. We’d know you anywhere, you’re Bill Reilly’s kid.”

  “That’s something I’ve never experienced. And I never will, unless I ever have kids of my own. And in fact, though, as we’ve seen right here, you can be the genetic product of both your parents and not look anything like them,” Gordon said, “which is what you can all think about tonight when you’re doing the math.”

  “I think it sucks,” the Reilly kid said, suddenly.

  “What?”

  “What happened with your baby,” he said, “it sucks bigtime.”

  “What did you say then?” Lindsay asked him that night as they lay spoon fashion, in his bed. Lindsay more often than not stayed over now, Gordon no longer having either the urge to stray or the absurd inhibition to shield Keefer from his nocturnal proclivities. And Keefer was so rarely, anymore, around. He’d given Lindsay a key, and she would come directly from work, and they cooked together —hi, honey, hi, honey, how was your day?

  “I couldn’t say anything,” Gordon told her. “I guess I just nodded or something. I hope the kid knew I appreciated it.”

  “He gave you so much flack before.”

  “He’s a good kid, though. Definitely the genetic high-water mark of all Reillys.”

  “Does it make you think, teaching all that stuff, about what your own kids will be like?”

  He felt Lindsay’s back stiffen when he said, “I don’t know for sure if I’ll ever have kids, Lins.”

  “Why not? Gordie, you’re beautiful.”

  “You’re biased, goofer.”

  “No, I mean, you have the best genes.”

  “I guess I think about Keefer. And if I get to raise Keefer . . .”

  “And?”

  “Well, how she would feel, if we . . . I mean, if my wife and I, if I should get married, would feel about me having a kid who was biologically related to me. I wouldn’t want to hurt Keefer. I know that’s nuts.”

  Lindsay rolled out of the bed, and he noticed the faint line where her bikini had covered the crack in her butt before she shrugged into one of his shirts. She sat down cross-legged on the foot of the bed, her pale red pubic thatch visible between her knees. Hills, Gordon thought, thickly forested with evergreens, had always reminded him of pubic hair. “I think it is nuts, Gordie. You wouldn’t have felt any different about Georgia if she’d been born to your folks.”

  “I was jealous, when I was little, that she looked like my mom.”

  “But you say you’re like your mom.”

  “I am like my mom, in personality. Maybe because I was jealous. Kids are like any other little animal. They’ll push and root and find their niche in the unit. If they’re not the biggest, they’ll be the quickest—”

  “I think you should have your own babies because—”

  “What?”


  “Because what if you don’t get her back?”

  “I have to think we’re going to get her back.”

  “And you’re going to just be you and Keefer for the rest of your life?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well?”

  “Well?”

  “Well, what about me?”

  “You mean, you want to have kids.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “That’s something we’re going to have to discuss—”

  “Fine. Let’s discuss.”

  “Not now. I’ve got a stack of labs out there I have to grade—”

  “Now is a fine time.”

  “Lins—”

  “Who’s Alicia?”

  He felt a tingling in his jaw, his shoulders. “Alicia?”

  “When I came in, there was a message from her on the answering machine.”

  “You listened to my messages?”

  “No, she was leaving the message right when I walked in.”

  “She’s the mother of one of my students.”

  “Well, she asked if you got the flowers.”

  “She sent me some flowers with her daughter, when the bill passed the Senate.”

  “And she mentioned the volleyball team.”

  “You know I play on a volleyball team sometimes. Christ, Lins, it’s the only exercise I get anymore. I’m starting to look like pictures of my grandpa Kiss. The guy had legs like matchsticks. My dad can probably bench more than I can at this point.”

  “There was . . . she said ‘cutie.’ ”

  “She’s just being nice.”

  “Did you date her?”

  “No.”

  “Did you date her, Gordie?”

  “No! We’ve hung out a couple of times.”

  “Hung out? Did you sleep with her?”

  “No!”

  “Did you fool around?”

  Lie, he thought. Make it easy. Don’t lie, he thought then. Make it easy.

  “A little, once. Drunk. A long, long time ago. I stopped because I was involved with you and I didn’t want to trespass on what we have. Okay, Lindsay?”

  “How much do you expect me to overlook, Gordie?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, do you want me to say it more slowly, how much do you expect me to overlook?”

  “Lindsay, nobody forces you to be with me. I assume we’re both here because we want to be.”

  “All through college, I was your vacation fuck. You think I didn’t know that? And summers. If you were around—”

  “Wait a minute here. Wait a minute. Neither of us ever expected that we were having an exclusive relationship then.”

  “But that’s what I wanted, and you knew it.”

  He’d known it.

  “Well, we are now,” he said. Lame, even to his own ears.

  “So what’s going to happen to us?”

  “I’ve thought about that, Lins.” He hadn’t thought about it, but it became clear to him, as the words formed. “It depends on what happens with Keefer.”

  “How?”

  “Well, I guess if I get to keep Keefer, I’ll stay here, in Tall Trees. Maybe buy a house. Keep her where she can see my parents and my aunts and uncles and my cousins, and the Nyes, too, of course.”

  “And if it . . . goes wrong?”

  “Then, Lindsay, I don’t know what I’ll do. But I can tell you, I’m going to want to . . . take off. Go work for EnviroTreks again. Or find some hilltop in Montana and be a hermit who collects botanical specimens—”

  “All alone?”

  “That’s how I think of it, yes. But it’s probably crazy.” He lay back on his pillow, on Keefer’s “Queen of Everything” pillow, which he’d taken to keeping in the bed. “Maybe I’d go back to school.”

  “For what?”

  “My doctorate. Maybe in cell biology. I think about, you know, my sister, and her cancer. People don’t just get breast cancer at twenty-six unless they carry a gene for it. Which could mean that Keefer could be at risk for it. She’s already at risk for it. And the human genome project is under way, maybe I will work in research . . .”

  “And you’d have to go to school alone, too.”

  “Not necessarily. But since when would you want to leave Tall Trees, Lins? You almost fucking starved to death in college because you missed Laura and your parents so much. And pretty soon, Laura’s going to have kids, and you’re going to want to be with them, too.”

  “I would leave for you.”

  “Think that over, Lins. Don’t just say it.”

  “I thought that if you get Keefer, you’re going to need me, Gordie. A girl needs a mother—”

  “So thought the psychologist, that dumb bitch.”

  “A girl needs a mother, Gordie. And I would be a good mother.”

  “I think you’d be a great mother, Lins. But think about whether you’d be satisfied raising my kid? Just my kid?”

  “You make this impossible. You’re leaving if you don’t get her. You’re going to be practically a . . . monk if you do get her. What is my choice?”

  “It’s not fair,” Gordon pulled Lindsay down beside him, and her gorgeous hair spread like silk threads over his chest; there was no more luxurious feeling. He remembered Keefer’s delight in rooting her tiny, box shaped feet in his own hair. Keefer. What was she doing now? “It’s not fair, and I’m not asking you to wait. I change my mind about stuff every day now. I can’t plan and I can’t project. There’s the appeal next week and then the time it’s going to take to wait for the decision. If I were a decent human being, I’d tell you to get up and take your toothbrush and leave me to rot.”

  “Yes, you would,” Lindsay told him, pouting. She struggled out of his arms and leaned on his bedroom window, studying the spangling of frost on the trees. He breathed in the scent of her leg, of their sex. Maybe all this talk of solitary specimen collecting was romantic horseshit.

  “On the other hand,” he ventured, “maybe Keefer would love having a brother or sister. She’s crazy about that kid of Delia’s . . .” Perhaps there was even logic in it. If he reproduced, a child of his would grow up with Keefer as he and Georgia had grown up, a representative of his genetic endowment alongside his sister’s. And those children’s children would carry forth his sister’s traits and his own, their adoption being, then, a sort of clumsy macrometaphor for the double helix—unrelated strands notched with genetic messages looped loosely round one another in a braid generation after generation.

  Lindsay flung herself across him, straddling him.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Lindsay, you look like Lady Godiva.”

  “Is it?”

  “It’s a definite maybe, and I feel like a piece of shit making you settle for that.”

  “Oh, Gordie. Gordie, my Gordie,” she crooned, nuzzling him, wakening him.

  It was time, he guessed, to make someone happy. If you made someone happy, like the old song said, maybe you would be happy, too.

  CHAPTER sixteen

  The governor was a small, powerfully built man whose hometown, he told Gordon and his parents, was no more than ten miles from Tall Trees. Ever spent a summer shearing Christmas trees, he asked Gordon, who answered, yes, sir, many. Hot work, the governor nodded, chuckling. They sat down in their assigned seats under the seal of the eagle amid the luxe expanse of Wisconsin cherrywood paneling at a table crafted from Wisconsin black walnut in chairs Lorraine assumed were padded with Wisconsin foam rubber. Jungles of cables and tent cities of tripods crowded the door and spilled out into the hall as the governor signed Assembly Bill 600, turning first to Gordon to hand him a pen embossed with his name and the seal of the state, then to pass one to Lorraine, to Mark, to Senator Hammersmith and Phil Kay. In chairs against the walls, Tim was wiping his eyes, Nora and Lindsay were sobbing outright. Two months and three days had passed since that first phone call, the one Phil Kay had felt summoned to pick up on his own.


  “Are you a Republican?” one reporter asked, as Lorraine and her family made their way into the hall.

  “No, a very indebted Democrat,” Lorraine answered. “This is a great day for all adoptive families, all families period. There are people all over the country who are going to sleep better tonight.”

  “And will this law make it easier to resolve your own custody dispute over your granddaughter?”

  “It’s not my custody dispute,” Lorraine said. “It is our son, who is . . . well, who nobody can doubt now is the equal of her ‘blood’ uncle, who hopes to adopt Keefer Kathryn Nye. But we’re going to stand beside him every step of the way.”

  “Gordon”—a woman with corkscrew black curls that reminded him of Georgia’s untamed childhood do, worked her way to the front—“Is this law going to affect the appeal?”

  “We don’t know anything for sure,” he said, “because, you probably know, the appeal will deal with the decision Judge Sayward made before the law was changed, not taking into consideration the way the law—”

  “Thanks,” she smiled.

  “You went over the limit of the sound bite,” Mark told Gordon.

  On a whim, feeling like stalkers, they drove past the Cadys’ spruce-colored condo, straining for a glimpse of Keefer. There was a pink playhut in the backyard and signs of a wooden swing set under construction. “It’s a pretty neighborhood,” Lindsay said, and they all glared at her.

  Delia and Craig had known full well, Lorraine assumed, that the bill would be signed into law today, Friday, the same day that their first visit with Keefer in two exhausting months was to commence. Lorraine had sent a note; they would be in Madison on business; they would be happy to pick Keefer up at noon and spare the Cadys a two-hour drive. Delia had left a message. No, Keefer’s time with the McKennas did not begin until that night—the Cadys would bring Keefer up on Friday night, as per the stipulations of the visitation agreement, and they would pick her up on Sunday afternoon. Routine, she added, was important for a child. They would be surprised, the message continued, how Keefer’s language had taken off. She was using three-word sentences almost overnight, and saying “Daddy” and “Mommy” and “Lexie” clear as a bell.