Lorraine would have welcomed an interval of stark, staring madness. By the magnitude of her losses, she was owed greater latitude for weakness and eccentricity. But her life offered no room for a breakdown. Their thirty-fifth anniversary fell in May. They dined, on a gift certificate sent by an anonymous well-wisher they could not find to gratefully refuse, at a fancy seafood restaurant in Merrill. Offered Chilean sea bass in a thyme reduction sauce, Lorraine agreed she certainly could use one, but the server only gave her a baffled smile. Over the course of the next two weeks, school was drawing to its close, with its festival of final projects and exhibits, the culmination in the students’ work on the gifts they would offer, the sculptures Lorraine was keenly aware hold pride of place for parents long after the children themselves had made homes of their own.
And the machine that spread the news about the outrage now proceeded of its own momentum; Lorraine pulled along with its progress, posing for photos for magazine stories prepared months before, pulled to respond to a request from Redbook that she write her own first-person narrative—all she would really have to do, the editor who called insisted, would be to write down the facts; someone would massage the facts into a story, but even writing down the facts had taken a week of nights at the table with Nora busily looking up facts and dates Lorraine could not remember.
At a seminar in Wausau on integrating art into other sections of the curricula, which took up one whole day of the Memorial Day weekend, when they had Keefer, Lorraine was approached by a woman who first asked her to sign a copy of the column on the case that had appeared in Woman’s Day, and then condoled her on losing her “adopted granddaughter.” The sheer glass wall of ignorance daunted Lorraine, who nonetheless took time to carefully explain that she had not adopted her granddaughter, that adoption had fused their lineage before Keefer was ever born. Patty Roe of the American Academy had called to tell them that there was indeed not one, but thirty references to “blood relatives” in the Children’s Code, and that it was her belief that the law would not truly be sound until each of them was amended. Greg Katt no longer charged them for his thrice-weekly telephone calls, sharing details of the opposing side’s arguments, the points their side rebutted, the questions from the panel of judges. The McKennas now owed Greg Katt and his posse more than $40,000, the hope of a new trial with all its attendant costs still ahead. Quietly, Lorraine and Mark visited the Soderberg boy and remortgaged their long-since-paid-for home on Cleveland Avenue.
Lorraine kept hats off the bed, and shoes off the table. She carefully closed her umbrella before stepping inside her front door. During the long evenings in May, she set herself the task of clearing out Gordon’s and Georgia’s teenage memorabilia, but was sidetracked almost immediately by one of Gordie’s college biology textbooks. She carried the book down to her work table. Using a root charcoal and a handful of nubbin-old pastels, Lorraine began sketching what would be, by August, a series of fourteen, vastly imagined magnifications of the shredded gossamer of a sickle cell, a tumor cell, a healthy erythrocyte. She would call them “Cell Lives.”
Retirement, Mark realized as they waited, was receding further and further to a distant horizon for him. That was fine. Medi-Sun employed chemists in their seventies, took pride in their embrace of older colleagues. Though Northern Mutual had come forth with the $500,000 premium, it would be ninety days before the check arrived. Through their attorneys, both sides had agreed to permit Great Wisconsin to manage the estate until a final decision was reached. During meetings at work over a bizarre legal claim—a woman who’d blamed her diverticulitis on the four thousand milligrams of C she’d ingested every day since 1985—it slowly dawned on Mark, piecing together various references and comments and mental snapshots of the yearly Medi-Sun picnics at Fidelis Hill with the peculiar atmosphere in the conference room, the anxious glances some of the managers sneaked at him when the corporation’s lawyer spoke, that one of their counsel, Jamie Zavara, was actually the husband of Judge Sayward. Mark’s first instinct was to disarm the young man—it was a small town; they were coworkers. But the man’s manner, his avid, almost greedy intelligence, put him off. Thereafter, he quietly informed his boss, he would communicate with the legal division through memoranda.
Dale Larsen called one night and invited Mark to join him, a few of his deputies, Bud Chaptman, and Hart from the high school for a few hands of poker. Mark went and gratefully consumed more than his share of beer. He’d offered muzzily to walk home, but Dale, who had, Mark noted, tipped more than a few himself, drove him slowly home in the cruiser. Dale urged his wife to include Lorraine in her bunco night, but Sheila felt too shy to approach Lorraine, whose new haircut and forceful public face only rendered her more intimidating to acquaintances who’d considered her demeanor perfectly nice, but regal enough to give an ordinary person pause, before any of the events of the year began. Dale began to see how a single event of ordinary grief opened bystanders and made them generous, but an enduring misery of crisis hardened and repelled. Marooned by their own exigency, the McKennas probably needed the welcome interference of friends more than they had during Georgia’s illness, when well-wishers had tripped over one another on the path to the door of the house on Cleveland Avenue. There was the assumption that people who got on TV were sufficient unto themselves, Dale ruminated.
He nagged his wife to call on Lorraine, at least ask her to lunch. As a man, he felt that he could not do that without causing talk, the kind of rumors that would be more damaging for the fact that they would be true. Dale Larsen’s heart went out to Lorraine, but too far, and it was a bittersweet reckoning to admit to himself that people in their fifties were not, after all, beyond the nonsense of secret crushes. When Sheila finally rolled into bed one night tossing out the intelligence that Lorraine had agreed to a lunchtime pep walk, Larsen seized his wife in a bear hug, and it was after midnight when they finally parted to den in the accustomed hollows of their respective sides of the bed, lingeringly, gasping, each of them privately grateful and confused beyond words by the resurgence of passions they thought they’d left in the birthing room with Trina long years before.
On the night that they watched a Tom Brokaw special report entitled “Thicker than Blood?” Emily Sayward and her husband discussed, briefly, the idea of moving back east and starting a practice together. The discussion had not been much more than desultory. Jamie loved his job. And Emily loved the safe, quiet sixties life on Hat Lake they could give as a gift to Emory, their son, who would begin school in the fall. Later that same night, as they undressed in the dark, presumptive current between them, Jamie had suggested it might be time for another child, a little brother or sister for Emory, and though Emily emphatically agreed, dispensing with the cervical cap that very night, she mentioned the next morning her concern that she was thirty-eight now. What if she could not become pregnant? What if there were issues? And when Jamie, busy replacing a rotten deck board, replied that they would adopt—that no one in Columbia had ever heard of Tom Brokaw—she had refused, irrationally and pettishly, to speak to him for a full day.
In late May, at Sandpiper Reserve, in the final hours of a tournament dedicated to Raymond Nye, Jr., and to benefit Keefer Kathryn’s scholarship fund, Big Ray’s left arm tingled, then went numb, and over fear from that, he supposed, his heart began to gallop, and, in a little beverage cabana off the ninth hole, he’d vomited. Haven Corcoran and Lee Jurgen bundled him into the car, over his faint protests, and by that night he was ensconced in a private room at Tampa Memorial, where the next morning, he underwent angioplasty. Too much bacon and eggs in there, the cardiologist gently chided him, pointing at Ray’s gut. Lose the golf cart and walk from this day forward, the doctor further added.
That night—when Diane arrived home from Wisconsin, wringing her hands and imploring him not to die, she couldn’t take any more, not one single thing more, she was going to have one of those lives where one tragedy toppled over into another tragedy and another tragedy—he’d quiet
ed her down and taken her hand and told her what he’d been thinking about when they’d run the icy liquid into the vein, and that was Gordie McKenna. “Now, don’t get yourself in a swivet, Mother,” he soothed her gruffly. “I just have a notion we ought to be in touch.”
“Be in touch?”
“When I was lying there, in that room, never knowing if I’d ever see another sunrise, I got to thinking about the first time Ray brought Gordie to the house. You remember? It was Caroline’s wedding. And the two of them came up here at five in the morning, getting me out of bed, saying, ‘Dad! We’re going to have us some beer and eggs! Beer and eggs, that’s what you need, Dad!’ Both of them in those big shorts the surfers wear, Ray jumpin’ up on the bed, you screamin’ . . .”
“Ray, what could that mean now, honey?”
“It’s that . . . when I thought I was about to die, I thought, Diane, Baby is right where she ought to be, except . . . and it’s a big except, one of our own girls should have wanted more than anything else on earth to raise our son’s only child. That’s the truth and you know it is, Diane. And Gordie did. He was a good boy then, and he’s a good boy now, Diane, and my boy, my boy loved Gordie.” Big Ray breathed carefully. He could not get over the notion that his body was made of some friable material, like Diane’s hollow crystal cats. “Here’s what I’m saying. I want you to write to Gordie and to his folks and try to make amends. I’m not saying we can ever make amends, or even that we’d do anything differently if we could. I want Keefer Kathryn to grow up a Nye. But I also want to rest easy on my own conscience, Diane.”
“Lorraine McKenna would never allow—”
“And if you don’t write, when I get up out of this bed, I will.”
The following night, she had brought him the letter she had begun to compose.
One early evening, Tim Upchurch glimpsed Lindsay and Gordon walking Keefer along Main Street. Each of them had hold of one of her hands—step, step, big swing. He’d been about to brake and wander over, when some unaccustomed reluctance brought him up short. He had just braked then, and watched. Step, swing. Step, swing. The baby’s hair was long and wavy, like Georgia’s. Lindsay’s gaze on Gordie was a sun. Tim saw his fist connect with his best friend’s perfect, big, white front teeth. He would have treated her so well. He would have fucking treated her like a princess. Tim watched them vanish around the corner by Hubble’s. They were a family. He had no place with them.
Out at the edge of the subdivision, the fire department was conducting a practice burn on one of Ryder’s ancient outbuildings, a corn crib, Tim believed. He thought he might motor out there, perhaps catch sight of that yummy mommy Alicia they’d run into up at Black Wolf. Gordie evidently hadn’t taken the bait after that first night. It wouldn’t be the first time Tim had been in the position of scavenging Gordie’s leavings. But Gordie’s leavings were better than anyone else’s. There was that. And no thirty-plus woman would be interested in Tim for anything more meaningful than a night of energy. Well, what was so bad about that? One night of energy was something Tim could definitely get invested in.
Greg Katt waited like a man who knows he has two courtside tickets to a play-off game in his windbreaker pocket.
If he had ever felt more confident during the course of his professional life, he could not recall it. He rose every day at dawn and embraced his wife and kissed his little daughters, then jogged slowly, even through the blessing of a warm rain, and drove to work singing Aretha’s greatest hits. For this, the most-watched, most publicized and most heartfelt case he might ever argue, he could have felt no more game. No fear. Only daring.
It would be a walk in the park.
They would go down. They would be rubble.
The amicus brief prepared by Rob Greenbaum and Patricia Roe, representing the Academy of Adoption Attorneys, built an elegant historical house with a door that opened wide to admit Gordon McKenna. Excluding Gordon constituted a complete contradiction of all the other statutes that made up 48, the Children’s Code, which was one of the most thorough in the nation. Rob and Patty quoted from the section “effects of adoption,” a scant two paragraphs from the now notorious 48.90. After adoption, the bond between the parent and child was to include “all the rights, duties and other legal consequences of the natural relation of child and parent.”
They bore down harder: Even before the amendment, had Ray and Georgia Nye been bad parents, whose rights had been terminated by law, Gordon would have been among the immediate family members entitled to immediate placement of his niece, with no waiting period. How could common sense prescribe a different set of rules for an uncle whose sister’s rights had been tragically, through no fault of her own, terminated by death? How could common sense allow the same chapter that defined adoptees as exactly legal in status omit adoptees from the definition of “relative”? The brief examined other laws on the books: People called up for jury duty, for example, could not be related “by blood or marriage” to defendants or attorneys involved with a trial. No auto insurance policy could exclude from benefits persons related to the policy holder by “blood or marriage.”
And so, was state law intended to prohibit families from getting car insurance for their adopted children? Could the prosecuting attorney’s sister, if she were adopted, get on a jury and help push along the conviction her brother was trying for? Was that logical? In any universe?
Even the United States Supreme Court, in 1977, had given the opinion that “adoption, for example, is recognized as a legal equivalent of biological parenthood.” No statute should ever be construed to degrade common sense. The legislature, in the Children’s Code and in countless other instances, had clearly intended for adoptive children to be included in every possible definition of family. The omission had been oversight, that inclusion perhaps so obvious that it might not have occurred to the lawmakers at all.
He’d focused on the specifics. And in his brief, he dismembered the whiny preoccupations of Wentworth and the guardian ad litem. Wentworth lovingly recounted the history of the Cadys with Ray and Georgia in Florida, how they’d planned to buy a duplex and live side by side forever, that they had specifically, in naming the Cadys godparents, “a role to which Craig and Delia gave utmost allegiance,” actually conferred on them the traditional role of godparents as prospective guardians. Wentworth attacked the McKennas, claiming that “little K.K.” had been sheltered by the Cadys from the “firestorm” of national publicity “orchestrated” by L. M. and her unnatural obsession with her “adoptive” grandchild. Wentworth condemned Gordon’s attempt to “tactically outmaneuver” her clients using the expedited adoption procedure and concluded smugly that this “presumed advantage” had blown up in Gordon’s face. In a footnote, Wentworth prissily noted that Judge Sayward had rebuked Gordon’s team throughout the hearing for trying to one-up the Cadys instead of considering the best interests of little K. K.
And though the best interests of Keefer would be served, Katt went on with exultation, when they first reviewed their documents during discovery, that was not at all the point for which they had been summoned in the first place, at all! Gordon had never even been given the chance to present his side of that very issue in a court of law, since the court had ruled that Gordon had no standing to petition to adopt his niece. And why should Gordon have not attempted to use every advantage?
Katt addressed that. It was ludicrous. He was the child’s uncle, now by indubitably signed law even a moron like Wentworth could not misinterpret. “Gordon was the sole surviving sibling of Georgia, Keefer’s mother, and his deceased sister’s dying wish was for Gordon to care for her child,” Katt wrote. To deprive Gordon of any part of his status as Keefer’s only maternal uncle was to deprive Keefer of her very heritage.
Dr. Bogert’s recommendation of the Cadys was based solely on the bias that sprang from every section of her report, the psychologist’s belief that a female child of tender years should have a mother. It was not Gordon’s—Katt quoted—“loving a
nd positive” relationship with Keefer that she doubted, but his inability, as a single male, to cope with the developmental needs of a female child. And yet, Katt reminded the court, the Wisconsin legislature had specifically noted that “any unmarried adult,” not merely a woman, might adopt a minor child.
“The only issue before this court is to determine whether Gordon, adopted as a baby, has the legal standing,” Katt had written, “under Wisconsin Statute 48.90, to petition for the adoption of his niece. Should an ‘adopted’ uncle be denied the same opportunity a ‘natural’ uncle would certainly be afforded?”
The only reason Gordon had not moved sooner to adopt Keefer was so as not to seem to interfere in the venue dispute by both sets of grandparents. His hesitation was prompted by family loyalty, not by indecision or by reluctance. Resoundingly, Katt had, in his final brief, sliced away at their feeble assertion that the adoption statute intentionally discriminated against adopted relatives in “procedural” matters of law, though not “substantive rights.”
No court in the land, certainly not the courts of the state of Wisconsin, had ever upheld that it was “appropriate to discriminate against an adopted person, provided that the discrimination is limited to legal procedure.”
Show him one example, he dared them between the lines.
Wait and hope, Mary Ellen Wentworth comforted her clients, when they phoned her, Delia especially distraught over the Tom Brokaw show. Every day that Keefer Kathryn lived in their home was a good day, a day for their side, she advised. Whether or not Judge Sayward’s decision was overturned, whether or not a new trial went forward with Gordon able to present his petition, Keefer was growing older and more bonded to her mother, father, and sister. With the passage of each new day, any judge would be become less disposed to interrupt her healthy adjustment. Don’t worry, Mary Ellen told them. The delay actually works for us. Nothing will ever overrule the child’s best interests.