But she and Bradie had made the season’s last strawberry pies that morning, and Georgia had loved strawberry pie all her life. Even in the weeks before her wedding, when she was living on Grapenuts to squeeze into the wasp-waisted antique wedding gown from one of those Southern belle Nye relatives, Georgia could still not refuse her aunt’s strawberry pies. Tonight, the latest round of chemo would have kicked in and the vomiting would have begun. Nora had wanted Georgia to be able to enjoy one piece of pie before she would have to spend the next two days trying to swallow tea from a spoon.
“I’m only doing chemo because of Keefer, Auntie,” Georgia had told her. “If I get better, I really think it’s going to be from the minerals and the juices. The body really can heal itself. My mother-in-law is right about that. I know what they put in me at the hospital is just poison.” Nora held her tongue when Georgia, yellow, exhausted, gagged as she tried to swallow the oat-straw and cypress-bark tea Diane Nye sent up in freezer bags from Florida. It was all poison.
If dying in Georgia’s stead would have been worth trying, Nora would eagerly have done that. Since her from-a-passing-cloud, tumble-down birth, Georgia had been Nora’s pet, and when Keefer was born, Nora did the same thing she’d done for Georgia, sat right down in the middle of planting, no apologies to Hayes or any of them, and smocked a little gray cotton dress with ladybugs on the bodice, the whole thing no bigger than one of her husband’s handkerchiefs. And Georgia, tired as she was—so tired she could sleep right through the baby’s crying, and of course, at least then, nobody knew why—her niece drove all the way out to put some pretty soap in Nora’s mailbox as a thank-you.
The hours marched past and Nora’s exhaustion took on a plodding rhythm. She brewed so many pots she thought the coffeemaker would blow up, and scribbled so many phone messages from relatives about their plane flights and rides they needed from the airport that her hand got a cramp. She was grateful only that the work distracted her. All Nora’s boys left work and came, and so did Ray’s cousins, Craig and Delia, from Madison, who hadn’t seen Keefer since they’d stood godparents for her last fall. Mark’s and Nora’s cousins drove down from the Cities. Nora filled an envelope back with so many ranks of four-digit flight numbers they began to read like a code she could make no sense of at all. One of Ray’s sisters would fly from Tampa that night. Could she meet someone else in Madison and share a car? And could they hold off on making any more phone calls until she had time to inform her parents? Ray’s other sister was on a cruise in Alaska. Could she make it home in time? Nora had to call Fidelis Hill and even the Half Moon Motel to find places for everyone to stay once she’d calculated that the farm couldn’t hold them all. In her bustling about, she’d pass Lorraine and Mark at the kitchen table. Mark got up occasionally to walk out onto the porch and stretch his legs, but Lorraine never moved. Even her eyes did not move. Nora would think, well, they’re all right for now, they’re together. Dale Larsen came back for a second time, with his wife, and Nora almost didn’t know him in his civilian clothes, a red open-necked golf shirt and beige slacks; it was like being a girl and seeing the intern priest at the pool swimming with the youth group, his whole body white but for the notched little band of tan where his clerical collar stopped. Sheila, the sheriff’s wife, bless her soul, brought puppets she’d made for the children’s hospital in the Cities and set to playing castle with Keefer.
This numb bustling around was what sustained people after a tragedy. Nora was thankful for it.
Nora had earlier overheard Gordie snort to his dad, “One more word about ‘arrangements’ and ‘at peace’ and I’m going to throw up . . .” but the arrangements weren’t to care for the dead (the dead, Nora believed, could take care of themselves) but to keep the living reminded they were living. And she relished the presence of all her family under one roof. The way the McKennas had circled the wagons since Georgia’s illness was the way families ought to behave even in ordinary times, to Nora’s way of thinking. From Thanksgiving on, Gordon virtually lived at his parents’ house, especially with Georgia’s own husband gone on that Knockers Tour, or whatever it was called, half the time, even on Christmas Day. Nora personally did not think that the dramatic way he finally did come home, giving up his greatest match in the last minutes, all those pictures in all the papers that said, “Georgia on His Mind,” made up for it. But Georgia loved Ray. And it was all over now.
Sometime toward sundown, the phone stopped ringing as if it had run out of breath, and Nora decided to tidy things up for Lorraine. She went into Georgia’s room with an old pillowcase, because somehow a bag from Wilton’s Grocery didn’t seem quite respectful, and began stripping the bedding, with its lambswool pads underneath the sheets to cushion her poor bony bottom. She rolled up the pressure socks into little balls and swept the stack of pill bottles into a Tupperware box she thought she’d maybe put discreetly on Mark and Lorraine’s bureau—she was no doctor, and though she’d tossed all Pop’s meds when he died, she didn’t know whether this was the procedure to use in every case. She pushed the portable IV pole into a closet, and began stacking up the papers, pamphlets with titles like Facing Cancer in a Young Person.
There was a stack of spiral notebooks with dates written on the cover in thick marker, the way girls used to etch their boyfriends’ names on school folders. Nora knew what they were—the sort of running journal of letters Ray and Georgia mailed back and forth while he was on the road. It had been Georgia’s ambition, she’d told Nora, for their marriage to be “a long conversation that never stops, like my parents’ is.” The books, she’d said, would be a record, something to read when they were old, when all their disagreements would seem silly. He’d write an entry and mail it off; she’d write an entry and mail it back. Nora opened to one, in Georgia’s small, elegant hand, “The thing I miss most is sleeping skin to skin . . .”
Nora closed the book.
She’d only heard them have one argument, over the hours of tapes Georgia had insisted on recording for Keefer. Tapes of Georgia reading aloud or singing the lullabies she crooned rocking Keefer to sleep, old songs such as “You Are My Sunshine” and that old Irish song about wild mountain thyme and the blooming heather. The video camera on its tripod was still set up in the corner, pointed at the bed. She had seen Georgia walking the baby, while Georgia could still walk on her own, back and forth in front of the camera’s lens in her stroller, or sitting Keefer up on her shoulders, the baby, still far too little then to really manage this, slumped over the top of her mother’s head like a rag doll. Hayes and Ray had rigged up a little holster for the remote, so Georgia didn’t even have to sit up to turn the camcorder on, whenever she felt strong enough to talk. Once, over everyone’s objections, Gordie had insisted on playing one back to see if the system was working at all, and that was when they’d realized Georgia had been making tapes even in the middle of the night. It had been spooky—Georgia, in a dark room, her face in the glow of the bedside lamp thin and somehow hot, like a paper lantern, holding up a children’s book, as if she were on a TV show, “Go to sleep, little bird, little bird . . .” Georgia had exploded in a rage one day when Ray insisted she rest, after a bout of retching. She didn’t want to sleep. Her face sheened in cold sweat, she’d cried out, “I’m right in the middle of Green Eggs and Ham!” (People a county over could hear it; Hayes used to say Georgia missed her vocation as a hog caller.) “These are her memories, Ray! How can you ask me to stop making her memories? What good is another bloody hour of sleep going to do me?”
I do not like them, Sam, I am.
All right, thought Nora, as she lay herself down on the bed where Georgia had lain.
She said, out loud, “Fuck it.”
Nora let the sobs take her and shake her, let pictures of her niece roll up in front of her mind. She allowed loss to pound her, and also the guilt, for the fool she’d been twenty years ago, when she’d believed that people who took in Korean orphans and such were saints, but that an adopted child could nev
er really be kin. She saw five-year-old Georgia, hands on hips, telling Nora, “I find the smell of cow shit depressing.” She saw Georgia roaring with laughter when the fancy pressure canner Hayes gave Nora for Christmas exploded, spewing blackberry jam from hell to Sunday. She saw Georgia’s quiet rapture—she couldn’t have been more than ten—the first time she made a tidy French embroidery knot. Nora had shared with Georgia all the homely things she’d have shared with the daughter she’d never had, things people didn’t really do anymore unless they were rich and read Martha Stewart. Georgia hadn’t wanted a high-powered career. She’d wanted a home and family.
She certainly hadn’t gotten that from Lorraine. No offense. The same old Belgian woman who cleaned house for the monks had come to clean Lorraine’s house every week, even back in the days when having a “cleaning lady,” if a woman wasn’t bedridden, was unheard of in Tall Trees. But Lorraine had her teaching and her painting, and she did things for the children, but not the things ordinary moms did. Nora used to marvel at the built-in closets filled with neatly stored and labeled costumes from Georgia’s plays, the shelves of polished trophies Gordie brought home. One of the only real jokes Nora and Lorraine had ever shared had been when Georgia had chicken pox, and Nora had dropped by one night to bring cookies. “Wait!” Lorraine suddenly cried, in the middle of their joint effort to count Georgia’s spots. “I have to get something out of the oven!” And she’d taken out a cookie sheet, but instead of cookies, well, there were bright sculpted clay figures of Lady, and the Tramp, and the Siamese cats, all just perfect. Georgia clapped her hands—what child wouldn’t? A mother who was their own toy shop. Lorraine had looked at Nora perfectly seriously, and, pointing at the oven, said, “I used to wonder what this thing was for when we first moved, then I figured it out.”
And Lorraine had always been sharp as a pin, clothes ordered from the Spiegel catalogue, not purchased for the bowling banquet from Gloria’s Finer Designs, which even Nora, whose clothes ran to new Levi’s and old Levi’s, knew were anything but.
To tell the truth, Nora thought heavily, as the heaving in her breast subsided and she sat up on the bed, she liked Lorraine better now, in the disarray that had claimed her since Georgia got sick, than she ever had when Lorraine was such a powerhouse she never had time to sit down even for a piece of coffee cake. They were cut of different bolts, as Hayes put it. The first time Mark brought her home, she’d swept in as if she were some highly colored exotic bird Mark had captured. Thirty years ago, she couldn’t imagine how Lorraine would fit in, in Tall Trees—well, the Tall Trees they’d grown up in, anyway, before part of town became a sort of northern suburb grown up to house executives and workers at the big Medi-Sun plant. There’d always been mom-and-pop-type tourists, and there were more swanky ones now that the monks had converted Fidelis Hill into a ski resort. At the same time, original Tall Trees people still called acreage after the farmers who’d owned it, years after the farms were made into subdivisions. They might buy their paper toweling at the big Sam’s, which looked like an alien installation glowing in the darkness of the pines at the junction of Q and the interstate, but they would buy meat at Wilton’s. If you turned off the radio, you could pretend it was 1955.
But Lorraine had found her fit. She’d made her place as a teacher, and sold her huge paintings, which always looked to Nora like a cross between giant flowers and sexy highway maps. And Mark was kind of a minor celebrity on account of having been the county extension agent for so many years, answering callers’ questions on Larry Miller’s public radio show about why you often saw a small bird chasing a big bird or how mole rats were different from shrews.
Given that Georgia was adopted, it was peculiar how similar she was to Lorraine. Two little women with big hands and hips and masses of ringlety hair so dark it was almost purple in the sun. Nora’s son Marty (the rascal) said Georgia and Lorraine had the “uni-brow,” and it swept over eyes so black the pediatrician thought Georgia had a congenital cataract when she was born.
Lately, Lorraine had withered along with her child, as if eating when Georgia could not was a sin. She didn’t trouble with the pretty auburn highlights anymore, her scraggled hair long, streaked white, witchlike, skewered with what looked like a hatpin. The house was going seedy. Whenever Nora came by, she thought how she’d once envied that plushy emerald lawn and stately redbrick foursquare with its white awnings, the awnings alone a badge, to Nora, of ease and education. It was still cleaner than her own farmhouse could ever be, where dried mud and flies made a batter as customary as the bread and butter at the supper table. But Mark had planted no annuals this year; the hedges were parched and stringy, shoots like angry fingers blocking the picture window.
How much of Lorraine’s life Nora had envied. That special current between her and Mark, for one thing, which was nothing like the stately companionability of her and Hayes. There were times when Nora felt as though she and Hayes were more like brother and sister than she and Mark were. For a time, Nora had thought that Lorraine’s having two careers and a marriage that looked from the outside more like a courtship, was the reason Mark and Lorraine never had kids.
Then had come that one Christmas Nora would never forget. Dinner was just over, and the men were groaning, too stuffed to move, and Lorraine, for once, got up with the rest of the women to help clear.
Debbie had been pregnant then with Matt, and they’d got to telling stories about labor, as women will do, and Debbie had told about some woman from her office at Wisconsin Bell who got so big her stretch marks literally tore open, and Lorraine said, “I couldn’t bear that. I couldn’t bear to be torn up like that . . .”
And it just spilled out. Nora had said, “Well, I guess you’re going to have that flat tummy of yours all your life . . . I mean, I know your art is like a child, in a sense . . .”
Lorraine had given Nora a look that could’ve set paper on fire.
“Is that what you-all think?” Lorraine asked, her jaw cast tightly to one side, “that I don’t want a baby because I have a job?”
“It’s none of our business,” Debbie put in, handing Nora a dish to dry. But Lorraine tore out of that kitchen—“Now you’ve done it,” Debbie said—and then she was back, towing her husband, “Tell them, Mark. Tell them. Tell them why we don’t have a baby.”
Nora and Debbie were so embarrassed they wanted the linoleum to open and swallow them up. But Lorraine bullied it all out of him. How many years they’d tried to conceive a child. How they’d tried all the medical things. How they’d almost drifted past the age when they could hope to adopt one. How Lorraine wanted to adopt a baby who was blind or ill or already in first grade. “Tell them how you feel about that, Mark,” Lorraine said, in that honeyed voice of hers that could make a cuss sound like a Valentine, words that no man should have had to put up with from his wife. “Tell your family what you think.”
And Mark said it. “I just don’t think I could ever really love a child who wasn’t mine.”
Not that Nora blamed him. Not one bit. Hayes, when she’d told him about it, said the same thing. A man wanted his name carried on, and that was that.
But then, months after they’d all forgotten about it (except for Nora, who could still burn with embarrassment at night before bed when she thought of what she’d asked), there was Georgia, like a sun shower from a blue sky. Mark ended up thinking the sun rose and set on her. But even after Gordie came—and despite the many weekends he’d spent on the farm with her own boys and the hopes Nora had that they’d all moved into territory with a shared border—Mark and Lorraine and their children still mostly kept themselves to themselves, as if the four of them made their own country.
All that unease vanished, however, with the first phone call, from Mark, his voice saying that Georgia was ill. Nora had made more visits to Cleveland Avenue in the past year than in the past decade.
It was when she reached down to pick up a get-well card that Nora found Georgia’s Florida State sweatshirt, th
e one she’d begun wearing over her nightgowns because she was always so cold. “Look at me, Auntie,” she’d said one day, shrugging her shoulders lost inside the folds of cloth, “I’m a skinny girl. I’m more pretty and slim than I’ve ever been in my life, without even trying. When I go out, people who don’t know say, ‘Gosh, I wish I’d been that thin when my baby was ten months old . . .’ If I wasn’t practically dying, I’d be totally happy.” Nora pressed the shirt against her face. Even the sour taint of the air in this closed room couldn’t erase Georgia’s brisk scent, crisp and sassy as a pine needle crushed in your hand.
Feeling like a disobedient child, Nora dropped the straps of her own overalls, raised up her yellow blouse and laid that sweatshirt against her skin, smoothing it down like wallpaper, tucking it down into her cotton underwear. She could simply ask Mark if she could keep it, but she would not take the chance. She would walk right out and put it in the back of her truck along with Keefer’s overnight things and the little gray flannel pallet the baby slept on, because Georgia would never use a crib; she said they were cages. Who knew when Lorraine would be up to having the baby back here?
When she suddenly heard Gordon’s voice from the kitchen, raised, she jumped, and glanced at the videotape camera, as if she’d been caught stealing on a bank monitor.
“Well, it’s true, Mom,” Gordon was saying, “The only way the body can experience pain is through a neurological response, and the way that the accident was . . . the car was firm but people’s bones and skulls are more fragile. There was huge gravitational force.”
“Look at all these cakes,” Lorraine said, as if Gordon hadn’t said anything at all, “There are four cakes here. What, do people just have a cake sitting around in case somebody dies?”