A Theory of Relativity

  “Do you think that’s likely?” Gordon asked, thinking of course it’s likely, it’s a virtual certainty . . .

  “Not really. I think that if I was their lawyer, I’d advise against it. I think it would make them seem mean-spirited, if they did. If Wentworth is smart, she’ll tell them to sit tight. And I guess they’re in no shape for that.”

  “Well, it was her choice to get pregnant right now,” Lorraine snapped.

  Katt looked embarrassed, and Gordon knew what he was thinking. That his mother sounded as mean-spirited and obsessive as some people portrayed her. He’d wanted to hug his mother, to let her know that he understood she was just frazzled, not spiteful.

  “I think we’re fine,” Katt said, leaning over to gather Lorraine’s small, and Gordon noticed, scrubbed hand.

  The scrubbed hand was a clue. It meant she’d been working on her art again. In childhood, when their mother was at work on drawings, they would complain not only because it distracted her from their all-important demands but because it coarsened the skin of her hands. When she came in at night to rub their backs, there were little cracks, irritating as emery boards, on the balls of her fingers. They would flinch away, annoyed. She would apologize. For one Mother’s Day, he and Georgia had brought Lorraine a basket filled with one of every kind of moisturizer they could find, including udder balm. Now, seeing evidence of Lorraine’s engagement with something in life apart from the case and her grief moved Gordon’s heart to a silent cheer. Good for Mom. Good job.

  Gordon himself had been unable to turn his anger outward, into energy. He felt genuinely, physically ill, and he knew it all stemmed from the subversive work of his emotions on his body. Headaches, menstrual cramps, nervous stomachs, he’d always considered these things in the same bag with “panic attacks” and “motion sickness.” They were things anyone with the self-awareness of a cricket could overcome.

  But he could not will himself to feel healthy. He’d begun to regret the scornful opinions he’d once held about psychobiological illnesses.

  On the nights when Keefer was not with him, he lay horribly awake. Sometimes he could not relax even with the human security blanket of Lindsay, curled into a balletic sleep pose beside him. She was such a quiet sleeper, Gordon occasionally thought she’d stopped breathing, though both he and Keefer snored uproariously. He had such piercing, local headaches he felt as though he’d been battered on the side of the head with a garden trowel. He’d even asked his mom for more of her extra-strength aspirin, but she’d said it was a prescription, and had run out. When he tried to do something as innocuous as a hammer curl, his neck caught and clamored. He was losing even more weight, becoming chickeny, a scrawny light man, like his great-uncle Harold. Rather than endure such interfering wretchedness for life, he would have chosen to die.

  Nothing helped. Not the eye mask scented with eucalyptus that Lindsay had brought from the store. Not the white noise of the fan he ritualistically placed near the head of his bed. Not water or Benadryl. He would drift close to sleep and then in would skip images of his Keefer. His combustible darling. Keefer, not there, but an apparition with a voice and a presence just beyond his reach. Where’s Dory’s hair? Where is Kipper’s hair? Dory’s eyes, Kipper’s eyes, Dory’s funny tooth, Kipper’s pretty tooth. She was so fucking brilliant, and he wasn’t just saying that. She had the strutting, assured presence of a tiny Atlantic City mobster.

  “Whose scrawny little kid are you?” he would demand.

  “Mine!” Keefer would cry, jabbing her round belly with her index finger, and then relenting, and nuzzling his shirt. “Mine Dory’s.”

  He’d gotten up. A walk, maybe. He was too sore to really move, too restless to lie down. He could hear her chirps, her soprano variations and combinations: “Dory out dere! Whass at? Uh-oh. Baby go wah! Doggy go ruff!” He could feel her smooth cheek, an orb filled with freshest water, as she nuzzled it along his chest when they lay in bed mornings, the belly farts she made so exuberantly, the sly looks she had taken to giving him from the corners of her eyes, her head feathered with fox-colored tufts of baby hair that somehow refused to grow long like other toddlers’, so that she looked like a punk rocker, the perfect globes of tears that spilled from her great marmoset eyes at will, the way she covered her face with the wings of his pant legs when they encountered a pushy stranger. He thought of Keefer and ended up stiff-armed over the toilet, bent double, heaving up nothing, especially not the dinner he had been too nauseated to eat. Steeped by proximity in his mother’s absurd rituals, he slammed the window closed at the sound of a whippoorwill, racing thoughts like imps of kidnapped souls. He was too clumsy to strum, too jangled to read. Another day would come, and he’d have to face it dry-mouthed, reedy with weakness. He’d been unable to overcome the momentum of knowing he’d lose her. What he had to do was to construct a way to live without her. How could he live without her?

  He would live, that’s all. He would do many interesting things with his freedom and include her in as many of them as he could. He would be an important figure in her life.

  He would die.

  He would live, a pithed, cored old man in his twenties.

  The Cadys would mark her, sacrifice her, transform his renegade darling into a compliant, lumpen Jesus-freak baby. She would shy from him. He would bore her. She would complain about the turpentine smell in his mother’s house. She would grow up and wear mall bangs and tight T-shirts embroidered with Rich Girl in cheap sequins. She would marry early. She would never marry; she would be raped by the youth minister at the Foursquare Christian Church.

  She would become a cosmetician.

  He would die without her. He had never been alive before her. When Gordon pictured his life previous to the inheritance of Keefer, he saw himself in a series of muscle-and-fitness poses, a buff mannequin with a hyperactive, grinning dick.

  He could give Keefer up, with dignity.

  He would eliminate his rivals. He would find a way to crimp Craig’s brake lines with pliers. He knew nothing about cars. He would plan a field trip to the State Hygiene Lab, and, while his students viewed gruesome forensic marvels, he would liberate a virus, a crumb of cyanide . . .

  He would have to relinquish her, stand aside so that she could become someone else. He could do it. He had mourned Georgia. He had mourned Georgia and gone on.

  This was a lie. He had not begun to mourn Georgia. He had not had time. He had been forced to shunt Georgia aside, for Keefer. In the unremitting struggle for what already was his.

  He would lose them both!

  How were such things accomplished? He thought of talking this over with his father, who seemed to have achieved a quiet acceptance. What reserves of character did Mark possess that Gordon had not inherited? Experience. He would come to it in time. An accumulation of wounds degraded the first gash. He would learn.

  That hot night, his neck pain bellowing if he so much as moved his eyes, a weird belling in his left ear when he lay down, he’d driven to the ER at Methodist. And the doctor on call had been Michelle Yu.

  “I thought this was stress, but now I think I have a neurological problem,” he said. “I’m stroking out.”

  “Stress is a neurological problem,” she smiled. “You look like the sicker brother of the guy I saw in here a couple of months ago.”

  “How do you remember me?” Gordon said, and then cursed himself for an egregious asshole. “I mean, you see hundreds of people every week.”

  “You’re thinking it was your good looks?” Doctor Yu smiled, rubbing the face of her stethoscope in cupped hands before placing it against Gordon’s breast. “Well, let’s just say I remembered. And that I’m an avid late-night viewer of CNN. You’ve got quite a pulse going there for a guy your age. Ninety-five, resting. How’s your daughter, formerly your niece?”

  “She’s my niece again,” Gordon began.

  “How so?”

  “We’re breaking up,” he said, and began to cry, gulping grateful sobs that forced
his head down, as though he were a diver with the bends.

  To her eternal credit, she did not try to put her arm around his shoulders or even pat his back. She’d hitched one tiny hip onto a metal stool and said, “Fortunately, what’s out there is an old guy with a sore throat who’s going to smoke no matter what kind of lecture I give him, and an older lady who makes the rounds of urgent-carecenter rooms to get painkillers for a back injury she suffered when Jimmy Carter was in office.”

  “You weren’t born when Jimmy Carter was in office,” Gordon said.

  “I was,” Michelle Yu told him. “I’m thirty-five, Mr. McKenna.”

  “You are? How come you look so young?”

  “Ancient Chinese secret. I’ve been at this for a while. It takes a couple of semesters to become a doctor.”

  “Right. I considered doing that.”

  “Too intense?”

  “Too much math. I’m sure you use calculus daily.”

  “Yes; in fact, constantly.” She’d smiled.

  “Well, I couldn’t hack it.”

  “But you are a scientist.”

  “Only to people north of Stevens Point, like my friend Tim says.”

  “So, as I was saying, what we have is a waiting room full of people who’ve induced their own ailments. In fact, everyone here tonight has what we’d call emotionally aggravated physical complaints.”

  “Me, too, you mean.”

  “I mean, you have a sleep deficit.”

  “How do you know?”

  “By the circles under your eyes, and by the fact that it’s two in the morning and you’re here talking to me instead of sleeping.”

  “Right.”

  “I could do an electrocardiogram. I could do some labs, because you could have mono. But in the absence of fever, sore throat, vomiting—”

  “I vomit. I’m a great vomiter. But nothing comes up.”

  “Persistent nausea.”

  “At night.”

  “Any other kinds of . . . dysfunctions?”

  “Wouldn’t know,” Gordon sighed, “I have the romantic life of your average retirement-home resident.”

  “You’d be surprised by that, I think. You should hear that guy out there with the cigar throat tell stories. I think that what we’re talking about here is a healthy guy under an unhealthy amount of pressure. Who needs sleep and surcease of sorrow—”

  “My sister would know what poem that was.”

  “Your sister, who’s dead—”

  “A year now.”

  “Buddy, I’m going to give you . . . about, um, ten Alprazolam. That’s more or less Valium . . .”

  “I don’t think I need ten.”

  Doctor Yu rolled her eyes. “I don’t mean ten at once, Mr. McKenna. I’m going to give you what should amount to a couple of weeks’ worth of guaranteed uninterrupted sleep. . . . Do you use any form of sleep medication now?”

  “No medication whatsoever. Except,” he blushed, “like Nutra-Gen. Muscle potion, you know.”

  “Training for the Iron Man?”

  “No, just an idiot.”

  “Now, you’ll need to be careful with alcohol when you take one of these. Start with a half, and don’t do it when you’re getting ready to fire up the John Deere; this is all on the label.”

  “And it will make me sleep.”

  “It should. You should feel drowsy in about an hour. And get some decent food.”

  “I can’t face food.”

  “Not even Kung Pao tofu?”

  “I wouldn’t know Kung Pao tofu if it was hanging on my leg.”

  “Well, I will introduce you to it. I’m off in fifteen minutes.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I eat every night at this time.”

  “Where do you go to eat at this time? Around here?”

  “My house,” she said. A look balanced between them. “I’m not inviting you to have sex with me, Mr. McKenna. Though it has crossed my mind, this would not be the time or the place. You just . . . I’ve read about what you’re going through; I made the connection with the little girl who didn’t have an ear infection, and now you’re the one who’s losing sleep. I thought we could eat a midnight snack, which would not include me.”

  “You’re going to cook?”

  “Ancient Chinese secret,” she said. “I buy it from Hurry Curry in Wausau every night on the way to work and then I think of it all night, just waiting for me in that little silver-lined bag in the fridge.”

  They did just that. They ate tofu in her elegant, spare, totally white apartment, fetchingly decorated with dried branches and constructs of rock and driftwood. “I thought doctors were rolling in money,” Gordon said.

  “First-year residents are rolling in debt,” she explained.

  “This is very kind,” he told her, finding that it was possible for him to eat in the company of another. “This is impossible to understand.”

  “Not for me. I was adopted.”

  “But your last name—”

  “I’m the only Korean orphan in America to actually have been adopted by Chinese people.”

  “So you don’t have . . . all the stuff you’re supposed to have?”

  “All the anxiety about my roots?” She twirled her silver chopsticks, then made them into a cross. Gordon was using a fork. “Dave and Sherry Yu are as Chinese as lox and bagels. We’re Episcopalians. Our favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. They gave me dolls from Korea. But I’m a New Yorker. I only have the custom chopsticks because I don’t like the taste of the wood kind. And I fight with my dad every time we spend more than three hours in the same apartment.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “UW Medical School. I like it.”

  “I think sometimes of going back for my Ph.D. Research.”

  “Yeah, well, I love my dad more than anything on earth. From behind, when I walk, I’m a little Dave Yu. He’s . . .” She looked away from him for an instant. “He’s my heart. I love my dad. I love . . . my dad.”

  They turned to their food, embarrassed by the size of the emotion in the small room. “So, I wish you good luck. That’s all.”

  It was nearly four when he left. At the door, he leaned over and kissed her cheek, inhaling her scent of wooden tongue depressors and honeysuckle. “Thanks,” he said, and then put his hands on her waist and kissed her again, with intention.

  “You have a girlfriend,” she said.

  “You’re psychic, too?”

  “You do.”

  “I do. But right now, I wish that I did not.”

  “But right now, you do.”

  “Thank you for the tofu, Dr. Yu. That sounds like the name of a movie.”

  “No fee, Mr. McKenna. For the tofu or the consummate wisdom.”

  “May I call you?”

  “Someday, maybe. I’m not going anywhere.”

  He’d been asleep for no more than four hours, drooling blissfully in the arms of the tranquilizer, when his telephone rang. Lindsay told him, “Your mother couldn’t find you this morning, and she called here. The judge is asking for a teleconference, at two o’clock.” Gordon asked for a moment, dropped the telephone, stumbled into the bathroom and opened his mouth under the faucet.

  “Run this by me again.”

  “A mediation.”

  “Judge Kid?”

  “He wants you and your parents, and the lawyers . . . where were you?”

  “When?”

  “Last night . . . when! Where were you?”

  “Do you mean, was I with a woman?”

  “Yes. Don’t tell me. No, tell me.”

  He told her. “I was at the emergency room, Lins. For sleeping pills.”

  “Gordie, I love you,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, “I know. And I love you. And I’m going back to sleep if I can.”

  “I’ll call you at noon.”

  “Okay. You don’t have to.”

  But she had called and had come to sit beside him as the red numbers on th
e clock toiled over to two, and Greg Katt phoned, putting him on hold while he got access to the conference line. Gordon could have sworn he felt the air change when the Cadys entered the line space.

  Judge Kid was brief. “I want you people to meet. I want you to make a good faith and honest effort to work this out among yourselves, reach a solution like the family you are, for better or worse.”

  “We have made every effort . . .” Mary Ellen Wentworth began.

  “Make more,” Judge Kid said. “Listen. I am perfectly in earnest when I say that it is not impossible that I could find that this child cannot thrive in an atmosphere of so much hostility. You communicate with notes, Mrs. Cady, Mr. McKenna. You ask your aunt to bring the baby outside when the Cadys come to visit—”

  “That was agreed—” Greg Katt said.

  “I want you to know that if you cannot reach an agreement, a third-party adoption is not out of the question.”

  “By . . . what do you mean?” Lorraine breathed.

  “It would be stressful for her in terms of her adjustment, but Dr. Bogert assures me that she would indeed adjust, and the stress she is absorbing from this endless wrangling is not inconsequential, either.”

  “Your Honor, we need time to respond—” Greg Katt said.

  “Take your time!” Kid retorted. “Take hours! Take days! The Cadys have assured me that they are not intending to appeal the higher court—”

  “Is that true?” Mark asked.

  “We are not going to appeal the decision,” Delia said clearly.

  “So you accept that Gordon is Keefer’s blood uncle,” Lorraine said.

  “We also think that we know what’s best for her,” Delia said.

  “If you know what’s best for her, why are you putting Keefer through this?” Lorraine asked.

  “We don’t think we’re the ones putting her through anything,” Craig Cady said. “We think we simply want Keefer to have a stable, permanent home.”

  “You’re ill!” Lorraine cried. “You’re ill, Delia!”

  “I’ll get better, Lorraine. It’s almost over, and what a blessing it will be for Keefer to have a sibling.”