A Theory of Relativity (25 page)

And that was a lie. Though he had set more store, as his sister would say, by Gordon, Mark McKenna’s daughter had been the radiant center of his life. All the comfort and cohesiveness he had taken and given growing up close to his brother and sister, that mattered greatly.

His . . . passion would not be too strong a term . . . for Lorraine, for his work, all this combined could not approach the might of his attach-ment to Georgia.

This had not been how he had believed it would transpire. Fear, real fear, had overtaken him when he finally agreed with Lorraine’s desperate wish to adopt. More than most, he knew that genetic characteristics were not suggestions, but destiny. They were a map, with all the points of interest clearly marked. The Minnesota twin studies had proven that twins raised in separate adoptive homes—the barbarity of that, separating twins for adoption!—still chose similar jobs, parted their hair on the same side, developed the same ailments within months of one another. He had known, with complete certainty, that the nature versus nurture debate was specious, that a child’s upbringing could only enhance or detract from that child’s predestined development. An adopted child would be unlike him. That child would be a mystery. Talents, personality quirks, diseases.

Diseases.

But then Georgia had been placed in his arms by the foster parent who’d been caring for her. The placement coordinator from Catholic Social Services had been late. A half hour had passed. An hour. Finally, Mark had insisted that they put the baby in the car and leave. What if there had been a problem, and they intended to take her back? They’d been driving up the road, on the way home, when they passed the social worker driving in the opposite direction. They’d had a few laughs about it. The foster mother, the placement worker, and Lorraine, at least. Mark had not laughed. He could only see Georgia, examine Georgia’s auburn fuzz, her piercing black eyes, her tender limbs.

He recognized his Georgia, his child.

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He had forgotten an enormous fact of primate biology. The nature versus nurture debate was specious, but not for the reasons he had supposed. Georgia was who she was, and he who he was. But it was his nature to nurture her. Had anyone suspected how bewitched he had been, how unable to think of anything except seeing her, laying his finger against her skin?

Lorraine’s joy over the baby verged on madness. It poured from her like scent. She had walked home from the library the day of the call from the adoption agency, her arms loaded down with a stack of childcare books, and forgotten for two days that she had left her car in the parking lot. She assumed it had been stolen and didn’t care. With quarts of washable latex, she’d painted the walls of Georgia’s room in huge splashes of raspberry and gold and metallic blue, so much color that her sister, Daphne, whose husband was a neurologist, worried that the baby might get overstimulated.

Lorraine hadn’t even cared whether Mark took to the baby. She chose her name. When he balked, asking, “Don’t you think the name is a little much?” Lorraine became short with him.

“Your mechanic named his baby Juniper,” she’d said, pouting. She had planned since she was sixteen to name her baby after Georgia O’Keeffe—

and by God, she was going to name her baby after Georgia O’Keeffe.

And it had been the most perfect name. Mark could not imagine another girl so unique and impossible to diminish as his child. Two years later, his son was born, on the day man first walked on the moon.

They had not even known of Gordie’s existence on the summer night that they, like all their friends, woke to the alarm and watched the grainy telecast, a drowsy Georgia sprawled across their laps. But six weeks later, even though Gordon Cooper hadn’t been part of that particular mission, Mark had borrowed a leaf from Lorraine’s book and named his son for someone famous and accomplished, and to com-memorate the scientific historicity of his birthday. It was fanciful instead of practical.

How their names suited his children. Soft and hard variations of the same letter, they were like handmade shirts, instantly and perfectly fitting.

He had traveled for work until Gordie was almost a year old.

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Longer than Mark would have liked. It had taken him time to reposition himself at Medi-Sun so that he would do more R and D. But wher-ever he was, whatever client dinner or other obligation lay before him, he would set aside everything to call home at six, just after Lorraine would have cleared the dishes. If it was a Thursday or a Sunday, he’d wait just a few minutes longer, to catch them after dinner and before
Bewitched
or
The Munsters
came on. There were times his wife hadn’t had much to say. Two under three was quite a feat, and women didn’t hold down full-time jobs and full-time families back then. Lorraine’s job was always demanding, and she simply would not do things halfway. Even having Mary Dwors happy to care for the children in those early years and someone to help with the cleaning and ironing didn’t make up for another parent. Mark was never unaware of how much sleep Lorraine surrendered to keep it all rolling when he was away. By the time Georgia was four, he’d come in off the road for good.

Years later, they would look back and marvel at how they’d ever managed.

Mark felt the calls had helped. They were an anchor. When Georgia first began talking, he would ask for her, and she would grow wistful, no matter what her mood had been like in the moments before he called—“She was throwing her foam blocks at the baby and he was pretending to fall over just now,” Lorraine would tell him, exasperated.

“She was fine, Mark. This is Sarah Bernhardt over here. Tell Dad how much fun you were having, Georgia.”

Mark would coax her, “Georgia? Georgia on my mind?”

“Daddy.”

“My Georgia.”

“My Daddia.”

“Are you happy, Georgia?”

“No, I am sad.”

“Why are you sad?”

“Because you are not with me.”

“Soon, I will be with you.”

“You aren’t with me.”

“Soon.”

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“Why aren’t you here?”

And he would carefully explain, in language she could understand, how Daddy’s job was getting vitamins to people so they could stay strong and healthy and not get colds that were too bad, even in winter.

And still, she would say, “Daddy, I am sad.” He did not once disbelieve her. He thought it was entirely possible that a happy life could contain enormous sadness, and he didn’t think children’s emotions were any less noteworthy than adults’. For a small child, the walls of the room were the boundaries of the universe. He would sit, in Phoenix or Milwaukee or Trenton, and imagine him and Georgia, each immured in the restrictive enclosure of their separateness, the wall of distance between them.

He had accepted, when Georgia became ill, that however long his life lasted, ten years longer, or twenty, he would be a man living on the other side of the wall from his own heart. The spunk and resolve Lorraine brought to their struggle over his granddaughter made him want to stand up and applaud his wife’s courage. But he had no taste for it.

He hoped that his distance was not felt. He hoped he could do his part.

The Nyes were wrong. He knew that much.

He knew very little else.

He was certain that no intelligence survived death.

So he did not at least have to live imagining Georgia’s grief because he could not be with her. His chest filled with tiny, insistent pulses and he gasped. He wondered with vague curiosity whether he was having a heart attack. But no, he was only, finally, crying, tears hot along his cheeks, down into his ears.

“Mark?” Lorraine stirred, not quite waking. “Are you okay?”

“I miss my baby girl,” he managed to say, holding himself still, trying not to alarm her.

“Monday,” Lorraine sighed. “She’ll be home on Monday. Go to sleep.”

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Go to sleep, Gordon urged her. Gotosleepgotosleepgotosleep. He dared not cough or breathe or even shift the pillow to a more comfortable place between his knees because he believed . . . no, he knew, that Keefer could hear his thoughts.

Why was there so little research on this phenomenon? If he thought of nothing except sleep, then Keefer would slip over the edge into sleep. If he let his mind drift, if he began to think about skiing, or tomorrow’s lesson, or an itch in his groin, or the pucker around Alicia’s navel when she dived for the set on her volleyball team (he’d joined, insisting they treat each other as friends only, and she’d trumped him, asking him, with genuine bafflement, what he was talking about), or about how much he wanted a ginger ale with ice, then Keefer would stir.

It would begin with a single whimper, like a puppy on its first night home. Then would come silence, during which Gordon would plead with the universe, and one in every five times—he had counted it up—

Keefer would sigh, insert her thumb upside down high in the back left corner where her grueling molars were sprouting, and collapse like a deflated wind sock back down onto her dog bed. Gordon had tried, for Lindsay, to describe the joy he felt when she fell back to sleep. The security of knowing that when the sun came up, he would not be desperate, wild, his eyes so dry they literally clicked open and closed. It 165

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was holy, a gift from above, one more night when he would not have to have watched the middle forty-five minutes of
Fast Times at Ridgemont
High
or
Batman and Robin
, while he stroked Keefer’s restless little feet with one thumb.

For a time, at first, she had slept overnight so well that Gordon felt as though he were on steroids. He could do fatherhood! Totally! Let Faith Bogert come. Let ’em all come. What was all this whining about never a moment to yourself? Why did the single parents at school always look like hell? “She’s down at eight,” he would comment, trying to stifle the sniff of pride he felt coming on, “and she’s out for the night.”

But then the molars peeked through, and Keefer woke up at night with a wail like steel on steel.

The first time, terrified, Gordon had called his mother, who asked him to hold the telephone close to the baby’s head so that she could hear the quality of the cry. “She’s just fussing, Gordie,” Lorraine said wearily. “Now, let me get some sleep. I have to work tomorrow.” But Keefer wailed on, and Gordon finally wrapped her in his Brewers warm-up jacket, tying the sleeves in front in a way that kept Keefer both warm and immobile, and drove to Trempeauleau County Methodist. The resident who carefully thumped, eyed, and palpated Keefer was Asian, a young woman.

“You are her father?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m her uncle,” Gordon answered.

“She’s your daughter?” the young woman asked again, and Gordon thought, shut up, shut up, you spoiled overcerebrated brat, and he also thought that this was exactly the sort of woman who once would have, by now, been providing him accidental occasions to brush her breast against his arm. Single parenthood, he had discovered to his disgust, was not the chick magnet he’d believed it would be. When Keefer dim-pled and kept her barrettes in, he had to beat the bruistas at the Perk Place off him with a stick. But when she whined, or threw herself facedown on the floor, kicking both her Weebocked feet until she puked, women were grateful to find him invisible.

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with me, so de facto, yes, I’m her father. My sister, her mother, died last spring.”

“I’m sorry. But I have a good reason for asking.”

“Health insurance? She’s on my parents’. I have a copy of their card, and a letter.”

“I’m not a bookkeeper.”

“Oh, right. Well, then, shoot.”

“I want to know how much you know about the teething patterns of toddlers.”

“A fair amount. I’m a biology teacher.”

“I’m talking children, not dogfish sharks.”

“Fine.”

“So, you know why she’s in pain. Pain equals crying. Restless sleep.”

Bitch, thought Gordon.

“I’d be glad for restless sleep, Doctor. We’re talking no sleep. I know she’s getting a back tooth, but I didn’t know it would affect her like this. . . .”

“What happened when she cut her front teeth? Was she bothered?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t live with her then. Her parents, my sister, was alive then. I think she was pretty little when she got her first ones.”

“Well, this is considerably harder for her. Molars are bigger. And she’s bigger. More sentient. Aren’t you, honey?”

“Tell me about it. I mean, she never sleeps. She . . . never. . . .

sleeps.”

“Most parents of young children get far more sleep than they actually think they’re getting. It’s more of a misperception, because the sleep is so broken. I know it seems impossible, but everyone goes through this.”

“Do you have kids?”

“Nooooo,” the young woman, whose name tag read Michelle Yu, answered. “If she were truly sleep deprived, she’d have some physical . . .

she’d show it.”

Thank you, Yu, he’d thought, as she dismissed him with some sam-ple packets of Tylenol syrup and he headed home for the dawn patrol.

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*

*

*

Day after day, he caught himself nodding in class. The kids noticed.

One of the endless procession of Reillys—this one named Dennis—

woke him by turning the volume to the max on the CD player he kept in the lab. The opening riff of “Layla” blasted him literally off his stool.

“Tempus fugg-it, Mr. McKenna,” the kid said.

Gordon forced down his desire to slug the kid and joked, “Reilly, I’m an old man.”