A Theory of Relativity (5 page)

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JACQUELYN MITCHARD

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?” Nora crept closer to the hall, where she could hear more clearly.

“Mom,” Gordon persisted, “what I mean is that the way Georgia would have died from the cancer would have been a lot worse. Peaceful deaths aren’t really peaceful. Your lungs fill up. It’s like drowning in your own body. But think about on TV, how a gazelle looks when a lion grabs it,” he said, words coming faster, “You know, at the last moment, the deer just lets go? That’s when the endorphins kick in—it means Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 25

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‘endogenous morphine,’ Mom, your body’s own morphine, and so even the worst kind of bleeding or bruising, well, you probably feel pretty good during the last seconds.”

“Shut up, Gordon, honey, just shut up,” said Lorraine quietly.

“Lor,” Mark put in quietly. “Leave him alone. He’s only trying to help . . .” Nora peeked around the edge of the door. Her sister-in-law sat huddled in a shawl, a line of untouched plates of pie and cups of coffee arranged on the table before her, with the two men standing, leaning toward her, both of them so tall and her so little. It struck Nora that they often appeared that way, leaning down to Lorraine as she told them what was what; it reminded Nora of one of those funny photos you saw once in a while in the
Country Journal
. A bantam hen set unawares on a clutch of Canadian goose eggs, and when they hatched, there’d be this tiny little mother with huge chicks four times her size toddling along behind her.

“I know he is, Mark,” Lorraine said. “But he doesn’t think.” She scanned the counters again. “Look at all this food. Who’s going to eat it?

I’m glad I don’t have to. I don’t ever have to eat again if I don’t want to.

I don’t have to keep my strength up anymore.”

“Yes, you do, Lor,” Mark said.

“No, I don’t,” Lorraine answered. “Well, you take it home, Gordie.”

“I don’t eat cake,” he said. Gordie, Nora thought, was a health nut.

“Well, someone will eat it. Maybe Mike or Matt. Maybe cousin Delia. She doesn’t look like she ever missed a meal.”

“Lor!” Mark chided.

“Well, it’s just so . . . isn’t it? It’s disrespectful. People chowing down like it’s their last meal.”

“It’s what people do,” Mark said softly.

“All I meant was,” Gordon began again, “if you just think about it the way it really is, if she would have died at home, it would have been better for us, but not for her. That’s all I meant.” Lorraine’s voice, when she replied, made Nora’s neck prickle. “I warn you, Gordon. You’re the one who doesn’t get it. The way it
really
is. This is your sister! Your only . . . my only . . .”

“Your only . . . what?”

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“My only daughter.”

“I thought you were going to say, my only child.”

“I would never say that. And Gordie, for God’s sake, this is not about you, so just, just shut up, honey!” And Lorraine was up, knocking over cups in her flight, brushing past Nora, her shawl cloaking her head to toe, her dark shape triangular, like bats’ wings, dark on dark.

Nora expelled the breath she had been holding. She could barely see Gordon’s blond head in the cage of his clean hands, where he sat slumped at the table, his elbows soaked by the rivulets of dripping coffee, his knees blocked by overturned chairs. Mark stood beside him, his hand extended, not quite touching Gordon’s shoulder.

“It’s okay, son,” Mark said.

“Make her come back, Dad,” Gordon said.

“She will,” said Mark.

Patting the bulge at her waist where the sweatshirt lay, Nora pictured her niece up there, still tethered to earth like a kite, unable to comfort her loved ones or stop them from turning on one another.

Nora recalled that priests always used the child’s name in the context of sainthood at a baptism, even if it was Saint Tiffany or Saint Justin. Nora said a prayer to Georgia.
I’m going to need your help,
she said. She hoped it was not blasphemy, especially at a time like this.

Diane Nye hoped she did not look as stupid as she felt, because she felt stupid enough for three people, and the size of three people, with a purple foam rubber harness strapped around her middle and purple foam slippers strapped onto each foot, churning her legs up and down in the deep end of the pool at Sandpiper. This water aerobics class had been Shelby’s idea. Shelby, Diane’s herbalist and best friend, though probably not much older than Diane herself, was starting menopause and starting to pack on the pounds. She’d cajoled Diane into at least trying the class with her, pleading she’d otherwise be the only lady there under sixty. Diane owed it to her friend, whose floral teas had banished Diane’s migraines three years before and who was now concocting everything in her power to help save Georgia.

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Shelby, whose face was ruddy with effort, glanced over at Diane, and Diane tried to smile. But she kept feeling as though at any moment she was going to tip over like a duck diving and end up with those absurd slippers waving in the air.

This was a little much. Diane liked a walk, and tennis, but she had never gone for that Ironwoman crap, and she never would. She knew Shelby was trying to hold back time, so that she might still have a baby with that really sweet (and much younger) guy of hers. But she thought Shelby ought to be looking to freeze-dry some of her eggs before she ran out of them instead of lifting weights and churning up the club pool.

“Okay, now let’s stride!” called the instructor, miming giant steps on the edge of the pool. The teacher was no older than Diane’s children, and had one of those peekaboo little navels, the kind Diane had been proud to display like a tiny smile above her hip huggers even after she’d had Raymond Junior and Alison. Of course, she’d been only twenty-one after those first two, with skin that snapped back like a Spandex leotard. It was Caroline, who weighed ten pounds, who stretched Diane’s poor tummy to such a size her belly button still looked like a shut eye winking. Well. Couldn’t hurt, Diane sighed, trying to synchro-nize her arms and legs to sluice through the water like one of those big old skinny bugs that skated over the pond at her grandpa’s horse farm when she was a little girl.

At first, Diane thought it was the heat or all this damned flailing around that made her think she saw her daughter, Caro, standing with her mouth open and her hands pasted against the glass of the club-house grill. But, no, it was Caro, and she was crying.

Diane went still in the water, then awkwardly rowed herself over to the ladder, hauling herself up even though the foam-rubber belt felt like a huge purple sponge. Big Ray, she’d thought first, he’s had heat-stroke or palpitations. Merciful God, the man couldn’t stuff himself with cheeseburgers and martinis and then go out in this heat and play nine more holes . . . then, she’d thought, oh, no, oh, it’s Georgia. Georgia’s had a seizure again. Georgia’s dead. As she walked toward Caro, Diane had a last, irritating notion. Caro should still have been at work.

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It had to be Caro’s husband Leland. Some new fart-witted nonsense from Leland, like the time he’d gone off to New Mexico to turn himself into a he-man by drumming with the Indians. Then Caro had disappeared and come running out the door of the ladies’ locker room and said the thing that would break open Diane’s world like a boot to a melon.

She’d been shaking Caro, shaking her daughter’s shoulders hard, her clenched fingers digging wet ridges into her daughter’s silk blazer, when Shelby pulled her off; but Diane, as if watching from a distance, kept on yelling, “You shut up! Stop it! Raymond’s dead?
Raymond
’s dead?”

“Mama, it’s true, Mama! They were in a car accident!”

“I don’t believe you!”

“It’s true, Mama.”

“What do you mean?” Caroline had never had the sense God gave an angleworm.

“Diane, honey,” Shelby said. “Come on. We’ll phone. Someone get Mrs. Nye a drink, please.”

The instructor had scurried over with a paper cup full of water, which Shelby regarded with disdain. “I mean, get Mrs. Nye a drink, please. A drink.”

Diane was sitting there, holding a glass of red wine, staring down at those ridiculous rubber duck feet, while someone took off on a golf cart to get Big Ray, when Caro said in a baby voice, “Mama, my brother loved Georgia so. At least they’re together.” And Diane, who did not care at that moment whether God forgave her, said, “Caroline. They never should have been together in the first place. If Georgia hadn’t talked my boy into moving to that frozen hellhole, he’d be here with us now. He’d be . . . warm and safe, and where he belonged . . . he’d have had the life he was supposed to have. All this”—Diane gestured, the wine sloshing over the rim of the glass, red splashes staining the concrete of the pool deck—“was his life. My baby.

They took it all away.”

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It was a produce counter, but instead of lettuce and apples there were pills, all shapes, sizes, and smells, her child’s garden of pharma-cology.

Lorraine knelt on the floor in Georgia’s bedroom, her elbows on the card table they’d set up to display all the translucent orange bottles with their childproof white chef’s-hat tops. There were shy pink pills to suppress Georgia’s normal, young-woman’s hormone functions. Businesslike-scored white tablets—Lorraine thought of them as little nurses—to soothe the nausea. Pale blue footballs for anxiety. And then the big pills, the gulls and eagles that sent the neurological system soaring, capsules with serious beads of shiny amber and red. Those for sleep were lawyerly mauve and blue, sleek and seductive as miniature guns. Those for mood were more cheerful and squat, dental hygienists in kelly green.

Lorraine sighed.

Even the big-gun pills didn’t deliver her anymore. Her liver must have the density of a submarine. In college, Lorraine had inhaled enough dope to stagger a hippo and then unnerved her friends by asking, “Now what?” She had wanted to get noddy and giggly, but nothing ever pushed her over the edge.

And yet, not long after Georgia’s first surgery, Lorraine had begun hopefully abusing her daughter’s medications, just a little. It had been 29

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almost a reflex, a logical if asinine response to an emotional pain so fierce it seemed to cry out for medical intervention—two Percocet for you, sweetie, and one for me.

The pills had indeed been kindly. After no more than fifteen minutes came a heady wave, leaving Lorraine floating on what felt, unex-amined, like well-being. Soon, she was doing it twice a day. The hos-pice nurses and the University of Minnesota doctors, bless their hearts, threw drugs at Georgia. They didn’t pay any attention to numbers and dosage this far down into the valley. It was a free-for-all, a Mardi Gras of pills. And yet, after a few months, the pills no longer lifted Lorraine up onto the lap of the awaited surge. But she still used them. They had the power to move truths into the next room.

On the morning after Georgia died, Lorraine had solemnly assured one of the nurses (one who happened to have once been a student of Lorraine’s, and would never have suspected kindly, grammatical Mrs.

McKenna of anything bad) that she had flushed all those pills down the toilet. But Mrs. McKenna had no intention of doing any flushing. She had taken the bottles out of the Tupperware box, where someone had thrown them all ajumble, and lined them up in comfortable ranks on the card table. There was morphine here, and Nembutal, serious blot-out medicine for someone so inclined. Lorraine was going to guard Georgia’s pills. In the middle of the first night after the crash, she’d gone wandering in the dark to find a few for sleep and nearly sobbed when she could not locate them. They were options, not to be wasted, she’d thought, with growing panic, as she first carefully then with abandon opened and tossed the boxes of pressure bandages, bins of syringes; and then finally, she’d found them, plunging her hand in the dark into the rubber box where the pill bottles clicked like nestled beetles.

She didn’t intend to commit suicide with them.