A Theory of Relativity by Jacquelyn Mitchard Read Free Book Online

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.
    Suicide seemed an awfully dramatic, athletic kind of thing to do.
    But she was relieved that living was something she was no longer strictly required to do.
    Any living she did from now on would be extra credit.
    People would tell her to be strong. But she’d already been strong.
    She had lifted her dying, leaking, groaning little girl out of her sweat-Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 31
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    and-pee-soaked bed. She had stayed awake for eighteen-hour stretches, lying or pacing on the carpeted floor, listening to the thump-hiss of the oxygen apparatus and Georgia’s moans. Freezing one set of washcloths, soaking another set in hot water and oil, Rhuli for the lips, bag balm for the bedsores. She had left school for a month of “compassionate” leave (after twenty-two years of service, that meant “unpaid”) and so had learned to use rice creatively and to forget phone numbers of friends she’d known for twenty-five years. For a year, she had not picked up a brush except to paint cat whiskers on Keefer’s cupid mouth, not ventured beyond the baby and pajama department of any store for six months, learned to live on four hours a night of sleep, though that had been the one constant she’d craved in quantity as sustenance her entire life, gotten glasses to be able to read Wuthering Heights in the dark so as not to assault Georgia’s light-sensitive eyes, watched the beloved flesh of her daughter mutate from exquisite to china pale to clay, and smiled and sang . . . be strong?
    What about those books she’d been discreetly slipped by Natalie Chaptman? By Karen Wright and Nina Upchurch? Hope and healing books. Live a full life after loss? Come to terms? Understand that bad things happened to good people?
    What would Lorraine’s seventh-graders say to that?
    In your dreams.
    I’m so sure.
    I don’t think so.
    Not.
    No hardened adult could ever talk so jaded as they: My world, your problem. Talk to the hand ‘cause the mind don’t understand.
    Right they were. They had the balls not to be fooled. Adults were not mature, they were chickenshit and full of pretense. Not kids.
    At first, when Mark called her from the oncologist’s office—it had just been a precaution by the obstetrician, to “rule things out”—she had wanted for Georgia to die. Right away. Before she got home. Lorraine had copied articles from the library, from the books about rational suicide, recipes for pill cocktails. Mark had had to take Georgia to work and the doctor, because Lorraine could not bear to look at her beautiful Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 32
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    child. A copy of the Golf Week photo, the one from the feature story about up-and-comers on the minor tours, the ones with real PGA hopes, with Georgia crisp and slim wearing the obligatory chinos and loafers, gazing proudly at her Ray, was still propped on the mantel. And she had been sick then! It hadn’t been nursing that let her “get in shape” so quickly after Keefer’s