A Theory of Relativity by Jacquelyn Mitchard Page B

like the Galapagos. He’d joined a ski and climbing club Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 56
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    JACQUELYN MITCHARD
    in Wausau and endured the chatter because the women were succulent to look at if not to listen to. And he’d been out, with Lindsay or Tim or one of the girls Tim called his aqua-bunnies, on most weekend nights.
    But stupid as it was, he always felt safer when he came home to a blinking answering machine light. He always called back. Georgia always talked to him, even if he woke her up. Half the time, he’d just drive over there. Sometimes, the birds were talking by the time they fell asleep.
    Gordon had rationalized, when Georgia got really ill, that the time he spent sponging her and helping her make her tapes and reading Wuthering Heights to her would compensate for the scattered days they would have shared over the course of forty more years—a sprinkling of holidays, a family trip or two. Why had he not taken better care to think of what he’d say when this time came. Why had he not asked Georgia for help? Would she have delighted in the sly mischief of writing her own memorial? Part of him thought so. Would the effort, with its bald admission of defeat, have been so unbearably poignant the two of them could never have borne it?
    And yet, Gordon’s memories of his sister were all her version. Georgia was custodian of boxes of blackmail-quality photographs from childhood. Gordon had a single eighteen-by-twenty frame of family snaps, chosen (by Georgia) to represent their lives together, and a shoebox full of semiseductive photos taken of or by girlfriends. It also contained a college graduation card that read, “Way to Go!! Who Says Hard Work Doesn’t Pay Off?” with a laminated fourth-grade science test, grade D-plus. Any stories he couldn’t tell to his mother, he’d taken to Georgia. About the ER intern in Colorado who treated his broken tail-bone and ended up taking him home with her for a week, about the girl he taught who thought animals with split hooves had roots.
    Gordon ventured into their bedroom. Georgia’s wedding dress, in its heavy-duty plastic bag, took up the space of three men’s parkas. On a shelf, under a couple of half-used rolls of Christmas wrapping paper, Gordon uncovered an oversized, full-color book of photos, “Compromise and Positions: A Hot Guide for Cool Couples.” Absently, he opened and closed drawers. Georgia’s nursing bras. The big old Knock-Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 57
    A Theory of Relativity
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    outs promotional T-shirts she slept in. Ray’s boxer shorts, the size of small backpacker tents . . . Christ, he’d been a big guy. For a crystalline instant, he could see Ray on the fourth tee at Pelican Point, waiting for him and Jurgen, hacky-sacking the ball with his driver, bouncing it around, never letting it drop, Ray’s excruciatingly slow, metronomically precise swing—Tempo Ramundo, they called him, recalling Ray Floyd—the shot cleaving the exact middle of the sky. “That’s no balota,” Jurgen would say, clasping his hands as if in prayer, “thass a bullet.” The horrible pity of trespass swamped him—the dead had no privacy. When he was old, he would burn his every intimate scrap and document. Which would probably amount to that same shoebox full of photos. He pictured himself, a bent, silver-haired man in cargo shorts, poking a tiny bonfire.
    Helplessly, he thought of Georgia and how she’d been unable to keep her hands out of the back of Ray’s tuxedo pants even during the reception, of Ray shaking him awake the morning after his and Georgia’s second date, “You and me got to have a word, Bo. Did she call you?”
    “Ray, it’s nine a.m.”
    “But did she call you yet? About me?”
    “Didn’t you just come from there?” And then the realization. Sleep parting for amusement. “Did you spend the night there?” Ray shaking his head, shaking Gordon’s shoulder, shaking off his prying, a blush spreading up from his