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back to see if the system was working at all, and that was when they’d realized Georgia had been making tapes even in the middle of the night. It had been spooky—Georgia, in a dark room, her face in the glow of the bedside lamp thin and somehow hot, like a paper lantern, holding up a children’s book, as if she were on a TV
    show, “Go to sleep, little bird, little bird . . .” Georgia had exploded in a rage one day when Ray insisted she rest, after a bout of retching. She didn’t want to sleep. Her face sheened in cold sweat, she’d cried out,
    “I’m right in the middle of Green Eggs and Ham! ” (People a county over could hear it; Hayes used to say Georgia missed her vocation as a hog caller.) “These are her memories, Ray! How can you ask me to stop Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 20
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    JACQUELYN MITCHARD
    making her memories? What good is another bloody hour of sleep going to do me?”
    I do not like them, Sam, I am.
    All right, thought Nora, as she lay herself down on the bed where Georgia had lain.
    She said, out loud, “Fuck it.”
    Nora let the sobs take her and shake her, let pictures of her niece roll up in front of her mind. She allowed loss to pound her, and also the guilt, for the fool she’d been twenty years ago, when she’d believed that people who took in Korean orphans and such were saints, but that an adopted child could never really be kin. She saw five-year-old Georgia, hands on hips, telling Nora, “I find the smell of cow shit depressing.” She saw Georgia roaring with laughter when the fancy pressure canner Hayes gave Nora for Christmas exploded, spewing blackberry jam from hell to Sunday. She saw Georgia’s quiet rapture—she couldn’t have been more than ten—the first time she made a tidy French embroidery knot.
    Nora had shared with Georgia all the homely things she’d have shared with the daughter she’d never had, things people didn’t really do anymore unless they were rich and read Martha Stewart. Georgia hadn’t wanted a high-powered career. She’d wanted a home and family.
    She certainly hadn’t gotten that from Lorraine. No offense. The same old Belgian woman who cleaned house for the monks had come to clean Lorraine’s house every week, even back in the days when having a “cleaning lady,” if a woman wasn’t bedridden, was unheard of in Tall Trees. But Lorraine had her teaching and her painting, and she did things for the children, but not the things ordinary moms did. Nora used to marvel at the built-in closets filled with neatly stored and labeled costumes from Georgia’s plays, the shelves of polished trophies Gordie brought home. One of the only real jokes Nora and Lorraine had ever shared had been when Georgia had chicken pox, and Nora had dropped by one night to bring cookies. “Wait!” Lorraine suddenly cried, in the middle of their joint effort to count Georgia’s spots. “I have to get something out of the oven!” And she’d taken out a cookie sheet, but instead of cookies, well, there were bright sculpted clay figures of Lady, and the Tramp, and the Siamese cats, all just perfect. Georgia Theory[001-112] 6/5/01 11:58 AM Page 21
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    clapped her hands—what child wouldn’t? A mother who was their own toy shop. Lorraine had looked at Nora perfectly seriously, and, pointing at the oven, said, “I used to wonder what this thing was for when we first moved, then I figured it out.”
    And Lorraine had always been sharp as a pin, clothes ordered from the Spiegel catalogue, not purchased for the bowling banquet from Gloria’s Finer Designs, which even Nora, whose clothes ran to new Levi’s and old Levi’s, knew were anything but.
    To tell the truth, Nora thought heavily, as the heaving in her breast subsided and she sat up on the bed, she liked Lorraine better now, in the disarray that had claimed her since Georgia got sick, than she ever had when Lorraine was such a powerhouse she never had time to sit down even