Relativity (34 page)

Ethan's face brightened. “Then what happened to me wasn't bad? The brain hemorrhage gave me a gift.”

Dr. Saunders looked up from his notes. “Ethan, I'm sorry; I wish that were the case. But this isn't a gift. You're sick. If you continue to have these seizures, you risk further brain damage.”

“But I can see physics.” Ethan looked at Mark. “Things nobody else can see.”

“Sadly, what you can see isn't real,” Dr. Saunders said. “You had a severe traumatic brain injury. It caused as much damage to you as a baby as an adult falling off an eight-story building.”

This was an analogy Claire remembered. Eight stories; as much damage as an adult falling off an eight-story building. Dr. Saunders had told her that twelve years ago, when he'd made his initial diagnosis. She once went to the eighth floor of a high-rise office just to look at the window, to see how terrifying that jump must have been. What she wouldn't have given to take the damage herself instead of Ethan.

“But the red and blue shift of the flashlight?” Ethan asked. “What about the ping-pong ball and the Magnus effect?”

“When you're having a seizure, you think you can see them,” Dr. Saunders said. “But they're only inside your brain. They're not there.”

“No, they're real. I really saw them.”

“You're seeing with your brain, Ethan. Hallucinating. Remember when I set up the four speakers in my office? How you said the waves made a pattern like a chessboard. You explained wave reflection perfectly. But I didn't realize until today that there was a bass at the front of the room. If you really saw sound waves, your drawing would include the waves the bass made too.” The doctor handed him the picture.

“I was wrong?” Ethan ran a finger over the concentric circles. The little boy's eyes welled up. “But if I can't see physics, then I'm not special.”

Mark placed his hand on Ethan's shoulder. The gesture made Claire lose her focus.

“Going forward, there are two options,” the doctor said. “Either Ethan will need to be on antiseizure medication for the rest of his life. Or surgery. We remove the part of his brain where the lesion is, the source of the abnormal electrical activity. This is my recommendation.”

Claire turned to the doctor. “Isn't that serious, cutting out a piece of his brain?”

“Ethan hasn't responded to aggressive treatment with antiseizure medications. We need to consider his quality of life. Continued seizures and constant hallucinations would take a huge toll on him, day-to-day. Physically, emotionally, and intellectually. Socially too, when he starts high school.”

Ethan's face crumpled. “But I don't want that. If I have an operation, they'll go away. I won't be able to see physics anymore.”

“You're one of the lucky ones, Ethan,” Dr. Saunders told him. “I've seen hundreds of cases of abusive head trauma at this hospital. Most babies with brain injuries as serious as yours either die or become vegetables. It's a miracle that you survived, and even then you've still had significant cognitive and developmental delays. My team needs to have a more extensive look at the scans and speak to the neurosurgeons. The triage nurses might want to transfer Ethan into the surgical unit later this afternoon. I'll come back a little later.” Dr. Saunders walked out into the hall.

The three of them were alone in the consultation room now. Claire tried to make eye contact with Ethan, then with Mark, but both of them were distant, far away in their own worlds.

Mark walked to the window, his hands resting on his hips.

Claire stared at his back and saw the reflection of his face in the glass. She tried to decipher his expression. As clouds passed, Mark looked up at the sky, wide-eyed and bewildered.

She turned to Ethan. His eyes were focused on the floor, trying his best to hold back his tears, but Claire could feel how upset her son was. His disappointment was attached to every atom in the room. She held her hand out to Ethan and he took it, wrapping his fingers around her thumb.

“Mum.” His bottom lip trembled.

“Pumpkin, don't be scared. Everything's going to be okay.” She'd assured him of this so much that Claire doubted Ethan still believed it. Things hadn't been okay; those were empty words. His palm was sticky in her hand.

“I really need to talk to Dad,” Ethan said, letting go. “Alone.”

Ω

MARK STOOD AT THE WINDOW.
Ethan came up beside him, playing with the plastic tag wrapped around his wrist. His skin was the pearly color of glue. Looking at the boy was difficult—moist eyes, limp posture like a deflated balloon—so it was easier to keep looking out the window. Those were nimbostratus clouds ahead, Mark could tell by their formless shape, thickening into a dense layer over the sky. Dark blankets of cloud caused by atmospheric instability; the temperature outside must have risen.

“Makes you feel small,” Mark said. “Doesn't it? The sky.”

“I guess.” Ethan touched the window.

“Did you know that the sun is 108 times wider than Earth and 330,000 times more massive? But there are stars out there that make the sun look like a tiny speck of dust. Crazy, don't you think? The size of the universe is unimaginable. Really puts things into perspective.”

Physics was beautiful like that—it was the most powerful lens to see the universe through. Whenever Mark felt throttled by his own feelings, he knew that he could quickly forget everything by looking at the sky. We were all part of something bigger—massive and infinite—and the sheer size of the universe overshadowed the smallness of our lives. Everyone was made of the same stuff as wandering stars, as interstellar galaxies of gas and dust. Even on the opposite side of the galaxy, our building blocks were identical; we shared the same atoms, molecules, and compounds as other planets, suns, and moons.

Ethan touched Mark's arm. “Dad, I know all that. But I don't really care about the size of the universe at the moment. I don't want to talk about physics right now.”

“Only four percent of the observable universe is made of ordinary matter,” Mark continued. “That's everything we can see and imagine and beyond. We don't understand ninety-six percent of what's out there. There are so many big questions that still need answers. How did the universe begin? What's dark matter made from?”

“They're your big questions. I don't think they're mine.”

“Remember what you said at the park? Physics is figuring out how to ask the right questions.”

Ethan frowned. “Then I asked the wrong ones. The time machine didn't work. I couldn't time-travel. I didn't find out the truth. Now I need to have an operation. So I don't really care about physics anymore. Physics is just a stupid bunch of abandoned theories and wrong hypotheses and invisible stuff nobody can see. I couldn't make a wormhole. I'm not special. I'm just a freak.”

“You are special.” Mark looked his son in the eyes.

“I'm not. I'm no different from anyone else. Why'd you tell me time travel was possible?” The boy moved away from the window and sat back down on the metal bed.

“Ethan, I didn't know you were trying to build a time machine.”

“But, Dad, I was making it for you,” Ethan said. “It was supposed to fix everything. The time machine was going to fix us. I was going back to prove that you didn't shake me. Then it would be like you never left. Like we'd always been together. Mum wouldn't have made you go away. We'd be happy. We'd be a family again.”

Mark wanted that too. Happiness, his family: they belonged to one another. They should have been a unit; instead, they were shards of broken china that couldn't be stuck back into a vase. Their family was ruined, wrecked with cracks and faults, shattered by its own entropy. It was already too late; they were irreparable. Time travel could never set that right.

“There's something wrong with my brain,” Ethan pressed on. “There's a scar inside my head that's making me sick. Scars form for a reason, so I guess I'm confused. If you didn't shake me when I was a baby, what's wrong with me?”

Mark closed his eyes. “This was a mistake.”

Ethan looked at the ceiling, his left eye twitching slightly. Mark could tell the boy was trying to hold his feelings in, like a diver clinging to oxygen inside his underwater lungs. His son breathed deeply. “What did I do wrong?”

“You didn't do anything wrong, mate.” But it didn't matter; Mark shouldn't have said that to his son, that anything was a mistake. Now he'd hurt Ethan's feelings. He'd crossed a line.

Ω

IT ALWAYS HAPPENED
so quickly, so abruptly—the crossing of the line. Mark had long forgotten the color of the baby's towel, erased the order of events of that morning bath, had blanked out the sounds of a dying infant choking for breath in his arms.

Sights, sounds, and smells were easily repressed—the senses were fluid, powdery, fleeting—but feelings had solidity. Mark still felt the shape, the density, of that moment of turbulence twelve years ago. It was impossible to forget the power of his animal frustration, during the tiniest second when he'd crossed that uncrossable line.

In prison, several psychological assessments suggested Mark suffered from dissociative amnesia—derealization, compartmentalizing, gaps in his memory. One prison psychologist wrote that the subject's detachment might have interfered with the encoding and storage of his recollection of the crime. Mark's memory was mercurial—large and small details kept shifting and turning inside his head. No, he'd insisted, he didn't do it, it wasn't him. He needed to undo his thinking; the enormity of it crippled him. Mark unraveled reality to protect himself while his mind built false memories on false foundations.

But now love was unraveling him.

Ω

UNTIL RECENTLY,
Mark hadn't known how it felt to truly love his child—this robust selflessness, when whatever the price, Ethan's needs came first. This love was pure and unconditional. But he knew he had to earn it.

“Ethan, I love you.”

“I love you too, Dad.”

Mark took his son in his arms, wishing he could stay there forever. Freeze this moment and stop time. He smelled the top of Ethan's head and wiped hot tears off the boy's soft cheek. From the subatomic—protons, neutrons, quarks, and leptons—to massive stars and galaxies, Mark thought about the scale of everything. All 13.7 billion years of the known universe: it carried so many incalculable secrets. Out there, beyond the Milky Way, was an infinity that dwarfed them both.

But their bodies carried their own infinities, composed of billions of tiny particles with secrets of their own. Mark had held on to his secret for over twelve years, had bound it tight around every organ and cell. As he held his son against his body, Mark thought of his mother's embrace. How no matter what he'd done, how badly he'd behaved, Eleanor's love for him never changed.

She'd often joked she'd throw herself under a bus for her children, take a bullet for them; she was selfless to a fault. He knew how much she'd sacrificed: Eleanor was miserable in her marriage, had a universe of talents that were wasted on the roses. And Mark could hit his brother, fail tests, lose his temper, but still the strength of their bond was unbreakable like an electron, indestructible like energy. His mother always loved him unconditionally. That was just what existed between parent and child. He understood that now.

Meeting Ethan had ionized Mark. He'd never be the same. Falling in love with his son had changed him on a molecular level. The boy sobbed into his father's chest and grabbed his hand. Physics might be figuring out how to ask the right questions, but what Ethan deserved were the right answers.

Mark took a deep breath and looked his son in the eyes. “Ethan, none of this is your fault. It was mine.”

Ω

CLAIRE STOOD OUTSIDE
the hospital with Alison, waiting for her mother. The girl balanced on the curved green brick wall, poking out her tongue and holding her arms apart. With her jumpsuit on, she looked like a tiny plumber. What the doctor had said to Ethan weighed on Claire's mind. His world turned upside down again. He was still sick.

She'd never hallucinated, had never seen things that didn't exist, but Claire knew how it felt to realize your perception was wrong. When your mind played tricks on you. When what you were convinced was in front of you didn't align with what was real.

“Alison, can I ask you something?”

“Yep.” The girl jumped off the wall.

“What's been the worst thing about being sick?”

She answered without hesitating. “I never get to swim. I love being in the water. My favorite thing in the world is going to the beach, or the pool. Putting my head underwater and feeling my hair float around me like I'm a mermaid. But my parents never let me. They're always scared I'll have a seizure and drown. Or hit my head on a rock. So I've always felt like I'm missing out on something. It's hard to feel left behind.” The little girl looked at her hands.

“I wonder if that's how Ethan feels.”

Alison pushed her hair behind her ear. “Why don't you ask him?”

“I wish he wanted to talk to me about it.”

“Yeah, he does.” Alison smiled. “You're his mum.”

“Ever since his father came back, everything has been such a mess. I've been a mess. Sorry, I don't know why I'm telling you this. I just wish Ethan knew the truth.”

“Have you told him what happened?” Alison asked. “Your side of the story?”

Claire shook her head. It was too painful and she knew it would hurt him—it hurt her. But now it was too late. She'd been so caught up in her own reaction to Mark's reappearance that she'd overlooked Ethan. Thinking she was protecting him, when what he needed was honesty. Claire knew she could never offer Ethan the whole truth, but she could give him particles of it. Fragments, pieces, scraps: they were all she had.