Relativity (39 page)

It looked like an overexposed photograph, a washed-out summer day. The bathroom was full of white light: reflections, mirrors and the shiny plastic of the baby bath. Scattered smells of baby shampoo and talcum powder clung to the air. The only shock of color in the room was the inside of the bath, a vivid smear of bright orange runny poo. Mark hovered by the side of the bath. He was pale and pacing; Claire had never seen him look so scared. Lying on the changing mat was Ethan.

Ω

FOR HER EIGHTH BIRTHDAY,
Claire was given a gift of seventy-two Derwent pencils, the entire rainbow boxed in a tin. She loved their names, they sounded like poetry. Prussian Blue. Burnt Sienna. Vandyke Brown. She'd recognize the seventy-two colors of the box in reality, like it was her superpower, the Derwent spectrum her index to the real colors of the world. Milk was No. 72, Chinese White. Lemon Curd was No. 6, Deep Cadmium Yellow. Claire put her hand over her mouth as she looked at the color in Ethan's face.

No. 69, Gunmetal.

A very pale gray with a tiny trace of blue: the color of death. When Claire drew pictures as a child, she used Gunmetal only for silvery ghosts, shading them to eerie perfection with a very soft touch. It wasn't a color that she wanted to see in the face of her own baby.

Ω

“HE JUST . . .”
Mark trailed off and looked at Claire.

She started to cry. “Is he alive?”

When Claire was pregnant, she had recurring nightmares about her unborn baby fighting for life. Details were never the same. Sometimes the baby was drowning, sometimes it was deformed; other times the baby fell and fell into a measureless void. According to parenting magazines and books, these nightmares were perfectly normal so Claire put it down to the anxiety any mother-to-be feels. But those dreams always bent themselves toward abstraction.

This, there—right in front of her—was too real, too tactile. Chill of the bathroom tiles against the soles of her feet. Layer of sweat on her hands making the plastic casing of the phone slippery. Claire handed it to Mark. He spoke with the ambulance officer but she couldn't hear a word they said. All she could do was look at her baby.

Ethan was very still. He was partially wrapped in a yellow towel, its embroidered duck looking inappropriately cheery. His body was unrecognizable. Pudgy arms with bracelets of fat around the wrists motionless at his sides. His chubby cheeks, which Claire had kissed so many times before, were sunken and sallow. He didn't open his eyes. Without any signs of life, Ethan looked like a broken doll, cast aside.

She reached out and touched Ethan's hand. It was freezing; she lurched back. Claire put her ear up to his mouth. Nothing. She wanted to pick Ethan up and hold him in her arms, but what if she made it worse? Mark was still speaking to the ambulance officer on the phone and started trying to resuscitate Ethan. Claire couldn't watch. She ran outside to wait for the ambulance, looking at the vanishing point at the end of the street, listening for a siren.

It was only five minutes between Claire's call and the ambulance arriving at their front door. She'd never experienced five longer minutes than those. Five minutes for her heart to break, for her nightmares to come to life. Five minutes of thinking she'd lost her Ethan. Five minutes without enough oxygen. Babies took an average of forty-four breaths per minute, two hundred and twenty in five. One hundred and twenty liters of air. Five minutes without breath was too long.

She heard the siren. It grew louder, lights flashing, its brakes screeching as the van arrived. Two ambulance officers hurried to the baby. Claire ran upstairs with them. One was blond and tall; the other had brown hair and a more solid build. They brought a tank, a bag full of instruments and the tiniest oxygen mask.

“What's his name?”

“Ethan.” Claire hugged her stomach.

“Okay, Ethan, hang in there for us, mate,” said the blond as he fitted the mask over the baby's head.

“Glasgow Coma Score 3,” said the other ambulance officer. “Shallow breaths, respiratory rate 40.”

“He's alive?” She almost didn't believe it.

Mark paced behind them, staring at the tiles on the floor. “Do we need to go to the hospital?”

The blond ambulance officer turned around. “We need to stabilize his breathing first. Once he has a regular breathing pattern again we can make the trip.”

“He's going to be okay?” Claire asked.

“We'll do our best.”

Color hadn't returned to the baby's face yet. Claire held her breath, hoping it would leave more oxygen in the atmosphere for Ethan. She reached for Mark's hand and together they watched the naked baby fight for air.

Within a minute, mask on mouth, Ethan found his lungs again. He strained to open his eyes. But they weren't his eyes—they were black and empty, no iris, all pupil. The baby was too sick to cry. The silence wasn't natural. Claire wondered if Ethan knew what was happening, if he was in any pain. She knew babies felt pain, but how much? When did consciousness begin? It felt like her baby was begging her to save him with his dark glassy eyes.

With the mask still anchoring the baby to the oxygen tank, the two men took him out to the ambulance on a tiny stretcher. Claire stayed in the back with Ethan and the blond ambulance officer while Mark rode with the driver. They attached a heartbeat monitor to Ethan's toe; it chirped irregular beeps. He was barely alive. Claire stroked his mottled arm as the ambulance raced through red lights to the Sydney Children's Hospital.

By the time they arrived, the siren was drowned out by the long monotonous tone of the heartbeat monitor—of Ethan's small life flatlining to an end.

I
N THE RESUSCITATION AREA
of the emergency room, a door led straight from the ambulance driveway to an operating theater. Red tinsel dangled from the violet walls. Nine nurses and doctors—all in white coats except for one—waited for Ethan. Immediately after the ambulance pulled in, the baby was placed onto a metal table.

Medical staff swooped over Ethan. Attached him to another tank. Poked him with syringes and drew his blood. Checked his pulse, held a light to his eyes. Inserted a catheter directly into his bladder by injecting a needle straight into the skin just above his groin. Ethan didn't cry or flinch.

“Would you be able to tell me what happened?” A female doctor asked the parents. “Who was with him when he went into respiratory distress?”

Mark took control. “I was giving him a bath and then he just stopped breathing.”

“Was he submerged underwater?” the doctor asked.

“No.”

“Did he fall off any high surfaces?”

“No.”

“When did he stop breathing exactly?”

Mark looked over at Ethan's catheter. “After the bath.”

He didn't know what to say. What had happened in that bathroom gave him aftershocks, had left him with earthquakes in the tips of his fingers. That strange sensation of the baby's body shaking backward and forward, snapping at the neck. But that couldn't have led to this. It was nothing; Mark hadn't done anything. Something else was wrong, the baby was sick. “He just stopped breathing.”

“Normal birth, no complications?”

Claire nodded vacantly but looked away. Her face was pale, her eyes pink. She was pulling on a necklace, a gift Mark had given her for Mother's Day, when she was six months pregnant. He reached his hand out to hers and their fingers interlocked. Two linked lives; there was no way Mark could tell her that maybe this was his fault.

On the operating table, they were losing Ethan. He slipped in and out of consciousness. His breathing was unsteady and his left foot twitched. Mark stared at his own feet. Some nameless shame, deep in the core of his body, crushed him as he watched on. It was in the family of guilt, but it was different. The feeling was repulsive—darker than shame—like a dense pool of mercury collecting in his heart. He couldn't explain this to those doctors or to Claire. As Ethan fought for his life, the thought of losing her too was unendurable.

“Seizure,” a male nurse said to another doctor. This doctor had a big brown beard and examined the baby's jerking foot. Ethan's eyes rolled into the back of his head and he stretched out his neck. His tiny tendons reminded Mark of the roots of a mangrove.

A female doctor ran her fingers over the baby's head. She paused when she touched the fontanel. Ethan was still small enough to have that empty space between the bones of his skull; it hadn't fused yet. It was taut and bulging.

“Intracranial swelling through the fontanel,” she said.

“Hematoma?” a bearded doctor asked.

The female doctor addressed Mark again. “Did anything happen to the baby's head? Did he knock it against anything?”

“No. Maybe when he kicked in the bath, he hit his head against the side?”

“You were the only one with him?”

Mark nodded.

Saliva spilled from the side of Ethan's mouth and he started convulsing violently. Ripples of the heart monitor fluctuated, crashing then subsiding until the beats of the baby's heart quieted completely, like the still waters of a waveless beach.

Claire became hysterical, pushing her way to the operating table. “What's happening?”

“Did the baby hit his head against the bath?” The bearded doctor now looked back at Mark.

“Maybe,” he said. “I think that was what happened. He hit his head against the side of the bath.”

“Please,” Claire pleaded. “What's wrong with Ethan? Why is he shaking like that?”

The baby's eyes closed and his spasm stopped. He was flatlining again. More nurses came into the operating theater, obscuring Claire's view of her son. She tried to look through the wall of doctors but could only catch glimpses of Ethan, a small foot here, a flash of torso there.

The baby's heartbeat came back.

Mark exhaled and put his hand on Claire's shoulder. He pulled her back from the table. Mark buried his face in Claire's neck. He didn't want to look at Ethan anymore.

“He's still naked,” Claire said to Mark. “Don't you think he's cold? Can't they find something to keep him warm?”

“Don't worry. They know what they're doing.”

Another female doctor stood over Ethan. “His retinas. Take a look.”

Claire was frantic now. She broke free of Mark's embrace, trying to monitor any movement that Ethan made. The baby still wasn't breathing properly; his rib cage stayed motionless for a moment too long.

Finally, Ethan's leg stopped jerking. It took another five minutes for his breathing to stabilize once more.

“We need to take him to Radiology,” the bearded doctor said.

Mark didn't want the baby to have an x-ray. Had it left marks inside Ethan? Could they see what happened in his bones? No, that wasn't possible. Whatever it was Mark had done, it wasn't that harmful. If he'd done anything at all. Nothing more than a light nudge. Or a small bump. It couldn't have done enough damage to leave traces of itself inside Ethan's body.

“I don't understand what's happening,” Claire said.

Mark feigned a smile. “Ethan must be okay now if they're going to take him to Radiology to have an x-ray, right?”

The doctors moved Ethan to an elevated stretcher. He didn't look like a baby anymore—he was more like some toy robot—with the oxygen mask covering his face, and intravenous cords of the drip and monitors extending from his body.

“Where are you taking him?” Claire asked. “Can I come?”

The female doctor with the red hair nodded. “He needs some scans so we can figure out what's wrong.”

Claire put her hand on the stretcher. “You don't know yet?”

“He's just had a seizure,” the red-haired doctor said, adjusting the baby's oxygen mask. “Looks like something's up with his brain.”

Ethan's brain? Mark stared at his hands. They were big, but not big enough to cause significant harm. Just a small . . . shudder. Jiggle. Knock. Mark couldn't find a word for it. How had anything happened to the baby's brain?

That split second in the bathroom played out again and again, vague snapshots dissolving like smoke inside Mark's head. He needed to reorder and rearrange the memory, warp it back to the right shape. The memory he'd pulled out must be wrong. Mark's antimatter self—identical but oppositely charged—had hurt the baby. But that wasn't him. It wasn't.

The medical staff was ready to move the baby now. Claire shadowed the stretcher as the female doctor and two other nurses opened the double doors to exit the theater. Mark tried to follow them, but the bearded doctor stopped him before he could step out of the room.

“I'm Dr. Saunders. I'd like to ask you more questions about what happened to the baby.”

Mark nodded. He calmly followed the doctor out of the resuscitation area, walking away from his son.

Ω