Relativity (16 page)

Ethan examined the head, noting the different slices marked on the glossy brain. The words were painted by hand. Spirituality. Calculation. Time. Memory. Secretiveness. Hope.

“Let me show you how the brain really works.” Dr. Saunders opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out another model—plastic like a child's toy, a color-coded and chunky puzzle. “I want to talk to you about the cerebral cortex. That's the big outer area of the brain, what we call the gray matter. With all the folds and bumps.”

“Okay,” Ethan said.

“Just under your forehead,” Dr. Saunders continued, “is the frontal lobe. Basically, where our personality lives. The frontal lobe controls motor function, problem-solving, judgment, decision making, and social interaction. Back here, at the top of our head, is the parietal lobe. This area processes sensory information from other parts of the body.”

“Like taste and touch?” Ethan asked.

“Exactly. Now over here, just above your neck is the occipital lobe. Your visual processing center. And the last part of the cerebral cortex is the temporal lobe, just above your ears. It's responsible for auditory and visual perception, memory storage, speech, and our emotions. And it's in your left anterior temporal lobe, Ethan, where you have scarring. This was the area where you had the subdural hematoma when you were four months old. And according to your more recent scans, this is also where you had your ictal seizure.”

Ethan touched his head again. On the model, the temporal lobe was tiny. It didn't seem possible that this small part of his body could do so much damage. “Can I hold it?” he asked, reaching for the plastic brain.

“Take it apart if you like.” Dr. Saunders paused, regarding his notes with a frown. “Ethan, do you remember when I shone the light into your eyes?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember what you said?” The doctor pushed his glasses down his nose and read from a piece of paper. “You said when the light was in your eyes, you saw the light move from red to blue. Red to blue to red again. Can you explain what you meant by that?”

Ethan sat back in his chair. “That was just what I saw.” He fiddled with the plastic lobes on the desk. Dr. Saunders had said his pupils weren't something; he couldn't recall the word. But he remembered the light sting his eyes, the glaring light that changed from red to blue.

“Your mother told me you like physics,” Dr. Saunders said.

“Yeah, I do.”

“I suppose you've heard of the Doppler effect? Could you explain it to me?”

“Okay. Say you hear a fire engine coming toward you. At first, the pitch of the siren is really high. And then when it passes you, the pitch is lower. That's why it sounds different when it's moving to you and when it's moving away from you.”

Dr. Saunders smiled and reached into his shirt pocket to find a pen. “Do you know why it sounds different?”

Ethan nodded. “The distance between the waves. I see waves all the time. Especially near ambulances. First they're short waves when the ambulance is coming closer. And then longer waves when it drives away.”

“You've seen them?”

“Yeah.”

Dr. Saunders wrote in the file. “What do they look like?”

Ethan wasn't sure how to describe them. Ripples that rushed through the wind, bending and crashing in the atmosphere. He saw them everywhere. Sometimes it looked like an earthquake in the sky; the air shook and trembled. Like sitting on the beach and watching the ocean rise and fall, undulating from blue water to white foam. “I don't know,” he said finally. “They're just waves.”

“Do you know how the Doppler effect works with light?”

Ethan scratched his ear. “The same way. High- and low-frequency waves.”

“It's called red shift and blue shift,” Dr. Saunders said. “The light wavelength changes. Red shift for one side of the visible light spectrum, blue shift for the other. But it's not something you can see with your naked eye. You can't see it with a flashlight.”

Ethan shifted his weight from one side of his body to the other, wondering how much longer this appointment would take. He leaned forward and tried to read the doctor's notes. His name was written all over the page.

Dr. Saunders closed the file. “I think that's all for today then, Ethan. See you next week?”

“Okay then, 'bye.” Ethan stepped into the hallway outside the doctor's office and stared into the overhead light. He turned his head one way, then the other, trying to catch the frequency of the electromagnetic waves. Nothing. No scrunching or spreading, no shift. As he walked away from the light, he glimpsed the tiniest flash of red. Ethan blinked before heading back to the waiting room to find his mum.

C
LAIRE SET OFF
toward the hospital during her lunch break, trying her best not to contemplate why. In one hand, she clutched a framed photograph, in the other a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. She kept thinking about John; she knew she needed to go see him herself. Her categorical refusal to grant John's final wish made her feel like a monster, even though she knew it was right.

When Claire was still married to Mark, her loyalty was to him. He'd been whittled down by his father—minimized to a shell—and although Mark didn't often talk about his feelings, he was visibly hurt. Speaking about his family made Mark's voice tremble. His wounds were deep; she wanted to mend them. Put him back together again. Before she'd met John for the first time, Claire had pictured a tyrant: oppressive, controlling, violent. But he wasn't. John seemed benign, just a widowed old man.

She'd lost her own father more than fifteen years ago. Frank had a stroke in his sleep. It was so sudden, so unexpected, that it took a long time for Claire to accept that her dad was really gone. There'd been countless things she'd wanted to tell him and never had the chance. Ethan never got to meet him. She still thought of her father every afternoon, when sunlight beamed through the trees. Between the leafy shadows, in a few fragile scraps of light.

When Claire was a little girl, her father would lift her onto his shoulders whenever they went for walks outside. “Careful of the branches!” he'd say and Claire ducked to make sure twigs and leaves didn't brush across her face. Speckled light on green lawns, the smell of eucalyptus, magpies singing duets to one another across the cricket pitch at Burwood Park—a pristine world, her suburban childhood. Up there on her father's shoulders, Claire felt on top of the world. She saw everything in a way she couldn't from down on the ground. That was what her dad did best: made her feel like she truly was on top of the world. He showed her a different perspective.

Frank used to sing a Joni Mitchell song to put her to sleep—about ice-cream castles, moons, Ferris wheels, and not really knowing love at all—but now Claire understood that couldn't be further from the truth. She'd never known anybody who knew love so much; her dad taught her how to love, made it a verb, not just a noun. Remembering sitting on her father's shoulders seized Claire with sadness, with a dullness that drummed in her chest. Her father was still gone; soon John would be too.

Midday sun drenched the concrete courtyard outside the hospital. No cheerful murals here, no colorful handprints or comic-book smiles—the palliative-care wing was stark. Over the years, John had tried to contact Claire numerous times. He'd invite them both to Christmas lunch, send presents to his grandson on his birthday, but Claire never changed her mind. Better for Ethan to keep Mark's family out of his life, it might confuse him, cause him unnecessary distress. Convenient excuses—it was better for Claire too.

Sometimes when she picked Ethan up from school, she'd spot John standing across the road. He never approached them, never tried to make his presence known. All the old man ever did was look on from afar, hoping to catch a brief glimpse of his grandson. Seeing him wait there, helpless and forlorn, made Claire feel like the real tyrant. She'd alienated Ethan's only living grandfather. None of this was John's fault.

Claire stood at the reception desk and asked for directions. This hospital was sleek and minimalist—decorated with white lilies in glass vases, muted watercolor paintings on the walls—and it was so quiet. It felt like the opposite of the Sydney Children's Hospital. But by the time she reached John's room, her mind had finally caught up with her body. What was she doing here? John wasn't her dad. Seeing him wouldn't raise her own father from his grave. Her heartbeat escalated—what if Mark was here, visiting too? Claire opened the door, relieved to find John alone. He was awake, propped up by pillows, looking at the wall with a fixed stare.

“Hi, John, it's Claire.” She took a seat beside the bed, holding up the bottle of Baileys. “Not sure if you can still drink this, but I brought you something. Your favorite.”

The old man turned his head to face her. “You remembered.” His voice was more faint than a whisper, his eyes were bloodshot and gold. Mottled skin discolored his hands and neck, purple and gray, patterned like veins on a leaf. John reached for Claire. “Ethan,” he said hopefully.

She placed the bottle down on his bedside table. “I'm sorry. Just me. Ethan's at school.”

He cast his eyes back to the wall and nodded.

Monitors attached to his chest filled the room with a mechanical hum. Claire looked around. There were some photographs—Tom's kids, she guessed, pretty girls with shiny dark hair and gap-toothed smiles—behind a row of hand-drawn cards saying, “Get Well Soon, Pop!” She picked up one of the frames. For a moment, Claire remembered Tom's daughters were also Ethan's first cousins. But they didn't know him; she'd made Ethan an outsider in his own family. How ashamed she felt, how selfish and self-absorbed, looking at the innocent smiles of the three little girls. Ethan's cousins didn't deserve to be boycotted. These children hadn't done anything wrong.

“Your granddaughters are lovely,” Claire said, putting the picture frame down.

“Tell me,” John rasped. “About him.”

“About Ethan?” She exhaled. “I don't know where to start. He's brilliant. Curious. Really articulate. Bit of a perfectionist. Has a photographic memory. Such an intelligent boy. Probably smarter than me. When I think about how sick he was as a baby . . .” Claire trailed off for a second before collecting herself again. “Even though he's only twelve, Ethan is the most determined person I know. He has no idea just how brave he is. How brave he's always been.”

The old man lay still and smiled. His pale lips were the same color as the rest of his skin.

Claire took the framed photograph of Ethan out of her handbag. “Here, it's his most recent school photo, taken only a few months ago. Can you imagine, Ethan's about to finish primary school. High school next year. I can't believe how quickly he's growing up.”

She looked at her son in the picture, smiling sweetly at the camera. Sometimes Claire forgot exactly how objectively handsome he was. Normally she saw him through the biased lens of a mother's subjective gaze. But mounted in a silver frame, under a shiny sheet of glass, Ethan was undeniably striking. One day he was going to break thousands of hearts.

John ran a crooked finger over the photograph. “Mark,” he said softly.

Was the old man confused, disoriented to the point where he couldn't tell the difference? Claire wasn't sure and didn't want to correct him.

“Mark,” he said again. John hugged the photograph to his chest, the way a child cuddles their favorite toy. His eyes watered. As he sank back into his pillows, he tried to tell her something else, but his voice was so weak Claire couldn't hear what he said.

She leaned into him. “Sorry, John, I didn't hear that.”

John wet his lips with his coated tongue. His speech was strained and slow. “Claire, I'm dying. I know I'm an old bastard. A bully. Angry. Mean. Terrible father. The boys should hate me. But they don't. Not sure why. They visit every day. Stay for hours. I don't deserve it.” His breathing became ragged.

“Don't be silly,” Claire said, touching his shoulder. His body felt cold. “They're your sons. They love you unconditionally.”

“Blood, thicker than water.” John shrugged. “I'm a ratbag. Didn't deserve a second chance.” He held out the photograph of Ethan again, studying it for a while, before tucking the frame under his blanket. “Never set a good example for them. Mark was always so impressionable; I was too hard on him, too rough. I've always known I'm to blame for what happened too.” John inhaled loudly and exhaled deeply, until the air in his lungs slowly petered out.

Claire looked out the window at the paperbark trees, with their cream bottlebrush blossoms and peeling trunks. She thought of her own father, wondering what he might've said with the chiseled clarity that seemed to accompany imminent death. But she wasn't sure. She couldn't imagine what final laments he'd need to articulate, if he had any sins to confess. Her dad didn't have time to think about it. And she'd never know.