Relativity (24 page)

She cited other incidents overseas where the clinical judgment of the medical professionals was completely wrong. Once shaken baby syndrome was put on the diagnostic table, of course Mark was treated like scum. He was guilty until proven innocent. In Kate's view, the baby's diagnosis wasn't evidence based, so the testimony of these expert witnesses was admissible. Breaking this story would be a huge exposé. She was going to get her hands on a copy of the court transcript and see what they could do.

Then one day, out of the blue, Kate stopped visiting. Stood him up on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Mark waited for two hours, staring at the vending machine. The following week he waited for her again. The screws smirked, made him feel like a fool. Months passed. In a frenzy of frustration, Mark wrote to her several times, an angry letter at first, but then eventually only wanting an explanation for the sudden silence. She'd disappeared. Why had she gone to all this effort to help him, and then never followed through with it? The exposé was never published. His side of the story never got told. Kate Levy never wrote back.

Ω

THE CROWD INSIDE
the Lord Nelson was thinning now. Mark decided it was time to head back home. The old man was drunk, ranting about various women who'd broken his heart over the years—the bitches, the beauties, the ones who got away. Mark knew he probably sounded just as bitter. But Claire should have believed him, stood by him. At least considered another view. Treated him with respect.

Mark didn't want to admit that it hurt, so he pushed it to the back of his head with beer. She wasn't using her head; she was irrational. He'd tell her about his father's will some other time.

Ω

THERE WERE THREE THINGS
Ethan needed to ask his mum and they were keeping him awake. Noisy questions that thrashed around inside his head like the thunder of rough surf breaking on rocks. He stared at the dark patch of mold on his bedroom ceiling.

The first question was whether or not he could sleep over at Alison's house, because yesterday she'd sent him a text message asking if he could this weekend. She'd been out of the hospital for over a week now. The second question was about what Will said at school. Ethan needed to confirm that the boys were liars, that obviously she wasn't actually a slut.

Ethan needed an answer for the third question the most, but it seemed the trickiest to ask. Why was Mark's phone number saved in her phone?

His parents were speaking to each other; they'd spoken to each other today. Ethan looked at her call history, then saw his father's name. He blinked repeatedly to make sure it wasn't a mirage. In the last month, they'd spoken to each other exactly five times for call durations of 11:02, 0:30, 2:41, 6:29, 2:08, making a total of exactly twenty-two minutes and fifty seconds of conversation between his parents, or 0:38 hours, or 1,370 seconds. Mark had called her three times. She'd called him twice.

But the problem was Mum's force field. It wasn't exactly invisible—Ethan could just make out the buzzing plasma of its energy shield—but nobody but him could see it. Maybe not even Mum. Her force field only materialized sometimes, usually when she was sad. This made scientific sense. After all, a body's amount of energy was directly proportional to its mass, so logically the mass-energy equivalence concept applied to his mum too. When his mum was feeling heavy, that increased the energy, and that strengthened the force field's barrier. Sometimes she vibrated on a frequency he couldn't understand, and all he could do was watch, and wonder, and notice.

In the middle of the night, Ethan was woken by a loud sob. He lay still for a moment to analyze the sound. At first he thought maybe it was a wounded possum outside the house, possibly the neighbors' cats fighting again, but as he listened more carefully he recognized it—his mum was crying.

He pushed her bedroom door open. “Mum?”

“Ethan, why are you still awake?” Her eyes were red and her face was wet. She sat up in her bed. The room was mostly dark, but his mum's bedside table lamp was on. It lit her up from the left, casting a weird shadow across half her face.

“Can't sleep.”

“Me neither.” She looked at him carefully for a moment. “Do you want to sleep in my bed tonight?”

He nodded.

“You need a haircut,” his mum said, handing over one of her pillows.

Ethan couldn't wait anymore—the questions screamed to be let out. “Mum, can I ask you something?” He stalled. Her deflector shields were up; this force field was strong. To break down the energy barrier, he'd need to start with the easiest question.

“Can I sleep over at Alison's on Saturday night?”

“Is it okay with her parents?”

“I think so.”

“Maybe,” she said, nodding absently. She placed her head on her pillow; they were now looking at each other face-to-face. “Was that it?”

Something about her face snapped Ethan's resolve. He didn't want to upset her more. “Yeah, that's it.”

She pulled the blanket up. “Come here,” she said, throwing an arm over him. “Ethan, I love you so much. I used to yell it at you when you were in the womb.”

“I know, weirdo. But I love you more.”

“Good night, pumpkin.”

“Good night, Mum.”

She kissed the top of his head and switched off the lamp. Ethan rolled over to face the wall.

Neither of them fell asleep right away. Mum thrashed about, adjusting her pillow, rolling from her back to her side to her stomach. Ethan could still taste the leftover questions lingering inside his mouth. He waited until his mum was perfectly still—for her breathing to slow down, for her temperature to drop, for her muscles to relax—but by the time she finally drifted off, he was already dreaming.

C
OME AND SEE MY ROOM!”
Alison said, excited. She wore a gray beanie on her head that had knitted ears. It made her look like a koala.

“Don't overstimulate yourself, Al!” her mother called out.

Ethan followed Alison upstairs. Along the hallway, there were several framed family photos displayed on the walls, all similar—studio shots, neutral backdrops, kids stiffly wearing their best clothes. There weren't photographs like this in Ethan's house; he'd never posed for a family portrait. In one of the pictures, Alison's hair was combed to one side, covering an eye and making her lopsided.

Ethan laughed. “This one is great,” he said, pointing at her asymmetrical hair.

“Shut up,” she said, grinning. “I hate that picture so much. Mum did my hair like that to hide a huge bruise on my forehead. Two days before that photo was taken, I fell down those stairs and hit my head.”

Ethan lowered his eyes. He shouldn't have teased her but Alison shrugged it off. She opened the door to her bedroom. Posters covered every centimeter of her walls, kaleidoscopic jumbles of clothes were piled all over the floor, teetering towers of books stacked by the bed. Her room was a mess; it didn't look like it belonged to this tidy house.

She pushed some magazines off a chair and onto the carpet. “Make yourself at home.”

“You have a lot of stuff,” he said, looking at the tubs of nail polish on her desk. He put his overnight bag down on one of the few uncovered patches of carpet.

“Let's paint your nails!” Alison picked up two little jewel-colored bottles and read their labels. “Which color do you like best, Holiday or Nouvelle Vague?”

“Nail polish is for girls.”

“If you let me paint your nails, I'll tell you a secret?”

“Nope, no way.” Ethan shook his head. But a really good secret had a power of its own. “Maybe the blue one.”

“That's not blue, it's Nouvelle Vague. It means ‘new wave' in French. Okay, spread your fingers out on the table like this. No, like this.” Alison demonstrated how to perfectly splay a hand and Ethan tried to copy her. “Good. Don't move.”

The nail-polish fumes had a chemical punch; Ethan felt light-headed. Alison poked out her tongue as she dipped the brush in the little pot, painting his short nails in slow strokes. Her concentration made Ethan smile; he'd never had a friend who was a girl before. Alison was different, but she got him, she understood. Somehow, somewhere, something between them had fused: the misfiring of their neurons, the misshapen cartilage of their faulty skulls, their abnormal synaptic activity.

He looked at the polish drying on his fingernails. “What's the secret?”

“Before I can tell you,” Alison began, “you have to promise me you won't tell anyone. Cross your heart and hope to die.”

“Stick a needle in my eye.” He passed his hand over his chest as he made the oath.

“Careful not to smudge the top coat!” She grabbed his hand and blew on his finger. “Remember how I was still having seizures and needed to stay in the hospital for a really long time?”

Ethan nodded.

“Okay.” Alison took a deep breath and carefully removed her beanie. She lifted a section of her hair and winced. “I had a lobotomy.”

One side of her head was bald. There was a long curved scar around her ear—the shape of the letter C. Metal staples held her skin together; the area around the cut was puffy and pink.

He sat forward in his chair. “Seriously? Why'd they do that?”

“Because the antiseizure medicine stopped working. They've put me on at least eight different kinds. So the surgeon removed the part of my brain where the seizures were happening. To make them stop.”

“Does it hurt?”

Alison squinted at him. “What do you think? They cut open my head and took out a piece of my brain. Not exactly a trip to Disneyland.”

“Do you feel different?” Ethan asked.

“I guess. I haven't had another seizure.”

“Can I touch it?”

Alison hesitated and straightened her posture. “Only for a second. It's still pretty sore.” She pulled her hair back and closed her eyes.

“Gross.” Her skin felt hot; the stitches were lumpy. Ethan quickly retracted his hand.

They both stared at the floor for a while, not sure what else there was to say.

Ethan perked up suddenly. “I have a secret too. I haven't told anyone. Well, except my Mum. I'm an acquired savant.” He explained what Dr. Saunders told him about savants: how he could see physics because of his brain injury, how that was unusual, how there were only around fifty acquired savants in the whole world.

She looked at him, stunned. “Fifty, out of seven billion! That's amazing. You're one of the most special people on the planet.”

“No, I'm not. Maybe. I guess so. I'm one in 140 million. That's like six times the population of Australia. So savants like me are only 0.000000714285714 percent of the total world population. I never thought about it like that.”

“It's huge!” Alison stood up. “You just calculated that number in your head, didn't you? Ethan, you could be famous. You could even go on my favorite talk show and do physics tricks. Once, I saw some kid say the whole periodic table backward. Please show me. Show me something you can see?”

Ethan thought really hard then shook his head. “I can't. It doesn't work like that. I can't just make it happen whenever I want. I don't know how it works. Sometimes when I listen to music I see sound waves. There are lots of things we can't see with our eyes everywhere. Like the Internet. Websites and emails are all floating around us right now.” He pointed at the empty space in front of their faces, where data shot wirelessly through the air.

“You're right,” Alison said, looking intently at nothing in particular. “I can't see anything, but there is stuff in the air. It's like you have microscopes inside your eyes. So you can see this stuff because of your brain injury from when you were a baby?”

“I suppose so.”

Alison smiled. “You know what that means? You don't need to be sad about it anymore. Maybe it was actually a good thing that your father did, if it made you special.”

Ethan stared at his painted fingernails, thinking carefully about this. “Then why did he go to jail?”

“Yeah,” Alison said, considering it for a moment. “I don't know.”

“Maybe you're right. My mum has been talking to him on the phone. If he were really a bad person, she wouldn't ever speak to him again. And look!” Ethan took a piece of paper out from his backpack. “I have his phone number.”

“Do you want to call him? You could use my cell.”

Ethan imagined dialing, listening to the ringing phone, hearing his father's voice on the other end of the call, saying hello to him. “No,” he said finally. “I don't want to talk to him.”

Alison put her beanie back on and grabbed his hand. “Let's go outside. We're going to camp in the garden. Have you ever slept in a tent?”

Ω

THAT NIGHT,
as the moon peeked through the boughs and branches of the acacia tree in Alison's back garden, black clouds gathered overhead. A dark storm front broke into torrents of rain. Water smacked the tent's fabric, cascading down its thin walls. Lightning lit the nylon white. Claps of thunder followed, shaking the ground.