Relativity (26 page)

“I can't do this,” she said, suddenly pushing him away.

Mark wiped his mouth. “It's a really bad idea.” He knew this wasn't the right thing to do.

Claire hugged her legs and looked around the living room. “Do you remember when we used to meet here in the afternoons between my rehearsals?”

Mark nodded. How could he forget? When they'd first started seeing each other, he still lived at home. Used to sneak her into the house in the afternoon before his father came back from work. They'd spent hours in bed in this house—talking and fucking and laughing—and Claire would fall asleep in his arms, their noses touching and her sweet breath on his face. Mark loved watching her snooze; her eyelashes were so pale they looked see-through; her mouth, red from kissing, slightly open as she drifted off. It was always a struggle to wake her up so she wouldn't miss her evening dance rehearsal. But that was so long ago, when they'd been so young and uncomplicated. Suddenly it felt like it was yesterday. A strong wind outside rattled the window.

Claire looked at Mark's face. “I hate you,” she said softly and she cupped his cheek with her hand. She leaned forward and pulled off the Big Banana T-shirt. “I hate you,” she said again as she sat on his lap. She was only wearing her underpants now.

“I know,” Mark whispered. His mouth brushed against Claire's chin as her arms went up around his neck. Her torso pressed against his own and he exhaled, trying to unknot his stomach and not look at her exposed breasts. But her touch felt soft and familiar, and as Claire lifted his shirt up over his head and her bare skin came into contact with his, Mark felt a shock run through his body. Some sort of electric current passing between them.

“I hate you,” Claire whispered into his ear as he ran a hand over her breast and started to kiss her neck. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”

Ω

ALL THOSE YEARS
of an empty bed, of waking up without the consolation of a morning reunion, had not gone unnoticed by Claire. The warmth of another body under the sheets as she woke up in the middle of the night made her feel safe—tangle of limbs, head of hair on another pillow, the symphony of other lungs. Since her marriage ended, Claire had never had many boyfriends. A few brief indiscretions, yes, that stupid affair, but never anything serious. She didn't fall in love again.

Not because of Mark or because she'd never gotten over him. She knew she had. Claire simply wasn't interested in the currency of love; its exchanges carried a price she didn't want to pay. Men chased her but she never let them get close. She built necessary barricades, fortified her heart, and wasn't interested in ever tearing down those walls. They were easy, safe, and strong. Over time, Claire calcified; she grew emotionally insoluble. Nobody would ever hurt her again that badly. It wasn't possible anyway.

The cocoon of night was slipping away from them, ephemeral as the storm. So while it rained outside and Mark lifted his leg over hers, Claire drowsily catalogued him: the way his lips felt against her lips; the way his skin pressed against hers. She recorded the rhythm of his breath and the cadence of his sighs as if they were music, committed to memory the sweaty smell of his body as if it were perfume. Muscles melted, cartilage softened, joints unhinged.

Their fingers brushed together and Claire closed her eyes. They still had that indefinable thing, that fiery intensity. That spark. In the midnight throes of it, that spark was still there. She'd forgotten what it felt like to be electrocuted. Through the night, Mark made her sweat, smile and laugh, but more than that, he made her believe in energy.

Claire was woken again by the unexpected dawn chorus of birdsong—currawongs, magpies, galahs—as the sun was coming up. Mark rolled over and rested his arm on her hip. His touch felt wonderful but she quickly experienced a sickening unease. Slowly, the room came into focus. Clarity shocked her back to real life. She was in bed with Mark, in his childhood bedroom. His clothes strewn across the floor, her underwear hanging off the end of the bed. What had she done? Claire tried to deaden her feelings of guilt, shook off her conscience, and buried her face into the pillow. Maybe this was a dream.

Mark was still asleep, purring in a contented snore. He looked childlike, like Ethan. Absentmindedly, she ran her fingers up and down his back. A layer of sweat clung to his skin and Claire felt it transfer to the tips of her fingers. He was more muscular now than when he was younger; his skin was brown and smooth. Maybe he worked out these days and spent more time in the sun. Goose bumps formed on the downy areas of his lower back.

“Good morning,” Mark said, roused from his sleep.

“Hi.” Skin-to-skin contact was like a drug and she needed another fix. She wanted to resist him, but her body had other plans. Claire pressed her face into his back and kissed his skin. Whatever she felt was just driven by pheromones, she reminded herself. What happened here was only sex.

Mark rolled over to face her, his breath on her cheek. Claire remembered how cute she found him in the mornings, squinty-faced with messed-up hair. She'd forgotten these little things, edited them out of her revisionist history. He pulled their bodies closer together. Claire felt his erection brush up against her stomach and she sunk into the mattress. She closed her eyes.

“Look at me,” said Mark.

She kept her eyes shut and pressed her skin against his erection again.

He moved away. “Look me in the eyes. It's not that difficult.”

Claire squirmed; his pupils were black and dilated. Mark was the only person who'd ever looked at her this way. Staring at him made her uncomfortable; she couldn't wait to look somewhere else. She'd already clawed her way out of that labyrinth—stopped being lost in the vortex of his dark eyes—and now that she'd found the exit, Claire didn't want to go back. She blinked and looked away.

Mark ran his hand through her hair. “They're still there. Those galaxies in your eyes.”

“Please don't.”

“You used to love it when I said that to you.”

Claire sat up in the bed. Once, that was the most romantic thing anybody had ever told her. She remembered the first time Mark said it. They'd only been going out for a few weeks, and after her admission she'd never seen any of the Star Wars movies, Mark forced her to watch the original trilogy in one sitting. She fidgeted on the sofa, trying to work out what was going on. The story line was difficult to follow and the dialogue was terrible. Mark apparently knew the script by heart but he was watching Claire instead. They were his favorite movies and he couldn't take his eyes off her. She noticed him staring, somewhere in the middle of
The Empire Strikes Back
, and shot him a look.

“What's wrong?”

“You have galaxies in your eyes,” he said.

It was the closest Claire had ever come to melting. Now it felt like a cheap line.

The bedroom felt stuffy suddenly. Sweat, bodies, unwashed sheets: the smell in the air made her feel sick. She put her feet on the floor. “I need to go.”

“Why are you here?” he asked.

She could tell by the tone of his voice that he was upset; she recognized the cadence.

Mark continued. “What are you doing? Why did you sleep with me? Are you so miserable that you need to fuck people for comfort?”

“Why did you sleep with me?” she shot back.

He shrugged. “Long time since I'd had sex and you were up for it.”

Claire tore the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around her body. “You don't mean that. You're just being cruel.”

“What do you want me to say? That I still love you and want to be with you? Even if I did, you wouldn't want to hear it anyway.”

There was nothing to say in response. “I'm going to have a shower,” she said.

After closing the bathroom door, Claire ran cold water in the sink and put her mouth to the tap. Gulp after gulp, she drank until she was almost choking. She washed her face and watched the running water spiral down the drain. His smell was on her body; she had to wash off last night. She didn't understand how all of a sudden they were kissing, touching, undressing, making their way into bed. But she recalled vivid flashes of it: his hand running along the bare skin on her back, her lips making their way down his chest.

How had she let this happen? How had Mark? Both of them should have known better. Or maybe it wasn't a mistake in his eyes, maybe this was his plan all along. To get Claire back into bed, manipulate her into having sex with him. Fuck his way to atonement. Would this make him feel better about himself, as though he hadn't done anything wrong? He was disgusting. Worse. It made her insides curdle. He'd sucked her into his fantasy world where he was blameless. Where he could play the victim when he'd committed the crime. After all these years, she'd thought maybe he'd show just a speck of remorse for what had happened to their son. Be a human being.

Claire stood under the shower and caught her breath. The sound of running water made her calm down. She thought she hated him; she'd felt it in her blood. But she carried something else in her blood too—some involuntary pull, poisonously locking her body toward his, like a mutual blood-borne disease or virus. She wondered if she did still love him, if she could possibly be that stupid. Maybe with the vague affection everyone has for their former loves. Even the bluest veins continued to flow but the blood pumping through them was oxygen-starved. Her heart had that same starved duality, broken into chambers; Mark split Claire in half.

She lathered her body with soap. But what if he was innocent? Or shaken baby syndrome didn't exist? Mark's words from the other day weighed heavily on her mind—it broke our family, destroyed us, he'd loved that child and he was taken away. What if there'd really been a misunderstanding, some horrible misinterpretation of medical evidence? The shower floor felt like it was giving way under her feet.

“Claire?” He knocked on the door. “You okay in there?”

She let out a sob. “Mark.”

He came into the bathroom, wearing only his underpants. “What's wrong?”

“I don't . . . what if,” she said, choking on water. It was a struggle to articulate this tangle of binary feelings: love and hate, trust and doubt. Fallen scaffolding, fractured framework; she'd believed their lives were built around facts, but perhaps those facts were actually lies. She'd lost her bearings and felt swept away by an avalanche of uncertainty. Claire leaned against the tiles and cried.

Mark opened the shower door and turned off the tap. He tightly encircled her wet body. Claire didn't want to be held like this. Inside, she refused to be contained, but on the outside she fell into his embrace. His arms felt safe; his touch felt dangerous. Frightened by blurred boundaries, she shivered; her sense of definition was as clouded as the bathroom filled with steam. Claire was a single heartbeat away from believing him.

“It's okay,” he said, as he reached for a towel and carefully wrapped it around her body.

Claire shook her head. “No, it's not okay.” Her mind focused on a question—how could somebody this tender hurt a baby? “Mark, I need to tell you something about Ethan.”

“What is it?”

“The doctors did all this diagnostic testing on him recently. They think he's a genius; his IQ is ridiculously high.”

Mark took a step back. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because,” she said. “I don't understand how something violent could cause something so positive and good. Maybe there's some other issue inside Ethan's brain, maybe there's always been. I was completely convinced it was shaken baby syndrome. But people used to believe the world was flat. I suppose you can convince yourself of anything. Now, I'm not so sure what I think.”

He looked stunned.

Claire got dressed. Her head was full of contradictions, as though each hemisphere of her own brain were battling some civil war. Confusion left her with a strong desire for solitude, to be left alone with her conflicting thoughts. She felt completely disoriented, questioning her entire life. What if her heart had reshaped itself around a lie? Part of her was angry, at the doctors who gave evidence at Mark's trial, at the prosecution—for being too quick to point the finger, for maybe making a mistake. Another part of her was utterly distraught. If they'd been wrong, the consequences were devastating. Mark was right—it had broken their family.

Across the room, Mark was rubbing his face with his hands. She thought immediately of Ethan; it was a mannerism they shared.

“I need to go,” she said.

“Sure.” Mark still wasn't dressed but he suddenly seemed guarded. “Let's talk later.”

His distance made her skin flush with self-conscious heat. She wasn't sure how to say good-bye to him now. One moment they'd been intimate, then arguing, then intimate again. Claire was exhausted; she felt nauseous as she contemplated what had happened between them last night. But her shame was coupled with this persistent exhilaration. She let herself out of the house.

Outside, the monochromatic sky slipped into morning. The storm was over and although the rain had stopped, the streets were covered in puddles. Claire walked through them, not caring if her feet got wet, as she made her way to the end of the road to find her parked car.

Ω

ETHAN WOKE SUDDENLY,
covered in sweat. He'd dreamed of Albert Einstein. Universes had bent around them like a cosmic grid—time and space intersected, galaxies swirled. They'd shot across the dark sky, riding motorcycles and chasing beams of light. Then the white-haired man vanished, splintering himself into the shining beam of another time and out of Ethan's dream.

Ethan's T-shirt was stuck to his chest; he felt breathless and disoriented. He pulled the sleeping bag off his shoulders and wiped sweat off his face. Alison was in her bed on the other side of the room making sleeping noises—the sighs and snores of a body at rest—and while Ethan wanted to wake her up, he thought it was probably too early.