Relativity (40 page)

CLAIRE STOOD BEHIND
a glass screen. She watched her baby travel down the white tunnel of the MRI. Ethan was tiny and the massive equipment overwhelmed him; he looked like the smallest babushka doll nestled inside the biggest. Radiographers flipped switches. The machine hummed.

When Ethan was born, he was perfect. Perfect weight, perfect height, perfect health, perfect Apgar score. They'd been to the baby health center twice; the midwife told Claire that everything was progressing normally. Ethan was gaining weight and reaching his milestones. He fed well. Nothing to signal that he was sick. Did he have a congenital disease? Was he born with some dormant poison, waiting to erupt. What did the doctors say about knocking his head? His brain? Claire jumped, startled by the machine's sudden loud whirling boom.

On the opposite side of the room was another window where the medical staff looked on. Pictures appeared on the monitors. The radiographers were talking to the red-haired doctor but Claire couldn't hear what they said. She only saw their mouths move, exchanges of serious looks, frowns and nodding heads. What could they see inside Ethan? Claire couldn't see her son so kept her eyes on the heart monitor, making sure he didn't skip a single beat.

Her breasts were full; her nipples ached. She called out to the nurse. “Could I feed him? He must be hungry.”

The nurse shook her head. “He'll be in the scanner for a while longer. Don't worry, your baby has a drip.”

Claire snorted quietly. Don't worry? Her son was the color of a corpse. There was nothing to do but worry, nothing to do but fill her head with fear. Maybe this was her fault; maybe she'd done something detrimental during her pregnancy. Or had taken Ethan for an afternoon stroll in the cold for too long. She'd smoked during the first weeks of her first trimester, before she knew she was pregnant. And she'd continued to dance until close to the end of the third trimester; maybe each
pas de chat
,
soubresaut,
and
tour jeté
had hurt him in the womb. Everything Claire had eaten, drank, thought flicked through her mind as she searched for the root of the problem.

Where was Mark? Claire needed him. She was starting to break, felt dizzy and terrified. Why wasn't he here? She leaned back to support her weight on the wall, listening to the jingling bells of Christmas carols that blared through the hospital speakers, behind the bangs and clicks of the MRI coils.

Ω

MARK SAT
in a plastic chair on one side of a desk, the two doctors opposite staring him down. With the glaring lights, incessant questions and taking of notes, it felt like a police interrogation. He stretched his legs; he'd left sweaty marks on the chair. This would have to be over soon. Mark exhaled. Everything was going to be fine. Nobody had seen it; nobody could prove anything.

“Can I see my son now?”

“Soon,” Dr. Saunders said.

“I have a few more questions,” the other doctor said. His name was Dr. Gibson, director of forensic pediatrics. No wonder Mark felt treated like a criminal—this doctor was looking for a crime. “At what point did the infant stop breathing? Was it before he did the poo? Or afterward?”

“After.”

“And how long did you wait before you called for help?”

“Claire called the ambulance.”

“But she wasn't present when Ethan stopped breathing?”

“No.”

Dr. Gibson wrote some notes. “How long, approximately, do you think it was between the child going into respiratory distress and the ambulance arriving?”

Whatever happened grew increasingly clouded. Mark's memory had a hazy underwater quality now. Before the ambulance arrived, each thought, each movement, every word exchanged were now clustered together into chaos. Mark had no clear concept of how much time had actually elapsed between one point and another. Like an impressionistic smudge, time and space were an incoherent tangle. But there remained a stubborn darkness that split him in two.

“I'm not sure. Maybe ten, fifteen minutes?”

Mark felt a singular awareness as he watched the doctors; he knew exactly what they were trying to do. They wanted to catch him out somehow, find an inconsistency. But it would be impossible for them to prove anything. Mark was smart enough to keep his story straight. No witnesses. No one but the baby, and the baby couldn't tell his side of the tale.

He felt the heat of a tear run down his cheek. “I'm sorry,” he said. “My son . . .”

The doctors were quiet. Mark held his face in his hands; he couldn't bring himself to say anything else. His knee trembled under the table. As Mark tried to retrieve the violent memory, it corrupted the file, became the memory of a memory. Margins between reality and remade reality began to blur inside his head.

Ω

DR. SAUNDERS MOTIONED
to a small room down the hall in the intensive care unit. “Could I speak to you in private?”

Claire felt her stomach drop. One of those little rooms; she felt claustrophobic just thinking about it. Good news was never shared in those little rooms. They were the rooms where you were told your loved one had cancer, a brain tumor, was dead. She didn't want to go there. Mark was still gone. He'd disappeared at the precise moment when Claire needed him more than ever.

The doctor opened the door. “I need to show you something.”

She followed reluctantly. One wall had a light box that was covered in x-rays. Small skull, baby bones—pieces of her son. A chill went down Claire's spine: it was as though Ethan were a ghost, glowing like phosphorus, who haunted the wall. Shining white skeleton, cross sections of Ethan's brain—delicately patterned, like the vein structure of a leaf. Claire stared at the x-ray of Ethan's rib cage: thin lines fragmented the bony frame. Something wasn't right.

“What's wrong with him?” Claire asked quietly.

Dr. Saunders lifted one scan to the light and pointed at her son's brain. “See this dark section? It's an acute subdural hematoma, a collection of blood between the skull and the brain. Also notice here how Ethan's brain isn't symmetrical? This hemisphere's been displaced by the blood so it's shifted past its center line. We call that midline shift. Blood has increased the intracranial pressure, mounting the pressure in his skull and on his brain.”

“Blood?”

“Your son has sustained a severe, high-impact brain injury.” The doctor paused. “Have you heard of something called shaken baby syndrome?”

Claire gave a feeble nod. Shaken baby syndrome. She didn't know much about it but she'd heard the term before. Read about it in the paper: cases of frustrated babysitters shaking an infant in their care. But surely they didn't think this had happened to her baby. “That can't be what's wrong with Ethan?”

“His symptoms are consistent with SBS. Infant neck muscles provide little support for their heads. So the violent movement of shaking pitches the infant's brain back and forth within the skull, rupturing blood vessels and nerves throughout the brain and tearing brain tissue. When someone forcefully shakes a baby, the infant's head rotates uncontrollably about the neck, then the brain repeatedly strikes the inside of the skull, causing bleeding in the brain.”

“Forcefully shaken?”

“Quite a lot of force,” Dr. Saunders said. “Enough to cause diffuse axonal injury, the result of shearing forces that occur when the head is rapidly accelerated and decelerated. The force that caused Ethan's injuries is equivalent to the force of an adult falling off an eight-story building.”

Claire swallowed. No, this was a mistake. Her baby wasn't forcefully shaken. It was illness, not injury; Ethan was sick. There had to be another explanation. Her legs buckled.

Dr. Saunders continued. “These are Ethan's ribs. If you look closely, you'll see small fractures, conceivably from the baby being gripped tightly around the chest. On Ethan's elbows and knees you'll notice metaphyseal fractures, possibly caused by twisting, pulling, jerking, or wringing of a child's arms or legs.”

Claire looked away. Twisting, pulling, jerking, wringing—these were violent words. She saw white spots in her vision. “That happened to Ethan?”

“All his symptoms are consistent with abusive head trauma. Inside the child's eyes, we found extensive retinal hemorrhages extending to the ora. Further bleeding. Another indicator of shaken baby syndrome.” The doctor's eyes had hardened.

Blood in Ethan's brain and eyes, fractures in his ribs and limbs. Claire didn't want to be in this awful room anymore; she wanted to be with her baby. But he was unconscious in the intensive care unit. His breathing had stabilized, his heartbeat was regular, but the seizures were now getting worse. She wanted to go home, back to yesterday, when none of this had happened.

“Did you see anything?” Dr. Saunders asked. “Anything at all?”

“No, I was in Melbourne. I've been there for the past two days. When I spoke to Mark from the airport earlier this morning, Ethan was screaming in the background. But normal screaming, not like he was in pain.”

“So, you went away? Mark was the only person looking after the child?”

It sounded like an accusation, like the doctor disapproved of her absence too. That Claire should never have left her baby or let him out of her sight. “What are you saying?”

“I only want to establish that Ethan was left in Mark's care.”

She looked at her son's skeleton and asymmetrical brain. “You don't think that Mark . . .” Her voice trailed off. Ethan was too young to speak, but the scans spoke for themselves.

“There's one more thing I need to show you,” Dr. Saunders said quietly. He opened a large brown folder with a number written on its spine: 1435962. Her son was reduced to a number. “I must warn you, these photographs are upsetting.”

Claire looked at the pictures briefly. “No,” she said, turning away.

“We took these photos a few hours ago,” the doctor said. “If you look here, you'll see several bruises on Ethan's neck, just below his chin. Also, he has this bruising on his chest. They weren't visible when Ethan was admitted, leading us to believe the trauma is recent.”

In the photographs, purple marks covered Ethan's pale skin, his eyes looked dead, a sickening pattern of bruises dotted his chest. She squeezed her eyes shut, and then opened them again. Claire could visualize exactly where Ethan was held—the bruises looked like fingerprints.

“I need to get some fresh air.”

“Of course,” Dr. Saunders said. “Take your time. I'll check on Ethan in intensive care in the next hour.”

Ω

CLAIRE FOUND HERSELF
standing outside the hospital. A southerly breeze blew in her face. The cool air gave her goose bumps but she didn't feel cold. What was going on? What had happened to her baby? She didn't want the doctor's conclusion to be the answer—just considering it was an irreconcilable thought. Mark needed to explain that this was some misunderstanding. But he'd abandoned her and left her stranded in waters out of her depth—it was a feeling Claire recognized feeling before.

Summer light shifted to a starless sky. This was the precise moment her life reoriented itself, when Claire began living with a sharp pain. Its sting grew milder over time, muted and transmuted, but whenever she recalled Ethan's scans and x-rays—those photographs—it was like touching the raw skin of an open wound.

Like a bruise, the horizon changed from pink to violet. Nausea swirled at the back of her throat. As the late December sunset stained the pavement magenta, Claire ran over to a tree and vomited on its roots.

Ω

THAT NIGHT,
Mark went home without speaking to Claire. When he woke up in the morning, he was alone. Their bed felt wide and empty and he reached over to touch her before realizing she wasn't there. Mark had slept like a baby that night—a dreamless, cavernous sleep—and it was difficult to resurface into real life. The warm safety of reverie slipped away from him before he opened his eyes.

Police had come to the apartment late the night before. Videotaped his version of events, treated the bathroom as if it were a scene of a crime. They examined the baby bath but he'd wiped it clean before they arrived. Bleach mixed with the sour smell of the dried baby poo. Photographs were taken, objects measured, but Mark remained unruffled by the police. Not one crack in his voice, nor one catch in his story—everything was going to be just fine.

Upon waking, Mark packed his suitcase. He grabbed some clothes, plucked his toothbrush from the holder beside Claire's, and took his dusty violin case out from under the bed. Then he scrubbed the bathroom again, spraying every surface with disinfectant until the harsh chemical fumes burned his eyes. He scoured everything until his knuckles were white and skin peeled off his fingers.

But echoes of memories repeated their shapes on the tiles and inside the tub. No matter how hard Mark scrubbed, they wouldn't disappear and dissolve.

It was Christmas Day. But the lights on the tree they'd decorated together didn't flash, presents beneath it remained unopened. This was going to be Ethan's first. Claire had bought an ornament that proclaimed it proudly: “Baby's First Christmas!” Mark was reminded of the first Christmas he'd spent with Claire. She'd been uncharacteristically shy, rearranging the ham and turkey on her plate. He knew Claire had wanted to impress his family—keep up with their dinner table conversation about politics, philosophy, physics—but she'd floundered. She thought with her body; Mark loved that about Claire. No pretension, no snobbery, she was just herself. She'd thawed him, brought warmth he'd never known before into his frosty life.

Now, inside the home they'd started to build together, Mark saw only objects. Chairs, tables, things. Things that triggered memories; memories he didn't want brought back. Everything was painful to look at. He had to leave. Mark still didn't know whether or not Ethan had survived the night. The baby was in critical condition when he'd left yesterday. In a way, Mark didn't want to know. Last night, he'd even had the briefest, most rotten thought: he wished the baby would die so that his secret might die with him.