Relativity (7 page)

Mark

Ethan's face burned and his legs shook. He read the letter several times. Pen marks moved around the page, words collided with other words, until Ethan couldn't read anymore. It was just a jumble of ballpoint lines, curves and hoops, dancing across the paper.

There was a dirty fingerprint in the right-hand corner. Ethan pressed his finger against it. His father's fingertip. His father's handwriting. This was an object his father had held, folded, and touched. Just moments before, his actual father had stood at the front door. He'd knocked, sighed, breathed. That shadow against the curtain had been the shape of his father's body. He was tall. He had loud footsteps. He was real. All that had separated them was a pane of glass and a length of fabric. What might have happened if Ethan had opened the door, would that have broken the universe?

Western Australia was far away but right now his father was here, in Sydney. The letter was written on the personal stationery of a man named John Hall. Was this his father's father—his grandfather—who was sick? Ethan didn't know anything about the other side of his family—what were their names, where did they live, what did they look like, how did they smell? John Hall lived in Woollahra. Ethan looked up the address: 5.6 kilometers away, a fifteen-minute drive, or a one-hour-and-twenty-three-minute walk. All this time he'd had family nearby, but they may as well have been on the moon.

Ω

THE YEAR 1 CLASS
was making cards for Father's Day. Ethan was six years old. He liked using crayons and drew a picture of himself as an astronaut, surrounded by stars and on his way to the moon. But then he got stuck. He didn't know what his father looked like. Beside him, Will had drawn himself and his dad at the beach making a big yellow sandcastle.

“Will,” Ethan whispered.

“Yeah?” Will said, drawing a picture of a bright red crab with huge claws.

“Can I copy your dad? Dunno what mine looks like.”

“You don't?” Will took another crayon and put black beady eyes on his crab.

“Never met him.”

“Then how are you going to send him the card?”

This was a good question. If Ethan didn't know where he was, how would he get the card to him? He wondered if Mum knew. They'd lost him like a set of keys. Was there a Father's Day fairy, just like the tooth fairy or Santa, who knew where all the lost dads were and could deliver all the unaddressed cards?

Will stopped coloring and looked at Ethan's card. “That's a good drawing of the moon.”

“The moon has craters,” Ethan told him. “But not very much oxygen.”

Oxygen. This gave Ethan an idea. He took a black crayon out of the plastic bucket and outlined a bigger astronaut standing on the moon's surface. Astronaut Dad needed a helmet to breathe, so he didn't need to draw his face. When the kids took the cards home that afternoon, Ethan wasn't sure what to do with his. He slipped it into one of his favorite picture books, just in case.

On Father's Day that year, Ethan stood with his mum outside on the street, on a Telecom junction box that he called their special star-watching stone. He took her there to study the night sky. They held hands and looked up at the indigo horizon, stargazing together at their concrete observatory. Sometimes when they held hands, Ethan pretended her fingers belonged to somebody else.

“I want to see the moon,” Ethan said. It was behind the trees.

Mum lifted him up. “Can you see it now?”

Ethan nodded. It was a brilliant full circle, shadowy craters dotted over the glowing milky surface. “Mum, can we go there one day?”

“We can go right now,” his mum said. “Close your eyes.”

Ethan shut them tight.

“Are you on the moon?” asked Mum.

“No, I'm still on the street.”

“Look harder. Keep your eyes closed.”

Ethan was confused because he couldn't look harder with his eyes closed, all he could see were the backs of his eyelids. There was no moon when he closed his eyes—nothing, no colors, no shapes, just darkness.

Mum kept talking. “We've just arrived on the moon, and we're standing beside a big rocky hole. Around us is silver terrain as far as the eye can see. All the stars are so clear, tiny twinkles of flickering light. Earth is far away, blue and green and brown, covered in cloudy swirls. It looks like a marble from the moon. It's quiet here, and everything is gray. At our feet there's lunar dust shifting along the ground. Can you see it?”

He opened his eyes. “I saw it,” he said, wrapping his hands around his mum's neck. “Thank you.”

She squeezed his dangling leg and kissed him on the cheek.

Ethan studied the dark patches on the moon's surface, counting its basins and seas. “Mum?” he asked eventually. “Can my dad see the moon where he is too?”

“I'm sure he can,” she said, suddenly dropping an octave. Ethan knew this was her sad voice.

“Is he looking at it right now?”

“He might be.”

Ethan thought about his father, wherever he was, looking up at the moon. Did he like to study the stars as well? Was he thinking about Ethan too?

Mum put him back onto the ground. “That's one small step for Ethan,” she said in a silly voice.

They walked toward home. The moon hid behind an apartment block but Ethan needed to see it one last time before he went to bed. He let go of his mum's hand and sprinted back to their star-watching stone.

“Happy Father's Day,” Ethan whispered to the moon.

Ω

There were seven cards now: one with the astronauts, another that he'd painted with a picture of the ocean and a boat, one that looked like a comic book. Every year his class made those cards. Sometimes he wanted to throw them in the trash but there was always a flicker of hope—that one day his dad might walk through the front door and say, “Hello, son, I'm home!”

Now there was an address. Now there was somewhere to send them.

Ethan copied John Hall's address on an envelope. He placed the cards inside in chronological order and stuck on several stamps, just in case. Ethan wrote a note, sealed the envelope, and threw it into the dark slit of the mailbox.

The note said:

Sorry these are so late. I didn't know where to find you.

M
ARK SAT ALONE
in the empty house. It was a sandstone estate in Woollahra—heritage listed, north-facing parterre garden—although these days it looked tired, needed to be restored. Rooms held the same smells, their faded walls splashed with familiar lines of light. His childhood home was suspended in a quiet lacuna of time.

Even the boys' bedrooms were stuck in the past: John had never packed away their things. School textbooks still piled high on their desks, forgotten toys assembled on shelves in straight lines. Mark's wooden train set still coiled around one corner of his room, covered in dust. Old leather school shoes lined up underneath his old bed, old school blazers hanging off the back of the old door.

Tom drove Mark back after another long day at the hospital. They ate baked beans they'd found in the pantry for dinner and watched the 7 p.m. news, falling back into their easy rhythm of easy silence, the way family members do. But the house played tricks on Mark: he swore he saw his father sitting in his armchair and reading the newspaper, his mother knitting on the sofa, a basket of lavender balls of wool at her feet. Tom hadn't invited Mark to stay at his own home, hadn't insisted he sleep in their spare room. Mark didn't actually know if his brother had a spare room, but it would've been nicer to stay with people. That option was never put on the table. Maybe there was no space. Or maybe there was.

After Tom went home, Mark riffled through old newspapers and unopened mail, wiped dust off the photo of his mother on his father's bureau. Among the stacks of papers, Mark recognized a worn paperback—his tattered copy of
Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy. He picked it up and leafed through the book, surprised to find there was an ultrasound stuck between its pages. The thin sonogram paper had yellowed, the dark ink faded to gray, but Mark remembered the round belly of the fetus. He hadn't looked at this monochrome image since Claire's ultrasound appointment. It reminded Mark of trawling through his father's slide collection, of the overseas trips John made before his children were born, looking through the light to find toy-sized Athens, Rome, and Cairo like vivid jewels trapped in tiny white frames.

Ω

IT WAS CLAIRE
who recommended
Jude the Obscure
. She'd sat up late one night reading the book, later urging it into Mark's hands. Between the chapters of textbooks and journals, Mark found himself; he didn't like getting lost in novels. Claire was the fiction reader, would happily lie in bed and devour stories, retelling the plot as if it were her own life, chatting about the characters as if they were people she knew.

But Mark wanted to read
Jude the Obscure
. The title drew him in. His mother loved to garden, was never happier than in those moments he'd watched her balanced on her knees, her hands deep in the soil. Mark liked sitting in the dirt with his mother and talking to the plants below the Moreton Bay fig. He'd pass her the fork and trowel, help her press the seeds into the ground, and water the flowers. Even when she was dying, even when she wouldn't eat or drink, she still watered those flowers.

Roses were her favorites. Eleanor grew them in every color: yellow, red, pink, orange, white, blue. Those roses were Mark's childhood friends and he could call them by name: Benjamin Britten, Wise Portia, The Nun, The Swan, Scarborough Fair. Mark still thought of his mother whenever he smelled a rose.

The cancer spread quickly toward the end, metastasizing impatiently from cell to cell. In a matter of months, the color of her skin changed, her eyes grew dull, her clothes fell off her shoulders and hips. She was in and out of the hospital, and Mark was in and out of waiting rooms, until the treatments stopped working. The doctors let Eleanor come home to die.

In those last few days—almost twenty years ago now—she was barely conscious but Mark sat at the foot of her bed and spoke to her like nothing was wrong. Tom stood by the door and couldn't speak, couldn't stay in the room for more than five minutes at once, but Mark wanted to be close. He was nineteen years old then, taller than her, but still needed his mother. Her hair was black and long, and although she was nearly fifty and had been ill for several years, Eleanor hardly had any gray hairs. Mark brushed it and told her she looked beautiful. She smiled and held his hand.

Two hours later, she passed away. Mark was the only one with her in the room. He felt her leave him. Her hands were still warm but something else changed. His mother wasn't inside her body anymore.

After the ambulance took Eleanor away, Mark spent the night in the garden. He moved from one rose to the next. Now that she was dead, these flowers were the only part of her left alive. He put on her gardening gloves, although they were too small for his hands, and started to turn the soil. The earth smelled rich and rotten, of metal and spores. His trowel hit the roots of one rosebush and Mark broke the dirt away. Its roots were white, thick and deep. Anger flew through him; he pulled at the plant. The rosebush fought back, reluctant to withdraw from the soil, but eventually Mark unearthed it. In the horrible quiet of that night, every rose was trampled, every precious bush hauled out of the ground, as Mark slaughtered his mother's garden.

But there was one large rosebush, where the powdery petals turned apricot as they bloomed, that was Eleanor's favorite. It smelled of sweet white wine; the flower formed the perfect shape of a round cup. These roses were the only survivors that night. Despite the following years of neglect, barely watered and undernourished, this bush stayed alive much longer than his mother.

Its name was Jude the Obscure.

Mark started the novel the day he found out Claire was pregnant. He wasn't a fast reader; he found fiction difficult, its twists and turns mostly implausible. But he'd loved
Jude the Obscure
. He didn't exactly identify with Jude Fawley—Mark grew up privileged, walked right into university without any effort, then felt he didn't belong there. It was the book's haunting grief that resonated with Mark. That scene where Little Father Time killed his siblings and hung himself always stayed with him. He couldn't stop thinking about it: “Done because we are too menny.”

He'd read that scene as they waited for Claire's ultrasound. She was silent, sipping a bottle of water. Mark felt relieved to have a distraction. Hospital smells made him think of death, even though new life brought them there today. The sonographer called them into her dark room and Claire lay down on the bed. Mark watched as blue gel was squirted onto her stomach.

On the screen, the image started to move. The sonographer shifted her hands over Claire's belly, trying to find the best position for the probe. Flashes of the baby's body appeared on the monitor until the sonographer settled on the perfect angle. The baby moved its hands to its oversized head and the sonographer captured the image, printing it out with thick thermal ink. Claire's eyes welled up as she watched the baby move. Rather than looking at the screen, Mark watched his wife. The glow of the display lit her face; she was visibly besotted with this blob on the screen. Mark looked at the image of his child again, knowing he should feel something—anything—but he was numb. Nothing about these vague pictures moved him.