Relativity (10 page)

“I don't know. I don't even know how I got here.”

“That happens to me all the time,” said Alison. “Just retrace your steps. What's the last thing you remember?”

Ethan thumbed the corner of the blanket; the word “hospital” was printed in blue ink. He remembered fire in the balls of his feet, a wrinkled sky, air dancing above hot pavement like on a summer day, the rainbow. “I think I was running.”

He'd run through the rainbow like it was a mirage, a trick of the light. Pieces started to come together. The meeting at school. Mum being late. Will. Will's mother. Jail. His father? He pulled up the blanket to cover his arms.

Ethan glanced out the window behind Alison's bed, overlooking the hospital driveway. Outside it was dark, but he couldn't tell if it was late night or early morning. The street was empty; no pedestrians, no cars. His eyes unfocused and his chest ached. He wanted his mum.

“What's on your head?” Ethan pointed to the swimming cap.

Alison touched the cap's wires with her fingertips. “My hat? Latest fashion. Everyone will be wearing these soon.” She paused. “I have to wear this because I have epilepsy. Lately I've been having a lot of seizures.”

Ethan sat up straight in his bed. “Why?”

“Weird electrical activity in my brain.”

“Wow,” he said. “Does the hat fix it?”

“Nope.” Alison looked down at her pink toenails. “It connects electrodes to my head and records what's happening in my brain. Have you ever seen a lie detector on TV? With all the squiggly lines? Electrical activity in the brain looks like that. Like waves. Or mountains.”

“That's cool.”

“Not really.” She wrinkled her nose, like something in the room smelled bad.

“Sorry.” Ethan kept saying the wrong thing. “How long have you had epilepsy?”

“Forever,” Alison said dramatically. “As long as I can remember.”

“So are you okay?”

“Most of the time. Sometimes it gets bad and I end up here again. But I'm used to it.” Alison shuffled closer to Ethan and widened her eyes. “Have you ever had a seizure?”

“I don't think so. What does it feel like?”

“Hard to explain,” she said, tilting her head and thinking about it. “Have you ever read
Alice in Wonderland
?”

“I've seen the movie.”

“You need to read it. It's my favorite book,” Alison said. “You know the rabbit hole? Having a seizure is like falling down that. You disappear. It's scary. Usually I feel terrible afterward. But sometimes it opens up a whole other world. Sometimes you get to go to Wonderland.”

Ethan pressed his lips together. “Do you know what the time is?”

“Ten minutes past five. In the morning.”

“Was anyone else here?”

“Yep.” Alison brushed a curl off her face. “I wish I had blond hair like your mum.”

Ethan looked around. “Where is she?”

“I don't know. She was right there before.” Alison reached over and took the red button on the side of Ethan's bed in her hand. “By the way, you really should let everyone know you've finally woken up.” She pressed down on the buzzer.

An orange light by the door flashed.

Ω

FROM THE OTHER SIDE
of the street, Claire had watched Ethan fall. His legs just gave way. She'd sprinted over to him, checked his breathing, his pulse. One-sided spasms, indigo lips. Warm pee spread on the pavement and trickled from Ethan's pants into the cracks. She dialed 000, calmly gave an address, and listened to the control center officer on the other end of the line. They told her to try to turn the boy onto his side, make sure he wasn't in respiratory distress. Claire numbly obeyed every instruction.

The ambulance arrived quickly. Blue and red lights lit the concrete; the van glowed reflective orange, a ripple of white and yellow paint. Two paramedics ran out, checked Ethan, said he needed to get to the hospital. But in the back of the ambulance, as her child lay unconscious on a stretcher and the siren wailed, Claire started to panic. The murky line between dream and reality, past and present, blurred. Her body flooded with adrenaline, that breathlessness, prickling her skin. She broke out in a cold sweat.

Even though the paramedics assured her that the worst was over now, Claire was convinced her son was about to die. Daylight shrank from the corners of her eyes. Oxygen, Ethan needed more oxygen, fresh air. There wasn't any oxygen in here, just the sticky smell of urine. The paramedic sitting beside her in the back of the ambulance gave her a concerned look.

“I'm fine,” she said, gasping. “But Ethan—”

“We're getting your son to the hospital as fast as we can.”

Claire blinked, overcome by déjà vu. She had to be hallucinating; this was some reflection of another life. Echoing angles of the ambulance lights—the odd, distinct slant of them—dragged her to the past. She blinked again. Breathe in, breathe out. It's only temporary; this too shall pass. She just had to ride the wave. Claire held Ethan's hand and closed her eyes, blocking her ears from the siren, blocking her thoughts from the spinning world.

The ambulance pulled into the hospital driveway. Usually, Claire did her best to avoid the Sydney Children's Hospital. If she ever needed to drive through Randwick, she'd take another route. The curved blue and yellow canopy over the front entrance made her recoil and she hated the friendly smiling logo, its primary-colored confection. But as much as being back at the hospital filled her with dread, there was also something soothing about returning. Harrowing memories came from these walls—seeing the neon “Emergency” sign made her every rib stretch, her lungs turn to concrete—but in the same impulse, it felt like coming home.

Ethan was examined, hooked up to monitors. Unconscious, but not in major distress. Doctors and nurses threw around medical terms Claire didn't know—tonic, clonic, post-ictal—as she watched on, paralyzed in the corner. She stared at the ceiling lights—they reminded her of a path of stepping-stones in a garden or a rocky causeway in shallow water. The harsh, magnified lighting stung her eyes like chlorine. She felt weightless—a floating cloud, a hovering ghost—and became unconvinced she was a real and solid person, present in the room. Claire felt separate from her skin.

The doctors asked about Ethan's medical history but Claire couldn't communicate properly, could only absently repeat questions she'd just been asked.

How old is your son?
How old is my son?

What's his date of birth?
His date of birth?

Through the thin curtains of the emergency department, she listened to other parents speak to the triage nurses, explaining tales of fevers and falls, burns and broken limbs. Another ambulance arrived. Claire overheard it was a six-year-old boy, seriously injured in a fatal car accident. They rushed the little boy to surgery. While Ethan was taken to radiology, Claire sat in the waiting room, eavesdropping on a woman's phone call with her husband. Their daughter had fallen in a gymnastics class and dislocated her elbow.

Back in emergency, Ethan was eerily motionless. Claire kept checking on him, making sure blood still moved around his body, that oxygen still made it to his brain. He looked pale and wooden. Tiny blue veins covered his closed eyelids. The nurse practitioner assured her that unconsciousness was symptomatic—Ethan wasn't comatose, just in a very deep sleep. Not life-threatening but he'd need to stay for observation overnight.

Even though Ethan was fast asleep, Claire told him the bedtime stories he'd loved hearing since he was little, tales of swans and sugarplums, spinning wheels and dancing ghosts.

It was almost midnight when Ethan was finally admitted to a ward. Claire followed two nurses upstairs as they pushed his bed into an elevator, expertly steering around sharp corners. Ward C1 North. Claire did a double take. The giant corkboard at reception was still covered in children's artwork, but these were fresh drawings, new pictures, different kids. She stopped to look at them for a moment, wondering what they did with the old pictures made by the children she'd known, who'd long been discharged, cured, had hopefully grown up. The nurses wheeled Ethan to an empty partition. He didn't stir as they lifted his limp body into the bed. Claire settled in beside the sleeping boy, keeping vigil in the vinyl chair.

“You need to eat,” a nurse said. “There's a vending machine down the hall.”

Claire shook her head. “I'm not hungry.”

The ward was quiet now, nurses at the station occasionally chatting with one another in whispers. A young girl sat with them, putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Her arms jerked as she placed down each piece. Probably cerebral palsy, Claire thought to herself, reminded that things could be worse. Another little girl was in the bed beside them, wired to a beeping machine. Ethan suddenly exhaled, making Claire sit up straight. She put her face close to his. His breathing was fine. Color tinted his cheeks again. She smoothed his bedclothes, pulled up the blankets, stroked his sweaty hair.

Slumped in the rigid chair, Claire covered her eyes. Her legs trembled and the floor bulged. Her mouth was dry, her face was hot; her fingers and toes tingled. Shallow breath after breath, she started to choke. The room caved in. One of the nurses heard Claire panting and approached with a glass of water. She drew the curtains closed.

“Take deep breaths,” the nurse said, rubbing Claire's back. “Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth.”

“I,” Claire started, gulping the word down. “I can't.”

“Yes, you can. In the nose, out the mouth. Let's try counting backward from one hundred in threes. We can do it together. One hundred. Ninety-seven. Ninety-four.”

“Ninety-one,” said Claire, following the breathing pattern: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, in the nose, out the mouth. “Eighty-eight. Eighty-five.”

The nurse gave her an encouraging smile. “That's right. Eighty-two.”

Eventually, Claire caught her breath. The dizziness stopped and her panic began to shrink. But now she felt like she'd been hit over the head with a blunt object. “Sorry, I don't know what came over me.”

“You're exhausted,” said the nurse. “You need to sleep. Even for an hour. There's a parents' lounge just down the end of the hall.”

“I need to stay here. What if he wakes up?”

“Then we'll come and get you,” the nurse said. “I promise. Rest up for him, you'll be no help to your son tomorrow if you're sleep-deprived.”

Claire reluctantly agreed. She went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. Her hair looked wild, her eyes bloodshot. Breathe normally, she said to her reflection in the mirror. Do not fall apart.

But she couldn't fall asleep. She rolled onto her back and stared at the patterns on the ceiling. Each time a car drove past outside, it distorted the light. Her heart beat loudly; she was sure other parents sleeping nearby could hear it pump and pound.

Back here again. She couldn't believe it. Lying on a narrow foldout bed with its familiar metal frame pressing into her back. It even smelled the same—industrial laundry powder, stale hospital food. But what Claire really couldn't believe was that she was back in this place inside her head. The darkest place with the darkest thoughts and the darkest feelings; she thought she'd come so far. This was all her fault. She knew it was. She could've stopped Ethan being here again. She'd made so many mistakes, kept too many secrets.

Claire pushed the memories aside but now everything was flooding back. She'd seen things she couldn't forget. Years of nightmares, flashbacks, hauntings; there'd been so many sleepless, terror-filled nights. Friends had gently suggested she really ought to talk to somebody about it, get professional help. One psychologist had diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, but knowing the name for whatever was wrong didn't heal Claire. Her trauma wasn't easily extinguished; it quietly continued to blaze and flare. But looking after herself wasn't a priority. She'd do that later. Ethan always came first. Claire learned to live with the lightning crashes of pain and panic, the sudden stun of suffocation. They were her penance for her mistakes.

Another car drove past, white headlight streaks elongating on the ceiling before the sound of the engine rolled away. Her nightmare revisited, refracted from another angle, fractured by different light. Claire was drained. After her adrenaline-fueled high, she could feel her body crash. Shadows crept back again, the blacks and blues of pre-dawn like bruises left behind by night. Her heavy eyelids started to close.

Ω

A TALL DOCTOR
entered the room. Something about him made Ethan think of a rainforest: trunks for limbs, a beard so thick maybe wildlife lived inside. Behind him was a nurse with straight black hair fixed into a neat ponytail. She smiled at the two children. Alison was still sitting on Ethan's bed. Next to the giant doctor, the nurse seemed like a dwarf.

“Morning, Alison,” the doctor said in a loud voice, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Remember what you've been told about leaving your bed; you're not allowed to get in with other patients. But looks like you've made a friend.” He smiled. “How long has he been awake?”

“Only a few minutes. Not long, promise,” Alison said, talking too fast. She waved at Ethan, shuffled back to her partition and closed the curtain.

The doctor stood over the bed. “How are you feeling, Ethan? A little confused?”

Ethan blinked. “I guess.”

“Pupillary reflexes look normal,” the doctor told the nurse, before turning to Ethan. “You've grown,” he said warmly. “I'm your neurologist. My name is Dr. Saunders.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Conversing normally,” Dr. Saunders said to the nurse as he wrote something on his notepad. He turned back to Ethan. “We've actually met before. Although you wouldn't remember. I was your doctor when you were a baby.”