Gravity Is the Thing

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  Briefly, I outlined the disappearance of my brother, the loss of my husband, the reasons that these things, and Oscar’s accident, were my responsibility.

  Wilbur considered. His silence was lengthy and measured.

  ‘About Oscar’s accident,’ he said eventually. ‘You could tell that story in a different way. The watch manufacturer who cut costs so that five-year-olds can open battery compartments. A mother who was patient with her child’s imaginative play, and generous in her definition of toy, who couldn’t have known about the manufacturer’s negligence.’

  I gave him a doubtful look, but he wrapped his hand around my knee and squeezed. ‘Sorry,’ he said, realising what he was doing. ‘I was trying to get that expression off your face. Can I talk about your former husband?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘It sounds like that other woman was stringing him along before you met, and you rescued him. But here she came again, and there was nothing anybody could have done.’

  ‘You mean because she was his soul mate,’ I said flatly.

  ‘Doubt it. She sounds awful. You don’t have to be someone’s soul mate to get addicted to them. I just mean it was nothing to do with you talking about your missing brother—if you’d never said a word about your brother you’d probably have decided that was the reason. You’d have blamed yourself for keeping yourself from your husband.’

  I looked away.

  Along the wall behind Oscar’s bed was a call button, the word cancel underneath. I studied this: call, cancel, call, cancel. Not for any particular reason.

  ‘And can I say something about your brother?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘In all honesty,’ he said, ‘I find the causal connection between you telling your brother that his joke about elephants wasn’t funny and his running away from home extremely tenuous.’

  I frowned.

  ‘No offence,’ Wilbur added, ‘but you must have been a pretty crap lawyer.’

  ‘I was a great lawyer!’

  He shook his head. ‘Not with arguments like that, you weren’t. What I think is that life is full of memories, stories and facts, and we push our way through them—’

  In the dim light of the sleeping ward, a nurse stood at the foot of a child’s bed, writing something on a chart.

  Wilbur gestured, as if pushing through curtains: ‘—and now and then, we pluck one, pull on the seam and make that responsible for everything.’

  The nurse stepped to the next bed along, brushing past a pair of Get Well! helium balloons.

  ‘Which,’ Wilbur murmured, ‘is wrong.’

  The balloons knocked together gently, a small reprimand, and settled back into place.

  6.

  On Oscar’s last night in the hospital, Wilbur came by to celebrate. Oscar fell asleep with a slice of cake slipping from his hand.

  Wilbur picked up his bag, placed it on his lap. ‘I’ve been packing up the Flight School,’ he said. ‘All my parents’ archives. And something occurred to me.’

  He cleared his throat, his expression odd and formal.

  ‘You remember I mentioned they got your contact details from the creative writing course?’ he continued. ‘Well, I decided to look through the archives to check—and then . . .’

  Again, he paused. My heart fluttered. I didn’t know why.

  ‘Your brother,’ Wilbur said.

  Now my heart stopped altogether.

  ‘You mentioned you did that course with him. So I was thinking, what if my parents sent the first chapter to him, as well?’

  ‘But . . .’ I thought fast. The big envelope in the rusty frying pan. If there’d been a second envelope, one addressed to Robert, I’d have seen that too.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘There was only one.’ And then I remembered that Robert had been home from school that day. He could have already opened his, he could have read it, and—

  ‘But,’ I repeated, shaking my head, ‘even if they did send him one, he must have thrown it out. If he’d sent back a yes, well, The Guidebook would have come for him too.’

  ‘Right,’ Wilbur said. ‘That occurred to me too, but I looked anyway. I found all the replies to the first chapters. They’d kept everything, my parents. Even the stack of papers and postcards that only said: Yes! And I found this.’

  Wilbur reached into his bag. He drew out a small, open envelope. He held it out to me.

  ‘I’ll go,’ he said, standing. ‘So you can read this alone.’

  He glanced at Oscar, curled and sleeping, blankie pressed beneath his arm, and smiled. Then he leaned down and kissed the top of my head. He’d never done that before. I could feel warmth through my hair. He walked out of the ward.

  7.

  Inside the envelope was a worn piece of paper.

  Robert’s handwriting. It stopped my breath. There’s more of Robert in his handwriting than in close-up photographs of his face.

  It was his formal style, his neatest cursive, and this is what it said.

  Dear Rufus and Isabelle,

  Thank you for sending me the first chapter of your guidebook.

  It made me laugh so hard I spat out my orange juice. I love it. It’s exactly the kind of guidebook I’d want to read, if I decided to start reading guidebooks.

  However, I can’t accept your offer because I’m going to be leaving pretty soon, and I won’t be here to receive them.

  The reason I’m leaving is this. Recently, I was diagnosed with MS. Now, the man who first discovered MS had a son who was a doctor. And after his father died, this son became a polar explorer. POLAR regions: the regions of long dark and long light.

  Whenever I read about MS, there’s talk about light and dark. Not enough exposure to sunshine: a deficiency of vitamin D.

  Why did the son become a polar explorer? I think I know why. He was on to something.

  So I’m going to the North Pole to see if the patterns of light there are the cure. The short days of winter, long days of summer, the aurora borealis. Flying to London, then straight to Finland, where I plan to get a job on a Russian trawler. I’ve researched, and this seems a cheap and sensible way to reach the North Pole.

  I get to Helsinki on my sister’s birthday. I’ll send her a postcard to wish her a happy birthday from the north side.

  Speaking of my sister, I can see that you’ve sent the same envelope to her. So of all the people, in all the world, she’s been chosen, too. Hopefully, she’ll say yes.

  Yours sincerely,

  Robert Sorensen

  8.

  You know what’s extraordinary? How quickly this letter uncovered the truth.

  A single turn of the spade almost. Within a few weeks, Matilda, still technically our caseworker, had sorted it out. She came over to my place to meet with me, my parents and their partners, and sat on my couch, a black coffee growing cold in front of her. As she spoke, I stared at her face and thought how it had widened and softened, and how her eyelids had grown heavier, her voice deeper, but that she was otherwise exactly the same.

  Here is what she said.

  In December 1990, a young man was found drowned in Lake Saarijärvi, one of the many small lakes outside Helsinki, Finland. The papers in his coat pocket were so water-damaged they were illegible. It seemed he had broken into an old holiday cottage that day, probably planning to sleep there, walked outside to explore, stepped onto the frozen lake, and fallen through the too-fragile ice.

  A shopkeeper a few kilometres away said that he had spoken to the young man earlier that day when he bought provisions and postcards. The boy had told him he was from Montepulciano in Italy and that it was his nineteenth birthday. They had chatted about barrel-racing and gelato.

  Nobody claimed the young man, he matched no missing persons profile, and he was listed on police files as an unknown Italian youth, aged nineteen.

  ‘It’s not Robert,’ my father said, annoyed. ‘Robert was only fifteen.’

  ‘He had the neighbour’s passp
ort,’ Matilda reminded him. ‘Andrew Grimshaw’s passport, remember?’

  It was Robert, it turned out. The local police had stored his dental and fingerprint records. We also recognised the list of possessions left in the cottage: his brown corduroy trousers, the baggy black trousers that narrowed at the ankle, his button-up shirts with tiny, sharp collars, his white sandshoes, his favourite black duffel coat with chunky wooden buttons (not given away after all), grey t-shirts, a toothbrush, unwritten postcards, a bottle of my mother’s sixteen-year-old Lagavulin, and a mixtape that I remembered making for him: the Cure, Depeche Mode, Madness, Talking Heads, Joy Division, the Triffids, the Church.

  Matilda finished reciting the possessions, the playlist. She had memorised it all. She looked around at us. We stared at her, silent.

  ‘But where’s he been,’ my mother asked, baffled, ‘all this time?’

  ‘They kept him in a morgue for two years,’ Matilda explained. ‘But they could never identify him. His passport wasn’t on him or with his things—they think it must have been lost in the lake. Eventually, they gave him a small state funeral and he was buried in a special section of a local graveyard reserved for unknowns.’

  ‘Who would have been at the funeral?’ my father asked.

  ‘Well . . .’ But here Matilda, whose voice had been neutral, practical, kind, began to splinter. My mother moved closer to comfort her. My father and I sat listening to Matilda sob because nobody had attended Robert’s funeral, and stared at our palms, at the truth we had just been handed.

  Robert had flown to London, immediately on to Helsinki, taken a bus to Saarijärvi, broken into a cottage, and stepped onto the ice.

  part

  16

  1.

  After Matilda left, my father howled.

  It turned out he’d never truly believed that Robert was dead. He’d just pretended, to us and to himself. Trying to force Seneca’s approach: believe the worst and you will be prepared when it takes place; by believing the worst, he actually thought he was earning a happy surprise. That’s what you call a misreading of Seneca. Dad tried to stand up and his legs gave way beneath him.

  For my mother, it was terrible and strange. All this time, I realised, she’d been carrying the burden of the search and the hope for us. Now her face and shoulders settled into quiet, desperate anguish. Watching her was like seeing an unnatural shift in a landscape: real-life time-lapse photography.

  I was okay.

  ‘This is good,’ I said. ‘Now we know the truth.’

  He hasn’t been alone, trapped, suffering somewhere, for years, I pointed out. Also, drowning was supposed to be an almost euphoric death, and Robert had died in a generally happy, adventurous state, play-acting that he was Italian, buying himself food for a picnic in a stranger’s cottage. Nobody had taken his life. It was sad and stupid, but I had already grieved for him. I had grieved for years. Now we could all move on.

  The next couple of days, I hurried around making lists. I was back at my café and Oscar was back at day care. Oliver and Shreya had looked after the place well in my absence, but all its deficiencies—the peeling paint, the worn table edges—were now startling. So there was plenty to list.

  On the third day, I decided to walk up to Greenwood Plaza myself, to pick up some fresh avocados and tomatoes, as we were low. I waved to Jennie in Hair to the Throne, and we both pantomimed in our usual way. It’s possible that she knows what we mean by the pantomime, but I certainly don’t.

  It was a Thursday afternoon, a bright sky, and Blues Point Road was busy. I skirted around tables of outdoor cafés and a curious thought occurred to me.

  My marriage had been over before it began, and my brother had died before I even knew that he was missing.

  My imaginary husband, I thought, smiling to myself, observing the parallels, and my imaginary brother.

  These last twenty years, since Robert had disappeared, he had been with me all the time, a growing-older brother. I’d seen him around corners and underneath hats, I’d seen him pulling gloves onto his hands.

  I’d seen Robert with a girlfriend or a boyfriend, leaning on a partner’s shoulder, looking through a window; Robert rolling a pen—

  And now I was howling.

  Standing on the corner of Blues Point Road and Lavender Street, wailing.

  Robert rolled a pen along a table and it felt good beneath his palm. He thought about skipping the song on his stereo. He grew older. He figured out how to live with his multiple sclerosis. Some days he was exhausted, but some days he felt great. He even jogged when he could. He thought about getting gas for the barbecue, and how to be bigger than all this, and whether there was any point in being bigger.

  I was standing in the daylight, wailing, and I didn’t see how I could stop.

  Whenever I drove in my car, Robert was always pulling up beside me at the lights, in a Land Rover, or a ute, a Mini—he was always turning to look at me, the stranger in the car alongside, and his eyes were always lighting up, a wild grin: Abigail! There you are! The whole enormous joke of it. Look! It’s me! I’m back!

  I stood on the corner, and now it wasn’t sobbing, it was shrieking, it was caterwauling.

  People stared at me in horror, or quickly looked away. They stepped around me, clutching their grocery bags higher. A woman pushing a baby in a pram briskly crossed the road to avoid me.

  My throat stung from the terrible sounds it was making, my body shook with it, and I knew this was wrong, I had to stop—I’d be arrested, sedated, restrained; this screaming, it was unseemly, uncivilised, illegal—but here came Robert, grinning in my direction, here was Robert carrying a saxophone, here was Robert taking to an orange with his fingernails . . .

  A Toyota Corolla pulled over alongside me. Its door opened. A woman in a sundress, a stranger, climbed out. Behind my own screams, I heard a voice calling, ‘Mum? What are you doing?’ A teenager sat in the passenger seat, plucking at her seatbelt: ‘Mum? What are you doing?’

  But the woman ignored the girl, and ran across to me. Astonishingly, she flung open her arms and wrapped them around my shoulders, and she pulled me closer, the smell of her perfume, her shampoo, the warmth of her hands on my back.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘My brother,’ I sobbed. ‘My brother is dead.’

  The woman cried out herself and drew me closer, and here I was standing on the corner of Blues Point Road and Lavender Street, and there was no such thing as hope, no such thing as Robert, and there was my brother, a little boy, fifteen years old, a blue sky day, a frozen lake, there he was, stepping out, full of hope, onto the ice, and here was a stranger, murmuring shhh, and hush, and patting my back while I wept in her arms, and there he was, my brother, stepping out, full of hope—

  2.

  For a while, my parents and I looked for someone to blame. It was Andrew Grimshaw’s fault for leaving his passport unattended; it was Carly’s fault for inviting Robert over. It was Wilbur’s parents’ fault, we decided, in a flash of inspiration, for not contacting us when they received Robert’s letter outlining his plan.

  Only, it was not their fault: it was implausible, a fifteen-year-old boy running away to the North Pole. They would have dismissed it as fantastical.

  Next, we began to claim fault for ourselves: it was my fault for not allowing Robert to be frightened; it was my mother’s fault for ever telling him about Jean-Martin Charcot; my father’s fault for not sitting Robert down and sorting through viable treatment options.

  This led us all into silence—viable treatment options was a gentle way of pointing out that Robert was an idiot. Looking for a cure for MS in the North Pole. Which led to our agreeing that Robert was a boy, a kid, fifteen years old, flawed, brave, terrified. My mother said that I, Abigail, had been just a girl myself, almost exactly Robert’s age, doing my best to help him.

  My mother whispered, ‘I should have paid more attention.’

  ‘I should have paid attent
ion,’ Dad said, his hand on her hand.

  For a moment, I thought that was the moral of the story: pay attention. Stop thinking about self-help and sex! Concentrate! Watch your child, be vigilant! Don’t let him run away to the North Pole! Don’t let him take apart his digital watch!

  But then I remembered that I can be standing in the kitchen beside Oscar and he can fall from a chair. Just as it is psychically impossible (for me, at least) to focus on goodies and baddies for more than five minutes, it is physically impossible to monitor a child as if you were a CCTV camera. Sometimes you have to set a saucepan on the stove. It only takes a fraction of a second for a child to eat a battery.

  And I might never have considered the absence of the watch battery, or its significance, if I hadn’t left Oscar for a weekend away, walked beside Lera, listening to her talk about her work.

  I told my parents that Robert had been a creative soul, a free spirit, and that if they’d closed him down, or trapped him, or tried to shape him, they’d only have lost him sooner. I watched my mother straighten, as I spoke, while my father’s shoulders relaxed.

  One day, our family would fly to Finland and retrace his journey, visit the cottage, the lake, his grave, take a sauna, try ice-fishing, eat warm Leipäjuusto with cloudberry jam.

  For now, we held a party to remember and farewell Robert, with collages of photographs and old video footage. His old friends and mine turned up—Carly and Andrew Grimshaw and their parents, little Rabbit-all-grown-up, Robert’s friend Bing, even Clarissa, his old girlfriend. My mother’s best friend Barbara came too; they’d made up a few years ago, after Barbara’s husband died of motor neurone disease. We played Joy Division, Robert’s favourite band, and told stories about the wild way he hurtled down a ski slope, laughed about his astonishing courage—secretly saving the money to fly alone to Finland—and read aloud some of his high school poetry. Oscar jiggled, ecstatic, beside me. For him, it was like a party for a superhero, only one where he himself was junior superhero: his own middle name was Robert, he was Robert’s spitting image.