Relativity by Antonia Hayes Page B

been on the moon.
    Î©
    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.
    â€œWill,” Ethan whispered.
    â€œYeah?” Will said, drawing a picture of a bright red crab with huge claws.
    â€œCan I copy your dad? Dunno what mine looks like.”
    â€œYou don’t?” Will took another crayon and put black beady eyes on his crab.
    â€œNever met him.”
    â€œThen 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.”
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œWe can go right now,” his mum said. “Close your eyes.”
    Ethan shut them tight.
    â€œAre you on the moon?” asked Mum.
    â€œNo, I’m still on the street.”
    â€œLook 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?”
    â€œI’m sure he can,” she said, suddenly dropping an octave. Ethan knew this was her sad voice.
    â€œIs he looking at it right now?”
    â€œHe 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