THE ROOM – SMALL, oddly shaped, poorly lit – lay at the end of a cul-de-sac hallway, at the place where an older hospital building had been mated to a newer addition, the room itself a structural afterthought formed by opening some space off the side of a storage closet. It had several corners, one narrow window, and provided barely sufficient floor space for a few pieces of equipment, two chairs and a single bed. On the ceiling a fluorescent light box flickered. ‘They brought me back to life and then what? Then they put me into a tomb,’ complained James Dell, his voice a croak. He sipped from a plastic cup and water overspilled his lips and flowed onto his green hospital gown, where he batted at it. Pale and brightly scarred, he lay in collapse, a pair of eyeglasses with thick black frames owling his eyes.
Ellis had come here in a state of exhaustion that left him stumbling and half blind, fearful that James would despise him, that James would refuse him. But James seemed hardly aware of him. Instead he worried aloud about money, and because of money he wanted to leave the hospital. His wife said he couldn’t leave. He said it was a free country. Mrs Dell said the doctors said he shouldn’t leave. He tried to get out of bed but fell back with a shriek and moaned. He said she should help him. She glowered and said she would not help him to act like an idiot. He said he would soon be broke. She said he had no choice. He said he would be broke and would soon live under a bridge and cook rats for dinner over a barrel fire. She said he had never cooked a thing in his life. He said she should have let him die rather than be bankrupted into a life of homelessness and rat-eating and could she move the pillow under his leg nearer to the knee? Which she did. But on and on they argued, with loud indifference to anyone who might be listening.
Their volume rose and fell; James’s strength was inconsistent. Ellis sat in the corner in one of the plastic chairs. Now that he was here, he had little sense of reason or purpose. He recalled the collapse of James Dell onto the hood and the patter of glass against his own face – and now he sat beside James Dell’s bed and James Dell complained that there were too many commercials on and changed the channel and Mrs Dell hounded him to change it back and leave it, please. Meanwhile the light in the little window over the bed brightened and faded with the passage of unseen clouds.
Eventually Ellis excused himself to go to the bathroom. When he’d finished he considered walking out of the hospital and driving away. But he wanted to watch one more time the opening and closing of James’s eyes, the life of his thin limbs, the sneering of his lips.
James lay alone in the room, holding up a hand and staring at it.
Ellis said, ‘I wish I could do more than say I’m sorry.’
‘Sir.’ James grimaced. ‘If you apologise again, I’ll have them throw you out.’
Ellis sat. The overhead light flashed. A passing bed rattled in the hallway.
‘I shouldn’t have crossed there,’ James said.
‘I shouldn’t have tried to pass on the right.’
‘I’ve passed on the right a thousand times.’ James’s voice guttered with self-disgust. ‘Nothing wrong with it.’
Ellis hesitated, feeling he should apologise, afraid to apologise.
‘She went out for some lunch,’ James said. ‘The bitch.’
‘She was here all the time that you were in the coma.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘It was very hard for her, her husband -’
‘I’m not her husband. She’s not my wife.’
‘She isn’t?’
‘Ex. We were unmarried eight and a half years ago. She can go any time she wants. I don’t love her.’ He wound his sheet on his finger. ‘I wish I did. It would be something.’
Then he sat forward with a jerk and looked around. He complained that she had been away too long and she was spending money on lunch when she could have just as easily eaten off the tray of food that the hospital gave him.
A short, cushiony nurse came in to fret over the machines.
Ellis rose and excused himself.
He drove to Heather’s house. In the street before it he slowed the minivan to a crawl and remembered years before, passing by here in naivety and embarrassment, while Boggs waved from the garage, and it roused a sensation that he could not name but it was excruciating. A car came close behind him, and he accelerated away. Then through a route of miles he turned and turned back, slowed, turned into the drive, let the minivan idle down its length. He stood a minute in the driveway. The garage was closed, the windows dark. The grass of the lawn had grown long. Black clouds were heaving up out of the west.
He reached for the doorbell, but then tried the knob instead, and at his touch the door opened. He stood looking in at the darkened living room. ‘Heather?’ he called, softly. The walls were worked with innumerable bright colours – images in crayon, watercolour, construction paper, cellophane, papier mâché, stickers, marker, glued buttons, seashells, bottle caps – pieces of art that her students had given her or had simply abandoned. Some of it she had framed and some of it was stuck up with thumbtacks, so that they filled the walls from floor to ceiling with stick figures, mountains, houses, flowers, monster trucks, rainbows and various abstractions and images so crude as to be effectively abstract. Their initial effect could be overwhelming, but he had seen them a couple of times before when he picked up Boggs for work trips, and he looked at them now only to try to detect whether anything had changed. All over the floor lay many objects, scattered or assembled in piles – pens, coffee mugs, silverware, magazines, drink coasters, a tube of Crest, sheets, a bar of soap, telephone books, wire hangers, a TV remote. He studied these things for a while, but could make no sense of them, and then toed through to the kitchen, which stood empty, the shades drawn, the refrigerator whirring, a single light under a cabinet illuminating a tub of sugar and a set of knives mounted to the wall on magnets so that they appeared to float.
The windowless stairwell was particularly dark. He hung onto the banister as he went up. Then the top step lay underfoot and the guest bedroom stood open and empty, the bed squarely made and desolate. The door of the master bedroom stood ajar and swung under his hand. The shades drawn, the room lay in dim grey illumination, its objects defined by shadows. After a while he could see Heather asleep in the bed. He felt he could hardly breathe and feared he would inadvertently gasp or cry out. For minutes he stood. Then he moved into the room, aware of the sounds he made – the brushing of the creases of his clothing, the crackling press of his feet into the carpet, the tiny grinding of his joints. He stood beside the bed, then eased down until he kneeled on the carpet. She slept on her stomach, her head turned so that the right side of her face pressed into the pillow, exposing the scar on the left side. Her hair spread wild. Her lashless eyelids appeared frail and naked as an infant’s, but her face was lined in a way that made her seem tired even as she slept. He reached toward her, but stopped short. The bed sheets were twisted tight around her. Laundry sprawled at the foot of the bed, and a half-dozen coffee mugs crowded the bedside table.
He was glad to watch her sleep and feared that when she woke she would send him away, because he had not saved Boggs, because he had killed Boggs, because he had left her for so long, because he had not called, because to be sent away seemed the least that he deserved.
Through parted lips her teeth showed dry and dull white. Her eyes darted under the lids. The scar on her skin seemed more shining and pale than he recalled. The room’s shadows darkened.
Then her eyes opened; she gazed at him.
Time seemed to condense, gather and fall in tiny droplets. He kneeled trembling. ‘Ellis,’ she said, unsurprised. ‘I’ve been so worried.’
‘Boggs is dead.’ His awareness concentrated in a little circle, of Heather, of the dark beyond gone blurry. ‘He stepped into the highway.’
‘They said you were there.’ She touched his hand. ‘I thought maybe at the funeral you would come.’
‘I just drove. For days I didn’t know what I was doing. Or I tried not to know. I was afraid if I came here you would send me away.’
She shook her head. ‘Why?’
‘You’ll forgive me?’
‘Forgive? There are a thousand things that we should talk about, and I don’t even know what you’re talking about.’
‘Heather -’
‘I thought about buying an RV like the one my dad had and going out to look for you. The same kind of RV so you would know it was me. But I guessed you would come back.’ She spoke to the ceiling, turning to him only with glances, as if shy. ‘Because you had said you would, and you’re the kind of person who does what he says he will do. Even if you did say you would come back soon.’
‘As soon as I could -’
‘If I had a nickel for every excuse.’
‘The road to hell is paved with nickels.’
She smiled a little. ‘Yes.’
It seemed as if he could hear the faint, entropic noise of everything around him slowly corroding, oxidising, of the room’s thin light minutely eating into the surfaces it touched.
Heather’s features suddenly strained, and she rolled away. ‘It’s OK,’ she said without looking at him. ‘It’s OK.’
He moved into bed with her. He nestled against her. He tried not to suggest to himself the question of how many times Boggs had lain in this bed.
After Boggs’s death, after the police had released him, he had begun driving without any sense of intention. He seemed able to see and to recall everything, and this was terrible, and he wished for a catatonic state, a slipping under the waters of consciousness. Only the shaking in him had stopped, and now he found he missed it. Otherwise he wanted nothing of the world, but even as it feigned indifference the lurid world impinged on him constantly. He ate, he drank, he slept, he went to the bathroom in gas stations and rest stops and Taco Bells. His feelings were small, constant and physical in their shifting, like a leaf fluttering in his lung. He had loved Boggs, but he loved Heather more passionately, and recalling this pairing of facts stirred certain notions to life, and at times he screamed, beat on the steering wheel. But these efforts made no difference to anything, and when he stopped it seemed to be because he had simply decided to stop.
One afternoon, as he drove a lonesome stretch of two-lane between fields where cotton tufted white like a scatter of snow on low brown plants, the minivan’s temperature gauge began to climb. Soon the radiator spit steam, and he had to be towed from the roadside. While a mechanic worked to swap the water pump, Ellis asked what day it was. Two weeks had dissolved since Boggs’s death. He went to a phone on a post near the road and, after several minutes of doubt, called the hospital.
‘He’s come out of it,’ Mrs Dell exclaimed. ‘He’s really better. I’ve told him about you, about how you called, about your concern. He wants to meet you.’
This – he saw now – was obviously an untruth. But when she said it, he believed her and glimpsed something past his personal oblivion. He drove the minivan for a day and a half without rest to reach the hospital.
But now the jolt of purpose had faded. He moved in a strange world, filled with dark strangeness, and it was strange to be expected – by the implication of the progress of time, if nothing else – to continue with life and find ways to act. For three days he did not leave Heather’s house. He wished he had come here sooner. He felt impossibly indebted. Here, for now, nothing needed to be explained.
Boggs had been cremated, Heather said, the ashes sent to his surviving aunt. She had arranged to have his convertible donated to a charity rather than shipping it back here, but the things piled over the living-room floor were Boggs’s things, or things that she thought of as his, which she could not bring herself to use or to trash. She asked Ellis if he would do something with them.
So he had a task. When she went to school to teach, he ranged the house, gathering: all the items in the living room, then the shoes and shirts and slacks in the bedroom closet – clothing that he had seen Boggs wear many times – and a pair of sunglasses on the dresser, toothbrushes in a drawer under the bathroom sink, a collection of pocketknives in the chest of drawers in the hallway, an assortment of baseball caps on the refrigerator, all into plastic garbage bags that he assembled in ranks on the back patio. The files of records and financial documents that Boggs had assembled were still stacked on the dining table. Ellis put them into a cabinet in the spare bedroom.
He told her what had happened, as best he could, the facts of the event, likely not much different from what the police had told her. The official report, Heather said, had labelled it a suicide. ‘No,’ Ellis said. ‘What do you call it when a person loses at Russian roulette? He didn’t look at the car that hit him. He didn’t look to see if there was a car. I don’t think he was aware of the car, except as a possibility. He knew there was traffic, which might or might not be able to stop for him. He’d done exactly the same thing a little while earlier, and got away with it. He took a chance. What do you call a person who does that?’ He waited for Heather to say something, but she didn’t. He said, ‘I think there was a distinction in his mind.’
He told her that when he reached Boggs and found him dead, he had somehow bloodied his own face on the ground, so that the police believed for some time that he had also been involved in the collision. And that his own actions had even at the time felt light and insultingly comic.
He laboured to raise words. ‘What’s strange is that I have to work very hard to remember the collision,’ he told her. ‘James Dell still flips up onto the hood in front of me. But it’s as if Boggs had stepped into a fog. I can remember details, but I have to concentrate, and even then the sequence doesn’t flow, there are only some disconnected pieces, as if I had been told about it, no sense of having been there, and it seems I can’t even feel guilty correctly.’ As he spoke a prickling sensation of hot sand filled him grain by grain until he was choking and could say no more.
Over the days he grew aware – in a partial way – that Heather’s constraint and quiet were a little strange, but he had his own impulse to silence, and he told himself that the silence between them was not uncomfortable, because of Boggs and everything now thick with Boggs’s presence, because they both knew that in death John Boggs had spread himself everywhere. The idea that Boggs was simply gone was impossible to sustain. Unlike the dead man at the lake, who in his anonymity became a curiosity. Unlike Christopher, who Ellis had known well but had not understood, so that in death he became an object of the past.
And although they hardly spoke in the course of the evening, they still clung together in the night, they still made love, and he felt as if here they had come to a place of such unbounded emotion that there was nothing left to say.
In boxes in the closets he discovered hats and gloves and scarves, rubbers for Boggs’s size twelve shoes, and a sunshade for his convertible’s windshield. In the corners of the garage he discovered a dusty, half-empty pack of cigarettes, an extra set of tyres for the convertible, a few old T-shirts. He sifted and contemplated Boggs’s collection of tools – wrenches, screwdrivers, hand drill, sander, pipe cutter, hammers, pliers, table saw, mitre saw – and then began putting them into boxes. From the basement he brought up cans of tennis balls, aluminum-frame tennis rackets, cross-country skis, a selection of paperback thrillers, AC/DC and Led Zeppelin cassette tapes, a box of model-railroad equipment. Most surprising, perhaps, was how little it all amounted to. A few bags. Boggs kept a messy desk at the office, but he didn’t have much clutter at home. Soon Ellis was searching through closets for the fourth or fifth time, sorting item by item through drawers and wondering whether Heather would consider a ballpoint from a Hyatt or a stray brown coat button to have been Boggs’s. He peered under the bed and sofa, into the crannies of the furnace room, along the rafters of the garage. In a bin of unused flowerpots he found a hidden box of Boggs’s keepsakes – tapes of a high school rock band, photos of a girl perhaps eighteen years old, strings of beads and shells, medals from youth golf tournaments, high school and college diplomas, and stacks of report cards. Ellis began to sort through the stuff, but then stopped and upended it into a garbage bag.
He also found hidden away – and, it seemed, forgotten – a couple of Heather’s art projects. There were a few disposable coffee cups that rattled when he lifted them: each contained a paper diorama to be viewed through the hole in the lid. Octopuses hanging from tiny strings. A skyline of gold foil buildings. A dinosaur emerging from an outhouse. And he discovered a toy airplane, more than two feet long, which had been covered with delicately placed feathers. It looked like an airplane-shaped chicken, with a chicken’s incompetence for real flight, and he adored it. Fearing Heather might throw them away, he left them where he had found them.
He discovered evidence of a house that had been divided for some time – many of Boggs’s clothes were in the guest room. Dirty plates and glasses were stacked around the desk Boggs kept in the basement.
On the fourth day Ellis decided to take out this desk and the file cabinet beside it. He approached the task with some anxiety – he knew Boggs had kept copies of a number of work files in the drawers, and Ellis had a fear of those files, as if by a monstrous magnetism they might draw him into old nightmares. But when he opened the drawers, he found them empty. Heavy and bulky, the desk and the drawers could be pushed over the floor, but he saw that he could not move them up the stairs by himself. He retrieved a hammer and a pry bar from Boggs’s tools, began yanking out the drawers, and found taped to the underside of one a broken, weathered plastic nameplate that said airlane.
He stood turning it in his hands for a long while, confounded. Eventually he carried it to the minivan and put it into the glovebox. He sat in the passenger seat, wondering, until, with a bellowing noise, a neighbour began mowing his lawn. Ellis locked the glovebox, retreated inside and took apart the desk with hammer blows.
Still time moved by like a slow wind, a large and invisible force, present in the nodding of grasses and the shaking of leaves, easily forgotten. He watched Heather and thought a great deal about the airlane nameplate, trying to derive its significance. You ever talk to Heather about your brother’s accident? Boggs had asked.
‘I feel ashamed all the time,’ she said one evening. ‘As if I’d been coated with something, plasticky or rubbery, shiny. Mint green. It’s strange when no one else seems to notice.’ She looked at her hand. ‘Do you still see my scars?’
‘I haven’t noticed them in a long time,’ Ellis said. This seemed the only thing to say, even if it was not entirely true.
‘I think I’d actually forgotten them for a while. I didn’t think I ever would, but then I did. I know because now I see them again.’
He watched for her to throw things or claw herself, but she didn’t move. He knew something undefined and emotional had shifted between them, and he tried to think through it carefully. But it was like trying to think his way to California.
In their long stretches of silence, he watched her take art books off the shelf – Rothko, Still, Motherwell, Johns – and turn through the images, her expression unaffected by whatever she saw. Sometimes she spent hours with the TV on and a page before her, doodling dense tangles of lines, craggy, elaborate constructions: leaves, machineries, mazes, branches, flowers, tangles of wire, heaps of rope, blending into one another from edge to edge of the page.
The shattering heat of the shower poured on him until the hot-water tank had been exhausted. He set himself into jeans and a T-shirt, socks and shoes, and with these tasks completed sat on the bending edge of the bed. Heather would not be back until five or six. Sunlight cut between the leaves outside and set a shifting pattern of shadow on the wall. He watched it move until the last of it seeped off the wall onto the floor. Then he went into the bathroom to pee and then the kitchen and ate a couple of slices of plain bread. At the bottom of the sink lay loose puddles of water, evaporating. All around, dust settled. He swept the kitchen floor – as he had done the day before, and the day before that – and gathered a few crumbs into a dustpan and threw them away. In the living room he turned through a magazine – not reading, but watching how the glare of the light moved over the gloss of the pages as he manipulated them.
At noon he poured a can of soup into a bowl, microwaved it, ate, washed the bowl and spoon by hand, dried them, set them back in the cupboard. He sat with the jobs section of the classifieds and read through it but marked nothing – he was either under-qualified or overqualified. He went to the computer that Heather kept in the spare bedroom and opened a new document to begin working out a résumé. He’d put his name at the top of the page before he realised that the mouse pad beside the keyboard, showing a brown mouse with a red ribbon around his neck, was the same one that he had given to her in the museum years before. It disoriented him badly.
Finally he aimed his gaze at the screen and tried to consider whether he should provide as his address this house or his apartment, until his eyes felt dried by the steady glow of the screen, and he turned it off. Darkened, the dust captured on its surface could be seen. He attempted to examine it, mote by mote. He shifted his fingers. He seemed to feel something, but was it large or small, was it guilt or grief? Did these two actually feel different from each other, or were they only two labels applied to the same thing depending on context?
He sat on the floor, trying to detect the impression of the bones of his spine one atop another, the press of his lungs into his ribs, the taste of the top of his mouth against his tongue, the flickering contact of his eyelids when he blinked, the fall of his hair against his scalp. If he concentrated hard enough perhaps he could even sense the hair growing from the follicles, the smell of himself lifting from himself, the noise of molecules of nitrogen and oxygen bouncing off his eardrums, the cells of his body slowly creating and destroying themselves.
Certain thoughts worked through his mind on long, spiral paths. Christopher became James became Boggs, and other accidents that he had worked on pressed into his attention, photograph images, the scents and winds and landscapes of accident scenes, a family scattered dead over the road and the crushed tow-truck driver and the little girl killed by a family of geese and the man who backed away from the burning van while screams still sounded inside – which was exactly what Christopher had failed to do. It shocked Ellis to realise this. How strange he had never made the connection.
He did not know what to do with the questions that the airlane nameplate forced him toward. Apparently Boggs had gone to see Christopher’s car. Why had he done that? Had he done a reconstruction of Christopher’s accident? Why? What had he found? Ellis didn’t want to look into any accident, he didn’t want to reconstruct anything, and he absolutely did not want to consider or reconstruct Christopher’s accident. But it seemed the only way to discover what Boggs had known. Did it matter what Boggs had known? He wasn’t sure. But the question presented itself again and again, summoning itself up as if by the same mechanism that the image of James Dell on the hood still made itself known. He could only guess that it related to Boggs’s conversation with Heather beside the golf course.
When Heather arrived home she moved around to redistribute the same items she had collected that morning – cellphone, keys, purse – then went into the bedroom. He heard the lisp of her skirt’s collapse on the floor and a drawer opening as she pulled out jeans.
She sat beside him. She asked how his day had been. He spoke of what he had seen in the paper and online, of thinking about his résumé. She nodded. ‘What happened to Boggs’s files in the basement?’ he asked.
‘I took all that to the office and told them this was everything I had of John’s work, and I didn’t want anyone from there contacting me again.’
She rested one hand on his knee, and he studied her veins and tendons, the faint small hairs, the irregularity of scarred skin near the base of the thumb. He asked about her day, she described the variable moods of children, and then they sat touching lightly while the traffic in the street buzzed. She asked, not looking at him, ‘How long will it be like this?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t see anyone but me.’
‘What about you? How do you feel?’
‘I’m so absolutely fucking angry with him,’ she said.
It seemed odd to him that it really hadn’t occurred to him to be angry at Boggs.
‘How long?’ Softly. Her hand on his leg did not move away and neither did it tighten.
Feeling the question was unanswerable, he did not answer. He saw behind her, perched in a far upper corner of the room, a spider. It crept an inch down the wall, then returned to where it had started. Then he was aware again of her attention on him – it seemed to have tightened, and he observed suddenly how strange he was becoming. Had become. He bore responsibility, too, for her quiet. He had reduced her to quiet doodling.
Her fingers tightened slightly on his leg, then lifted away.
She stood and went out of the room. A cupboard door clattered. Ellis lifted a hand and held it, testing its heaviness. With a tap of noise a glass was set on the counter. Water hissed into the kitchen sink.
‘I’m sorry,’ he called.
She reappeared and stood looking at him. Not unkind. Not without patience. But looking. And he felt something in himself hiding. He wanted to ask her, What am I hiding? What is wrong with me? He recalled how, when searching for Boggs, he had wished to somehow pry under his rational processes. Maybe now he had succeeded, but if so it had been a foolish thing to hope for, because under them lay, it seemed, nothing.
When she turned away he was startled, as if he had forgotten the possibility of movement.
At dinner Heather lit two squat candles on the table that burned with tiny steady globular flames, and they ate Italian takeout with the television on, tossing its shifting light on the ceiling. In bed he clasped lightly around her back until she seemed asleep. With eyes clutched shut he waited for sleep, thinking of her attention on him. Not without patience, but with limits.
The first time he set out, he drove north a few miles, then turned in at a park that he knew and sat for some hours at the edge of a lake with a swim area to watch the children scream and splash one another. Behind him mountain bikes came down a rocky trail with the noise of rolling typewriters. As the day leaned into dusk the bikes grew fewer and the swimmers exited until the lake water lay smooth, and he sat alone in the bluish light that hovered off the water and recalled the dead man that he and Boggs had left, and who might still, for all that he knew, lie there undiscovered, because in the aftermath of Boggs’s death he had never mentioned it to the police.
The second time he made it to Coil. He circled on the roads, peering at the park, the strip malls, the old buildings in the old centre of town, many shut and boarded. Much of the local commerce had shifted to chain stores and restaurants around an interstate exit a couple of miles to the west. But the high school appeared unchanged, the library likewise; he avoided the street where he had grown up. In only a few minutes he was carried through town and out into the surrounding fields of corn and sugar beets. He discovered a new golf course – a startling open space of deep green and lifeless flags.
He turned back and stopped in front of a store that sold pet supplies. It stood in the place of a baseball-card shop that he remembered, and he sat not looking at the intersection where his brother had died, then stood out of the minivan and approached the intersection and with his hands in his pockets looked at the place. East across Mill Street lay the gas station where Heather had watched the accident, now a green-and-white BP – he studied it with a sense of unease. Whatever it had been back then, he felt pretty sure it hadn’t been a BP. Cattycorner from where he stood spread the trees and grass of the park that had held his favourite swings. The trees looked older and fewer now, and a weirdly rococo gazebo had been put up to rot. And south across Main Street lurked, presumably, the house where he had once lived; the tall fencing that ran alongside the street had been replaced, now even taller, painted a red brown. The lane counts on Mill and Main had not changed, but the lights suspended overhead appeared new, and in the years since the accident how many times had the asphalt been resurfaced, the kerbs rebuilt, the lane lines repainted? The entire pattern of it could have shifted several feet. The parking lot he stood in had a new kerb cut near the intersection. To what extent was this no longer really the place where Christopher had died? To a great extent. But there was no other place.
He didn’t want to be doing this work again. But he thought of the airlane nameplate and went forward. He paced the distances across the lanes, from light pole to kerb edge, from kerb edge to street sign, measuring a yard with each step, a simple skill that Boggs had made him practise. Boggs had also given him a five-pound sack of sugar and told him to test its weight at arm’s length, then gave him a desk lamp, a laptop computer, a brake drum, and asked of each, ‘More or less than five pounds? Guess the weight?’ Soon they descended to the basement garage where Boggs attempted, with loud failures, to juggle wrenches – the memory of the odour of motor oil and sawdust and the riotous clanging of the wrenches became suddenly so vivid that Ellis had to stop a minute and breathe.
He ripped a page from the back of the minivan’s owner’s manual and sketched the intersection in ballpoint and labelled it with his paced measurements. He added notes on light timing and traffic flow, and amid this work he noticed a new sensation – relief. As if he had swum nearly to the point of exhaustion, of drowning, but now his feet had found land. This work. How easy it was to move here. The relief unnerved and disappointed him.
Eventually he looked up and saw a woman, in sweatpants and a T-shirt snug enough to show the roll of her belly fat, standing outside the pet supply store, watching him. She smiled and moved to the side window of the minivan and tapped. ‘Ellis Barstow!’ she exclaimed as he rolled down the window. And he said hi, but who was she? Without provocation she talked about teachers he remembered and some of his friends. She mentioned Christopher, solemnly, and glanced at the intersection. She seemed his own age, more or less, but her weight had bagged into small jowls that exaggerated as she frowned. A spray of curling thin brown hair imperfectly covered her pink scalp. Ellis said little to encourage her, and finally she said, ‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’
He smiled and shook his head.
‘Kari Butters.’
Even this did not help. But he said, ‘Oh, yes, Kari. Of course.’ And because she still had a look of expectation, he added, ‘Wow.’
She mentioned other people, one feebly familiar, but more that it seemed to him he had never heard of before in his life. He nodded dumbly. He tried to subtract the jowls, subtract some wrinkles from around her eyes. But the effort gained him nothing. She talked on, faster and faster, and suddenly she said, with forced enthusiasm, ‘Well, how about you? What are you up to? What do you do?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing right now.’
She waited.
‘I’m between jobs,’ he said. ‘Between things.’
With a little clawing motion she burst into talking about a couple more people. He felt like a disappointment. Soon she looked over to the pet store – Kissing Kritters – as if it had just now appeared, cast out a farewell and fled.
He was glad to drive again. The land streamed by and he worked out a sense that some of the people she had mentioned had been a grade or two below himself, and if she were also from one of the lower grades that might explain how she had been so aware of him while he could not recall her at all. Or perhaps Christopher’s death had made everyone aware of him. Nonetheless, he had a feeling of precarious nullity: the place where his brother had died was no longer the place where his brother had died, and Kari Butters indicated a world that had once been his life and yet now he hardly recognised it.
When he reached the house and found Heather there, he embraced her with an urgency that he saw startled her.
That night he lay naked beside her, and he recalled that she had never answered his questions about Christopher’s accident, but he also hated to be holding any secret from her. Having begun this examination of Christopher’s accident he felt himself in the midst of a betrayal that he could hardly afford when without her he might dissipate, a phantom of smoke, an odour of tyre rubber.
On the interstate the next day he passed signs and exits, fields and woods that should have been perfectly familiar from the day before and yet much of it appeared strange and newborn. Then, in Coil he had to stop and think for several minutes to recall where to find the police station.
Like the high school, like the library, the police station had not changed: an almost windowless beige brick building, its function named across the front in aluminum letters. He had entered it only once before, years ago, on a grade school field trip led by a teacher named Mrs Hose – with a hair out her nose, went the playground chant. The children were fingerprinted onto souvenir cards, and they peered into a holding cell. He had been disappointed that it had no steel bars, only pink walls. Pink, said their guide, a woman who normally sat at the reception desk, was soothing.
He wasn’t sure that it wasn’t the same woman, now much older, who sat at a desk by the door and nodded and darted glances at him while he explained his purpose. The accident report that he wanted was very old, she said, and it wouldn’t be here but at a document-holding facility maintained by the county. She drew a map on the backside of an ‘Emergency Preparedness’ brochure, lining roads and highways atop a bulleted list of first-aid items.
Her route took him through the intersection where Christopher had died and onward between two silvered lakes under a vast cream sky, through cow fields, and along the edge of a regional airport where prop airplanes came down and went up with dragonfly noises, to a warehouse with a bank of offices stretched along the front. Its gutters sagged and the appliqué window tints had bubbled. A receptionist sent him to a heavy, balding, moustached, cubicled man in beige pants and a mauve shirt who listened to what Ellis wanted, spent a few minutes peering into an old, DOS-based program on his computer, wrote down a number, said, ‘Please wait here,’ and went away.
Ellis studied a photograph on the desk – two fat children grinned before a pull-down backdrop of washed-out blue – until he wanted to smash it. The man returned with a manila folder. He said that he could xerox the text of the report for ten cents a page, but the photos would have to be sent to the photo lab for prints, which would take several days.
He went away to copy the report, and Ellis sat with the stack of photos – color glossy 4x6s. Minutes passed while he sat not looking at the photos, thinking only of putting them aside, standing and leaving.
Then without any conscious prompting his attention settled onto them. The first photo, mostly black, showed a view straight down at an asphalt road surface with someone’s black shoe – probably the photographer’s – gleaming in the corner, and he could not tell if the photo was taken in error or if it was supposed to show something on the road that could not be seen, a tyre mark, perhaps. The second photo offered only more black and a double yellow lane line crossing it diagonally. In the third photo shapes could be made out – a lamp post, a portion of a parked police cruiser, and in the middle distance a burned vehicle bellied on the street, an overhead light reflecting weakly from the patches of unburned paint on its front end. Between the burned car and the camera lay a blanket-covered shape that was, almost certainly, Christopher, and Ellis experienced a surge of feeling that he had not prepared for. A ferocious hot pain. He set the photos aside. He had not taken them up again when the fat man returned with his copy of the report. Ellis gave him a cheque and asked to have the photos mailed to his apartment’s address.
He had not been to his apartment since the day after the accident with James Dell. The silent grandfather clock, the shelves of books – everything here held a layer of dust, which obscurely pleased him, and he tried to disturb it as little as possible. He sorted the mail heaped under the mail slot – junk mail, magazines, catalogues, bills, overdue notices – and when he found the photos he opened the envelope quickly, to pre-empt hesitation, and turned through the images. The pain that had caught him the first time he had looked at them did not resume. Christopher’s body was visible in just three photos and was never the centre of focus, only a thing under a blanket in the middle distance. Ellis looked at it calmly. Why? He didn’t know. Was this how he should have felt when he first saw the photo? Or had the feeling before been the true feeling?
The evidence in the photos seemed generally as he had expected – short tyre marks left by the airlane, a point of impact indicated by a spill of fluid and glass in the middle of the intersection, two cars standing at their points of rest, police and fire vehicles scattered around the periphery, everything muddled by the surrounding murk of night. Strange to see how long ago it all appeared – the boxy cars, the men with shaggy hair and moustaches, a sign in the background offering a gallon of gasoline for less than a dollar. It had been an Amoco station – so, he and Heather had both been wrong. He went back and forth through the photos, thinking, If you look long enough you will see something new. He didn’t; but when he finally set the photos down, the objects of his apartment appeared strange, as if their dirt and wear had been caused by someone else.
Working between the photos, the police report and the measurements he’d made at the intersection, he built a diagram of the scene in his computer. He drew dimensionally correct icons to represent the cars at their points of rest, then he studied the damage on each vehicle and the tyre marks on the roadway to estimate their orientations as they collided and set the icons at the point of impact and at maximum intrusion with a couple of inches added to account for restitution – his brother’s airlane striking the left rear-quarter panel area of the other vehicle at a little less than ninety degrees, the result of both vehicles swerving too late.
When he finished, the diagram showed an overhead view of the lane lines, the kerbs, the poles at the corners, the two cars at the instant of impact and the positions where they had come to rest. This was, in a sense, the place where Christopher had died.
He copied the scene diagram into a specialised accident reconstruction program called PC-Crash – when he started working with Boggs he had thought a lot of jokes would come of the name, but it had only become part of the background: chair, calculator, email, PC-Crash. Within the program he created representations of the two cars that included suspension characteristics and passenger weights – he tried for a minute to remember what Christopher’s weight might have been, but finally settled for using a published statistical average. He set the simulated vehicles onto the icons at the point of impact, adjusted their velocities, steering angles, brake factors and restitution. Then he ran the analysis and watched as they spun away from the impact toward the rest positions. The airlane overshot its mark by a dozen feet, while the other vehicle didn’t go far enough and ended up facing the wrong way. He began to make adjustments. Velocity. Steering angles. Brake factors. Restitution factors. Small changes sometimes resulted in large effects in post-impact motion, but after a couple of hours he had refined the model so that the vehicles spun away from the point of impact, scrubbed speed off as they went round and rocked to a stop exactly on the icons where he had marked the rest positions.
He ran the model a few times, and the accident enacted itself again and again in shifting pixels, perfectly silent. The computer offered that at impact Christopher’s car had been travelling at 42.3 mph; the other car at 49.1 mph. By hand Ellis calculated his brother’s initial velocity before he had begun laying down tyre marks, and came up with 46 mph, give or take a couple of mph, a speed not unexpected on that road, a speed that might even be considered cautious, since Ellis had observed many vehicles breezing through at around 60 mph. Perhaps Christopher had slowed while he was involved with some distraction. But one might formulate endless speculations.
He had no evidence whatsoever as to whether Christopher had entered the intersection under a green, yellow or red light. Witnesses often provided the only available evidence about light timing, and here the witness statements recorded in the police report, from the occupants of vehicles that had been approaching the intersection, were all against Christopher. The report mentioned that Heather had been at the scene at the time of the accident and described her injuries, but it didn’t include any witness testimony from her.
He tried to think, what had he gained from this analysis?
Nothing presented itself. This sort of analysis was needed to make a credible presentation in a courtroom, but he probably could have estimated the results to within a few mph beforehand.
Could Boggs have seen something in this that he had missed?
He turned through the photos again. It seemed perhaps the airlane had come to a stop a few feet further off the kerb than he had represented it in his scene diagram. He moved the point of rest in PC-Crash and began readjusting parameters. It took him an hour to clean up the simulation again, but in the end it only made a half an mph of difference.
He went through the photos yet again, and again, until although his eyes focused on the images he seemed not to see anything, and he was tempted to think that by memorising them completely he might forget them.
He returned to the house. He was lying flat on the floor when he heard Heather’s car in the drive. Seeing him, she started, then laughed. ‘You’re all right?’ She passed through the room, her steps jarring faintly through the floor into his skull. After a few minutes she returned, barefoot – he couldn’t see her feet but knew by the sound.
‘Can you get up?’
‘It’s all right,’ he said.
‘I find you like this,’ she said, ‘and I worry that you’ve been on the floor all afternoon.’
‘It’s only been a moment,’ he said. ‘It’s not uncomfortable.’ Sun through a window beat warmly on his foot and ankle. He monitored the effort of the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. ‘It’s a very nice floor,’ he offered.
She frowned, but sat cross-legged beside him.
He felt his heaviness pressing him to the floor and, in a way gratifying to observe, it held him here and his weight implied his substance, his existence.
He pushed himself up – surprising how little effort it took – and put his head in her lap. She stroked the hair at his temples. ‘You’re OK,’ she said, in a tone that didn’t seem to seek an immediate response. He closed his eyes and lay feeling his weight and her fingers and thinking to himself that he loved her. And, he didn’t quite trust her. He wanted to ask her about that, but the words too were dense and did not like to rise.
The next step would be to go to see his father, but he hesitated.
He made coffee and watched the arabesque of the milk and its subsequent slow diffusion. He put ice in a glass of water and grew lost in the transmutation of solid into liquid. Everything worked this way, one thing always becoming another, powered by entropy. In the nights when he rose to pace the house it contained a faint, nameless smell that Boggs must have carried on his clothes, because at times it sucker-punched Ellis, forcing memories of awful vividness. And despite a general sense of slowness, whenever he looked at a clock minutes seemed to have passed with startling speed.
‘My brother -’ From time to time those two words came of themselves into his mind, the beginning of a sentence or thought that went no further. Sometimes it felt like a message delivered incompletely, sometimes it felt like a failure in himself, and sometimes he seemed to be thinking about Christopher only to realise that the image he had in his mind was of Boggs. And he still saw the form of James Dell strike the windshield and press into it and saw, or imagined – because he knew that he had shut his eyes – the glass flex and the cracks form and run to all directions like a growth of shining crystals.
Heather asked what kind of jobs he was looking at. Engineering, he said, the only field he had qualifications in. ‘Accident reconstruction?’ He said no. They ate dinners with the television on, so that the quiet would be less conspicuous.
As far as he knew, his father still had Christopher’s airlane. To see it he would need to see his father, and he didn’t want to see his father.
In the mornings he woke before her, but waited, listening to her slow breath. Eventually she pulled up her legs and curled her face down toward them, as if in a last effort to gather into sleep and fend off the day. Then she stretched. He rolled over and moved to hold her a minute before she slipped out of bed. He made coffee and put on a kettle of water for her tea while she showered. He stirred milk into her tea and handed it to her while she ate a bowl of cereal. He asked about what she would do that day. As she finished a bowl of cereal, her spoon knocked noisily against the bottom of the bowl. She carried her bowl to the sink. She moved toward the front door, efficiently gathering her things along the way. He watched her go with a knife working inside himself.
Heather had given him a cellphone, so that she could reach him, and he had had his old number reassigned to it. It surprised him every time it rang.
‘I’m having a bad time,’ said Mrs Dell. ‘I don’t want to bother you. But I thought it might help to talk.’
He went to visit. Although Mrs Dell’s house stood directly beside an industrial-looking railway embankment that crossed the road on a concrete bridge, her neighbourhood was filled with pleasant little houses on large lawns. Mrs Dell’s was a yellow house with green shutters behind tall trees and several flower beds – a patch of hostas under a blue spruce, towering sunflowers near the road, clusters of roses and others around the house. The rubber mat at the front door said ‘Welcome’, and a brass plaque attached to the door frame said ‘Solicitors will be composted’. He rang, and she opened the door squinting into the sun glare and smiling with the corners of her lips. She appeared puffy under the eyes. But she had her hair neatly in place and wore pants, blouse and vest in matched patterns of white, grey, and black. She led him into a pink sitting room shadowed and crowded with photos and knick-knacks, set him on an overstuffed love seat, and sat across from him on the front edge of a high-backed wooden rocking chair, leaning with her elbows on her thighs. She began to say something, then laughed, looked away, began again. ‘This is silly. I shouldn’t have dragged you here.’
He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know you were a gardener.’
‘Only a few flowers.’ She looked at the window. ‘The hostas have a slug problem. The thing to do about slugs is to put out pans of beer, and they will drown themselves.’
‘My mom liked flowers,’ Ellis said. ‘But when I was growing up the entire lawn around our house was covered with concrete.’
‘A city?’
‘Small town, a sort of semi-rural place. Dad worked for a concrete contractor.’
‘He paved your yard?’ She looked shocked.
‘Dad never could get the screws in his head all tightened down. Once I went outside and found a gas-pump nozzle stuck in the gas tank of his car, hose hanging down. He’d forgotten to take it out at the gas station and just drove away. It might have been in there for days if I hadn’t pointed it out.’
She sat blinking, as if trying to remember if she had ever done such a thing.
Ellis said, ‘When I told him about it, he said, “I thought something sounded funny.”’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘we all have our quirks.’ She twisted a foot against the carpet. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Ellis refused. She nodded. ‘I should be glad he’s gone, really. He met a woman who throws pottery.’ She glanced around. ‘Well, maybe he’s known her for a while. She makes it, I mean. The pottery. Her hands are ugly things.’ She smiled as if for a camera. ‘Oh, it’s true he never totally lived here. Maybe he told you that. He had his own place, but he stayed here. He’d come here crying like a baby, and I’d take care of him. A lot of drama. Eventually, he’d leave, then a couple of days later he’d come back. He didn’t have anyone else to take care of him. Maybe now the potter is taking care of him.’ She shrugged. ‘Do you understand? I thought you might understand, somehow.’ She nodded her rocking chair. ‘Why did he do this, now? What’s wrong with him? How can I help him? I thought maybe – He was very moved by your visit. He didn’t have many friends.’
‘I don’t really have any insight -’
‘He often hides what’s in his heart. But there was a connection between you, wasn’t there?’
Ellis shook his head.
She stood and made little fluttering gestures. She said, ‘Should I give up hope?’
Ellis didn’t dare say a thing.
‘Shouldn’t I?’ she said. ‘But if I could, wouldn’t I have years ago?’
‘Maybe a little time apart from him will help,’ Ellis said, then regretted having said it. For a time he watched her as she paced. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘He’s old now, of course,’ she said, ‘but he was a good-looking young man.’ She retrieved a photo from the clutter on a shelf. ‘That’s him with his brother,’ she said. ‘His brother died several years ago of a stroke, unfortunately.’ Two young men, probably in their twenties, stood holding each other around the shoulders and lifting champagne glasses, wearing matching black suits and ties, one with a moustache and the other O-ing his mouth as if singing. Either one could have been a plausible younger version of James Dell. Ellis hazarded, ‘He’s the one singing?’
Mrs Dell sat again in her rocking chair and gazed at the ceiling. ‘He hated singing.’
Ellis wasn’t sure how that answered the question. He didn’t ask. It seemed he might only, somehow, grow even more confused, and he didn’t know if he could bear that. At the top of the window he saw a long series of coal cars creeping silently by on the railway embankment.
When he stood, she stood, and he stepped forward and awkwardly accepted her embrace. Returning to the minivan he saw, under the blue spruce, two pans of standing beer. He stopped at a gas station, then steered for the interstate. The sun made a white smear in a silver-grey sky. He passed over a stretch of roadway dark and shining with wet, but he saw no rain. The exit ramp lifted the minivan upward as if to launch it into the sky. He would see his father.
Because until now he had avoided it, he went first to the old house. The white siding had been replaced with pale blue and – absurdly, he thought – a wagon wheel and ox yoke had been nailed to the wall on either side of the front door for decorative effect. The TV antenna that he had climbed no longer existed. Grass, shaggy and weedy, had replaced the concrete lawn. A pair of maples he had never seen before reached up twenty-five feet or more. The driveway lay empty, and he could see nothing in the windows. Strange to think of strangers living here, but his family hadn’t been the first to live here, either.
He stood out of the minivan, crouched on the kerb, put a hand in the lawn. Surely, he thought, remnants remained here – paint under the paint, holes patched in the drywall, scratches in the floors, fragments of broken concrete buried in the lawn – by which a former life could be reconstructed. As he crouched with his hand pressed to the grass, watching the house, it seemed his parents might walk out, or Heather, or Christopher, or himself, now, or now, or now.
He stood and brushed the clinging grass from his hand and saw that the impress of the grass remained in the skin. He walked to the park, which lay nearer than it seemed in his memory. The swings had been taken out and unmarked turf lay where the scalloped places under them had been. In the intersection moved traffic. Blue pickup. Silver coupé. Yellow school bus. A green convertible – not Boggs’s.
As he walked back to the house no one was around, except in the vehicles on the road, and he felt as if moving on foot made him strange and atavistic. From the minivan he watched the house a while longer, then turned the ignition.
His father’s house lay a dozen miles to the west, and Ellis drove slowly that way, following first along a river, then down a long straight two-lane interrupted now and again by stop signs at the intersections of narrow dirt roads spanning off to perhaps a house, a farmer’s field access, a fishing pond, a patch of private hunting preserve. After a signpost indicating the county line, the roadway became an assemblage of patched cracks and potholes that set the minivan’s panels and joints rattling in bright percussion and the steering wheel shaking in his hands. Weeds flourished to the edge of the asphalt and infiltrated its cracks. He passed ragged houses with missing roof shingles, listing into their foundations, wood trim rotting, lawns decorated with tyres and broken concrete. In front of one house a tall woman with a sledgehammer laboured to destroy something on the ground.
He turned onto a dirt-and-gravel road that rolled below the van more smoothly than had the patched asphalt. On either side lay open fields, but the road was lined with oaks and maples that reached over the road so that he seemed to be passing down an arbour. Dust pulled up off the road accumulated on the rear window in a brown fungous pattern. Tunnelling under glinting leaves with the tyres murmuring on the gravel, he felt he would be content to drive on and on and on this way and never arrive.
He slowed approaching the driveway, wallowed up to it, turned in.
The solitary object of any size on the horizon was the house, a two-storey clapboard farmhouse, grey neglect gripping its edges. When he stopped at the end of the drive he saw behind the house a long, metal-roofed shed and, on open ground a little further away, a solitary white toilet. Past the toilet lay only open field, ploughed into parallel furrows and abandoned to low weeds. In the distance ran a trace of fence and low green brush along it, demarcating the next field. The land fell gradually toward the line of the fence and rose again on the other side. Where the land appeared to stop, the sky began with a ridge of clouds the colour of used motor oil.
He stood out of the minivan and kicked through untended grass to the front porch – a pair of naked two-by-fours held up one corner of the porch roof, and missing posts gap-toothed the surrounding rail. Here and there on the floorboards stood empty beer bottles, a sprawling water-damaged phone book, a half of a Clorox bottle filled with rusting nails.
When he put his fist to the door, no one answered. His minivan was the only vehicle in the driveway. He sat on the porch steps to wait.
He destroyed without energy or malice the first half-dozen mosquitoes that came to him, then gave up and let them have what they wanted. Gnats swarmed in clouds over the grass. He closed his eyes, rested his head on his arms.
He woke with a jerk as a long Oldsmobile drew up. It parked behind the minivan, and his father emerged: his father with a paunch, shoulders fallen, bagged under the eyes, hair receded and feral, but unmistakably his father, with his father’s large hands and his high cheekbones grown even more prominent, the staring dark eyes a little watery. He wore a button-down shirt of startling white. He crossed half the distance from the car, stopped in the grass, and said, ‘Is that you?’ He raised a hand and pointed at Ellis, as if to clarify.
Ellis felt confused by the question which, in its literal sense, seemed to allow no negative answer. He stood and opened his hands. He said, ‘I need to see the car, Dad.’
His father came forward with a tight smile, staring. Small sharp wrinkles rayed from under the lobes of his ears. His arms, above the big hands, were thinner than Ellis remembered. ‘Boy,’ he said. ‘A surprise.’ He twitched and stepped back and looked around the yard. He laughed. ‘Let me get you a beer.’
His father let him in and passed into the kitchen while Ellis waited in a dark living room where, as his eyes adjusted, the furnishings materialised slowly and silently in their places. Heavy curtains were pulled, but a vertical slat of light penetrated and illuminated spiralling dust. An unnerving sense of familiarity seized and held him for some seconds before he understood that these furnishings, although in a new context and new arrangement, were known to him: he had grown up with these chairs, these end tables, this sofa, this coffee table, this bookshelf, this wall mirror with the thick carved frame, its silver now spotting and browning, holding a distorted version of himself – his aged self examining a mirror where his younger self had once examined his younger self.
The sofa and chairs, all in their original upholstery, were dirty, sagging, blackened along the front edges of the cushions and arms. Scratches and stains marked the coffee table. One of the shelves of the low bookcase had been replaced with a plank of particle board that sagged alarmingly under a pair of pickle jars filled with coins.
His father gave him a bottle of beer and Ellis said, ‘You’ve kept everything.’
His father glanced around. ‘It’s a little old, I guess, but nothing wrong with it.’ As if to demonstrate functionality, he sat in one of the armchairs.
‘Have you seen a tall bearded man here?’ Ellis asked – the same question that he had put to any number of cashiers and clerks, and asking it again seemed to frame him once more into that long pursuit. As if Boggs had arranged things so that he would be pursuing him all the rest of his life. ‘Have you?’ he asked.
‘My son died in that car,’ his father said.
Ellis shook his head. ‘He didn’t die in that car. He climbed out and got himself burned and died in the street. And you had two sons. You might say, “One of my sons died.”’
‘Tell me something,’ his father said, staring. ‘Of your life.’
‘Tell me about the big bearded guy. I know he was here. I know he looked at the car.’
His father didn’t answer.
Ellis looked at the furniture again and hated it, hated the mindless, numb inertia that kept it here. ‘Did he tell you who his wife was?’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I need to see the car.’
‘Why?’
Ellis stood over the coffee table and vaguely tried to recall which of its nicks and scratches had been there when he last saw it. ‘That’s a reasonable question, but it would require a lot of background, and it doesn’t really matter. I have a suspicion. That’s what it amounts to.’
‘You mean, to explain you’d have to tell me something about your life.’
He reluctantly met his father’s gaze. The pouches below his father’s eyes sagged as if they stored coins.
‘Well, your friend was here,’ his father said. ‘He talked for quite a while. Friendly guy. He did, in fact, tell me who he was married to. Had some interesting ideas about this and that. A little full of himself. I showed him the car. He wouldn’t tell me much about you, though.’
‘Can I look at the car?’
A fly noised a circle somewhere overhead. His father shifted and drank. ‘I ran into someone who knew Heather’s dad the other day, at Pep Boys. I was buying lifters for my trunk lid. This guy said Heather’s husband is dead. Hit by a car. Is that true?’
‘It is. Can I look at the airlane?’
When his father only stared, Ellis turned and went to the window and pulled the shade aside. He had to keep a grip on his anxiety and impatience. He felt he might begin to scream. But he sipped his beer.
His father said vaguely, ‘It’s funny.’
Ellis looked at him.
‘You can look at the car if you’ll do something for me. Two things.’
Ellis waited.
‘Tell me something about yourself. And then listen while I tell you something.’ A meekness shaded his father’s stare.
‘All right,’ Ellis said. ‘Fine.’
A quiet.
‘Tell you something?’
‘Please.’
Without intention, Ellis sat. The feel of the chair under himself was familiar. ‘I hated my brother.’
‘You didn’t really hate him,’ his father said. He pulled at the sleeve of his strangely white shirt.
‘I did.’
‘Christopher was in a bad position, between myself and his mother, sent back and forth, never allowed to settle and get comfortable with anyone or learn to trust anyone. Maybe he wasn’t your friend, but he was your brother. You looked up to him, you envied him, you wanted him to give more of himself to you than he did, and that angered you. But you didn’t hate him. If you think so, it’s an idea you’ve developed since then, and it’s my fault. I can see it’s my fault.’
‘You’re constructing fantasies and blaming yourself for them. I hated him because he was a jerk.’
‘I didn’t understand what I was doing to your relationship with him. I rarely understand what I’m doing, I guess.’
‘You have no idea how I felt, Dad.’ Ellis was angry with himself for allowing a conversation he had wanted to avoid. He looked at his father’s receded hair, tendrilling and floating a little up and down as he drank his beer. Was this truly his father? His father, certainly, but transformed by years, and so was this in any meaningful way the man that he had grown up with? ‘I’m living with Heather,’ he said. ‘I’ve been involved with her for some time, since before Boggs died. He killed himself. He stepped into moving highway traffic right in front of me.’
‘Ah,’ his father said.
Ellis straightened and remembered straightening exactly this way in the same chair long ago.
‘I’ll tell you this,’ his father said. ‘I love you.’ He examined his shirtsleeve in silence. ‘But I realise I’ve never been able to properly manage that emotion.’ Silence. ‘You were easy to love and Christopher was hard to love, and maybe that was the problem – I overcompensated. I don’t know. Some years back, I had a girlfriend, a waitress with three kids. I liked her a lot, I was fond of her kids. One day she asked if I would pick up the youngest, a boy, from day care and drop him off at a friend’s where he would stay a couple more hours until she got off her shift at the restaurant. So I did. Picked up the boy, drove him to the friend’s house, nudged him in the door. I was backing out of the driveway when a woman came charging out of the house, yelling. Took me a while to figure out what had set her off. What it was was, I had brought the wrong kid. To look at him, it was perfectly obvious, and I knew the kid well enough, there was no excuse for it. So I took this boy back to the day care, where everybody had been going bonkers – police, a fire truck, my waitress girlfriend and other people, all running around, yelling at each other. My girlfriend’s boy, feeling guilty that he’d missed his ride, had hidden in a closet, under a pile of blankets, and it took a while to find him. And the parents of the boy I had taken were screaming at anyone who stood still to listen. They let me have it. My girlfriend was practically having seizures. A mess. I apologised of course, but that was it, I never saw her again. I thought about it a lot, and I realised that I just never learned how to do anything properly. I can’t even see things properly. I miss the obvious. It’s sabotaged my life.’
Ellis waited. When he moved his foot a board creaked and it sounded explosive. He felt sad and heavy and weary and impatient and indifferent – he had heard from his father a number of similar stories with the same conclusion, and nothing ever came of it, no change of temperament or behaviour. The most surprising part of this one was that his father had managed to find a girlfriend, if only briefly. In the kitchen the compressor in the refrigerator kicked on and whirred. His father finished his beer, stared at him for a full minute, then stood and led him outside and around the house to the shed where he turned a key in the lock and slid the door aside. It moved with a sound of corroded steel bearings and revealed a space filled high and wall to wall with dusty and haphazardly stacked objects, many of them familiar – the brass coat rack, the child-sized desk, the crate of board games, the lamp made out of driftwood, the iron headboard, the steamer trunk painted green. His father heaved out two full garbage bags and revealed the hood of the airlane, standing at the centre of the clutter like an icon in a shrine.
The two of them stepped over a box of slot-car tracks and squeezed past a cupboard that Ellis recognised from the old kitchen. Leaning into the trunk of the airlane, his father grunting through his nose, they pushed it into the daylight. The damaged chassis caused it to move on an arc to the right, so that when they stopped it pointed toward the toilet standing at the verge of the open fields, and Ellis realised that the toilet, too, he knew. ‘You took the toilet.’
‘The bank got the house,’ his father said, ‘so I took out everything. Took the hot-water tank. Would have taken the furnace, but it wouldn’t fit through the doorway, and I didn’t have time to rip out the door frame.’
‘You have our old hot-water tank?’
‘Started leaking a while back. It’s in the shed there somewhere. Might be useful some day.’
‘How?’
‘Could need a part out of it.’
‘Why is the toilet out there?’
‘Weather won’t hurt a toilet. Ceramic. Washes right off.’
‘You’ve lost your mind,’ Ellis said, and his father smiled.
Dust on the car’s upper surfaces had been disturbed here and there by the brushing and pressing of hands – presumably from Boggs’s visit. Wires spilled from the broken headlamp openings. The wheels were overtaken by rust, and the tyres were flat and cracked. Looking at the damage across the front he could see already that the estimate of the angle of impact that he had used in the PC-Crash simulation had been off by a few degrees, although it seemed unlikely to make much difference. The airlane nameplate was missing from the left front fender.
He retrieved a pen, notepad and three disposable cameras from the minivan, and he borrowed an old, worn retractable tape measure from his father; he could not recall if it was the same tape measure that they had had when he was a boy. He would have preferred to have several tape measures to provide measurements relative to one another, but his father only had the one. He found just inside the shed door a sack of wooden golf tees – he’d never known his father to play golf, but he didn’t ask – and used them to mark points in the grass around the car and measured straight lines between them.
He followed the same protocol that he and Boggs had developed over the years. He checked and noted vehicle make, model, year, ID number, wheel and tyre sizes, transmission type, brake type, overall width, overall height, overall length, axle positions, tyre conditions, brake-pad wear. At every six inches across the front end he measured depth of crush relative to the rear axle position, first at bumper level, and then again at hood line. The air was ripe with humidity, and as he made notes sweat fell on the page and glistened there in wet blisters. His father stood watching, then went to the toilet and sat facing the open fields, elbows hitched up a little as if he might giddy-up the commode into the distance.
Ellis stood fussing with one of the cameras until he realised that he was hesitating, unsure he wanted photos of this car. He circled, taking photos from each side and each corner, from low and high, then moved in and snapped close-ups of the wheels, licence plates, vehicle ID number, the place where the airlane nameplate should have been, broken headlamps and windows, then focused on the damaged area at the front and took photo after photo at every angle, nearer and further, with and without measuring tape for scale. A gust of wind ruffled his notes and made the trees along the road silvery and flickering. The clouds on the western horizon were closing in, black, rigged with claws of vapour. He tried the driver’s door but it would not budge, so he opened the passenger door and slid over to the driver’s side – he had to cram himself, thighs nudging the steering wheel, knees into the dash. He sat gripping the steering wheel. Then he took up his pad and noted the mileage, the fuel level and that the gear shift was in neutral. The dash appeared largely undamaged, though now riven with age cracks. He twisted himself down under the steering wheel to look at the foot pedals – wear of use looked normal. Remembering the headlamp bulbs, and wondering if they were on at the time of the collision, he climbed out but couldn’t find either of them. They might have been lost in the collision, or put into police storage somewhere, or possibly Boggs had taken them. He drew out the driver’s seat belt and examined its length and found a transfer marking where the belt had locked and pulled a little plastic off the D-ring during the impact. He took a photo of it, leaned across the front seat and pulled out the passenger belt, and it also bore a transfer mark.
A transfer mark on the passenger-side belt.
Ellis stared at it for a long while, then let the belt run back on its retractor and stood out of the car. His hands had picked up a layer of grime from the car, and he saw it in great detail – the grey thickest on the pads of his fingers, thinner down through the joints and onto the palm.
A transfer mark on the passenger-side belt.
He crawled in again, pulled out the passenger belt and examined the mark and then looked away and then re-examined the mark: a small black line across the width of the webbing, almost as if drawn there with a crayon. But it matched the colour of the D-ring, and when he pulled the belt away from the D-ring the impress of the belt into the plastic could be seen there. He photographed both – transfer mark, D-ring.
‘Got to put the car back before the rain,’ his father said behind him.
‘A minute.’
Sometimes load markings could also be found on the belt latch plate, but here he could not see one on the driver’s side, and on the passenger side he could only see a very faint marking that might have been a manufacturing effect. Inconclusive. He crawled into the back seat, which had only lap belts – no D-rings, and therefore no possibility of transfer marks. He checked the latch plates, but there were no indications of loading. He returned to the front passenger-side belt and looked at the transfer mark there one more time, felt its texture, turned it in the light. He let the retractor take the belt back. He stood out of the car. ‘Dad,’ he said.
Side by side they put hands on the damaged sheet metal and leaning and straining they rolled the car back. His father slid the shed door shut and set the lock, then started toward the toilet. He said, without looking around, ‘I’m sorry that your friend is dead. I liked him.’
‘I’m going to get going.’
‘Find what you wanted?’
Ellis didn’t answer. His father turned to look. ‘I need to think,’ Ellis said.
‘You always did.’
They watched the weed-infested fields and the sky, which darkened further, the reaching, dark cloud masses now advancing with visible speed. A wind pressed, died, then renewed violently. Ellis put his notes in a back pocket and stood hesitating. Odours rose of dust, manure, mud. His father sat unperturbed on his toilet. A piece of paperboard went by bouncing and spinning, and the wind took dust off the fields and streamed it through the air, making Ellis squint and blink. He wasn’t sure of what he was seeing until it had come halfway across the fields: the leading edge of the rain, perfectly defined, a curtain in the air, and below it the field turned black. The sight of this vast motion held Ellis until, although it seemed to be very slowly crawling over the open fields, the rain suddenly hit him with heavy cold droplets. A gust soaked the length of him. He squinted at his father – at times in the past he’d been convinced that the root problem of his life was that his father loved Christopher more than himself. But perhaps his father in his self-pity was right, and everything could be explained by errors of incompetence.
Then his father looked at him through the rain and howled, cheerfully, like an ape.
Startled, Ellis ran.
In the minivan, his father was visible through the windshield, radically distorted by the water moving on the glass, glowing in his white shirt. He remained atop the toilet and his white arm waved high in the air, like a captain committed to going down with the ship. Ellis waved, but his father almost certainly could not see the gesture. He backed the minivan to the road. The wipers flopped water aside but could barely keep up. The muddy gravel road spattered into the wheel wells. He drove slowly and watched the road and wanted to watch the gravel stones in the road, to watch each drop of water on the windshield – he did not want to think about the transfer mark on the passenger belt of his brother’s car and its meaning.
Abruptly he cleared the rain. Traffic moved densely on the interstate. Now the afternoon sun, which had stood over his right shoulder in the morning, stood again over his right shoulder. He powered the windows down and air entered clamorously.
Boggs would have seen the same thing. It meant that a second person had been in the car. Who?
He didn’t know that it had been Heather.
He followed the paired doors of a semi-trailer for miles and miles. At a certain distance from the rear of the trailer, he could glimpse the heavy-lidded eyes of the driver in the jittering side-view mirror.
The police report didn’t say anything about a second person in the car. Why would the second person have been covered up?
He discovered that he had passed his exit. To keep driving – to drive and drive and drive – seemed simple and enticing. World passing without consequence. But he took an exit ramp and turned back.
On the night of the accident he had assumed that Heather had been a passenger in Christopher’s car, until her father told him that she had been at the gas station.
If she had been driving -
The front seat of the airlane had been close against the steering wheel.
He manoeuvred through roads and turns, returning. He carried his notes and cameras into the house and went to the computer to pull up a reference website – the designed distance between the wheels of the 1970 Fairlane was within a half-inch of the distance that he had measured on the driver’s side of his brother’s car. That distance had not been altered by the collision: the dash had not been pushed back toward the seat. Rather, the seat had been slid forward, for a driver shorter than he was, or Christopher had been.
He looked through the police report again, for any suggestion of a second occupant. There was none. An officer that Ellis did not recognise had signed the report. It did note that Heather’s father had been first on the scene. Certainly he had been there, because Ellis had seen him. Perhaps he had not been able to author the report because his daughter was involved. But surely he had had input.
Ellis called the police station at Coil. A woman’s voice told him that the officer who had signed and filed the report had died several years ago, of a heart attack, only months after his retirement. The woman’s voice caught, and Ellis murmured condolences.
He took the police report and his notes and cameras to the minivan and put them into the glove compartment and locked it. Why did he feel so ungainly as he moved? As if the earth were teetering under him. He returned to the living room. He sat.
If other explanations existed for the evidence on the seat belts, those explanations did not rise to mind. Typically in such cases he would have talked to Boggs for a fresh perspective. Boggs had known all of this. He had seen the same evidence. What had led him to it? Something Heather said, perhaps. It would have been like him to decide to investigate some small contradiction in whatever she had told him about the accident. Or, just curiosity.
If she had been driving the car, why hadn’t she told him? The question was critical, and Ellis tried to focus on it. Of course she had held some of herself from sight; in the nature of their affair a lot had been obscured. Yet he thought he had understood her, essentially, if not entirely. Perhaps he had been wrong. What had he known of her relationship with Boggs? She’d said little about it. But he had not asked. She had said that her marriage was a mistake that she blamed on herself. And what had she meant by that? He had no idea. How, after all, had she come together with him? He had been someone other than Boggs, and he had desired her, and she had felt herself linked to him by – what?
Rain again, darkening the windows, thrumming on the roof, sloshing in the gutters. He watched a droplet work slowly down a windowpane, the shift of the light it held. He tried to think what he should do, of confronting Heather – an idea like a balloon at the end of a string, he pulled it toward himself, then it rose a short distance away again.
He sat in the living room until late, waiting, listening to the air conditioning turn itself off and on. The rain had stopped. The hour when Heather usually returned went by and in agitation he checked the windows whenever a car passed. Finally he went to the toilet, then lay down and curled on the hard tile of the bathroom floor.
Eventually he stood again and went upstairs to the bedroom. Startled, he stopped – a shape lay in the bed.
At the sound of his step she shifted a little. ‘Love,’ he said. ‘You’ve been here all this time?’ he asked. She was silent. ‘Where is your car?’
‘It broke down,’ she said. ‘The engine just stopped.’ Her hand, lying atop the bed sheets, opened and closed. ‘I got it towed, and then I was late and stressed. I couldn’t face school, not another day of it, so I took a taxi home. I thought you’d be here.’
He understood that she was frightened of him, and that she had been for some time now.
‘Where were you?’
‘I’ve been in Coil,’ he said.
That night he lay gathering a hatred of Boggs. He could not believe that Boggs had not envisioned this course of events.
He lay beside her until morning, then he said, ‘I have to show you something.’
Her station wagon was already repaired – an ignition coil replaced. They retrieved it, and then she drove. He was struck by the fact that she almost always preferred to drive. The route to the interstate through familiar end-to-end suburbs spanned past. Tuxedo shop. Liquor store. Laundromat. Starbucks. Church. Chiropractor. A build-your-own-teddy-bear shop. Jiffy Lube. Walgreens. Babies R Us. Bed Bath & Beyond. He had not ridden in the passenger seat of a car in a long time, and it felt unnatural and dangerous, travelling down the roadway without steering wheel or pedals, without control. Strip mall abutted strip mall to create a continuous path of commerce over the land. Heather wound up the engine and pushed into the interstate lanes. Ellis asked, ‘Do you still think about Christopher?’
‘Are we going to talk now?’ she asked. ‘Have a conversation?’
‘Do you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Do you think often of the accident?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I hate to think of it.’
‘So you just stopped?’
‘I’d say it’s something that I’ve learned.’
‘What do you remember?’
‘I don’t like to remember.’
‘Why have we never talked about this?’
‘There are a lot things that we haven’t talked about. Maybe you’ve noticed.’ She looked at him, her expression closed and ungiving.
‘Heather,’ he said, and hesitated, and the two syllables stood open, an empty vessel. They were the last spoken for several miles.
But then he asked, ‘Will you tell me what you remember about Christopher’s accident?’
‘Why?’
‘Heather – please.’
‘I walked from school to the gas station to buy a 7-Up and to call my dad for a ride. And I was standing in the parking lot when I heard the brakes and turned and saw one car slam into another.’ She spoke flatly. ‘There was an enormous explosion and a fire-ball. When it had settled down and my eyes readjusted, I saw that the car was Christopher’s. I ran to it. By the time I got there, he was already out, and he went to the other car.’ She stared ahead. ‘There were screams and it was hot and Christopher went into the car and came out with someone, and the fire was spreading and he went in, and the fire and smoke were everywhere, and he was trying to go in even further. He kept trying, and I was screaming at him to come out. Then he just stopped. I tried to pull him out. Someone dragged me away.’
‘Did you call your dad from the gas station?’
‘What?’
‘You said that was the reason you were at the gas station.’
‘I was waiting. I knew he wouldn’t be home yet.’
‘Did you buy the 7-Up?’
‘I guess so, yes. I remember the cold of it in my hand when the heat of the explosion pushed out over me.’
‘How long did it take you to recognise the airlane?’
‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘Where was Christopher when you first saw him?’
‘This is a strange conversation,’ she said.
‘Did anyone else get out of the airlane?’
‘Oh God. Ellis -’
‘Were there two people in the airlane?’
‘Did John tell you to ask these questions?’
‘Well, there were two people in the car at the time of the collision.’
‘Did John tell you that?’
‘I looked at the car.’
‘You think I was in there? That’s what John thought.’
Ellis said nothing.
‘I wasn’t,’ she said.
‘Who then?’
‘Christopher was alone.’
‘These things are never knowable to one hundred per cent certainty,’ Ellis said, ‘but the evidence is pretty clear. Someone sat in the driver’s seat and someone else sat in the passenger seat. Both wore seat belts. I think you were in the car. In fact, you were driving. And your dad manipulated the accident report.’
She pulled to the side of the road and stopped, tyres scraping on the gravel, and she bent forward and gasped.
‘Isn’t that right?’ he asked.
‘I watched from the gas station with a can of 7-Up in my hand. You have no idea how much you sound like John.’
It is over, he thought, this is the end. He breathed shallowly and she stared at the steering wheel and time passed.
‘Do you want me to drive?’ he asked.
She opened her door, stood out of the car. He thought she might walk away, but she circled the car, and he stood out and circled the car, and he began to drive.
A boy and an older man – presumably the boy’s father – huddled together over something in the lawn, a white-and-red cylinder with tailfins.
‘What are they doing?’
‘Water rocket.’
The father began to work a small hand pump.
‘No concrete,’ she observed.
‘You remember.’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you know the difference between a cheeseburger and a blow job?’
‘No.’
‘Then let’s go get lunch.’
She glanced at him, but her expression didn’t change. She said softly, ‘You were afraid of me.’
‘When’s the last time you were here?’ Ellis asked.
‘Before the accident.’
‘When?’
She sat looking at the house. ‘I met him here earlier that day, I think.’
‘You left with him in the airlane?’
In the lawn, the boy and his father stepped back, and in a shrill voice the boy shouted, ‘Ten! Nine! Eight!’ At zero, the rocket shot into the sky.
‘I don’t remember.’ She sighed. ‘That ox yoke is ridiculous.’
‘But you think you got out of his car at some point and went to the school and then went to the gas station and waited there for your dad to pick you up.’
Something crashed just above their heads, and Ellis threw his hands up. Heather screamed.
‘The rocket,’ Ellis said.
‘I think my heart really stopped.’
The boy and father came running, and the father took the rocket off the roof of the car, grinning and mouthing, ‘Sorry.’
‘But why would you go back to the school?’
‘I had friends in choir. Maybe I met one of them. I don’t know.’ The father and son crouched to prepare a second launch. They stepped back and counted down, but this time the rocket only lifted a foot or so before it flopped over, geysering.
Ellis drove. Again the road reduced to a cobble of asphalt patchwork. Again he took the dirt road under the trees. Turning in the driveway he said, ‘This is my father’s house.’ He stopped behind his father’s car. ‘The car is here.’
‘What car?’
‘Christopher’s. The airlane.’
‘No.’ She shook her head with a jerk. ‘Are you kidding?’
‘It’s here because my dad is completely crazy.’
They stood on the porch, and his father opened the screen door. He let the door slap into his shoulder and his gaze shifted between them. He seemed to be wearing the same clothes he’d worn the day before, with the same or an identical white shirt, clean and pressed.
‘Dad, this is Heather.’
‘I remember, of course.’
‘Hi, Mr Barstow. It’s nice to see you again.’
‘We need to see the car, Dad.’
‘Do you want to?’ his father asked Heather.
But she was staring past him. ‘Is that the same sofa? And chairs?’
His father reached and with awkward gentleness, with the fingertips of one hand, touched her on the shoulder. Then he turned. ‘I’ll get the key.’ He could be heard in the kitchen rattling jars and drawers. Ellis again looked over the living room’s wretched objects. Heather pushed a fist into the sofa. Then his father reappeared, holding the key in one cupped hand. He led the way toward the shed, but Heather veered off and stopped near the toilet and stood looking at the fields while Ellis and his father again slid open the shed doors, again slithered through the clutter to the rear of the vehicle, again strained to move the car on its rotten wheels into the sunlight.
Ellis then stood beside it, watching Heather. Blue sky topped the open fields, and there rose neither wind nor the sense of imminence that the weather had provided before.
Finally he crossed the open ground and asked her to come. He brought her to the passenger side and pulled out the seat belt and showed her the trace of plastic it had pulled off the D-ring, then asked her lean inside to see the matching impression in the plastic of the D-ring itself.
She looked and offered no comment.
Then he asked her to slide over into the driver’s seat. ‘How is the steering wheel?’ he asked. ‘The pedals? Are they too near? Too far?’
‘No.’
‘You see?’
She only sat. He didn’t know what to do now, and she said nothing.
After a minute he climbed into the passenger seat to sit beside her.
‘We used to fight in this car. Christopher did let me drive occasionally. For some reason he always wanted to fight when I was driving.’
‘What did you fight about?’
‘Which party to go to. Dumb things like that. Whose fault it was that we were lost. That was pretty common. We made long trips into the countryside until we had no idea where we were. One time I got out at a farm stand and the woman there referenced all these towns and roads I had never heard of, and eventually it came out that we’d gone almost two hundred miles and had actually crossed the state line.’
‘That seat is set for you. Maybe you were at the gas station earlier on the day of the accident and transposed the memory.’
‘I remember the heat of the explosion. I remember stumbling on the kerb as I ran.’
‘The collision would have thrown you forward, the belt would have held your torso, but your head would have snapped down, your arms and hands would have been thrown forward, your legs probably gone up into the dash, probably bruised. And maybe the next day you had bruising along the line of the belt. Maybe your neck hurt.’ They sat facing forward and gazing at the space where the windshield should have been, and it struck Ellis as a terrible arrangement for a conversation. But perfectly common. ‘There would have been a flash of light and heat through the broken windshield. The spin of the car throwing you into the door, the shrieking of the tyres, the lurching stop.’
‘I told John that I had nothing to say about it. I don’t.’
He stood out of the car and after a minute wandered to the house. From the kitchen he looked back through the window. She was still in the car. He found his father in the living room, slouching back in one of the chairs, eyes closed, lax, looking dead.
I hate him, Ellis thought.
But the thought passed; it wasn’t true. He didn’t even dislike his father. His father made him uncomfortable. He didn’t want to allow himself, however, to develop dislike or hate out of a resentment of discomfort, the proximate cause of which was his father.
‘You’re not dead,’ Ellis said.
His father’s eyes opened. ‘Don’t think so, but you never can tell.’ He lifted his head into an awkward angle. ‘Strange to see her again, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve been seeing her for a while.’
‘Great.’
‘You don’t know anything about it.’
‘What are you showing her?’
‘She says she wasn’t in the car.’
‘So?’
‘She was. She was driving.’
‘Really?’
‘Both the driver and passenger seats were occupied at the time of the accident, and the driver’s side is positioned for a person her size.’
His father’s eyelids lowered shut again. ‘It happened a long time ago.’
Silence.
‘I thought you would have more to say. Christopher was your favourite.’
Slack, dead-looking, his father said, ‘I love you.’
‘All right.’
‘You don’t believe me.’
‘All right. I believe you.’
‘I love you, and I know you know I love you. I guess that must be enough. You love her?’
Ellis turned away and came out of the house. Heather had wandered into the fields. He waited for her to turn, so that he could wave for her to come back, but she did not turn.
The furrowed soil crumbled underfoot. Low weeds snagged his shoes and cuffs. His lungs laboured to move the heavy, humid air, and he had the feeling that if he tried to shout to her the words would hit the air and fall to the ground. She stood motionless, looking away toward the line of the fence and the brush growing along it, arms hugging herself, posture tense. And what did he want from her? He only wanted an acknowledgement of the facts. A life without access to facts felt to him like a life without anchors.
Was this what Boggs had intended? To punish the two of them? Or to reveal a truth to a friend?
‘Heather,’ he said.
‘You whisper my name that way,’ she said, ‘and I feel as if I’ve embarrassed myself, like I’ve forgotten to wear pants.’
He laughed a little hysterically. She held a dandelion gone to seed, and she was picking it apart, letting the seeds fall down a languid, angled path. He circled to stand in front of her, downslope. By the fence – three strands of rusting wire sagging between greyed posts – a trickle of water gurgled between weeds.
‘John could have done it,’ she said. ‘He could have made a mark like that on the seat belt.’
‘Boggs?’
‘He would, too.’
Would he? Could he? Ellis hadn’t thought of such a thing. But he said, ‘No. It would have been extremely difficult.’
‘John could do anything he set himself to.’
‘He couldn’t just draw some crayon onto the belt. You saw the D-ring, the plastic had clearly transferred from the D-ring. There would be two ways to do it. One would be to somehow heat the D-ring to the point of melting and then pull the belt over it, and you’d have to experiment with the heat level and practise the movement of the belt to produce an effect that looked right – it would be hard. The other way to do it would be to pull the belt as hard as it would be pulled during a collision. But it’s not as if anyone has the arm strength to just reach in and do it. Extreme forces are involved. You’d need to create some mechanical device, an original design and fabrication. And then you’d have to bring it into the car and operate it and at the same time hide it from my dad. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘It was a used car when Christopher got it. It could have been in some other accident.’
‘The driver’s belt showed only one mark, and it would show two if it had been involved in two collisions.’
She cast down her shoulders. ‘What are we to each other?’ she asked. ‘I don’t even know.’
‘You don’t remember the accident at all?’
‘I remember it. I remember it just as I told you.’
‘You don’t have any doubt.’
‘It’s what I remember.’
‘But what do you believe?’
‘What do you want me to do, Ellis? What do you want me to believe? Tell me. I’ll try. That little black mark is the truth? I’ll believe it. Should I tell you that I remember it as you described, the seat belt on me, my limbs flying, all of that? Then everything would line up with the evidence and that would be that?’
‘All I know,’ he said, ‘is that when we worked our cases, we always discounted witness testimony. We set it aside entirely, if possible, and worked from the physical evidence. People will tell you they saw a car shoot a hundred feet into the air like a rocket and flip a dozen times end over end before coming down undamaged on its wheels – stuff that’s not remotely possible in the real world. The physical evidence is objective.’
‘Physical evidence,’ she said. Her tone might have been the same if she had been echoing the phrases of a gibbering lunatic.
‘Verifiable facts and analysable traces of events as they actually occurred, outside the subjective manipulation of memory.’
‘You think that I killed those people and your brother.’
‘I’m asking you what you remember. You really don’t have any doubt?’
She stepped a little distance from him. ‘It’s like you’re asking, The world ended yesterday, don’t you remember?’
‘All right,’ he said, ‘what do you want to do?’
She looked at the turned earth at their feet. He awaited the answer with fear.
She said, with exhaustion, ‘I just want to eat something.’
She drove them back into town – he had a feeling of hurtling down the road with insane speed yet watching it pass very slowly – to Devito’s, an Italian restaurant and pizzeria where his family had sometimes gone. It still stood in its place in the middle of the town’s single central block. The storefront windows to either side, however, showed only plywood. He saw no one he recognised at the old tables, which stood in an arrangement unchanged since he had eaten at them as a child, and he watched for one of the old waitresses – now in bifocals, short hair and gaudy lipstick. But the girl who came to the table was only a couple of years out of high school and nervous, touching her ear and trying to smile by straining her lips into a rictus. The tables and chairs and wood panelling and green-glass light fixtures were all just as they had been when he was young, when this place seemed fancy and sophisticated. But the salad bar now seemed classless, the water came in plastic cups, cheap silverware sat beside paper napkins. Down the centre of the ceiling ran a strip of fluorescent lights. It was merely a neighbourhood restaurant, more or less a dive.
They ate quietly.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘if we look at the photos, something will stir up in your mind.’
She shook her head.
‘Boggs said that if you look at the photos long enough, you can always see something new.’
‘Sounds like John.’
They were quiet.
‘You expect too much,’ she said.
It seemed to him, however, that all he ever did was to passively accept the rough world. He paid, and when he came outside she stood on the sidewalk, looking at the street as if a secret door might open there. It occurred to him that she could have fled, and she had waited. A couple of cars floated down the street, lamps glowing in the twilight. The row of buildings across from them stood dark, the windows boarded or hung with For Sale and For Lease signs. Across the railroad tracks and down the street, the True Value remained, the pharmacy, the grocery.
He had to force his thoughts slowly forward. ‘Will you drive through the intersection?’ he asked. ‘It might bring out some memory. Have you driven it since the accident? Since Christopher died?’
She stepped down the sidewalk.
He followed. Already she was opening the door of the station wagon. As he approached, the engine ignited, and before he pulled the passenger door closed behind him she began reversing. ‘Heather,’ he said. He watched her steer into traffic. ‘Heather.’ She took them west, out of town, the night-time road streaking under the headlamps. She turned and turned and soon they drove on unfamiliar roads where cars were scarce. A few houses stood far back from the road, deep in the murk, a window or two glowing. A massive green John Deere tractor tilted on the road shoulder, abandoned. She slowed for an intersection, and low branches groped past the stop sign toward the car.
He saw that they had circled. Coil lay ahead of them now. They passed an abandoned motel, a used car lot, a bar called the Best Place. As they heaved and thudded on potholes and patches, Heather leaned forward, right hand flexing.
Two-storey houses on festering lawns. A church fronted with a wide parking lot. A low bridge with concrete rails flaking and showing rebar. Most of it looked just as it had when he was a child, returning from the mall in the back seat of his mother’s car. They passed the high school. The road here ran with two lanes in either direction, sparsely trafficked. A Buick with red cellophane taped over a broken tail light slowed and turned without signalling.
‘How fast was Christopher’s car going before the crash?’ she asked. ‘Do you know?’
‘Forty-seven, forty-eight, around there.’
The lights of the intersection shone a quarter-mile ahead. He saw Heather settle the speedometer between 45 and 50 mph. At the intersection, the green light dropped to red. A little white Plymouth rolled to a stop in the right lane, but the left lay open. A couple hundred feet from the cross street she still held speed, and finally he understood. He could grab the steering wheel, but he could see nowhere safe to redirect the vehicle. To reach a foot over to the brake pedal he would need to remove his seat belt. He said, ‘Heather.’
‘I want to know.’
‘I didn’t mean this.’ Although at the same time, he wondered if something might be gained, a more authentic version of the experience.
‘I want to know,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to know?’
The car bellied into a low place, then rose into the inter section. He felt brightly calm, aware, a passenger, he could do nothing. He started to lift his hands to brace against the dash, but remembered the airbag that would explode from there and let his hands drop.
This accident felt different from the others, from the accident with James Dell, which had moved slowly before him while every detail caught him with surprise, and from the accident that killed Boggs, which came in an instant of distraction and finished even before he understood that it had begun. Here he felt no surprise and as he faced the oncoming event without surprise an awareness rose of how time might be subdivided, of his mind ranging forward as if all of it were preordained. And maybe it was – probably it could all be calculated already.
His left hand, thrown out, came awkwardly against Heather’s chest. A green Ford Explorer passed just before them, left to right, the driver peering at them through his side window, a large bald head with eyes tight, mouth tight, right hand risen as if to fend away, and in the window behind him a boy of seven or eight with brown bangs over his eyes, grimacing. Crossing in the opposite direction in the far kerbside lane moved a beige Saturn driven by a tall man, his head nearly into the ceiling, watching straight ahead, apparently oblivious, while in the passing lane came a red Chevy pickup. A horn sounded – the Explorer’s, although the Explorer had already safely passed by.
As they crossed the first lane he saw that they would miss the Saturn, but the Chevy pickup would be very close.
Headlights on the left, bright. Noise of the road under the tyres. Motion, shrieking, vehicles locked into their trajectories.
Heather had not touched the brakes, and in this she had it wrong: the driver of his brother’s car had braked. She looked straight ahead while he looked past her profile into the pickup’s headlights, incredibly near, as if in the car with them. Shrieking. The pickup braking, shrieking, how long had that noise existed? The gaping chromed grille of the pickup. Heather’s profile passed in front of the second headlight. He could not see the pickup’s driver, could see nothing past the lamps and the grille. The lamps passed behind the B-, then C-pillars, and the light thrown into the wagon flickered. Perhaps it would pass behind them, by an inch or two, he thought.
Then the horrendous clash of sheet metal on sheet metal in mutual forced distortion, and the wagon lurched right, and Ellis felt himself twisting, one shoulder biting into the seat belt while his chin slammed down into the other. An instant later the wagon was free of the Chevy, the noise of the collision ended, replaced by the scream of the tyres rubbing sideways and of chassis components biting into one another, the wagon spinning. His chin came up, and already he was being pulled in the other direction, toward the door. Lights streaked out horizontally. Objects moved across the windshield – a parked car, a lamp pole, the canopy of the gas station, the fence. His body hit the door while time sub-divided ever more finely, into a desert of sand, and then smaller yet, as if he might approach death with the assurance of never reaching it. He recalled once, at some event where they were all together, Boggs had asked a simple question about Christopher, and neither he nor Heather answered, and Boggs said, ‘When you get like this about it, I begin to wonder if he ever really existed at all.’ But he did exist, and now he didn’t, and that was what had always been incomprehensible, even if he was a jerk.
The station wagon lurched and heaved as it came into the kerb, and Ellis glimpsed a wheel, broken free, spinning into the air and away into the dark. The wagon’s yawing movement was stopped, but it continued to slide sideways, scraping bare metal over concrete. He could not bring his head around to see where they were going, saw only where they had come from, a spectacle of sparks streaming up in their trail. Heather had her eyes closed. Another impact pressed him hard against his door. Darkness shuddered up. He could not breathe and could not see. Everything rushed toward ending, and again the phrase my brother -
He touched something human with his left hand. Heather moaned. A network of cracks shone in the windshield. Beside him stood a white vehicle, only a few inches from his window, some enormous thing, a pickup or SUV. The station wagon had slapped sideways into it. He looked for his left hand and saw it clutching at the fabric of his own pants. ‘Heather,’ he said. He could not get out through his door, because of the vehicle beside it.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you open your door?’
‘I thought I would remember,’ she said. ‘I really thought I would. I was terrified that I would remember. But I didn’t. I don’t. Did you?’
Did he? Did he remember driving Christopher’s car into the intersection? No, he’d never driven Christopher’s car. No. He felt a lurch of nausea. But no. The driver’s seat of the airlane – he recalled – wasn’t set for his height. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’ He unbuckled his belt, leaned across her, opened her door. An excess of adrenalin made objects vibrate. ‘Can you climb out?’
She did. And he crawled over her seat, put his hands on the concrete and pulled his legs out. Slowly he stood. He examined his right arm where it had hit the door, but there was no blood, only dull pain. Heather looked fine. The vehicle that had stopped their movement was an empty Suburban. Ellis smelled faintly the acrid scent of gasoline, and he took Heather by the hand and led her away from it.
The Chevy pickup that had hit them stood on the road’s shoulder, and the driver emerged from it with a cellphone pressed to his head. A couple other cars had stopped. ‘Are you all right?’ someone called.
Ellis nodded.
He felt tremors passing through Heather. He sat with her on the kerb. ‘When the cops come,’ he said, ‘tell them that you just didn’t see the light.’
She turned to regard him.
‘You don’t have any idea if it was red or green or yellow,’ he said. ‘A lapse of attention. It happens all the time.’
‘I’ll never drive again,’ she said.
Ellis shook his head. ‘You can’t live in this country without driving.’ Traffic, working around the pickup, resumed its movements. The lights overhead changed. The air stank of scorched brake pads and smoked rubber.
The police released her late that evening. He drove a rental car; she fell asleep in the passenger seat. He passed the exit for her house and went on. For half an hour he fought exhaustion and drooping eyelids. Then the sense of fatigue passed and he grew alert, open. He stopped at 2 a.m. for gas in an island of fluorescent glow, crowded with vehicles and silent drivers. Heather didn’t wake. Interstate miles passed. She slept with her head slumped to her shoulder.
Dawn was marshalling when her shoulders and hands twitched, after which she was still for another ten minutes. Then she groaned and winced as she lifted her head. She blinked at the road. Ellis said nothing. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.
The eastern sky, in his mirror, lay awash in shades of pink and lilac. ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ he said. ‘Does it matter?’
Flat land streamed by. She said, ‘Pull over.’
‘Here?’ He let the car slow and stop on the shoulder. She looked decided: the muscles around her eyes relaxed, her lips set – a look that pushed him down like a hand on the head of a swimmer. She stood out and closed the door and walked away, a figure diminishing, then vanishing, under the blush of dawn light.
He watched the traffic and the road and the landscape – the road ran straight to disappearing in either direction and on either side the land opened, the trees a distant effect clutching the horizon, except, across the highway, a single old oak, like a thing that would be there forever. He went through everything again. Could he be wrong about Christopher’s accident? An error in multiplication, a detail missed in a photograph, a cop sliding seats around – it was possible. Could she be right? Could he have been in Christopher’s car? It was insane to think so. If that were true, anything might be true. But perhaps anything might be true.
He discovered that he was sweating and he ran down the windows, which alleviated the temperature only a little and brought into the car all the furious noise of the highway, the wheels beating on the asphalt and the trucks clanking and the air pushed before one vehicle and sucked behind another so that at times it howled as it was torn in two directions.
Not knowing what to do he waited. If she had said anything he would have had no hope – if she had said go on, if she had said goodbye, if she had flicked a hand in gesture, he would be without hope. But she had said nothing, and so he would wait.
A double-trailer truck went by, the air shuddering behind it. A series of silver sedans passed one after another like a beaded necklace dragged over the ground. Midday, he stood out of the car and went a little distance off the side of the road to pee. And then examined the roadside gravel, with greater and greater care, studied it stone by stone. But if traces of her steps were there, he could not see them.
Had Boggs foreseen all of this, or something like this? His gaze drifted to the oak across the highway, to its intricate, indifferent manner of occupying space. A cement truck passed, its barrel striped like a colossal peppermint candy. Had Christopher foreseen this? A lawless unreality hung like a purple fog at the limit of vision. How long should he wait? He thought of trying to follow her, as he had tried to follow Boggs. But Boggs had wanted him to follow. She did not. Yes? Or, was he only too tired? Of course, she would be right to leave him. For a time he cried out amid the roaring traffic noise and swore he would wait until he saw her coming – a figure resolving out of the far distance. He would wait. He would wait and wait and wait. He could only wait.
He waited into the afternoon with a headache scraping his eyes. He was also hungry – a dull, ridiculous sensation.
If he sat here long enough, he thought, he would see an accident occur.
For a long while he watched the oak, its solidity flickered by passing vehicles, and when he turned forward again he saw her.
He held his breath. He could see her. Coming out of the wavering distance, beside the flashing traffic. Stooped a little. Limping a little. Watching him as she came.
When she reached the minivan she opened the door and sat beside him. Smelling of sweat and exhaust and faintly sweet and of herself. Scarred. Without eyelashes.
Not saying anything. But here.
‘Love?’ he said, and abandoned all the rest, turned the key and began to drive again.
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