The Reconstructionist (29 page)

‘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.’