The Reconstructionist (13 page)

And then, with that element of familiarity established, his sense of what he saw flickered and surged. He ran forward. He had not imagined that the black coupé might be the
airlane
. But it was. The person screaming was – Ellis saw – Heather. And the figure beside her lay under a grey blanket and did not move, and Ellis dreaded everything ahead.

He called Christopher’s name, feeling the syllables in his mouth, their rhythm slow and clumsy, tasting of smoke and chemicals. One of the firemen caught him across the chest, but with a sudden fierce motion he slid under it and lunged forward. He pulled away the blanket: a hardly recognisable face, a horror – a mass of
blisters
, blood and blackening, lips burned off white teeth, eyes and nose bloody holes – a blackened shirt, and the jeans on the unmoving body might have been anyone’s, but he knew Christopher’s white-and-blue leather sneakers. Someone drew the blanket over again, and a hand grabbed Ellis’s arm, restraining him. Heather screamed, and the bandage fell and exposed the left side of her face, blistered and bleeding. Awkwardly she swung herself so that her face landed against Ellis’s chest, and he felt moisture on the skin. Terrified, he closed his eyes, but he filled with the smell of sweat and blood and burn and the sound of Heather’s incoherent voice.

Her father pulled her away, and someone else dragged Ellis back. He wanted to run away, but he could barely breathe and the grip on him was too strong. He closed his eyes, and let time pass. Yet when he looked around again little seemed to have changed. Christopher’s car was not the one that burned, because his car was not a station wagon, and the burned car was plainly a station wagon. He looked at the vehicles and verified this.

Then he saw that the sky had fallen off and revealed the dark and the stars. He was seated on a kerb. The form of his brother lay still under the grey blanket, alone, but Heather was gone. Heather’s father crouched down, hat gone, hair smeared. ‘What happened?’ Ellis asked. He shook thinking of how his parents would react.

‘Breathe, OK? Concentrate on breathing.’

‘That’s not his car,’ Ellis said and gestured at the burned station wagon.

Heather’s father shook his head. ‘He blew through a red and hit the wagon, and it exploded. Then he went in to help them. Heather wasn’t in the car, thank God.’ He glanced around in agitation. ‘She was at the gas station buying a Coke, but she saw the fire, and she ran over. She tried to help your brother. I’m sorry. Breathe, that’s all you need to think about now. Breathe. I need to go be with my girl.’

She hadn’t been in the car. She had been at the gas station. Ellis worked to understand this. And then his mind, exhausted, gave up.

Later, with a feeling of waking, he startled upright in his bed. From another room came a series of small strange sounds. Ellis listened for several minutes before he realised that these were the whimpers of his father’s weeping.

After Christopher’s accident, Ellis scarcely left the house for several days. In the autumn cool the box fans still stood around the house, but they were quiet. Ellis came to hate the quiet; the time would have passed more easily in the summer, when the noise and wind filled the air.

He did wonder at the chances of it, because they knew of many accidents in the intersection, and yet he had never thought of it as a particularly dangerous place, never heard his parents or anyone else describe it that way. No one advised special caution there. Maybe – he thought – if one actually worked out the statistics, it would have appeared no more dangerous than an average intersection with the same traffic load. Maybe he had seen so many accidents there only because it happened to be near home. If accidents tended to occur in intersections, and that was the intersection he saw most often, he would often see accidents in that intersection. And if Christopher drove most often through that intersection, then it would be the intersection where he would be most likely to have an accident.

His mother cried unpredictably in sobs that took her like a seizure, up to and through Christopher’s funeral. But the next day she said to Ellis, ‘We have to move on,’ and she resumed old routines and sent Ellis back to school. She carried boxes into Christopher’s room and began packing the things there. Dad, however, looked ten years older, and his sense of focus – never a strength – seemed to vanish entirely. At dinner he looked at his food until it lay cold. At night, Ellis found him standing in the living room, staring at the wall. He slept until noon or later. Often, at all times of day, he wandered into Christopher’s room, looked around, then wandered out.

One day a ruined car appeared in the backyard, a thing crushed and bent across the front by enormous forces. Ellis stared at it
from
the kitchen window and again it took him some seconds to recognise the
airlane
.

He went down into the basement. His father was working sandpaper over a cylinder of wood. Ellis scuffed his foot, and his father stopped sanding but sat there considering his hand – as if it were a little machine that he was unsure about operating – before he looked at Ellis and asked, ‘What do you think?’

‘Mom won’t like it,’ Ellis said, and then he went back upstairs. Despite the collision, the broken
airlane
nameplate was still on the side of the car. He tried the driver’s door, but it wouldn’t open. The passenger door, however, opened. He crawled in and slid over to the driver’s side. The damage to the car had pushed the dash and steering wheel close to the seat, so that he had to squeeze in. Setting his hands on the steering wheel, he imagined the traffic, the stop light ahead, nearing, a car crossing there, the dusk sky beyond.

When his mother came home and discovered it, she went into the basement and began yelling.

She argued and pleaded for days, but his father would not allow the
airlane
to be moved. It was critical to him in some way that he could not articulate. ‘Christopher died in there,’ he said, as if to explain. This was not true, Mom pointed out: Christopher died in the other car. Dad shook his head. He offered to build a shed around it.

In the next weeks Ellis’s father wandered around the house moving the furniture – never far, only a few inches in one direction or another, in a way that made entering a room vaguely disorienting. He began to go through several shirts a day and running laundry for shirts he had worn only a couple of hours. For a while Ellis’s mother complained about this behaviour, and then, eventually, she began to ignore it.

When Ellis and his mother moved out, a little more than six months after the accident, the
airlane
still lay in the backyard. His last night in the house, Ellis sat at a window, studying it – under a moon the concrete of the lawn glowed a little, and in the middle of that space the black car sat absorbing light, perfectly dark.

His father was out of the house, no one knew where, when Ellis and his mother departed in an orange-and-white U-Haul. The latch of the small hinged vent window on the passenger side was broken, and the wind pushed in with a giggling noise. His mother made a three-mile detour to avoid the intersection where Christopher died. Winter had dragged to a muddy end, and they passed stubbled brown-grey fields, stands of leafless trees, an occasional barn and silo. The truck’s engine rumbled and rattled and grunted, as if straining to the limits of its power, as if the things they were leaving behind exerted a gravity that could be escaped only by great physical effort.

THE STATE HIGHWAY
tracked an east–west line sagging and rising through a series of gentle hill slopes, then slumping into a lowland where bright signs and flat buildings latched to one side like suckling creatures – a pair of strip malls, a Costco, an Olive Garden, a McDonald’s, gas stations, and various others, including a two-storey motel, of 1960s vintage, which appeared to be the oldest structure here, remnant of a previous age. These were all accessed by a road with a lane in either direction and a centre turn lane – a three-lane. The motel faced the three-lane with a discordant ensemble of pastel yellow, aquamarine and, on the second-floor balconies, salmon pink.

Ellis parked under a semicircular scallop-roofed canopy in front of the lobby and walked to the backside of the motel to check the view – the rooms here gazed without obstruction at the highway. He went inside and asked for a second-floor room, in back.

He stepped into the room and frigid air gripped him; mounted into the opposite wall was a roaring air-conditioner unit. Next to it stood a sliding glass door onto the balcony. A green-and-blue
watery
wallpaper flowed from the ceiling to a plum-coloured carpet bearing a history of spills and heels. A bed covered by a polyester blanket, two wooden side tables, a dresser, a desk and two hard-back desk chairs crowded against one another. On the dresser stood a TV, and over the bed hung a little framed picture of a jumping swordfish – it looked as if it had been cut from a magazine. Ellis turned down the air conditioner, then stepped onto the balcony. He stood for some minutes, watching the traffic on the highway, then went back into the room, retrieved one of the desk chairs and set it on the balcony. He sat and watched the road.

To the motel’s immediate left Ellis could see a Jiffy Lube and on the right was a drive-through bank. Ahead, across the highway, lay a golf course where people in twosomes and foursomes took practice swings, hit balls, watched them fly, settled into golf carts to drive a hundred yards then got out again, searched for balls, took practice swings, hit little spurting chip shots, stood around on the green talking, took practice putts, putted, all of this at a leisurely pace that contrasted oddly with the traffic’s incessant flurrying. The highway had two lanes in either direction, separated by a shallow grassy ditch. Once, a Suzuki Samurai had been stopped in that ditch with a driver who happened to look in his rear-view mirror just in time to see a semi sliding sideways, off the lanes, toward him.

As the afternoon passed the traffic in the westbound lanes clotted and dragged into a low-speed crawl, which didn’t begin to clear until a couple of hours later. Ellis phoned Heather and told her where he was, what he was doing, described the motel. ‘Do you think it will work?’ she asked.

‘Driving, I could miss him by a minute, I could pass him in the night. Statistically, my chances are probably better in one place.’

‘It sounds more healthy. Give yourself some downtime.’

‘I guess.’

Soon the sky was hung with a scatter of white stars, and the traffic had thinned to a swift motion of lights pressing the speed limit.

He wondered if Boggs might come here at night. He thought it unlikely. No one visited old battlefields in the dark.

Hungry, he stepped back into the room and then stood looking around, a little dazed, after so much driving, with the shock of still being in the same place. He went out the front of the motel to the three-lane and walked on the shoulder. At the Target he bought a bag of new clothes, then crossed the parking lot to the Olive Garden and consumed portions of penne and chicken. When he finished his stomach complained against the quantities, and he sat watching his glass of beer, the tiny bright sparks there that rose straight upward. His waitress stopped to comment on his sunburn, and when he told her he’d had his arm hung out of the window of his car for a couple of days, she talked about her car, a Buick that smoked when she started it.

He returned to the motel, slept, woke, dressed and set himself on the balcony as the sky, still sunless, began to brighten. Boggs will come, he assured himself.

On the morning of the accident the highway had been glazed by a light rain. When the man in the Suzuki in the ditch looked at his mirror and saw the jackknifed, overturning semi – the assets of the hauling companies were, like fires, beacons for hopeful litigants, so Ellis and Boggs had often been involved in cases with semi-trailer trucks – coming broadside toward him, he ducked. The roof of the Suzuki was crushed flat, and the driver had to be cut out with a Jaws of Life, but he walked away. The semi, however, continued into the opposing lanes, flipping. Even more fortunate than the man who walked away from the Suzuki were the occupants of a Ford Taurus that passed under the trailer at the apex of its flight – police photos showed the Taurus parked beside the road, undamaged, except for the radio antenna, which had been hit by the flying semi and bent to a right angle, like a crooked finger.

Then the semi flopped onto the roadway behind the Ford and a fifteen-year-old Dodge pickup pulling a pop-up camper trailer crashed into the trailer’s roof. Several seconds passed before a Toyota Highlander, travelling at approximately 64 mph, struck
the
pickup from behind, smashing the pop-up camper to pieces and forcing the trailer hitch into the Dodge’s gas tank, igniting a hot fire that spread rapidly forward and backward. The pickup burned, the Toyota burned, the semi and its load of discount brand furniture burned. Two fatalities in the pickup and three in the Toyota. Only the driver of the semi, who extracted himself from the overturned cab with broken arms, survived.

Boggs was contacted just days after the accident by an attorney associated with the manufacturer of the pickup. After landing at the airport, Boggs and Ellis had driven first to look at the Toyota, which was held in a vehicle storage yard of a kind that Ellis – still early in his career – had never seen before, a collecting place for vehicles involved in ongoing disputes. Towering racks held vehicles atop one another, three-high, like shelved pieces in a gigantic museum. A rack ran five hundred feet or so, ended at an aisle, and then began another set of racks, and these rows of racked vehicles ran out to a distance of a half-mile or more. Big trucks with long lifting forks hurtled between the rows and spun at speed around the corners.