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
‘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
