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,
‘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
