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
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
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.
