‘I’m a nurse,’ she said and edged him aside.
He sat on the grass between the kerb and the sidewalk with his knees to his chest. He rocked forward and back, his sense of relief already gone. A broken body lay on the ground, and it seemed clear to him that in his impatience he had killed a man. He tried to recall the decision to pass the pickup on the right – it had hardly been a decision. He had seen the situation and responded. Watching the nurse as she touched and manipulated the man, he felt a great deal collapse on him until it seemed he should be blinded or deafened, or perhaps the world should cease altogether.
‘He has a heartbeat.’ The nurse glanced over. ‘Can you find a blanket? Something to cover him?’
Ellis stood and took a step backward. He turned to the sidewalk, where a number of people had gathered. One moved toward him, and Ellis looked at the approaching figure with a curious fractional delay between perception and understanding: Boggs, wearing a dark blue jacket and a white shirt open at the collar, reaching toward Ellis. ‘I thought it was you,’ Ellis said. ‘I thought I hit you.’
‘I’m fine.’ Boggs touched him on the shoulder. ‘Although I might be sick. That poor guy’s legs. Are you OK?’
‘I went to pass on the right, and when I got on the brakes it was too late. I hit him pretty hard. Probably thirty- five, forty miles an hour.’
Boggs nodded. ‘I saw your car.’
‘There’s a nurse. She wants something to put over him.’
Boggs pulled off his jacket. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it. Excuse me. I’m really sorry, but I’m going to be sick.’
Ellis took the jacket and moved toward the fallen man, but several people now huddled and crouched there. ‘Give us room,’ the nurse said.
Ellis tapped a young man on the shoulder, and the jacket was handed down. Ellis stood peering, but because of the others he could see little. ‘How is he?’ he called. No one replied. He tried to press in, but an elbow nudged him away, and he lost resolve. Traffic moved in the opposite lanes, people walked by on the sidewalks. The continued progression of time was surreal. Where had Boggs gone to be sick? He looked down at himself, at the clean, unmarked length of his clothes. The muscles of his right leg ached from pressing the brake pedal.
He returned to his car and stood next to it – a hole smashed into the windshield, a shallow dent in the hood. The windshield’s shatterproof glass shaped itself around the hole like a stiff, glittering fabric. It seemed as if a kind of error had been made in putting him into the centre of this accident, if only he could work out the origin of the error and remedy it, he would now be in the theatre, a little anxious, a little bored.
The SUV’s horn – which had continued to drone on and Ellis had forgotten – stopped. A police car sidled up beside the pedestrian, lights orbiting.
Peering into the glare thrown by the headlamps of waiting cars, he could make out small intermittent markings made by the pulsing of his ABS. He moved back along the street, counting paces. He estimated that he had braked for almost thirty feet before the approximate point of impact, and then for another eighty feet prior to coming to a stop. Using these distances and a standard friction factor, he mentally calculated that he had been travelling at about 50 mph when he began braking, and he had been travelling at around 40 mph when he hit the pedestrian, assuming that he had correctly estimated the location where his car met the pedestrian – no physical evidence of that impact showed on the roadway, and he could only make a guess from memory.
The measuring and calculating helped to calm and structure his thoughts. He stood at the open door of his car waiting for the police, examining a shallow dent on the roof, where the man’s leg or arm or hip had struck before he was thrown forward. He heard a short shrill warbling, an alien sound difficult to connect with anything in the field of reality. It frightened him a little, and only after it had sung out several times did he realise: his cellphone. He found it on the floor of the car. ‘Heather?’
‘Ellis? Is Boggs there? Where are you?’
‘Heather -’ he said. He felt a dread of speaking, as if doing so would make events irrevocable.
‘It looks like there was an accident.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you stuck in traffic?’
‘Where are you?’ Ellis said.
‘There you are. Is that your car?’
He looked from face to face along the sidewalk and saw her as she stepped into the street toward him. She wore a long black skirt and a short black jacket, clutched a purse with one hand, held her phone to her ear with the other. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.
Dark hair cut straight at the neck, teetering a bit on tall heels, she looked large-eyed, confused. Ellis examined her with an aching uncertainty. Where was Boggs? ‘Wait there,’ he said. He hung up the phone and put it in his pocket and hesitated, recalling how he had nearly laughed when he realised that the man he had hit was not Boggs. He thought, perhaps I am not sane. Then his muscles moved and carried him toward her.
‘You’re all right?’ she said.
‘I thought I’d hit Boggs. But it wasn’t Boggs.’
Her mouth open, she peered up at him, and he was a little glad to see her stunned. At least he wasn’t crazy to be stunned.
He asked, ‘Have you seen Boggs?’
‘No.’
He stepped back to look around. ‘I hit a pedestrian,’ he said. ‘I was on the phone with Boggs when it happened.’
She moved to put her arms around him and he felt off balance, then his legs lost strength altogether, he collapsed to the ground, and because she would not let go she came down with him. He sat on the street crying, the asphalt rough under him, a pair of headlamps pressing him with white light, and he and Heather were clinging to each other when a police officer gripped his shoulder.
The rear seat of the cop’s Crown Vic smelled of soap, bleach and plastics. Heather bent at the window and gestured with her fingers, back and forth. Ellis attempted to smile, but on his face it felt mangled. ‘I’m going to look for John,’ she called and waved again and turned away and glanced back and turned away. The cop had already gone. A wire barricade blocked off the front seats, where a CB radio blurted numbered codes.
After a time he glanced out the window and saw, down the sidewalk, Heather running and – it seemed, faintly – Boggs’s tall shape moving away in the distance. And Heather ran after her husband until she vanished. She must have taken her heels off, Ellis thought. He examined the door, but the handle was inoperative. He watched the place where they had gone, but saw only the night, and eventually set his elbows on his knees, closed his eyes, and waited, listening to the world’s small unimportant sounds.
He could still smell the odour of tyres scrubbing against asphalt. Although he rarely thought of the accident that had killed Christopher – avoided the memory – the smell made that memory inevitable. He knew that Heather would also be thinking of it. Christopher, his half-brother, had lain ruined in the street, too. Here, however, there was not the smell of burned flesh.
4.
AFTER THE ACCIDENT, released by the police, Ellis went home. He tried to phone Heather, then Boggs, without success.
He lay awake all night, unable to move his thoughts past what had just happened.
‘It’s not illegal to pass on the right,’ the cop had told him, without glancing up from his paperwork. ‘On the other hand, jaywalking: illegal.’ Ellis asked if he could ask the name of the man he had hit, and the cop looked at his notes and said, ‘James Dell.’
The rooms in Ellis’s duplex were haphazardly furnished with a thoughtless mix of antiques and items from Target – the long battered wood dining table had only two cheap plastic chairs, and in the living room an ornate grandfather clock and an imposing writing desk stood over otherwise modern furniture. While the sunlight in the windows gathered strength he sat in a stiff-backed armchair, listening to the clock ticking, ticking, and staggering him forward through time. That Heather failed to call worried him, but he couldn’t bring his mind to focus and
