Nick Arvin - The Reconstructionist

Three hundred twelve stood open, but a curtain suspended from a curved track on the ceiling obscured much of the room’s interior. Ellis knocked at the door frame, and a woman with a flat, reddish face peered from behind the curtain. ‘Are you here for lunch orders?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’ He moved around the curtain. The woman sat on a stool on casters at the foot of a bed that held a man with a respirator on his face, an IV line in his arm, bandages on his head and arms. A white sheet concealed the rest.

‘Are you a doctor?’ the woman asked.

He still wore the clothes he had put on the day before – slacks, a belt, a pale blue dress shirt now badly wrinkled. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. The heart monitor beeped in slow rhythm. Where skin could be seen between the bandages it was dry, pale and darkly veined.

‘You’re crying,’ the woman said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ellis said again and raised his hands and pushed the tears off his face. ‘I’m the driver.’

‘The driver?’ She looked at him out of her flat face, then swivelled – her stool creaking – to the bed. The heart monitor counted time and Ellis stood not moving, afraid of moving, of time, of the woman, of the man in the bed, of sound and smell, of air and light.

‘I couldn’t stop,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sure.’ She looked at him. ‘Please. Don’t let it bother you very much. I’m sure it was an accident.’

Ellis, in his surprise, said nothing. The only sounds were of faint voices and clangour up and down the hall, of the heart monitor and slow breaths in the mask. The man’s lidded eyes barely showed amid the bandages.

‘Both legs were broken,’ said the woman, ‘with multiple fractures. And three ribs, punctured lung, cracked vertebrae, internal bleeding. They’re not sure yet how hard he hit his head.’

Ellis recalled the pop of the man’s head striking the windshield.

‘There are more operations to do. But they hope he might show some alertness today.’ Her gaze drifted. ‘All there is to do is wait.’

He found more tears on his face and pushed them away. Suddenly, the woman caught Ellis’s fingers in her own hot, soft hand. He had expected her to rage at him, expected her to curse him and send him away, and now he had to ask himself, What did he want here?

‘Are you -’ he began. But the questions that came to mind were either empty or heartless.

After a minute he pulled away. ‘I think I had better go.’

But he stood while the woman sat as if she had not heard, gaping at the bed. Eventually a nurse entered with a plastic apparatus in her hands. When she glanced at Ellis, he nodded and turned and stepped out of the room. For a minute he stood against the wall, letting it prop him, dizzy and gasping.

He summoned another taxi and watched the side window as it carried him home. Children with baseball bats stood on a corner. A handwritten sign taped to a street lamp advertised a weight-loss plan. They passed a series of wide paved fields populated with ranks of glittering vehicles – car dealerships. The cab driver said, ‘Nice day.’ It was. The land lay ablaze with sunlight, as if some power wanted to be sure that nothing would be left unrevealed.

But soon traffic slowed, and they halted for a time in the darkness beneath a thundering interstate overpass. Ellis’s phone rang, Heather’s name on the display. He answered, ‘Love?’

‘Ellis,’ she said, and he heard a trace of fracture and guessed that, somehow, things had gotten worse. ‘I’m sorry that I didn’t call sooner. John and I were up late. Ignoring each other. Yelling at each other.’

‘I went to the hospital to see the man I hit.’

‘You did?’

‘He’s bad. He looks terrible. I broke his legs, his ribs, vertebrae, everything. He hasn’t woken up. His wife said they weren’t sure how hard he hit his head, but I remember. It hit the windshield. It hit hard.’

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘If I had stayed in my lane. If I had had some patience.’

‘If he hadn’t been in the middle of a busy street in the dark.’

For some time neither of them spoke. Houses flashed by the window of the cab.

She sighed. ‘Have you seen John?’

‘What’s he done?’

‘He hasn’t called you?’ she asked.

‘No. I tried to call him, but I didn’t get an answer.’

‘He was very emotional. He left here saying he was going to kill himself.’

In the window streamed a mall and a thousand empty parking spaces. Ellis closed his eyes against them, but only gained the impression that they would go on forever.

‘He got a lot of papers from his desk and spread them on the dining table. All of our financial stuff. Insurance. The mortgage. Our wills. The papers for the cars. Then he labelled folders and filed everything into a neat stack. Then he wrote down a list of phone numbers, his lawyer, his financial adviser, people like that. Then he got on the computer and set up folders on the desktop for all of the financial files in there.’

‘He did all this last night?’

‘I’m hysterical, and he says, “That should be everything you’ll need.”’

‘Maybe it’s one of his funny jokes.’

‘He’s upset about you and me.’

Ellis hunched forward and pressed his head into his knees. ‘He knows? How? We didn’t do anything last night.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Someone should talk to him.’

‘He won’t answer his phone for me.’

‘I mean someone other than you or me.’

‘Who?’

Ellis winced. ‘I hoped you would know someone.’ He suggested the names of a couple of men at the office that Boggs might be willing to talk to. Then, after an exchange of vague murmuring, they hung up.

He collapsed on the sofa, and there might have been a seepage of sleep. The grandfather clock ticked unvaryingly. Then it stopped – he had forgotten to wind it. He lay in the silence, watching the busy movements of the leaves of a locust tree in the window, sweat slipping sideways down his forehead.

When Heather phoned again the ring startled him badly.

‘John called,’ she said.

‘OK.’ He would have liked to leave it at that. But he went on, ‘And?’

‘He’s -’ She laughed roughly. ‘He talked about me, mostly.’

‘He’s trying to make you feel guilty,’ Ellis said.

‘Yes. That’s what he said.’

‘He’s not serious.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘He’s horrible. He’s ridiculous,’ Ellis said.

‘He said something about the lake.’

‘What something?’

‘I don’t know. I was crying, I was yelling at him, and in there, with the crying and the yelling, he said something, a lake, the lake.’

‘We can’t just drive around to every lake in the world.’

‘There’s a camping spot where we used to go, when we were first married. He went alone a couple of times more recently. He always liked it.’

It seemed to Ellis that he knew what she meant, that Boggs had mentioned to him something about a rocky beach there. Of course Boggs could have gone anywhere, but it might be like him to go to water, to the possibilities of drama offered by water.

Ellis said that he would look there. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Should I come?’

‘Both of us together is probably not a good idea, is it?’

She offered her car, but he said he would buy one.

UNDER AN AFTERNOON sky whitened by haze he walked past low houses, past square graceless apartment blocks, past gas stations, past a strip mall. An adult entertainment cabaret named Lavender. An Applebee’s. A sallow office complex with tinted windows. After a mile and a half he came to a used-car lot. He walked among Fords and Pontiacs and Buicks and Chryslers and Jeeps, disliking all of them without particular reason, until he found a grey Dodge minivan – six years old, 87,349 miles. He looked at the interior, looked at the underbody, looked at the engine then started the engine and looked at it again. Light scratches marked the hood, a crack spanned vertically the passenger-side mirror, something orange had stained the carpet behind the driver’s seat, but otherwise it appeared to be in good shape. A goateed salesman in a blue blazer with anchors stamped on its shining buttons watched. ‘You have a family? Kids?’ he asked.