Nick Arvin - The Reconstructionist

He moved down, stood breathing, examining his fingers – they had set into claw-like hooks, and to make them move and straighten required peculiar concentration. After a minute he walked to the front of the house. He wandered down the driveway between the flowerpots – two rows of containers of empty dirt – and returned up the driveway. He went in through the door and closed it behind himself noisily, took up his algebra homework on the sofa, peered at the symbols without comprehension. Had he believed that Christopher’s relationship with Heather was immaculate? No, and yet he had not imagined the other either. He had even, in fact, tried to imagine it, but he saw now that his imagination had failed him. He also felt aware that his announcement to Heather in the park – I like you a lot – had been rendered pathetic.

He heard Heather coming downstairs, her steps entering the kitchen. Water ran. Chair feet rubbed on floor tile.

Soon Christopher came down the stairs and joined her. In a low voice she said something. Ellis left his algebra and went to the kitchen. The two of them sat on either side of the small kitchen table, Heather giggling. Ellis went to the cupboard and took down a bevelled glass for milk and observed them sidelong. Christopher cracked a knuckle. Heather traced shapes on the table with the tip of her finger. Christopher looked over. ‘Ellis.’

After being ignored for so long, to be addressed by him was stunning, as if the refrigerator had started flipping cartwheels.

‘Ellis!’

Ellis sipped his milk, watched the floor.

Christopher walked over and stood before him, so that when Ellis looked up he saw his half-brother grinning.

‘What are you looking at?’ Christopher said, his tone turning soft-hard with insinuation, then repeated himself. ‘What are you looking at?’ He had known – Ellis realised – that Ellis had been at the window, watching. He had known and allowed it to go on.

Christopher reached forward and pushed Ellis on the shoulder with force enough to snap his head back against the cupboard. His milk glass hit the edge of the counter, fell, and broke.

Ellis nearly cried out and took a wild swing, but with an effort he held still. He wanted to be cold, and he wanted to make a comment that would wither Christopher’s superiority, but his mind failed to propose one.

‘Jesus,’ Heather said. ‘Don’t be a jerk.’

‘Yeah,’ Ellis said. This seemed insufficient, so he added, ‘Back off.’

Christopher nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. He grabbed Ellis by the shoulder and swung him around and pushed him toward Heather. ‘Go get her, champ.’

Ellis stumbled to a stop in the middle of the floor. He hoped she might come to comfort him, but there was only an awkward – nothing. Silence. ‘Hey,’ he said. She didn’t look at him. ‘Here’s a joke,’ he said. ‘Do you know the difference between a cheeseburger and a blow job?’

She stood and walked past Ellis to the door. ‘Come on,’ she said to Christopher. Christopher grinned at Ellis, and left.

In the empty room, Ellis said, ‘I hate you.’

Ellis bitterly avoided them then, and hid himself in books and earphones.

Several days had passed when he heard, even through his earphones, a collision in the intersection behind the house. Bored, he left his room and passed through the living room where Father and Mother were watching TV. Without looking up, his father had said, ‘Don’t be out late.’

Early autumn, late in the day, and the overhead lamps flickered into feeble luminescence as Ellis walked out the curve of the street and then between the collapsing brick posts that marked the entrance of the subdivision, into a stench of burning rubber, plastics and other petroleum products.

The traffic idling in the street included two semis that obstructed his view of the accident vehicles until he moved up to the corner: a rear-ended station wagon on the kerb had burned black from the rear bumper to halfway along the hood, and at the far side of the intersection lay a black coupé wrecked aslant over the front. Policemen and firemen stood around the burned station wagon, and several prone figures, evidently injured, lay here and there in the street. The scene looked familiar, like other accidents here, though somewhat worse than average. Ellis regarded it without focus, almost in a state of daydream, until one of the people on the ground sat and screamed, a woman’s scream. A cop held a bandage to her face and urged her gently back down. ‘Calm, honey, please, please -’ Ellis knew the cop: Heather’s father.

And then, with that element of familiarity established, his sense of what he saw flickered and surged. He ran forward. He had not imagined that the black coupé might be the airlane . But it was. The person screaming was – Ellis saw – Heather. And the figure beside her lay under a grey blanket and did not move, and Ellis dreaded everything ahead.

He called Christopher’s name, feeling the syllables in his mouth, their rhythm slow and clumsy, tasting of smoke and chemicals. One of the firemen caught him across the chest, but with a sudden fierce motion he slid under it and lunged forward. He pulled away the blanket: a hardly recognisable face, a horror – a mass of blisters, blood and blackening, lips burned off white teeth, eyes and nose bloody holes – a blackened shirt, and the jeans on the unmoving body might have been anyone’s, but he knew Christopher’s white-and-blue leather sneakers. Someone drew the blanket over again, and a hand grabbed Ellis’s arm, restraining him. Heather screamed, and the bandage fell and exposed the left side of her face, blistered and bleeding. Awkwardly she swung herself so that her face landed against Ellis’s chest, and he felt moisture on the skin. Terrified, he closed his eyes, but he filled with the smell of sweat and blood and burn and the sound of Heather’s incoherent voice.

Her father pulled her away, and someone else dragged Ellis back. He wanted to run away, but he could barely breathe and the grip on him was too strong. He closed his eyes, and let time pass. Yet when he looked around again little seemed to have changed. Christopher’s car was not the one that burned, because his car was not a station wagon, and the burned car was plainly a station wagon. He looked at the vehicles and verified this.

Then he saw that the sky had fallen off and revealed the dark and the stars. He was seated on a kerb. The form of his brother lay still under the grey blanket, alone, but Heather was gone. Heather’s father crouched down, hat gone, hair smeared. ‘What happened?’ Ellis asked. He shook thinking of how his parents would react.

‘Breathe, OK? Concentrate on breathing.’

‘That’s not his car,’ Ellis said and gestured at the burned station wagon.

Heather’s father shook his head. ‘He blew through a red and hit the wagon, and it exploded. Then he went in to help them. Heather wasn’t in the car, thank God.’ He glanced around in agitation. ‘She was at the gas station buying a Coke, but she saw the fire, and she ran over. She tried to help your brother. I’m sorry. Breathe, that’s all you need to think about now. Breathe. I need to go be with my girl.’

She hadn’t been in the car. She had been at the gas station. Ellis worked to understand this. And then his mind, exhausted, gave up.

Later, with a feeling of waking, he startled upright in his bed. From another room came a series of small strange sounds. Ellis listened for several minutes before he realised that these were the whimpers of his father’s weeping.

After Christopher’s accident, Ellis scarcely left the house for several days. In the autumn cool the box fans still stood around the house, but they were quiet. Ellis came to hate the quiet; the time would have passed more easily in the summer, when the noise and wind filled the air.