Nick Arvin - The Reconstructionist

He woke with a jerk as a long Oldsmobile drew up. It parked behind the minivan, and his father emerged: his father with a paunch, shoulders fallen, bagged under the eyes, hair receded and feral, but unmistakably his father, with his father’s large hands and his high cheekbones grown even more prominent, the staring dark eyes a little watery. He wore a button-down shirt of startling white. He crossed half the distance from the car, stopped in the grass, and said, ‘Is that you?’ He raised a hand and pointed at Ellis, as if to clarify.

Ellis felt confused by the question which, in its literal sense, seemed to allow no negative answer. He stood and opened his hands. He said, ‘I need to see the car, Dad.’

His father came forward with a tight smile, staring. Small sharp wrinkles rayed from under the lobes of his ears. His arms, above the big hands, were thinner than Ellis remembered. ‘Boy,’ he said. ‘A surprise.’ He twitched and stepped back and looked around the yard. He laughed. ‘Let me get you a beer.’

His father let him in and passed into the kitchen while Ellis waited in a dark living room where, as his eyes adjusted, the furnishings materialised slowly and silently in their places. Heavy curtains were pulled, but a vertical slat of light penetrated and illuminated spiralling dust. An unnerving sense of familiarity seized and held him for some seconds before he understood that these furnishings, although in a new context and new arrangement, were known to him: he had grown up with these chairs, these end tables, this sofa, this coffee table, this bookshelf, this wall mirror with the thick carved frame, its silver now spotting and browning, holding a distorted version of himself – his aged self examining a mirror where his younger self had once examined his younger self.

The sofa and chairs, all in their original upholstery, were dirty, sagging, blackened along the front edges of the cushions and arms. Scratches and stains marked the coffee table. One of the shelves of the low bookcase had been replaced with a plank of particle board that sagged alarmingly under a pair of pickle jars filled with coins.

His father gave him a bottle of beer and Ellis said, ‘You’ve kept everything.’

His father glanced around. ‘It’s a little old, I guess, but nothing wrong with it.’ As if to demonstrate functionality, he sat in one of the armchairs.

‘Have you seen a tall bearded man here?’ Ellis asked – the same question that he had put to any number of cashiers and clerks, and asking it again seemed to frame him once more into that long pursuit. As if Boggs had arranged things so that he would be pursuing him all the rest of his life. ‘Have you?’ he asked.

‘My son died in that car,’ his father said.

Ellis shook his head. ‘He didn’t die in that car. He climbed out and got himself burned and died in the street. And you had two sons. You might say, “One of my sons died.”’

‘Tell me something,’ his father said, staring. ‘Of your life.’

‘Tell me about the big bearded guy. I know he was here. I know he looked at the car.’

His father didn’t answer.

Ellis looked at the furniture again and hated it, hated the mindless, numb inertia that kept it here. ‘Did he tell you who his wife was?’

‘Why are you here?’

‘I need to see the car.’

‘Why?’

Ellis stood over the coffee table and vaguely tried to recall which of its nicks and scratches had been there when he last saw it. ‘That’s a reasonable question, but it would require a lot of background, and it doesn’t really matter. I have a suspicion. That’s what it amounts to.’

‘You mean, to explain you’d have to tell me something about your life.’

He reluctantly met his father’s gaze. The pouches below his father’s eyes sagged as if they stored coins.

‘Well, your friend was here,’ his father said. ‘He talked for quite a while. Friendly guy. He did, in fact, tell me who he was married to. Had some interesting ideas about this and that. A little full of himself. I showed him the car. He wouldn’t tell me much about you, though.’

‘Can I look at the car?’

A fly noised a circle somewhere overhead. His father shifted and drank. ‘I ran into someone who knew Heather’s dad the other day, at Pep Boys. I was buying lifters for my trunk lid. This guy said Heather’s husband is dead. Hit by a car. Is that true?’

‘It is. Can I look at the airlane ?’

When his father only stared, Ellis turned and went to the window and pulled the shade aside. He had to keep a grip on his anxiety and impatience. He felt he might begin to scream. But he sipped his beer.

His father said vaguely, ‘It’s funny.’

Ellis looked at him.

‘You can look at the car if you’ll do something for me. Two things.’

Ellis waited.

‘Tell me something about yourself. And then listen while I tell you something.’ A meekness shaded his father’s stare.

‘All right,’ Ellis said. ‘Fine.’

A quiet.

‘Tell you something?’

‘Please.’

Without intention, Ellis sat. The feel of the chair under himself was familiar. ‘I hated my brother.’

‘You didn’t really hate him,’ his father said. He pulled at the sleeve of his strangely white shirt.

‘I did.’

‘Christopher was in a bad position, between myself and his mother, sent back and forth, never allowed to settle and get comfortable with anyone or learn to trust anyone. Maybe he wasn’t your friend, but he was your brother. You looked up to him, you envied him, you wanted him to give more of himself to you than he did, and that angered you. But you didn’t hate him. If you think so, it’s an idea you’ve developed since then, and it’s my fault. I can see it’s my fault.’

‘You’re constructing fantasies and blaming yourself for them. I hated him because he was a jerk.’

‘I didn’t understand what I was doing to your relationship with him. I rarely understand what I’m doing, I guess.’

‘You have no idea how I felt, Dad.’ Ellis was angry with himself for allowing a conversation he had wanted to avoid. He looked at his father’s receded hair, tendrilling and floating a little up and down as he drank his beer. Was this truly his father? His father, certainly, but transformed by years, and so was this in any meaningful way the man that he had grown up with? ‘I’m living with Heather,’ he said. ‘I’ve been involved with her for some time, since before Boggs died. He killed himself. He stepped into moving highway traffic right in front of me.’

‘Ah,’ his father said.

Ellis straightened and remembered straightening exactly this way in the same chair long ago.

‘I’ll tell you this,’ his father said. ‘I love you.’ He examined his shirtsleeve in silence. ‘But I realise I’ve never been able to properly manage that emotion.’ Silence. ‘You were easy to love and Christopher was hard to love, and maybe that was the problem – I overcompensated. I don’t know. Some years back, I had a girlfriend, a waitress with three kids. I liked her a lot, I was fond of her kids. One day she asked if I would pick up the youngest, a boy, from day care and drop him off at a friend’s where he would stay a couple more hours until she got off her shift at the restaurant. So I did. Picked up the boy, drove him to the friend’s house, nudged him in the door. I was backing out of the driveway when a woman came charging out of the house, yelling. Took me a while to figure out what had set her off. What it was was, I had brought the wrong kid. To look at him, it was perfectly obvious, and I knew the kid well enough, there was no excuse for it. So I took this boy back to the day care, where everybody had been going bonkers – police, a fire truck, my waitress girlfriend and other people, all running around, yelling at each other. My girlfriend’s boy, feeling guilty that he’d missed his ride, had hidden in a closet, under a pile of blankets, and it took a while to find him. And the parents of the boy I had taken were screaming at anyone who stood still to listen. They let me have it. My girlfriend was practically having seizures. A mess. I apologised of course, but that was it, I never saw her again. I thought about it a lot, and I realised that I just never learned how to do anything properly. I can’t even see things properly. I miss the obvious. It’s sabotaged my life.’