Nick Arvin: The Reconstructionist

‘No.’

‘You see?’

She only sat. He didn’t know what to do now, and she said nothing.

After a minute he climbed into the passenger seat to sit beside her.

‘We used to fight in this car. Christopher did let me drive occasionally. For some reason he always wanted to fight when I was driving.’

‘What did you fight about?’

‘Which party to go to. Dumb things like that. Whose fault it was that we were lost. That was pretty common. We made long trips into the countryside until we had no idea where we were. One time I got out at a farm stand and the woman there referenced all these towns and roads I had never heard of, and eventually it came out that we’d gone almost two hundred miles and had actually crossed the state line.’

‘That seat is set for you. Maybe you were at the gas station earlier on the day of the accident and transposed the memory.’

‘I remember the heat of the explosion. I remember stumbling on the kerb as I ran.’

‘The collision would have thrown you forward, the belt would have held your torso, but your head would have snapped down, your arms and hands would have been thrown forward, your legs probably gone up into the dash, probably bruised. And maybe the next day you had bruising along the line of the belt. Maybe your neck hurt.’ They sat facing forward and gazing at the space where the windshield should have been, and it struck Ellis as a terrible arrangement for a conversation. But perfectly common. ‘There would have been a flash of light and heat through the broken windshield. The spin of the car throwing you into the door, the shrieking of the tyres, the lurching stop.’

‘I told John that I had nothing to say about it. I don’t.’

He stood out of the car and after a minute wandered to the house. From the kitchen he looked back through the window. She was still in the car. He found his father in the living room, slouching back in one of the chairs, eyes closed, lax, looking dead.

I hate him, Ellis thought.

But the thought passed; it wasn’t true. He didn’t even dislike his father. His father made him uncomfortable. He didn’t want to allow himself, however, to develop dislike or hate out of a resentment of discomfort, the proximate cause of which was his father.

‘You’re not dead,’ Ellis said.

His father’s eyes opened. ‘Don’t think so, but you never can tell.’ He lifted his head into an awkward angle. ‘Strange to see her again, isn’t it?’

‘I’ve been seeing her for a while.’

‘Great.’

‘You don’t know anything about it.’

‘What are you showing her?’

‘She says she wasn’t in the car.’

‘So?’

‘She was. She was driving.’

‘Really?’

‘Both the driver and passenger seats were occupied at the time of the accident, and the driver’s side is positioned for a person her size.’

His father’s eyelids lowered shut again. ‘It happened a long time ago.’

Silence.

‘I thought you would have more to say. Christopher was your favourite.’

Slack, dead-looking, his father said, ‘I love you.’

‘All right.’

‘You don’t believe me.’

‘All right. I believe you.’

‘I love you, and I know you know I love you. I guess that must be enough. You love her?’

Ellis turned away and came out of the house. Heather had wandered into the fields. He waited for her to turn, so that he could wave for her to come back, but she did not turn.

The furrowed soil crumbled underfoot. Low weeds snagged his shoes and cuffs. His lungs laboured to move the heavy, humid air, and he had the feeling that if he tried to shout to her the words would hit the air and fall to the ground. She stood motionless, looking away toward the line of the fence and the brush growing along it, arms hugging herself, posture tense. And what did he want from her? He only wanted an acknowledgement of the facts. A life without access to facts felt to him like a life without anchors.

Was this what Boggs had intended? To punish the two of them? Or to reveal a truth to a friend?

‘Heather,’ he said.

‘You whisper my name that way,’ she said, ‘and I feel as if I’ve embarrassed myself, like I’ve forgotten to wear pants.’

He laughed a little hysterically. She held a dandelion gone to seed, and she was picking it apart, letting the seeds fall down a languid, angled path. He circled to stand in front of her, downslope. By the fence – three strands of rusting wire sagging between greyed posts – a trickle of water gurgled between weeds.

‘John could have done it,’ she said. ‘He could have made a mark like that on the seat belt.’

‘Boggs?’

‘He would, too.’

Would he? Could he? Ellis hadn’t thought of such a thing. But he said, ‘No. It would have been extremely difficult.’

‘John could do anything he set himself to.’

‘He couldn’t just draw some crayon onto the belt. You saw the D-ring, the plastic had clearly transferred from the D-ring. There would be two ways to do it. One would be to somehow heat the D-ring to the point of melting and then pull the belt over it, and you’d have to experiment with the heat level and practise the movement of the belt to produce an effect that looked right – it would be hard. The other way to do it would be to pull the belt as hard as it would be pulled during a collision. But it’s not as if anyone has the arm strength to just reach in and do it. Extreme forces are involved. You’d need to create some mechanical device, an original design and fabrication. And then you’d have to bring it into the car and operate it and at the same time hide it from my dad. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘It was a used car when Christopher got it. It could have been in some other accident.’

‘The driver’s belt showed only one mark, and it would show two if it had been involved in two collisions.’

She cast down her shoulders. ‘What are we to each other?’ she asked. ‘I don’t even know.’

‘You don’t remember the accident at all?’

‘I remember it. I remember it just as I told you.’

‘You don’t have any doubt.’

‘It’s what I remember.’

‘But what do you believe?’

‘What do you want me to do, Ellis? What do you want me to believe? Tell me. I’ll try. That little black mark is the truth? I’ll believe it. Should I tell you that I remember it as you described, the seat belt on me, my limbs flying, all of that? Then everything would line up with the evidence and that would be that?’

‘All I know,’ he said, ‘is that when we worked our cases, we always discounted witness testimony. We set it aside entirely, if possible, and worked from the physical evidence. People will tell you they saw a car shoot a hundred feet into the air like a rocket and flip a dozen times end over end before coming down undamaged on its wheels – stuff that’s not remotely possible in the real world. The physical evidence is objective.’

‘Physical evidence,’ she said. Her tone might have been the same if she had been echoing the phrases of a gibbering lunatic.

‘Verifiable facts and analysable traces of events as they actually occurred, outside the subjective manipulation of memory.’

‘You think that I killed those people and your brother.’

‘I’m asking you what you remember. You really don’t have any doubt?’

She stepped a little distance from him. ‘It’s like you’re asking, The world ended yesterday, don’t you remember? ’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘what do you want to do?’

She looked at the turned earth at their feet. He awaited the answer with fear.

She said, with exhaustion, ‘I just want to eat something.’

She drove them back into town – he had a feeling of hurtling down the road with insane speed yet watching it pass very slowly – to Devito’s, an Italian restaurant and pizzeria where his family had sometimes gone. It still stood in its place in the middle of the town’s single central block. The storefront windows to either side, however, showed only plywood. He saw no one he recognised at the old tables, which stood in an arrangement unchanged since he had eaten at them as a child, and he watched for one of the old waitresses – now in bifocals, short hair and gaudy lipstick. But the girl who came to the table was only a couple of years out of high school and nervous, touching her ear and trying to smile by straining her lips into a rictus. The tables and chairs and wood panelling and green-glass light fixtures were all just as they had been when he was young, when this place seemed fancy and sophisticated. But the salad bar now seemed classless, the water came in plastic cups, cheap silverware sat beside paper napkins. Down the centre of the ceiling ran a strip of fluorescent lights. It was merely a neighbourhood restaurant, more or less a dive.