The Reconstructionist (26 page)

Working between the photos, the police report and the measurements he’d made at the intersection, he built a diagram of the scene in his computer. He drew dimensionally correct icons to represent the cars at their points of rest, then he studied the damage on each vehicle and the tyre marks on the roadway to estimate their orientations as they collided and set the icons at the point of impact and at maximum intrusion with a couple of inches added to account for restitution – his brother’s
airlane
striking the left rear-quarter panel area of the other vehicle at a little less than ninety degrees, the result of both vehicles swerving too late.

When he finished, the diagram showed an overhead view of the lane lines, the kerbs, the poles at the corners, the two cars at the instant of impact and the positions where they had come to rest. This was, in a sense, the place where Christopher had died.

He copied the scene diagram into a specialised accident reconstruction program called PC-Crash – when he started working with Boggs he had thought a lot of jokes would come of the name, but it had only become part of the background:
chair, calculator, email, PC-Crash
. Within the program he created representations of the two cars that included suspension characteristics and passenger weights – he tried for a minute to remember what Christopher’s weight might have been, but finally settled for using a published statistical average. He set the simulated vehicles onto the icons at the point of impact, adjusted their velocities, steering angles, brake factors and restitution. Then he ran the analysis and watched as they spun away from the impact toward the rest positions. The
airlane
overshot its mark by a dozen feet, while the other vehicle didn’t go far enough and ended up facing the
wrong
way. He began to make adjustments. Velocity. Steering angles. Brake factors. Restitution factors. Small changes sometimes resulted in large effects in post-impact motion, but after a couple of hours he had refined the model so that the vehicles spun away from the point of impact, scrubbed speed off as they went round and rocked to a stop exactly on the icons where he had marked the rest positions.

He ran the model a few times, and the accident enacted itself again and again in shifting pixels, perfectly silent. The computer offered that at impact Christopher’s car had been travelling at 42.3 mph; the other car at 49.1 mph. By hand Ellis calculated his brother’s initial velocity before he had begun laying down tyre marks, and came up with 46 mph, give or take a couple of mph, a speed not unexpected on that road, a speed that might even be considered cautious, since Ellis had observed many vehicles breezing through at around 60 mph. Perhaps Christopher had slowed while he was involved with some distraction. But one might formulate endless speculations.

He had no evidence whatsoever as to whether Christopher had entered the intersection under a green, yellow or red light. Witnesses often provided the only available evidence about light timing, and here the witness statements recorded in the police report, from the occupants of vehicles that had been approaching the intersection, were all against Christopher. The report mentioned that Heather had been at the scene at the time of the accident and described her injuries, but it didn’t include any witness testimony from her.

He tried to think, what had he gained from this analysis?

Nothing presented itself. This sort of analysis was needed to make a credible presentation in a courtroom, but he probably could have estimated the results to within a few mph beforehand.

Could Boggs have seen something in this that he had missed?

He turned through the photos again. It seemed perhaps the
airlane
had come to a stop a few feet further off the kerb than he had represented it in his scene diagram. He moved the point of rest in PC-Crash and began readjusting parameters. It took him
an
hour to clean up the simulation again, but in the end it only made a half an mph of difference.

He went through the photos yet again, and again, until although his eyes focused on the images he seemed not to see anything, and he was tempted to think that by memorising them completely he might forget them.

He returned to the house. He was lying flat on the floor when he heard Heather’s car in the drive. Seeing him, she started, then laughed. ‘You’re all right?’ She passed through the room, her steps jarring faintly through the floor into his skull. After a few minutes she returned, barefoot – he couldn’t see her feet but knew by the sound.

‘Can you get up?’

‘It’s all right,’ he said.

‘I find you like this,’ she said, ‘and I worry that you’ve been on the floor all afternoon.’

‘It’s only been a moment,’ he said. ‘It’s not uncomfortable.’ Sun through a window beat warmly on his foot and ankle. He monitored the effort of the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. ‘It’s a very nice floor,’ he offered.

She frowned, but sat cross-legged beside him.

He felt his heaviness pressing him to the floor and, in a way gratifying to observe, it held him here and his weight implied his substance, his existence.

He pushed himself up – surprising how little effort it took – and put his head in her lap. She stroked the hair at his temples. ‘You’re OK,’ she said, in a tone that didn’t seem to seek an immediate response. He closed his eyes and lay feeling his weight and her fingers and thinking to himself that he loved her. And, he didn’t quite trust her. He wanted to ask her about that, but the words too were dense and did not like to rise.

The next step would be to go to see his father, but he hesitated.

He made coffee and watched the arabesque of the milk and its subsequent slow diffusion. He put ice in a glass of water and grew lost in the transmutation of solid into liquid. Everything worked
this
way, one thing always becoming another, powered by entropy. In the nights when he rose to pace the house it contained a faint, nameless smell that Boggs must have carried on his clothes, because at times it sucker-punched Ellis, forcing memories of awful vividness. And despite a general sense of slowness, whenever he looked at a clock minutes seemed to have passed with startling speed.

‘My brother –’ From time to time those two words came of themselves into his mind, the beginning of a sentence or thought that went no further. Sometimes it felt like a message delivered incompletely, sometimes it felt like a failure in himself, and sometimes he seemed to be thinking about Christopher only to realise that the image he had in his mind was of Boggs. And he still saw the form of James Dell strike the windshield and press into it and saw, or imagined – because he knew that he had shut his eyes – the glass flex and the cracks form and run to all directions like a growth of shining crystals.

Heather asked what kind of jobs he was looking at. Engineering, he said, the only field he had qualifications in. ‘Accident reconstruction?’ He said no. They ate dinners with the television on, so that the quiet would be less conspicuous.

As far as he knew, his father still had Christopher’s
airlane
. To see it he would need to see his father, and he didn’t want to see his father.

In the mornings he woke before her, but waited, listening to her slow breath. Eventually she pulled up her legs and curled her face down toward them, as if in a last effort to gather into sleep and fend off the day. Then she stretched. He rolled over and moved to hold her a minute before she slipped out of bed. He made coffee and put on a kettle of water for her tea while she showered. He stirred milk into her tea and handed it to her while she ate a bowl of cereal. He asked about what she would do that day. As she finished a bowl of cereal, her spoon knocked noisily against the bottom of the bowl. She carried her bowl to the sink. She moved toward the front door, efficiently gathering her things along the way. He watched her go with a knife working inside himself.

* * *

Heather had given him a cellphone, so that she could reach him, and he had had his old number reassigned to it. It surprised him every time it rang.

‘I’m having a bad time,’ said Mrs Dell. ‘I don’t want to bother you. But I thought it might help to talk.’

He went to visit. Although Mrs Dell’s house stood directly beside an industrial-looking railway embankment that crossed the road on a concrete bridge, her neighbourhood was filled with pleasant little houses on large lawns. Mrs Dell’s was a yellow house with green shutters behind tall trees and several flower beds – a patch of hostas under a blue spruce, towering sunflowers near the road, clusters of roses and others around the house. The rubber mat at the front door said ‘Welcome’, and a brass plaque attached to the door frame said ‘Solicitors will be composted’. He rang, and she opened the door squinting into the sun glare and smiling with the corners of her lips. She appeared puffy under the eyes. But she had her hair neatly in place and wore pants, blouse and vest in matched patterns of white, grey, and black. She led him into a pink sitting room shadowed and crowded with photos and knick-knacks, set him on an overstuffed love seat, and sat across from him on the front edge of a high-backed wooden rocking chair, leaning with her elbows on her thighs. She began to say something, then laughed, looked away, began again. ‘This is silly. I shouldn’t have dragged you here.’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t know you were a gardener.’

‘Only a few flowers.’ She looked at the window. ‘The hostas have a slug problem. The thing to do about slugs is to put out pans of beer, and they will drown themselves.’

‘My mom liked flowers,’ Ellis said. ‘But when I was growing up the entire lawn around our house was covered with concrete.’

‘A city?’

‘Small town, a sort of semi-rural place. Dad worked for a concrete contractor.’

‘He paved your yard?’ She looked shocked.

‘Dad never could get the screws in his head all tightened down. Once I went outside and found a gas-pump nozzle stuck in the
gas
tank of his car, hose hanging down. He’d forgotten to take it out at the gas station and just drove away. It might have been in there for days if I hadn’t pointed it out.’

She sat blinking, as if trying to remember if she had ever done such a thing.

Ellis said, ‘When I told him about it, he said, “I thought something sounded funny.”’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘we all have our quirks.’ She twisted a foot against the carpet. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ Ellis refused. She nodded. ‘I should be glad he’s gone, really. He met a woman who throws pottery.’ She glanced around. ‘Well, maybe he’s known her for a while. She makes it, I mean. The pottery. Her hands are ugly things.’ She smiled as if for a camera. ‘Oh, it’s true he never totally lived here. Maybe he told you that. He had his own place, but he stayed here. He’d come here crying like a baby, and I’d take care of him. A lot of drama. Eventually, he’d leave, then a couple of days later he’d come back. He didn’t have anyone else to take care of him. Maybe now the potter is taking care of him.’ She shrugged. ‘Do you understand? I thought you might understand, somehow.’ She nodded her rocking chair. ‘Why did he do this, now? What’s wrong with him? How can I help him? I thought maybe – He was very moved by your visit. He didn’t have many friends.’

‘I don’t really have any insight –’

‘He often hides what’s in his heart. But there was a connection between you, wasn’t there?’

Ellis shook his head.

She stood and made little fluttering gestures. She said, ‘Should I give up hope?’

Ellis didn’t dare say a thing.

‘Shouldn’t I?’ she said. ‘But if I could, wouldn’t I have years ago?’

‘Maybe a little time apart from him will help,’ Ellis said, then regretted having said it. For a time he watched her as she paced. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘He’s old now, of course,’ she said, ‘but he was a good-looking
young
man.’ She retrieved a photo from the clutter on a shelf. ‘That’s him with his brother,’ she said. ‘His brother died several years ago of a stroke, unfortunately.’ Two young men, probably in their twenties, stood holding each other around the shoulders and lifting champagne glasses, wearing matching black suits and ties, one with a moustache and the other O-ing his mouth as if singing. Either one could have been a plausible younger version of James Dell. Ellis hazarded, ‘He’s the one singing?’

Mrs Dell sat again in her rocking chair and gazed at the ceiling. ‘He hated singing.’

Ellis wasn’t sure how that answered the question. He didn’t ask. It seemed he might only, somehow, grow even more confused, and he didn’t know if he could bear that. At the top of the window he saw a long series of coal cars creeping silently by on the railway embankment.

When he stood, she stood, and he stepped forward and awkwardly accepted her embrace. Returning to the minivan he saw, under the blue spruce, two pans of standing beer. He stopped at a gas station, then steered for the interstate. The sun made a white smear in a silver-grey sky. He passed over a stretch of roadway dark and shining with wet, but he saw no rain. The exit ramp lifted the minivan upward as if to launch it into the sky. He would see his father.

Because until now he had avoided it, he went first to the old house. The white siding had been replaced with pale blue and – absurdly, he thought – a wagon wheel and ox yoke had been nailed to the wall on either side of the front door for decorative effect. The TV antenna that he had climbed no longer existed. Grass, shaggy and weedy, had replaced the concrete lawn. A pair of maples he had never seen before reached up twenty-five feet or more. The driveway lay empty, and he could see nothing in the windows. Strange to think of strangers living here, but his family hadn’t been the first to live here, either.