The Reconstructionist Read online

  The measuring and calculating helped to calm and structure his thoughts. He stood at the open door of his car waiting for the police, examining a shallow dent on the roof, where the man’s leg or arm or hip had struck before he was thrown forward. He heard a short shrill warbling, an alien sound difficult to connect with anything in the field of reality. It frightened him a little, and only after it had sung out several times did he realise: his cellphone. He found it on the floor of the car. ‘Heather?’

  ‘Ellis? Is Boggs there? Where are you?’

  ‘Heather –’ he said. He felt a dread of speaking, as if doing so would make events irrevocable.

  ‘It looks like there was an accident.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you stuck in traffic?’

  ‘Where are you?’ Ellis said.

  ‘There you are. Is that your car?’

  He looked from face to face along the sidewalk and saw her as she stepped into the street toward him. She wore a long black skirt and a short black jacket, clutched a purse with one hand, held her phone to her ear with the other. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

  Dark hair cut straight at the neck, teetering a bit on tall heels, she looked large-eyed, confused. Ellis examined her with an aching uncertainty. Where was Boggs? ‘Wait there,’ he said. He hung up the phone and put it in his pocket and hesitated, recalling how he had nearly laughed when he realised that the man he had hit was not Boggs. He thought, perhaps I am not sane. Then his muscles moved and carried him toward her.

  ‘You’re all right?’ she said.

  ‘I thought I’d hit Boggs. But it wasn’t Boggs.’

  Her mouth open, she peered up at him, and he was a little glad to see her stunned. At least he wasn’t crazy to be stunned.

  He asked, ‘Have you seen Boggs?’

  ‘No.’

  He stepped back to look around. ‘I hit a pedestrian,’ he said. ‘I was on the phone with Boggs when it happened.’

  She moved to put her arms around him and he felt off balance, then his legs lost strength altogether, he collapsed to the ground, and because she would not let go she came down with him. He sat on the street crying, the asphalt rough under him, a pair of headlamps pressing him with white light, and he and Heather were clinging to each other when a police officer gripped his shoulder.

  The rear seat of the cop’s Crown Vic smelled of soap, bleach and plastics. Heather bent at the window and gestured with her fingers, back and forth. Ellis attempted to smile, but on his face it felt mangled. ‘I’m going to look for John,’ she called and waved again and turned away and glanced back and turned away. The cop had already gone. A wire barricade blocked off the front seats, where a CB radio blurted numbered codes.

  After a time he glanced out the window and saw, down the sidewalk, Heather running and – it seemed, faintly – Boggs’s tall shape moving away in the distance. And Heather ran after her husband until she vanished. She must have taken her heels off, Ellis thought. He examined the door, but the handle was inoperative. He watched the place where they had gone, but saw only the night, and eventually set his elbows on his knees, closed his eyes, and waited, listening to the world’s small unimportant sounds.

  He could still smell the odour of tyres scrubbing against asphalt. Although he rarely thought of the accident that had killed Christopher – avoided the memory – the smell made that memory inevitable. He knew that Heather would also be thinking of it. Christopher, his half-brother, had lain ruined in the street, too. Here, however, there was not the smell of burned flesh.

  4.

  AFTER THE ACCIDENT, released by the police, Ellis went home. He tried to phone Heather, then Boggs, without success.

  He lay awake all night, unable to move his thoughts past what had just happened.

  ‘It’s not illegal to pass on the right,’ the cop had told him, without glancing up from his paperwork. ‘On the other hand, jaywalking: illegal.’ Ellis asked if he could ask the name of the man he had hit, and the cop looked at his notes and said, ‘James Dell.’

  The rooms in Ellis’s duplex were haphazardly furnished with a thoughtless mix of antiques and items from Target – the long battered wood dining table had only two cheap plastic chairs, and in the living room an ornate grandfather clock and an imposing writing desk stood over otherwise modern furniture. While the sunlight in the windows gathered strength he sat in a stiff-backed armchair, listening to the clock ticking, ticking, and staggering him forward through time. That Heather failed to call worried him, but he couldn’t bring his mind to focus and speculate on reasons, he could only think of the accident.

  When the clock had struck noon, he finally stood. He needed to see what he had done, and he did not want to hesitate. The police had impounded his car, so he phoned for a taxi. He asked the driver to take him to the hospital.

  Sweating, he went through sliding, quiet, automatic doors and between white walls to a desk where he asked for the room of James Dell. The clerk looked into her computer. ‘Are you family?’

  Ellis whispered yes, and she told him that Mr Dell was in critical care, room 312.

  As the elevator ascended and Ellis leaned in the corner, two stout nurses in teal scrubs complained to each other about their shift schedules.

  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, dizz
y 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.

  5.

  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.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it’s terrific for hauling cargo.’

  ‘Minivans are pretty safe,’ Ellis said. ‘You don’t see a lot of fatal accidents involving minivans. Some, but not a lot.’

  ‘Huh,’ said the salesman. He thumbed and twisted his anchor buttons.

  ‘At least I haven’t,’ Ellis said. When he had written a cheque and transacted the paperwork he sat unmoving in the driver’s seat a minute, then started the engine, let it idle, did not touch the controls but stared at them. He took out his phone and called Boggs, but Boggs did not answer. He set his hands on the steering wheel to absorb the engine’s trembling. He had not driven since coming to a stop as James Dell flew into the darkness of the street ahead. He thought about driving. In some gentler world devoid of cars and highways and stop lights and parking lots and accidents he would not need to drive. But in this world he needed to drive. When he lifted a hand it shook, but he put it to the gear shift. The minivan lurched from reverse into drive. But otherwise the process of crossing the parking lot and turning into the street was routine.

  ‘Human error is to be expected,’ Boggs had said, shortly after Ellis began working for him. ‘You’ve got a lot of people hurling themselves around in machines weighing two tons plus, under the regulation of laws that the people driving these machines understand only poorly. And they’re going to be making mistakes anyway because of limited attention spans, flawed perceptions, psychopharmaceutical use, poor decisions, haste and et cetera. So you really have to expect that from time to time someone will crash into someone else, and someone will be hurt. Which doesn’t stop anyone from suing anyone else for their errors.’

  Ellis bought a map at a gas station, and with the map and his phone lying on the passenger seat he drove to the interstate and joined the westward flow. The broken white line flickered beside him, the odometer wheels rolled, the sun moved down.

  Boggs had claimed that the accidents didn’t shock him. What shocked him was that there weren’t more. He said, ‘The ability to drive on a road with thousands of others and probably survive the experience gives me a little faith in the humanity of humanity.’

  Ellis phoned Heather. He’d begun to doubt himself, he told her. Even if he found Boggs, what could he say?

  ‘Tell him that
he’s –’ She stopped. ‘A friend. Tell him that he’s loved.’

  ‘He’ll laugh. I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t kill me.’

  ‘You’ll know what to say. You’ll think of it.’ But her voice was uncertain.

  He passed a series of middle-size cities with big box stores by the interstate exits, then ramped off the interstate and passed white-clad homes and the dark vertical lines of telephone poles and reaching trees, the lowering sun flickering yellow in the leaves. He travelled north, slowing in the limits of little towns with a block or two of storefronts. Pizzeria. Barbershop. Bar. Pharmacy. Bank. Auto body shop. Between towns, small ranch houses squatted over flat, aggressively green lawns. He passed a bar with a painted sign, ‘The Cloverleaf Lounge’ – a vinyl-sided structure with a couple of high, small windows and a sagging banner: ‘Bud Light $1.50’. He came down a gradual hill to an intersection where, off to the side, a swathe of raw earth lay levelled and heaped beside two enormous yellow machines. Ellis waited under a green light for a semi to clear the opposite lane, then turned left toward the lake.

  He travelled a couple more miles before it struck him that he had been in that intersection before. With Boggs. They had done an accident-scene inspection there – an old motel had stood on the ground now scraped down by the yellow machines. The neon had been gone from the motel sign, its lawn had been untended and overgrown, but a handful of cars had stood in front of the rooms and a shirtless man had been loitering in the parking lot, scratching his thighs while Ellis and Boggs dodged in and out of the intersection with measuring tapes and cameras. Three years ago? More or less.

  A sign pointed at the park entrance.

  Narrow, high-crowned roads led to three different camping areas, and Ellis drove through the loops of each, past RVs, SUVs, pop-up campers, pup tents, fire pits, tiki torches, lawn chairs, and a few couples, children, solitary men. None were Boggs, and none of the vehicles were Boggs’s convertible. He phoned Heather to be sure that he had come to the right place, to see if she had any ideas, and she directed him back to the most remote of the camping areas. He circled through it twice more. Then he drove by the others again, then turned at the sign for the boat ramp, followed a short road to the water, and found the area empty. He parked and walked down to the wavelets lapping and rattling small round stones. Above him, forest loomed and reached toward the water and the spectacle of the setting sun. Haphazard on the beach lay pale rounded driftwood, beer bottles, a tyre. Seagulls rose and fell. To the south a man and a couple of children were prancing at the water’s edge. In the other direction, smeared by distance into anonymity, a single figure moved. Impossible to say that it wasn’t Boggs.