— Sorry?
— Nothing, he said, shaking his head.
We went down along Quincy, where I had parked the car. I suppose he knew it the minute he saw the Pontiac. It was parked with its front facing us. One wheel was up on the curb. The smashed headlight was apparent and the fender dented. He stopped a moment in the middle of the road, half nodded, as if it all made sense to him now. His face fell in upon itself, like a sandcastle in time lapse. I found myself shaking as I got into the driver’s side, leaned across to open up the passenger door.
— This is the car, isn’t it?
I sat a long time, running my fingers over the dashboard, dusty with pollen.
— It was an accident, I said.
— This is the car, he repeated.
— I didn’t mean to do it. We didn’t mean for it to happen.
— We? he said.
I sounded exactly like Blaine, I knew. All I was doing was holding my hand up against the guilt. Avoiding the failure, the drugs, the recklessness. I felt so foolish and inadequate. It was as if I had burned the whole house down and was searching through the rubble for bits of how it used to be, but found only the match that had sparked it all. I was clawing around frantically, looking for any justification. And yet there was still another part of me that thought perhaps I was being honest, or as honest as I could get, having left the scene of the crime, having run away from the truth. Blaine had said that things just happen. It was a pathetic logic, but it was, at its core, true. Things happen. We had not wanted them to happen. They had arisen out of the ashes of chance.
I kept cleaning the dashboard, rubbing the dust and pollen on the leg of my jeans. The mind always seeks another, simpler place, less weighted. I wanted to rev the engine alive and drive into the nearest river. What could have been a simple touch of the brakes, or a minuscule swerve, had become unfathomable. I needed to be airborne. I wanted to be one of those animals that needed to fly in order to eat.
— You don’t work for the hospital at all, then?
— No.
— Were you driving it? The car?
— Was I what?
— Were you driving it or not?
— I guess I was.
It was the only lie I’ve ever told that has made any sense to me. There was the faint crackle of something between us: cars as bodies, crashing.
Ciaran sat, staring straight ahead through the windshield. A little sound came from him that was closer to a laugh than anything else. He rolled the window up and down, ran his fingers along the ledge, then tapped the glass with his knuckles, like he was figuring a means of escape.
— I’m going to say one thing, he said.
I felt the glass was being tapped all around me: soon it would splinter and crumble.
— One thing, that’s all.
— Please, I said.
— You should have stopped.
He thumped the dashboard with the heel of his hand. I wanted him to curse me, to damn me from a height, for trying to calm my own conscience, for lying, for letting me get away with it, for appearing at his brother’s apartment. A further part of me wanted him to actually turn and hit me, really hit me, draw blood, hurt me, ruin me.
— Right, he said. I’m gone.
He had his hand on the handle. He pushed the door open with his shoulder and stepped partly out, then closed it again, leaned back in the seat, exhausted.
— You should’ve fucking stopped. Why didn’t you?
Another car pulled into the gap in front of us to parallel-park, a big blue Oldsmobile with silver fins. We sat silently watching it trying to maneuver into the space between us and the car in front. It had just enough room. It angled in, then pulled out, then angled back in again. We watched it like it was the most important thing in the world. Not a movement between us. The driver leaned over his shoulder and cranked the wheel. Just before he put it in park he reversed once more and gently touched against the grille of my car. We heard a tinkle: the last of the glass left in the broken headlight. The driver jumped out, his arms held high in surrender, but I waved him away. He was an owl-faced creature, with spectacles, and the surprise of it made his face half comic. He hurried off down the road, looking over his shoulder as if to make sure.
— I don’t know, I said. I just don’t know. There’s no explanation. I was scared. I’m sorry. I can’t say it enough.
— Shit, he said.
He lit a cigarette, cracked the window slightly and blew smoke sideways out of his mouth, then looked away.
— Listen, he said finally. I need to get away from here. Just drop me off.
— Where?
— I don’t know. You want to go for a coffee somewhere? A drink?
Both of us were flummoxed by what was traveling between us. I had witnessed the death of his brother. Smashed that life shut. I didn’t say a word, just nodded and put the car in gear, squeezed it out of the gap, pulled out into the empty road. A quiet drink in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.
Later that night, when I got home — if home was what I could call it anymore — I went swimming. The water was murky and full of odd plants. Strange leaves and tendrils. The stars looked like nail heads in the sky — pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall. Blaine had completed a couple of paintings and had set them up around the lake in various parts of the forest and around the water edge. A doubt had kicked in, as if he knew it was a stupid idea, but still wanted to experiment with it.
There’s nothing so absurd that you can’t find at least one person to buy it. I stayed in the water, hoping that he’d leave and go to sleep, but he sat on the dock on a blanket and when I rose from the water, he shrouded me with it. Arm around my shoulder, he walked me back to the cabin. The last thing I wanted was a kerosene lamp. I needed switches and electricity. Blaine tried to guide me to the bed but I simply said no, that I wasn’t interested.
— Just go to bed, I said to him.
I sat at the kitchen table and sketched. It had been a while since I had done anything with charcoal. Things took shape on the page. I recalled that, when we got married, Blaine had raised a glass in front of our guests and said with a grin: ’Til life do us part. It was his sort of joke. We were married, I thought then — we would watch each other’s last breath.
But it struck me, as I sketched, that all I wanted to do was to walk out into a clean elsewhere.
NOTHING MUCH HAD happened, earlier, with Ciaran, or nothing much had seemed to happen anyway, at least not at first. It seemed ordinary enough, the rest of the day. We had simply driven away from the cemetery, through the Bronx, and over the Third Avenue bridge, avoiding the FDR.
The weather was warm and the sky bright blue. We kept the windows down. His hair wisped in the wind. In Harlem he asked me to slow down, amazed by the storefront churches.
— They look like shops, he said.
We sat outside and listened to a choir practice in the Baptist Church on 123rd Street. The voices were high and angelic, singing about being in the bright valleys of the Lord. Ciaran tapped his fingers absently on the dashboard. It looked like the music had entered him and was bouncing around. He said something about his brother and him not having a dancing bone in their bodies, but their mother had played the piano when they were young. There was one time when his brother had wheeled the piano out into the street along the seafront in Dublin, he couldn’t now for the life of him remember why. That, he said, was the funny thing about memory. It came along at the oddest moments. He hadn’t remembered it in a long time. They had wheeled the piano along the beach in the sunshine. It was the one time in his life that he remembered being mistaken for his brother. His mother had mixed up the names and called him John—Here, John, come here, love—and even though he was the older brother it was a moment when he saw himself as firmly rooted in childhood, and maybe he was still there, now, today, and forever, his dead brother nowhere to be found.