‘What are you looking at?’ Christopher said, his tone turning soft-hard with insinuation, then repeated himself. ‘What are you looking at?’ He had known – Ellis realised – that Ellis had been at the window, watching. He had known and allowed it to go on.
Christopher reached forward and pushed Ellis on the shoulder with force enough to snap his head back against the cupboard. His milk glass hit the edge of the counter, fell, and broke.
Ellis nearly cried out and took a wild swing, but with an effort he held still. He wanted to be cold, and he wanted to make a comment that would wither Christopher’s superiority, but his mind failed to propose one.
‘Jesus,’ Heather said. ‘Don’t be a jerk.’
‘Yeah,’ Ellis said. This seemed insufficient, so he added, ‘Back off.’
Christopher nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. He grabbed Ellis by the shoulder and swung him around and pushed him toward Heather. ‘Go get her, champ.’
Ellis stumbled to a stop in the middle of the floor. He hoped she might come to comfort him, but there was only an awkward – nothing. Silence. ‘Hey,’ he said. She didn’t look at him. ‘Here’s a joke,’ he said. ‘Do you know the difference between a cheeseburger and a blow job?’
She stood and walked past Ellis to the door. ‘Come on,’ she said to Christopher. Christopher grinned at Ellis, and left.
In the empty room, Ellis said, ‘I hate you.’
Ellis bitterly avoided them then, and hid himself in books and earphones.
Several days had passed when he heard, even through his earphones, a collision in the intersection behind the house. Bored, he left his room and passed through the living room where Father and Mother were watching TV. Without looking up, his father had said, ‘Don’t be out late.’
Early autumn, late in the day, and the overhead lamps flickered into feeble luminescence as Ellis walked out the curve of the street and then between the collapsing brick posts that marked the entrance of the subdivision, into a stench of burning rubber, plastics and other petroleum products.
The traffic idling in the street included two semis that obstructed his view of the accident vehicles until he moved up to the corner: a rear-ended station wagon on the kerb had burned black from the rear bumper to halfway along the hood, and at the far side of the intersection lay a black coupé wrecked aslant over the front. Policemen and firemen stood around the burned station wagon, and several prone figures, evidently injured, lay here and there in the street. The scene looked familiar, like other accidents here, though somewhat worse than average. Ellis regarded it without focus, almost in a state of daydream, until one of the people on the ground sat and screamed, a woman’s scream. A cop held a bandage to her face and urged her gently back down. ‘Calm, honey, please, please -’ Ellis knew the cop: Heather’s father.
And then, with that element of familiarity established, his sense of what he saw flickered and surged. He ran forward. He had not imagined that the black coupé might be the airlane. But it was. The person screaming was – Ellis saw – Heather. And the figure beside her lay under a grey blanket and did not move, and Ellis dreaded everything ahead.
He called Christopher’s name, feeling the syllables in his mouth, their rhythm slow and clumsy, tasting of smoke and chemicals. One of the firemen caught him across the chest, but with a sudden fierce motion he slid under it and lunged forward. He pulled away the blanket: a hardly recognisable face, a horror – a mass of blisters, blood and blackening, lips burned off white teeth, eyes and nose bloody holes – a blackened shirt, and the jeans on the unmoving body might have been anyone’s, but he knew Christopher’s white-and-blue leather sneakers. Someone drew the blanket over again, and a hand grabbed Ellis’s arm, restraining him. Heather screamed, and the bandage fell and exposed the left side of her face, blistered and bleeding. Awkwardly she swung herself so that her face landed against Ellis’s chest, and he felt moisture on the skin. Terrified, he closed his eyes, but he filled with the smell of sweat and blood and burn and the sound of Heather’s incoherent voice.
Her father pulled her away, and someone else dragged Ellis back. He wanted to run away, but he could barely breathe and the grip on him was too strong. He closed his eyes, and let time pass. Yet when he looked around again little seemed to have changed. Christopher’s car was not the one that burned, because his car was not a station wagon, and the burned car was plainly a station wagon. He looked at the vehicles and verified this.
Then he saw that the sky had fallen off and revealed the dark and the stars. He was seated on a kerb. The form of his brother lay still under the grey blanket, alone, but Heather was gone. Heather’s father crouched down, hat gone, hair smeared. ‘What happened?’ Ellis asked. He shook thinking of how his parents would react.
‘Breathe, OK? Concentrate on breathing.’
‘That’s not his car,’ Ellis said and gestured at the burned station wagon.
Heather’s father shook his head. ‘He blew through a red and hit the wagon, and it exploded. Then he went in to help them. Heather wasn’t in the car, thank God.’ He glanced around in agitation. ‘She was at the gas station buying a Coke, but she saw the fire, and she ran over. She tried to help your brother. I’m sorry. Breathe, that’s all you need to think about now. Breathe. I need to go be with my girl.’
She hadn’t been in the car. She had been at the gas station. Ellis worked to understand this. And then his mind, exhausted, gave up.
Later, with a feeling of waking, he startled upright in his bed. From another room came a series of small strange sounds. Ellis listened for several minutes before he realised that these were the whimpers of his father’s weeping.
After Christopher’s accident, Ellis scarcely left the house for several days. In the autumn cool the box fans still stood around the house, but they were quiet. Ellis came to hate the quiet; the time would have passed more easily in the summer, when the noise and wind filled the air.
He did wonder at the chances of it, because they knew of many accidents in the intersection, and yet he had never thought of it as a particularly dangerous place, never heard his parents or anyone else describe it that way. No one advised special caution there. Maybe – he thought – if one actually worked out the statistics, it would have appeared no more dangerous than an average intersection with the same traffic load. Maybe he had seen so many accidents there only because it happened to be near home. If accidents tended to occur in intersections, and that was the intersection he saw most often, he would often see accidents in that intersection. And if Christopher drove most often through that intersection, then it would be the intersection where he would be most likely to have an accident.
His mother cried unpredictably in sobs that took her like a seizure, up to and through Christopher’s funeral. But the next day she said to Ellis, ‘We have to move on,’ and she resumed old routines and sent Ellis back to school. She carried boxes into Christopher’s room and began packing the things there. Dad, however, looked ten years older, and his sense of focus – never a strength – seemed to vanish entirely. At dinner he looked at his food until it lay cold. At night, Ellis found him standing in the living room, staring at the wall. He slept until noon or later. Often, at all times of day, he wandered into Christopher’s room, looked around, then wandered out.
One day a ruined car appeared in the backyard, a thing crushed and bent across the front by enormous forces. Ellis stared at it from the kitchen window and again it took him some seconds to recognise the airlane.
He went down into the basement. His father was working sandpaper over a cylinder of wood. Ellis scuffed his foot, and his father stopped sanding but sat there considering his hand – as if it were a little machine that he was unsure about operating – before he looked at Ellis and asked, ‘What do you think?’
‘Mom won’t like it,’ Ellis said, and then he went back upstairs. Despite the collision, the broken airlane nameplate was still on the side of the car. He tried the driver’s door, but it wouldn’t open. The passenger door, however, opened. He crawled in and slid over to the driver’s side. The damage to the car had pushed the dash and steering wheel close to the seat, so that he had to squeeze in. Setting his hands on the steering wheel, he imagined the traffic, the stop light ahead, nearing, a car crossing there, the dusk sky beyond.
When his mother came home and discovered it, she went into the basement and began yelling.
She argued and pleaded for days, but his father would not allow the airlane to be moved. It was critical to him in some way that he could not articulate. ‘Christopher died in there,’ he said, as if to explain. This was not true, Mom pointed out: Christopher died in the other car. Dad shook his head. He offered to build a shed around it.
In the next weeks Ellis’s father wandered around the house moving the furniture – never far, only a few inches in one direction or another, in a way that made entering a room vaguely disorienting. He began to go through several shirts a day and running laundry for shirts he had worn only a couple of hours. For a while Ellis’s mother complained about this behaviour, and then, eventually, she began to ignore it.
When Ellis and his mother moved out, a little more than six months after the accident, the airlane still lay in the backyard. His last night in the house, Ellis sat at a window, studying it – under a moon the concrete of the lawn glowed a little, and in the middle of that space the black car sat absorbing light, perfectly dark.
His father was out of the house, no one knew where, when Ellis and his mother departed in an orange-and-white U-Haul. The latch of the small hinged vent window on the passenger side was broken, and the wind pushed in with a giggling noise. His mother made a three-mile detour to avoid the intersection where Christopher died. Winter had dragged to a muddy end, and they passed stubbled brown-grey fields, stands of leafless trees, an occasional barn and silo. The truck’s engine rumbled and rattled and grunted, as if straining to the limits of its power, as if the things they were leaving behind exerted a gravity that could be escaped only by great physical effort.