This – he saw now – was obviously an untruth. But when she said it, he believed her and glimpsed something past his personal oblivion. He drove the minivan for a day and a half without rest to reach the hospital.
But now the jolt of purpose had faded. He moved in a strange world, filled with dark strangeness, and it was strange to be expected – by the implication of the progress of time, if nothing else – to continue with life and find ways to act. For three days he did not leave Heather’s house. He wished he had come here sooner. He felt impossibly indebted. Here, for now, nothing needed to be explained.
Boggs had been cremated, Heather said, the ashes sent to his surviving aunt. She had arranged to have his convertible donated to a charity rather than shipping it back here, but the things piled over the living-room floor were Boggs’s things, or things that she thought of as his, which she could not bring herself to use or to trash. She asked Ellis if he would do something with them.
So he had a task. When she went to school to teach, he ranged the house, gathering: all the items in the living room, then the shoes and shirts and slacks in the bedroom closet – clothing that he had seen Boggs wear many times – and a pair of sunglasses on the dresser, toothbrushes in a drawer under the bathroom sink, a collection of pocketknives in the chest of drawers in the hallway, an assortment of baseball caps on the refrigerator, all into plastic garbage bags that he assembled in ranks on the back patio. The files of records and financial documents that Boggs had assembled were still stacked on the dining table. Ellis put them into a cabinet in the spare bedroom.
He told her what had happened, as best he could, the facts of the event, likely not much different from what the police had told her. The official report, Heather said, had labelled it a suicide. ‘No,’ Ellis said. ‘What do you call it when a person loses at Russian roulette? He didn’t look at the car that hit him. He didn’t look to see if there was a car. I don’t think he was aware of the car, except as a possibility. He knew there was traffic, which might or might not be able to stop for him. He’d done exactly the same thing a little while earlier, and got away with it. He took a chance. What do you call a person who does that?’ He waited for Heather to say something, but she didn’t. He said, ‘I think there was a distinction in his mind.’
He told her that when he reached Boggs and found him dead, he had somehow bloodied his own face on the ground, so that the police believed for some time that he had also been involved in the collision. And that his own actions had even at the time felt light and insultingly comic.
He laboured to raise words. ‘What’s strange is that I have to work very hard to remember the collision,’ he told her. ‘James Dell still flips up onto the hood in front of me. But it’s as if Boggs had stepped into a fog. I can remember details, but I have to concentrate, and even then the sequence doesn’t flow, there are only some disconnected pieces, as if I had been told about it, no sense of having been there, and it seems I can’t even feel guilty correctly.’ As he spoke a prickling sensation of hot sand filled him grain by grain until he was choking and could say no more.
Over the days he grew aware – in a partial way – that Heather’s constraint and quiet were a little strange, but he had his own impulse to silence, and he told himself that the silence between them was not uncomfortable, because of Boggs and everything now thick with Boggs’s presence, because they both knew that in death John Boggs had spread himself everywhere. The idea that Boggs was simply gone was impossible to sustain. Unlike the dead man at the lake, who in his anonymity became a curiosity. Unlike Christopher, who Ellis had known well but had not understood, so that in death he became an object of the past.
And although they hardly spoke in the course of the evening, they still clung together in the night, they still made love, and he felt as if here they had come to a place of such unbounded emotion that there was nothing left to say.
In boxes in the closets he discovered hats and gloves and scarves, rubbers for Boggs’s size twelve shoes, and a sunshade for his convertible’s windshield. In the corners of the garage he discovered a dusty, half-empty pack of cigarettes, an extra set of tyres for the convertible, a few old T-shirts. He sifted and contemplated Boggs’s collection of tools – wrenches, screwdrivers, hand drill, sander, pipe cutter, hammers, pliers, table saw, mitre saw – and then began putting them into boxes. From the basement he brought up cans of tennis balls, aluminum-frame tennis rackets, cross-country skis, a selection of paperback thrillers, AC/DC and Led Zeppelin cassette tapes, a box of model-railroad equipment. Most surprising, perhaps, was how little it all amounted to. A few bags. Boggs kept a messy desk at the office, but he didn’t have much clutter at home. Soon Ellis was searching through closets for the fourth or fifth time, sorting item by item through drawers and wondering whether Heather would consider a ballpoint from a Hyatt or a stray brown coat button to have been Boggs’s. He peered under the bed and sofa, into the crannies of the furnace room, along the rafters of the garage. In a bin of unused flowerpots he found a hidden box of Boggs’s keepsakes – tapes of a high school rock band, photos of a girl perhaps eighteen years old, strings of beads and shells, medals from youth golf tournaments, high school and college diplomas, and stacks of report cards. Ellis began to sort through the stuff, but then stopped and upended it into a garbage bag.
He also found hidden away – and, it seemed, forgotten – a couple of Heather’s art projects. There were a few disposable coffee cups that rattled when he lifted them: each contained a paper diorama to be viewed through the hole in the lid. Octopuses hanging from tiny strings. A skyline of gold foil buildings. A dinosaur emerging from an outhouse. And he discovered a toy airplane, more than two feet long, which had been covered with delicately placed feathers. It looked like an airplane-shaped chicken, with a chicken’s incompetence for real flight, and he adored it. Fearing Heather might throw them away, he left them where he had found them.
He discovered evidence of a house that had been divided for some time – many of Boggs’s clothes were in the guest room. Dirty plates and glasses were stacked around the desk Boggs kept in the basement.
On the fourth day Ellis decided to take out this desk and the file cabinet beside it. He approached the task with some anxiety – he knew Boggs had kept copies of a number of work files in the drawers, and Ellis had a fear of those files, as if by a monstrous magnetism they might draw him into old nightmares. But when he opened the drawers, he found them empty. Heavy and bulky, the desk and the drawers could be pushed over the floor, but he saw that he could not move them up the stairs by himself. He retrieved a hammer and a pry bar from Boggs’s tools, began yanking out the drawers, and found taped to the underside of one a broken, weathered plastic nameplate that said airlane.
He stood turning it in his hands for a long while, confounded. Eventually he carried it to the minivan and put it into the glovebox. He sat in the passenger seat, wondering, until, with a bellowing noise, a neighbour began mowing his lawn. Ellis locked the glovebox, retreated inside and took apart the desk with hammer blows.
Still time moved by like a slow wind, a large and invisible force, present in the nodding of grasses and the shaking of leaves, easily forgotten. He watched Heather and thought a great deal about the airlane nameplate, trying to derive its significance. You ever talk to Heather about your brother’s accident? Boggs had asked.
‘I feel ashamed all the time,’ she said one evening. ‘As if I’d been coated with something, plasticky or rubbery, shiny. Mint green. It’s strange when no one else seems to notice.’ She looked at her hand. ‘Do you still see my scars?’