‘I haven’t noticed them in a long time,’ Ellis said. This seemed the only thing to say, even if it was not entirely true.
‘I think I’d actually forgotten them for a while. I didn’t think I ever would, but then I did. I know because now I see them again.’
He watched for her to throw things or claw herself, but she didn’t move. He knew something undefined and emotional had shifted between them, and he tried to think through it carefully. But it was like trying to think his way to California.
In their long stretches of silence, he watched her take art books off the shelf – Rothko, Still, Motherwell, Johns – and turn through the images, her expression unaffected by whatever she saw. Sometimes she spent hours with the TV on and a page before her, doodling dense tangles of lines, craggy, elaborate constructions: leaves, machineries, mazes, branches, flowers, tangles of wire, heaps of rope, blending into one another from edge to edge of the page.
The shattering heat of the shower poured on him until the hot-water tank had been exhausted. He set himself into jeans and a T-shirt, socks and shoes, and with these tasks completed sat on the bending edge of the bed. Heather would not be back until five or six. Sunlight cut between the leaves outside and set a shifting pattern of shadow on the wall. He watched it move until the last of it seeped off the wall onto the floor. Then he went into the bathroom to pee and then the kitchen and ate a couple of slices of plain bread. At the bottom of the sink lay loose puddles of water, evaporating. All around, dust settled. He swept the kitchen floor – as he had done the day before, and the day before that – and gathered a few crumbs into a dustpan and threw them away. In the living room he turned through a magazine – not reading, but watching how the glare of the light moved over the gloss of the pages as he manipulated them.
At noon he poured a can of soup into a bowl, microwaved it, ate, washed the bowl and spoon by hand, dried them, set them back in the cupboard. He sat with the jobs section of the classifieds and read through it but marked nothing – he was either under-qualified or overqualified. He went to the computer that Heather kept in the spare bedroom and opened a new document to begin working out a résumé. He’d put his name at the top of the page before he realised that the mouse pad beside the keyboard, showing a brown mouse with a red ribbon around his neck, was the same one that he had given to her in the museum years before. It disoriented him badly.
Finally he aimed his gaze at the screen and tried to consider whether he should provide as his address this house or his apartment, until his eyes felt dried by the steady glow of the screen, and he turned it off. Darkened, the dust captured on its surface could be seen. He attempted to examine it, mote by mote. He shifted his fingers. He seemed to feel something, but was it large or small, was it guilt or grief? Did these two actually feel different from each other, or were they only two labels applied to the same thing depending on context?
He sat on the floor, trying to detect the impression of the bones of his spine one atop another, the press of his lungs into his ribs, the taste of the top of his mouth against his tongue, the flickering contact of his eyelids when he blinked, the fall of his hair against his scalp. If he concentrated hard enough perhaps he could even sense the hair growing from the follicles, the smell of himself lifting from himself, the noise of molecules of nitrogen and oxygen bouncing off his eardrums, the cells of his body slowly creating and destroying themselves.
Certain thoughts worked through his mind on long, spiral paths. Christopher became James became Boggs, and other accidents that he had worked on pressed into his attention, photograph images, the scents and winds and landscapes of accident scenes, a family scattered dead over the road and the crushed tow-truck driver and the little girl killed by a family of geese and the man who backed away from the burning van while screams still sounded inside – which was exactly what Christopher had failed to do. It shocked Ellis to realise this. How strange he had never made the connection.
He did not know what to do with the questions that the airlane nameplate forced him toward. Apparently Boggs had gone to see Christopher’s car. Why had he done that? Had he done a reconstruction of Christopher’s accident? Why? What had he found? Ellis didn’t want to look into any accident, he didn’t want to reconstruct anything, and he absolutely did not want to consider or reconstruct Christopher’s accident. But it seemed the only way to discover what Boggs had known. Did it matter what Boggs had known? He wasn’t sure. But the question presented itself again and again, summoning itself up as if by the same mechanism that the image of James Dell on the hood still made itself known. He could only guess that it related to Boggs’s conversation with Heather beside the golf course.
When Heather arrived home she moved around to redistribute the same items she had collected that morning – cellphone, keys, purse – then went into the bedroom. He heard the lisp of her skirt’s collapse on the floor and a drawer opening as she pulled out jeans.
She sat beside him. She asked how his day had been. He spoke of what he had seen in the paper and online, of thinking about his résumé. She nodded. ‘What happened to Boggs’s files in the basement?’ he asked.
‘I took all that to the office and told them this was everything I had of John’s work, and I didn’t want anyone from there contacting me again.’
She rested one hand on his knee, and he studied her veins and tendons, the faint small hairs, the irregularity of scarred skin near the base of the thumb. He asked about her day, she described the variable moods of children, and then they sat touching lightly while the traffic in the street buzzed. She asked, not looking at him, ‘How long will it be like this?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t see anyone but me.’
‘What about you? How do you feel?’
‘I’m so absolutely fucking angry with him,’ she said.
It seemed odd to him that it really hadn’t occurred to him to be angry at Boggs.
‘How long?’ Softly. Her hand on his leg did not move away and neither did it tighten.
Feeling the question was unanswerable, he did not answer. He saw behind her, perched in a far upper corner of the room, a spider. It crept an inch down the wall, then returned to where it had started. Then he was aware again of her attention on him – it seemed to have tightened, and he observed suddenly how strange he was becoming. Had become. He bore responsibility, too, for her quiet. He had reduced her to quiet doodling.
Her fingers tightened slightly on his leg, then lifted away.
She stood and went out of the room. A cupboard door clattered. Ellis lifted a hand and held it, testing its heaviness. With a tap of noise a glass was set on the counter. Water hissed into the kitchen sink.
‘I’m sorry,’ he called.
She reappeared and stood looking at him. Not unkind. Not without patience. But looking. And he felt something in himself hiding. He wanted to ask her, What am I hiding? What is wrong with me? He recalled how, when searching for Boggs, he had wished to somehow pry under his rational processes. Maybe now he had succeeded, but if so it had been a foolish thing to hope for, because under them lay, it seemed, nothing.
When she turned away he was startled, as if he had forgotten the possibility of movement.
At dinner Heather lit two squat candles on the table that burned with tiny steady globular flames, and they ate Italian takeout with the television on, tossing its shifting light on the ceiling. In bed he clasped lightly around her back until she seemed asleep. With eyes clutched shut he waited for sleep, thinking of her attention on him. Not without patience, but with limits.
The first time he set out, he drove north a few miles, then turned in at a park that he knew and sat for some hours at the edge of a lake with a swim area to watch the children scream and splash one another. Behind him mountain bikes came down a rocky trail with the noise of rolling typewriters. As the day leaned into dusk the bikes grew fewer and the swimmers exited until the lake water lay smooth, and he sat alone in the bluish light that hovered off the water and recalled the dead man that he and Boggs had left, and who might still, for all that he knew, lie there undiscovered, because in the aftermath of Boggs’s death he had never mentioned it to the police.