Boggs would have seen the same thing. It meant that a second person had been in the car. Who?
He didn’t know that it had been Heather.
He followed the paired doors of a semi-trailer for miles and miles. At a certain distance from the rear of the trailer, he could glimpse the heavy-lidded eyes of the driver in the jittering side-view mirror.
The police report didn’t say anything about a second person in the car. Why would the second person have been covered up?
He discovered that he had passed his exit. To keep driving – to drive and drive and drive – seemed simple and enticing. World passing without consequence. But he took an exit ramp and turned back.
On the night of the accident he had assumed that Heather had been a passenger in Christopher’s car, until her father told him that she had been at the gas station.
If she had been driving -
The front seat of the airlane had been close against the steering wheel.
He manoeuvred through roads and turns, returning. He carried his notes and cameras into the house and went to the computer to pull up a reference website – the designed distance between the wheels of the 1970 Fairlane was within a half-inch of the distance that he had measured on the driver’s side of his brother’s car. That distance had not been altered by the collision: the dash had not been pushed back toward the seat. Rather, the seat had been slid forward, for a driver shorter than he was, or Christopher had been.
He looked through the police report again, for any suggestion of a second occupant. There was none. An officer that Ellis did not recognise had signed the report. It did note that Heather’s father had been first on the scene. Certainly he had been there, because Ellis had seen him. Perhaps he had not been able to author the report because his daughter was involved. But surely he had had input.
Ellis called the police station at Coil. A woman’s voice told him that the officer who had signed and filed the report had died several years ago, of a heart attack, only months after his retirement. The woman’s voice caught, and Ellis murmured condolences.
He took the police report and his notes and cameras to the minivan and put them into the glove compartment and locked it. Why did he feel so ungainly as he moved? As if the earth were teetering under him. He returned to the living room. He sat.
If other explanations existed for the evidence on the seat belts, those explanations did not rise to mind. Typically in such cases he would have talked to Boggs for a fresh perspective. Boggs had known all of this. He had seen the same evidence. What had led him to it? Something Heather said, perhaps. It would have been like him to decide to investigate some small contradiction in whatever she had told him about the accident. Or, just curiosity.
If she had been driving the car, why hadn’t she told him? The question was critical, and Ellis tried to focus on it. Of course she had held some of herself from sight; in the nature of their affair a lot had been obscured. Yet he thought he had understood her, essentially, if not entirely. Perhaps he had been wrong. What had he known of her relationship with Boggs? She’d said little about it. But he had not asked. She had said that her marriage was a mistake that she blamed on herself. And what had she meant by that? He had no idea. How, after all, had she come together with him? He had been someone other than Boggs, and he had desired her, and she had felt herself linked to him by – what?
Rain again, darkening the windows, thrumming on the roof, sloshing in the gutters. He watched a droplet work slowly down a windowpane, the shift of the light it held. He tried to think what he should do, of confronting Heather – an idea like a balloon at the end of a string, he pulled it toward himself, then it rose a short distance away again.
He sat in the living room until late, waiting, listening to the air conditioning turn itself off and on. The rain had stopped. The hour when Heather usually returned went by and in agitation he checked the windows whenever a car passed. Finally he went to the toilet, then lay down and curled on the hard tile of the bathroom floor.
Eventually he stood again and went upstairs to the bedroom. Startled, he stopped – a shape lay in the bed.
At the sound of his step she shifted a little. ‘Love,’ he said. ‘You’ve been here all this time?’ he asked. She was silent. ‘Where is your car?’
‘It broke down,’ she said. ‘The engine just stopped.’ Her hand, lying atop the bed sheets, opened and closed. ‘I got it towed, and then I was late and stressed. I couldn’t face school, not another day of it, so I took a taxi home. I thought you’d be here.’
He understood that she was frightened of him, and that she had been for some time now.
‘Where were you?’
‘I’ve been in Coil,’ he said.
That night he lay gathering a hatred of Boggs. He could not believe that Boggs had not envisioned this course of events.
He lay beside her until morning, then he said, ‘I have to show you something.’
Her station wagon was already repaired – an ignition coil replaced. They retrieved it, and then she drove. He was struck by the fact that she almost always preferred to drive. The route to the interstate through familiar end-to-end suburbs spanned past. Tuxedo shop. Liquor store. Laundromat. Starbucks. Church. Chiropractor. A build-your-own-teddy-bear shop. Jiffy Lube. Walgreens. Babies R Us. Bed Bath & Beyond. He had not ridden in the passenger seat of a car in a long time, and it felt unnatural and dangerous, travelling down the roadway without steering wheel or pedals, without control. Strip mall abutted strip mall to create a continuous path of commerce over the land. Heather wound up the engine and pushed into the interstate lanes. Ellis asked, ‘Do you still think about Christopher?’
‘Are we going to talk now?’ she asked. ‘Have a conversation?’
‘Do you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Do you think often of the accident?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I hate to think of it.’
‘So you just stopped?’
‘I’d say it’s something that I’ve learned.’
‘What do you remember?’
‘I don’t like to remember.’
‘Why have we never talked about this?’
‘There are a lot things that we haven’t talked about. Maybe you’ve noticed.’ She looked at him, her expression closed and ungiving.
‘Heather,’ he said, and hesitated, and the two syllables stood open, an empty vessel. They were the last spoken for several miles.
But then he asked, ‘Will you tell me what you remember about Christopher’s accident?’
‘Why?’
‘Heather – please.’
‘I walked from school to the gas station to buy a 7-Up and to call my dad for a ride. And I was standing in the parking lot when I heard the brakes and turned and saw one car slam into another.’ She spoke flatly. ‘There was an enormous explosion and a fire-ball. When it had settled down and my eyes readjusted, I saw that the car was Christopher’s. I ran to it. By the time I got there, he was already out, and he went to the other car.’ She stared ahead. ‘There were screams and it was hot and Christopher went into the car and came out with someone, and the fire was spreading and he went in, and the fire and smoke were everywhere, and he was trying to go in even further. He kept trying, and I was screaming at him to come out. Then he just stopped. I tried to pull him out. Someone dragged me away.’
‘Did you call your dad from the gas station?’
‘What?’
‘You said that was the reason you were at the gas station.’
‘I was waiting. I knew he wouldn’t be home yet.’
‘Did you buy the 7-Up?’
‘I guess so, yes. I remember the cold of it in my hand when the heat of the explosion pushed out over me.’
‘How long did it take you to recognise the airlane?’
‘I don’t know. Why?’