‘Where was Christopher when you first saw him?’
‘This is a strange conversation,’ she said.
‘Did anyone else get out of the airlane?’
‘Oh God. Ellis -’
‘Were there two people in the airlane?’
‘Did John tell you to ask these questions?’
‘Well, there were two people in the car at the time of the collision.’
‘Did John tell you that?’
‘I looked at the car.’
‘You think I was in there? That’s what John thought.’
Ellis said nothing.
‘I wasn’t,’ she said.
‘Who then?’
‘Christopher was alone.’
‘These things are never knowable to one hundred per cent certainty,’ Ellis said, ‘but the evidence is pretty clear. Someone sat in the driver’s seat and someone else sat in the passenger seat. Both wore seat belts. I think you were in the car. In fact, you were driving. And your dad manipulated the accident report.’
She pulled to the side of the road and stopped, tyres scraping on the gravel, and she bent forward and gasped.
‘Isn’t that right?’ he asked.
‘I watched from the gas station with a can of 7-Up in my hand. You have no idea how much you sound like John.’
It is over, he thought, this is the end. He breathed shallowly and she stared at the steering wheel and time passed.
‘Do you want me to drive?’ he asked.
She opened her door, stood out of the car. He thought she might walk away, but she circled the car, and he stood out and circled the car, and he began to drive.
A boy and an older man – presumably the boy’s father – huddled together over something in the lawn, a white-and-red cylinder with tailfins.
‘What are they doing?’
‘Water rocket.’
The father began to work a small hand pump.
‘No concrete,’ she observed.
‘You remember.’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you know the difference between a cheeseburger and a blow job?’
‘No.’
‘Then let’s go get lunch.’
She glanced at him, but her expression didn’t change. She said softly, ‘You were afraid of me.’
‘When’s the last time you were here?’ Ellis asked.
‘Before the accident.’
‘When?’
She sat looking at the house. ‘I met him here earlier that day, I think.’
‘You left with him in the airlane?’
In the lawn, the boy and his father stepped back, and in a shrill voice the boy shouted, ‘Ten! Nine! Eight!’ At zero, the rocket shot into the sky.
‘I don’t remember.’ She sighed. ‘That ox yoke is ridiculous.’
‘But you think you got out of his car at some point and went to the school and then went to the gas station and waited there for your dad to pick you up.’
Something crashed just above their heads, and Ellis threw his hands up. Heather screamed.
‘The rocket,’ Ellis said.
‘I think my heart really stopped.’
The boy and father came running, and the father took the rocket off the roof of the car, grinning and mouthing, ‘Sorry.’
‘But why would you go back to the school?’
‘I had friends in choir. Maybe I met one of them. I don’t know.’ The father and son crouched to prepare a second launch. They stepped back and counted down, but this time the rocket only lifted a foot or so before it flopped over, geysering.
Ellis drove. Again the road reduced to a cobble of asphalt patchwork. Again he took the dirt road under the trees. Turning in the driveway he said, ‘This is my father’s house.’ He stopped behind his father’s car. ‘The car is here.’
‘What car?’
‘Christopher’s. The airlane.’
‘No.’ She shook her head with a jerk. ‘Are you kidding?’
‘It’s here because my dad is completely crazy.’
They stood on the porch, and his father opened the screen door. He let the door slap into his shoulder and his gaze shifted between them. He seemed to be wearing the same clothes he’d worn the day before, with the same or an identical white shirt, clean and pressed.
‘Dad, this is Heather.’
‘I remember, of course.’
‘Hi, Mr Barstow. It’s nice to see you again.’
‘We need to see the car, Dad.’
‘Do you want to?’ his father asked Heather.
But she was staring past him. ‘Is that the same sofa? And chairs?’
His father reached and with awkward gentleness, with the fingertips of one hand, touched her on the shoulder. Then he turned. ‘I’ll get the key.’ He could be heard in the kitchen rattling jars and drawers. Ellis again looked over the living room’s wretched objects. Heather pushed a fist into the sofa. Then his father reappeared, holding the key in one cupped hand. He led the way toward the shed, but Heather veered off and stopped near the toilet and stood looking at the fields while Ellis and his father again slid open the shed doors, again slithered through the clutter to the rear of the vehicle, again strained to move the car on its rotten wheels into the sunlight.
Ellis then stood beside it, watching Heather. Blue sky topped the open fields, and there rose neither wind nor the sense of imminence that the weather had provided before.
Finally he crossed the open ground and asked her to come. He brought her to the passenger side and pulled out the seat belt and showed her the trace of plastic it had pulled off the D-ring, then asked her lean inside to see the matching impression in the plastic of the D-ring itself.
She looked and offered no comment.
Then he asked her to slide over into the driver’s seat. ‘How is the steering wheel?’ he asked. ‘The pedals? Are they too near? Too far?’
‘No.’
‘You see?’
She only sat. He didn’t know what to do now, and she said nothing.
After a minute he climbed into the passenger seat to sit beside her.
‘We used to fight in this car. Christopher did let me drive occasionally. For some reason he always wanted to fight when I was driving.’
‘What did you fight about?’
‘Which party to go to. Dumb things like that. Whose fault it was that we were lost. That was pretty common. We made long trips into the countryside until we had no idea where we were. One time I got out at a farm stand and the woman there referenced all these towns and roads I had never heard of, and eventually it came out that we’d gone almost two hundred miles and had actually crossed the state line.’
‘That seat is set for you. Maybe you were at the gas station earlier on the day of the accident and transposed the memory.’
‘I remember the heat of the explosion. I remember stumbling on the kerb as I ran.’
‘The collision would have thrown you forward, the belt would have held your torso, but your head would have snapped down, your arms and hands would have been thrown forward, your legs probably gone up into the dash, probably bruised. And maybe the next day you had bruising along the line of the belt. Maybe your neck hurt.’ They sat facing forward and gazing at the space where the windshield should have been, and it struck Ellis as a terrible arrangement for a conversation. But perfectly common. ‘There would have been a flash of light and heat through the broken windshield. The spin of the car throwing you into the door, the shrieking of the tyres, the lurching stop.’
‘I told John that I had nothing to say about it. I don’t.’
He stood out of the car and after a minute wandered to the house. From the kitchen he looked back through the window. She was still in the car. He found his father in the living room, slouching back in one of the chairs, eyes closed, lax, looking dead.
I hate him, Ellis thought.
But the thought passed; it wasn’t true. He didn’t even dislike his father. His father made him uncomfortable. He didn’t want to allow himself, however, to develop dislike or hate out of a resentment of discomfort, the proximate cause of which was his father.
‘You’re not dead,’ Ellis said.