He saw that they had circled. Coil lay ahead of them now. They passed an abandoned motel, a used car lot, a bar called the Best Place. As they heaved and thudded on potholes and patches, Heather leaned forward, right hand flexing.
Two-storey houses on festering lawns. A church fronted with a wide parking lot. A low bridge with concrete rails flaking and showing rebar. Most of it looked just as it had when he was a child, returning from the mall in the back seat of his mother’s car. They passed the high school. The road here ran with two lanes in either direction, sparsely trafficked. A Buick with red cellophane taped over a broken tail light slowed and turned without signalling.
‘How fast was Christopher’s car going before the crash?’ she asked. ‘Do you know?’
‘Forty-seven, forty-eight, around there.’
The lights of the intersection shone a quarter-mile ahead. He saw Heather settle the speedometer between 45 and 50 mph. At the intersection, the green light dropped to red. A little white Plymouth rolled to a stop in the right lane, but the left lay open. A couple hundred feet from the cross street she still held speed, and finally he understood. He could grab the steering wheel, but he could see nowhere safe to redirect the vehicle. To reach a foot over to the brake pedal he would need to remove his seat belt. He said, ‘Heather.’
‘I want to know.’
‘I didn’t mean this.’ Although at the same time, he wondered if something might be gained, a more authentic version of the experience.
‘I want to know,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to know?’
The car bellied into a low place, then rose into the inter section. He felt brightly calm, aware, a passenger, he could do nothing. He started to lift his hands to brace against the dash, but remembered the airbag that would explode from there and let his hands drop.
This accident felt different from the others, from the accident with James Dell, which had moved slowly before him while every detail caught him with surprise, and from the accident that killed Boggs, which came in an instant of distraction and finished even before he understood that it had begun. Here he felt no surprise and as he faced the oncoming event without surprise an awareness rose of how time might be subdivided, of his mind ranging forward as if all of it were preordained. And maybe it was – probably it could all be calculated already.
His left hand, thrown out, came awkwardly against Heather’s chest. A green Ford Explorer passed just before them, left to right, the driver peering at them through his side window, a large bald head with eyes tight, mouth tight, right hand risen as if to fend away, and in the window behind him a boy of seven or eight with brown bangs over his eyes, grimacing. Crossing in the opposite direction in the far kerbside lane moved a beige Saturn driven by a tall man, his head nearly into the ceiling, watching straight ahead, apparently oblivious, while in the passing lane came a red Chevy pickup. A horn sounded – the Explorer’s, although the Explorer had already safely passed by.
As they crossed the first lane he saw that they would miss the Saturn, but the Chevy pickup would be very close.
Headlights on the left, bright. Noise of the road under the tyres. Motion, shrieking, vehicles locked into their trajectories.
Heather had not touched the brakes, and in this she had it wrong: the driver of his brother’s car had braked. She looked straight ahead while he looked past her profile into the pickup’s headlights, incredibly near, as if in the car with them. Shrieking. The pickup braking, shrieking, how long had that noise existed? The gaping chromed grille of the pickup. Heather’s profile passed in front of the second headlight. He could not see the pickup’s driver, could see nothing past the lamps and the grille. The lamps passed behind the B-, then C-pillars, and the light thrown into the wagon flickered. Perhaps it would pass behind them, by an inch or two, he thought.
Then the horrendous clash of sheet metal on sheet metal in mutual forced distortion, and the wagon lurched right, and Ellis felt himself twisting, one shoulder biting into the seat belt while his chin slammed down into the other. An instant later the wagon was free of the Chevy, the noise of the collision ended, replaced by the scream of the tyres rubbing sideways and of chassis components biting into one another, the wagon spinning. His chin came up, and already he was being pulled in the other direction, toward the door. Lights streaked out horizontally. Objects moved across the windshield – a parked car, a lamp pole, the canopy of the gas station, the fence. His body hit the door while time sub-divided ever more finely, into a desert of sand, and then smaller yet, as if he might approach death with the assurance of never reaching it. He recalled once, at some event where they were all together, Boggs had asked a simple question about Christopher, and neither he nor Heather answered, and Boggs said, ‘When you get like this about it, I begin to wonder if he ever really existed at all.’ But he did exist, and now he didn’t, and that was what had always been incomprehensible, even if he was a jerk.
The station wagon lurched and heaved as it came into the kerb, and Ellis glimpsed a wheel, broken free, spinning into the air and away into the dark. The wagon’s yawing movement was stopped, but it continued to slide sideways, scraping bare metal over concrete. He could not bring his head around to see where they were going, saw only where they had come from, a spectacle of sparks streaming up in their trail. Heather had her eyes closed. Another impact pressed him hard against his door. Darkness shuddered up. He could not breathe and could not see. Everything rushed toward ending, and again the phrase my brother -
He touched something human with his left hand. Heather moaned. A network of cracks shone in the windshield. Beside him stood a white vehicle, only a few inches from his window, some enormous thing, a pickup or SUV. The station wagon had slapped sideways into it. He looked for his left hand and saw it clutching at the fabric of his own pants. ‘Heather,’ he said. He could not get out through his door, because of the vehicle beside it.
‘Yes.’
‘Can you open your door?’
‘I thought I would remember,’ she said. ‘I really thought I would. I was terrified that I would remember. But I didn’t. I don’t. Did you?’
Did he? Did he remember driving Christopher’s car into the intersection? No, he’d never driven Christopher’s car. No. He felt a lurch of nausea. But no. The driver’s seat of the airlane – he recalled – wasn’t set for his height. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’ He unbuckled his belt, leaned across her, opened her door. An excess of adrenalin made objects vibrate. ‘Can you climb out?’
She did. And he crawled over her seat, put his hands on the concrete and pulled his legs out. Slowly he stood. He examined his right arm where it had hit the door, but there was no blood, only dull pain. Heather looked fine. The vehicle that had stopped their movement was an empty Suburban. Ellis smelled faintly the acrid scent of gasoline, and he took Heather by the hand and led her away from it.
The Chevy pickup that had hit them stood on the road’s shoulder, and the driver emerged from it with a cellphone pressed to his head. A couple other cars had stopped. ‘Are you all right?’ someone called.
Ellis nodded.
He felt tremors passing through Heather. He sat with her on the kerb. ‘When the cops come,’ he said, ‘tell them that you just didn’t see the light.’
She turned to regard him.
‘You don’t have any idea if it was red or green or yellow,’ he said. ‘A lapse of attention. It happens all the time.’