by Nick Arvin
His mother mentioned that Christopher’s girlfriend’s name was Heather Gibson. And even before he knew her name, Ellis knew – it seemed the kind of knowledge that simply hung in the air of a high school – that she was a favourite of the school’s art teacher. Ellis also had the impression that she was a little aloof, but nearly every upperclassman seemed that way to him.
Everyone also knew that Heather’s father was a cop. One evening he arrived at the house in his squad car and came inside to introduce himself, crushing fingers with his handshake. No, he did not want to sit. Yes, he would accept a glass of water. He drank, and under his heavy moustache his mouth clamped and winced as if he had a tack in his shoe. Grunted and waited until all of Ellis’s parents’ attempts at conversation had suffered and died, and then he turned and sauntered out again.
Heather hung out with Christopher on the sofa, or in his room, or rode with him in the airlane. To talk with her in Christopher’s presence seemed impossible, and Ellis’s internal default position held that he didn’t want to anyway. He might have never known any more about her, except that every once in a while she walked to their house from school, and one evening as he was walking out of the subdivision he met her alone in the early darkness. His mother had sent him to buy double-A batteries at the gas station. He saw her from a long way off, and watched, and watched.
Approaching, she said hello.
‘Christopher isn’t home,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said. Then, ‘My dad’s working the night shift tonight.’
‘That sucks.’
‘I don’t want to go home.’
He nodded.
‘It’s your neighbourhood,’ she said. ‘Let’s not stand here.’
He stared at her until he realised what he was doing and grew embarrassed. He looked around – the park lay across the street. He said, ‘The park.’
They crossed the street and passed under a row of poplars. They threaded through trees and picnic tables to a small playground – swings, a merry-go-round, a set of monkey bars. He hesitated here, and Heather stopped beside him. A little further on the land sloped downhill to the creek, and Ellis could hear its burble. ‘That’s a good swing set,’ he said. Below the vertical parallel lines of the chains and the U’s of the seats connecting the chains lay a series of scalloped holes where the earth had been eroded by the passing of feet. Growing up, it had been his favourite because the swings hung from an unusually tall frame and he could fling himself to alarming heights.
Heather sat in one and began twisting side to side. A minute passed in silence.
‘Do you think that Christopher and I are a good match?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Ellis said.
She swayed forward and back. ‘Guys never tell you what they really think.’
He spent some seconds considering this. He asked, ‘Do girls?’
‘I try.’
‘Do you think that you and Christopher are a good match?’
She pulled her legs back, kicked forward. Soon Ellis had to step out of her way. She flew by, receded. At the furthest point of her motion, Ellis could hardly see her, then she appeared from nothing to rush up, passed upward, returned backward, slipped away, vanishing. ‘I like him,’ she said loudly, to be heard, and her voice changed pitch with her motion, and Ellis recalled a word: Doppler.
He edged forward and held himself as near to her path as he dared. Her hair collapsed around her face and hid her eyes as she receded. ‘He doesn’t talk to me any more,’ he said.
‘But he’s pretty sensitive inside.’
‘Maybe everyone is, I guess.’
She laughed. ‘You two are a lot alike.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Like what?’
‘For one, you both look that same way when I say something that you disagree with. You tighten your eyes like that. And your nostrils.’
He concentrated on relaxing his face.
‘Do you think it’s possible to think too much?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ Ellis said. ‘Sometimes all I want is to be able to stop thinking.’
‘Dad says I think too much about things like my mom did. My mom is dead, you know.’
‘From thinking too much?’
‘She had cancer. In her boob.’
He said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK. I hardly remember her. How old are you?’
‘Fourteen.’
She said nothing. A set of flashing lights moved down the street. The siren was off, so the lights passed silently. Ellis moved a inch or two nearer to Heather’s path of motion.
Rising, she said, ‘I don’t want to kick you.’
He stepped back again. Then he circled and took the swing next to hers, pushed off, pumped his legs. He tried to swing side by side with her. The chains of his swing squealed where they were bolted to the crossbar, a noise that paused at the suspended zenith of the swing’s motion. ‘I haven’t been on a swing in a long time,’ he called.
Stars then trees then earth. Earth then trees then stars.
‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ she asked.
He swung to and fro once, before he admitted, ‘No.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
She slowed, then hopped off her swing in mid-air. Her silhouette floated against the stars before dropping.
‘Should get back,’ she said.
He went backward and forward. He liked the cool of the air. He felt he did not want her to leave. He pulled hard and swung his legs.
‘Are you coming?’
He pushed off at the top of the swing’s motion. The atmosphere felt thick. Then he landed suddenly and tumbled forward onto his hands.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’ But his hands and knees were scuffed, and remembering what she said about boys, he revised. ‘Not hurt bad, anyway.’
She started toward the street. ‘Smells like rain,’ she said.
The air did offer up a faint mineral odour. As they passed under the poplars he watched the vague form of her back, the pendulum swings of her arms. They were nearly to the street, where they would be under the street lamps, out of the concealing darkness, and he felt a dread that caused him to reach to touch one of her swinging arms.
She stopped to peer at him. ‘What?’
‘Want to hear a joke?’
‘I guess.’
‘Knock knock.’
‘Who’s there?’
‘Fuck.’
‘I can see where this is going.’
‘No, it’s grammatical.’
‘What?’
‘Just say it, “Fuck who?”’
‘All right.’ She smirked a little. ‘Fuck who?’
‘No, it’s fuck whom.’
She laughed. He plunged ahead. ‘Do you really want to know what I think?’
He could not see the expression of her face clearly. They both stood as if waiting for the other, until finally she said, ‘OK.’
‘I like you a lot.’
He feared she would laugh again, but she did not. She did not move or say anything, and that perhaps was worse. The leaves above collided against one another with soft noises and a few cars moved by with throbs of sound.
‘Thanks,’ she finally said. ‘But I have a boyfriend.’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
And now she laughed. She stepped close and pressed her face into his shoulder and turned her head from side to side, a warmth and movement so unexpected that it hardly seemed credible. Clumsily he reached to the back of her neck, but already she was stepping away.
When they reached the entrance to the subdivision she said goodbye as though she expected he would go in, and he did. He glanced back, and she was walking quickly away. Yet as he continued around the curve of the street toward home he had a slippery sense of accomplishment. He glanced up and saw clouds obscuring the stars in the west. In bed, he lay turning his thoughts and waiting to he
ar the rain. He lay awake until late, but he didn’t hear any rain, and then he slept.
And after this, he still felt prevented by Christopher’s presence from speaking to her. To go through him to Heather appeared as impossible as building a V-8 from the contents of his bedroom – the task made a mockery of his resources and his tools. He listened to them from his room, but he never could make out words. Their laughter made him upset and anxious; he could not think what they might be laughing over together, unless it was himself. He found a few doodles that she had done, on a corner of a magazine, on the back of a piece of junk mail. They were of random objects. A shoe. An egg. A hand. He stared long at these. At the places where he knew she had been – the living-room sofa, a chair at the kitchen table – he put his face to the surfaces, and smelled for her.
Then one day he went up the antenna. He had no particular intention of spying: he didn’t even know that anyone was home. His father had had cable TV installed a couple of years earlier, and the antenna hadn’t been used since, but it still stood beside the house on a structure of steel tubes. The crossbars happened to form a kind of ladder, and Ellis liked to go up to see the horizon and watch the traffic in the street, to be alone and above things.
A rain had fallen earlier in the afternoon, leaving the bars of the antenna tower cool and moist. He paused at each rung to be sure of his grip. At the second floor, at Christopher’s window, a narrow vertical gap remained between the shut curtains, and in this gap he saw a movement, the colour of flesh, perhaps an arm rising. He looked away, to the concrete below. A low chorus of engines muttered at idle in Main Street, on the other side of the fence. He listened for a few seconds. Then, leaning precariously, peering through the opening between the curtains, he saw Christopher, shirtless, facing him, and he feared that Christopher could see him, but Christopher made no sign of doing so. In front of Christopher stood a desk chair. His attitude and posture seemed odd. He twitched. Also, someone sat in the desk chair with a head of brown hair, Heather’s, and she leaned toward Christopher. Briefly, Ellis thought they were talking, but then he saw that this was incorrect. Heather faced Christopher – who faced Ellis – with her head at the level of his hips, and he had his shirt off, and his pants were down. Heather moved slightly, put a hand on his naked hip, and he rolled his head. Ellis adjusted his hands, looked again down at the concrete. She was giving Christopher a blow job. Ellis felt a weird laugh rising but swallowed it. Christopher made a meaningless vowel sound, loud enough to be heard through the window, and Heather’s head inclined. Christopher took a small step backward. Heather turned and moved and Ellis couldn’t see her any longer. Then Christopher, too, moved and could no longer be seen. A soft muted sound of Heather’s voice came through the window as Ellis pulled himself back to the frame of the antenna’s tower, arms trembling.
He moved down, stood breathing, examining his fingers – they had set into claw-like hooks, and to make them move and straighten required peculiar concentration. After a minute he walked to the front of the house. He wandered down the driveway between the flowerpots – two rows of containers of empty dirt – and returned up the driveway. He went in through the door and closed it behind himself noisily, took up his algebra homework on the sofa, peered at the symbols without comprehension. Had he believed that Christopher’s relationship with Heather was immaculate? No, and yet he had not imagined the other either. He had even, in fact, tried to imagine it, but he saw now that his imagination had failed him. He also felt aware that his announcement to Heather in the park – I like you a lot – had been rendered pathetic.
He heard Heather coming downstairs, her steps entering the kitchen. Water ran. Chair feet rubbed on floor tile.
Soon Christopher came down the stairs and joined her. In a low voice she said something. Ellis left his algebra and went to the kitchen. The two of them sat on either side of the small kitchen table, Heather giggling. Ellis went to the cupboard and took down a bevelled glass for milk and observed them sidelong. Christopher cracked a knuckle. Heather traced shapes on the table with the tip of her finger. Christopher looked over. ‘Ellis.’
After being ignored for so long, to be addressed by him was stunning, as if the refrigerator had started flipping cartwheels.
‘Ellis!’
Ellis sipped his milk, watched the floor.
Christopher walked over and stood before him, so that when Ellis looked up he saw his half-brother grinning.
‘What are you looking at?’ Christopher said, his tone turning soft-hard with insinuation, then repeated himself. ‘What are you looking at?’ He had known – Ellis realised – that Ellis had been at the window, watching. He had known and allowed it to go on.
Christopher reached forward and pushed Ellis on the shoulder with force enough to snap his head back against the cupboard. His milk glass hit the edge of the counter, fell, and broke.
Ellis nearly cried out and took a wild swing, but with an effort he held still. He wanted to be cold, and he wanted to make a comment that would wither Christopher’s superiority, but his mind failed to propose one.
‘Jesus,’ Heather said. ‘Don’t be a jerk.’
‘Yeah,’ Ellis said. This seemed insufficient, so he added, ‘Back off.’
Christopher nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. He grabbed Ellis by the shoulder and swung him around and pushed him toward Heather. ‘Go get her, champ.’
Ellis stumbled to a stop in the middle of the floor. He hoped she might come to comfort him, but there was only an awkward – nothing. Silence. ‘Hey,’ he said. She didn’t look at him. ‘Here’s a joke,’ he said. ‘Do you know the difference between a cheeseburger and a blow job?’
She stood and walked past Ellis to the door. ‘Come on,’ she said to Christopher. Christopher grinned at Ellis, and left.
In the empty room, Ellis said, ‘I hate you.’
* * *
Ellis bitterly avoided them then, and hid himself in books and earphones.
Several days had passed when he heard, even through his earphones, a collision in the intersection behind the house. Bored, he left his room and passed through the living room where Father and Mother were watching TV. Without looking up, his father had said, ‘Don’t be out late.’
Early autumn, late in the day, and the overhead lamps flickered into feeble luminescence as Ellis walked out the curve of the street and then between the collapsing brick posts that marked the entrance of the subdivision, into a stench of burning rubber, plastics and other petroleum products.
The traffic idling in the street included two semis that obstructed his view of the accident vehicles until he moved up to the corner: a rear-ended station wagon on the kerb had burned black from the rear bumper to halfway along the hood, and at the far side of the intersection lay a black coupé wrecked aslant over the front. Policemen and firemen stood around the burned station wagon, and several prone figures, evidently injured, lay here and there in the street. The scene looked familiar, like other accidents here, though somewhat worse than average. Ellis regarded it without focus, almost in a state of daydream, until one of the people on the ground sat and screamed, a woman’s scream. A cop held a bandage to her face and urged her gently back down. ‘Calm, honey, please, please -’ Ellis knew the cop: Heather’s father.
And then, with that element of familiarity established, his sense of what he saw flickered and surged. He ran forward. He had not imagined that the black coupé might be the airlane. But it was. The person screaming was – Ellis saw – Heather. And the figure beside her lay under a grey blanket and did not move, and Ellis dreaded everything ahead.
He called Christopher’s name, feeling the syllables in his mouth, their rhythm slow and clumsy, tasting of smoke and chemicals. One of the firemen caught him across the chest, but with a sudden fierce motion he slid under it and lunged forward. He pulled away the blanket: a hardly recognisable face, a horror – a mass of blisters, blood and blackening, lips burned off white teeth, eyes and nose bloody holes – a blackened shi
rt, and the jeans on the unmoving body might have been anyone’s, but he knew Christopher’s white-and-blue leather sneakers. Someone drew the blanket over again, and a hand grabbed Ellis’s arm, restraining him. Heather screamed, and the bandage fell and exposed the left side of her face, blistered and bleeding. Awkwardly she swung herself so that her face landed against Ellis’s chest, and he felt moisture on the skin. Terrified, he closed his eyes, but he filled with the smell of sweat and blood and burn and the sound of Heather’s incoherent voice.
Her father pulled her away, and someone else dragged Ellis back. He wanted to run away, but he could barely breathe and the grip on him was too strong. He closed his eyes, and let time pass. Yet when he looked around again little seemed to have changed. Christopher’s car was not the one that burned, because his car was not a station wagon, and the burned car was plainly a station wagon. He looked at the vehicles and verified this.
Then he saw that the sky had fallen off and revealed the dark and the stars. He was seated on a kerb. The form of his brother lay still under the grey blanket, alone, but Heather was gone. Heather’s father crouched down, hat gone, hair smeared. ‘What happened?’ Ellis asked. He shook thinking of how his parents would react.
‘Breathe, OK? Concentrate on breathing.’
‘That’s not his car,’ Ellis said and gestured at the burned station wagon.
