The Reconstructionist by Nick Arvin

husband until she vanished. She must have taken her heels off, Ellis thought. He examined the door, but the handle was inoperative. He watched the place where they had gone, but saw only the night, and eventually set his elbows on his knees, closed his eyes, and waited, listening to the world’s small unimportant sounds.
    He could still smell the odour of tyres scrubbing against asphalt. Although he rarely thought of the accident that had killed Christopher – avoided the memory – the smell made that memory inevitable. He knew that Heather would also be thinking of it. Christopher, his half-brother, had lain ruined in the street, too. Here, however, there was not the smell of burned flesh.

4.
    AFTER THE ACCIDENT , released by the police, Ellis went home. He tried to phone Heather, then Boggs, without success.
    He lay awake all night, unable to move his thoughts past what had just happened.
    ‘It’s not illegal to pass on the right,’ the cop had told him, without glancing up from his paperwork. ‘On the other hand, jaywalking: illegal.’ Ellis asked if he could ask the name of the man he had hit, and the cop looked at his notes and said, ‘James Dell.’
    The rooms in Ellis’s duplex were haphazardly furnished with a thoughtless mix of antiques and items from Target – the long battered wood dining table had only two cheap plastic chairs, and in the living room an ornate grandfather clock and an imposing writing desk stood over otherwise modern furniture. While the sunlight in the windows gathered strength he sat in a stiff-backed armchair, listening to the clock ticking, ticking, and staggering him forward through time. That Heather failed to call worried him, but he couldn’t bring his mind to focus and speculate on reasons, he could only think of the accident.
    When the clock had struck noon, he finally stood. He needed to see what he had done, and he did not want to hesitate. The police had impounded his car, so he phoned for a taxi. He asked the driver to take him to the hospital.
    Sweating, he went through sliding, quiet, automatic doors and between white walls to a desk where he asked for the room of James Dell. The clerk looked into her computer. ‘Are you family?’
    Ellis whispered yes, and she told him that Mr Dell was in critical care, room 312.
    As the elevator ascended and Ellis leaned in the corner, two stout nurses in teal scrubs complained to each other about their shift schedules.
    Three hundred twelve stood open, but a curtain suspended from a curved track on the ceiling obscured much of the room’s interior. Ellis knocked at the door frame, and a woman with a flat, reddish face peered from behind the curtain. ‘Are you here for lunch orders?’
    He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’ He moved around the curtain. The woman sat on a stool on casters at the foot of a bed that held a man with a respirator on his face, an IV line in his arm, bandages on his head and arms. A white sheet concealed the rest.
    ‘Are you a doctor?’ the woman asked.
    He still wore the clothes he had put on the day before – slacks, a belt, a pale blue dress shirt now badly wrinkled. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he said. The heart monitor beeped in slow rhythm. Where skin could be seen between the bandages it was dry, pale and darkly veined.
    ‘You’re crying,’ the woman said.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Ellis said again and raised his hands and pushed the tears off his face. ‘I’m the driver.’
    ‘The driver?’ She looked at him out of her flat face, then swivelled – her stool creaking – to the bed. The heart monitor counted time and Ellis stood not moving, afraid of moving, of time, of the woman, of the man in the bed, of sound and smell, of air and light.
    ‘I couldn’t stop,’ he said.
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sure.’ She looked at him. ‘Please. Don’t let it bother you very much. I’m sure it was an accident.’
    Ellis, in his surprise, said nothing. The only sounds were of faint voices and