The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  It just wasn’t right—to be alive, to have had what people assured you was a close call, and then go out and hire a lawyer; it wasn’t right. And even if you were the mother and father of one of the kids who had died, like the Ottos or the Walkers, what good would it do to hire a lawyer? To sue, because your child had died in an accident, and then collect a bunch of money from the state—it was understandable, yet it somehow didn’t seem right, either. But to be the mother and father of one of the kids who had survived the accident, even a kid like me, who would spend the rest of her life a cripple, and then to sue—I didn’t understand that at all, and I really knew it wasn’t right. Not if I was, like they said, truly lucky.

  There was no stopping Mom and Daddy, though. They had their minds made up. This Mr. Stephens had convinced them that they were going to get a million dollars from the State of New York and maybe another million from the town of Sam Dent. Daddy said they all have insurance for this sort of thing; it won’t come out of anybody’s pocket, he kept saying; but even so, it made me nervous. Since the accident, I had become superstitious, I think. Mom and Daddy are Christians, at least Mom is, and I sort of believe in God myself, so I did not want to appear ungrateful and end up losing what little luck I had.

  “This Mr. Stephens, who bought me the computer—what does he want me to do? I don’t have to be the one to sue anybody, do I? Can’t you guys do it?”

  Daddy was in the bathroom now, unscrewing the mirror. “Well, sure, but he’s got to arrange for the other side’s lawyers to take a statement from you, a deposition, it’s called, and then we all go to court, and you’ll be asked to testify and so forth—”

  “About what?” I hollered. “I don’t even remember the accident! It’s like I wasn’t even there!”

  “Don’t get excited, honey,” Mom said, smooth as butter. God, I hate her sometimes.

  Jennie was sucking her thumb. “Cut that out,” I said to her. “You’re too old for that,” I said, and she started to cry. I’m such a rat. “I’m sorry, Babes,” I said to her. I pulled her to me and hugged her. She stopped crying and didn’t put her thumb back in her mouth, but now I was wishing she would.

  Daddy said, “Mr. Stephens is really a very nice man, very gentle and understanding. He just wants you to describe in your own words what life was like before the accident, you know, with school and all, cheerleading, your plans for the future and all, that sort of thing. In your own words. He says it’s much more effective if you tell it, instead of just us telling it.”

  “Yeah. I’ll bet. Well, maybe I won’t. I don’t like even thinking about that stuff, and I sure don’t want to talk about it to any lawyer or some judge in a courtroom. So maybe I’ll just refuse to talk about it. They can’t make me, can they?”

  “C’mon, Babes, be reasonable,” Daddy said, coming back into the bedroom.

  “Let’s talk about this later, okay?” Mom said. “She just got home, Sam. Are you hungry, honey? You want me to fix you something, a sandwich or some soup? No more hospital food, honey, aren’t you glad?” She had her cheery TV-mom voice working.

  “Yeah,” I said, and I suppose I was glad. I hate hospital food. “I am hungry. Maybe a sandwich and some soup would be good.”

  Mom got up and hustled out to the kitchen, and Daddy slowly gathered his tools and followed. I rolled over to the door and shut it and put the new hook in place. “It works,” I said to Jennie.

  “Cool,” she said, imitating me.

  “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

  “That’s okay. Can you make the computer work?” she asked. “Can you show me how to use it?”

  I said sure and wheeled back to the table and switched on the computer. “Cool,” I said, and winked at her and laughed. Quickly, she came up next to my chair and put her arm around my shoulder, and we started fooling around with Mr. Stephens’s computer, writing our names and silly messages on the screen.

  I was home again, and lots of things were the same as before. But a few things, important things, were different. And not just my room, either. Before the accident, I was ashamed all the time and afraid. Because of Daddy. Sometimes I even wanted to kill myself. But now I was mostly angry and never wanted to die.

  Back then, though, with Jennie sound asleep in the bunk above me, I used to lie awake at night thinking up ways to kill myself. Dying was the only way I could imagine the end of what I was doing with Daddy, although sometimes I imagined that he had suddenly decided to leave me alone, because weeks would go by, whole months, when he did leave me alone, when he just acted regular, and I thought then that maybe he had decided that what he was making me do with him was wrong, really wrong, and he was sorry and wouldn’t come to me anymore when we were alone in the house or in the car and touch me and make me touch him.

  Those times when he left me alone, I thought maybe I had dreamed the whole thing up, dreams are like that, or had imagined it, because even when I was a little kid like Jennie, before Daddy started touching me that way, I had imagined some things that had made me ashamed, sexual things, sort of. Everybody does that. So maybe I had imagined this too. A few weeks would pass, and I’d start to forget that it had actually happened, and then I’d feel guilty for having been so upset and confused.

  But late one night he would pick me up from babysitting at the Ansels’ or somebody else’s, and in the darkness of the car he’d slide his hand across the seat to me and put it on my leg and pull me toward him and keep sliding his hand up my leg, under my skirt, and I knew his pants were undone and he wanted me to put my hand on him there again, and so I would, and then we would do things to each other, like he had taught me, things like I knew my girlfriends did with their boyfriends after school dances and in cars with older boys but that I would never do with a boy and pretended to be disgusted about when they told me.

  When we got home I would run into the house from the car and go straight to my room upstairs with my heart pounding and a roaring sound in my ears. It was awful. I lay in bed in the darkness with my clothes still on and listened to him lock up below and walk slowly up the stairs and go into his and Mom’s room and shut the door. I could hear the bedsprings squeak as he got into bed next to Mom, and soon I heard him snoring. For hours I stayed there, still as a log, until finally the roaring in my ears stopped and I dared to get out of the bed and take off my clothes in the darkened room and put on my nightgown and go down the hall to the bathroom and come back to bed, where I lay awake trying to think up ways to kill myself that wouldn’t upset Jennie too much. Usually, I decided on sleeping pills and Daddy’s vodka in the kitchen cupboard. Like Marilyn Monroe. But I didn’t know how to get hold of any sleeping pills, so the next day I always gave it up and instead tried to make what had happened in the car coming home from the Ansels’ seem like I only dreamed it.

  I didn’t have to try very hard, because Daddy, except when he wanted to do those things with me, the rest of the time treated me normally, like nothing wrong had happened. Always, the next morning at breakfast he was just the same old Daddy, grumpy and distracted, bossing the boys and me and Jennie around, ignoring Mom the way he does, while she fussed in the kitchen, shoving food at the rest of us and as usual worrying over her diet. She never eats anything in front of anybody but keeps getting fatter and fatter all the time. She’s not a blimp, but she is fat.

  “Look at Nichole,” Daddy always said to Mom. “Look at me. We never diet, we just eat three squares a day, and we’re not fat. What you got to do, Mary, is stop all the in-between-meal snacking,” he’d say.

  “Nichole’s fourteen,” Mom would answer. “And you, everyone in your family is skinny as a rail. And I don’t snack; it’s my metabolism.” Then she’d pout and try to change the subject. “Rudy, you keep your hat on today; you’re coming down with a cold,” she’d say, and start hurrying us from the table so we wouldn’t miss the bus.

  Normal life at the Burnell house.

  What used to be normal life anyhow. Because after the accident, things c
hanged. For one thing, when the other kids went off to school in the mornings, I stayed home. Mr. Dillinger, the principal, came over one day and brought a bunch of assignments from my teachers so I could catch up with the rest of my class and pass into the ninth grade with them. He’s a huge gawk who wears a bow tie and always has dandruff on his suits, and he sat in the living room with me and Mom, all hearty and cheerful, talking real loud, like being in the wheelchair had made me deaf, and together they tried to convince me to come back to school and attend classes with everyone else. He said the school board had authorized a special van to bring me back and forth. “Isn’t that terrific!” he said, like I was supposed to jump up and give a cheer for the school board.

  “No way,” I said. “I’m never going back to that school,” I said, and I noticed he didn’t argue very hard. Mom didn’t, either, but she never argues hard when an official man is around. She just takes her cues from him and agrees. Later on, Daddy tells her what she should have said.

  Anyhow, I don’t think Mr. Dillinger wanted me wheeling around the school reminding everyone of the accident and the kids who had died in it. They’d hired some woman from Plattsburgh, I heard, and arranged all these special group therapy meetings and assemblies for the kids after the accident, and things had more or less returned to normal now. Besides, Mr. Dillinger knew I could do all the work at home and still be ahead of most of the kids in my class, except for the real brainy ones. And next year my class would all be going on to high school in Lake Placid, and then I’d be somebody else’s problem.

  I didn’t want to stay home alone with Mom all day, that’s for sure, but I really did not need to see any of the kids from school. I didn’t want to watch them strolling around in the hallways and the cafeteria, sneaking into the lav between classes to put on lipstick and share a cigarette, going off to cheerleading practice and hanging out after school in the parking lot together. I didn’t want them to stop what they were doing or saying when I rolled up in my wheelchair, “Hi, guys, what’s up?” I knew what I’d look like to them, how they’d all go silent for a minute when the dweeb arrived and then change the subject not to embarrass her or make her feel bad because they were talking about something she couldn’t do, like dancing or sports or just hanging out. Poor Nichole, the cripple. That’s the best I’d get from them—pity. And no matter how many of those group therapy sessions they’d been to, everyone would see me and instantly think of the kids who weren’t there anymore, the kids who had not been lucky like me, and maybe they would hate me for it. And I wouldn’t blame them.

  At the hospital, lots of kids from school, even the little kids from the Sunday school class I taught, had come to visit me, like official delegations at first, in groups of three and four at a time, but it was always self-conscious and embarrassing, especially with the kids my age, my friends, so called, and I knew they could hardly wait to leave, and I was glad myself when they did. Then only my best friend, Jody Plante, and one or two others, when they could get someone to drive them over, came to visit, and that was okay. But by the time I left the hospital to come home, I had pretty much run out of things to talk about with them. We were living in different worlds now, and they couldn’t know about mine, and I didn’t want to know about theirs anymore.

  For a while after I got home, Jody called me on the phone and even came over once or twice, and she yacked brightly about school and cheerleading gossip and boys, the usual stuff. But she was forcing it, I knew, and I never seemed to have the desire to call her, and of course I couldn’t visit, so pretty soon she didn’t call me anymore and never came to visit, either.

  I stayed in my new room, with the door closed and locked, except when I came out to eat or use the bathroom. For supper, I had to sit at the table with the rest of the family, but breakfast and lunch I usually ate alone. One Saturday morning Mom and Daddy moved everything in the cupboards—dishes, glasses, food, everything—down to the lower cabinets, so I could reach them from my wheelchair. It was Daddy’s idea. I think Mom would have preferred to have me go on asking her for help every time I wanted a sandwich or a bowl of cereal. But since Jennie was in school now, Mom was gone a lot of the time herself, working part time over to the Grand Union in Marlowe, so she had to go along with my taking care of myself in the kitchen.

  During the days, I pretty much had the whole house to myself, but I still stayed in my room. One night Daddy brought home a portable black-and-white TV for me that he had bought used in Ausable Forks, and he tied it into the regular cable, so I was able to watch TV then without leaving my room. Soaps and game shows, mostly, which were fine by me. And music videos. And Oprah and Donahue and Geraldo. After a month of that stuff you feel like it’s all one show, ads and everything, and you’ve been watching it for years. But I had Mr. Stephens’s computer to play with, and plenty of schoolwork to do, and books that Mrs. Twichell, the school librarian, brought over for me, mostly sappy young-adult novels about race relations and divorce, which I don’t like but will read anyhow because the writers seem so intent on having you read them that you feel it’s impolite not to.

  Things with Daddy were different now too. I had become a wheelchair girl, and I think that scared him, like it does most people. You see them on the street staring at you and then looking away, as if you were a freak. To Daddy, it was like I was made of spun glass and he was afraid he would break me if he touched me. Probably I wasn’t pretty to him anymore, either, and he couldn’t pretend that I was like some beautiful movie star, the way he used to. Miss America, he always called me. “How’s my Miss America today?” But not anymore. Which was fine by me. If he did touch me, by accident or because he couldn’t avoid it, like the time he had to carry me up the stairs at the courthouse in Marlowe when I had to make my deposition for Mr. Stephens and the other lawyers, he backed away from me right away and wouldn’t look at me.

  I looked at him, though. I looked right into him. I had changed since the accident, and not just in my body, and he knew it. His secret was mine now; I owned it. It used to be like I shared it with him, but no more. Before, everything had been fluid and changing and confused, with me not knowing for sure what had happened or who was to blame. But now I saw him as a thief, just a sneaky little thief in the night who had robbed his own daughter of what was supposed to be permanently hers—like he had robbed me of my soul or something, whatever it was that Jennie still had and I didn’t. And then the accident robbed me of my body.

  So I didn’t own much anymore. My new room, maybe, and Mr. Stephens’s computer, which weren’t really mine and weren’t worth much anyhow. No, the only truly valuable thing that I owned now happened to be Daddy’s worst secret, and I meant to hold on to it. It was like I carried it in a locked box on my lap, with the key held tightly in my hand, and it made him afraid of me. Every time he saw me looking at him hard, he trembled.

  I remember the first time Mr. Stephens came over to the house, how strained and nervous Daddy was when he wheeled me out into the living room and introduced me. It was like Mr. Stephens was a police officer or something, probably because he’s such a big shot lawyer and all, and Daddy was afraid I’d say something to make him suspicious.

  Of course, he was also afraid that I would refuse to go along with their lawsuit. I still hadn’t agreed to do it, not in so many words, but in my mind I had decided to go ahead and say what they wanted me to say, which they insisted was only to answer Mr. Stephens’s and the other lawyers’ questions truthfully. That couldn’t hurt anything, I figured, because the truth was, I didn’t really remember anything about the actual accident, so nothing I said could be used to blame anybody for it. It was an accident, that’s all. Accidents happen.

  Mr. Stephens was this tall skinny guy with a big puffy head of gray hair that made him look like a dandelion gone to seed and a gust of wind would blow all his hair away and leave him bald. I liked him, though. He had a small pointy face and red lips and a nice smile, and he looked right into my eyes when he talked to me, which is some
thing that most people can’t do with me. Also, he reached down and shook my hand when Daddy introduced us, which I liked. Adults almost never do that, especially with girls. And with wheelchair girls, I’ve noticed, they actually take a step backward and put their hands on their hips or in their pockets, like you’ve got something they don’t want to catch. Mr. Stephens, though, after he shook my hand and Daddy went to stand edgily by the porch door, pulled a kitchen chair up next to my wheelchair and sat right down and got his head the same level as mine, and I felt like he could see that I was really a normal person.

  He talked funny, fast and like he had already thought out ahead of time what he wanted to say, the way city people or maybe just lawyers do, but I liked it, because once you trust a person like that, you can have a real good conversation with him. You can concentrate on what the words mean and not have to worry all the time about what the other person is thinking.

  “Well, Nichole,” he began, “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time now, and not just because I’ve heard so many good things about you all over town, but because, as you know, I’m the guy representing you and your mom and dad and some other folks here in town,” he said, diving right in. “We’re trying to generate some compensation, however meager, for what you all have suffered and at the same time see that an accident like this one never happens again. And you, Nichole Burnell, you’re pretty near central to the case I’m trying to build,” he said. “But you would probably just as soon let the whole thing lie, I’ll bet, so you can get on with your life as quickly and smoothly as possible, right?”

  I said yes, as a matter of fact I would. He waited for me to go on, so I did. I said that I didn’t like thinking about the accident, which I couldn’t remember anyhow, and I really hated talking with people about it, because I didn’t even know what the accident meant, and since it was obvious to me that anyone who wasn’t there couldn’t possibly know what it meant, why bother at all? Besides, I said, it just made people feel sorry for me, and I hated that.