The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  I said I would, and then Mr. Schwartz looked straight at me, smiled, and gazed into my eyes like the next words I heard were going to make us lifelong friends. “Nichole,” he said, “good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  “Nichole, I’m going to ask you a series of questions about this case. If at any time you do not understand the question or would like me to rephrase or repeat it, please just ask me and I will do so. Is that agreed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Could you tell me your full name?”

  “Nichole Smythe Burnell.” I didn’t mention it, of course, since he didn’t ask, but Smythe is Mom’s maiden name. At school in the fall I was planning to start calling myself Smythe Burnell. No more Nichole. No more Nickie, Nike, Nickie, Nicolodeon. From now on, Smythe.

  “Where do you presently reside?”

  “Box 54, Bartlett Hill Road, Sam Dent, New York 12950.”

  “How long have you resided at that address?”

  “All my life. Since December 4, 1975.” I figured I’d throw that in, so he wouldn’t have to ask my age.

  “Fine. And with whom do you presently reside at that address?”

  “With my parents, Samuel and Mary Burnell, and my two brothers, Rudolph and Richard, aged eleven and ten, and my sister, Jennifer, aged six.”

  For a long time, that’s how it went—Mr. Schwartz asking these boring questions, like he was filling out a job application for me, and me answering with the basic facts of my life so far. But I liked it. I liked the way it was so factual and impersonal, almost as if we were talking about someone else, a girl who wasn’t even in the room.

  After a while, though, he started asking more personal things, like about my health and my daily activities. I realized that he had done some research already, because it was obvious from the questions that he already knew the answers to most of them. It was like that TV game show Jeopardy, where the MC gives the answers and the contestant has to come up with the questions. Except that here the contestant, Mr. Schwartz, seemed more in charge than the MC, me.

  At one point, he asked me questions about how I spent my days now. He wanted me to tell about my new room on the first floor and how I stayed there almost all the time and hadn’t gone to school and so forth. When he asked about graduation, I told him I hadn’t attended it, and I thought he would ask why not, but he didn’t. He was trying to make me look pampered and spoiled, I knew, but even so, I was glad he didn’t go any further into my home life or school stuff than he did. Instead, he wanted to know about the physical therapy I was getting, and I told him; and then he asked me if I was in any pain now, suddenly, just like that.

  I said, “Well, no, not really.”

  “You’re not in pain?”

  “Actually, I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, Nichole, that you don’t know?”

  “Well, I mean, it’s like I can’t feel it. I don’t have any feelings. In my legs, I mean. From my waist down. That’s why I’m in a wheelchair, Mr. Schwartz,” I said. “It’s not like I’m paralyzed or anything. I just can’t feel anything down there, so I can’t move anything down there. That’s what the physical therapy is for, to keep the muscles from atrophying from disuse. Because even though they’re basically okay, the muscles and bones and all, it’s actually like they’re dead.”

  I looked over at Mr. Stephens, and I saw him tighten his mouth against a smile. He said, for Mr. Onishenko’s record, that he would be introducing a set of medical reports along with depositions from Dr. Robeson and the other doctors at Lake Placid Hospital who had taken care of me, and I saw Mr. Garay make a few notes on a yellow lined pad. “And unless the medical records are allowed to go into evidence,” Mr. Stephens added, “I will of course object to this line of questioning.”

  After that, Mr. Schwartz wanted me to tell them about my social life.

  “Now or then?” I asked.

  “Then.”

  Mistake. He would not enjoy what I was about to tell him. I started with cheerleading and talked about how big a deal that is to the kids at school, and then I told him about the Harvest Ball and Bucky Waters, even, and Mr. Schwartz started looking flustered. I was telling him the truth, though. More or less. It was Q and A, not multiple choice. On paper or like this, in a deposition, I probably came out looking like Miss Teenaged America or something. I’m talking about before the accident.

  I knew, of course, that was where he would eventually have to lead me, to the accident itself, and sure enough, pretty soon he was asking me about what happened that morning.

  “Now, on January 27, 1990, did there come a time, Nichole, when you left your parents’ house on Bartlett Hill Road?”

  “Yes.”

  He asked a bunch of small questions for a while, nailing down details, like what time of day was it, where did the bus pick us up, who was at the stop with me, and so forth. “I was with my brothers,” I said. “Rudy and Skip. Jennie was sick and stayed home that day.”

  “Was there anything unusual about the driver, Dolores Driscoll, or the bus this morning?”

  “Like what? I mean, I don’t remember a lot.”

  Mr. Stephens jumped in. “I object to the form of the question. Note that.”

  “Was the bus on time?” Mr. Schwartz asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And where did you sit that morning?”

  “My usual place, on the right side, the first seat.”

  “But according to your recollection, there was nothing unusual about the drive that morning,” he said.

  “Until the accident?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. Yes, there was. It was when Sean Walker got on, because he was crying and didn’t want to leave his mother. So I sat him next to me and quieted him down, and Dolores and Sean’s mother talked for a second. Then, when Dolores started up again, a car came around the corner there by the Rendez-Vous and almost hit Sean’s mother. She was okay, but it really scared Sean, because he saw it out the window.”

  After that, he didn’t want to ask about individual stops anymore, which was fine by me, because except for when we picked up Sean, the rest of the route was like every other day and I couldn’t be sure if I was remembering something from the actual day of the accident or just making it up from my usual experiences.

  “Can you remember what the weather was like that morning?” he asked me.

  “I think it was snowing. Not hard, not at first. It wasn’t snowing at all when we left the house, but it was snowing a little by the time we stopped at Billy Ansel’s.”

  Mr. Stephens interrupted again. “Unless the report from the National Weather Bureau for the town of Sam Dent of January 27, 1990, goes into the record, I will object to that question.”

  “I will offer that report,” Mr. Schwartz said. Then he asked me if I saw Billy Ansel that morning.

  I said yes, he was driving behind the bus in his pickup, like he did every morning, following the bus in. I was exact and said I saw Billy’s pickup truck, not Billy himself. “I sit in front; it’s the kids in the back who always watch and wave at Billy.”

  “Who were they?”

  “In the back? I don’t know: Billy’s kids, of course, and Bear Otto, and a couple of others.”

  “Objection,” Mr. Stephens said. “Note my objection. She said, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  Mr. Schwartz slipped a quick smile past me, his old friend. “Did there come a time when all the children had been picked up?”

  “Yes.”

  “You remember that much,” he said. Like, How interesting.

  “Yes. As I’m talking, I’m remembering more about it.” And I really was, which surprised me probably as much as it was surprising the lawyers.

  Mr. Stephens looked worried. “Note my objection. She said, ‘As I’m talking.’ ”

  “Do you remember, did there come a time when the bus turned off Staples Mill Road onto the Marlowe road at what’s called Wilmot Flats?”

  “Yes,�
� I said. “There was this big brown dog that ran across the road up there, right by the dump, and Dolores slowed down so’s not to hit him, and he ran into the woods. And then Dolores drove on and turned onto the Marlowe road, as usual. I remember that. I’m remembering it pretty clearly.”

  “You are?” Mr. Schwartz said, eyebrows raised.

  “Yes.”

  “Note that she said pretty clearly.’ Not ‘clearly,’” Mr. Stephens put in.

  Then Mr. Schwartz asked me some more questions about Billy Ansel, like, After we turned onto the Marlowe road, how far behind the bus was his truck?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It was snowing pretty hard by then. Dolores had the windshield wipers on.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Stephens said, “You remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. Schwartz went on, “Well, then, what else did you observe at that time? Before the actual accident, I mean.”

  “I was scared.”

  “You were scared? Of what? This is before the accident, I’m asking. Do you understand what I’m asking, Nichole?”

  “Yes, I understand. Dolores was driving too fast, and it scared me.”

  “Mrs. Driscoll was driving too fast? What made you think that, Nichole?”

  “The speedometer. And it was downhill there.”

  “You could see the speedometer?”

  “Yes. I looked, because it was snowing so hard. And because it seemed to me that we were going very fast coming down the hill there. I was scared.” Mr. Stephens, I noticed, had gone silent.

  “All right, then, Nichole, how fast would you say she was going? To the best of your recollection.”

  “Seventy-two miles an hour.”

  “Really? Seventy-two miles an hour. You’re sure of this?”

  “Yes.” I had my back to Mr. Stephens now and couldn’t see him, but I imagined him slumped in his chair, looking at his fingernails.

  “You believe that the bus driven by Mrs. Driscoll was going about seventy miles an hour at that time?” Mr. Schwartz asked.

  “No,” I said. “I know she was going seventy-two. The speedometer is large and easy to see from where I was. I was in the first seat, right beside it, practically.”

  “I see. Did you say anything to her about this?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I guess I was scared. And there wasn’t time.”

  “There wasn’t time?”

  “No. Because then the bus went off the road. And crashed.”

  “You remember this?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do now. Now that I’m telling about it.”

  “She said, ‘Now that I’m telling about it.’ Note that,” Mr. Stephens said in a weary voice.

  “What do you recall of the accident itself? Exactly.”

  “I remember the bus swerved, it just suddenly swerved to the right, and it hit the guardrail and the snowbank on the side of the road, and then it went over the embankment there, and everyone was screaming and everything. And that’s all. I guess I was unconscious after that. That’s all. Then I was in the hospital.”

  Mr. Schwartz smiled and made some notes on his pad. Mr. Garay was furiously doing the same. “Do you have any questions, Mr. Stephens?” Mr. Schwartz said without looking up.

  I made like I was straightening my skirt across my knees, but I could see off to the side that Mr. Stephens was staring at me, and for a long time he didn’t say a word. He just breathed hard through his nose. Of course, he didn’t know if I had told the truth or not, but he was leery of pressing me too hard to find out, or he might end up asking questions that Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Garay would love to hear me answer.

  I glanced up at Daddy, who was leaning forward in his chair, his mouth half open, as if he wanted to say something but he didn’t dare.

  “I have no questions,” Mr. Stephens said quietly.

  Mr. Schwartz said, “I have no further questions. Mr. Garay?”

  “No questions,” Mr. Garay said.

  “Thank you, Nichole. You can go now,” Mr. Stephens said. He didn’t get up from his seat; he sat there, sliding some papers into his briefcase. Glancing along the table, I saw Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Garay doing the same, only quicker. Mr. Onishenko had shut off the tape recorder and was writing on a self-stick label. I pushed myself away from the table and turned my wheelchair toward Daddy, who was standing now but looking kind of wobbly.

  As I passed by him, Mr. Stephens, in a voice so low only I could hear, said to me, “You’d make a great poker player, kid.”

  I said, “Thanks,” and quickly moved away from him. Daddy was in shock, I could tell, white-faced and slouched, like someone had punched him in the stomach. Probably, the meaning of what I had told Mr. Schwartz was just now registering in his mind, over and over, and he hadn’t begun to react yet.

  I rolled my chair up beside him, and to further delay his reaction, and maybe because I didn’t want him to embarrass himself in front of the lawyers, for he was, after all, my father, I said, “Let’s go, Daddy. We have to get home now.”

  Like a kind of numb servant, he nodded okay and lifted me out of the wheelchair and carried me down the stairs. This time I wrapped my arms around his neck and shoulders and held on tight, making it easier for him to lift my weight and carry me to the car.

  While he was setting me into the front seat, I saw Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Garay get into a fancy gray car parked on Court Street and drive quickly away. They were loosening their neckties and smiling and in general looking very pleased with themselves.

  Daddy hurried back to retrieve my wheelchair from the courthouse, but I knew he’d be longer than necessary, because he and Mr. Stephens would want to have a few words up there in private. Mr. Stephens would probably be incredibly mad at Daddy for not having warned him that I had remembered so much about the accident, and Daddy would be insisting that he hadn’t expected it, either.

  Daddy would have concluded by now that I had lied, however, and he would try to tell that to Mr. Stephens. She lied, Mitch, she doesn’t remember anything about the accident, she has no idea how fast Dolores was going. And Mr. Stephens would have to point out to him that, Sam, it doesn’t matter whether she was lying or not, the lawsuit is dead, everyone’s lawsuit is dead. Forget it. Tell the others to forget it. It’s over. Right now, Sam, the thing you got to worry about is why she lied. A kid who’d do that to her own father is not normal, Sam.

  But Daddy knew why I had lied. He knew who was normal and who wasn’t. Mr. Stephens couldn’t ever know the truth, but Daddy always would. He put my wheelchair into the trunk of the car and came around to the driver’s side and got in and sat there for a minute with the key in his hand, looking at it as if he didn’t quite understand its purpose. He said nothing for a long time.

  Finally, he reached forward and put the key into the ignition, and speaking slowly, he said in a strange half-dead voice, “Well, Nichole, what do you say we stop at Stewart’s for an ice cream? We haven’t done that for a long time,” he added.

  “That sounds fine, Daddy. I’d really like it.”

  He started the car up then and drove across the road to Stewart’s and bought each of us a huge pistachio cone, which is the kind we both like best but that no one else in the family likes.

  When we had left Marlowe and were coming along the East Branch toward Sam Dent, with Daddy’s cone dripping and me handing him napkins, we passed the fairgrounds at the edge of town, and I noticed that they were setting up a midway. I hadn’t realized that it was so late in the summer. Winter and spring and now summer had passed by, and it was like I had been in some other land, traveling.

  “Is it time for the fair already?” I asked. It looked beautiful, and sad somehow. The white grandstand and the covered stage facing it had been freshly painted, and the field of mown grass inside the oval racetrack in front of the stand was bright green and shiny under the huge blue sky. When I was Jennie’s
age, the grandstand had seemed enormous to me and frightening, especially when we went at night and it was filled with a huge noisy crowd of strangers. Now the structure seemed tiny and almost sweet, and it would no longer be filled with strangers; I would know the faces and even the names of almost everyone up there on those board seats, and they would wave at me and say, Come on over, Nichole, and sit here with us. The track that looped around the field and passed between the stage and the grandstand had been raked smooth and watered until it looked like it was made of chocolate frosting. Scattered among the pine trees behind the grandstand were the low livestock barns and pens and the exhibit halls, where over the years I had won ribbons for my 4-H projects—my angora rabbits, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum; and my plaster-of-paris relief map of Sam Dent in 1886 with balsa wood houses and lichen woods and painted fields; and my Just Say No to Drugs poster. They had all won blue ribbons, which Daddy had framed and hung on the living room wall and which were still hanging there, although I had not looked at them in a long time. The skeleton of a Ferris wheel and the long arms of the octopus ride were already in place, and the game booths and tents were being assembled by a gang of tanned shirtless young men and boys with tattoos on their arms and cigarettes in their mouths, probably the same out-of-town men and boys who last year had flirted and called to me and Jody and the other local girls as we strolled along the midway and tried to ignore them but always found an excuse to turn around at the end of the row of booths and walk back, more slowly this time, looking at each other and rolling our eyes as the boys asked us to come on over and try our luck.

  “Would you like to go to the fair this year, Nichole?” Daddy asked. He had slowed the car and had been looking at the fairgrounds with me, probably thinking some of the same thoughts.

  “When is it? When does it start?”

  “Starts tomorrow, runs all week, right through the weekend.”

  “I don’t know, Daddy. Maybe, though. Let me think about it, okay?”

  He said sure, and we drove on into town.