The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  It’s a way of living with a tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand. I could understand that. But it irritated me to hear it, especially with so many journalists poking microphones in people’s faces and with all the downstate lawyers crawling around looking for someone to blame, so I want to say right out front that I was the person closest to the accident and I never saw it coming.

  I knew that stretch of road as well as anyone in town, and I knew the bus inside and out, and I knew better than anyone what Dolores’s driving habits were, because one of my habits was to follow her into town every morning; and believe me, I was not in the slightest afraid of an accident. I would be now, of course, because the accident has changed everything, but back then, even though I expected death in a general way as much as the next person—probably even more so, since I am a widower and a Vietnam vet and had already learned a few things about the precariousness of daily life—I was able that morning, while I drove along behind the school bus, to let my mind fix on the image of the woman I happened to be sleeping with, a woman I was having an illicit affair with. Illicit because she was married to a friend of mine.

  I feel guilty for it, of course—for conducting the affair, I mean, not for having a fantasy about sex with her at that awful moment in my life, in her life, in the life of everybody in this town, practically. I could as easily have been thinking about money, which I did not have much of, as sex with Risa, which at that time I had quite a lot of, owing, I suppose, to my freedom of movement and to her unhappiness with her husband, Wendell, and her financial problems—although we liked to believe then that we were in love with each other, and often said it: “I love you, I love you, oh God, how I love you.” That sort of thing; playing a role. We did talk that way then. We don’t anymore.

  But it was a lie, and I think we both knew it. I surely did. I still loved my wife, Lydia, and I don’t think Risa loved anyone except her son, Sean. Nevertheless, we were both lonely and both burdened with strong sexual natures. But neither of us had the ability to say that to the other in a way that would not be hurtful. So, instead, we said, “I love you,” and let it go at that. I have the benefit of hindsight now, of course, and at the time maybe I half believed the tender words I whispered in her ear after we had made love and I was still inside and surrounding her, covering her body with mine in the darkness of the motel room.

  We used to meet like that, in Room 11 at the Bide-a-Wile, after Wendell had gone early to bed alone, which he had been doing for several years, except when there was a Montreal Expos ball game on TV—Wendell adored the Expos; probably still does. I would leave my kids with a babysitter, usually Nichole Burnell, who took care of the house and kids from after school two days a week until eleven at night, when her father, Sam, drove over from Bartlett Hill and picked her up. The drill was for me to kiss the twins good night, tell Nichole that I was going down to the Rendez-Vous or the Spread Eagle for a few beers or to Placid for a movie, and a few minutes later, with the key that Risa had given me, to let myself into Room 11 and sit in the darkness and wait for Risa to arrive.

  It sounds sordid, I know, but it didn’t feel cheap or low. It was too often too lonely, too solitary, for that. Many nights Risa could not get away to Room 11, and I sat there by myself in the wicker chair beside the bed for an hour or so, smoking cigarettes and thinking and remembering my life before Lydia died, until finally, when it was clear that Risa could not get away from Wendell, I would leave the room and walk across the road to the lot next to the Rendez-Vous where I had parked my truck and drive home.

  On those nights when Risa did arrive, we spent our time together entirely in darkness, for we couldn’t turn on the room light, and we barely saw each other, except for what we could make out in the dim light from the motel sign outside falling through the blinds: rose-colored profiles, the curve of a thigh or shoulder, a breast, a knee. It was melancholy and sweet and reflective, and of course very sexual, straightforwardly sexual, for both of us.

  Our meetings were respites from our real and very troubled lives, and we knew that. Whenever I saw Risa in daylight, in public, it was as if she were a wholly different person, her sister, maybe, or a cousin, who only resembled in vague ways the woman I was having an affair with. I’m not sure that’s how I appeared to her—men and women see each other differently. For instance, a man generally doesn’t even know how small a woman really is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child’s and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem. Women almost always appear larger to us than they actually are, and we don’t have much opportunity to observe how small and delicate their bodies are in comparison to ours.

  They know our size, of course, know it thoroughly, for they have felt our weight on top of them—smaller people always know the size of people who are larger than they. But we men have usually taken the physical measure of the women in our lives only with our eyes, and because we are secretly afraid of them, we tend to see women as having bodies that are at least as large as our own. I think that’s one reason why a man is so often surprised by how easily he can injure a woman with his hands. Although I myself have never hurt a woman with my hands. But you know how men talk to one another. Surprise is one of our main motifs. We like to pretend we’re surprised by common knowledge.

  I remember one night shortly after my wife, Lydia, went into the hospital to stay, I gathered up all her clothing and spread it across our bed—dresses, blouses and skirts, jeans and shirts, nightgowns, her underwear, even—and folded everything neatly and boxed it and carried the boxes out to the garage, where we have a storage room in back. I don’t know why I did that; she hadn’t died yet, although I knew of course that in a few weeks at most she would be dead from the cancer. But I could not bear to look at her clothes hanging in our closet or see them whenever I opened a dresser drawer; I could not bear even to walk past the closet or dresser and know that her clothes were inside, hanging or neatly folded in darkness like some foolish hope for her eventual return.

  That night, without planning it, I made myself a double-sized drink of Scotch and water (the twins had finally fallen off to sleep), and I walked back to our bedroom and simply started to pack her clothing, and at once it seemed deeply correct somehow, and so I went on doing it until the job was done. I must have known this was a task that I would have to do soon anyhow, and I must have sensed that it would be much more painful for me later, with her dead, so I did it now, while she was still alive, while I could keep myself from weeping with self-pity.

  It was not so bad, it was almost a kindness, as if she were about to leave me and the children for a long journey, and as I held up her thin blouses and nightgowns one by one and studied them, I was amazed at how small they were, what bare scraps of cloth they were, seen like that, without her body inside to fill them out and give them weight.

  I remember that night and standing there beside our bed and holding up my wife’s articles of clothing as clearly as if it were last night; it was a discovery of an aspect of her deepest reality and, through it, a discovery of a part of my own. Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped to clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self. And if you loved the person a great deal, as I loved Lydia and my children, your sense of who you are will have been clarified many times, and so you will have many such moments to remember. I have learned that.

  Nights now I can sit in my living room alone, looking at the glass of the picture window, with the reflection of my body and the drink in my hand and the chair and lamp beside me glaring flat and white back at me, and I am in no way as real in that room as I am in my memories of my wife and children. Sometimes it’s not as if they have died so much as that I myself have died and have become a ghost. You might t
hink that remembering those moments is a way of keeping my family alive, but it’s not; it’s a way of keeping myself alive. Just as you might think my drinking is a way to numb the pain; it’s not; it’s a way to feel the pain.

  Four years ago—well, four years before the accident, the year before Lydia died—she and I and the twins spent two weeks on the island of Jamaica. It was late in the winter, early March, which is when if you’re going to get out of Sam Dent at all, you get out then. I don’t care how much you think you like the snow and ice and darkness of upstate New York; after four or five months of it, nobody in this region manages to keep from being depressed that late in the winter. And unless you drive a snowplow or run a ski lift, you’re not making any money here anyhow, so if you can afford it, you leave for anywhere south of Albany. That March, for the first time in my life I could afford it, the garage was finally running in the black, and Lydia was feeling bad for the first time, although we did not yet know why. By May they’d remove her thyroid; by the following May she’d be dead. We merely thought we deserved a vacation, so to speak.

  We rented a house, a “villa” the travel agent called it, but it was a house, a modest three-bedroom cinder-block affair surrounded by a chain-link fence. It was a compound, more or less, situated up on a hill in an inland village a dozen miles west of Montego Bay. There was a small swimming pool and a terrace and a yard stuffed with flowers, and we had a part-time gardener and a cook, as advertised, local folks whose relation to us was the same as the one most folks back home in Sam Dent bore to summer people. In Jamaica we were winter people, which was a little unsettling at first, but in a day or two we got used to it (it’s amazing how fast you can accommodate yourself to luxuries like domestic help and swimming pools), which gave me some insight into the Adirondack summer people.

  We weren’t big drinkers, Lydia and I, but we were smoking a lot of dope. Both of us. Not so much back at home, because after all we both had to work every day and take care of the kids and couldn’t very well walk around stoned all day and night, and unless you were a teenager, marijuana was somewhat difficult to acquire in Sam Dent. Even so, by the time we went to Jamaica, marijuana had become our recreational drug of choice, you might say, which meant that three or four times a week, usually late at night in our bedroom at home, we got high. In Jamaica, though, there was an abundance of very strong dope, which they called ganja and sold cheap. There was cocaine too, but we bought ganja. Every other kid on the street sold it; you could smell it in the marketplace, on the crowded streets of Montego Bay, even in the yard of our house.

  I would rise early, and feeling wicked and weirdly dislocated, would walk out onto the terrace and look over the hills to a silvery wedge of sea glistening in the morning sun, and the breeze would carry the smell of the natives’ wood-burning cook fires and marijuana smoke across the tops of the trees straight into my face, and just like in Vietnam, I would think, What a damned good idea, to get stoned early and stay stoned all day long and go to sleep stoned. So I’d roll a joint and take off. It made the dream and the threat of travel and being surrounded by permanently poor black people whose language was incomprehensible to me both safe and real—it woke me up without scaring me.

  With marijuana, your inner life and outer life merge and comfort each other. With alcohol, too, they merge, but they tend to beat up on you instead, and I didn’t particularly like getting beat up on. Which is why I have never had a problem with alcohol. Until now, I mean. Since the accident. I admit it; what do I lose by admitting it? I do have a problem with alcohol, and I’ll probably continue that way until something terrible happens and brings me up short, something I can’t or won’t imagine now. It could be the collapse of my business; although frankly I don’t think that would do it. It could be my own death.

  But back then I had a problem with marijuana, and I did not know it. I thought it was just me taking unnecessary chances, and I was still young and undamaged enough, despite Vietnam, to think you could get away with taking unnecessary chances without admitting that you had a problem. I believed that it was an interesting way to live. Lydia too—although she was more cautious than I and followed a ways behind me, just in case I stumbled and fell, which was her habit and temperament in most things. We were a powerful couple, and I cannot think of her without feeling my heart instantly harden against the thought, because when I remember her and how powerful and happy we were and why I loved her so, I think at once of her death. Just as with the twins, Jessica and Mason. I can barely say their names without feeling the flesh of my heart turn into iron. This is not bitterness; it’s what happens when you have eaten your bitterness.

  We had rented a car for the entire two weeks, a beat-up yellow Ford Escort, and every day we left the house on a family outing of some kind—the beach at Doctor’s Cave, Rose Hall, the straw market, river rafting, whatever took our fancy—and usually on our way home in the afternoon we stopped at a pathetic shabby little shopping center in Montego Bay called Westgate, to pick up a few household supplies, like toilet paper or paper towels, and snacks for the kids, who were always tired and fussy by then. They loved those things called coco-pops, clear plastic tubes of flavored ice hawked by kids in the parking lot, sticky disgusting things that melted as soon as you bought them, and while Lydia and I scurried up and down the aisles of the store, the twins sucked their coco-pops and waited outside in the car.

  One afternoon late in our stay, we drove back from what I think was the beach at Doctor’s Cave—I don’t recall exactly where we were coming from, but I do remember feeling sunburned and sandy, which certainly suggests the beach—and stopped at Westgate. The last time we had come here, Jessica and Mason had been hassled in the parking lot by a bunch of local kids attracted to them by their whiteness and the fact that they were twins, which seemed to have an unusual fascination for people down there, even though they were not identical twins. It was harmless enough, but because there hadn’t been any adults to control the Jamaican kids, the episode had scared Jessica and Mason. They were only four years old and did not have much interest in other cultures.

  Anyhow, this time, instead of waiting out in the lot in the car, they followed us into the store, a cavernous supermarket with no air-conditioning and smelling of sour milk, bad meat, and pickles. It was like every food store on the island that we happened to enter during those two weeks: half-empty shelves stocked more with paper goods and bottles of rum for tourists than with food for the natives—a generally depressing place, which I wanted to avoid, and but for the kids, who seemed to need a few familiar things to eat and drink, potato chips, cereal, packaged cookies, that sort of thing, I would have. Those items comforted the children somehow. They were lonely in Jamaica, and being the only white children in the village, or so it must have seemed to them, they were always a little tense and frightened. All their routines were broken, and they were not used to being without TV, and they were not accustomed to receiving so much daytime attention from us. The twins were at a very cautious age that spring, and, too, they may have sensed, even before I or she herself did, that their mother was sick. Also, they weren’t able, as Lydia and I were, to get stoned every day and night.

  Looking back, I feel very sorry for them. Then, I thought that we were all having the time of our lives, which made it easier for me to accept the high level of anxiety that the time of our life extracted as payment. We were surrounded by black people, people who carried machetes and sold drugs openly and talked a foreign-sounding English in loud voices, who pointed at us because of our skin color and made ugly noises with their lips at my wife or smiled and lied and tried to take our money. But here we are, on vacation in Jamaica, I thought. Isn’t that just the greatest thing an American dad can do for his family? I think I’ll celebrate and reward myself by getting blasted on this terrific ganja I bought today for only ten bucks while getting the car filled with gas.

  You think that way down there.

  While we paid for our groceries at the register—always
a slow and sullen process interrupted by several arguments and exchanges between the Jamaican clerks and customers—Mason went on ahead of us to the car, so that when we arrived there he was already seated in back, slurping at his second coco-pop. I put the bag of groceries into the trunk, got in and backed away from the front of the store and drove quickly out of the lot, sweating in the car, which distracted me somewhat. I again regretted not having rented an air-conditioned car.

  I remember that they were burning off the sugarcane fields at that time of year. West of Montego Bay there were broad fields of smoldering cane stubble, and the air was filled with a sugary haze that smelled like burnt molasses. It looked like after a firefight, with patches of grass flaming in the distance and the air filled with a spooky haze that filtered out the sunlight but did not dull the bright green foliage or the tall yellow grass. There was a kind of false breeze, caused by the distant and immense heat of the fires, so that the air blew warmly against your face, pushing toward the fires that burned behind you.

  When we had crossed the plain, we entered a neighborhood of seaside houses owned by foreigners and rich Jamaicans, where high concrete walls topped with razor wire ran alongside the narrow winding coastal road. Then, after a few miles, we turned left and started the three-mile climb into the hills to our village. Halfway up the first long hill, I turned to smile at the twins in back. They had been silent since Westgate, and I expected them to be asleep, curled up in each other’s arms like litter mates, like puppies or kittens, which was their inclination then, so that you couldn’t tell whose blond head belonged to which set of arms and legs, or whether they were two separate children at all and not one strange creature with two heads and eight limbs, which I am sure is how they themselves sometimes felt.