The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  But they were not sleeping. Mason stared absently out the window; he was alone in the back seat. Jessica was gone.

  Had she somehow climbed over to the front, to sit in her mother’s lap, and I hadn’t noticed? I looked over at Lydia, whose eyes were half closed, approaching sleep, trusting me to get us all safely, smoothly back to the house. She wore shorts and halter, her pale hair tied back with a pink scarf, her tanned arms and legs glittering with dried sea salt. There was no child on her lap. Our daughter was gone.

  I said nothing, kept driving the overheated Escort up the curving narrow road, and with a sideways glance checked the rear doors, for perhaps one had opened and—too horrible to believe, maybe, but not too horrible to imagine, not for me—she had fallen from the car without a cry and, amazingly, no one had seen it, not even her twin brother, seated next to her. Both doors were shut tight.

  We were almost at the top of the hill, approaching the turnoff to the potholed lane that led along the narrow tree-covered ridge to our house. Pale green sunlight fell at oblique angles through the trees and speckled the roadway and the packed dirt yards of the tiny tin-roofed houses. I remember that. Barefoot children walked along the edges of the rain gullies, lugging water home from the village stand-pipe in buckets that they balanced on their heads. It was almost evening, time to begin cooking supper. Where was our daughter? How had she been taken from us?

  I kept driving straight on toward what we called home and could not say aloud the words that were thrashing me, as if somehow by remaining silent I could keep the terrible thing from having occurred. Finally, when we passed through the gate and drew up in front of the house, I said, without turning back to him, “Mason, is Jessica asleep?”

  I was afraid, terrified, and did not yet believe that such a thing could happen to you in America or even while on vacation from America. My wife had not yet died, and my two children had not yet been taken from me in the accident, so all I had to go on was what had happened to me in Vietnam when I was a nineteen-year-old kid, and by some necessary logic, I believed that because terrible things had happened to me then and there, it was impossible for them to happen here and now. I did not want to give up that logic; it was like my childhood: if I admitted that my daughter had been kidnapped or had fallen from the car or had simply been lost in a foreign country, then the whole world for the rest of my life would be Vietnam. I knew that.

  Mason’s response was very strange—or at least that’s how I remember it. Of course, you have to keep in mind that Lydia and I were pretty much stoned most of the time, so that when we were coming down we were thinking about having been high, and when we finally were down, like now, we were thinking about getting high again. Our perspective on things was tilted, and foreground kept getting confused with background, and vice versa. Mason answered, “You left her at the store.” Straight out, as if he were slightly pleased by my having abandoned his twin sister and somewhat annoyed by his having to remind me.

  But twins are like that. They behave in ways, especially regarding each other, that can seem very strange to someone who is not a twin himself. They have a morality that is different from ours—at least when they are young they do—because, unlike other children, they are not inclined to imitate adults until much later. To children who are twins, even when they are not identical, the other twin is both more and less real than everyone else in the family, and they deal with each other the way we deal with ourselves alone. Which means that it’s like twins are permanently stoned. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.

  I started to holler. “Jesus, Mason! I left her at the store? Why the hell didn’t you say something?”

  “My God! How could we do that?” Lydia cried. “How could we have left her there?”

  “I thought she was sleeping!” I shouted at her. By now I had the car turned around and headed back up the drive toward the gate. “I thought she was sleeping in back!”

  “Hurry,” she said. “And shut up. Please.”

  “What the hell did I do? I didn’t do anything wrong, it was a goddamn accident,” I said.

  “No one’s to blame, we’re both to blame, we’re all to blame, even she is, so let’s just get back there and pray that she’s all right. That no one—”

  “She’ll be fine,” I said. “No one’ll hurt her. These people, they love children.” I said it, but I didn’t believe it. How could my four-year-old daughter be safe among people I myself felt frightened of? The image of flaxen-haired Jessica searching the aisles of the store for us, wide-eyed, fighting tears, lower lip trembling as she starts to call for us, “Mommy? Daddy? Where are you?”—the thought made me tremble with rage, and because I could not blame my wife or son for what Jessica was enduring, I had to blame myself alone, and because, as Lydia had said, I could not blame myself alone, I blamed love.

  This was the beginning of what I have come to think of as the permanent end of my childhood and adolescence. The Vietnamization of my domestic life. Which is why I am telling you this. What had been an exception was now possibly the rule. That headlong terrified drive back down the hill and across the smoking cane fields to Westgate in Montego Bay, Jamaica—there began the secret hardening of my heart, a process that today, as I guess is obvious, is nearly complete.

  Jessica was not in the parking lot. A scattering of skinny shirtless boys in bare feet kicked a bundled rag in loopy overhead arcs. I drew the car up in front of the grocery store, leapt out, and made for the door; then remembered Mason and came running back. But Lydia already had him out of the car and was hurrying along behind, holding his hand. He was oddly calm and watched the older boys enviously, as if he did not understand what was happening to our family, although of course he did.

  There was a single strange thought leading me into the store: I will make this one last try to save her, and then I will give it up. I must have known that if my child was indeed to be lost to me, then I would need all my strength just to survive that fact, so I had decided ahead of time not to waste any of my strength trying to save what was already lost.

  You are probably astonished that I gave her up so easily. And although you could say that it was only a minor event in my life, a scare is all, that broke me, you’d be wrong; I think I was broken long before that afternoon in Jamaica, possibly in Vietnam but more likely not. Maybe in the womb, or even earlier. If not broken, I was weakened. Which is not all bad, you understand. The way we deal with death depends on how it’s imagined for us beforehand, by our parents and the people who surround them, and what happens to us early on. And if we believed properly in death—the way we actually do believe in taxes, for instance—and did not insist on thinking that we had it beat, we might never even have had a Vietnam war. Or any war. Instead, we believe the lie, that death, unlike taxes, can be postponed indefinitely, and we spend our lives defending that belief. Some people are very good at it, and they become our nation’s heroes. Some, like me, for obscure reasons, see the lie early for what it is, fake it for a while and grow bitter, and then go beyond bitterness to … to what? To this, I suppose. Cowardice. Adulthood.

  We entered the store frantic, wild-eyed, looking ridiculous, I’m sure, and the three women at the registers saw us and smiled knowingly and pointed, together in a single gesture, as in a chorus line, to the counter at the end, where Jessica was seated cross-legged like a little blond yogi, sucking on an orange coco-pop and studying the pages of a Jamaican romance comic book. She hadn’t seen us, or if she had, she had decided to ignore us.

  Lydia got to her first and swept her up in her arms. Mason and I hung back a bit—emotions in dignified check. When Lydia put her down, Jessica marched quickly past me and out the door, haughty, empowered by neglect, with Mason falling in line behind her, and the two of them got into the back seat of the car and began together to study the drawings of the black men and women in love. A tall, broad-shouldered cashier asked me for two dollars for the comic book and the coco-pops Jessica had consumed, and I paid her, and Lydia and I le
ft the store.

  We never returned to that store; we couldn’t face the cashiers, I think. Also, we stopped smoking marijuana. It was one of those episodes that clarify things, that shape and control your future behavior. We never went back to Jamaica, of course: a year later, Lydia was dead. Four years later, the twins were dead. And now, here am I.

  I could say that I saw it all coming, like most people in town do, but unlike them, I’d almost be lying. It’s just that after Jamaica, while I expected death, I did not anticipate it.

  That’s how Risa thinks, however, and she believes it, poor woman—she actually believes that she saw it all coming. Before the accident, for several years, mainly due to her collapsed marriage and numerous financial problems, she was merely a woman depressed and troubled; but that’s what she thinks of now as prescience. Which is like writing history backward, if you ask me, fixing the past to fit the present. Hindsight made over into foresight.

  “Oh, I knew it, Billy,” she told me after the accident, when finally we could speak of it to each other. “I knew for the longest time, I knew that something terrible was coming down. When I heard the sirens and the alarm from the firehouse, nobody had to tell me that something terrible had happened, that something unimaginably awful had been visited on me and Wendell, and on you, too, and on the entire town. I knew it instantly, because I had known for months that it was coming. That was why all those months, all the time we were meeting each other, in fact, I was so unhappy and turbulent in my emotions.”

  Risa actually said that to me. And when she did, it turned me off, but there was a time when that particular cast to her mind, the superstitious part of it, you might say, made her appear wonderfully attractive to me. After the accident, however, it made her seem stupid and weak, and it embarrassed me to find myself talking so intimately with her.

  She had always been essentially the same person, of course, just as I had been, but the Bide-a-Wile Motel, which she and Wendell bought from the bank at auction and which anyone who’d ever tracked the economy of this town could have predicted would be nothing but a sinkhole for their little bit of money (that’s the sort of thing you can predict), was probably the start of her decline, the ending of her dream, the end of her youth. Some people, when their dreams collapse, turn superstitious in order to explain it, and Risa is one of them. The motel, in addition to the insurmountable financial difficulties it created for them, made Wendell, who’d always worked behind the counter of someone else’s business, never his own, look lazy and a little dumb and pessimistic to her, which of course he was anyhow and had been from the day they married. But she hadn’t seen it before, and now she believed that his character was getting in front of her realizing a very important dream. That got her angry at him in a profound way, which drove him further into himself, and although they both loved their boy Sean dearly, they soon began to love each other less. That’s when he started going to bed early and alone, and Risa started meeting me in Room 11.

  By that time, which was about three years before the accident, their marriage was essentially dead, except for their love of Sean, of course. I suppose I want to believe that; anyone who’s an interloper in a marriage wants to think the marriage was dead before he pulled up and parked; but in this case I’m sure it’s the truth.

  It started innocently enough—that is, without my knowing anything had been started. I’ve known Risa and Wendell most of my life; we more or less grew up together here in Sam Dent, although Risa is a few years younger than Wendell and I. When I was in Vietnam, Wendell, who was bagging groceries at Valley Grocery in Keene Valley, started dating Risa, who was then barely out of the eighth grade. They stuck together, though, and the year she graduated high school, he got a job as a Tru-Value cashier in Marlowe, and they got married. I always liked Wendell, even though he was indeed, as Risa eventually discovered, lazy and pretty dumb and pessimistic. That’s a hard combination for a wife to like, and frankly I never would have hired him to work for me, even if he had been one of the Vietnam vets who for a long time were the only people I hired at the garage. But Wendell made it relatively simple, by being good-looking and passive, for a man to call him a friend. (Some folks might regard him as low-key or easygoing, but I have to say passive.)

  What it came down to was that in an important sense, Wendell didn’t really give a damn about much. He liked sports—TV sports, that is; he was a little heavy in the gut to play any himself—and he was very fond of his son. Not like Risa was, of course, for she was much more intense about everything than he, but sufficiently fond to have his heart broken by the boy’s death.

  Wendell is like the rest of us, a person whose life has two meanings, one before the accident and one after. I doubt, however, that he worries much about connecting the two meanings, as the rest of us do, but that’s Wendell Walker. That was always Wendell Walker. Even so, I felt guilty because, before his life became a tragedy, he was basically a likable fellow. Just as, before her life became a tragedy, Risa’s superstitious nature was an aspect of her character that was downright attractive. At least to me it was.

  I was a widower and a relatively young man still, with two small children in a big house and a business that was making money but was top-heavy with debt. Those were the facts that filled my head night and day—the death of my wife, the needs of my children, and cash flow at the garage. For a year or so after Lydia died, and even for most of the year before she died, it was as if I had no sexual nature. From the time she went to the hospital to stay, I woke alone in that huge king-sized bed of ours every morning in darkness and never once had an erection or even thought about the pleasures Lydia and I had taken from each other in that bed at exactly that time of day so many hundreds of times; I couldn’t permit such a thought. I had work to do, children to wash and dress and feed and get off to school so I could get to the garage by eight, and at the garage I’d work like two men until the kids got out of school, so I’d be free then to drive them to Cub Scouts and Brownies, to their friends’, to the dentist in Placid, to Ames in Saranac for winter boots, stopping off at the Grand Union for groceries that I’d cook for supper and popcorn for after supper while watching TV together, and when they had gone to bed, I’d stay up late drinking and doing the garage account books that Lydia used to take care of. I had started drinking pretty heavily by then; but nothing like now.

  For a long time, though, that was my whole life. There was no way I could let myself think about anything that did not lie directly before me—the death of my wife, the physical and emotional needs of my children, and my business. It was as if during that period I were crossing a crevasse on a high wire, and if I once looked down at the ground or off to the side or even ahead of me or behind, I’d fall, and I’d take down with me anyone holding on to me, meaning my children.

  Then I started to change. First in erotic dreams and after a while in fantasy—little pornographic movies in which I was both actor and audience: my sexual nature had begun to reassert itself. It was only chromosomal and glandular, but even so, whenever it happened I felt oddly disloyal to Lydia. While she was alive I had been able to wake from my dream or fantasy and immediately cast her in the leading female role and let reality take over; but with her gone, if I tried casting her, the dream turned instantly to grief and sorrow. It was specifically to avoid that pain that I auditioned for the sex scenes numerous women I knew personally and believed I could be attracted to—the wives and daughters of the town of Sam Dent. And to my surprise, my number one sex goddess turned out to be Risa Walker.

  I say surprise because Risa was by no stretch of the imagination the sexiest woman in town. That title went by male consensus to Wanda Otto, whom the boys in the garage called The Beatnik Queen, because of her long straight hair and her eye makeup and the low-cut knit dresses she wore. It was probably the image of 1960s hippie sex that she evoked—most of my mechanics suffered from a kind of time warp anyhow. Also, Wanda behaved in what you might call a provocative way—at least it provoked the boys
in the garage, who scrambled to fill her Peugeot with gas whenever she drove in. Normally, when someone pulled up to the pump, Bud or Jimbo or whoever was on duty only crawled further into the vehicle he was working on and pretended not to see or hear it. Selling gas was strictly a necessary frill at the station, and whoever happened to be on duty was supposed to look after it; there was no regular attendant, and I myself spent most of my time in the office, with Lydia when she was alive and alone afterwards, or supervising the more delicate and difficult jobs out in the garage. No one wanted to pump gas. But Wanda Otto never to my knowledge wore a bra, and so long as she was without her husband, Hartley, or her son, the Indian boy Bear, she had a habit of driving into the station with her dress pulled halfway up her very attractive thighs. Wanda could get a mechanic out from under the hood and beside her open window faster than any other customer. She laughed easily and flirted and used expressions like “Shit!” and “Fuck!” if you told her she was down a quart, and that turned men on. Although it probably scared them too, because I don’t know of anyone who ever made a direct pass at Wanda, at least not when he was sober. They just talked about it with one another.

  Risa, by contrast, though she is an intense person and when present fills your entire screen, drawing all your attention, is unadorned, shy, and private. Her manner, until the accident, was upbeat and warm, but her smile was undercut by a look of permanent sadness that she seemed to be trying to hide, as if she were struggling to protect you from it. Everyone liked Risa, but when she pulled in with her Wagoneer, no one rushed out to fill her tank, and like most people, she often had to fill it herself. She is tall, broad-shouldered, with ample breasts and a nice large female butt that she covers with somewhat mannish clothes, flannel shirts and loose jeans, that sort of thing. Typical for up here. She is the kind of woman who makes a man think of his favorite sister, if he has one, or his best friend’s sister, if he doesn’t. Not a likely candidate for erotic fantasy.