The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  Nichole Burnell

  “The mind is kind,” Dr. Robeson told me, touching my forehead with his soft pink cool fingertips, which I couldn’t move away from, so I just glared up at him.

  I’m lucky, they all say, because I can’t remember the accident. Lucky that it’s like a door between rooms, and there was one room on the far side, and that room I remember fine, and another on the near side, and I remember it too. I’m still in it. But I don’t have any memory of passing through, I don’t remember the accident, and that’s counted lucky by everyone.

  “Don’t even try to remember,” Daddy said, and got up from his chair by the window and looked out at the hospital parking lot. I think it was snowing out. He was probably worried about the drive home.

  Mom, seated in a chair next to the bed, kept patting the back of my hand and not looking at me and said, “You just think about getting well, Nichole, that’s all.”

  By then I knew I was as well as I would ever be again, and Dr. Robeson had told me that just to stay like this I would have to work very hard. So shut up, Mom, go to hell. To live like a slug, I was going to have to work like someone trying to become an Olympic ski jumper. To feed myself, to go to the bathroom, to bathe, to get in and out of bed, to put my clothes on and take them off, to change channels on the TV or do schoolwork—for me to do these things as well as a three-year-old, I’d have to work out for years, maybe the rest of my life, in a room with pads on the floor and walls to keep my bones from breaking when I fell off the parallel bars or one of the shiny new exercise machines.

  Anyhow, this was the room I woke up in after the accident, a hospital room, a weepy Mom and embarrassed distracted Daddy room, a doctor and nurse room, a room with a physical therapist who yells at you for your own good and another guy who’s supposed to massage you, but I wouldn’t let him, so they finally got a woman to do it. One room led into the next, but they were all the same. Even when I finally went home to my own room.

  Daddy drove, with me in front next to him, and Mom and my new wheelchair, folded up beside her, in the back. It was spring already, late April, with only patches of snow left in the woods and on the mountains, a few old dry dirt-covered mounds along the sides of the road and at the edges of parking lots. No leaves on the trees yet, but you could see a light green haze and in some places a reddish glow over the branches where the buds were coming. At the edge of town, the fairgrounds was mostly under water and mud, but here and there in the field in front of the grandstand the snow melt had begun to recede, and yellow wet chunks of old dead grass had appeared. What happened to winter? I wondered. It was like I’d gone to Florida for the worst of it. Wouldn’t that have been nice?

  I was incredibly glad to be out of the hospital, though. I was sick of Dr. Robeson and had started calling him Dr. Frankenstein, even to his face, which of course he thought was cute. It wasn’t cute; I did it because I felt like a monster and Dr. Robeson had created me out of all these different body parts. I couldn’t walk as good as Frankenstein’s monster, I couldn’t walk at all, though I could talk fine; but I felt ugly like him and out of it, different from everyone else. I could really understand why the monster had turned on all the dumb villagers. Sometimes when one of the nurses came into the room and chirped like a birdie at me, “And how are we this morning?” I’d go, “Argh-guh-guh!” and cross my eyes and flop my head back and forth like a spastic.

  The first thing I noticed, when Daddy opened the car door and pushed the wheelchair up next to it, was the ramp he’d built. It was made of wood and way too wide and sloped from the ground up to the front porch beside the regular people’s steps. My very own entrance, like for a circus elephant. I pictured Daddy out there evenings after work, whistling like he does when he’s got himself a new carpentry project, hammering and sawing in porchlight, feeling proud of himself—a good daddy.

  “How do you like it, Babes?” he said.

  “The ramp?” I swung myself out of the car seat and lurched into the wheelchair. No way anybody was going to lift me up and set me down. Especially him.

  “Yeah. Pretty slick, eh?” He got behind the chair and pushed me over to the bottom of the ramp and stopped so we could examine it more closely. Mom came along behind, lugging my suitcase and stuff. There was still a bunch more in the trunk, mostly presents from strangers but some from people in town and Mom’s and Daddy’s church friends and kids in school. The usual dumb things—handmade get-well cards, stuffed animals, and pictures of Jesus and other inspirational items.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Rudy and Skip can use it for skateboarding.”

  “They better not,” Daddy said. “I made it for you.”

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  “I had to widen a few doors too. You’ll see,” he said proudly, and he pushed me up his ramp and into the living room, like I was a new piece of furniture. Then he didn’t know what to do with me, where to park me. Put me by the window, I wanted to tell him, next to the plants. But I said nothing. He was confused, and I guess I felt sorry for him.

  The phone rang, and Mom went off to the kitchen to answer it. Rudy and Skip came down from their bedroom and said hi and all, looking self-conscious and like they wished they weren’t there, as if I was some old relative they had to be polite to. Jennie came along behind them, sucking her thumb as always, and she stared at the wheelchair for a minute and then decided it wouldn’t explode or anything and came over and hugged me.

  She’s the one, she’s the family to me, the whole family; the rest of them, including Rudy and Skip, even though I love them the way you’re supposed to, make me feel like I have to protect myself against them.

  “You want to see your new room, Babes?” Daddy asked.

  “My new room? What’s wrong with the old one?” I knew what was wrong with it—it was upstairs, with all the other bedrooms and the big bathroom, and I couldn’t get to it anymore. But it was mine, mine and Jennie’s since she was a baby, and we were safe there, because there were two of us, and he never dared to come in there. Nothing bad had ever happened in that dark little room with the bunk beds and the clutter of all our clothes and her toys and my school stuff and pictures and posters on the walls. From that room we could hear the boys squabbling and playing late at night in their room next door, and we could hear Daddy and Mom on the other side and know to pretend we were asleep if they were arguing. There were places that weren’t safe: the car at night with Daddy alone, the living room couch, the bathroom unless the door was locked, the toolshed out back—and, now, my new room?

  Well, he said it was new, didn’t he? And I was a wheelchair girl now, a cripple. Maybe everywhere was safe now. The whole house. Everywhere. A fresh start.

  “Come along, come along,” Daddy said. “I’ll show you.”

  “You’re lucky,” Rudy said. “I still gotta sleep with him,” he said, and he punched Skip on the shoulder, and Skip punched him back.

  Mom came in from the kitchen, smiling like she’d just eaten something sweet and light. “People are so kind,” she said. “The phone’s been ringing off the hook with people wanting to welcome you home. That was Edith Dillinger, the principal’s wife. She sent her love.”

  “Show me my room, Daddy,” I said, and he pushed me through the door and across the kitchen to where the sun porch was. We’d always used it in summers as a kind of playroom, setting up electric trains and Barbie doll villages and stuff that no one wanted to pick up and put away afterwards. But now it was a bedroom. My room. Daddy had walled most of it in and installed baseboard heating units, had even built a small closet in one corner, and had carpeted it nicely. One whole wall was still windows, and I could see the yard and the woods beyond. Mom had made white chintz curtains. There was a single bed and a new dresser and a worktable Daddy’d made from a door. My New Kids on the Block poster had been tacked on one wall, and a whole bunch of my other favorite things were there—pictures of kids from school, the cheerleaders’ team photograph, with me front and center, look
ing grinny and dumb, my Albert Einstein picture, my books, and on the bed Fergus the Bear. There was a new picture of Jesus over the dresser that I knew Mom had put up; she’d no doubt left the old one upstairs to keep track of Jennie.

  “And you’ve got your own private bathroom,” Daddy said, swinging open the door of what used to be a washroom. He had enlarged it by cutting into the hallway and had installed a small tub with a shower and a sink with a big mirror above it. Hung too high, I noticed, but I didn’t say anything.

  It was all very nice. Like my own little apartment.

  “You are really lucky,” Rudy said again.

  “Shut up, Rudy,” I heard myself say.

  “Yeah,” Skip said, and he whacked Rudy on the back. That’s all they do now, hit.

  “You boys, get outside,” Daddy said, and they left, happy to be relieved of duty.

  “Can I come and visit you in your room?” Jennie asked.

  “You better. And you can sleep in my new bed with me sometimes too. I’ll get lonely way off here by myself,” I said, and I grabbed her hand, and she moved in close to me. The phone rang again, and Mom went to answer it.

  “So whaddaya think, Babes?”

  “It’s really very nice, Daddy,” I said, and I meant it. But it was strange too. The room made me feel like I was suddenly a tenant, like I had been eased out of the family somehow. I wanted that, though. In a way, being a tenant was perfect. Except for Jennie, I didn’t want to be a member of the same family as the rest of them, and I was glad that we could never go back to being the family we had been before the accident. Glad; not happy.

  I wheeled my chair into the room and looked at the back of the door. “It needs a lock on the door,” I said.

  “It does. Sure it does. A girl needs her privacy and all, right? I’ll fix that up now,” he said briskly, and he left the room to get his tools and a lock from his shop in the basement.

  “You got to keep the boys out,” Jennie said. “I need a lock too. Mommy says I don’t need one because I’m only six. But the boys’re always barging in when I’m undressing and stuff.”

  “That’s right. A girl needs her privacy,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll get Daddy to do it for you,” I said, and she grinned and pinched me on the cheek like she was the grownup and I was the baby.

  Then Daddy was back with an awl and a hook and eye. He made a hole in the door with the awl and started screwing in the hook part, and I said, “That’s too high. I’ll never reach it.”

  “Oh, right, yes, of course,” he said, all flustered. He studied the hole he’d made in his newly painted door. Now he’d have to fill it in and sand it and paint it over. Daddy’s like that. “I better get some spackle,” he said, and he left the room again. I saw him look at the bathroom mirror as he passed it and knew what he was thinking.

  I heard Mom say goodbye on the phone, and then she talked in a low voice for a minute to Daddy. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but when they both came back I knew they had some kind of pronouncement to make. Mom sat down on the bed and crossed her legs at the ankles, like she does, and Daddy went to work filling the tiny hole in the door with spackle.

  “So you like your new room?” Mom said brightly.

  “Yeah, it’s great.” I wheeled over to the worktable and discovered that it was just the right height for my chair to slide under. That’s when I saw the computer, a Mac. I guess I’d seen it before that, but the room at first had looked like a picture to me, a magazine photograph, and the new computer hadn’t really registered or something. Slowly the whole thing was becoming real, though. “Wow. Is this mine? A Mac?” There was a printer and everything.

  Mom said, “Yes, it is. It’s yours. It’s a present.”

  “Wow. Who from?” I turned to Daddy, but he was bent over at the door, still working on the lock, this time screwing it in at shoulder height for me, waist high for him. “You guys?”

  “No,” Mom said. “It came from Mr. Stephens. You don’t really know him yet. As a matter of fact, that was him just now on the phone. He was calling to see how you were and all. Isn’t that a coincidence?”

  “Who’s Mr. Stephens?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” Daddy said. “He’s our lawyer.”

  “You have a lawyer? You and Mom?”

  “Well, yes, we all do. He’s your lawyer too,” Daddy said. He’d finished with the lock and closed the door and tested it. It worked, but the room seemed real small with the door closed and all these people in it, like a closet, except for the big window, and I was relieved when he unlocked and opened the door again.

  “My lawyer? What do I need a lawyer for?”

  Mom said, “Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about this just now, with you barely home yet. Aren’t you hungry, honey? Want me to fix you something?” She started to get up.

  “No! What’s this lawyer business? How come this Mr. Stephens gave me a computer?”

  “He’s a very kind man,” Mom said. “And he knew you’d need one for doing schoolwork, and he knew you wouldn’t be able to use the computers at school until next fall, when you go back. And naturally we couldn’t afford one….” She was picking invisible threads from the bedspread, not looking at me, but her legs were still crossed at the ankles, like she was on stage. I hate these kinds of conversations, like everyone but me knows the lines and has been rehearsing the scene without me.

  Daddy sighed. “It’s because of the accident,” he said. “A lot of people in town whose kids were on the bus have got lawyers, because of the accident. Thank God we didn’t lose you, but a lot of people … well, you know. People in town are very, very angry,” he said. “Us included. There’s been a lot of grief here. People lost their children, Babes.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t lose me!”

  “No, honey,” Mom said. “And we will thank the Lord for that every day and night for the rest of our lives. But you … you almost died, and you were badly injured, and you won’t be … you can’t …”

  “I can’t walk anymore.” I said it for her.

  “Well, that’s … that’s a terrible loss,” Daddy said. “To you, especially,” he said. “But to all of us.”

  I looked at him hard, and he said, “Because we love you so much. And because you’re going to need special care for a long time to come, all that physical therapy and who knows what. For years, Babes. Spinal cord injuries don’t just go away. It’s not going to be easy. Not for you, not for any of us. And it’s going to cost more money than we can imagine. For years.”

  “What about insurance? Doesn’t insurance pay for these things?”

  “Partly, yes, but it’s still expensive. There’s a lot the insurance doesn’t cover. That’s one of the reasons we have a lawyer for you, to make sure the insurance gets paid and to help us pay for the rest.”

  “One of the reasons. What’re the other reasons?”

  Daddy said, “Well, Mr. Stephens is representing several families: the Ottos—you know them, of course—and Risa and Wendell Walker, and us, and I think a couple more. Mr. Stephens is suing the state and the town for negligence, because he is sure that the accident could have been avoided if the state and the town had done their jobs right.”

  “Suing! But it’s not the same for us! The Ottos … I mean, they lost Bear in the accident, and maybe it’s like that with the Walkers and poor little Sean, but …” I could feel myself starting to cry; I did not want to cry.

  So I shut up. I did not remember the accident, maybe, but I definitely knew what had happened. I could read the newspapers, and of course I had asked people, and eventually people had told me, although they had not wanted to. Everyone had come to the hospital to visit and tell me how lucky I was, to touch me on the hands and shoulders and top of my head like I was some kind of rabbit’s foot, so when I asked them about the other kids, what happened to the other kids who were on the bus that morning, at first no one was willing to tell me. Oh, now, Nichole, don’t you trouble yourself about that. You just concentrate
on getting better and coming back to school. That sort of stuff.

  But what about the other kids? I really needed to know. What about Rudy and Skip, they were on the bus, were they okay? I had asked about them first, naturally, as soon as I learned what had happened to me. And what about the Lamstons, what about the Prescott kids, what about the Bilodeaus? What happened to Sean Walker, who had been sitting in my lap that morning because he didn’t want to leave his mother? I could remember that much, Sean trying to catch a glimpse of his mother by the road. And what about Bear Otto? What about the Ansel twins? What happened to Dolores? Was she all right? How come I’m lying here in the hospital with tubes stuck in me and my body all numb. How come I’m not dead too? Someone, anyone, tell me where all the other children are!

  Slowly people let me know. One by one. That’s how I came to understand what they meant by lucky. Rudy and Skip, they were especially lucky; they had been up front in the bus and had been almost the first to be removed from it, with barely a scratch on either of them. Jennie had stayed home sick that day. There were a bunch like that. Close calls. Because I was regarded as one myself, people liked standing around in the hospital room talking to me and each other about all the close calls.

  But so many of the other kids were dead, and no one wanted to talk about them. They told me with downcast eyes and sad slow shakes of the head and as few words as possible. The Lamstons were dead, all three of them. One of the Prescott kids was dead. Two of the Bilodeaus, who had been at the rear of the bus, had been trapped underwater. Sean Walker had been in front, like me, but when the bus flipped over he’d fractured his skull and died from it before they got him out of the bus, and I’d only broken my back. So I was lucky, right? And Bear and the Ansel twins and several other kids who’d been in the back, they were all dead. Dolores was okay, I learned. She’d been in shock for a while, people said, but now she was okay. So she was lucky too. I wondered if she had a lawyer, like me.