The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

  “C’mon,” Daddy said. “You know that won’t—”

  “Do you know,” Billy interrupted him, “that we got lawyers suing lawyers, because some people were stupid enough to sign up with more than one of the bastards? And we got people switching lawyers, because these sons-of-bitches are bribing them, making deals and dickering over percentages.” I hoped Mom and Daddy hadn’t done that, switched lawyers, because of Mr. Stephens’s computer.

  Billy said, “A couple of local folks I won’t bother to name—but you know them, Sam, they’re friends of yours—they’ve even started a suit against the school board, because they’re not happy with the way they decided to use the money that got collected around town last winter and the junk that people sent in from all over. There’s one group in town that agrees with the school board and wants to spend the money for a memorial playground and donate the junk to the Lake Placid Hospital, and another that wants the money to go against this year’s town tax bills and maybe have a tag sale or something to get rid of the stuff.” He laughed, but he wasn’t amused. I knew Mom and Daddy were in the second group, but I guess Billy didn’t.

  “Yesterday,” he said, “I heard somebody wants to sue the rescue squad, for Christ’s sake. The rescue squad. Because they supposedly didn’t act fast enough.

  “This whole town,” Billy said in a suddenly dead voice, “the town has gone completely crazy. I used to like this town, I used to really care about what happened here, but now … now I think I’ll sell my house and the garage and move the fuck away.”

  That got Mom upset—the word “fuck,” not the idea of Billy’s moving. “Billy, please,” she said. “The children.” Like they could hear him over the television. It was her own ears she was trying to protect, not theirs. “I can’t have you talking that way in this house,” she said. Right, this Christian house.

  He said he was sorry, and the three of them were silent for a minute. “I was thinking, if you two dropped the case,” Billy said in a low voice, “then maybe the others would slowly come to their senses and follow. You’re good sensible people, you and Mary. People respect you.”

  “No, Billy. We can’t drop the lawsuit,” Daddy said. “I shouldn’t have to tell you, because I run a pretty good tab at your garage, but we need the money, Billy. For hospital bills and suchlike. Just for living.”

  “Christ, I’ll pay Nichole’s hospital bills, if that’s what you’re talking about. The Walkers, they’d drop out if you did. And the Ottos, I don’t think they want to be doing this, either. Then your lawyer wouldn’t have any reason to pursue the case. I bet he’d pack it in, cut his losses, and go home.”

  “None of us wants to be doing this, Billy.”

  “If you two could make a smart shyster like Stephens pull out, then maybe the other people in town would start to see the light, and people could get their mourning done properly and get on with their lives. This has become a hateful place to live, Sam. Hateful.”

  “Not for us,” Daddy said.

  “No, not for us,” Mom chimed in.

  What a dumb thing for them to say. It shocked even me. I heard Billy’s chair bump against the floor as he stood up.

  “Not for you. Right,” he said, “not for you.” He must have thought they were the stupidest people he’d ever met. Then, naturally, because of what they’d said, he thought of me. “How’s Nichole? She around?”

  Mom jumped in. “She’s resting, in her room.”

  “Yeah. Well, that’s too bad. I haven’t seen her, you know. Since the accident. I guess no one has. Tell her hello for me,” he said in a low sad flat way that made my chest tighten, and I wanted to fly out into the kitchen and hug him.

  But I didn’t. I stayed there by the door, patting Fergus the Bear and listening, and suddenly I was aware that I was shaking all over.

  At that moment, I hated my parents more than I ever had. I hated them for all that had gone before—Daddy for what he knew and had done, and Mom for what she didn’t know and hadn’t done—but I also hated them for this new thing, this awful lawsuit. The lawsuit was wrong. Purely and in God’s eyes, as Mom especially should know, it was wrong; but also it was making Billy Ansel sadder than life had already done on its own, and that seemed stupid and cruel; and now it looked like half the people in town were doing it too, making everyone around them crazy with pain, the same as Mom and Daddy were doing to Billy, so they didn’t have to face their own pain and get over it.

  Why couldn’t they see that? Why couldn’t they just stand up like good people and say to Mr. Stephens, “No, forget the lawsuit. We’ll get by somehow on our own. It’s too harmful to too many people. Goodbye, Mr. Stephens. Take your law practice back to New York City, where people like to sue each other.”

  I heard the door close behind Billy, and then Mom and Daddy went up to their bedroom, probably to discuss things in private, which they were doing more and more now, talking alone in their bedroom. We were becoming a strange family, divided between parents and children, and even among the children we were divided, with me and Jennie on one side and the boys on the other. No one in the family trusted anyone else in the family.

  It had started back when Daddy began touching me and making me keep his secret, but he and I were the only ones who knew about that, so we had all gone on afterwards as if we were still a normal family, with everyone needing and trusting one another, just like you’re supposed to. But now it was like everyone, not just me and Daddy, had secrets. Mom and Daddy had their secrets, and Jennie and I had ours, and Rudy and Skip had theirs, and we each had our own lonely secrets that we shared with no one.

  I knew it was all directly connected to what had happened between me and Daddy before the accident, and through that to the accident itself, which had changed me and my view of everyone else, and now from the accident to this lawsuit—which had set Mom and Daddy against me, although they didn’t know that yet, and me against everyone.

  Maybe my realizing this, after Billy left the house, is what let me start to evolve a plan in my mind that I couldn’t share with anyone, certainly not Mom or Daddy, and not Jennie, who would never understand, and not the boys, who would have ratted on me. If our family was going to be all fragmented like this, I figured, then I might as well take advantage of it and, for once, act completely on my own.

  The first glimpse of it had come to me in a flash, as I sat there by the door with my sweet old teddy bear, Fergus, in my lap. I suddenly realized that I myself—and not Daddy and Mom or the Walkers or the Ottos—could force Mr. Stephens to drop the lawsuit. I could force their big shot lawyer to walk away from the case. And Daddy would know that I did it. Which would give me a good laugh. And because of what I knew about him, he wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it afterwards. It wouldn’t really matter, but maybe then we could become a regular family again. Husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, all of us trusting one another, with no secrets.

  Except the big one, of course. Which would always be there, no matter what I did, like a huge purple birthmark on my face, something that he alone could see whenever he looked at me, and I, whenever I looked in the mirror.

  Graduation came and went, and, yes, I did stay home, and the school board mailed me my diploma, along with official notification that I would be attending ninth grade next year at Lake Placid High School and there would be a special van to transport me. At the last minute, Mom and Daddy almost went to the graduation ceremonies without me, just the two of them, all dressed up, but I talked them out of it. It was a stupid idea, but typical of them. They couldn’t bear being kept out of the limelight.

  “It’s not the same as going to church every Sunday without me,” I explained, “where people feel sorry for me and proud of you. People at school will just think you’re dumb and will feel sorry for you instead of me,” I said.

  “Don’t talk to your mother that way,” Daddy said. They were all sitting in the living room watching television together, like a good American family—it
was The Simpsons, probably, which was the one show the whole bunch of them thought was funny. Even Jennie. Me, I can’t stand that show; it’s insulting.

  “Actually, Daddy,” I said, “I’m talking to you both,” and I backed my wheelchair out of the room, turned, and went into my own room. I wasn’t afraid of him anymore, and he knew it, but he couldn’t do anything about it.

  With summer here and school out, the kids were at home more, and because Mom was working at the Grand Union full time now, I had to baby-sit. That was all right by me, since I didn’t have anyplace else to go, except physical therapy in Lake Placid two afternoons a week, which Grand Union let Mom take off, so she could drive me to the Olympic Center. Most days, Rudy and Skip ran wild, off in the woods and fishing or swimming in the Ausable River or riding their bikes all the way into town to goof around at the playground with their friends. I just let them go, as long as they got home before Mom did, and lied for them when Mom asked where they’d been all day, since they were supposed to stay around the house.

  Jennie stuck close to me and was easy enough to amuse, especially if I let her play in my room with her Barbie dolls, which I did most of the time. We talked a lot that summer, almost as if she were a few years older than her real age and I were a few years younger, and it was one of the nicest things I can remember about our family. It was like I was ten years old again, and in the company of a sister who was also ten, because Jennie met me halfway. Sometimes I almost forgot about all the bad things that had happened to me, and I felt safe again and whole, untouched and innocent.

  We both played Barbie dolls and read the same books and talked about things like witches and ghosts and whether we believed in them or not, and we wrote funny poems about people we didn’t like or thought were stupid and ridiculous, like Mr. Dillinger and Eden Schraft, the postmistress. Silly nonsensical stuff.

  There once was a man named Dillinger,

  Whose brain had only one cylinder.

  His wife’s had none, but she called him “Hon,”

  Now he’s convinced he’s thrilling her.

  Eden Schraft was slightly daft

  And learned the alphabet late.

  She sorted the mail in a plastic pail,

  And licked her stamps from a silver plate.

  Those summer mornings and afternoons alone in the house with Jennie were, in a way, the last days of my childhood; that’s how it felt, even at the time it was happening to me.

  Then one night Daddy knocked on the door of my room and said, “Nichole, are you there? Can I come in a minute?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” I said, “I’m here.” Where did he think I was? I rolled over to the door and unlatched it, and he walked in. I reached over to the television and shut off the sound; I knew he had an announcement to make. He never came into my room alone now, unless he had to. In fact, he almost never talked directly to me anymore, probably because he couldn’t be sure of what I would say in response. He knew I hated him.

  He sat down on the bed and put his hands on his knees and studied them. He has big hands. To me, they look like animals, thick and hairy. To him, I suppose, they’re just hands.

  “Nichole,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “Tomorrow, Nichole, tomorrow Mr. Stephens wants you to make your deposition over to the courthouse in Marlowe. I thought, even though it’s a weekday, I’d stay home from work so I can take you over, and Mom can stay with the kids, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  “Whatever. You sure are …”

  “What? I’m what?”

  “I don’t know. Well, distant, I guess. Distant. Hard to talk to.”

  “Daddy,” I said, looking right at him. “We don’t have much to talk about. Do we?”

  “What?”

  “Do we?”

  He inhaled and sighed heavily, as if he felt suddenly sorry for himself. “Well, then, it’s okay? I’ll take you over about nine-thirty in the morning? That’s okay with you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t always say that.”

  “Say what?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just … it sounds like you’ll do whatever I want, like you think you’re in my power or something. Only sarcastic. That’s the part I don’t like, the sarcasm.”

  I looked at him and didn’t say anything. Sometimes I don’t know who’s more out of it, him or Mom. Slowly he got up and went out to the living room, and I heard him and Mom go upstairs to their room.

  The next morning, he drove me over to Marlowe. We rode the whole way without saying anything, although once or twice Daddy started whistling a little tune and then after a few seconds trailed off into silence. It was a balmy clear day, with small white puffs of cloud sailing over the mountains from Sam Dent. Daddy parked the car in the lot and wheeled me around to the main entrance of the redbrick building, which looks more like a mental hospital than a courthouse, and it gave me the willies. Unexpectedly, I was very nervous and dry-mouthed, scared of what I was about to do.

  Daddy huffed and puffed carrying me up the long stairs, because I kept my body stiff and wouldn’t hold on to him, and I must have felt heavier to him than I really was. Like he was lugging a hundred and ten pounds of cinder blocks. After he set me into a regular chair and went back down for my wheelchair, I looked around me and saw that I was in a nice large book-lined room with a huge table in the middle and these big leather-covered chairs pulled up to it.

  Mr. Stephens was there, wearing a dark pin-striped lawyer suit, and he shook my hand with obvious pleasure. He was glad to see me, I could tell, and this relaxed me some. When I first met him at our house, he had worn his regular clothes, a plaid shirt and wool pants, and had seemed even friendlier and gentler then. I had liked him, but he wasn’t what you’d call impressive, probably because of his hairdo. Now he looked important and smart, and I was glad my lawyer was him and not one of the other guys he introduced me to there, a Mr. Garay and a Mr. Schwartz. They were all suited up too, like him, but their suits looked like K Mart compared to his, and they were both short and baldish, and one of them, Mr. Garay, had real bad breath that he was trying to kill with Feen-a-Mints. Good luck.

  Mr. Schwartz stood at the far end of the table and shuffled a messy pile of papers over and over, as if he was looking for a lost document. Every few seconds, Mr. Garay walked down to Mr. Schwartz’s end of the table and watched over his shoulder and waited, then came back and stood nervously near me and Mr. Stephens.

  “Well, Nichole, are you all ready for this?” Mr. Stephens asked me, and he smiled and winked. We’re on the same side, and we’re smarter than these other guys, was what he was communicating to me.

  “I’m ready,” I said. And I was.

  Daddy came back then with the wheelchair and opened it out for me, and when I had hitched myself into it, Mr. Stephens rolled me up to the table and took the seat beside me on the right. He asked Mr. Schwartz where the stenographer was, and Mr. Schwartz looked up from his papers, blinked, said to Mr. Garay, “Dave, you can tell Frank we’re ready. We’re ready, right?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Mr. Stephens said. Daddy dragged one of the leather chairs from the table over by the wall next to the door, where he sat down and crossed his legs and tried to look casual, like he does this all the time.

  Mr. Garay went out and a few seconds later came back followed by a short dark man I recognized from Mom and Daddy’s church—which is how I thought of it by that time. It wasn’t my church anymore, that’s for sure. The man carried a tape recorder and some papers, and he nodded and smiled at Daddy as he passed him, and Daddy nodded back. I realized then that this was probably the third or fourth time Daddy had been in this room, so maybe he did have a reason to look casual. He was getting used to this legal business.

  “This is Frank Onishenko, he’s the stenographer, and he’ll be taking down everything we say,” Mr. Stephens said to me. “This is ca
lled an examination before trial, Nichole,” he explained, “and these gentlemen will ask you some questions, and I may make a few comments about the questions or your answers. Then Mr. Onishenko will make a transcript of the whole thing, which we’ll sign, and we’ll all have notarized copies, so there won’t be any surprises. Right, gentlemen?”

  Mr. Schwartz looked up from his papers. “What?”

  “Just explaining to Nichole what’s going on here,” Mr. Stephens said. “Are you ready?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Mr. Schwartz said, as if he’d really rather be doing something else. Mr. Garay didn’t seem too interested in what was happening, either. I guess I was Mr. Stephens’s choice witness, Exhibit A or something, and they figured there wasn’t much they could ask me that would help their case. They knew the facts already, and I was obviously exactly what I looked like, a poor teenaged kid in a wheelchair, a victim—and that served only Mr. Stephens’s purpose, and of course Mom’s and Daddy’s purpose, and the Walkers’ and the Ottos’. But not Mr. Schwartz’s or Mr. Garay’s.

  Mr. Stephens made some legal talk then. Stuff like “Pursuant to the order of Judge Florio” and “all parties to appear today for the court-ordered deposition, blah blah blah.” He talked like that for quite a while. “Prior to this date … numerous discovery and inspection … furnished to my office … the defendant, the State of New York … the codefendant, the Town of Sam Dent, Essex County, State of New York …” Et cetera, et cetera. It was pretty impressive, though, and if he hadn’t been my lawyer, here to protect me, I would’ve been seriously scared of him.

  He went on growling and barking like that for a while, and the other lawyers cut in and out a couple of times and made legal speeches of their own. After each speech, they would all three fall into a conversation among them that they said was off the record, so Mr. Onishenko would stop the tape and look at me and smile a little, like we were actors in a play rehearsal forced to stand by while the director consulted with one of the other actors.

  Finally, it looked like the lawyers had got all their technical difficulties ironed out, and Mr. Onishenko asked me to swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God.