Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

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.

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.