Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

I said nothing; the blood, hers, surged past my throat into my face. I could hear the heavy slam of my heart. I was swimming in blood.

“You know what that means, Daddy? Do you? Does it register?”

“Yes.”

“AIDS, Daddy.”

“Yes.”

“Welcome to hard times, Daddy.”

“Yes, that’s one way of saying it.”

“Isn’t that a kick, Daddy?”

“Oh, Lord,” I said. “What do you want me to do, Zoe?”

“What do I want you to do?” She practically shrieked it. Then she laughed, a long high-pitched cackle, like an old madwoman, a witch on the heath.

“I’ll do whatever you want, Zoe.”

“Good. That’s really good of you. I was hoping you’d say that. I really was.” She laughed again, girlishly this time, a child who had tricked her grumpy old dad. “Money,” she said. “I want money.”

“What for?”

She laughed again. “You can’t ask me that. Not anymore. You asked me what I wanted. Not what I wanted it for. I want money.”

Suddenly, I was the man I had been twenty years earlier with the knife hidden in my hand, my child in my lap. “All right,” I said. “Fine. I’ll give you money. For whatever purpose.” I was the calm easy daddy singing our favorite song. I’ve got sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence, I’ve got sixpence, to last me all my life.

“I’ll come back down to the city this afternoon,” I assured her, “and I’ll give you as much money as you need.”

“Want!”

“Yes, want.”

We were both silent then.

“I can hear you breathing, Daddy,” she said.

“Yes. I can hear you breathing too.” I’ve got sixpence to spend, and sixpence to lend, and sixpence to take home to my wife, poor wife.

“I’ll come to your apartment,” she said. “Tonight. What time will you be there?”

“Oh, seven or eight, maybe sooner. It’s about six hours’ drive from here. I’ll leave here today, as soon as possible. How much … how much money do you want, Zoe?”

“Oh, let’s see. Give me a thousand bucks. For now.”

“For now.”

“That’s all I’ve got, Daddy. All I’ve got is now. Remember? AIDS, Daddy.”

“All right,” I said. I almost smiled agreeably into the phone. “I’ll meet you at my place, and we’ll talk, won’t we?”

“Yes. We’ll talk. So long as you have the money. Otherwise, I’m out of there, Pops.”

“Do you have the test? The blood test?”

“You don’t believe me!” she shrieked. “I get it — you don’t believe me, do you?”

“Yes. Yes, I do believe you. I thought, maybe, I thought I could get you to take another test. With a regular doctor, in case the first one was wrong.”

“You don’t believe me.” She laughed. “I like it even better that way. It’s better you don’t believe me but have to act like you do.”

“I do believe you, Zoe. You say you have AIDS, goddammit! I know what that means. Let me, for Christ’s sake, be your father!”

She began to cry then, which didn’t surprise me. And so did I. Or at least I sounded, to her and to me as well, as if I was crying. I was not, however; I was fingering the knife blade, testing its sharpness with my thumb.

“I love you, Daddy. Oh, God, I’m scared,” she sobbed.

“I love you too. I’ll be there soon, and I’ll take care of you, Zoe. No matter what happens, I’ll take care of you.”

I felt incredibly powerful at that moment, as if I had been waiting for the moment for years.

We finally hung up, and I quickly packed my bag and put my room in order. Zoe was right, of course. I did not believe her. I did not disbelieve her, either. In that way, this call was like a thousand others. There was one important difference, however. Until this moment, I had for years been tied to the ground, helpless and enraged by my own inability to choose between belief and disbelief. That first task, to eliminate one or the other — to free one limb so as to untie the other — had until now been denied me; because I loved her. Oh yes, I loved my daughter. And because I loved her, I could not know the truth and then act accordingly. Now, for the first time in all those years, I was in a position to know the truth — and then to act. Out of desperation, Zoe had freed me from love. Whether she had AIDS or was lying to me, I would soon know. Either way, I was free. She’d played her final card with me; she could no longer keep me from being who I am. Mitchell Stephens, Esquire.

“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.