Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

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.