Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

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 called 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.

I said I would, and then Mr. Schwartz looked straight at me, smiled, and gazed into my eyes like the next words I heard were going to make us lifelong friends. “Nichole,” he said, “good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“Nichole, I’m going to ask you a series of questions about this case. If at any time you do not understand the question or would like me to rephrase or repeat it, please just ask me and I will do so. Is that agreed?”