Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

“You are?” Mr. Schwartz said, eyebrows raised.

“Yes.”

“Note that she said pretty clearly.’ Not ‘clearly,’” Mr. Stephens put in.

Then Mr. Schwartz asked me some more questions about Billy Ansel, like, After we turned onto the Marlowe road, how far behind the bus was his truck?

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was snowing pretty hard by then. Dolores had the windshield wipers on.”

“She did?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Stephens said, “You remember that?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Schwartz went on, “Well, then, what else did you observe at that time? Before the actual accident, I mean.”

“I was scared.”

“You were scared? Of what? This is before the accident, I’m asking. Do you understand what I’m asking, Nichole?”

“Yes, I understand. Dolores was driving too fast, and it scared me.”

“Mrs. Driscoll was driving too fast? What made you think that, Nichole?”

“The speedometer. And it was downhill there.”

“You could see the speedometer?”

“Yes. I looked, because it was snowing so hard. And because it seemed to me that we were going very fast coming down the hill there. I was scared.” Mr. Stephens, I noticed, had gone silent.

“All right, then, Nichole, how fast would you say she was going? To the best of your recollection.”

“Seventy-two miles an hour.”

“Really? Seventy-two miles an hour. You’re sure of this?”

“Yes.” I had my back to Mr. Stephens now and couldn’t see him, but I imagined him slumped in his chair, looking at his fingernails.

“You believe that the bus driven by Mrs. Driscoll was going about seventy miles an hour at that time?” Mr. Schwartz asked.

“No,” I said. “I know she was going seventy-two. The speedometer is large and easy to see from where I was. I was in the first seat, right beside it, practically.”

“I see. Did you say anything to her about this?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I guess I was scared. And there wasn’t time.”

“There wasn’t time?”

“No. Because then the bus went off the road. And crashed.”

“You remember this?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do now. Now that I’m telling about it.”

“She said, ‘Now that I’m telling about it.’ Note that,” Mr. Stephens said in a weary voice.

“What do you recall of the accident itself? Exactly.”

“I remember the bus swerved, it just suddenly swerved to the right, and it hit the guardrail and the snowbank on the side of the road, and then it went over the embankment there, and everyone was screaming and everything. And that’s all. I guess I was unconscious after that. That’s all. Then I was in the hospital.”

Mr. Schwartz smiled and made some notes on his pad. Mr. Garay was furiously doing the same. “Do you have any questions, Mr. Stephens?” Mr. Schwartz said without looking up.

I made like I was straightening my skirt across my knees, but I could see off to the side that Mr. Stephens was staring at me, and for a long time he didn’t say a word. He just breathed hard through his nose. Of course, he didn’t know if I had told the truth or not, but he was leery of pressing me too hard to find out, or he might end up asking questions that Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Garay would love to hear me answer.

I glanced up at Daddy, who was leaning forward in his chair, his mouth half open, as if he wanted to say something but he didn’t dare.

“I have no questions,” Mr. Stephens said quietly.

Mr. Schwartz said, “I have no further questions. Mr. Garay?”

“No questions,” Mr. Garay said.

“Thank you, Nichole. You can go now,” Mr. Stephens said. He didn’t get up from his seat; he sat there, sliding some papers into his briefcase. Glancing along the table, I saw Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Garay doing the same, only quicker. Mr. Onishenko had shut off the tape recorder and was writing on a self-stick label. I pushed myself away from the table and turned my wheelchair toward Daddy, who was standing now but looking kind of wobbly.

As I passed by him, Mr. Stephens, in a voice so low only I could hear, said to me, “You’d make a great poker player, kid.”

I said, “Thanks,” and quickly moved away from him. Daddy was in shock, I could tell, white-faced and slouched, like someone had punched him in the stomach. Probably, the meaning of what I had told Mr. Schwartz was just now registering in his mind, over and over, and he hadn’t begun to react yet.

I rolled my chair up beside him, and to further delay his reaction, and maybe because I didn’t want him to embarrass himself in front of the lawyers, for he was, after all, my father, I said, “Let’s go, Daddy. We have to get home now.”

Like a kind of numb servant, he nodded okay and lifted me out of the wheelchair and carried me down the stairs. This time I wrapped my arms around his neck and shoulders and held on tight, making it easier for him to lift my weight and carry me to the car.

While he was setting me into the front seat, I saw Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Garay get into a fancy gray car parked on Court Street and drive quickly away. They were loosening their neckties and smiling and in general looking very pleased with themselves.

Daddy hurried back to retrieve my wheelchair from the courthouse, but I knew he’d be longer than necessary, because he and Mr. Stephens would want to have a few words up there in private. Mr. Stephens would probably be incredibly mad at Daddy for not having warned him that I had remembered so much about the accident, and Daddy would be insisting that he hadn’t expected it, either.

Daddy would have concluded by now that I had lied, however, and he would try to tell that to Mr. Stephens. She lied, Mitch, she doesn’t remember anything about the accident, she has no idea how fast Dolores was going. And Mr. Stephens would have to point out to him that, Sam, it doesn’t matter whether she was lying or not, the lawsuit is dead, everyone’s lawsuit is dead. Forget it. Tell the others to forget it. It’s over. Right now, Sam, the thing you got to worry about is why she lied. A kid who’d do that to her own father is not normal, Sam.

But Daddy knew why I had lied. He knew who was normal and who wasn’t. Mr. Stephens couldn’t ever know the truth, but Daddy always would. He put my wheelchair into the trunk of the car and came around to the driver’s side and got in and sat there for a minute with the key in his hand, looking at it as if he didn’t quite understand its purpose. He said nothing for a long time.

Finally, he reached forward and put the key into the ignition, and speaking slowly, he said in a strange half-dead voice, “Well, Nichole, what do you say we stop at Stewart’s for an ice cream? We haven’t done that for a long time,” he added.

“That sounds fine, Daddy. I’d really like it.”

He started the car up then and drove across the road to Stewart’s and bought each of us a huge pistachio cone, which is the kind we both like best but that no one else in the family likes.

When we had left Marlowe and were coming along the East Branch toward Sam Dent, with Daddy’s cone dripping and me handing him napkins, we passed the fairgrounds at the edge of town, and I noticed that they were setting up a midway. I hadn’t realized that it was so late in the summer. Winter and spring and now summer had passed by, and it was like I had been in some other land, traveling.

“Is it time for the fair already?” I asked. It looked beautiful, and sad somehow. The white grandstand and the covered stage facing it had been freshly painted, and the field of mown grass inside the oval racetrack in front of the stand was bright green and shiny under the huge blue sky. When I was Jennie’s age, the grandstand had seemed enormous to me and frightening, especially when we went at night and it was filled with a huge noisy crowd of strangers. Now the structure seemed tiny and almost sweet, and it would no longer be filled with strangers; I would know the faces and even the names of almost everyone up there on those board seats, and they would wave at me and say, Come on over, Nichole, and sit here with us. The track that looped around the field and passed between the stage and the grandstand had been raked smooth and watered until it looked like it was made of chocolate frosting. Scattered among the pine trees behind the grandstand were the low livestock barns and pens and the exhibit halls, where over the years I had won ribbons for my 4-H projects — my angora rabbits, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum; and my plaster-of-paris relief map of Sam Dent in 1886 with balsa wood houses and lichen woods and painted fields; and my Just Say No to Drugs poster. They had all won blue ribbons, which Daddy had framed and hung on the living room wall and which were still hanging there, although I had not looked at them in a long time. The skeleton of a Ferris wheel and the long arms of the octopus ride were already in place, and the game booths and tents were being assembled by a gang of tanned shirtless young men and boys with tattoos on their arms and cigarettes in their mouths, probably the same out-of-town men and boys who last year had flirted and called to me and Jody and the other local girls as we strolled along the midway and tried to ignore them but always found an excuse to turn around at the end of the row of booths and walk back, more slowly this time, looking at each other and rolling our eyes as the boys asked us to come on over and try our luck.