Russell Banks: The Sweet Hereafter

Nights now I can sit in my living room alone, looking at the glass of the picture window, with the reflection of my body and the drink in my hand and the chair and lamp beside me glaring flat and white back at me, and I am in no way as real in that room as I am in my memories of my wife and children. Sometimes it’s not as if they have died so much as that I myself have died and have become a ghost. You might think that remembering those moments is a way of keeping my family alive, but it’s not; it’s a way of keeping myself alive. Just as you might think my drinking is a way to numb the pain; it’s not; it’s a way to feel the pain.

Four years ago — well, four years before the accident, the year before Lydia died — she and I and the twins spent two weeks on the island of Jamaica. It was late in the winter, early March, which is when if you’re going to get out of Sam Dent at all, you get out then. I don’t care how much you think you like the snow and ice and darkness of upstate New York; after four or five months of it, nobody in this region manages to keep from being depressed that late in the winter. And unless you drive a snowplow or run a ski lift, you’re not making any money here anyhow, so if you can afford it, you leave for anywhere south of Albany. That March, for the first time in my life I could afford it, the garage was finally running in the black, and Lydia was feeling bad for the first time, although we did not yet know why. By May they’d remove her thyroid; by the following May she’d be dead. We merely thought we deserved a vacation, so to speak.

We rented a house, a “villa” the travel agent called it, but it was a house, a modest three-bedroom cinder-block affair surrounded by a chain-link fence. It was a compound, more or less, situated up on a hill in an inland village a dozen miles west of Montego Bay. There was a small swimming pool and a terrace and a yard stuffed with flowers, and we had a part-time gardener and a cook, as advertised, local folks whose relation to us was the same as the one most folks back home in Sam Dent bore to summer people. In Jamaica we were winter people, which was a little unsettling at first, but in a day or two we got used to it (it’s amazing how fast you can accommodate yourself to luxuries like domestic help and swimming pools), which gave me some insight into the Adirondack summer people.

We weren’t big drinkers, Lydia and I, but we were smoking a lot of dope. Both of us. Not so much back at home, because after all we both had to work every day and take care of the kids and couldn’t very well walk around stoned all day and night, and unless you were a teenager, marijuana was somewhat difficult to acquire in Sam Dent. Even so, by the time we went to Jamaica, marijuana had become our recreational drug of choice, you might say, which meant that three or four times a week, usually late at night in our bedroom at home, we got high. In Jamaica, though, there was an abundance of very strong dope, which they called ganja and sold cheap. There was cocaine too, but we bought ganja. Every other kid on the street sold it; you could smell it in the marketplace, on the crowded streets of Montego Bay, even in the yard of our house.

I would rise early, and feeling wicked and weirdly dislocated, would walk out onto the terrace and look over the hills to a silvery wedge of sea glistening in the morning sun, and the breeze would carry the smell of the natives’ wood-burning cook fires and marijuana smoke across the tops of the trees straight into my face, and just like in Vietnam, I would think, What a damned good idea, to get stoned early and stay stoned all day long and go to sleep stoned. So I’d roll a joint and take off. It made the dream and the threat of travel and being surrounded by permanently poor black people whose language was incomprehensible to me both safe and real — it woke me up without scaring me.

With marijuana, your inner life and outer life merge and comfort each other. With alcohol, too, they merge, but they tend to beat up on you instead, and I didn’t particularly like getting beat up on. Which is why I have never had a problem with alcohol. Until now, I mean. Since the accident. I admit it; what do I lose by admitting it? I do have a problem with alcohol, and I’ll probably continue that way until something terrible happens and brings me up short, something I can’t or won’t imagine now. It could be the collapse of my business; although frankly I don’t think that would do it. It could be my own death.

But back then I had a problem with marijuana, and I did not know it. I thought it was just me taking unnecessary chances, and I was still young and undamaged enough, despite Vietnam, to think you could get away with taking unnecessary chances without admitting that you had a problem. I believed that it was an interesting way to live. Lydia too — although she was more cautious than I and followed a ways behind me, just in case I stumbled and fell, which was her habit and temperament in most things. We were a powerful couple, and I cannot think of her without feeling my heart instantly harden against the thought, because when I remember her and how powerful and happy we were and why I loved her so, I think at once of her death. Just as with the twins, Jessica and Mason. I can barely say their names without feeling the flesh of my heart turn into iron. This is not bitterness; it’s what happens when you have eaten your bitterness.

We had rented a car for the entire two weeks, a beat-up yellow Ford Escort, and every day we left the house on a family outing of some kind — the beach at Doctor’s Cave, Rose Hall, the straw market, river rafting, whatever took our fancy — and usually on our way home in the afternoon we stopped at a pathetic shabby little shopping center in Montego Bay called Westgate, to pick up a few household supplies, like toilet paper or paper towels, and snacks for the kids, who were always tired and fussy by then. They loved those things called coco-pops, clear plastic tubes of flavored ice hawked by kids in the parking lot, sticky disgusting things that melted as soon as you bought them, and while Lydia and I scurried up and down the aisles of the store, the twins sucked their coco-pops and waited outside in the car.

One afternoon late in our stay, we drove back from what I think was the beach at Doctor’s Cave — I don’t recall exactly where we were coming from, but I do remember feeling sunburned and sandy, which certainly suggests the beach — and stopped at Westgate. The last time we had come here, Jessica and Mason had been hassled in the parking lot by a bunch of local kids attracted to them by their whiteness and the fact that they were twins, which seemed to have an unusual fascination for people down there, even though they were not identical twins. It was harmless enough, but because there hadn’t been any adults to control the Jamaican kids, the episode had scared Jessica and Mason. They were only four years old and did not have much interest in other cultures.

Anyhow, this time, instead of waiting out in the lot in the car, they followed us into the store, a cavernous supermarket with no air-conditioning and smelling of sour milk, bad meat, and pickles. It was like every food store on the island that we happened to enter during those two weeks: half-empty shelves stocked more with paper goods and bottles of rum for tourists than with food for the natives — a generally depressing place, which I wanted to avoid, and but for the kids, who seemed to need a few familiar things to eat and drink, potato chips, cereal, packaged cookies, that sort of thing, I would have. Those items comforted the children somehow. They were lonely in Jamaica, and being the only white children in the village, or so it must have seemed to them, they were always a little tense and frightened. All their routines were broken, and they were not used to being without TV, and they were not accustomed to receiving so much daytime attention from us. The twins were at a very cautious age that spring, and, too, they may have sensed, even before I or she herself did, that their mother was sick. Also, they weren’t able, as Lydia and I were, to get stoned every day and night.