The Sweet Hereafter (16 page)

Hi! How’re you doing? Where are you? Where’s five one eight? I got this number off your phone machine.

Yeah, well, I’m… I’m surprised to hear from you. I’m on a case, upstate, in the Adirondacks.

She said that was very interesting, and for a minute I gabbled on about the case, the motel, the town of Sam Dent, like we have these conversations, any conversation, all the time. Finally, I was able to stop myself, and I said, Zoe, why are you calling me?

‘Why am I calling you? You’re my father, for Christ’s sake! I’m not supposed to call you?

Oh, Jesus, Zoe. Please, for once, let’s talk straight.

Fine. That would be terrific. I called Mom, and all she wanted to know was had I grown my hair back yet and what color was it, so I hung up. What do you want to know?

‘Well, to be perfectly honest, right now I want to know if you’re high.

You mean, Daddy, am I stoned? Do I have a needle dangling from my arm?

Am I nodding in a phone booth?

Did I score this morning, get whacked, Daddy, and call you for money?

Trees, snow, mountains, ice. I could hear sirens, street traffic, a radio or TV newscaster in the background. I imagined some boyfriend behind her, sick and dying, smoking a cigarette, waiting for her to raise some money from her rich father. Who was I talking to? The living or the dead? How should I behave?

God, she said. I don’t fucking believe it.

I’m sorry. I just need to know, if that’s possible. So I can know how to talk to you. So I can know how to act.

Just act naturally, Daddy, she snapped.

The operator suddenly came on the line, instructing her to please deposit another two dollars and twenty cents for an additional three minutes.

‘Where are you, Zoe? I’ll call back.

Shit! she said. Then she hollered to someone, ‘What the fuck’s the number of this phone? It’s not here!

Zoe, just tell me where you are.

It’s this hotel, this… place. Where’s the goddamned number? I can’t find the fucking number. The operator’s voice cut in again, repeating her instructions.

‘Where are you, Zoe? Give me the name of the hotel; I’ll get the number from Information. What’s the address?

You’re in New York?

Shit! It’s this pay phone. Yeah, she said, and then the line went dead.

What do you do when this sort of thing happens? I’ll tell you what you do. You sit still and count slowly to ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, however long it takes for your heart to stop pounding, and then you resume doing what ever it was you were doing when the telephone first rang.

I had been standing in my socks and underwear at the bathroom sink, shaving. I went back to shaving. I was in the tiny village of Sam Dent, New York, in the middle of generating a terrific negligence suit.

I went back to that.

I’d planned to return to the city that day anyhow, and Zoe’s phone call hadn’t touched that. She was probably in a ratty, crack infested single room occupancy hotel in back of Times Square, or had just been kicked out of one. And for all I could do about it, she might as well be in L. A. as New York.

I switched my mind onto the business at hand, which I could do something about. Breakfast at the Noonmark.

Attending funerals. Dolores Driscoll. The need to sound her out before I got myself locked into this case.

There was only one funeral left, the service for the Catholic kids at St. Hubert’s Church, a small white wood frame structure out by the fairgrounds on the East Branch of the Ausable River, on Route 73, a few miles from town.

The funeral was for the Bilodeau and Atwater kids, from Wilmot Flats, and there were five small open caskets up front, surrounded by flowers and miscellaneous plant life.

There were maybe a hundred people attending, a sadly shabby crowd in their Sunday best, mostly somber young men with big Adam’s apples and weeping overweight young women with rotten complexions, and bunches of kids and babies in hand me downs, with red runny noses and slobbering mouths. The kind of crowd the Pope likes.

I recognized several lawyers, easy to spot in their suits and topcoats, checking out the scene for potential clients, and a couple of journalists with cameras dangling from their necks and notebooks in their hands, waiting for visible signs of grief. Dolores I spotted immediately, thanks to Risa’s description: late middle age, round face, frizzy red hair, a little on the plump side, and wearing a man’s parka and heavy trousers and boots. You’d think she was a lesbian or something, if you didn’t know about her husband, Abbott, and her sons, who are all quite normal, Risa had explained.

I noted that Risa herself seemed to prefer men’s clothing, but said nothing. What the hell, it was probably just some thing between women, the way they compete with one another without having to acknowledge it.

I was standing by the door in a pack of late arrivals, still thinking about Zoe, I admit it, when I first saw Dolores.

The tiny church was crowded, but she had half a pew at the back to herself, so I slid in next to her. Immediately four or five people followed and sat on my other side, filling the rest of the pew. It wasn’t too hard to see what the difficulty was these people liked Dolores, she was one of them, and they felt as profoundly sorry for her as for themselves; but they also could not help blaming her and wanting to cast her out. They would have preferred that she simply disappear from town for a while, go and stay with her son in Plattsburgh or at least hide behind the door of her house with her husband up there on Bartlett Hill. They wanted her to stash her pain and guilt where they didn’t have to look at it.

But she wasn’t having any of that. Silently, with her head bowed, Dolores was plunking herself down in the exact center of the town’s grief and rage, compelling them by her presence at these funerals to define her. Was she a victim of this tragedy, or was she the cause of it? She had placed herself on the scales of their judgment, but they did not want to judge her. To them, she was both, of course, victim and cause; just as to herself she was both. Like every parent when something terrible happens to his child, Dolores was innocent, and she was guilty. We knew which, in the eyes of God and our fellowman, we were, despite the fact that most of the time we felt like both; but she did not.

Denial was impossible for her, so she wanted us to come forward and do the job for her.

Toward the end of the service, when the short red faced priest turned to the cross in the nave for a closing prayer and the pallbearers stepped forward from their front row seats and took their posts by the caskets, Dolores suddenly stood and squeezed past me and the others in the pew. I followed her, excusing my knees as I worked my way to the aisle. From the foyer, I watched the woman hurry down the path to the road, then move rapidly past the hearses and the long line of parked cars. I broke into a run and caught up with her just as she reached a large dark blue van.

missis Driscoll! I called. Please!

She turned and faced me, scared. ‘What do you want!

I can tell you, I can tell you whether you’re guilty or not. I was out of breath; for her size, the woman moved pretty fast.

Who are you? Who is it can do that? No one can do that.

Yes, I can. Answer me one simple question, and I’ll tell you if you are to blame.

One question?

Yes. When the bus left the road, missis Driscoll, how fast was it moving?

I don’t know.

Approximately.

You said one question.

It’s the same question, missis Driscoll. Approximately how fast?

The police already asked it.

‘What did you tell them?

You said one question.

Same question.

Fifty, fifty five at the most, is what I told them.

Then you’re not guilty, I said. You’re not to blame.

Believe me.

Why? Why should I believe you?

Listen to me, you poor woman. You didn’t do any thing wrong that morning. It wasn’t your fault. I now know as much as anyone about what happened out there on the highway that morning, and believe me, it’s not you who are at fault.

Who, then?

Two or maybe three parties who were not there at the time, I said, and I listed them for her. I told her my name and explained that I was representing the Ottos and the Walkers, people who liked and admired her and who believed, with me, that she was in many ways as much a victim of this tragedy as they were. I said that I would like to represent her too.

Me? Represent me? No, she said. You can’t. I only said I was doing fifty, fifty five. To the police; to Captain Wyatt Pitney, from the state police. Because that’s how I remembered it. But the truth, mister, is that I might have been doing sixty miles an hour when the bus went over, or sixty five. Not seventy, I’m sure. But sixty is possible.

Sixty five, even. And I would say that to a judge, if some smart lawyer like you, only working for the other side, took it into his head to ask it that way. And, mister, she said in a low voice, let’s face it, if I was over the limit, no matter how you tell it, I’m sure I’m to blame.

Yep. But what if Billy Ansel insists that at the time of the alleged accident, you were going fifty two miles an hour?

He knows that? Billy?

Yes. He does.

Billy said that?

If he does not volunteer to say so in court, I will subpoena him and oblige him to testify to that effect-if you’ll let me bring a suit in your name charging negligent infliction of emotional harm. It’s clear to me and many other people that you have suffered significantly from this event.

And then, Dolores Driscoll, your name, your very good name, will be cleared once and for all in this town. Everyone will know then that you, too, have suffered enormously, we’ll have established it legally, and then you will not have to bear any of the blame.

‘Well, I’m not to blame! she said. I’m not to blame.

Her large round face crinkled suddenly, and she began to weep. I placed both hands on her shoulders and drew her toward me, and in a few seconds she was blubbering against my chest. Peering over her head, I watched the caskets come out of the church, one after the other. The pallbearers-uncles and older brothers and cousins of the kids inside the boxes shoved the caskets into the hearses, and the somber black suited guys from the funeral homes slammed the doors shut on them.

It was probably just as well that Dolores had her back to the scene.

When the people coming out of the church saw us standing there, they stopped, many of them, and glared at us. And when they moved toward their cars and pickup trucks, they cut a wide swath around us, until finally we were standing there in the parking lot next to the church alone.

Come out to the house, she said to me, wiping her red swollen face with her sleeve. What I want, you can tell my husband, Abbott, what you’ve told me. Abbott’s logical. Like you. But he’s more interested than you in doing what’s right. You’ll see. If he says I should do this, go to court and all, like you say, so my name can be cleared and like that, then I will. But if he’s against it, then I’m against it.

I hadn’t planned on this, but I said fine, that made perfect sense to me, and agreed to follow her out to her house in my car. Yes, I suppose I had a few minor misgivings about having lied to her I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to get Billy Ansel to confirm that she had been driving under the speed limit. It was a gamble, a calculated risk, but the odds were maybe ten to one that no matter how fast they were going when the bus went over, Ansel, for several reasons, would say to a jury, just as she had told the cops, Fifty, fifty five. You have to gamble like this now and then.

‘Would you say fifty two miles per hour, mister Ansel?

Yeah. Fifty two, I’d say.

‘Would you say fifty three miles per hour, mister Ansel?

Yeah. It might have been fifty three. No more, though.

At that time, mister Ansel, and under the weather conditions and road conditions that prevailed at that time, the time of the accident, and at that place on the road from Marlowe to the town of Sam Dent a stretch of road that you, like missis Driscoll, are extremely familiar with, are you not Yeah.

‘Would fifty three miles per hour have been a safe speed to be operating a school bus?

Objection!

Sustained.

I withdraw the question. I have no further questions of the gentleman, Your Honor.

Piece of cake, on a plate.

Dolores and her husband, Abbott, lived near the top of Bartlett Hill Road in a large foursquare white house with a wide porch in front and a big unpainted barn in back, with nothing but dense woodlands beyond.

From the porch you had a great one hundred eighty degree view that included The Range, as they call it, from Mount Marcy to Wolf Jaw.

A million dollar view. For the area, it was an old house, and it had fallen on bad times. In the late 1800s, Dolores’s grandfather had been a successful dairy farmer, she told me as we stood in the driveway before going inside. He’d built it himself from trees cleared off this land, and her father and then she herself had been raised in it. Back then, Dolores said, even in her father’s day, these forested mountains were alpine meadowlands. It was like Switzerland, she said, although I can’t say what Switzerland’s like. Now, for miles, straight to the horizon, you saw nothing but trees hardwoods, mostly, and hemlock and pin and if it weren’t for the occasional old stone wall sinking into the leafy ground, you’d think you were in the forest primeval.

Abbott Driscoll was a shriveled guy in a wheelchair; he’d had a stroke a few years before, and his whole right side had blinked out. He had long thinning white hair, bright blue eyes, and soft pink skin, and he drooled a little and sat canted to one side, like a baby in a high chair.

Although he seemed bright enough, his speech was seriously impaired, and I could make out only about half of what he said. Most of the other half Dolores translated, whether I wanted her to or not. He spoke in these odd cryptic sentences that didn’t really mean a whole lot to me but to Dolores were like Delphic pronouncements. I guess she loved the hell out of the guy and heard what she wanted to hear.