The Sweet Hereafter (19 page)

Slowly people let me know. One by one. That’s how I came to understand what they meant by lucky. Rudy and Skip, they were especially lucky; they had been up front in the bus and had been almost the first to be removed from it, with barely a scratch on either of them. Jennie had stayed home sick that day. There were a bunch like that. Close calls. Because I was regarded as one myself, people liked standing around in the hospital room talking to me and each other about all the close calls.

But so many of the other kids were dead, and no one wanted to talk about them. They told me with downcast eyes and sad slow shakes of the head and as few words as possible. The Lamstons were dead, all three of them. One of the Prescott kids was dead. Two of the Bilodeaus, who had been at the rear of the bus, had been trapped underwater. Sean Walker had been in front, like me, but when the bus flipped over he’d fractured his skull and died from it before they got him out of the bus, and I’d only broken my back. So I was lucky, right? And Bear and the Ansel twins and several other kids who’d been in the back, they were all dead. Dolores was okay, I learned. She’d been in shock for a while, people said, but now she was okay. So she was lucky too. I wondered if she had a lawyer, like me.

It just wasn’t right to be alive, to have had what people assured you was a close call, and then go out and hire a lawyer; it wasn’t right.

And even if you were the mother and father of one of the kids who had died, like the Ottos or the Walkers, what good would it do to hire a lawyer? To sue, because your child had died in an accident, and then collect a bunch of money from the stat it was understandable, yet it somehow didn’t seem right, either.

But to be the mother and father of one of the kids who had survived the accident, even a kid like me, who would spend the rest of her life a cripple, and then to sue-I didn’t understand that at all, and I really knew it wasn’t right. Not if I was, like they said, truly lucky.

There was no stopping Mom and Daddy, though.

They had their minds made up. This mister Stephens had convinced them that they were going to get a million dollars from the State of New York and maybe another million from the town of Sam Dent. Daddy said they all have insurance for this sort of thing; it won’t come out of anybody’s pocket, he kept saying; but even so, it made me nervous.

Since the accident, I had become superstitious, I think. Mom and Daddy are Christians, at least Mom is, and I sort of believe in God myself, so I did not want to appear ungrateful and end up losing what little luck I had.

This mister Stephens, who bought me the computer what does he want me to do? I don’t have to be the one to sue anybody, do I? Can’t you guys do it?

Daddy was in the bathroom now, unscrewing the mirror. Well, sure, but he’s got to arrange for the other side’s lawyers to take a statement from you, a deposition, it’s called, and then we all go to court, and you’ll be asked I to testify and so forth About what? I hollered. I don’t even remember the accident! It’s like I wasn’t even there!

Don’t get excited, honey, Mom said, smooth as butter. God, I hate her sometimes.

Jennie was sucking her thumb. Cut that out, I said to her. You’re too old for that, I said, and she started to cry. I’m such a rat. I’m sorry, Babes, I said to her. I pulled her to me and hugged her. She stopped crying and didn’t put her thumb back in her mouth, but now I was wishing she would.

Daddy said, mister Stephens is really a very nice man, very gentle and understanding. He just wants you to describe in your own words what life was like before the accident, you know, with school and all, cheerleading, your plans for the future and all, that sort of thing.

In your own If words. He says it’s much more effective if you tell it, instead of just us relung it.

Yeah. I’ll bet. Well, maybe I won’t. I don’t like even thinking about that stuff, and I sure don’t want to talk about it to any lawyer or some judge in a courtroom. So maybe I’ll just refuse to talk about it. They can’t make me, can they?

C’mon, Babes, be reasonable, Daddy said, coming back into the bedroom.

I Let’s talk about this later, okay? Mom said. She just got home, Sam. Are you hungry, honey? You want me to fix you something, a sandwich or some soup? No more hospital food, honey, aren’t you glad?

She had her cheery TV mom voice working.

Yeah, I said, and I suppose I was glad. I hate hospital food. I am hungry. Maybe a sandwich and some soup would be good.

Mom got up and hustled out to the kitchen, and Daddy slowly gathered his tools and followed. I rolled over to the door and shut it and put the new hook in place. It works, I said to Jennie.

Cool, she said, imitating me.

I’m sorry I yelled at you.

That’s okay. Can you make the computer work? she asked. Can you show me how to use it?

I said sure and wheeled back to the table and switched on the computer.

Cool, I said, and winked at her and laughed. Quickly, she came up next to my chair and put her arm around my shoulder, and we started fooling around with mister Stephens’s computer, writing our names and silly messages on the screen.

I was home again, and lots of things were the same as before. But a few things, important things, were different.

And not just my room, either. Before the accident, I was ashamed all the time and afraid. Because of Daddy. Some times I even wanted to kill myself. But now I was mostly angry and never wanted to die.

Back then, though, with Jennie sound asleep in the bunk above me, I used to lie awake at night thinking up ways to kill myself. Dying was the only way I could imagine the end of what I was doing with Daddy, although sometimes I imagined that he had suddenly decided to leave me alone, because weeks would go by, whole months, when he did leave me alone, when he just acted regular, and I thought then that maybe he had decided that what he was making me do with him was wrong, really wrong, and he was sorry and wouldn’t come to me anymore when we were alone in the house or in the car and touch me and make me touch him.

Those times when he left me alone, I thought maybe I had dreamed the whole thing up, dreams are like that, or had imagined it, because even when I was a little kid like Jennie, before Daddy started touching me that way, I had imagined some things that had made me ashamed, sexual things, sort of. Everybody does that. So maybe I had imagined this too. A few weeks would pass, and I’d start to I forget that it had actually happened, and then I’d feel guilty I for having been so upset and confused.

But late one night he would pick me up from baby sitting at the Ansels’ or somebody else’s, and in the darkness of the car he’d slide his hand across the seat to me and put it on my leg and pull me toward him and keep sliding his hand up my leg, under my skirt, and I knew his pants were undone and he wanted me to put my hand on him there again, and so I would, and then we would do things to each other, like he had taught me, things like I knew my girlfriends did with their boyfriends after school dances and in cars with older boys but that I would never do with a boy and pretended to be disgusted about when they told me.

When we got home I would run into the house from the car and go straight to my room upstairs with my heart pounding and a roaring sound in my ears. It was awful. I lay in bed in the darkness with my clothes still on and listened to him lock up below and walk slowly up the stairs and go into his and Mom’s room and shut the door. I could hear the bedsprings squeak as he got into bed next to Mom, and soon I heard him snoring. For hours I stayed there, still as a log, until finally the roaring in my ears stopped and I dared to get out of the bed and take off my clothes in the darkened room and put on my nightgown and go down the hall to the bathroom and come back to bed, where I lay awake trying to think up ways to kill myself that wouldn’t upset Jennie too much. Usually, I decided on sleeping pills and Daddy’s vodka in the kitchen cupboard. Like Marilyn Monroe. But I didn’t know how to get hold of any sleeping pills, so the next day I always gave it up and instead tried to make what had happened in the car coming home from the Ansels’ seem like I only dreamed it.

I didn’t have to try very hard, because Daddy, except when he wanted to do those things with me, the rest of the time treated me normally, like nothing wrong had happened. Always, the next morning at breakfast he was just the same old Daddy, grumpy and distracted, bossing the boys and me and Jennie around, ignoring Mom the way he does, while she fussed in the kitchen, shoving food at the rest of us and as usual worrying over her diet. She never eats anything in front of anybody but keeps getting fatter and fatter all the time. She’s not a blimp, but she is fat.

Look at Nichole, Daddy always said to Mom. Look at me. We never diet, we just eat three squares a day, and I we’re not fat. What you got to do, Mary, is stop all the in between meal snacking, he’d say.

Nichole’s fourteen, Mom would answer. And you, everyone in your family is skinny as a rail. And I don’t snack; it’s my metabolism. Then she’d pout and try to change the subject. Rudy, you keep your hat on today; you’re coming down with a cold, she’d say, and start hurrying us from the table so we wouldn’t miss the bus.

Normal life at the Burnell house.

What used to be normal life anyhow. Because after the accident, things changed. For one thing, when the other kids went off to school in the mornings, I stayed home. mister Dillinger, the principal, came over one day and brought a bunch of assignments from my teachers so I could catch up with the rest of my class and pass into the ninth grade with them. He’s a huge gawk who wears a bow tie and always has dandruff on his suits, and he sat in the living room with me and Mom, all hearty and cheerful, talking real loud, like being in the wheelchair had made me deaf, and together they tried to convince me to come back to school and attend classes with everyone else. He said the school board had authorized a special van to bring me back and forth.

Isn’t that terrific! he said, like I was supposed to jump up and give a cheer for the school board.

No way, I said. I’m never going back to that school, I said, and I noticed he didn’t argue very hard.

Mom didn’t, either, but she never argues hard when an official man is around. She just takes her cues from him and agrees. Later on, Daddy tells her what she should have said.

Anyhow, I don’t think mister Dillinger wanted me wheeling around the school reminding everyone of the accident and the kids who had died in it. They’d hired some woman from Plattsburgh, I heard, and arranged all these special group therapy meetings and assemblies for the kids after the accident, and things had more or less returned to normal now.

Besides, mister Dillinger knew I could do all the work at home and still be ahead of most of the kids in my class, except for the re al brainy ones. And next year my class would all be going on to high school in Lake Placid, and then I’d be somebody else’s problem.

I didn’t want to stay home alone with Mom all day, that’s for sure, but I really did not need to see any of the kids from school. I didn’t want to watch them strolling around in the hallways and the cafeteria, sneaking into the lav between classes to put on lipstick and share a cigarette, going off to cheerleading practice and hanging out after school in the parking lot together. I didn’t want them to stop what they were doing or saying when I rolled up in my wheelchair, Hi, guys, what’s up? I knew what I’d look like to them, how they’d all go silent for a minute when the dweeb arrived and then change the subject not to embarrass her or make her feel bad because they were talking about something she couldn’t do, like dancing or sports or just hanging out.

Poor Nichole, the cripple. That’s the best I’d get from them pity.

And no matter how many of those group therapy sessions they’d been to, everyone would see me and instantly think of the kids who weren’t there any more, the kids who had not been lucky like me, and maybe they would hate me for it. And I wouldn’t blame them.

At the hospital, lots of kids from school, even the little kids from the Sunday school class I taught, had come to visit me, like official delegations at first, in groups of three and four at a time, but it was always self conscious and embarrassing, especially with the kids my age, my friends, so called, and I knew they could hardly wait to leave, and I was glad myself when they did. Then only my best friend, Jody Plante, and one or two others, when they could get someone to drive them over, came to visit, and that was okay. But by the time I left the hospital to come home, I had pretty much run out of things to talk about with them. We were living in different worlds now, and they couldn’t know about mine, and I didn’t want to know about theirs any more.

For a while after I got home, Jody called me on the phone and even came over once or twice, and she yacked brightly about school and cheerleading gossip and boys, the usual stuff. But she was forcing it, I knew, and I never seemed to have the desire to call her, and of course I couldn’t visit, so pretty soon she didn’t call me anymore and never came to visit, either.

I stayed in my new room, with the door closed and locked, except when I came out to eat or use the bathroom.

For supper, I had to sit at the table with the rest of the family, but breakfast and lunch I usually ate alone. One Saturday morning Mom and Daddy moved everything in the cupboards-dishes, glasses, food, everything down to the lower cabinets, so I could reach them from my wheelchair. It was Daddy’s idea. I think Mom would have preferred to have me go on asking her for help every time I wanted a sandwich or a bowl of cereal. But since Jennie was in school now, Mom was gone a lot of the time herself, working part time over to the Grand Union in Marlowe, so she had to go along with my taking care of myself in the kitchen.

During the days, I pretty much had the whole house to myself, but I still stayed in my room. One night Daddy brought home a portable black and white TV for me that he had bought used in Ausable Forks, and he tied it into the regular cable, so I was able to watch TV then without leaving my room. Soaps and game shows, mostly, which were fine by me.