The Sweet Hereafter (6 page)

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 nervous 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.

Looking back, I feel very sorry for them. Then, I thought that we were all having the time of our lives, which made it easier for me to accept the high level of anxiety that the time of our life extracted as payment. We were surrounded by black people, people who carried machetes and sold drugs openly and talked a foreign sounding English in loud voices, who pointed at us because of our skin color and 48 made ugly noises with their lips at my wife or smiled and lied and tried to take our money. But here we are, on vacation in Jamaica, I thought.

Isn’t that just the greatest thing an American dad can do for his family? I think I’ll celebrate and reward myself by getting blasted on this terrific ganja I bought today for only ten bucks while getting the car filled with gas.

You think that way down there.

While we paid for our groceries at the register always a slow and sullen process interrupted by several arguments and exchanges between the Jamaican clerks and customers Mason went on ahead of us to the car, so that when we arrived there he was already seated in back, slurping at his second coco pop. I put the bag of groceries into the trunk, got in and backed away from the front of the store and drove quickly out of the lot, sweating in the car, which distracted me somewhat. I again regretted not having rented an air conditioned car.

I remember that they were burning off the sugarcane fields at that time of year. West of Montego Bay there were broad fields of smoldering cane stubble, and the air was filled with a sugary haze that smelled like burnt molasses.

It looked like after a firefight, with patches of grass flaming in the distance and the air filled with a spooky haze that filtered out the sunlight but did not dull the bright green foliage or the tall yellow grass. There was a kind of false breeze, caused by the distant and immense heat of the fires, so that the air blew warmly against your face, pushing toward the fires that burned behind you.

When we had crossed the plain, we entered a neighborhood of seaside houses owned by foreigners and rich Jamaicans, where high concrete walls topped with razor wire ran alongside the narrow winding coastal road. Then, after a few miles, we turned left and started the three mile climb into the hills to our village. Halfway up the first long hill, I turned to smile at the twins in back. They had been silent since Westgate, and I expected them to be asleep, curled up in each other’s arms like litter mates, like puppies or kittens, which was their inclination then, so that you couldn’t tell whose blond head belonged to which set of arms and legs, or whether they were two separate children at all and not one strange creature with two heads and eight limbs, which I am sure is how they themselves sometimes felt.

But they were not sleeping. Mason stared absently out the window; he was alone in the back seat. Jessica was gone.

Had she somehow climbed over to the front, to sit in her mother’s lap, and I hadn’t noticed? I looked over at Lydia, whose eyes were half closed, approaching sleep, trusting me to get us all safely, smoothly back to the house.

She wore shorts and halter, her pale hair tied back with a pink scarf, her tanned arms and legs glittering with dried sea salt. There was no child on her lap. Our daughter was gone.

I said nothing, kept driving the overheated Escort up the curving narrow road, and with a sideways glance checked the rear doors, for perhaps one had opened and too horrible to believe, maybe, but not too horrible to imagine, not for me-she had fallen from the car without a cry and, amazingly, no one had seen it, not even her twin We were almost at the top of the hill, approaching the turnoff to the potholed lane that led along the narrow tree covered ridge to our house. Pale green sunlight fell at oblique angles through the trees and speckled the roadway and the packed dirt yards of the tiny tin roofed houses. I remember that. Barefoot children walked along the edges of the rain gullies, lugging water home from the village stand pipe in buckets that they balanced on their heads. It was almost evening, time to begin cooking supper. Where was our daughter? How had she been taken from us?

I kept driving straight on toward what we called home and could not say aloud the words that were thrashing me, as if somehow by remaining silent I could keep the terrible thing from having occurred. Finally, when we passed through the gate and drew up in front of the house, I said, without turning back to him, Mason, is Jessica asleep?

I was afraid, terrified, and did not yet believe that such a thing could happen to you in America or even while on vacation from America.

My wife had not yet died, and my two children had not yet been taken from me in the accident, so all I had to go on was what had happened to me in Vietnam when I was a nineteen year old kid, and by some necessary logic, I believed that because terrible things had happened to me then and there, it was impossible for them to happen here and now. I did not want to give up that logic; it was like my childhood: if I admitted that my daughter had been kidnapped or had fallen from the car or had simply been lost in a foreign country, then the whole world for the rest of my life would be Vietnam. I knew that.

Mason’s response was very stranger at least that’s how I remember it.

Of course, you have to keep in mind that Lydia and I were pretty much stoned most of the time, so that when we were coming down we were thinking about having been high, and when we finally were down, like now, we were thinking about getting high again. Our perspective on things was tilted, and foreground kept getting confused with background, and vice versa. Mason answered, You left her at the store.

Straight out, as if he were slightly pleased by my having abandoned his twin sister and somewhat annoyed by his having to remind me.

But twins are like that. They behave in ways, especially regarding each other, that can seem very strange to someone who is not a twin himself. They have a morality that is different from ours at least when they are young they do-because, unlike other children, they are not inclined to imitate adults until much later. To children who are twins, even when they are not identical, the other twin is both more and less real than everyone else in the family, and they deal with each other the way we deal with our selves alone. Which means that it’s like twins are permanently stoned. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration.

I started to holler. Jesus, Mason! I left her at the store?

Why the hell didn’t you say something?

My God! How could we do that? Lydia cried. How could we have left her there?

I thought she was sleeping! I shouted at her. By now I had the car turned around and headed back up the drive toward the gate. I thought she was sleeping in back!

Hurry, she said. And shut up. Please.

What the hell did I do? I didn’t do anything wrong, it was a goddamn accident, I said.

No one’s to blame, we’re both to blame, we’re all to blame, even she is, so let’s just get back there and pray that she’s all right. That no one’ She’ll be fine, I said. No one’ll hurt her. These people, they love children. I said it, but I didn’t believe it.

How could my four year old daughter be safe among people I myself felt frightened of? The image of flaxen haired Jessica searching the aisles of the store for us, wide eyed, fighting tears, lower lip trembling as she starts to call for us, Mommy? Daddy? Where are you? the thought made me tremble with rage, and because I could not blame my wife or son for what Jessica was enduring, I had to blame myself alone, and because, as Lydia had said, I could not blame myself alone, I blamed love.

This was the beginning of what I have come to think of as the permanent end of my childhood and adolescence.

The Vietnamization of my domestic life. Which is why I am telling you this. What had been an exception was now possibly the rule. That headlong terrified drive back down the hill and across the smoking cane fields to Westgate in Montego Bay, Jamaica there began the secret hardening of my heart, a process that today, as I guess is obvious, is nearly complete.

Jessica was not in the parking lot. A scattering of skinny shirtless boys in bare feet kicked a bundled rag in loopy overhead arcs. I drew the car up in front of the grocery store, leapt out, and made for the door; then remembered Mason and came running back. But Lydia already had him out of the car and was hurrying along behind, holding his hand.

He was oddly calm and watched the older boys enviously, as if he did not understand what was happening to our family, although of course he did.

There was a single strange thought leading me into the store: I will make this one last try to save her, and then I will give it up. I must have known that if my child was indeed to be lost to me, then I would need all my strength just to survive that fact, so I had decided ahead of time not to waste any of my strength trying to save what was already lost.

You are probably astonished that I gave her up so easily. And although you could say that it was only a minor event in my life, a scare is all, that broke me, you’d be wrong; I think I was broken long before that afternoon in Jamaica, possibly in Vietnam but more likely not.

Maybe in the womb, or even earlier. If’ not broken, I was weakened.

Which is not all bad, you understand. The way we deal with death depends on how it’s imagined for us beforehand, by our parents and the people who surround them, and what happens to us early on. And if we believed properly in death the way we actually do believe in taxes, for in stance-and did not insist on thinking that we had it beat, we might never even have had a Vietnam war. Or any war.

Instead, we believe the lie, that death, unlike taxes, can be postponed indefinitely, and we spend our lives defending that belief. Some people are very good at it, and they become our nation’s heroes. Some, like me, for obscure reasons, see the lie early for what it is, fake it for a while and grow bitter, and then go beyond bitterness to… to what?

To this, I suppose. Cowardice. Adulthood.

We entered the store frantic, wild eyed, looking ridiculous, I’m sure, and the three women at the registers saw us and smiled knowingly and pointed, together in a single gesture, as in a chorus line, to the counter at the end, where Jessica was seated cross legged like a little blond yogi, sucking on an orange coco pop and studying the pages of a Jamaican romance comic book. She hadn’t seen us, or if she had, she had decided to ignore us.

Lydia got to her first and swept her up in her arms.

Mason and I hung back a bit motions in dignified check.

When Lydia put her down, Jessica marched quickly past me and out the door, haughty, empowered by neglect, with Mason falling in line behind her, and the two of them got into the back seat of the car and began together to study the drawings of the black men and women in love. A tall, broad shouldered cashier asked me for two dollars for the comic book and the coco pops Jessica had consumed, and I paid her, and Lydia and I left the store.

We never returned to that store; we couldn’t face the cashiers, I think. Also, we stopped smoking marijuana. It was one of those episodes that clarify things, that shape and control your future behavior. We never went back to Jamaica, of course: a year later, Lydia was dead. Four years later, the twins were dead. And now, here am I.

I could say that I saw it all coming, like most people in town do, but unlike them, I’d almost be lying. It’s just that after Jamaica, while I expected death, I did not anticipate it.

That’s how Risa thinks, however, and she believes it, poor woman-she actually believes that she saw it all coming. Before the accident, for several years, mainly due to her collapsed marriage and numerous financial problems, she was merely a woman depressed and troubled; but that’s what she thinks of now as prescience. Which is like writing history backward, if you ask me, fixing the past to fit the present.

Hindsight made over into foresight.

Oh, I knew it, Billy, she told me after the accident, when finally we could speak of it to each other. I knew for the longest time, I knew that something terrible was coming down. When I heard the sirens and the alarm from the firehouse, nobody had to tell me that something terrible had happened, that something unimaginably awful had been visited on me and Wendell, and on you, too, and on the entire town. I knew it instantly, because I had known for months that it was coming.

That was why all those months, all the time we were meeting each other, in fact, I was so unhappy and turbulent in my emotions.

Risa actually said that to me. And when she did, it turned me off, but there was a time when that particular cast to her mind, the superstitious part of it, you might say, made her appear wonderfully attractive to me. After the accident, however, it made her seem stupid and weak, and it embarrassed me to find myself talking so intimately with her.

She had always been essentially the same person, of course, just as I had been, but the Bide a Wile Motel, which she and Wendell bought from the bank at auction and which anyone who’d ever tracked the economy of this town could have predicted would be nothing but a sinkhole for their little bit of money (that’s the sort of thing you can predict), was probably the start of her decline, the ending of her dream, the end of her youth. Some people, when their dreams collapse, turn superstitious in order to explain it, and Risa is one of them. The motel, in addition to the insurmountable financial difficulties it created for them, made Wendell, who’d always worked behind the counter of someone else’s business, never his own, look lazy and a little dumb and pessimistic to her, which of course he was anyhow and had been from the day they married. But she hadn’t seen it before, and now she believed that his character was getting in front of her realizing a very important dream. That got her angry at him in a profound way, which drove him further into himself, and although they both loved their boy Sean dearly, they soon began to love each other less. That’s when he started going to bed early and alone, and Risa started meeting me in Room 11.