The Sweet Hereafter (8 page)

None that I know of, anyhow.

As a result, until the morning of the accident, Risa Walker and I behaved toward each other as if we could go on like that forever meeting and making love a couple of times a week in a darkened room late at night for an hour or two, and acting like mere acquaintances the rest of the time. Our love affair seemed to be permanently suspended halfway between fantasy and reality. Our sense of time and sequence was open ended; it was like a movie with no beginning and no ending, and it remained that way because we did nothing to make our relationship public, to involve other people, a process that would have been started if Risa had ever confided in someone or if I had revealed it to someone. That would have objectified it somehow, taken it outside our heads, and no doubt would have led Risa to choose between me and Wendell, or would have led me to demand it. She would have chosen me, I believe that, and we would have married soon after. And then, by the time of the accident, when we lost our children, we would have had each other to turn to, instead of away from, which is what we did.

Out there on the Marlowe road that snowy morning, I remember at last climbing back up the embankment from the sandpit to the road and seeing her in the crowd. It was by then a large mixed stunned gathering along the shoulder of the road, of parents and local folks trying to calm and comfort one another, and cold exhausted state troopers, firemen, and rescue workers, and a pack of ravenous photographers and journalists.

There was even a TV camera crew from the NBC affiliate in Plattsburgh on the scene, headed by a blond woman in tights and leg warmers and a leather miniskirt who kept shoving her microphone at people’s gray faces, asking them what they were feeling. As if they could say.

Of course, I thought of Vietnam, but nothing I had seen or felt in Vietnam had prepared me for this. There was no fire and smoke or explosive noise, no wild shouts and frightened screams; instead, there was silence, broken ice, snow, and men and women moving with abject slowness: there was death, and it was everywhere on the planet and it was natural and forever; not just dying, perversely here and merely now.

And when I saw Risa Walker standing among the others up there by the road, it was as if I were seeing her for the first time in my life as if seeing her on newsreel footage, a woman from the village who had lost her son, a mother who had lost her only child. She was like a stranger to me then, a stranger whose life had just been made utterly meaningless. I know this because I felt the same way. Meaning had gone wholly and in one clot right out of my life too, and as a result I’m sure I was like a stranger to her as well.

Our individual pain was so great that we could not recognize any other.

The bus had not been hauled out you could see the front end of the vehicle up on the ice cluttered far bank of the pit, like some huge dying yellow beast caught struggung to clamber out and frozen in the midst of the attempt, with the rest of the thing underwater. The snow and the cold made everyone down there the rescue workers, the wet suited divers from Burlington, the state troopers move slowly, hunched in on their bodies as if with fear and permanent resentment, like lifetime prisoners in a Siberian gulag.

On the near bank, covered with dark green wool blankets, were the bodies of the last of the children removed from the bus by the divers, the kids who had been seated near the back. They had been laid out in the trampled snow but had not been brought up to the road yet. And among these were the bodies of Risa’s son, Sean, who had been in front but whose body had got jammed under a seat, and the Ottos’ boy, Bear, and my twins, Mason and Jessica.

I had seen them myself, I looked straight down into their peaceful ice blue faces, and then quickly drew the blankets back over them again, turned and walked away alone, numb and solid as stone, and climbed slowly, on legs that weighed like lead, the steep side of the frozen embankment to the road. Photographs of them alive and smiling would have made me cry and fall down and beat the earth with my fists; their actual dead faces only sealed me off from myself.

I don’t know where I was going, whom I was looking for. Yes, I do know. Lydia. I was looking for Lydia to tell her that our children were dead, and that I had not been able to save them, and that finally we were all four of us together again.

The last of the ambulances had left for the medical center in Marlowe, where they were taking the survivors before dispatching the most seriously injured children to Lake Placid and Plattsburgh, and the firehouse in Sam Dent, where they had set up a temporary morgue, and there was a break while the workers waited for them to return for the rest. The wrecker from my garage, driven by Jimbo Gagne, was being brought around by the dump road from Wilmot Flats, preceded by a huge town snowplow, for that road had not been used since fall and was under six or eight feet of snow.

Except for Dolores Driscoll, who was uninjured and had remained down by the sandpit, lost and mumbling in a kind of shock but refusing stubbornly to leave the scene, there were no more survivors. Everyone knew that now.

Those of us who had not left with the ambulances knew what we were waiting for the removal of the last of the bodies of our children.

Some people sobbed and wailed into the arms of friends and strangers, whoever would hold them; a few had been placed in the back seats of friends’ cars; a few others, like Risa, just stood among friends and relatives and stared silently at the ground, their minds emptied of thought or feeling.

I guess I was one of these, although at first I had tried to keep on working down below alongside the other men, as if my own children had not been on the bus, as if this had happened to someone else and not me. At first, a few people-Jimbo and Bud from the garage, who had raced out at once with the wrecker when they heard on the CB that there’d been an accident (a message that in fact I myself had called in, although I don’t know how I managed that; I don’t even remember it), and Wyatt Pitney, the state trooper, and a couple of guys on the rescue squad had tried to get me the hell out of there, but like Dolores, I wouldn’t leave.

Later, I learned that people thought I was being courageous. Not so.

There were selfish reasons for my behavior.

I shoved everyone away and kept more or less to myself, silent, stone faced, although continuing nonetheless to help the other men, as we received one child after another from the divers and wrapped them in blankets and dispatched them in stretchers up the steep slope to the road and the waiting ambulances, as if by doing that I could somehow prolong this part of the nightmare and postpone waking up to what I knew would be the inescapable and endless reality of it. No one spoke.

Somehow, at bottom, I did not want this awful work to end.

That’s not courage.

It was still snowing pretty hard; close to half a foot of it had fallen since the bus had gone over. There was no horizon. The sky was ash gray and hung low over the mountains. Within a few hundred yards the spruce trees and pines in the wide valley below the road and the thick birch trees and the road itself quickly dimmed and then simply faded into sheets of falling snow and disappeared entirely from view. There was a long disorderly line of cars, pickups, snowmobiles, and police cruisers parked on the shoulder, while several troopers wearing fluorescent orange jackets stood out in the middle of the road directing traffic, hurrying onlookers skiers mostly, up for the weekend, delighted by the new snow, slowed suddenly and properly sobered by the sight of our town’s disaster, memorizing as much of it as they could, so as to confirm it to their friends later, when it appeared in the newspapers and on television past the scene and on to their weekend.

When I reached the top of the embankment, I stepped over the orange plastic ribbon the state troopers had hung along the roadway to keep people from scrambling down to the crash site. One of the troopers, a man I knew vaguely, came toward me, as if to escort me, and when I looked straight through him and waved him off, he backed quickly away, as if I had cursed him. That’s when I saw Risa, standing a few feet in front of Wendell, who looked as though someone had punched him in the chest: all the force had gone out of him, and his face was twisted with the pain of the blow. By comparison, Risa was solid and resolved, already mourning, and slowly she looked up and then saw me when I passed near her. We could no longer pretend to love each other or even pretend to be hiding our love. Our eyes locked for a fraction of a second, and then we both looked away, and I moved on.

After that it was as if no one dared to talk to me or come forward in any way; I walked straight down the line of parents and other townspeople, the onlookers, cops, and reporters, until finally I was alone, plodding along the side of the road, moving uphill, back the way barely two hours earlier the school bus had come and then right behind it I had come in my pickup, idly daydreaming of sleeping with Risa Walker.

The snow continued to fall, and from the perspective of Risa and the others back at the accident site, I must have disappeared into it, just walked straight out of their reality into my own. In a few moments I was utterly alone in the cold snowy world, walking steadily away from everyone else, moving as fast as I could, toward my children and my wife.

For a long time that’s how it was for me; perhaps it still is. The only way I could go on living was to believe that I was not living. I can’t explain it; I can only tell you how it felt. I think it felt that way for a lot of people in town.

Death permanently entered our lives with that accident.

And while some people simply denied it, as poor Dolores Driscoll seems to have done, or moved to another part of the state and attempted to start their lives over, like the Lamstons, or tried to believe that death had been there all along, like Risa, claiming no difference between then and now, which is a way of denying it too for me, and perhaps for some of the children who survived the accident, like Nichole Burnell and the Bigelows and Baptistes and the several sad little Bilodeau kids whose older brothers and sisters had been killed, for us there was life, true life, real life, no matter how bad it had seemed, before the accident, and nothing that came after the accident resembled it in any important way. So for us, it was as if we, too, had died when the bus went over the embankment and tumbled down into the frozen water filled sandpit, and now we were lodged temporarily in a kind of purgatory, waiting to be moved to wherever the other dead ones had gone.

We didn’t have available to us the various means that many of our neighbors and relatives had for easing the blow. At least I didn’t.

The Christians’ talk about God’s will and all that only made me angry, although I suppose I am glad that they were able to comfort themselves with such talk. But I could not bring myself to attend any of the memorial services that the various churches in Sam Dent and the neighboring towns invited me to. It was enough to have to listen to Reverend Dreiser at the twins’ funeral. He wanted us all to believe that God was like a father who had taken our children for himself.

Some father.

The only father I had known was the one who had abandoned his children to others.

And then there were those folks who wanted to believe that the accident was not really an accident, that it was somehow caused, and that, therefore, someone was to blame.

Was it Dolores’s fault? A lot of people thought so. Or was it the fault of the State of New York for not replacing the guardrail out there on the Marlowe road? Was it the fault of the town highway department for having dug a sandpit and let it fill with water? What about the seat belts that had tied so many of the children into their seats while the rear half of the bus filled with icy water? Was it the governor fault, then, for having generated legislation that required seat belts? Who caused this accident anyhow? Who can we blame?

Naturally, the lawyers fed off this need and cultivated it among people who should have known better. They swam north like sharks from Albany and New York City, advertising their skills and intentions in the local papers, and a few even showed up at the funerals, slipping their cards into the pockets of mourners as they departed from the graveyard, and before long that segment of the story had begun the lawsuits and all the anger and nastiness and greed that people at their worst are capable of.

At first, however, people behaved well, which is to say, they behaved as you would expect: they decently gathered around one another and tried to provide comfort and aid. That’s when you could be glad that you lived in a small town, relieved that you had family and friends, whether they could help you or not. The attempt was dignified and praiseworthy.

Most of my own family, at first, did exactly that, and I was appropriately grateful. We are not an unusual family that is, we are not much of one. My mother, because of Alzheimer’s, had been in a nursing home in Potsdam for over two years then, and she no longer even remembered the bare fact of my existence, let alone my children’s; but my three sisters, who are married and have children of their own, called me as soon as they heard about the accident on the evening news.

They and I are not personally close, we are in no sense confidants, but they are conscientious women and live in the area, you could say the nearest, Sally, in Saratoga Springs, with her husband, who is an accountant for the racetrack commission, the other two in western New York, Rochester and Buffalo, where their husbands work, one as a machinist, the other as some kind of the clinician for Eastman Kodak.

My brother, Darryl, the youngest, is out of the loop altogether. Years ago, he followed our father to Alaska but only got as far as Washington State and didn’t quite disappear; once every eighteen months or so’ he gets drunk and calls me late at night. I never heard from Darryl when the twins were killed, although I am sure he learned about it right away from my sisters, and when a year or so later he did call me, drunk as usual, very late at night, neither of us mentioned it, me for my reasons and he no doubt for his. I was probably as drunk that night as he was. Of course, I never called him, either, to tell him what had happened; that would have been impossible for me, almost unthinkable-in fact, it took me until this very instant to think of it.