The Sweet Hereafter

Billy Ansel

Just to show you how far I was from predicting the accident or suspecting that it could occur — even though, except for Dolores Driscoll, who drove the bus, I was surely the person in town closest to the event, the only eyewitness, you might say — at the moment it occurred I was thinking about fucking Risa Walker. My truck was right behind the bus when it went over, and my body was driving my truck, and one hand was on the steering wheel and the other was waving at Jessica and Mason, who were aboard the bus and waving back at me from the rear window — but my eyes were looking at Risa Walker’s breasts and belly and hips cast in a hazy neon glow through the slats of the Venetian blind in Room 11 of the Bide-a-Wile.

So I don’t know anything of what immediately preceded the accident, although once it happened, of course, I saw it all, every last mind-numbing detail. And still do, every time I close my eyes. The swerve off the road to the right, the skid, the smashing of the guardrail and the snowbank; and then the tilted angled plummet down the embankment to the sandpit, where, moving fast and somehow still upright, the bus slid across the ice to the far side; and then the ice letting go and the rear half of the yellow bus being swallowed at once by the freezing blue-green water.

I don’t close my eyes a whole lot now. Unless I’m drunk and can’t help it — therefore, a frequently desired state, you might say.

Many of the folks in Sam Dent have come out since the accident and claimed that they knew it was going to happen someday, oh yes, they just knew it: because of Dolores’s driving, which, to be fair, is not reckless but casual; or because of the condition of the bus itself, which Dolores serviced at home in her barn, and as a consequence it did not get the same supervision by me as the other school buses got; or because of that downhill stretch of road and the fact that there’s almost no shoulder to it on either side of the guardrail; or because of the sandpit below the highway there, which the town had opened up a few years before and then abandoned when it filled with water, thinking no one could get to it except by the old blocked-off access road on the other side of the Flats.

It’s a way of living with a tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand. I could understand that. But it irritated me to hear it, especially with so many journalists poking microphones in people’s faces and with all the downstate lawyers crawling around looking for someone to blame, so I want to say right out front that I was the person closest to the accident and I never saw it coming.

I knew that stretch of road as well as anyone in town, and I knew the bus inside and out, and I knew better than anyone what Dolores’s driving habits were, because one of my habits was to follow her into town every morning; and believe me, I was not in the slightest afraid of an accident. I would be now, of course, because the accident has changed everything, but back then, even though I expected death in a general way as much as the next person — probably even more so, since I am a widower and a Vietnam vet and had already learned a few things about the precariousness of daily life — I was able that morning, while I drove along behind the school bus, to let my mind fix on the image of the woman I happened to be sleeping with, a woman I was having an illicit affair with. Illicit because she was married to a friend of mine.

I feel guilty for it, of course — for conducting the affair, I mean, not for having a fantasy about sex with her at that awful moment in my life, in her life, in the life of everybody in this town, practically. I could as easily have been thinking about money, which I did not have much of, as sex with Risa, which at that time I had quite a lot of, owing, I suppose, to my freedom of movement and to her unhappiness with her husband, Wendell, and her financial problems — although we liked to believe then that we were in love with each other, and often said it: “I love you, I love you, oh God, how I love you.” That sort of thing; playing a role. We did talk that way then. We don’t anymore.

But it was a lie, and I think we both knew it. I surely did. I still loved my wife, Lydia, and I don’t think Risa loved anyone except her son, Sean. Nevertheless, we were both lonely and both burdened with strong sexual natures. But neither of us had the ability to say that to the other in a way that would not be hurtful. So, instead, we said, “I love you,” and let it go at that. I have the benefit of hindsight now, of course, and at the time maybe I half believed the tender words I whispered in her ear after we had made love and I was still inside and surrounding her, covering her body with mine in the darkness of the motel room.

We used to meet like that, in Room 11 at the Bide-a-Wile, after Wendell had gone early to bed alone, which he had been doing for several years, except when there was a Montreal Expos ball game on TV — Wendell adored the Expos; probably still does. I would leave my kids with a babysitter, usually Nichole Burnell, who took care of the house and kids from after school two days a week until eleven at night, when her father, Sam, drove over from Bartlett Hill and picked her up. The drill was for me to kiss the twins good night, tell Nichole that I was going down to the Rendez-Vous or the Spread Eagle for a few beers or to Placid for a movie, and a few minutes later, with the key that Risa had given me, to let myself into Room 11 and sit in the darkness and wait for Risa to arrive.

It sounds sordid, I know, but it didn’t feel cheap or low. It was too often too lonely, too solitary, for that. Many nights Risa could not get away to Room 11, and I sat there by myself in the wicker chair beside the bed for an hour or so, smoking cigarettes and thinking and remembering my life before Lydia died, until finally, when it was clear that Risa could not get away from Wendell, I would leave the room and walk across the road to the lot next to the Rendez-Vous where I had parked my truck and drive home.

On those nights when Risa did arrive, we spent our time together entirely in darkness, for we couldn’t turn on the room light, and we barely saw each other, except for what we could make out in the dim light from the motel sign outside falling through the blinds: rose-colored profiles, the curve of a thigh or shoulder, a breast, a knee. It was melancholy and sweet and reflective, and of course very sexual, straightforwardly sexual, for both of us.

Our meetings were respites from our real and very troubled lives, and we knew that. Whenever I saw Risa in daylight, in public, it was as if she were a wholly different person, her sister, maybe, or a cousin, who only resembled in vague ways the woman I was having an affair with. I’m not sure that’s how I appeared to her — men and women see each other differently. For instance, a man generally doesn’t even know how small a woman really is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child’s and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem. Women almost always appear larger to us than they actually are, and we don’t have much opportunity to observe how small and delicate their bodies are in comparison to ours.

They know our size, of course, know it thoroughly, for they have felt our weight on top of them — smaller people always know the size of people who are larger than they. But we men have usually taken the physical measure of the women in our lives only with our eyes, and because we are secretly afraid of them, we tend to see women as having bodies that are at least as large as our own. I think that’s one reason why a man is so often surprised by how easily he can injure a woman with his hands. Although I myself have never hurt a woman with my hands. But you know how men talk to one another. Surprise is one of our main motifs. We like to pretend we’re surprised by common knowledge.

I remember one night shortly after my wife, Lydia, went into the hospital to stay, I gathered up all her clothing and spread it across our bed — dresses, blouses and skirts, jeans and shirts, nightgowns, her underwear, even — and folded everything neatly and boxed it and carried the boxes out to the garage, where we have a storage room in back. I don’t know why I did that; she hadn’t died yet, although I knew of course that in a few weeks at most she would be dead from the cancer. But I could not bear to look at her clothes hanging in our closet or see them whenever I opened a dresser drawer; I could not bear even to walk past the closet or dresser and know that her clothes were inside, hanging or neatly folded in darkness like some foolish hope for her eventual return.

That night, without planning it, I made myself a double-sized drink of Scotch and water (the twins had finally fallen off to sleep), and I walked back to our bedroom and simply started to pack her clothing, and at once it seemed deeply correct somehow, and so I went on doing it until the job was done. I must have known this was a task that I would have to do soon anyhow, and I must have sensed that it would be much more painful for me later, with her dead, so I did it now, while she was still alive, while I could keep myself from weeping with self-pity.

It was not so bad, it was almost a kindness, as if she were about to leave me and the children for a long journey, and as I held up her thin blouses and nightgowns one by one and studied them, I was amazed at how small they were, what bare scraps of cloth they were, seen like that, without her body inside to fill them out and give them weight.

I remember that night and standing there beside our bed and holding up my wife’s articles of clothing as clearly as if it were last night; it was a discovery of an aspect of her deepest reality and, through it, a discovery of a part of my own. Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped to clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self. And if you loved the person a great deal, as I loved Lydia and my children, your sense of who you are will have been clarified many times, and so you will have many such moments to remember. I have learned that.

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.

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 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 brother, seated next to her. Both doors were shut tight.

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 strange — or 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 ourselves 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 instance — 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 — emotions 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.

By that time, which was about three years before the accident, their marriage was essentially dead, except for their love of Sean, of course. I suppose I want to believe that; anyone who’s an interloper in a marriage wants to think the marriage was dead before he pulled up and parked; but in this case I’m sure it’s the truth.

It started innocently enough — that is, without my knowing anything had been started. I’ve known Risa and Wendell most of my life; we more or less grew up together here in Sam Dent, although Risa is a few years younger than Wendell and I. When I was in Vietnam, Wendell, who was bagging groceries at Valley Grocery in Keene Valley, started dating Risa, who was then barely out of the eighth grade. They stuck together, though, and the year she graduated high school, he got a job as a Tru-Value cashier in Marlowe, and they got married. I always liked Wendell, even though he was indeed, as Risa eventually discovered, lazy and pretty dumb and pessimistic. That’s a hard combination for a wife to like, and frankly I never would have hired him to work for me, even if he had been one of the Vietnam vets who for a long time were the only people I hired at the garage. But Wendell made it relatively simple, by being good-looking and passive, for a man to call him a friend. (Some folks might regard him as low-key or easygoing, but I have to say passive.)

What it came down to was that in an important sense, Wendell didn’t really give a damn about much. He liked sports — TV sports, that is; he was a little heavy in the gut to play any himself — and he was very fond of his son. Not like Risa was, of course, for she was much more intense about everything than he, but sufficiently fond to have his heart broken by the boy’s death.

Wendell is like the rest of us, a person whose life has two meanings, one before the accident and one after. I doubt, however, that he worries much about connecting the two meanings, as the rest of us do, but that’s Wendell Walker. That was always Wendell Walker. Even so, I felt guilty because, before his life became a tragedy, he was basically a likable fellow. Just as, before her life became a tragedy, Risa’s superstitious nature was an aspect of her character that was downright attractive. At least to me it was.

I was a widower and a relatively young man still, with two small children in a big house and a business that was making money but was top-heavy with debt. Those were the facts that filled my head night and day — the death of my wife, the needs of my children, and cash flow at the garage. For a year or so after Lydia died, and even for most of the year before she died, it was as if I had no sexual nature. From the time she went to the hospital to stay, I woke alone in that huge king-sized bed of ours every morning in darkness and never once had an erection or even thought about the pleasures Lydia and I had taken from each other in that bed at exactly that time of day so many hundreds of times; I couldn’t permit such a thought. I had work to do, children to wash and dress and feed and get off to school so I could get to the garage by eight, and at the garage I’d work like two men until the kids got out of school, so I’d be free then to drive them to Cub Scouts and Brownies, to their friends’, to the dentist in Placid, to Ames in Saranac for winter boots, stopping off at the Grand Union for groceries that I’d cook for supper and popcorn for after supper while watching TV together, and when they had gone to bed, I’d stay up late drinking and doing the garage account books that Lydia used to take care of. I had started drinking pretty heavily by then; but nothing like now.

For a long time, though, that was my whole life. There was no way I could let myself think about anything that did not lie directly before me — the death of my wife, the physical and emotional needs of my children, and my business. It was as if during that period I were crossing a crevasse on a high wire, and if I once looked down at the ground or off to the side or even ahead of me or behind, I’d fall, and I’d take down with me anyone holding on to me, meaning my children.

Then I started to change. First in erotic dreams and after a while in fantasy — little pornographic movies in which I was both actor and audience: my sexual nature had begun to reassert itself. It was only chromosomal and glandular, but even so, whenever it happened I felt oddly disloyal to Lydia. While she was alive I had been able to wake from my dream or fantasy and immediately cast her in the leading female role and let reality take over; but with her gone, if I tried casting her, the dream turned instantly to grief and sorrow. It was specifically to avoid that pain that I auditioned for the sex scenes numerous women I knew personally and believed I could be attracted to — the wives and daughters of the town of Sam Dent. And to my surprise, my number one sex goddess turned out to be Risa Walker.

I say surprise because Risa was by no stretch of the imagination the sexiest woman in town. That title went by male consensus to Wanda Otto, whom the boys in the garage called The Beatnik Queen, because of her long straight hair and her eye makeup and the low-cut knit dresses she wore. It was probably the image of 1960s hippie sex that she evoked — most of my mechanics suffered from a kind of time warp anyhow. Also, Wanda behaved in what you might call a provocative way — at least it provoked the boys in the garage, who scrambled to fill her Peugeot with gas whenever she drove in. Normally, when someone pulled up to the pump, Bud or Jimbo or whoever was on duty only crawled further into the vehicle he was working on and pretended not to see or hear it. Selling gas was strictly a necessary frill at the station, and whoever happened to be on duty was supposed to look after it; there was no regular attendant, and I myself spent most of my time in the office, with Lydia when she was alive and alone afterwards, or supervising the more delicate and difficult jobs out in the garage. No one wanted to pump gas. But Wanda Otto never to my knowledge wore a bra, and so long as she was without her husband, Hartley, or her son, the Indian boy Bear, she had a habit of driving into the station with her dress pulled halfway up her very attractive thighs. Wanda could get a mechanic out from under the hood and beside her open window faster than any other customer. She laughed easily and flirted and used expressions like “Shit!” and “Fuck!” if you told her she was down a quart, and that turned men on. Although it probably scared them too, because I don’t know of anyone who ever made a direct pass at Wanda, at least not when he was sober. They just talked about it with one another.

Risa, by contrast, though she is an intense person and when present fills your entire screen, drawing all your attention, is unadorned, shy, and private. Her manner, until the accident, was upbeat and warm, but her smile was undercut by a look of permanent sadness that she seemed to be trying to hide, as if she were struggling to protect you from it. Everyone liked Risa, but when she pulled in with her Wagoneer, no one rushed out to fill her tank, and like most people, she often had to fill it herself. She is tall, broad-shouldered, with ample breasts and a nice large female butt that she covers with somewhat mannish clothes, flannel shirts and loose jeans, that sort of thing. Typical for up here. She is the kind of woman who makes a man think of his favorite sister, if he has one, or his best friend’s sister, if he doesn’t. Not a likely candidate for erotic fantasy.

But lying half drunk in the darkness in that king-sized bed in my house on the hill, the twins sleeping soundly in their room at the end of the hall, I’d imagine Risa Walker naked and ecstatic, and it positively thrilled me. Took me straight out of the misery of my daily life and let my hormones run things for a while. Risa released me sexually when no other woman could. Women like Wanda Otto are already so close to naked and ecstatic in public, it’s not much of a thrill to take them one more step alone and in private. In fact, what you imagine is a woman you can’t satisfy — an image that is well known for dousing the fire in a man. But picturing Risa — calm, reticent, controlled, decent, and modest Risa Walker — picturing her wild with passion, sweating and naked, long legs akimbo, hands digging into your back, mouth grunting and licking into your ear … well, that’s a picture a man can cook with.

In time, the fantasies were insufficient. That’s how it is — the more vivid the imagined sex, the less satisfying it is as sex. You have to keep upping the ante, just like they do in pornographic movies, until finally you have to either replace it with the real thing or else rent a different movie. I didn’t want a different movie; by then all I wanted was Risa Walker. Any other woman was a diminishment, and even a slight diminishment was a total loss. I wanted, I needed, Risa.

The trouble was, Risa was thoroughly married to a friend of mine, and in all the years I had known her, she had not once shown the slightest interest in going to bed with anyone other than her husband. Especially not with me. To be fair, I had not given her much opportunity. I am known as a self-contained man and am probably not very approachable, which has always been my choice of character anyhow, insofar as a person can choose his character.

I like to be the strong, silent man in charge, the boss, the point man, the lieutenant, the head of the household, et cetera, a preference that may come from my having been the oldest of five children, with a more or less incompetent mother and a father who took off for Alaska when I was twelve and was never heard from again. Looking back, it seems I spent most of my youth cleaning up my father’s mess and the rest of my life making sure that no one mistook me for him. He was an impractical man, not quite honest, a fellow of grand beginnings and no follow-through, one of those men who present their children and wives with dreams instead of skills, charm in place of discipline, and constant seduction for love and loyalty. When he took off to make a fortune in the oil fields, he left behind a huge hole in the yard that was going to be a swimming pool, a pile of cinder blocks that was going to be a restaurant, a hundred old casement windows that were going to be a greenhouse, a stack of IOUs written to half the people in town, and a promise to return by fall, which no one in town wanted him to keep.

Anyhow, when I began trying to seduce Risa Walker, I found myself behaving like my father, which embarrassed me and made me feel incompetent as well. I felt his phony smile on my face, heard his glib words coming from my mouth, and it made me cringe. I’d be pumping gas into her Wagoneer and mouthing lines like “Gee, Risa, you’re looking swell these days! Life must agree with you, or you must agree with life, or something like that anyhow….” I’d smile and smile and yammer on, playing a part. Then suddenly I’d switch roles. I’d have somehow become a member of the audience, and I’d hear myself yammering on, and it would be my father, and I’d see myself wink and grin and see my father, so I’d break off in the middle and freeze Risa out completely, leaving her somewhat confused, I’m sure. Other times I’d call her on the phone, and if Wendell answered, I’d gab about the Expos and the weather and local politics, like we were close buddies, which we were not; if Risa answered, I’d just ask for Wendell. Passing by the motel in my truck, if I happened to see her outside, I’d slow almost to a stop, wave like a long-lost friend, and when she made a move toward me, I’d speed up and take off, as if I were heading to a fire.

I have never been good with women, that is, skilled at the games that most men play — flirting, cajoling, soliciting their attention and favors — and until Risa, had never especially wanted to be. After all, I had always been able to count on Lydia. Who needed to flirt? Lydia and I in a sense spent our whole lives together: we were childhood friends and then high school sweethearts, and when I came back from Vietnam we discovered that we still loved each other, and so we got married. Technically, I was faithful to Lydia from beginning to end. There were a couple of occasions while we were married when, drunk or stoned or just inattentive, I slipped into what might be called compromising positions with a few local women, who shall remain nameless, but I got out before any damage was done and was even able to come home feeling virtuous. And there were a few sexual encounters with bar girls and prostitutes when I was in the service, Stateside and in Vietnam and once in Honolulu. Sowing wild oats, as they say. But in fact, for my age, I was unusually inexperienced in sexual matters.

The night Risa and I finally got together, it happened not because of anything I did but because Risa simply came up and put it to me at the bar at the Rendez-Vous, where I was sitting over a beer watching an NBA playoff on TV with three or four other men. She’d come through the door and stood there a minute as if looking for someone in particular. Then she walked straight to me, slipped her arm through mine and leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “Listen, Billy, when you’re through here, why don’t you come over and visit me? Room 11,” she added, and patted my forearm and departed. As simple as that.

I left at halftime. Los Angeles was beating the hell out of Utah, and I just said I was going home. It was a cold, clear spring night with a sky full of stars, and my breath puffed out in front of me in little clouds as I walked past my pickup in the parking lot, crossed the road, and practically jogged the hundred or so yards along the road to the motel and went straight to Room 11.

I don’t know how much in fact I had controlled or arranged it, how much I actually had seduced her with my awkward embarrassed onslaughts of alternating attention and withdrawal — probably a lot (sometimes you act a part and don’t realize that the role is of a man who doesn’t know how to act). But that night it appeared to me that Risa alone had made it possible for me to be, once again, not my father but myself, the strong, silent type of man I admired and had grown used to being, and I was deeply relieved and immensely grateful to her.

From then on, I guess you could say we were in love. At least we called it that. From start to finish, though, it was a secret affair. Risa has always assured me that no one knew we were in love; she insists that during the nearly three years we were involved she confided in no one. Consequently, she had her private version of the love affair, and I had mine, and there was no third version to correct them. 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 struggling 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’s 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 technician 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.

But it didn’t matter, because, regardless, I was unable to take the comfort offered me. Something metallic in me refused to yield, and when one by one my sisters phoned and offered to come up to Sam Dent, an old compulsion took over; the same thing happened when various local people — Reverend Dreiser, Dorothy Coburn, even the men from the garage — called or came by to see how I was or to ask if there was anything they could do for me. It’s something I have done since childhood, practically. When a person tries to comfort me, I respond by reassuring him or her — it’s usually a her — and in that way I shut her down, smothering all her good intentions by denying my need.

I can’t help it, and I’m not sorry for it; I’m even a little proud. People think I’m cold and unfeeling, but that’s a price I’ve always been willing to pay. The truth is that I’m beyond help; most people are; and it only angers me to see my sisters or my friends here in town wasting their time. To forestall or cover my anger, I jump in front of them, and suddenly I myself have turned into the person come to provide comfort, reassurance, help, whatever it is they originally desired to provide me with. I take their occasion and make it my own. I never know this at the time, of course; only afterwards, when I’m alone again, sitting in my living room with a glass of whiskey in my hand, brooding over my solitude, trying to generate a little feeling, even if it’s only self-pity.

When my youngest sister, Sally, called on the night of the accident, she was the first in the family to reach me, but it was maybe the fifteenth telephone call I’d received since hiking through the snow all the way home from the site. I had walked in whited out like a snowman, shucked my soaked clothes and put on a bathrobe, sat down at the kitchen table, opened a bottle of Scotch, and started to drink. I knew what it looked like and was glad no one could see me, although I was not ashamed. I knew why I was drinking, and it wasn’t to numb the pain. Gary Dillinger, the school principal, called, and Wyatt Pitney, and Eden Schraft; and I reassured them all that there was nothing they could do for me. I’m okay, I’ll be fine. They believed me: not that I was fine; they believed that there was nothing they could do for me. I was like a wounded animal gone to ground: better leave him to heal alone, or you might get bit trying to help. A couple of reporters called, and I simply hung up on them.

Jimbo Gagne called from the garage, and as usual, it was like we were both in Vietnam again — I was playing the lieutenant and he the corporal. We were all logistics. What did I want him to do with my truck? Leave it at the garage; I’d drive my car in tomorrow. Where should he put the wrecked bus? Out of sight behind the garage, and keep people away from it, because there was sure to be an investigation. Was there anything I needed? No, but if people came into the garage and asked, tell them I might be taking a few days off from work, so there’ll probably be a delay for a couple of jobs.

“Are you okay, Billy?” He finally came right out and asked it. “How’re you doing up there on the hill? You got somebody at the house with you?”

“Are you okay, Jimbo?” I returned. “It must have been rough on you out there.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m all right, I guess. It was rough …,” he began, but then realized where that would lead and swerved away. “But, yeah, Billy, I’m okay.”

By eight that night, when my sister Sally called, I was thoroughly drunk and was responding automatically, as if my mouth were a telephone answering machine: You have reached the home of Billy Ansel, he has suffered an irretrievable loss, has discovered that he is inconsolable, and thus, to save you trouble and him embarrassment, has removed himself from normal human contact. He will probably not return, but if you wish to leave a message anyhow, do so at the sound of the ice cubes tinkling in his glass, and if someday he does return, he will try to respond to your message.

But don’t count on it.

Before you lose your children, you can talk about it — as a possibility, I mean. You can imagine it, like I did that time in Jamaica, years ago, and then later you can remember the moment when you first imagined it, and you can describe that moment coherently to people and with ease. But when the thing that you only imagined actually happens, you quickly discover that you can barely speak of it. Your story is jumbled and mumbled, out of sync and unfocused. At least that’s how it has been for me.

People who have lost their children — and I’m talking here about the people of Sam Dent and am including myself — twist themselves into all kinds of weird shapes in order to deny what has happened. Not just because of the pain of losing a person they have loved — we lose parents and mates and friends, and no matter how painful, it’s not the same — but because what has happened is so wickedly unnatural, so profoundly against the necessary order of things, that we cannot accept it. It’s almost beyond belief or comprehension that the children should die before the adults. It flies in the face of biology, it contradicts history, it denies cause and effect, it violates basic physics, even. It’s the final contrary. A town that loses its children loses its meaning.

Desperately, we struggled to arrange the event in our minds so that it made sense. Each of us in his own way went to the bottom and top of his understanding in search of a believable explanation, trying to escape this huge black nothingness that threatened to swallow our world whole. I guess the Christians in town, and there are a lot of them, got there first, at least the adults did, and I’m glad for them, but I myself could not rest there, and I believe that secretly most of them could not, either. To me, the religious explanation was just another sly denial of the facts. Not as sly, maybe, as insisting that the accident was actually not an accident, that someone — Dolores, the town, the state, someone—had caused it; but a denial nevertheless. Biology doesn’t matter, the Christians argued, because this body we live in is not ultimately real; history doesn’t matter, they said, because God’s time is different and superior to man’s anyhow; and forget cause and effect, forget what you’ve been told about the physical world, because there is heaven and there is hell and there is this green earth in between, and you are always alive in one of the three places.

I was raised, like most folks in Sam Dent, with a Christian perspective, and I remember it well: they made no bones about it. Billy, they said, there is no such thing as death. Just everlasting life. Isn’t that great? That was the bottom line, whether you were Protestant like me and Lydia or Catholic like half the other folks in town. But when I was nineteen and went to Vietnam, I was still young enough to learn something new, and the new thing was all this dying that I saw going on around me. Consequently, when I came home from Vietnam, I couldn’t take the Christian line seriously enough even to bother arguing with it. To please Lydia and the kids, I went to church a couple of times a year, but the rest of the time I stayed home and read the Sunday paper. Then Lydia died, and the Christian perspective came to seem downright cruel to me, because I had learned that death touched everyone. Even me. I stopped going to church altogether.

I still believed in life, however — that it goes on, in spite of death. I had my children, after all. And Risa. But four years later, when my son and daughter and so many other children of this town were killed in the accident, I could no longer believe even in life. Which meant that I had come to be the reverse, the opposite, of a Christian. For me, now, the only reality was death.

I went to the funeral service, of course; there was no way to avoid it without hurting and bewildering innocent people. And not to go, to stay holed up in my house like I had been doing, would have drawn too much attention to me, the last thing that I wanted. But the night before the funeral, late, I ventured out of my house for the first time and drove down the hill to town. I had been drinking pretty steadily for four days, but at that particular hour was sober — or at least sober enough to drive. It was a clear, starry night. A nearly full moon was circled by a ring of pale blue haze. There were no other vehicles on the road, and no lights on in the town. Sam Dent was a ghost town surrounded by fields of glistening snow under moonlight, with the hulking shades of the mountains blocking out half the sky.

I pulled in at the garage and drove around to the back, where the bus had been hauled by the wrecker and dropped, and for a few moments I sat in my truck with the motor running and looked at the thing — a huge dead fish, one of those leviathans drawn up from the deepest bottom of the sea, the ice-encrusted carcass of a creature from another age. Most of the windows had been smashed by the force of the accident and by the divers, the headlights and grille were gone, the sides and roof were bent and dented, and the tires were flattened and torn. It was dead, permanently stilled, silent, harmless.

I don’t know why I was there, staring with strange loathing and awe at this wrecked yellow vehicle, as if it were a beast that had killed our children and then in turn been slain by the villagers and dragged here to a place where we could all come, one by one, and verify that it was safely dead. But I did want to see it, to touch it with my hands, maybe, in a primitive way to be sure finally that we had indeed killed it.

I got out of my truck, leaving the motor running and the headlights on, and walked slowly toward the bus. It was very cold; my shoes squeaked against the hard-packed snow on the ground, and my breath glided out in front of me in pale thin strips. There were several other vehicles parked in the darkness in the back lot — customers’ cars scheduled to be repaired but crowded out of the garage and a couple of wrecks stashed there for parts or being rebuilt for the demolition derby. The orange plastic tape that the state police had wrapped around the bus to warn people away from it looked like tangled lines from the harpoons we had stuck it with.

For a moment I stood at the side of the bus, looking up at the windows; and then I heard the children inside. Their voices were faint, but I could hear them clearly. They were alive and happy, going to school, and Dolores was moving through the gears, driving the bus up hill and down, cheerfully doing her duty; and I longed to join them, felt a deep aching desire to be with them, the first clear emotion I had felt since the accident; I wanted simply to pull the door open and walk inside and smell the wet wool and rubber boots and the lunches carried in paper sacks and tin boxes, hear their songs and gossip and teasing; I wanted to be with them in death, with my own children, yes, but with all of them, for they seemed at that moment so much more believable than I myself was, so much more alive.

But it was not the voices of the children that I heard, of course; it was the hiss of the wind in the pines at the edge of the lot, where the forest begins, the cold wind that blows down along the valley from the north. And it was not the sound of Dolores driving up hill and down; it was the engine of my own vehicle idling a few yards behind me, illuminating me and the bus with its headlights. For a long moment I stood there, listening to the wind and the low thrum of the truck, and slowly returned to reality.

And then, as I stepped away and turned back toward my truck, I heard the unmistakable thump of a car door open and close, and the crackle of leather footsteps on the hard dry snow of the lot. A tall man emerged from the darkness next to the truck and entered the circle of light between us. He wore a tan wool topcoat and was hatless, a middle-aged man with a bulbous tangle of curly gray hair that made his head appear much too large for his tall thin angular body. His hands were jammed deep in his coat pockets, and he hunched over slightly against the chilling wind that blew from behind him. Now, in the shadows at the far end of the lot, I saw the car he had been sitting in, a light-colored Mercedes sedan, silver or gray. The headlights were off, but the engine was running; doubtless I had not heard it over the sound of my own vehicle and the wind, the engine of the bus and the voices of the children.

The man came up to within a few feet of me and made a strange little smile, almost wistful. “You work for Ansel?” he said.

“I am Ansel.”

“Yes, I thought so.” He had bright blue wide-open eyes that were impossible to read and sharp small features. He was clean-shaven, and his skin was pink and taut. It was a likable face, but the face of a smooth talker, self-confident and intelligent, and pleased, even eager, to let you look directly at him. “I’m sorry about your children, Mr. Ansel,” he said, lowering his voice.

“You are, eh?”

“Yes.”

For a few seconds neither of us spoke; we just looked straight into each other’s eyes. He was good at it, he didn’t get nervous or scared or even glance away; he held his ground and waited for me to break the silence or the stare, whichever I preferred.

“I take you to be a lawyer,” I said, holding on to the stare.

“Yes, I am an attorney. My name is—”

“Mister, I don’t want to know your name.”

He hesitated a second. Then in a soft voice he said, “I understand.”

“No. No, you don’t understand.”

“I can help you.” He went on looking right into my eyes, as if he knew something I didn’t.

“No, you can’t help me. Not unless you can raise the dead.” I was sorry at once for having said it, a cliché, a boy’s smart remark, not a man’s sad one. I had revealed to him, and to myself, a desire that I did not want to permit myself and that I was instantly ashamed of.

Pushing past him, I made quickly for my truck, but when I pulled the door open and started to get in, he came up beside me and held out a business card. “Here,” he said. “You may change your mind.”

I took the card and lifted it up and read it in the moonlight: Mitchell Stephens, Esq., of a four-named firm, one of them Stephens, in New York City. Then I passed it back to him. “Mr. Stephens,” I said to him, “if right now I was to beat you with my hands and feet so bad that you pissed blood and couldn’t walk right for a month, would you sue me? Because that is what I’m about to do, you understand.”

“No, Mr. Ansel,” he said in a weary voice. “No, I wouldn’t sue you. And I don’t think there’s anyone in this county who would even arrest you for it. But you’re not about to beat me up, are you?”

I looked over at the bus. The children waved back at me, bright knots of apparition. The lawyer was right; I was no danger to him. I was a ghost.

“No, I’m not going to beat you up. Just don’t talk to me again,” I said to him. “Don’t come around my garage, and don’t come to my house or call me on the telephone.”

“You may change your mind. I can help you,” he said again.

“Leave me alone, Stephens. Leave the people of this town alone. You can’t help any of us. No one can.”

“You can help each other,” he said. “Several people have agreed to let me represent them in a negligence suit, and your case as an individual will be stronger if I’m allowed to represent you together as a group.”

“My ‘case’? I have no case. None of us has a case.”

“You’re wrong about that. Very wrong. Your friends the Walkers have agreed, and Mr. and Mrs. Otto, and I’m talking with some other folks. It’s important to initiate proceedings right away. Things get covered up fast. People lie. You know that. People lie about these things. We have to begin our own investigation quickly, before the evidence disappears. That’s why I’m out here tonight,” he added, and he drew a small black automatic camera from his coat pocket.

“Our children aren’t even buried yet,” I told him. “It’s you — you’re the liar. Risa and Wendell Walker, I know them, you’re right, but they wouldn’t hire a goddamned lawyer. And the Ottos, they wouldn’t deal with you, for Christ’s sake. You’re lying to me about them, and probably to them about me. We’re not fools, you know, country bumpkins you can put the big-city hustle on. You’re just trying to use us,” I told him. “You want us to pull each other in.”

He was not lying, though, and I knew it, and at bottom I didn’t give a damn what the others were doing, even Risa. It was almost funny to me at that moment, in a cruel and slightly superior way. Ghosts don’t enter into class action lawsuits. I calmly smiled at the lawyer, and I think I even wished him luck, and got into my truck and closed the door on him. Slowly I backed the truck away from him and drove out of the lot, turned left, and headed down the valley toward the Rendez-Vous.

As I had so many times over the last couple of years, I parked my truck in the deserted parking lot outside the Rendez-Vous, which, like everything else in town, was closed, and walked across the road to Room 11 at the Bide-a-Wile. I don’t know if I expected Risa to be there, but surely I hoped she would be — I had no other reason to go there this late.

She was sitting by the window in the wicker chair, and when I let myself into the darkened room, she said simply, without expression, “I knew you’d come.”

“Well, I can’t say I did.” I sat down opposite her, on the edge of the bed, and put my hands on my knees. “Habit, I guess.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Thank God for habits.”

We tried for a few moments to talk the way we used to, the way people who love each other are supposed to talk — intimately, more or less honestly, about their feelings for one another and for other people as well. We tried to talk not as if nothing had happened, of course, but with the accident and the loss of our children as a context. It was useless. I couldn’t say anything true about how I felt, and neither could she.

“This is the first time I’ve been able to leave the house,” I said.

“People keep calling on the phone and coming by to see if they can help out.”

“No one can help.”

“No. Not really. But they try.”

“Yes, they try.”

“You’ll go to the funeral, though, won’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll be there. But I’d rather stay at home alone.”

“There’ll be a lot of people there.”

“I expect so.”

“I wish it was just going to be the families, you know, like us. They’re the only ones who really understand.”

“I guess so.”

“But people have been very thoughtful and sympathetic.”

“Yes. They have.”

We sounded like strangers sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. Finally, though, we gave it up and were silent for a while. Then she told me how she had known all along that something like this was going to happen. She had felt it in her bones, she said. As if she wanted me to be amazed and praise her for it.

I decided that she was stupid to think that and even stupider to say it, although I did not tell her so. Instead, I told her about my unexpected meeting with the lawyer, Stephens. Without saying why, I said that I’d stopped by the garage and while I was there I’d caught the lawyer taking pictures of the bus with a flash camera, which was more or less the truth. “The sonofabitch tried to get me to hire him for some kind of negligence suit,” I said. “He told me he’d already got you and Wendell signed up, you and Wendell and the Ottos, and I told him to shove it. We don’t need a lawyer,” I added.

“What do we need?”

“Good question.” I stood up and took a step toward the door; I still had my coat and wool cap on. “But we don’t need a lawyer,” I said. “Count me out.”

She looked up at me, and in the bands of moonlight falling through the blinds I could see her face clearly, and it was no longer lovely to me. It didn’t even look like a woman’s face anymore; it was like the face of a male actor who had made himself up as a woman. “Well,” she said, “goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” I pulled my gloves over my hands and opened the door and stepped outside, where I turned and said to her, “I have to go home now.”

“You go home, Billy.”

I closed the door on her and walked away. We spoke again, of course, on numerous occasions, but always with other people surrounding us; we managed not to meet again in a room alone, however, or to speak face-to-face, and so it was as if we never saw each other after that, never saw the people we had once been, Risa Walker and Billy Ansel. From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different.