“The mind is kind,” Dr. Robeson told me, touching my forehead with his soft pink cool fingertips, which I couldn’t move away from, so I just glared up at him.
I’m lucky, they all say, because I can’t remember the accident. Lucky that it’s like a door between rooms, and there was one room on the far side, and that room I remember fine, and another on the near side, and I remember it too. I’m still in it. But I don’t have any memory of passing through, I don’t remember the accident, and that’s counted lucky by everyone.
“Don’t even try to remember,” Daddy said, and got up from his chair by the window and looked out at the hospital parking lot. I think it was snowing out. He was probably worried about the drive home.
Mom, seated in a chair next to the bed, kept patting the back of my hand and not looking at me and said, “You just think about getting well, Nichole, that’s all.”
By then I knew I was as well as I would ever be again, and Dr. Robeson had told me that just to stay like this I would have to work very hard. So shut up, Mom, go to hell. To live like a slug, I was going to have to work like someone trying to become an Olympic ski jumper. To feed myself, to go to the bathroom, to bathe, to get in and out of bed, to put my clothes on and take them off, to change channels on the TV or do schoolwork — for me to do these things as well as a three-year-old, I’d have to work out for years, maybe the rest of my life, in a room with pads on the floor and walls to keep my bones from breaking when I fell off the parallel bars or one of the shiny new exercise machines.
Anyhow, this was the room I woke up in after the accident, a hospital room, a weepy Mom and embarrassed distracted Daddy room, a doctor and nurse room, a room with a physical therapist who yells at you for your own good and another guy who’s supposed to massage you, but I wouldn’t let him, so they finally got a woman to do it. One room led into the next, but they were all the same. Even when I finally went home to my own room.
Daddy drove, with me in front next to him, and Mom and my new wheelchair, folded up beside her, in the back. It was spring already, late April, with only patches of snow left in the woods and on the mountains, a few old dry dirt-covered mounds along the sides of the road and at the edges of parking lots. No leaves on the trees yet, but you could see a light green haze and in some places a reddish glow over the branches where the buds were coming. At the edge of town, the fairgrounds was mostly under water and mud, but here and there in the field in front of the grandstand the snow melt had begun to recede, and yellow wet chunks of old dead grass had appeared. What happened to winter? I wondered. It was like I’d gone to Florida for the worst of it. Wouldn’t that have been nice?
I was incredibly glad to be out of the hospital, though. I was sick of Dr. Robeson and had started calling him Dr. Frankenstein, even to his face, which of course he thought was cute. It wasn’t cute; I did it because I felt like a monster and Dr. Robeson had created me out of all these different body parts. I couldn’t walk as good as Frankenstein’s monster, I couldn’t walk at all, though I could talk fine; but I felt ugly like him and out of it, different from everyone else. I could really understand why the monster had turned on all the dumb villagers. Sometimes when one of the nurses came into the room and chirped like a birdie at me, “And how are we this morning?” I’d go, “Argh-guh-guh!” and cross my eyes and flop my head back and forth like a spastic.
The first thing I noticed, when Daddy opened the car door and pushed the wheelchair up next to it, was the ramp he’d built. It was made of wood and way too wide and sloped from the ground up to the front porch beside the regular people’s steps. My very own entrance, like for a circus elephant. I pictured Daddy out there evenings after work, whistling like he does when he’s got himself a new carpentry project, hammering and sawing in porchlight, feeling proud of himself — a good daddy.
“How do you like it, Babes?” he said.
“The ramp?” I swung myself out of the car seat and lurched into the wheelchair. No way anybody was going to lift me up and set me down. Especially him.
“Yeah. Pretty slick, eh?” He got behind the chair and pushed me over to the bottom of the ramp and stopped so we could examine it more closely. Mom came along behind, lugging my suitcase and stuff. There was still a bunch more in the trunk, mostly presents from strangers but some from people in town and Mom’s and Daddy’s church friends and kids in school. The usual dumb things — handmade get-well cards, stuffed animals, and pictures of Jesus and other inspirational items.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Rudy and Skip can use it for skateboarding.”
“They better not,” Daddy said. “I made it for you.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
“I had to widen a few doors too. You’ll see,” he said proudly, and he pushed me up his ramp and into the living room, like I was a new piece of furniture. Then he didn’t know what to do with me, where to park me. Put me by the window, I wanted to tell him, next to the plants. But I said nothing. He was confused, and I guess I felt sorry for him.
The phone rang, and Mom went off to the kitchen to answer it. Rudy and Skip came down from their bedroom and said hi and all, looking self-conscious and like they wished they weren’t there, as if I was some old relative they had to be polite to. Jennie came along behind them, sucking her thumb as always, and she stared at the wheelchair for a minute and then decided it wouldn’t explode or anything and came over and hugged me.
She’s the one, she’s the family to me, the whole family; the rest of them, including Rudy and Skip, even though I love them the way you’re supposed to, make me feel like I have to protect myself against them.
“You want to see your new room, Babes?” Daddy asked.
“My new room? What’s wrong with the old one?” I knew what was wrong with it — it was upstairs, with all the other bedrooms and the big bathroom, and I couldn’t get to it anymore. But it was mine, mine and Jennie’s since she was a baby, and we were safe there, because there were two of us, and he never dared to come in there. Nothing bad had ever happened in that dark little room with the bunk beds and the clutter of all our clothes and her toys and my school stuff and pictures and posters on the walls. From that room we could hear the boys squabbling and playing late at night in their room next door, and we could hear Daddy and Mom on the other side and know to pretend we were asleep if they were arguing. There were places that weren’t safe: the car at night with Daddy alone, the living room couch, the bathroom unless the door was locked, the toolshed out back — and, now, my new room?
Well, he said it was new, didn’t he? And I was a wheelchair girl now, a cripple. Maybe everywhere was safe now. The whole house. Everywhere. A fresh start.
“Come along, come along,” Daddy said. “I’ll show you.”
“You’re lucky,” Rudy said. “I still gotta sleep with him,” he said, and he punched Skip on the shoulder, and Skip punched him back.
Mom came in from the kitchen, smiling like she’d just eaten something sweet and light. “People are so kind,” she said. “The phone’s been ringing off the hook with people wanting to welcome you home. That was Edith Dillinger, the principal’s wife. She sent her love.”
“Show me my room, Daddy,” I said, and he pushed me through the door and across the kitchen to where the sun porch was. We’d always used it in summers as a kind of playroom, setting up electric trains and Barbie doll villages and stuff that no one wanted to pick up and put away afterwards. But now it was a bedroom. My room. Daddy had walled most of it in and installed baseboard heating units, had even built a small closet in one corner, and had carpeted it nicely. One whole wall was still windows, and I could see the yard and the woods beyond. Mom had made white chintz curtains. There was a single bed and a new dresser and a worktable Daddy’d made from a door. My New Kids on the Block poster had been tacked on one wall, and a whole bunch of my other favorite things were there — pictures of kids from school, the cheerleaders’ team photograph, with me front and center, looking grinny and dumb, my Albert Einstein picture, my books, and on the bed Fergus the Bear. There was a new picture of Jesus over the dresser that I knew Mom had put up; she’d no doubt left the old one upstairs to keep track of Jennie.
“And you’ve got your own private bathroom,” Daddy said, swinging open the door of what used to be a washroom. He had enlarged it by cutting into the hallway and had installed a small tub with a shower and a sink with a big mirror above it. Hung too high, I noticed, but I didn’t say anything.
It was all very nice. Like my own little apartment.
“You are really lucky,” Rudy said again.
“Shut up, Rudy,” I heard myself say.
“Yeah,” Skip said, and he whacked Rudy on the back. That’s all they do now, hit.
“You boys, get outside,” Daddy said, and they left, happy to be relieved of duty.
“Can I come and visit you in your room?” Jennie asked.
“You better. And you can sleep in my new bed with me sometimes too. I’ll get lonely way off here by myself,” I said, and I grabbed her hand, and she moved in close to me. The phone rang again, and Mom went to answer it.
“So whaddaya think, Babes?”
“It’s really very nice, Daddy,” I said, and I meant it. But it was strange too. The room made me feel like I was suddenly a tenant, like I had been eased out of the family somehow. I wanted that, though. In a way, being a tenant was perfect. Except for Jennie, I didn’t want to be a member of the same family as the rest of them, and I was glad that we could never go back to being the family we had been before the accident. Glad; not happy.
I wheeled my chair into the room and looked at the back of the door. “It needs a lock on the door,” I said.
“It does. Sure it does. A girl needs her privacy and all, right? I’ll fix that up now,” he said briskly, and he left the room to get his tools and a lock from his shop in the basement.
“You got to keep the boys out,” Jennie said. “I need a lock too. Mommy says I don’t need one because I’m only six. But the boys’re always barging in when I’m undressing and stuff.”
“That’s right. A girl needs her privacy,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll get Daddy to do it for you,” I said, and she grinned and pinched me on the cheek like she was the grownup and I was the baby.
Then Daddy was back with an awl and a hook and eye. He made a hole in the door with the awl and started screwing in the hook part, and I said, “That’s too high. I’ll never reach it.”
“Oh, right, yes, of course,” he said, all flustered. He studied the hole he’d made in his newly painted door. Now he’d have to fill it in and sand it and paint it over. Daddy’s like that. “I better get some spackle,” he said, and he left the room again. I saw him look at the bathroom mirror as he passed it and knew what he was thinking.
I heard Mom say goodbye on the phone, and then she talked in a low voice for a minute to Daddy. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but when they both came back I knew they had some kind of pronouncement to make. Mom sat down on the bed and crossed her legs at the ankles, like she does, and Daddy went to work filling the tiny hole in the door with spackle.
“So you like your new room?” Mom said brightly.
“Yeah, it’s great.” I wheeled over to the worktable and discovered that it was just the right height for my chair to slide under. That’s when I saw the computer, a Mac. I guess I’d seen it before that, but the room at first had looked like a picture to me, a magazine photograph, and the new computer hadn’t really registered or something. Slowly the whole thing was becoming real, though. “Wow. Is this mine? A Mac?” There was a printer and everything.
Mom said, “Yes, it is. It’s yours. It’s a present.”
“Wow. Who from?” I turned to Daddy, but he was bent over at the door, still working on the lock, this time screwing it in at shoulder height for me, waist high for him. “You guys?”
“No,” Mom said. “It came from Mr. Stephens. You don’t really know him yet. As a matter of fact, that was him just now on the phone. He was calling to see how you were and all. Isn’t that a coincidence?”
“Who’s Mr. Stephens?”
“He’s a lawyer,” Daddy said. “He’s our lawyer.”
“You have a lawyer? You and Mom?”
“Well, yes, we all do. He’s your lawyer too,” Daddy said. He’d finished with the lock and closed the door and tested it. It worked, but the room seemed real small with the door closed and all these people in it, like a closet, except for the big window, and I was relieved when he unlocked and opened the door again.
“My lawyer? What do I need a lawyer for?”
Mom said, “Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about this just now, with you barely home yet. Aren’t you hungry, honey? Want me to fix you something?” She started to get up.
“No! What’s this lawyer business? How come this Mr. Stephens gave me a computer?”
“He’s a very kind man,” Mom said. “And he knew you’d need one for doing schoolwork, and he knew you wouldn’t be able to use the computers at school until next fall, when you go back. And naturally we couldn’t afford one….” She was picking invisible threads from the bedspread, not looking at me, but her legs were still crossed at the ankles, like she was on stage. I hate these kinds of conversations, like everyone but me knows the lines and has been rehearsing the scene without me.
Daddy sighed. “It’s because of the accident,” he said. “A lot of people in town whose kids were on the bus have got lawyers, because of the accident. Thank God we didn’t lose you, but a lot of people … well, you know. People in town are very, very angry,” he said. “Us included. There’s been a lot of grief here. People lost their children, Babes.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t lose me!”
“No, honey,” Mom said. “And we will thank the Lord for that every day and night for the rest of our lives. But you … you almost died, and you were badly injured, and you won’t be … you can’t …”
“I can’t walk anymore.” I said it for her.
“Well, that’s … that’s a terrible loss,” Daddy said. “To you, especially,” he said. “But to all of us.”
I looked at him hard, and he said, “Because we love you so much. And because you’re going to need special care for a long time to come, all that physical therapy and who knows what. For years, Babes. Spinal cord injuries don’t just go away. It’s not going to be easy. Not for you, not for any of us. And it’s going to cost more money than we can imagine. For years.”
“What about insurance? Doesn’t insurance pay for these things?”
“Partly, yes, but it’s still expensive. There’s a lot the insurance doesn’t cover. That’s one of the reasons we have a lawyer for you, to make sure the insurance gets paid and to help us pay for the rest.”
“One of the reasons. What’re the other reasons?”
Daddy said, “Well, Mr. Stephens is representing several families: the Ottos — you know them, of course — and Risa and Wendell Walker, and us, and I think a couple more. Mr. Stephens is suing the state and the town for negligence, because he is sure that the accident could have been avoided if the state and the town had done their jobs right.”
“Suing! But it’s not the same for us! The Ottos … I mean, they lost Bear in the accident, and maybe it’s like that with the Walkers and poor little Sean, but …” I could feel myself starting to cry; I did not want to cry.
So I shut up. I did not remember the accident, maybe, but I definitely knew what had happened. I could read the newspapers, and of course I had asked people, and eventually people had told me, although they had not wanted to. Everyone had come to the hospital to visit and tell me how lucky I was, to touch me on the hands and shoulders and top of my head like I was some kind of rabbit’s foot, so when I asked them about the other kids, what happened to the other kids who were on the bus that morning, at first no one was willing to tell me. Oh, now, Nichole, don’t you trouble yourself about that. You just concentrate on getting better and coming back to school. That sort of stuff.
But what about the other kids? I really needed to know. What about Rudy and Skip, they were on the bus, were they okay? I had asked about them first, naturally, as soon as I learned what had happened to me. And what about the Lamstons, what about the Prescott kids, what about the Bilodeaus? What happened to Sean Walker, who had been sitting in my lap that morning because he didn’t want to leave his mother? I could remember that much, Sean trying to catch a glimpse of his mother by the road. And what about Bear Otto? What about the Ansel twins? What happened to Dolores? Was she all right? How come I’m lying here in the hospital with tubes stuck in me and my body all numb. How come I’m not dead too? Someone, anyone, tell me where all the other children are!
Slowly people let me know. One by one. That’s how I came to understand what they meant by lucky. Rudy and Skip, they were especially lucky; they had been up front in the bus and had been almost the first to be removed from it, with barely a scratch on either of them. Jennie had stayed home sick that day. There were a bunch like that. Close calls. Because I was regarded as one myself, people liked standing around in the hospital room talking to me and each other about all the close calls.
But so many of the other kids were dead, and no one wanted to talk about them. They told me with downcast eyes and sad slow shakes of the head and as few words as possible. The Lamstons were dead, all three of them. One of the Prescott kids was dead. Two of the Bilodeaus, who had been at the rear of the bus, had been trapped underwater. Sean Walker had been in front, like me, but when the bus flipped over he’d fractured his skull and died from it before they got him out of the bus, and I’d only broken my back. So I was lucky, right? And Bear and the Ansel twins and several other kids who’d been in the back, they were all dead. Dolores was okay, I learned. She’d been in shock for a while, people said, but now she was okay. So she was lucky too. I wondered if she had a lawyer, like me.
It just wasn’t right — to be alive, to have had what people assured you was a close call, and then go out and hire a lawyer; it wasn’t right. And even if you were the mother and father of one of the kids who had died, like the Ottos or the Walkers, what good would it do to hire a lawyer? To sue, because your child had died in an accident, and then collect a bunch of money from the state — it was understandable, yet it somehow didn’t seem right, either. But to be the mother and father of one of the kids who had survived the accident, even a kid like me, who would spend the rest of her life a cripple, and then to sue — I didn’t understand that at all, and I really knew it wasn’t right. Not if I was, like they said, truly lucky.
There was no stopping Mom and Daddy, though. They had their minds made up. This Mr. Stephens had convinced them that they were going to get a million dollars from the State of New York and maybe another million from the town of Sam Dent. Daddy said they all have insurance for this sort of thing; it won’t come out of anybody’s pocket, he kept saying; but even so, it made me nervous. Since the accident, I had become superstitious, I think. Mom and Daddy are Christians, at least Mom is, and I sort of believe in God myself, so I did not want to appear ungrateful and end up losing what little luck I had.
“This Mr. Stephens, who bought me the computer — what does he want me to do? I don’t have to be the one to sue anybody, do I? Can’t you guys do it?”
Daddy was in the bathroom now, unscrewing the mirror. “Well, sure, but he’s got to arrange for the other side’s lawyers to take a statement from you, a deposition, it’s called, and then we all go to court, and you’ll be asked to testify and so forth—”
“About what?” I hollered. “I don’t even remember the accident! It’s like I wasn’t even there!”
“Don’t get excited, honey,” Mom said, smooth as butter. God, I hate her sometimes.
Jennie was sucking her thumb. “Cut that out,” I said to her. “You’re too old for that,” I said, and she started to cry. I’m such a rat. “I’m sorry, Babes,” I said to her. I pulled her to me and hugged her. She stopped crying and didn’t put her thumb back in her mouth, but now I was wishing she would.
Daddy said, “Mr. Stephens is really a very nice man, very gentle and understanding. He just wants you to describe in your own words what life was like before the accident, you know, with school and all, cheerleading, your plans for the future and all, that sort of thing. In your own words. He says it’s much more effective if you tell it, instead of just us telling it.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet. Well, maybe I won’t. I don’t like even thinking about that stuff, and I sure don’t want to talk about it to any lawyer or some judge in a courtroom. So maybe I’ll just refuse to talk about it. They can’t make me, can they?”
“C’mon, Babes, be reasonable,” Daddy said, coming back into the bedroom.
“Let’s talk about this later, okay?” Mom said. “She just got home, Sam. Are you hungry, honey? You want me to fix you something, a sandwich or some soup? No more hospital food, honey, aren’t you glad?” She had her cheery TV-mom voice working.
“Yeah,” I said, and I suppose I was glad. I hate hospital food. “I am hungry. Maybe a sandwich and some soup would be good.”
Mom got up and hustled out to the kitchen, and Daddy slowly gathered his tools and followed. I rolled over to the door and shut it and put the new hook in place. “It works,” I said to Jennie.
“Cool,” she said, imitating me.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you.”
“That’s okay. Can you make the computer work?” she asked. “Can you show me how to use it?”
I said sure and wheeled back to the table and switched on the computer. “Cool,” I said, and winked at her and laughed. Quickly, she came up next to my chair and put her arm around my shoulder, and we started fooling around with Mr. Stephens’s computer, writing our names and silly messages on the screen.
I was home again, and lots of things were the same as before. But a few things, important things, were different. And not just my room, either. Before the accident, I was ashamed all the time and afraid. Because of Daddy. Sometimes I even wanted to kill myself. But now I was mostly angry and never wanted to die.
Back then, though, with Jennie sound asleep in the bunk above me, I used to lie awake at night thinking up ways to kill myself. Dying was the only way I could imagine the end of what I was doing with Daddy, although sometimes I imagined that he had suddenly decided to leave me alone, because weeks would go by, whole months, when he did leave me alone, when he just acted regular, and I thought then that maybe he had decided that what he was making me do with him was wrong, really wrong, and he was sorry and wouldn’t come to me anymore when we were alone in the house or in the car and touch me and make me touch him.
Those times when he left me alone, I thought maybe I had dreamed the whole thing up, dreams are like that, or had imagined it, because even when I was a little kid like Jennie, before Daddy started touching me that way, I had imagined some things that had made me ashamed, sexual things, sort of. Everybody does that. So maybe I had imagined this too. A few weeks would pass, and I’d start to forget that it had actually happened, and then I’d feel guilty for having been so upset and confused.
But late one night he would pick me up from babysitting at the Ansels’ or somebody else’s, and in the darkness of the car he’d slide his hand across the seat to me and put it on my leg and pull me toward him and keep sliding his hand up my leg, under my skirt, and I knew his pants were undone and he wanted me to put my hand on him there again, and so I would, and then we would do things to each other, like he had taught me, things like I knew my girlfriends did with their boyfriends after school dances and in cars with older boys but that I would never do with a boy and pretended to be disgusted about when they told me.
When we got home I would run into the house from the car and go straight to my room upstairs with my heart pounding and a roaring sound in my ears. It was awful. I lay in bed in the darkness with my clothes still on and listened to him lock up below and walk slowly up the stairs and go into his and Mom’s room and shut the door. I could hear the bedsprings squeak as he got into bed next to Mom, and soon I heard him snoring. For hours I stayed there, still as a log, until finally the roaring in my ears stopped and I dared to get out of the bed and take off my clothes in the darkened room and put on my nightgown and go down the hall to the bathroom and come back to bed, where I lay awake trying to think up ways to kill myself that wouldn’t upset Jennie too much. Usually, I decided on sleeping pills and Daddy’s vodka in the kitchen cupboard. Like Marilyn Monroe. But I didn’t know how to get hold of any sleeping pills, so the next day I always gave it up and instead tried to make what had happened in the car coming home from the Ansels’ seem like I only dreamed it.
I didn’t have to try very hard, because Daddy, except when he wanted to do those things with me, the rest of the time treated me normally, like nothing wrong had happened. Always, the next morning at breakfast he was just the same old Daddy, grumpy and distracted, bossing the boys and me and Jennie around, ignoring Mom the way he does, while she fussed in the kitchen, shoving food at the rest of us and as usual worrying over her diet. She never eats anything in front of anybody but keeps getting fatter and fatter all the time. She’s not a blimp, but she is fat.
“Look at Nichole,” Daddy always said to Mom. “Look at me. We never diet, we just eat three squares a day, and we’re not fat. What you got to do, Mary, is stop all the in-between-meal snacking,” he’d say.
“Nichole’s fourteen,” Mom would answer. “And you, everyone in your family is skinny as a rail. And I don’t snack; it’s my metabolism.” Then she’d pout and try to change the subject. “Rudy, you keep your hat on today; you’re coming down with a cold,” she’d say, and start hurrying us from the table so we wouldn’t miss the bus.
Normal life at the Burnell house.
What used to be normal life anyhow. Because after the accident, things changed. For one thing, when the other kids went off to school in the mornings, I stayed home. Mr. Dillinger, the principal, came over one day and brought a bunch of assignments from my teachers so I could catch up with the rest of my class and pass into the ninth grade with them. He’s a huge gawk who wears a bow tie and always has dandruff on his suits, and he sat in the living room with me and Mom, all hearty and cheerful, talking real loud, like being in the wheelchair had made me deaf, and together they tried to convince me to come back to school and attend classes with everyone else. He said the school board had authorized a special van to bring me back and forth. “Isn’t that terrific!” he said, like I was supposed to jump up and give a cheer for the school board.
“No way,” I said. “I’m never going back to that school,” I said, and I noticed he didn’t argue very hard. Mom didn’t, either, but she never argues hard when an official man is around. She just takes her cues from him and agrees. Later on, Daddy tells her what she should have said.
Anyhow, I don’t think Mr. Dillinger wanted me wheeling around the school reminding everyone of the accident and the kids who had died in it. They’d hired some woman from Plattsburgh, I heard, and arranged all these special group therapy meetings and assemblies for the kids after the accident, and things had more or less returned to normal now. Besides, Mr. Dillinger knew I could do all the work at home and still be ahead of most of the kids in my class, except for the real brainy ones. And next year my class would all be going on to high school in Lake Placid, and then I’d be somebody else’s problem.
I didn’t want to stay home alone with Mom all day, that’s for sure, but I really did not need to see any of the kids from school. I didn’t want to watch them strolling around in the hallways and the cafeteria, sneaking into the lav between classes to put on lipstick and share a cigarette, going off to cheerleading practice and hanging out after school in the parking lot together. I didn’t want them to stop what they were doing or saying when I rolled up in my wheelchair, “Hi, guys, what’s up?” I knew what I’d look like to them, how they’d all go silent for a minute when the dweeb arrived and then change the subject not to embarrass her or make her feel bad because they were talking about something she couldn’t do, like dancing or sports or just hanging out. Poor Nichole, the cripple. That’s the best I’d get from them — pity. And no matter how many of those group therapy sessions they’d been to, everyone would see me and instantly think of the kids who weren’t there anymore, the kids who had not been lucky like me, and maybe they would hate me for it. And I wouldn’t blame them.
At the hospital, lots of kids from school, even the little kids from the Sunday school class I taught, had come to visit me, like official delegations at first, in groups of three and four at a time, but it was always self-conscious and embarrassing, especially with the kids my age, my friends, so called, and I knew they could hardly wait to leave, and I was glad myself when they did. Then only my best friend, Jody Plante, and one or two others, when they could get someone to drive them over, came to visit, and that was okay. But by the time I left the hospital to come home, I had pretty much run out of things to talk about with them. We were living in different worlds now, and they couldn’t know about mine, and I didn’t want to know about theirs anymore.
For a while after I got home, Jody called me on the phone and even came over once or twice, and she yacked brightly about school and cheerleading gossip and boys, the usual stuff. But she was forcing it, I knew, and I never seemed to have the desire to call her, and of course I couldn’t visit, so pretty soon she didn’t call me anymore and never came to visit, either.
I stayed in my new room, with the door closed and locked, except when I came out to eat or use the bathroom. For supper, I had to sit at the table with the rest of the family, but breakfast and lunch I usually ate alone. One Saturday morning Mom and Daddy moved everything in the cupboards — dishes, glasses, food, everything — down to the lower cabinets, so I could reach them from my wheelchair. It was Daddy’s idea. I think Mom would have preferred to have me go on asking her for help every time I wanted a sandwich or a bowl of cereal. But since Jennie was in school now, Mom was gone a lot of the time herself, working part time over to the Grand Union in Marlowe, so she had to go along with my taking care of myself in the kitchen.
During the days, I pretty much had the whole house to myself, but I still stayed in my room. One night Daddy brought home a portable black-and-white TV for me that he had bought used in Ausable Forks, and he tied it into the regular cable, so I was able to watch TV then without leaving my room. Soaps and game shows, mostly, which were fine by me. And music videos. And Oprah and Donahue and Geraldo. After a month of that stuff you feel like it’s all one show, ads and everything, and you’ve been watching it for years. But I had Mr. Stephens’s computer to play with, and plenty of schoolwork to do, and books that Mrs. Twichell, the school librarian, brought over for me, mostly sappy young-adult novels about race relations and divorce, which I don’t like but will read anyhow because the writers seem so intent on having you read them that you feel it’s impolite not to.
Things with Daddy were different now too. I had become a wheelchair girl, and I think that scared him, like it does most people. You see them on the street staring at you and then looking away, as if you were a freak. To Daddy, it was like I was made of spun glass and he was afraid he would break me if he touched me. Probably I wasn’t pretty to him anymore, either, and he couldn’t pretend that I was like some beautiful movie star, the way he used to. Miss America, he always called me. “How’s my Miss America today?” But not anymore. Which was fine by me. If he did touch me, by accident or because he couldn’t avoid it, like the time he had to carry me up the stairs at the courthouse in Marlowe when I had to make my deposition for Mr. Stephens and the other lawyers, he backed away from me right away and wouldn’t look at me.
I looked at him, though. I looked right into him. I had changed since the accident, and not just in my body, and he knew it. His secret was mine now; I owned it. It used to be like I shared it with him, but no more. Before, everything had been fluid and changing and confused, with me not knowing for sure what had happened or who was to blame. But now I saw him as a thief, just a sneaky little thief in the night who had robbed his own daughter of what was supposed to be permanently hers — like he had robbed me of my soul or something, whatever it was that Jennie still had and I didn’t. And then the accident robbed me of my body.
So I didn’t own much anymore. My new room, maybe, and Mr. Stephens’s computer, which weren’t really mine and weren’t worth much anyhow. No, the only truly valuable thing that I owned now happened to be Daddy’s worst secret, and I meant to hold on to it. It was like I carried it in a locked box on my lap, with the key held tightly in my hand, and it made him afraid of me. Every time he saw me looking at him hard, he trembled.
I remember the first time Mr. Stephens came over to the house, how strained and nervous Daddy was when he wheeled me out into the living room and introduced me. It was like Mr. Stephens was a police officer or something, probably because he’s such a big shot lawyer and all, and Daddy was afraid I’d say something to make him suspicious.
Of course, he was also afraid that I would refuse to go along with their lawsuit. I still hadn’t agreed to do it, not in so many words, but in my mind I had decided to go ahead and say what they wanted me to say, which they insisted was only to answer Mr. Stephens’s and the other lawyers’ questions truthfully. That couldn’t hurt anything, I figured, because the truth was, I didn’t really remember anything about the actual accident, so nothing I said could be used to blame anybody for it. It was an accident, that’s all. Accidents happen.
Mr. Stephens was this tall skinny guy with a big puffy head of gray hair that made him look like a dandelion gone to seed and a gust of wind would blow all his hair away and leave him bald. I liked him, though. He had a small pointy face and red lips and a nice smile, and he looked right into my eyes when he talked to me, which is something that most people can’t do with me. Also, he reached down and shook my hand when Daddy introduced us, which I liked. Adults almost never do that, especially with girls. And with wheelchair girls, I’ve noticed, they actually take a step backward and put their hands on their hips or in their pockets, like you’ve got something they don’t want to catch. Mr. Stephens, though, after he shook my hand and Daddy went to stand edgily by the porch door, pulled a kitchen chair up next to my wheelchair and sat right down and got his head the same level as mine, and I felt like he could see that I was really a normal person.
He talked funny, fast and like he had already thought out ahead of time what he wanted to say, the way city people or maybe just lawyers do, but I liked it, because once you trust a person like that, you can have a real good conversation with him. You can concentrate on what the words mean and not have to worry all the time about what the other person is thinking.
“Well, Nichole,” he began, “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time now, and not just because I’ve heard so many good things about you all over town, but because, as you know, I’m the guy representing you and your mom and dad and some other folks here in town,” he said, diving right in. “We’re trying to generate some compensation, however meager, for what you all have suffered and at the same time see that an accident like this one never happens again. And you, Nichole Burnell, you’re pretty near central to the case I’m trying to build,” he said. “But you would probably just as soon let the whole thing lie, I’ll bet, so you can get on with your life as quickly and smoothly as possible, right?”
I said yes, as a matter of fact I would. He waited for me to go on, so I did. I said that I didn’t like thinking about the accident, which I couldn’t remember anyhow, and I really hated talking with people about it, because I didn’t even know what the accident meant, and since it was obvious to me that anyone who wasn’t there couldn’t possibly know what it meant, why bother at all? Besides, I said, it just made people feel sorry for me, and I hated that.
From his perch by the door, Daddy said, “What she means, Mitch—” and Mr. Stephens shushed him with a wave of his hand.
“Why do you hate it when people feel sorry for you?” he asked me. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
Mom jumped up from the couch and said, “I’ll get an ashtray, Mr. Stephens. I’m sorry, we don’t smoke, and I just didn’t think—”
“Actually, I mind,” I said. If I wasn’t allowed to smoke in this Christian house, why should he? And it was me he had asked, not her.
“No problem,” Mr. Stephens said, and he smiled broadly at me, like he was a teacher and I’d just aced a test, and said to Mom, “Please, Mary, that’s fine. No ashtray. I can wait.” Then to me, “Go ahead, Nichole, tell me why you hate it when people feel sorry for you. Because they can’t help it, you know. They really can’t. When they see you in this wheelchair, especially if they know what your life was like just six months ago, people are going to feel sorry for you. No way around it. I’ll be honest: we just met, and already I admire you — who wouldn’t? You’re a brave tough smart kid, and that’s obvious right away. And I didn’t know you or know how exciting and promising your life was before the accident. But listen, even I feel sorry for you. Do you hate that?”
Yes, I said, certainly I did, because all it did was remind me that I wasn’t normal anymore. “You can feel lucky that you didn’t die for only so long,” I said. “And then you start to feel unlucky.”
“That you didn’t die, you mean. Like the other children.”
“Yes!” I said. “Like Bear and the Ansel twins and Sean and all the other kids on the bus who died out there that morning!”
“Nichole!” Mom said.
“It’s the truth!” I said.
“It is the truth,” Mr. Stephens said in a calm sure voice, like he was correcting her on what time it was, and I knew that he understood what I was feeling and Mom didn’t have the foggiest. I think Daddy understood, but he couldn’t say it, not to me. I wouldn’t let him.
“It would be strange,” Mr. Stephens said to me, “if you didn’t feel that way about the other kids.”
Then he got me talking about last year at school, how I had tried out for cheerleading in the seventh grade and had made the team easily, which is unusual for a seventh grader, and how last fall I was captain, and that’s a big deal in Sam Dent, because the boys’ football and basketball teams are so important to the town. I was Queen of the Harvest Ball too, and I went with Bucky Waters, the captain of the football team, even though he wasn’t my boyfriend.
I never actually had a boyfriend, no one steady, I told Mr. Stephens, but Bucky was okay to go to the dance with, because he was sort of famous at school as a playboy who wouldn’t go steady with anybody, and I was famous for being churchy and stuck-up, or so some kids thought. Bucky was chosen King of the Harvest Ball, naturally, and for a while everybody thought we were a couple, but we knew we weren’t. I didn’t say this to Mr. Stephens, but after the dance, Bucky tried really hard to make out with me at Jody Plante’s party, and I wouldn’t let him, so he got mad and went off with some of the other football players to drink beer in Gilbert Jacques’s older brother’s car, I heard later.
We stayed friends, though, Bucky and I, and let people think what they wanted. It suited him that kids thought I was his girlfriend, at least during football and basketball season, and it suited me too, because then no one else bothered me, since he was such a big shot and all. Boys are so immature, I said to Mr. Stephens. At least the boys in Sam Dent are.
“Have you seen Bucky since the accident?” Mr. Stephens asked. Mom was in the kitchen making tea, and Daddy had left the room to go to the bathroom, I think.
“No.”
“Not once?”
“Nope.”
“What about the other kids, your girlfriends?”
“I saw them some at the hospital. But not lately,” I said.
“No one?”
I knew I was going to cry and sound stupid if we didn’t change the subject, so I said, “Tell me what I have to do for the lawsuit.”
That got him talking about depositions and lawyers for the state and the town, and by the time Daddy came back from the bathroom and Mom came in with her tea and cookies, which I knew she’d already eaten a bunch of in the kitchen, Mr. Stephens was going on about how tough it would be for me to answer some of the questions those other lawyers would ask. “They work for the people we’re trying to sue, you understand, and their job is to try to minimize the damages. Our job, Nichole, is to try to maximize the damages,” he explained. “If you think of it that way, as people doing their jobs, no good guys and no bad guys, just our side and the other side, then it’ll go easier for you.”
No one was interested in the truth, was what he was saying. Because the truth was that it was an accident, that’s all, and no one was to blame. “I won’t lie,” I told him.
“Some of the questions will seem pretty personal to you, Nichole. I just want to warn you up front.”
“No matter what they ask me,” I said, “I’ll tell the truth,” and I looked straight at Daddy, who had taken a seat next to Mom on the sofa. He studied his tea when I said that, as if he had seen a fly in it. I knew what he was thinking, and he knew what I was thinking too.
“Fine, fine, I don’t want you to lie,” Mr. Stephens said. “I want you to be absolutely truthful. Absolutely. No matter what I or the other lawyers ask you. They’ll have a laundry list of questions, but I’ll be right there to advise and help you. And there’ll be a court stenographer there to make a record of it, and that’s what’ll go to the judge, before the trial is set. It’ll be the same for everybody. They’ll be deposing the Ottos and the Walkers, the bus driver, and even your mom and dad, but I’ll make sure you go last, Nichole, so you can keep on getting well before you have to go in and do this. It’ll all take place over the summer,” he said to Mom and Daddy. “And the trial will be set for sometime this fall, probably.”
“When do they award the damages?” Daddy asked, and he and Mom leaned forward for the answer.
“Depends,” Mr. Stephens said. “If they appeal, and they probably will, this could drag on for quite a while. But we’ll be there at the end, Sam, don’t you worry,” he said. He put his cup on the coffee table and stood up, thinking about a cigarette, I bet. He said his goodbyes, and Daddy saw him out to his car, where they talked together for a while.
I went back to my room and closed the door and locked it. Let them discuss their lawsuit without me, if they wanted; I had done my part for now, and I didn’t want to speak about it again until I had to.
The whole thing, even though I liked Mr. Stephens and trusted him, made me feel greedy and dishonest. I looked at my picture of Einstein. What would he have done, if he’d been in an accident and been lucky like me?
I hitched myself out of the wheelchair and when I swung onto the bed, my skirt got hitched up, and I sat there for a minute, looking at my dumb worthless legs reflected in the window glass. They looked like they belonged to someone else. How much had they been worth a year ago, I wondered, or last fall, at the Keene Valley game and the Harvest Ball afterwards, when Bucky Waters and I, with crowns on our heads, danced in the gym in front of the whole school? And to whom? That was the real question. To me, my legs were worth everything then and nothing now. But to Mom and Daddy, nothing then and a couple of million dollars now.
After that night, I remember, a long time passed when it seemed no one talked about the lawsuit, at least not to me, and I didn’t hear anything more about Mr. Stephens, either. Which was fine. I sure didn’t want to bring it up, and I guess Mom and Daddy, for different reasons, didn’t want to, so it was as if it had never happened. Like I had dreamed it, the way I used to about me and Daddy; and just as before, I felt guilty for having so much emotion about the subject. When you live with people like my mother, who thinks Jesus takes care of everything except your weight, and my father, who goes around whistling and hammering and sawing all the time, you tend to feel guilty for your emotions. At least I did.
Then one night we were having supper together; it was in June, I remember, because Mom and Daddy were trying to get me to attend my graduation ceremonies with the other kids. I had come out second in my class, and Mr. Dillinger had told Mom and Daddy that everyone thought it would be great if I would give the salutatorian’s speech from my wheelchair in front of the whole town.
I thought it was a terrible idea, and I said so. I had written a research paper for English on Sam Dent, the man the town was named after, and had received an A + for it, and Mr. Dillinger and Mrs. Crosby, the English teacher, said that with a little revising it would make a perfect salutatorian’s speech. The way they wanted me to revise it, I knew without their even saying, was to turn Sam Dent into an example for the kids who were graduating, which meant that I’d have to cut out all the bad things he’d done, like cheating the Indians out of their land and buying his way out of the Civil War, things— that lots of people did in those days but that were just as bad then as they would be now.
“C’mon, Babes,” Dad said. “You’ll be the star of the show.”
“Some star,” I said. “What you mean is, you and Mom’ll be the stars of the show!” That was the main reason I didn’t want to do it. Of course, they thought I was just ashamed of being in a wheelchair, which was partly true, but I was slowly getting over that by then. Twice a week, since I’d come home from the hospital, Mom had been carting me over to Lake Placid for physical therapy at the Olympic Center, where there were lots of kids and young people who were even worse off than I was, and some of them had made friends with me, so I was beginning to see myself in the world a little clearer by then. I didn’t feel so abnormal anymore, and I didn’t worry so much about whether I was lucky or unlucky. I was both, like most people.
No, the reason I was dead set on avoiding the graduation ceremonies was because Mom and Daddy were so dead set on getting me to do it and because they wanted it for themselves, not me. They didn’t realize that, of course, but I did. Sometimes I almost felt sorry for them, the way they desperately needed me to be a star, and that’s why in the past, before the accident, I had always given in to them. But no more. Now I only did what I wanted to do, for my reasons. For my reasons, I didn’t go to church with them anymore, I didn’t teach Sunday school, I didn’t baby-sit for anyone in town (although no one had asked me to), I didn’t go to the movies or to restaurants with the family. Instead, I stayed home, behind the door of my new room, and that I did for my reasons too. No one else’s.
Anyhow, in the middle of our arguing about this, the phone rang, and Mom got up to answer it. Daddy hates talking on the phone and never answers it himself, even if he’s standing beside it when it rings. He walks away and lets one of us do the job for him. I never minded, and I used to rush to the phone when it rang, hoping it was for me; but no more, of course.
A minute later, Mom came back to the table, looking worried. “That was Billy Ansel,” she said to Daddy. “He wants to come over. To talk to us, he said.”
“He say what about?” Daddy asked, sounding suspicious, although as far as I knew then, he liked Billy Ansel well enough. Everyone did. In fact, Billy Ansel was more of a local hero than Sam Dent was. If they wanted a graduation speech about a role model, they ought to get someone to make it about him.
“No,” Mom said.
“Was he drinking, could you tell?”
“I can’t tell about those things, Sam, you know that.”
I just listened. This was new, Billy Ansel drinking and Mom and Daddy worried about his coming over to talk with them.
Rudy asked to be excused, and then Skip did, and Daddy said sure, and they took off to watch TV in the living room, with Jennie following along behind. Usually, that’s when I disappeared from the table too, heading for my room, but this time I stayed.
“Is he coming over now? Right away?” Daddy asked.
Mom got up and started clearing the table. “That’s what he said.”
Daddy turned to me and said, “What’re you up to tonight, Babes?” Trying to get rid of me.
“Nothing.”
“No homework?”
“Done. Besides, it’s Friday.”
“Nothing good on your TV?”
“Nope. Thought I’d wait around and see Billy Ansel,” I said, but as soon as I said it, I realized that I didn’t want to see him at all. Because of the accident. Maybe that’s why Mom and Daddy were so nervous about his coming over.
In the last couple of years, after Billy’s wife died, I had become his kids’ regular baby-sitter, and now they were gone too. Maybe I was stuck in a wheelchair and all, but I sure wasn’t dead, like his twins, so the idea of him seeing me made me cringe with shame. I didn’t want to be seen by anyone whose kids had been killed in the accident, but especially not Billy Ansel.
“Actually,” I said, “now that I think about it, I’d just as soon stay in my room when he comes.”
“Fine,” Daddy said, obviously relieved, as I shoved my chair away from the table and rolled across the kitchen toward my room.
“Daddy, when he comes …,” I said, trying to think of what I wanted him to say for me to Billy Ansel, remembering all the times I had tucked Jessica and Mason into bed, remembering how they loved to have me read their Babar the Elephant books to them before they went to sleep, remembering their faces, their bright trusting motherless faces; and I had to give it up — there was nothing I could say to Billy, except I’m sorry. I’m sorry that your children died when my parents’ children didn’t.
“Just tell him I’m sleeping,” I said, and wheeled into my room.
In a little while, I heard his pickup truck drive up and crunch across the gravel of the driveway. He knocked on the door, and Daddy greeted him in his fake-surprise way. “Hey, Billy! What brings you out on a night like this? C’mon in, c’mon in, take a load off.”
I shut off the TV sound and with Fergus the Bear in my lap rolled my chair over next to the door so I could hear them better. Mom was washing dishes at the sink; I heard Billy and Daddy scrape their chairs on the floor as they sat down at the kitchen table. Billy still hadn’t said anything. I wondered what he was like when he was drinking. He used to go out a lot at night, which is why I baby-sat so often for him, and most times when he left the house he said he’d be having a few beers with the boys down at the Rendez-Vous or the Spread Eagle, in case of an emergency or something, but when he came home he never seemed drunk or anything. Just sad, as usual. Because of his wife, I assumed. That and Vietnam. He was a well-known Vietnam vet, and those guys are always a little sad.
“Would you like a cup of tea, Billy?” Mom said. “There’s a piece of cake left, if you want.”
“No. No, thanks, Mary,” he said in a flat voice.
“So,” Daddy said. “What brings you out tonight?”
“Well, Sam, I might’s well tell you the truth. It’s this lawsuit you’ve gotten yourself all taken up with,” he said. “I want you to drop the damned thing.”
“I don’t see how that concerns you, Billy,” Daddy said. I could tell from his voice that he was smiling but was seriously mad. That’s what he does when he’s mad, keeps on smiling but shifts his voice down a notch. It’s scarier that way.
“It does concern me.”
Daddy said, “I don’t know why it should. There’s a whole lot of people in town that’s involved with lawsuits. We’re hardly unique here, Billy. I mean, I can understand how you feel, it’s depressing, sure, but it’s reality. You can’t just turn this off because you happen to think it’s a bad idea. Half the town is suing somebody or other, or getting ready to.”
“Well, I’m one who’s not suing anybody. And I don’t want a damned thing to do with it, either.”
“Okay, so fine. So stay out of it, then.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve tried to do. I’ve really tried to stay the hell out of it. But it turns out that’s not so easy, Sam. You’ve gone and got yourself some hotshot New York City lawyer, this Mitchell Stephens — you and Risa and Wendell Walker and the Ottos.”
“Yeah, so? Lots of folks have got lawyers.”
“But yours is the one who’s gonna subpoena me, Sam. Force me to testify in court. He came by the garage this afternoon, real smooth and friendly.”
“Why would he do that?” Mom said. “You didn’t have anything to do with the accident.” She’s so out of it. Even I knew that Billy had been driving behind the bus that day, so he could wave at his kids, like he always did. That made him the only person not on the bus who’d actually witnessed the accident which meant that he’d be the one to tell if Dolores had been driving safely. They naturally couldn’t sue anybody if Dolores was driving recklessly, and only Billy knew the truth about that.
“And if the bastard does subpoena me,” Billy said, ignoring Mom, “then all these other lawyers are gonna line up behind him and try to do the same thing.”
“No, that won’t happen, Billy. Mitch Stephens’s case is small, compared to some of these guys, and very focused. The way he told me, all he needs is for you to say what you saw that day, driving along behind the bus. I know it’s a painful thing to have to do, testifying and all, but it’ll only take a few minutes of your time, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“Wrong,” Billy said. “That’s purely wrong. The other shysters’ll copy him, or do a version of whatever he’s doing, and there’ll be all kinds of appeals, and I’ll be tangled up in this mess for the next five years. And believe me, you and Mary will too,” he said. “This thing is never going to go away, Sam.”
“C’mon,” Daddy said. “You know that won’t—”
“Do you know,” Billy interrupted him, “that we got lawyers suing lawyers, because some people were stupid enough to sign up with more than one of the bastards? And we got people switching lawyers, because these sons-of-bitches are bribing them, making deals and dickering over percentages.” I hoped Mom and Daddy hadn’t done that, switched lawyers, because of Mr. Stephens’s computer.
Billy said, “A couple of local folks I won’t bother to name — but you know them, Sam, they’re friends of yours — they’ve even started a suit against the school board, because they’re not happy with the way they decided to use the money that got collected around town last winter and the junk that people sent in from all over. There’s one group in town that agrees with the school board and wants to spend the money for a memorial playground and donate the junk to the Lake Placid Hospital, and another that wants the money to go against this year’s town tax bills and maybe have a tag sale or something to get rid of the stuff.” He laughed, but he wasn’t amused. I knew Mom and Daddy were in the second group, but I guess Billy didn’t.
“Yesterday,” he said, “I heard somebody wants to sue the rescue squad, for Christ’s sake. The rescue squad. Because they supposedly didn’t act fast enough.
“This whole town,” Billy said in a suddenly dead voice, “the town has gone completely crazy. I used to like this town, I used to really care about what happened here, but now … now I think I’ll sell my house and the garage and move the fuck away.”
That got Mom upset — the word “fuck,” not the idea of Billy’s moving. “Billy, please,” she said. “The children.” Like they could hear him over the television. It was her own ears she was trying to protect, not theirs. “I can’t have you talking that way in this house,” she said. Right, this Christian house.
He said he was sorry, and the three of them were silent for a minute. “I was thinking, if you two dropped the case,” Billy said in a low voice, “then maybe the others would slowly come to their senses and follow. You’re good sensible people, you and Mary. People respect you.”
“No, Billy. We can’t drop the lawsuit,” Daddy said. “I shouldn’t have to tell you, because I run a pretty good tab at your garage, but we need the money, Billy. For hospital bills and suchlike. Just for living.”
“Christ, I’ll pay Nichole’s hospital bills, if that’s what you’re talking about. The Walkers, they’d drop out if you did. And the Ottos, I don’t think they want to be doing this, either. Then your lawyer wouldn’t have any reason to pursue the case. I bet he’d pack it in, cut his losses, and go home.”
“None of us wants to be doing this, Billy.”
“If you two could make a smart shyster like Stephens pull out, then maybe the other people in town would start to see the light, and people could get their mourning done properly and get on with their lives. This has become a hateful place to live, Sam. Hateful.”
“Not for us,” Daddy said.
“No, not for us,” Mom chimed in.
What a dumb thing for them to say. It shocked even me. I heard Billy’s chair bump against the floor as he stood up.
“Not for you. Right,” he said, “not for you.” He must have thought they were the stupidest people he’d ever met. Then, naturally, because of what they’d said, he thought of me. “How’s Nichole? She around?”
Mom jumped in. “She’s resting, in her room.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s too bad. I haven’t seen her, you know. Since the accident. I guess no one has. Tell her hello for me,” he said in a low sad flat way that made my chest tighten, and I wanted to fly out into the kitchen and hug him.
But I didn’t. I stayed there by the door, patting Fergus the Bear and listening, and suddenly I was aware that I was shaking all over.
At that moment, I hated my parents more than I ever had. I hated them for all that had gone before — Daddy for what he knew and had done, and Mom for what she didn’t know and hadn’t done — but I also hated them for this new thing, this awful lawsuit. The lawsuit was wrong. Purely and in God’s eyes, as Mom especially should know, it was wrong; but also it was making Billy Ansel sadder than life had already done on its own, and that seemed stupid and cruel; and now it looked like half the people in town were doing it too, making everyone around them crazy with pain, the same as Mom and Daddy were doing to Billy, so they didn’t have to face their own pain and get over it.
Why couldn’t they see that? Why couldn’t they just stand up like good people and say to Mr. Stephens, “No, forget the lawsuit. We’ll get by somehow on our own. It’s too harmful to too many people. Goodbye, Mr. Stephens. Take your law practice back to New York City, where people like to sue each other.”
I heard the door close behind Billy, and then Mom and Daddy went up to their bedroom, probably to discuss things in private, which they were doing more and more now, talking alone in their bedroom. We were becoming a strange family, divided between parents and children, and even among the children we were divided, with me and Jennie on one side and the boys on the other. No one in the family trusted anyone else in the family.
It had started back when Daddy began touching me and making me keep his secret, but he and I were the only ones who knew about that, so we had all gone on afterwards as if we were still a normal family, with everyone needing and trusting one another, just like you’re supposed to. But now it was like everyone, not just me and Daddy, had secrets. Mom and Daddy had their secrets, and Jennie and I had ours, and Rudy and Skip had theirs, and we each had our own lonely secrets that we shared with no one.
I knew it was all directly connected to what had happened between me and Daddy before the accident, and through that to the accident itself, which had changed me and my view of everyone else, and now from the accident to this lawsuit — which had set Mom and Daddy against me, although they didn’t know that yet, and me against everyone.
Maybe my realizing this, after Billy left the house, is what let me start to evolve a plan in my mind that I couldn’t share with anyone, certainly not Mom or Daddy, and not Jennie, who would never understand, and not the boys, who would have ratted on me. If our family was going to be all fragmented like this, I figured, then I might as well take advantage of it and, for once, act completely on my own.
The first glimpse of it had come to me in a flash, as I sat there by the door with my sweet old teddy bear, Fergus, in my lap. I suddenly realized that I myself — and not Daddy and Mom or the Walkers or the Ottos — could force Mr. Stephens to drop the lawsuit. I could force their big shot lawyer to walk away from the case. And Daddy would know that I did it. Which would give me a good laugh. And because of what I knew about him, he wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it afterwards. It wouldn’t really matter, but maybe then we could become a regular family again. Husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, all of us trusting one another, with no secrets.
Except the big one, of course. Which would always be there, no matter what I did, like a huge purple birthmark on my face, something that he alone could see whenever he looked at me, and I, whenever I looked in the mirror.
Graduation came and went, and, yes, I did stay home, and the school board mailed me my diploma, along with official notification that I would be attending ninth grade next year at Lake Placid High School and there would be a special van to transport me. At the last minute, Mom and Daddy almost went to the graduation ceremonies without me, just the two of them, all dressed up, but I talked them out of it. It was a stupid idea, but typical of them. They couldn’t bear being kept out of the limelight.
“It’s not the same as going to church every Sunday without me,” I explained, “where people feel sorry for me and proud of you. People at school will just think you’re dumb and will feel sorry for you instead of me,” I said.
“Don’t talk to your mother that way,” Daddy said. They were all sitting in the living room watching television together, like a good American family — it was The Simpsons, probably, which was the one show the whole bunch of them thought was funny. Even Jennie. Me, I can’t stand that show; it’s insulting.
“Actually, Daddy,” I said, “I’m talking to you both,” and I backed my wheelchair out of the room, turned, and went into my own room. I wasn’t afraid of him anymore, and he knew it, but he couldn’t do anything about it.
With summer here and school out, the kids were at home more, and because Mom was working at the Grand Union full time now, I had to baby-sit. That was all right by me, since I didn’t have anyplace else to go, except physical therapy in Lake Placid two afternoons a week, which Grand Union let Mom take off, so she could drive me to the Olympic Center. Most days, Rudy and Skip ran wild, off in the woods and fishing or swimming in the Ausable River or riding their bikes all the way into town to goof around at the playground with their friends. I just let them go, as long as they got home before Mom did, and lied for them when Mom asked where they’d been all day, since they were supposed to stay around the house.
Jennie stuck close to me and was easy enough to amuse, especially if I let her play in my room with her Barbie dolls, which I did most of the time. We talked a lot that summer, almost as if she were a few years older than her real age and I were a few years younger, and it was one of the nicest things I can remember about our family. It was like I was ten years old again, and in the company of a sister who was also ten, because Jennie met me halfway. Sometimes I almost forgot about all the bad things that had happened to me, and I felt safe again and whole, untouched and innocent.
We both played Barbie dolls and read the same books and talked about things like witches and ghosts and whether we believed in them or not, and we wrote funny poems about people we didn’t like or thought were stupid and ridiculous, like Mr. Dillinger and Eden Schraft, the postmistress. Silly nonsensical stuff.
There once was a man named Dillinger,
Whose brain had only one cylinder.
His wife’s had none, but she called him “Hon,”
Now he’s convinced he’s thrilling her.
Eden Schraft was slightly daft
And learned the alphabet late.
She sorted the mail in a plastic pail,
And licked her stamps from a silver plate.
Those summer mornings and afternoons alone in the house with Jennie were, in a way, the last days of my childhood; that’s how it felt, even at the time it was happening to me.
Then one night Daddy knocked on the door of my room and said, “Nichole, are you there? Can I come in a minute?”
“Yes, Daddy,” I said, “I’m here.” Where did he think I was? I rolled over to the door and unlatched it, and he walked in. I reached over to the television and shut off the sound; I knew he had an announcement to make. He never came into my room alone now, unless he had to. In fact, he almost never talked directly to me anymore, probably because he couldn’t be sure of what I would say in response. He knew I hated him.
He sat down on the bed and put his hands on his knees and studied them. He has big hands. To me, they look like animals, thick and hairy. To him, I suppose, they’re just hands.
“Nichole,” he said, and he cleared his throat. “Tomorrow, Nichole, tomorrow Mr. Stephens wants you to make your deposition over to the courthouse in Marlowe. I thought, even though it’s a weekday, I’d stay home from work so I can take you over, and Mom can stay with the kids, if that’s all right.”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”
“Whatever. You sure are …”
“What? I’m what?”
“I don’t know. Well, distant, I guess. Distant. Hard to talk to.”
“Daddy,” I said, looking right at him. “We don’t have much to talk about. Do we?”
“What?”
“Do we?”
He inhaled and sighed heavily, as if he felt suddenly sorry for himself. “Well, then, it’s okay? I’ll take you over about nine-thirty in the morning? That’s okay with you?”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”
“I wish you wouldn’t always say that.”
“Say what?”
“Whatever.”
“Why?”
“It’s just … it sounds like you’ll do whatever I want, like you think you’re in my power or something. Only sarcastic. That’s the part I don’t like, the sarcasm.”
I looked at him and didn’t say anything. Sometimes I don’t know who’s more out of it, him or Mom. Slowly he got up and went out to the living room, and I heard him and Mom go upstairs to their room.
The next morning, he drove me over to Marlowe. We rode the whole way without saying anything, although once or twice Daddy started whistling a little tune and then after a few seconds trailed off into silence. It was a balmy clear day, with small white puffs of cloud sailing over the mountains from Sam Dent. Daddy parked the car in the lot and wheeled me around to the main entrance of the redbrick building, which looks more like a mental hospital than a courthouse, and it gave me the willies. Unexpectedly, I was very nervous and dry-mouthed, scared of what I was about to do.
Daddy huffed and puffed carrying me up the long stairs, because I kept my body stiff and wouldn’t hold on to him, and I must have felt heavier to him than I really was. Like he was lugging a hundred and ten pounds of cinder blocks. After he set me into a regular chair and went back down for my wheelchair, I looked around me and saw that I was in a nice large book-lined room with a huge table in the middle and these big leather-covered chairs pulled up to it.
Mr. Stephens was there, wearing a dark pin-striped lawyer suit, and he shook my hand with obvious pleasure. He was glad to see me, I could tell, and this relaxed me some. When I first met him at our house, he had worn his regular clothes, a plaid shirt and wool pants, and had seemed even friendlier and gentler then. I had liked him, but he wasn’t what you’d call impressive, probably because of his hairdo. Now he looked important and smart, and I was glad my lawyer was him and not one of the other guys he introduced me to there, a Mr. Garay and a Mr. Schwartz. They were all suited up too, like him, but their suits looked like K Mart compared to his, and they were both short and baldish, and one of them, Mr. Garay, had real bad breath that he was trying to kill with Feen-a-Mints. Good luck.
Mr. Schwartz stood at the far end of the table and shuffled a messy pile of papers over and over, as if he was looking for a lost document. Every few seconds, Mr. Garay walked down to Mr. Schwartz’s end of the table and watched over his shoulder and waited, then came back and stood nervously near me and Mr. Stephens.
“Well, Nichole, are you all ready for this?” Mr. Stephens asked me, and he smiled and winked. We’re on the same side, and we’re smarter than these other guys, was what he was communicating to me.
“I’m ready,” I said. And I was.
Daddy came back then with the wheelchair and opened it out for me, and when I had hitched myself into it, Mr. Stephens rolled me up to the table and took the seat beside me on the right. He asked Mr. Schwartz where the stenographer was, and Mr. Schwartz looked up from his papers, blinked, said to Mr. Garay, “Dave, you can tell Frank we’re ready. We’re ready, right?”
“Yes, indeed,” Mr. Stephens said. Daddy dragged one of the leather chairs from the table over by the wall next to the door, where he sat down and crossed his legs and tried to look casual, like he does this all the time.
Mr. Garay went out and a few seconds later came back followed by a short dark man I recognized from Mom and Daddy’s church — which is how I thought of it by that time. It wasn’t my church anymore, that’s for sure. The man carried a tape recorder and some papers, and he nodded and smiled at Daddy as he passed him, and Daddy nodded back. I realized then that this was probably the third or fourth time Daddy had been in this room, so maybe he did have a reason to look casual. He was getting used to this legal business.
“This is Frank Onishenko, he’s the stenographer, and he’ll be taking down everything we say,” Mr. Stephens said to me. “This is called an examination before trial, Nichole,” he explained, “and these gentlemen will ask you some questions, and I may make a few comments about the questions or your answers. Then Mr. Onishenko will make a transcript of the whole thing, which we’ll sign, and we’ll all have notarized copies, so there won’t be any surprises. Right, gentlemen?”
Mr. Schwartz looked up from his papers. “What?”
“Just explaining to Nichole what’s going on here,” Mr. Stephens said. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah, sure,” Mr. Schwartz said, as if he’d really rather be doing something else. Mr. Garay didn’t seem too interested in what was happening, either. I guess I was Mr. Stephens’s choice witness, Exhibit A or something, and they figured there wasn’t much they could ask me that would help their case. They knew the facts already, and I was obviously exactly what I looked like, a poor teenaged kid in a wheelchair, a victim — and that served only Mr. Stephens’s purpose, and of course Mom’s and Daddy’s purpose, and the Walkers’ and the Ottos’. But not Mr. Schwartz’s or Mr. Garay’s.
Mr. Stephens made some legal talk then. Stuff like “Pursuant to the order of Judge Florio” and “all parties to appear today for the court-ordered deposition, blah blah blah.” He talked like that for quite a while. “Prior to this date … numerous discovery and inspection … furnished to my office … the defendant, the State of New York … the codefendant, the Town of Sam Dent, Essex County, State of New York …” Et cetera, et cetera. It was pretty impressive, though, and if he hadn’t been my lawyer, here to protect me, I would’ve been seriously scared of him.
He went on growling and barking like that for a while, and the other lawyers cut in and out a couple of times and made legal speeches of their own. After each speech, they would all three fall into a conversation among them that they said was off the record, so Mr. Onishenko would stop the tape and look at me and smile a little, like we were actors in a play rehearsal forced to stand by while the director consulted with one of the other actors.
Finally, it looked like the lawyers had got all their technical difficulties ironed out, and Mr. Onishenko asked me to swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God.
I said I would, and then Mr. Schwartz looked straight at me, smiled, and gazed into my eyes like the next words I heard were going to make us lifelong friends. “Nichole,” he said, “good morning.”
“Good morning.”
“Nichole, I’m going to ask you a series of questions about this case. If at any time you do not understand the question or would like me to rephrase or repeat it, please just ask me and I will do so. Is that agreed?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Could you tell me your full name?”
“Nichole Smythe Burnell.” I didn’t mention it, of course, since he didn’t ask, but Smythe is Mom’s maiden name. At school in the fall I was planning to start calling myself Smythe Burnell. No more Nichole. No more Nickie, Nike, Nickie, Nicolodeon. From now on, Smythe.
“Where do you presently reside?”
“Box 54, Bartlett Hill Road, Sam Dent, New York 12950.”
“How long have you resided at that address?”
“All my life. Since December 4, 1975.” I figured I’d throw that in, so he wouldn’t have to ask my age.
“Fine. And with whom do you presently reside at that address?”
“With my parents, Samuel and Mary Burnell, and my two brothers, Rudolph and Richard, aged eleven and ten, and my sister, Jennifer, aged six.”
For a long time, that’s how it went — Mr. Schwartz asking these boring questions, like he was filling out a job application for me, and me answering with the basic facts of my life so far. But I liked it. I liked the way it was so factual and impersonal, almost as if we were talking about someone else, a girl who wasn’t even in the room.
After a while, though, he started asking more personal things, like about my health and my daily activities. I realized that he had done some research already, because it was obvious from the questions that he already knew the answers to most of them. It was like that TV game show Jeopardy, where the MC gives the answers and the contestant has to come up with the questions. Except that here the contestant, Mr. Schwartz, seemed more in charge than the MC, me.
At one point, he asked me questions about how I spent my days now. He wanted me to tell about my new room on the first floor and how I stayed there almost all the time and hadn’t gone to school and so forth. When he asked about graduation, I told him I hadn’t attended it, and I thought he would ask why not, but he didn’t. He was trying to make me look pampered and spoiled, I knew, but even so, I was glad he didn’t go any further into my home life or school stuff than he did. Instead, he wanted to know about the physical therapy I was getting, and I told him; and then he asked me if I was in any pain now, suddenly, just like that.
I said, “Well, no, not really.”
“You’re not in pain?”
“Actually, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, Nichole, that you don’t know?”
“Well, I mean, it’s like I can’t feel it. I don’t have any feelings. In my legs, I mean. From my waist down. That’s why I’m in a wheelchair, Mr. Schwartz,” I said. “It’s not like I’m paralyzed or anything. I just can’t feel anything down there, so I can’t move anything down there. That’s what the physical therapy is for, to keep the muscles from atrophying from disuse. Because even though they’re basically okay, the muscles and bones and all, it’s actually like they’re dead.”
I looked over at Mr. Stephens, and I saw him tighten his mouth against a smile. He said, for Mr. Onishenko’s record, that he would be introducing a set of medical reports along with depositions from Dr. Robeson and the other doctors at Lake Placid Hospital who had taken care of me, and I saw Mr. Garay make a few notes on a yellow lined pad. “And unless the medical records are allowed to go into evidence,” Mr. Stephens added, “I will of course object to this line of questioning.”
After that, Mr. Schwartz wanted me to tell them about my social life.
“Now or then?” I asked.
“Then.”
Mistake. He would not enjoy what I was about to tell him. I started with cheerleading and talked about how big a deal that is to the kids at school, and then I told him about the Harvest Ball and Bucky Waters, even, and Mr. Schwartz started looking flustered. I was telling him the truth, though. More or less. It was Q and A, not multiple choice. On paper or like this, in a deposition, I probably came out looking like Miss Teenaged America or something. I’m talking about before the accident.
I knew, of course, that was where he would eventually have to lead me, to the accident itself, and sure enough, pretty soon he was asking me about what happened that morning.
“Now, on January 27, 1990, did there come a time, Nichole, when you left your parents’ house on Bartlett Hill Road?”
“Yes.”
He asked a bunch of small questions for a while, nailing down details, like what time of day was it, where did the bus pick us up, who was at the stop with me, and so forth. “I was with my brothers,” I said. “Rudy and Skip. Jennie was sick and stayed home that day.”
“Was there anything unusual about the driver, Dolores Driscoll, or the bus this morning?”
“Like what? I mean, I don’t remember a lot.”
Mr. Stephens jumped in. “I object to the form of the question. Note that.”
“Was the bus on time?” Mr. Schwartz asked.
“Yes.”
“And where did you sit that morning?”
“My usual place, on the right side, the first seat.”
“But according to your recollection, there was nothing unusual about the drive that morning,” he said.
“Until the accident?”
“Yes.”
“No. Yes, there was. It was when Sean Walker got on, because he was crying and didn’t want to leave his mother. So I sat him next to me and quieted him down, and Dolores and Sean’s mother talked for a second. Then, when Dolores started up again, a car came around the corner there by the Rendez-Vous and almost hit Sean’s mother. She was okay, but it really scared Sean, because he saw it out the window.”
After that, he didn’t want to ask about individual stops anymore, which was fine by me, because except for when we picked up Sean, the rest of the route was like every other day and I couldn’t be sure if I was remembering something from the actual day of the accident or just making it up from my usual experiences.
“Can you remember what the weather was like that morning?” he asked me.
“I think it was snowing. Not hard, not at first. It wasn’t snowing at all when we left the house, but it was snowing a little by the time we stopped at Billy Ansel’s.”
Mr. Stephens interrupted again. “Unless the report from the National Weather Bureau for the town of Sam Dent of January 27, 1990, goes into the record, I will object to that question.”
“I will offer that report,” Mr. Schwartz said. Then he asked me if I saw Billy Ansel that morning.
I said yes, he was driving behind the bus in his pickup, like he did every morning, following the bus in. I was exact and said I saw Billy’s pickup truck, not Billy himself. “I sit in front; it’s the kids in the back who always watch and wave at Billy.”
“Who were they?”
“In the back? I don’t know: Billy’s kids, of course, and Bear Otto, and a couple of others.”
“Objection,” Mr. Stephens said. “Note my objection. She said, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
Mr. Schwartz slipped a quick smile past me, his old friend. “Did there come a time when all the children had been picked up?”
“Yes.”
“You remember that much,” he said. Like, How interesting.
“Yes. As I’m talking, I’m remembering more about it.” And I really was, which surprised me probably as much as it was surprising the lawyers.
Mr. Stephens looked worried. “Note my objection. She said, ‘As I’m talking.’ ”
“Do you remember, did there come a time when the bus turned off Staples Mill Road onto the Marlowe road at what’s called Wilmot Flats?”
“Yes,” I said. “There was this big brown dog that ran across the road up there, right by the dump, and Dolores slowed down so’s not to hit him, and he ran into the woods. And then Dolores drove on and turned onto the Marlowe road, as usual. I remember that. I’m remembering it pretty clearly.”
“You are?” Mr. Schwartz said, eyebrows raised.
“Yes.”
“Note that she said pretty clearly.’ Not ‘clearly,’” Mr. Stephens put in.
Then Mr. Schwartz asked me some more questions about Billy Ansel, like, After we turned onto the Marlowe road, how far behind the bus was his truck?
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was snowing pretty hard by then. Dolores had the windshield wipers on.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Stephens said, “You remember that?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Schwartz went on, “Well, then, what else did you observe at that time? Before the actual accident, I mean.”
“I was scared.”
“You were scared? Of what? This is before the accident, I’m asking. Do you understand what I’m asking, Nichole?”
“Yes, I understand. Dolores was driving too fast, and it scared me.”
“Mrs. Driscoll was driving too fast? What made you think that, Nichole?”
“The speedometer. And it was downhill there.”
“You could see the speedometer?”
“Yes. I looked, because it was snowing so hard. And because it seemed to me that we were going very fast coming down the hill there. I was scared.” Mr. Stephens, I noticed, had gone silent.
“All right, then, Nichole, how fast would you say she was going? To the best of your recollection.”
“Seventy-two miles an hour.”
“Really? Seventy-two miles an hour. You’re sure of this?”
“Yes.” I had my back to Mr. Stephens now and couldn’t see him, but I imagined him slumped in his chair, looking at his fingernails.
“You believe that the bus driven by Mrs. Driscoll was going about seventy miles an hour at that time?” Mr. Schwartz asked.
“No,” I said. “I know she was going seventy-two. The speedometer is large and easy to see from where I was. I was in the first seat, right beside it, practically.”
“I see. Did you say anything to her about this?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I guess I was scared. And there wasn’t time.”
“There wasn’t time?”
“No. Because then the bus went off the road. And crashed.”
“You remember this?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do now. Now that I’m telling about it.”
“She said, ‘Now that I’m telling about it.’ Note that,” Mr. Stephens said in a weary voice.
“What do you recall of the accident itself? Exactly.”
“I remember the bus swerved, it just suddenly swerved to the right, and it hit the guardrail and the snowbank on the side of the road, and then it went over the embankment there, and everyone was screaming and everything. And that’s all. I guess I was unconscious after that. That’s all. Then I was in the hospital.”
Mr. Schwartz smiled and made some notes on his pad. Mr. Garay was furiously doing the same. “Do you have any questions, Mr. Stephens?” Mr. Schwartz said without looking up.
I made like I was straightening my skirt across my knees, but I could see off to the side that Mr. Stephens was staring at me, and for a long time he didn’t say a word. He just breathed hard through his nose. Of course, he didn’t know if I had told the truth or not, but he was leery of pressing me too hard to find out, or he might end up asking questions that Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Garay would love to hear me answer.
I glanced up at Daddy, who was leaning forward in his chair, his mouth half open, as if he wanted to say something but he didn’t dare.
“I have no questions,” Mr. Stephens said quietly.
Mr. Schwartz said, “I have no further questions. Mr. Garay?”
“No questions,” Mr. Garay said.
“Thank you, Nichole. You can go now,” Mr. Stephens said. He didn’t get up from his seat; he sat there, sliding some papers into his briefcase. Glancing along the table, I saw Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Garay doing the same, only quicker. Mr. Onishenko had shut off the tape recorder and was writing on a self-stick label. I pushed myself away from the table and turned my wheelchair toward Daddy, who was standing now but looking kind of wobbly.
As I passed by him, Mr. Stephens, in a voice so low only I could hear, said to me, “You’d make a great poker player, kid.”
I said, “Thanks,” and quickly moved away from him. Daddy was in shock, I could tell, white-faced and slouched, like someone had punched him in the stomach. Probably, the meaning of what I had told Mr. Schwartz was just now registering in his mind, over and over, and he hadn’t begun to react yet.
I rolled my chair up beside him, and to further delay his reaction, and maybe because I didn’t want him to embarrass himself in front of the lawyers, for he was, after all, my father, I said, “Let’s go, Daddy. We have to get home now.”
Like a kind of numb servant, he nodded okay and lifted me out of the wheelchair and carried me down the stairs. This time I wrapped my arms around his neck and shoulders and held on tight, making it easier for him to lift my weight and carry me to the car.
While he was setting me into the front seat, I saw Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Garay get into a fancy gray car parked on Court Street and drive quickly away. They were loosening their neckties and smiling and in general looking very pleased with themselves.
Daddy hurried back to retrieve my wheelchair from the courthouse, but I knew he’d be longer than necessary, because he and Mr. Stephens would want to have a few words up there in private. Mr. Stephens would probably be incredibly mad at Daddy for not having warned him that I had remembered so much about the accident, and Daddy would be insisting that he hadn’t expected it, either.
Daddy would have concluded by now that I had lied, however, and he would try to tell that to Mr. Stephens. She lied, Mitch, she doesn’t remember anything about the accident, she has no idea how fast Dolores was going. And Mr. Stephens would have to point out to him that, Sam, it doesn’t matter whether she was lying or not, the lawsuit is dead, everyone’s lawsuit is dead. Forget it. Tell the others to forget it. It’s over. Right now, Sam, the thing you got to worry about is why she lied. A kid who’d do that to her own father is not normal, Sam.
But Daddy knew why I had lied. He knew who was normal and who wasn’t. Mr. Stephens couldn’t ever know the truth, but Daddy always would. He put my wheelchair into the trunk of the car and came around to the driver’s side and got in and sat there for a minute with the key in his hand, looking at it as if he didn’t quite understand its purpose. He said nothing for a long time.
Finally, he reached forward and put the key into the ignition, and speaking slowly, he said in a strange half-dead voice, “Well, Nichole, what do you say we stop at Stewart’s for an ice cream? We haven’t done that for a long time,” he added.
“That sounds fine, Daddy. I’d really like it.”
He started the car up then and drove across the road to Stewart’s and bought each of us a huge pistachio cone, which is the kind we both like best but that no one else in the family likes.
When we had left Marlowe and were coming along the East Branch toward Sam Dent, with Daddy’s cone dripping and me handing him napkins, we passed the fairgrounds at the edge of town, and I noticed that they were setting up a midway. I hadn’t realized that it was so late in the summer. Winter and spring and now summer had passed by, and it was like I had been in some other land, traveling.
“Is it time for the fair already?” I asked. It looked beautiful, and sad somehow. The white grandstand and the covered stage facing it had been freshly painted, and the field of mown grass inside the oval racetrack in front of the stand was bright green and shiny under the huge blue sky. When I was Jennie’s age, the grandstand had seemed enormous to me and frightening, especially when we went at night and it was filled with a huge noisy crowd of strangers. Now the structure seemed tiny and almost sweet, and it would no longer be filled with strangers; I would know the faces and even the names of almost everyone up there on those board seats, and they would wave at me and say, Come on over, Nichole, and sit here with us. The track that looped around the field and passed between the stage and the grandstand had been raked smooth and watered until it looked like it was made of chocolate frosting. Scattered among the pine trees behind the grandstand were the low livestock barns and pens and the exhibit halls, where over the years I had won ribbons for my 4-H projects — my angora rabbits, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum; and my plaster-of-paris relief map of Sam Dent in 1886 with balsa wood houses and lichen woods and painted fields; and my Just Say No to Drugs poster. They had all won blue ribbons, which Daddy had framed and hung on the living room wall and which were still hanging there, although I had not looked at them in a long time. The skeleton of a Ferris wheel and the long arms of the octopus ride were already in place, and the game booths and tents were being assembled by a gang of tanned shirtless young men and boys with tattoos on their arms and cigarettes in their mouths, probably the same out-of-town men and boys who last year had flirted and called to me and Jody and the other local girls as we strolled along the midway and tried to ignore them but always found an excuse to turn around at the end of the row of booths and walk back, more slowly this time, looking at each other and rolling our eyes as the boys asked us to come on over and try our luck.
“Would you like to go to the fair this year, Nichole?” Daddy asked. He had slowed the car and had been looking at the fairgrounds with me, probably thinking some of the same thoughts.
“When is it? When does it start?”
“Starts tomorrow, runs all week, right through the weekend.”
“I don’t know, Daddy. Maybe, though. Let me think about it, okay?”
He said sure, and we drove on into town.
We had one more conversation before we got home, which I think was responsible somehow for my deciding to go to the fair, although it’s not really connected. As we pulled into the yard, I said to Daddy, “Nothing will happen to Dolores, will it?”
He shut off the engine, and we sat there for a moment in silence, listening to the dashboard clock tick. Finally, he said, “No. Nobody wants to sue Dolores. She’s one of us.”
“Will the police do anything to her now?”
“It’s too late for that. Dolores can’t drive the school bus anymore, anyhow; the school board saw to that right off. I doubt she even wants to. Everyone knows she’s suffered plenty.”
“But everyone will blame her now, won’t they?”
“Most will, yes. Those that don’t know the truth will blame Dolores. People have got to have somebody to blame, Nichole.”
“But we know the truth,” I said. “Don’t we?”
“Yes,” he said, and for the first time since before the accident, he looked me straight in the face. “We know the truth, Nichole. You and I.” His large blue eyes had filled with sorrowful tears, and his whole face seemed to beg for forgiveness.
I made a small thin smile for him, but he couldn’t smile back. Suddenly, I saw that he would never be able to smile again. Never. And then I realized that I had finally gotten exactly what I had wanted.
“Well,” I said, “it’s over now.”
He turned away from me and got out of the car, and when he came around to my side with the wheelchair and opened my door, I said to him, “Daddy, I think I do want to go to the fair.”
He concentrated on unfolding the chair and said nothing.
“Let’s go Sunday afternoon and see everything,” I said. “The last day is always the best. Everyone in town goes then, and we can sit in the grandstand, and everyone will see us together. We can look at the livestock too, and the rides, the midway, the games, everything. All of us together, the whole family.”
He nodded somberly and lifted me out of the car and set me into my wheelchair. Then he pushed me up the ramp and into the house.