Free The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks Page A

grateful to her.
    From then on, I guess you could say we were in love.
    At least we called it that. From start to finish, though, it was a secret affair. Risa has always assured me that no one knew we were in love; she insists that during the nearly three years we were involved she confided in no one. Consequently, she had her private version of the love affair, and I had mine, and there was no third version to correct them.
    None that I know of, anyhow.
    As a result, until the morning of the accident, Risa Walker and I behaved toward each other as if we could go on like that forever meeting and making love a couple of times a week in a darkened room late at night for an hour or two, and acting like mere acquaintances the rest of the time. Our love affair seemed to be permanently suspended halfway between fantasy and reality. Our sense of time and sequence was open ended; it was like a movie with no beginning and no ending, and it remained that way because we did nothing to make our relationship public, to involve other people, a process that would have been started if Risa had ever confided in someone or if I had revealed it to someone. That would have objectified it somehow, taken it outside our heads, and no doubt would have led Risa to choose between me and Wendell, or would have led me to demand it. She would have chosen me, I believe that, and we would have married soon after. And then, by the time of the accident, when we lost our children, we would have had each other to turn to, instead of away from, which is what we did.
    Out there on the Marlowe road that snowy morning, I remember at last climbing back up the embankment from the sandpit to the road and seeing her in the crowd. It was by then a large mixed stunned gathering along the shoulder of the road, of parents and local folks trying to calm and comfort one another, and cold exhausted state troopers, firemen, and rescue workers, and a pack of ravenous photographers and journalists.
    There was even a TV camera crew from the NBC affiliate in Plattsburgh on the scene, headed by a blond woman in tights and leg warmers and a leather miniskirt who kept shoving her microphone at people’s gray faces, asking them what they were feeling. As if they could say.
    Of course, I thought of Vietnam, but nothing I had seen or felt in Vietnam had prepared me for this. There was no fire and smoke or explosive noise, no wild shouts and frightened screams; instead, there was silence, broken ice, snow, and men and women moving with abject slowness: there was death, and it was everywhere on the planet and it was natural and forever; not just dying, perversely here and merely now.
    And when I saw Risa Walker standing among the others up there by the road, it was as if I were seeing her for the first time in my life as if seeing her on newsreel footage, a woman from the village who had lost her son, a mother who had lost her only child. She was like a stranger to me then, a stranger whose life had just been made utterly meaningless. I know this because I felt the same way. Meaning had gone wholly and in one clot right out of my life too, and as a result I’m sure I was like a stranger to her as well.
    Our individual pain was so great that we could not recognize any other.
    The bus had not been hauled out you could see the front end of the vehicle up on the ice cluttered far bank of the pit, like some huge dying yellow beast caught struggung to clamber out and frozen in the midst of the attempt, with the rest of the thing underwater. The snow and the cold made everyone down there the rescue workers, the wet suited divers from Burlington, the state troopers move slowly, hunched in on their bodies as if with fear and permanent resentment, like lifetime prisoners in a Siberian gulag.
    On the near bank, covered with dark green wool blankets, were the bodies of the last of the children removed from the bus by the divers, the kids who had been seated near the back. They had been laid out in