The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks

give a damn what the others were doing, even Risa. It was almost funny to me at that moment, in a cruel and slightly superior way. Ghosts don’t enter into class action lawsuits. I calmly smiled at the lawyer, and I think I even wished him luck, and got into my truck and closed the door on him. Slowly I backed the truck away from him and drove out of the lot, turned left, and headed down the valley toward the Rendezvous.
    As I had so many times over the last couple of years, I parked my truck in the deserted parking lot outside the Rendezvous, which, like everything else in town, was closed, and walked across the road to Room “at the Bide a Wile. I don’t know if I expected Risa to be there, but surely I hoped she would be-I had no other reason to go there this late.
    She was sitting by the window in the wicker chair, and when I let myself into the darkened room, she said simply, without expression, I knew you’d come.
    ‘Well, I can’t say I did. I sat down opposite her, on the edge of the bed, and put my hands on my knees. Habit, I guess.
    Me, too, she said. Thank God for habits.
    We tried for a few moments to talk the way we used to, the way people who love each other are supposed to talk intimately, more or less honestly, about their feelings for one another and for other people as well. We tried to talk not as if nothing had happened, of course, but with the accident and the loss of our children as a context. It was useless. I couldn’t say anything true about how I felt, and neither could she.
    This is the first time I’ve been able to leave the house, I said.
    People keep calling on the phone and coming by to see if they can help out.
    No one can help.
    No. Not really. But they try.
    Yes, they try.
    You’ll go to the funeral, though, won’t you?
    Yes, I said, I’ll be there. But I’d rather stay at home alone.
    There’ll be a lot of people there.
    I expect so.
    I wish it was just going to be the families, you know, like us.
    They’re the only ones who really understand.
    I guess so.
    But people have been very thoughtful and sympathetic.
    Yes. They have.
    We sounded like strangers sitting in a dentist’s waiting room.
    Finally, though, we gave it up and were silent for a while. Then she told me how she had known all along that something like this was going to happen. She had felt it in her bones, she said. As if she wanted me to be amazed and praise her for it.
    I decided that she was stupid to think that and even stupider to say it, although I did not tell her so. Instead, I told her about my unexpected meeting with the lawyer, Stephens. Without saying why, I said that I’d stopped by the garage and while I was there I’d caught the lawyer taking pictures of the bus with a flash camera, which was more or less the truth. The sonofabitch tried to get me to hire him for some kind of negligence suit, I said. He told me he’d already got you and Wendell signed up, you and Wendell and the Ottos, and I told him to shove it. We don’t need a lawyer, I added.
    What do we need?
    Good question. I stood up and took a step toward the door; I still had my coat and wool cap on. But we don’t need a lawyer, I said. Count me out.
    She looked up at me, and in the bands of moonlight falling through the blinds I could see her face clearly, and it was no longer lovely to me.
    It didn’t even look like a woman’s face anymore; it was like the face of a male actor who had made himself up as a woman. ‘Well, she said, goodbye.
    Goodbye. I pulled my gloves over my hands and opened the door and stepped outside, where I turned and said to her, I have to go home now.
    You go home, Billy.
    I closed the door on her and walked away. We spoke again, of course, on numerous occasions, but always with other people surrounding us; we managed not to meet again in a room alone, however, or to speak face to face, and so it was as if we never saw each other after that, never saw the people we had once been, Risa Walker and Billy Ansel.