The Sweet Hereafter

Ansel begins his chapter by asserting that, despite being the closest person to the accident, and despite knowing the roads, the bus, and Dolores’ driving habits, he “never saw it coming” (39). At the time of the accident, Ansel was waving to his two children in the back of the bus, but was actually thinking about the body of Risa Walker, with whom he is having an affair.  Risa Walker and Ansel regularly meet in Room 11 of the Bide-a-Wile Motel, which Risa Walker operates with her husband, Wendell. Ansel feels guilty about the affair, but says that Risa and Wendell’s marriage is already “dead” (57). Risa Walker and Ansel used to say “I love you” to each other, but Ansel says they were just lying to each other, and they stop saying this to each other after the accident.

Ansel describes their affair as “lonely” and “solitary” (40). Sometimes, Risa doesn’t come to meet Ansel in Room 11, in which case he goes home. Other times, she meets him and they have sex in the dark. It is “melancholy and sweet and reflective” and “straightforwardly sexual” (41). The sex allows each of them to escape their own lives. Ansel says that men don’t notice how small and fragile women are until they hold up an article of a woman’s clothing. Men mistakenly see women as having the same size bodies in part because men are afraid of women. 

Years before the accident, when Ansel’s wife, Lydia, went into the hospital because she was dying of cancer, Ansel packed up all of her clothes. He held up her nightgown and was struck by how small and flimsy it was, saying it was a discovery of “an aspect of her deepest reality” and a discovery of part of Ansel’s own reality (43).

After the bus accident, Ansel drinks and stays home alone. He feels dead, liminal or limbic, alive only to contemplate the memories of dead wife and children. Drinking is a way to “feel the pain,” and thinking of his lost wife and children is a way of keeping himself going (44). 

Before his wife died, Ansel took his family on a trip to Jamaica. On the trip, Ansel and his wife smoke a lot of marijuana and one day accidentally leave one of their 4-year-old twins, Jessica, at a supermarket. They drive for a while without realizing it and then they rush back to get her, afraid that she has been kidnapped, or worse. Jessica is at the supermarket and fine, but the experience scares Ansel, and “clarified things” for him (55). It made him realize that terrible things are not confined to Vietnam, and war, and could happen to his family. The experience was the “permanent end of [his] childhood and adolescence” which begins the process of “hardening of [his] heart,” which Ansel describes as the “Vietnamization of [his] domestic life” (53). 

Ansel actually witnesses the bus accident, in which the vehicle swerves to the right, crashes through a guardrail, and plummets down the embankment onto the ice filling a sand pit. The bus then slides along the ice before the back of the vehicle breaks through and sinks into the freezing water. Ansel sees images of the accident whenever he closes his eyes, so he tries not to. After the accident, he begins to drink heavily.

After Lydia dies, Ansel feels “as if [he] had no sexual nature” (59). He focuses on the needs of his children, his dead wife, and the garage and its finances. Ansel’s libido reemerges, however, he begins fantasizing about Risa Walker. Ansel is awkward in trying to seduce Walker, at first over-effusive and then embarrassed and distant.. Eventually, it’s Risa that walks up to Ansel and invites him to Room 11. They have been having the affair for three years, and neither of them has told anyone else.  

When the bus accident happens, Ansel participates in the rescue efforts. Both Ansel and Risa lose the only meaning they had in their lives when their children die. When they see each other at the accident scene, they feel like strangers: “Our individual pain was so great that we could not recognize any other” (68). The bodies of the dead children are laid out on the snow, waiting to be put on stretchers. Ansel sees their dead faces, which he says “sealed [him] off from [him]self” (69). He begins irrationally looking for Lydia, his wife, who has been dead for several years, to tell her that their children are dead. After the injured children are evacuated to area hospitals, the rest of the parents remain, waiting for the bodies. Both Ansel and Dolores refuse to leave the scene of the accident. 

Ansel goes to visit the damaged bus one night; there, he meets a lawyer named Mitchell Stephens, who is also looking at the bus. Ansel describes the bus as a kind of horrible creature that took the town’s children, before the people of the town killed the beast in turn. When Ansel visits, he hears the children’s voices, and the dead children seem more alive to him than he does to himself. Ansel repeatedly expresses that he wants to be with the children. Stephens and Ansel speak. Stephens appears to try to be comforting, and says that he can help Ansel, but Ansel becomes angry and threatens to harm Stephens. Ansel admits to himself that he is no danger to Stephens and is instead a mere “ghost” (84). Stephens says others have agreed to be represented by Stephens in a lawsuit, and that Ansel has a case. Ansel responds by saying that none of the townspeople have any case: “You’re just trying to use us […] [y]ou want us to pull each other in” (85). Stephens describes this same conversation, but from a very different perspective, in the next chapter. 

After the accident, Ansel goes to Room 11 and he and Risa talk. Risa says she felt and knew that something terrible was going to happen. Ansel thinks she is stupid for thinking that way. Ansel understands why people rationalize what happened in the way Risa has, but it still irritates him. When Risa does it, it makes her seem, to him, “stupid and weak” (56). He says her dreams collapsed and she “turned superstitious” (57). He adds, “[i]t’s a way of living with tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand” (39). The scene in Room 11 is the last time they will be alone together. Risa asks Ansel what they must do, to heal, and neither of them have any answer (88). Risa’s face is not beautiful to Ansel anymore, and it seems like that of a male actor. They never speak to each other alone again because “from then on, [they are] simply different people” (88).