The Sweet Hereafter

Dolores and Abbott have mostly stayed out of the public view after the accident. Dolores attends the funeral services because to do so is, for her, “something crucial between [her] and the children” (224). Dolores has been terminated from her job as a bus driver and still struggles emotionally every time she sees a school bus. She has to look away. She starts a job driving patrons of the Lake Placid hotels. She is very lonely after the accident and only really communicates with Abbott. Her son, Reginald, invites her and Abbott to move up to Plattsburgh to live with him, but she refuses. 

Dolores and Abbott decide to attend the Sam Dent County Fair. They have both been attending the fair since they were children, long before they knew each other. Every year, Abbott gets excited about the demolition derby, “almost like a child” (221), while Dolores likes the livestock exhibitions because they remind her of her childhood, when her father was a dairy farmer. Abbott likes to sit at the top of the grandstand and every year men volunteer to help lift him in his wheelchair up to the top. 

However, this year, after the accident, Dolores and Abbott have a very different experience at the fair. Dolores has mistakenly believed that people had moved on and that her relationships to the people she has known all her life, as friend and neighbor, have returned to the way they were before. She considers the town her “true family” (223) and has begun to feel like herself, although she admits that “[she] knew, of course, that [she] would never be the same person again. You can’t raise the dead. [She] knew that” (226). Dolores is nervous and scared about going to the fair. Once there, all the cars are laying out in a big open space and all the drivers and teenagers are milling around them and flirting and talking. Dolores looks around for her old station wagon, nick-named Boomer, which she sold to Sam Dent resident, Jimbo Gagne, a man who looks evil but is actually very respectful. Gagne had wanted to enter the car into the demolition derby, but Dolores does not see Boomer anywhere.

As Dolores pushes Abbott’s wheelchair toward the stand, one person after another turns away or refuses to acknowledge either her or Abbott. When they get to the stand, no one offers to help and Dolores has to drag Abbott up to the first landing by herself, in view of everyone. Billy Ansel arrives with a young woman, Stacey Gale, and Dolores realizes that Ansel and the woman are drunk. Ansel is friendly to Dolores and describes her an Abbott as “old friends.” Ansel helps get Abbott up to the top of the stand and says that neighbors need to help each other out. Dolores puts her head in her hands and feels very sorry that she and Abbott came to the fair. Ansel tells Dolores that she’s got to have a good time and to hell with everyone else.

Dolores describes how Ansel had changed since the accident. She says “[h]e scared me; but mostly he made me sad. He had been a noble man; and now he was ruined” (235). Dolores also says that though the town didn’t realize it, it depended in many ways on its children: “[a] town needs its children for a lot more than it thinks” (236).

Dolores describes what has happened in Sam Dent since the accident. Risa has separated from Wendell and they are getting a divorce. The Lamstons have moved up to Plattsburgh. Kyle Lamston was admitted to the hospital, went back to drinking afterwards, and then got brain damage and can never work again. Some of the families from the Wilmot Flats who lost their children, including the Bilodeaus and Atwaters, began selling drugs and went to prison. Lots of people moved away. Dolores says “a town comes undone” without its children and becomes a “scattering of windblown individuals” (236-37). In some cases, as with Sean, the son of Risa and Wendell, the child or children are the only reason their parents are still together. Dolores says that in her own life having children strengthened and deepened the love between her and Abbott, which was previously superficial and selfish love. 

Before the derby starts, Nichole Burnell arrives, receives cheers from the crowd, and is treated like a hero. Several men lift up Nichole and her wheelchair to the top of the grandstand. Ansel tells Stacey that Nichole saved the town from 100 horrible lawsuits and adds that all the families have dropped out of the lawsuit. Dolores and Ansel ask what it was that Nichole witnessed. The derby gets going and cars crash into each other, in a scene that echoes the destruction of the accident itself.

Ansel admits to Dolores and Abbott that Nichole said Dolores had been driving 72 miles per hour at the time of the accident. Both Dolores and Ansel know that Nichole lied. Dolores realizes that the whole town now believes she was speeding and driving recklessly, and was responsible for the accident. 

The demolition derby continues, and Dolores’ old station wagon, Boomer, appears. The crowd cheers every time Boomer takes a hit from the other cars. At the last second, Boomer escapes being crashed into and manages to hit the two remaining cars instead, which the crowd also cheers for. Boomer wins that heat. Dolores decides, even before the heat has finished, that she and Abbott “must leave this place” (253).She feels “utterly and permanently separated from the town of Sam Dent and its people” (253). She describes that she and the children involved in the accident are solitary and separate from the people of the town, and that the people of the town supported or despised Dolores and the children according to their own needs. Dolores begins to take Abbott down when four men from the town step forward to help. She describes the sounds she hears as she and Abbott leave the fairground, which are like “[o]ur childhoods that were gone forever but still calling mournfully back to us” (256). As Dolores drives home with Abbott, she sees her headlights reflected in the sparkling eyes of animals by the side of the road, creatures she describes as waiting for her to pass by so they can return to the “safe familiar darkness” (257).