What we see is the shocked look on a father's face as he watches the accident unfold, then later sees a blanket put over the bodies of his dead children. Then he looks up and sees them laughing, running toward him in the snow. At the moment of their deaths, they are more alive to him than ever. Later, as he looks at the hulk of the bus after the accident, he hears the screams of the trapped children. This is a motif that recurs several times.
People looking at the bus hear the screams.
The loss for Nicole's father is not that she ends up in a wheelchair, but that he loses his dream of helping her become a rock star, a dream he wants to share with her in an intimate way. As the story advances, one thread occurs years later. On a plane, Mr. Stevens finds himself sitting next to a young woman who was a childhood friend of his daughter. This brings us to a revelation of what happened in that opening scene. As she began to swell, there is a long ride to the hospital during which Mr. Stevens holds his daughter in his lap, a knife ready to cut into her throat if she can no longer breath.