Here Lies Daniel Tate
Cristin Terrill
The first question everyone always asks is, what’s your name?
I won’t tell you, because I don’t want to lie to you. I want to tell the truth for once; no fake names like the ones I used to give when people asked me. I had no choice back then. I was a born liar and, by the time everything began, I barely remembered my real name anyway. I left that boy dead and buried in a Saskatchewan town where the snow somehow turned gray the moment it hit the ground. I don’t mean that metaphorically, like I just shed his name and history, although I did that, too. I mean I killed him.
I crept back into town one night, skirting the bright pools of light from streetlamps and avoiding the houses where I knew dogs barked. Old, stale snow crunched under my feet. Inside my coat pocket I fingered a glossy baseball card that was creased and fraying at the corners from too much handling. It wasn’t a real baseball card, just a picture of me in my T-ball uniform with my name in block letters across the bottom. I was six in the picture, and already there was a gap in my smile, the tooth knocked loose by a closed fist. But I was still smiling.
When I reached my mother’s house, I stood in the darkness below the trees outside and watched her through the window. She was sitting in her usual chair, flipping channels on the television. I hadn’t seen her for a year, and I guess I expected to feel . . . something. But I didn’t. There was only the familiar hole in my chest where the feeling should have been.
I dialed her number from memory. Snow fell and clung to my eyelashes, and I blinked the flakes away to watch her. After three rings, she rose from her chair and crossed to the ancient handset mounted on the wall.
“Hello?” she said, the word partially muffled by a cigarette.
“Mrs. Smith?” I said. Not exactly that, of course, since “Smith” isn’t my name. “This is Officer Green of the Royal Mounted Police.”
“Yeah?” she asked. Getting a call from the cops didn’t faze her.
“It’s about your son,” I said. “I’m sorry to tell you there’s been an accident.”
I told her I was dead, hit by a speeding car as I crossed an icy road. I watched her close. She didn’t move or speak for a long time.
Then she said:
“I don’t have a son.”
She hung up and went back to her chair, and that was it. I left, and I left the boy I’d been behind with her, dead and buried in the dingy gray snow.
? ? ?
But that’s not where this story starts, not really. It began on another snowy night a few years later, with police lights bathing the world in red and blue.
I hunched against the cold at one of the few remaining pay phones on the east side of Vancouver. It was too fucking cold to be on the streets. I dialed 911 and counted along to the rings. After the seventh, someone answered.
“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”
“Hello?” I ground my voice down against the back of my throat, making it sound low and gravelly. “My wife and I just came across this kid, and there’s . . . well, there’s something wrong with him. He seems really out of it.”
I heard the dispatcher suppress a yawn. Either bored or new to the night shift. “How old is he?”
“Like fifteen or sixteen,” I said. I’d learned by then what a crucial part of the scam that was, and luckily I had enough of a baby face to pull it off. “I think maybe he’s lost. Someone should come get him. It’s freezing out here.”
She asked for the address and told me they were sending a car. I sat down on the sidewalk in a protected alcove that had once been the doorway of a boarded up pharmacy. The cement was like ice through the fabric of my jeans, but I wouldn’t be there long. I pulled my baseball cap down over my eyes, flipped up the hood of my sweatshirt, and waited.
The squad car pulled up with its siren off but its lights flashing, painting red and blue beams across the lacy curtain of falling snow. I burrowed deeper into my hoodie and bowed my head to hide my face under the brim of my cap.
“Hi there,” one of the officers, the younger one, said as he climbed out of the cruiser. His voice was kind, but he kept his distance. Fresh out of the academy and still a little jumpy. “You okay?”
The older officer was less cautious and crouched down beside me. He had a ring on his left hand, maybe kids of his own around my age at home. “Hey, buddy, what’s your name?”
I didn’t speak. I didn’t even look up.
“Come on, you’ve got to know who are you,” the older officer pressed, his tone light and teasing. “Everyone knows who they are.”
Not true.
“Okay,” he said when I didn’t respond. “How about you come with us? You’ve got to be half-frozen.”
He reached for my arm, and I recoiled violently. It wasn’t a hard reaction to fake. The officer held up his empty hands, while his partner’s hand flew to the holster at his side.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” he said. He looked back at his partner, who was still poised to grab his gun if I turned out to be violent. “Jesus, Pearson. Relax, would you? We’re not going to hurt you, son, I promise.”
I gradually let them talk me up off the sidewalk and into the squad car. They tried to engage me in conversation as they took me back to their station, but I kept my head down and my mouth shut. I used to talk, tell some sob story, but I’d learned there was more power in silence.
They stuck me in a holding room with a vending machine sandwich and a cup of hot chocolate until they could figure out what to do with me. I would have preferred not to have involved the authorities—it was riskier this way—but Covenant House was full and it was cold. These guys were my best chance for a bed. It took about an hour for them to come back with a small white woman in jeans and a messy ponytail. I had moved to the corner of the room, sitting on the thin carpet with my knees pulled up to my chest. She crouched down at my eye level, but well out of my reach, so she’d obviously been doing this for a while. She told me her name was Alicia, in that low, soothing voice that people who work with troubled children or wild animals seem to be born with. She worked at a province-run care home, and she was going to take me there so I could get some sleep.