The Day I Died
Lori Rader-Day
Opening
On the day I died, I took the new oars down to the lake. They were heavy, but I was saving myself the second trip. The blades rode flat along the ground, flattening two tracks through the wet grass.
It was morning. The air was cool, but down on the dock, the slats were already hot. I noted a lone fishing boat out on the water. Inside, two men hunched silently over their tackle, their faces turned out across the lake. Beyond them, mist rose off the water, nearly hiding the far shore.
This moment. This is what I return to.
Later, I will note the long crack in the new oar, just before my head goes under, just before the flume of blood rises off my skin under the water like smoke. I will come back to this moment and think, if I had just gone back up the steps to the house immediately. If I had just stayed up at the house in the first place.
If I had just.
Part I
Chapter One
By the time the search volunteers arrived at my door with a handful of flyers, their zeal and concern had worn to a polish. I’d been watching the news and was a little tired of the kid myself. But I couldn’t look away. A baby, really, gone all day. He had bottomless brown eyes and tousled hair like the fuzz of a baby bird. He was two. He hadn’t toddled down the street to pet the neighbor’s dog, wasn’t found halfway to the convenience store with a handful of pennies for candy. The real thing, this kid. Missing.
“Have you seen this little boy?” asked one of the women. The other yawned into the back of her hand. They wore yoga pants and Parks Junior-Senior High School Booster Club sweatshirts. One had pigtail braids, like a child, and the other one, the tired one, had her hair pulled back in a band, probably growing out bad bangs. Behind them, the street was overlit with neighborly porch lights.
“I saw him on the news,” I said, taking the offered flyer and reading the details I’d already heard: Aidan Ransey, height, weight. So small. “How long’s he been gone?”
“Since this morning,” said the one with pigtails, but the other woman didn’t like me being curious, I could tell. Either she’d tired of the questions or she thought mine wasn’t the right kind. “From his own bed,” pigtails said, her voice catching. I was reminding this woman to be worried for other children now sleeping in their beds or waiting up for their mommies to come home from their good deeds. “I can’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head.
The other woman shot her friend a look. She could believe it. “Look,” this one said, getting down to business. “Can you put a flyer in your . . .” She glanced behind me, toward the staircase with its worn carpet, then toward the back hallway with the overhead light dangling, waiting for a new bulb. I lived upstairs, but none of the other neighbors would bother to answer a knock on the front door. Truthfully, I usually didn’t, either, but I knew from the news that there would be canvassers. Better to open the door. Better to take the flyer. “. . . in your laundry room or something?” the woman said finally. “Call the number if you hear or see anything, OK? We need to keep moving.”
“Wait a minute,” the one with the braids said. “I know you from football pickup. Are you Josh’s mother? I’m Caleb’s mom, from Boosters?”
“Joshua,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth.
“We haven’t heard from you about helping with concessions,” she said. “And the pancake breakfast is coming up—here, let me give you my number.” She folded a flyer in half, Aidan’s face cut in two, and pulled out a pen. “We really count on all the parents to help.”
Her friend smirked as I took the flyer. “Thanks,” I said. It was the second time in one evening I’d been asked to volunteer for something. My activism was normally confined to dropping the occasional quarter into fund-raising buckets. But not for anyone who rang a bell or stood in street intersections. They were assholes. “Pancakes,” I said.
“It’s the most popular fund-raiser for the team we do all year,” Caleb’s mom said. “And so much fun.”
Headband and I exchanged a look. “Great, well,” I said. “I hope they find that little boy soon.”
A shadow passed over Caleb’s mom’s face. “They will,” she said. “As soon as they find his—”
“Come on, Steph,” her friend said. “We need to get this street done.”
They were down the sidewalk, the reflective stripes on their athletic shoes flashing, when the door at my shoulder opened to the chain’s length. The neighbor, Margaret, put one myopic eye against the opening. “What did she say? As soon as they find his what?”
“His mother,” I said.
Margaret pressed her ear up to the door opening. She wasn’t hard of hearing. She caught every noise we made upstairs and let us know about it, thumping a broom handle at her ceiling. She wrestled with the chain to open the door wider. Her twiggy legs stuck out of her housecoat. “How d’you know that?”
I looked again at the flyer, at the infant cheeks of Aidan Ransey, and handed it to her, then at the other copy, with a phone number and the woman’s name—Stephanie Bux—written in round, cheerful shapes. The i was dotted with a fat circle; the fours in her phone number were pointy, defensive. No—protective. The other woman would fill her in on their way down the street and then Caleb’s mom would be sorry she’d written anything down for me, even if we all knew I had no intention of calling.
I turned to Margaret. “Haven’t you heard?” I held the folded flyer to my forehead. “Apparently I’m some kind of voodoo priestess. I can see into the future. I seeeeee . . . a small boy, brown eyes. Yellow, almost white hair . . . I see pudgy hands and a full diaper—”
Margaret huffed and closed the door.
I lowered the flyer. After a moment of watching the street, I reached for the switch for our porch light and flicked it on. I didn’t believe in wishful thinking, even though it was all I seemed to do.
THE NEXT MORNING at the café on the courthouse square, the Parks County Spectator was sold down to a few copies. A handwritten sign above the cash register read NO CHANGE SORRY. I paid for a paper and a weak tea, glancing between the careful, narrow warning on the sign and the careful, narrow man behind the counter.