The Day I Died

by Lori Rader-Day

  This boy—the closed doors, the slammed doors, the constant video games, the wary looks—this boy was a ghost boy, a haunted boy, and my son had vanished. Joshua was missing, just as gone as the little boy Sheriff Keller was looking for. Why was no one looking for Joshua? Who was getting my boy back to me?

  I closed the refrigerator and wandered out of the kitchen, gathering some magazines, a sweatshirt, a few other loose items of clutter, then, no plan for them, stacked them on the nearest flat surface. I sat heavily on the couch and gazed around. Here. A two-bedroom rental with too-thin white walls and no yard or balcony. The same not-much we’d grown accustomed to. But I’d lived in worse, in places other people would abandon, in places that stank of decay and neglect. Decay. Neglect. These were crisp, precise words on the page that stood in for a reality most people didn’t truly understand.

  Tennessee, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio. Small towns, big towns one after the other, false starts, lost deposits. Mice in the walls and backed-up sinks. Old wallpaper with black freckles of mold.

  Then Chicago, where I’d let us get too comfortable. A handful of miles to the Wisconsin border, and I’d started to entertain ideas of settling down, maybe buying a condo. And then—

  Small towns were better. Towns with forgettable names, apartments with two locks on the door. Indiana. You could clean the dirty ovens. You could put out traps. There were more important things than having your slice of the pie, of putting down some roots, but it didn’t stop me from wondering. Maybe this was the place. Except it wasn’t because there was only one place, and we couldn’t go back there.

  I went to the kitchen and put some water on to boil, then grabbed the mail from the counter and went to the window in the living room to sort it in the fading light. Across the street, the houses lined up like a hand of solitaire. Down below, people walking their dogs stopped to chat.

  I glanced up and down the block. From the second floor, you could see pretty far, a precaution. But I would never get used to the scrubbed look of this place. The whole town, harvested. How long had it been since I had been among the stillness of trees, encircled by a stand of pines like a bunch of protective brothers? The only trees nearby were scrawny, scrub or planted, with no better reason to be here than I had.

  I added noodles to the boiling water and then took myself to the table and dropped into a chair. I was tired. Not just exhausted from a day of playing upright citizen for the sheriff, but forever tired, in my bones, in my skin. Tired of days, tired of nights. From the table I watched the window darken, the outside world folding away.

  In a minute I would go to the window and close the blinds. Another precaution. But did it matter? Here, in Plain Sight, Indiana, who was I hiding from anymore? I was afraid of thinking it through too fully.

  I got up and grabbed the straps of Joshua’s backpack to move it off the table but instead pulled it to me.

  The guidance counselor had called yesterday, twice. So actually yesterday I’d been asked to do three things I didn’t want to do—but I supposed it wasn’t volunteering when it was your own kid in trouble.

  Down the hall, Joshua’s door was still closed.

  A tangle of papers caught in the backpack’s zipper. I fought it open, pulled out the papers, and checked the spines on the books at the bottom. Language arts, Our World and Its People, a ragged copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which he’d finished a book report for weeks ago. Maybe it was a test, to see if I’d take it out. The math text, of course. I’d offered to help. I’d even learned the new alien way they did math in order to help, but he preferred to do it himself, badly.

  From the wad of papers, I picked out a math worksheet. Proof. He’d received a well-deserved D in red pen.

  I tried not to spend much time on the pinched belly of that red letter. So what if the teacher had a tendency toward small-mindedness? That didn’t change the facts.

  I flipped through a few more sheets, then dug deeper, flattening a few pages to take stock. More math, a report. They were just figures, or typed.

  At last I found a short-answer workbook page at the bottom of the pack. It was incomplete—empty, actually, except for the large round zero in red at the top and a few meager pencil markings in a corner. His name, JOSH, all capital letters.

  I stared at the name for a long moment, then stowed all the backpack’s contents as best I could and closed it up, leaving it on the table.

  In the kitchen, I stirred the noodles and wished I’d never looked. But I had, and now I knew. His handwriting—once so playfully dismissive of the horizon, so youthful and alive—was gone. His name, even written by his own hand, was false. It was built of sticks, each letter strategically rendered and apart, lonely and stripped. I’d never seen anything so desolate, so perfectly engineered to give away nothing at all.

  Joshua was hiding in plain sight, too. And I was pretty sure he was hiding from me.

  Chapter Three

  The call, when it came, was from Kent.

  “What did you get me into?” I said before he’d had a chance to say hello.

  “You’re up to the challenge,” he said. I could hear the smile. Sometimes I thought I might be in love with Kent, even though I hadn’t seen him in person in twelve years. What that said about me—well, it said everything about me that anyone could ever want to know. I’d been in love just the one time, a disaster. I’d had a few dates, if that was even the word. An awkward setup, once, and then the guy, the client, I’d met for a few weeks in a series of beige chain-name hotel rooms—but that was just sex. What I missed was the other person’s hip against mine on the couch. The thoughtless moments of life spent together. When I started thinking like this, I wished Kent weren’t twenty years older and completely in love with his wife.

  “Kent, the kid was taken by his mother,” I said. My cheek was growing hot against my cell phone. “Right? We’ve got the nanny, babysitter, whatever—spotted by the neighbors taking the kid out in her car, early. We’ve got the nanny and kid witnessed at the park. And then, poof. The woman’s dead in the broken-down ladies’ john, the kid’s gone, and the mother can’t be found.”

  “The mother—yeah, I didn’t think that through, did I? Maybe she didn’t do it.” We both listened to that false tenor of his voice. “OK, I can send someone else. But you’re literally down the block. You’d be saving your nation some serious travel expenses.”

  “I was thinking about charging my nation double this time,” I said. “Anything that reminds me too much of home, I charge at least time and a half.”

  He laughed, but we’d both heard it. Home. I couldn’t think what to say next.

  He cleared his throat. “Was there anything you wanted to know?”

  I didn’t think he meant about the dead babysitter. Some things, it was better not to know. “How did she die?” I said instead.

  “Badly,” he said. I could hear the grim set of his mouth. He was worried about me, or maybe it had nothing to do with me at all. “Something heavy to the back of the head—”

  “Got it. Sorry I asked. Did you know Keller lied about having the note so he could try me out first? Friend of yours?”

  “A little puffed up, but he’s all right—good guy, really. Just heard from him,” Kent said. “He’s got the note in hand and a few other things for you to look at. I could look into sending someone else . . .”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I have an appointment at Joshua’s school later but I can go do this early, get it over with.” I heard the words I had used and cringed. “Not that I don’t appreciate all the work.”

  “There’s another package coming from me,” he said. “Human resources.”

  “My favorite.” In fact, I liked the hiring cases that came through Kent less than I liked the little letters and notes people sent me from all over the country in response to a few well-placed ads of my own. My lonelyhearts. Given my preferences, I would never have to take Kent’s subcontracts or talk, really, to anyone else ever again. But a f
ew love letters sent from prison to analyze was no way to keep a roof over our heads.

  “I knew you’d be excited. Did you see that article in the Wall Street Journal about so-called smart pens saving the art of penmanship?” he said. “Published online, with no irony whatsoever.”

  “I hardly go online at all,” I said. “But I’m glad someone is saving handwriting, or we’ll be out of business.” I calculated our age difference again. He’d retire in a few years, and then what would I do? Joshua still needed to go to college. All those forms asking for information, social security numbers, phone numbers. Addresses where you could expect to be for a little while. In a few years, our life would need a solidity it didn’t have just now.

  I had met Kent in a university classroom. I was supposed to be cleaning it, and he had just spoken to the students there. I had listened from outside the door, rocking my sleeping newborn against my chest. Up until then, I’d been taking community center handwriting classes for fun. After the class, I let the students and then the visitor and the professor, deep in conversation, walk by and then carried Joshua in his car seat into the room. There were always so many coffee shop cups left behind. At the lectern, I found a lovely leather notebook filled with a geometric script. I was paging through it when the professor cleared his throat at the door. Kent introduced himself, eyeing the sleeping baby. “What did you see?” he said as I handed him the notebook. “Am I a serial killer?”

  The professor had laughed, but then his face drew still as I told the visitor what I thought of his script: self-conscious, high-minded, literal, a little too process driven.

  “High-minded?” Kent had said, grinning. “Am I really? I think you might be right.” And he had handed me one of his cards.

  Now Kent said, “You OK? Seriously, Anna, I didn’t even think—”

  I had taken a deep breath to calm myself, but he probably thought I was still thinking about the back of the babysitter’s head. I was glad I hadn’t heard about it while still in the sheriff’s office. “It’s fine,” I said. “Really. And send me as much human resources or whatever else as you want. I’m grateful for everything you—”

  “Going to stop you there,” he said. “Get down to see Keller again today, and that will be all the thanks I need.”

  All the thanks, but I never got to say them. In this way I was reminded that we weren’t friends. One of us had been a drowning person, and the other, a life raft. I was on land for the moment, and he probably only hoped he wouldn’t have to rescue me again. “I’ll go today,” I said. Not love, not friendship, in some ways not even gratitude on my part. It was relief, pure and deep relief that I might never need anyone’s help as much as I already had.

  KELLER’S RECEPTIONIST SAT at her desk, listening to the local talk-radio station at a low volume. When I opened the door, she snapped the dial down and smiled with a recognition I didn’t think warranted. Keller had been mouthing off about me, I figured. “Hey,” she said, drawing out the word. “I’m Sherry.”

  I waited for the punchline. Sherry and the sheriff? It was a bad ’70s sitcom, set in a diner with a laugh track and the same cop/doughnut joke in every script.

  The woman was just as bright as the sticky note she’d left the day before, just as blond and ponytailed and open-faced as the dot over that i had promised. More than that, I could sense that she was sticky, too—curious, wheedling.

  I didn’t have the patience, not after my repeat trip through the cattle chute of security downstairs. I hadn’t brought my laptop on purpose this time, hoping it would speed things up. But a gum-chomping uniformed woman with a nametag that read Deputy Tara Lombardi, a woman hardly older than Joshua with a pixie face and spiky black hair, had taken a long look through everything in my purse, including my Illinois driver’s license. Who would leave Chicago for this place? she had said with sneer.

  I had the same feeling now, in front of this receptionist’s too-familiar smile, as I had with my purse opened to its guts on the table. “The sheriff left a packet for me,” I said, all business.

  “Oh, sure, let me get it.” She pushed herself from her desk and hurried to the back.

  Aidan’s missing-child poster had been tacked to the wall over the woman’s workspace. The same fluffy-headed photo from all over town. Below it, nearly hidden from public view, was a coloring-book page scratched with red and blue, with a few distended letters in green in the corner. Mommy, it read in unpracticed lines and a simple squat pumpkin of a circle. The child’s handwriting telegraphed nothing except that he drew his o’s clockwise.

  Sherry returned carrying a large flat manila envelope. “I had to dig up his desk to find it,” she said. “That man, I swear.”

  I recognized the moment. I was supposed to respond in agreement, a roll of the eyes or a nod that said I also didn’t understand the mysteries of men. No problem. I didn’t.

  “Is there somewhere I can take a look at this?” I said. “I shouldn’t be long.”

  Sherry slid the envelope across the counter and watched my hand claim it. “Back there,” she said. “Any of the desks that aren’t . . . gross. They’re all slobs.”

  I chose a desk near the sheriff’s dark door. That man, Sherry had said, as though this one was worth distinguishing from another. I don’t think I’d ever offered a wry smile over a man’s endearing faults. I hadn’t had much of a chance for fondness.

  Just before I’d started formal training in handwriting, I’d moved into another new—old, actually—apartment, a house with three floors and tall ceilings. Kentucky. I was hugely pregnant and slow on the stairs, which attracted the attentions of the man on the top floor. He always managed to be getting his mail at the same time I was coming home. When he finally asked me to dinner, I couldn’t imagine what he saw in me. I wasn’t finding men at all attractive, then. But I’d considered his offer.

  In my lonely life, even with another life growing inside me, those months were the most alone I’d ever been. I waited tables, and sometimes the other girls would cover me for an extra break out of pity, but we weren’t friends. I took reduced-price classes at the community center, taught by retired accountants and résumé-building new college graduates, any topic anyone wanted to teach me. I hardly talked to anyone. I didn’t know what I was doing during that time. I spun in place with energy, with freedom and possibility, but also with nerves jangling. Each evening was a struggle not to dial Ray’s number and tell him where to pick me up. I missed him. I missed—everything. My memories would flatten until I couldn’t remember why I was somewhere he wasn’t.

  Then, in one of the community center classes, I learned a bit about handwriting analysis from a librarian who had taken it up as a hobby.

  The world peeled away. My manager at the restaurant had a scribble as fast as a rabbit’s heartbeat, panicked. The college student taking polls at the bus stop transcribed with a script so tight and hesitant that she seemed to grow smaller as she wrote. People began to reveal themselves on the page. In life, they might be working, playing with their kids, remodeling their houses. But on the page, most of them skirted the edges of complete chaos.

  Once I’d scraped the bottom of the librarian’s knowledge of handwriting analysis, I’d put together enough tips from the restaurant to order a used textbook. The package came while I was at work, and the nice upstairs neighbor signed for it, leaving it at my door with a note. He hadn’t known he was giving me everything I needed.

  His handwriting had been calming, elegant in a way I hadn’t expected and hadn’t ever seen. I put myself to sleep that night remembering the way his script rolled forward, confident and steady and hopeful.

  But then every time I saw him afterward, he brought up the package and how happy he’d been to offer his John Henry for the delivery. He meant John Hancock. John Henry, the steel-driving man, had probably signed his name, if he ever had, with a shaky X. Was John Henry a real person? John Hancock was the one with the significant signature. Maybe it was a joke? I couldn’t tell.
/>
  The neighbor only smiled, now with affection. What I saw was possession. He didn’t know me, didn’t know what I’d come through to hold this precious freedom in my own two hands. But he was already breaking off a hunk of it for himself.

  I started to use the back stairwell. After Joshua was born, his late-night cries drove off most of the other neighbors, including the man with the elegant hand.

  That man might have been something to regret, if I was in the mood. But these days I only had time for the man I was trying to raise.

  I was still holding the sheriff’s assignment in my hand. I ran a finger under the envelope’s sealed flap and slid out a single sheet of copy paper and a plastic sleeve. I shook the package upside down. Another, smaller piece of paper drifted to the desk.

  I took up this one first. Pink, lined. It had been ripped without care from a notepad, probably beside the phone. Two edges of the paper were ragged. Felt-tip pen, black.

  Content first:

  MILK, CAT FOOD

  AIDAN’S CRACKERS

  PEANUT BUTTER

  BANANAS

  HAMBERGER

  I went through the list again, then turned the paper over, looking at the points at which the pen had leaked through. I turned to the front again and studied each line. The lettering was all uppercase, rigid, each letter a hostage on the page. Each word had taken a lot of time. The author might have used a chisel and had similar results—except that Aidan’s crackers had a little slant to it.

  I looked for a long time at those two words, so heavy with attention and care. So laden with the unbearable love for the name a mother called her child.

  Then I turned to the other sheet of paper. It was a copy. A color copy, but still a copy. Apparently Keller considered my time his to waste.

  Like the grocery list, the note had been ripped from a larger piece of paper, ragged on two edges, too, from the looks of the thing. Pink again. Hearts in a slight darker pink lined the edges. It was unsigned, and the block letters of the grocery list were gone. The script here was slim and girlish, but uneven and hurried. Ballpoint pen, blue.