The Day I Died

by Lori Rader-Day

  Back through town, Joshua slumped against the passenger door, as far from me as he could get.

  I took a deep breath. We were supposed to talk about math, but I didn’t think math was the problem. “Would it be the worst thing, for the little boy to live with his mom and not his dad?”

  He began to pick at the spot on the window again. “No.”

  “No?”

  “But why?” he said.

  “Why what?”

  “Well, why couldn’t he see him?” he said. “Sometimes?”

  Shards of memory: the glint of sun on the new boat oar. Lake water at the back of my throat.

  We drove on, stopping for a red light a few blocks from the apartment. The truck rumbled lightly under us as I calculated the silence ahead. He was only thirteen. At least five years until college, and then what? In the silence, he might become the very thing I feared. Or worse: I might lose him altogether.

  The image that came to me now was my mother, leaning against a kitchen counter, then turning away. I’d had a broken arm and she’d said—what had she said? This isn’t how I raised you. To talk back, she meant.

  The light changed but I sat staring at the bright green circle, immobile until the car behind us honked. I pulled through the light and to the side of the street, threw the truck into park, and turned to him. What were the words we had agreed on, over time?

  “Joshua, you know your dad had some—he was sick, and I didn’t think he could get better,” I said. “I worry that I was wrong, but I don’t think so. I worry about a lot of things. If there’s something you want to talk about . . .”

  I was leaning toward him, pleading. He was unmoved and silent.

  “I can tell you one thing,” I said, turning back to the steering wheel. “You’re not like him.”

  I was about to start the truck again when, finally, in a voice as even and unconcerned as though he were asking about math, he said, “How do you know?”

  “Because I do,” I said, gripping the wheel with both hands. “I know him and I know you. I’m in a pretty good place to judge. You’re smarter, kinder. You’re already a better man than your dad had a chance of being.”

  He let his head fall against the window. “Did you read it in my handwriting?”

  “No. I didn’t read it anywhere,” I said. “Haven’t you ever heard of intuition?” I wanted to place a hand on him, but didn’t. “I don’t need to see it in your handwriting. I can just feel it.”

  He looked at me, and I knew what he wasn’t saying. I didn’t rely on intuition. Sometimes I didn’t seem to have any.

  But then his eyes went wide. I turned my head to find a dark figure outside my window. I threw my elbow on the door’s lock button as a set of knuckles landed on the glass.

  I finally recognized the gold buttons of the uniform, and then the sheriff’s hat. I cranked down the window, still shaking.

  “Ms. Winger, is everything fine here?” He ducked low to see across the expanse of the front seat.

  “We’re just having a little talk, sort of unexpectedly. I—Sheriff, this is my son, Joshua,” I said. “Joshua, this is Sheriff Keller.”

  The sheriff leaned across me and put out his hand. “Well, nice to meet you, sir. Your mother thought you were too good a guy for us to meet, but here we are.”

  Joshua pumped the offered hand a few times, giving up a smile kept tight and cautious.

  “School going OK, then?” the sheriff asked, pulling back outside and leaning on the window with folded arms.

  “Yeah, it’s OK. Except math.” Joshua shot me a look. “But I’m on it.”

  “Good, good.” Keller nodded. “Ms. Winger, I was just over at the Ransey house to talk with Bo.”

  I glanced into the sideview mirror at the vehicle behind ours. A black SUV. Of course.

  “Damnedest thing, I thought I saw you out at Sugar Creek Park yesterday after our chat, too. I’m running into you everywhere I go.” I looked away from his self-satisfied grin. “I was just reassuring Bo Ransey how hard we’re working to get Aidan back. I left you out of that. I don’t think he needs to know my methods. But I told him I have all my best people on it.”

  The process was tainted, irrevocably. Meeting Bo—even twice, even having a conversation with him—might have been forgiven. But I had broken my own rules by going to the house, and what had I gained? Nothing useful. Seeing the Ransey house had confirmed something for me, given me a moment of relief. Now I saw that I had driven there for that very thing, a sense of superiority.

  Joshua scooted in from his side of the seat. “How many people do you have?”

  “Ah, son. It’s a small town,” Keller said, smiling. “My best people is just one guy. Me.”

  Joshua’s laugh was full and loud.

  “And my chief deputy. And your mom, of course. She’s been the consummate professional,” Keller said, giving me a heavy-lidded look. “She’s so good at her job I’d like to have her come back by to help me out with another lead.”

  Extortion. None of this would have happened if I’d just minded my own business. “A new lead?”

  “Maybe, maybe nothing, but I have to follow every single lead I get, even if it is a far shot in the dark,” he said, turning his head to give a sharp look to a car passing too quickly. The car slowed, an arm poking out the window to wave. “Frank Hart,” the sheriff said, shaking his head, and then turned back to us. “Trying to make my town a better place to live, all the time, so of course I’m going to track down every last bit of a lead. If I can’t spend too much time on the hocus-pocus, it’s because I have a boy to get home before the trail gets cold.”

  I rubbed my arms, feeling the evening chill now. There was something in his tone that I remembered—a sudden memory of a knock on the tin-can trailer I’d rented on a patch of nowhere in Tennessee. The state trooper with the apologetic eyes.

  I hadn’t thought of that man in a long time. That man. He was the one who’d found me and had to report me alive—but he’d also set me free. You don’t have to sit here, waiting, he’d said. Is there someplace you can go? There hadn’t been, but I had hoped someday there would be.

  I turned and studied the sheriff’s face.

  “—shoot anybody?” Joshua was asking.

  “Joshua.”

  “Well, now, we don’t like to do that if we don’t have to,” Keller said.

  I said, “So. Your best man is on the case.”

  “He certainly is,” Keller said. “I’ve been out to the Ransey place quite a lot in my tenure. I send my chief deputy even more. He’s on Ransey duty most of the time. If Mr. Ransey needs attention, we’ve got it to spare—but he doesn’t get to decide what we pay that attention to. Understand? Now, I don’t want to keep you. Good evening, Ms. Winger, Mr. Winger.”

  I sat for a moment after he was gone, finally coming out of the conversation as if from a deep sleep. At last I rolled up the window.

  “Mom,” Joshua said. “Did you hear that?”

  I wasn’t sure what I had heard and what my mind had filled in. “What? Did I hear what, honey?”

  “He called me Mister Winger.” He turned in his seat to watch the sheriff pull away. Keller flipped the siren to let it whoop-whoop at us. I laughed at Joshua’s surprise, relieved by how good it felt to take air deep into my lungs. How long had I been holding my breath?

  I leaned over and put a hand on the back of Joshua’s neck, gently. “Well. Why not? I was telling you. That’s who you are.”

  Joshua, of course, brushed my hand away.

  Chapter Eight

  The Dairy Bar parking lot was full, a crowd gathered around the picnic tables. I would have pulled back out again and gone home, except that Joshua seemed interested in dinner out, even a crappy malt. But I couldn’t help thinking that most of the people had come to gawk or compare notes on the Ranseys in what amounted to their own front yard. I made our order at the window—to go, I confirmed twice.

  When I turned back from paying, Joshua was
walking off toward the tables. “Hey,” I called, but the girl at the window was pulling me back for my change.

  “I need quarters,” she yelled over her shoulder.

  “We all need something we don’t have,” said the woman coming up behind her in a matching Dairy Bar shirt. I recognized the old woman from somewhere and decided she must have been the one smoking out the back door earlier that day, a long shift. The woman’s eyes were sunken and her voice scratchy. “Give the lady some dimes, peach. Dimes is spending money, aren’t they?” The woman looked over at me with a smile that didn’t reach beyond a grimace.

  I waved the dimes away, but the girl was insistent it would mess up her drawer. I remembered that all-encompassing concern and took pity, waiting. By the time the change had been sorted out, I’d lost sight of Joshua.

  “He’s over here.” Grace stood at the edge of the lot in the spotlight of a streetlamp overhead, waving me over. A few faces had turned to see who was yelling and who’d been yelled at, and they all seemed to be watching openly as I made my way over. “He and mine are tight, I guess,” Grace said. She had a big cup of something icy in her hand and gestured with it toward a picnic table where Joshua sat with an assortment of kids, including one who might have been one of the boys from the school hallway. “Shane Junior or Shay, we call him,” she said, pointing with the cup again. “I wanted to name him Brad Pitt after his daddy, but my husband wouldn’t hear of it. Here he comes.”

  I turned into a chest of brown polyester and brass buttons. In the sheriff’s path again. Then I saw that the collar of the uniform shirt was unbuttoned and pulled open to reveal a beefy red neck and the face of the same cop who had handed the sheriff his strawberry malt earlier. “She told you the kid’s George Clooney’s or whoever’s, right?” he said around the mouthful of chili dog, his cheek distended. “Every time I meet someone new, they’re embarrassed for me. Shane Mullen.” He wiped one of his hands on the hip of his uniform pants and held it out. I shook it, reading his nametag.

  “Chief Deputy Mullen.”

  “Just Shane is fine,” he said. “Unless you run up against the law before I get this dog finished.”

  “No plans to,” I said. “Anna Winger.”

  “Oh, I know,” he said. He had chili at the side of his smile. Grace reached in and swiped at him with a napkin, rolling her eyes at me. “The whole courthouse is talking about you coming in,” he said. “Exciting week.”

  “I would imagine, what with a murder and a kidnapping already this week, my visit wouldn’t inspire much notice.”

  “We notice when the boss starts dealing in witchcraft—”

  “Shane, shut up,” Grace said. “Brad Pitt would not be such an asshole.”

  “—or magic or whatever you call it,” Shane said. “The sheriff’s a straight shooter, one of the old kind of cops, like you see in the westerns. White-hat dude, for sure.”

  Grace had missed a small patch of chili sauce on her husband’s cheek. I stared at it. “I would have thought all the sheriff’s office would be white-hat dudes,” I said. “The good guys. And gals, I guess,” I added, thinking of the sullen Deputy Lombardi.

  “I’ve always gone in for a nice pearl gray, myself,” he said. Grace went in with the napkin again, and he grabbed it from her. “Woman, watch the sunburn. Brad Pitt would never put up with this. Let’s get a move on so the kid can get his homework done. He’s supposed to be grounded this week, I thought. What are we even doing here?”

  “Getting chili down the front of your uniform, for one thing,” Grace said. Shane walked off toward the boys. “He was supposed to be gone this week golfing and fishing but then shit hit the fan here and he got called back. All he got was a scenic drive and a sunburn he can whine about. All I got for my trouble is a morning off before he’s back wanting dinner.” She looked at me. “I liked what you said today about my handwriting. About me. I don’t believe it for a second—but it was nice.”

  “If I spent more time with the sample, maybe I’d find something else to add,” I said.

  “Something I wouldn’t like as much, I bet,” she said. “I’d have you look at Shane’s handwriting, but I don’t think I want to know him that well. You could set up a booth right here, though, doing what you do and the line would go around the block.”

  “A booth—oh, you mean—” Like a kissing booth? Like a sideshow? I was stunned by that image in my head. “I don’t think so,” I said. Her husband, instead of wrenching his son away, had settled in to talk with the boys. “Joshua doesn’t want me to do that kind of thing. In public. It horrifies him.”

  “Mine is horrified that I’m even seen in public,” Grace said. “We come here for a little air and ice cream, he’s never met me before. That’s fine,” she said, sipping at her cup. “I get to catch up on the happenings. Have you heard the latest?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “I’m only a subject of the grapevine, not actually attached to it.”

  “They’re saying that girl, the one who got killed . . . maybe she was Bo’s live-in something else.”

  I made a contemplative noise. I had seen the handwriting of the man sending notes of love to Charity, and it wasn’t Bo. Those could be old notes, set on fire because of a new man in her life. But I also remembered how careful the Spectator had been to say she lived with her parents. “Maybe.”

  “And maybe the reason the wife moved out?”

  “So then your theory—one woman comes back for her kid and kills the girlfriend, not the babysitter.”

  “It fits,” Grace said.

  “It would also fit if someone wanted to get rid of both the girlfriend and the mother and the kid all at once,” I said.

  Grace turned to me, stricken. “What do you mean?”

  “The mother is missing,” I said. “Until they find her, alive, with no kid, she’s not just a possible suspect. She’s a possible victim.”

  “You mean Bo,” she said, shaking her head. “You don’t even know him.”

  “I don’t know any of you,” I said, waving it away.

  Shane and Shay were heading off toward a showy black SUV in the back of the lot. Everyone seemed to have a black truck here. “Hey, Angelina Jolie,” he yelled. “You walking?”

  “I got the keys, smartass,” she hollered back. “Bo’s OK. He’s—I’ve known him since we were all kids together.” She watched Shay all the way to their truck. “He was Aidan’s age two blinks ago, you know? Well, of course you know.”

  “They’ll find him,” I said.

  “They’ll find her,” she said. “Look, I know that what you said about me at the café today was wrong. You know why? Because when I think about that young girl with her head cracked open, I don’t feel charitable toward the one who did it at all. Not even a little bit.”

  TO THE DAIRY Bar and back to the white-walled blank of the apartment, greasy bags in our fists, I replayed the image of Joshua’s hand swiping mine away.

  At home, he ate everything, including the malt and burger I had ordered for myself but didn’t want. He sat at the kitchen table with his propped-open math book serving as a screen between us. He flipped to a blank page in his notebook and glared at me.

  “Just do the homework,” I said, getting up from the table. “Let’s just start by seeing how much you can do. I won’t look.” He ducked his head behind the book, and I went to the couch.

  From there I studied him. He was all odd shapes and angles, elbows thrown out onto the table and knees sharp underneath sloppy blue jeans. He’d always been thin, too thin at times. When he finally started collecting girth, I’d been relieved. One less thing to worry about. But that relief was misplaced, I saw now. His new shape wasn’t the return of something he had lost, but a different flesh altogether, a new body that would serve some purpose. A new purpose. Wasn’t that what biology was? Kids grew into the next phase, and you wanted them to become adult, to take the form of their adult selves. Joshua was just reaching, biologically speaking, toward—

&
nbsp; Sex.

  My throat seized up, and I coughed to catch my breath.

  Joshua turned his head. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I croaked, fanning my hand in front of my watering eyes. I grabbed at a notepad I’d left on the table and waved it in front of my face. Joshua watched.

  Through the floor: tap, tap.

  Joshua whipped around in the chair. “I’m not doing anything.”

  “No, I know. It might be a cry for help.” Although if Margaret’s broom could reach the ceiling, how much trouble could she be in? “Or maybe she hit the wall by mistake?”

  We sat and listened.

  Tap. Tap-tap.

  I put down the notepad and slid into my shoes. “I’ll be quick.”

  I paused on the stairs, in no mood to be neighborly: all my efforts to keep men from my life to the contrary, there was one living in my house.

  In the hallway outside Margaret’s apartment, I could hear the broom handle punching at the ceiling. I knocked and waited, long enough that I began to think something was actually wrong.

  “Margaret? Are you OK?”

  The door swung open, the old woman leaning on her broom. “Why wouldn’t I be OK?”

  “Are you sweeping your ceiling? You might use the bristle end.”

  “What do you think of that deal with the kid?”

  “Margaret,” I said. “Is anything on fire? Can you not reach something? What did you need?”

  “What’s that ruckus up there?” the old woman said.

  “You have fantastic hearing, Margaret, to detect Joshua sitting at the table, silently doing his homework.”

  “I have a hearing aid,” she crowed. “Never mind that. What’s all that stomping up and down the stairs lately?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Do you want me to take out your trash or something?”

  “You, lady. You’re running all over the damn place. I can’t get a lick of sleep.”

  Margaret slept all day, except for the two hours her game shows played. The volume was loud, broom-worthy. “That’s awful. I’m so sorry you can’t sleep.”