The Day I Died

by Lori Rader-Day

  Her voice seemed different. I looked over my shoulder. My mother’s shirt was the color of a one-day-old bruise.

  I turned back to the textbook, but couldn’t think about anything other than the expression on my mother’s face. It wasn’t sad. I could do better than that, or at least that’s what my English teacher wrote on the margins of my essays when I wrote a sentence that said something obvious or tried to say something that I wasn’t really sure I understood. I stretched sometimes, using words I hadn’t looked up, or repeating things I’d read in our text or during library study. My teacher was never fooled, which was perplexing and pleasing, in a way. How did they always know when I tried to be someone else?

  I could do better than sad. I glanced over. My mother looked—used.

  That weekend we didn’t paint the room or even pick up the can to judge how much Daisy Smile was left. The next time I thought about it, the can wasn’t there.

  I opened my eyes and looked around, willing and also not willing to leave where I’d been. The walls seemed more bare than ever before. They were white, always white, because they were someone else’s walls. We never hung things or put in nails. We never painted. If we moved, it was just too much trouble to make it right. Too much trouble, and too much time to spend, if we moved.

  I swung my feet over the side of the bed to the floor and sat, staring at the pattern in the carpet I hadn’t chosen. Underneath my bed were the flattened boxes from our last move.

  Who was I kidding? If we moved? If? The only question, really, was when.

  Chapter Twelve

  To shake off my coma, I washed my face in cold water, changed into yoga pants, and went to check the mail.

  At Margaret’s door, I paused. I’d meant to check on her before now, but how did you get into the habit of checking in on people?

  I knocked. “Margaret? It’s Anna, from upstairs,” I said to the door.

  Shuffling feet and the chain sliding. The door cracked and swung open. She waved me in and lay back down.

  “How are you feeling?” The table next to the couch had the glass of water I’d left her, but it was empty. I fetched more. “Have you eaten?”

  She didn’t answer.

  I turned up the volume. “Margaret, have you—”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I had some soup.”

  There was no pan or bowl in the sink.

  “Can I make you something? Or call anyone?”

  “If I had anyone to call, I would have called them,” she said. Her hand fluttered as it reached for the water. “I used to have a lot of people.”

  This sounded like the beginning of a story. I sat down. “Around here?”

  “I grew up here, missy. People used to stay where they were planted. They didn’t run around everywhere.” She sounded tired, and her wrinkled face was thin and drawn.

  “What happened to them? Your people?”

  “The same thing that happens to us all,” she said. “But a little faster, maybe, than we’d have liked.”

  Her eyelids drooped. The apartment around us grew still and I sat and listened to the old woman’s shallow breathing. The dense quiet reminded me of when my mother and I whispered around the closed door of the bedroom while my dad slept off a bad night, both of us trying to stay as still and small as we could. At a certain age, I’d enjoyed these times, like a game. Later, not so much. And now—I would have given anything not to imagine the moment I might have sat by my elderly mother as she napped on the couch, a future no longer possible. What if I had talked her into coming with us? What if she had lived a long life, without me there? In my old town, people cast off were sent to a home on the river, the loony bin. That place, Riverdale, was a cruel taunt, a threat. At least I was glad I’d never have to see my mother placed there.

  We sat for a long while until I thought Margaret had fallen asleep. When I went to get up, she reached out to grab my knee.

  “I don’t think I ever ate that soup,” she said.

  Margaret fed and tucked in again, I returned to the apartment to find the time had moved maddeningly onward without me. I had less than an hour to work before Joshua’s footsteps brought the outside world into the apartment again.

  I dumped the mail onto the table and sat down to the neglected in-box, but my gaze transferred to my computer screen. What do you want to know? Kent had asked. And he hadn’t been talking about Charity Jordan’s death or Aidan Ransey’s disappearance. He had meant mine.

  A few keystrokes and I was looking at the website for the Vilas County News-Review. The news, always the same. Fund-raisers. Fishing tournaments. School-board minutes. Lake houses for sale. Family names I should remember. I still felt nervous to click through the pictures of arrests, awards, weddings, deaths—as though someone on the other side could see me peeking. I rarely saw the names I wanted to see—or didn’t want to see—in the news. What was Ray doing? Theresa? Such quiet lives, if they still lived there. I checked the clock and searched for their names directly. Addresses in Sweetheart Lake for both. They still lived there. They still lived.

  I had to force myself to close the window and get some work done. Even a little.

  I sorted the day’s mail and plucked out a stationery-sized envelope. A lonelyhearts request. My ladies in anguish and doubt. That seemed like an easy, welcome task.

  The letter was from a woman in San Francisco who wanted to know if she should marry her boyfriend. She had included several samples of the man’s handwriting, copies of scrawled lists and a signature ripped from what seemed a very formal document, as well as a short note on stationery that was signed with a simple Charles. I looked first at the woman’s note asking for help, noting the large, looping scroll of her letters with interest. Nothing too crazy there; the request was an honest one. Her signature appeared again on the check, which I set aside.

  Now: Charles. The formal signature was sloppy, a little impatient. As though he’d had to sign the document in several places. The list was a set of notes from a household project of some kind, a checklist of purchases to make at the hardware store. I started to get a feel for Charles, for the ebb and flow of his hand on paper.

  Then I took up the personal note. An original. An original was always better. There was always some doubt with a copy. Copies could be tampered with, for one thing. Part of the paper could be missing, or the whole thing could be constructed from multiple samples. Sometimes people sent me patchwork pieces in order to test my abilities. I could always tell them more about the owner of the handwriting than they had expected, and then I could tell them quite a bit about themselves, if they wanted to know.

  In Charles’s note, the script had strong lines. He had a very nice hand, actually, all the markers open and charitable. Why had the woman even thought to solicit my services? That’s the sort of thing I wished my clients would put into their requests. But they didn’t, because it might lead me down some path—like telling the palm reader that you were most worried about money and having her give happy predictions on your financial troubles. They didn’t want to give me any signposts so they could be sure my work was genuine, not the work of a shyster. They believed enough to send me money, but they didn’t believe enough to send clues.

  I reached for the laptop to type up a response, but paused over the personal note Charles had written. I hadn’t really read it before as much as parse its construction, a set of dots and lines that added up to a message for someone else. It was the encoding that I was paid to tear down, not the text. But a word had caught my attention: sweetheart.

  I had a real dread of the word, but tried not to get distracted from Charles. Sweetheart seemed like a word Charles meant.

  Satisfied, I typed up the response. This man is a keeper. Congratulations on your engagement. I finished it off with a couple of specific notes about Charles’s handwriting so that his new fiancée felt that she had received her money’s worth. But I knew the sentence that the woman would come back to again and again in the future. A keeper. It occ
urred to me how less than qualified I was to say so.

  I set Charles aside and tore through a few more easy tasks, questions that needed a fast answer and a renewal of a discreet magazine ad that attracted the lonelyhearts. I could stand to see more letters from people like Charles.

  Then I turned to email and picked through what was there until I saw a new message from Kent, recent. The Chicago businessman had some concerns about the assessment I’d done on the threatening letter he’d received. Did I have anything else to add to the report?

  Without going back to my notes or files, I remembered the thoroughness with which I’d studied that letter, the careful thought I’d given in honor of the debt I owed Kent. I remembered all the thought I’d put into those gaps in the descenders of his f’s and g’s, how I worried over my access to that information about the author. I emailed back a quick reply, hiding my frustration and offering to take another look if Kent wanted me to. It was professional courtesy to offer, even if there was nothing more I could say.

  I HEARD JOSHUA arriving home from the bus stop long before he got to the door. Maybe Margaret had a point about the noise he generated.

  The door swung wide, hitting the back of one of the dining chairs. “Shit,” he said.

  “Joshua.”

  He appeared around the open door. “Hi, Ma.” His backpack thunked down in its customary spot: in the way.

  “Oh, hi, yourself. You know what I said about the swearing—”

  “But you do it all the time!”

  “I do not swear ‘all the time,’” I said. “And you know it. Only when it’s really the best word for the situation. One of these days, you’ll need a fat, juicy swear word for the occasion, and all yours will be used up. Save it for when life get really tough.”

  He flung himself down into the chair opposite me. I was bent over the laptop, but on alert immediately. He was sitting? Down? I checked the clock. Usually he reserved this golden hour for vendettas against video game ninjas.

  “Life already sucks,” he said, resting his head in his fists, face turned toward the tabletop. “How much worse do you need it to get?”

  “I didn’t get any calls today from the school,” I tried, each word leaving my mouth with a calculated effort at lightness.

  He raised his head and gave me a twitchy sneer that might have turned into a smile if he weren’t so determined to remain sullen. “Funny, Mom. Really, really funny.”

  I reached for a batch of paperwork on the table and started to flick through it. Casual, casual. “Is something going on?”

  He was silent, face down for so long that I wondered if I hadn’t walked too directly into the topic. But then he sighed and emerged from behind his arms. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You could try me.” Now I turned the in-box upside down on the table and began to sort. The cell phone bill, unearthed just in time. My hands nearly shook from the effort of not looking at him. I was the one who had made his life difficult. Could I take a direct hit, if he said so? “I might understand,” I said.

  “Never mind.”

  “Oh.” In my hands, an expired rebate form, a notice of a tenants’ meeting I’d missed. I really needed to get it together. If I hadn’t already known it, here was the physical evidence I was losing control over the order of my life. “Why?”

  “Why what?” he mumbled, arms crossed, knees jangling. He watched me dig through the stacks.

  “Why ‘never mind’? Is it guy stuff? I wouldn’t understand because it’s guy stuff?”

  He replied with a snort.

  I tried again. “I wouldn’t understand because . . .”

  “Mom, whatever. You just wouldn’t understand, that’s all. It’s not guy stuff. What’s guy stuff? Just. That’s it. Whatever. You wouldn’t understand because you’re my mom.”

  “Oh.” I considered arguing my position, but then I didn’t know what my position was. “I guess you’re right, because I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “See?”

  “No, I really don’t.”

  “Exactly.”

  The exchange brought back the efficient shorthand at the sheriff’s office. Joshua and I were having our own kind of half conversation, far less successfully.

  “I’m still willing to listen.”

  “Mom.” It was less a word than exhale. “You won’t think it’s hard at all. It will be all easy for you.”

  “Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.” And I did. Leave him, Theresa would say, had said already when no one else would. You can stay at my place. As though moving a mile away changed anything. “Some things, you have to make your own decision.”

  “Yeah.” He leaned forward for a moment and then collapsed low into the chair, more despondent than ever. “I have to figure it out for myself.”

  “Well, no, that’s not exactly right,” I said. “You could take the advice other people have for you. Sometimes others can see things in a way you can’t. But—but you may not believe them. Or deep down, you will, and you’ll hate them for being right.” I stopped. Who needed this advice more?

  He was still listening.

  “Eventually,” I said, clearing my throat, “you’ll make your own decision. But it doesn’t hurt to try your problems out on other people, like, like a referendum on what you should do. Do you know—”

  “Yes, I know what it means. Social studies class, you know?”

  “Exactly. Just like social studies class.”

  Joshua sat chewing on his bottom lip. I picked up a large, flat envelope that had fallen to the floor, just to have something to hold onto.

  He leapt to his feet. “What’s for dinner?”

  The referendum would not come to a vote today. I felt the immediate loss of his attention. “I don’t know yet. Is there something you wanted?”

  “Can we have something good? We never have anything good.” He sat back down, pushed the chair from the table, and swiveled the chair from side to side.

  “What are you talking about? We just had burgers last night. You ate about six pounds of them, so don’t tell me they weren’t good. Did you bring this in?”

  “What?” He stopped the chair’s tilt-a-whirl spin and looked at the envelope I held aloft.

  “It doesn’t have a stamp on it.” Without postage, it couldn’t be from Kent. And his human resources job, now that I thought about it, was probably the Chicago CEO’s threat I’d already received. They were sorting through disgruntled employees to find the author of that note. That was human resources. So what was this?

  I was by nature paranoid, but I’d also heard unlikely stories from Kent and others that came back to me at times like these. Mail without stamps—that seemed to dredge up some warning I’d heard. Like email from people you didn’t know, with their unsolicited attachments. Computer viruses or—something. This envelope could have its own kind of attachment. I dropped the envelope, and before I could say anything, Joshua picked it up. “I’ll throw it away,” he said.

  “No!”

  He looked up, startled. I stood and grabbed the envelope from him.

  “What? Why?”

  I rubbed the open flap of the envelope with a finger and then peered at my fingertip.

  “You are so weird,” he said.

  “I work with the FBI and the police, Joshua. You know that. I have to be careful.”

  “Like someone would be after you,” he said. “Who would be after you, Ma?” He rose and stretched tall, taking a swat at the ceiling to see if he could reach it yet. “Air ball.” With a squinting glance over his shoulder, he made for his bedroom.

  I waited for the click of his door, and then sat back down with the envelope. The label was typed, but then every label I ever got was typed. No return address, no postage. Someone had left this for me at our mailbox or at the front door of the building.

  Who would be after me?

  The kid had no idea how much worse his life could be.

  I shook the envelope over the table, watching
for flecks of powder. I sniffed at it, holding it out several inches. Finally I reached in for the single sheet of folded paper inside. Standard-sized copy paper. White, no watermark.

  Before I shook the paper loose, I knew. A call in the night. A stranger on the street using an old name. The tourist magazine. Around and around we went.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I called Kent but got his voicemail. Did anyone use voicemail anymore? I hung up, paced the floor awhile, closed the blinds, and peered out between them. When I got his recorded message the second time, I took a chance. “Kent, it’s me. I know it’s after hours, but if you have a second, I could use your opinion on something.”

  But my voice must have given me away because the answer came in a text—Sending cavalry—and then with a buzz from the front door. I buzzed him in and waited for the knock.

  “Kent, you didn’t have to—” The sheriff filled up the doorway.

  I was sick to see him. To see him so often. To see him so near, and here, here in the place that belonged only to me and Joshua. He was supposed to be on the other side of a desk, and now he stood next to me, looking down at the unfolded paper resting on the table where I did my work, where I ate my food, where my son did his homework. Eight at night, and I could smell his shaving cream. I went to the window and opened it to let a little air in. He watched.

  The panicked call now seemed like a mistake. I wasn’t taking my own advice. I was still standing here, still planted in this spot when I should have the moving boxes out.

  The sheriff took his time with the letter. All I wanted to do was crumple the thing and fling it away.

  “What does it mean to you, Anna?”

  My disgust rose. Why did he take this very minute to call me by that name? Just now, when I was feeling closed in? I’d given the sheriff credit for being able to read people, but now I questioned that skill.

  “I don’t know.”

  He was watching me closely. Of course he was. He was always watching, always studying everyone else for detail, for weakness. He was just like the rest of them, always wanting to know, to know, to know. They were like children, with their unending questions, like cats, with their maneuvers to be under my feet, to trip me up.