The Day I Died

by Lori Rader-Day

  I drank deeply from my wine and checked the clock with bleary eyes. When I finally slipped between the sheets this time, I wanted to be so tired, so wrung out, or so drunk that I could slip off without seeing or hearing anything from tonight’s mistakes. I kept my hand on the glass and turned to the signatures in the larger stack of the forms.

  Some of them were purposefully complicated. Others were hurried. Some mechanical. There were a lot of tiny dust marks from the copier down the page near the signature column. Should have taken it to the copy shop, because the copier he’d used on these was throwing off too much toner.

  I studied each signature in turn, my own hand stilled over my notes. There was something odd, but—I rubbed my eyes, looking toward the clock. Pushed the wine glass away and tried again.

  Light had started showing at the edges of the living room blinds before I finally gave up, squared up the forms and put them away, poured out the dregs of wine, and took myself to bed. I hadn’t forgotten what I’d done to Joshua, but my preoccupation had shifted enough that I might be able to sleep. I had a lot to put right in the morning in my own home. After that, I could worry about the sheriff’s evidence locker.

  I WOKE IN the dark from a choking dream. In my sleep, there had been a word, a long word running on and on, coursing its way across a field of blue: white script across an ashen sky. The script’s loops opened up into wide nooses, flicking around my neck and yanking me up, out of bed, and into the dark. My ceiling became a gallows. Awake, I sat up gasping, my hand at my throat. There was a figure in the doorway.

  “Mom,” Joshua said. “Your phone keeps ringing.”

  I fumbled to the door and down the hall, still inside the dream. Still expecting the unending word trailing along behind me to loop around an ankle to drag me back. The predawn light at the living room window reminded me of some other emergency, long forgotten, in one of the old houses we’d lived in—Wisconsin. Some gray morning, bad news. The past, the dream—I couldn’t imagine who would be on the other end. I picked up the phone from the counter. “Hello?” I croaked. I had to clear my throat and repeat myself.

  “Ms. Winger?” A woman’s voice. I was in no condition to place it. My head shrieked at me for being upright, for daring to open my eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Pamela Harris. From Riordan.”

  “Oh.” Riordan was—a company. A client? I could not make these pieces fit together. Anachronisms at six in the morning.

  “I know it’s early. Very early, but we have a problem. I’m sure they’ll call you eventually, but—I thought you should know.”

  “Yes?”

  “The chief executive of the company,” the woman said, helping me come awake, because I suddenly knew what the call meant.

  “The man who got the threat,” I said. “Is he—?”

  “He’s dead,” the woman said, her voice clipped. “They found his body outside his car in the office garage last night. Shot.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Yes. You’ll be happy to know that they didn’t literally skin him.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “He had a wife. Three kids,” she said. “And business partners and employees who actually didn’t mind coming to work every day. I know you don’t think about those people when you wave your wand, but I wanted to make sure that you heard it from someone—” Her voice broke. “We trusted your strange mumbo jumbo, and look what it got us. We might as well not have bothered. Someone high up in security will be calling you at a normal hour, I imagine. They’ll be polite, but I’m not going to be. You need to quit selling your snake oil, Ms. Winger, before someone else gets hurt.”

  The phone went dead. I put it down, waited.

  I checked on Joshua, but he was back to sleep, his head shoved under his pillow. I pulled his door closed and returned to the front room, wide awake and shaking.

  He was dead?

  Snake oil?

  The gray light at the window drew me. I stared out at the sleeping street, at the row of hazy houses on the other side. I felt as though I were the only person awake in the world. The time was a gift. I had time to process. I had time to look the whole thing over, to be ready for the next call.

  Still I sat and watched the walls turn gold as the sun rose. I had the feeling that the phone call had interrupted me in the middle of running a race, a marathon, and that I was obligated to get back to it, to start at the exact spot where I had stumbled out for the phone. The dream? But the dream had been nonsense, just another thrilling ride in the human psyche.

  I lay on the couch with my back to the window, a throw pillow under my head. The gold wall—

  The walls painted yellow for me were long in the past by the time I went to say good-bye to my parents. I don’t know why I bothered. The terrible place they lived—the last place, as I thought of it, an old diner not quite turned into a house—was squalid and stale-aired, a mess. He wasn’t right. His hands shook, his eyes rolled. Something in his coffee? Something in his head. I was less worried about his hands by then, because he had trouble raising them.

  But I hadn’t come for him.

  “Come with me,” I’d said. Though I didn’t forgive her. In some ways, I hated her more than I’d ever hated him. For putting up with it, I supposed.

  “You’ll be back. What’s out there?” my mother said.

  “Something else,” I said.

  “Everywhere has troubles,” my mother said. “Don’t believe that the grass is always greener.”

  But how did she know? She’d never been anywhere else. None of us had.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” I blurted. I hated that anything of the baby would stay here, even the words spoken. Here, the mice in the walls and the crickets clawing the air after the lights went out. A last effort to get her to come with me. Out there, she’d be away from him, and with her grandchild. With me.

  It should have been enough.

  But this time she turned her back on both of us. Why had I always felt so guilty leaving her, when she was the one who left me, right there in that diner?

  I heard Joshua’s alarm sound, the strike of his hand to silence it. It jangled and cut out once more before I heard his feet hit the floor. He stomped to the shower and through his routine while I waited.

  At seven, my phone rang. I was ready.

  “Ms. Winger.” The sheriff.

  “How did you get mixed up in this?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was waiting on a call, and I thought—”

  “You were waiting this early? Business must be thriving.”

  “We’ll see,” I said, wondering if I would ever get work from Kent again. Things got around. You started to collect—for lack of a better word—an aura around you, if you made mistakes or if jobs you worked on didn’t somehow end the right way. I’d seen it happen.

  “I need your help with a little policing today, if you can make the time.”

  “Policing?”

  “Well, it’s right up your alley, I think. It’s a busy day, but maybe I could meet you at the crime scene and get your thoughts?”

  Crime scene. I felt sick. “Is it Aidan?”

  “No, no. Aidan’s still out there. Nobody’s hurt. This scene’s not even a little bit bloody. Here, let me give you the address.”

  I rooted around for some paper and a pen, and ended up sitting at my computer. I listened to the sheriff give road-by-road directions, staring at the address scrawled in my own careless hand. What would I say about this handwriting if I were given the assignment? That the woman who wrote it was hungover, that she was exhausted and weakened from a battle with her teenage son? That she was lost in the confusion of having been completely wrong about something she’d been certain of? The distraction of it all might have shown up in a comparison to another sample of handwriting—but the rest would be lost between the spaces of the words. I could tell so little from handwriting, after all. What value did any o
f it have, if the threatened men were going to die anyway? If the woman who asked about her fiancé knew all along that she would say yes when he proposed? If the company that wanted to hire an honest executive candidate turned around and made a dishonest man of him on the job?

  I couldn’t tell any of them what they wanted to know, in the end. I couldn’t tell the future. That’s what they wanted: a guarantee on what will happen, how things will turn out. Madame Zonda might have her vibrations, but I didn’t know what would happen in three minutes’ time. I had only one concern: what was on the paper. And what was on the paper didn’t add up to much. Against the grim light of morning, against the reality of a man killed, it didn’t seem like anything at all.

  The sheriff was saying something. “I’ll meet you there, then—”

  “I’m not sure I’m as good at this as maybe you were led to believe,” I said.

  “Led to believe by whom? You?”

  “By everyone. I’m—I’m not sure I should be shilling what I think right now.”

  “Well. How about I don’t pay you and then you won’t be shilling a thing?”

  “I meant—Sheriff, I don’t know if I’m any good at this, or if this, whatever this is, is good for anyone else.”

  “What happened to you?” he asked quietly.

  “I made a mistake. I might have cost a man his life.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes on the job,” he said. “Even doctors, and you know they’re killing way more people than you are. Police make life-and-death decisions every day. You know, so I hear. The bullets in my gun get pulled out and cleaned every week, but those same six, they’ve gotten me through some lean years.”

  He was trying to make me laugh. I took it as a triumph of will that I could even recognize the effort.

  “Seriously, Anna,” he said. “People mess up. I don’t know what happened, but I’m sorry it did. Listen, you have to learn how not to take your job so personally. It’s just work. You have to punch in every morning, do what you can, and punch out at night.”

  “That’s what you do?” I’d seen all those people on his office walls. They needed him. They looked to him to solve their problems. I saw it clearly in an instant: I was doing the same thing to him right now. “Never mind. You probably need to get on with your day.”

  “I do. But so do you. Hey, anything to say about those evidence forms yet?”

  I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to say anything about those forms. “Let me spend a little more time,” I said.

  “That’s fine. See you this afternoon. Oh, and wear long pants.”

  “What?”

  “Long pants. There’s tall grass where we’re going. Gets itchy.”

  “Pants.”

  “Exactly.”

  The phone hung up. I retreated to the shower earlier than normal, so that I wouldn’t have to face Joshua right away. Drying off in front of the mirror, I caught sight of my naked self, and stood still, taking a closer look. I bent over the sink and studied my face. The longer I stared into my own eyes—the longer I built constellations from the freckles on my own skin—the more I was willing to believe that the woman looking back at me was someone else. I was willing to believe anything now. Anyone’s hocus-pocus, anyone at all. I’d believed in my abilities, in the science of analysis, the way that other people raised their eyes to the sky. The way some people played the lottery or the stock market. The way certain people could say they were saving for a rainy day, and believe that this day was not the rainiest. People needed to believe in something; they needed a little hocus. But my magic hadn’t saved anyone. Not the executive in Chicago. It had come too late for my mother. It had come too late for me, too. And now, it didn’t matter. I had believed that my job had saved me, but I wasn’t saved.

  By the time I got out of the shower, Joshua had left for school.

  At my computer with my wet hair still dripping into the neck of my T-shirt, I set aside Keller’s evidence project and called up all my notes from the executive’s threat, the original assignment, my response. I took another look at my copy of the sample, finding again the same characteristics I’d noted the first time. My phone should have rung. I traced my notes to the response, checking each detail off as I’d reported them.

  Everything added up; I started to feel the fury of the wronged, until, suddenly, the bulleted list came to a stop, and one significant detail from my analysis remained. I checked again, then searched my Sent folder for the original email. All of it came up short.

  The gaps. I’d never reported the likelihood of the writer’s sexual impotence.

  I put my head in my arms on the table. I hadn’t been wronged; I’d been distracted. By Joshua, by the sheriff calling, Sherry, the Boosters, Jeffries, Margaret. This was what happened when you let your guard down. You got caught up. You got caught.

  Tied up in personal matters, I’d made the worst sort of mistake. Not just an error, but a lapse of my authority. I’d taken what the handwriting told me and dismissed it. Dismissed a man crippled in one way from being powerful in another.

  That wasn’t just bad analysis. That was bad human understanding. One or the other, and it didn’t matter. The man was dead, his killer at large, and the phone still hadn’t rung to tell me what I already feared: that my career was over, that the whole business was a bunch of bunk.

  On the table, a short pile of assignments and queries sat, untouched. I brushed the top envelope with my hand to make sure it was really there. These people actually thought I had something to offer them. I’d made a mistake, but not the one Keller thought I’d made. No, the mistake had been long ago and it had nothing to do with handwriting. The mistake had been in believing that there was anywhere I could go that would change me from one kind of person to another.

  I shoved the work away, shut off the computer. There was nowhere I was supposed to be, no one I could talk to. Joshua was right. I didn’t have anyone.

  And all he had was me, some prize.

  And worse, I’d taught him there was even a part of himself that was unspeakable. I’d taught him to hate the very thing he was becoming. To hate himself. I’d saved him from a snake, only to poison him myself.

  All that work to protect him. I’d done it for him. For him, that was the part I’d wanted him to understand. Why hadn’t I been able to make him understand that last night? I was going to lose him and I deserved to. What else had I taught him, except that he didn’t need anyone else?

  Chapter Nineteen

  I drove toward the meeting with Sheriff Keller, the radio off. The only sound was the wind in my ears from the open window, and the pinging of gravel against the bottom of the truck. Dust billowed out behind. On either side of the road, long threads of grass waved me along, or away—I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I drove, turning left or right when the directions told me to. “I give up,” I said to the countryside, not sure whether I meant it for Joshua or myself. I had spent the morning looking over the evidence-form signatures, waiting for someone, Kent probably, to call about the dead man in Chicago. The call hadn’t come, and all the signatures on the forms were blurring together.

  At the same time, I knew that I couldn’t actually give up. Give up parenting? Hardly possible. Give up working? Again—not an option. I would have to work the lonelyhearts and maybe the human resources clientele harder. After today, though, I was done with law enforcement. It was too much, too dangerous. The people drew too close. Their life-and-death matters began to matter to me.

  I would try the only thing I knew to do. We’d go. Another town, another school for Joshua. Maybe further west, somewhere really new. Montana, Idaho, maybe as far as the West Coast. I wanted trees. I wanted land. I wanted wide space, and no one but the two of us allowed in.

  I consulted the directions again. I’d taken the last turn, and now my handwriting gave out. Something—on the right. I scanned the right side of the road ahead and checked the rearview for something I might have missed. Nothing but the waving husks
of dry cornfields, all ending at a woods a half a mile or so back from the road. And then I saw it—a glint of steel low in the woods that took shape as the sheriff’s black truck. The truck disappeared behind a crest. A set of indentions in the tall grass, not quite a driveway, appeared. I turned and followed the faint trail. When I rose over the small hill, the sheriff emerged and threw a hand up in greeting. I parked behind him and got out, surveying the lonesome stretch of nothing around us.

  “I forgot to tell you to wear some good hiking shoes,” he called.

  “I’ll do OK,” I said. “Back there?” I gestured toward the stand of trees.

  “Good guess,” he said. “Unless you’ve got some ideas for Bob Banning about his soybeans next year. Ready?”

  “Should I have brought a day pack or something? A tent?”

  We started off toward the trees, the sheriff leading. He grinned over his shoulder. “You didn’t strike me as the outdoorsy type.”

  “I’m not. I’m really”—my foot found a dip under the thick grass, my ankle twisting a little—“really not.”

  “Careful,” he said. “The grass hides all sorts of things.”

  “One of those things wouldn’t be snakes, would it?”

  He stopped and turned, his hand on his gun. “Where?”

  I held up my hands in surrender. “You are itching to use one of those bullets.”

  He set his jaw, grim, and relaxed his trigger grip.

  “I’m kidding, Sheriff. Kidding.”

  “I didn’t take you for a kidder, either.” He turned on a boot heel and started off again. He swung a hand out to scatter the tops of the hip-high grass.

  “I’m not.” We walked the rest of the way into the woods without speaking, my head down to watch for whatever it was the grass might hide. We followed a grass path through the trees, stepped over a trickle of a rocky creek.

  “What is this place?”

  “This is the old Werner farm.”

  “You’re kidding now, right?” I paused and looked into the trees on either side. On foot, the narrow lane seemed wider. It opened up onto another grassy hill. Ahead, I thought I saw a roofline through the trees.