The Day I Died

by Lori Rader-Day

  I fell to my knees. Joe came to the door, his cell phone already out and to his ear. I picked up the copy of Huckleberry Finn, its edges frayed from its crushing life inside the backpack. “He’s been carrying this around forever.”

  “Are all his books there? Yes, hello,” Joe said into the phone. “I need to have the police—Keller. I need the sheriff. Anna, are those the books for his current classes?”

  My hands shook as I sorted through the stack.

  “The sheriff, yes,” Joe said into the phone. “We might have a runaway situation. We’re not sure. Anna, your address.”

  I was going through the books again.

  “Anna, what is your address?”

  “He didn’t run away.” I was running a finger down the spines of the books and found the loophole I needed, the hope. “His history class stuff is missing.” He must have gone to school. Who would run away with history books weighing them down?

  “Hold on,” Joe said into the phone. “He doesn’t take history. Shepherd Ave. And—” He went to the window and looked out. “Crest and Shepherd—Shepherd Village. Second floor in the front. Yes. Yes. No. The sheriff.”

  “Why would he take his history book with him if he weren’t going to school?” The missing book was a dangling prize. I wouldn’t let go of it. He’d gone to school, of course he had. He was mad at me, and lying low in the courthouse square with Steve and Caleb and Shay and the rest of them. Or they were out at the barn smattering the day’s outrage on the walls. I would forgive truancy. I would forgive vandalism. I would forgive anything, if he’d just walk through the door.

  Joe came over and put a hand on my shoulder. “World history is a freshman class. He’s in social studies. That’s the book right there.” We both gave our full attention to Our Land and Its People. “The sheriff should be on his way. Is there anything else missing? Clothes? Favorite objects? Can you tell?” He dragged a hand through one of the boxes.

  “No, wait,” I said, standing up. “He’s doing a project for history class. Personal history. The genealogy project. He’s been working on it so hard in the library—you said so.”

  Joe grimaced. “I said he’d been working on something. I don’t know anything about a genealogy project. I doubt Michelle Grivner’s got the seventh-grade social studies group doing genealogy. Last week they were doing reports on the Industrial Revolution. Milah—the librarian—said they’d ransacked that section of the stacks. She sent a group of them to see the principal.”

  I stared at him, waiting for the words to make sense. “Social studies is history, isn’t it?”

  “Hell,” he said. “I don’t remember what it means. Geography. Culture.”

  “The genealogy project?”

  “If he was enjoying it, maybe he was doing it for fun . . .”

  He didn’t finish. Neither of us believed this.

  There was a hard knock at the front door. Joe went to get it.

  I sat on the edge of Joshua’s bed, shaking and sick. The room was spinning. I slid off the bed onto the carpet, listening to a commotion at the front door, more people arriving. Joe got out his phone and yelled into it for a few minutes. It seemed hours before someone showed up at the doorway. I couldn’t look up to see whose legs walked into the room. Someone knelt at my side and placed a hand on my shoulder. I pushed it off.

  “Anna,” the sheriff said.

  He leaned low so that I couldn’t help but see him. “Anna, what happened?”

  “It didn’t work,” I said. My breath felt short, as though I had been running, running. In my dreams, in real life—always running. I’d hoped for a finish line, but I had only fooled myself. The race could never stop, and now that I’d hesitated, I couldn’t win.

  We had to go. We had to run. Run, Leely. That’s what I would have said.

  Running was a way of life. Running was a prayer, a church, a religion. Running was a god, the only one I’d ever truly believed in. You don’t need hocus-pocus. You don’t need magical thinking. You don’t need anything or anyone. But the worst part was that I knew, and maybe had always known, that the running would never get us anywhere.

  “It didn’t work,” I said. “I lost him.”

  Part II

  Chapter Twenty-two

  On the day I died, I dragged the new oars down to the lake. I pulled them by their shafts across the yard. 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.

  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.

  I got to work. Ray had already dragged the rowboat from where it had been stored upside down under the porch since fall. Now I pulled it from the side of the hill, flipping it and pushing it to the water’s edge. The bucket we kept tied to a piling had already been fastened into place. I filled it with green lake water, flushing spiderwebs out of the boat’s bottom boards and from under the benches, then baled the water back out and pushed the boat into the water, guiding it along the dock and tying it in place.

  At last I slid the new oars into the rowlocks, one at a time, stopping to admire the gleam on the blades. At the end of last summer, one of the old cracked ones had split wide, useless. We’d splurged for new instead of knocking around at rummage sales all season, waiting for something cheap to turn up.

  The lifejackets. I ran back up to the house, spending twenty minutes digging through hideaways and corners as quietly as I could around our closed bedroom door. At the last minute I remembered the bungee cords to secure them. Down on the dock again, I patted at the jackets to beat out the dust.

  I didn’t notice the fishermen this time, not until one of them spoke. “Morning,” he said.

  His voice was quiet but large in the vast emptiness of our lake. Our lake, though many people lived on it. Many other people came to fish on it, like these men. These two men. They had drifted close to the shore, only a few feet off the end of the dock. There would be no fish there, nothing worth catching.

  Their boat sat low and heavy in the water, barely clearing the sand. Two men. I glanced up the slope and stairs behind me.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” the man said. His friend seemed content to remain silent, but his eyes roved over my bare legs. I’d gotten wet putting the boat in, and now I turned cold. I held the jackets in front of me.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Trying your luck?” He lifted his reel a bit. The gesture seemed strangely dirty, as though he’d unzipped his pants and shown me his dick. I didn’t say anything. The men glanced at one another. I kept picturing one of them stepping out of the skip into the water. Up to his waist, maybe, nothing more. They were big men, but I imagined them moving fast. “Not much biting this morning,” the man said. “You fish?”

  “My boyfriend,” I said. “My boyfriend likes to fish.” He didn’t. Ray preferred red meat to fish, didn’t think fresh fish on the grill was worth the guts, not worth the mess or the trouble. He liked burgers from the Clipper in town, with beer. He was up at the house now, sleeping off a late night. He didn’t like the quiet of fishing, either, or quiet of any kind. He couldn’t sit still for very long. Even out on the boat, we were always rowing, always moving, and always turning back before it got too late or too cold or too anything. He let me row more than was probably gentlemanly and took over when I was too slow for his taste. He wasn’t interested in spotting eagles’ nests with me. “We’re heading out in a few minutes,” I said.

  “Should’a been out before now,” the guy said. “Too warm and bright for anything now. Muskies don’t much like a hot tub.”

  The other man looked back out at the lake, bored. The mist had started to burn off, and I could hear the faint sounds of the summer camp around the bend from us, children laughing and splashing. Their can
oes would come out into view soon. We usually hated the camp kids and their noise. Now all my hopes leaned toward them.

  “Isn’t your guy Ray Levis?” the talkative one said suddenly.

  He might know that Ray didn’t fish, but then the first rafts in the battalion of camp canoes nosed out into the lake. I felt the darkness—imagined, it seemed—pass and took a deep breath. “You friends with Ray?”

  “Wouldn’t say that,” the first man said.

  The other guy looked at him, a hint of a smile at his mouth. He mumbled something his friend thought was funny that I didn’t catch.

  The first man looked up at the ridge to the house, but I didn’t think he could see much past the stairs and the deck at the top. The house lay a hundred feet too far from the water, tucked into the dark woods. We wanted to cut down a few trees, but then it wasn’t our place. We had no say in which trees lived and died. Ray sometimes walked among them and mimed an X on their trunks, choosing which ones needed to go.

  “Would have guessed Ray’d be down for the count,” the first man said. “After what he drank up at the Clipper last night.”

  My back went up again. I didn’t want to be nervous but it seemed like I couldn’t be anything else lately. I clutched the lifejackets to my gut.

  Just weeks ago, that’s when I’d realized. That night I’d been a little slow to meet him at the door when he came home, and then I hadn’t wanted any dinner. Ray had big brown eyes, like bites of a rich dessert when he was happy, but like holes in his head when he was mad. That night, he had turned and watched me. “You’ve been sick for a while now.”

  It sounded like an accusation, so it probably was. He didn’t know that I always felt sick, always, but had taught myself the trick of hiding it most of the time. To be discovered—to be noticed—was the surprise. “I have?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “I’m sorry.” This was the best thing to say. I thought it over. “Are you sure?”

  This was not the best thing to say, but I really couldn’t decide.

  “Couple of weeks.” He looked me over, studying me hard while I wished he would forget it, think of something else to say or worry about. I didn’t have the strength to keep up my side of an argument, and sometimes not arguing was as bad as starting one. “You’re not pregnant, are you, Ell?”

  It was best not to laugh until Ray had laughed, but I did. I was brittle, dead already. Such a thing had never occurred to me. “No way.”

  “Good.” He turned his attention back to his plate. “You know what I’d do if you got pregnant.”

  I thought I knew.

  I hadn’t given getting pregnant any thought. But I was sick. I’d been sick a long time.

  That night we’d spent the evening in front of the TV, but I didn’t follow a single thing happening. Inside, I nudged and poked at the idea until a tiny crack formed and a hairline fracture of light showed itself. I thought I knew what Ray would do if I got pregnant, but suddenly I wondered wildly, forgetting who I was for a moment, forgetting the person I’d let myself become, what would I do? Me, not him. What would I do?

  The little crack of light was hope. I’d been prying at it ever since.

  So: the boat, the oars, the jackets. If I set up the boat and had a nice lunch ready when he woke up, had the right kind of beer in the fridge, cold, if I just made sure everything was right, I could tell him.

  There was a cold heavy stone in my gut that had nothing to do with the baby growing there. But what had he even said? He hadn’t really threatened anything, when you came down to it. He’d been in a funk that night, anyway. Now that it was getting warm and sunny, spring finally here, maybe it would all be OK. Maybe we’d be fine, all of us.

  We’d be fine if these two men would just go. One of them, at least, had been at the Clipper to see Ray empty a few. “We were celebrating,” I said, blushing a little. I’d nursed a drink or two, to make sure Ray and the ladies at the Clipper didn’t notice I hadn’t. Nothing went unnoticed around here. Unless they didn’t want to notice.

  “That’s a thing Ray Levis sure likes to do,” the second man said. This was the first time I’d heard his voice and I didn’t like it. Didn’t like the sound, the leering swagger that lived there, and didn’t like that I’d heard it, either.

  “What were you clinking glasses over, then?” the first man said. I thought I recognized him now, and maybe the other one, too. We got strangers in town all the time, what with the weekly rentals all around the lakes, the fishermen trying out other waters, the summer camps, the flea markets. But this guy didn’t just know Ray by reputation or through the long history of small places with very few shoulders to rub up against. He drank at the Clipper, and if Ray was the kind of man to have friends, that’s what he’d be.

  The lifejackets smelled like mildew but I hugged them tightly, afraid again. For a moment I couldn’t figure out why. I’d been afraid of something my whole life. My dad’s belt, looped. The back of my mother’s head, turned from me. Then boys, their hands fumbling and grabbing. Then Theresa and the only currency I cared about, which was her attention and her presence. Scared that I’d lose it, and then I had.

  In my childhood, being near Theresa, I had realized that some people didn’t go around frightened the way I did. I admired them. Later, when I knew more, I hated them, envious. There was even a part of me that had grown to pity them. They were just babies, the way people cuddled and cared for them. Toddlers, unaware.

  So I had been afraid, but this was different. I was not scared now of bruises, not of people seeing the bruises, not of what Theresa knew and couldn’t stand to watch, or whatever it was that Ray might do.

  I was afraid of the mist burning off the lake and the wide sky opening up over the far shore. My teeth chattered. I could barely keep the lifejackets in my hands.

  I was afraid that I could have changed everything, and hadn’t.

  I was afraid that everything could yet change, or not, and I was the one who had to decide.

  I was afraid of choices I had let go, of decisions I might never make. I was afraid I had turned down every opportunity to be someone other than who I was now. I was afraid I would never get back to someplace real, someplace on the map that would feel like a place to start.

  I was afraid of the future. I didn’t think I’d ever thought about the future before, beyond fantasies. Fantasies didn’t require anything from me, but real life, the real future, did. I held the lifejackets against the slight swell of my belly. I had never had a future before.

  What had we been celebrating? Just the fact that we had enough money in our pockets for one of us to get shit-faced. Another trip around the horn of a weekend. Another scraping by.

  The men in the boat had long ago given up on hearing my answer. They had drifted a polite distance away, where they might ignore me completely. The talkative guy motioned for the other to pick up the oars, and there was no question that they meant to make the distance far more than polite. The first guy took out his phone but we didn’t get much reception out this far. When he put it back in his pocket, he turned resolutely away from me so that no one would feel as though they had to say anything in parting.

  Later, the guy with the phone could say I was alive and well and alone until such-and-such time. Alive and alone, at least. No one had spoken for my well-being in a while. But I hadn’t been hurt at 12:39 p.m., and these men turned out to be above suspicion, churchgoers and family men, one of them a grandfather, the other a veteran. He walked in the Fourth of July parade over in Rhinelander every summer.

  One of the men would say to the papers that they’d noticed two lines in the grass, like the feet of a body being dragged to the shore. It hadn’t been my body, of course, and by the time people were curious about where my body was, the grass had dried and the twin tracks from the oars had disappeared. But it was the kind of thing that got people thinking.

  The men paddled away, and I dropped the lifejackets and cords into our boat and took the stair
s two at a time.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I was doing something. I was making the choice as I went, hoping I would know what I had decided when I reached the deck or the yard or the car or the road.

  At the top of the stairs, Ray, his bare chest tan, sat back in a folding chair. His eyes were holes in his head.

  “Who were your friends?” he said.

  I had a lot of experience with knowing when I was in trouble. A part of me observed us from a high branch of a nearby tree. Maybe from the bald eagle’s nest we’d spotted last week. I was an eagle, and all these human problems down here were none of my business.

  “They seemed to be friends of yours,” I said.

  “No friends of mine.” And that was true, because Ray didn’t have friends. He had twenty or thirty guys he could buy a beer for down at the Clipper, but hardly anyone would buy a round for him. So he admitted, when he was in the mood to count his grievances.

  “One of them was at the Clipper last night, I guess,” I said. This was fact. The guy knew Ray was somewhere sleeping off a bender. Or maybe that had just been a good guess. I was musing about this when Ray reached for me.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Men and men and men. They stormed the apartment and tried to find something to do that wasn’t already being done. They poked around, moving items from place to place and back again, taking papers and the game system from Joshua’s room.

  I sat in the front room and watched their sensible black shoes and boots walk into and out of my field of vision. The sheriff kept close by, stepping away now and then to respond to his hissing radio. Each time he left my side, he directed another officer to be my guardian.

  “Do you want anything?” someone said. The voice was unconvinced it could offer me anything, maybe hoping I wouldn’t need anything. I looked up. Tara Lombardi, the young, smug deputy who was supposed to have a crush on the sheriff but might be dating a hooligan instead. The one who might have been on the scene of a murder a little too soon, who might have patrolled a crime scene just before a body was found.