The Day I Died

by Lori Rader-Day

  “How are you so sure it’s just a goose?”

  “I’m not, which is why I’m going,” he said. “Got to meet up with a local constable. He won’t know anything. Long drive to confirm nothing is nothing.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, I’d rather not say. I might want to build a secret fortress there.”

  “Did you ever figure out the evidence forms thing?”

  “Anna. You’re off duty.”

  Off duty sounded suspiciously like out of line. “Only trying to help.”

  “Just trying to keep my head clear, and when you’re helping—well. Let’s just say you’re distracting.”

  He was distracting, too, but I didn’t want to say it. I couldn’t say it, and there was no point. Only Joshua mattered. I was the one who couldn’t be distracted.

  “I’ll try to stay out of it,” I said. “Good night.”

  I HADN’T WANTED to stay the night, but Mamie bested me. I needed an early start and didn’t relish finding a room in one of the log motels where the snowmobile kamikazes camped out every winter. I was so tired the prospect of finding another place to sleep seemed as complex as a NASA reentry from space. So when Mamie started fixing up the couch, I gave up arguing.

  “What’s he like? What was he like as a baby?” Mamie was stuffing a giant pillow into its case. In the next room, Ray still sat at the kitchen table studying the photo. He hadn’t said a word since I’d gotten off the phone.

  I perched on the edge of a chair and rubbed my face. “He was a good baby. Quiet. Not a crier.”

  “Like one of those that always gazes around at the world through huge eyes,” Mamie said. “They’re seeing everything, and nothing meets with their full approval. Like old men.”

  They saw everything, all right. “That’s my boy.” I glanced over at Ray, but he didn’t seem to be listening. “You two don’t have any children?”

  Mamie smoothed out another layer of thin blanket on the couch, her back a little too straight. The dog lay at her feet, her eyes rolling to watch everything Mamie did.

  I sighed. “That was really nosey. I’m a little rusty on social graces.”

  “It’s OK. We just—we found each other late, and then just never had any luck.” Mamie finished her nesting with a last plump of the pillow and sat in a chair across the room. I could see the two of them there, each night returning to their spots. Mamie in her chair with the craft basket at her feet, and he in—in this recliner I couldn’t quite settle into.

  Mamie stared out the sliding glass doors into the dark trees. “No luck at all there, but we’ve had a lot of grace. I’m not ungrateful.”

  “Luck,” I said. “In my case, bad luck. At least that’s how I felt at the time.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “To death.” For a second, I let myself think of the blood that must have pooled on the dock. If he’d known I was pregnant, he might have held my head under the water long enough to follow through.

  Mamie turned to look at Ray, brooding over the photo. “It’s hard to imagine now. I’m—I’m just so sorry.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for.” I hadn’t lost track of Ray’s apology, which hadn’t yet come. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.

  “But you know how it is. Men and their feelings, never the twain shall meet. We stand in for them in times like this.” Mamie looked at me for confirmation. “You know what I mean? Like when Ray’s dad was sick in the hospital. It was chaos, just utter—he was crazed from the drugs they had him on, poor soul. And I held Big Ray’s hand and calmed him down, just like he was my own, because I knew Ray couldn’t. They’re not born that way, but they’re not raised that way, either. It’s just one of the things we do.”

  I didn’t think that was true. I’d heard Joe Jeffries’s voice, trying to tell me the truth about Joshua, heard Russ calming the startled animal right out of me with a few words. But I didn’t want to get into it. “I’ve never been anyone’s wife.”

  “Oh. I didn’t mean—I just mean we women. Maybe that’s not lady lib enough, but I think we do what we can, and some things are easier for me than for Ray.” She turned her eyes on him again. “Like for instance. Right now he’s stunned and he can’t say what’s in his heart. I don’t think he knows all what’s in there right now.”

  I barely stifled a yawn. “You do, though?”

  “I usually do. There’s a lot competing for his attention right now. Love he can’t explain. And worry that he won’t be able to explain it to me, that I’ll take offense. Disappointment that Joshua doesn’t have any half siblings. And regret. Thirteen years is a lot of time to miss.” She avoided meeting my eyes. “Lots of regret.”

  Watching Ray rub his thumb methodically across the image of my son made me crazy. Given the chance, I’d leave right now and keep Joshua to myself forever. Regrets for leaving. Regrets for coming back. Regrets of such size that they seemed to be welling up and choking me from the inside. Or maybe that was the anger. I could still feel some of that, too. Thirteen years is a lot of time to miss. No one knew that better than I did.

  Mamie hoisted herself to her feet. In the low light from the kitchen, she looked tired and older, and I imagined that’s how I looked to her, too. “We all have some regret, Leeanna. Sometimes I think that’s what we’re made for. Humans. No matter what we do, we regret what we didn’t.”

  I didn’t answer. Mamie sounded to me like a woman who hadn’t suffered, not quite as much as she thought she had.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  I slept badly. I woke once in the night from a dream—words scribbling across the same blue field of earlier nightmares. Everything hinged on reading the message and knowing who wrote it, but the words circled and looped around me so that I was tied up in them, noosed. Half awake, I tried to remember: Was it Joshua? Was it Ray? Was I chasing or being chased?

  I lay in bed until the sun finally rose over the lake, straight into my eyes.

  The clock in the kitchen said six thirty. I found a nearly full pot of coffee and a mug waiting for me. In the window over the sink, I caught sight of myself—puffy eyes, hair haphazard—and beyond my reflection, the lake.

  The sliding door was quiet. Outside the world was already alive with chittering bugs and birds. This was my favorite time of day in the woods. Before mosquitoes, before the high, burning summer sun. Before the boats pulling water-skiers roared across the water. I’d always slept through the mornings as a kid staying with Theresa’s family on the lake. But when Ray and I had lived on the lake—

  My pulse jumped. I didn’t want to think about it.

  The sky over the lake was a tender blue.

  I took my coffee outside to the deck. There was something unfair and unsatisfying about being the only one who seemed to remember just how awful those days were. Ray should remember, but he hadn’t been very talkative. Or apologetic. And Mamie had all the facts, but she hadn’t gotten her head bashed in. She didn’t get her arm twisted behind her back. She hadn’t heard her own body creak and snap. Something unfair about how well one person can know these things. Other people could never understand, no matter how much they thought they did. I caught myself feeling smug and started down to the lake.

  Ray was sitting on the dock bench. Before I could turn around and go back inside, Magic jumped up from the dock and came to escort me down the steep stairs, her tail wagging a hero’s welcome.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Good morning.”

  He turned back. The water was black where the sun had not yet reached.

  “Or,” I said, “maybe not a good morning?”

  “A—confusing twenty-four hours.”

  “I think I’m only responsible for your last twelve or so.”

  “Always had to be right.”

  I sipped my coffee, thinking how easy it would be, just this one time, to bash his head in. Here was the mug in my hand. He might even get a little scald. “Is that it? The reason for it all?”

  He
slid over on the bench to make room for me. “Sorry.”

  “For the comment, Ray? Or for more than that?” If I ran for the stairs, he’d be too fast for me. I sat on the edge of the bench. If he’d really changed, here was his chance to prove it.

  He nodded into the lake. “For everything.”

  For everything. Two words didn’t quite cover it, but I guessed it was all he was capable of. It was probably all locked in his heart. Locked in his monstrous heart, if he’d actually been born with one.

  Magic had had enough inattention. She put her chin on my knee and sighed. I switched the mug to my other hand and gave the dog a scratch on her neck.

  “I want to see him,” Ray said. “Joshua.”

  “Me, too.”

  “No, I mean. I want to get to know him.”

  I’d been waiting for this. Had worked the words over and over in my head in the night until I’d made sense of it. He’d want to grab his half now. Now that I’d done all the hard work of surviving his abuse and raising his offspring. He could do all the anger-management training in the world, and it wouldn’t change my mind about this: he could go to hell.

  “I think it’s probably not the right time to be making plans like that. Obviously he and I have some things to work out. I think you might just—complicate things.”

  Ray was glaring at me with Joshua-brown eyes. “You’re going to run off again.”

  “Don’t even—you’re not allowed to talk about it like that. Like I was some crazy kid taking a joy ride.”

  “He’s my son, too.”

  I hated him, I really did. “I won’t entertain clichés from talk shows, OK? I just won’t. I could have gone my entire life not coming back here. You’d never have known.”

  “But now that I do—”

  “Screw you.”

  “I can get a lawyer.”

  “And your lawyer.”

  Ray slapped his hand on his knees, the sound jolting me. “What am I supposed to do? Just ignore that you did come back?” He narrowed his eyes at me. “You had to come back. You thought he’d come here. He didn’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that you thought he wanted to. My kid has an interest—”

  “He has a lot of interests. Football. Oh,” I said, “and he’s taking up street art.”

  “He wants to meet me, and that just drives you insane.”

  “Can you just go back in the time machine for a second? I left here thinking that you would kill me. Kill me, Ray. You said”—I lowered my voice to imitate him—“‘you know what I’d do, right?’ And I took you at your word—no, I didn’t have to, did I?”

  Ray’s face went flat. “I’ve left all that behind me.”

  “Well, how lucky for you. How very lucky for you, indeed. I—have not.” I looked around the empty lake as though the words I meant to say would be there. If those dream-supplied ribbons of words were ever going to surface, now was the time. “I’ve been on hold all these years, Ray. You have a lake house and a lake and a wife and a dog and grace, and I have put my life on complete hold for thirteen years with fear of you. All the time you were getting counseled and fixed, hooray for Ray, I was wondering when you were going to come kill me.”

  His hands lay in fists on his thighs. I took a shuddering breath, watching them, and kept going. “If it seems like I can’t let go of what you’ve already left behind, it is because I haven’t left it behind. I came here for one thing. And now I’d like to go home and maybe get on with my life. Maybe get a house and a—dog.” I had almost said husband. “I have been on hold. I have been on ice. No matter how well your anger has been managed, I remember. And I don’t forgive you. You stole—” I pictured Joshua, small, on my shoulder, his thumb in his mouth. What if I’d stayed? What if I didn’t have him? “You stole everything, and you would have stolen more if I’d let you.”

  Ray’s attention had returned to the lake. A boat with an outboard motor putted along the shoreline toward us, two men in camouflage caps casting into the darkest shallows. Ray let them pass, everyone but me nodding acknowledgment. The boat tugged along until I couldn’t sit still anymore. I stood and strode down the dock, Magic at my heels.

  The dog beat me to the stairs, but Ray was just behind.

  “Wait.”

  “I will scream.” I saw the rowboat at the dock and inside, two shiny red oars. I turned and fled up the stairs, the dog racing beside.

  “Wait. Damn it, Leeanna.” His fingers grazed the back of my elbow as I ascended the last stair.

  I whipped around and faced him. “That is not my name,” I said. “Not anymore. That girl is dead.”

  He looked away. “What, then?”

  “You don’t need it. Just for you? I’ll answer to some of our old favorites—” He winced. “You want to catch my attention in the next five minutes before I leave here forever? I’ll answer to bitch-face. Or whore. I’ll answer to—”

  The screen door slammed, and Mamie came out on the deck in a long robe, a mug in her hand. “Morning,” she called. “You-all are up early.”

  I glared at Ray. “I’ll get my things and be out of your way.”

  “Don’t you want your kid to have a father? As crappy as I would have been then, Ell, I’m not such a slouch now.”

  Ell—he was the only person who’d ever called me that, giving me a new identity that was all his. I’d loved it, then. “I think he’s doing just fine without a father, slouch or not.”

  “Fine? Missing for a week? He’s just dandy.”

  “Shut up. We have some things to—”

  “But why would you give me a chance? That father relationship was never anything you had much time for.”

  I shook my head. “You know what my father was for me. He primed me for one thing: a relationship like the one you and I had.”

  I turned on my heel and walked toward the house. I had a calm face for Mamie.

  “Is everything OK?” Mamie said, reaching out to touch my arm as I swung by for the deck door.

  “Leeeee-Anna!” Ray taunted at my back. “Just a damn minute before you pack your shit and leave forever.”

  I pulled at the door and left Mamie, open-mouthed, in my wake. Inside, I saw that nothing at all belonged to me. Except the photo of Joshua. I’d thought to leave it, a token, but just now I wanted it back. The photo was mine. Joshua was mine.

  Ray walked in. His eyes dropped to the frame in my hands. “I know your dad was pretty messed up—”

  “Don’t talk to me about my father,” I said. “Your memory is pretty bad concerning the years you were slamming me into walls, so I can’t imagine you remember the stories I used to tell you about him. But why would you? It’s all revisionist history in this little idyllic cottage by the lake, isn’t it?”

  “I think it’s more like a course in denial.”

  I tucked the photo under my arm, making sure he saw me do it. “Thanks for the visit and the new outlook on life.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said. “Oh, yeah. Look at Lee-Lee Winger now, running out when things get tough. That’s what she’s good at.”

  I had reached the kitchen door. I burst through it and hurried for the truck.

  He ran up behind me and grabbed my arm, spinning me around. The frame slipped out. We both reached for it, but too late. The glass shattered on the driveway. I raised my hand, but I couldn’t let it fly. As much as I wanted to hear a resounding belly flop of a slap on that man’s face, all I could see was the shape of my hand on Joshua’s cheek.

  “Go ahead. You learned from the best,” Ray said.

  “I don’t need to,” I said. The glass was smashed and the frame broken. I reached down and slid the photo out of the debris.

  “But you wanted to,” he said. “I wonder why Joshua hit the road.”

  I stood. “I’m a good mother. I could have done better, but I could have done worse. Much worse, since I learned from the best there, too.”

  “Such loyalty,” he said, shaking his head. “I used to wonder how you left her b
ehind, but I’m starting to see. Are you even going to pay your respects while you’re in town? Before you leave, you know, forever?”

  I didn’t even know where my mother had been buried.

  The clock was ticking. No, the alarm was going wild, and I needed to get going. The longer I was here, the more I turned into a person I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be—home. Wherever Joshua was. All I wanted was to make sure he was safe. I’d thought, once, that when I was a parent I would finally understand my own. But I actually understood them less.

  “You wouldn’t be a father if I hadn’t left,” I said. “You know what you’d have done.”

  Ray, ashen, glanced toward the house.

  I felt only grim confirmation. “Didn’t tell her that part, did you? Sorry I won’t be here to see her believe in love on this one.”

  “Ray, what’s going on?” Mamie called. He nodded, and she disappeared into the house.

  “You should at least pay your respects.”

  “Respect was the one thing my mother didn’t earn.” I pushed the photo of Joshua into his hands. “She never did a thing to stop it. None of it.”

  “Didn’t mean her,” he said.

  “I need to—I’ve been gone too long.” What if Joshua had come back? And I wasn’t there?

  “That’s what I’m saying. You’ve been gone too long. You should go see him while you can.”

  I shielded my eyes. Ray was backlit, his expression lost in shadow. “Who?”

  “Who?” Ray turned his head toward the deck, where Mamie stood with a box under her arm. “I mean your dad.”

  “My—? But he’s—” He was dead. But when I tried to remember how I knew this, I came up short. “His name wasn’t in her obituary,” I said. And I’d put him behind me long before I’d left town. Only my mother’s death had concerned me. Only my mother’s death had released me.

  “They were divorced by then,” Ray said. “She left him. She just didn’t get far.”

  Mamie had arrived in her slippers. She held out the box. “I’m sorry it’s not nicer—”

  Ray took the box and thrust it into my hands.

  I swallowed the rock in my throat. “What—”