The Day I Died

by Lori Rader-Day

  “I heard you was a police.”

  The Parks grapevine really was impressive to reach a woman who never left her apartment. “Not exactly. Just helping out where I can.”

  “What do you think about it, then? That boy gone?”

  “I’m not sure what to think,” I said.

  “That boy,” Margaret said, shaking her head. “That poor boy.”

  “They’ll find him. We have to keep hopeful.”

  Margaret glared. “I mean that boy, Bo. He’s got enough to bear. And that wife ’a his.”

  I felt strangely protective of Aidan’s mother, had developed a sort of secret crush on her, for running, for eluding them all even for a few days. I couldn’t think how she had outgunned a woman a foot taller and probably thirty pounds heavier and so I couldn’t help but assign that crime elsewhere. I kept my tone noncommittal. “What?”

  “She’s a real handful,” Margaret said.

  That was old-biddy code. I’d heard it before, names applied to my mother and then later to me. We were women who got ideas, who got a notion, who thought they were better.

  “Who said that?” I asked.

  “People just say,” she said. “It’s in the air.”

  “That must be what I smelled,” I said. “I thought it was the fumes from somebody’s hog farm.”

  “What?” She reached to turn the volume on her hearing aid higher.

  “What about the babysitter? Charity Jordan?” I said. “What’s in the air about her?”

  “Well,” Margaret said, frowning. “She died.”

  We didn’t speak ill of the dead. I thought about that burned blue letter. “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “How should I know?”

  “You seemed to be on the pulse of Parks society, Margaret,” I said. “Never mind. You didn’t need anything? If not, could you keep the broom off the ceiling?”

  Margaret sniffed and brushed at the carpet with the broom. “Ride to the doctor,” she said.

  “What—oh. You need a ride? When?” This was not the question I wanted to ask. Why? Why me? “What about the van that comes around?”

  “That’s for church,” she said. “For the doctor, I usually take a taxi, but the doc won’t let me check myself out tomorrow. Says I’ll be woozy.”

  “Oh.” I thought of excuses, rapid fire, but none of them stuck. The best was the truth: that I didn’t care enough, that I didn’t want to get involved. Of all the neighbors in the building, why me? Because the sound of a broom handle could travel to my apartment? Because I worked from home and, maybe from Margaret’s perspective, didn’t seem to work at all? “Tomorrow?”

  On my way upstairs, the best excuse of all came to me. Tomorrow—who made plans that far in advance?

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning, with Joshua out the door, I turned to my computer. Projects were stacking up while I played cops and robbers, while I got dragged into the lives of my neighbors.

  First, I had in my email a new project from Kent: a scribbled kidnapping threat against a CEO of a Fortune 500 company in Chicago. For a moment, I let myself think about the apartment we’d left there, the noisy invented games of the children next door, the smell of barbecue on a Sunday afternoon. We’d lasted several years there, and I’d never, not once, had to take a neighbor to the doctor.

  And then the trip downtown one day, like tourists. Chicago pizza, a trip to stores we never went to, Joshua lining up for some famous caramel popcorn he had to try. Not as though I was the criminal. Not as though I hadn’t done everything I could think of to get on with my life. But then some northern Wisconsin grandma looks at me like she’s seen a ghost. She’d been wearing a Sweetheart Lake sweatshirt.

  I had forgotten about chance, about coincidence. I’d allowed myself to forget that unlikely things did happen. Chalk it up to a god, call it fate or the planets aligning or a bad sun on Jupiter, whatever woo-woo you believed in. Unlikely things happened all the time.

  I opened Kent’s file, blowing the scrap up on my screen and focusing on a few words: I’ll skin the fucking bastard.

  I studied the height of the letters, how much of each figure seemed pulled upward away from the baseline. Some of the uppercase letters had a careful pride to them. An educated author. I peered at the sample closely, planning what to say. It always occurred to me how much longer I spent reading samples than the author had spent writing them.

  Second point: some pinching of the letters, which led me toward a diagnosis of narrow-mindedness. Typical of the kind of people who left threatening letters, whether they followed through with violence or not. I plodded through a few more features of the man’s handwriting and, when at last I couldn’t ignore them, I studied the curve of descending tails of g’s and y’s. Gaps.

  Gaps in the strokes of those appendages meant that the poor jerk probably suffered more sexual frustration than anything else.

  I felt a recurring sensation at moments like this: Who was I? What right did I have to dig into someone’s life this way? I hardly ever came down on the side of mercy, but I hated speculation when real crimes happened every day. When they involved people at the top of corporate boards, the FBI cared, they jumped. When they happened to girls too young or naïve to know they didn’t deserve it, nobody blinked.

  Me, my mother, maybe her mother, too. Maybe generations of women who weren’t allowed, or didn’t know how, or were trained not to think, react, fight. Was it biology? Did I have no shot at all? Because this was the question, the only question: Would any of my efforts with Joshua make any difference?

  Maybe all the violence had already been passed down to him by biology, the anger marker on the chromosome I had passed him from my father finding a happy match in Ray. Or if not biology, then environment. Had I raised him too attached to me, so that now he would fight to free himself? Had I brought him up too strictly, so that now he could do nothing but rage against rules?

  This was the science I didn’t know. It made no sense, and it was all guesswork, all what-if, until I woke to a late-night call from the police or saw his face in a grainy security camera film on the news. It was all speculation, until it all went one way or the other.

  I went to the kitchen for a cup of tea and when I came back to the table, I ignored the email in progress and picked up the notepad from the night before, still open to the empty page. I brushed my hand over the smooth page and reached for a pen from a cup on the table. Joshua, I wrote, knowing that the curve of each letter gave away everything the word meant to me. I tried to free myself from thinking about my handwriting. Joshua, I wrote again, pouring myself into it.

  I was enjoying the curve of the J of Joshua in my own hand when it came to me: I had to settle for reality. Joshua needed help, and I wasn’t the one he needed.

  A psychiatrist? It was too much invasion. But—a good influence? A good, strong, intelligent, safe influence—who could help me guide Joshua through this rough patch? Some figure that Joshua could turn to, who could be a sort of spy in the house of adolescence, who could make certain there wasn’t any real trouble brewing? What if—

  “Sure,” I said aloud to myself. I flopped back in my chair and threw aside the notebook. Because Joshua was making it clear that he was finished in the world of women. He was done with my coddling, my protection. He needed a man.

  It had been a long time since a man had been in my life. So long that I tended to forget. No, that wasn’t right. It was more that the desire had become a low-grade buzz, a thin wire of white noise that was pulled taut along my spine. The noise was easily drowned out.

  There had been offers. That neighbor and his jackass John Henry. And then in Ohio, the client who’d asked the right questions at the right time. For six weeks, twice a week at noon, like a therapist. He might as well have been a stranger—a string of one-night-stand strangers, actually, for how little we spoke of it before, during, or after. Quick, repeated, trying to seek the enjoyment I never fully felt. When his phone rang, his hand w
ould reach for it without hesitation. His kids, calling from their mother’s. Too young to settle so completely, too old for a relationship built on film noir, I quit the project.

  But the idea of finding a man for Joshua, a man who would crack the Joshua code for me, gave a clumsy strum to that wire of need. I found myself thinking of the sheriff. Then Mr. Jeffries. I stared at the open window on my laptop, tapping idly at the keys before hitting the send button on the email to Kent. One item off my list, but I felt no satisfaction, no possibility, no sense of hope.

  Tap.

  I glanced at the clock, then shut down the computer, letting Margaret’s messages grow more insistent. When I thought about it, when I really looked back on my life, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt much hope at all.

  “YOU DRIVE TOO fast,” Margaret said.

  “Here?”

  “You nearly took out that mailbox—”

  “Is this the place?”

  “Slow down. Well, you passed it.”

  I took a deep, steadying breath and pulled into the next entrance. “Here? Urogynecology?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “Fine by me.”

  “They’re falling out,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “My lady parts,” Margaret said. “I think you parked over the line there.”

  “It’s a handicapped spot. Hop out—”

  “Young lady, you wouldn’t hop if you were here for what I’m here for!”

  “—and I’ll meet you inside,” I said.

  I took my time parking. Inside, everyone turned to see whose lady parts were falling out next. The waiting room held husbands of a certain age, daughters, one little girl sitting on her mother’s lap. The magazines were outdated and the television in the corner silent.

  “Ma’am, I have a form for you.” The woman behind the desk held out a clipboard.

  “Me?”

  “You’re with Mrs. Percy?”

  I tried to remember the name on Margaret’s mailbox. “I’m with Margaret. She just came in?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Percy. We’ve taken her back already. I just need you to sign that you’re taking responsibility for her after her appointment.”

  “A liability thing?” I walked to the desk and let the woman put the form in front of me. “Is this legally binding?”

  The receptionist took a good look at me. “Your signature, phone number, and relationship to the patient.”

  I read a few lines. Crazy legalese. I wasn’t adopting the woman, was I? “What are the options?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t really have a relationship to the patient.”

  Someone in the room behind me laughed.

  The woman had color in her cheeks now. “Are you family?”

  “No.”

  “Then you are a friend,” she said. “Sign or I’ll have to go get Mrs. Percy from her exam room and reschedule her for when someone else can bring her.”

  This bumped up against my concerns. In a lowered voice, I said, “I’m not sure she has someone else.”

  “Apparently not.” The woman stared at the form until I picked up the pen and signed. After another second, I gave in. Friend.

  “She’s going to be about an hour,” the woman said, taking the clipboard back.

  I looked over the waiting room again. One of the women was staring openly. “Is there anyplace nearby to get coffee?”

  The main hallway could have been any corporate office, with its low-pile carpet and framed still-life prints, but signs led to a set of doors that opened automatically onto a hospital setting: clinical, medicinal, familiar. The doors started to close, then bounced back again as I convinced myself to go through them. A few people looked up from their magazines as I squeaked through, concentrating on the cafeteria sign and trying not to look too closely at anyone’s injury or pained face.

  I’d almost made it past the waiting area when someone gasped, a tiny whimper meant for no one to hear. I glanced toward the sound. In a chair that had been designed to invite comfort, a young woman sat forward, awkward and careful, her hair hanging into her face. A piece of paper lay near her bright pink sneakers.

  “Did you drop—” I had reached for the paper but stopped when she recoiled. Her hair swung away to reveal a violent red, puffy mouth. “Let me get it for you,” I said. I left it on the seat next to her and hurried on.

  I found the cafeteria and paid for the coffee with shaking hands. The round-cheeked woman at the register smiled at me. “Maybe it will be OK, baby,” she said.

  “Thank you.” I was not the patient, Joshua was safe at school. Maybe it would be OK. “Thank you so much,” I said, meaning it.

  When I saw an exit, I took it. Outside the sun was shining, warmth beating down on the top of my head. I closed my eyes and returned to my skin.

  The sidewalk led out and around the corner of the building. I could see the door back to Margaret, but also a group of trees across the street, the tops waving gently. I sat on a nearby bench and sipped the coffee. Maybe it would be OK.

  These were not thoughts I’d entertained before. Inside, many people were having the worst day of their lives. I had already been that person. I didn’t have to keep being that person. I kept running up against that person. From experience I knew the woman in the waiting room didn’t want to be talked to. She only wanted to fade into that chair until they called the name she’d given them.

  When the breeze in the treetops wasn’t enough entertainment, I turned to the comings and goings at the clinic. Old people, being helped along. A woman with two young children, one of them crying and fighting her. At one point I thought I saw Stephanie from the Boosters hurry inside.

  A sheriff’s cruiser pulled up and parked in the fire lane, expelling two officers I couldn’t identify. They’d called the cops on that puffy lip. I tried to see it from the side of authority. It had to be reported or nothing would ever change.

  But that’s not the way I felt. My pulse battered against my skin as I waited for someone to emerge.

  My phone rang in my pocket. I answered distractedly.

  “Ms. Winger, Mrs. Percy is ready to be escorted home.”

  “Oh—” I held the phone back and checked the time. “Oh, right, yes. I’ll be right in.”

  I hurried across the lot, discarding the coffee in a bin near the entrance. As I opened the door, I spotted Stephanie back at the other entrance, this time leaving. She moved cautiously but fast, her arm around a figure in a baggy coat and baseball cap. It might have been her son. It might have been anyone, except for the pink shoes, bright, neon, and running.

  Chapter Ten

  I woke with the imprint of Aidan’s crackers on my mind. When my cell buzzed on the kitchen counter the second the clock showed 8:00 a.m., I was not surprised. Maybe I could tell the future after all.

  Sherry said, “The sheriff wonders if you can come in this morning.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Sherry paused. I could imagine her craning her neck to make sure the sheriff was at his desk. She whispered, “He won’t tell me anything. I’m dying to know.”

  An hour later I had assembled myself and arrived at the same hazy glass door on the third floor of the courthouse. When I opened it, Sherry’s smile drew me in and quickly dimmed. “I think they’re on her trail.”

  “Yeah.” I leaned on the counter. Sherry wheeled herself closer. Some officers talked quietly to one another in the back, one of them Chief Deputy Mullen. I nodded when he waved. The other was the young woman who’d given me daggers every time I’d seen her. Deputy Something Lombardi, but I couldn’t think what I’d done to insult her. Beyond them, the sheriff’s door was shut tight. “I think we had better get used to the idea,” I said. “It’s likely she’s a kidnapper. At the very least. She might be a murderer, too. She—well, she’s going to get caught.” The thought of it made my gut go tight with anxiety. Call-in-the-night anxiety. Moving-bo
x anxiety.

  Sherry nodded. “I don’t wish she’d get away with it so much as I wish—I wish she hadn’t needed to do it.”

  “Exactly.” We considered each other, but I was thinking of Margaret, who spoke gibberish all the way back to our building the day before. I’d put her down for a nap on her couch, trying not to take in too much of the surroundings. I didn’t want to see my own future—elderly, alone—that clearly. “Didn’t Aidan’s mother have anyone?”

  “Just the—”

  The sheriff’s office door opened. He emerged with his head turned over his shoulder. I took a step in his direction, but he hadn’t come out for me. Behind him, a stout, stooped, gray-haired woman trailed, he the sheep dog, she the sheep. I could sense the sheriff’s gentle impatience with the woman as she inched forward in prim little pumps.

  When she looked up, her eyes, though heavy-lidded slits in a leathery face, beamed utter reverence. She nearly shined at the sheriff, reminding me of the collected portraits on his office wall. All those people leaning, grasping, reaching—the walls closing in with the weight of all that need. All those people depending upon him.

  I just had the one depending on me, and that was enough. Though now that I thought about it, I should have checked on Margaret this morning. I should have offered to check on her, at least, and let her brush me off.

  “I just don’t know what we’d do,” the woman murmured.

  “Let’s not think that way, now,” the sheriff said.

  On the way past, the woman’s eyes darted all over me, then returned to the sheriff.

  “You’re a true hero, Sheriff,” the woman said.

  Keller, pink, directed her inch by inch toward the front door. I tried not to watch. There was something magical in the mechanics of how Keller led the woman to the door and coaxed her out. She didn’t seem hurried to leave the sheriff’s company, but she was leaving as fast as he could make her.

  I watched, fascinated, until I realized I was the one here at his beck and call, for the third time in almost as many days.

  When the door finally clicked behind my back, separating the sheriff from his one-woman flock, Sherry looked up from her papers and waited for him to come around to the counter.