“He’s like my brother.”
That June, she chased him around my kitchen table, waving the red paddle he’d bought her two summers earlier. Her name was written along the handle in permanent marker, already fading at the edges.
They’d gone kayaking a couple of times, and Maya enjoyed it.
“You said we’d go this weekend, Danny.”
Her name was written along the handle.
“I said if the weather holds,” my son replied.
“The weather is holding. I checked.”
Daniel laughed and set the bags down.
“She checked, Mom. Eleven years old, and she checked the forecast.”
I poured him some coffee. “You spoil her.”
“Somebody has to.”
“She checked, Mom.”
Maya sprinted off to find her water shoes, and for a moment it was just the two of us in the kitchen. That’s when I noticed Daniel’s phone buzzing on the counter for the third time.
He glanced at it, frowned, and stepped out onto the back porch to answer it.
He had been gone a long time.
When he returned, he wouldn’t quite meet my eyes.
I noticed Daniel’s phone buzzing on the counter.
“Everything okay, honey?” I asked.
“Just work stuff. You know how it gets.”
I did know. Or I thought I did.
I watched him lift Maya’s paddle from where she’d propped it against the wall and turn it slowly in his hands, as if he were reading something written there in a language only he could see.
“Everything okay, honey?”
“Dan?”
My son looked up and smiled, and it was the same smile he’d given me since he was a little boy.
“We’ll leave at 8 a.m., Mom. The river is 40 minutes away, so it’ll be a day trip. I’ve done it a dozen times.”
***
I waved from the porch as they pulled out of the driveway, Maya’s red paddle sticking up out of the back seat like a little flag.
I had no way of knowing Daniel would come home without her.
My son looked up and smiled.
***
Daniel returned at 4 p.m.
I was folding laundry in the living room when I heard the truck door slam too hard. Then nothing. No little voice. No screen door banging open.
I went to the window, and my knees almost gave out before I understood why.
My son was standing in the driveway soaking wet, shaking so badly he seemingly couldn’t walk. His life vest was still buckled across his chest. His hair was plastered flat.
My knees almost gave out before I understood why.
Maya wasn’t behind him.
I opened the front door.
“Daniel?!”
He looked up at me, and his whole face broke.
“She went under,” he said. “Mom, she went under! I tried! I tried to get her! I couldn’t find her!”
“What are you saying to me?!”
“The river. Maya, she was there, and then she wasn’t, and I dove, and I dove, and I couldn’t…”
“She went under.”
I collapsed into the chair on the porch.
I remember hearing my own voice from somewhere very far away, telling him to call 911, telling him to sit down, telling him to breathe.
My son sat on the floor at my feet and sobbed into his hands.
***
The police came within 30 minutes. Then more officers. Then divers, boats, and volunteers from three counties.
I collapsed.
For two weeks, they searched both banks of that river, mile by mile.
They found her sun hat, snagged on a branch a quarter mile downstream. They found one of her flip-flops. But they didn’t find her.
The detective at the time was a kind man with tired eyes.
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