I keep up a brisk pace while approaching a man on the side of the road. He wears a plastic vest, fluorescent orange like the sun rising over the vineyard.
“Another morning,” he says, nodding. “Each day is different.”
Maybe he means the northern California weather, balmy one day and bracing the next. Yesterday my wife and I found another spring lamb dead in the pasture. We watched a ewe nuzzle its limp head while her live one suckled at her udder. Vultures encircled the frosted field, descending then hopping around, their wide wings lifted skyward. Later a hawk claimed the carcass. Finally the crows came, picking at the entrails berry red, eviscerated.
I pause as a car careens past and straddles two lanes before disappearing around a bend.
“If they had put those reflectors in, maybe she wouldn’t have died,” he says.
It takes me a moment to connect the blind turn with the roadside memorial, which I’ve glimpsed numerous times on my weekly walks. Tucked into a clearing of blackberry brambles is a nightstand like the ghost-yellow furniture of my girlhood room once wallpapered in Holly Hobbie, which my mother warned would remain at least until I turned eighteen. Everlasting.
Cement steps in the sandy dirt invite me to peer into the paint-peeled bedside table battered by wind and rain. Inside the torn top drawer lies a large photograph, water damaged. A middle-grade girl stands in a soccer uniform with her hands on her hips, caught in a state of arrested development yet slowly fading away.
Somewhere there’s a picture of me around the same age, wearing a red pinafore and white knee socks. While I sat on our scratchy plaid sofa with a hefty book of fables in my lap, my mother hovered in the doorway.
“Don’t move, I’ll be right back.” Soon she reappeared with her camera. Snap!
This girl’s photo, curling up at the edges, is held down by stones—one painted with turquoise dots, another colored purple like the poolside pebbles we decorated with felt-tip markers and sealed with a sheen of clear nail polish. A white wooden cross leans against a plywood slab of nails patterned with rubber bands in the shape of a heart. The initials E D hang vertically from the top. On the ground rests a larger E in plaster, flanked by a pink metal pail and a Hello Kitty Pez dispenser. I see glittery foil remnants of bubblegum wrappers, the offering scattered, ransacked by mice.
I wonder if she was walking alone. Or riding a bicycle. Was it a hit-and-run?
A fourth-grade friend and I sometimes defied our mothers’ orders to keep close, roller-skating from our suburban enclave to purchase candy at the strip mall a few miles away. Departing the safety of the sidewalk with our rhythmic scratch-scratch on cement, we dared to navigate the unbounded territory of asphalt, but always returned to her cul-de-sac where we’d choreograph disco moves until sundown. She’s the one who warned me about the woods. A girl was strangled there the same year we turned cartwheels on the front lawn. I knew none of the details then. Only that the dim forest was fairytale dangerous.
In adolescence I learned that it was a classmate’s older sister who was murdered. A peripheral acquaintance, she skirted the edges of my peer group but attended the same synagogue. The tract of trees where her sibling was lured by a serial killer with a kitten—I would discover decades later—was fronted by our high school football field. Every day, en route to school, I passed a woman walking her dog. Each time we nodded hello, not much more. One night I accompanied a few girls from my youth group to that classmate’s house. When her mother answered the door I realized it was the same woman who always greeted me with a smile. How could she go on, I wondered, living in the same town, walking her dog near the brush where she’d found a rope tied around her eleven-year-old daughter’s neck?
Now, leaving behind this small monument to a girl’s life gone, I consider what the man said.
It’s another morning. Each day, different.
