Story-Portal

I want to tell you about Randy McPherson. I’m afraid, though—afraid that you won’t care. Afraid that I’ll get through this whole thing and you’ll let him disappear, anyway. I want to make sure he never dies.
The first thing you need to know is that, when he disappeared, he was just a boy. That’s all anyone would say after it happened. Everyone walked around for weeks with that look on their faces, the look you get when you put something on the counter, walk away, come back, and can’t find it.
I remember him, too. No matter what I do, he’s always right there, just behind my eyes. That was the problem. I couldn’t help but remember him. I’d taught him how to swim. I remember how light he was in my hands. I used to have to hold him up out of the water when he got scared, and I remember how light he was. I remember his tiny little shoulders. When they put the casket in the ground without him in it, I couldn’t help but think ‘it’s too wide’. And it was. It was too wide for how small his shoulders were. He was always tall, but not that wide. People would come in, look at the casket, then search the crowd for Mr. Barker’s face. I guess they wanted to ask him the same thing we were all thinking. We all knew that casket was empty when they put it in the ground.
There was only one casket place in town back then. Mr. Barker owned it. I guess most people liked him. He went to church every Sunday and most Wednesday nights. He lived alone, though, and didn’t date much. I guess after the thing happened with Randy, he got a little less religious, too. People started to talk about how he wasn’t in church anymore. Started wondering why a forty-eight year old man didn’t have a wife or a girlfriend. Every time a cat disappeared or someone lost a dog, all the adults would just sort of look toward that house. You know how people get talking. He moved, eventually. Placerville must not have been the right place for him.
I guess in some ways, someone must have thought it wasn’t the right place for Randy, either. I don’t know. I’m getting ahead of myself. See, that’s my problem. Mom always says I can’t focus in on what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m always off in the clouds somewhere. Most guys from Placerville, they go out for football and they get a girlfriend and get married, eventually. Then they either go off to work at the truck plant in Eukiah, dragging along the wife and her expanding belly, or they enlist in the Army. The recruiter here in town always gets his quota, every year. Either way, the girl packs up all their things and cries, trying not to watch the last stop sign on Hitt road as they drive past.
Until Randy disappeared, I swear I the universe ended at that stop sign. In kindergarten, they ask you to draw a map of the world. Most kids draw something like a circle and color it blue. That’s what they’ve seen on the television. I left mine blank, but even back then I knew it had something to do with that stop sign. I can remember sitting there and thinking about it. I did all kinds of wandering around what I thought of then as “in town,” but never beyond that stop sign.
I went out for football just like every other boy, but I couldn’t cut it. I mean, I just wasn’t interested. I think maybe there’s more to life than trying to knock some guy down just because he has a ball in his hands. I don’t tell people that, though. They’d call me a nancy. I tell them it’s an old knee injury from when I was in scouts. I tell them I was trying to climb Freeberg Hill by myself and I slipped on the bared rocks at the top. The girls always make that ‘oh’ sound and cock their heads to the side. I like that.
The day I got my degree, I kept thinking about how Randy would be just old enough to have started college that year. Sitting in my cap and gown, listening to some professor from State or someplace ramble on for an hour, all I could think about was how Randy should have started this year. I wondered if he’d have been going here. I wondered if he’d have remembered that I gave him swimming lessons.