3. Amelia
AMELIA
We didn’t ask for an autopsy. They’re not automatically performed in all situations in our state, not that Imogen or I knew the rules, with this being our first encounter with death.
Our healthy and fit mother dying at fifty-four didn’t make sense to us, or anyone else who knew her.
But without signs to the contrary, her death was determined to be a tragic drowning accident, with no reason to question that conclusion.
We came to learn that Washington state law permits medical examiners to perform autopsies if they see fit, but since the crinkly skinned man at the county office didn’t find grounds to perform one, our mom was set in line for cremation without the intrusion.
It was simply an attack by Mother Nature, fastening Mom’s name to a list of thousands who die annually from vicious storms: lightning, wind, earthquakes, fires, and, in her case, rain.
Mom was a serial pedal boater. It had been her daily exercise for as long as I can remember, something she usually did before dusk, as the sun made the surface of the water glow orange and pink, when she could pretend she was gliding on sherbet.
She’d be out for over an hour, weather permitting, listening to birds or the water oscillating through the rear wheel.
Imogen and I would watch her from the living room sometimes, like a remarkably uneventful reality TV show that would bore anyone else.
She’d pedal across the two-mile surface that makes up our private lake, returning after dark with a smile.
They’re beautiful memories that have only recently withered to something rotten and wicked.
When I look at the lake now, all I see are the waves snuffing her out.
No more birdsong or cheer, just death, ever since the officers arrived at Lake Blair that dreadful Wednesday morning, finding her body washed up on the shallow shore near the community center after a freak end-of-summer storm, dripping in a cream nightgown, her body still, her skin an unnerving shade of blue.
I spoke to her on the phone the night before, and she was tired.
She told me she hadn’t been sleeping well for weeks—though she didn’t explain why—and, being the restless woman she was, the only thing she felt would help wear her out enough to doze off was more exercise.
I didn’t feel good about her going out at night, without even the light of the moon to guide her.
But being in Seattle, I couldn’t stop her.
And with Lake Blair being so safe and familiar, I’d never truly imagined something would happen out there to my I’m-going-to-live-forever mom.
Even though she didn’t pass that night, she must have gone out late again the following evening.
Though I’m not sure why she was wearing her nightgown.
I was told the storm came out of nowhere, raining harder than it had in two years.
For whatever reason, she took our old kayak out, something she hadn’t done in a while, to my knowledge.
Like I said, serial pedal boater. It was found snagged on a neighbor’s canoe across the lake early the next morning, turned over on its face with BLY written underneath it in worn Sharpie.
I picture her rapidly paddling to get back to the dock after the rain began, water filling the boat faster than her paddle could propel her across the lake’s surface.
The pure sense of regret ringing in her head, knowing there was little she could do, being up against a vicious and unpredictable force.
That’s a difficult reality I had to face.
That there were likely multiple minutes of terror and suffering that she endured, wishing she could teleport to shore. That thought will never leave me.
The kayak had eventually capsized, with rain beating her face hard enough to make breathing a challenge.
Until finally, she couldn’t keep her mouth above the waves, and they took her under.
The lake reaches forty feet at the center, so if she was caught offshore, she’d be unable to touch the soft mud below, with quick-swimming trout and bass darting around the space between her feet and the bottom.
Late the next morning, my mother’s ex-partner and longtime friend, Leo, drove down to the community dock to check for storm damage before heading into the offices across the street—he’s the de facto contractor of the area, doing all the building and repairs around here.
Mom hadn’t shown up for work yet, Leo had been told by the woman who helped her run the lake club.
With the neighborhood losing power from the storm, he figured she was running behind.
But while checking for general destruction at the community docks, he saw splayed blonde hair and a foot, lightly bobbing in the waters below.
That’s when he found her, at the mouth of the lake’s beach, lying on her back, as though she were having a peaceful morning float.
It would have been easy, however, to tell that wasn’t the case, even without touching her.
I can picture the overcast light hitting her cloudy, unblinking eyes.
A neutral expression on her pale lips. Like a hollow mannequin greatly out of place.
I wonder if Leo made a sound when he saw her. A guttural cry that echoed on the still water, hitting the windows of every home in earshot.
These are the thoughts that haunt me.
After calling the police, Leo dialed me next.
There was no reason to wait for officers to arrive and assess the scene, because he knew without a doubt that it was her, and he didn’t want another second going by without me and Imogen knowing she was gone.
I hadn’t seen him in years, so when his name appeared on my phone, a knot immediately formed in the base of my abdomen.
I didn’t even know what I thought was wrong, but it certainly wasn’t what he explained.
Not that.
He shakily whimpered into the phone, knowing how much of a loss this was, not just for the family, but for the entire community. For it to happen right there on the lake in a way that was completely avoidable made it that much more tragic.
Realizing I was a twenty-eight-year-old orphan was inconceivably numbing. I sat in my classroom sixteen minutes before the end-of-lunch bell rang, hung up the phone, and sobbed over my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, feeling like a small, abandoned child.
I called Imogen, and then my boyfriend, Wes, and my entire world crumbled beneath my feet, as though my teacher’s desk cracked in half and Hell opened up in the belly of my third-grade classroom.
Imogen answered on the fifth ring in a sleepy voice.
Her job makes for late nights, so I think I woke her up with this call, making her wish desperately that it was a very bad dream.
“It’s Mom,” I had managed to blurt out. “She’s gone.”
“Where?” Imogen groggily replied with a tinge of tension. “What are you talking about, Amelia?”
I relayed what Leo told me in dramatic, gasping whispers so no one passing by in the hall could hear me. The last thing I needed was a fellow teacher I barely knew popping their head in with a worried smile, asking, “Is everything all right?”
Imogen was silent for a long time, and I knew she was as confused and overwhelmed as I was.
With it only being my second year officially teaching and the very first week of the new school year, the kids who would fill the thirty seats in front of me minutes later were still complete strangers to me. Would they care about what I was going through? Would they even understand what it meant?
It didn’t matter. I knew I’d have to wipe my tears and plaster a smile on before that bell rang.
Before I knew it, the back-to-class bell shrieked through the speakers, making me jump, while giggling eight-year-olds pounced into the room in clusters.
I envied them for being so slap happy in a moment like that.
But they quickly behaved and slid into their seats.
And as I looked at their tiny, round faces, I knew that each of them would experience such misery someday.
Though, statistically, I know some already had.
I pulled it together and acted like my entire life hadn’t changed in the thirty minutes since I’d seen them last, and they were unfazed by my glassy eyes and pink cheeks.
For the next two hours, I gave scattered lessons on US regions and fucking single-digit multiplication and pretended like any of it mattered.
Because falling apart wouldn’t have done me any good, and my students count on me to be an adult of positive influence.
As I lay in my childhood bedroom thinking of the horrors that occurred two weeks ago, I once again have the same glassy eyes and pink cheeks.
I slip under my covers, unable to sleep, and imagine my sister in the room across the hall, probably wide awake and afraid of the world. The last time we felt like this was twenty-one years ago, when That Terrible Thing happened with Imogen.