Day for Night

First Chapter

Day for Night

Reagan Arthur Books

1

Yesterday’s Day

THEY’RE AROUND HERE,” said our guide, as we slowly motored up the Homosassa River. It was late afternoon, a mildly sunny day in midwinter. My boyfriend David, his son Jordan, and I wore wetsuits, which we had rented along with snorkeling equipment. We’d been assured that a group of five overwintering manatees had been grazing all day in the oxbow.

“Look!” Jordan yelled, and pointed. Across the river, a pair of seal-like heads had surfaced.

“Well, thar she blows,” said the guide, and let the motor die. He tossed a small metal anchor into the blue-gray water.

We’d been in Tampa for one of David’s conferences. We had heard about the Homosassa River, an hour’s drive north and one of just a few places on earth where it was possible to swim with wild manatees. I had mixed feelings about the venture, but we had Jordan, who was thirteen, with us, and he had been extremely bored and brooding for the three days of the conference.

Since the proximate cause of Jordan’s moodiness was not apparent, I chalked it up to the obvious, larger issue we were facing. Six months before, David had been diagnosed with leukemia. He had recently gone into remission, but the odds were that the remission would not last more than a year. Though Jordan had not been briefed yet on the prognosis, his father’s bald head and skinny frame were enough to suggest that something was vastly different. This three-day trip also marked the first time either Jordan or I had gone with David to a conference. Perhaps it had not been a waste of money, though Jordan and I had spent most of the time playing backgammon in our motel room while David agonized about his presentation.

In our rented car we’d driven up to the town of Homosassa right after David finally gave his talk about the latest trends in the population dynamics of the long-spined black sea urchin. During the ride I offered David my impressions of the talk while Jordan tuned us both out with his Sony Walkman. He was thirteen, after all. Somehow he’d managed it. His mother died when he was six, but he’d come through it more or less okay. I attributed this to David’s good and loving nature, and I reluctantly gave some credit to the two twentysomething budding marine biologists whose thesis committees David had more than chaired. That was during the years between his wife Deborah’s death and our first meeting, on the occasion of his bringing Jordan into my office with tonsillitis. It took three years before we started discussing marriage, but then his diagnosis came, and so instead we discussed my plans to adopt Jordan, if David died.

I thought about this as Jordan jumped into the river. He liked me now but I wondered if he would still like me as his mother. I guessed the grad students were more sisterly than maternal, and that maybe this had been a safer enterprise. I also guessed I wasn’t anything like Deborah. She was a dancer. David once told me she had a habit of getting extremely lost while she was driving. Sometimes she went to the store for milk and took an hour to get home.

Jordan swam calmly up to the nearest manatee and dove down, as if to take a few bites of whatever species of aquatic grass was growing on the river bottom. When he resurfaced, the nearby manatee approached and seemed to nuzzle him. Within seconds, he appeared to have been approved as a new member of the herd.

David followed Jordan in. With the same unlearned skill Jordan had inherited, he too was quickly welcomed by the manatees. For twenty minutes or so, I watched the two of them swim around with these floating teddy bears, one of whom seemed to be continually demanding that David tickle him. “Go on,” said our guide, a tall, skinny young man who looked to be in his early twenties. He had blond hair and a very bad complexion, and I had noticed that he kept glancing at my chest.

I said, “I don’t know that I want to.”

He said, “Why not?”

I didn’t answer. I almost told him that as a young girl I had lived in a small village in eastern Poland, that we didn’t have any marine mammals, and that I’d once seen a dead man floating facedown in the river Bug. But that would have been melodramatic. The truth was I was afraid that I would not be made as welcome by these manatees. That they would sense a certain problematic energy in me—or worse, I would find that I was terrified of them. As rationalization, I was reviewing various environmentalist arguments against fostering interaction with wild animals. These ranged from ethical problems related to ecotourism to the dangers these manatees might face thanks to their willingness to tolerate human presence. Of course, it also occurred to me that they’d been tamed long ago, that their nature was genuinely docile in the first place, and finally, that I had never seen creatures more beautiful in my life.

So I went in with my rented mask, fins, snorkel, and too-small wetsuit. I swam toward them with far less ease than David or Jordan, veering away, then toward, then back away, and at last choosing to swim in the general direction of a single manatee on the periphery. It was the wrong choice, I quickly realized. This manatee was the only member of the group that appeared to be the least bit skittish. I stopped swimming when it drew back from me. I prepared to face unprecedented manatee rejection, but thankfully, it did not turn its whiskered snout away. With the most placid, unearthly face, it watched me. Its tiny eyes looked to me like stars. It let its tail fluke sink until its body was almost vertical. When I looked down I saw that the tail was horribly disfigured, sliced into several leaflike segments by the blades of an outboard motor.

I knew what to do, somehow. I swam away from the manatee and it followed. I took a few more gentle strokes, let myself glide, and did not look back. When the creature swam up beside me, I kept going. It stayed with me for a minute or so, once even nuzzling me, and finally I turned toward it. I saw more scars on its back, including one that was shaped like the letter Z. It moved up close and pressed the side of its long body against my shoulder. Then it drew back again, submerged, swam under me, and was gone.

Our guide had told us that if you stay where you are and do not try to follow, the manatee will usually return in a few minutes. I treaded water until its head popped up near the main group. It stayed away and submerged again when Jordan swam out toward it. I didn’t see its head resurface, although I waited ten more minutes. Then I swam back to the boat and felt as if my heart would burst.

I pulled myself up the rope ladder that our guide had hung down the boat’s side.

“That one, she likes you,” he said.

“She swam away from me.”

“She’s just a shy one. See any markings?”

“What kind of markings?”

“Propeller scars,” he said, and glanced down at my chest again. Fixed action pattern, David would say. All part of preprogrammed neurophysiology. He’d claimed his attraction to the second of the two grad students, a top-heavy girl named Stacy Bennett, could be blamed on the phenomenon of “supernormal stimuli.” Just like the oversized claw of the fiddler crab or the inflatable red neck of the magnificent frigatebird. David conveniently ignored the fact that these and other supernormally stimulating appendages typically cited in college textbooks were, almost exclusively, traits that occurred in males.

“Oh, those markings,” I said. “Yeah, her tail was mangled. She also had a scar shaped like a big Z along her back.”

“That’s what I figured,” he said. “Zelda. She’s a real shy one, like I said.”

“Do you have names for all the manatees?”

He nodded and said, “We get to know them.”

“And this is all you do? Take people out to see manatees?”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“What else?”

“I work on boats.”

“You’re a mechanic?”

He said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s all this ma’am stuff?” I asked.

“Being polite.”

“Did you grow up around here?”

“Born and raised in Homosassa.” With a twinkly smile he added, “Ma’am.”

“That’s very nice,” I said, and stared at his vaguely Germanic features.

“I also play the guitar,” he said. “We have a band. We’re called Dee Luxe. That’s because Dee, she’s the lead singer and she started the band with her boyfriend. He plays the drums.”

“Is his name Luxe?” I asked.

He smiled again and said, “It’s Jerry.”

Jordan and David were swimming up. By then they’d been in the water close to an hour.

“Hey, Beverly, did you see us?” Jordan said, as he climbed up the rope ladder.

I said, “Yes. You turned into a manatee.”

“Maybe I did,” he said, and appeared to be assessing the possibility. He reached behind himself to unzip his wetsuit. I helped him peel it down off his shoulders and draped a towel around his neck. Jordan was wearing a little necklace he’d won last summer playing Skee-Ball at an arcade in Cape May, New Jersey. He and Rocky, my younger daughter, had each cashed in their win tickets for a pendant of polished light green stone that hung from a thin black cord. They called them “wonder stones,” which, apparently, was how they had been marketed.

“We saw you swimming,” Jordan said. “With that one manatee who wouldn’t go near me and Dad. It had a messed-up tail, from all the boats.”

I said, “Our guide said her name’s Zelda. She has a Z-shaped scar across her back.”

“What about that one with three scars on its head? What’s his name?”

“That must be June,” said the guide. “The others were Lana, Kate, and Francie.”

“How do you know?” Jordan asked.

He said, “I came here with another group this morning. They swam right up to the boat, so I got a good look at their scars.”

“Can you tell who they are without the scars?” I asked.

“Not really.”

Jordan said, “Dad,” and looked at David, who had just climbed up the ladder. “We were with Lana, Kate, and Francie.”

“That’s good to know,” David said softly, and pushed his mask up to his forehead. He’d started growing a new mustache, which made him look like a big, wet seal.

On the ride back, I sat with David, pulling him close with my arm around his shoulder. For the first time in a long while, he seemed relaxed, even serene. I recognized his mood. He’d been this way after a whale-watching trip we’d taken during the past fall. For all his scientific deconstruction of wild habitats, for all the academic bureaucracy and political maneuvering he had weathered, David had somehow preserved his fundamental love of nature. For me it was long gone, beaten out of me in my twenties, during med school, when I was taught to recognize the many horrors that nature can bestow. This was a problem, I later realized, and maybe one I’d hoped to remedy by falling in love with David. But in the three years since we’d met, I hadn’t healed much or gotten any softer. And in the months since David’s diagnosis, I’d often felt—more than he—that I wanted to give up trying.

— — —

When we got back to the dive shop, our fearless guide gave me a flyer for his gig that night at some local bar. I thanked him, folded the flyer up, and stuck it in my pocket. I wanted to tell him there were drugs that he could take for his bad acne, but I didn’t. It didn’t really seem appropriate.

We ate pizza and then returned to our motel room. The plan was to wake at six, drive back to Tampa, and catch a nine-thirty flight to Newark. I made phone calls—checked with my answering service, called two patients, and then called Jennifer and Rocky, my two daughters. Rocky was short for Roxanne, a name I’d once been keen on, God knows why. As expected, I got the answering machine. I left the number of our motel. I said we’d swum today with manatees and were staying in a town called Homosassa. I said to call if either one of them got home that night before ten o’clock.

As had become our nightly ritual, Jordan and I played backgammon. He rolled doubles on three straight moves and went on to achieve a gammon. Because David no longer had his presentation to obsess about, he’d been coaching me and suggesting moves, and after this thorough beating, I let David take my spot.

I went downstairs and found the motel lobby. I bought three root beers from a soda machine. As I walked back up, I encountered David, who had run down to find me. He said that Rocky was on the telephone, that it was urgent. “Nu?” I said—Yiddish for “So?” or “Well?”—which had become our little joke. My mother said it all the time, and for a year David had thought she was always asking about my clothes. “So is my house burning down?” I asked, when he didn’t answer. Then he explained that my older daughter, Jennifer, was about to spend the night in jail.

I assumed that whatever happened had involved alcohol. I was wrong, as it turned out. She’d been arrested with a girlfriend of hers, Alison Belle, for blowing up a mailbox in East Brunswick. They’d used M-80s, Rocky said, which I inferred was some kind of explosive. The owner of the exploded mailbox was Mildred Turner, a hated history teacher. Still it seemed strange to me since Jennifer’s midterm grade in history that trimester had been, as usual, an A.

To make matters more complex, Rocky had Jennifer on hold, calling from the police station, and had called me since, in theory, Jennifer was only allowed one phone call. I guessed she might have been granted two, but, in truth, I didn’t want to talk to her.

I let Rocky tell me that Jennifer needed a lawyer, that she was going to be transferred to the Middlesex County juvenile detention center, that she would need to be bailed out in the morning, and that somehow I was supposed to make all of this happen despite the fact that it was 10:20 p.m. and my plane would not be landing in New Jersey until almost 2:00 p.m. the next day. What little I knew was this: (1) being two months shy of eighteen, Jennifer was still a minor and would most likely get off easy; (2) I would have to call Mel Blumenthal, my pediatrics practice partner, and get him to bail her out. I told Rocky to tell Jennifer these two things and that I’d see her when I got back. I stayed on hold after that for about five minutes, until Rocky returned and explained that Jennifer was crying.

“What is she crying about?” I asked.

“She keeps on saying it’s a mistake, that she shouldn’t be there.”

“Well, was she present for the explosion of Mrs. Turner’s mailbox?” I asked Rocky.

“Yes, but Alison Belle is evil,” she said, as if this clarified everything.

“What does she want?” I asked, and realized I was shaking. “She blew up her teacher’s mailbox, and now she’s feeling bad because she happened to get caught.”

“She’s crying,” Rocky said. “She’s all hysterical.”

I took a breath and tried to suppress my anger, not to mention the surge of empathic terror I was feeling for my daughter.

I said, “Okay, Rocky. Listen. This is what I want you to tell Jennifer. Tell her she’s going to be fine and that Mel will bail her out first thing tomorrow. Tell her I love her, and that you love her, and that one night in a county lockup won’t kill her. Send her a hug for me and tell her to be brave. Then ask her to take a deep breath and hang up.”

I sat on hold again while Rocky relayed this message. It took another five minutes before Rocky’s voice returned. She said, “I told her. She won’t hang up.”

Somehow I’d guessed this would be the case.

I said, “Then I will. I’ll call home from the airport in the morning. Tell Jennifer that I said good-bye, okay? I’m hanging up now. Here I go.”

“Wait,” Rocky said, but I went through with it. She may have tried to call me back, but the line was busy since I immediately called the East Brunswick Police.

I pleaded with two officers, begged them to let Jennifer out that night on the pretense that she was fragile and might have a mental breakdown. A Sergeant Jones informed me that the lockup facility would be quite comfortable and that Jennifer and her friend had both seemed hardy. Furthermore, he said my daughter had committed a very serious and disturbing crime and that maybe a night in jail would be enough set her fragile soul straight. Barely resisting the urge to respond rudely, I hung up on him. I quickly got in touch with Mel, who promised he’d be there to bail out Jennifer at 7:00 a.m. sharp. I also called my lawyer friend, Lynn Burdman, who said she’d come with me to Jennifer’s arraignment Monday morning. David and Jordan sat there listening to everything. I hung the phone up after the last of an hour’s worth of calls and said, “Root beer, anyone?”

“Are you okay?” David asked.

I said, “Not really.”

“I’ll have a root beer,” Jordan said, and smiled at me. I smiled back at him—Jordan could elicit this—and tossed him one of the three cans I had put down on the bed. I agreed to play one more game of backgammon, during which I explained the situation. He again beat me badly and apologized. I assured him it was okay.

Jordan said, “Why don’t you take the wonder stone tonight?” and lifted the black cord off of his neck.

“Thanks,” I said, and slipped it on over my T-shirt.

We turned off the light so Jordan could get some sleep. It was almost midnight. David and I went outside to take a walk. There wasn’t much to do but wander around the parking lot. After we’d walked the full perimeter, we got into the rented car. Illogically, I began kissing him, which lasted twenty seconds or so, at which point I started crying. Then David held me against his chest and continued telling me how brilliantly I’d handled things. I calmed down after a bit and asked him whether he thought Jennifer would be okay in jail.

“She should be fine,” David said. “She’s tough, like you.”

I said, “But I’m not fine.”

“I think you’ll be calmer in the morning.”

“Do kids go to jail a lot these days?” I asked. “Is this a normal thing?”

He said, “It’s probably more common than it used to be.”

I still felt negligent, guilty of raising a precocious and pretty girl who blew up mailboxes. And Jennifer was the honor student, whereas Rocky was dyslexic and God only knew what I might get with Jordan.

We went inside and got in bed. Jordan was snoring away, and although David rubbed my back under the covers for a few minutes, he soon nodded off as well. I counted sheep and other things I never do. I tried filling my body, part by part, with a gold mist, but this old remedy also didn’t work. So I got up, slipped on my jeans, walked outside, and leaned over the second-story rail. The bending caused me to feel the piece of paper in my back pocket. I pulled it out. Dee Luxe at the Blue Ox. 10 p.m. One free drink with $5 admission. The address was on a main road, the name of which I recognized. I went inside and found the car keys. I flipped the light on and quickly scribbled a note for David, although I guessed that I would be back in an hour.

— — —

The Blue Ox was as grungy as I’d expected it to be. A sedimentary layer of beer coated the floor and the ventilation system seemed not to be working. Two steps inside and a cloud of cigarette smoke and body odor enveloped me, though the place wasn’t really all that crowded.

The stage was near the entrance, and I immediately saw our young manatee guide. He was wearing ripped jeans and a white button-down, sweating profusely, his electric guitar dangling above his thighs. I found the bar, ordered my free beer, and then sat down in the small section of the Blue Ox that had tables. From where I sat, I couldn’t see the stage well. The sound system was terrible, but the music I found tolerable. Mr. Manatee Guide knew how to play guitar, and the lead singer, Dee, clearly had charisma. She was a hefty and sexy girl whose crass expression and haughty presence contrasted nicely with the soft, sweet quality of her voice. She had once been in a church choir, I suspected. Now she was doing the angry and rebellious thing, wearing sheer tights, platform sandals, and hot pink miniskirt. She strutted around the stage while Mr. Manatee Guide stepped up to play a fast, bluesy, and altogether skillful lead. When he’d stepped back, Dee shouted, “Tim the Slim-Jim Birdsey on guitar!”

Tim Birdsey. His name seemed to fit him perfectly. They played one more song and thanked the twenty people or so who were standing around in front of them. They put their instruments down and turned the amps off, and it was clear that they were finished for the night.

I was about to leave when a young pixie-haired waitress came to my table, placed a Bud Light down in front of me, and said, “Timmy asked me to bring this.” I thanked her and looked toward Tim, who had been breaking down the stage setup with the other members of Dee Luxe. A waitress brought all of the band members tequila shots and they downed the shots in unison. Tim had a lime wedge in his mouth when he caught me looking. He pulled it out and called, “Hey, I’m glad you made it. I’ll be done here in a minute.” I was relieved to feel myself detaching from the night’s debacle regarding Jennifer, but I still wondered why I’d wait for a redneck boy who’d spent the afternoon staring at my chest.

“So how’d we sound?” were his first words when he joined me at the table. He had a beer in his hand and had just put on a Miami Dolphins cap.

I told him, “Pretty good, though maybe not quite ready for the big time.”

“We’ll get there,” he said, and then laughed amiably. He seemed different, much more confident and grounded.

He said, “The funny thing is, I thought you’d come tonight.”

“Are you a psychic?”

He said, “I just had a strong feeling.”

“I had some trouble falling asleep.”

He asked, “Did you and your husband fight?”

“No,” I said, and didn’t bother telling him David was not my husband.

He said, “My mother used to stay up the whole night after she fought with my crazy daddy. He always threatened to smash her skull in with a shovel while she was sleeping.”

Thankfully, the waitress appeared just then. She had another shot of tequila on her tray.

Tim said, “You want one?”

I said, “No.”

He took the shot glass in his hand and this time drank it without the salt or lime.

“It’s a tradition,” he said. “After we play. But two’s my limit. Dee and Jerry can both drink me under the table.”

“Dee has a nice voice,” I said.

“I know. We could make it big because of her. So why aren’t you sleeping? Are you one of those insomniacs?”

I said, “My daughter got arrested.”

He seemed unsure of whether or not to believe me.

“For vandalism,” I said. “Back in New Jersey, where I live. She and her friend blew up their history teacher’s mailbox. You ever do that? Blow up a mailbox?”

After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Sure, once or twice. Though it was more fun to just drive around and knock them down with baseball bats. Mailbox polo is what that’s called. You sort of hang out of the passenger-side window…”

“I get it,” I said, and forced myself not to imagine the other crimes Jennifer may or may not have committed.

“That’s a nice necklace,” Tim said.

I was still wearing the wonder stone.

“Is it jade or something? Malachite?”

“No,” I said, surprised by Tim the Slim-Jim Birdsey’s knowledge of semiprecious stones.

“Tourmaline?”

“It’s a wonder stone.”

“A wonder stone?”

I said, “Yes. I have to go.”

“But what’s a wonder stone?” Tim asked.

I took the stone between my fingers and held it toward him.

“I have no idea,” I said.

Tim said, “Actually, it looks more like aventurine.”

I asked him how he knew so much about green stones.

He said, “My pop was a big rock hound. Guess I became one too. And you know, Dee, she knows things about gemstones, like that jade is good for calming the nerves and ridding yourself of negativity. She has a necklace with jade and rose quartz. Rose quartz is good for creativity. She keeps a bunch of stones in our practice room. Aventurine is one of them. She said it helps the imagination. Maybe that’s why whoever gave it to you said it’s a wonder stone.”

“It’s my son’s,” I said. “He won it at an arcade in New Jersey.”

“Well, it looks pretty.”

I said, “Thank you.”

“Your name is Beverly, right?” he said.

I said it was.

“That’s a nice name,” he said. “I knew a Beverly Dupont back in high school. In ninth grade we were partners in biology lab. We once dissected a fetal pig. She didn’t look anything like you, though. The funny thing is I feel like I just know you. Maybe we’ve met somewhere, a past life or whatever. Dee’s always talking about past lives. Says she was once the servant of a wizard somewhere in England. You seem familiar is what I’m saying. I bet that maybe you’re like me in certain ways.”

“I bet that maybe you’re drunk,” I said.

He shook his head and said, “Trust me, you would know if I was drunk.”

“How would I know?”

He said, “I’d probably be telling you all about my crazy family.”

I said, “Okay then, Mr. Psychic. Why don’t you tell me all the ways that I’m like you?”

“Well, off of the top of my head, I’d say you think too much,” he said. “That’s not so bad, really. It just gets tiring. I’d also say that way down deep inside, you’re sad. Did both your parents die when you were really young or something?”

“No,” I said, although my father was believed to have been murdered in World War II. But this was after my mother and I escaped from eastern Europe, and all we’d ever heard were stories. All we could ever truly know was that we had never seen him again.

“Well, both my grandfather and father blew their brains out,” he said. “My grandfather did it seven years before I was born. I never knew him. My dad did it when I was sixteen. Right in our yard. I think it’s why I became the way I am.”

“Which is what way?” I asked, not unaware that he was telling me all about his crazy family.

He said, “Oh, lots of ways. But worried is the word I always come to. I’m sort of worried all the time, though I doubt anyone who knows me would even think it. I worry about my grandma and my mother, who I barely ever see, and about Dee because we slept together a few times, more like a few dozen times actually, maybe like five dozen, and even though we told Jerry, I still feel guilty because I’m pretty sure I’ll sleep with her again. I worry about other people and right now I’m even worrying about you because your husband, he looks like he’s pretty sick. But like I said, I doubt I even look like I’m worried about anything. Maybe it’s wary, more than worried. Maybe that’s it. I’m always wary. Maybe wary is what you look like when you’re secretly always worried. Does this make any sense at all?”

I said, “A little,” though I think I was being charitable.

“I want to take you somewhere,” he said.

I said, “I’m sorry. It’s getting late.”

“It won’t take long.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

He said, “It also might help you sleep.”

I concentrated on his face and I sensed earnestness. Strangely enough, his intent seemed pure.

“I’ll tell you what,” Tim said. “You can just follow me in your car. When we get to what I have to show you, you can just leave if you don’t want to get out.”

“How far is it?”

“Five minutes up the river.”

It was one-thirty, possibly later.

I said, “Okay.”

— — —

I was surprised by the bright light of the moon. A day or so past full, it had emerged from a patch of clouds. Its glow had turned the Blue Ox into stone. I got into the rental car and Tim walked across the parking lot to his pickup. He placed his guitar down on the rear bed, wedging it in beside some boxes. He climbed inside, rolled down the window, and said, “Okay, just follow me.”

I was still not sure if I’d really follow. I thought of Jennifer and hoped that she had managed to fall asleep. I also found myself thinking about my mother, who had lamented, more than once, that my appearance of perfect assimilation often led me into “extremely stupid American situations.” She was referring to my two daughters and my ex-husband, Richard, who I’d been married to for less than four years before he left to pursue his acting career in Hollywood. We’d tied the knot in 1964. I had wanted a child immediately, and after eight nerve-racking months of trying, I became pregnant with Jennifer, who was just two years old when Richard and I separated. A little more than a year after we’d signed divorce papers, Richard was spending a few days in New Jersey. We made a plan to meet and talk, got very drunk, and after a single night of unremarkable sex, I was pregnant again, which to me seemed so miraculous that I did nothing except watch my belly grow. I didn’t tell him for six months, at which point, as expected, Richard plotzed and for some reason I just laughed at him. “Funny how easy it was,” I said, and he said, “You are a fucking cunt.” When I told my mother, she moaned and groaned and said my father did not save our lives so that I could become a fallen woman. I suggested she might at least feign happiness for the fact that she would soon have a second grandchild. She called back later to apologize, but, as expected, the conversation ended with her moaning again.

“Well, are you coming, Bev?” said Tim, having already sensed my hesitation.

He didn’t scare me, but clearly something made me nervous. “Don’t call me Bev,” I shouted back. I put the car into gear and pulled behind him.

“Just follow me,” he said once more, and we drove off.

He led me back to the road that ran along the river. For a mile or so we drove beside the water. We passed the shop with the SWIM WITH MANATEES! sign, which was where we’d first encountered Tim that afternoon. The road turned south and the river vanished. We passed by citrus orchards and several herds of cattle. Given the alcohol he’d consumed, Tim drove commendably. Soon we veered back and drove again along the Homosassa River. In certain places the road ran right above the levee. I wondered whether the thing he’d brought me to see was simply this river glowing in the moonlight. It would have been enough, I thought, to see the river against this night, which was almost day.

At a sharp curve in the road, Tim pulled his truck onto the shoulder. He turned his engine and his lights off. I pulled over and did likewise. “Look there,” he said, and held his head out of the window. He pointed to a missing section of the guardrail. He said, “It happened a few days ago. Truck crashed right through. Look in the water.”

Beyond the bank and almost right in front of us, a pair of manatees lay resting on the surface of an oddly inclined island or peninsula. My eyes adjusted to the strangely illumined darkness. Then I was gazing, most unexpectedly, at the roof of a sunken carousel. It had come to rest along the river’s bottom, which sloped enough that, in the section nearest the shoreline, the top portion of several poles and a few horse heads had broken the water’s surface. Except for the corresponding section of the roof, the rest of the carousel was submerged.

“They got the truck out,” Tim said. “It landed down on its side, but they dragged it out. I don’t know why they haven’t picked the carousel up yet. The water can’t be doing it any good.”

I spotted a third manatee, most of its body underwater, bearing its weight on the sunken portion of the roof. Then the head of a fourth popped up behind the others, in the water.

“How did you know they were here?” I asked.

“They were here last night.”

Something was rising up inside me, something uncanny. I was starting to feel an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

He said, “Those manatees must like having something to rest on while still being in the water.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Want to get out?”

I said, “I think so.”

He pushed his door open and stepped out.

I said, “Hey Tim, can you tell me why you brought me here?”

He said, “Just thought you could use a little wonder.”

I smiled at the cleverness of his answer and pushed my door open. As I stepped out onto the glowing roadside, I considered how I might explain all this to David and to Jordan. It struck me that I’d probably choose not to.

“You coming down?” Tim asked.

I said, “Yes,” and followed after him. I had that feeling of being stupid but also knowing that what seemed stupid would be okay. Somewhat incongruously, I also found myself trying to recall the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I could get three—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens, and the Colossus. We reached a sand shoal that glowed hazily in the moonlight. “Do you know the Seven Ancient Wonders?” I asked Tim. He said, “The what?” and I said, “The Seven Ancient Wonders. Like the Great Pyramid.” He said, “Nope.”

We walked out farther, to the water’s edge, where less than fifteen feet of river lay between us and the portion of the carousel that was visible. One of the manatees began moving, awkwardly sidling along the submerged roof until it reached water deep enough to swim. The creature’s movements suddenly turned graceful. The water rippled in its wake, seemed to fluoresce. And then it vanished, leaving its momentary, perfectly smooth footprint on the surface. I stood there feeling the small weight of the wonder stone. I thought of Jordan and it struck me that this part of his life was going to seem wondrous, and that my Herculean task, if David died, would be to keep this sense of wonder from imploding, turning inward, and reshaping itself as longing and despair. Or perhaps such a task was futile. Perhaps it wasn’t my task at all. What would my task be then and what was wonder anyway?

A nechtiger tog, I thought, and then a door inside my brain opened.

This was a phrase my father used. Biblical in origin, it was Yiddish for “a yesterday’s day,” by which he meant something absurd, silly, or impossible. Often sarcastic, sometimes not, the words could substitute for “Don’t bother even thinking about it.” It’s what he’d say if I worried that the friendly talking ravens in a story I loved got angry when I finished the book and closed it. It’s what he’d say each time my mother expressed her wish that we leave Poland and cross the ocean to America.

On a summer night two months before we fled from Poland to Lithuania, he woke me up and took me out to see the glow of the full moon over the Bug floodplain. We’d come to live with his brother, Lejb, after my father left his job at a gymnasium in Warsaw. He’d been a science teacher there. Now he helped Lejb run his small farm and in the evenings he read books. He held my hand as we walked. The moon was casting its glow over the fields that ran beside the river. I had the sense that the bright light was clinging desperately to the earth. And for one purpose—to remake yesterday’s day, which, with a five-year-old’s capacity for literalization, I believed might happen if the full moon glowed bright enough. That night as we walked along the river, I kept waiting, hoping the light would reach its threshold, so that a nechtiger tog would actually appear.

The manatee’s head popped up again. Its fist-size muzzle floated on the surface of a deep pool right in front of us. I could hear its exhalations. Raspy, stertorous breaths. As if the river itself were drawing air through its enormous river-lungs and using this lone manatee as its mouth. I turned to Tim and said, “Are we anywhere near the place we swam today?”

“Maybe a quarter mile upriver.”

I said, “How come you didn’t take us to see this carousel?”

“Boss said not to,” he said. “Whoever owns it called him up and asked him to keep tourists away. Anyway, the manatees were downriver, where we found them.”

“You think it’s Zelda,” I said, “right here in front of us?”

Tim said, “Who knows. We’d need to see her scar.”

“Or else her tail,” I said, and crouched so that my knees were sticking out over the water.

“Are you okay?” Tim asked.

I said, “I’m tired.”

As I spoke, the manatee ducked under again. Another smooth, still print appeared on the water’s surface. Five seconds later the manatee’s head popped up downriver. Then it submerged again and did not reappear.

“Well, that’s like Zelda anyway,” said Tim. “She’s not too social.”

I said, “She’s wary,” and stood back up.

We stayed there maybe another minute. The water shimmered, and some reckless, erratic part of me was longing to dive in. To become part of that glowing river. Somehow to enter its ghostly province. It seemed within my reach, a day beyond all days, its wonder. But it would wait, I understood. Possibly it would wait for a long time.

“Ready to go?” Tim said.

I nodded. I had the silly thought that I should kiss him. I refrained, knowing the gesture would be foolish and misleading. I also refrained once more from telling him he should see a dermatologist. In the end, I hooked my arm in his and asked him whether he would guide me to my vehicle. He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and we headed up the levee.

— — —

On the plane ride home, David slept while I held his bald head in my lap. I had the window and I watched the eastern seaboard, trying to figure out which states we were flying over. At one point David woke disoriented, sat up stiffly, and looked around. He sometimes woke like this, in terror. He’d once explained that sometimes when he woke he would feel certain, for a moment, that he had died.

“We’re in a plane,” I said. “We’re over one of the Carolinas.”

He seemed relieved as he registered the interior of the airplane. “Hi,” he said, and then leaned over, kissed my cheek, and said, “I’m back.”

I took his head in my arms again. Jordan sat listening to his Walkman with his eyes closed, now and then mumbling a snippet of a song. I felt happy, in a way, or at least peaceful, despite the impending drama that was sure to ensue with Jennifer. It was a feeling I wasn’t used to. It seemed to have to do with balance. I guessed it also had to do with manatees, and I told David I was glad we had gone to see them. I fell asleep soon after that and didn’t wake until we hit the runway.

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Excerpted from Day for Night by Reiken, Frederick Copyright © 2010 by Reiken, Frederick. Excerpted by permission.
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