The boy at table six has my dead son’s face.
Same jaw. Same gap between his front teeth. Same way he tucks his chin when he’s nervous. I haven’t seen that face in eleven years because my son, Daniel, drowned at seven years old in the lake behind our house.
Fourteen days earlier, a woman I’d never seen before walked into the diner I’ve worked at for nine years and sat at table six with a kid who looked maybe eight years old.
I almost dropped the coffee pot.
The boy ordered chocolate milk and a grilled cheese, no crust. That was Daniel’s exact order. Every single time. My hands were shaking when I set the plate down.
The woman said her name was Caroline. She said they’d just moved to town from outside Albany. She was polite, kept to herself, tipped okay.
But the boy.
The boy kept staring at me.
Three days in, I told myself it was coincidence. Kids look like other kids. I was projecting grief onto a stranger’s child. I’d been doing that for over a decade – seeing Daniel in parking lots, in school hallways, in my sleep.
Then the boy spoke to me.
“Are you my dad’s friend?”
I stopped breathing.
I said I didn’t know his dad. The woman grabbed his arm and pulled him close. She gave me a look that made my whole body go cold.
I went home that night and pulled out Daniel’s old photos. His birth certificate. His hospital bracelet from when he was born. I laid everything on the kitchen table and stared at it until two in the morning.
Then I pulled up the obituary I’d written for the local paper in 2015. I read it six times.
The funeral home name was wrong.
I KNOW which funeral home handled Daniel’s service. I picked it. I signed the paperwork. I picked out the tiny casket myself.
But the name in the archived obituary – the one I supposedly wrote – was a funeral home that didn’t exist in our town. Never did.
I called the funeral home I remembered using. I asked for records from June 2015.
The receptionist said, “Ma’am, we have no record of a Daniel Mercer.”
I drove to the cemetery the next morning. I found the headstone. Same plot number. Same inscription.
But the death certificate I’d kept in my filing cabinet for eleven years listed a different cemetery.
I went to the county clerk’s office. I asked for Daniel Mercer’s death certificate on file with the county.
The clerk came back with it.
The signature at the bottom wasn’t mine. My name was on there as mother. But the person who signed as the one who identified the body was a man named Victor Mercer.
I never married anyone named Victor.
I never knew anyone named Victor.
I drove back to the diner. Caroline was sitting at table six. The boy was drawing with crayons.
I walked up to her and said, “Who is Victor Mercer?”
Her face went white.
She grabbed the boy and headed for the door.
The boy looked back at me and said, “Mom, is she the one?”
The door swung shut behind them.
I’m standing in the parking lot right now. Caroline’s car is gone. But taped to the windshield of my car is a manila envelope.
Inside is a photograph of Daniel.
He’s older. Maybe ten. Alive. Standing in front of a house I’ve never seen.
Written on the back: “He never died. Come to this address. Alone.”
The Address
The address was forty-three miles west, past the reservoir, down a county road I’d driven maybe twice in my life. Route 9 to Route 212 to a gravel road with no name. The kind of road that doesn’t get plowed in January.
I sat in my car outside the diner for twenty minutes first.
I called my sister, Beth. She didn’t answer. She never answers after eight p.m. because she takes a trazodone and she’s out. I called twice anyway. Let it ring.
Then I drove.
The photograph sat on the passenger seat. I kept glancing at it at stoplights. Daniel at ten. Three years older than when I last saw him. He was wearing a red sweatshirt I didn’t recognize. His hair was longer than I’d ever kept it. He was smiling. Not the posed smile I’d trained him into for school pictures. A real one. Half his face scrunched up.
I didn’t know that smile.
That was the part that made me sick. Not the funeral home. Not the death certificate. The smile. I didn’t know my own son’s smile.
The gravel road went on for two miles. No streetlights. Just my headlights
For more deeply unsettling encounters, don’t miss reading about My Daughter Drew Four People in Our Family of Three or I Was Just Buying Cereal When a Five-Year-Old Asked Me for Help. If you’re looking for a different kind of intensity, you might appreciate I Called a Code My Charge Nurse Told Me Not to Call.
