When I was in third grade, a boy in my class disappeared at recess. They yelled his name in every bathroom in the school before concluding he was gone or had been taken. He was on the playground then he wasn’t. The search went on past the time school ended. At some point, the evening news announced he had been found. He was in the lake. He was very alive, just hadn’t finished the homework that was due after recess. I’m not sure if this was what they said, but I always pictured him swimming through the cattails and doing a backfloat.

Now my mom and I walk by the lake. Not much has changed about it since I came here growing up. A new playground and the lake was drained a few years ago, but you wouldn’t know that by looking at it now. The playground is bordering on outdated and the lake is full and frozen over. 

There’s missing posters taped to the trees as a young man is missing in the area. His family is out in the lake wearing waders and they’re slinging whatever tools they figured could break ice into the thick sheets of it. Apparently the cops aren’t helping. It’s been a month since he walked away on New Years Day. 

Maybe he’ll float up soon as the ice thaws during a couple of unusually warm February days. 

I sometimes practice searching my mind for my earliest memory. I usually have my eyes open because I do this mostly in public: in line at the DMV, waiting for a light to change, etc. I try to see if maybe today is the day I will remember my birth. It has yet to be that day. 

Usually I land on one of a few memories. Most of them are probably fabrications of the mind. I’m trying so hard to remember something that my mind finds a story I’ve been told about being young and I come up with the pictures for it. Nonetheless, I will take them as truth. 

The only one of these memories which I know is real is that of some mid winter day in 2005. Maybe early 2006. 

My uncle was missing, but that’s not what the memory is really about. I’m 6 with my ear pressed against the fence alongside my brother and a family friend. Family friend’s mother would die a couple years later, but right now we are listening to my mother. Our little ears find the gaps between the 2x4s and we listen intently as she is being interviewed by the news. 

He was 40 and paranoid schizophrenic. 

Then again, I do have one memory earlier than that: him, my Uncle Jim, cutting a tree down in our backyard. It’s an oversaturated blue sky day and I’m watching as the chainsaw whirs.

He was found dead in May by two methed out contractors for Walgreens.