My daughter was pinned behind the wheel at the bottom of an irrigation canal, water at her collarbone, and the one man who climbed down to her came back up the bank, looked me in the eye and said, “I can’t do a thing for her from here.” Then he got on his motorcycle and rode north while nineteen of us screamed at his back.
I screamed the loudest.
Autumn’s little girl was standing next to me on the canal road in her socks, holding two of my fingers, and her mother was eight feet below us in brown water.
It was a Thursday in September, a few minutes before four. Autumn had been coming out to my place outside Othello to pick Addison up, same as every weekday, and the loose gravel on the curve had finally done what everybody on that road always said it would.
Her Corolla went over the lip nose first.
The sound carried all the way up to my porch.
A long scrape. Then quiet.
By the time Addison and I got down the lane, cars were pulling over in both directions. A guy in a camo jacket was already down in the canal up to his belt, yanking at her door. A woman named Padma was on the phone with 911, spelling the road name twice. A college girl named Lauren held her phone up and filmed. Maeve Shah, who has run the dairy across from me since before I was married, got down on her knees in the gravel and prayed out loud.
The canal had been shut off all week for a repair. The water down there was low and still, and that was the only reason my daughter was breathing.
Her door had folded in against the concrete wall. Her left foot was caught somewhere under the pedals.
She could move her arms and her head. That was all.
“Mom,” she said, over and over. “Mom, don’t go anywhere.”
Addison pulled on my hand. “Grandma, the water comes back at four.”
I told her hush.
Then we heard the bike.
It came up the canal road from the south, slow, a big black bagger with dust up the fairing, and it stopped on the shoulder right above Autumn’s car.
The man who got off it was sixty, maybe a little more. Broad through the shoulders. A short silver beard, old faded tattoos down both arms, a leather vest gone soft at the edges. He hooked his sunglasses on the vest and went down the bank on his heels like he’d done it before.
Stan Mattingly. People told me that later.
Right then he was one more stranger in the water with my kid.
He got to her window and laid his hand flat on the roof.
“Eyes up here, honey,” he said. “Not the water. My face. You’re doing fine.”
Autumn quit crying. I saw her shoulders come down an inch.
He reached in and felt along her leg under the dash for a long time. Then he looked up the canal, north. Then he looked at the concrete beside her, at the dark wet stripe on it from the summer, and he put his thumb right on the top of that stripe.
And he climbed out.
The camo jacket grabbed his arm. That was Ira Hsu. “We pull her. Three of us can pull her.”
“You’ll take her foot off. Leave it.”
“So what the hell do we do?”
Stan didn’t answer him. He came up the bank and stopped in front of me and Addison.
“Ma’am. What time is it?”
I didn’t even understand the question. Padma said, “Three forty-nine.”
He crouched down to Addison for maybe two seconds. I didn’t hear what he asked her.
She nodded.
Then he stood up and said it to my face, the thing I can’t stop hearing.
He walked to his bike.
Autumn saw him going. “Sir? Sir, please.”
He stopped with one leg over the seat. He didn’t look back down at her.
Then he started it.
Maeve came up off her knees. “YOU GET BACK DOWN THERE.”
Ira called him gutless. Lauren ran after him on the gravel with her phone out, narrating to it that this biker had looked at a pinned woman and left. Somebody shouted out his plate number so the phones would get it.
And me?
I chased him six steps and threw my truck keys at his back.
“SHE HAS A LITTLE GIRL,” I screamed. “Where do you think you’re going?”
He looked down at the canal one more time.
Then he gave it gas and went north up the service road, the way the water comes from, until the dust swallowed him.
I went down the bank myself. I got into that water in my work jeans and held my daughter’s head against me through the window and told her the fire trucks were coming from town.
Eleven miles, Padma said.
Not one of us looked at what he’d left on the concrete by her window. His riding gloves, folded. His phone on top of them, unlocked, with a number already typed in.
Not one of us asked Addison what he’d said to her.
And not one of us looked at that wet stripe on the wall again until 4:02.
That’s when I felt it against my back.
The water was moving.
Slow first. Then cold, and pulling, and full of weeds from somewhere up the canal, climbing the concrete an inch at a time. Past her collarbone. Her chin.
“MOM,” she said.
Addison was at the top of the bank with Maeve’s arms around her, and she wasn’t crying. She was pointing north.
Out of the dust on the service road came eleven headlights in a line.
The first bike had something long and orange strapped across its saddlebags, and the man riding it wasn’t Stan.
4:02
They came off the service road one behind the other and pulled onto the shoulder right where Stan’s bike had stood. I counted them without meaning to. Eleven.
The orange thing was a farm jack. Five feet of steel, painted the same orange the irrigation district paints everything it owns, bungeed across the saddlebags like a fishing rod.
The man riding it was big and bald, with a gray beard braided down to his chest.
The water was at Autumn’s lower lip. I had both hands under her jaw, holding her face up against the top of the window frame, and I could feel her breathing on my wrist.
“Where’s her foot,” he said. He didn’t make it a question.
“Under the pedals. The left one.”
He set the jack against the wall and looked at the stripe. The water was two inches under the top of it.
Then he looked at the concrete ledge by her window. The gloves. The phone sitting on them.
He picked up the phone and turned the screen toward the bank so all of us could see the number on it.
“Which one of you was supposed to call this?”
The cow magnet
Nobody answered him, because none of us had looked.
I’ll tell you what I had looked at. I’d looked at those bikes every Thursday since April.
They came up the canal road past my place around a quarter to four. Nine of them some weeks, fourteen others. They went two miles north to the Twelve check, where the district keeps a shed and a picnic table, and sat there an hour. Then they came back past my place, loud.
In July I filled out a complaint for the county. Noise, speed, dust on the service road. I wrote “a group of between nine and fourteen motorcycles, every Thursday afternoon.” Maeve signed under me.
The county put it on the commissioners’ agenda for the second Tuesday in October. The letter saying so was on my refrigerator under a magnet shaped like a Holstein.
Autumn read it at my sink in August. “They wave at Addison,” she said.
“They can wave from somewhere else.”
She took Addison home that night in the Corolla, which was mine until she turned nineteen. A 2009, silver, with a driver’s floor mat that slid forward and bunched up under the brake pedal no matter what you did to it. I’d told her for ten years to throw that mat out.
That Thursday morning the district’s orange pickup stopped at Maeve’s gate. Addison was on my porch in her socks, eating dry cereal out of the box. The ditch rider leaned out his window and said it loud enough for the whole road.
“Water’s back on at four. Keep your calves off the bank.”
I’d forgotten it in about a minute.
Addison hadn’t.
That stripe on the wall is where the canal runs full. I’d lived above it for thirty years and quit seeing it.
Down in the water, the man with the braid had his thumb on the phone.
“That’s the district’s emergency line,” he said. “He typed it in for you.”
He pushed call and held the phone between his ear and Autumn’s head so she could hear it ring.
A woman picked up on the first ring and said, “Stan? Where are you?”
Thelma
Her name was Thelma. He told her a car was in the canal below the Twelve with a woman pinned in it and the water at her mouth.
Thelma talked fast and flat, like she was reading off a screen.
“The main gate at the river opened at four on the schedule. I’m closing it from here right now. Hang on.” I heard keys clicking. “Okay. It’s coming down. But you’ve got two miles of water already in that ditch between the river and you, and it doesn’t care what I do.”
“How long till it quits rising.”
“Down where you are? Twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five.”
Autumn did not have twenty minutes.
“The only thing faster is the waste gate at the Twelve,” Thelma said. “It dumps the whole canal off into the coulee. But that’s a hand wheel. Three hundred turns, and nobody’s put a hand on it since Stan retired in April. Thirty-one years he rode that ditch. Is he up there?”
“He’s on it,” the man said. “He was on it when we left.”
I didn’t understand that yet. I just held my daughter’s chin.
Ira Hsu was back down in the water. He had his hands on her door again.
“We pull her,” Ira said. “Three of us. Now.”
“You pull her, she comes out without the foot.”
“She’s going to drown with it.”
Lauren had come halfway down the bank with her phone still up. “The first guy left,” she said to it, “and now these guys came.”
Maeve was up top with both arms around Addison.
“Ira,” she said. “You let that man work.”
Ira let go of the door. He didn’t get out of the water.
The water went over the top of the stripe and kept coming.
The floor mat
Two more riders got into the water beside the car. The man with the braid jammed the base of the jack against the concrete and set the nose of it under the door pillar where the frame had folded in.
He pumped it. The gap at the dash opened maybe an inch.
“Try now, honey,” he said. “Pull your knee to you.”
Autumn tried. I felt her whole body go tight under my hands. Her foot didn’t come.
She tipped her head back, and the water ran into the corner of her mouth, and she spit and said, “It’s not the pedals.”
“What is it.”
“It’s soft. It’s something soft.”
“It’s the mat,” I said. “The floor mat. It rides up under the brake.”
The man with the braid put his arm in through the window and down past the wheel and stopped at his elbow. His arm was as big around as my leg.
“Can’t get past the column,” he said. He pulled his arm out and looked at me. “You can.”
I’m five foot one.
“Somebody’s got to hold her face,” I said.
He got his hand under her jaw before I’d let go of it. Big, flat, steady. “Eyes up here,” he said to her, the same thing Stan had said. “Not the water.”
I took one breath and went under.
The water was so cold it hurt my teeth. I went in through the window with my eyes shut, down her hip, down her leg, and the weeds kept wrapping my wrist like somebody’s hair.
Her foot was right where she said. Her heel had gone down into the fold of that mat, and the mat was wadded up under the brake pedal, and the whole thing was pinned by the dash coming in on top of it.
I couldn’t move the mat. I pulled her sneaker off instead. It took two tries, and on the second one I had to come up.
The water was at her nose when I got my face out. The man had her tipped so far back she was looking straight up at the sky.
“Again,” he said.
I went down again and got my fingers under the edge of the mat at her toes and pulled it toward the seat, and it slid, and her bare foot came up out of it into my hand.
I came up yelling, “Now.”
They had her out the window in about four seconds, Ira and the riders together.
When I got my own head up, the water was at my chin.
It had stopped moving.
The Twelve check
Autumn sat on the gravel in somebody’s leather jacket with her bare foot in Maeve’s lap. The ankle was already the size of a softball.
Addison stood next to her and held onto two of her mother’s fingers.
I sat at the top of the bank with my jeans full of canal.
The water was going down. The weeds slid back along the concrete, and the dark stripe from the summer came out of the water an inch at a time.
The man with the braid had handed me the gloves and the phone when they lifted her. I’d shoved them into my jacket and forgot them.
At twenty past four, one bike came down the service road from the north, slow.
Stan stopped on the shoulder above the car. He didn’t get off.
He looked down at Autumn on the gravel for a long time. His palms were on his knees, turned up. They were red and shiny, like he’d been holding a hot pan.
Addison let go of her mother and walked over to his front tire in her socks.
“You were right,” he said to her. “About four.”
“You asked me,” Addison said.
I got up. My legs barely held me. “What did he ask you?”
She looked at me like I should know.
“If it was the orange truck man that said it. Or if it was just something people say.”
That was the question I didn’t hear while I was screaming at his back.
“I said it was the orange truck man,” she said.
Stan nodded at her, once. Then he looked at me.
I had my mouth open. I don’t know what was going to come out of it.
“Fire trucks?” he said.
“Coming.”
“Keep her off that foot.”
Then he put it in gear and went back up the service road toward the Twelve, where the rest of them were already heading.
His phone was still in my pocket.
The second Tuesday in October
Lauren’s video went up at 3:51 that Thursday, while my daughter was still in the canal.
It was a minute and twelve seconds long. It ended on the dust. By the weekend a TV station out of the Tri-Cities had run it, and somebody had matched his plate to his name. Ira was on the same broadcast, standing by the canal in his camo jacket, as the man who tried.
So the commissioners’ room was full that Tuesday. My complaint was item six.
Maeve sat next to me. Eleven leather vests sat across the back row. Stan wasn’t with them.
When they read my name, Ira Hsu stood up before I did.
“I was in that water,” Ira said. “I want to speak in support of this lady. You all saw the video. That man looked at her and he got on his bike and he left. Then a dozen of his friends come down that bank like a gang, nobody asked them. That’s what’s on that road every Thursday. That’s what she’s been telling you since July.”
The chairman looked at me. “Ma’am? It’s your complaint.”
I walked up and set Stan’s gloves on the table in front of the microphone, folded the way he’d folded them. I set his phone on top. Every Thursday since, I’d stood at the end of my lane holding it, and every Thursday I’d gone back in the house before they came by.
The number was still on the screen. The district’s emergency line.
“He typed that in at three forty-nine,” I said. “I was standing next to it.”
“That doesn’t change one thing,” Ira said. “Leaving a phone on a rock? That’s not doing something. I was in the water. I’m the one who was pulling on that door while he was…”
“I have the rest.”
That was Lauren, from the back.
She came up the aisle holding her phone out flat. She didn’t look at me. She held it to the microphone and pushed play.
The whole room heard me. SHE HAS A LITTLE GIRL. Where do you think you’re going? And the keys hitting his back. And my own voice saying hush to a six-year-old, earlier, which I didn’t know she’d gotten.
Then the part she never posted. The eleven headlights. The jack. Ira’s voice, We pull her. Three of us. Now. And the man with the braid, You pull her, she comes out without the foot.
“Turn that off,” Ira said. “Turn it off. Why didn’t you put that up?”
“Nobody wanted that one,” Lauren said.
Ira looked at the back row. Then he picked up his hat and walked out.
Maeve stood up, went to the clerk, took the pen off her desk and drew a line through her own name.
The chairman waited.
“I’d like to withdraw it,” I said.
Thursday
The canal went dry for the winter the week after.
Autumn was in a walking boot until Thanksgiving. The Corolla went to a yard in Ephrata and stayed there, so I drove her to work every morning.
Lauren’s first video is still up. My face is in it, and my keys.
The first Thursday in November, a few minutes before four, Addison and I were standing on the canal road. She was in her socks again because she won’t keep shoes on, and she had two of my fingers.
I heard them before I saw them.
Stan’s black bagger came up from the south first, slow, the dust on it, and the rest behind him in a line. I counted. Twelve.
He stopped on the shoulder in front of us.
I held out his gloves, folded, with his phone on top.
He took the phone. He left the gloves in my hand.
“What time is it?” he said.
Addison didn’t even look at a clock. “Almost four,” she said.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who still has a complaint form stuck on the refrigerator.
More stories of unexpected generosity and family secrets unfold in The Eleven Receipts in Her Sandwich Bag Were in My Handwriting, The Crayon IOU My Late Husband Taped Over His Father’s Register, and The Folded Paper Beside My Daughter’s Pinewood Car Said $9,400.
