But What About Odetta?
our son asked,
when I told him
his father was missing
in the snow.
She was his favorite singer,
this was to be her final tour.
She was seventy-seven.
He was eleven.
We had tickets to see her
in concert that night,
had been planning it
for months.
He cried when I told him
we couldn’t go.
Our son was used to
his father taking off
to the woods
or the rocks,
some river or slope.
He could be late,
get lost sometimes
or snowed in
but he’d always find us
and catch up to whatever
we had planned.
Our son asked if his father
could just meet us
at McCabe’s
when he got home.
But I had to say “No,
this is more serious.”
I needed to drive
to Mountain High
while listening to
car-radio news updates.
I needed to wait there
for my husband,
for his father
to be found,
one way or the other.
Our son asked,
when I got home,
if he could sleep
in the bed with me.
He knew they’d called off
the search
and his father was
still missing.
“When will he be back?”
he asked repeatedly.
I lit a candle,
turned out the lights.
From the bed,
when I looked up at
the ceiling,
I could have sworn
I’d seen the shadow
of a skier,
climbing uphill.
Our son was half-asleep
when I said,
“I don’t have
a good feeling
about this.”
I held him in my arms
for hours. Only
these days,
when he tells the story,
he doesn’t even remember
my being there.
In the middle of the night,
I knelt in the kitchen
singing an Odetta song,
“Hit or Miss”
trying to find comfort in
her rejoicing.
And finally, I stood over
the trash can,
tore up
the concert tickets.
—From Now You Are a Missing Person by Susan Hayden (Moon Tide Press, 2023)
Photo: The Road to the Hot Springs/Mother and Son, 2007 by Christopher Allport
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