My Daughter Found A Dead Woman On Her First Bike Ride Without Me

Even the toughest helmet can’t protect you from everything.

If cities are made of blocks, suburbs are made of loops. The house I live in with my husband and our kids is at the end of a cul-de-sac that connects to a half-mile loop of pavement. In the decade we’ve lived here, we’ve covered the loop thousands of times.

At first, it was just with our dog for daily walks. Then our daughter was born we graduated to a stroller and then a red Radio Flyer wagon. She grew up and graduated to a scooter and finally a bike with training wheels.

We all know every step of the loop by heart, which means we notice even the slightest changes to it. If someone in the neighborhood gets new curtains, switches landscaping companies, or has guests visiting with Minnesota plates, we’ll notice it. We know each dog by its bark and we know which houses give out full-sized candy bars on Halloween.

By the time my daughter was six, she had grown to be an expert at the loop. She knew where the best puddles formed during a rainstorm and which houses had TVs big enough that you could look through the window and watch cartoons.

One day in May, another family was visiting us from out of town. Their son was seven and was free-spirited and independent just like our daughter. The two of them spent the morning riding their bikes up and down the driveway, but by the afternoon, they wanted to venture out on their own.

In all our years on the loop, we’d never had an incident more serious than a skinned knee or a broken flip flop. Letting the two of them go alone around the loop felt safe so we sent them out without a second thought.

As the rest of us played bocce ball on the lawn, the two of them disappeared around the corner, excited by the idea of ten minutes of freedom.

It felt like no time had passed when they rode back into the yard. Both of their faces looked pale and their smiles were gone.

I knelt and put my hands on my daughter’s shaking shoulders.

“Mommy, we found a dead woman,” she whispered in my ear.

It’s a strange thing for a child to say, regardless of whether it’s true or not. When I asked her to elaborate, she explained that halfway down the steep hill, they had come across a motionless woman lying facedown in the middle of the road. The road was streaked with blood and ‘throw-up’ and there was nobody else around.

It did indeed seem like they had found a dead woman.

I grabbed my husband and we started jogging up the road. We rounded a corner to see a few neighbors gathered around an awkwardly still body right in the middle of the road. Her hair was plastered across her face with vomit and she didn’t have any shoes on.

It was a startling sight.

As got closer, we heard an ambulance siren coming from the top of the hill. My husband, a paramedic, jumped into action and started a preliminary assessment of the girl.

As he checked her out, she started coughing and swatting him away. It turned out she wasn’t dead, just badly injured.

When another bystander noticed skid marks on the road we all looked toward the woods. At the bottom of a steep embankment, there was a battery-powered Vespa style scooter.

In the end, the injured girl was mostly OK. She was taken by ambulance to the nearest trauma center and treated for her injuries. We learned that she was 18 and had been riding a borrowed scooter wearing flip-flops and no helmet.

When the dust settled and we got back home, we all praised our daughter and her friend for keeping their shit together and coming to tell us what they had found. I didn’t want her to feel scared to venture out on her own again, so we tried to keep the whole thing pretty low-key. Sometimes you find a dead body and sometimes you don’t. It’s just one of those facts of life you have to get used to.

In my mind though, I wondered if it was the right thing to let her do the loop on her own at such a young age. I wondered if the scooter-girl’s parents were letting her head out on the scooter for the first time, confident nothing bad would happen.

Exposing your kids to risk is walking a razor’s edge. Too little risk and they’ll grow up sheltered and afraid. Too much risk and they’ll just get hurt all the time.

Our daughter is nine now and she’s still independent and brave. I can’t say how much of it she was born with and how much of it she’s developed because we’ve always encouraged her to push boundaries and look for new challenges.

From time to time though, she’ll ask us: “Do you remember when I found that dead woman?”

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