There were some good days, when Grace was fun, singing old show tunes while dancing around the kitchen making homemade doughnuts, or playing with their brown toy poodle, Coco. She was full of colorful idioms: she wasn’t usually vulgar, but often, when she had to use the restroom, she’d say, “I have to piss like a racehorse!” She’d come home from shopping, having talked someone into giving her a deal, and announce, “He gave me a rake-off!” Frequently, these sayings would come out confused, such as “That’s water over the bridge,” or “It’s not rocket surgery.”
Sometimes Grace would say something strange to someone and not realize it until later. She’d tell the kids about it, laughing at herself, and they’d laugh along with her. But then she would suddenly get mad and start crying, saying, “Oh, no! Are you laughing at me?” Her mood often turned swiftly, without warning. With her red hair, which she maintained with Clairol until the day she died, she looked like Lucille Ball. But Ray wouldn’t tolerate any of her silliness, her singing and dancing, so she could play only when he was out of the house.
At some point, the boys became too much trouble and they were sent to live with their nomadic father, Howard, who had run away to Texas. Finally, only three children were left at home: Tootsie, Gwen, and Crystal. Tootsie clashed most fiercely with Ray, and she passed the cruelty on down to her younger sisters, beating them up whenever she got the chance. In her early teens, she more or less moved in with the Wards, a nearby family with so many children they hardly noticed one more. Her memories of Ray seem more detailed, her accounts free of the circumspection I sense from the others; she once said that he hit her with electrical cords when she misbehaved. When I mention this to my other aunts, they don’t contradict her; they frown and tell me the problem was that Tootsie never learned to keep her mouth shut.
* * *
Gwen and Crystal, Grace’s two youngest girls, continued to raise themselves, mostly. The two were a cutely mismatched set, so close in age that some playfully called them “Irish twins.” Gwen was a soft-spoken brunette with small features and a halo of frizz, a cautious girl who liked to sew on her grandmother’s old Kenmore. Crystal was lanky and wilder, with carrot-orange hair and a forceful mind of her own. If one sister got something, the other had to have it, too; when it was Gwen’s birthday, Crystal also got a present. If the toys matched at first, they didn’t for long; Crystal would take out her things and use them up, tattering their edges and smudging their clean parts, while Gwen liked to put her belongings on a shelf so she could look at them and keep them nice and new and pretty. But the girls did everything together—they built a tree fort in the woods behind the house, rode their bikes for miles into town to get penny candy, swam together down at the nearby shore of Long Lake. They fought constantly, like many sisters, but they also tried to keep each other cheerful under the pressure of Ray’s control. Their mother always bought them matching outfits in slightly different colors, even though they insisted, “We’re not twins!” Their biggest difference was how they responded to Ray’s meanness, to their mother’s inability to protect them. Gwen learned to hide, wait it out. Crystal learned to escape. Gwen was lucky: at nineteen, she would meet a man named Dave—her safe harbor from that moment through today, a man who didn’t ask her to put up with the burdens that Howard and Ray had laid upon Grace. Crystal would have a harder time finding a good man to lean on, and would slowly, but too slowly, realize that she didn’t need to.
6
* * *
after
I have always remembered how the sunshine streamed in upon my first waking moment at Grammy’s in that little room I’d once shared with Mom, but now I find that history contradicts me. It was gray, still rainy, just as it was when we’d left the hospital. The sunshine must have been the world pressing in on me, all the sensation and noise and light that I wasn’t sure I could handle.
Gwen soon came in and encouraged me to put on a bathrobe and come out and eat. The bathrobe was Grammy’s—purple quilted polyester trimmed in scratchy lace. I had left the hospital in nurse’s scrubs, my own robe having become evidence. I found Grammy in the kitchen, wiping counter edges with the flat of her hand, straightening the line of cookie jars, uncharacteristically quiet. Someone placed a plain doughnut in front of me, the kind that comes in a plastic wrapper. I had eaten these often at Grammy’s, sometimes heated up in the microwave. She always let me eat as many as I wanted. I picked the doughnut up. I put it down. I couldn’t stand the thought of chewing, of transforming an object into blood and muscle; the idea was grotesque. I looked down at my bare legs, the blue shadows of veins under pale skin, and felt revulsion ripple through me. I pushed the little plate aside.
Within the hour, a woman named Cheryl Peters, a social worker employed by the state, arrived. She had a laptop with her and said I could play with it while she filled out some forms. The idea that I might want to play, that day or ever again, struck me as absurd. I could see that she meant to be kind, but I felt almost mocked: playing was for happy children. I didn’t touch the machine, but sat quietly on the bed. She asked me to tell her what had happened, and I recited the events of the night for her, even though I didn’t really understand what she was there to do. Later, she told a police officer that she had met my family and, according to his notes, said, “They were all losers.”
Shortly after, two police officers came, filling the tiny bedroom with their dark blue, rustling polyester uniforms. Several Bridgton officers had come to the Venezia, but these were new cops, state cops. One was Detective Dick Pickett, by then appointed leader of the investigation, a small, weaselly man with wire-rimmed glasses and a condescending manner. The other, Pat Lehan, I remember only as a generic cop figure, nodding along with Pickett. Lehan was one of more than two dozen policemen who would work on the case over the next twelve years, many of whom I would not meet and still know little about. I never spoke with Lehan again, but Pickett would stay in my life for some time, until the case got reassigned to someone else. On that first day, though, neither he nor I had any idea just how long our tense relationship would last.
I told Pickett and Lehan what had happened, focusing on one detail and then the next and then the next. Then we went over it again more carefully, Pickett stopping me repeatedly to ask questions, trying to get me to be more specific. I did my best to be thorough. Because I was a minor, Cheryl sat next to me while I answered questions. My aunts were left outside the door.