At some point, the police asked me to write down what had happened that night. I have a photocopy of this now. I’m struck by the careful, freshly learned cursive, the stiff, formal language revealing my desire for precision. My final sentence is written slightly larger, in block letters, and underlined: “I do not know who committed the crime.”
I recently asked Glenice to describe how I looked and acted that first day. When she answered, she spoke in a halting manner very different from the voluble expressiveness I’m used to. She said, “You looked like you hadn’t slept in a week . . . I don’t know . . . but you just—like your eyes looked, well . . . sunken in and you looked white as a ghost. And you were sweating—sweating and hot.” I hear compassion in her words, but fear in her pauses. I can imagine that to get closer to me would have been to get closer to what had happened.
* * *
That first full night, Gwen and her fiancé, Dave, took Glenice and me to their apartment to sleep—we were to share the big brass bed in the spare room. I remember Glenice cracked, worn down, emptied out. When we got to the apartment, she said she had to brush her teeth right away: “I’ve been crying so much, my mouth tastes like the bottom of a birdcage.” It was such a strange and perfect image; I remembered it forever.
We spent the next few days and early evenings at Grammy’s, gathering there with her and my uncle Wendall and his wife Jane, who stayed there with her overnight. After sunset, we did our best to numb out in front of the television. We watched Roseanne and other sitcom reruns, not speaking much, trying to set our brains on automatic, running the grooves of the familiar stories. But we couldn’t escape the teasers for the six o’clock, then the eleven o’clock, news, flashing into view at the very beginning of every commercial break, too quickly for us to change the channel. Even when we grew to expect the footage we would see for weeks, no one got up to turn the knob. We couldn’t admit that openly the power those images had over us. It somehow seemed undignified.
The video showed my black-and-white house behind bright yellow tape. It showed men in uniform carrying a gurney out the front door, a black body bag distorted to a shape I didn’t understand. There was a strange lump in the middle, and a hollow to one side. I tried not to analyze that shape, just as I tried to ignore the fact that it was daylight by the time the news vans took that shot. I tried not to think of the intervening hours. Of the school bus driver slowing to pick me up that morning, then pulling away. My classmates pressing their faces to the foggy windows.
I didn’t know then that the shape on that gurney was the curve of her hip, that she had been carefully lifted and transported as she fell, so her body could tell the story of what had happened to it. All I knew was that it was not the shape of a restful body, that it looked unnatural in a way I didn’t want to think too much about. She seemed exposed; all the other body bags I’d seen on the news had been flat. I hated the idea of thousands of television viewers being able to trace some curve of her, as though all the desirous eyes that had followed her in life would never cease looking.
That body bag also featured prominently on the front page of the Bridgton News, in a bleak, sad image that took up almost all the space above the fold. I was furious about this, that we could not go downtown without seeing that picture in store windows and on racks next to the checkout line. I’ve since spoken to the reporter responsible, Lisa Ackley. I was surprised when she mentioned that shot before I even asked about it, telling me how she had fought to have it included. “This is a family newspaper,” her editor had countered. “We don’t run things like that.” But Lisa had refused to pretend nothing had happened, to help cover it up just to make readers more comfortable. “People have to know,” she said. “People have to know exactly what this person did.” Now that I’ve spoken with so many people who will refer to the murder only as “what happened,” or “the incident,” or even “the accident,” I understand.
* * *
Throughout those first weeks, I became fixated on an image: the inside of my head filling with a viscous blackness, insanity as matter, crowding my mind into a tight corner. I knew I had to keep the blackness contained or it would take over; it would suffocate me entirely. I so terribly feared insanity. The part of me that had seen the huge insect in the dark arms of the clock that night, that had heard that sturgeon thrashing on the floor, had to be locked up so it couldn’t take over. I considered restraint and control my best defenses. So mostly I did not cry. Mostly I stayed calm. Cheryl, the social worker, said that her teenage daughter thought I mourned “with grace,” and I thought that was the kindest thing someone could say about me. I wondered, though, how Cheryl’s daughter knew anything about it.
But the Blackness, as I thought of it then, wasn’t just insanity. I could feel that what the killer had done had gotten inside of me. I had seen what a person could do and I could never unsee it; I was unclean, poisoned. I looked into my pupils in the mirror and there seemed to be no bottom to the black. Just as much as I feared him out in the world, I feared him within me.
The worst part of feeling poisoned was that it seemed to wipe out anything in me that was gentle and intelligent and funny—all the things my mother had loved about me. I was devastated to think that if she had ever been able to come back, I might already be unrecognizable to her.
* * *
Despite my attempts at control, there were moments of breakage. One came the night after the murder, or the night after that. We were sitting around Grammy’s dining room table—Gwen and Glenice and I, and Carol and Grammy. I was trying to eat something. The idea of my body and its processes still disgusted me. I would look at my calves, shaped just like hers, and they would seem like flesh, like meat, like something that could be dead and inert tomorrow. Grinding an object with my teeth, swallowing its paste, adding yet more to this body—this vulgar, heavy, gross thing I had to carry around—was gruesome. Even showering was difficult: faced with my solid, naked self, having to touch and attend to limbs, belly, to my useless feet, still raw from the run to get help, I shut down completely, stood staring for minutes at a time. My body persisted as a living, warm vehicle, while hers had become a thing under a tarp. The blood flowing neatly through my veins gave me a feeling of horror, a sense of invasion. I didn’t feel like I inhabited a living body so much as a temporarily animated corpse.