After days of lending me jeans and sweaters and even shoes, my aunts asked me to write a list of things I wanted from the house, and to indicate what rooms those things would be in. I assumed they would hand the list over to the police, who would comb the scene and bring us what we asked for. It was only recently that I discovered the police hadn’t even accompanied my aunts to the house. By then, they had the keys and permission to go in and take whatever we needed. The Bridgton curious would circle for months, driving by slowly to see what they could see, to hover in the epicenter of the dramatic vibration that enveloped the town. Knowing that someone might see them at the house and call the police, Carol called the station to let them know. She also asked if the house had been cleaned, and the woman on the phone assured her it had.
But the house was not clean. The sisters opened the front door and the sun shone through the kitchen windows onto the smears of blood on the linoleum and carpet. The killer’s boot prints shone blue-black with forensic chemicals. Squares of carpet had been cut out by the police and taken for evidence, and there were other blank spots in the mess on the kitchen floor. There were parts taken out of the couch, fluff standing up out of the holes. Splashes on the wall, smears on the phone. Our cat Max’s scratching post, on the floor near the kitchen, lay sideways, snapped off at the base. “Oh, God,” Gwen said upon entering. “Oh, God.” Then they silently got to work. Looking back, she will only say, “I had not expected to see that. I had not expected to see that at all.”
While Gwen and Glenice and Carol worked inside the house, Gloria stayed outside and out of sight. Later they discovered that she’d dug up one of the little trees in the yard, roots and all. She wrapped it in a sheet and settled it onto the backseat of her car. She wanted to keep something of her sister’s that was still living. The tree is now large enough to be Christmas-tree cheery, although the house it stands by is empty: Gloria died of lung cancer a few years ago. The first to go since Mom, her departure reminds me that the others will only follow.
* * *
The next day, Gwen brought me some of the items from my list, without mentioning what it had taken to get them. She brought clothes and shoes, my diary, a couple of favorite stuffed animals. But my own belongings seemed strange to me; I had the sensation that the real things were still in the house, and those before me were perfect replicas. My stuffed animals gave me a sudden, surprisingly strong feeling of sorrow, because they brought no comfort. I could see now that they had no value on their own. They had just been vessels for Mom’s love, a love now gone.
I can never quite place the day my aunts went back into my house, but it had been long enough that there was no chance of saving the tiny rosebush I had given her for Mother’s Day, three days before the murder. It had withered and died with no one to water it. My cat, Max, was okay, though—he had been outside that night, roaming, and had found his way over to the Demeritts, who lived behind that first door I knocked on. They’d started feeding him and agreed to keep him. Grammy couldn’t stand cats, and no one was sure where I would be living. I was in so much pain I couldn’t bear any more, so I resolved not to feel sad about my kitty—it was enough to know people were taking care of him. And it was better that I was alone. Less complicated.
It was around this time that I thought back to Mom’s desire to have another child. In the previous year, she had sometimes asked me what I thought about having a little brother, and I was always opposed to the idea: I couldn’t imagine the noise and mess and diapers and demands on her time. I went to friends’ houses and saw them fight bitterly with their siblings, saw them constantly trailed by sticky-fingered morons, and came home and voiced my opposition to this hypothetical pregnancy anytime she hinted at it. Now, as I sat in the spare room at Grammy’s, displaced among my displaced things, I pictured a little brother, and my thoughts were tender and sad. I saw myself with a toddler slung on my hip, trudging down that dark road, smoothing his soft, rain-wet hair over his forehead and wondering if I’d be allowed to take him with me, wherever I ended up.
A few nights later, I found a silver pendant of Mom’s among the things from the house. The pendant was heart-shaped and shiny, relatively new. I held it in my palm, the thin chain draping through my fingers, and I could see it so clearly as it had been just a few days before, sitting on my mother’s breastbone. And it was in that moment that I first felt sadness, a pure sadness that had nothing to do with my being left alone or the terror of what had happened. I finally understood the cosmically sad fact that my mother, this beautiful, kind young woman, would never live again. She would never again car-dance or suntan on the beach or drink coffee or play with her cat or watch TV with her daughter. She would never find the love that she’d so badly wanted and deserved. I finally, for just a moment, felt something for her, instead of myself. I felt that, separate from the fact that I’d lost someone, there was now that much less beauty in the world. I called my friend Marie and sobbed. I told her I was holding that necklace—she had seen it before, she knew the one—but I couldn’t explain the rest. I cried and shook and could barely speak, and a few years later, Marie told me that phone call was the only time she was ever afraid for me: she could tell that, in that moment, all my strength had left me, and she didn’t know if I’d be able to get it back.
13
* * *
before
When I was about eight, Dale’s settlement money finally came through from his construction accident and he bought a slate-blue house at the end of Otter Pond Road, named for the small, still body of water just beyond its reach. At the time, it was a sandy, unpopulated lane that turned off 302 just a few hundred feet past the Dump, a little farther from the center of town. It cut through a wide field that in summer hummed with insects and gave off the sharp, dry stench of Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans.
The house had a long, sloping dirt driveway and was set into the earth so that one approached it at basement level and had to walk up a long row of porch steps to reach the front door. It was like climbing up into a sanctuary. Inside, the rooms were spacious, the walls were perfectly white, and the baseboards were clean, pale pine. Only one other family had ever lived there.