At the funeral, Linda had sat in one of the back pews. I had a vague sense that this was wrong, but I wasn’t able to speak to her—I was in the receiving line, and then I was ushered to the front, and then it was over, a mass of bodies rising from their seats, scattering to their separate sadnesses. There were other friends of Mom’s present, but it was Linda I’d thought of while I sat up front with my aunts. She seemed so alone.
About a week later, I visited her. Gwen drove me over in the afternoon so I could have a break from Grammy’s house, its dense air of grief. When I arrived, Linda looked as hollowed out as I felt, entirely drained of her bright energy. Suddenly I could see how the years she had spent baking in the sunshine were aging her. She hugged me briefly, then got us sodas out of the fridge. We settled onto her living room couch and turned on the TV. I’d never sat there before—usually the three of us had perched in the kitchen. It was the first time Linda and I had ever been alone, and the silences between our words were cavernous. We didn’t know how to be together without my mother, didn’t know what our friendship was supposed to look like. Within moments, the Addams Family movie came on.
Linda said, “Oh, geez. Do you want to watch this?”
“Oh, yeah, it’s fine. I heard it’s really funny,” I said. I was fast settling into the habit of pretending everything was okay, of wanting desperately to behave like a normal person. But the coffins and the animate, severed hand and the pale, waxy faces of the characters were sickening, and we watched the entire movie without laughing.
When it was time to go, Linda hugged me at the door, her eyes shining.
She said, “Keep in touch, kiddo. I love you.”
I didn’t keep in touch. The awkwardness of that visit, all that pain and silence, remained with me, and life took over. I would move many times in the coming years, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes against my will. There were too many people to keep track of, too many to hold on to. But I carried with me a lead-glass cat that Linda had given Mom for her last birthday, moving it from bookshelf to desk to dresser. I would look at that sweet, simple present and think of Linda: her best friend dead, the killer still free, possibly living in her town. I would picture her in her little tan-and-brown house, and I would write her a letter. But the letters never got sent. I folded them neatly, slid them into envelopes. I left them on my desk to await postage, where they got buried in books and homework.
* * *
Not long after the funeral, Carol and her husband, also named Carroll, took me to stay with them for a few days in the town of Peru, about fifty miles north of Bridgton. Their house could have been cozy under other circumstances, but now it felt dark and cramped, full of worn carpet and brown furniture and marooned in the woods on a poorly paved road that ended, a few miles away, in a narrow lane that looped around a small pond. Carol and Carroll had only one visible neighbor, an old woman who lived across the road. They were two miles from the center of a twelve-hundred-person town: cemetery, schoolhouse, two-pump gas station, one-truck fire station, and one traffic light flashing red and yellow.
Theirs is a small house, their bedroom in one downstairs corner, then the living room, dining room, kitchen, and a tiny bathroom. Upstairs, two small bedrooms with sloped ceilings, tucked under the roof and surrounded by narrow crawl spaces. At night, I watched television in the living room, which shared a wall with their bedroom, numbly staring at the screen with the volume turned down low so I could catch any unusual sounds around the house: a thud on the porch, a screen door creeping open. The distance between Bridgton and Peru insulated me, helped me talk myself out of my fear a little, but not much. I kept my shoes on. When I slept, I did so on the couch. The bedrooms upstairs were too far away. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hear if someone entered the house, and if someone came up there after me, I’d have no way out.
I lay on the couch and tried to convince myself that whoever the killer was, if he had wanted to kill me, he would have done it already. It was a dark thought that I hoped had the substance to hold me up. But every time the wind chimes on the porch tinkled gently in the dark, I imagined a rough hand brushing them, to terrify me. To let me know what was coming.
Back in Bridgton, the police were monitoring any location that had anything to do with Mom, hoping he would make a mistake, show himself somehow. An officer had sat in a cruiser across the street from the funeral, and cops regularly stopped in at the Shoe Shop. Several times each day, a patrolman drove past Grammy’s house to check for anything unusual, and the Bridgton Police called Carol and Carroll every few days to make sure I was okay, to ask if we had seen anything strange. The police were sure the killer was someone Mom knew, and anyone she knew would have known that I was in the house that night. “We had no idea who this guy was,” Gwen now says. “We didn’t know if he was going to come after you.” Everyone around me tried to hide or downplay the same fear that kept me up most of every night, a fear that would remain unresolved for years.
A week passed, with Carol and Carroll letting me stay up on the couch late into the night and acting, during the day, as normally as they could. My aunt asked me few questions, other than whether I wanted milk or soda with dinner, and my uncle spent most of his time at work, hauling trees out of the deep woods and delivering them to the nearby paper mill. I was grateful for their pragmatism, their lack of tears. If Carol went to the grocery store, I went with her, glad for something mundane to do. Sometimes we encountered women she knew, and when they looked at me their faces were complex mixtures of concern and forced cheer, struggling under the fluorescent lights of the produce section.