Gwen was supposed to start a new job the Monday after the funeral, sewing microfleece outdoor gear in a small factory near her house in New Hampshire, not far from Bridgton. She had, at most, two dozen coworkers, and they all knew about her sister’s murder; the grapevine rumors were confirmed when they watched the nightly coverage on the Portland news, or even the late-night news out of Boston. Gwen’s new boss offered to let her take a few days before she reported for work, but she had to do something, had to distract herself somehow, because every unoccupied hour was torture. She was plagued by thoughts of her sister’s last moments, unable to imagine them without feeling sick and panicky. She started the new job promptly on Monday. Her coworkers were quiet and kind. And every night, Dave held her, kept her safe. They hoped each day that the police would catch whoever had done this terrible thing. But the days kept passing.
In a strange confluence of fate, Glenice, too, was slated to start a new job the Monday after the funeral, back home in Boston, where those around her had little reason to pay attention to that late-night news item, just one killing among the many. She arrived that first morning carrying a secret, determined to keep it together. She was overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness, of not knowing what to do, and the best approach, she felt, was to stick to her routine, make sure her mind stayed busy. Both she and Gwen had learned, growing up, that the best thing to do in difficult times was to plow forward, to keep going.
After a couple of days, Glenice did tell her coworkers about the murder—it must have been unavoidable. Outwardly, they displayed the expected compassion, but really they thought she was lying: that she disliked her new job and had made up a dramatic story as an excuse to quit soon. They only believed her when they saw the story in a newspaper. Years later, a coworker would tell Glenice about conversations in the office back then, when she’d been out of earshot: “We were all freaked out. ‘Who is this person we hired? Somebody murdered her sister, that’s really weird.’ We thought maybe you were from some really crazy, crazy family. We thought, ‘What kind of people are they?’”
As though the murder had happened because of the “kind of people” we were. But as the years passed, Glenice’s coworkers got to know her and thought, Oh, Glenice is okay, she’s a normal person, she’s one of us. That must have been a real tragedy after all.
The “kind of people” comment is familiar to me. Just a few months ago I told a seemingly caring, intelligent friend about my mother—not only about her death, but about her life, her search for love. My friend replied, “You get to thinking—with all those men—that she had it coming to her.” I no longer speak to this person. I cannot trust anyone whose first response, knowing very little about anything, is to blame my mother for her own death.
And I remember, so clearly, the plague of the word “weird” in those early days. When reporters asked people in town how they felt about the murder, that “weird” always came popping out, and classmates kept telling me how “weird” my life had become. Back then, the inadequacy of the word brought me to furious tears. My mother had been murdered, and all these people had to say was that it was weird? Declare something weird and you don’t have to think much more deeply about it. It’s a word meant to shut a conversation down, push the scary thing away. I didn’t have that luxury. Even silence would have been better: to be struck dumb is to be affected. This is the difference between sympathy and empathy.
* * *
In those weeks following Mom’s death, the rest of the family retreated to their separate corners, did their best to stand up to each suffocating, exhausting day. It was disorienting how similar everything was to how it had been before, how the external world didn’t change, didn’t reflect the fact that none of them would ever again see their baby sister. They drove the same long roads to work, passed the same tall trees on the edges of the same wide fields, were awakened in the morning by the same diffuse sunlight, and all of it persisted, despite the fact that Crystal would never see any of it again.
They made posters, offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to the identification of the killer, and hung them on telephone poles in three counties. Mom’s grainy, xeroxed face smiled out at friends and family and strangers for miles. When the late-spring rains came down and melted the signs, the family made the rounds again, replacing them over and over. They each pledged a portion of their savings to the reward, hoping someone would come forward and take it from them. They talked to friends, wondering aloud what possibly could have happened to end Crystal’s life in this way. They called and called the cops, checking for progress that did not materialize. But mostly they went back to work. Made dinner. Watched the news. Did their best.
It turns out that Teresa tore down some of the Bridgton reward posters, but she could not keep the word from spreading, aided as it was by car-crash, train-wreck voyeurism, but also by real community concern. For years, my aunts and uncles would meet strangers who knew all about the pretty young woman who was killed in Bridgton, some of whom would mention it before they did. Have the police come up with anything? they’d ask once they knew who they were talking to. How’s her daughter doing?
* * *
The law can sometimes be blindingly simple, a blunt instrument that can do more harm than good. After Mom died, legal responsibility for me automatically returned to Tom, the father I barely knew. He had been a suspect for only a fleeting moment, and mostly because police always have to examine the ex-husband. But they quickly disregarded him, even before the lab work came back showing that his DNA failed to match any found in the house. His personality wasn’t consistent with the crime, they felt. And he was drinking so heavily then that there was some doubt that he could have physically managed the killing.
I am grateful that my family, on my mother’s side, knew better than to let Tom take me, and I am grateful, I admit, that he himself knew better. Sometime that summer, a calm, sober Tom, dressed in the best clothes he could find, traveled to the county courthouse in Portland, a stately building so close to the ocean that the air in the parking lot smells of salt water. There, after a short hearing, my father signed power of attorney over to my aunt Carol, granting her temporary custody on the condition that he would no longer be charged the child support he rarely paid. Carol and my other aunts were relieved; as they understood it, if he had defaulted on his responsibilities, and no other legal arrangements had been made, I could have landed in foster care.
Tom says now that he wanted to take me to live with him, but he knew that he was too unstable; he was “still drinking, of course,” and he was still with Teresa, who even he knew was dangerous and unpredictable. Teresa wanted him to bring me home, though. She’d scream at him, “Go get her! You’re no kind of man!” She craved the warmth of the spotlight. Wanted to be seen as a hero. Less than four years later, she would abandon her own daughter, and Tom would find himself, finally, the more responsible of two parents. Teresa hardly would have done a good job of caring for the child of a woman she hated.
* * *