Tom remembers seeing me on the courthouse steps with Carol on the day of the hearing, a hundred or so feet away—that I looked at him with a forlorn expression. “I felt I had just added one more sadness to your burden,” he says. He wanted to go to me, to comfort me. But this scene isn’t possible; I stayed in the car the entire time. I remember that it was warm outside but I felt safer with the windows rolled up. Surely I was sad, but not about Tom. About him I was angry. He could have made Mom’s life so much easier. But now when he tells me the story of that day, I simply nod. It’s been a long time. Let him keep his myth.
One of my other aunts recently told me more about that day. “Carroll was standing outside the car, watching,” she said. Her voice lowered a step. “He was guarding the car.” I’d forgotten this long ago. It makes me wonder what other protective kindnesses I’ve lost to memory. I had also forgotten that as a condition of signing over guardianship, Tom had demanded to visit me before the hearing. A time and place were agreed upon, but he never showed. I don’t remember being upset. And now all I feel is embarrassment—for him or for myself, I’m not entirely sure.
When I think about the day of the hearing, I feel tenderness for that girl in the car, those grief-wrecked sisters. We thought we’d be returning to that courthouse soon, to see Mom’s killer stand trial. We had no idea how many years would pass.
17
* * *
before
After nine months of bending under the weight of Grammy’s criticisms, pushing and pulling that trundle bed in and out, Mom and I finally moved into our new house out on Route 93. It was one story, and just under a thousand square feet, but it felt like a palace. I remember the feeling of our early days there, an overwhelming sensation of space and light and freedom, a feeling that had as much to do with the newness of the place as with Mom’s contagious happiness. She was more relaxed than I had seen her in months. She had finally arrived in a safe, quiet place where she could do as she wanted, where she could create a real home for us. Best of all, against all odds, she owned it; as long as she kept making the payments, no one could take it away from her, no one could make her move out. When she’d paid off her little car, she’d called Gwen excitedly and said, “It’s all mine!” Owning a house was almost unimaginable. The doorways and countertops were hers, as were the bathtub and the furnace and the line of trees at the edge of the big backyard. I could finish growing up there without worrying, and then when I went to college, I could come home for holiday breaks. And if I ever needed a place to live after that, she could provide it.
We moved in as soon as we got the keys, before we even had beds, happy to curl up in sleeping bags on the short, dense carpet. Grammy called several times a day for weeks, most often with complaints, but Mom did her best to hold her at a distance. Sometimes, after she’d been on the phone for a few minutes, I’d realize she was talking to Grammy, and walk to the far side of the room and call, “Mo-om!” so she’d have an excuse to hang up. Usually she waved me off and scowled at me for being rude. But sometimes she gave me a shy grin and told Grammy she had to go.
We got a daybed for me, and gauzy curtains to match my green carpet, casting the room in forest light. My new comforter was printed with tropical leaves and flowers—more grown-up than the Garfield one I’d been using.
Twenty years later, I would stay at my aunt Carol’s house, and when I went upstairs to the guest room, I found the bed covered in that tropical blanket. It was a sweet, silent gesture, but its effect on me was complicated. I hadn’t slept under that blanket since leaving our house that night. I associated it with fear as much as love. It was one of the few things left of that home, a fantasy we lived out for only a couple of years, and one that proved more vulnerable to danger than we wanted to admit.
Mom loved the house and the quiet that surrounded it, the strident songs of chickadees and the twitterings of swallows and the rat-a-tat ramblings of excitable squirrels broken only occasionally by the ocean-wave sweep of a passing car. But the quiet made her nervous, too. She told Linda she felt a little exposed.
The house had been shipped from the factory in two big Lego pieces, trucked in almost completely built—“stick-built” houses were for rich people or for hippies who built with their own hands. When it arrived, the men in charge of settling it in and snapping it together ripped out all the trees in front to make it easier to maneuver the house pieces onto the lot. When we drove by to see the completed house, the entire front yard was unexpectedly barren. Mom had specifically requested that some trees be left standing so that we would have a screen from the road. When she called to complain, the contractor promised to plant new trees out front for free. What we got was two spruce trees no higher than my hip, planted tight on either side of the front door. Useless little suburban things. They broke up the stark view, but they certainly wouldn’t give any privacy.
I was mad on her behalf about those trees, but not really that concerned. Our house faced a chunk of woods, and most people in Bridgton lived on secluded roads like ours. We had only one neighbor in direct eyesight, and she was an elderly woman. I didn’t understand, then, that our isolation made my mother even more anxious.
* * *
Our house was like a diamond Mom had pulled out of the earth herself and now polished regularly. In my adult life, I have never, ever kept such a clean house. Every room was immaculately clean; Mom polished the counters daily, vacuumed every other day, and scrubbed the entire bathroom every week, leaning deep into the bleach-filled tub, squirting that minty-blue gel under the toilet bowl lip. She was drawing a force field around us, creating a magically calm space, free from chaos. When summer came, I liked to run around barefoot in the thick grass of the backyard, or pick my way through the dense woods further down the gently sloping hill. Afterwards, Mom insisted that I rinse my feet off with the hose on the side of the house. And when people would come over to visit, they’d remove their shoes at the door. It was a widely known fact that if you wanted to visit Crystal in her home, you would do so in your socks. The dirt of the world was not to enter.