When that first spring came, Mom and I resumed our walks. We walked more often than we had in early winter, and farther. Every few days, the thawing earth smelled stronger and sweeter, and the hard buds on the trees unfurled, the undersides of ash leaves shimmering in the warm breezes, maple leaves like hands opening to cover the empty spaces of winter. We put up a birdhouse, and a pair of swallows quickly moved in; we named them Sunny and Swifty. We visited Linda more and bought a few pictures to decorate our eggshell walls. Mom got some paints and stencils and started adding a border up by the ceiling in the kitchen: red hearts for love, pineapples for hospitality. The project was way more time-consuming than we’d anticipated; it stretched on and on, over many weekends, Mom taking care to make each shape symmetrical, identical, flawless.
One afternoon, she was standing on a ladder in the sunshine, the thickened air of an early-summer breeze coming through the window at her feet, her red hair wrapped in a bandanna, while I stood down below, holding her paints. She looked at me and smiled. “By the time we’re done”—she rolled her eyes a little—“we’ll have to move or something!” I laughed; I knew we weren’t going anywhere. The painting could stretch on forever, and Mom could make every brushstroke as neat and painstakingly perfect as she wanted. We were home. But as it turned out, she would finish the border just barely in time.
18
* * *
after
My family was relieved to have safely ushered Tom out of the picture, but the question of where I would live next was still unanswered. Gwen and Glenice and Carol talked on the phone at night, often about me. Despite all that had happened, I desperately wanted to get back to Bridgton. I loved my hometown and did not want to lose it; I felt like it was all I had left. I wanted my old-fashioned Main Street, my dusty library, my deep lakes. The drive-in during summer. The long grass in the field by the elementary school.
Grammy was my only relative who lived nearby, and my aunts thought she was too old, at seventy-five, to take care of me. And of course she still didn’t drive—a real problem in a place with no public transportation. They may also have been remembering their own childhoods: Grace’s neglect, her unpredictability. Two beloved teachers offered to take me in, but my family worried that they were just swept up in the moment, that their kind gesture wouldn’t hold for the years and difficulty involved in raising a bereaved adolescent. In the end, my former babysitter, Peggy Martin, called up Carol in Peru and offered to let me live with her and her husband, Fred. I had stayed with them in the mornings before afternoon kindergarten and had seen them occasionally since—Peggy was Grammy’s Avon lady. But Peggy told Carol that she was my mother’s best friend, that she saw me all the time, that she’d be thrilled to have me.
Gwen would have known that Linda, not Peggy, was Mom’s best friend, and if she’d heard Peggy’s claim, she might have found it strange. But Carol was the decision-maker, and she wasn’t as close to Mom. At the time, she figured my staying with Peggy and Fred would be a convenient arrangement that would allow me to finish out the school year while she and my other aunts decided what to do. Within two weeks I’d returned to Bridgton and to school, and moved in with them.
Peggy and Fred lived in a single-wide trailer on Lower Main Street near Long Lake. Their home was very close to Plummers Landing, a little beach where I’d spent many summer afternoons with my friend Marie. They had long ago built an extension onto the trailer, a sunken room for watching TV, the floor made from plywood that had never been sanded or covered. I remembered that I would get splinters in my feet when I was a toddler. Back then I’d helped Peggy plant pansies and sweep their tiny porch. When she was den mother to her son Jason’s Cub Scout troop, I’d been an honorary scout. I spent many afternoons playing in the sprinkler in their garden—sunbeams making rainbows in the spray—and I remembered sleeping in their daughter Kelly’s bed years earlier, head to feet, by the blue glow of the radio that soothed her. Now I was given her former bedroom: she and Jason had since grown up and moved out. As a teenager, Kelly had painted the walls a deep red, and done a sloppy job: there were thick red splashes on the ceiling and on the baseboard radiators.
Fred and Peggy told me I could stay with them until I graduated from Lake Region, the high school that pooled students from Bridgton and three other nearby towns. It was the school that Mom had gone to before she’d gotten married, and that Kelly and Jason had attended. Peggy and I went to a play at the high school, and it was the first time I’d been inside. I thought of Mom walking those same waxed halls, past all those years of golden sports trophies. I was eager to follow her there.
I wanted to stay with my classmates, keep getting good grades, graduate head of my class with my friends and all the peers who I was sure expected me to fail, whose sympathy sometimes seemed like vicarious resignation. I was beginning to fixate on the idea of not “becoming a statistic”—I didn’t want to end up sad and broken and have people sigh and shake their heads over me, talk about how my failure was understandable, how I’d been doomed. I decided that graduating high school, the same high school I was destined for all along, would be my first big victory over the killer.