I tried to think about the future, but there was a shadow over every moment, an unrelenting, invisible weight. Certain mundane details had become nightmarish. I avoided mirrors. I could not walk on linoleum barefoot. I hated taking showers, because the rushing of the water blocked my hearing. I’d never seen Psycho, but I’d heard of it, had seen posters of cinema’s most famous stabbing; I’d stand in the warm water and my mind would keep filling with my own shadowy profile behind the plastic curtain. My ears would take the shower’s white noise and create vague sounds of threat until I turned off the water and strained to hear if something was happening in another room of the house. I’d stand there naked and dripping, telling myself over and over that all I’d heard was the rumble of the TV, fighting the urge to jump out and put clothes on, until I could turn the water back on and finish washing. To take baths would have required explanation, because of course only small children took baths every day. And I knew how I would sound. I knew I would sound crazy.
Peggy took me to the hardware store downtown and we picked up a couple of gallons of pale lavender paint to cover the blood-red in my room, the stated reason being to make the room seem bigger. She bought a dresser for my clothes, made of perforated and precut cardboard, white with little purple flowers on it. It came in big, flat sheets, and assembling it was a nice distraction. I liked the idea of building something that would allow me to arrange my possessions neatly, make them orderly and controlled. I insisted that purple was my favorite color, but looking back, I realize that it had been Mom’s; my favorite color had been red, sometimes black. I’d begun adopting her tastes and mannerisms without even realizing I was doing it. It was a way to preserve her within me.
Peggy even bought me a little purple parakeet from the mall in New Hampshire, to keep me company. I named him Moonshadow, after a knickknack shop across the way from the pet store, which had a striking neon sign in purple and pink.
* * *
I was convinced that the killer was probably hiding in town, and Lower Main Street seemed a likely place for him. If he was a Bridgton man, leaving would raise suspicion; it would be wisest for him to go about his usual routine. And while I was often anxious and afraid, I was also furious. If he wanted to kill the only witness, he could come find me, I’d think defiantly. Holding on to my hometown seemed the only way to salvage anything. To fight back.
When I went into town to run errands with Peggy, I imagined concentric lines of dark energy with myself at the center. I hoped to snag him, to sense his location by the pull of our connection. I hoped some alarm would go off within me if he was nearby. I would run, but this time, when I reached safety, I’d be able to tell the police who he was.
I went back to school as soon as I moved in. I tried to hold my head up, plow forward to the end. We had just a few weeks left of sixth grade before summer began. I’d been a straight-A student, so my teacher, Ms. Shane, waived most of my missed assignments. Hers was a mercifully indirect kind of care; she didn’t push me to talk to her, but she kept watch over me, tried to make things easier when she could. Of course, she couldn’t cushion me from all social interaction. Suddenly, kids who had teased me for years wanted to be best friends, gave me the desserts from their lunches, urged me to cut ahead of them in line, drew me sympathy cards. Some were genuinely concerned; others made their offerings with a quavery touch of excitement that I was beginning to recognize as a desire to get closer to the drama. I was disgusted by this excitement. It made me angry, but it also made me afraid, less sure of who was really on my side.
One girl was particularly eager to prove our connection: she told me that her grandmother lived in the big white house across from ours—the one that shone like a lighthouse—and had heard me knocking that night but was too afraid to come to the door. This was later verified as fact. Cheryl Peters had already told me that the family next door, the third house I’d gone to, had also heard me and not opened the door. “They have two children,” she said, matter-of-factly. But I was a child, too. Or at least I had been.
I went to my class for advanced kids one day, normally my favorite period, and a boy told me he had heard that Mom had killed herself. As he spoke, he was flanked by other boys, all nodding eagerly as if to confirm the story. I didn’t explain how impossible this was. They were just kids, I thought. They didn’t understand.
At recess, I stayed inside with Ms. Shane, or I hid in a bathroom stall, crying as hard as I could, forcing the emotion out of myself all at once so that afterwards I could calm down and put my face back together for the rest of the afternoon’s lessons. I don’t know what I would have done out on the playground.
Some gestures did manage to reach me, though. Ryan Davis, the kind of boy who thought it was fun to push you off the slide or break something precious that you had brought for show-and-tell, sent me purple irises, having heard they were my favorite. They were the first flowers I ever received from a boy, and I told myself to remember them. Whether or not I liked Ryan didn’t matter; the flowers were a sign that life would still have some joy in it, even if I wasn’t yet capable of feeling it. Romantic love had not saved Mom, but maybe someday it would save me.
* * *
School, difficult as it was, proved easier to navigate than living with the Martins, which began with tension and worsened each day. Peggy’s voice was always loud, and she talked to me in the same singsong tone she’d used when I was four or five. And she insisted that I “talk about it.”
“Sarah, listen,” she’d start. “Listen, you need to talk about your muh-ther. I know you must be going through some very tough feelings, and you need to get those out there.”
“Um, I don’t know what to say,” I’d answer, trying to keep my voice soft. Feeling anger start to swell.
“Listen, I’m telling you”—getting louder now—“you have got to tell me what is going on! It’s not good to keep it all bottled up, okaaayy?”
“Uh-huh,” I’d say. “It’s just . . . I don’t know what to say. What do you want?” And then I’d start to cry, which was, perhaps, what she wanted. “What does it change? I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”
“Now, now. Just try, okaaayy? Just do your best.”
But it was impossible to share my feelings of grief with Peggy, because most of the time it was impossible to feel them. My sadness was overwhelmed by fear and visceral disgust and rage, rage so consuming and aimless that sometimes I was afraid of myself. I was convinced that the killer’s fury had entered me, and would never leave.