I knew that Peggy, my soft-bodied former babysitter, with her houseful of Precious Moments figurines, was not interested in hearing about my rage. She wanted to wipe away the tears of the cute little blond girl she had known. She didn’t know what to do with my fear and rage, so she tried to will them to disappear, in favor of a gentler, more manageable sadness. One day, exactly a month after the murder, I woke up and found her and Fred getting ready to go to Portland for the day, leaving me alone in the house. When I begged them to stay or take me with them, Peggy told me I needed to “start getting over it.”
I discovered later that Peggy and Fred had first heard about my mother’s death on the police scanner they kept in the kitchen as a form of news and entertainment, a common fixture in Maine at that time, before expanded cable access and the internet. Murder is a 10-49. They would have heard the code first, a general location, the police channel heating up, local and state cops tensely broadcasting plans and requests framed in bursts of static. Soon they would have known it was her, it was us. Then Peggy called Carol, told her she was Mom’s best friend. She may even have believed it herself at the time. I should not have been living with someone who had first heard about Mom’s death by eavesdropping on our town’s misfortunes. From the very start, her taking me in seemed more about her feelings than about mine.
But I didn’t know about the scanner then. I must have thought that my family had reached out to Peggy, not the other way around. I also didn’t know that Carol was paying Peggy to take care of me, out of government survivor benefits written in my name. That the bird and the paint and the cheap cardboard dresser were things I’d bought myself, and that any cash left over went into Peggy’s bank account. I also didn’t know that the original agreement was open-ended, meant to be temporary, and that Carol had no idea Peggy was promising me that I could stay through high school graduation. Peggy misled my family, and we wouldn’t realize the extent of her dishonesty until Carol and I compared notes twenty years later.
* * *
Peggy kept pushing me to share my feelings of sadness, to talk about Mom. When I didn’t want to, or didn’t know how, she got angry. I was cold, she thought, but spiky and sarcastic when pushed, a combination that I now understand would earn me disproportionate trouble as the years passed. Another fight culminated in her saying, “We take you in out of the goodness of our hearts, and this is how you thank us?!”
“This” meant, as far as I could tell, withholding my feelings, pushing against her nagging, and spending too much time alone in my room.
“The goodness of your heart?” I spat out. “Fuck the goodness of your heart!”
My own heart felt black, dead. I hated being so mean, hearing myself yell and swear. Mom wouldn’t have liked it; she would have been disappointed. I could have stayed at Carol’s, but I was afraid of her house; it was harder to sleep out in those woods than it was in downtown Bridgton. Besides, it was a different school district; I didn’t want to leave my friends, or start anew with only a few weeks left. I would gladly have stayed with Gwen or Glenice, but they weren’t offering. I’d decided the goodness of people’s hearts was their own business. I hadn’t experienced any when I was knocking on those first four doors that night.
But I kept trying. I did my homework, I did my best to be nice to Peggy. I thought, I only have six years left. I thought about the gleaming floors of the high school, and college beyond. The police insisted that Peggy take me to a children’s psychologist in Portland, and arranged state funding for the appointments. It was an hour-long drive I quickly grew to dread. The doctor was elderly and she kept a big, smelly dog in her office. She looked to me as if she’d never been through anything more traumatic than someone fixing her coffee wrong, and I had nothing to say to her. That doctor lived in the same place my classmates did: an orderly universe governed by safety and logic. Her fancy degrees didn’t change the fact that she was living a childish fiction.
After a few sessions, it was decided that Peggy and I would see the doctor together, to talk through our issues. The grown-ups were ignorant, but they outnumbered me. I felt defenseless but still couldn’t give them what they wanted—weepy, submissive grief. I couldn’t get anyone to understand that my effort at control was the only thing holding me together. And now I know that I had reason not to trust the doctor, who concluded that my silence was sinister. She told the police that my behavior was a “real mystery” and that I could “very well be somehow involved” in my mother’s murder.
* * *
Grief requires imagination: mental images of the one you’ve lost, of the world that would have been. At school, I struggled to look and act normal, to get all the solace I could out of the distractions of classwork and tests. I threw myself into straightforward subjects, tasks that had clear, simple answers. I was careful not to think too deeply. I did not write stories. I did not draw pictures. I skipped chorus and music class. On the night Mom was killed, I was halted: imagination became a dangerous place, full of darkness and terror. Creativity would have taken energy I needed to survive. And so I could not write, and I could not remember, and I could hardly mourn, only fear.
Ms. Shane gave me extra worksheets and let me plunge ahead on busywork, or she’d recommend a new book to read while I sat inside with her at recess. Reading I could handle; it was still an escape. She also gently encouraged me to join in with my classmates when I could, and on the last day of sixth grade I finally managed to have fun with my friends. We were all looking forward to the coming year, when we would attend Lake Region Middle School, one town away. It was an exciting transition—we would meet all the kids from the other elementary schools nearby, and we would be one step further on our way to becoming grown-ups. We’d be a warm, familiar group—the Bridgton kids—within an exciting larger one.
There was a moment near the end of the school day when I stood in the empty main hallway of the building, sunlight shining on the tiled floor. I thought about the day of the eclipse, only weeks before, and felt an echo of the happiness and excitement that had come over me then. I was glad to be alive. I was full of love for my friends. I was going to make it through.
* * *
When I got home to Peggy’s, Carol was there, putting all my stuff in black plastic trash bags. They looked like body bags scattered all over the living room.
“Peggy called me,” Carol told me, “and said you can’t live here anymore. She said she can’t take it anymore.”
I spent that night on the couch in Peru, listening for footsteps.
19
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before