These years later, I approach this question very carefully. Glenice says, “Gwen lived so close to Bridgton, and we didn’t know who this guy was . . . And my place was too small. I thought about moving. But you and Tootsie seemed to have a lot in common. She had been to college; you were both so bright.” I can see that they wanted it to be okay, and that my living at Tootsie’s made some sense. They were overwhelmed and grieving. I made my peace with this long ago.
I decided to stay in Texas, even though I wasn’t sure if I was an escapee or an explorer. Tootsie was unpredictable, she could be harsh and judgmental, but the house and the land were big and airy and sunny. I wanted everything to be okay, too, and would tell my other aunts very little about how Tootsie behaved. My only other option was to return to Peru, and although Carol and Carroll were kind, I couldn’t imagine going back to the dark woods and their isolated little house. Plus, the murder was still all over the news; if I went back to Maine, the kids in my new school would surely know who I was. I couldn’t stand the thought of strangers watching me struggle, looking for signs that I would crack. I didn’t know that the police and many others were glad that I would not be returning, because with the killer still at large, they were worried about my safety. I didn’t know that a collective sigh of relief had followed my departure.
21
* * *
before
Dennis Lorrain could have been the one.
He worked as a laster at the Shoe Shop, running a big machine that drove rough silver tacks through leather, holding the pattern onto a last—a chunk of wood shaped like a foot—to prepare it for sewing. He had to wear a headset to protect his hearing—the machine sounded like a gun going off every time he hit it, all day long. Those tacks were everywhere in the Shop, and when Mom wasn’t looking, I’d pull them out of the soft soles of her shoes and push them into mine, my sneakers turned to tap shoes, clicking down the halls at school.
When Dennis started working at the Shop in 1992, he already knew a few of Mom’s coworkers there, and he was immediately drawn to their beautiful friend Crystal. She was like nothing he had ever seen; he was mesmerized by her freckles, her thick red hair, her pale blue eyes. He saw in her a feminine softness, a delicate manner that was different from those of the women he knew. He loved her voice, so light and smooth. He couldn’t imagine her ever raising that voice. She knew just how to look at him, just how to talk to him. She made him feel special. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, was always coming up with excuses to visit her and Penny and their friend Richard at the hand-sewing benches.
Dennis’s post at the tacking machine was right in Crystal’s line of sight. He was tall and thin, but roped with muscle. His hands were broad and strong, and when he moved them she could see the muscles in his forearms shift under tan skin covered in fine blond hair. His eyes were electric blue, his hair light brown and thick and always charmingly mussed. He wore one tiny gold hoop in his ear. When he turned and smiled at her, he looked like a cat: crinkly eye corners, deep dimples, snaggly eyeteeth just peeking over a full lower lip. He smiled at her a lot. He wore tight jeans and took long strides when he walked toward her bench. You could almost hear him purr.
But he wasn’t exactly calm. When the tack machine went awry, as it often did, driving tacks in crookedly or getting jammed, Dennis would turn it off, grab the nearest tool—a heavy wrench, perhaps—and bang on the side of the thing in a fury. He was known for these meltdowns. Mostly, people laughed about it. “Get yourself together, man,” they said. He was a nineteen-year-old kid.
He was also married. And Mom was twenty-nine, and still dating Tim. At home, the mood of each day was increasingly colored by Tim’s behavior—the red of passion, the blue of distance. She knew he loved her, she told Linda; he just needed more time. He was calm and respectful, he was on his way to a good job, and, at twenty-three, he was bound to grow into an even better guy. She couldn’t give up just yet. Tim, with his decent manners and his button-down shirts, stood out from so many others in Bridgton: he wanted financial stability, and peace; he wanted to better himself, to rise above a difficult upbringing, and he seemed to know how to do it.
Mom did her best to keep the mood in our house light, taking me out to movies and on special trips to the art museum in Portland. She cooked dinner at the exact same time every night and surprised me with inexpensive gifts that waited on my bed almost every Friday afternoon—pretty hair ties or new books or rings set with big, colorful glass stones. But I could tell when her heart was limping along. I could feel her tension and desperation, and when she didn’t feel much like talking because she was sad over Tim, I missed her terribly. I monitored her closely, tuning in to her half of telephone conversations when she thought I was watching television, more interested in keeping an eye on her and anticipating changes in our life than in respecting her privacy. As soon as I became aware of Dennis, I hoped he would push Tim out.
I had no idea Dennis was married, though. I didn’t find out until years after Mom was gone. His wife, Janet, was a little older than Mom—in her early thirties. Near the end of his first year at the Shop, Janet cheated on him with one of his coworkers, a man he’d often taken smoke breaks with. This turned up the volume on their already intense fighting. She wasn’t a small woman. She was loud, and he once said she punched him in the face a couple of times. Dennis claimed never to have raised a hand to her. He claimed she was the only one cheating.
When Dennis went to work, he relished Crystal’s gentle affection, her intelligent conversation. Around this time, when we’d been living in our new house for almost a year, their flirtation became more obvious. Dennis had previously been insulated from the soap opera of liaisons swirling around the Shop—his machine was too loud for him to hear much, and he was, in his words, “country, a farm kid.” Now he took his place center stage in the drama—literally. He and Crystal worked right in the middle of the huge building; people observed them from all angles. They were two of the most beautiful people in the Shop.
Dennis didn’t live on a farm, exactly; he lived two towns away in Casco, on Tenney Hill, a high, narrow road with dirt lanes that branched off and slid down either side of a ridge. There, he was mostly surrounded by other Lorrains—cousins and aunts and uncles in small houses with rocky, shared backyards. Tenney Hill was also home to a couple of well-known coke dealers, older men you didn’t mess with. Crystal, a young homeowner who worked hard for her child, struck him as rare. It seems he was drawn to her for many of the same reasons she was drawn to Tim.