I knew Mom was afraid, but she wouldn’t say so, and although she encouraged me to hate Teresa, she also told me to laugh her off. “Don’t take her too seriously,” she said. She thought it was beneath us to be intimidated, no matter what Teresa was capable of.
Teresa’s rage worked in combination with cold, precise instinct: she told Mom over and over that she was going to burn our house down. She’d catch us sleeping and we’d die in the fire and she’d have destroyed something that must have made her terribly jealous. Teresa, living on state disability checks and making death-threat calls from a pay phone, could never hope to buy a house.
The kitchen’s ringing phone became a fraught thing: impossible to tell if it was a cheery bell announcing a friend’s hello or a shrill siren that could cast fear over the rest of our night. For a few months, I wasn’t allowed to answer it at all, but one time I forgot. The phone rang and I skipped over to it, thinking it was Marie, and stuck the receiver to my ear.
“Hello!” I said.
“You fucking cunt! I’m going to come over there and—”
I jumped and hung up the phone. Mom made me tell her what Teresa had said to me. I stammered and blushed and felt like I was the one who was making her mad, saying that word.
Sometimes Tom called, too. I don’t think he made any threats—mostly he was just drunk and maudlin. “I’d like to see my kid,” he’d slur. “C’mon, Crystal, just let her see me.” As though she were stifling some desire of mine.
Mom would say something like, “If you care so much, why don’t you pay some child support?” And then she’d hang up. She knew that once he sobered up, he’d know better. And it’s true that he never asked for anything when he was sober, knew he didn’t have the right. But he didn’t make any efforts to straighten out, either. He often started his first six-pack in the morning, job or no, and he didn’t leave Teresa, didn’t even stop her from calling us.
* * *
I don’t remember ever seeing Teresa face-to-face, but apparently I did. After Mom’s death, several of her friends would tell the cops that one day, the week before the murder, Teresa had come up to us on the street. She must have seen Mom suddenly, or sought her out, then rushed up to her, confronting her before she had time to take me away.
“You can’t have him now,” Teresa said. “I’m pregnant! I’m having his baby—whaddya think now?!”
Mom took a second, then hissed back, “Well, I’m pregnant, too. I don’t give a shit about you two.” It was a sad lie: she very badly wanted a larger family, but she wasn’t pregnant.
Teresa wasn’t lying, but her pregnancy didn’t stop her from toasting Mom’s death three days after the murder, sitting in the cab of her friend Mary’s pickup, drinking down a bottle of cheap champagne and laughing.
24
* * *
after
The school months in Texas stretched on, and I was grateful for the routine of classes and band practice. Angela had convinced me to join marching band with her, where she played flute and I played clarinet, and for the first time I felt at home again in a pack of kids. The classes were more challenging in Texas than they would have been back in Maine, which turned out to be a relief. When I first arrived, I’d gone to a school counselor and told her that I was supposed to skip seventh grade. “Just call the office in Bridgton,” I said. “They’ll tell you.” But skipping was against my new school’s policy, which seemed terribly unfair. I complained loudly, arguing that I was being forced, essentially, to attend an extra year of school. But I think I was actually upset because skipping had felt like my mother’s final wish for me, the last one I could identify, and I could no longer fulfill it.
Despite the comfort of routine, school could still be a minefield of inadvertent cruelties. My French teacher was a jolly Québécois who liked to play us the pop music of his homeland—he had that embarrassing “buddy” style of teaching. One day we were having a class discussion about families, and he posed a question to me about my mother. “Umm,” I said as the rest of the class waited expectantly. He sighed and prompted me with something, thinking I didn’t have the words to answer him in French. “Non,” I said. “Non, je . . . Elle . . .”
“Comment?” he said, growing impatient.
I could have lied to this teacher. I was pretty good at French at the time. I could have said that my mother sewed shoes or that she lived in Maine, that she had red hair. I could have told him her age or said she was thin, or even said she was divorced. But I didn’t want to say any of these things; none of them were true anymore, and I wasn’t willing to lie, in any language, just to make people more comfortable. We hadn’t yet studied past tense, and if I had referred to her in the present, it would only have underscored her absence. I thought for a moment, and could only come up with a blunt answer. “Ma maman est morte.”
“Comment??” he said, loudly.
“Ma maman est morte,” I repeated, cheeks burning. My mama is dead. The room was suddenly completely silent.
“Ma mère est morte,” he said. My mother is dead. Then he looked at me, eyebrows raised, and swept his hand out in a “Go ahead” gesture.
“Ma mère est morte,” I whispered.
* * *
Toward the end of the semester, just before my first Christmas in Texas, I received a card from Dale. He wrote that my photo sat on his desk every day, that he would never forget me. “Hope to hear from you when you’re ready. Love, Dale.” The card was postmarked not from Otter Pond Road but from the state prison. Although he didn’t explain in the note, I heard he had gotten in a terrible car wreck with a woman who had been paralyzed as a result. He had been driving drunk or high or both. I considered it a tragic accident more than anything else, unable to face the true extent of his culpability.
In my heart, I knew that Dale had not killed Mom, could never have, and even Gwen and Glenice were comfortingly convinced of his innocence. But a voice still whispered within me, reminding me that anything was possible. I thought I remembered the police telling me he was a suspect, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to know if he had already been in prison when Mom was killed: then it would have been safe to write back. I didn’t know who I could ask this question, and it made me feel shy—it seemed somehow inappropriate to want to be in touch with him. And although Dale had visited me every few months in the years after he and Mom broke up—taking me fishing or out for ice cream—now I couldn’t help but think about how viciously he had fought with her. I didn’t write back that Christmas, and unfortunately he never wrote again. Now I wonder if my friendship could have made a difference. But I wasn’t ready.
Just a few years ago, when I was preparing to find him again, Dale and an accomplice were arrested for pistol-whipping a young man into unconsciousness, then attempting to throw him out a window, in what appeared to be a drug deal gone wrong. Glenice sent me the article online. “So disappointing,” her note read. “I never would have thought Dale would end up like this.”
* * *