I was a few inches taller than Angela, and stouter, even at my thinnest; I mostly felt large and ungainly next to her. She had an easy, compact cuteness that, for a time, I attempted to emulate, wearing flowered skirts and polo shirts rather than my usual ripped jeans and loose tees. Her ideas about beauty and behavior were, at the very least, a track I could follow. Being around her sharpened my desire to be small, harmless. I ate less and less: another way to practice restraint, to banish that little girl called Heifer. I’d finally gotten thin—108 pounds at nearly five-six—and it’s hard now to tell if I was trying to be more beautiful or if I was still trying to erase myself.
I quickly grew to prefer Angela’s house to Tootsie’s—it was a relaxed, comfortable place where I could borrow her easier life for hours at a stretch. Her mother, Donna, was the first true stay-at-home mom I’d ever met. She was like a blond, Texan Sally Field, with big, highlighted hair and a twangy voice. She had competed in beauty pageants “as a young lady” and now kept very busy raising Angela and her quiet little sister, Katie. I remember eating cookies in Donna’s spacious kitchen while she asked me about school, about Tootsie and her little boys. Angela’s father, Bill, was in the Air Force, but he had an ease that was alien to both Tootsie and Jimmy—he liked a beer after work, he watched action movies with us, and he was a big Cowboys fan. He had a cheesy mustache, and he gave great hugs. Bill told me that his branch of the military was generally more laid-back than the Army, a sentiment Tootsie once echoed, but with scorn.
The Eilers were like a television family, and I found their bland rituals both fascinating and comforting. The neighborhood itself was soothing in its uniformity and order; for months I’d had to count the houses from the bus stop to be sure I’d come home to the right one. On cooler nights, Angela and I camped in a small tent in her backyard, talking late into the night. We talked so much, in fact, that we unwittingly developed a sort of twin speech, wherein we could listen to each other and speak to each other simultaneously with little confusion. Angela felt like a little sister to me, because she had been sheltered from so much of what I’d witnessed and experienced. I already had my period, and she was terribly jealous. I clued her in to the general mechanics of sex, which I had divined from movies her parents would have forbidden, plus the overheard, quiet shufflings that had emerged from behind my mother’s bedroom door. But I kept my knowledge of grief and terror to myself. I didn’t want to darken the sunny childhood that she was still enjoying. When I discovered that Pickett had briefly interviewed her when they came down, I felt defensive of her. “They asked if you were ever cruel to animals,” she said. “It was so weird. You love kitties!” She didn’t seem to understand that this question meant they could be evaluating me as a suspect. Still, I watched her carefully, looking for signs of fear.
* * *
January 1995 approached, and I thought of it as merciful. I held tight to the idea of a new beginning, or the possibility of one, someday. But this would be a shadow year, too.
On January 24, the O.J. Simpson trial began. I still felt like I contained a great darkness, poison that I didn’t want anyone to see, and now the outer world was a gauntlet of blood-spattered tiles, accusations of Nicole’s infidelity, and those terrifying black gloves. Everyone had an opinion, from kids in my math class to adults I overheard in Walmart. Murder was everywhere, the sexiest thing. I couldn’t hide from it, so instead I hid myself. I saw again how excited people got when they talked about a killing, and I didn’t want them turning that excited interest upon me. I listened mutely while people went on and on, and I said nothing. The police in Maine collected DNA samples from more men and sent them off to the FBI lab in DC, while much of the country learned about this technology for the first time.
The O.J. trial was a mess from the start, but at least they had the guy. All they had to do was convict him. It was just a matter of time—he was right there, it was so obvious. Both cases were missing the murder weapon, which I understood to be no small challenge for a prosecutor. I had to see that this detail could be overcome, once a viable suspect was identified. I needed to see that he was the only missing piece, that when we put him on trial, he’d be convicted. The man who killed Mom wouldn’t have the benefit of a high-powered legal team, money, fame. As a white girl from an overwhelmingly white state, I had little understanding of how race factored into the trial, and thought more about how men dominated women, how the rich dominated the poor. Like most of America, I was focused primarily on what the O.J. trial meant to me. If O.J. went down, I reasoned—even while knowing that my reasoning was fanciful—Mom’s killer would, too.
I didn’t want to see O.J.’s face every day, and I got tired of seeing Nicole’s bloody patio and the door that could have kept her safe, if only she’d known not to open it. But Tootsie and Jimmy were captivated; it seemed that whenever I passed the living room TV, there was O.J. I saw his lame pantomime when he tried on the gloves found at the murder scene, the smirk that pulled at the side of his mouth. In the days that followed, I kept waiting for someone—a reporter or commentator—to wonder why, if he was supposed to be innocent, he hadn’t at least feigned sadness or disgust at handling gloves covered with the blood of a woman he had once loved. But I never heard anyone make that point. I even mentioned it to a friend once, but she just shrugged. It seemed that nobody was much interested in Nicole. To America, O.J. was special, whether or not he was a murderer: he was charming, famous, and physically heroic. Nicole was just another beautiful woman.
When the verdict came, acquitting O.J. of murder, everyone in my classroom jumped up and cheered. Everyone but me.
In that moment it was abundantly clear: even if the police identified the man who killed Mom, even if we waited years for that glorious day in court, we might be disappointed. The law was imperfect, vulnerable to human whim. I could not wait for justice to come heal me.
29
* * *
always
From this distance, I can look back and see, objectively, that Mom was not model-perfect. She was thin, with flaming hair and pretty eyes, but she also had pale eyebrows and crowded teeth. It takes my sharpest concentration to see these imperfections; like many daughters, I will always consider my mother to be the pinnacle of beauty. And she was truly striking. In the small town of Bridgton, many people agreed.
After Mom’s death, when the police interviewed Earl Gagnon—a friend of Tom’s who worked at the Shop—he said, “A lot of guys looked at her—pleasing to the eye, you know.” The full record of interviews, and the stories of other townspeople, back him up. There are too many to detail in full, but here is a partial list of men who, in the days and weeks and years following Mom’s death, were known by police or rumored by others to have been attracted to her:
BRUCE INGALLS, a contractor who lived next door to Grace, who helped Tom avoid his child support responsibilities by paying him in cash.
SCOTT MITCHELL, Mom’s friend Valerie’s husband, who looked just like Tom Petty.
GLEN KNIGHT, her friend Kim’s husband, a self-righteously pious born-again Christian who now works as a prison warden.
DONNIE MARTIN, the one who had that habit of bragging that he’d killed her.