My uncle Carroll worked in the woods, cutting trees for that same paper mill. He had the same curly blond hair, and had been with Carol since they were teenagers, back when he was her brother Wendall’s best friend. He was silly around little kids and cared deeply for animals, who seemed magically drawn to him. Still, he also carried a flinty anger within; some days he would be unaccountably silent, and I’d constantly feel like I was annoying him.
Peru was familiar, but disappointing. It’s a typical Maine town, but even smaller: fewer than two thousand people living on thickly forested land that winds between a river and a ridge. It’s about an hour north from Bridgton, an hour that makes a big difference. Four other small towns feed into the high school, which sits across the wide Androscoggin River in Dixfield. The school is called Dirigo, the Maine state motto—Latin for “I lead.” When I attended, Dirigo led in girls’ basketball and sometimes boys’ wrestling and not much else, and had a student body of about 250. I had dedicated teachers, especially in my English and history classes, but I learned calculus out of a textbook from 1963. The entire first floor was gutted; most of our classes that year were held in church basements while the old building was being renovated, and I couldn’t pronounce the French I learned because I could barely hear my teacher over the band saws in the next room. The wide, slow Androscoggin was beautiful, but when we wanted to swim we had to go upstream, past the paper mill in Rumford. This was not a land of sparkling lakes; the summer people did not come here. The shadows of tall, dark pines loomed over me. Sunset happened early and far away, beyond the prodigious mountains.
I was isolated by my anger, an indignant rage that made me turn further and further within myself, convinced that no one could understand me. Carol and I would have some minor clash, and I’d head up to my bedroom and kneel on my bed and scream, high-pitched and breathless, shoving a pillow into my mouth until I could hardly breathe, drool and tears wetting the pillowcase. I can still feel that peach-fuzz cotton on my tongue, taste the baby powder and faint detergent. My body rigid, I’d drive my head into the pillow over and over, angry not at Carol but at Tootsie—so angry that when I heard she had moved to Washington State, I imagined a hundred-foot cedar falling on her. Even in the moment, I knew the image was silly and cartoonish, but I wanted something unfair and horrible to happen to her, and the image was perfectly diffuse and indirectly violent, like a spinning house crash-landing in Oz.
Carol and Carroll were mostly reasonable and calm, and they did truly care about me. They did a lot for me over the couple of years I lived with them. But there were some blunt reminders that their responsibility for me went only so far. I arrived shortly before my sixteenth birthday, and I’d already had my license in Texas, under a special “emergency” provision related to Tootsie’s military work. In Peru, the nearest town big enough to have a movie theater was forty-five minutes away, and no people my age—in fact, few people of any age—lived within walking distance. But when I asked Carol how we would go about securing my Maine license, she said, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. If you get in a wreck, somebody could sue me and take my house. You’ll just have to wait until you’re eighteen.” I could live with them, but they would not take any risks for me, however far-fetched the potential consequences. The fact that this made sense didn’t make it less painful.
I knew that if I’d been born into another family, I could have ended up in foster care after Mom died. Or, perhaps worse, with my father and Teresa. I knew that taking me in wasn’t easy, that Carol and Carroll—whose son was now thirty-three—hadn’t planned on housing a teenager in their later years. I tried to be thankful that they had accepted this burden. But I didn’t want to be accepted. I wanted to be wanted.
I was desperate to conceal myself, to seem placid and normal, because I knew that I’d reached the last place that would take me. I could not show my rage, as I had at Peggy’s. I could not feel for any other girl the sort of affection I had felt for Anne, or at least I couldn’t do anything about it. But I knew that neither of those things had been the reason I’d been told to leave either of those homes. I knew it wasn’t that simple. It was hard not to suspect that there was a catalog of things about me that were annoying, offensive, hard to live with. Sometimes I wished that someone would just tell me what they were.
* * *
Dixfield got a new chief of police a couple of months after I arrived. It was Dick Pickett. I felt followed, plagued. I was working to put that time and that town and that girl behind me—I built a barricade of the lakes and rivers and mountains between Bridgton and Peru, mentally exaggerating the distances. Dick Pickett sitting in an office just steps from my school seemed like a sick joke. I didn’t want him or anyone connected to Bridgton anywhere near me. I fantasized about acting out, drinking at a party somewhere, getting arrested and hauled in and then facing Dick down, asking him if he and his boys couldn’t do something better with their time. Like solve my mother’s murder.
I ignored the fact that the state criminal division was a separate entity from the Dixfield Police Department. And I didn’t know that someone new was taking over the investigation, someone smarter, far less arrogant. That he and his partner were analyzing every word of Pickett’s files, were tracking down dozens of potential suspects. That in the next couple of years, they would draw blood for DNA testing from so many men that they would come to be known as the Vampires.
I went silent again, as much as I was able. I spoke to people only when I had to. A girl named Carrie, whose grandmother lived in the only house visible from Carol and Carroll’s, was asked to help me settle in at school. There was only the one building, plus those church basements; there wasn’t much to show or to explain to me. Sometime during the first week, she introduced me to a few friends of hers, and the first thing I said to them was “Sorry, I’m not going to remember any of your names.” I wasn’t interested in making friends after learning all those names at Central, names of people I would probably never see again. After all that work, my grades hadn’t even transferred.
I planned to wait out my last two years of school, graduate, and go back to Texas. Anne and I had started talking on the phone again and writing long letters. I understood that this mirrored my first days in Texas, when I longed for Maine forests even as I was falling in love with the desert, and once again I felt I’d forever be dreaming of a place other than the one I was in.