As a child, I had always been sad that I didn’t look more like my mother. When I was very small, this was about my love for her, about wanting to be even more closely connected. In first grade, I begged her to let me dye my hair red, and didn’t understand why she said no. Anytime someone told me I looked like her, I figured they were just being nice, and I’ve never been able to shake that feeling. Later, my desire to look more like her took on a tinge of jealousy. I imagined bringing future boyfriends home to meet her, and seeing in their eyes that they thought she was more beautiful. I didn’t want to compete with her, but I wanted to share that power and attention. I felt it was terribly unfair that I hadn’t inherited her unique looks. But I liked that we both had blue eyes, even though mine are more gray.
When I’m heavier, I look like my father; when thinner, more like my mother. In the pictures accompanying that Portland Press Herald article, I am blatantly Tom’s daughter. The wait between the DNA match and the trial was projected to be a year, and I decided then that I’d use the time to remake myself in Mom’s image. I had been dyeing my hair red for years by then, but at that time it was much shorter and darker than hers had been. I had just enough time to grow it out to my shoulders and lighten it gradually until it looked naturally bright auburn.
I was the heaviest I’d ever been, and weak and unhealthy from too many late nights and too little exercise. I planned to pare myself down to essentials, muscle and bone, until I was almost as thin as she was. I knew I couldn’t expect to hit her 117, not only because she was an inch shorter than me but also because I had my father’s thicker frame. I told a close friend that I was aiming at 130, down from 150, but the real number was 125. That number was like a talisman I carried. I kept it secret; I didn’t want to seem crazy. But I wanted to scare Hutchinson. I wanted him to walk into that courtroom and see Crystal sitting in the front row, staring him down.
I ran a lot that year, sometimes outside, but mostly on the treadmill at the gym. A row of televisions faced the cardio machines, and when they weren’t taunting everyone with cooking shows, they were playing Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Every episode featured a woman’s splayed corpse, lengthy discussion of her rape and murder. I tried not to look, but I always caught a pale limb extending from under a tarp, or tangled hair cast over a face. It seemed it was always raining.
I resented having these bodies paraded before me while I was trying to gather the strength to face down a real murder; it felt like an absurdity that no one else could see, like O.J. all over again. My fellow runners, lined up next to me and going nowhere, seemed to watch with impassive eyes. They couldn’t know how my breath caught in my throat, how I wanted to take the remote and hurl it through the nearest screen.
But maybe some of them did feel the same choking anger. I looked to the left, to the right, taking in girls with long strides and bouncing ponytails, and other women marching along, faces tense with what looked like desire. Twenty percent of American women are victims of rape. In Bridgton, that would make about five hundred women, twice the high school’s population of girls. I was then living in a town four times the size of Bridgton, and so I wondered which of the women around me might also be struggling to breathe, keeping their faces neutral and stoic. But we were an invisible club, estranged by the need to cope. To pretend all day, every day, that everything was fine. To imagine that society and law enforcement and the courts would behave exactly the same way if something so terrible happened to one in five men, that conviction rates would be the same, that the world would find those crimes just as entertaining as it found these, that we weren’t being further subjugated by having to be still and take it, pretend outward calm and enjoy the show.
So I did nothing—even to change the channel would have been to admit weakness. Instead I tried to enjoy the plot lines, the well-written dialogue. Be a normal person. I thought about what I would eat when I got home, whether it was time for that week’s weigh-in. Time to see how close I was to scaring him.
When I ran, I also thought about the night of the murder, the journey from my house to the Venezia. The distance was just under a mile, but I didn’t run the whole way. I ran from house to house at first, but then in that final long stretch, weakness crept upon me like strong arms wrapping around my chest, pulling me back. I would run a few steps, but then the air would slice my lungs, my heart would threaten to leap out, and I’d stumble down into a thump-heeled walk. I’d try to catch my breath, try to run again. Then I’d break down and walk again. I felt like a failure every single time. I felt like crying every single time. I should have run the whole way, but the truth was that I didn’t have the strength.
Running continuously would not have made a difference. If I’d arrived at the Venezia thirty seconds or one minute or five or ten minutes earlier, I do not think Mom could have been saved. If I’d popped out my window screen and run the second I heard her screaming, I do not think Mom could have been saved. But I still felt shame; I still wished that little girl had been able to sprint heroically.
This time, I would do everything I could. I would run several hundred miles, gather my strength and whittle myself down until I resembled Mom as much as possible. As I slimmed down, I couldn’t help but be pleased with my appearance, a happy bonus. When I ate, I limited my portions, thinking of Hutchinson at every meal: a strangely intimate connection. If it was true, as Walt guessed, that Hutchinson had targeted Mom because he had seen her walking along our road and around town, then it was Mom’s beauty, ultimately, that had gotten her killed. I refused to hide mine. Instead, I polished it like armor.
* * *
It was important not only to resemble Mom, to be thin and strong and able to run, but to be mentally strong, psychologically prepared, so that when I took the stand, there wouldn’t be another 991 slip, some moment when I thought I was saying or doing one thing but was really doing another.