I don’t like that word, “claimed”—and “little girl” is so inaccurate now. In a moment, the phone is in my hand, and I’m doing my best to explain to a soft-voiced woman what has happened. I try to be specific and precise, not like a little girl at all. Years later, I will hear that 911 tape. I sound so calm, so incredibly calm.
After the call there is a period of waiting and quiet. I try not to think about the flashlight. I don’t tell anyone about it. I go to the bathroom, and there is blood on the right side of my face. Not mine. Somewhere deep within me I feel horror, but the feeling stays there, far below the surface. I do not cry or cringe; I reach for a washcloth, run warm water over it, and wipe mechanically at my faraway reflection. I think, This is a thing I must do.
3
* * *
before
In the last two years of her life, my mother and I lived in a neat little black-and-white house on a quiet road, in an inland Maine town of five thousand people: white Congregational church spire, an unusual abundance of calm cool water, thick snow sifting out of a gray sky in winter. The town’s waters collected in two big lakes, called Highland and Long, and its snow powdered a tiny ski resort whose trails spelled out LOVE when lit up in the night. The word was an accident of topography, the treeless spaces carving out clear letters. Route 302, a two-lane state road, ran in front of the mountain and southeast into town, becoming High Street until it became Main Street at the War Memorial, an armed Union soldier atop a granite pillar. From there, Main coasted down a steep hill, bent away from the Highland lakeshore, and edged past steady storefronts—the Magic Lantern theater, Renys discount store, the Flower Pot, Food City, the Black Horse Tavern—before diving back into the forest and becoming Route 302 again, threading through two smaller, satellite towns and then running an hour south to Portland. At the town’s one traffic light, another state road wound north to smaller, more isolated towns. Inundated with city tourists in the summer, closed and private in the winter, we were a border place, a portal between inside and outside, in a state with a keen, often claustrophobic sense of insularity.
Our town was called Bridgton, and its people knew Crystal Perry, the pretty young redhead who had lived there nearly all her life. Her path to that little black-and-white house was a long one. She was a good mother, and a homeowner. The little money she earned, she managed well: I still remember shopping with her in the grocery store over the New Hampshire state line—there’s no sales tax there. She’d push the cart along with her forearms, clutching a memo pad, a Bic pen, and a tiny pink calculator in her hands. Luxuries—new clothes, car stereo—were earned with patience, over long layaway periods, and everything was funded by the days she spent locked in a factory, her hands expertly whipping thread through fine leather shoes. The work was hard, but it was stable. She had good friendships with at least two of her six sisters, and a better one with her friend Linda, whom she had known since she was eight years old. We’d visit her on weekend afternoons and stay for hours, Linda’s charm and silliness unraveling the anxiety that Mom almost always held just below the surface.
Mom spent much of her life trying to find and keep good love—for her own sake and, she thought, for mine. She dealt with alcoholics, welfare cheats, hot tempers. She extracted promises of undying devotion that brought with them efforts at control and verbal abuse. After wisely divorcing my father, Tom, when I was still very young, she found Dale, a man who was unfailingly good to me, like a father should be, and good to her, too, but she lost him a few years later. Her next love was Tim, whom she longed for desperately but could not hold, like a comet that would swing close and then recede. And her last was Dennis, her fiancé at the time of her death, the most complicated of them all, the one that I will forever turn over and over in my mind. There were others, of course. She was a beautiful young woman who’d been taught that she needed a man. And they found her, for a night or a week or a few years. But she never found the one that she needed.
* * *
My mother was a very private person; exposure was the final indignity of her murder. Her violent end was illuminated in full detail for a hungry public. The curtains were stripped from her home; anyone could press their nose to the glass. But the beauty of her existence was not reported or filed, was not documented or reenacted on cable television; her light was blocked out by terror. I want to push away that darkness, to travel back through fear and reunite with her as she was before.
My mother gave birth to me when she was eighteen years old, and she was killed when she was just thirty. I began this story eighteen years after her death—when I myself was thirty. In that moment, we had lived without each other for an equal amount of time. A deep part of me had always suspected that I would never live longer than she had, that something would happen to ensure that I would never become older than her. But the months passed and I found myself living years she never had, years that had been impossible to imagine. I have worked to bring her forward into them, with me.
4
* * *
after
On the first morning after the murder, I awoke heavy and still, in my grandmother’s house. It felt as though only seconds had passed since I’d knocked on the door of the Venezia, and so I was spared the moment that so many talk about, when the brain forgets the tragedy in the first moments of waking and then the heart is crushed again by the realization of what has happened. I lay flat on my back under a staticky velour comforter in a room I’d once shared with my mother, before we bought our house. The bed that had been hers was now mine. I stared up at the ceiling and thought about how much energy it would take to move my body, and how I would have to keep moving, day after day after day.
I am forever grateful for the blank sleep of that first night, that perfectly dreamless stretch of mental silence. For if nightmares had come, I would have spent every night after fearing their return, and that fear would have been an open door, beckoning the shapes of darkness. As it was, there would be plenty of fear without the aid of dreams.