“Wait,” I said. “You think Linda introduced Mom to him?”
“Potentially, yeah,” Gwen said, her lips tightened in thought. “?’Cause he was a cousin of Linda’s boyfriend Mike Douglas, wasn’t he? So Hutchinson and your mother probably met through Linda.”
I took a slow breath, tried to stay open to what she was saying. I wanted to know what she thought, and why she thought it. “So you think Mom and Hutchinson met? Or dated? ’Cause there’s no proof . . .”
“Yeah. I mean,” Gwen hesitated. “I thought, I thought that they . . . it was said that he did know her.” I could see her reviewing the facts in her head.
I jumped in. “He said that.”
“True,” she conceded.
“That’s his story,” I said, a little more harshly. I wanted her to tell me something else, some other reason that she thought that Mom and Hutchinson had met, or been somehow involved. But it was clear that even though Hutchinson’s defense hadn’t convinced anyone of his innocence, it had still managed to wend its way into the story of Mom’s life.
“That’s from his side—it was part of his defense,” I said. To this day, there is no evidence that the two knew each other at all. But this is something that’s impossible to prove definitively, and I wanted to keep Gwen talking. I wanted to admit a wide range of possibilities that might lead to insights. So I made myself add, “Not that I actually do know for sure whether they knew each other . . .”
Gwen sat back a little. “Well. Now I have to think, y’know. I have to think about it. ’Cause I don’t know, either.”
We paused for a moment. A chickadee’s call rattled against the silence. Gwen lowered her head a little and looked at me closely. “I . . . I have this question that I want to ask you. And I don’t want to make you mad.” She cleared her throat, folded her hands.
Dave had been walking around the living room, straightening things up, half-watching the quiet TV. He turned to us. “Huhm,” he said. A muted laugh of tense anticipation.
“Okay . . .” I said, a ragged giggle coming out of me, too. Our sudden awkwardness filled me with fear. My skin flooded with the electricity of impending sweat.
“So there’s this thing I’ve been meaning to ask you. And you can turn that recorder off if you want.”
Dave rushed over and jokingly wrapped an arm around my shoulders, as though to hold me back from attacking someone. “Go ahead!” he said to Gwen. We all emitted big, desperate laughs. Ha. Ha. Ha. I suddenly understood that I had stumbled into a moment they had imagined many times. I definitely did not want to turn off the recorder, was glad when they agreed to leave it on.
“So, I don’t even know if you remember,” Gwen began. “There was this day, and we never knew if you remembered it, but maybe it would tell us something if you did.”
In that moment, all the things I had been telling myself—that I was having these conversations, collecting the evidence, to get to know my mother again, that I wasn’t playing detective in my own mystery—fell away. Suddenly I found myself looking into the dark heart of our unknowing, and all I wanted was for Gwen’s long-withheld question to lead us to all the answers, solve all the old mysteries.
Gwen told me about a Sunday in April, about a month before Mom died, when she and Dave had spent several hours with Grammy, drinking coffee and talking, mostly listening to her go on and on. After a while, they gathered their things, stepped backwards down the porch steps. Goodbye, goodbye, they said. We’ll come again next week, give us a call.
Gwen got into the car and Dave slammed his door, started the engine. If you didn’t interrupt Mumma, it could be dark by the time you got out of there. It had been three hours of visiting and they were tired. They hated driving home in the dark—the roads were narrow and winding, and there were quite a few densely wooded stretches between Bridgton and their house, a thirty-five-minute trip. The danger of hitting a deer was real. And they never wanted to come home late on a Sunday, before the workweek. But on that day, it was still early, really—about four o’clock—and as they pulled out of the driveway, Gwen said, “Dave, let’s stop at Crystal’s house on the way home.” She often said this.
“Nah, it’s too late. By the time we leave . . .”
“No, Dave, let’s go. We’ll just stop in for a minute.”
They drove through town, took the inviting Y-shaped turn down Route 93, coasted the one mile from the Venezia to our house. Gravel popped and rolled beneath their tires as they pulled into the driveway behind Mom’s black car. They stepped up onto the side porch, a little slab of cement. As they knocked, they peered through the wide glass pane of the door and saw me sitting on the couch, alone, reading. Upon hearing their knock, I jumped up from the chair, opened the door.
“Hey!” I said. Weirdly drawn out, a little bit louder than usual.
“He-ey!!” Gwen said, echoing me, gently teasing. “What’re you doo-ing?”
I swung the door open slowly. I glanced back through the living room, toward the bedrooms. It was very quiet in the house. “Mo-om!” I yelled. “Um, Mom?”
Something felt off to Gwen. She said, “What’s your mother doing?”
I walked quickly down the hall, tapped on her door. “Mom, uh, Gwen and Dave are here.”
Her reply came muffled through the door. “Ohh-kay.”
I sat back down on the couch with Gwen and Dave; we turned on the TV, volume low. We talked for a couple of minutes. My attention was divided between them and my book, as usual. It was a big book. They’d ask me a question and I’d answer, then look back down and read a sentence or two. Occasionally I asked them something back. I was acting weird, but I was often weird. A few minutes passed, not more than five, but those minutes felt long. Gwen and Dave wondered if Crystal had been napping? Was pulling on clothes and fixing her hair a little?
And then she walked out of her room, followed by a very young man they had never seen before.
It wasn’t Dennis. It wasn’t Tim.
Gwen and Dave froze on the couch. Desperately wished they’d called before coming, or left in a hurry before Mom had come out, made excuses to me about the late hour or something. Awkward tension crowded the oxygen out of the room. Muscles strained in the effort to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
“Hiiiii!” Mom said, clearly embarrassed. The man behind her was fit, with a baby face. Looked no more than twenty. He plodded along behind her. She turned toward him, looked at Gwen and Dave, and told them his name. “This is _____?,” she said. He mumbled something. They nodded hello. He made a quick exit through the kitchen, out the side door.
After the young man left, everyone pretended nothing had happened.
* * *