It was a beautiful day, warm gentle wind pushing cotton ball clouds across a blue sky. Route 302 runs all the way to Bridgton from Portland, and I took a sharp interest in all the little towns along the way, to keep my mind off what I was doing, what road I was on, what might lie at the end. Linda could refuse me with a slammed door or a screaming cry. Her mind could be so addled that she made no sense at all. She might seem normal and friendly at first, and let me in, then become angry or scared. I wondered if she might try to hurt me, if she could. I wondered if my mission was terribly ill-advised. But I had to go. I reminded myself that I was a strong, capable adult. There was also the chance, of course, that she might simply not be home. I knew that even if she had just left for an hour or so to get groceries, I wouldn’t be able to return.
I entered Bridgton and everything came into focus. I drove past Otter Pond Road and the empty space where our first house with Dale—long since torn down—once stood. All the familiar buildings advanced upon me, one after another, their edges in high relief. I looked up to a window in the downtown strip where I used to take dance lessons, high up in a nineteenth-century building whose floors creaked with every plié. I passed the café that used to be a barbershop that used to be the liquor store. Turned right at the War Memorial, where the vise around my heart tightened. Passed a few more houses, a strip of lakeshore, and then: Linda’s house. Tan siding, brown trim, same as ever. I drove past. It occurred to me that I could just turn around and drive back to Portland without stopping, and I wondered, in a detached way, if I was about to watch myself do just that. I drove to Route 93, turned around at the Venezia, the easiest place to double back. Went back down High Street, and turned, finally, into Linda’s driveway. Switched off the ignition. Got out. I was no longer on autopilot; I could do whatever I wanted.
A line of hung laundry wavered in the breeze, strung across the edge of her back porch. The sheets parted and came together like slow wings, and through the gaps I could see her, lying facedown with her top off, sun-tanning. I stood on the porch and peered through. “Hi?” I called out. Her face turned toward me with a smooth robotic motion. She just looked at me. She didn’t move to get up. Kept staring. I retreated around the corner so she could come see who was at her door. She could be nearsighted by now. She might need a moment to get herself together, to re-tie her bikini top. I stood there for a minute or two, then said, “Hello?” throwing my voice around the corner. She still didn’t approach. The radio was on, quietly, playing a song from those long-ago years. I stepped around the edge of the house again, and again she looked at me through the flapping sheets. I said, “Linda? I’m Sarah.”
And then it was like someone hit PLAY on a freeze-framed movie. She got up and wrapped a white towel around herself. Her face crumpled into tears, a sudden release. Her mouth bent into a tight, wide smile, and every muscle of her small face was in motion. She came forward and hugged me tight, her soft curls brushing my face. I could see the top of her head as I looped my arms around her tiny shoulders. I held her and said, quietly, the first thing that came to mind: “Little Linda!”
* * *
I stayed at Linda’s house for ten hours that day. She cried often, she laughed openly, she kept apologizing: “I know you’re all grown up right now, but you’re still just that little girl to me, I can’t help it.” She referred to Mom only in the present tense. “For your mom and me, part of us will always think of you as that little girl.”
Her face was riveting. At first I thought it was just because I was seeing it again, when I had nearly given up. But over the hours I saw that her face, at fifty, was wildly mercurial. Her profile is like a fine-penciled drawing, like a girl, only shaded here and there with age. She has a delicate nose and lips, and her fine, dark blond curls are cut short around her face. Her hands are tiny and very soft. She began with them in her lap, leaning forward to sip from a bendy straw stuck into a tall boy of Natural Ice beer. Then, finally, she reached for my hand and held it for hours.
In other moments, especially after the sun went down, she looked like an old woman, twenty or even thirty years older than she was, than Mom would be. All her years of tanning had actually touched her quite lightly; it wasn’t the lines that aged her. It was a certain sort of tension, a widening of her eyes, a compression at the corners of her mouth. Sadness and fear and resignation. It would happen in a moment, linger, and then vanish.
Occasionally, strong expressions took hold of her face, appearing for only an instant. A grimacing smile, which often came after a self-deprecating remark. A fretful, worried look, where she peered down at her hands, then snapped her gaze back up. And sometimes when she was making a point, she lowered her forehead a bit and looked at me intensely, and I could see the whites at the bottom of her eyes. And in that moment, I could see what Walt had warned me about. I felt dizzy, like I was peering into a ravine. It was a moment of looking into wildness, a moment I fear will start growing and taking over more of her existence. There seemed to be an unleashed quality to it, as though she could tip over into something like madness. But then she would come back, perfectly placid. All this blew over her face like dark clouds and bright light speeding across a summer sky.
* * *
Linda told me about the days after Mom died, about talking and talking to the police. About her frustration as the years went on with no news of the killer. I asked her about Michael Hutchinson, if she knew him, if she thought he and Mom had dated. She only knew him after, she said, through his friend Ray. She met Mike at a party once, and he went pale. Acted really weird, she now recalls, although at the time she had no idea why. She is confident that Michael and my mother never met, that they were not dating. “We had been wild, in our day!” she said. “We were best friends, we knew everything about each other. I would’ve known.” She said she had driven herself crazy trying to figure out who had killed Mom. “I just kept thinking I should know. That I should figure it out!”
And I believe her. I believe her fully. When I asked her why she wouldn’t speak to me before, her voice got very small and she said, “I’m so sorry. I just didn’t know what to say to you. I was just so nervous.” I believe this, too. Sometimes the truth is less strange than fiction, and it can be a great relief.