Linda talked about times she and Mom had gone out dancing, how their friendship was more important than anything else. “We’d go out with two guys, y’know. Whoever it was at the time. And they’d sit in the front of the car and we’d sit in the back, and we would hold hands with each other! We would hold hands and just laugh and whisper and ignore them.” And, without my even asking, she brought up that one night, when the two of them were with the same man. She said there was a moment when he left the room, a kiss on the neck, and nothing more. They were young.
As evening fell, Linda led me to her back bedroom to show me the clothes she and Mom had gone out in: “We used to wear the most amazing things, you know. It was the eighties and nineties!” She opened a wardrobe and pulled out dress after dress. “I wore this one on New Year’s, and this one when we went out for our thirtieth birthday. Our birthdays are just six days apart, you know. We always celebrated together.” It was like a dream, where things you’ve lost return to you, whole and just as you remember them. I stood there, amazed that she still had all these dresses—fantastic ensembles with big shoulder pads and attached jewelry and cutouts in the torso; innocent shifts printed with tiny flowers or trimmed in white eyelet; electric blue suits with huge lapels and short, tight skirts. She had saved them all, although she no longer dressed up, had aged beyond them. But I could see Mom standing there in a slightly different version of so many of those outfits, with Linda right next to her, thinner and younger and happier.
Linda wanted me to sleep over that night rather than drive back to Portland so late. But as good as I felt, as happy as I was to be reunited with her, I knew I could not sleep there in her little house, so close to my own. She had done laundry recently, and against her protests I made up her bed, smoothing an old blanket over her flowered sheets. She’d been drinking all day, delicately sipping from one tall can after another, but was nowhere near drunk, and I wondered how long she could keep it up. How many years. I wanted to buy her a better blanket. I wanted to get her into AA. I wanted to do many things that I knew I would not do. She kept saying, “Now, I know I’m not your mother, but I’m the next best thing.” But I knew it was far too late for that; finally seeing her again had brought me to face that fantasy, which I could now let go. I asked if she would be okay for the night, if she would be lonely. She said, “I’ll be fine. You know what I’m going to do after you leave? I’m going to just sit here in the living room and talk to your mother.” I smiled and hugged her and promised to keep in touch.
I left shortly after midnight, eager to get away before one o’clock, before the death hour. As I drove, listening to all those old radio songs, I felt happy and whole. I felt as though different parts of me had come together. But I was also relieved to go, to head back to the present. I knew that serene feeling of connection would fade, in and out, like a flickering light.
* * *
Last September, I was in Maine for a few weeks, coasting to the end of my research and also, finally, taking some days to enjoy myself, visit friends, drive aimlessly through the mountains. One weekend, I went over to Bridgton to see my old friend Marie. She and her husband were hosting a barbecue, the last of the season. I was the first to arrive, so we sat and talked for a while. She left the TV on, playing a mesmerizing feature on the custom-designed pools of millionaires, long, hypnotic shots of perfectly bordered, teal water. She had just moved back to Bridgton after seven years away in the city and was glad, she said, that her two girls, and her son on the way, would now grow up swimming in real lakes, that they would feel sand under their toes. Her new house is right near Woods Pond, a place we visited many times when we were small.
Marie sat calm and unperturbed while we chatted, often glancing at the TV. It was like I’d just dropped in on my way to the grocery store, or on a walk from my house nearby, like I’d been there just the day before. It made me feel like I could come back the next day, or the following week. It was a moment from the life we might have had.
She had sent online invitations to the barbecue, so I had an idea of who might be coming. The first to arrive was an old friend of ours, Shauna, one sister in a big family. She wasn’t one of the sisters I knew well, so I hadn’t seen her since before Mom died. She was kind, and asked the usual catch-up questions, and I felt loved when it became clear that Marie talked about me occasionally, that Shauna had some idea of what I’d been up to in recent years. But the conversation was weighted for us both. When she said she was glad I was doing well, I could hear the unspoken “in spite of . . .”
More people had gathered around the fire by then. I reached the bottom of my second beer and started thinking about what I wanted off the grill. Some people were introduced to me, and others blended into the other side of the small crowd; this was a weekly gathering, and everyone was easy with one another. Little kids started arriving with parents, and Marie’s daughters, Brianna and Kayla, ran around with them in the slanting light. I felt welcomed but different, apart. In moments when everyone else was engaged in conversation and I had no clear way in, I played kickball with Brianna. At some point I drifted back to the grown-ups, and Marie introduced me to a redheaded man who had just arrived. “This is Rob,” she said.
I knew which Rob this was. This was Rob Desjardins, the man whose missing pot plants had led to Michael Hutchinson’s arrest for kidnapping. Rob looked a little serious, a little nervous, maybe. We shook hands. I gave him my most assertive grip, the one that a Republican friend taught me my freshman year of college. He introduced his girlfriend, Alyssa, whose name I also knew: back at the time of the kidnapping, she had been the victim’s girlfriend. She was thin and beautiful and had excellent hair, the sort of natural-looking highlights and precise cut that are hard to get in a small town.
Then the three of us stood there, in the semicircle around the firelight. I felt I should ask Rob some questions, learn something about Hutchinson, but couldn’t bear to bring up any of that at a neighborhood barbecue. I felt like I had him trapped; it seemed unfair. I could tell he knew who I was, but I could not tell what that meant to him.
An hour or two later, parents started leaving; it was Sunday, a school night. I went home not long after, to a lakeside cabin that some friends had lent me in Casco, less than a mile from Tenney Hill Road. It was the off-season, and all the other places along my narrow dirt road were abandoned until spring. To get to the cabin, I had to walk down a very steep hill, climbing down from a long ridge. There was no cell reception, no internet, no landline. When someone at the party asked me where I was staying, I had been intentionally vague. Just in case.
That night, I sat on the porch as the sky fell from deep blue to black, watching the stars reveal themselves. I didn’t turn on a single light. I listened to the loons sending their ghostly calls across the water, my gaze drawing a straight line over the low hills to Highland Lake, to my old house. And I felt at peace, there in the darkness.
Coda