After the Eclipse

by Sarah Perry

  Then I let my mind empty out. I sat motionless and stared past the colorful mural painted on the cinder-block wall of the room. I do remember the mural, though: a cheerful tiger peering through wavy blades of jungle grass. I might have seen it before, that Christmas when I got the flu.

  Moments later, Officer Kate Leonard, who had ridden with me in the ambulance, came into the room. She took my hand, and I knew that was bad. She had tears in her eyes, but she said, simply:

  “She’s gone.”

  I nodded once, and then I began to cry for the first time that night. Finally, there would be no more forward motion, and pain came out and over me like a wave. All the muscles in my body contracted, starting with the hand that Kate held, then my arms, chest, neck, torso. Legs. Feet. Face. My body writhed on the crinkly paper as pain rippled through me: hope I didn’t realize I had, flushed out by those two words.

  What Kate didn’t mention was that Mom’s body had never reached the hospital. The ambulance that went to our house had been sent away immediately. Lights off. Empty. No use.

  If I’d saved anyone, it was only myself.

  Memory recedes here, falling into a hospital-white mist, an inconsistent curtain that rolls over the hours, obscuring some moments, parting to let others through. In the next clear shot, a woman—the nurse?—is leading me down a hallway, gently guiding me by the arm. We’re headed to the chaplain’s office, and I’m vaguely bothered by this, because Mom and I aren’t religious. No one seems to understand that this isn’t where we go in times of tragedy, but I don’t know where we do go, so I let them lead me.

  The ceiling of the hallway is low, the floors thick with wax that pulls slightly at each step. I feel the nurse stiffen as we approach a couple of cops talking to a young man who stops talking, looks at me. It’s my mother’s fiancé, although the nurse doesn’t know that, or what that means. But she walks me past him and the cops urge him to walk in the other direction. As we pass each other, Dennis and I lock eyes; I can see how bloodshot and pink his are, how anguished he looks. He seems to tower over the cop holding his arm, and he shifts his weight from one foot to the other and back again, lifts a strong hand and runs it through his light brown hair, his long limbs in constant motion, full of that same agitated energy with which I’m all too familiar. The proximity of our bodies rings out at me, takes my breath away, strikes up a vibration that I try to read: Was he in my house a couple of hours ago? Or was he home sleeping?

  His clothes and bare forearms are clean, but there would have been time to go home and shower. Just barely. I’m certain I see heartbreak on his face, but I don’t have time to look for anything else.

  For years, I will think how strange it was, how inept the police were to let us get that close to each other when they already suspected him, when I wasn’t sure whether or not to. How in that moment, no one seemed to understand, yet, quite what had happened. What the possible stories were.

  The nurse and I pass Dennis, and he fades from my mind; each new sensation overwrites what came before as I try to remain alert to my surroundings, deal with each moment as it comes. The chaplain’s room is tiny and bare, and there’s no chaplain. There’s a hard little couch. Simple chairs. Wood-laminate desk, gray metal filing cabinet. I’m left alone there for a few moments, moments I try to maintain in quiet emptiness. And then someone brings in my grandmother, sits her in a chair, goes back out the door. Leaves her there with me, just the two of us.

  Grammy’s eyes are round, and I can hear the whispering shush of her dry skin as she works her hands over and around each other, her wedding ring on one clicking quietly against her mother’s ring on the other. Her purse sits like a comforting pet in her lap. She is seventy-five years old.

  “Something happened to Crystal. Something happened, I don’t know, they won’t tell me anything. She’s been hurt and, oh, we don’t know what happened! The police came and got me, they didn’t tell me anything. There’s been an accident! Did somebody hurt her?”

  She keeps talking and talking, and tremors are running through me. Grammy’s hysterical, talking and talking, and I’m the one who has to say:

  “I don’t know, Grammy . . . Yes, I do think they should tell us something. Something happened, I’m—I’m not sure . . .”

  She interrupts me with more questions, but I sense that since the cops and the nurses haven’t given her any answers, I’m not supposed to, either. They brought her here in an ambulance. They are being very careful with her.

  The minutes stretch out while I’m alone in this tiny room with the swirling storm of Grammy’s confusion and fear. I am furious that I’m left to do this, that no one else is here, but I’m also ashamed, because the soothing words I offer her, my faltering half answers, are mostly attempts to maintain my own sanity. I must calm her down.

  I must not scream at her: “She was stabbed to death! She was stabbed to death and I was there and no one is helping me and you have to shut up right now!”

  And I don’t want to do this to my grandmother, not really. I don’t want to see Grammy’s face as I tell her this terrible thing, I don’t want to strike this blow. So the rage does come back around again, to love.

  Then, finally, I’m rescued as aunts and uncles start to flow in: Gwen arrives from New Hampshire; Wendall and Carol from Oxford County, in the north. Glenice from Boston. She must have driven very, very fast.

  I can’t remember my aunts’ and uncles’ faces; the remaining hours at the hospital recede behind that misty curtain. For the rest of my life, people will assume that my youth somehow wiped out the memory of the murder. It’s a thought they use to console themselves, not me. The thudding and the blood and the run along the road will always be sharp and clear. It’s the shock and confusion of family, the soothing words and hugs and questioning eyes, that have barely ever existed as memory.

  5

  * * *

  before

  My grandmother passed away more than a decade ago. Still, she remains changeable, complicated, hard to pin down. It’s easy to see how difficult her life was, but it’s also easy to see how she could have done better, or at least pushed her girls to try for better. I have never known my uncle Webster to call her anything other than Gracie, a name that some of the older siblings use, too. But in the family, she is more commonly Mumma. Or Grace, when people are sharing unflattering information. Or sometimes Grammy, especially when they are talking to me, or feeling generous or nostalgic. Grammy is sweet. Mumma is exasperating. Grace is wild. Gracie is both a mother and a child.

  * * *

  It’s 1954, and Gracie is running through a long-grassed field, cutting across its slope instead of down to the river, trying to reach her neighbor’s house. She’s in her mid-thirties, seven or eight months pregnant. She runs fast—she’s had practice. But her husband, Howard, is close behind her, and her belly weighs her down. He grabs her arm, he grabs her red hair. She stumbles as he starts pulling her down the hill. He strikes her face, adding to the bruises already blooming from the fight that started in the house. She yells, digs her feet into the singing grass. Calls him a bastard. Begs him to stop. He hollers, “I’ll friggin’ drown you! Then I’ll stop.”

  But when blood comes out on her dress, it halts them both. For all his meanness, Howard gets scared. Instead of the river, they go to the hospital. They have two boys already: Wendall and Wayne. This would have been Walter.

  Miscarriage is a strange word. Mis-carry. It implies that the woman did something wrong, that she didn’t hold on properly. Perhaps in this case it was the holding on itself that was the problem.

  There are girls at home, too: Betty and Carol, and Gloria and Glenice. Another boy will come later, Webster, and another girl, Tootsie. Finally, the two smallest: Gwendolyn and, ten months later, Crystal.

  Crystal was the third redhead, the tenth child of the household. The eleventh or twelfth or thirteenth born to Grace, depending on who’s asking, and who’s telling. At the age of eighteen—before Howard, long befor
e Crystal’s birth—Grace had married a man named Ray Bartlett, with whom she had her first child, Keith. Soon after, Ray went into the Navy, and while he was away, rumors spread that Grace was running around behind his back. She may have been; she didn’t know how to live without a man. Ray’s parents convinced him to divorce her, and they took Keith, raised him as their own. They had money.

  After Keith came another lost child: Richard, Grace’s second, his father forever a mystery. She had moved back home after her divorce from Ray, and her mother made her give him up to strangers who lived in the area. When Grace’s other kids were little, Richard was the family’s milkman. Some of them knew he was their half brother, some of them didn’t. It didn’t occur to those who knew to tell the others.

  A few years after her divorce from Ray, Grace met Howard Farnum, the man who would chase her across the field and down the road and around the house, for years. He was a drinker like Ray, a fiery man with a handsome enough face. They soon married, and she stayed long enough to have most of those ten children with him. When he wasn’t away with the Army he was often in jail: assault, petty thefts, house robberies. He and his friends Hoppy and Hornet took turns running jobs and serving sentences, but they weren’t quite organized enough to be called a gang. They traded horses and conned whomever they could. They tried robbing the funeral home, even as Howard’s uncle was lying in it. But a safe is a tough thing to breach or steal; they got caught.

  Each time Howard was released, he would return home in a taxi, stepping out in the new suit the prison issued upon discharge in those days, a hundred-dollar bill in his pocket. One fresh start after another. But the house didn’t match the suit. It was a camp, really, in a place called Milton Plantation, too small to this day to be called a town. One room downstairs, another upstairs, all the kids crowded into one bed, no matter how many there were. Grace and Howard’s bed just feet away. Winter heat provided by a sheet-metal stove in the center of the room, its thin walls glowing red. Crescent moon outhouse. Water from a bucket thrown down to break the ice, until Howard installed a hand pump on the well. A big step up.

  * * *

  When I visit the Maine State Archives in Augusta, curious about Howard’s criminal convictions, I find less and more than I expected. Just one record, just one crime: convicted of rape, October 1958. Sentence: ten to twenty years. The victim: one of his oldest daughters, age thirteen at the time.

  The trial record contains only one piece of admitted evidence: a typewritten letter from the victim, retracting her original charge, saying that she’d lied to the neighbor woman she told. I suspect this was coerced. For Howard to have been convicted, in that era, especially considering this retraction, there must have been little doubt of his guilt. I later learn that she was sent away for a while, alone, to a school for wayward girls. When I ask another aunt why, she says, “I guess people wanted her out of there. People thought she’d done something wrong.” She doesn’t say quite who she means by “people.” Of course that young girl hadn’t done anything wrong. I’m sad that she was sent off alone, but I do hope that being away from that house, Howard or no, helped her.

  It turns out that Grace visited the prison regularly, but never went to the school to see her daughter. And then Howard returned home after less than five years, in time to father my mother, Crystal. Grace was forty-four years old; Crystal was her last child. If Howard had served the maximum term of his sentence, or if Grace hadn’t taken him back, my mother would not have been born.

  * * *

  Even when Howard was living at home, Grace tried to go out on the town. She’d wait until Friday night and then pick a fight with him so he’d run off, get too drunk to come back until morning. Sometimes, she got more than she bargained for. He’d rage at her, shake and hit her. She’d yell, “Howard! Oh, Howard!” He liked this. He liked her scared. And she knew it, too: she could amplify the sound of her own fear for his pleasure, her yells operatic and trembling, until finally his hands got more gentle. These were the nights he stayed home.

  But most Fridays, Howard was out finding trouble or getting punished for it, and Grace didn’t have to pick a fight. She would curl her hair and put on her best dress, enlisting Glenice’s help. And her ex-husband, Ray, would appear in his teal Thunderbird, tailfins cutting the dust of the road, to take her out dancing and more. She didn’t always come home on Saturday. Or Sunday, or Monday. She didn’t always go out with Ray—sometimes there were others. Grace favored the Top Hat, a long, low dance hall in the woods at the base of a steep mountain. A dark place, for open secrets.

  Whenever Grace didn’t come home on Monday, Glenice, still only about twelve years old, had to miss school to take care of the five younger kids. Her older siblings had all moved out by then. Sometimes there wasn’t any food in the house, but she knew that her mother had chocolate bars and new stockings hidden away, that she denied herself nothing. When Crystal and Gwen were just toddlers, mobile but too little to understand very much, the river was a problem, always cold and clear and running swiftly behind the field, as though waiting to take a younger one under. Glenice worried about it constantly. But she couldn’t watch them every minute. There were Wayne and Webster, and then there was Tootsie and, even younger, Gwen and Crystal, but those two stayed together, could watch themselves, a little. Glenice got distracted; there was so much to do. And they disappeared so quickly.

  One afternoon she was in the house, making sandwiches out of the little she could find, and suddenly it was too quiet. Suddenly she knew: the river.

  She ran through the field, the sharp edges of deer grass pulling at her pant legs, long, dark blond hair streaming out behind her. She ran faster than ever, because she knew. The river, oh God.

  She found Gwen facedown in the water, arms splayed out, alone. Gwen was about four, kept forgetting she couldn’t swim. Loved the water. When Glenice turned her sister over, she was blue in the face. They were alone on a strip of sandy beach, no parents to help. Glenice was overcome with rage. The rage carried her running back through the field, carried her as she carried the inert weight of the wet child, her sister.

  She got to the dusty road and, miraculously, improbably, there was a car. There was a car, and an adult, and help, and Gwen survived.

  This wasn’t the first time Glenice had pulled her little sister from the water, but it was the worst. For years to come, she would suddenly notice Gwen gone from the room, panic and call out for her. Gwen would sometimes hide on purpose, and the other kids would laugh—not at Glenice, really, but at fate. Luckily, Crystal was too little to wander that far, and once she was, she was a stronger swimmer, and tougher, less prone to mishaps. She was the baby of the family, but everyone knew she could take care of herself.

  Eventually Glenice stopped helping her mother get ready to go out. The tender ritual, perhaps their only one, of helping Grace curl her hair and button up her dress, disappeared in Glenice’s anger. “You need to stay here and take care of all these kids!” she’d yell, still just a kid herself. At the age of fourteen, she left for good, slapping her mother’s face on the way out. She felt guilty for years—not about the slap but about leaving her brothers and sisters there. But she knew that if she didn’t leave, she would miss too much school and eventually fail out, and then she wouldn’t be able to help anybody, not really.

  Gracie wasn’t malicious; there were just a lot of things that she couldn’t handle. One day, she was home with the kids when Gloria tripped on the stairs, landing on an exposed nail that ripped her thigh open. The other kids tended to the wound; Gracie was too scared. She locked herself in the bedroom and wouldn’t come out.

  * * *

  It’s unclear exactly when Grace decided to leave Howard, or even whether she was the one who did the leaving. But at some point, when my mother was four or five, the two divorced. Soon after, Grace married Ray—of the teal Thunderbird and the first child—for the second time. He had left the Navy with a decent pension and was able to move the family to a moder
n, three-bedroom house in the town of Bridgton, about an hour’s drive south of Milton. It was a real town, with a post office and a police station and a stoplight town center.

  Grace must have exerted a truly powerful, undeniable pull on Ray, because he hated children, and five of hers were still living at home. Ray demanded quiet in the house at all hours; even a whispered conversation in another room could send him into a fit. He was especially intolerant when he was drinking, which was often. The kids—Tootsie, Gwen, and Crystal, and Wayne and Webster—couldn’t really play, couldn’t have friends over. Glenice and Gloria picked them up for weekend visits whenever they could, driving them back north to the towns they’d escaped to from Milton, either to Glenice’s house in Rumford or to Gloria’s in Dixfield, a few towns downriver. They even tried to take Gwen and Crystal for good, but Grace wouldn’t let them.

  Ray wouldn’t let the kids take showers; they could only take baths, and he allowed them just a shallow measure of water. He didn’t want to waste it on them, he said. They weren’t allowed to eat at the table; Grace cooked elaborate dinners for Ray alone and sent her children to their rooms with bowls of cereal.

  Sometimes Ray hit Grace, but he generally didn’t strike the children. Instead he growled at them from around corners, cursed at them and told them they were worthless. “I can’t stand to look at you,” he’d say to a braided, freckled, six-year-old girl. He ordered Grace around and she took it. She did whatever she could to make her children be quiet, to keep them from bothering him in any way. Grace was more passive with Ray than she had been with Howard, possibly because Ray was a little less extreme; there was less opportunity for open brawling. Ray also provided more material benefits. He agreed to tolerate the children—just barely—and she agreed to do what she could to shut them up. He got access to this woman who so compelled him, and she got a nice house to live in. The deal mostly worked for them. It just didn’t work for anybody else.