After the Eclipse

by Sarah Perry

  But I kept trying. I did my homework, I did my best to be nice to Peggy. I thought, I only have six years left. I thought about the gleaming floors of the high school, and college beyond. The police insisted that Peggy take me to a children’s psychologist in Portland, and arranged state funding for the appointments. It was an hour-long drive I quickly grew to dread. The doctor was elderly and she kept a big, smelly dog in her office. She looked to me as if she’d never been through anything more traumatic than someone fixing her coffee wrong, and I had nothing to say to her. That doctor lived in the same place my classmates did: an orderly universe governed by safety and logic. Her fancy degrees didn’t change the fact that she was living a childish fiction.

  After a few sessions, it was decided that Peggy and I would see the doctor together, to talk through our issues. The grown-ups were ignorant, but they outnumbered me. I felt defenseless but still couldn’t give them what they wanted—weepy, submissive grief. I couldn’t get anyone to understand that my effort at control was the only thing holding me together. And now I know that I had reason not to trust the doctor, who concluded that my silence was sinister. She told the police that my behavior was a “real mystery” and that I could “very well be somehow involved” in my mother’s murder.

  * * *

  Grief requires imagination: mental images of the one you’ve lost, of the world that would have been. At school, I struggled to look and act normal, to get all the solace I could out of the distractions of classwork and tests. I threw myself into straightforward subjects, tasks that had clear, simple answers. I was careful not to think too deeply. I did not write stories. I did not draw pictures. I skipped chorus and music class. On the night Mom was killed, I was halted: imagination became a dangerous place, full of darkness and terror. Creativity would have taken energy I needed to survive. And so I could not write, and I could not remember, and I could hardly mourn, only fear.

  Ms. Shane gave me extra worksheets and let me plunge ahead on busywork, or she’d recommend a new book to read while I sat inside with her at recess. Reading I could handle; it was still an escape. She also gently encouraged me to join in with my classmates when I could, and on the last day of sixth grade I finally managed to have fun with my friends. We were all looking forward to the coming year, when we would attend Lake Region Middle School, one town away. It was an exciting transition—we would meet all the kids from the other elementary schools nearby, and we would be one step further on our way to becoming grown-ups. We’d be a warm, familiar group—the Bridgton kids—within an exciting larger one.

  There was a moment near the end of the school day when I stood in the empty main hallway of the building, sunlight shining on the tiled floor. I thought about the day of the eclipse, only weeks before, and felt an echo of the happiness and excitement that had come over me then. I was glad to be alive. I was full of love for my friends. I was going to make it through.

  * * *

  When I got home to Peggy’s, Carol was there, putting all my stuff in black plastic trash bags. They looked like body bags scattered all over the living room.

  “Peggy called me,” Carol told me, “and said you can’t live here anymore. She said she can’t take it anymore.”

  I spent that night on the couch in Peru, listening for footsteps.

  19

  * * *

  before

  For a brief time, Mom and I lived in a comfortable little kingdom all our own. We belonged to each other, in a way that’s common to only daughters and single mothers, especially when both are young. These years later, I sit with a bag of letters and holiday cards that Mom collected, mostly ones I made her. They are always labeled FROM: SARAH. TO: MOM. I LOVE YOU! XOXOXO! My love for her was so strong that no expression ever seemed enough, prompting me to churn out these soft-leaved stacks of construction paper. Now there is no one left to cherish them but me. Young children are naturally effusive in their love for their mothers, but I had a fierce kind of love for her, an every-marker-in-the-box kind of love. A toddler’s sort of clinging that held on straight through to age twelve. Of course, no matter what might have happened, the outer world would have imposed itself; we could never have been everything to each other.

  Mom, still a beautiful young woman, also wanted more. Soon her friend Ruth, our old downstairs neighbor, introduced her to a man named Tim. I have a flash memory of Tim kissing my mother in our house, standing between the kitchen and the living room. He was tall and thin and boyish, with thick, dark hair. He wore a button-down shirt, tucked in, and he had beautiful hands. When he kissed her, he placed one long palm on either side of her face, his fingers reaching into the soft hair behind her ears. He held her upturned face gently but firmly, like he was drinking from a bowl of water.

  When Mom looked at Tim, I could see that she adored him, couldn’t believe her good luck. I had never seen her look at anyone like that before. I had never seen her so vulnerable, and it scared me, especially as I watched how he behaved. In his quiet way, he took and took, but did not give. He came over after sunset; he left with the sunrise. He’d disappear for a couple of weeks, and every day she’d get sadder and sadder, and then he’d call her up again.

  They had an intense connection, but he wouldn’t commit. As she told her friends, he wouldn’t say he loved her, expressly told her that he could not say it. He’d been burned by an ex who had cheated on him. He was attending a community college nearly two hours away, training to be an electrician, and would not make pledges until he’d graduated and gotten a job; it’d be another year at least. Even though she wanted someone who would marry her, perhaps have another child with her, and he clearly didn’t want that, she kept right on hoping, and he kept right on coming over.

  I could feel her tension and desperation; when she wasn’t on a high from Tim’s love and attention, she was anxious about keeping it. There were times when they would break up for a week or so and she would curl up, catatonic, on the couch, her thin torso looking bent and collapsed, her legs unshaven for days and days. I knew things were bad when I felt those prickly calves against my arm as she stared blankly at the TV, trying but mostly failing to hide how terrible she felt. But then she’d take Tim back, although he still lived far away, still seemed unwilling to alter his life in any way to make her happier. Each time they got back together, I wanted it to work out, for her sake. But each time, I got a little more frustrated.

  Mom wanted Tim, but perhaps even more, she wanted a true partner, and all that a partner ideally provides. Companionship. Increased financial security. Protection. Our house on Route 93 was wonderful—peaceful, neat and tidy, and entirely ours. But the nervousness that she had felt upon moving in never really dissipated. She felt better with a man around.

  Even then, I understood that although I was there with her, in a fundamental way she considered herself alone. I was a girl: no matter how much I wanted to make her feel safe, I could not. And so she was keeping an eye out for someone who could.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, I was edging into adolescence, pulled along by the tide of my classmates. My best friend in those days was a girl named Marie, with whom I’d been close since second grade. She was less of a nerd than me, more artistic than scholarly, blessed with an angelic drawing ability that I coveted. She wore thick, heavy glasses that shrank her pretty green eyes, her teeth were locked behind a heavy grille of braces, and she had hit puberty embarrassingly early. A lot of kids still called me Heifer; it didn’t help that in addition to being chubby, I was the sort of know-it-all, teacher’s-pet kid who didn’t know when to put her hand down in class. Marie and I were probably the only two girls who were allowed to get spiral perms at that age, which only made us stranger to the other kids. We were a perfect outcast match.

  Every month or so, I’d sleep over at Marie’s, a big two-story home full of knickknacks and old couches. Her mother liked crafting—there were beads and yarn and wooden cutouts of animals scattered on every horizontal surface. I remember watchin
g MTV at their house one of the first times I slept over; Mom and I never had cable. Marie and I caught our first glimpse of both Madonna and Michael Jackson in the same night, and started to sense how much magic there was out there in the world beyond Maine.

  Marie lived in town, not far from Bridgton’s central intersection, on a narrow blacktop road that quickly ran into the thick woods down to the Plummers Landing beach. On long summer afternoons, we would barrel down that road together, two of us on one bike, headed to the lake to lay out in the sun on a square, floating dock. Marie would stand on the pedals while I clung to the seat, hiding my fear while we coasted through a steep tunnel of green. She was more independent than I was, and would often dare me to do things that I didn’t want my mother to know about. She helped propel me forward, her feet strong on the pedals while I peeked over her shoulder.

  Finally I started begging Mom for more independence. Our downtown was compact, easily walkable, and I wanted to do something on my own after school while she was still at work, instead of just going home on the bus, sitting on the couch, and waiting for her. After a few tense discussions, I convinced her to let me walk to the library from school, one day a week.

  The Bridgton Library was a two-story redbrick building, Carnegie-era, simple columns holding up a small portico. At night, it was lit by opaque globes on iron columns, like something Gene Kelly would spin around. The children’s room was in the basement, a cozy area with brightly colored beanbags, but by then I had graduated to the adult reading upstairs. I liked to roam the shelves, pulling down decaying old books of poetry, titles embossed in gilt letters. I always checked the stamped dates on the circulation card, and was especially attracted to books that hadn’t been taken out in a while. I had this idea that every book deserved some attention, so I didn’t want to read what everyone else was reading. There was also a delicious, heightened privacy in reading something that apparently no one had touched in fifty years, something that was all mine. I stuck my nose into those books and breathed deeply, ran my fingers over the worn edges of the pages. Stories and poetry were best, but occasionally I latched onto a research interest—sharks, horse breeds, mythology, and finally, just in time for the eclipse, astronomy.

  One day, on my walk to the library, I was listening to David Bowie, the ringing guitars and strings of “Starman” pouring out of my headphones and creating a translucent curtain between me and the rest of the world. Just before the library, I had to pass a park bench notorious for loud, smoking teenagers, but that day I felt less nervous than usual, shielded by sound. I skirted the group, but one of them jumped out in front of me just as I was passing. He laughed and started walking backwards, and he opened one side of his long black jacket. Shielded by the coat, his hand held a little plastic bag full of white powder. He kept laughing and laughing, then spun and ran back to his friends.

  I knew he’d shown me drugs, or pretended to, but I didn’t understand why. To scare the young girl? Or was I not a young girl anymore?

  There were others who seemed not to think so, like the man who whistled at me from his truck on the street one day. I turned around quickly to see who he was looking at, but no one else was there. Now, when I ran errands downtown with Mom and men called out, I could not be sure to whom they were calling.

  After Mom’s death, her friend Ruth told the police that I had been spending a lot of time with friends and leaving Mom alone in the house—that I “had a mind of my own,” a damning charge for a child, especially for a girl. In reality, for a preteen, I was spending only the usual amount of time with friends—occasional weekend sleepovers with Marie and a few others; long, gossipy phone calls in the evenings. And every single time I went over to a friend’s house, it wrenched my heart. When Mom dropped me off, I’d hug her across the car console while she reminded me to be good. I’d linger there, her soft hair falling on my shoulder, and a dizzy panic would wash over me. Suddenly I’d change my mind—more than anything in the world, I wanted her to take me back home so we could watch a movie together, or lie in the sun in the yard. I did worry about her returning to a lonely house, and felt guilty. But my friend would already be waving from the porch. I knew I was supposed to get out of the car, that once I was inside the house I’d no longer feel like crying. So I’d let go, and slam the door, and run up the driveway. I’d perch for a moment on the stairs and blow a big, stagy kiss, my hand sweeping the air in front of my tight throat.

  If I felt responsible for her loneliness, if I could barely leave her for a night, and if even her adult friends thought I had a duty to take care of her, what would my love for her feel like today? I am overwhelmed thinking about the hot, dense feeling of that bond, its intense gravitational force. How would I ever have moved away from her? I imagine daily phone calls, worries about her health, about her boyfriend or husband. Is she eating enough? Is that fatigue or sadness in her voice? I imagine my own friends and partners finding it all a bit too intense. I think about the burden of this love, and am grateful, for a moment, for my freedom. And then guilt flashes in my chest like heat lightning, followed by a rumbling quake of sadness.

  * * *

  I was probably actually furthest from my mother when immersed in my interior world, where I lived most fully. As far back as I could remember, reading had been a perfect escape, an alternate universe where none of the problems were mine. When I was upset at home or at school, I could always pull out a book, or know that one was waiting for me in the next quiet moment. In first grade, encouraged by my teacher, I’d started writing stories, and this was even better: I could create whatever escape I wanted, include whichever characters I wanted to spend time with. Writing gave me power. As the school years passed, each teacher encouraged me in my writing, and I remember Mrs. Anderson, in second grade, advising me to keep my maiden name forever, so that when I published books, she and others would know they were mine. The idea that an activity that I loved could bring me recognition outside of my tiny town, my rural, isolated state, was exhilarating.

  That first year we lived in the house, my teachers arranged for a boy from Bridgton Academy—the prep school where Mom and Gwen had painted the dorms—to tutor me in creative writing. He didn’t provide a whole lot of guidance, but the fact that he was hired just for me gave me extra motivation, and, looking back, I am so touched that my teachers went out of their way to hire him. I spent most of my free time in those days making up stories and scribbling them out on the rough yellow paper that I dragged home by the stack, my hands smelling constantly of wood pulp and friction-hot erasers. Even when Mom and I went to dinner with her friends, I would write, pulling out paper and a clipboard when the adult conversation started to get dull.

  Late in fourth grade, one of my poems was selected for a national student anthology: a sign to me that, someday, I would be a real writer. I rushed to show Mom the acceptance letter, but her response was uncharacteristically cold. “They just want you to buy that book,” she said. In the moment, I was wounded, surprised—she was so dismissive of this thing that was so important to me, that I imagined building my future around. I’ll never know why she reacted like that. She could have just been in a bad mood. She could have been jealous of the time and attention I gave to writing. Or she could have realized, as I slowly would, that we had found the first thing we would not share.

  * * *

  It is easy for me to remember moments when Mom and I didn’t get along, or when one of us said something cruel, because they stand in such contrast to the rest. I still feel pain or embarrassment or disappointment when I think of fights or misunderstandings we had, most of which occurred in that final year, on the forward edge of adolescence. But I’m glad for these memories. They assure me that my idea of our relationship is accurate, not some rosy thing I constructed after her death.

  I remember, so clearly, one Thursday evening. Thursday was Seinfeld night—we never missed an episode, and we both loved to talk about the show when we saw her friends or sisters. I knew that other kids my
age were watching Beverly Hills, 90210 in that time slot, and I liked that Mom and I had this instead. It proved we were special, somehow more sophisticated.

  On this particular Thursday, I was reading in our spare room. Mom let me read almost anything I wanted, and by then I was mostly interested in adult novels. I read with intensity, dropping into a book as if into a deep, cold lake, my pulse slowed, my hearing muffled. That day I was reading a thick romance that had racy scenes I didn’t want her to know about. Mom knocked on the door, then opened it and stuck her head in. “Hey! It’s almost time for Seinfeld!”

  I was irrationally, incredibly frustrated. I sighed like the worst parody of an annoyed teenager. “Uhh, I don’t know . . .” I said.

  “What?” She frowned a little, looked hurt but mostly confused. “Well, I’ll come back and let you know when it starts . . .”

  The conversation devolved into an argument. I didn’t want to be interrupted, Mom thought I had a tone, and so on. Finally I said, “I don’t care about stupid Seinfeld! Go watch it yourself!”

  I know that pushing away your parents is a natural part of growing up, the first step in becoming your own person. I know this. But if I’d known how soon she would be taken from me, I would never have begun the process of leaving her.