by Sarah Perry
20
* * *
after
Over that first summer I spent without her, I occasionally went to Gwen and Dave’s for the weekend. Their spare, modern apartment on the second floor, with a front door that opened out to the brightly lit interior hallway of the building, felt safe and separate from the rest of the world. And then one weekend, we watched a white Bronco drive slowly up a Los Angeles highway, a murderer hiding in the back. When we changed the channel, we saw the same shot, the only difference a slight shift in color. Redder. Bluer. Redder. All around the dial. Nicole Brown Simpson died one month and one day after my mother. Her daughter was only eight, but I kept thinking she was twelve. Her neighbor found her, but I kept thinking her daughter had. I remember watching that slow-motion chase intently, hoping O.J. would follow through on his threats to kill himself. He entered my life, however distantly, just when I needed a killer upon which to focus my anger.
For years, I remembered the Bronco chase as occurring the weekend of Mom’s funeral. I remembered sitting on Gwen and Dave’s couch, puffy-eyed and exhausted, the smell of afternoon coffee filling the room, the sound of the news chopper cutting through the air. But of course on that day, Nicole still had twenty-eight days left to live. In the days and weeks after Mom died, time was a movable thing, a fluid substance that pushed the meaningful and the terrible closer together and crowded out everything else.
* * *
Months earlier, Mom had bought us tickets to fly that summer to Texas, where my aunt Tootsie was stationed in the Army, having finally returned to the States after eleven years in Germany. Mom and I had flown only once before—years ago, with Dale, to Disney World in Florida. This time, it would’ve been just the two of us. I can imagine her leaning over me toward the little window, looking at the tops of clouds, so solid-looking, like soft hills you could step right out onto. I think now about how excited she must have been while planning that trip. How she would have already arranged to take time off from work, a rare vacation. She’d never been to the Southwest before. She would have loved all that sunshine, all those pretty pastel colors.
Instead, after a month or so at Carol and Carroll’s, I flew alone. I wanted to get far away from supermarket whispers and the six o’clock news, put half a country between me and the killer. When I flew, I did so weighed down with a grocery bag of quarters and nickels, dollar bills and fives: the collected kindness of the surviving Shoe Shop hand-sewers. In Portland, I was surprised when airport security failed to find that bag of shrapnel. Only after I passed through the metal detectors did I realize they had been silent, and I was afraid of this silence—it took the place of some kind of necessary witness. I wondered if it would be permanent.
* * *
I touched down in the middle of the West Texas desert, tumbleweeds and dust devils greeting me. I came in the night, ferried from the airport in my aunt’s minivan, and stumbled into a bed made with crisp blue sheets. I woke to bright sunshine and a big, empty room—bigger and emptier than any I had ever slept in before. I could hear my steps swishing on the carpet, and the faint echo of that sound on the walls, which were textured to resemble half-polished stone. I opened the closet door and discovered a space big enough to step into, lined with shelves and many-leveled bars on which to hang far more clothes than I could imagine owning. Tootsie had left stationery on one of the shelves, personalized with my name and bearing a filigreed border of muted purple and brown. In that closet, there was also a small scorpion.
The house itself was spacious and neat, with very little color. White walls, beige carpet, pale linoleum. The living room held a large brown sectional couch, a coffee table, and an enormous, wall-length shelving unit called a shrunk, imported from Germany. There was a brick fireplace, and ceiling fans turned in every room. There were two bathrooms. To me, these people were rich.
The name of the city, San Angelo, was lovely on my tongue, and just exotic enough. I marveled at the short, crooked mesquite trees, at the prickly pear cacti, the armadillo roadkill. The sky, when blue, burned with blue, and, when overcast, hovered white and flat and endless. Once, while walking through the neighborhood, I came upon the flattened, sun-cured husk of a snake that stretched across both lanes of traffic. From the French doors next to the house’s fireplace, I looked out over the dry canal, out into the land, a receding line that beckoned patiently. Nearly every day brought a postcard sunset, violent and multihued and spreading over the wide expanse of sky. I did not miss Maine’s close granite hills or its towering pines full of shadows. When I heard that on a still night one could see a single candle flame from a mile away, I knew I’d landed where I belonged, in the abundant clear air of the desert.
* * *
My first days in Texas were spent quietly—dinners with Tootsie and her husband, Jimmy, and their two young sons, Alan and John; trips to Walmart and the grocery store and the pool on the military base. I met the Eilers, next door: Angela and Katie and their parents, Bill and Donna. Angela was my age and Katie was a couple of years younger. Angela and I played basketball in her driveway, took long walks around the neighborhood just before sunset, and poked fun at each other’s strange accents. She came to the base pool with us and taught me to haul myself out of the water and salute the nearest flag when the national anthem played over the loudspeakers at four. When she asked why I was in Texas, I told her my mother had been killed, and she did not ask any more questions.
Before that summer, I had met Tootsie only twice: once when I was a toddler and once earlier that spring, when she had visited Maine on her way to Texas from Germany. I have a picture of her and Mom from the evening she came to see us, the only picture I’ve ever seen of the pair. They are sitting on the floor in between the living room and the kitchen, in the very spot where Mom would die just weeks later.
Though she hardly knew me, Tootsie soon offered to let me live in her home permanently. I had a few weeks to think about this decision, to observe her closely and weigh my options. I had to decide for sure by August 3. When Tootsie gave me this deadline, she stressed the fact that it was the last day we could cancel my return flight without losing its cash value. I still appreciate how careful and ethical she was when handling my money. But I could have used a little more guidance, an idea of how everyone else felt about this decision. She did not say, “We’d like you to stay.” She did not say, “Carol would love to have you in Maine.”
Tootsie had earned her nickname in the cradle, when her eldest sister leaned down and saw her there, swaddled up and adorable, “just like a little Tootsie Roll!” This did not predict the tough kid who would beat up her younger siblings, or the intimidating, unfamiliar woman I now found myself with. It would be months before I learned that Army women could keep their hair long, that they weren’t forced to wear it in Tootsie’s unstyled chop. Her face was thin, with a narrow, pointed nose and slender eyes accentuated with slight crow’s-feet. She did not wear makeup or make other attempts to soften her image, and I couldn’t understand why she hacked off her red hair, which I saw as her only real source of beauty. She was puzzling to me, seemed almost aggressively unadorned; she was a type of woman that I did not yet understand.
Tootsie’s husband, Jimmy, was retired from the Army, a tall, broad man with a slight stoop, originally from Arkansas. He kept his gray hair very neat, and he rarely said a word. Tootsie gave the orders: she was a first sergeant, in charge on base and at home. Their sons, Alan and John, ages five and three, were rambunctious, prone to fighting with each other and full of wild energy. I had spent very little time with younger children and did not know what to do with them, especially Alan, a big, blond, square-headed kid who tended to bait his little brother into fights and misbehavior. John, the gentler of the two, was a thin boy with bright red hair who was pretty quiet when left alone. Sometimes, if I sat in the living room and watched TV, he would come and sit on my lap, and the fact that someone so sweet and innocent wanted to be near me was both terrifying and intensely comforti
ng.
Although Tootsie was welcoming at first, buying me books and new shoes and planning family outings for my benefit, I did get glimpses in those early days of the difficulties that were to come. When I first got to her house, I had the occasional habit of talking in a baby voice. This was probably something I did when talking to the cats or to my little cousins, but I won’t rule out that I might have done it at the dinner table, joking around. John had the most adorably garbled toddler speech that I’ve heard to this day. Whenever he said my name—“Tair-wah!”—I felt a pure shot of pain in my chest, a visceral joy that surprised me every time. One afternoon, Angela was at the house and he said something that came out in a really funny way, and we laughed and repeated it the way he’d said it. He sounded so silly! Tootsie heard us and lashed out: “At least when he talks like a baby, he doesn’t do it to be cute.” I was mortified; shame burned through me so hot that I wished it would singe a hole in the floor so I could drop out of sight. How could I have been so stupid, I thought, to behave like a child in this house?
From then on, I tried to hide from Tootsie any emotions she might see as too warm, too sentimental. When the family’s two cats died suddenly and terribly, within just a few weeks of each other—one choked on a toy, the other was accidentally crushed under my uncle’s foot while he was carrying a large, heavy box—I held in my tears, telling myself that after all I’d been through, I wasn’t going to get all soft and weepy over some mere animals.
* * *
The end of summer approached, and Tootsie moved up my deadline for deciding where to live by several weeks. Emotionally, it would have made the most sense for me to live with Gwen or Glenice. But so much had happened, and I’d lost so much, I didn’t have the luxury of wondering why the aunts I loved the most wouldn’t take me home with them. This fact loomed like a cocked fist in my peripheral vision; if I didn’t turn to look at it, I wouldn’t get hit.
These years later, I approach this question very carefully. Glenice says, “Gwen lived so close to Bridgton, and we didn’t know who this guy was . . . And my place was too small. I thought about moving. But you and Tootsie seemed to have a lot in common. She had been to college; you were both so bright.” I can see that they wanted it to be okay, and that my living at Tootsie’s made some sense. They were overwhelmed and grieving. I made my peace with this long ago.
I decided to stay in Texas, even though I wasn’t sure if I was an escapee or an explorer. Tootsie was unpredictable, she could be harsh and judgmental, but the house and the land were big and airy and sunny. I wanted everything to be okay, too, and would tell my other aunts very little about how Tootsie behaved. My only other option was to return to Peru, and although Carol and Carroll were kind, I couldn’t imagine going back to the dark woods and their isolated little house. Plus, the murder was still all over the news; if I went back to Maine, the kids in my new school would surely know who I was. I couldn’t stand the thought of strangers watching me struggle, looking for signs that I would crack. I didn’t know that the police and many others were glad that I would not be returning, because with the killer still at large, they were worried about my safety. I didn’t know that a collective sigh of relief had followed my departure.
21
* * *
before
Dennis Lorrain could have been the one.
He worked as a laster at the Shoe Shop, running a big machine that drove rough silver tacks through leather, holding the pattern onto a last—a chunk of wood shaped like a foot—to prepare it for sewing. He had to wear a headset to protect his hearing—the machine sounded like a gun going off every time he hit it, all day long. Those tacks were everywhere in the Shop, and when Mom wasn’t looking, I’d pull them out of the soft soles of her shoes and push them into mine, my sneakers turned to tap shoes, clicking down the halls at school.
When Dennis started working at the Shop in 1992, he already knew a few of Mom’s coworkers there, and he was immediately drawn to their beautiful friend Crystal. She was like nothing he had ever seen; he was mesmerized by her freckles, her thick red hair, her pale blue eyes. He saw in her a feminine softness, a delicate manner that was different from those of the women he knew. He loved her voice, so light and smooth. He couldn’t imagine her ever raising that voice. She knew just how to look at him, just how to talk to him. She made him feel special. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, was always coming up with excuses to visit her and Penny and their friend Richard at the hand-sewing benches.
Dennis’s post at the tacking machine was right in Crystal’s line of sight. He was tall and thin, but roped with muscle. His hands were broad and strong, and when he moved them she could see the muscles in his forearms shift under tan skin covered in fine blond hair. His eyes were electric blue, his hair light brown and thick and always charmingly mussed. He wore one tiny gold hoop in his ear. When he turned and smiled at her, he looked like a cat: crinkly eye corners, deep dimples, snaggly eyeteeth just peeking over a full lower lip. He smiled at her a lot. He wore tight jeans and took long strides when he walked toward her bench. You could almost hear him purr.
But he wasn’t exactly calm. When the tack machine went awry, as it often did, driving tacks in crookedly or getting jammed, Dennis would turn it off, grab the nearest tool—a heavy wrench, perhaps—and bang on the side of the thing in a fury. He was known for these meltdowns. Mostly, people laughed about it. “Get yourself together, man,” they said. He was a nineteen-year-old kid.
He was also married. And Mom was twenty-nine, and still dating Tim. At home, the mood of each day was increasingly colored by Tim’s behavior—the red of passion, the blue of distance. She knew he loved her, she told Linda; he just needed more time. He was calm and respectful, he was on his way to a good job, and, at twenty-three, he was bound to grow into an even better guy. She couldn’t give up just yet. Tim, with his decent manners and his button-down shirts, stood out from so many others in Bridgton: he wanted financial stability, and peace; he wanted to better himself, to rise above a difficult upbringing, and he seemed to know how to do it.
Mom did her best to keep the mood in our house light, taking me out to movies and on special trips to the art museum in Portland. She cooked dinner at the exact same time every night and surprised me with inexpensive gifts that waited on my bed almost every Friday afternoon—pretty hair ties or new books or rings set with big, colorful glass stones. But I could tell when her heart was limping along. I could feel her tension and desperation, and when she didn’t feel much like talking because she was sad over Tim, I missed her terribly. I monitored her closely, tuning in to her half of telephone conversations when she thought I was watching television, more interested in keeping an eye on her and anticipating changes in our life than in respecting her privacy. As soon as I became aware of Dennis, I hoped he would push Tim out.
I had no idea Dennis was married, though. I didn’t find out until years after Mom was gone. His wife, Janet, was a little older than Mom—in her early thirties. Near the end of his first year at the Shop, Janet cheated on him with one of his coworkers, a man he’d often taken smoke breaks with. This turned up the volume on their already intense fighting. She wasn’t a small woman. She was loud, and he once said she punched him in the face a couple of times. Dennis claimed never to have raised a hand to her. He claimed she was the only one cheating.
When Dennis went to work, he relished Crystal’s gentle affection, her intelligent conversation. Around this time, when we’d been living in our new house for almost a year, their flirtation became more obvious. Dennis had previously been insulated from the soap opera of liaisons swirling around the Shop—his machine was too loud for him to hear much, and he was, in his words, “country, a farm kid.” Now he took his place center stage in the drama—literally. He and Crystal worked right in the middle of the huge building; people observed them from all angles. They were two of the most beautiful people in the Shop.
Dennis didn’t live on a farm, exactly; he lived two towns aw
ay in Casco, on Tenney Hill, a high, narrow road with dirt lanes that branched off and slid down either side of a ridge. There, he was mostly surrounded by other Lorrains—cousins and aunts and uncles in small houses with rocky, shared backyards. Tenney Hill was also home to a couple of well-known coke dealers, older men you didn’t mess with. Crystal, a young homeowner who worked hard for her child, struck him as rare. It seems he was drawn to her for many of the same reasons she was drawn to Tim.
At the time, Crystal really had no intention of dating this very young man, marriage or no, but she couldn’t stop herself from talking to him. He showered her with attention, and she had fun gently teasing him in return. As Christmas approached, they joked about mistletoe.
Dennis was still living with Janet then and, by his account, trying to make the best of the shaky marriage. She had two daughters from a previous relationship, whom Dennis said he loved as his own. He wasn’t ready to give up just yet. But on Christmas Eve, Janet sent him out for something—a lightbulb, maybe, or milk. The grocery stores were all closed, so he went to Rite Aid. He grabbed the milk and strode up to the counter. Just as he was taking out his wallet, he looked up and there she was: Crystal, with her daughter in tow. He knew just what to do. He grabbed a sprig of plastic mistletoe from next to the register, threw down a ten, and, with a parting nod to the cashier, bounded up to her.
“Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?”
She smiled. She may have rolled her eyes a little. “Yeah, okay. Sarah, go pick out a card, I’ll be right back.”
