by Sarah Perry
“Comment??” he said, loudly.
“Ma maman est morte,” I repeated, cheeks burning. My mama is dead. The room was suddenly completely silent.
“Ma mère est morte,” he said. My mother is dead. Then he looked at me, eyebrows raised, and swept his hand out in a “Go ahead” gesture.
“Ma mère est morte,” I whispered.
* * *
Toward the end of the semester, just before my first Christmas in Texas, I received a card from Dale. He wrote that my photo sat on his desk every day, that he would never forget me. “Hope to hear from you when you’re ready. Love, Dale.” The card was postmarked not from Otter Pond Road but from the state prison. Although he didn’t explain in the note, I heard he had gotten in a terrible car wreck with a woman who had been paralyzed as a result. He had been driving drunk or high or both. I considered it a tragic accident more than anything else, unable to face the true extent of his culpability.
In my heart, I knew that Dale had not killed Mom, could never have, and even Gwen and Glenice were comfortingly convinced of his innocence. But a voice still whispered within me, reminding me that anything was possible. I thought I remembered the police telling me he was a suspect, but I wasn’t sure. I wanted to know if he had already been in prison when Mom was killed: then it would have been safe to write back. I didn’t know who I could ask this question, and it made me feel shy—it seemed somehow inappropriate to want to be in touch with him. And although Dale had visited me every few months in the years after he and Mom broke up—taking me fishing or out for ice cream—now I couldn’t help but think about how viciously he had fought with her. I didn’t write back that Christmas, and unfortunately he never wrote again. Now I wonder if my friendship could have made a difference. But I wasn’t ready.
Just a few years ago, when I was preparing to find him again, Dale and an accomplice were arrested for pistol-whipping a young man into unconsciousness, then attempting to throw him out a window, in what appeared to be a drug deal gone wrong. Glenice sent me the article online. “So disappointing,” her note read. “I never would have thought Dale would end up like this.”
* * *
That Christmas morning at Tootsie’s, I sat on the carpet near the tree, handing presents to the family. I opened mine as I encountered them, slowly, letting the boys open three in the time I took with one. Eventually I pulled out a solid rectangular gift that could have been a hardcover book. I flipped up the tag. TO: SARAH, it read. FROM: MOM.
I looked at Tootsie, who met my gaze with a small smile. I flicked my eyes back down to the package, then carefully pulled back the paper to reveal a solid brass frame, two-sided and folded like a book. Inside were six photographs of me and Mom, each carefully trimmed and set within the matting that came with the frame. On the right side was a five-by-seven, beautifully lit and composed, no doubt taken when Tootsie and Jimmy visited us when I was very small, as they were the only people in the family who owned a high-quality camera back then. In this photo, my mother and I sit in uneven sunlight. I’m about four years old. I hold a Barbie doll and look straight into the camera with a serious expression, blond hair in pigtails. It’s a face I still make—friends often recognize it when I show them this picture, laughing as they point it out in a chubby-cheeked kid. Behind me, my mother wears a flowing top in a 1980s calico print and her signature blue eyeliner. She is twenty-three.
As I sat next to that tree, I imagined Tootsie calling other family members so she could corral all the other pictures in the frame for me—snapshots from later eras that I knew she wouldn’t have owned. I thought of her hovering a pen tip over the gift tag, wondering what to write. And I wanted to thank her, but I didn’t know how. She had done a lovely thing for me, but hadn’t acknowledged that she had done it. We had no script for tenderness between us. I set the photo frame aside and dug through the presents, looking for something else to distract Alan and John.
I still have this frame; it is the first thing I unpack when I move, and if I go on a long trip I bring it with me. It’s heavy, but it has crossed many miles of land and ocean. There are five photos in addition to the one taken by Tootsie or Jimmy, all arranged in the left-hand side of the frame. A studio portrait of mother and infant, in sepia tones. A snapshot from the Halloween two years before Mom died: me as a princess, Mom as a gypsy. The two of us eating sandwiches on a stone wall, legs sticking straight out before us, then sitting on a sunny hillside surrounded by tangled blueberry bushes, wind blowing our hair. And then a moment from our final Christmas: Mom and me standing in front of a glowing tree at the last family party she would attend. In it, my mother is wearing the suit we selected for her funeral viewing, chosen for its solid structure and high neckline. Tootsie couldn’t have known this; she’d been absent from both the party and the funeral. That photo resonated differently for me than it did for her, like almost everything else.
25
* * *
before
I didn’t have the full picture regarding Denny, and Mom was too unsure to act on what she saw. A few months into their relationship, his temper got him fired from the Shop. I now know that he became more controlling after he left, perhaps because he couldn’t monitor Mom all day anymore. Her friend Sandy recently told me that she would often see him pull Mom aside, talking low into her ear and scowling while tears came to her eyes. Sandy couldn’t hear these exchanges, but she gathered that they were over little things: Crystal smiled at a male friend and Dennis took it the wrong way, or he was simply having a bad day and she hadn’t given him enough attention.
Shortly after he found a new job at an auto parts store, Sandy said, Dennis made Mom cut her hair. I was surprised to hear this; despite everything she put up with, it’s hard for me to imagine her taking such a specific order. But I admit I can see her giving in after he hounded her about it over and over, reasoning that, well, it’s just hair, after all, and hair grows. But her hair wasn’t just hair. Her hair was the most powerful emblem of her beauty, and it seems he wanted it reduced. He wanted to be the only one looking at her.
* * *
Soon after that, Mom realized that she had made a mistake getting involved with Dennis, that the relationship was unsalvageable. He kicked the side of our house so hard once that he broke the siding and had to replace it. Another night, he left our house so angry, he crashed and totaled his truck. He broke a shovel in half, wielding it aimlessly in a tantrum. He grabbed Mom’s arm once, hard—at least, once that I saw. She kept trying to leave him, but he kept pulling her back in. By early spring 1994, the Shop’s hand-sewers made a joke of checking Crystal’s finger for the engagement ring each morning—she pulled it off and pushed it back on that frequently.
Secretly, I had started to worry that Denny would go over the line, push one of his and Mom’s screaming matches too far. I thought of this line like a physical thing, a definitive landmark that I would recognize when we came to it. We had watched all those horror movies and made-for-TV dramas: I knew that violent men only got more so after marriage, after the woman was trapped, and that sometimes even nice guys turned out to be psychos. This fear stalked the edge of my mind.
But then he’d be back: the same funny, smart, cute guy I knew, arriving at lunch with flowers for her, maybe a stuffed animal for me. I knew he was the same man who yelled at Mom in the night, who called her a slut, who would furiously accuse her of not loving him enough, as though that were the worst possible sin. But in the daylight, it was hard to believe it.
So I kept renewing my faith in him, making excuses. Denny was under a lot of pressure, after all—he had wrecked his truck, and then sprained an ankle weeks later while running around playing tag with me in the yard. He was also having money troubles, although I didn’t know at the time that this was because he had gotten himself fired from the Shop. I thought it was possible Mom had gotten nervous after the engagement was official, might have become more exacting, harder to please. I knew how frustrating she could be, how stubborn. She n
ever, ever said she was sorry for losing her temper.
I pushed away my concerns. You’ve watched too many movies, I’d say to myself. Denny will get better. Everything will get better. They just need more time.
But there was no time. On a Sunday in mid-May, the three of us celebrated Mother’s Day at my grandmother’s house. By Thursday Mom was dead, and Dennis became the prime suspect.
* * *
The police came to Dennis’s house at a little past four in the morning that day. He heard a loud banging on the front door, next to his bedroom, and as he shuffled out into the living room, he saw his mother. She was in her nightgown, and edged backwards as the cops moved in, filling the small entryway. There were at least four of them. One was Gary Arris—the family knew him, but that night his face was still, professional.
Dennis’s mother pulled her nightgown tighter around her. She wasn’t quite awake yet and couldn’t understand why anyone would come at such an early hour. Her husband stood behind the bar of the kitchen, blinking in the light, and the police started asking her son questions. He was twenty years old, standing there in pajamas. A couple of the cops looked very big.
“Did you go anywhere last night? Did you see Crystal Perry last night?”
Dennis was direct: “Is she all right?”
He didn’t get an answer, but another question.
“Dennis, were you at home last night?”
And then he panicked. Instead of answering, he asked another question. He says it was “Is she alive?” The cops say it was “Is she dead?”
She wasn’t alive. His mother caught him as he fell.
When Dennis came to, he was led out to a police cruiser for questioning. A couple of the cops stayed in the house to talk to his parents separately. He was not handcuffed. He walked through the rain and sat in the back of the car. He did his best to provide answers, alternating between numb disbelief and a frantic, instinctive desire to get to Crystal, to do something. He had gotten home from work, he said, just past eight o’clock. He remembered because that was when he called Crystal on his parents’ house phone. The microwave showed 8:07 exactly. She was upset. He was supposed to have been at our house at eight, but he had stopped to check out a car that a friend was selling. A brown 1968 Mercury Cougar. He was seven minutes late by then and twenty minutes away. He admitted that he and Crystal had argued over the phone.
“I’ll come right over, right now. C’mon, Crystal, don’t be that way. It’s okay, I’m on my way right now.”
“No,” she said. “No, don’t even bother. I’ll talk to you on Saturday.”
It was Wednesday night. Dennis usually came over on Wednesdays and Saturdays. So when I first heard fighting that night, I’d assumed it was Dennis she was fighting with. I’d forgotten he hadn’t been there when I went to bed. I didn’t even wake up enough to form these impressions into full thoughts.
I hate to think that as I drifted back to sleep, I might have felt exasperated, frustrated with Mom’s inability to leave this man who was causing us so much trouble. But I may have—I was so tired of their fighting by then. I certainly figured that I couldn’t do anything about it. Let her stand up for herself, I might have thought, had I been more awake, had it really been Dennis.
I didn’t know until many years later that she had gotten irritated and told Dennis not to come over, that she had stood up for herself. She didn’t care what he wanted; she needed to sleep. And despite his temper, it would turn out that it wasn’t Dennis I heard—he had respected her wishes and stayed home. He wasn’t in our house that night. He wasn’t the one. And so she had no one to protect her when someone else came knocking.
* * *
Dennis once failed a polygraph examination. When asked if he felt “responsible for Crystal’s death,” he said, “No,” and his body went haywire. Responsibility can mean many things. I wonder how my heart would have responded to such a question.
26
* * *
after
They flew down to Texas as a trio, a small flock of carrion birds: Chief Bob Bell from Bridgton, plus Dick Pickett and Dale Keegan—a new detective—from the Maine State Police. In Pickett’s notes from that long weekend, there’s a section, perhaps written while on the plane, where he coaches himself. His bubbly script, i’s dotted with little circles, contrasts with its content. “Appeal to her sense of justice. Don’t want it to happen again,” he writes. “Smile . . . also be serious when appropriate.” He adds, “Mother may have been an embarrassment to her. She may have wished it happened.”
They landed at Tootsie’s house after dinner on a Friday night—to see where I lived, to say hello. Angela came over, too: she was curious, she wanted to support me, and the cops wanted to see what sort of friends I had.
Chief Bell was gray-haired and quiet; he hung back. He had an almost grandfatherly air to him. He was there to represent Bridgton, of course, and to consult with Pickett, but it seems to me that the chief of police wouldn’t normally fly halfway across the country to help out with an interview from a case already nine months old. I believe his presence speaks to his dedication. To his memory of that sad little redheaded girl he once picked up when she was running away on her bike, back when they were both so much younger.
I didn’t appreciate any of this at the time. I just saw three men, come to question me. I still didn’t like Pickett very much, was still put off by his attempts to ingratiate himself with me. The way he spoke seemed calculated, false. Even while supposedly making friendly conversation, he would ask questions and then not listen to the answers; there was no natural flow. He still seemed to think I was purposely hiding something. I was glad to hear that I would spend most of the weekend with Keegan. He was younger than the others. He chatted with me and Angela in my room, and complimented my large book collection. Later, she and I agreed that he was reasonably good-looking, in a forgettable sort of way. He had, it turns out, recently been trained in new interrogation tactics at the FBI Academy in Quantico.
On Saturday morning, Tootsie drove me to the Holiday Inn downtown to be officially interviewed by Detective Keegan. We were silent in the humming elevator and walking down the hallway. He greeted us effusively, all smiles as he swept open the door. After brief hellos, Tootsie left to meet up with Pickett and Chief Bell. I let her disappear from my mind. I didn’t want to think about her talking about me, about Mom.
After some small talk, Keegan and I got settled. Thinking back on it now, I don’t know how he was alone in a room with a minor, but I suppose Tootsie must have consented. This is one of the many things about the investigation that doesn’t make sense to me, no matter how many questions I ask or how hard I think about it.
There was a hotel desk chair for me: heavy wood, padded vinyl. Keegan sat down in another, handed me a Coke he’d fetched from the vending machine down the hall. I took it and glanced out the window through the gauzy curtains. I could see the occasional car or truck working its way down the wide, pale streets, moving slowly across the pane of glass like a drop of water, silent at this height.
Keegan began slowly. What was my relationship with my mother like? What sorts of things did we do together? Did I know her friends? Was it true what people said, that we were like sisters? All weekend, he would alternate between friendliness and pressure, acting as both good cop and bad. Sometimes he insisted that I had repressed memories from that night, that if I just thought hard enough, and felt relaxed and open enough, I would be able to give him the information he needed. At other times, he spoke as though I was hiding information on purpose. And although I didn’t want to admit it, because the idea seemed too far-fetched, it also seemed as though he was trying to determine if I had something to do with Mom’s murder.
Despite all this, and my well-entrenched suspicion of cops—the general feeling of distaste and disappointment that swept through me each time I saw a blue uniform—I resolved to cooperate with Detective Keegan. I was willing to turn myself inside out for even the smallest cha
nce that I could help find the killer. I actually felt a little bad for him, sent down here to shake up the orphan witness, to do Pickett’s dirty work. I hated that his name was Dale, though; I didn’t want to associate him with anyone I had loved. Since he insisted that I call him by his first name, I avoided calling him anything at all. But I took each Coke he offered, thanked him and drank it, until I was jittery from caffeine and the strain of making nice. When he pressed me, asking the same question over and over, I stayed as calm as I could, even if all I really wanted was to pick up the lamp and hurl it through that tall window.
Now, I listen to recordings of that long weekend, captured on a stack of black cassette tapes. I had to buy a tape deck to play them, and the outdated little device feels like a kind of time machine. The sound quality is uneven, having degraded over the long years; some sections are warped and slow, others manic and anxious, and whole stretches of interview are missing. But much remains, and as I listen, dutifully typing out each word, I often feel like a voyeur. The girl on the tapes is exactly me one moment, and in the next she’s someone else entirely. Her voice is high, her Maine accent still prominent, shot through with fresh bits of Texan twang: “ten” sounds like “tay-en.” Even when she is sobbing, she is agreeable; she tries very hard to deliver what is asked of her. I hear no trace of the angry girl I know lurked within, the girl with the window-breaking rage. The girl who didn’t want to answer the same damn questions over and over and over. But she’s in there. She’s the one who resisted Keegan’s theories and implications, who would not let his desperation for answers twist reality, erode and damage my sanity. She’s the reason I’m still here.
