After the Eclipse

by Sarah Perry

  I remember, on top of a stack of paper on the bed, a hand-drawn diagram of my house. It magnetized me. It was so orderly, clearly mapped and neutral, completely unlike the dark chamber that had grown inside my head. Keegan noticed me staring: “I’ve got some diagrams of your house we’re gonna go over—I can see you looking at them—and some pictures. No bad pictures.” Later, when he first pulled the diagram close so we could examine it, he said, in a jokey, game-show tone, “This is your house! ” I don’t think he understood that even the diagram gave me a heavy feeling in my chest, or that calling the house “mine” only made me think of how very not mine it now was, how I would never return. A home can become a crime scene, but the reverse is impossible.

  * * *

  On that first day, I took a polygraph examination. Although the Supreme Court would later question the reliability of polygraphs as courtroom evidence, they were then and still are a useful tool for police. A polygraph report can reinforce or invalidate different lines of inquiry, help a detective see the path to truth more clearly. It’s a divining rod; it’s not the water.

  This test would examine only one question, which Keegan intoned with deliberate pauses: “Do you know for sure . . . that the person who killed your mother . . . was”—and here he inserted one name from a list of seven: Dennis, Dale, Tim, four other male suspects from Bridgton, and a control, Cheryl Peters, the social worker who had first come to Grammy’s house. An additional query was “a name I have not mentioned,” which would mean that I had seen someone but did not know or would not reveal that person’s name. The base question had been carefully written—I could only say that I did not know it was a certain person, not that it definitely wasn’t that person.

  Keegan told me about the fight-or-flight response, explaining that the body is faithful to truth: anything else sends it into alarm, raising the blood pressure and quickening the heartbeat and the breath, as though responding to physical threat. He hoped my body would tell him that one of these people might be the killer. “The thing is,” he said, “if you did see someone, your heart’s gonna know.” This combination of the literal and the figurative now strikes me as beautiful.

  To take a polygraph examination is to be restrained. Before the test began, Keegan strapped me into the various measurement instruments, explaining the function of each. The first two were black cords across my chest, one high, one low, to measure my breathing. I remember how careful and solicitous he was while putting those on me, and can now imagine how uncomfortable he must have been, alone in a hotel room with a young girl, moving in close. I hear him now on the tape, laughing nervously and saying, “Oh, you’re so skinny!” I rolled my eyes when he said this, not believing him. But once the cords were in place, a serious feeling descended upon me. They exerted a slight pressure that made me feel like I was breathing abnormally. It was a slightly out-of-rhythm feeling, like the pause and stutter of observed footsteps. A tangle of wires sent impulses to a machine housed in a black metal box, where they were recorded by a spidery inked arm scribbling my breath onto the pale blue grid of a rolling cylinder of graph paper. I tried looking at it. I tried not looking at it. I took a deep breath and watched the spider arm go haywire.

  Next came the blood pressure cuff—familiar enough. I had always been a good patient. Then two metal caps—one for my left index finger, one for my ring finger—to measure the conductivity of my skin, which would increase if I broke out in a sweat, however subtle. Keegan attached each finger cap with a long, winding strip of black Velcro, holding my hand carefully. His hand was hot and dry and muscled, his touch awakening the fear that lay so close to the surface then. Oh, calm down, I thought to myself, sternly. The cold metal began warming to my body temperature, bent over the pad of my finger like a thimble, an ironic echo of protection. I remembered, briefly, that Mom had never used thimbles at work—they slowed her down. She preferred her leathery callus, her body’s natural response to her difficult work.

  As Keegan sat back down and got his notes together, I tried to breathe deeply and evenly, tried not to think about the sensors on my fingers broadcasting my electric sweat to a second scribbling metal arm. I could hear it scratch against the paper, like a fingernail on a door.

  Keegan asked me to keep my feet on the floor, to look straight ahead. The inked metal arms scraped at my ear, tempting my neck to twist. We began.

  “Do you know for sure . . . that the person who killed your mother . . . is”—he took a breath—“Cheryl. Peters.”

  “No,” I replied. Then there was a fifteen-second pause, to allow the machine to recalibrate.

  “Dale. Morton.”

  “No.” Long pause.

  “Dennis. Lorrain.”

  “No.”

  He ran the test three times, shuffling the order of the names each time. I felt like a sleepwalker, intoning those no’s against the silence. It was a slow call-and-response litany, a two-person ritual. It was as though we were casting a spell together, trying to conjure the answer we both so desperately wanted.

  Keegan spoke softly, and rather slowly, throughout that weekend. In almost all moments, he radiated kindness and concern. He had a comfortingly familiar, but not jarringly strong, Maine accent. But the cumulative effect of his words wasn’t comforting. Once I was free from the polygraph, we began what felt like an unending interview about that night. He thought I had something to say, and over the course of the weekend he became increasingly determined to get me to say it.

  He asked the same questions over and over, changing the wording slightly, or the angle; he pretended to explain himself clearly while constantly contradicting himself. When I became confused, he blamed my grief, my fear, my guilt. He looped his theories and stories around me, trying to see what he could squeeze out.

  I’m not trying to put words in your mouth or anything . . .

  Not to accuse you of lying or anything . . .

  Is it possible you know who did this? And if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine. Tell me that. If you don’t want to tell me who did this . . .

  There’s some things you’re telling, that you could have only seen, not heard. The words you use, there’s more there. Almost like pulling teeth here; you’re telling us more. And there’s more than you’re telling us. For whatever reason, you don’t want to tell us . . .

  Yeah. I’m just trying to sit here and think, if I was in your shoes—if I knew who did this—why wouldn’t I tell? Huh. The only thing I can think of is fear. Fear of the person. I think you’re scared . . .

  I think something like this would be something you wanna try to get out. Just like anything, you don’t want to do things you don’t want to . . .

  Is it possible you walked out there, and you saw an attack, and you ran back to your room? . . . I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, okay! . . .

  If you saw the attack going on, you got scared so bad . . . It could’ve happened to you. It would have been a double murder, would have never been solved . . .

  Can you describe the guy? . . .

  If you don’t wanna say, you can write it to me. Tell me what you saw . . .

  Anyone who did this to your mom is still out there. And it could happen again. You don’t want that man to be that violent again. You don’t want that guy getting away with murder . . .

  Do you know who the person is? . . .

  On the morning of the second day, before Keegan launched back in, he left to get something from his car, and Tootsie came into the hotel room. She rushed toward me as I stepped backwards, startled by her frenzied energy. “Listen,” she said, raising a bony finger and pointing it in my face. “Stop wasting everyone’s time. We all fucking know you’re protecting someone. Now just tell them who it is. Tell them who it is! You’re driving the family crazy.”

  We stood about a foot apart, looking into each other’s eyes. I had almost grown accustomed to her sudden accusations, but this one proved that she could still shock me. What actually hurt, what took a second to
process, was that “everyone.” That “family.” I imagined my other relatives standing behind Tootsie in an angry crowd, a force with her leading the charge. As though Carol and Gwen and Glenice, Webster and Wendall and Wayne, even Betty and Gloria, all thought I knew the answer, all thought I loved a murderer more than them, more than my mother, lost now forever.

  “I don’t know,” I said, the words edging past my closing throat. “I’m sorry; I really, really don’t know who it is.”

  Tootsie put her finger down and turned away with a disgusted snort. And then Keegan came back in and continued.

  I’m sure you did a lot of thinking last night. Do you remember anything in more detail? . . .

  I’m sayin’, I’m not tryin’ to put words in your mouth. There’s just certain details here that don’t add up. I truly believe that you heard more than you said . . .

  ’Cause, when people tell stories to us—not you—especially the bad guys, they’ll try to tell lies to protect themselves. Not that you’re telling me a lie, but you don’t remember. And you’re not a bad guy here . . .

  I hardly believe that there’s all that screaming going on, that your mom didn’t scream a name, or didn’t tell you to go hide, or the bad guy didn’t tell your mom to shut up or any type of thing . . .

  And the thing is, we’re not trying to say that you’re crazy or anything like that. We’re just saying that—you gotta admit—something is happening in the next room, all the yelling and screaming, that probably you heard something. Okay. And you have a reason that you don’t want to tell us, okay? . . .

  I don’t want to just sit here and go over and over and over this. I’m not gonna do that. But I’m gonna be quite honest with you. There’s more there. I believe you did hear more . . .

  Did your mom say anything? Scream, “I’m gonna kill you!”? Or did the man say, “I’m gonna kill you!”? Even to protect herself. Your mom could have gone to the kitchen, gotten something, to protect herself. And then the man took the weapon away. She was trying to protect you . . .

  I’m not trying to put ideas into your head. We’re just going on different theories of what happened. If any of this stuff is coming back to you. If you didn’t see it, don’t tell me you did, okay? But if you saw something happen . . .

  Did she see you standing there? Did she not see you standing there? She could’ve thought the bad guy was gonna get you or something. You look at the bloody footprint here, there’s almost an indication . . . that the bad guy started down the hall towards your room, and came back. For some reason, he stopped . . .

  Don’t try to make things up to make it—ha!—look good for yourself, y’know? . . .

  What do you know? Ha-ha . . .

  I wanna make sure you don’t come up with anything and say, “It must’ve happened this way,” y’know? Did you hear your mom say Dennis’s name, or anything like that? Or Dale’s name? Did she say, “Stop it, asshole,” or anything like that? “You’re hurting me”? . . .

  If you were a betting person . . . You must have strong feelings . . . who would you bet did this? It’s up to us to prove it, now. Let us do our job . . .

  In response to Keegan’s questions and theories, I answered “I don’t know” at least sixty-two times. Sometimes I said it calmly, sometimes with a lilt of curiosity, sometimes through sobs, sometimes with a monotone, flat dejection.

  Keegan told me a story about another girl, a girl who knew more than she had at first admitted. “We had a case up in Maine—this is true; you’ll probably think I’m making this up, but I’m not—there was a girl, twelve years old, saw her mother kill a man. And she helped bury the body. She was twelve years old.” He told me that he had talked to her again and again, for years, and she would not tell him where the body was. Suddenly, after eight years, she came in and told him. “Do you know something?” he asked. “You will not feel good, today, if you tell me. But in the long run, you will feel better.”

  Unfortunately, I would not feel better, because I didn’t have anything to tell him. It was like I was trapped in a locked room, and he kept saying that all I had to do was turn the knob, but I didn’t have the key.

  “We asked that girl, ‘How close were you two?’ ‘Oh, kinda like sisters.’” Keegan looked at me closely, as if he were peering behind my eyes: “There’s more details there.”

  This story did not convince me I had more details. I did not feel a kinship with this girl. I felt jealousy. She could visit her mother in jail. That man had probably been violent, abusive. If I’d had the opportunity, I would gladly have buried whoever came to our house that night.

  * * *

  I would like to say that my sixty-two I don’t know’s meant that I held firm, entirely faithful to my original story of that night, to my own true memory in Texas, to the night as I remember it to this day. But I did not. Near the end of the second day, after a short break, I looked within my mind, and in the rainy mist of that night, in the weak white light reaching from that one streetlight, a car appeared in our driveway. It was a blue car. Parked right behind Mom’s. A blue car, like, well, Dennis’s. “I don’t know if I’m just seeing it in my head, or if it really happened,” I told Keegan, through tears. To his credit, he did suggest that maybe this image was from another night. But then he led me back inside my house, to the moment when he was convinced I had seen my mother struggling with someone. “Can you describe him at all?”

  I said, “I don’t know if I saw the person.” I didn’t say, “I didn’t see the person.” Deep within me, I knew I really had not, but here Keegan was, so convinced that I had. After so many hours of questioning, I now doubted myself at every turn. I was so broken down and frustrated that I was hardly sure of my own name. Suddenly anything seemed possible, and my story felt like just that: a story. Malleable, expandable, expendable. The story of a little girl. Of a girl.

  Eventually I said I might have seen Dennis in the house. But when Keegan posed follow-up questions, I could not provide any details. The blue car dissolved into the mist; the supposed figure of Dennis melted into the shadows. When I couldn’t say anything more, I realized that these were just visions, not memories. I was young, after all, still capable of magical thinking—just a year earlier, I’d believed in witches. I was thirteen years old.

  When I brought up Dennis, Keegan said, “We’re working on the blood samples now, to see if they match him. We’re looking at him . . . I’m sure you’ve heard about the O.J. Simpson trial, all the blood tests they’re doing.” I wasn’t convinced Dennis was the killer, had no clear reason to think he was. But I did still fear him, in part because I had no other face upon which to focus my fear. I could say I had not seen him that night, but I could not confidently say that I thought him incapable of murder. I had seen his temper.

  And so Keegan, and Pickett, too, revived this fear, which grew in the nights following their departure. But they neglected to tell me that Dennis’s DNA had, a full two weeks before their visit, failed to match that found at the crime scene.

  * * *

  Late that Sunday, Tootsie, Pickett, and I went to the San Angelo police station to have my hands inked for comparison with certain smudges left at the crime scene. I pressed the rivers of my palms to the paper and hoped they wouldn’t match, so we might have the mark of the killer. But the smudges, and the other finger and palm prints at the scene, would all turn out to be mine: the meaningless, careless marks of a child. The erratic mountain ranges of the polygraph reports were unreadable, inconclusive. My words had not helped us, nor had my hands, my fingertips, my heart, my breath. I was nothing more than what I did not know, what I could not tell.

  27

  * * *

  meanwhile

  After Mom’s death, our town went on without us, forever. Summer came to Bridgton, the misty rains of May replaced by long, clear daylight. The vacationers from Boston and New York returned to their cottages lining Long Lake and Highland Lake and the ponds, and word spread among them of that pretty young woman
’s death. It was the last thing they would have expected of the town they came to as an escape from the world, that escape now exposed as an illusion.

  The people of the town talked about the murder in the grocery store, over coffee while their kids played in the backyard, while sitting on the sandy lakeshores. They shared suspicions. They began locking their doors at night.