by Sarah Perry
Carol and Carroll were mostly reasonable and calm, and they did truly care about me. They did a lot for me over the couple of years I lived with them. But there were some blunt reminders that their responsibility for me went only so far. I arrived shortly before my sixteenth birthday, and I’d already had my license in Texas, under a special “emergency” provision related to Tootsie’s military work. In Peru, the nearest town big enough to have a movie theater was forty-five minutes away, and no people my age—in fact, few people of any age—lived within walking distance. But when I asked Carol how we would go about securing my Maine license, she said, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. If you get in a wreck, somebody could sue me and take my house. You’ll just have to wait until you’re eighteen.” I could live with them, but they would not take any risks for me, however far-fetched the potential consequences. The fact that this made sense didn’t make it less painful.
I knew that if I’d been born into another family, I could have ended up in foster care after Mom died. Or, perhaps worse, with my father and Teresa. I knew that taking me in wasn’t easy, that Carol and Carroll—whose son was now thirty-three—hadn’t planned on housing a teenager in their later years. I tried to be thankful that they had accepted this burden. But I didn’t want to be accepted. I wanted to be wanted.
I was desperate to conceal myself, to seem placid and normal, because I knew that I’d reached the last place that would take me. I could not show my rage, as I had at Peggy’s. I could not feel for any other girl the sort of affection I had felt for Anne, or at least I couldn’t do anything about it. But I knew that neither of those things had been the reason I’d been told to leave either of those homes. I knew it wasn’t that simple. It was hard not to suspect that there was a catalog of things about me that were annoying, offensive, hard to live with. Sometimes I wished that someone would just tell me what they were.
* * *
Dixfield got a new chief of police a couple of months after I arrived. It was Dick Pickett. I felt followed, plagued. I was working to put that time and that town and that girl behind me—I built a barricade of the lakes and rivers and mountains between Bridgton and Peru, mentally exaggerating the distances. Dick Pickett sitting in an office just steps from my school seemed like a sick joke. I didn’t want him or anyone connected to Bridgton anywhere near me. I fantasized about acting out, drinking at a party somewhere, getting arrested and hauled in and then facing Dick down, asking him if he and his boys couldn’t do something better with their time. Like solve my mother’s murder.
I ignored the fact that the state criminal division was a separate entity from the Dixfield Police Department. And I didn’t know that someone new was taking over the investigation, someone smarter, far less arrogant. That he and his partner were analyzing every word of Pickett’s files, were tracking down dozens of potential suspects. That in the next couple of years, they would draw blood for DNA testing from so many men that they would come to be known as the Vampires.
I went silent again, as much as I was able. I spoke to people only when I had to. A girl named Carrie, whose grandmother lived in the only house visible from Carol and Carroll’s, was asked to help me settle in at school. There was only the one building, plus those church basements; there wasn’t much to show or to explain to me. Sometime during the first week, she introduced me to a few friends of hers, and the first thing I said to them was “Sorry, I’m not going to remember any of your names.” I wasn’t interested in making friends after learning all those names at Central, names of people I would probably never see again. After all that work, my grades hadn’t even transferred.
I planned to wait out my last two years of school, graduate, and go back to Texas. Anne and I had started talking on the phone again and writing long letters. I understood that this mirrored my first days in Texas, when I longed for Maine forests even as I was falling in love with the desert, and once again I felt I’d forever be dreaming of a place other than the one I was in.
I did my schoolwork well, still seeing college as salvation. My teachers paid close attention to me, and I didn’t realize how depressed I was until the guidance counselor asked me into his office and said that several of my teachers were worried about me. They knew why I’d come to the school, why I lived with my aunt and uncle; I was one of the few new students in a fifty-two-person class that had been together since kindergarten. “I’m fine,” I insisted, ashamed that my unhappiness was so evident. “Really. But thanks.”
Still, I agreed to be paired with one of a handful of teachers who had offered to listen, informally, to students’ troubles. I got the youngest one, a good-looking guy who must have just gotten out of college. But I couldn’t tell him anything. The problem was that I’d noticed, while he was writing on the board during Humanities, how much his hands looked like Mom’s—freckled, with long fingers, strong palms, and large knuckles. I was scared of those hands, of their unnatural persistence in the world, but I also wanted them on me. When we met after school to talk, all I could do was look at those beautiful hands of his, folded on his desk. I could have leaned over and softly kissed his full mouth. I could have burst into tears. I sat there, carefully not moving, unsure which impulse was more likely to seize me.
* * *
That first winter back rose to greet me like a dog that had been chained and waiting, lean and cold and beautiful and full of teeth. The snow came down relentlessly, and as I waited for the bus in the morning, the air was so dry and harsh that I could feel it rushing down my throat and into my body with each breath. But I had retained my thick northern blood: each morning I woke in the dark and showered, and I would stand out by the road in a canvas jacket over a T-shirt, the long ropes of my hair freezing around me.
In January, the night before we were to return to school from winter break, a light drizzle of freezing rain began, sparkling in the spotlight mounted on the garage and pinging against the windows. The next morning I awoke to the pure silence of lost power, the absence of refrigerator hum and furnace kick. Even my uncle’s police scanner was silent. My alarm had not sounded, and I had no idea if I was late or early. I walked downstairs in a disoriented haze, and when I looked outside I saw that two inches of ice had covered everything in the night; the glassy layer on the porch railing was so flawless that I could see right through it. The rain was still coming down fast, a solid silver sheet. The ice on the porch grew to three inches, four. Carol’s rosebush, towering out of the snow, held slabs of ice on every twig.
The ice came down for two full days. We were out of school for two weeks, out of power at our house for three. I read every book on that semester’s English class list, from dawn through candlelight. I drank cups of hot chocolate and wrote in my journal and looked out at the bright whites and soft shadows of snow polished under the glare. We had heat for a few hours a day, when Carroll ran the generator. I’d step out onto the porch now and then, just to listen to the gunshot crackle of trees breaking under the weight of the ice. Many of them died under that weight, but others held strong, sending forth green leaves when spring finally came.
The melting of ice works by acceleration: slow at first, then faster and faster. As the warmth returned, I thawed out, too; I felt purified, lighter. I was grateful for Carol’s simple meals, served every evening at six o’clock precisely, and for the neatly folded laundry she left on the stairs for me to take up to my room. My purple parakeet, Moonshadow, had stayed at Carol and Carroll’s while I was in Texas, and every few nights Carroll would take him out of his cage and give him a bath in the kitchen sink, the two of them saying “Good little bird!” back and forth to each other, Moonshadow boxing with Carroll’s thumb.
Things kept improving, gradually, life nudging me along. I got recruited to the math team and started practicing with the tiny, misfit marching band. I even joined the tennis team, although I could barely play. I applied for and was accepted to a summer program for students who would be the first in their families to attend college. I wa
sn’t a runner, but I let my friend Jen talk me into joining the cross-country team so the girls would have six members and thus be eligible for state rankings for the first time in years.
I felt the same pull toward Jen that I had toward Anne. I tried not to think about it, to deny it, but of course volunteering to run miles through the steep, rocky woods every day after school was just the sort of stupid thing a person does to win a girl’s affection. But I knew our friendship could go only so far; my uncle hated “queers.” More and more celebrities were coming out in the late nineties, and related news coverage never failed to spark a vicious rant from him about how “all those pedophiles should be locked up; we should just shoot ’em.” I wanted to think that none of this applied to me, but could not ignore my body’s panicked reaction each time I heard him say these things. In addition to my worry that I’d be thrown out, I didn’t want to lose his love; I didn’t want him to hate me. I did not want more loss.
Conveniently, I liked boys, too, and I soon fell for one—Jen’s best friend, Jason—so I dated him. It was easier and safer to be like everyone else, or seem to be, just as it had been easier and safer to hide my past in the time of the O.J. trial. I became skilled at ignoring my own desires, focusing less on what I wanted to do and more on what I was supposed to, on what was expected of a smart, college-bound girl. I could not take risks, and it seemed foolish to make myself more vulnerable than I already was.
My school tour guide, Carrie, and her friends Danielle and Nicole became my close friends, and to this day they love to repeat my opening line to them—“I’m not going to remember any of your names!”—while bursting into laughter. We four girls were a relatively innocent group: we liked to stay up late watching funny movies and swim in Danielle’s pool and play billiards in the rec room above her garage. We could make one another laugh at any stupid little thing. We didn’t party or drink or smoke weed; I felt safe with them.
But when I was alone I felt different, far apart. Very late one night in my bedroom, I turned to a random cable station and began watching a movie called Freeway. In the movie, an orphaned, fifteen-year-old blonde is driving to her grandmother’s house when her car breaks down. A nice-looking man in glasses picks her up, but soon she figures out that he is a serial rapist and murderer, one she’s heard about on the news. She eventually manages to shoot the man several times, by being tough and nasty and smart. I watched this movie in a state of hypnosis, not just cheering this girl on but becoming her. I was in that cab in the night: I could feel the busted springs of the grimy bench seat, the forward-sweeping motion of the truck, the weight of the gun in my hand. And I felt, in my body—in what had become her body—the desire to kill. Oh, if I could kill some man, one of these men who prey upon us. It wouldn’t even have to be the one who killed Mom. Any violent man would do. My hands tightened into fists; I was a torch upon my bed. When the movie ended, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I didn’t dare leave my room. If I did, I might take all the glasses and dishes from the cupboards and throw them to the floor one by one, just to destroy something. I stayed up until sunrise, visions of the night of the murder competing with fantasies of myself as killer.
It might have been then that I began consoling myself with thoughts of a long silver gun. I saw it clearly, for years after the murder: a shiny barrel at the end of my hands, both weapon and shield. I’d sneak it into the courthouse on the first day of the trial I longed for, somehow using my victim’s innocence, my blond harmlessness, to get it past the guards. A few hours of the proceedings would pass before I’d get my moment. The killer would be sitting on a witness stand, ready to defend himself, and I’d stand up from the gallery, stride to the front of the courtroom, and destroy him before anyone knew what I was doing. In the fantasy, my hands and the barrel and the explosion always obscured his face.
Those fantasies, and that rage, eclipsed the grief and love I felt for my mother. My memories of her were becoming dimmer with time, and it was easier to feel fear and anger, because they seemed to have an endpoint: the trial, if it would ever come. Sadness was more dangerous, because I knew it would never end.
32
* * *
Near the beginning of senior year, just as I was starting to research colleges, the cops returned. I met the new primary investigator on the case, Walter Grzyb ( pronounced “Gribb”), who would consult with Dick Pickett for some time. They’d had a few small leads here and there, but they hadn’t made any real progress. Despite the fact that Dennis’s DNA had twice failed to match the samples from the crime scene, Dick still thought Dennis was the killer, and still thought that I had repressed some memory that would solve the case. When I met Walt, he seemed more reasonable, more personable and empathetic than Dick, but by then I was angry at all cops. They were incompetent and lazy. They should have solved the case long ago. But still, I agreed to be interviewed again.
After a few weeks of research, Walt found Dr. Daniel Brown, a psychiatrist who specialized in memory recovery using a combination of therapy and hypnotherapy. He had a professorship at Harvard and an international reputation; if we were going to uncover repressed memory, this was our guy. Walt asked if I’d be willing to see Dr. Brown down in Boston, for four to six two-hour visits. If Dr. Brown concluded that I had no repressed memory, the police would never again try to retrieve it. They would take my word that I’d told them everything I could. I agreed. I was sure we wouldn’t uncover anything.
I hoped I’d be proven right. And I hoped I’d be proven wrong.
Walt drove me down to Boston himself: four hours of awkward attempts at conversation. He insisted I select the radio station, but it was hard to enjoy the music when I thought he was just humoring me, suffering through the monotony of “Bittersweet Symphony” for my benefit. I was relieved when we finally pulled up and parked next to a long brick office building, when we were finally sitting with Dr. Brown, getting started.
I liked Dr. Brown right away, because he was a bit strange. I liked that this Ivy League memory expert had wild gray hair and a shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest, with a gold chain showing. That he was matter-of-fact and didn’t spend a lot of time cozying up to me. Here was a man who drew his own conclusions, I thought, who wouldn’t listen to a bunch of easy bullshit. He seemed like a truly neutral party, not a tool the cops were wielding against me.
Walt was excused from the sessions, which were videotaped for Dr. Brown’s later analysis. I quickly forgot about the presence of the camcorder, because I spent the sessions with my eyes closed, following Dr. Brown’s quiet prompts. The goal was to immerse me in the night of the murder and the weeks preceding it, so I could take another look around and try to report more than I had before. I entered an altered state—just a little more conscious than hypnosis—where I could perceive details but felt little emotion in connection with them. This was meant to make details less threatening, and therefore easier to retrieve. At the end of the session, it always felt like only a few minutes had passed.
The visits were on Tuesdays, and when Carol explained the situation to my school principal, he readily agreed to excuse my absence. The days afterwards, though, always felt a little unreal. I told my closest friends why I was going out of town, and word must have spread—in such a small class, absences were always commented on the next day—but I can’t remember anyone asking me anything. Carol and Carroll and I didn’t even talk about it, just as we rarely talked about Mom.
The final session came in the last week of school before Christmas. Afterwards, Walt and I sat waiting on one side of a narrow conference table: wood laminate, edges wrapped in black rubber that I pressed my fingernail into, making satisfying hatch marks. Dr. Brown came in and settled into a chair across from us. Winter light flowed in through a tall window, and the hum of traffic below threaded between the panes. I could see the white hulls of boats lined up along the Charles.
“I think we’ve pretty well determined that Sarah doesn’t have any significant repressed memories,” Dr.
Brown began, and then I stopped listening. I settled back into my chair. The corners of my mouth twitched: a tiny smile. I’d won, finally. After all this time, here was an official who believed me, who could stand up for me, who could get them to stop asking the same goddamn questions over and over and over. I felt relief, and I felt smug, like any teenager proven right in the face of adult conviction.
But still, I would gladly have been proven wrong, to have found out who the killer was. If we had recovered something important in the first session, we could have had him in jail by Christmas. The theory was that memories are repressed for a reason—usually to minimize psychological damage. I had been willing to risk some damage to find this person.
Walt’s face remained serious as he listened to Dr. Brown. He nodded, asked a couple of questions. As we walked back to the car he said, “Well, I guess that’s it.”
“I guess so,” I said. “Sorry there wasn’t more.”
We drove to a deli and got Italian sandwiches, made small talk as we ate. Walt wasn’t a bad guy, I thought. But the cops had failed me, and I was sure they would keep on failing. They were so prim in their pressed blue uniforms, so professional in their manner, and yet they weren’t actually in control of anything. It had been six years, and still they were helpless.
