by Sarah Perry
When we got back into the car, Walt sat there a moment before putting the key in the ignition.
“Sarah . . .” he said. “I’m really sorry that we haven’t found this guy yet. I know it’s been hard for you to do all this. We’re going to keep working. I promise you, we’re going to do everything we can to find this guy.” He bowed his head a moment while he ran a hand across his forehead. Then he put the car in reverse and twisted around to peer past me, to see the way out.
There had been tears in Walt’s eyes; he’d had such hope. I felt uncomfortable, seeing this man cry. I finally had to admit that he and the other cops had been trying as hard as they could. That maybe we just weren’t going to find him.
33
* * *
Carol and Carroll and I got along pretty well in those final high school years, until suddenly, shortly after my eighteenth birthday, we didn’t. Carol and I got into a huge fight—our first, really. I was going to a movie with Jason that night, and she asked who was paying for the tickets. I told her I was, surprised that she knew that when he and I went out, I sometimes—but not always—paid. It made sense to me: I received an allowance out of the remainder of Mom’s Shoe Shop money, and his family wasn’t able to give him extra cash. He was very kind, always did something nice for me in return. Carol immediately got angry when I told her I was paying, and I was so surprised that I responded with something snotty, like, “It’s my money—what does it matter? It’s only like ten dollars.”
But it didn’t really matter what I said; I could see that Carol had been ready to be angry before I’d even answered the question. Everything I said made her angrier, in a way I’d never seen before, an out-of-control escalation. She was particularly irate over the fact that I was letting my boyfriend “take advantage,” which I took as an insult, as though I would be blind to manipulation.
Carol’s reaction was surprising, all out of proportion. The fight didn’t last long; moments after she asked who was paying, she was leaning sharply toward me, yelling. Soon she was chasing me up the stairs. It didn’t occur to me to stand my ground. I slammed my bedroom door against her, slid down to the floor, and braced my sneakered feet while she continued to yell. The next day, when I asked her to serve as a reference for potential landlords, she agreed, and that was the only discussion we ever had about my moving out. I was angry at her, but I was more angry at myself, for scurrying away into my bedroom, for taking it.
Later, I found out that Carol and Carroll’s son had landed in some serious legal trouble shortly before our fight. And I remembered that Tootsie was going through a divorce when she threw me out. They’d both been raised in a family where people screamed at one another, where if you felt vulnerable you came out swinging. I wasn’t perfect, but I think that I was probably the recipient of frustrations that had little to do with me, or, at least, that made dealing with an extra family member much more difficult.
I’d used some of the Shoe Shop money to get my license and a car on my eighteenth birthday. And I was already paying a small rent to Carol and Carroll, out of the Social Security benefits that would continue to be paid out until I started college, money that would have gone to Mom had she lived to retirement. I figured I might as well pay a landlord instead, and lose the ten o’clock curfew.
The only available apartments were in Rumford, home to the smoke-pumping paper mill that was the area’s stuttering economic heart. The mill’s golden era was forty years past, and now the town was all uneven clapboard and acid-crumbled bricks, the bars of better times long boarded over. Most mill employees preferred to live in one of the clean, leafy towns nearby and commute to work, as Carol and my uncle Wendall did. But those places were too small to have many apartment buildings, and I would have been too nervous to rent a house surrounded by trees.
I met with a handful of landlords I found via classified ads in the newspaper, older men who often seemed a bit threatening. One asked if I had a boyfriend, and as I answered him I told myself that he just wanted to know if I had a backup if I ran out of cash. The apartments were usually moldy, with stained carpets and long-buried cooking smells. I told a girl at school the address of one, and she said that the place next door was where people went to buy meth. I got a little more depressed with each showing, until I found a miraculously perfect apartment: the top floor of a cute wooden house, a clean place with a washer and dryer and a screened-in deck. The bedroom was huge, and from it I could crawl out onto the roof to sunbathe. A previous tenant had stenciled a border of flowers and ducks up near the ceiling; when I saw them I remembered Mom on the ladder in the sunshine, painting hearts and pineapples in the kitchen. The landlord, Rob, was a respected foreman at the mill, a youngish man who knew my friend Danielle’s mom. The rent was eighty dollars a week, cash I left in an alcove in the back stairway, where Rob sometimes left me maple syrup he tapped from his own trees.
Two weeks after that fight with Carol, I left. It was one of those rare, beautiful circumstances where I didn’t consider a decision at length; I knew just what I had to do. I told my friends my moving date, and eighteen of them showed up to whisk my belongings from my cramped bedroom to the new place. I didn’t even have to pack. I felt loved, but I also knew that my move was exciting for them: I was the first person we knew to go out on her own.
Rumford was out of my school district, but my guidance counselor said that if I didn’t change my mailing address, I could quietly finish out my senior year without changing schools. I had just enough money to live on my own; to my Social Security income I added paychecks from a part-time job at Viewer’s Choice Video, the micro-chain that Mom and I had rented from in Bridgton. A guy from school soon came in and told me I was known as the “hot movie store girl” among the skater boys in Rumford. I felt proud when he told me this, and powerful, but when he left, I suddenly felt more exposed, standing with my back to the plate glass window that separated me from the parking lot.
* * *
As soon as I moved out, Carol and Carroll appeared more regularly at school events, offering easy smiles and congratulations after plays and award ceremonies. Their hugs had the clutch of apology. When I came by to pick up my mail, I drank coffee with Carol in the kitchen, and she asked after Danielle and my other friends. My uncle, formerly taciturn and cranky, now gave me a kiss on the cheek each time I walked out the door. I was as happy for the kindness as I was for the ability to leave.
My apartment was cute, but it was on Pine Street, which sat just a couple of blocks from the mill. The sky was never fully dark at night, instead glowing orange with floodlights and smoke. When people discovered I lived on Pine, they invariably asked, “Which end?” The section near the hospital was respectable, but as you moved west, the buildings fell progressively further into disrepair, until you reached the welfare apartments closer to the river. My place was right in the middle, a tough call between “good” and “bad” Pine. My life, too, seemed to straddle that border.
There was a man who lived on the bad end of Pine whom I seemed to see too often. He’d be walking down the street or shopping at the grocery store and I’d think, There’s that guy again. Days would pass, and he’d cross my mind for no real reason; I’d tell myself I was just being paranoid, but then I’d see him later that day. He came to the movie store often and was always too friendly, and he rented videos only from the porn room in the back. My coworkers teased me, said this washed-up older man was my “boyfriend.” My “secret admirer.” I didn’t tell them that he looked a bit like my father.
One morning I woke up and walked out to my car, and there was an unrolled condom hanging from my antenna. Two days later, my friend Jessie confessed, laughing at her prank. “Good one,” I said. “Yeah, good one.”
I never had any trouble from that man, but his resemblance to Tom disturbed my sense of security. I had been so fully severed from the girl I was the last time I saw Tom—from a distance, that day at the courthouse six years before—that even the thought of seeing him again
confounded me. I’d see this echo of my father around town and idle fantasies would run through my head: that he really was Tom, and was just waiting for me to recognize him and say hello. And only that girl I’d been when I was twelve, the girl who had lived through all that fear and sadness, a person who now seemed so distant and abstract, would know if it was him. It wasn’t really Tom I was looking for; it was me. If someone from my former life could recognize me as that same girl from long ago, I’d know she hadn’t died along with Mom.
* * *
As I finished up the school year and kept working my video store job, I waited for college admission decisions to roll in. I’d applied to six colleges that fall and was admitted to all but one, Harvard, where I was wait-listed. I didn’t want to wait for them to make up their mind about me, so I called and told them to remove me from the list. The woman on the phone was confused, and then surprised—she had never gotten such a call. But if they weren’t sure they wanted me, I no longer wanted them. I’d walked through that beautiful brick-and-ivy campus a few times with Glenice, longing burning in me even when I was only ten years old. But I knew I’d never enjoy it as the poor kid who’d barely gotten in. I still wanted to be wanted, and this time I wasn’t going to settle for just being tolerated.
I wanted to be bold and adventurous and attend school in a big city, but I ended up choosing Davidson, a tiny liberal arts college in small-town North Carolina. For years afterwards, I regretted my failure of nerve, but now the choice makes perfect sense. When I visited the campus, the weather was warm and lush, and the buildings were stately and impeccably maintained, from the neoclassical library to the small brick hut where students brought their laundry to be done for free. The admissions office could offer me generous financial aid, because most of the students’ families could pay the full tuition. The curriculum would be challenging, but nothing else about the place would be. Ultimately, I wanted to be safe.
At Dirigo graduation, I stood for a moment alone, in a momentary break between hugs from friends and hectic photographs taken by Carol and Carroll and Gwen and Glenice. I looked out over a shining green lawn, and suddenly and painfully couldn’t comprehend that Mom wouldn’t come rushing up a moment later, to wrap her arms around my neck, imprint my cheek with her sticky strawberry lip gloss.
34
* * *
I left Maine, closed that chapter of my life. I cordoned off both the hope and the hopelessness, left them up there in the cold and went down south. I read. I partied. I pretended the reading had nothing to do with a deeply buried impulse to write, and I pretended the partying was no different from any other college kid’s. I sat in dorm rooms on dusty futons, gossiping and laughing, and danced in frat houses hazy with sweat, pushed up against khaki-clad young men I had no intention of bringing home. I could drink half a bottle of vodka in a night, taking bloated shots straight off the bottle’s narrow lip. I felt pain only in that upturned second, when I looked at the convex glass bottom and thought about draining the burning liquid down to it, tipping it all into my throat and seeing what would happen. I imagined the relief I would feel at the end, the sweet, collapsing surrender. I had gained weight but was still small-framed like my mother, would not have survived drinking an entire glassy fifth. I’d stumble home in the gunmetal early morning, the nightmare corpses of cicadas crunching under my heels.
I spent many nights throwing up, my body fighting my impulse to poison, lying on cool linoleum between sessions over the toilet and feeling my heart flutter erratically in my chest. At the end of the night, alone again at three, four, later, I could not give up; I always struggled against the slow suicide I’d begun. Sometimes I got it together enough to run cool water over a washcloth and lay it across my forehead, as my mother had done when I was little. I fought to keep my eyes open, whispering encouragement to my heart, that small, sick animal within me. It’s okay, I thought. Just keep going. One misstep and I would fall, I knew that much, and in the end I did not want to fall.
Eventually my heartbeat would even out, and the nausea would let go a little, and I’d climb off the floor and shuffle to bed. As gray light edged into my room, I’d close my eyes, hoping that I’d wake up again, that I’d learn to stop doing this.
On some of those blurry nights, I’d think of Tom, or of Howard. I’d think about how alcoholism can travel through the family tree like poison up from the roots. But I was okay; I drank only on weekends. Until I drank on Wednesdays. Until I drank most days, could polish off an entire case of beer if I started in the morning. But I was fine; I felt fine. Couldn’t feel a thing.
I didn’t have a lot in common with most of the girls and boys I drank with. The girls wore neatly pressed shirts and tiny pastel shorts, and their legs were always perfectly shaved. The boys wore polos and khakis and exuded the sort of self-possessed assurance I associated with middle-aged businessmen. Their bodies and faces were capable and unmarred, their smiles too easy; they were already too used to getting what they wanted. When the fringe student newspaper ran an editorial describing an epidemic of unreported sexual assault on campus, the only thing that surprised me was how surprised other people were to read it.
For a time, I joined a women’s social club, wore pearls to our weekly meetings, cultivated a well-behaved, sexless prettiness. But I could never get the details right. My nails were dirty or my bra straps showed or my Army surplus jacket covered up my whole outfit anyway. I didn’t have the energy for all the powdering and lotioning required to erase the traces of my body, the smell of uncontrolled emotion. When I got drunk, I could be angry and mean, sharp remarks shooting from my mouth before I thought to restrain them. It was rare for the other girls to show anger, drunk or sober.
I loved that Army jacket, and wore it constantly; it had been given to me by a family friend who could find no one else small enough to wear it. But when a lacrosse player, a friend of a friend, sneered at me for wearing it all the time, telling me I should take it off and show my body more, I was overcome with embarrassment. As though the harmlessly pretty girls around me were the real women and I was just some tomboy kid. I charged around in boots while everyone else wore the boat shoes that my mother had deformed her hands to make.
* * *
My feeling of alienation at Davidson actually made it pretty easy to make friends with others who felt the same way, once I gave up on entering the wealthy mainstream of the place. My close friends were mostly broke northerners, queer kids, international students, and, paradoxically, nerdy students who didn’t drink much. We stood out to one another, and clung together.
Two of my closest friends were Christina, the sort of cheery, easygoing athlete who is friends with all sorts of people, and Brent, who was gay but not yet fully out. One night we went to see In the Bedroom, a movie that I hadn’t realized was set in Maine. As the lights fell, I was transported to a town that could have been a neighbor of Bridgton and Naples and Casco. There was the white Congregational church steeple, the turning drawbridge, the steep hill lined with clapboard buildings. Marisa Tomei played a young, beautiful single mother, around thirty years old, who dates a much younger man. As I watched the first half hour of the movie, I knew something terrible was coming; I knew it was a crime drama. But I was so happy watching her. She had a beautiful, spontaneous smile, and she loved with an easy, optimistic freedom. She was devoted to her two sons, and although she wasn’t highly educated, she was smart and perceptive. She endured the judgment of her boyfriend’s mother, and of others, with composure and grace. I’d always loved Marisa Tomei, who had been one of Mom’s and my favorites ever since we’d watched her in My Cousin Vinny.
But in this movie, Marisa is plagued by a violent ex-husband who, halfway through, shoots and kills her young boyfriend. The ex gets out of jail for a while, on bail, and she and the boyfriend’s parents have to suffer seeing him around town. I sat in the darkness of that theater, watching this killer buy coffee at the convenience store and drive slowly down Main Street, and I imagined Mom�
��s killer doing the same in Bridgton. Except he would be blending right in; no one would know what twisted his face into a smug grin.
By the end of the movie, the boyfriend’s mother convinces her husband, a pliable Macbeth, to kill the killer and bury him deep in the woods. I was thrilled, watching this unfold, but also terrified. I had long fantasized about killing Mom’s murderer, or sending someone else to. But would I, if given the chance? Sitting in that theater, immersed in the deep woods on-screen, I felt that I was capable, but that I would ultimately choose not to. It was too ugly, ugliness on ugliness. I had long known this, but now could see it up close.
Realizing that I would never kill, even in the most forgivable of circumstances, should have made me feel good, secure in my humanity. But instead I felt bleak. Because what I realized was that there would be no recompense, there would be no satisfaction. I wanted Mom’s killer off the streets, sure. I didn’t want him walking around town as though nothing had happened, a violent man who could threaten the safety of others. But I knew then that jail wouldn’t be enough, and death would be too much. There was no hope of a satisfying ending. I would have to find my own peace, without one.
When the lights came up, I felt exposed, like a mask had been pulled from my face. As we walked across the dark parking lot, I looked down at the pavement, away from my friends. We were all quiet at first. Then Brent started laughing. “Oh my God!” he said. “She was soo white trash! Marisa Tomei is the best! ” I felt a rush in my chest, like hot water poured across my heart. I didn’t say a thing.
