by Sarah Perry
* * *
Despite other moments of disappointment, I still felt more connected to my new friends than I did to the other Davidson students, although I told only a few of them about Mom. I still had an impulse to pretend as though this life and the one that came before were disconnected, unrelated. I kept binge drinking, unable to resist the numb comfort that came with it, and somewhere along the way I started blacking out. The first time, sophomore year, shocked me. I pieced it together the next morning, my memories skittery and disconnected, representing only a fraction of what my friends told me about the night. I thought about my body walking around, my consciousness switching to autopilot. Talking to people I knew or didn’t, words escaping me and traveling out into the void, my memory for the last moment, the last hour, shut off. Memory not repressed, but never written.
That first blackout shook me, but when it happened again, it lost some of its force. I was a college kid; college kids blacked out. I’d spent so much time insisting to the cops that my memory was intact, it was a delicious relief to throw some of the hours of my existence to the oblivion they’d been so convinced lurked within me.
* * *
I didn’t go to Maine for the shorter holiday breaks—Thanksgiving, Easter, the long Presidents’ Day weekend. It wasn’t worth the quick trip, I thought, and anyway I was proud of the fact that I didn’t need to run home every chance I got, like the other students, who sometimes seemed like children to me. I went back north just once or twice a year. I’d stay in Peru and try not to think of that other town. But one day during a summer visit, I left the house and started driving, only half aware that I was headed toward Bridgton. I went the back way, slowly steering along bumpy camp roads that held tight to the lakeshores, before coming out on a long, straight road that led past the turnoff to Grammy’s house and the cemetery, then shot down a hill into the center of town.
As I turned at the light downtown, I felt strangely out of place as an adult driving a car. I could almost see my shadow self in the passenger seat where I belonged—chubby kid belly, long blond hair—looking over at me expectantly. We were headed back toward that house. I felt curiosity mixed with some sort of bravado, some need to stare things down. The times I would drive slowly past that house would come to outnumber the times I drove up to the cemetery where Mom’s pink-heart headstone sits.
As I drove down Route 93, I almost expected to see that police tape still cutting across my view, fluttering in the slight summer breeze. What I found was almost as sad: chain-link fence around the yard, dark fly screens falling off the windows, cheap children’s toys scattered on the lawn. The remaining spruce tree next to the door did nothing to block my view.
There were two cars in the driveway, so I rolled slowly by. I didn’t want to get caught, yet another curious stranger. I thought briefly about pulling over some distance away, maybe on the little connecting road across the street from the house, the one I’d given the 911 dispatcher as a landmark. But I knew that if I stopped, I wouldn’t be able to step out of the car. The moment my foot hit the road, darkness would snap down like a shade. A mist would envelop me, and 1994 would come roaring into my living present.
Safe behind the wheel, I turned around and went back up Route 93. The distance from my house to the intersection seemed pathetically short. As I turned left onto Route 302, I was careful not to look at the Venezia.
I passed Linda’s house, and just as I was wondering if she still lived there, I saw her walk out her front door in a bikini, holding a towel around her waist. I remembered how she used to tan on her lawn and even on her black-shingled roof.
Seeing Linda sent a shock through my body, a strange, bright thrill that made sweat break out in the crooks of my elbows. I kept driving, dimly registering more old landmarks: the big white house where my friend Vicki used to live. The cabins of Highland Lake Resort strung out along a break in the woods, with the water sparkling behind them. The town hall where I used to play basketball in the summer, the shack where I ice-skated in the winter visible just behind it. I turned left at the War Memorial and wound down the hill to the Big Apple, the gas station and convenience store that was the center of town gossip, where, a few hours after Mom died, dozens of people received news of the murder.
When I came to the Big Apple, I pulled into the parking lot to think; the electric feeling of seeing Linda was still running through me, and I had to figure out what it meant. I wanted to see her, to talk to her. Mom would want us to be in touch, I thought.
I took a deep breath, squeezed my fists around the wheel to force the shakiness from them. I dug some quarters out of the console. When I stepped out of the car and walked to the pay phone, I had to hold myself back from running. A phone book hung there from a steel chain; the pages were feathery under my fingers, and her number was easy to find. That sequence of digits was immediately familiar, lined up neatly with memory I didn’t realize was still within me. I pushed the coins in, but my heart started pounding; the blood was rushing through my head faster than I could think. What to say? What if seeing me would be too painful? The dial tone hummed in my skull. Finally I punched a button, and a clean, breathless silence began. I punched two or three more. I paused and held the heavy receiver to my ear. My shaking got worse, and I felt nauseated. I put the receiver back on its cradle. I kept my hand wrapped around it for a moment, holding on.
I didn’t call. It was the first time in my life that I’d been physically unable to go through with something for reasons I couldn’t explain.
I gave up, got back in the car. I drove over to the parking lot of the Highland Lake beach. The water shimmered in the late-afternoon light, sending up white explosions as skinny kids cannonballed off the docks. A few families sat on the sand, and some teenage boys perched in a cluster on a brick-red picnic table under the trees. I stayed in the car. I thought these people might recognize me, or they might not, and I wasn’t sure which would be worse. I lit a cigarette and smoked through my open window, watching those kids jump off the dock, over and over.
35
* * *
My final year at Davidson, 2003–2004, was the smoothest one. I enjoyed my academic work and had a supportive group of friends. When I declared myself an English major, I hadn’t understood that the degree wouldn’t include much creative writing, but I did manage to take one writing class before graduating, and was encouraged by my professor, which gave me tentative hope. I’d fallen in love while studying abroad in Australia the previous year and was planning to move back, as charmed by him as I was by that country’s abundant sunshine, its culture of laid-back happiness. But then I lost my courage right before graduation—we broke up, and I threw out the immigration paperwork. I could not commit, could not pull off such a big transition. The happiness that I imagined seemed ludicrous, totally unlikely, so I sabotaged it before I could be disappointed. This left me with no specific passion or profession or love I could follow, no idea where to go.
So the summer after I graduated from college found me stranded at Carol and Carroll’s, broke and panicked about the future. Having dedicated so many years to academic success, I didn’t know what to do with it. For weeks, I slept too late and shuffled aimlessly around the house, occasionally going out to my packed car to extricate something from the floor-to-ceiling mounds of my belongings. I avoided the television when my aunt and uncle were watching marathon sessions of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit or Cold Case, shows they seemed to find cathartic and I couldn’t stand. Carol and Carroll tactfully avoided asking me what my plan was, but I knew they were wondering. I looked up rent prices in cities from coast to coast and tried on various futures in my head, but I couldn’t gain any traction.
My friend and classmate Alex, who had moved to Raleigh for graduate school, saved me. After many sad summer nights of online chatting, countless tears shed in the white-blue light of the computer screen, I read his lifeline: “Just put your shit in your car and come back down. We’ll figure it out.”
&nbs
p; My car was still packed, so I easily surrendered to Alex, a steadfast, responsible person who would never judge me for not being one myself. A couple of days later I said my goodbyes and got on the road. I stayed on Alex’s couch for weeks, then rented a room in a filthy apartment in Chapel Hill, near the university. My roommates were expelled stoner undergraduates who cooked so much bacon that the kitchen walls were slick with it. The three years separating me from them suddenly felt like a decade. I didn’t have a cell phone or internet connection or landline, and the feeling I remember most clearly from that time is the anticipation of walking through the clinging heat to the huge bank of steel mailboxes outside, hoping someone—who?—had sent me a letter.
Soon I got a job as an administrative assistant at the University of North Carolina, a huge blessing that at the time felt like a failure. I was ashamed to be a secretary while so many of my college classmates were moving on to bigger things, getting their MDs or going to art school or working with high-minded nonprofits in Washington. But then I’d look at my soft hands and think about Mom’s swollen, twisted knuckles, and berate myself for wanting more. You got this great education, and what are you doing with it? What people don’t know is that you’re actually stupid, a vicious, ruthless part of me would hiss. And you can’t even fucking appreciate that you don’t have to do any real work.
Sometimes that voice got worse. Sometimes things got out of hand. The generalized fury I’d felt during college, unleashed on those long vodka nights, I now turned inward, I now felt all the time. I’d come home from work and sit alone in my bedroom, on my mattress on the floor, drinking beer from a warming six-pack I’d keep on the old carpet next to me. I could be out walking around town in the nice weather, I’d think, or I could go to a coffee shop, maybe make a new friend. But the idea of actually going out in public when I didn’t have to was unfathomable, no matter how much Carolina sunshine sifted through my blinds. There was no hectic social life to throw myself into, to use as distraction, so it became hard to leave the house at all.
I’d try to read or to listen to CDs on my laptop, but I had trouble focusing on the books, and the music sounded tinny and emotionless, like it was coming from an open door at the end of a long hallway. I was full of rage at myself. Why wasn’t I doing more, why was I wasting all of Mom’s hard work? Why wasn’t I at least happy? Finally, the frustrated energy within me had to go somewhere. I’d stand up quickly, as though I could run from that voice, and finally I’d pull my hand back and slap my face, hard, over and over. There was no one to keep me in line, no one to motivate me. No one seemed to care what I did, except me. I could be ruthless, and my ruthlessness paralyzed me.
I recognized this inner voice, but I didn’t want to admit it. It was the second self, born into the rain on the night of the murder, the older sister who had helped me move forward under that great weight. She had taken me this far, but now she’d gone rancid within me, bitter and trapped and scornful of my flagging strength.
I fought back against her, though, as my life gradually improved. Courtney, the receptionist in our office, was around my age, and she kept inviting me to spend time with her tightly knit group of friends; eventually I said yes, and my life expanded from there as I met more and more people. I was terribly self-conscious at first, unused to talking to new people, but each time someone smiled upon seeing me again, each time I told a joke and someone laughed, I remembered for a moment that I could be nice to spend time with, that I wasn’t as stupid and dull as I felt.
Courtney was a writer, at work on a book. She had talent and hope—she knew what she was doing. She’d polish up scenes between copies and incoming calls. She knew publishing was a long shot, but, unlike me, she wasn’t ashamed to be seen trying. When I finally told her that I wanted to write, too, it felt like a huge confession. Part of the reason I’d taken a low-responsibility job was that I wanted time to write in my off-hours—a fact I hardly admitted to myself—but I rarely had the courage to sit down and do so. When I did, all I could think about was Mom. I would be overpowered by a clear memory of her, then sit down at my computer and pour out five or so pages in a fever, desperate to keep that moment forever. But then the fever would pass and I would be left with the screen’s infinite blank page, the cursor blinking at me expectantly, and I’d go pour myself a drink. I did this every month or so, until my desktop was littered with disconnected stops and starts. As a child, I had left writing in a moment of terror, and every time I tried to return as an adult, that terror came back, hardwired and physical.
I’d thought slinking back down to North Carolina was some kind of failure, but it turned out to be exactly the right move. Free from the suffocating, conservative atmosphere at Davidson, its academic pressure, I could slowly relax in this land of large houses and mild winters. Eventually I moved to nearby Durham and became the caretaker of a beautiful, comfortably decaying historic house, living rent-free and steadily paying down credit card debt I’d accrued during college. My neighbor Liz exuberantly befriended me, dragging me out of the house and introducing me to her friends. She took me to parties, and we went out dancing at least once a month, when a friend of ours spun soul records in a crumbling four-story building that used to house a boxing ring, all dark corners and red lights.
I dated a little, falling into the comfort of touch and immediacy. Often, a relationship would begin before the previous one had ended; I tried to make myself feel better by joking that I had a “little problem with overlap.” I was barely aware that I chained my loves together just as my mother had; I never would have admitted how deeply I needed someone.
I ended up befriending many other people who had crash-landed in the area, artists and writers looking to re-center, people who had been thrown off-balance by turmoil they would not or could not discuss. Six or eight of us started taking turns hosting weekly dinners, the meals becoming more elaborate and competitive each week. After we ate, we’d sit out on the porch and continue drinking the wine and beer we’d begun over salad, our chairs wobble-thudding on the wide, warped planks. Heavy vintage ashtrays from Goodwill lined up next to dirty tea saucers on the railings, and other friends would sometimes amble by and come sit with us. Porch sitting was best in the middle of the summer, when it was still eighty-five degrees at ten o’clock, the evening stretching unnoticed into the still-sweaty early hours of the morning. For me, porch sitting gave me back the night I’d loved as a young child, made it safe and beautiful again. And sitting and talking with these kind, smart friends, music on low, took the hard, speedy edge off my drinks, made me happy with fewer of them.
Looking back, it seems like we were all trying to catch our breath during those after-dinner, red-wine nights on the front porch, all those smoky evenings at the bar. Life was pleasant despite the feeling that if anything important was happening, it was happening elsewhere. Rent was low in Durham and wages were okay; we could put everything on hold for a while. Occasionally, someone would move to New York or Portland, Oregon. We’d have a big going-away party, only to welcome them back a few months later.
We laughed and drank and shared confidences and made love in a musical-chairs kind of way. When parents came up, I made it clear that my father was absent, my mother dead. Everyone assumed cancer and I didn’t correct them. I made of these friends a new family that didn’t need the facts concerning my first one. I faded away from my aunts and uncles; I called only every six months or so, and for the most part they didn’t call me. I was no specific person’s responsibility, and they all had their own lives to worry about. I had one friend, Mindy, with whom I had deeper, more open conversations. She knew what had happened to my mother, but we didn’t talk about it much. There was no reason to. It all belonged to another era, for a while.
36
* * *
Then, one afternoon at the office, time collapsed again. It was a Monday, late March 2006. A quiet day. Polite, mumbled conversations, gurgle of the coffeemaker, the shirring sound of paper piling up in the copy machin
e exit tray. The occasional warbly, digital ring of a telephone.
The central reception line sang out at about two o’clock, blurr-blurr-bl’blur breaking the post-lunch spell.
“Dean’s office—this is Courtney . . . Hold on—just a moment.”
She nodded at me, hit the HOLD button. I stretched my face into a smile, one that would bend my words so that it sounded, on the other end, like I was chipper and energetic, eager to help. I raised my eyebrows at Courtney while she giggled. I snatched up the receiver, punched the lit button to release the line.
“Hello, this is Sarah!”
“Sarah, this is Walter Grzyb. How you doin’ down there?”
The long, rounded vowels of that Maine accent rushed suddenly into my unprepared ears. It had been months since I’d spoken to anyone up north.
“Oh . . . I’m, I’m good. Just, y’know, Monday, working. Just at the office here . . . It’s been a while—”
Walt cut me off, abrupt in a way I’d never heard before. “Good, good. Listen, Sarah, I’ve got some news for you. In fact, are you alone right now? Or can you get somewhere where you have some privacy?”
“Sure, sure,” I said, starting to shake, just a little, surprising myself. “We have an extra office; I’ll just transfer over. Just give me a minute.” I couldn’t tell if I sounded normal. I focused on all those old failed leads, tried to use them to hold down my newly pounding pulse. There had been a tightness in Walt’s voice, a slightly higher pitch, something different from the even, professional tone I remembered. It almost sounded like excitement.
