After the Eclipse

by Sarah Perry

  Dennis plopped down into one of the little plastic chairs, long legs spread wide, and started talking. He spoke with the rapid excitement of someone who has been waiting a long time to be heard. He told us he’d gone into the military as soon as Walt took over the case in 1998 and he was cleared through a second round of DNA testing. His job skills training was in installing and maintaining security systems, which reinforced my sense that the universe has a twisted sense of humor—while I was sitting in my bedroom in Texas, eyeing my shut blinds and thinking of him with fear, the Army was flying him to DC to help repair the White House security system.

  But Dennis had also focused on special combat training, learning as many ways as possible to kill a man. When he returned to Maine a few years later, he spent most of his free time and energy trying to figure out who had killed his fiancée so he could put to use all that he had learned. He was a man obsessed—he wanted revenge, and he wanted exoneration in the court of public opinion.

  “To this day,” he said, “I mean, it happened just this week—people will move out of my line in the grocery store. I’d like to leave Maine for good, to where people don’t know me, but I couldn’t leave until this was solved.”

  Ashley and I mostly nodded during that hour. Everything Dennis said was so dramatic, I thought, like in a movie. He was still freshly torn and heartbroken and unable to move on. He’d forgotten, perhaps, that he had often been mean and controlling. Watching him, I could see the wide space of this omission, but strangely it didn’t reduce my sympathy for him. The character traits that made him both an unhappy person and a target of suspicion had only been amplified by the stress and rage and sadness he felt in the wake of the murder. His impulsive, reactive personality had made him both the perfect suspect and the worst survivor.

  But he was a good storyteller, and thoughtful. I was struck by his evident intelligence. I’d spent years thinking my mother dated this man mostly because he was there: he was convenient, he was insistent, and he was cute. But now I could see what she saw: an interesting, smart, passionate man. She hadn’t simply been under his power. She had also been a victim of her own kindness, her desire for his better nature to prevail.

  Dennis told me that he now shows up early to everything—eternally haunted by the consequences of his running late on the night of Mom’s murder, forever sprinting in a race he’s already lost. He always tries very hard to do exactly what he says he’s going to do. He said, “I don’t wish what happened to us on anyone . . . I’m living proof of what can happen—and so are you—when you say you’re going to do something and you don’t do it.” By “us” he meant me and him.

  He also said that he still had the brown paper bag Mom gave him the last time she made him lunch for work. She had drawn a little character on it, a bubbly smiley face surrounded by long curls like hers. I can picture it perfectly; it’s the same face she drew on the notes she put in my lunchbox every day. I wish I’d saved mine, too. He has another present from her; he describes it as “a little stuffed sheep. And I won’t let anyone touch it.” I remember the sheep. His name is Sherman. Denny has pictures, too—some of her, some of me—all in a big wooden chest. He said, “I haven’t opened it in a few years—every now and then I do. Either on her birthday or, y’know, May twelfth. Every now and then, I’ll sit down with a bottle of bourbon and go through it . . . Remember: You never drink to forget. You drink to remember, ’cause that’s what ends up happening.”

  Seeing Dennis, and having Susie casually hand us back to each other, seemed to restore a bit of order to the world. I’d been right to hold out against the cops’ implications about him. But I had always had to guard against the chance that the police were right, that his feral temper had snapped. He had long been the face of fear, and now we could sit and talk with each other, trading stories like we were old friends. This gave me a feeling of freedom that I never would have known I was missing.

  But at some point, I realized I needed to use the restroom. I missed one break in the conversation, and then another, and another. I just couldn’t leave. I absolutely could not leave that room, couldn’t leave my friend—beautiful, desirable Ashley—in there with him.

  It wasn’t a fair thought, I knew. But I also knew that survival isn’t about fairness.

  * * *

  I became so immersed in seeing Dennis again that for a while I forgot what I was waiting for. Susie had been smart to bring him to me. By the time he’d finished speaking, the opening statements were over in the courtroom, and after a short break, it was finally time to go in.

  Susie ushered me into the courtroom, a large, high-ceilinged space filled with winter light streaming through tall windows. The walls were plaster, heavily edged in polished wood paneling, rising to a high ceiling covered in ornate molding. Long oak pews faced the bench and witness box. I sat in the front row, and found Michael Hutchinson immediately, sitting with his lawyer behind a wooden table.

  He had gotten hepatitis in prison, was jaundiced. He was wearing a tan sport coat. He didn’t much resemble the person I’d seen in the mug shot, a shirtless young man with tousled hair and a smile, head thrust forward from his rounded shoulders: a sarcastic young punk. It was in prison, apparently, that he had picked up the aura of slow brute strength that one might expect from a killer. His hair was buzzed, neck and forearms thick. He was barrel-chested. His blue eyes were unnervingly pale, but otherwise he was thin-lipped, round in the face, forgettable. His gaze was so blank it was hard to ascribe anything to it at all. He wasn’t even that tall—officially, five foot nine. He could have been nearly anyone on the street, or in the woods, of Bridgton. Or anywhere.

  Over the course of the next few days, as I watched the proceedings from the front row, Michael kept his eyes forward, and I could see him only in profile. But when he was led in and out of the courtroom, he always took the opportunity to turn and look at me. His eyes went right to me; he didn’t have to search. He knew exactly where I was. His look remained unreadable—not menacing, not sorry, not ashamed. If I had to pinpoint it, I’d say it was the look of a man who has something to say.

  Lisa, the prosecutor, was a short, blond, direct woman—kind to the family, satisfyingly sharp and bullheaded in the courtroom. With her fair coloring, tough attitude, and dark humor, she fit right in with us. The lawyer assisting her was Lara Nomani, a quieter woman with sleek, dark hair. I loved that they were both women; it was an unexpected bit of poetic justice.

  I was sworn in at two thirty on the afternoon of Monday, April 2, 2007. Lisa began her questioning by asking me simple things, verifying my identity and current residence, that I was from Bridgton, that I was Crystal Perry’s daughter. Nothing was true until entered into the court record, and anything not entered did not officially exist, so what the jury knew and what everyone else knew were sometimes miles apart. The jurors were instructed to listen to the facts only and do their best not to draw inferences. But emotions lay under the facts like shadows. The pain of loss. The cold grip of fear.

  The jury sat across from me, in two elevated rows perhaps fifteen feet away. I addressed my answers to them, but my eyes often wandered to Hutchinson, who sat just to their left, next to Andrews, angled toward me. Every time I looked at him, his eyes were already on mine, as though waiting for my glance. Over the next two hours, I sometimes held his gaze for a few moments, and he never backed down or looked away. His face did not move or change. His expression was unreadable, and I hoped mine was, too.

  I’d been advised to keep my answers short so Lisa could direct the conversation according to the argument she was building. But I did occasionally stray from simple facts. When called upon to describe Mom, I couldn’t resist adding, “I have all my life wanted to be as pretty as she was.”

  At some point, I was speaking too quietly, and Lisa had to move the microphone a little closer to me. I briefly had an opportunity, then, to speak directly to the jury: “Can you hear me? Is this all right?” It was a moment of sudden intimacy, watchin
g them nod back at me. For those few seconds, I saw them as twelve individuals, people with lawns and apartments and spouses and friends. People I could have met under a hundred different circumstances.

  From there, Lisa and I continued our call-and-response until just after Mom’s screaming stopped, when I prepared to walk out of my room. At this point, she yielded the floor to me, and I told the story of the rest of that night, minute by minute, my voice going on and on in the perfectly silent courtroom.

  Looking at the trial transcript now, I am most drawn to the part where I say that while I listened to the murder happening, I could do nothing but sit on my bed, “entirely still, absolutely frozen, hearing all of this so loud in my head.” I read this from a distance of years—many from that night, a few from the trial—and suddenly I pan out and up, free from that loud place within my mind. I see my house, so small, like a cardboard model. The place vibrates with the sound of terror. Dark figures struggle near the kitchen; they are hard to see, because what’s happening between them is so awful. But just as scary is the girl there, on the other side of that wall. She sits immobile, not reacting, like a doll, a body the soul has left. It amazes me that she was ever reanimated.

  * * *

  Hutchinson’s lawyer, Robert Andrews, was smart enough not to bully me too much in his cross-examination; it would win him no favor with the jury. But we were still opposed, lightly sparring. At one point, I corrected a date for him and felt a rush of petty satisfaction. At another, he was unsatisfied with an answer I gave, and he slapped an interview transcript down in front of me and asked, “Does this refresh your memory?”

  A pervasive difficulty during the cross-examination was distinguishing between my memory of that night at that moment, in 2007, and the way I remembered having described it in interviews at earlier dates. It was difficult to hew closely to what I actually remembered on that first day of the trial—the only way, as I saw it, to avoid perjury—without looking evasive about slightly different things I’d said previously, small inconsistencies that Andrews tried to exploit. So many years had passed, and I’d been interviewed so many times, that these layers had become interwoven. The whole afternoon was a complicated dance between delivering information from my live memory and perspective—re-inhabiting long-ago events in real time—and trying to understand and interpret several earlier versions of myself: at twelve, at fourteen, at eighteen.

  At one point, Andrews mentioned the interviews in Texas and asked, “Were you aware that you were being treated as a suspect?” At that moment, all my earlier suspicions were confirmed. But if Andrews had wanted me to get angry or upset on my own behalf while on the stand, he failed; I just felt sad for that skinny, polygraphed thirteen-year-old from so long ago.

  * * *

  When Andrews and Lisa had finished their questioning, I was dismissed, and court recessed for the day. Gwen and Glenice went back to their hotel in town, everyone else went home, and Ashley and I went to the Regency. Before the trial, when she had announced that she was coming with me, I had protested: I didn’t need hand-holding, I said; it was ridiculous for her to take time off. But after that first day, I was glad that she hadn’t listened to me. For the rest of that week, she was at my side: she would run out to get me coffee or sandwiches during breaks in the proceedings, when I needed energy but couldn’t risk leaving the building because we might be resuming any minute. She held my hand at the most intense moments. My family was there, too, and I could have leaned on them more than I did. But Ashley was someone from my new life, from the previously murderless present. She was a bridge.

  In the evenings, we would briefly talk through the day, then try to unwind. That first night, we went out for a nice meal, drank a glass of wine in our room, and watched some TV. The day was important, but it had been difficult, and, left alone, I would have run through every detail until I was exhausted. With Ashley there encouraging me to take a break, I could admit that I needed one. And in the night, I had the comfort of her quietly breathing in the second bed, between me and the window to the cold outside.

  * * *

  On the morning of the second day, I settled into the courtroom with everyone else, and had some time to get oriented. Members of the press sat strung along the back row, scribbling in notepads: no cameras allowed. Our family and some friends of the family, about twenty people in all, sat in three or four rows on the right side of the large room. Gwen was on my left, Ashley on my right. On Gwen’s other side sat Chief Bell of the Bridgton Police, whom I’d last seen in Texas. He had retired two years before but had continued to work the case from home. Every time a document was read or quoted, his lips moved along with the words.

  On the left side of the room sat Hutchinson’s father, Brad, his stepmother, and his friend Justin, with some officials and other observers behind them. His mother did not appear. We were split on two sides of an aisle, like a horrible parody of a wedding. We didn’t look at them; they didn’t look at us. Or, rather, each side stole flickering glances at the other. And we kept running into the stepmother in the restroom. I washed my hands next to her once; we met each other’s eyes in the mirror, but neither of us said a word.

  One evening, as Ashley and I were sitting on our beds at the Regency, we were talking over the day—there was so little opportunity to react to things and think about them as they happened. After a moment’s visible hesitation, Ashley told me that Justin, Hutchinson’s best friend, his only apparent supporter other than his father and stepmother, had approached her in the hallway during a short break. “I was leaning over the water fountain,” she said, “and I heard this voice in my ear.”

  Justin said, in his way, that he found her very attractive and wanted to see if he had a chance to sleep with her. I stared at her in momentary disbelief. But I wasn’t really that surprised. There’s no limit to these guys, I thought. They think we’re always here just for them. By all other outward appearances, Justin seemed sane, even if deluded and possibly malicious. The next day, he asked Susie if Lara, the assistant prosecutor with the beautiful dark hair, was single.

  * * *

  Justice Thomas Warren presided over the courtroom. He was a thin man with short, dark gray hair and a long face. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, like a nerdy college professor, and his ears stuck out from the sides of his head, but he could be stern. He was particularly impatient with any sort of procedural delay or illogical questioning. He was just a little sarcastic, sometimes, but was notably kind and respectful when speaking to the members of the jury. I liked him right away, in part because he reminded me of Alan Alda in M*A*S*H. And as the days went on, I gained more and more respect for him.

  The first person to take the stand on the second day was Bernie King, one of the first policemen on the scene that night, who had taken such pleasure in arresting Hutchinson on his wedding day. Officer King described the general chronology of that night and very early morning, and the basic layout of the crime scene. As he spoke, I tried to remember how he had looked thirteen years earlier, when I had met him in the living room of the Venezia apartment. I could not. I wasn’t even sure I would have recognized him on the street.

  Next was Craig Handley, a state forensic expert, who went over the scene in the kind of careful, precise detail I’d been unable and unwilling to see in the dark. Despite his dispassionate thoroughness, Handley had the unexpected habit of referring to my mother not as “the body,” as others might have, but as Crystal, as though he had come to know her by closely studying her home. He took every opportunity to say her name, constantly reminding the jury that we were talking about a real person—not just a body, but someone who had lived.

  When I had reviewed the crime scene photos with Susie, she had told me that the police had also taken a video camera and walked through our house. I had been glad to look over the pictures, despite how gruesome they were—facing them was better than remaining in the dark. But to watch that tape would have been to walk through that house again, much more viscerally than i
n memory. I’ve still never seen it, but I’ve since read a description. The police began filming at 7:15 a.m., when the world was still gray and dark, shrouded in misty rain. They had not yet removed Mom’s body and would not do so for another three hours. They slowly recorded every inch of our house. The bloody kitchen and living room. The pictures on the walls, greeting cards on the dining table. The angle of her leg. The narrow hallway, the bed I left, my desk and all my stuffed animals. Our spare bedroom, crowded with a pink pullout couch and my bookshelf. Mom’s bedroom—her dresser and perfume bottles and her neatly folded-back bedcovers.

  That day at the trial, when the bailiff wheeled in the television and turned it away from us, toward the jury, a deep quiet descended on the courtroom. The judge asked for the thick window shades to be pulled down, darkening the room so the jurors could more easily see the screen.

  The bailiff pressed PLAY, the button making a loud plastic thunk. The jurors shifted, settled in. A couple of them leaned forward, just slightly.

  The room was still, only tiny gray coughs occasionally breaking the dry air. The video was not muted, but all we could hear was the whispery pickup of ambient sound from the house, the cop or cops behind the camera just as quiet as we were. I watched the faces of the jury and was very glad I had chosen not to see this video. They mostly maintained their serious expressions, but I could see revulsion break through—a widening of the eyes, a distracted, open-palm stroke of the chin. They didn’t look at one another or out at us. Their eyes remained fixed on the screen. We watched them watching. It went on and on and on, much longer than I had anticipated. Sixteen minutes of feathered silence that I wanted to break with a scream.