by Sarah Perry
47
* * *
In the years after Mom died, so many things made me think of her; every detail in the world seemed to be associated with her. There were so many opportunities for pain. Some days, the colors and sounds and textures of the world still seem to conspire to bring her back to me, but now it is mostly gratitude I feel for the shadow of her presence. These are deep memories, things the cops do not know, the everyday details that make a person’s life. I gather them while I can, before they disappear, as so many others have.
She loved summer thunderstorms, and when they hit, she’d turn off the TV, turn down the lights, and open the windows and doors to the cool breezes and mist. She and I would sit and watch the lightning flash, our faces and shins in the spray, our noses full of the metallic scent of the fly screen.
On long drives through the woods, she’d pull the car over to pick tiger lilies from grassy ditches. At the Dump, with Dale, we always had pussy willow branches in a deep, dry, bottle-green vase.
She liked Boston, where her sister Glenice lived. The rest of the family found it too big, too crammed full of people, too hot, too cold. She liked its museums, its interesting food. The view of the Charles along Storrow Drive. The grimy adventure of riding the T.
She whistled poorly. She was right-handed. She had been a majorette in high school, before she dropped out. She got me a silvery baton when I was about eight, and she could still twirl pretty well. She tried to teach me, but my hands were slow.
She licked every finger meticulously clean when she ate something messy.
She loved tiny, waxy Dixie cups, and we always had pullout dispensers of them in the bathroom and the kitchen. They were convenient for little sips of water, for mouthwash at night. And for rinsing paintbrushes.
Once, at our annual extended-family pool party, my aunts and uncles were competing to see who could do the best backflip off the diving board. I wanted to do one, but I was afraid. As I stood at the end of the board, hesitating, she pushed me over into the water. Thought it would be good for me. I scraped my thigh on the rough board, bled into the chlorine and cried.
She was a mediocre swimmer.
Sometimes after I took a shower in the evening, we would sit on the floor in front of the TV while she wound all my long, long hair into tiny braids, dozens of them, about the width of a pinkie, secured with elastics meant for Marie’s braces. The next morning, we’d unravel them, and my hair would be soft and crinkled, thousands of tiny waves floating down my back.
Vodka was her drink when she went out. She hated whining. She became furious the one time she thought she heard me swear, and would not be convinced that I’d said “Kitty gas!” instead of “Kitty’s ass!” Dennis laughed at this but would not back me up. She sent me straight to my room.
She would not go to bed with dirty dishes in the sink.
She liked solid plans and good surprises equally.
Walking across summer-hot parking lots, she would sometimes stoop to pick up tiny bits of trash—gum wrappers, receipts—that weren’t hers. Then put them in the nearest garbage can without comment.
One rainy day when I was in third grade, for no particular reason, she let me stay home from school. The morning was cozy and gray, and she had a rare midweek day off work. We watched some TV, lounged in our pajamas. We drove to Renys and got a box of popsicle sticks and some Elmer’s glue, and when we got home she taught me how to make a box by alternating the sticks over and under one another at right angles. She kept my box for years.
* * *
These are all small pieces, like shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope; I spin and combine them to make a glowing, shifting picture. But they are finite in number. I cannot know my mother as others know their parents—I will never have an adult conversation with her. But in addition to memory, I do have something else, something that most children would never see: notes from the therapist she started seeing nine months before she died, the records subpoenaed by police two days after her death. The dead cannot give permission; I shouldn’t have this access. But it helps me see that time, and my mother, more clearly. This profile of her internal state, her thoughts and feelings, matters more to me than all the official evidence ever could. So the most valuable document from my trip to Gray was created before the investigation even started.
These notes show me that the truly terrible fights with Dennis started happening much earlier than I’d remembered, right at the beginning, really, when I still believed in them, still wanted to brush aside the bad things about their relationship. I can see that she was making a monumental effort to hide most of her pain from me, that we were conspiring in a sort of white-knuckled optimism.
Mom’s therapist, Anna Parker, was young, just finishing up her training. Mom may have been one of her very first patients. It is perhaps Anna’s common name that keeps her hidden from me; I have been unable to find her and speak to her, have only these notes. Mom’s final appointment, before Anna was to leave the state for another internship, was scheduled for May 13, the day after she died.
On her first visit with Anna, Mom said, “If it were not for my daughter, I would probably kill myself.” I wonder if this was one of the appointments that I went along to, when I brought homework with me, filling in spelling worksheets in the stuffy, wood-paneled waiting room, bored and impatient. I wonder if I was right there on the other side of the door while she talked so frankly about wanting to end her life. If she would have felt differently had she known that it would soon be ended for her.
And so opens a steady vein of disappointment and self-doubt, anxiety and ambivalence: feelings I knew she was having at the time, but that were far more abundant than I realized. She spent the final nine months of her life trying to understand her feelings for Dennis and for Tim, trying to find a path to happiness through the chaos of anger and sex and love.
Mom seemed, at first, ready to take action: by her second week of therapy, she’d broken up with Dennis. They’d been dating for about six months. She realized—partially because of his many failed, premature proposals—that he was too immature, too impulsive. But she dreaded the unfilled weekend hours. Anna suggested different activities that could help keep her busy, to stave off loneliness and keep her from breaking down and calling Dennis. She offered one idea after another: going to the movies or a new restaurant or driving to the coast and taking a walk on the beach. But Mom was afraid to go to a new place by herself, and she couldn’t drive very far because she worried she’d be stranded by a migraine. Nothing sounded fun to her, and she left the appointment merely resolved to suffer through the empty days. When I first read these notes, I was exactly the age Mom was at that appointment—one month past my thirtieth birthday—but I was overwhelmed with sympathy for this young woman. I have never had a physical ailment that restricted my freedom, and I have never been afraid to go to a movie or restaurant on my own. Suddenly she seemed so fragile, so girlish and young, so different from the vivacious woman I knew, cloaked in the willed bravery of motherhood.
There is no way to neatly plot Mom’s feelings for Dennis over those last nine months of her life. She accepted Dennis back, broke up with him again, asked him to take her back, and stayed with him—all while sharing with Anna her feelings of ambivalence and dread. Her resolve to leave him waxed and waned, as did her fear of being alone. At some point, Tim came around again and “pressured” Mom into sex, which left her feeling confused and angry. I can’t tell who called whom. I also can’t determine, from Anna’s clinical notes, what “pressure” meant. Soon after, Dennis staged his paper-bag marriage proposal, and Mom accepted.
Two weeks after the engagement, Mom told Anna that she was trying to set some limits with Dennis: “He can’t swear at me or break things,” she said. This was meant to be a starting point. He needed to understand that this was abusive behavior, even if he didn’t touch her. She was scared, but determined. Through shaky tears, she told Anna that she did not want to have “any kind of violence
in her life.”
The next day was my twelfth birthday—the last we would spend together. Mom gave me an emerald ring I had seen at Kmart, and I was ecstatic to have my own gold band and jewel. I remember opening the gray velour box at our kitchen table, then leaping up to hug her, bumping the table and tipping a glass of soda over onto the cake while she and Denny laughed. She must have worked so hard to make it a happy day for me. About a month later I lost the ring, and I remember her disappointment when I told her, her sadness about the loss mirroring and amplifying my own. She had been so happy to give me this thing I desperately wanted. I found it at school, three weeks after she died. It was a joyous moment marred by the fact that I could not share it with her. One of the first of thousands.
* * *
Over the next few months, Mom told Anna about the neglect and violence in her family, even pointing out that her parents never hugged or kissed their children. I am surprised that she spoke so frankly, even to a therapist. But I’m glad someone was listening.
At some point, Mom bought a desk for my room, and Grammy insisted that we needed Dennis to put it together for us, even though he and Mom were broken up at the time. It was just a cheap drafting table—a pressboard surface supported by hollow metal tubes, with a little plastic bag stapled to it, filled with sturdy screws and an Allen wrench. Mom and I ended up putting the desk together, but she still felt weak in the face of her mother’s criticism, and within days she was back with Dennis. Anna helped her start to see the effects of her upbringing; Mom finally admitted that she wasn’t quite sure what a healthy relationship was supposed to look like. Grace had taught her daughters that they couldn’t survive without a man. And so, then, how could one ever leave?
By then, I was fighting with her, about Dennis and about Tim. Seeing her shuffle around the house in Tim’s absence, so sad and breakable, was as painful for me as sitting in my room hearing her and Dennis scream at each other. I wanted her to let us off the roller coaster, to free us from the shifting moods and whims of unreliable men. When letters came from Tim, I considered throwing them away, although I didn’t dare. I thought she would get over it if he would just leave her alone.
Once, when Mom got back together with Dennis days after breaking up with him, Anna wrote that “she is upset that she has not been able to stay single and her daughter is equally upset.”
I thought I could step in and save her, but of course Anna knew that she had to save herself. She pointed out that Mom was already more independent and resourceful than Grace had ever been, and told her that she could decide how she would be treated, what she would put up with. They talked about how Mom had quit smoking and significantly cut down her drinking years before. “But this is the hardest one,” Mom insisted.
With Anna’s help, Mom kept trying to reduce the intensity of her arguments with Dennis, to at least keep him from physically acting out. But the violent outbursts continued. Through winter and early spring of that final year, more and more nights were marred by loud, angry fights that Dennis escalated with fits of rage.
Less than a year after the murder, at age thirteen, I described Dennis’s behavior to a Maine State Police officer:
“He’d call Mom all sorts of nasty names when he’d get mad. He had a temper, you know—if he gets mad he just throws a fit,” I said, laughing. “Once he hit the screen door so hard he knocked it off the hinges.” It seems that I found this hilarious, or at least that I wanted to. Then I said, “Dennis never really did anything violent.”
It chills me to think about what that young girl thought was normal—what everyone thought was normal. Couples fought. Men got pissed. Official violence started only when someone got hit in the face. You didn’t want to make too much of anything, get labeled hysterical, paranoid. Even after the murder, I wanted to laugh off Dennis’s aggressive, intimidating behavior. Later in that same police interview, I described their on-again, off-again, out-of-control romance as a “typical adult relationship.” Loons crying out at each other, unable to stay away.
* * *
Mom’s final therapy session, on May 5, 1994, caught her on an upswing. She was wearing Dennis’s ring, “but still maintaining some distance from him.” Even in the wake of a recent call from Tim, she felt balanced. She and Anna talked about “maintaining this distance from both and not falling into the either/or trap—even holding the door open for a Mr. X who might come along.”
Anna Parker would leave Maine without knowing who killed her patient, this beautiful young woman who was trying so hard to cast violence out of her life. She would not know if it was the fiancé or the ex or a Mr. X who came along, knocking on that open door.
I so wish that Mom had lived long enough to recognize her formidable strength, and it saddens me to see that she spent so much of that final year struggling with self-doubt and fear. But there was happiness, too; it shines in my memory, as undeniable as those notes she scribbled on our calendar.
As I read this therapy record over and over, trying to get closer to her, it is Mom’s first appointment that I keep going back to, the one where she says that she would kill herself if not for me. I realize that even though we could do nothing for each other on that final dark night, we have, at least sometimes, kept each other alive.
48
* * *
This story will never be over. I could make calls and conduct interviews forever, contacting one person and then another and then another in an ever-widening circle, each person suggesting another until I’ve talked to the whole town, the whole state, the whole country, the whole world. We are connected by violence; we are connected by love.
I will never know exactly how and why we lost her: it is a puzzle I cannot solve, and even Hutchinson probably doesn’t know the answer. I’ve had to find my own ending, decide for myself when to move on.
Before I quit, I knew I had to do one last thing. Almost two years after my last attempt, I decided to try talking to Linda one last time. I could not go forward, could not return to my current life in any state of peace, if I was still afraid of someone I was supposed to love. I was staying in Portland at the time. One morning, I woke up and knew it was time. Get in the car, I told myself. Drive to Bridgton. Park in her driveway, and get out. See what happens.
It was a beautiful day, warm gentle wind pushing cotton ball clouds across a blue sky. Route 302 runs all the way to Bridgton from Portland, and I took a sharp interest in all the little towns along the way, to keep my mind off what I was doing, what road I was on, what might lie at the end. Linda could refuse me with a slammed door or a screaming cry. Her mind could be so addled that she made no sense at all. She might seem normal and friendly at first, and let me in, then become angry or scared. I wondered if she might try to hurt me, if she could. I wondered if my mission was terribly ill-advised. But I had to go. I reminded myself that I was a strong, capable adult. There was also the chance, of course, that she might simply not be home. I knew that even if she had just left for an hour or so to get groceries, I wouldn’t be able to return.
I entered Bridgton and everything came into focus. I drove past Otter Pond Road and the empty space where our first house with Dale—long since torn down—once stood. All the familiar buildings advanced upon me, one after another, their edges in high relief. I looked up to a window in the downtown strip where I used to take dance lessons, high up in a nineteenth-century building whose floors creaked with every plié. I passed the café that used to be a barbershop that used to be the liquor store. Turned right at the War Memorial, where the vise around my heart tightened. Passed a few more houses, a strip of lakeshore, and then: Linda’s house. Tan siding, brown trim, same as ever. I drove past. It occurred to me that I could just turn around and drive back to Portland without stopping, and I wondered, in a detached way, if I was about to watch myself do just that. I drove to Route 93, turned around at the Venezia, the easiest place to double back. Went back down High Street, and turned, finally, into Linda’s driveway. Switched off the ignitio
n. Got out. I was no longer on autopilot; I could do whatever I wanted.
A line of hung laundry wavered in the breeze, strung across the edge of her back porch. The sheets parted and came together like slow wings, and through the gaps I could see her, lying facedown with her top off, sun-tanning. I stood on the porch and peered through. “Hi?” I called out. Her face turned toward me with a smooth robotic motion. She just looked at me. She didn’t move to get up. Kept staring. I retreated around the corner so she could come see who was at her door. She could be nearsighted by now. She might need a moment to get herself together, to re-tie her bikini top. I stood there for a minute or two, then said, “Hello?” throwing my voice around the corner. She still didn’t approach. The radio was on, quietly, playing a song from those long-ago years. I stepped around the edge of the house again, and again she looked at me through the flapping sheets. I said, “Linda? I’m Sarah.”
And then it was like someone hit PLAY on a freeze-framed movie. She got up and wrapped a white towel around herself. Her face crumpled into tears, a sudden release. Her mouth bent into a tight, wide smile, and every muscle of her small face was in motion. She came forward and hugged me tight, her soft curls brushing my face. I could see the top of her head as I looped my arms around her tiny shoulders. I held her and said, quietly, the first thing that came to mind: “Little Linda!”
