by Sarah Perry
When the weak one screams out, the other one hushes her, hurries her along. We can’t stay here, she says. We have to get out of here, she says. You want to help her, right?
And so I say nothing else, but open my eyes wider in the darkness. I perform one small test: I pinch my arm, clamping the flesh tightly for several seconds. I’ve had lucid nightmares before, and this is how I always escape. I wait for the moment when I pivot upright again in my bed, sweating, gasping, shaking off the residue of this vivid dream. Pain spreads from that point of contact, but I remain in the dark.
Reality confirmed, now comes the time for action. Her body is lying in front of the door. This helps the second self prevent the weaker one from running away. Another test: We reach a cautious foot out, touch the back of her pale, exposed calf. This is further proof that we aren’t hallucinating. She is still, and we recoil at the solid fact of her. Her head is in the corner, near the hinges of the side door that is closed to the night outside. A glass panel in the door admits weak gray light from a far-off streetlamp. The longer we stand here, the more we can see. The corner is dark, her hair is too dark. We can see the red now, closer to the light, but there is too much; we can’t understand what we’re looking at. There is a thick, fluid shadow covering her head, and it’s impossible to figure out what is casting it. We quickly look away, to the safer territory of the leg.
The phone receiver lies on the floor, at the very end of its curly cord, near but not quite touching her hand. The very tip of it rests lightly on the linoleum. When we heard the droning of the open line, the tension of the cord must have drawn the receiver back across the floor, away from her.
We step over the legs and pick up the receiver. We must complete her last action. We would like to make a call. But nothing happens. We punch 911 repeatedly, and with some speed. Listen. Nothing, no sound at all from the plastic receiver. We punch 911 repeatedly. Silence. We return the phone to its cradle on the wall, turn away.
Now a journey begins. The house is very small, but the other phone is on the opposite end of it. We turn back toward the hallway from which we came. Step over the legs again. Do not give a final look to the mother. Either she is not the mother anymore, or we will succeed tonight, save her, and see her again, whole.
The hallway is short, but there is time for one distinct thought before we reach the end of it. It comes suddenly and fully formed like a voice, the voice of the second self, reverberating in my head: “There is no God.” She’s casting off comforting fantasies, stripping existence down to this carpet, these close walls, this hallway, the phone at the end. The short, swift feeling of desolation that follows is a surprise, because I had never believed in God before.
Her bedroom presents a challenge: it’s dark, and the light must be turned on. A bit of terror leaks through the numb, autopilot feeling, a lightning flash of fear between darkness and exposure: what will the light reveal? Flip the switch: Nothing out of the ordinary. Empty room.
The bedroom smells like her, and the covers are neatly folded back. We note these details, to carry to the police later—we are already thinking about interviews in the safe fortress of the station downtown. But the phone under the bed doesn’t work, either. We dial over and over. Silence. We are huddled here in a blind corner. We did not hear anyone leave.
We must leave the house.
We go back to the living room, careful not to look back into the kitchen. We leave by the front door, which is very rarely used. We step out into a prickly, light rain, feel the sharpness of the cement porch under bare feet. Any working phone is our polestar, and now we will navigate through the dark, nausea gripping us as if from an ocean swell.
* * *
We come out onto a two-lane road that cuts through thick forest. A halogen lamp propped on a wooden pole casts a cloud of white-blue light near the tops of the trees. We can see the mist cutting across the light, sharp sparkles materializing in its periphery, then driving back down into the black. It is the only light for a mile or two, except for the dim porch lamps of the few neighbors along this road, a ragged constellation.
The Demeritts live next door; they are kind people. They brought brownies when we first moved in, about two years ago. Like us, they have two doors: one often-used, one hardly ever used. To reach the often-used one, we will have to descend a very dark dirt path into the dripping trees. We contemplate this. The door hardly ever used stands in a clearing, broadly lit by that one shining beacon on the pole. We can see the whole way there.
We approach the door hardly ever used. We knock. We punch it with our fists. We yell, we scream. We say things like My mother’s been stabbed. Things like There’s someone in my house. Things like Help me. But we are met by silence. We can hear how the rain is stealing our sound. We throw our body against the door, forearms braced for maximum impact, a knee slipping out of the flapping robe and hitting the unyielding metal. We are at war with the solidity of this house, with this door that will not rattle. We yell. We wait. We wait. More silence.
There is another house across the street. A large, white house, beautifully kept, with a nicely clipped lawn. We have never met the people who live there. It sits under the cast of that one streetlamp, shining like a lighthouse in the night. We turn from the Demeritts’ and run to that place, feel the soft, even grass under bare feet. The bathrobe flaps open a little, lets in rain.
There is a screened porch connected to the house, and we knock on the outer door first. Ring the little electric doorbell, another dim orange light. We yell. We wait. Try the screen door, find it unlocked. We hesitate, don’t want to enter without permission. Then plunge forward to the more substantial inner door, a hollow one that accepts our banging and rings out sound. We can hear how it fills the hallway just beyond this door. We repeat our pleas.
Somebody stabbed my mother.
Please, you have to help me.
There’s somebody in my house.
We wait. We wait. Silence. We conclude that everyone is dead.
We resolve to try every house on the sparsely populated road. We imagine doing this until we reach the center of town, where there are more houses, pushed together into the communal safety of neighborhoods. We will try each one until we find the living. Linda is closer to town. We imagine her sleeping, alive, unaware.
We turn around, passing our house on the way toward town. It takes maybe five minutes to get to the next house. We are running as best we can.
Somewhere in those five minutes, there is a moment of grace in which the second self, the strong one, gets distracted and allows another clear thought to cut through the darkness. I feel the precise moment in which my mother’s soul departs the earth. I feel this so strongly that I stop in my quick march along the double lines of the road. I stand there, one foot on a smooth, dull yellow line, one on the rough pavement. I feel no danger. I think of her leaving, of her sadly giving up on this night, on all the years to come. I mouth, “Goodbye.” But then the actual organ of my heart contracts suddenly and painfully, trying to draw itself inside its own chambers. It is a thick, collapsing feeling. So the second self reaches into that heart, sets emotion aside again, and walks the body on.
We come to the third house. This one is tough; sitting in deep darkness, down a steeply sloping driveway. It might be hard to get back up out of there. But we sort of know these people, have at least seen them outside: a family of four, plus a bounding yellow dog. We descend. Stand exposed in their porch light. We repeat the knocking, the yelling, the waiting. We try to yell things that are less scary, just in case. Remember to say “Please.”
Still, no one comes. No way to tell if they are dead or sleeping.
We turn back toward the road, see the lights of an approaching car. Hustle a few steps up the steep driveway, then stop short. It could be anyone. We are a live witness, and wish to remain so. We stay down in the darkness and come back up only when the lights have passed.
Next we are faced with a long stretch of woods and road, perhaps t
en minutes’ worth, before we will reach the house of the Wilson family. We walk along the center of the road, the smoothness of the stripes a relief. The skipping lines of the passing lane are so much longer than they usually look. About halfway through, something makes us look back and we see, shining through the trees, the unmistakable gleam of a flashlight.
We must walk faster. But of course we have to stop at the Wilson house. This time, we barrel right through the screen door to the inner door of the porch, yelling and banging and trying not to think of that flashlight advancing.
But the Wilsons don’t come, either.
There is one more building before we reach the intersection with the larger two-lane state road, Route 302, where the town truly begins. This walk takes another five or ten minutes. It is impossible to tell exactly how long. We are thankful for the rain, which must be keeping the pavement from cutting our feet. We are concerned about that flashlight, which looks closer now.
Time bends and stretches and we are becoming convinced that the rest of our life will be spent walking along this road in the rain. We start thinking ahead. The tough one steps aside, trusting me to keep walking, propelled by fear of that bobbing flashlight. I wonder where I might live next. Maybe my friend Marie’s mom will take me in. Their house always smells like oil paints and cheesecake.
At the very end of the road lies the Venezia, an Italian restaurant. I’ve never been inside; it’s fancy. There’s a porch light and screen door at the back, next to a glowing square of yellow window. I step from the pavement. My footsteps are cool in the sandy ruts of tire treads, threaded through with uncut grass. I hold my breath tightly as I bang on the frame of the screen door. In the rain, the door makes a rhythmic, wet drumming sound, warping and thwapping against the threshold, wood hammering on wood. I call out, yelling over the sound of my own fists.
And a dark-haired man comes to the door. He squints at me. His hair is thick, his features small, and for a moment he reminds me of my father. I take a step back. Put my fist down at my side. I become more sharply aware of the rain, which is coming down harder now. An older woman, with the same cap of thick, dark hair, comes up behind the man.
The woman pushes him aside, unlatches the door. For a few moments they both stand in the doorway, looking down at me.
I tell them someone has stabbed my mother. I say, “I’ve never been so happy to see people!” Still, their faces look strange to me, seem miles away somehow, separated from me by a naked incredulity.
But they let me in to use the phone. I find myself sitting on a floral couch in a small apartment at the back of the restaurant. The woman gives me slippers while the man dials. Receiver in hand, he looks at me sideways, says, “I need the police up here right away.”
These words are so beautiful.
Then he says, “I have a girl here, claimed someone killed her mother. She’s a little girl running down the road from somewhere.”
I don’t like that word, “claimed”—and “little girl” is so inaccurate now. In a moment, the phone is in my hand, and I’m doing my best to explain to a soft-voiced woman what has happened. I try to be specific and precise, not like a little girl at all. Years later, I will hear that 911 tape. I sound so calm, so incredibly calm.
After the call there is a period of waiting and quiet. I try not to think about the flashlight. I don’t tell anyone about it. I go to the bathroom, and there is blood on the right side of my face. Not mine. Somewhere deep within me I feel horror, but the feeling stays there, far below the surface. I do not cry or cringe; I reach for a washcloth, run warm water over it, and wipe mechanically at my faraway reflection. I think, This is a thing I must do.
3
* * *
before
In the last two years of her life, my mother and I lived in a neat little black-and-white house on a quiet road, in an inland Maine town of five thousand people: white Congregational church spire, an unusual abundance of calm cool water, thick snow sifting out of a gray sky in winter. The town’s waters collected in two big lakes, called Highland and Long, and its snow powdered a tiny ski resort whose trails spelled out LOVE when lit up in the night. The word was an accident of topography, the treeless spaces carving out clear letters. Route 302, a two-lane state road, ran in front of the mountain and southeast into town, becoming High Street until it became Main Street at the War Memorial, an armed Union soldier atop a granite pillar. From there, Main coasted down a steep hill, bent away from the Highland lakeshore, and edged past steady storefronts—the Magic Lantern theater, Renys discount store, the Flower Pot, Food City, the Black Horse Tavern—before diving back into the forest and becoming Route 302 again, threading through two smaller, satellite towns and then running an hour south to Portland. At the town’s one traffic light, another state road wound north to smaller, more isolated towns. Inundated with city tourists in the summer, closed and private in the winter, we were a border place, a portal between inside and outside, in a state with a keen, often claustrophobic sense of insularity.
Our town was called Bridgton, and its people knew Crystal Perry, the pretty young redhead who had lived there nearly all her life. Her path to that little black-and-white house was a long one. She was a good mother, and a homeowner. The little money she earned, she managed well: I still remember shopping with her in the grocery store over the New Hampshire state line—there’s no sales tax there. She’d push the cart along with her forearms, clutching a memo pad, a Bic pen, and a tiny pink calculator in her hands. Luxuries—new clothes, car stereo—were earned with patience, over long layaway periods, and everything was funded by the days she spent locked in a factory, her hands expertly whipping thread through fine leather shoes. The work was hard, but it was stable. She had good friendships with at least two of her six sisters, and a better one with her friend Linda, whom she had known since she was eight years old. We’d visit her on weekend afternoons and stay for hours, Linda’s charm and silliness unraveling the anxiety that Mom almost always held just below the surface.
Mom spent much of her life trying to find and keep good love—for her own sake and, she thought, for mine. She dealt with alcoholics, welfare cheats, hot tempers. She extracted promises of undying devotion that brought with them efforts at control and verbal abuse. After wisely divorcing my father, Tom, when I was still very young, she found Dale, a man who was unfailingly good to me, like a father should be, and good to her, too, but she lost him a few years later. Her next love was Tim, whom she longed for desperately but could not hold, like a comet that would swing close and then recede. And her last was Dennis, her fiancé at the time of her death, the most complicated of them all, the one that I will forever turn over and over in my mind. There were others, of course. She was a beautiful young woman who’d been taught that she needed a man. And they found her, for a night or a week or a few years. But she never found the one that she needed.
* * *
My mother was a very private person; exposure was the final indignity of her murder. Her violent end was illuminated in full detail for a hungry public. The curtains were stripped from her home; anyone could press their nose to the glass. But the beauty of her existence was not reported or filed, was not documented or reenacted on cable television; her light was blocked out by terror. I want to push away that darkness, to travel back through fear and reunite with her as she was before.
My mother gave birth to me when she was eighteen years old, and she was killed when she was just thirty. I began this story eighteen years after her death—when I myself was thirty. In that moment, we had lived without each other for an equal amount of time. A deep part of me had always suspected that I would never live longer than she had, that something would happen to ensure that I would never become older than her. But the months passed and I found myself living years she never had, years that had been impossible to imagine. I have worked to bring her forward into them, with me.
4
* * *
after
On the first m
orning after the murder, I awoke heavy and still, in my grandmother’s house. It felt as though only seconds had passed since I’d knocked on the door of the Venezia, and so I was spared the moment that so many talk about, when the brain forgets the tragedy in the first moments of waking and then the heart is crushed again by the realization of what has happened. I lay flat on my back under a staticky velour comforter in a room I’d once shared with my mother, before we bought our house. The bed that had been hers was now mine. I stared up at the ceiling and thought about how much energy it would take to move my body, and how I would have to keep moving, day after day after day.
I am forever grateful for the blank sleep of that first night, that perfectly dreamless stretch of mental silence. For if nightmares had come, I would have spent every night after fearing their return, and that fear would have been an open door, beckoning the shapes of darkness. As it was, there would be plenty of fear without the aid of dreams.
The rain had stopped and sunshine blared through the slatted blinds, obscenely bright—the blazing lurid sunshine that suffocates with humidity, unwelcome after a storm. I was alone in the room, and I could hear people in the kitchen, recognize the voices of a few of my aunts. We had left the hospital at six thirty, in the gray light of a rainy dawn. It was still not yet noon.
I had spent three timeless hours in the hospital, moving through a thick, underwater terror, everything slow and unreal. I remember a pediatric examination room. I sat on a cushioned, paper-covered table while a nurse took my blood pressure, shone a light for my eyes to follow. The other lights were dim; no fluorescent to blare down on me. The nurse made some notes, told me to lie back on the reclined table and just breathe quietly for a few minutes. As I did, I pictured Mom, or Mom’s body—I wasn’t sure which—lying on another table somewhere in the building, doctors and nurses and beeping machines working frantically over it. Over her.