by Sarah Perry
There were some good days, when Grace was fun, singing old show tunes while dancing around the kitchen making homemade doughnuts, or playing with their brown toy poodle, Coco. She was full of colorful idioms: she wasn’t usually vulgar, but often, when she had to use the restroom, she’d say, “I have to piss like a racehorse!” She’d come home from shopping, having talked someone into giving her a deal, and announce, “He gave me a rake-off!” Frequently, these sayings would come out confused, such as “That’s water over the bridge,” or “It’s not rocket surgery.”
Sometimes Grace would say something strange to someone and not realize it until later. She’d tell the kids about it, laughing at herself, and they’d laugh along with her. But then she would suddenly get mad and start crying, saying, “Oh, no! Are you laughing at me?” Her mood often turned swiftly, without warning. With her red hair, which she maintained with Clairol until the day she died, she looked like Lucille Ball. But Ray wouldn’t tolerate any of her silliness, her singing and dancing, so she could play only when he was out of the house.
At some point, the boys became too much trouble and they were sent to live with their nomadic father, Howard, who had run away to Texas. Finally, only three children were left at home: Tootsie, Gwen, and Crystal. Tootsie clashed most fiercely with Ray, and she passed the cruelty on down to her younger sisters, beating them up whenever she got the chance. In her early teens, she more or less moved in with the Wards, a nearby family with so many children they hardly noticed one more. Her memories of Ray seem more detailed, her accounts free of the circumspection I sense from the others; she once said that he hit her with electrical cords when she misbehaved. When I mention this to my other aunts, they don’t contradict her; they frown and tell me the problem was that Tootsie never learned to keep her mouth shut.
* * *
Gwen and Crystal, Grace’s two youngest girls, continued to raise themselves, mostly. The two were a cutely mismatched set, so close in age that some playfully called them “Irish twins.” Gwen was a soft-spoken brunette with small features and a halo of frizz, a cautious girl who liked to sew on her grandmother’s old Kenmore. Crystal was lanky and wilder, with carrot-orange hair and a forceful mind of her own. If one sister got something, the other had to have it, too; when it was Gwen’s birthday, Crystal also got a present. If the toys matched at first, they didn’t for long; Crystal would take out her things and use them up, tattering their edges and smudging their clean parts, while Gwen liked to put her belongings on a shelf so she could look at them and keep them nice and new and pretty. But the girls did everything together—they built a tree fort in the woods behind the house, rode their bikes for miles into town to get penny candy, swam together down at the nearby shore of Long Lake. They fought constantly, like many sisters, but they also tried to keep each other cheerful under the pressure of Ray’s control. Their mother always bought them matching outfits in slightly different colors, even though they insisted, “We’re not twins!” Their biggest difference was how they responded to Ray’s meanness, to their mother’s inability to protect them. Gwen learned to hide, wait it out. Crystal learned to escape. Gwen was lucky: at nineteen, she would meet a man named Dave—her safe harbor from that moment through today, a man who didn’t ask her to put up with the burdens that Howard and Ray had laid upon Grace. Crystal would have a harder time finding a good man to lean on, and would slowly, but too slowly, realize that she didn’t need to.
6
* * *
after
I have always remembered how the sunshine streamed in upon my first waking moment at Grammy’s in that little room I’d once shared with Mom, but now I find that history contradicts me. It was gray, still rainy, just as it was when we’d left the hospital. The sunshine must have been the world pressing in on me, all the sensation and noise and light that I wasn’t sure I could handle.
Gwen soon came in and encouraged me to put on a bathrobe and come out and eat. The bathrobe was Grammy’s—purple quilted polyester trimmed in scratchy lace. I had left the hospital in nurse’s scrubs, my own robe having become evidence. I found Grammy in the kitchen, wiping counter edges with the flat of her hand, straightening the line of cookie jars, uncharacteristically quiet. Someone placed a plain doughnut in front of me, the kind that comes in a plastic wrapper. I had eaten these often at Grammy’s, sometimes heated up in the microwave. She always let me eat as many as I wanted. I picked the doughnut up. I put it down. I couldn’t stand the thought of chewing, of transforming an object into blood and muscle; the idea was grotesque. I looked down at my bare legs, the blue shadows of veins under pale skin, and felt revulsion ripple through me. I pushed the little plate aside.
Within the hour, a woman named Cheryl Peters, a social worker employed by the state, arrived. She had a laptop with her and said I could play with it while she filled out some forms. The idea that I might want to play, that day or ever again, struck me as absurd. I could see that she meant to be kind, but I felt almost mocked: playing was for happy children. I didn’t touch the machine, but sat quietly on the bed. She asked me to tell her what had happened, and I recited the events of the night for her, even though I didn’t really understand what she was there to do. Later, she told a police officer that she had met my family and, according to his notes, said, “They were all losers.”
Shortly after, two police officers came, filling the tiny bedroom with their dark blue, rustling polyester uniforms. Several Bridgton officers had come to the Venezia, but these were new cops, state cops. One was Detective Dick Pickett, by then appointed leader of the investigation, a small, weaselly man with wire-rimmed glasses and a condescending manner. The other, Pat Lehan, I remember only as a generic cop figure, nodding along with Pickett. Lehan was one of more than two dozen policemen who would work on the case over the next twelve years, many of whom I would not meet and still know little about. I never spoke with Lehan again, but Pickett would stay in my life for some time, until the case got reassigned to someone else. On that first day, though, neither he nor I had any idea just how long our tense relationship would last.
I told Pickett and Lehan what had happened, focusing on one detail and then the next and then the next. Then we went over it again more carefully, Pickett stopping me repeatedly to ask questions, trying to get me to be more specific. I did my best to be thorough. Because I was a minor, Cheryl sat next to me while I answered questions. My aunts were left outside the door.
I was surprised to hear that there had been nothing wrong with the phones that night, and we have never really figured out why they didn’t work. Now, I have theories, and those must suffice. In the kitchen, I failed to put the phone back on the hook after it had fallen to the floor, after the beeping of the open line had turned to silence, and so there was no active line to call out on. If you’d like to make a call, you must hang up and try again. And then when I was about fifteen, I had a sudden, unbidden sense memory of having frantically dialed 991 from Mom’s room, rather than 911. The police have always been gracious on this point, have never dwelled on my failure to call out.
The phones are a failure of logic in the story; there is also a failure of memory. Although I could tell Pickett and Lehan everything that had happened from the moment Mom screamed that night, could march through every second and every detail, I could not remember the earlier part of the evening, before Mom and I had gone to bed. There was an utter blankness there, the terror of what came later destroying the final hours of our life together. The police wanted to know if Mom had seemed upset, if she had received any phone calls, when exactly she had gone to bed. No matter what they asked about those hours before the murder, or how hard I thought about them, I could not retrieve those details. It must have been clear to them that I would never get those hours back, because they were surprisingly merciful about them.
On all the other details, though, the investigators were relentless from the start. I gave Pickett all I had, but he wanted more.
“I really, really get the
sense that you know who was there,” he said. His attitude was slightly sarcastic, as though I were playing games with him and should cut it out. He raised his eyebrows and tilted his head back, inviting me to go ahead and give up my information.
When I described the sound of the kitchen drawer opening, of a knife being taken out, Pickett wondered how I knew it was a knife; the weapon had not been, and would never be, found. After I’d described, several times, the sounds of the stabbing and the silence that followed, he said, “Let me ask you this. How do you think your mother was hurt?”
Pickett found it suspicious that while I claimed I hadn’t seen the killing, I was sure that a knife had been taken out of our kitchen drawer. He kept asking me why I was so convinced that she had been killed with a knife, was unsatisfied when I said that just seemed the likeliest explanation. When he said, once more, “And what makes you think it was a knife?” I replied, “Because of the sound I heard, and, well, I don’t see how you could use a spoon or anything.” When I read the transcript of this interview years later, I found that response both obnoxious and wonderful. I was proud of my little-girl self for pushing back, even when she was most broken.
Pickett was interviewing me because I was the only witness, as well as the person who was closest to my mother, because the things I had to say were important. But still, he didn’t seem to really listen. He seemed to have already made up his mind, that very first day, about what had happened and who was responsible. His attitude implied that any answers that didn’t conform to his theory were mistaken, ridiculous. He asked me a long string of questions about Mom and Dennis’s fights. I said that Dennis had a temper, that they yelled a lot, and Pickett replied, illogically, “It sounds like you really think a lot of Dennis.”
Later in the interview, Pickett asked the question that most clearly told me that we would never understand each other. “Is it possible that the person that was there is somebody that you care a lot about and don’t want to get into trouble?” he said. “Even though, even though you know what happened was wrong?”
“I don’t know who it is,” I said once again, my voice straining with frustration. My love for my mother didn’t seem to matter much to Pickett; he was not going to assume that I cared more about her than about getting her killer “in trouble.” I realized that to the police—these people who had so much power—I was not a person who could be counted on to behave ethically. I looked at him, still not entirely sure he was serious. But he kept looking back at me, waiting.
I knew that the police and my family thought it would be additionally tragic if the killer was someone known to me, that they thought I would feel betrayed, confused, hurt. But I didn’t care if the killer was someone I knew, or someone I had previously cared about. Mom was dead. Nothing else had meaning. Whether it was a man I knew or a man I didn’t mattered very little in comparison with the fact that I would never see her again. It was one of the many things that no longer mattered at all.
I looked at Pickett’s impatient, self-assured face. “I don’t know,” I said again, slowly and clearly, while cursing my own ignorance. He and Lehan said they thought that maybe I had come out into the living room and seen the man’s face during the attack. But they offered no explanation for how I could have gotten out alive if I had. It was only my certainty that if I had I would have ended up dead that shielded me from a regret that would have torn me apart.
7
* * *
before
Fed up with Ray and her mother, Crystal once tried to run away on her bike—her goal being Glenice’s house, about fifty miles away. She was maybe ten years old; Glenice would have been nearly twenty-two. Crystal may not have understood how far the journey would be, but she knew how to get there because she had paid attention during weekend visits. She made it to the town of Norway, more than fifteen miles away, before night began to fall and Officer Bob Bell, recognizing the skinny, redheaded kid pedaling slowly along the shoulder and crying, picked her up and took her back home.
By the time she was fourteen, Crystal had grown from gangly to graceful, and her hair had shifted from carrots to sunset. She was already more or less living with other families, sharing friends’ bedrooms, avoiding home for days at a time. She’d started dating, and one afternoon, on one of the rare days that found her at the house, she headed out to meet a boy, but Ray decided he wanted her to stay.
Most of the time, Ray was glad for one less nuisance, but once a week or so, he’d get especially drunk and decide that he didn’t like the idea of the kids “running around,” even though when they stayed they could never be quiet enough.
Crystal probably told Ray some story about meeting up with Linda, but he wasn’t buying it; he told her she wasn’t going anywhere. He stared at her from his post near the door, waiting for her to back down or make a move. The boy was waiting; the timing was awful. She grabbed her bag and took long, quick strides across the kitchen, turning her face from her stepfather. Gloria, then twenty-seven years old, was visiting that day, and she sat silently at the kitchen table. She had a miserable look on her face but knew better than to try to help.
Crystal said, mostly to her sister, “Listen, I’ll see you guys later. Don’t wait up.” She tried to sound casual and brave. She had seen her older siblings do this—put their foot down, march right past the old man and let him unload after they slammed the door behind them. The aftermath wasn’t pretty, but she wouldn’t be there for it. She’d be free.
Just as she turned the hollow brass knob of the door, Ray reached out a strong, wiry arm. He threw it out, really, and Crystal thought that he was finally going to hit her. Gloria saw her flinch. They both knew that if he started, if he hit her once, he’d keep going. He’d been waiting a long time, after all. And she wasn’t a baby anymore.
Instead, his hand clamped down, hard, on Crystal’s skinny upper arm. He held her there, yelled that she was a slut, told her to go ahead and leave if she couldn’t do what he said in his house. He yelled a lot of things, punctuating his points with vicious shakes of her arm. But she didn’t hear him very well. His arm coming out so fast, and his hand gripping her so hard, had sent a hot wave of panic through her. He had scared her so much that she peed, standing right there in the kitchen. And then she couldn’t hear him. Her shame deafened her.
Finally, Ray let her go and pushed her outside. She stood on the porch for a moment, pants wet, then got on her bike and rode into town.
Crystal became more scarce, while Gwen stayed home and laid low, thinking, I only have a couple years until I can get out of here and go to college. She tried to keep out of Ray’s way as much as possible—a skill that Crystal never really had.
Gwen missed her little sister, only occasionally catching glimpses of her at school. One day there was a massive food fight in the cafeteria that quickly got out of hand. A boy named Larry threw a chair, and before she knew it Gwen was on the floor, bleeding from the head. She was dazed, but she would always remember Crystal running across the cafeteria, at her side before she could even start to get up. The sisters hadn’t spoken in weeks, but that moment of pain reunited them immediately, Crystal bending over her sister, oblivious to the blood staining her beautiful white pants. It was that image of the blood on the pants, Gwen says, that locked the moment into memory.
Crystal helped the teachers on duty press paper towels to Gwen’s head while someone ran to call the house, but she couldn’t go home with her sister. It was Ray who picked Gwen up, and for some reason he took her to his chiropractor, who made them wait through several other patients before stitching her up. Telling the story, Gwen laughs and says, “Why didn’t anybody in the waiting room see this kid bleeding and say, ‘Hey, go on ahead of me!’?” Like nearly all terrible stories in our family, this one is told with laughter. The chiropractor used a big, curved needle, and no anesthetic. Later that night, when she lay down to sleep, Gwen reached to the back of her head and felt wetness under her thick hair—she was still bleeding. Finally, h
er parents took her to the hospital, where the doctor on duty removed and replaced the chiro’s amateur stitches. Gwen couldn’t wash her hair for some time, so she wrapped a colorful scarf around her head and carried on. She refused to miss a day of school—she had perfect attendance every single year from eighth grade through graduation. No matter what happened, she kept studying, waiting for her chance. She’d go to college, maybe train to be a dental hygienist, like Glenice. She’d get a good job and a decent place to live, and then Crystal would come to live with her.
* * *
Once they were all adults, most of Grace’s children met every Thanksgiving and every Christmas, and eventually gathered once every summer around the pool Carol installed at her house in 1990—a sparkling, communal luxury. Complicated love compelled them to include Grace in these gatherings, and I wouldn’t hear of my grandmother’s negligence until I was a preteen. Ray was just a cranky voice in the other room, yelling at everyone to be quiet, until he died of emphysema in the late 1980s. And Howard was a dark ghost, rarely spoken of, his life ended by alcoholism, or a shotgun accident, or suicide, depending on who’s telling the story. Next to his body was a list of telephone numbers—people he’d failed to reach.