by Sarah Perry
Now I watch home movies of those annual family pool parties: Grammy waving coquettishly at the camera, Glenice taking center stage with a story, Wendall showing off his skillfully carved watermelon—one year a pig with a curly tail, one year a Bud-weis-er frog. There was always a prize for anyone who could guess the watermelon before he unveiled it. My mother wanders in and out of frame, ever thin and energetic, with a flat-footed walk and a ready smile. Gloria teases her affectionately, Carol’s husband jokingly mimes throwing her in the pool, Glenice and Gwen flank her for a photo, arms looped around her thin waist. Almost everyone has a good job, a stable home, a quiet life. There is a lot of love in these videos, a sense of hard-earned relaxation.
It is breathtaking to look back and watch them, so carefree, so young. The parties of recent years are more subdued; there is a sense of lost, irretrievable magic. I can’t remember the last time anyone even bothered to make a video. Glenice now says, “We all struggled so hard, and we all made it, and then that happened. We all made it but your mother.”
8
* * *
after
Dick Pickett was followed by more cops on that first day, and still more the day after. More than any single conversation, I remember my exhaustion, and everyone else’s. I remember my red-eyed aunts coming to me and announcing the arrival of more officials, clearly torn, hesitant to hand me over to the scrutiny of strangers. They explained repeatedly that I had to do my best to help whoever came, underestimating my eagerness to do so. If I just kept talking, I thought, the cops might find the person who had done this. But I did keep track of how often I was interviewed: nineteen times in those first three days. By the end there was nothing left of me; I was only this story of an evening. I felt like life would not continue past that night, beyond this retelling.
The police told me it was very important that I not share the details of what I had witnessed with anyone but them and other officials, because there were things that only the killer and I could know. We had to ensure that if someone other than me revealed any of that information, it would be incriminating. So the killer and I were bound by a dark connection that only the police could see. I didn’t discuss the events of that night with anyone in the family, and no one asked me questions. I couldn’t figure out if they were trying to avoid upsetting me or if they couldn’t handle hearing my answers.
I was also informed that the men who had loved Mom—Tom, Dale, Tim, Dennis—were all suspects, so I shouldn’t have contact with any them, just in case. I wasn’t tempted.
At some point, the police asked me to write down what had happened that night. I have a photocopy of this now. I’m struck by the careful, freshly learned cursive, the stiff, formal language revealing my desire for precision. My final sentence is written slightly larger, in block letters, and underlined: “I do not know who committed the crime.”
I recently asked Glenice to describe how I looked and acted that first day. When she answered, she spoke in a halting manner very different from the voluble expressiveness I’m used to. She said, “You looked like you hadn’t slept in a week . . . I don’t know . . . but you just—like your eyes looked, well . . . sunken in and you looked white as a ghost. And you were sweating—sweating and hot.” I hear compassion in her words, but fear in her pauses. I can imagine that to get closer to me would have been to get closer to what had happened.
* * *
That first full night, Gwen and her fiancé, Dave, took Glenice and me to their apartment to sleep—we were to share the big brass bed in the spare room. I remember Glenice cracked, worn down, emptied out. When we got to the apartment, she said she had to brush her teeth right away: “I’ve been crying so much, my mouth tastes like the bottom of a birdcage.” It was such a strange and perfect image; I remembered it forever.
We spent the next few days and early evenings at Grammy’s, gathering there with her and my uncle Wendall and his wife Jane, who stayed there with her overnight. After sunset, we did our best to numb out in front of the television. We watched Roseanne and other sitcom reruns, not speaking much, trying to set our brains on automatic, running the grooves of the familiar stories. But we couldn’t escape the teasers for the six o’clock, then the eleven o’clock, news, flashing into view at the very beginning of every commercial break, too quickly for us to change the channel. Even when we grew to expect the footage we would see for weeks, no one got up to turn the knob. We couldn’t admit that openly the power those images had over us. It somehow seemed undignified.
The video showed my black-and-white house behind bright yellow tape. It showed men in uniform carrying a gurney out the front door, a black body bag distorted to a shape I didn’t understand. There was a strange lump in the middle, and a hollow to one side. I tried not to analyze that shape, just as I tried to ignore the fact that it was daylight by the time the news vans took that shot. I tried not to think of the intervening hours. Of the school bus driver slowing to pick me up that morning, then pulling away. My classmates pressing their faces to the foggy windows.
I didn’t know then that the shape on that gurney was the curve of her hip, that she had been carefully lifted and transported as she fell, so her body could tell the story of what had happened to it. All I knew was that it was not the shape of a restful body, that it looked unnatural in a way I didn’t want to think too much about. She seemed exposed; all the other body bags I’d seen on the news had been flat. I hated the idea of thousands of television viewers being able to trace some curve of her, as though all the desirous eyes that had followed her in life would never cease looking.
That body bag also featured prominently on the front page of the Bridgton News, in a bleak, sad image that took up almost all the space above the fold. I was furious about this, that we could not go downtown without seeing that picture in store windows and on racks next to the checkout line. I’ve since spoken to the reporter responsible, Lisa Ackley. I was surprised when she mentioned that shot before I even asked about it, telling me how she had fought to have it included. “This is a family newspaper,” her editor had countered. “We don’t run things like that.” But Lisa had refused to pretend nothing had happened, to help cover it up just to make readers more comfortable. “People have to know,” she said. “People have to know exactly what this person did.” Now that I’ve spoken with so many people who will refer to the murder only as “what happened,” or “the incident,” or even “the accident,” I understand.
* * *
Throughout those first weeks, I became fixated on an image: the inside of my head filling with a viscous blackness, insanity as matter, crowding my mind into a tight corner. I knew I had to keep the blackness contained or it would take over; it would suffocate me entirely. I so terribly feared insanity. The part of me that had seen the huge insect in the dark arms of the clock that night, that had heard that sturgeon thrashing on the floor, had to be locked up so it couldn’t take over. I considered restraint and control my best defenses. So mostly I did not cry. Mostly I stayed calm. Cheryl, the social worker, said that her teenage daughter thought I mourned “with grace,” and I thought that was the kindest thing someone could say about me. I wondered, though, how Cheryl’s daughter knew anything about it.
But the Blackness, as I thought of it then, wasn’t just insanity. I could feel that what the killer had done had gotten inside of me. I had seen what a person could do and I could never unsee it; I was unclean, poisoned. I looked into my pupils in the mirror and there seemed to be no bottom to the black. Just as much as I feared him out in the world, I feared him within me.
The worst part of feeling poisoned was that it seemed to wipe out anything in me that was gentle and intelligent and funny—all the things my mother had loved about me. I was devastated to think that if she had ever been able to come back, I might already be unrecognizable to her.
* * *
Despite my attempts at control, there were moments of breakage. One came the night after the murder, or the night after that. We we
re sitting around Grammy’s dining room table—Gwen and Glenice and I, and Carol and Grammy. I was trying to eat something. The idea of my body and its processes still disgusted me. I would look at my calves, shaped just like hers, and they would seem like flesh, like meat, like something that could be dead and inert tomorrow. Grinding an object with my teeth, swallowing its paste, adding yet more to this body—this vulgar, heavy, gross thing I had to carry around—was gruesome. Even showering was difficult: faced with my solid, naked self, having to touch and attend to limbs, belly, to my useless feet, still raw from the run to get help, I shut down completely, stood staring for minutes at a time. My body persisted as a living, warm vehicle, while hers had become a thing under a tarp. The blood flowing neatly through my veins gave me a feeling of horror, a sense of invasion. I didn’t feel like I inhabited a living body so much as a temporarily animated corpse.
But I tried. My aunts told me I needed my strength, and I agreed. The meal that night was something I loved, one of my favorites, a leftover from the days of sitting happily with Grammy, a stuffed animal in my lap. Fish sticks and mashed potatoes, maybe. A meal that would have brought joy even a week before. Now I could only eat a bite of it before I had to stop.
Little things can, for moments, carry the full force of tragedy. I looked at this meal and it was all the childhood happiness I’d ever enjoyed and would never feel again, and I started to cry. And as I cried, I thought about how some person—not a tornado or a hurricane or a car crash or a fire, but a person—had taken her away from me, had robbed me of everything, and a great, furious wave suddenly swept over me. “I can’t eat! I can’t fucking eat!” I screamed. “Why would someone do this? Why! Why the fuck did this happen?! FUCK HIM! FUCK HIM!”
I kept on like this, banging the table with my fist. I could see that my aunts and my grandmother were terrified, and I ran with it. I wanted someone else to be afraid, I wanted someone else to feel everything spin entirely out of control. The fact that I had no face upon which to focus my hatred only intensified it. I raged at my helplessness, and at the fact that no one around me knew what they were talking about. My aunts’ attempts to soothe me only made me angrier. “You don’t fucking understand!” I told them, although they would have admitted that themselves. But I was beyond being fair. I was nearly blacked out.
Somewhere within me, though, I could see myself breaking down. As I burned off some of my trapped energy, that calmer, older self came out and shone a light in my head: I couldn’t let him do this to me. I could not let the shadow take over.
Just then, Grammy approached me with some pills. I was sobbing but no longer banging the table, and I saw her hand shake as she laid them in front of me. I picked up my glass of water and took them, didn’t ask what they were, didn’t pay attention to how many. I had always had a childish difficulty swallowing pills, but now I opened up and threw them down my throat. I became quiet immediately, all the fight leaving me as quickly as it had entered. The pills could not have worked that fast; I was just too tired to go on. Defeated. I didn’t look at anyone’s face. I got up from the table and headed for the living room couch, and as I did, I saw on the kitchen counter the box from which the pills had come. Cold medicine. They truly did not know what to do.
9
* * *
before
I never asked Mom about the early days of her marriage; any mention of my father, Tom, upset her, made her irritable and withdrawn. I think she felt that my rare questions about him implied that she wasn’t enough on her own. I had a couple of thin photo albums, plastic pages brittle with age, some hazy early-childhood memories, and that was all. They’d divorced when I was five, and Tom and I had only sporadic contact after that, and none after Mom died. And so, after eighteen years of silence, I decided to contact him, to ask him about Mom’s youth, about their seven-year marriage. I tried to put her descriptions of him out of my mind. Other people have often told me that my father is a surprisingly likable man, with a disarmingly friendly voice. “Tom’s a decent guy,” they’ll say, “when he isn’t drinking.”
We arranged for me to pick him up in a pharmacy parking lot. He was the sheepish man with the worn red cheeks. We went to his brother’s girlfriend’s apartment, a clean, cozy space. He told me he’d borrowed a nice shirt for the day. As he spoke, I found myself smiling at him, trying to put my finger on the familiar quality of his voice. It made me think of stock characters from old movies. A gentle farmer in a drought year. A noble con taking the fall for his buddy. But it didn’t quite fit any trope I could call up. I finally had to admit that his voice must have gotten into me when I was new to the world, trusting and fresh. That the exact timbre of it took me back to something simpler, despite everything that had happened.
We both knew I had to be the one to call first, just as we both knew I was searching for her, not for him. But now he calls on holidays, on my birthday. He has my address. We chat about the weather, and job prospects. I try to ignore the sense that I’m betraying her by speaking to him. It is the first thing I have done that I am sure would contradict her wishes. He and I dance carefully around each other, both wondering when I might suddenly feel like throwing a punch.
* * *
According to Tom, my parents met at a party.
It was at a camp down on the shores of Long Lake, a boxy place covered in cedar shingles darkened by moisture and time, the unheated rooms full of teenagers smoking weed and drinking Bud and Coors, Led Zeppelin on the crackly radio, shirtless boys jumping off the dock out in the dark.
Or maybe it was at somebody’s house downtown, parents gone for the weekend, records on a turntable, liquor cabinet busted open, cigarette ash ground into beige shag. High schoolers, dropouts, early-twenties road crew members, little siblings too young to be there.
Or it was in an apartment on Lower Main Street, in the broad middle of a Sunday, afternoon light filtering through clouds of smoke, music cranked up loud, people leaning and calling over rickety porch railings. Calls around to friends for more beer, stocked up: no liquor sales on the holy day. Wild teens, kids scurrying underfoot, adults home, but not from any job. Harder drugs available in the kitchen.
Mom wore high-waisted, faded bell-bottoms, or a ruched sundress in dark blue calico, or brown peg-leg pants and a halter. Tom wore jeans and a dark T-shirt with a pocket. Or a flannel. And boots.
He can’t quite remember the details; all of these are equally probable Bridgton stories. But he knows Mom was with another girl, probably Linda. The two of them would have been a beautiful sight, Linda’s soft brown curls complementing Mom’s bright red perfectly. It was very early summer—Mom’s freckles were starting to multiply, and Linda was taking on the brown of what would become a lifelong tan.
But Tom does remember the moment he saw Mom for the first time. He was immediately captivated: she was, as he says, “drop-dead gorgeous.” He walked over to her and started talking, about any old thing. She had a great sense of humor, and he was especially impressed by her intelligence, how she expressed herself precisely and fully and didn’t dumb anything down, even at a party. He told her, “You are something special,” and I can imagine her then, a skinny young teen, pretending not to be overwhelmed by his attention but still impressed by his direct confidence, a rarity in teenage boys. He said, right there, the very first time he met her, that he wanted to be with her. He knew a little about her family, knew there was trouble and unrest, if not outright abuse. He wanted to take care of her. It didn’t much matter that she was already dating someone, some guy called Junior, one of the multitude of Knight boys, well-known troublemakers in town. He considered this a minor obstacle.
Tom Perry had the thickest, shiniest black hair Crystal had ever seen. He was a little older—eighteen to her fifteen—with a wide, open face and small eyes that crinkled at the corners. He had friendly round cheeks and the muscular shoulders of a man who reaches under car hoods all day. She could smell motor oil on him, just faintly, a sweet, inviting smell, t
he smell of a man who took care of things, who could fix what was broken. He looked only at her when he spoke, nothing else competing for his attention.
Tom stole her away from Junior rather easily. He was charming and good-looking, with steady work and his own place. He’d been on his own since he was fourteen. He rented a trailer near the elementary school, close to the Black Horse Tavern, one of the town’s nicest restaurants, a place marked with a carved-wood sign that hung from fine chains, where locals mingled with the well-dressed summer people from Boston. He was a way out, a way to avoid living under Ray’s roof ever again. She moved into his place a couple of weeks after meeting him.
Tom drank and liked to have a good time, but he had a good reputation in town as a hard worker and a fair man, someone who didn’t take handouts and treated people well. These facts compensated for his occasional hell-raising—mostly fighting. Cops were rarely called, and when they were it was only to break things up when they didn’t resolve on their own. It wasn’t the sort of town where you talked out your differences, and Tom, raised with four brothers in the woods to the north, fit right in.
When Grace called the police, saying that her daughter had run off with this grown man, the cops took a look at the situation: Crystal wasn’t the first Farnum girl to start partying, to run from the house and from Ray. Officer Bell, who had picked her up in Norway as a skinned-kneed ten-year-old, was now chief of the Bridgton force, and he and others had reluctantly delivered the girls back home time and again. At Tom’s, Crystal was behaving: she went to school every day, got good grades. Chief Bell told her mother, “She’s doing fine, Grace. Just leave her be.”