by Sarah Perry
But Mom was known as one of the fastest in the Shop, a naturally skilled sewer who remained dedicated to making the most of a difficult job. She and her friend Penny had benches next to each other, and sometimes they would race, others nearby cheering them on. Penny is a muscular, tough woman, and my slender, smiling mother always kept up with her, beat her half the time. Reasonably talented hand-sewers could do about three cases in a day; Mom usually did four. The annual difference could be up to five thousand dollars.
By a conservative estimate, Mom drew three million arcs through the hot, dusty air over those twelve years, each firm tug spreading tension through her neck and shoulders, each repetition inflaming her wrists. She arrived every weekday at six in the morning and went home at four thirty, starting and ending her day earlier than others so she could be home for me in the evening. She was on her feet all those hours; the Shop provided stools, but almost everyone sewed faster when standing.
To further improve her rate, Mom pre-threaded her needles at home. Each week, she brought home a bag filled with long, white skeins of rough string. The ends were ragged and fuzzy, and each unraveled tip had to be waxed before it could be threaded through the eye of the thick silver needles she used. Sitting on the couch watching TV, or on the porch watching me, she pulled the long tail of each thread across the palm of a hand that held a small cake of soft wax, then pushed the tamed end through a needle. Next she bent the free end back along the string and twisted it into the wax there so the needle was firmly secured. She repeated the process until the bundle was finished, a hundred or more needles clicking together in a sharp bouquet.
Mom could hold a conversation or sing along softly to the radio as she waxed, her hands moving independent of her attention. As I got older, she’d sometimes accept my clumsy help, and I’d sit on the floor chewing my lip, trying to wax with her graceful whipping motion, chunks of wax sticking to the string and impeding my progress or flying off onto the carpet. Another daughter of the Shoe Shop recently told me about waxing with her mother, and I was overwhelmed by a sudden, painful feeling of sisterhood.
For a time, Linda worked at the Shop, too, and Mom must have been happy to have her company. But hand-sewing was too hard for Linda, too painful and tiring, and she soon left. When I knew Linda, she worked for a landscaping company, which tells me something about how hard hand-sewing must have been. She watched helplessly as the Shop wore down Crystal’s body, each year bringing with it new kinds of pain.
One day, Mom pulled a stitch taut and felt a huge snap at the base of her neck. From then on, she saw a chiropractor regularly, a tall, thin, gray-haired man with the aspect of an undertaker. He leaned over her small frame, bending her limbs and audibly cracking her bones while I sat in a chair next to the tall table he laid her out on. I didn’t like how he smelled—like dusty corners and unnameable chemicals—and my mother’s bare skin seemed disturbingly out of place in the brown, closed room, rather than out in the summer sunshine. Near the end of the appointment, he placed two flat plastic pads on her back, then left the room for a while. I sat alone with her for five or ten minutes that felt like an eternity while a rhythmic hum pulsed from a big metal box on the floor, wires leading from it to those plastic pads. I didn’t dare to interrupt her trancelike silence and instead sat there sweating lightly and hoping for the humming to end soon. I always worried that the doctor would forget to come back, that I’d have to pull the pads off before my mother was slowly electrocuted as she slept, like an animal gently boiled alive in an increasingly hot pot. I wasn’t sure how I would know when I should intervene. I felt a flooding relief when the doctor came back and removed the pads, when Mom pulled her shirt back on and stood up to leave.
I always understood that my mother worked very hard. But it is only now that I can appreciate her determination, that to work as quickly and as consistently as she did meant re-dedicating herself each day, each hour, each minute, to pushing through boredom and physical pain and sometimes despair. She didn’t do this for herself; she did it for me. Those years constitute a sacrifice that I could not repay, even if she were still here, but I am bereft that I never got to try. And after she died, the Shop’s profit-sharing plan meant that she would support me for years after her death. The Shop paid us better after she was gone than while she was alive.
The Shoe Shop was razed years ago, and now a chain supermarket stands in its place. My aunts and I have all made the pilgrimage, stood in the cereal aisle and wondered where the ghost of her workbench resides. As a child, I went to the Shoe Shop only a handful of times, and wasn’t permitted very far into the building. I remember it as a loud cavern full of dangerous-looking machinery and sad-looking parents. Despite her skill and speed, Mom always wanted to escape to something else, a job where she could use her brain, or at least sit down. But Bridgton had little to offer, so she was stuck with the tedious days and the grinding years of the Shop. By the end, she was generally healthy but plagued by her chronic back and neck aches, along with carpal tunnel and migraines. Her hands were whittled down by constant work, fingers bone-thin, the knuckles forever swollen—the only part of her that would ever age.
10
* * *
after
Word of the murder spread fast that morning, like poison released on a wind. Sandy, one of Mom’s closest friends from the Shop, was just about ready to leave her house in Casco, two towns to the south, and head to work when her ex-husband, Randy, came walking over from his trailer next door. Randy was a reasonable man, and he and Sandy had remained friends after their divorce, living close to each other so it would be easier on their children—a girl around my age and a younger boy.
When Randy came over that morning, he said a bewildering thing. He said a friend of his, a police officer, had called and told him that Crystal was dead. That she had been killed.
Sandy’s disbelief was so pure that at first she didn’t feel much at all. “Nooo,” she said. “Nah, that can’t be. There’s been some kind of mistake. Our Crystal?”
Randy said there hadn’t been a mistake, but Sandy still didn’t believe him. “There must be some miscommunication,” she said. He kept saying it was true: Crystal Perry was dead.
Suddenly, Sandy didn’t want to go to work. The Shoe Shop was the absolute last place she wanted to go. Because she knew. She knew if she went to work, this would be real.
She sat down for a minute on her porch. The weathered boards were dewy, and she could feel the moisture through her jeans. Maybe she should just stay home today. But of course, she couldn’t. She had to go see, to prove this was all just a big scare. She’d go and Crystal would be there and everything would be just as it always had been.
Sandy got in her car and wound up the dirt road leading to Route 302, pebbles crunching under her tires. She forgot to turn the radio on.
She drove over the Casco line to Naples. She drove over the causeway, Sebago Lake on one side, Brandy Pond on the other, and watched the gray sky gradually lighten over the dark water. Last night’s bad weather looked like it would stay.
Crystal was always at her bench, right across the way, when Sandy arrived in the morning. Always. As Sandy drove, she kept picturing Crystal standing there, how she would look up and give her that pretty, slightly crooked smile. She thought about how Crystal’s red hair stood out as soon as you walked in. In ten or fifteen minutes, Sandy would arrive at the Shop, she’d walk in the door, and Crystal would be right there, sewing away. If she could just walk in and see her, she would know that Randy was mistaken. If she could just see her.
* * *
Linda’s boyfriend, Mike Douglas, left her house that morning at about five o’clock to make the two-hour drive to his job at Bath Iron Works, where he was a welder who helped build massive warships. He left Linda in bed; she wouldn’t have to get up for another hour or so. Mike was near the Bridgton–Naples line when blue lights suddenly filled the cabin of his truck. He pulled over, confused, pretty sure he hadn’t done anything wrong.
The cop who walked up to his window was a guy he knew, Gary Chadbourne.
“Listen,” Gary said. He pulled back a little, cleared his throat. “Listen, Mike, Crystal Perry’s . . . been killed. Last night. We need you to tell Linda. We need you both to come up to Crystal’s house for questioning.”
Mike drove straight back to Linda’s house. She was in a deep sleep. She heard him as though he was underwater. “Linda . . .” And then, sharper, cutting through the fog, “Linda. Wake up.” His voice was loud, urgent. What the hell could he want? Why was he back already?
He told her, the words feeling false and strange in his mouth. “What?! What?” she said. She was angry, confused. It hit her all at once, made her feel like she was coming apart. She kept asking Mike questions he couldn’t answer. He told her that they had to go to Crystal’s, right away, to talk to the police. He helped her get up, get dressed. He walked her to his truck and drove her over.
They parked on the side of the road a short distance from Crystal’s house. The scene was something out of a nightmare, out of a movie. A fleet of white police cars and other official-looking vehicles lined the sandy shoulder of the road, and Crystal’s little car was eclipsed by a large van parked behind it. Huge lettering across the van’s back doors read CRIME SCENE UNIT. Yellow police tape glowed in the deep gray morning fog.
Before Linda could get out of the vehicle, a cop knocked on her window, motioned for her to come with him. They sat in his police cruiser; he told her he just had a few questions. She sat in the front, in the passenger seat. Every few minutes, she nervously glanced over at Crystal’s house, about fifty feet away.
The officer was Charles Stevens, another in a long line of cops who scrambled to learn all they could in those early days and weeks. Linda began by telling Stevens that she and Crystal were best friends, that their birthdays were six days apart. In interview after interview, she would make sure that her listener knew they were best friends, that Crystal was her only best friend.
She immediately mentioned Crystal’s fiancé, Dennis: his quick, fierce temper. She described a call she’d received a few weeks prior. Crystal was crying and frantic; she sounded a little afraid. She and Dennis had gotten into a terrible fight, a screaming match that ended with him grabbing her arm while punching the steel kitchen door. He flung her away from him, then stormed off, leaving her alone in a dark house.
Linda had insisted on coming over, but at this Crystal calmed down, said she was all right. No need to come over, no need to do anything so drastic. There was a limit to how much she would let Linda help. She just wanted to talk. One of her biggest concerns, she said, was that she couldn’t afford to replace things that he broke around her house, and she knew that he couldn’t, either. But sitting in the police car, Linda told Stevens how hard Dennis could punch.
“You guys have to look at that door,” she said. “The kitchen door—it’ll still have knuckle prints in it.” Crystal must have been looking right at them while she assured Linda she was all right. “He wasn’t the right man for her,” Linda added, and this profound understatement seems to reveal a desperate wish: that she had been more forceful when trying to convince Crystal to leave him.
Stevens asked about the last time Linda saw her friend, needed her to tell him the exact day. I imagine her haltingly figuring this out, voice shaking: “Um, it was a Friday, a coupla weeks ago, we went out for drinks. End of the month. Maybe it was Sat—No, no, I went to work that day. Friday . . .”
Stevens would have shifted some papers around on the dash, then opened the car’s inner console and pulled out a small calendar. Flipped back to April. “April 29th?”
“Yes. Yes, that was it. April 29th.” And the date would stay with her always.
Mike had injured his back that day, but he told Linda to go on out and have a good time. She and Crystal went to the three most popular bars in the area around Bridgton: the lounge of the Laurel Lea inn, on the north end of town, then Tommy’s, a dive bar in Naples, just to the south near Casco, then Rick’s Café, also in Naples, on the shore of Sebago Lake. It was weekly karaoke night at the Laurel Lea, but they weren’t singers. They had one beer and left. Tommy’s was too quiet; they didn’t stay there long, either. Rick’s was more lively, so they stayed awhile. A few people would later report that seeing them there was the last time they saw Crystal alive. One, Wendy Avery, the mother of two close friends of mine, asked her if she was still dating Dennis, and she said that she was trying to end the relationship. It wasn’t fair, Crystal said, for her daughter to see her and Dennis argue so viciously.
At the end of that night, the two women went back to Linda’s house. Linda told Stevens that they talked mostly about me. Mom told Linda that I was doing very well in school, that she was proud of me. She said the school wanted to advance me two grades the next year, so I would skip seventh. On the last day she was alive, she would send me to school with a sealed note giving them permission to do so. I read most of it on the bus, pressing the plain envelope to the damp, rattling window. Without this small transgression, these police notes, reaching me so many years later, would have been the first I’d heard of it. She knew I’d be excited, was just waiting for the right moment to tell me.
In the ambulance earlier that morning, Officer Kate had kept me talking, casually, asking about whatever came to mind. My heartbeat had been wild and erratic, my mind crowded with thoughts, sifting through recent days like the fodder of dreams. One of the first things I told her was that I would be skipping a grade in school. For years, whenever I thought about this, it would strike me as a shallow, self-congratulatory thing to have brought up, but I forgave my childish bragging because I had been in shock. Now, though, it makes sense. I was already grasping at school as a way forward, a way out.
That final night they saw each other, Mom repeated to Linda what she’d told Wendy: that she was going to break up with Dennis, mostly because of his terrible temper. I imagine them sitting together in Mom’s little black car. It’s past one o’clock—closing time in Maine—and they don’t want to go inside and risk waking Mike. Linda faces the windshield but occasionally turns to watch Crystal’s expression in the dim light cast from a single bulb mounted on the garage. She can just see her friend’s freckles.
Linda and Mom also talked about my plans to go to college—something few people we knew had done. She knew that leaving Dennis would make this more likely; she knew we both needed peace and stability. She wanted to be strong enough to leave him, to improve our life together, make college and other good things more possible.
Mom and Linda would never see each other again. The next Friday, the weekend before the Wednesday night murder, Linda missed a call. Crystal left an answering machine message, saying only that she wanted to talk.
Linda would never know what Crystal had wanted to talk about, or whether she was in some kind of trouble that Friday night. Whether she needed her. And because Linda didn’t call back that week, she never got to speak to her again. I wonder how long she kept that message. If she might even still have the tape.
* * *
This interview is only a glimpse. In his report of their conversation, Detective Stevens did not paraphrase Linda’s tone of voice, her tears or lack of tears, her rage or confusion or helplessness. I can only imagine what she said, and how she said it, based on the shadow of the woman I knew so long ago.
But the “just the facts, ma’am,” approach that kept Stevens from noting Linda’s emotions in his report is unevenly applied. In the wake of a violent crime, people’s deepest hopes and desires become a matter of official concern. Privacy erodes from day one. The end of the interview lays both of them bare:
“Both she and Crystal had talked of committing suicide because they have been very low emotionally in the past. Crystal would never do anything like that because she was always there for Sarah.” Linda did not expect to be the one left behind.
On the interview summary, there’s nothing written next to “End time,” but
I imagine the sun coming up, the gray light turning whiter and whiter, the rain backing off.
Occasionally, Linda would see a policeman enter or leave our house through the front door, the one we hardly ever used. They still hadn’t told her just how Crystal died.
* * *
Back over in Casco, Penny, the friend who raced Mom while hand-sewing, had just gotten out of the shower, at about five thirty, when she heard somebody banging on her door. She rushed out to her kitchen to see four police officers standing there under her porch light. When she let them in, they immediately started asking her if anyone disliked her friend Crystal. Besides Chief Bell, there were two state troopers and a county cop, which seemed like a lot of people to question one person. She had trouble answering them clearly without knowing why they were asking. They asked a few more questions and finally she said, “What’s going on here?”
Chief Bell told her: Crystal had been killed.
Penny’s first thought was for me. The cops assured her that I was with my aunts and my grandmother. They asked about Crystal’s ex-husband, Tom, and Penny was still preoccupied with me when she answered: “I know Crystal wouldn’t want Sarah living with him. Just make a promise, right now, that she won’t go there.”