by Sarah Perry
They couldn’t promise her that, of course. They said something noncommittal, moved on. They asked her question after question. Penny’s mind raced as she tried to provide clear answers. Finally, they left. The moment they pulled out of the driveway, Dennis appeared at her door. Penny lived alone. He must have been sitting across the street, she thought, waiting until everybody left.
When Penny told me about that day, I asked, “How did you feel, with him standing in your house?” This was a sideways way of asking her if she thought Dennis—who was an old friend of hers—was capable of murder, and we both knew it. She said, “I didn’t know what he was gonna say to me. But he just pulled me into a great big hug and asked me what he was gonna do with the rest of his life.” Still, she was a nervous wreck with him standing there, showing up so suddenly. “I didn’t know if he was the one that told the cops to come to my house, and that’s why he followed—I just didn’t know. It just seemed like he was sitting somewhere, waiting.”
For a while, Dennis had worked at the Shop with Penny and Mom, and, like Linda, Penny was plenty familiar with Dennis’s temper, his furious explosions when Mom displeased him or the Shop’s machinery defied him. When I asked Penny how often he had these meltdowns, she said, “Maybe once a day . . . maybe three, four times a week—usually once a day, y’know.” Even though I’d heard about these tantrums by then, I’d expected her to say about once a month. Moments later she said, “He loved your mother. They were gonna get married.”
Penny estimated that Dennis stayed at her house for about an hour and a half that morning. “He just couldn’t pull himself together,” she said. “He just wouldn’t leave.”
Penny didn’t bother going to work that day. She didn’t take her son to the babysitter’s. She stayed in her house and wondered how this could have happened.
But she went back to work the next day, and every time she looked up from sewing, Crystal’s bench was empty. It was the strangest, most terrible sight. And it remained empty. It was empty during the ice storm of 1998 and it was empty when her son graduated high school. It was empty as the other benches emptied around the last remaining hand-sewers, as shoe production went overseas and the end of the Shop drew near.
11
* * *
before
Mom and Tom were separated for about a year before divorcing, and it was probably during this time that she met a young man named Dale Morton. The meeting itself was unexceptional—two attractive young people, a dark bar, plenty of beer, a careful drive back to his place—but from that night on they fell into step. He had sandy, light brown hair, kind pale blue eyes, and a bristly mustache. He was tan from fishing and canoeing on quiet lakes. He was laid-back and quick to laugh, a mellow drinker who must have seemed like a safe harbor after Tom’s volatile outbursts. Their mutual attraction quickly became love, and right before I started kindergarten, we moved into a tiny house with him, on Route 302 near the southern edge of town.
Dale had suffered a back injury while working construction a few years earlier; he lived on state workers’ compensation checks while awaiting a settlement from his former employers. He spent his days gardening and fishing and working on a couple of beat-up Firebirds—one dull brown, one metallic speedboat teal—he kept in front of our house. He taught me the function of a carburetor when I was just a little kid.
Dale took me with him on long walks in the woods, teaching me the names of trees and birds, and he cleared a spot in front of our house for me to plant orange and yellow marigolds. That first house, the first place I have real memories of, was so run-down we called it the Dump. It was brown and squat, with an attached garage that was collapsing in on itself, too dangerous to enter and home to a colony of bats that came swooping out against the pink sky at dusk. I fell asleep every night to the whoosh of cars on Route 302, a few dozen feet away. The house had two tiny bedrooms, a seventies-yellow kitchen, and a bathroom so moldy that the floor bowed even under my weight. In the center was a living room and a woodstove, our only source of heat. Mom constantly warned me not to touch the stove’s black iron belly, but when I got a little older I was allowed to feed twists of newspaper into the fire, or dig in the glowing coals with a long, heavy poker.
One morning, soon after we moved in, some commotion woke me up and I shuffled out into the living room to find Dale pulling a snake down from a gap between the ceiling planks. I was too sleepy to be scared; he was like a hero in a dream.
We lived in the Dump for about three years. It was where Mom and Dale enjoyed the early days of their love, and where I spent the happily simple first days of my childhood. For my sixth birthday, Mom and Dale redecorated my bedroom, installing rose-colored carpet and putting up dreamy wallpaper I’d picked out myself: puffy pink clouds with V-shaped birds scattered in the distance, an endless beach sunrise. We kept the curtain of bamboo beads that served as my door; I liked the gentle clicking noises they made when I walked through, and the fact that they let in the sounds of the television in the living room. Every night I fell asleep to the Cheers closing credits, or the M*A*S*H opening theme song. I had a little TV, too—black-and-white, with a big metal antenna—and all the stuffed animals I wanted. During the day I spent long hours playing school—filling stacks of paper with wavy crayon “writing”—or catching caterpillars in the yard.
Living with Dale allowed Mom to settle in, and finally she bought a little black Ford Tempo after saving up for the down payment. That car was so simple, a small four-door in a basic shape, but I thought it was the coolest thing, with its sunroof and red vinyl interior.
When the Dump felt too cramped, especially in the hot, muggy summer, the three of us would go on long drives, in the Tempo or in whichever Firebird was running. We would go to the beach near Portland, spending long, sunburned hours on the yellow sand. I would bodysurf the waves with Dale and take long walks down the horizon with Mom. Or we’d head to New Hampshire and wind along the mountainous roads of the Kancamagus Highway, stopping occasionally to splash in glacier-cold river waters.
Meanwhile, Tom had gone out west, was roaming from one odd job to another, impossible to track down for weeks at a time. Mom filed for divorce, citing abandonment. The fact that he didn’t show up for the hearing only strengthened her case. It’s possible she began dating Dale before their official separation, but even Tom admits now that he abandoned her long before he left town.
But around the time I entered first grade, he returned to Bridgton and told my mother that he wanted to start seeing me again. Although legally she had sole custody, she agreed to weekly visits, perhaps feeling, despite her frustration with him, that she needed to give me a chance to get to know my father. Besides, he could be charming, and she might not have had it in her to deny him, despite her desire to sever ties, despite his already spotty record of child support payments.
So once every couple of weeks, Mom would drop me off at Tom’s apartment, a damp-smelling place in a large, mustard-yellow building on Lower Main Street, considered the seedy part of Bridgton. The people in those apartments didn’t seem to have any privacy, crammed together in clapboard apartment buildings and carved-up old Victorian houses. They did not have marigold gardens.
From Tom’s apartment on Lower Main, we’d get into his truck—floorboards littered with coffee cups and oily rags and receipts, window cranks too rusted up for me to operate myself. He’d take me out for ice cream, or to a movie a few towns over. He always moved slowly and spoke quietly; he seemed unsure of what to say. I was seven or eight and had no memory of living with him. We talked about school a lot, because I always did well. It was a happy thing to focus on, an easy thing to talk about with a kid. I didn’t notice, then, how much we look alike—same small nose, same round cheeks and square hands. It was years before someone told me that we walk with precisely the same gait, each step ending in a little bounce onto the toes. I still don’t know quite what this walk looks like on a man.
Tom once took me shopping at the mall just over the New Hampshire s
tate line. At the Hallmark store, he bought me a stained-glass sun catcher with a horse etched into it. When I showed it to my mother, I knew to downplay my pleasure in this shiny, magical thing. I’d heard her talking about him plenty of times, sitting over coffee with her sisters or on the phone with friends. They described him with words that I knew I wasn’t allowed to repeat. But I think she was trying to make it work: after a few visits, she pointed out that he’d be happier if I called him Dad instead of Tom. I complied, embarrassed that I hadn’t already known to do this, worried that I had hurt his feelings without meaning to. It wasn’t clear what was expected of me, how I was supposed to behave with this man I barely knew.
On another visit, Tom bought me an old swing set and we painted it together. He took me to Sherwin-Williams and I got to pick out the colors. I chose yellow and orange, and we spent a sunny afternoon laughing and slinging paint everywhere in his weedy backyard, finally having a genuinely good time. When I got home, Mom was angry that I had so much paint in my long hair—we had used oil paint, so there was really no way to wash it out. She did her best to strip some of it off with turpentine, but I had sticky yellow and orange strands threaded all over my head for weeks. I got a sinking feeling about Tom every time I saw them, as if I’d been tricked somehow.
Not long after, Tom made another mistake, bigger this time. I had the sense that he’d shown up drunk, or late, or not at all, but I didn’t dare ask. Mom sat me down and asked me if it was important to me to continue visiting my father. “Not really,” I said. “I don’t really know him.” It was Dale that I saw daily, that I loved. He was the one who was there when I came home from school. He was the one who caught big fish and made Mom laugh and made the cat do funny voices. Tom was just a big man who smelled like motor oil and seemed to want something from me, but I couldn’t figure out what.
I’d like to think Mom didn’t show that she was pleased with my answer, but I’m sure I knew there was only one answer to give.
* * *
Years later, I discovered that Tom hadn’t shown up late or drunk. He had moved in with a woman named Teresa, who once tried to attack Mom when she dropped me off for a visit, right after I went inside. Teresa had a reputation for violence, unpredictability, and substance abuse that made Tom’s drinking look mild. She had a metal plate in her head from a childhood accident involving her father and a gun, the details of which remained murky. She was from Massachusetts, and it was impossible to tell if the mob connections she bragged about were true. To say the least, she was a tough woman, with big opinions. Sensing that Tom still loved his ex-wife, Teresa disliked my mother intensely from the start.
Although Tom insisted that I would have no contact with Teresa, that was hard to guarantee. Mom wanted to be sure that I was nowhere near this potentially dangerous person, or anyone else Teresa might invite over to the apartment—she knew that people determined to live in darkness will always find each other. Mom wanted me to go to college someday; she didn’t want me around a bunch of people so defeated by life that they spent most of their time drunk and high. After checking to see if I would miss my father, Mom told Tom that as long as he was living with Teresa, he couldn’t see me. He ended up staying with Teresa until a few months after Mom’s death. By then it was far too late for us.
Still, I carry Tom’s last name, because Mom never got rid of it. When I was about ten, I braced myself and asked her why she had never gone back to her maiden name. She waved a hand dismissively, said that it was just easier, she didn’t want to deal with the paperwork and hassle. At the time, I didn’t question her explanation, but now it seems incomplete. Although she regularly visited her sisters and was a devoted and helpful daughter, I think she wanted to forget the years when she was a Farnum, years of fear and difficulty, years in which she naively hoped that taking a new name could make things better.
* * *
After the visits ended, I’d see Tom around town every once in a while. He was known for walking everywhere—his drinking meant he rarely had a license—which made him more visible than other people, who passed one another swiftly, in the relative anonymity of cars. To me, he seemed omnipresent but somehow still unreachable, like a vision in the corner of my eye, like a haunting.
But a few times a year, my father and I would intersect, most often at my grandmother’s. Her neighbor Bruce was a contractor and an old friend of Tom’s. We’d see them together, getting out of Bruce’s work truck, the bed crammed with ladders and two-by-fours. I knew this meant Tom was working “under the table,” getting paid in cash. Usually, when a father didn’t pay child support, the state could withhold his wages, but Tom officially had none, so we rarely received our twenty-five dollars a week. Mom would stick her little rectangular 110 film camera through the curtains and take pictures to prove that Tom was working, the plastic shutter emitting an angry clack, then send the prints to the relevant state office along with long, angry letters. But it did no good. By the time I was ten, we were on a waiting list with eight thousand other single mothers who had petitioned the state to investigate the deadbeat fathers of their children.
Looking back, I can absolutely understand Mom’s rage, and I shared it for a long time. But I wish she could have stepped back from the fight and admitted defeat, if only to have had a bit more peace in those last years.
But then I think of her persistence, her unwillingness to let the injustice of the situation go. Even if she knew that winning was unlikely, fighting was sometimes a way for her to maintain dignity. And I’m glad she struggled for more when others would have given up or settled. It taught me how.
12
* * *
after
After days of lending me jeans and sweaters and even shoes, my aunts asked me to write a list of things I wanted from the house, and to indicate what rooms those things would be in. I assumed they would hand the list over to the police, who would comb the scene and bring us what we asked for. It was only recently that I discovered the police hadn’t even accompanied my aunts to the house. By then, they had the keys and permission to go in and take whatever we needed. The Bridgton curious would circle for months, driving by slowly to see what they could see, to hover in the epicenter of the dramatic vibration that enveloped the town. Knowing that someone might see them at the house and call the police, Carol called the station to let them know. She also asked if the house had been cleaned, and the woman on the phone assured her it had.
But the house was not clean. The sisters opened the front door and the sun shone through the kitchen windows onto the smears of blood on the linoleum and carpet. The killer’s boot prints shone blue-black with forensic chemicals. Squares of carpet had been cut out by the police and taken for evidence, and there were other blank spots in the mess on the kitchen floor. There were parts taken out of the couch, fluff standing up out of the holes. Splashes on the wall, smears on the phone. Our cat Max’s scratching post, on the floor near the kitchen, lay sideways, snapped off at the base. “Oh, God,” Gwen said upon entering. “Oh, God.” Then they silently got to work. Looking back, she will only say, “I had not expected to see that. I had not expected to see that at all.”
While Gwen and Glenice and Carol worked inside the house, Gloria stayed outside and out of sight. Later they discovered that she’d dug up one of the little trees in the yard, roots and all. She wrapped it in a sheet and settled it onto the backseat of her car. She wanted to keep something of her sister’s that was still living. The tree is now large enough to be Christmas-tree cheery, although the house it stands by is empty: Gloria died of lung cancer a few years ago. The first to go since Mom, her departure reminds me that the others will only follow.
* * *
The next day, Gwen brought me some of the items from my list, without mentioning what it had taken to get them. She brought clothes and shoes, my diary, a couple of favorite stuffed animals. But my own belongings seemed strange to me; I had the sensation that the real things were still in the house, and those before
me were perfect replicas. My stuffed animals gave me a sudden, surprisingly strong feeling of sorrow, because they brought no comfort. I could see now that they had no value on their own. They had just been vessels for Mom’s love, a love now gone.
I can never quite place the day my aunts went back into my house, but it had been long enough that there was no chance of saving the tiny rosebush I had given her for Mother’s Day, three days before the murder. It had withered and died with no one to water it. My cat, Max, was okay, though—he had been outside that night, roaming, and had found his way over to the Demeritts, who lived behind that first door I knocked on. They’d started feeding him and agreed to keep him. Grammy couldn’t stand cats, and no one was sure where I would be living. I was in so much pain I couldn’t bear any more, so I resolved not to feel sad about my kitty—it was enough to know people were taking care of him. And it was better that I was alone. Less complicated.
It was around this time that I thought back to Mom’s desire to have another child. In the previous year, she had sometimes asked me what I thought about having a little brother, and I was always opposed to the idea: I couldn’t imagine the noise and mess and diapers and demands on her time. I went to friends’ houses and saw them fight bitterly with their siblings, saw them constantly trailed by sticky-fingered morons, and came home and voiced my opposition to this hypothetical pregnancy anytime she hinted at it. Now, as I sat in the spare room at Grammy’s, displaced among my displaced things, I pictured a little brother, and my thoughts were tender and sad. I saw myself with a toddler slung on my hip, trudging down that dark road, smoothing his soft, rain-wet hair over his forehead and wondering if I’d be allowed to take him with me, wherever I ended up.