by Sarah Perry
A few nights later, I found a silver pendant of Mom’s among the things from the house. The pendant was heart-shaped and shiny, relatively new. I held it in my palm, the thin chain draping through my fingers, and I could see it so clearly as it had been just a few days before, sitting on my mother’s breastbone. And it was in that moment that I first felt sadness, a pure sadness that had nothing to do with my being left alone or the terror of what had happened. I finally understood the cosmically sad fact that my mother, this beautiful, kind young woman, would never live again. She would never again car-dance or suntan on the beach or drink coffee or play with her cat or watch TV with her daughter. She would never find the love that she’d so badly wanted and deserved. I finally, for just a moment, felt something for her, instead of myself. I felt that, separate from the fact that I’d lost someone, there was now that much less beauty in the world. I called my friend Marie and sobbed. I told her I was holding that necklace—she had seen it before, she knew the one—but I couldn’t explain the rest. I cried and shook and could barely speak, and a few years later, Marie told me that phone call was the only time she was ever afraid for me: she could tell that, in that moment, all my strength had left me, and she didn’t know if I’d be able to get it back.
13
* * *
before
When I was about eight, Dale’s settlement money finally came through from his construction accident and he bought a slate-blue house at the end of Otter Pond Road, named for the small, still body of water just beyond its reach. At the time, it was a sandy, unpopulated lane that turned off 302 just a few hundred feet past the Dump, a little farther from the center of town. It cut through a wide field that in summer hummed with insects and gave off the sharp, dry stench of Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans.
The house had a long, sloping dirt driveway and was set into the earth so that one approached it at basement level and had to walk up a long row of porch steps to reach the front door. It was like climbing up into a sanctuary. Inside, the rooms were spacious, the walls were perfectly white, and the baseboards were clean, pale pine. Only one other family had ever lived there.
Dale cleared and planted a lawn that wrapped around one side of the house to the backyard, preserving the bigger pine trees that broke the space up into little glades. The trees were tall and straight like ships’ masts, and the sunlight filtered gently down through their long, shushing needles. On the edge of the lawn he put up a dog run for Bear, our new border collie. Beyond that, a snowmobile trail cut through the thick forest that ran down to the pond. A wide window in the living room framed a triangular slice of still water or gray, opaque ice, depending on the season. In the deepest months of winter, I’d fall asleep to the high whine of snowmobiles whipping through the tree-crowded dark.
On cold, short weekend days, Dale would take me down to the pond for ice fishing and skating. I’d sit on the back of a plastic sled behind the big ice auger and Dale would pull me down the snowy trail, looking back occasionally to make sure I didn’t tip over. At the bottom, we came out of the woods and into the dome of white light made by the overcast sky and the milky ice. Once we got out near the middle of the pond, Dale would hoist up the auger—a huge screw, with sturdy handles—and twist it into the ice to make a fishing hole about a foot wide while I laced up my high-ankle figure skates. Then we’d spend a few hours together out in the cold—Dale sitting patiently by the hole on a cushion, sipping a beer in a foam koozie and waiting for a fish to spring the red flag, me gliding tentatively over the ice, watching for other fishing holes. If I skated too far off, Dale would call me back.
Dale and I fished in the summer, too, on Otter Pond and on many other calm lakes and ponds in the area. We would pick up bait early in the morning from a dusty old convenience store filled with outdated candy—Zero bars, Charleston Chews, Necco Wafers. I was about seven when I caught my first fish, a decent-size rainbow trout that Mom caught again in a snapshot filtered through the blue of a softly falling dusk.
In my memory, all those quiet summer days with Dale blend together, creating one long, peaceful afternoon. Beyond the sandy shallows the water was flat and navy blue, darkened by the reeds and granite boulders below. The trees were thick and wild, branches bending over the water’s surface to snag my line again and again. Dale was always patient when he took my rod from me to jiggle the hook off a branch, or when he waded in to untangle me from underwater grass. I worked hard for the smooth arc that would land my Snoopy bobber out in the sweet spot between the shallows and the deep, smiling when that swissssshh . . . plop sounded just right. There was almost nothing better than hearing Dale tell me I’d done a good job.
As the years passed, there were occasional reminders that I should call Dale by his name; he didn’t want to be “Dad,” and I’m sure this had more to do with his discomfort than any deference to Tom. Dale spent many hours watching out for me while Mom was at work, but he insisted she make all the decisions about my upbringing. If, say, I wanted to spend the night at a friend’s house, I had to wait until she came home to ask her. And although the Otter Pond place was our home, it was Dale’s house: he was the one with the money to buy it.
I didn’t mind that Dale wasn’t Dad; he was a lot more fun than the grumpy, preoccupied men who lived in some of my friends’ houses. The three of us had a common refrain: that Mom and Dale would still be together when he went bald. Dale was muscular and energetic. His hair was barely thinning, just getting a little wispier at the crown of his head. And I knew they were still in love because I’d hear the tidal waves of their waterbed on afternoons when I was supposed to be playing outside. We had plenty of time.
* * *
One summer afternoon, a day when the moisture in the air hung thick and close, I was reading in my bedroom when I heard the sliding glass door to the deck open and close, the rubber seal letting the air in and out like a breath. Mom came to my room and asked me to follow her outside. We thumped down the steps from the deck to the grass, and I saw the garden that Dale had been making on the steep slope toward the pond, finally finished, salvaged railroad ties holding the earth in, lumpy dirt already getting lighter as the topsoil dried in the sunshine. I pictured the tall corn and the waving pansies he had described to me, and I felt a pure, young pride in this man who belonged to me and my mother.
But it wasn’t just the garden they were showing me. Dale held up another surprise: a hexagonal crystal, about an inch across, clasped between his thumb and forefinger. Moist, dark earth clung to it. He had found it in one of the sealed bags of soil he’d bought from the hardware store—not a crystal from a quarry but a glass prism with a hole machined through one of its facets, the kind they sold in the knickknack shop on Main Street. It amazed me that they’d found this shining thing inside a sealed bag of dirt. It seemed like a gift from fate, a little bit of preserved light to prove there would always be magic in whatever they did. Dale gave the crystal to my mother, and she ran a length of fishing line through it and hung it from the rearview mirror of her car.
The crystal stayed suspended there for the rest of Mom’s life, catching the sunlight and the gray rain light and the refracted colors of everything we passed on our long drives along back roads and our short trips to the grocery store. When she made a sharp turn and the crystal tapped against the windshield, she’d reach out and catch it, smoothing its anchoring string down to center, calming its motion to keep it from breaking.
But one day when I was ten, I came home from a friend’s sleepover and sensed a change, as though that light was suddenly hidden by an overcast sky. I distinctly remember that the air in the house tasted different, felt thin and empty, as though its molecules had compressed themselves into a far corner, making way for something large and hard and sharp. People speak of weighted silences, but this one seemed light and brittle, hanging on to that thin air tenuously. I went to my room and read for a couple of hours, willing our house to fill up once more with talk and warmth. Later that night, M
om and Dale started fighting, a rumbling explosion that broke the tension irrevocably. It was fighting like I had never heard before, hours and hours of loud, angry yelling.
For the next couple of months, the three of us fell into a pattern: they would scream late into the night for two or three days in a row while I cowered in my bedroom. Then a tense hush would fall over us all, until, a week or so later, we would gradually come together in a tentative peace. Then, just when I thought the fighting was over, they would break the post-dinner quiet, and the loud, furious shouting matches would begin again. Often when they fought, I sat on my bed and listened, trying to figure out what had gone wrong, why we weren’t happy anymore. How I could fix it.
But as the weeks wore on and the fights continued, I got more and more fed up. I’d play cassette tapes on my little boom box to drown them out, or do my best to read intently, to escape, but I could never entirely ignore them. Once, I ran out into the kitchen and yelled, “Shut up shut up shut up just stop!” insanely, shrilly. I had mostly been a quiet, obedient kid. But I’d hit my breaking point, and that should have told them something. They looked at me for a moment, and my mother said, evenly, that it was none of my business, to go back to my room.
Maybe a month after their initial outburst of fury, I was in my room with the door shut when I heard the buildup, the irritated murmur that by then I knew prefaced a fight. A high voice, a low one. An accusation, an insulted rebuttal. I started to sweat. I scurried out to the living room and scooped up my cat, Max, and locked him in my room with me for company and comfort. I also wanted to keep him safe; I hated the idea of him cowering in a corner of the living room while they fought. As the volume increased, I sat on the carpet on my floor, holding Max in my lap. Dale was a thunderstorm, a rolling cloud of rage and threat that I had trouble connecting to the patient friend who took me fishing. He called her “bitch,” he called her “cunt.” I sort of knew what those words meant. His voice was deeper and louder than I ever could have imagined. She returned his yelling with her own ugly snarls, a furious treble. They were in the kitchen, and their voices rang off the cabinets and the hard linoleum. Someone was opening cabinet doors and banging them shut. I heard a drawer pulled out, and the clean cutlery from dinner clattering into it. It was probably Mom, cleaning up, channeling her frustration and energy into the task at hand, refusing to stop to focus fully on the argument. Years later, I would do this when arguing with my own boyfriend, finding household tasks to barrel through while shouting. I did it to keep us both safe, to keep myself from kicking and throwing.
But it didn’t really work with Mom and Dale. Someone threw a plate. Someone punched the wall. The ugly words kept coming. I curled up on my floor, wrapped around my cat, tears dropping into Max’s striped fur. Then he wriggled out, scratching my arm, and that little pain let the real one come flooding out. I looked into the mirror while my face screwed up and wrinkled into itself, while my skin bloomed red. I knelt there on the carpet, its nubby texture pressing into my bare knees, and doubled over, pressing my forehead to the floor and sobbing hopelessly.
On this night, I knew I couldn’t even try to appeal to them. They were too loud. And the yelling and the banging wasn’t just noise; it had gotten inside of me. It made me shake and cry, and I knew that no amount of focused reading could take me away from it. I was beginning to feel that if I didn’t do something, I would be poisoned by them. I returned my gaze to the mirror and traced my outline, tried to strengthen it by looking.
I slowly wiped my face, still listening to their shouting, and I got out some paper and a pen. I wrote a letter to our school counselor, a woman I had met only once, a few years earlier, when I was evaluated for speech therapy for my lisp. I hated how she spoke to me, with syrupy familiarity that struck me as annoyingly fake. I was so glad when my mother refused to send me to those speech lessons, worried that I would be shunned, no longer considered one of the “normal” kids. But in the midst of all that fighting, the counselor was the only person I could imagine talking to about any of this.
I can’t remember if the house quieted down as I finished the letter or if my mother broke off the fighting to come into my room and tell me to go to bed. But suddenly she was there, standing over me, asking to see what I’d written. A sick feeling swept through me, but I handed the pages over. I can remember only one sentence from that letter, something that had been obvious from their fights: “I think she slept with someone else.” It must have been this that made her cry. It must have been this that prompted her to make me promise that I would never, ever write another letter like that, that I wouldn’t tell anyone about the fighting. I should have been angry, but instead I felt deflated, looking up at my crying mother as she crumpled up that yellow-lined paper.
* * *
Soon after that, Mom was gone for a while, perhaps a week, no more than two. Dale told me that she was very sad, and needed to go rest for a while under the care of some doctors. I missed her—this was the longest we were ever apart. But those days with just Dale were wonderfully quiet. He made sure to pay a lot of attention to me, and it was a relief, each evening, to know that there wouldn’t be a screaming match to hide from. When Mom returned, she was lighter, happier, more relaxed: she said that at first she hadn’t liked being away from home, but after a few days it was wonderful to have nothing to worry about for a little while. The doctors helped, she said, but unfortunately, her insurance wouldn’t let her stay any longer. I learned most of this by lingering near the kitchen while she was on the phone with her friends. For years, I would think that she had been hospitalized for depression, but Gwen later told me that Mom had called her crying from what was in fact a drug and alcohol treatment facility. Dale had pressured her to go as a condition of staying together. She’d made a big mistake, getting drunk and sleeping with that other man, and he convinced her she had a problem. This turned out to be untrue, or at least a bit of an exaggeration, but it didn’t really matter, because he would end it with her anyway.
* * *
I’ve always thought of Mom’s night of straying as the primary reason she and Dale broke up. It seemed like everything was perfect until then—all sunny days at the lake, fun nights at the drive-in, and cozy winter afternoons building snowmen in the yard. I had no doubt that she had slept with someone else—it was clear both from what Dale yelled and how she responded—but I didn’t know much about how it had happened. As it turns out, she went home with that other man after she and Dale had a terrible fight at the bar, a fight so bitter that he got up from the table and drove off, leaving her. She must have been embarrassed, crying, vulnerable. She was probably also furious. The bar would have been a local one; there were bound to be people there who knew her, but it’s no guarantee that any of her actual friends were present. Drunk and alone, twenty-seven years old, she might have concluded that her relationship with Dale was over. I was safe at my grandmother’s until morning. She needed a ride home, and it seems a friendly, handsome enough Bridgton guy offered that and more.
I have a photo of Dale from that time. In it he is smiling broadly, lit by a silver lamp clipped to a doorjamb. He is young and handsome, and he’s holding a small silver pistol, displayed proudly at an angle. His blue eyes are lit up like a summer lake, and look directly into the lens. Behind him is a screen of familiar, jagged green leaves—the side business that augmented those state checks. I spent hours in the basement with Dale while he trimmed his plants, keeping him company in the closet where he kept them, light spilling out onto the cement floor and walls. He and I placed tiny plastic frogs and turtles on little posts among the leaves, like two old ladies decorating their garden with windmills and gnomes.
I had been thrilled when we got a hot tub—it was so luxurious and exotic. Now I realize it was probably a cover for the sky-high electricity bills produced by Dale’s grow lights. My music teacher was scandalized, but suspected nothing, when I gleefully sang the chorus to the Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones” on Favorite Song Day. I
must never have mentioned Dale’s basement garden to my friends, or asked why they didn’t have one—it just didn’t cross my mind. Maybe I considered it a private family ritual—the cultivating, the fertilizing and pruning. Even the process of drying and trimming had a cozy, secretive feel to it. For years after, I didn’t even think about Dale’s plants. It was only when I finally ran across this square, faded snapshot that I could make sense of the forest, and see the plants for what they were. But it’s not the drugs that bother me now so much as the gun.
I do remember feeling uneasy when I saw Dale in the kitchen, bent over a large mirror, pulling gel capsules apart and mixing them, counting them, obsessing over them. He never talked to me as he worked on the pills, and this made me suspicious and a little afraid. Now I know that despite her love for Dale, Mom was afraid, too. She kept telling Sandy, “What if he gets caught? I don’t want them to come take Sarah. Because I have nothing to do with it.” She knew better, though. Even if she intercepted every counselor letter, something was bound to happen. She had to have known her time with Dale was limited.
* * *
These years later, the moment of Mom and Dale’s final parting haunts me. It seems to represent the end of some kind of happiness that she and I could never quite find again, and I’d like to know more about why they couldn’t make it through. I can’t ask Dale; for a while now he’s been a hard man to track down. The truth is, I haven’t looked too hard: I’m not sure I’d find the same man. Instead I rely on Mom’s friends.