After the Eclipse

by Sarah Perry

  Gwen was supposed to start a new job the Monday after the funeral, sewing microfleece outdoor gear in a small factory near her house in New Hampshire, not far from Bridgton. She had, at most, two dozen coworkers, and they all knew about her sister’s murder; the grapevine rumors were confirmed when they watched the nightly coverage on the Portland news, or even the late-night news out of Boston. Gwen’s new boss offered to let her take a few days before she reported for work, but she had to do something, had to distract herself somehow, because every unoccupied hour was torture. She was plagued by thoughts of her sister’s last moments, unable to imagine them without feeling sick and panicky. She started the new job promptly on Monday. Her coworkers were quiet and kind. And every night, Dave held her, kept her safe. They hoped each day that the police would catch whoever had done this terrible thing. But the days kept passing.

  In a strange confluence of fate, Glenice, too, was slated to start a new job the Monday after the funeral, back home in Boston, where those around her had little reason to pay attention to that late-night news item, just one killing among the many. She arrived that first morning carrying a secret, determined to keep it together. She was overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness, of not knowing what to do, and the best approach, she felt, was to stick to her routine, make sure her mind stayed busy. Both she and Gwen had learned, growing up, that the best thing to do in difficult times was to plow forward, to keep going.

  After a couple of days, Glenice did tell her coworkers about the murder—it must have been unavoidable. Outwardly, they displayed the expected compassion, but really they thought she was lying: that she disliked her new job and had made up a dramatic story as an excuse to quit soon. They only believed her when they saw the story in a newspaper. Years later, a coworker would tell Glenice about conversations in the office back then, when she’d been out of earshot: “We were all freaked out. ‘Who is this person we hired? Somebody murdered her sister, that’s really weird.’ We thought maybe you were from some really crazy, crazy family. We thought, ‘What kind of people are they?’”

  As though the murder had happened because of the “kind of people” we were. But as the years passed, Glenice’s coworkers got to know her and thought, Oh, Glenice is okay, she’s a normal person, she’s one of us. That must have been a real tragedy after all.

  The “kind of people” comment is familiar to me. Just a few months ago I told a seemingly caring, intelligent friend about my mother—not only about her death, but about her life, her search for love. My friend replied, “You get to thinking—with all those men—that she had it coming to her.” I no longer speak to this person. I cannot trust anyone whose first response, knowing very little about anything, is to blame my mother for her own death.

  And I remember, so clearly, the plague of the word “weird” in those early days. When reporters asked people in town how they felt about the murder, that “weird” always came popping out, and classmates kept telling me how “weird” my life had become. Back then, the inadequacy of the word brought me to furious tears. My mother had been murdered, and all these people had to say was that it was weird? Declare something weird and you don’t have to think much more deeply about it. It’s a word meant to shut a conversation down, push the scary thing away. I didn’t have that luxury. Even silence would have been better: to be struck dumb is to be affected. This is the difference between sympathy and empathy.

  * * *

  In those weeks following Mom’s death, the rest of the family retreated to their separate corners, did their best to stand up to each suffocating, exhausting day. It was disorienting how similar everything was to how it had been before, how the external world didn’t change, didn’t reflect the fact that none of them would ever again see their baby sister. They drove the same long roads to work, passed the same tall trees on the edges of the same wide fields, were awakened in the morning by the same diffuse sunlight, and all of it persisted, despite the fact that Crystal would never see any of it again.

  They made posters, offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for any information leading to the identification of the killer, and hung them on telephone poles in three counties. Mom’s grainy, xeroxed face smiled out at friends and family and strangers for miles. When the late-spring rains came down and melted the signs, the family made the rounds again, replacing them over and over. They each pledged a portion of their savings to the reward, hoping someone would come forward and take it from them. They talked to friends, wondering aloud what possibly could have happened to end Crystal’s life in this way. They called and called the cops, checking for progress that did not materialize. But mostly they went back to work. Made dinner. Watched the news. Did their best.

  It turns out that Teresa tore down some of the Bridgton reward posters, but she could not keep the word from spreading, aided as it was by car-crash, train-wreck voyeurism, but also by real community concern. For years, my aunts and uncles would meet strangers who knew all about the pretty young woman who was killed in Bridgton, some of whom would mention it before they did. Have the police come up with anything? they’d ask once they knew who they were talking to. How’s her daughter doing?

  * * *

  The law can sometimes be blindingly simple, a blunt instrument that can do more harm than good. After Mom died, legal responsibility for me automatically returned to Tom, the father I barely knew. He had been a suspect for only a fleeting moment, and mostly because police always have to examine the ex-husband. But they quickly disregarded him, even before the lab work came back showing that his DNA failed to match any found in the house. His personality wasn’t consistent with the crime, they felt. And he was drinking so heavily then that there was some doubt that he could have physically managed the killing.

  I am grateful that my family, on my mother’s side, knew better than to let Tom take me, and I am grateful, I admit, that he himself knew better. Sometime that summer, a calm, sober Tom, dressed in the best clothes he could find, traveled to the county courthouse in Portland, a stately building so close to the ocean that the air in the parking lot smells of salt water. There, after a short hearing, my father signed power of attorney over to my aunt Carol, granting her temporary custody on the condition that he would no longer be charged the child support he rarely paid. Carol and my other aunts were relieved; as they understood it, if he had defaulted on his responsibilities, and no other legal arrangements had been made, I could have landed in foster care.

  Tom says now that he wanted to take me to live with him, but he knew that he was too unstable; he was “still drinking, of course,” and he was still with Teresa, who even he knew was dangerous and unpredictable. Teresa wanted him to bring me home, though. She’d scream at him, “Go get her! You’re no kind of man!” She craved the warmth of the spotlight. Wanted to be seen as a hero. Less than four years later, she would abandon her own daughter, and Tom would find himself, finally, the more responsible of two parents. Teresa hardly would have done a good job of caring for the child of a woman she hated.

  * * *

  Tom remembers seeing me on the courthouse steps with Carol on the day of the hearing, a hundred or so feet away—that I looked at him with a forlorn expression. “I felt I had just added one more sadness to your burden,” he says. He wanted to go to me, to comfort me. But this scene isn’t possible; I stayed in the car the entire time. I remember that it was warm outside but I felt safer with the windows rolled up. Surely I was sad, but not about Tom. About him I was angry. He could have made Mom’s life so much easier. But now when he tells me the story of that day, I simply nod. It’s been a long time. Let him keep his myth.

  One of my other aunts recently told me more about that day. “Carroll was standing outside the car, watching,” she said. Her voice lowered a step. “He was guarding the car.” I’d forgotten this long ago. It makes me wonder what other protective kindnesses I’ve lost to memory. I had also forgotten that as a condition of signing over guardianship, Tom had demanded to visit me before the hear
ing. A time and place were agreed upon, but he never showed. I don’t remember being upset. And now all I feel is embarrassment—for him or for myself, I’m not entirely sure.

  When I think about the day of the hearing, I feel tenderness for that girl in the car, those grief-wrecked sisters. We thought we’d be returning to that courthouse soon, to see Mom’s killer stand trial. We had no idea how many years would pass.

  17

  * * *

  before

  After nine months of bending under the weight of Grammy’s criticisms, pushing and pulling that trundle bed in and out, Mom and I finally moved into our new house out on Route 93. It was one story, and just under a thousand square feet, but it felt like a palace. I remember the feeling of our early days there, an overwhelming sensation of space and light and freedom, a feeling that had as much to do with the newness of the place as with Mom’s contagious happiness. She was more relaxed than I had seen her in months. She had finally arrived in a safe, quiet place where she could do as she wanted, where she could create a real home for us. Best of all, against all odds, she owned it; as long as she kept making the payments, no one could take it away from her, no one could make her move out. When she’d paid off her little car, she’d called Gwen excitedly and said, “It’s all mine!” Owning a house was almost unimaginable. The doorways and countertops were hers, as were the bathtub and the furnace and the line of trees at the edge of the big backyard. I could finish growing up there without worrying, and then when I went to college, I could come home for holiday breaks. And if I ever needed a place to live after that, she could provide it.

  We moved in as soon as we got the keys, before we even had beds, happy to curl up in sleeping bags on the short, dense carpet. Grammy called several times a day for weeks, most often with complaints, but Mom did her best to hold her at a distance. Sometimes, after she’d been on the phone for a few minutes, I’d realize she was talking to Grammy, and walk to the far side of the room and call, “Mo-om!” so she’d have an excuse to hang up. Usually she waved me off and scowled at me for being rude. But sometimes she gave me a shy grin and told Grammy she had to go.

  We got a daybed for me, and gauzy curtains to match my green carpet, casting the room in forest light. My new comforter was printed with tropical leaves and flowers—more grown-up than the Garfield one I’d been using.

  Twenty years later, I would stay at my aunt Carol’s house, and when I went upstairs to the guest room, I found the bed covered in that tropical blanket. It was a sweet, silent gesture, but its effect on me was complicated. I hadn’t slept under that blanket since leaving our house that night. I associated it with fear as much as love. It was one of the few things left of that home, a fantasy we lived out for only a couple of years, and one that proved more vulnerable to danger than we wanted to admit.

  Mom loved the house and the quiet that surrounded it, the strident songs of chickadees and the twitterings of swallows and the rat-a-tat ramblings of excitable squirrels broken only occasionally by the ocean-wave sweep of a passing car. But the quiet made her nervous, too. She told Linda she felt a little exposed.

  The house had been shipped from the factory in two big Lego pieces, trucked in almost completely built—“stick-built” houses were for rich people or for hippies who built with their own hands. When it arrived, the men in charge of settling it in and snapping it together ripped out all the trees in front to make it easier to maneuver the house pieces onto the lot. When we drove by to see the completed house, the entire front yard was unexpectedly barren. Mom had specifically requested that some trees be left standing so that we would have a screen from the road. When she called to complain, the contractor promised to plant new trees out front for free. What we got was two spruce trees no higher than my hip, planted tight on either side of the front door. Useless little suburban things. They broke up the stark view, but they certainly wouldn’t give any privacy.

  I was mad on her behalf about those trees, but not really that concerned. Our house faced a chunk of woods, and most people in Bridgton lived on secluded roads like ours. We had only one neighbor in direct eyesight, and she was an elderly woman. I didn’t understand, then, that our isolation made my mother even more anxious.

  * * *

  Our house was like a diamond Mom had pulled out of the earth herself and now polished regularly. In my adult life, I have never, ever kept such a clean house. Every room was immaculately clean; Mom polished the counters daily, vacuumed every other day, and scrubbed the entire bathroom every week, leaning deep into the bleach-filled tub, squirting that minty-blue gel under the toilet bowl lip. She was drawing a force field around us, creating a magically calm space, free from chaos. When summer came, I liked to run around barefoot in the thick grass of the backyard, or pick my way through the dense woods further down the gently sloping hill. Afterwards, Mom insisted that I rinse my feet off with the hose on the side of the house. And when people would come over to visit, they’d remove their shoes at the door. It was a widely known fact that if you wanted to visit Crystal in her home, you would do so in your socks. The dirt of the world was not to enter.

  Buying a house and land were incredible accomplishments for a single mother with Mom’s salary. She made so little that I qualified for free milk at school, although when I noticed this and brought her the paperwork, she spurned it. “You’re not a free-milk kid,” she said. Looking back, I can see that part of the challenge of buying her own home was swallowing her pride to get that government loan, asking a faceless agency to officially designate us “low-income.”

  Gwen was so proud of her for buying her own house. “You did it, Crystal! You did it all on your own,” she said. “See, you don’t need a man. Stay away from the men.” But Gwen’s outlook wasn’t really that different from Mom’s. All these years later, she tells me, “I wasn’t too thrilled with the location of that house. You were all alone out there in the woods, with those logging trucks driving by. All those men who could see you and your mother out on the lawn.”

  There are dogs there now. A chain-link fence stands along the border of the front lawn, tracing the old police tape. Gwen tells me that the new owner raises German shepherds, and although I’ve never seen them there when I’ve passed, as she speaks I can hear them howling, I can see them rushing the fence, jaws open, coarse fur full of cold winter air. No one’s getting into that house now. Unless someone lets them in.

  * * *

  We moved into the house in November, but even when early winter hung cold and still over the stripped trees, we took regular walks. Once or twice a week, we would head out on Route 93 toward town, moving along the quiet, forested road until the light started to fail and we turned around and headed back to our warmly lit house, the comforting hum of television. If we started early, we could turn left at the end of the road and walk all the way to the War Memorial, passing Linda’s house on the way. Once every few weeks, we would stop in to visit, and each time it felt like a special treat.

  Linda didn’t have kids of her own, so she invested a lot of attention in me. She always had my latest school picture on her fridge, which she kept stocked with my favorite soda—Orange Crush—so I’d have something to sip while she and Mom drank coffee. She asked me a lot of questions, and seemed delighted by whatever I had to say. Around this time I started making beaded glass jewelry—lizard earrings were my specialty—and each time I made a pair for Mom, I made a pair for Linda, too. One night when Mom dropped me off at Grammy’s before going out, I presented her with matching ankle bracelets for the two of them; when Linda saw them, she insisted that they put them on right away and wear them out dancing.

  Linda had a lot less responsibility than Mom—in addition to being childless, she’d never married—and could remind her to have fun, to unwind. Just as Linda could borrow motherhood for an afternoon, Mom could pretend that she inhabited Linda’s relatively relaxed life. More than once, I pictured the three of us living together, no men around, just a swirl of pop songs and perf
ume and laughter. I always felt so happy in the carefree aura of their friendship. Linda made Mom laugh, and it was her best laugh, the one where she threw back her head, exposing her pale, narrow throat.

  * * *

  By midwinter, it was mostly dark when I got off the school bus around four o’clock, and black night would be coming down as Mom came in the door about half an hour later. Our walks suspended, we watched more television. Once or twice a week, we’d ride to the dusty, brightly lit Viewer’s Choice Video, at the bottom of Maine Hill, its angled red roof a reminder of the hot fudge sundaes we’d enjoyed there when I was very small and the building was still a Dairy Queen. We’d wander the aisles and pick out a VHS tape or two, then get dinner down the road at House of Pizza, a tiny place that had been there forever—even today, its counter is still green Formica, its menu board still written in white snap-on letters.

  We loved romances, and would fantasize, side by side, about future boyfriends and weddings. We also watched a lot of horror films—The Shining, The Amityville Horror, Children of the Corn—staring rapt at the screen and then tiptoeing down the hall to our comfy beds when it was over. Mom let me watch almost anything, certainly some things that were too scary for me, but she loved a good thrill and wouldn’t watch alone. Scary things were fun for us back then. She couldn’t know that we would end up in a horror of our own, that fear would never again be fun for me.