After the Eclipse

by Sarah Perry

  Mom also read a lot of creepy books; she had a collection of old paperbacks about the Jonestown massacre, the Mansons, Ted Bundy. She banned me from these, but I’d sneak into her room when she was out and peek at the photo inserts. The pictures were ghastly: pools of blood showing black on the black-and-white page, thin girls in courtrooms with hypnotized eyes. Scariest of all were the ones where the bodies had been replaced with pure white, the detail cut out of the negative entirely, the person utterly erased.

  Next to the thriller and crime novels stood a Time-Life series on the paranormal, tall, black books filled with mystical, silver-printed pictures. Magic took many forms in our house, from star charts to Mom’s tarot deck to the ESP experiments I subjected friends to on the rare nights I hosted sleepovers. I’d beg Mom to do a tarot reading with me or to hold a séance with her Ouija board, but she would always laugh me off. Still, she kept these things on her wicker bookshelf, next to a dusty Bible. She also loved traditional holidays, taking seriously the need to decorate for each; she taped paper cutouts of shamrocks on the windows for Saint Patrick’s Day, cherubs holding golden bows for Valentine’s. When I got a little older and cast doubt on the existence of Santa, she’d say, “C’mon, you can’t believe everything those other kids tell you. You know Santa exists!”

  On Halloween, my mother’s sense of mystery and happy celebration came together. The first year we lived in our house, I was a pirate and she was a vampire, with a cape and fangs and full face makeup. We followed our annual ritual precisely; Dale had never come with us on Halloween night, so this was one holiday that we didn’t have to adapt, that remained perfectly the same even after we left him. We began by driving to Grammy’s, and she was happy and nice, vicariously playful. Our next stop was an assisted-living facility, where we walked along the warm corridors, knocking on door after door, collecting candy in my pumpkin-shaped bucket. Here we knew most people would be home, and would be happy for a moment of company. The old people loved us, a couple of girls dressed up silly and out on the town.

  After the Home, as we called it, we drove along a few back roads looking for porch lights. “What do you think of this one?” Mom would ask as she slowed in front of a well-kept ranch house. “I don’t know,” I’d say. “Looks a bit dark. But they might have something fancy!” Sometimes when we knocked and no one came out, we could tell that people were hiding inside. We laughed at them, but Mom’s message was clear: Don’t grow up to be a jerk with no candy in the house on Halloween. Don’t be the kind of person who won’t even come to the door.

  * * *

  When that first spring came, Mom and I resumed our walks. We walked more often than we had in early winter, and farther. Every few days, the thawing earth smelled stronger and sweeter, and the hard buds on the trees unfurled, the undersides of ash leaves shimmering in the warm breezes, maple leaves like hands opening to cover the empty spaces of winter. We put up a birdhouse, and a pair of swallows quickly moved in; we named them Sunny and Swifty. We visited Linda more and bought a few pictures to decorate our eggshell walls. Mom got some paints and stencils and started adding a border up by the ceiling in the kitchen: red hearts for love, pineapples for hospitality. The project was way more time-consuming than we’d anticipated; it stretched on and on, over many weekends, Mom taking care to make each shape symmetrical, identical, flawless.

  One afternoon, she was standing on a ladder in the sunshine, the thickened air of an early-summer breeze coming through the window at her feet, her red hair wrapped in a bandanna, while I stood down below, holding her paints. She looked at me and smiled. “By the time we’re done”—she rolled her eyes a little—“we’ll have to move or something!” I laughed; I knew we weren’t going anywhere. The painting could stretch on forever, and Mom could make every brushstroke as neat and painstakingly perfect as she wanted. We were home. But as it turned out, she would finish the border just barely in time.

  18

  * * *

  after

  My family was relieved to have safely ushered Tom out of the picture, but the question of where I would live next was still unanswered. Gwen and Glenice and Carol talked on the phone at night, often about me. Despite all that had happened, I desperately wanted to get back to Bridgton. I loved my hometown and did not want to lose it; I felt like it was all I had left. I wanted my old-fashioned Main Street, my dusty library, my deep lakes. The drive-in during summer. The long grass in the field by the elementary school.

  Grammy was my only relative who lived nearby, and my aunts thought she was too old, at seventy-five, to take care of me. And of course she still didn’t drive—a real problem in a place with no public transportation. They may also have been remembering their own childhoods: Grace’s neglect, her unpredictability. Two beloved teachers offered to take me in, but my family worried that they were just swept up in the moment, that their kind gesture wouldn’t hold for the years and difficulty involved in raising a bereaved adolescent. In the end, my former babysitter, Peggy Martin, called up Carol in Peru and offered to let me live with her and her husband, Fred. I had stayed with them in the mornings before afternoon kindergarten and had seen them occasionally since—Peggy was Grammy’s Avon lady. But Peggy told Carol that she was my mother’s best friend, that she saw me all the time, that she’d be thrilled to have me.

  Gwen would have known that Linda, not Peggy, was Mom’s best friend, and if she’d heard Peggy’s claim, she might have found it strange. But Carol was the decision-maker, and she wasn’t as close to Mom. At the time, she figured my staying with Peggy and Fred would be a convenient arrangement that would allow me to finish out the school year while she and my other aunts decided what to do. Within two weeks I’d returned to Bridgton and to school, and moved in with them.

  Peggy and Fred lived in a single-wide trailer on Lower Main Street near Long Lake. Their home was very close to Plummers Landing, a little beach where I’d spent many summer afternoons with my friend Marie. They had long ago built an extension onto the trailer, a sunken room for watching TV, the floor made from plywood that had never been sanded or covered. I remembered that I would get splinters in my feet when I was a toddler. Back then I’d helped Peggy plant pansies and sweep their tiny porch. When she was den mother to her son Jason’s Cub Scout troop, I’d been an honorary scout. I spent many afternoons playing in the sprinkler in their garden—sunbeams making rainbows in the spray—and I remembered sleeping in their daughter Kelly’s bed years earlier, head to feet, by the blue glow of the radio that soothed her. Now I was given her former bedroom: she and Jason had since grown up and moved out. As a teenager, Kelly had painted the walls a deep red, and done a sloppy job: there were thick red splashes on the ceiling and on the baseboard radiators.

  Fred and Peggy told me I could stay with them until I graduated from Lake Region, the high school that pooled students from Bridgton and three other nearby towns. It was the school that Mom had gone to before she’d gotten married, and that Kelly and Jason had attended. Peggy and I went to a play at the high school, and it was the first time I’d been inside. I thought of Mom walking those same waxed halls, past all those years of golden sports trophies. I was eager to follow her there.

  I wanted to stay with my classmates, keep getting good grades, graduate head of my class with my friends and all the peers who I was sure expected me to fail, whose sympathy sometimes seemed like vicarious resignation. I was beginning to fixate on the idea of not “becoming a statistic”—I didn’t want to end up sad and broken and have people sigh and shake their heads over me, talk about how my failure was understandable, how I’d been doomed. I decided that graduating high school, the same high school I was destined for all along, would be my first big victory over the killer.

  I tried to think about the future, but there was a shadow over every moment, an unrelenting, invisible weight. Certain mundane details had become nightmarish. I avoided mirrors. I could not walk on linoleum barefoot. I hated taking showers, because the rushing of the water bloc
ked my hearing. I’d never seen Psycho, but I’d heard of it, had seen posters of cinema’s most famous stabbing; I’d stand in the warm water and my mind would keep filling with my own shadowy profile behind the plastic curtain. My ears would take the shower’s white noise and create vague sounds of threat until I turned off the water and strained to hear if something was happening in another room of the house. I’d stand there naked and dripping, telling myself over and over that all I’d heard was the rumble of the TV, fighting the urge to jump out and put clothes on, until I could turn the water back on and finish washing. To take baths would have required explanation, because of course only small children took baths every day. And I knew how I would sound. I knew I would sound crazy.

  Peggy took me to the hardware store downtown and we picked up a couple of gallons of pale lavender paint to cover the blood-red in my room, the stated reason being to make the room seem bigger. She bought a dresser for my clothes, made of perforated and precut cardboard, white with little purple flowers on it. It came in big, flat sheets, and assembling it was a nice distraction. I liked the idea of building something that would allow me to arrange my possessions neatly, make them orderly and controlled. I insisted that purple was my favorite color, but looking back, I realize that it had been Mom’s; my favorite color had been red, sometimes black. I’d begun adopting her tastes and mannerisms without even realizing I was doing it. It was a way to preserve her within me.

  Peggy even bought me a little purple parakeet from the mall in New Hampshire, to keep me company. I named him Moonshadow, after a knickknack shop across the way from the pet store, which had a striking neon sign in purple and pink.

  * * *

  I was convinced that the killer was probably hiding in town, and Lower Main Street seemed a likely place for him. If he was a Bridgton man, leaving would raise suspicion; it would be wisest for him to go about his usual routine. And while I was often anxious and afraid, I was also furious. If he wanted to kill the only witness, he could come find me, I’d think defiantly. Holding on to my hometown seemed the only way to salvage anything. To fight back.

  When I went into town to run errands with Peggy, I imagined concentric lines of dark energy with myself at the center. I hoped to snag him, to sense his location by the pull of our connection. I hoped some alarm would go off within me if he was nearby. I would run, but this time, when I reached safety, I’d be able to tell the police who he was.

  I went back to school as soon as I moved in. I tried to hold my head up, plow forward to the end. We had just a few weeks left of sixth grade before summer began. I’d been a straight-A student, so my teacher, Ms. Shane, waived most of my missed assignments. Hers was a mercifully indirect kind of care; she didn’t push me to talk to her, but she kept watch over me, tried to make things easier when she could. Of course, she couldn’t cushion me from all social interaction. Suddenly, kids who had teased me for years wanted to be best friends, gave me the desserts from their lunches, urged me to cut ahead of them in line, drew me sympathy cards. Some were genuinely concerned; others made their offerings with a quavery touch of excitement that I was beginning to recognize as a desire to get closer to the drama. I was disgusted by this excitement. It made me angry, but it also made me afraid, less sure of who was really on my side.

  One girl was particularly eager to prove our connection: she told me that her grandmother lived in the big white house across from ours—the one that shone like a lighthouse—and had heard me knocking that night but was too afraid to come to the door. This was later verified as fact. Cheryl Peters had already told me that the family next door, the third house I’d gone to, had also heard me and not opened the door. “They have two children,” she said, matter-of-factly. But I was a child, too. Or at least I had been.

  I went to my class for advanced kids one day, normally my favorite period, and a boy told me he had heard that Mom had killed herself. As he spoke, he was flanked by other boys, all nodding eagerly as if to confirm the story. I didn’t explain how impossible this was. They were just kids, I thought. They didn’t understand.

  At recess, I stayed inside with Ms. Shane, or I hid in a bathroom stall, crying as hard as I could, forcing the emotion out of myself all at once so that afterwards I could calm down and put my face back together for the rest of the afternoon’s lessons. I don’t know what I would have done out on the playground.

  Some gestures did manage to reach me, though. Ryan Davis, the kind of boy who thought it was fun to push you off the slide or break something precious that you had brought for show-and-tell, sent me purple irises, having heard they were my favorite. They were the first flowers I ever received from a boy, and I told myself to remember them. Whether or not I liked Ryan didn’t matter; the flowers were a sign that life would still have some joy in it, even if I wasn’t yet capable of feeling it. Romantic love had not saved Mom, but maybe someday it would save me.

  * * *

  School, difficult as it was, proved easier to navigate than living with the Martins, which began with tension and worsened each day. Peggy’s voice was always loud, and she talked to me in the same singsong tone she’d used when I was four or five. And she insisted that I “talk about it.”

  “Sarah, listen,” she’d start. “Listen, you need to talk about your muh-ther. I know you must be going through some very tough feelings, and you need to get those out there.”

  “Um, I don’t know what to say,” I’d answer, trying to keep my voice soft. Feeling anger start to swell.

  “Listen, I’m telling you”—getting louder now—“you have got to tell me what is going on! It’s not good to keep it all bottled up, okaaayy?”

  “Uh-huh,” I’d say. “It’s just . . . I don’t know what to say. What do you want?” And then I’d start to cry, which was, perhaps, what she wanted. “What does it change? I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

  “Now, now. Just try, okaaayy? Just do your best.”

  But it was impossible to share my feelings of grief with Peggy, because most of the time it was impossible to feel them. My sadness was overwhelmed by fear and visceral disgust and rage, rage so consuming and aimless that sometimes I was afraid of myself. I was convinced that the killer’s fury had entered me, and would never leave.

  I knew that Peggy, my soft-bodied former babysitter, with her houseful of Precious Moments figurines, was not interested in hearing about my rage. She wanted to wipe away the tears of the cute little blond girl she had known. She didn’t know what to do with my fear and rage, so she tried to will them to disappear, in favor of a gentler, more manageable sadness. One day, exactly a month after the murder, I woke up and found her and Fred getting ready to go to Portland for the day, leaving me alone in the house. When I begged them to stay or take me with them, Peggy told me I needed to “start getting over it.”

  I discovered later that Peggy and Fred had first heard about my mother’s death on the police scanner they kept in the kitchen as a form of news and entertainment, a common fixture in Maine at that time, before expanded cable access and the internet. Murder is a 10-49. They would have heard the code first, a general location, the police channel heating up, local and state cops tensely broadcasting plans and requests framed in bursts of static. Soon they would have known it was her, it was us. Then Peggy called Carol, told her she was Mom’s best friend. She may even have believed it herself at the time. I should not have been living with someone who had first heard about Mom’s death by eavesdropping on our town’s misfortunes. From the very start, her taking me in seemed more about her feelings than about mine.

  But I didn’t know about the scanner then. I must have thought that my family had reached out to Peggy, not the other way around. I also didn’t know that Carol was paying Peggy to take care of me, out of government survivor benefits written in my name. That the bird and the paint and the cheap cardboard dresser were things I’d bought myself, and that any cash left over went into Peggy’s bank account. I also didn’t know that the original agreement was o
pen-ended, meant to be temporary, and that Carol had no idea Peggy was promising me that I could stay through high school graduation. Peggy misled my family, and we wouldn’t realize the extent of her dishonesty until Carol and I compared notes twenty years later.

  * * *

  Peggy kept pushing me to share my feelings of sadness, to talk about Mom. When I didn’t want to, or didn’t know how, she got angry. I was cold, she thought, but spiky and sarcastic when pushed, a combination that I now understand would earn me disproportionate trouble as the years passed. Another fight culminated in her saying, “We take you in out of the goodness of our hearts, and this is how you thank us?!”

  “This” meant, as far as I could tell, withholding my feelings, pushing against her nagging, and spending too much time alone in my room.

  “The goodness of your heart?” I spat out. “Fuck the goodness of your heart!”

  My own heart felt black, dead. I hated being so mean, hearing myself yell and swear. Mom wouldn’t have liked it; she would have been disappointed. I could have stayed at Carol’s, but I was afraid of her house; it was harder to sleep out in those woods than it was in downtown Bridgton. Besides, it was a different school district; I didn’t want to leave my friends, or start anew with only a few weeks left. I would gladly have stayed with Gwen or Glenice, but they weren’t offering. I’d decided the goodness of people’s hearts was their own business. I hadn’t experienced any when I was knocking on those first four doors that night.