Over the next few months, Mom told Anna about the neglect and violence in her family, even pointing out that her parents never hugged or kissed their children. I am surprised that she spoke so frankly, even to a therapist. But I’m glad someone was listening.
At some point, Mom bought a desk for my room, and Grammy insisted that we needed Dennis to put it together for us, even though he and Mom were broken up at the time. It was just a cheap drafting table—a pressboard surface supported by hollow metal tubes, with a little plastic bag stapled to it, filled with sturdy screws and an Allen wrench. Mom and I ended up putting the desk together, but she still felt weak in the face of her mother’s criticism, and within days she was back with Dennis. Anna helped her start to see the effects of her upbringing; Mom finally admitted that she wasn’t quite sure what a healthy relationship was supposed to look like. Grace had taught her daughters that they couldn’t survive without a man. And so, then, how could one ever leave?
By then, I was fighting with her, about Dennis and about Tim. Seeing her shuffle around the house in Tim’s absence, so sad and breakable, was as painful for me as sitting in my room hearing her and Dennis scream at each other. I wanted her to let us off the roller coaster, to free us from the shifting moods and whims of unreliable men. When letters came from Tim, I considered throwing them away, although I didn’t dare. I thought she would get over it if he would just leave her alone.
Once, when Mom got back together with Dennis days after breaking up with him, Anna wrote that “she is upset that she has not been able to stay single and her daughter is equally upset.”
I thought I could step in and save her, but of course Anna knew that she had to save herself. She pointed out that Mom was already more independent and resourceful than Grace had ever been, and told her that she could decide how she would be treated, what she would put up with. They talked about how Mom had quit smoking and significantly cut down her drinking years before. “But this is the hardest one,” Mom insisted.
With Anna’s help, Mom kept trying to reduce the intensity of her arguments with Dennis, to at least keep him from physically acting out. But the violent outbursts continued. Through winter and early spring of that final year, more and more nights were marred by loud, angry fights that Dennis escalated with fits of rage.
Less than a year after the murder, at age thirteen, I described Dennis’s behavior to a Maine State Police officer:
“He’d call Mom all sorts of nasty names when he’d get mad. He had a temper, you know—if he gets mad he just throws a fit,” I said, laughing. “Once he hit the screen door so hard he knocked it off the hinges.” It seems that I found this hilarious, or at least that I wanted to. Then I said, “Dennis never really did anything violent.”
It chills me to think about what that young girl thought was normal—what everyone thought was normal. Couples fought. Men got pissed. Official violence started only when someone got hit in the face. You didn’t want to make too much of anything, get labeled hysterical, paranoid. Even after the murder, I wanted to laugh off Dennis’s aggressive, intimidating behavior. Later in that same police interview, I described their on-again, off-again, out-of-control romance as a “typical adult relationship.” Loons crying out at each other, unable to stay away.
* * *
Mom’s final therapy session, on May 5, 1994, caught her on an upswing. She was wearing Dennis’s ring, “but still maintaining some distance from him.” Even in the wake of a recent call from Tim, she felt balanced. She and Anna talked about “maintaining this distance from both and not falling into the either/or trap—even holding the door open for a Mr. X who might come along.”
Anna Parker would leave Maine without knowing who killed her patient, this beautiful young woman who was trying so hard to cast violence out of her life. She would not know if it was the fiancé or the ex or a Mr. X who came along, knocking on that open door.
I so wish that Mom had lived long enough to recognize her formidable strength, and it saddens me to see that she spent so much of that final year struggling with self-doubt and fear. But there was happiness, too; it shines in my memory, as undeniable as those notes she scribbled on our calendar.
As I read this therapy record over and over, trying to get closer to her, it is Mom’s first appointment that I keep going back to, the one where she says that she would kill herself if not for me. I realize that even though we could do nothing for each other on that final dark night, we have, at least sometimes, kept each other alive.
48
* * *
This story will never be over. I could make calls and conduct interviews forever, contacting one person and then another and then another in an ever-widening circle, each person suggesting another until I’ve talked to the whole town, the whole state, the whole country, the whole world. We are connected by violence; we are connected by love.
I will never know exactly how and why we lost her: it is a puzzle I cannot solve, and even Hutchinson probably doesn’t know the answer. I’ve had to find my own ending, decide for myself when to move on.
Before I quit, I knew I had to do one last thing. Almost two years after my last attempt, I decided to try talking to Linda one last time. I could not go forward, could not return to my current life in any state of peace, if I was still afraid of someone I was supposed to love. I was staying in Portland at the time. One morning, I woke up and knew it was time. Get in the car, I told myself. Drive to Bridgton. Park in her driveway, and get out. See what happens.