Page 72 of Welcome to Murder Week

It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that it occurred to me to ask my mother why she had left me. By then I had just accepted it, that my mother was flighty and left me to be raised by my grandmother, a very good mother indeed. But freshman year was all about getting to know new people, and there were so many questions. My friends complained their mothers were too involved in their lives, micromanaging and fretting over everything, their grades, and summer plans, and romances. Their mothers even commented on their Facebook posts.You look so pretty! Why aren’t you wearing a bicycle helmet? Love you, sweetie!They couldn’t believe my mother was barely aware of what I was up to. I was shocked when she showed up to parents’ weekend, though of course she wasn’tinterested in any of the official activities. It was a beautiful October day, so we walked along the trail by the Willimantic River. I must have thought about how to ask the question for half a mile before I finally spoke.

“Why did you leave me?” I asked.

It made her stop in her tracks, which made me nervous. Maybe I didn’t want to know. But her answer was anticlimactic.

“It wasn’t you, of course,” she’d said, like I’d be absurd to think that being abandoned had anything to do with me. “I was too young. Married, a mother, and a widow by the age of twenty-four. A child on my own, in Buffalo? I wasn’t ready.”

What I didn’t say:Neither was I.

And then she took my hand in hers and said, “Why dwell on the past? Nothing comes from that. I’m here now. You’re here now. Isn’t that enough?”

I couldn’t bring myself to say,No, it’s not enough.

Amity and I continue walking. From the other direction, two girls rush by, their heads bent and thumbs tapping out texts. A golden retriever, straining against its leash, bounds up to us, pulling a young woman in yoga pants.

“I’m so sorry, he’sbeastly,” she says.

We come to an old train tunnel that’s so long that the light winking at the end looks like a tiny bulb. Inside, the tunnel is dank and cool. A whoop ahead of us; Wyatt is trying out the echo. He and Germaine are almost out.

“You’ve described your mother as extremely charming, always taking an interest in everyone, which makes perfect sense,” Amity says.

“How so?”

Above us, a bare bulb flickers and buzzes.

“People deal with trauma in unexpected ways,” Amity says.“It’s like grief; everyone experiences it differently and on their own schedule. There’s no norm. Maybe your mother’s charm and curiosity and passion gave her the privacy she needed. Maybe it kept other feelings at bay.”

That and bolting.

We come to the end of the tunnel. The light is dappled through the bushes. And then the vegetation falls away, and we see the valley ahead of us, vast and green and rolling. The sun is almost too bright. We are on the bridge. The viaduct. We join Wyatt and Germaine, who have stopped about halfway across and are leaning on the ledge.

“It’s beautiful,” Amity says.

Below, the river ribbons its way through the valley. I see the narrow path where I met the fisherman. I follow it back toward the village. Somewhere between here and there a stone house once stood and then burned to the ground. I imagine a thin girl with wispy blond hair and narrow shoulders, running at night, the hem of her nightgown damp and dirty, her feet cold and scratched, her small heart thumping in her pale chest and delicate throat, pounding in her ears. Does she even know why she’s running, where she’s going? She must be so afraid. My anger starts to dissipate. Tears slide down my cheeks, but now I’m not crying for myself but for a nine-year-old girl whose life went up in flames, who lost everything and was shipped across an ocean to be raised by strangers. My heart is breaking for poor little Sukie Crowley, my mom. I wish I could hug the child she was and hold the woman she became, the mother who never shared her heartbreak or hinted at her enormous loss but kept running.

Germaine leads us down a rocky path to the riverbank and onto the path. We follow it back toward Willowthrop until Germaine steps off the trail and through the tall grass. “I think it was here.” We follow her away from the river to the edge of the forest. And there they are, stones, toppled and neglected, too big to have beenwashed up by the river. A piece of a wall, and then another chunk of remains, maybe part of the foundation, grass and weeds nearly concealing it. I put my palm on another stretch of wall, what was once part of my mother’s home, and try to imagine the rest. A child growing up here, a family. A life before the fire. I want to mark this place and my presence here. I pick up a few small rocks and place them on the wall like I used to do on my father’s gravestone. It’s a Jewish tradition, and I wonder if I should explain to the others, but before I say anything, I sense Amity beside me, and then Wyatt, and Germaine. Each of them places a rock on the wall too. I want to remember this, to etch it into my mind. This is where my mother’s childhood ended. And where Ann Crowley died. My grandmother, found and lost in a single swoop.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Germaine takes us back to town a different way, on a footpath through a forest and then across a pasture. The landscape hasn’t changed, but it feels different now. I can’t pass any of it, the tufted yellow tops of dandelions, the pale trunks of birch trees, or the clumps of fanned out ferns, without imagining my mother here too, skipping across the field, her little fingers brushing the tips of the tall grass. It’s disorienting, like I haven’t been here before. But when we pass through a stile that takes us onto a road, I know where we are. We’re at the bottom of the hill where Dev and his mother live. Germaine looks up toward their house and says, “I should stop in. See how Polly’s doing.”

“Polly?” I say.

“My friend,” Germaine says. “The one you walked home.”

“Penelope.”

“Whose nickname is Polly.”

“Edwina’s friend Polly?” I’m not sure what I’m grasping at.

“Same Polly. Same Penelope.”

“But Edwina said Polly was dead.”

“Why would she say that?” Germaine says. “Polly lives right up that hill. You’ve met her yourself.”

Did I hear wrong? I think back to our conversation. Edwina said that her friend Polly stayed in touch with Sukie for a while. When I asked if I could talk to Polly, Edwina said Polly wasn’t with us anymore.Because she has dementia.

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