Bill hears a car engine start. Are they leaving? No other noise suggested this. He redoubles his efforts trying to twist out of the ties.
The man drives the van to a Citgo station nearby and pumps ten dollars’ worth of gas into the plastic containers but none into the car, walks into the minimart, and hands the cashier a twenty. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt and jeans, just another guy buying gas on a Monday morning. The cashier, Selma Haddad, looks in his eyes, as she does with every customer, hands him his change, and thanks him. He walks back out to the hijacked minivan and drives away. He gets lost. He calls his friend back at the house. Calls him once, calls him again. Eventually, the man who went to buy gas finds his way back to 300 Sorghum Mill Drive, the plastic containers sloshing on the floor of Jennifer’s minivan.
—
A sweet sound drifts down from upstairs into Bill’s basement hell, a sound both familiar and incongruous. It is Jennifer’s voice, distant, muffled, but kind. Bill hears her voice every day in this house, in other rooms, talking to the girls, talking to her parents on the phone—Jen’s voice in this house has been the mood music of his existence for a long time. But now the sound has a different tenor. It is a sign that she is okay, a clue to what might be happening, a note of comfort after hours of terror. And yet there is also the unshakable truth that he is witnessing his wife, who must be petrified, having a conversation with two men who broke into their home and beat his skull with a bat. This must be what it feels like when the plane you’re in starts suddenly dropping—you’re still alive, holding your wife’s hand, but your world appears to be hurtling toward disaster and there is nothing you can do.
They are probably in the kitchen, because the kitchen is just up the basement stairs and it sounds as if the door at the top is open. Jennifer is calmly saying that she will need to get her purse and her husband’s checkbook before they go to the bank.
So they’re taking her to the bank to get money because there’s no cash in the house. Bank won’t be open for a while. But maybe this is good news. Maybe this move by these guys—a fairly stupid move on their part, it would seem—will draw the police. Or maybe Jen will give them some money and they will actually leave. Good, sweet Jenna. Inclined against hatred, wanting to trust. But she’s no pushover. She will have a clear head through this.
Bill knows his blood pressure must be dangerously low and tries to estimate his blood loss. It’s a lot, so far, and the torrent of blood pouring out of him makes it harder and harder to move without feeling like he’s going to faint. Eventually he figures out that if he stands up and then slides down the pole, the weight of his body moving down raises his blood pressure and makes him feel something resembling strength. Up and down he struggles, slowly building his strength while at the same time trying to free his hands and feet, the hard plastic ties still slicing into his skin.
Then, a little while later—it’s hard to figure how long—he hears Jen’s voice once more. This time she is leaving a message for Mona Huggard, the nurse who manages the office at Bill’s medical practice, telling her that Bill is feeling sick today and asking her to cancel all his appointments for the morning, a full schedule of patients. That will be a surprising message for Mona to hear. She’s worked for Bill for eighteen years. In all that time Bill has maybe called in sick once.
Things are happening.
All that matters for Bill right now is getting himself off this pole.
—
Thump, thump, thump.
The hell is that?
Thump.
Coming from the living room, it sounds like. Maybe the men are ransacking the house. Maybe they’re piling up the TV and furniture and whatever else they’re going to steal. Getting it ready to load into a car or something. He can’t bring himself to imagine that what he hears is the sound of his wife being raped on their living-room floor. Can’t make himself think about what has happened to his two girls, his beautiful Michaela and Hayley.
Then he hears what sounds like a moan.
“Hey!” he yells. It takes all the strength he has just to make a sound, and the word barely forms in the air.
A man’s voice responds back down the basement stairs.
“Don’t worry,” the voice says. “It’s all going to be over in a couple of minutes.”
He can’t stay tied to this pole anymore. He reaches deep, musters energy he doesn’t seem to have, and presses his wrists against the plastic ties, doesn’t care if they slice his damn hands off. Finally, all the scraping and rubbing against the pole and the twisting of his wrists has worn down the plastic ties, and they burst off. He contorts his hands out of the clothesline knots, unties the lines around his waist and chest, and he is free.
He has to get next door to Simcik’s, his neighbor. Dave can call the police.
He tries for a couple of seconds to force the ties off his ankles, but they’re too tight, and anyway he is mobile now. No need to unbind his feet, no seconds to waste. He drags himself to the stairs that lead up through the bulkhead door and into the backyard, then he pushes his body up the stairs themselves, propelling himself along on his hands and elbows. When he gets to the top, his heart feels like it’s beating two hundred times per minute. Feels like it’s going to explode right out of his chest. But he keeps going. His whole life, he has never given up on anything important, never given in, never relented. He has never not won. But right now, he knows one thing, and it might be the only thing he knows for sure: He needs help.
He falls. Just outside the bulkhead doors in the backyard, he tries to stand so that he can hop efficiently across the yard toward Dave’s house, but he falls. He pushes himself back up onto his feet, but he falls again. His body can’t do what he wants it to do. But he has to get to Dave’s—it can’t be much more than fifty feet, but it might as well be a mile if he can’t walk, can’t even hop. The grass is slick with the morning rain, which makes it even more difficult to keep his footing. He tries to crawl, but even that proves impossible, because he does not have the strength to support his body and his legs are tied together, so they have to move as one. He just keeps slipping, his arms sliding out from under his own weight like the legs of a newborn colt. He is getting nowhere.
So he rolls.
He lies prone on the grass and rolls across the backyard, through the copse of trees on the border of his yard and Simcik’s, past some bushes, up toward Dave’s driveway. When he gets close, he starts yelling, “Dave! Dave! Dave!”
He rolls right up to Dave’s white garage door and starts pounding on it. His ankles are still tied together tight, but his hands are free and he is banging on the door with the force of his whole life. Finally, finally, the garage door opens and Dave appears. Thank God. But Dave, his neighbor for eighteen years, looks down at Bill, a beaten, soaking-wet man lying in his driveway covered with blood, and asks, “Can I help you, sir?”
Bill says, “Dave! It’s Bill. Call 911! Quick. Quick.”
It seems like only a few seconds before a cop appears out of the rain and is standing over Bill, ordering him to stay down. Bill assumes it’s a cop, anyway. His gun is drawn and he doesn’t seem to know whether Bill is a suspect or a victim. Then another officer is there, who looks more like a SWAT team member—the black pants, the black vest. Bill is trying to tell them to cut the bindings from his ankles, but they won’t.
The first one, his gun still drawn, his arms bolt stiff, his eyes pivoting between Bill and Bill’s home, shouts, “Who’s in the house?”
“The girls,” Bill gasps through the rain.
The officer repeats himself, as if needing more information, or as if he had expected a different answer. His voice is urgent and impatient, the voice of an officer in an emergency: “Who’s in the house?”
Bill yells up at him, “The girls! The girls are in the house!”
AFTERMATH
Monday, July 23–Friday, July 27, 2007
BARBARA PETIT calls her husband, Bill Sr., at 10:15 to tell him that the fire alarm
at Billy and Jennifer’s house is going off and that they aren’t answering their cell phones. When the alarm company can’t reach anyone in the home, they call Bill’s parents as a backup, and Barbara is worried.
Bill Sr. is downtown in Plainville and decides to first check Bill’s medical office on Whiting Street. Mona, Bill’s nurse, tells Mr. Petit that Jennifer left a message early that morning saying that Bill was out sick. Bill Sr.’s first thought is his son’s weak heart. He and Mona call around to the few area hospitals where it would make sense for Billy to go if he were having a cardiac emergency. None has admitted a William Petit.
It’s not even a mile and a half from Bill’s office to Big Bill’s house on Red Stone Hill, so Bill Sr. drives up to his home to tell Barbara he’s going to Billy’s house in Cheshire to see what’s going on. On the twenty-minute drive, he calls Bill and Jen’s home number and everyone’s cell phones. There’s no answer on any of the numbers. The only response he gets is Michaela’s sweet voicemail greeting on her cell.
Bill Sr. exits Interstate 84 and is driving down Mountain Road toward Sorghum Mill Drive when an ambulance speeds by going in the opposite direction. Then two Cheshire police cars race past him and turn left up Sorghum Mill, and his heart drops into his stomach. He puts his blinker on and takes the left turn, as he has countless times before.
The yellow police tape stretches clear across the road, visible through the steady rain, and Bill Sr. can’t imagine what’s going on. And then, just beyond the tape, he sees a car—a minivan. It’s totaled. Just destroyed. It looks like Jen’s Chrysler, but it couldn’t possibly be. He stops his car, opens the door, and sees that, in fact, it is his daughter-in-law’s car. And his body begins to weaken. The fire alarm, a car accident, no answer on the phone…William A. Petit Sr., the patriarch of an American family that is both normal and extraordinary, stands in the rain, his face slack and his heart pounding and his knees shaking, and he can feel in his gut that something has happened that will be more than he can bear.
He tries to approach Jennifer’s car, but a Cheshire police officer stops him. Bill Sr. tells the officer that the car belongs to his daughter-in-law. At this the cop freezes for a second. He tells Mr. Petit to wait there while he gets someone to talk to him.
Fifteen minutes pass. He is too far down the road to be able to see his son’s house. He just stares at the mangled Chrysler Pacifica, unable to fathom what could have caused this. And what about the fire alarm in the house? How would that lead to this?
Finally, the chief of police, accompanied by two other officers, walks up to Big Bill and says, “Your son is on his way to the hospital, and there are three deceased in the house.”
—
The ambulance that roared past Bill Sr. on Mountain Road carries the almost lifeless body of his son. The driver swerves onto 84 going west and blows by four quick exits in downtown Waterbury before screeching up to the emergency-room entrance at St. Mary’s. In the emergency department doctors immediately begin suturing and stapling the pulsing lacerations on Bill’s head. The Coumadin makes his blood almost as thin as water, and it seeps from the wounds in little rivers. His body, in shock from what he has endured over the last seven hours and from the loss of between five and seven pints of blood—almost beyond what a human being can stand—convulses, and he vomits. This happens a few times before the ER staff administers an anti-nausea drug to stop the retching.
—
Bill Sr. calls home to tell Barbara. Her sister Johanna answers and tells him that Barbara is already on her way to Cheshire. He tries to tell Johanna what happened, but he can barely get the words out of his throat. He is sobbing. Finally he forces himself to say, “They’re all gone.” Johanna doesn’t understand. Big Bill can’t respond at first—he can’t talk, his voice a hostage of dread. After fifteen or twenty seconds, he finds the voice to tell her that Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela are dead.
When Barbara pulls up to the police tape, the cops bring her over to her husband. Barbara is screaming. Hanna pulls up and leaps from her car, yelling, waving her arms. Andrew and Abby sit in Hanna’s car, crying uncontrollably. The EMTs check Bill Sr.’s vital signs.
Bill’s brothers Glenn and Brian arrive and drive their parents to St. Mary’s, and Hanna follows them. Their other brother, Mike, his wife, and Hanna’s husband, Dennis, meet them there. The family is shown to a waiting room, where a police detective tells them everything that’s known about what happened at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive that morning, his words echoing around them like some faraway noise. The ten of them stand in the hospital waiting room, a place unfamiliar to them all, and try to comprehend what the detective is saying.
Eventually they are shown in to see Bill. Their darling Billy. Billy, their big brother. Uncle Billy. He is lying on a hospital bed, his clothes cut off, his body limp with exhaustion and blood loss, purple bruises and cuts around his wrists and ankles. He looks horrible, unrecognizable, like no version of Billy they have ever seen. The doctors are in the middle of sewing the wounds, but they pause for a moment because he lifts his head. He looks into the faces of his family, and he asks about the girls. His father just looks at him, his eyes clouding with tears, and shakes his head.
—
Ron Bucchi returns to his office around one o’clock after having lunch with a client. His phone rings, and it’s one of Bill’s cousins—not unusual, really. Ron has known Bill for forty years and done accounting work for half the family.
What number Sorghum is Billy?
Three hundred, says Ron.
Oh my God.
Ron finds the head of his firm and tells him he has to leave right away. “They killed my friend’s family,” he says, running out.
He speeds home. Ron lives on a quiet cul-de-sac in Kensington, another peaceful central-Connecticut town. Like Bill, he is a local boy done good, and he lives in a gorgeous home with an open kitchen looking out to woods in the backyard. Susan is there, and her mother has stopped by to visit. Ron tells them what happened, makes sure Susan is okay—thank goodness her mom is there—then runs back out to his car and races the twenty minutes to St. Mary’s.
He hardly leaves the hospital for the rest of the week. He goes home at night to sleep, and to give the family time alone with Bill, but during the day he is there, using a hospital conference room on the same floor as Billy’s room as a makeshift command center from which he handles all the tasks that are too much for the Petits to think about, the details that must be dealt with when a catastrophe falls out of the sky. First, on that Monday, there is the issue of Jen’s parents. They’re elderly. They live in Pennsylvania, at least six hours away by car when it’s not raining. Ron speaks to them by phone, and they tell him they’re going to get in the car. He says, No, wait, I’ll call you back. Ron makes a couple of calls. At the country club, there are some guys with money. He calls a buddy, says, Do you know anybody who has a plane? A couple more calls and he reaches a guy who has an account with a private charter company. Ron tells the guy what’s happened, his voice gravid with panic and pain and the urgent, shaking need to help. The guy orders a plane into the air and within an hour or two, Dick and Marybelle Hawke are flying up to Connecticut in a stranger’s jet.
Ron helps the hospital staff deal with the reporters who are showing up wanting an interview with Bill, or with Ron, or with anybody. He is also charged with organizing a memorial service for Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela, to be held this Saturday. He secures an auditorium at Central Connecticut State University. He sets up committees to oversee parking and sound systems. He works with the Petits’ church, United Methodist, to get the choir to perform, with musicians from a music school in Hartford. Everyone is on edge. The church people want something elaborate (“a Busby Berkeley production,” Ron says later), and Ron just wants a simple, relatively quick service that his friend Bill can survive without fainting, because it will be a miracle if he can show up at all. But eventually Ron and the church people figure things out, and everyone is rea
sonably satisfied with the plan.
It also falls mostly to Ron to arrange the funeral for the three Petit girls. He asks Bill, who is still hooked up to an IV, What do you want me to do?
White caskets, Bill says. I just want white caskets. You can figure out the rest.
—
At the burial on Friday in Plainville, in West Cemetery, there is no headstone on the graves. It will take Bill some time to decide what kind of stone he wants, and what he wants it to say. It will take him some time to get it perfect.
It will take some time to make himself set the stone, so heavy and final, into the earth.
It will take years.
REMEMBRANCE
July 28, 2007
ON THE morning of the memorial service, the staples are still in Bill’s head, crusted with purple blood. They bind together the flaps of scalp that the baseball bat tore apart 130 hours earlier. A long gash cleaves the back left side of his head, and on the right side of his forehead, a crimson line tears through the skin like a zipper, straight down from his hairline before hooking in just above the eyebrow.
A tailor from Melluzzo’s, a men’s clothing store in the next town over, comes to his parents’ house to make sure the new suit fits. The same man had appeared at St. Mary’s Hospital a few days before to measure him, because William A. Petit Jr., fifty years old, father of two, successful endocrinologist, director of clinical research at the Hospital of Central Connecticut, medical director of the prestigious Joslin Diabetes Center, owner of a cream-colored three-bedroom colonial on a corner lot in a nice town, has no clothes. Everything he owned burned in the fire. So somebody had called Melluzzo’s, and the man now shows up with a new charcoal suit, a crisp white shirt, and a gray striped tie. Bill puts on the clothes, ties the tie with unsteady hands, stands before the mirror, and gingerly combs his dark hair over the wound in the back.
The Rising Page 8
