The Rising

by Ryan D'Agostino

  He uses her word, abomination.

  “John was gay,” Hodges says, looking straight at Donovan.

  Without passion, Donovan says, “How did he react to that?”

  She says that her friend John lived a life of crushing self-hatred and repentance, and that he apologized to the entire church for “his moral failings.”

  “Was that kind of similar to the cycle of repentance and sin that you felt you were going through?”

  Donovan is coming to the end of his notes, and you can feel him going through the questions—this has gone from a heart-to-heart to a dry examination. But if you watch Fran Hodges, you can see she is starting to crack, talking about this John.

  “Yeah, I think we all just felt trapped.”

  Donovan looks down at his notes and asks, almost as an afterthought, “What finally happened to John?”

  “He jumped out a window.”

  He is still looking at his notes, shuffling papers, so he doesn’t see Fran’s body suddenly begin to convulse as soon as she can get the answer out, doesn’t see her soft face crinkle into sadness as the sobs tumble from her in silence.

  He is still looking down when he asks, “Things are better for you now, Fran?” And then he looks up at her. And he sees that she is overcome. He recoils, and looks down at the carpet, as if out of respect, or shame.

  “Ah, we need to take—ma’am, why don’t we do this. Let’s take a five-minute recess,” says Judge Blue.

  Fran leaves, leaning on the marshal who escorts her as she walks.

  Donovan stands motionless, his jaw hanging open a little, his arms slack. He is blindsided by her breakdown, and yet it probably helped him.

  —

  It doesn’t work. None of it matters. In the end, the jury finds that Joshua Komisarjevsky should be put to death. After the sentencing, Donovan gives an interview at his home, a beachfront cottage. Most of the houses around his are summer houses, empty now for the cold winter. A storm is raging on the water, and the waves are pounding over the seawall and lashing the picture windows, like a car wash. The wind rattles the storm windows.

  He talks about Komisarjevsky’s prison journals, which made their way onto the record in the Hayes trial. In them, Komisarjevsky wrote that Bill’s actions on the morning of the murders were despicable in their cowardice. He wrote that Hayley was “a fighter,” and that Jennifer deserved credit for leaving the bank because she “left that safety to protect her children and it cost her her life,” but that Dr. Petit just sat in the basement until he managed to escape at the last minute. Never mind that he had lost seven pints of blood or that he thought the two able-bodied men upstairs had a loaded gun. He was a “coward,” according to the man who killed his family.

  You have to play tricks on your own brain to do Jeremiah Donovan’s job sometimes. You have to convince yourself that the victims who seek the death penalty are deathmongers, and that their heart-shaped pins are like some kind of lethal force that can brainwash a jury. You have to pretend the murderer is your nephew, because that motivates you. And you, a smart man with three daughters who has seen ghastly photographs of what happened to Bill Petit and his family in 2007, have to try to convince yourself that Dr. Petit could have escaped sooner—could have saved his family, even—because that’s what your client needs you to believe.

  “We know that he didn’t break the bonds, he just slipped out of them,” Donovan says. The storm has knocked out the electricity, and he is sitting in the darkness of his kitchen, silhouetted against the tormented sky out the window.

  Didn’t Petit try desperately to loosen or break the ropes and plastic zip ties over a period of hours?

  “I don’t think so. If you look at the pictures, they weren’t tight enough, and he managed to get his hands out.”

  So you think it was easy for him to escape?

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Josh thinks it was.”

  Sometimes, late at night, when he’s lying awake, Donovan walks downstairs and settles into the white wicker couch next to the table of family photos—his three daughters, his wife, his house. The waves outside slosh against the sand in the blackness. And he sometimes remembers that on the night of July 22, 2007, Bill Petit dozed off on the sunroom couch and was awakened by the crush of a baseball bat to his head. And Donovan looks out the big picture windows that frame the black ocean, and he thinks about Joshua Komisarjevsky and the baseball bat, and he pulls a blanket over his body and tries to sleep.

  It’s a fairytale so tragic

  There’s no prince to break the spell.

  I don’t believe in magic

  But for you I will.

  —Bruce Springsteen, “Countin’ on a Miracle”

  MARRIAGE

  2012–Present

  BILL KEEPS trying to add bricks and mortar to his new life, a little more every day. Where he was once struggling simply to remain among the living, aiming only to survive each languid day and long, harrowing night, now he can see, maybe, a life in which he might feel happy.

  By the end of the second trial, he and Christine were living together, in a small house (572 square feet, Bill likes to note) on Lake Garda, a quiet strip of water about five miles from the Country Club of Farmington. They were only there for a few months, but it was the first place they lived together that neither had lived in before, so it was exciting—the novelty.

  The photography business Christine has built has her out shooting all the time. She loves the work, and the hours aren’t traditional, so she can make herself free to attend and photograph Petit Family Foundation events. Bill has even served as her assistant at a few weddings on Saturdays, carrying her equipment and providing humor.

  Oprah Winfrey asked Bill if he could ever imagine loving anyone again. She had sat in his mother’s living room, hands folded in her lap, squinted at him, and said, “Can you see yourself building another family? Can you see yourself loving again?”

  “I’ve imagined it. On good days, yes. On bad days, no.”

  “What would Jennifer want for you?”

  He didn’t answer for a few seconds. “She’d probably want me to go back to medicine.” Then a pause. He hadn’t answered her question, really, because there was no short answer. Winfrey thought he was done and started to ask her next question, but Bill tacked on a joke. “Wives are prejudiced,” he said. “She said I was the smartest guy she ever knew. I said, ‘You didn’t meet enough guys, then.’ ”

  He believes Jennifer—Jenna, as he often called her—would want him to be happy. He no longer wonders whether these feelings he has for Christine are correct. Bill still has that computational mind, still likes statistics, likes knowing who won and who lost and who’s averaging better than 80 percent from the free-throw line. Likes knowing that his house is exactly 572 square feet. Can’t go to a fundraiser without calculating, out loud on the ride home, how much money they might have raised. Let’s see, tickets were $100 a couple, there were about 150 people there, probably mostly couples, so figure $10,000 plus the 50 singles, so that’s…But there is no quantifying this question of moving on with Christine. He knows what some people think, or he can imagine. She’s awfully young, isn’t she? They’re moving awfully fast, aren’t they? To him, though, it is remarkably uncomplicated. She makes him happy. She seems to be amused by him. They want to be around each other. That’s hard to find.

  He still wears his wedding ring. He was married for twenty-two years. He takes it off sometimes, puts it back on. Wearing it, not wearing it—both feel right, in a way. Then one day, a friend of Christine’s who now lives in Australia—in Australia—sees a paparazzi photo of Bill and Christine on the Internet. Her friend texts Christine to politely inquire about the fact that she appears to be dating a guy who wears a wedding ring. This makes Christine laugh hysterically. Bill takes off the ring.

  There’s a jewelry store in Litchfield, a rural town in the northwest part of Connecticut, that Christine has loved since she was a little girl. They sell estate
pieces—antiques, vintage rings and necklaces and bracelets, gorgeous things. The store actually offered Christine a job not too long ago, running the shop, but it was a little too far to drive, and she was worried the hours might have impeded her photography business. But they stopped in sometimes, and she and Bill let the owners know what kind of engagement ring she might like. They said they would keep an eye out for anything like what she wanted and promised to call Bill if they found it.

  It was around Christmas when she saw the box on his dresser in the bedroom of the house on Lake Garda. Oh, Bill, she thought. She almost laughed out loud. Really? Right there where I can see it? The night before New Year’s Eve—Bill didn’t want to propose on New Year’s Eve or Christmas morning or anything like that—Christine went out early in the evening with a few girlfriends for mid-holiday martinis. She and Bill were heading to a party later that night. When she came home from the restaurant, the house was dark. She kicked off her shoes and took off her coat, and there was Bill, lying in bed, dressed for the party but half zonked. He bolted up. She gave him a kiss, told him it was almost time to go.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Eleven Months Later

  “You never saw these,” Bill says to a visitor as he opens his front door. It’s ten o’clock in the morning and he is holding a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes he was supposed to take out to the trash bin. They missed the recycling last week. They’re still getting used to the schedule. He and Christine got married three months before, moved into this house a month ago, and she’s trying to make it nice. To give it “the feminine touch,” as Bill says. And part of the feminine touch is not having recycling stacked by the front door. He scoots out past the pumpkin on the front step, left over from Halloween and half-eaten by squirrels, and gets rid of them before his wife notices.

  His hair is damp from the shower, combed back. He wears a beard now, and it is trimmed neat. He wears a checked shirt and jeans. He is a newlywed, for the first time in a long time, and a new homeowner, so his days are full of little interactions with his wife and with his house, the little interactions that make up a life. In the more than five years since the murders, it’s these moments that little by little have brought Bill back to life. Back inside, he fiddles with the sliding doors that lead out to the deck. “These sliders don’t sit right,” he says. “They’re not flush. There’s huge leakage of air, so when it’s twenty degrees, it’s not very happy with these sliders.” Have to fix that. He jiggles the door shut. The house is a baby-blue prefab sitting on steel beams and cement footings at the end of a residential street along the Farmington River in western Connecticut. Off to one side is a copse of maple trees along the river’s edge, some of them felled by the beavers who chew the trunks until the trees topple and land with a deep thud on the bed of brown leaves below. There’s a statue of a deer off in the trees, knocked down and forgotten by some previous owner, its head now sticking out of the brush. Scared the heck out of Christine when she first saw it the other week. On the other side of the house, right outside the front door, is a pumping station about the size of a tennis court, with a chain-link fence around it—the town recently put in a sewer system, and a pumping station ended up here in the Petits’ front yard. A row of rose of Sharons runs along the fence, between the house and the pumping station, which take your eyes off it somewhat. “The house sags a little bit,” Bill says. “Structurally it seems okay so far. We talked to a guy about getting a jack in and jacking it up, but after a while it didn’t seem worth it. It’s been here for twenty-five years. It sort of was a priority when we were looking at it, but now it’s like, ehh, five grand to go up an inch or two?”

  The room in the house that’s supposed to be the master bedroom faces the pumping station. Bill and Christine instead squeezed their bed into the small room across the hall, which is not much larger than the bed itself, but it faces the river. That’s the side of the house they choose to focus on. That’s the view they want, the peace they want.

  “We painted this, the inside,” Bill says, nodding to the white walls of the living room. “This was all dark. All dark. Then she put these funky lights in. Put a new floor in, got rid of some furniture, tried to fit in here. No basement, no attic, no garage, no storage. What you see is what you get.”

  One of the funky lights is a chandelier that looks like a giant fluffy white dandelion. That’s pure Christine. And the benches out on the deck, which the previous owner left behind—she had Bill paint those bright purple.

  Christine sings out as she enters the room, “Shangri-la!” She waves her hands around like a hostess on a game show presenting a prize. Then she takes her voice down a notch—still several notches, and a couple of octaves, above Bill’s dry New England elocution—and, extending her damp right hand, says of their home, “We like it. It’s fun. I just washed my hands. Nice to meet you.”

  She whirls around the room, putting water on for tea, straightening a blanket on the arm of a chair, sliding an ottoman over in front of Bill so he can put his feet up. “It’s peaceful here, you know? It’s hard to find that,” she says, clanging out mugs and spoons on the counter. “I find the water very calming. And the town here is an artsy kind of place, and there’s something about those places that, like—the mind-set is to create new things. Like this lamp. That’s the whimsy! Look at the shadows it makes. This is the jewelry, I call it. I’m trying to draw your eye awaaay from the bad walls, the bad windows.” She flicks her hands at the chandelier and says, “Like, you’re not gonna look at that because this is here!”

  She smiles and her eyes wander out the window toward the river. She runs a hand through her curly, beach-blond hair.

  “I’ll open this door a little,” she says to no one. “It’s a nice day.”

  Bill’s eyes follow her, and he grins as she buzzes around. “But the house is so small, so it’s hard,” she says, going on the way she sometimes does, filling the silence. “Like the room that would have been the master but we turned it into a—”

  “A whatever room,” says Bill.

  “You need extra space in this house. Literally, literally, you can’t walk around the bed in the room we made into our bedroom. But you can see the water! So of course we did it that way. Why would I want to look at that fence?”

  “Whose idea was that?” Bill asks.

  Christine gives him a glare and a smile.

  “Just checking,” he says, throwing a droll smile back at her.

  She’s back in the kitchen now, fixing the tea.

  “The thing with such an inexpensive home is, we can do whatever we want and who cares. Like that lamp. Of course, we have no room. No. Room. We buy stuff—like those little things you ordered for—”

  “My egg things.” Bill shrugs.

  “These little things to poach eggs! And I said, ‘What? Where are we gonna put those?’ ”

  Bill holds up a glass punch bowl, another recent acquisition that doesn’t have a place. “Saint Patrick’s Church Bazaar raffle winner.”

  “Oh yeah, that. What else did it come with?” Christine says.

  “Eight margarita glasses!”

  “Yeah, like this big.” She almost hollers with laughter, holding her hands far apart like a lying fisherman. “And eight shot glasses. I was like, Greaaat.”

  “It was this little teacup raffle thing—”

  “He’s a sucker for old ladies.”

  “So I put most of my tickets on things like the Shop Rite gift card, a pizza a month for a year—but I put one ticket in that thing, and that’s what I won,” Bill says. “It had a bag of chips on top. That’s what sucked me in.”

  In a small room halfway down the hall, Bill has made an office for himself and Christine. On top of a small bookshelf, angled perfectly so that they face each other just slightly, are two framed photographs, one of Michaela and one of Hayley.

  In the bathroom, Christine has hung a hand towel with the embroidered words “Keep your face in the sun and your toes in the
sand.”

  Out in the living room, Bill identifies some of the art on the walls. On their honeymoon in Kennebunkport, Maine, they stopped in at an art gallery and Bill immediately walked over to a painting he ended up buying: three birds standing in the grass under a dark blue sky. He printed out the artist’s biography and keeps it tucked behind the frame.

  “Ellen Welch Granter,” he announces, like a docent in a museum. Then he motions to a framed portrait hanging near it, a girl in pigtails wearing a pink dress with blue dots.

  “Michaela Petit,” he says. “Self-Portrait.”

  He absently picks up his phone from a side table. His hand brushes a stack of brochures that say “Michaela’s Garden,” the project Hanna’s husband, Dennis, has created for the foundation. Inside each brochure is a small packet of four-o’clock seeds, the flowers Bill and Michaela used to like to plant. Dennis harvests the seeds from the plants he rescued from the house on Sorghum Mill Drive—something like three hundred thousand seeds so far—and the foundation sells them in packets for ten dollars.

  Bill pokes his phone with his thumb. “Too many e-mails,” he says without looking up. Foundation business, invitations to appear as an honored guest at this function or that, junk mail. “I try to look at the ten worst ones and get rid of them. There’s Williams and Sonomas. Somehow Williams and Sonomas—we got a couple of wedding gifts and somehow now they have us on their list for the rest of our lives.”

  He keeps scrolling.

  “That thing at Children’s Hospital is next Tuesday at three-fifteen,” he calls over to Christine. “Tuesday the eleventh. Meet ’em in the lobby.”

  She looks up. “What thing?” There are so many things these days, it’s hard to keep track. But every “thing” they go to is a reminder of the astonishing success of the foundation. So, no complaints. It’s just hard to keep track.