“That lady, Wilma Hoffman, from Bulkeley High School who does the knitting club. They knit stuff for the kids. We gave them a grant, and we’re gonna go with them to Children’s Hospital.”
Christine pulls out her phone. This is what they have to do constantly. Sync.
“The thirteenth?”
“Eleventh. Tuesday the eleventh. Three-fifteen.”
“Okay. Children’s Hospital. Which one?”
“The one in Hartford,” Bill says. He pauses before adding, “The only one.”
Christine murmurs a gentle singsong-y reminder: “I don’t know that.”
They put their coats on. There are the usual errands to do. Bill shoves the storm door closed as he leaves. A gust of wind caught it the other day and busted the bracket that keeps it latched, so you need to really push it to make sure it’s shut. Have to fix that.
—
Lunch first. They’ll walk into town, which they like to do. Bill can do things to relax these days. Or at least he can do the kinds of things other people do to relax. He can simulate leisure. At the end of their driveway, an old railroad bridge creaks over the river. On the other side: an antiques barn, a package store, some gift shops, a wine bar, a pub in the old depot, a place to rent kayaks. Cute town. There’s this one sandwich shop where everything’s homemade. They do a turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce on pumpernickel that Bill gets almost every time. You just order and grab a seat at one of the mismatched tables. It feels like an old general store. Bill and Christine sit and eat and talk and watch people. No one stares at him here.
Bill sometimes makes jokes that show his age, and Christine’s—there are twenty years between them. At the lunch counter, the girl hands Christine a bowl of steaming winter-squash soup. “Danger, Will Robinson,” Bill says to his wife as she picks it up, quoting a television show that went off the air nine years before she was born. When she successfully carries it to the table without burning herself or spilling any, he says, “Well done, Grasshopper.”
Yeah, well, you gotta make some jokes.
He doesn’t talk about it much, his soldiering on or whatever people call it. His courage, his fortitude. It’s just how he was brought up, he says. You do what you have to, he says. You just keep going, he says.
No, Christine says. She corrects him: You need to give yourself credit. You do what you have to. You just keep going. You find ways to keep living. Not everyone would, or could. To which Bill scrunches his face into a look that says, If you say so, his fingers absently gathering the fallen leaves from a dying plant into a neat pile on the table.
After that—after you keep going for a while—you yearn for the return of mundane normalcy, if such a thing is even possible, although days like this at the sandwich place suggest it is, if only fleetingly. Your days, like anyone’s days, become a mosaic of present and past, each piece as surprising as the next. But in your case, the past is a conflagration, a nightmare. So you go on, and the most important questions in your life, the ones you ask yourself every day and the ones people think but don’t say out loud, become: Where, exactly, are you going? Will there ever come a time when you’ll be able to salvage what’s good and leave the horror behind?
How do you get out of the bed in the morning?
Do you sleep?
—
“Sorry, dudes. You’re out,” he says to the Rolling Stones after a couple of verses of “Midnight Rambler,” looking at the dash as he punches the buttons. “Oh, crap. Okay, we got about four-tenths of a gallon left. It says we got about ten miles left. Just about get us to Plainville.”
“Oh, don’t do that,” Christine says, half pleading, half joking. “Get gas.”
She knows how to poke him like that. He liked that in her from the time they met. Christine knows people worry about her husband, and she knows people miss Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela. Of course. She also knows she fell in love.
The night after they got engaged was New Year’s Eve, and they went over to Ron’s house to spend the evening with Ron and his wife, Susan. Susan and Jennifer were friends, seeing each other mostly at countless country-club events, and now Susan has taken a real liking to Christine. The Bucchis live in a fabulous house on a suburban cul-de-sac, a house they designed themselves. When Bill and Christine arrived, Susan and Christine went off to the kitchen. As Ron put away their coats, Bill gave him a nudge and told him, almost in a whisper, that he was going to announce to him and Susan that night that he had asked Christine to marry him.
Act happy even if you’re not, Bill said.
Ron clapped him on the back and said, What are you talking about? Of course I’m happy!
It was just that Bill, too, knew people worried about him. Nothing to do with Christine. In fact, Christine is perfect.
She’s had her bumps, too—nothing even close to what Bill endured, but nothing to belittle, either. Life. Fortunately for her, Christine’s parents gave her the gift of perspective from a young age. When she was growing up, sometimes her family would invite a member of their church to stay with them for a few days, someone who had nowhere else to go. In doing this they were teaching their daughter compassion. Christine’s mother is a psychiatric nurse. She works in hospitals and prisons with tough cases. From her, Christine learned how to listen. How to be present and not say anything. Early on when they were dating, if she saw Bill going to a dark place in his mind, she was quiet, just holding his hand. He used to thank her for that. “For what?” she would say. And he would tell her that a lot of people don’t know how to not do anything, which was usually what he needed. Just an easy silence.
The nightmares aren’t the toughest part. She comforts him as anyone would comfort a child. The toughest part is looking past his unmoving face and trying to read whether at any particular moment he feels unspeakable pain or feels like going out for a sandwich. Sometimes in the car, on the way to an event, they’ll be all dressed up, she’s cracking jokes, and suddenly the mood in the car just drops like a rock. Sometimes she tries to lift it back up, and sometimes she knows to let it fall.
Slowly, it’s getting easier. He had twenty-two years of marriage before, but it’s just the beginning for them, and they’re learning. And always, she jokes. “You don’t like doing dishes, do you? And how’d that go over with Jennifer?”
And Bill laughs.
They drive on, Bill nixing songs on the radio, searching for something he likes. Unionville Avenue turns into North Washington, and they pass a cemetery.
“This is the cemetery that the girls are buried in,” Christine says. “We could probably drive by there on the way back.”
Bill doesn’t say anything at first.
Vox clamantis in deserto.
“Yeah,” he says after driving another hundred yards.
It had to be a hundred degrees the day they put that headstone in.
“Depends what time we get back. Sun goes down around 4:10 now,” he says.
It took him a good two years, maybe three, to settle on a design, get it made the way he wanted. The funeral itself happened so quickly—the tragedy took place early on a Monday morning, and the funeral was that Friday, the day before the larger memorial service. But the headstone, that took some time, took until long after the violent anguish of that first week had dissolved into the hideous daily routine of trying to live. Once you plant a rock in the grass with their names chiseled into it, it’s set in stone, as they say. Right? It’s final. When the task is done, and your mind is unoccupied, the gaping maw of the universe comes to swallow you whole. So Bill took his time, worked and worked on the stone, choosing the right one, getting the design just right, the shape. It’s Virginia slate, and the man Bill bought it from said it came from so far deep in the earth that it would last five hundred years.
At the top is a circle divided into four parts, each quadrant etched with an image.
A rose, for Michaela Rose. KK Rosebud.
A rower with a long ponytail, powering a scull through the water�
�how many times had Bill watched Hayley row? (Watching crew was great, he says. You’d drive to some river somewhere at dawn, wrap yourself in blankets against the cold, and wait for two hours, and then—zoom!—a boat would whiz in and out of view in two seconds.)
An angel, with the hint of a smile—that represents all three of them. Jennifer was good to her core. The preacher’s daughter, not a mean bone. It wasn’t that she always thought the best of people or believed that everyone was good. It was that she gave them the chance to be good. That was her gift.
A couple of months after the second trial ended, Bill went to the cemetery. There had been snow on the ground for weeks. Sometimes when it’s cold and snowy, or when the spring rains come, there aren’t many visitors to the cemetery. When Bill went that day, he didn’t see many footprints in the snow. Not a lot of visitors lately. It didn’t bother him much—people are busy, and it was a cold winter. But he took a picture of the headstone and tweeted it. “5 years, 7 months and 24 days. We will never forget,” he wrote. Numbers matter to Bill.
In the fourth part of the circle, Petit chose the Latin inscription Vox clamantis in deserto. From the Old Testament. It’s the Dartmouth College motto, and he’s known it since he was eighteen. Hayley would have graduated two years ago by now.
It means: A voice crying out in the wilderness.
—
They’ve repainted the parking spaces on Whiting Street downtown, and Bill isn’t sure he likes it. His practice was across the street for eighteen years, and they never had spaces like this. He used to slide his old car into the same spot every day in the lot behind the small brick building that had his name on it. Now he’s backing this big boat of a Mercedes that he bought from Ron, 193,000 miles on it, into an end-to-end spot. “Ever since they put these little cutouts here, it seems like it’s harder to park,” he says, as if to himself. Then he adds, exhaling as he twists around to see how close he is to the minivan behind him, “Perception and reality.” The words come out like a shrug.
The office of the Petit Family Foundation is actually an office within an office, a small room with a desk, leased from a company that no longer needs the space. The foundation has two employees: Rolande Petit, the wife of Bill’s cousin Tim, who grew up down the street from him, and Hayley Hovhanessian, the daughter of a guy Bill went to high school with. She met Hayley Petit at basketball camp at Miss Porter’s School, and they became friends.
Christine says Hayley is the backbone of the foundation.
“Hey, Hayley-girl,” Bill says as he and Christine walk into the office. Hayley is the same age Hayley Petit would be, and wears her long brown hair in a ponytail. She has bright saucer eyes that light up when she smiles.
Hayley-girl.
“Hey!” she says, upbeat, grinning through a stack of papers. Bill looks at the yellow Post-it note on the pile. “Uh-oh,” he says. “ ‘Bill to Sign.’ Oh, crap.” Hayley keeps smiling. She knows he doesn’t mind signing these letters. They have a system: Hayley and Rolande enter every donation into a database and generate a letter of thanks to be signed by Bill. He comes in a few times a week and signs and signs. If he knows the recipient personally, he crosses out the formal “Dear Mr. and Mrs.” and handwrites their first names.
Bill sometimes writes little notes as he signs. He holds one up for Christine.
“Can you read my handwriting at all, or is it just a mess?”
She tries to read: “ ‘Thank you for…this…my’—something.”
“Thank you for this very generous gift.”
Christine frowns and smiles at the same time. “Show me four letters in that word. Show me two, even. Put the front end on the v at least.” It is the most loving needling you can imagine.
Bill puts the front end on the v and moves to the next letter in the pile. “Here’s a guy I went to medical school with. He’s an anesthesiologist in Pennsylvania now.” He scratches out some words of gratitude on the bottom. Christine peers over his shoulder and reads.
“Very…Christmas.”
“That’s ‘Merry Christmas.’ Come on.”
Hayley-girl.
It just comes out. That’s what he used to call his Hayley. Hayley-girl. It just comes out sometimes when he sees Hayley at the office.
The images fly in and out sometimes, unexpected: chestnut hair, a smile like she knew everything would be all right. Six feet by the time she graduated high school. A force of nature.
One of the letters in the stack on Hayley’s desk at the foundation is written in a child’s hand.
“Oh, these boys are great,” Bill says. There are these three brothers, he explains, and every year at their birthday party, instead of asking for presents, they ask their friends to make a donation to the Petit Family Foundation. And they mail a check with a note.
“Dear Dr. Petit,” this one says. “How are you? I just had my 10th birthday party. I invited all my friends and family. We celebrated at my favorite place, the Sports Arena. Like my brothers, I wanted to donate my presents to your foundation. I hope these donations help your awesome foundation to help others who are less fortunate.”
Bill knows the girls would be proud of the foundation and its mission, especially Jennifer. The next few years will be interesting. See if the donations keep coming. Self-sustainability remains the goal. For now, the board meets every two months, and Bill drives all over the state drumming up support, handing out big cardboard checks, shaking hands, saying a few words, flashing his best smile. He and Christine go to dinners, they go to balls, they go to galas, they go to silent auctions. And the foundation’s gifts are growing. The list of recipients is now in the dozens. The annual gift to Prudence Crandall, the women’s shelter, grew from $10,000 to a $100,000 multiyear gift. The board gave $4,300 to Pathways/Senderos, a teen-pregnancy prevention center in New Britain, Connecticut. And they awarded another $100,000 gift, to establish a health center in Jennifer’s name at the Channel 3 Kids Camp, a retreat that offers special recreation and leadership programs for children of military parents, children with disabilities, and siblings who have been separated in the foster-care system.
“The fact that the Petits not only give financial support but attend our events signals to our other supporters, and to our potential supporters, that ours is a cause that has merit,” says Barbara Damon, the director of the Prudence Crandall Center. “It’s a morale booster for all of us. We have forty-three employees. Our budget is two million dollars annually, and we have to raise thirty percent of that. The Petit Foundation support has been an important piece of that patchwork as we try to make sure that our services are able to continue from year to year. We’re here for people who have been the victims of domestic violence, but we also want to prevent it in the future.”
The foundation has also forged a new relationship with Bay Path University, a small women-only undergraduate school in Massachusetts with a heavy focus on science education. Most of the students are first-generation college students from modest backgrounds for whom the Petit Family Foundation’s scholarship is the difference that makes it possible for them to attend. “Many of our students are scraping dimes together,” says the school’s president, Carol Leary. “They take this scholarship very personally. They are struck by the fact that somebody out there believes in them, and that it’s this man, Bill Petit. He has a vision for creating something out of his own pain. He is tireless.” The school recently opened a new health science center on an eleven-acre campus, and will plant seeds from Michaela’s four-o’clocks on the grounds.
A happy consequence of the foundation’s momentum is that Bill’s niece Abby has come to embrace it. She had recoiled from it at first, but she thought and thought about it, and she watched the work her family put into it, and she saw the good that came out the other end. And eventually she decided to focus on the good it was doing for her uncle Billy, and for her extended family, and for causes all over the state and now the country. She did this on her own, and it felt good, and now she wears a Pe
tit Family Foundation polo shirt to all kinds of events, smiling, helping, starting to feel good again.
For the first few years, Bill did all those appearances alone. His parents were usually there, sure, and Hanna, and Ron, and his brother Glenn, and his friends. Even Gram Triano, at the Ride for Justice, with all those bikers! But when it came time to step up to the podium or cut the ribbon, it was Bill Petit. Now he has a date, a partner, someone to drive there with and drive home with, and that’s no small thing. Now he has a wife. His second wife. Miss Christine, he calls her sometimes. Christine, who hangs funky chandeliers and paints things purple. Funny, vivacious Miss Christine, whose laugh is like an aria and who says what she feels and so be it.
“Bill’s so good at going to everything,” she says, looking over at him. “Those relationships, the face-to-face. So many people have supported the foundation, and so many of those people have their own foundations, and they really like it when he’s at their events. I bought more dresses this year than in my whole life. Remember we went to that black tie and you were like, Why don’t you have anything you can wear? He thinks it’s normal to have all these black-tie outfits. He owns a tuxedo. We come from a little bit different lifestyles. But we’re converging, right?”
“What black tie did we go to?”
“New Britain.”
“Oh yeah. The museum?”
“Yeah, and you can’t wear the same dress you wore to the last one—hello, same people. And we have three events in the next week and a half that are all dress-up. And we’re going with his best friend’s wife to every one of them.”
“Ron and Susan. So just call Susan and agree to wear the same dress,” Bill says.
Christine glares at him, then lets out a laugh that could power a ship across the ocean.
—
…peaceful, easy feeling, and I know you won’t let me down.
“Finally,” Bill says, settling on a radio station. The Eagles. Familiar territory. He turns the volume up a tiny bit. They’re back in the car now, he and Christine, heading over to a fundraiser for the local food bank in downtown Plainville.
The Rising Page 23
