’Cause I’m alllll-ready standing…on the ground.
“Do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do,” Bill sings, doing the instrumental part, tapping the wheel.
Christine enters the Central Café before Bill. He’s outside talking to his brother Glenn, who’s waiting for somebody. But it’s cold, so Christine pushes through the door into the dim warmth of the bar.
The thoughts come and go without warning: Glenn, a champion. Sat with Billy every night in the hospital that first week. Went with Hanna to identify the bodies. Told Billy not to go, to remember them as they were. Told him Jen was unrecognizable.
Tickets are twenty bucks a head tonight, all proceeds going to the Plainville Community Food Pantry. You get two free drink tickets—when Bill finally wanders in, he orders a Bud and Christine gets a Guinness. On one side of the bar, a local sports memorabilia dealer has set up a silent auction, mostly framed photographs of Yankee and Red Sox players, many of them autographed. Bill knows the guy from way back, and they look at the stuff. It’s only a few minutes after five, so not many people are here yet—no bidders so far. Over in the back corner is a raffle table, and Bill buys a couple of tickets, stuffs them in the box. He knows the ladies doing the raffle, too, and he chats them up over the music.
The owner of the Central carries out trays of hors d’oeuvres a while later, and Bill parks himself by the tables where the food is. There are these little chicken, bacon, and pineapple skewers that are just delicious, and he downs three of them with another Bud. The memorabilia guy is in here now, jabbering away about how’s business, this and that. Hanna shows up, gives Billy a hug, and disappears into a circle of girlfriends. Big Bill and Barbara are over talking to somebody, and every couple of minutes somebody walks by and claps Billy on the back or gives him a peck on the cheek.
Bill is standing next to a tray of raw vegetables and creamy dip when two kids walk in, a boy around eight who looks momentarily stunned to be in a bar full of grown-ups, and a bouncing redheaded girl of five or six. “Here comes trouble,” Bill says so the kids can hear him, his eyes going wide. The boy stares, the girl just looks up at him with a little grin. Bill scooches down so he’s on their level. He grabs a bunch of grapes and swings them in front of the girl’s eyes, but she shakes her head. “What? You don’t like grapes?” he asks with mock consternation. He turns back to the table, scans it for something they might want. Baby carrots.
The boy says he doesn’t like carrots.
“You don’t want a—? Well, that’s good because this isn’t a carrot,” Bill says. “It’s French. These are hors d’oeuvres, right? This is a carrot.” He pronounces the word with a thick French accent: cah-roe. The boy giggles a little bit, and the girl takes him up on it and eats the carrot. He asks them about school, about what they want for Christmas, about anything he can think of. He’s squatted talking to these kids for a good five minutes, the roomful of grown-ups swirling around him.
At the beginning, after it happened, Bill could hardly stand to be around kids. Even the ones he loved most—especially the ones he loved most. Abby and Andrew. The two pairs of friends. It was too much. He felt like he made the kids miserable. He felt like an ogre, big, sad Uncle Billy, whom they suddenly didn’t know how to act around, or how to talk to.
He told Hanna, who responded by saying, Well, you know what? They make you sad and miserable, too, don’t they?
He thought about it.
Yeah, of course. Well, no, they didn’t make him miserable. He loved them. But—it was overwhelming to be around kids who knew the girls. All he saw were Hayley and Michaela. It wasn’t fair to anyone.
Eventually, the boy and the redheaded girl eating the carrot wander away, and Bill stands up from his crouch, the blood rushing back into to his legs, and exhales. A waiter walks by with more chicken-bacon things.
“These are great,” he says, walking over to meet Christine at a table where a representative from Hartford Distributors is offering a beer tasting. Bill immediately starts peppering the guy with questions about hops and brewing processes and alcohol-by-volume. He likes to know the details. Bill tries a taste of the Back East IPA, brewed in Bloomfield, about fifteen minutes away. It’s too hoppy for him. Christine loves it.
“That’s because her taste buds are still strong, because she’s younger,” he tells the guy, flashing the quick smile.
After a couple of hours at the Central, Bill and Christine start working their way out of the room. Christine is chatting with someone, and Bill is a few steps behind, finishing his beer, talking to some old classmate or another. Right now he’s just a guy at a bar, having a good time.
And then, “Excuse me, Dr. Petit?”
A woman wearing a brown leather coat and hoopy earrings is standing in front of him. She is probably in her forties, with frosted blond hair, warm, forlorn eyes, and a bashful smile. She speaks quietly and politely. “Do you recognize my voice?”
Hoo-boy. This happens sometimes. People approach him, people he met once maybe, who remember him because he’s Bill Petit, but who, for him, are part of an endless parade of truly kind, truly nice people whose names are sometimes hard to place. He purses his lips and looks at the floor.
“Okay, talk a little more so I have a chance,” he says.
She says her name is Lynn, and that they’ve talked a lot over the years. Bill is really trying, closing his eyes now as she speaks. He finally opens them and looks at her for help. It turns out she worked at one of the answering services his medical practice used, so she called him probably a hundred times over the years with messages from patients, at all hours.
“Yes!” he says.
Lynn smiles. She doesn’t get too close to Bill. “I always wanted to come up to you during one of the road races, but I didn’t want to bother you,” she says. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” He gives her a little hug, thanks her, and follows his wife out into the night.
—
As busy as he was in his medical career, the foundation business keeps him almost as busy now. Today he is standing in the cafeteria of the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center at Hartford Hospital, staring at a man made out of Legos. It’s a chilly blue December afternoon outside. Inside, the cafeteria is almost empty. The room, all bright colors and happy posters, is at the base of a swirling atrium that rises up six floors. It looks like the bottom of a missile silo decorated by children. Rainbow crepe-paper mobiles bob from the ceiling. Most of the floor tiles are gray, but there are oases of color mixed in—tiles the color of mustard, maroon tiles, royal-blue tiles, tiles the color of pencil erasers. They shine and squeak. The air smells like french fries. Off in a corner, a security guard pays for a Snapple, joking in Spanish with the girl behind the register.
The Petit Family Foundation gave a $500 grant to the knitting club at Bulkeley High School, a fortress of a school in a poor, banged-up part of Hartford. Some of the girls have knit scarves and hats for the sick children in the hospital, and they’ve come to deliver their gifts. Wilma Hoffman, the lady with orange beauty-parlor hair who runs the club, invited Bill to come. He is always invited to come, and he always shows up. It’s important, he thinks, to go. Lets people know he appreciates the good work they do.
The Lego man is life-size, just a few inches shorter than Bill. The statue is holding two Lego crates brimming with Lego vegetables—Lego tomatoes, Lego lettuce, Lego onions—between its muscular Lego forearms. It stands at the entrance to the food area, knees bent slightly under the imaginary weight of the vegetables, beaming a Lego smile, as if it had just arrived with the day’s ingredients. Somebody worked for a long time on this. Bill pauses before the toy man, raises his eyebrows for a second, like a heartbeat on a cardiograph. His wife’s camera is around his neck, and he takes a picture.
This is a fun one, the knitting club. The half dozen students here with Wilma don’t say much aside from some nudged whispers among one another. An exchange student from Burma speaks not a word as she presents Bill with a knit cap,
which he puts on, making a goofy face. Another girl, Cristal, who could be a junior but has the round, bright face of a girl a few years younger, sits on a radiator, knitting. Wilma announces to everyone that Cristal is knitting a hat for her six-month-old baby.
Wilma is great. Some people, you’d give them five hundred bucks and they’d say thanks, see you later. Not Wilma. She sends in every receipt—twelve dollars and forty-five cents for yarn, everything—so that the foundation can see where its money is going. Exactitude. Bill loves it. And Wilma is amusing, the way she leads her girls around the hospital talking about the power of knitting, trying to get them to talk.
It’s just—strange. There was a time he would have been in this building wearing a white coat and a beeper on his belt. Now he’s here wearing pleated khakis and a cap knit by a girl from Burma, sitting in an empty cafeteria next to a giant man made out of Legos. Cartoons play in closed caption on a flatscreen on the wall. But all he has to do is glance over at Christine and his heart slows down again, feels warm again. Wilma asks Bill if he wants to say anything. The girls stare and fidget. He pauses, then begins: “What you do to help others probably makes you all feel better as well.” His voice is soft, and he clips each sentence at the end, letting a beat pass before starting the next. “And while doing those things, you’re teaching your classmates about caring for other people. You set off a chain reaction. People say, Huh, they’re taking their time and doing this, maybe there’s something to it. So it’s very nice for you to set the example, especially at your age, help other people with things, and not expecting anything in return.”
He pauses, and Wilma talks a little more, makes a spirited but futile effort to get the girls to participate. (“Who wants to say something about why they enjoy knitting?”) Then Bill starts speaking again.
“You’re quiet leaders,” he says. His voice is quieter than before even, the words coming out slowly, just a few at a time. The girls all look up when he says that.
He is looking past the girls now, past Wilma, past this dim, sterile, hot room to another anonymous, institutional room. A small part of his mind is back in Courtroom 6A, New Haven Superior Courthouse.
Hayley went to Sunday school each week and all the teachers wanted her in their class, as she was a natural leader—though quiet.
His impact statement. That phrase, “quiet leader.” People used it so many times to describe Hayley after she died. Michaela, too.
I learned many things from Michaela’s teachers after she died that I wish they had told me before. One teacher said she always made an effort to go over to someone who was ignored by others in the class.
The impact statement serves no obvious legal purpose—the life-or-death decision has already been made—but, in Bill’s mind, it let the record show that when Michaela Rose Petit drew her last breath in her bed, and when Hayley Elizabeth Petit collapsed in the upstairs hall just outside her bedroom, running to try to save her family, and when Jennifer Lynn Hawke-Petit’s larynx was crushed by the hands of a stranger—in the horrible few minutes that those three heinous and incomprehensible events transpired, the world became a poorer place, and hell if Bill wasn’t going to let the record show it, legal purposes or not.
I miss Michaela running to the door and yelling “Da-da’s home!” On Friday nights, when she went to Great-grandma’s house, she always called my cell phone and wanted to know when I would be there and what I wanted for dinner. When I arrived, she made a great show of serving me specially and watching me eat….
When you are with someone twenty-six years, it takes a long time for habits to change. For months, and still on occasion, I start to think, “I’ll just ask Jen”…
What do I miss? I miss my entire family, my home, everything we had together as a group….
“Well, this has been very, very nice.” Wilma is thanking Dr. Petit and the cheery hospital administrators for hosting the girls from the knitting club. “I’m sure the girls appreciate this.”
And Bill stands, folds his knit cap into the pocket of his winter jacket, places his wife’s hand in his, and turns up his lips into a smile.
—
Christine warms some apple pie and plops a dollop of whipped cream on it for her husband. Outside the sliding doors, the colored lights she strung on the deck hang like planets against the black backdrop of the invisible river beyond.
He sits in his chair, scooping up the pie.
It’s getting late, but not for him. He used to take sleep medication after the murders. He didn’t sleep more than two hours in a night for the first three months, but finally he found something to help him. The problem then was, the more sleep he got, the more nightmares he had. And the deeper he slept, the greater the chances that he would wake up in the morning and, for that wonderful, terrible split second, forget.
He doesn’t use the pills much anymore. But he gets about five hours, which isn’t bad. He’s gotten used to just not sleeping much. But on a bad night—on a bad night he’s lucky to get three hours.
“In the beginning, it was always that night,” he says. “In the beginning it was always late at night, since it started to happen at two or three in the morning”—that’s when the men broke in—“so I’d be bolt-awake at 3:00 a.m. just like clockwork, no matter what. And then it sorta switched to the mornings. The mornings got bad. It would just always be right in front of me.” Those men again, come to end the world. Bill holds his palm, rigid, an inch from his nose. “Right in front of your face.”
During Bill’s waking hours, Christine is determined to chase away some of the darkness. To remember to be happy, to have some fun. She understands the irony of her position, knows that if all had gone according to plan, Bill never would have married her, because Jennifer would be alive. Which is a strange thing. But she gets that. And she never wants him to forget one minute of that life he built, that life he loved. For eighteen years he lived in the same house, slept in the same bed with the same woman. When he reached over to turn on the light by his bed, his hand knew where to go in the darkness.
She can’t replicate that, and she’s not trying to.
Life after death requires great effort, and she gets down sometimes, too. But Christine is also warm, and vital, and in life it’s just good to have someone to hold you as you sleep. Before they started dating, she saw Bill mostly through her camera lens. Smaller than life, drifting around the frame, his lips moving as he spoke to someone on the other side of the room. “I looked at him and watched him for years at those events, because I had to photograph him,” she says. “They needed his photo. And it was years before I could even get a smile. But then he sorta started to—you could just see things changing. Things were starting to lift just a little. And then there was this humor that was just shocking. When he’s in a good mood, forget it. Which was hugely important to me. Because you don’t want to be involved with someone who you can’t have a normal life with. Who’s not going to be fun.”
She tucks her feet underneath her on the chair, pulls on the sleeves of her sweater, cups her tea with both hands. Bill is done with his pie. Christine looks over and smiles at him.
“Right?”
—
Bill sits at a round table in a cavernous and ornate banquet hall that used to be a bank. The building must be a hundred years old. The ceiling climbs up three stories like a golden sky, held aloft by marble columns anchored in limestone and bronze. The place is a relic from the days when people used to have to make a trip into town to do their banking. Now it’s a party space, and Bill is sitting in the middle of it wearing a tuxedo, surrounded by hundreds of other men in tuxedos and women wearing their once-a-year gowns. There’s a United States senator a few tables away, hasn’t touched his wine. Dentists, insurance executives, and lawyers sit at the round tables, a state legislator here and there, picking at the last of their filets of beef, and the risotto with the scallops and some kind of mint sauce, which was pretty good for gala food. Better than at a lot of these things.
/>
Bill takes a bite and makes a face that says, Not bad.
Most people in the room are interested in him more than anyone else. They steal looks at him. If they achieve eye contact with him, they offer a quick, knowing smile, the way some people do when they find themselves on an elevator with a celebrity. Even after all this time—it is 2013, and in July it will be six years since the murders—people stare at him from across the buzzing room, shaking their heads a little, almost imperceptibly, dumbstruck.
Tonight Bill is the honorary chairman of this gala, the annual fundraiser for Interval House, a shelter for the victims of domestic violence. The Petit Family Foundation has been a big supporter of Interval House. It’s a cause for which he would do just about anything, but tonight all he has to do is let them put his name in the program, wear his tux, shake hands, say a few words at the podium. He is seated at table one, front and center, next to the dance floor, under the swirling balcony and the high, gold dome, pushing around the food on his plate, waving at friends and at people who look like he should know them.
Last night, with a brutal suddenness, sadness swept over his family again. Dennis, Hanna’s husband of twenty-three years, Abby and Andrew’s dad, Hayley and Michaela’s uncle, and Bill’s brother-in-law, died unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Hanna is distraught, of course. Bill’s instinct is to be there for her, but she told him that of course he should go to the gala. He doesn’t need to sit at her house and mourn. Dennis was a kind, gentle man, but strong. He grew up on a farm in Nebraska, understood work, and understood family. He attended the trials every day he could get away from work. And he came up with the idea for Michaela’s Garden. He knew about agriculture from his childhood, and he said to Hanna that maybe this could be his contribution. He presented the idea to the foundation’s board, they loved it, and it became not only a successful fundraiser but a project that made people feel better about the world. Everyone was supposed to be here tonight—Big Bill and Barbara, Hanna and Dennis. But Bill and Christine are the only Petits here.
The Rising Page 24
