As big a selling point as the house itself was the quiet that surrounded it. Sorghum Mill was a street that not many people drove down unless they lived on it or on one of the short loops or stubby dead-end streets that jutted off of it. The street was so quiet that early on Sunday mornings, or on summer afternoons or snowbound winter days, and especially at night, the world around it seemed to fall away.
Of course, a lot of people in Bill’s extended family couldn’t believe it. Cheshire? they would say. Why not Plainville? Everybody lived in Plainville. Cheshire was twenty minutes away! But Bill and Jennifer had found their home. Cheshire was a sweet town of old trees and good schools. It was hilly, laced with curvy roads that occasionally brought you to a small farm or past a red barn, survivors of the steady shift away from agriculture in central Connecticut, a shift that had begun before Bill was born.
He had finished his fellowship at Yale and established a private practice in Plainville, downtown on Whiting Street, a few doors from Petit’s General Store. (The fact that his office was in Plainville made the family feel a little better about him living so far away.) His practice was affiliated with New Britain General Hospital, which was almost a half hour from the house on Sorghum Mill Drive, farther than his new office in Plainville. Bill was going to be doing a lot of commuting.
Jennifer was still working at Yale as the head of the pediatric unit. But there was another change coming. On October 15, 1989, a brilliant sunny autumn day, Jennifer gave birth to a baby girl, whom they named Hayley Elizabeth.
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When Hayley was barely tall enough to see over a hospital bed, Bill started taking his daughter on his rounds. He worked so much, and it was one way he could spend a little time with her. But it was also his way of showing her the world—showing her how adults act. He had learned this at his father’s grocery, and she learned it at the hospitals and medical centers of central Connecticut. They would hold hands, and she would mostly watch and listen. And everything she learned made her more curious.
Hayley was just two when her aunt Hanna gave birth to her first child, Hayley’s cousin Abby. One evening, at Hanna’s house, Hayley followed her aunt into the bedroom when she went to breast-feed Abby. Hayley wanted always to know what was going on and to see what people were doing. As Hanna sat on the bed with Abby in her arms covered with a blanket, Hayley stood at the window, looking up at the sky. “Auntie Hanna,” she said, “where do all those stars come from? How did they get made?”
A well-worn story in the Petit family is that when Hayley turned four, Bill gave her a toy doctor bag with a toy stethoscope. At the hospital, the walls in most of the patients’ rooms were papered with finger paintings and Magic Markered get-well cards from the grandchildren and nieces and nephews and sons and daughters of the people in the beds. But in some rooms, the walls were bare. Bill used to tell Hayley that it would be nice if she wanted to draw a picture for anyone who looked lonely, or even if she just went in to say hello. That would brighten their day, he told her. And so she did.
Bill and Hayley, three, on a family vacation in 1993. “She always seemed older than her years,” he would say many years later.
Bill wanted Hayley to know everything. In the backyard, he would tell her the names of each species of tree. That’s a maple, you can tell by the shape of the leaves. Here’s a birch. The Latin names, which he also knew, could come later. He taught her the names of bird species, sometimes identifying them by their calls. Day after day and season after season, these became the moments that made up a childhood.
What Bill couldn’t tell Hayley, he showed her. Once, when she was still just a toddler, he gently took her tiny hand in his and held it a few inches over a candle’s flame so she could feel the heat on her skin. “Hot, hot,” he said, as Hayley pulled her hand away from the fire.
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A year after Hayley was born, when Bill was thirty-four years old, he joined the Country Club of Farmington so he could play golf. He and Ron Bucchi joined at the same time, because they had both taken up the sport and they planned to play together when they could. There had been a string of years when Bill and Ron didn’t see each other much, and they weren’t the kind of guys to have long chats on the phone. Life was happening. Bill had been in med school in Pittsburgh, then doing his residency in Rochester, then the fellowship at Yale. He was busy becoming a doctor and getting married. Ron, meanwhile, found an amazing girl himself. Susan Houlihan was funny and smart; Ron met her at a beer festival in the ROTC Hall at the University of Connecticut in January of 1974. They got married three years later.
Ron stayed local, building a life close to the community where he grew up. After Plainville High he went to college at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, the next town over, earned an accounting degree, then got a job with an accountant in Plainville. Pretty soon he was doing taxes for Bill Petit Sr. and all his businesses, then for Big Bill’s brothers, too. Mr. Petit even helped Ron land a seat on the board of the local YMCA. The Petits did what they could to pass down their sense of duty to their children’s generation.
Ron Bucchi, left, presents his old Plainville friend Bill with a fundraising award. Both were young fathers, golfing on the weekends when they could.
Ron was tall, like Bill, and lean, with dark Italian eyes, olive skin, and combed-back hair that didn’t move. They would catch each other quickly on the phone during the week to talk about tee times for the weekend. They’d pull into the club’s driveway early most Saturdays, around 6:30 in the morning, grab a coffee and a bagel or something, and walk out onto the course.
It wasn’t a ritzy club, Farmington. Nice, but not stuffy. Bill liked the history of the place. The clubhouse looked like a big white mansion. It was built in 1901 after the original, which dated to 1767, burned down. The entrance was open and airy, with a formal sitting room off to one side and a hostess station at the foot of a grand staircase. The ballroom had a drop ceiling, putty-colored walls, and heavy drapes. Out back was a sprawling terrace overlooking the first tee. If Bill and Ron played an afternoon round, they’d usually end up going for a beer in the Founders Room.
The country club became part of Bill’s world: house, yard, Whiting Street office, hospital, club. They knew him there. The club—its creaky floors, dark wood railings with the varnish wearing thin in spots, uniformed college kids rushing around serving food and clearing glasses, the way the sky over the course looked bluer and deeper on September mornings, when you could feel the first chill of fall if you breathed in through your nose—came to seem like a kind of home to him.
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The golf relieved some of the pressure of the work that was keeping Bill away from Sorghum Mill Drive more and more. And while the golf kept him away, too, he and Ron played so early in the morning that he felt he didn’t miss much quality time at home. He kept at it, working on his swing, honing his short game, almost always playing with his dad or with Ron or both of them. His medical practice was growing, and he was earning a reputation as one of the most respected diabetes specialists in the state. But at home, whenever possible, he tried to turn all that off—the beeper, the worries about patients and paperwork, the nagging thoughts about a hook or a slice—and focus only on his daughter. In 1993 a new show came on television, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. It starred Jane Seymour as Dr. Michaela Quinn, a strong, plucky physician who moves to Colorado in the 1860s, bucking the male-dominated customs of the Wild West. Bill and Hayley liked to watch the show on the couch in the family room with a bowl of popcorn between them.
When he was at home with his wife and daughter, in the quiet house on the quiet street in the quiet town, he had everything he wanted.
Jennifer, pregnant with Michaela; Bill; and Hanna’s husband, Dennis Chapman, 1995.
In 1995, Jennifer became pregnant again, and on November 17, a month after Hayley’s sixth birthday, Jennifer gave birth to another daughter. Bill and Jen asked Hayley if she had any ideas for a name for her baby sister. She sugge
sted naming her after Dr. Quinn. They called her Michaela Rose.
—
For years, Jennifer had sometimes felt more tired than she thought she should. Cindy had noticed first, way back when Jen was in nursing school in Pittsburgh. After Hayley was born, it got worse, but that seemed normal for a new mom. After Michaela was born, she left her job in pediatric care, but she still had two small kids, a busy husband, a three-bedroom house to take care of, and the family’s schedule to coordinate. She was still a preacher’s kid (a PK, if you’re in the club) and was active in the Cheshire United Methodist Church. She was charming and could crack a joke, and she was good at making friends around town—she met people through church and through the girls’ schools, and those relationships kept her busy, too. With Bill’s schedule, Jennifer was the reason they had any friends at all outside the Petits’ Plainville circle, wide and welcoming though it was. Jen was exhausted, but it seemed explainable.
Then, in 1998, she started feeling more acute symptoms. Parts of her felt strange, hard to move sometimes. Anesthetized. But like a lot of doctors and nurses, her first instinct was to tell herself it was either something imminently catastrophic or nothing at all—and not to seek medical attention. She joked to Bill that it was probably brain cancer. To Hanna, she would say, Oh, it’s nothing, probably a little Bell’s palsy. Still, Hanna said, even if that’s all it was, Jen should get it checked out. The symptoms were getting in the way of her daily life. The fatigue was relentless, and the numbness pronounced. Finally, she went to a doctor.
Jennifer was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. After her secret fears of some terminal nightmare, a part of her was relieved. You could treat MS. Research into the disease had accelerated in the 1950s and ’60s after the discovery of DNA, and by the ’80s progress was steady. Doctors now understood more about how the disease slowly attacked a person’s autoimmune system. There were different kinds of MS, and every case was different, but with the better understanding came more accurate diagnoses and more effective treatments. Still, Jen’s first thoughts were not about research or treatment or DNA but about Bill and the girls. She worried over how long she would be able to take care of them, to be a good mother and wife. Would she keep losing strength? Would she become a burden?
The day she and Bill sat down and told Hayley, who was nine years old, that her mother had an illness, Hayley didn’t cry. Her response was to ask what she could do. They did some research and found that in Connecticut, the National MS Society held an annual MS Walk. You could walk by yourself or form a team, and the more walkers on your team and the more people who sponsored you, the more money you could raise.
Hayley found a pad of lined paper and started writing letters to everyone she knew. Her grandparents, Aunt Cindy and Uncle Bill, Aunt Hanna and Uncle Dennis, Mr. and Mrs. Bucchi—lots of people started receiving Hayley’s notes in the mail, asking for their support. She had formed a team, she wrote. She had named the team Hayley’s Hope. If they would sponsor her team in the MS Walk, she could help raise money to find a cure for multiple sclerosis.
Hayley sealed the envelopes, mailed them off, and waited.
Within days, envelopes started appearing in the mail, addressed to her, with checks inside. In April 1999, she walked in the Connecticut MS Walk. The next year, she sent out the letters again, and again the checks came in. By her senior year of high school, in seven years, Hayley had raised $55,000 to try to save her mother.
—
Michaela Rose Petit became “KK” to her family early in life, shorthand for her name, which was pronounced Mih-kay-la. Bill took to calling her KK Rosebud. She had long honey-colored hair and eyes that could trick you—they looked almost sleepy sometimes, but the second she smiled, they sparkled. Michaela was often shy to the point of not talking, but she could be feisty, too, a side Jennifer and Bill had never seen in Hayley. A “stubborn streak,” Hanna would call it. “She was smart like her sister, but she fought back and spoke her mind—to them. To everybody else she was quiet, quiet, quiet. But to her parents she let her feelings be known.”
Martha’s Vineyard, 1999.
As she got older, Michaela grew to be a picky eater—another difference between her and Hayley—and eventually became a vegetarian. But she loved to cook, loved to be around the making of food. Hanna was a professional chef, and she used to try to teach all the cousins how to make simple dishes like fresh pasta. But Hanna always felt Michaela was the only one who truly wanted to learn. Jen used to take the girls over to their great-grandmother Triano’s house on Friday nights—Bill’s grandmother, Barbara’s mother. When she was old enough, Michaela would help Gram Triano cook. Pizza became the thing. A few photos of pizza night still survive today, and the stories persist: The girls would watch their Gram stretch the dough, then KK would add the sauce and grated cheese. When it got close to the time Bill was scheduled to pull into the driveway after work, KK would call him on his cell phone and tell him what was for dinner. When he arrived, she ran to him, yelling “Da-da’s home!” And when he sat down to eat, Michaela made sure she was the one to serve him, special.
Michaela watched the Food Network, especially the shows hosted by anyone with what Bill later called “pizzazz.” Rachael Ray, Emeril—chefs who always seemed to be having a great time. Sometimes when Jennifer took Hayley to the mall for new basketball shoes or a pair of jeans, KK would stay behind with her Gram. She didn’t like shopping. Her mother’s car was barely out of the driveway before Michaela was grabbing a bottle of root beer from the fridge and a tub of vanilla ice cream from the freezer while her Gram got down the tall glasses from the cupboard. Michaela made the root beer floats herself, copying the cooks she saw on TV. She seemed to love the theater of cooking, and for the grown-ups, it was fun to watch her having so much fun. But when the spotlight was on her, she recoiled. Once, at a family party, she was serving a dish she had cooked, and the person holding a video camera asked her what she made for everybody. She blushed. “I made…this,” she managed, with a shy giggle.
They had that in common, Hayley and Michaela: shyness. But they were very different girls. Hayley was content to sit in her small room, decorated all in blue, pictures taped to the walls at meticulous angles, and read. Michaela somehow scored the bigger bedroom down the hall, and it was pink and girly. She couldn’t fall asleep without a movie on, so Bill and Jen let her have one of those tiny TVs in her room that you had to get really close to in order to see anything. She loved it. Whenever Hanna’s son, her cousin Andrew, slept over, the two of them would finally give in to exhaustion at what seemed to eight- and nine-year-olds like an ungodly hour, after watching movie after movie.
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Michaela revered her older sister. She also looked up to her cousin Abby, who called her Cakes. Abby was more girly than Hayley, and KK loved that. Michaela was curious about makeup and nail polish and clothes and bathing suits, things Hayley showed little interest in. Abby would try to wrestle Hayley to the floor and pin her down so she could apply mascara to her eyes, but Hayley would fling her away, laughing.
Michaela and the cousins looked up to Hayley much the same way kids used to look up to Billy. Once, when Hayley was about fifteen, Jen and Hanna took their children to Lake Compounce, an old-timey amusement park in Bristol, another hardworking central-Connecticut town. Andrew was about nine. Everyone was taking rides on the Wildcat, a rickety-looking roller coaster built in 1927. But Andrew was scared. He asked his older sister if it was scary. He asked his mom. But he really wanted to find Hayley. When he did, he asked her if the ride was scary. She told him it might be a little scary but that it would be okay. So Andrew took a deep, serious nine-year-old’s breath and decided to ride the Wildcat—with Hayley. He would only ride it with her. He knew Hayley wouldn’t lie.
Abby used to tell Hayley, You’re stuck with me as your best friend for the rest of your life. Looking back, Abby feels they were drawn to each other because they were so different. Abby would come up with crazy ideas, and Hayley
would tell her why they were impossible. Abby would carry on hollering about one thing or another, and Hayley would smile at her like she was nuts and tell her to calm down. Michaela observed both of them, missing nothing.
Bill was a University of Connecticut basketball fan. He started bringing Hayley and Abby to games when they were little, and they would wear decals of the Huskies’ mascot on their cheeks. The girls would sit in the backseat and giggle the whole way there and the whole way back about who knows what. Incomprehensible, silly girl stuff. Bill would tilt his rearview mirror so he could see them and ask with mock seriousness, “What’s so funny back there?”
They would have sleepovers and watch Father of the Bride, the Steve Martin version, and Father of the Bride II, over and over and over again. They would laugh so hard they’d cry, and they would write down all the best lines in little notebooks until they could recite the movies from memory. Hayley and Abby developed a whole language between them—not jokes, but things that made them laugh, things no one else could ever understand, things they swore would stay just between them forever. They never went a day without talking. When Hayley enrolled at Miss Porter’s, an elite, private all-girls school nearby, Abby had never even thought about private school. But two years later she applied and got in, too, so she could be with Hayley. Abby even went out for the crew team, despite a fear of open water and boats. Crew is a cultish sport. You have to make it your life, and Bill joked that for dedicated rowers a good day was when you worked out so hard you threw up. This was not Abby’s style. But Hayley rowed crew, so Abby rowed crew.
The Rising Page 4