At Porter’s, everyone called Abby Hayley’s shadow, but she also knew when to keep her distance. School was different from hanging out at home. Hayley’s friends were smart and popular. Abby was younger, so despite their closeness she would never be so bold as to barge in on Hayley and her friends in the lunchroom. She’d wait until Hayley got up to get some more salad or a new fork, and then she’d skip over to her and ask for a ride home from school or for advice about a certain teacher—anything to get a public minute with her cousin. Sometimes she’d plead for Hayley to drive them off campus for lunch, just this once. But that was against the rules, and Hayley was not a rule-breaker. She would just smile and shoot Abby a look that said, Not a chance, kiddo.
When Abby was at her Uncle Billy and Auntie Jen’s house, Bill was always imploring them to go outside. When he wasn’t working, nighttime was for popcorn in front of a movie or a ball game, but the days were for gardening and basketball and keeping his lawn green and lush. He was constantly trying to get the girls to pull weeds. They would play epic basketball games in the driveway, Bill and Hayley and Abby and Hanna and whoever else was there, and when the score hit 21 or whatever the game was, Bill would yell, “Okay, twenty minutes, pull all the weeds you can. Go!”
Hayley used to say to Abby, “You know, when I get married, KK has to be my maid of honor. It has to be the sister.” And Abby would say, “What do you mean? She’s so young! If you’re gonna be mine—which you are—don’t I have to be yours?” And Hayley would smile, shrug, and say, “No, it has to be KK.”
Friday nights were for pizza at Gram Triano’s, but the Petits spent endless afternoons at the house Bill’s parents had bought on Red Stone Hill in Plainville. Bill Sr. had built his network of local businesses into a small empire, and he now lived in the proud old Georgian mansion perched above Norton Park, the biggest house in town, in whose shadow Bill and his friends used to play as kids. In every direction, the lawn unfurled in great green fields, which was unusual for Plainville, where many of the houses were lined up in tidy suburban rows on identical lots, a sidewalk out front, narrow yard in back.
At Barbara and Big Bill’s, the rooms always seemed to be filled with people. Barbara made sure the wood floors always gleamed, and the fourteen-foot ceilings made the rooms look like great halls. The kitchen was just to the left of the front door, and when you walked in, the warm smell of whatever was on the stove engulfed you. Jennifer fell into the routine, but it was a lot—the parties, the food, every birthday, every recital, every holiday. So different from her house growing up. In Plainville, there seemed to be something to celebrate every weekend, and everyone showed up to everything. Bill had eight aunts and uncles on one side and three on the other and about forty-two first cousins. It seemed like as soon as the dishes were dry from the last party, they were being set out for the next. Even if Cindy was visiting from North Carolina, or Jen’s parents were over from Pennsylvania (in the summer) or up from Florida (in the winter), if there was a party at the Petits’, off they all went.
Family was family. Jen rolled with it. And, truth be told, it was hard not to have fun with the Petits.
For Cindy, it was a chance to see what her older sister’s life was like. Jen could always handle anything, and Cindy marveled at how Jen joined the Petit family carnival with such apparent ease. She loved when Jen could make it down to North Carolina to visit her with the girls between Christmas and New Year’s Day so Cindy could see her big sister and Hayley and Michaela could spend time with Cindy’s kids, Lydia and Evan. Jen had a “striking beauty,” Cindy says. “When she would come downstairs dressed, you couldn’t wait to see her because you couldn’t wait to see what she was going to be wearing, and how she was going to have fixed her hair. It was always amazing and fun to look at, and fun to watch, and to have someone like her as your role model.”
Bill’s diabetes and endocrinology practice grew, and his register of patients seemed to continually expand. Doctors knew him to be a dedicated physician, “a man cut from the old cloth—a doctor’s doctor,” says his friend Steve Hanks, who would become the chief medical officer at two different hospitals in Connecticut. Bill treated all his patients equally, Hanks says. He was even known among the transgender community as an endocrinologist who would treat transgender patients without hesitation or prejudice, noteworthy in itself but perhaps especially because Bill was conservative politically. But in his office, everyone mattered, and everyone received the care they needed.
Around the time Jennifer was diagnosed with MS, Bill was named the director of the Joslin Diabetes Center, a well-known and respected treatment and research facility affiliated with the Hospital of Central Connecticut. He started seeing patients four and a half days a week there. While he made his rounds, there was always a resident or fellow from the endocrinology program at the UConn Medical School with him. “Every day was a teaching day,” he says. “Every interaction was a potential teaching moment.” He liked this new role, and he tried to pass along every bit of information he knew. But he was working even longer hours, seeing his family even less. Still, he stayed silent about the stresses that were building in his life, because for him, silence was useful in getting through just about anything.
In 1996 Jennifer started working again, too, taking a position as codirector of the student health center at Cheshire Academy, a private high school in town, just a few minutes from Sorghum Mill Drive. The way she engineered it, she and another woman would split the responsibilities, each running the center two and a half days a week. That way, Jen felt, she could be totally present wherever she was, at home or at the school. For the mother of two young girls who wanted part-time work that fulfilled a need to help people, the job was perfect.
Cheshire Academy had been around since 1794, and its campus covered more than a hundred manicured acres. The brick buildings were handsome and well-maintained, the athletic fields of higher quality than those at some colleges. Some of the faculty lived on campus in charming colonial houses. The school kept classes small. Students who lived in Cheshire and the surrounding towns could attend as day students, while others from all over the country, and from other countries, too, lived on campus as boarders. Jennifer, the nurse whom Bill had first seen standing calmly at the bedside of a sick girl in a Pittsburgh hospital, had entered a whole world of children who would come to rely on the serenity that seemed to surround her. They were children who needed a nurse who knew what it meant to be a mother. They were children who sometimes just needed a hand getting through the day. When a student walked in and stood at the Dutch door to the office, Jen would slide her glasses off and let them hang from the chain around her neck, look up, and say, in her routine singsong way, “What’s the matter?”
Running a health center at a high school was about more than handing out Band-Aids and Tylenol. At any boarding school, there are kids with everything from depression to ADHD to life-threatening allergies, and that was true at Cheshire. Jennifer wanted the school’s health center to be the best it could be—“state of the art,” she used to say. She and the other director, Deb Bond, were there to work. There was a third nurse who worked with them, Patty Poisson, whose husband was an art teacher at the school. The three women created an environment in which, first and foremost, students could feel comfortable. For all the medical emergencies they faced over the years—broken bones, midnight trips to the ER, the occasional sprint across campus with an EpiPen to help a girl who was in anaphylactic shock—the nurses most often provided comfort. And when a child whose parents lived across the country was feeling concussed by the pressures of academics or friends or sports or just being in high school, very often that child went to find Mrs. Petit. Once, when Jen’s nephew Andrew was sleeping over at the Petits’ house with Michaela, Jen got a call on her beeper about a student who was feeling the worst kind of homesick. So Jen packed up Michaela and Andrew and drove over to the campus so she could comfort the child.
Jen dressed up for work every day, a quirk that didn’t seem to a
lign with her quiet, unshowy way and that amused Patty. She wore stylish skirts and matching sweaters and high-heeled shoes. And always her pearls—a simple string of small pearls that was something of a signature for Jen, whether she had on jeans or a party dress. She wasn’t showing off, and the clothes weren’t all that expensive. She just liked to look put-together. But sometimes by the middle of the morning she’d groan to Patty, “What’s the matter with me? Why did I wear these awful shoes? They’re killing me.” And Patty would laugh.
It was Jen’s confidence and her ability as a nurse that most inspired Patty, her new friend. At night Jen would tell Bill about the kids who had come into the health center that day, and ask his opinion about how she had handled this situation or that. Jen liked when they disagreed, because it forced each of them to make their case, and she could then be sure that whatever conclusion they reached was the right one. She constantly read up on current practices in her field and knew every protocol. But her deeper, more essential knowledge was of when to ignore protocols. Patty never saw Jen reach for pharmaceuticals as a first response.
Jennifer believed in chicken soup. There was a kitchenette at the health center, and there were always cans of Campbell’s in the cupboard. She believed in pulling up a chair so that she and a student were sitting almost knee to knee, taking the kid’s hand in hers, and asking what was wrong. She believed in the restorative power of letting a child lie on the bed while she made tea or rubbed her shoulders or sat back and said nothing. She could see when a kid just needed someone to help her slow down.
Her work was demanding, and sometimes Jen and Bill would pick a weekend and seal themselves off from the world. They would turn off their cell phones, shut down the computer, leave the car in the garage, and just be. The house on Sorghum Mill Drive had become, to them, home. They had made it theirs. Not that they poured a lot of money into it. Every time Cindy came up to Connecticut to visit, she couldn’t believe Jen had no curtains on the windows. When Cindy mentioned that she had to get her floors redone or that she had ordered granite countertops for her kitchen, Jen looked at her funny. Their priorities were different. As fashionable and put-together as she always looked, Jen was a shrewd shopper who saw no shame in finding a good deal at Marshalls. Toward the end of her life, she had hemmed and hawed about an Oriental carpet for the house, a real extravagance. She must’ve kept it on loan for a year while she decided whether to go ahead and buy it. Easy assumptions about a doctor’s wife in Connecticut didn’t fit Jennifer Hawke-Petit.
It wasn’t that Bill and Jen were cheap. Their generosity could stun you. Once, when Cindy’s two children were young, she wanted to sign them up for a local swimming league. They both loved to swim, but Cindy and her husband had been able to afford lessons and leagues only occasionally, for a few weeks or a month at a time, paying as they went. She was going on about this to Jen, just talking, and Jen told her she wanted Cindy to be able to say yes to the summer swimming league all at once without having to worry. And Jennifer mailed her sister a check for the entire fee for both kids, $500.
Bill had gotten serious about his gardening on the weekends. He knew all the spots in his yard where the sun shined brightest before disappearing behind a ridge to the west. He would kneel in the grass, his fingers digging into the cool soil until it stained his hands. Out in the freshness of his yard, away from the sterilized, climate-controlled hospital air, he could actually work up a satisfying sweat. He mostly planted flowers so that in the summer he could cut little bouquets and bring them inside for the girls. But he landscaped the rest of the yard, too. When Hayley was about three years old, he planted a small Japanese maple, maybe two feet tall when he got it, next to the driveway near the house. Across the driveway was a chamaecyparis, a bush in the cyprus family that had soft evergreen leaves that felt just like yarn against your skin. As he had with Hayley, he taught Michaela the names of every plant, sometimes in Latin. (Ron Bucchi’s two sons used to caddy for him and Bill at the club, and Bill could add a good twenty minutes to a round of golf because he’d stop at every pond and instruct the boys on what kinds of fish swam in it. “It’d be like golfing with Euell Gibbons,” Ron says. “Billy’s going through the flowers around the tee box, telling the kids what kind they were.”)
In every corner of the garden, Bill worked with efficiency to encourage growth and support life. He set the timer on the underground sprinkler system so that his grass and all his flowers would be watered at 5:30 each morning. On the north side of the house, he and Jen used to cut off the wilted blooms on a row of rhododendrons to encourage new flowers to grow, a process called deadheading, which helped maximize the number of flowers each bush could produce during the summer. He did the same thing to the flowers on the tee boxes at the golf course. Deadheaded them while Ron and his two sons stood watching.
Out in front of the house was a huge viburnum, which had spectacular white flowers in the springtime and little berries in the summer and fall. That bush was the exception to Bill’s obsessive care. He barely touched the thing and it grew like mad. People used to stop and take pictures.
The best times outside were when Michaela gardened with him. Together they would wander the yard, looking for new places to grow flowers, mostly four-o’clocks, her favorite. They planted a large bed of them behind a rock wall at the end of the driveway. Four-o’clocks are showy flowers, red and white and pink and yellow, trumpet-shaped, bushy. Michaela liked them because they had pizzazz. Bill liked them because they were easy to plant—pop the seed in the soil about a quarter inch down, cover it up, boom. Done.
—
Bill and Jennifer had settled into the life they wanted. They had two beautiful daughters, different from each other, each wonderful in her own way. They had a kitchen with a table by the window looking out into the backyard. Bill’s practice was thriving, and Jen felt fulfilled in her job at Cheshire Academy. They went to church on Sundays. For vacations, they walked the beaches of Sanibel Island, Florida, collecting shells. At least once a year they drove to see Jen’s parents, the girls’ Popup and Meemaw, in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, where they would kayak in the creek and go to country fairs and working farms. Their families were close on every side.
But life isn’t easy for anybody.
Jennifer, for one thing, was coping with a disease that sapped her energy and was causing frightening degeneration in her body. One of the worst parts was that she was deprived of her precious sunshine. Heat exacerbated the exhaustion that was part of MS, so one of the things she loved doing best—sitting outside all afternoon, soaking in the warmth that had always made her feel so good and so alive—often made her feel her worst. Plus, she had to give herself shots all the time. From most people, Jennifer hid her disease well. Not because she felt embarrassed, but because she didn’t want anyone to feel pity for her. She didn’t want to be a burden. Around her family, however, it was sometimes the opposite. She would keep her medication right in the refrigerator, visible. When it was time to give herself a shot, she lifted her shirt a little and poked the needle into her stomach, or she did it in her thigh, just above the hem of her shorts. Never in front of Hayley and Michaela, but Cindy frequently saw Jen administer the shots. Her parents, too. At first, Cindy thought this was odd. She wondered why Jen couldn’t just go into the bathroom. Cindy asked their mother about it. Marybelle Hawke had been a nurse herself. She told Cindy her thoughts: Part of the reason Jen doesn’t hide it from us is that she doesn’t want us to forget that she has this disease. Maybe she doesn’t want us to forget that she’s dealing with it. Maybe deep down, she doesn’t want to sound like she’s complaining about having a low energy level, or not being able to travel, or needing to lie down. MS is not something you can see. But a shot is something we can see. Maybe she wants us to remember.
And Cindy thought that made sense.
Bill had begun to accept speaking engagements, sometimes in faraway cities—driving around, flying all over, talking to rooms full of people about endoc
rinology and diabetes. It wore him down, and Hanna, for one, used to talk to him about slowing down the juggernaut that his medical career was becoming. But Bill explained: At these speaking engagements, he could make a couple thousand dollars in a single night, and it went straight into the girls’ college funds. It may have been exhausting, and the travel could be miserable, but it was money in the bank. Hanna would frown when she saw the McDonald’s wrappers on the floor of his car after one of his trips. But he’d look at her as if to say, What am I supposed to do?
He had also been asked to write a book, a text on diabetes. He already had almost no free time to himself, and now whatever time he did have, at least for a while, would be devoted to writing. As it was, he woke up at six in the morning. Around seven he’d be on his way to the hospital and talking on his cell phone with the office. He wouldn’t get home until seven or eight at night, when he would spend a couple of hours with Jen and the girls. So that left a few hours: From ten at night until two in the morning, he would work on the book. Then he was up at six to start over again. It went on this way for a couple of years. Jen held the family together.
In 2004, Bill was playing golf with Ron one day when Bill passed out with atrial fibrillation. He came to, but Ron drove him to New Britain General Hospital, where the doctors discovered that his heart had slowed to between fifteen and thirty beats per minute. A normal heart rate for an adult is between sixty and a hundred. Fifteen to thirty is dangerously slow. He was hospitalized for a week, and the doctors installed a pacemaker. This put Jennifer into a quiet panic. She was worried about losing Bill while her own health was deteriorating, and about leaving the girls parentless. Bill’s instinct was not to talk about his ordeal, and he never learned how afraid she was until years later. Her friends told him. At the time, Jennifer never said a word.
—
The Rising Page 5