He doesn’t come downstairs a whole lot. He looks out the window at the cars, sees the familiar ones, some he doesn’t recognize. There are media trucks out on the street sometimes, and he knows there are reporters trying to get to the house. He just stays upstairs. Gram Triano, his mom, his dad—everyone knows to just let him sleep. It’s dark in there, maybe he’s sleeping. Let it be dark. Hanna is the one who goes to his room the most. Since the day it happened, she hasn’t been back to her job at the Italian restaurant in Farmington where she worked as a chef, across Main Street from the country club. She’s on indefinite leave—they’ll take her back anytime, of course. But right now, she is taking care of Bill. She talks if he wants to talk. She lies next to him on the bed if he’s lying down, holds him when he needs to be held—when he needs human contact. She doesn’t want to leave him. How can you leave your brother when he’s curled up on the bed in the fetal position, crying?
But when it gets late, he tells her to go home. Dennis and Abby and Andrew need her more than ever, he says. Even now, even as this shattered version of himself, this is big brother Billy dispensing advice, seeing through to the truth of things, keeping her straight, like when he told her as a kid to give up gymnastics because she wasn’t going to be a dancer, for Pete’s sake, and she oughtta play more ball instead.
—
The mailman, too, is a regular. Every day, some days twice, a truck arrives carrying bins overflowing with letters and cards. Thousands of pieces of mail. It comes from Cheshire, too, redirected. The post office in Plainville is great about it. Some people just write “Dr. William Petit, Plainville, CT” on the envelope, and the post office knows where to send it. Mail pours into the schools: Cheshire Academy, where Jennifer was a nurse; Chase Collegiate, where Michaela had just finished fifth grade; Miss Porter’s, from which Hayley had just graduated. All of it makes its way to the house on Red Stone Hill. It fills rooms.
And the money. Inside half the envelopes, it seems, are checks. Cash, even. Five dollars. A thousand dollars. Five thousand. Fifty bucks. A few heartbreaking singles. Tucked into drugstore sympathy cards. Or folded into notes composed with careful hands, printed on plain paper, signed at the bottom. Some brief and polite, some long and personal. Some really long and really personal. Some from children.
“I am sure you have heard this from many people but I hope you know how much your courage and strength has changed my life. When I am having a moment where I am fretting about the small stuff, I think of you and count my blessings,” reads one.
From a family that Jen used to babysit for when she was a teenager: “It was easy to see why our son took to his new babysitter very quickly and developed the biggest crush on her….For those that are faithful while on this earth I know when God calls us home it is to a place where we cannot understand the peace, love and wonder of this place called heaven. Jenny and your daughters are there now with the Lord watching over them.”
In a child’s hand: “I hope you feel better Dr. William Petit Jr.”
A lot of religious stuff. CDs of religious music. Josh Groban, songs people find inspirational. Books about Holocaust survivors. Letters from prisoners. Letters from women wondering if Bill needs a friend. Cards from Ireland and China and Italy and from friends down the street. A cake from a baker in Alaska. Cards from entire first-grade classes.
Bill’s parents, his sister and brothers, the constant gathering of aunts and uncles and cousins and old friends from the neighborhood who populate the Petits’ house in the days and weeks and months afterward—everyone wonders what they’re going to do with all the mail.
“We’re going to answer it,” Bill says.
And so they answer it. The family sits in an assembly line around the table on the porch and writes responses by hand. If there isn’t a return address, they go online to try to find it, or call information. A family friend shows Hanna how to catalog each piece of mail in a computer spreadsheet: name, address, type of letter (“simple” for sympathy cards with a short note; “large” for cards that included a donation; “letter” for longer letters), date received, date responded to.
And then everything goes into boxes. That’s Barbara.
No one organizes like Barbara. With five kids, you had to. This is the woman who keeps her tablecloths pressed and on hangers in a special closet. For Billy’s mail, she instructs everyone to divide the letters into small bundles and place an elastic around each one, then she stacks them neatly in boxes labeled with a black Sharpie in her hand.
They sit for hours each day, in shifts. There is always food and coffee. There are some letters that Billy wants to answer himself, and he does that at the same table, although usually when everyone’s not around. Each day, between everybody working together, they answer hundreds of letters. And each day, it seems, hundreds more come in. Not a single piece of mail gets thrown away. Into Barbara’s boxes they go.
The 25,000 pieces of mail Bill received after the murders are neatly preserved in his parents’ attic.
“I don’t know why I did all this,” Barbara says several years later, standing in her attic one morning, looking at the rows of cardboard boxes stacked two and three high, reaching almost to the rafters and the insulation under the roof of the house. She stands there for a few long minutes, one hand on her hip, the other resting on the lid of a box. There are at least twenty-five thousand pieces of mail up here. Mail that came for her boy, to make him feel better.
“I don’t know why,” she says. “I just did.”
—
The Petits didn’t plan on starting a charitable foundation. It was not a vision that Bill laid out. But there is so much money. After Ron collected the $77,000 from the men at the country club and paid for the funeral and the clothes and the plane, there was almost $25,000 left over, and nobody wants his money back. And the money in the sympathy cards and letters is adding up, too. Ron talks about it regularly with a couple of guys from the club, and somebody has the idea to start a foundation, to do some good in the girls’ memory. Ron tells Bill about this idea, and Bill says: Yes. Good. He isn’t sleeping or talking much and can’t make sense of anything at all—it’s still too soon. Some days, he isn’t even sure he will live another year, isn’t sure he wants to. But this fund, this foundation, he can see, is a good idea.
One of the men is a lawyer, one’s an accountant, and they just start doing it. The first thing they do is set in motion the paperwork process, to establish the Petit Family Foundation with the Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization. And almost immediately, somebody, probably Ron, says we should have a golf tournament. Right at the Country Club of Farmington. It feels like half the state of Connecticut is asking what they can do to help, so Ron and the club guys organize it quickly. Everybody pitches in. They run into a bit of good luck right away: The club is throwing a retirement party in early October for the longtime pro, so they’ll have tents and all kinds of equipment already set up. The Petit golf tournament can piggyback on that. Perfect.
It’s a cold day, even for October. The tents have side flaps and heaters, though, and the club is mobbed from first thing in the morning. Ron and Hanna ask Bill if he’s okay, if he’s up for this. Yeah, he says. They’ve had programs printed up, but they didn’t print Bill’s name in there as a speaker because they weren’t sure he had it in him. But of course he’s going to speak. The way he sees it, standing up and saying a few words is the least he can do for the girls.
So everybody plays golf. There’s dinner after, in the tents. Bill stands to speak, and you can hear your own breathing. He thanks everybody, and he has never meant it more in his life. Scores of people make their way over to give him a hug. He does the best he can. The day is a blur.
In the end, the nascent Petit Family Foundation raises $130,000 in a single day, not even three months after the murders. The date is October 15, 2007, the day Hayley Petit would have turned eighteen years old.
—
Ron Buc
chi and Rick Healey, a Petit family friend who’s a lawyer, work with the insurance people to figure out the settlements on the house, but there isn’t much work to be done—no negotiating, anyway. Thank goodness. “These people were unbelievable,” Ron will say later. The insurance companies max out every policy, pay it out in full, never a fight or a question.
At one meeting, toward the end of the process, one of the insurance people begins to weep and embraces Ron and Rick in a hug.
Inside the house is a claustrophobic darkness. After the fire, some of the family were allowed in to look for remnants from the Petits’ old life that could be saved, anything meaningful that hadn’t been smoke-stained or melted. Some of the furniture was okay. Cindy wanted to find two coffee mugs she’d given Jen for her last birthday. They weren’t expensive, but Cindy thought they were sort of cool—the handles didn’t attach at the bottom, which made them unique—and Jen loved getting artsy gifts from her artist sister. Cindy couldn’t get them out of her head, and she went in to find them. She stepped through the layer of soft ash that covered the floors, shining a flashlight in front of her—the windows were boarded up, and everything was black with soot. She felt around in what was left of a kitchen cupboard for the mugs like a blind woman searching for her Bible, ash clinging to her clothes and skin. Eventually her hands felt the mugs’ distinctive handles, and Cindy brought them home with her to North Carolina. She scrubbed them and scrubbed them, washing off the black, until her hands were pruned. Scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed the ashes off Jenny’s mugs.
At one point, the insurance adjuster needs to get back inside for some reason, and Ron volunteers to take her through the house.
Have you been inside since the crimes? she asks Ron.
No, Ron says. I’ve been to the property, but not inside.
Don’t go in, the adjuster tells him. The owner is your friend? Don’t go in. I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Don’t go in.
Ron doesn’t go in.
What he decides to do, eventually, as fall becomes winter becomes spring, is take the house down.
Ron has been a trustee to Bill and Jennifer’s estate, which was actually in only her name, for as long as he can remember. After the murders and the fire, the house automatically went into the Jennifer Hawke-Petit Trust, of which Bill and Ron are the cotrustees. Ron feels they have to demolish it. Before he says anything to Bill, he sets it all up with his buddy Jimmy Manafort, who owns Manafort Brothers, a big construction company out of Plainville.
Ron says, Jimmy, I gotta take down Billy’s house. And I want to do it quietly.
Jimmy gets it. Hooks Ron up with one of his guys, who will head up the job.
Ron tells the guy: Please, we don’t want the press there, so when you get the permits to do the demolition, don’t specify a date and time. The press will show up. People will be gawking. Some people are creepy that way. Fascinated by this kind of morbid stuff. So keep it a surprise as best you can. And when you take it down, crush it into dust. Crush it as finely as you can. Make it disappear. Because people will follow you to the dump. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but they will.
The guy says: Got it.
He calls Ron the morning of. Says, We’ll have the house down inside an hour and a half.
The Manafort trucks barrel up Sorghum Mill Drive and surround the property. Three gray dump trucks, each with the capacity to carry a hundred yards of debris. An excavator with a huge claw at its hydraulic end knocks the house in on itself, so that the whole of the Petit family’s physical existence is compacted into the foundation beneath it, a grave holding the wreckage of lives that ended in calamity. But it’s only the things—clothes, dinner plates, drywall, sinks, carpets, the linoleum of the kitchen floor.
Shovelful by shovelful, the claw grabs messy scoops of the rubble and loads them into the three massive dump trucks. Clouds of dust rise up with each load, some of it settling on the leaves of trees, most of it disappearing into the air. After an hour and a half, the house is now in the trucks, and the trucks drive back down Sorghum Mill Drive, as quickly as they arrived, onto I-84, and all the way to Ohio. Any creep who wants to scavenge this stuff is going to have to travel a long way.
Ron calls Jimmy Manafort. Thanks a lot, Jimmy, he says. You can send the bill to me.
Come on, Ron, Jimmy says. Don’t be ridiculous.
—
There are other trucks there on another day, at the old house. From a landscaping company.
All winter long, Bill had given himself the task of designing a memorial garden behind his parents’ home. Its paths and trees and flowers would form the shape of a heart, with an arch at the center.
At the old house in Cheshire one afternoon, men from the landscape company carefully dig up the trees and bushes that surround the house, wrapping the root balls in burlap. Some of the plantings weigh almost as much as a small car, so long have their roots been growing in the soil, so diligently had Bill taken care of them. Later the same day, the landscapers’ trucks arrive at Bill’s parents’ house in Plainville—flatbeds and pickups loaded with trees and bushes. Trays and trays of perennials, the dark soil still clinging to their stringy white roots. There is the chamaecyparis—not any chamaecyparis but the very one from the corner of his driveway in Cheshire, by the basketball hoop. There is the Japanese maple, purple and majestic and delicate, carefully strapped to the truck so it won’t topple. One whole truck carries the rhododendrons from the north side of the house, some of them showing raggy tops now that they have been separated. There is the viburnum. Some of Michaela’s four-o’clocks.
Bill is not at the house when the trucks arrive. He pulls into the driveway and sees them laid out neatly in the yard, all these beautiful, vibrant plants he raised from when they were tiny—raised with help from Hayley and Michaela, of course, and Abby and Andrew, when they were over. The occasional weeders. And now it is a beautiful sight once again, a bit of his old life resurrected.
—
The scars on Bill’s head eventually heal, and his hair grows back to hide the places where the gashes were stapled together. The last wounded stripe of crimson to disappear under a new layer of skin, the way the grass grows back on the side of the highway after a car wreck, is the one on his forehead—the one everyone can see. It’s gone now, and his face is restored.
One night maybe six months after the murders, in the room upstairs in his parents’ house, Hanna sat with him as the trees outside blackened with dusk. Bill was lying on the queen-size bed, staring at the ceiling, rubbing his forehead where the red cut used to be. His fingers absently traced its invisible trail, rubbing the area around it as if in search of it.
“That scar’s disappearing,” Hanna said.
“Yeah.”
“Everyone probably thinks that’s great. But it’s not, is it? The scar told everyone you’re not okay. Maybe you want it back.”
Billy looked at her, rubbed his head some more, and said, “How’d you know?”
—
A lot of people are saying, Well, if he could just get back to work, that might take his mind off things. Or if they aren’t saying it, they are thinking it.
Bill is fifty-one now. His whole life, he has kept busy. Playing ball as a kid. Leading the kids in the neighborhood to Norton Park like some pied piper, setting up the games, picking teams. Working every angle in high school—good grades, clubs, captain of two sports. Plowed his way through Dartmouth. Med school. Residency, the way it forces you to be superhuman, staying up all night. Setting up a practice. Devoting himself to a marriage. Hustling all week seeing patients, making his rounds, answering his beeper, being there. Getting some time on the weekend for a round of golf before going home to his kids and trying to relax. Writing a textbook. Lecturing. Moving up in his field—becoming the director of this and the chairman of that. Fatherhood, the most important job of all. Seeing his mom and dad. Hustling, hustling, hustling.
For fif
ty years.
And now…now he has not a thing to do. Nothing. They took his family, they took his house, they took his clothes and his car, and they stole any sense of purpose he ever felt in the world. And now he spends a lot of time sitting upstairs in his folks’ place, staring, weeping, lying on top of the bedsheets, wondering what to do. No situation could be less familiar to him or more antithetical to his previous existence. He has always been one of those guys who just works and works toward some big, vague goal of getting better, getting smarter, having a good life. The things we all want and that he knew how to get. Now, though, now he is somewhere primal, bounced back to the beginning. Back to nothingness, stripped of himself.
Bill misses practicing medicine. Of course he does. Downtown, on an anonymous brick office building on Whiting Street, the white block letters over the rear entrance still read “William A. Petit, Jr., M.D. Internal Medicine, Endocrinology & Diabetes.” But there is no way in the world. He can’t focus for more than five or ten minutes at once, and when you’re treating patients with diabetes and other complex illnesses, trying to do it when your mind is elsewhere is not only difficult but dangerous. Concentration is essential, and it is the one medical skill he lost in all this. The jagged images of that night still rip into his mind every hour of every day, sometimes every minute of every hour. Bill can’t concentrate on anything except trying to make them go away. And the way to make the jagged thoughts go away is not to see all your old patients all day and to hear them ask how you’re doing, kind though their intentions no doubt would be. And financially, he is okay. He and Jen had some savings, and there was insurance money, and heartbreaking college funds for Hayley and Michaela. Just money.
To sleep, he swallows a combination of medicines that puts him out for eight to ten hours, which would seem good except that it makes him groggy for the next eight or ten hours after he wakes up. And while the sleep is good for his body, sleep is the time when the nightmares come. Between the triggers that hit him all day long and the nightmares that haunt him all night, there isn’t a lot of mental capacity for much of anything, let alone endocrinology.
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