The Rising

by Ryan D'Agostino

  Any doctor will tell you that doctors make the worst patients because they think they know best. Not Bill, not now. He is a willing recipient of treatment. None of the usual doctor’s protests that he’s fine and everything’s fine. It is fairly obvious that he is not fine. Brain trauma is the most severe of his lingering physical problems. Sometimes he has trouble walking on uneven ground, and he has to use the handrails when he goes up or down stairs. Twice he passes out and is brought to the emergency room. Black spots splatter his field of vision, and sometimes he has trouble seeing things between nine and eleven o’clock in his left eye and between one and three o’clock in his right. If he moves his head too quickly, it can make him nauseous or bring on vertigo.

  Bill is not about to start seeing patients again. Bill still has trouble finding reason to get out of bed.

  But he’s trying.

  —

  The foundation is gaining momentum. They have a board of directors now, an extraordinary group of people: CEOs, lawyers, loyal family members, people who have busy lives and hard jobs but who want to help. Guys like Mike Chambrello, whose dad coached Billy in Little League and who played on the Cubs when Billy was on the Owls, and who is now the CEO of a huge gaming and lottery corporation. Most have served on other boards, and they know how to get things done. In 2008, they start to meet regularly, once a month. They divide into committees. The meetings are all business. They gather around Big Bill and Barbara’s dining-room table. Hanna cooks for everybody. There’s wine and soda. Bill, in time, grows comfortable running the meetings.

  One of the first objectives is to write a mission statement. They all have ideas for how to put into words what the foundation ought to do, what its goals should be. Eventually they settle on three causes the foundation could potentially support, causes that hew closely to the lives of Bill and the girls. All three causes are important to Bill, but a few people point out that most foundations have a single, unifying mission and it might be confusing to have three. In the end, though, they all agree: So what? These are equally important causes, and none of them can be dropped. The Petit Family Foundation board of directors ratifies its mission statement:

  To foster the education of young people, especially women in the sciences; to improve the lives of those affected by chronic illnesses; and to support efforts to protect and help those affected by violence.

  There is only one last-minute change. An earlier version read, “women affected by violence.” Rick Bucchi’s wife, Ann, points out that Bill was a victim of violence, too. Why not change “women” to “those,” to be more inclusive? They make the change.

  Bill spent many hours writing thank-you notes and doing Petit Family Foundation business on his parents’ porch, where he could see the memorial garden in the backyard.

  By the end of the first year, Bill is spending most of every day on foundation business. A lot of what that means is that he sits at the table on the porch and writes thank-you notes. He writes hundreds, maybe thousands, thanking people he knows well and people he has never met for mailing money to his foundation. Some people he thanks simply for their expressions of support, for their advice, and for their prayers. For the kindnesses that some people summon, without thinking, when they hear about somebody who needs help.

  He sometimes talks to Hanna and Ron about moving out of his parents’ house, getting his own place. But why? The house on Red Stone Hill is beautiful and big. He is surrounded by people who love him, his mother cooks and cleans, and he can help his dad around the house. Man, it’s a different life, though. For one thing, he tries to convince his parents to eat dinner a little later than five o’clock. By the time the lunch dishes are put away, it seems like his mother is already pulling the meat out of the fridge and rinsing potatoes for dinner. And then there’s the television. It’s unbearably loud. The other people in the house—his dad, his mom, his grandmother—are all at various stages of hearing loss, so the TV is turned up to full volume whenever it’s on, and he has to shout above it.

  If the circumstances that brought about the situation weren’t so horrible, the whole thing could be a sitcom.

  On some mornings, he goes for breakfast at Saint’s on Route 10, a family restaurant with an L-shaped counter, vinyl booths, eggs how you like ’em, and bottomless cups of coffee. He checks his e-mail on his phone, a constant stream of messages mostly about the foundation. The purpose of establishing the foundation was never to help Bill ease back into the world again, but that has quickly become its secondary mission. It is a cause for him to leave the house, to meet people, to write e-mails, to sit on boards and run committees. His whole life, Bill has searched for order in the world, and where he found disorder he constructed a system that made sense to him. When he saw that college was too expensive and too busy, he built a system: give up basketball, enroll in a work-study program, methodically visit the financial-aid office in search of help. Even his habit of cataloging the natural world, teaching anyone who would listen the Latin names of every species of bird and tree and flower, was his way of imposing order on the wild, at least in his mind. It was the same with the foundation. It too was a projection of his mind’s need for order, and it became part of Bill’s system of defense against the chaos his world had become. Small tasks like writing notes and licking envelopes, large projects like running meetings and helping organize the golf tournament—these were the girders of his rebuilt world, the only one in which he might know how to live.

  The foundation’s role in Bill’s recovery is undeniable, but its primary mission is to give money to worthy causes in memory of the girls. Even by the end of 2008, its first full year of existence, it has awarded $5,000 to the Prudence Crandall Center, a Connecticut domestic-violence support organization. And a group of Bill’s classmates from Plainville High, class of ’74, gets together to establish a community-service award at the school. The foundation pledges $3,500. The following year, it begins supporting a similar award at Cheshire High School. The board also decides to pledge $8,500 to continue the multiple-sclerosis funds that Hayley and Michaela set up. It has supported a place called Manes & Motions, a therapeutic horseback-riding farm whose clients include veterans suffering from PTSD, a young girl with cerebral palsy, and all kinds of other patients. The 5K road race in Plainville has become a massive community event in central Connecticut, with thousands of participants and dozens of volunteers wearing PFF T-shirts. The golf tournament, too. And the pasta dinners and the speeches and the appearances. The foundation is real. The whole family is a part of it.

  —

  Except Abby.

  Everyone at Miss Porter’s used to call Abby and Hayley “kissing cousins” because they were so close. For Abby, in high school, Hayley was a security blanket. Abby loathed walking to those cold, miserable crew practices, but Hayley made Abby feel better just by being present. Not with pep talks or pats on the butt. Abby just had to know that Hayley was there, and if she could see her hero older cousin, she could find a way to keep jogging or rowing in that godawful cold. She wanted to be around Hayley all the time. The Sunday night before the morning Hayley died, Abby easily could have been over at her house, watching a movie or talking about basketball or Otis or college or how many babies each of them wanted to have someday. Easily. Or Hayley could have been at Abby’s house. They had been texting all weekend, as usual.

  Abby was sixteen when it happened, going into her junior year. A teenager, learning and figuring out how the world works, only to wake up one morning and find it in ruins. She quit the crew team at Miss Porter’s almost immediately. She stuck with basketball, but it would never be the same. The year before, her sophomore year, when Hayley was team cocaptain, Abby had averaged around twenty points per game. Her coach had begun inviting college scouts to see her play. But after it happened, in the 2007–08 season, she wasn’t scoring, wasn’t feeling it.

  Her friends are starting to look at colleges, but in Abby’s family, that isn’t easy to focus on. The Petits and Abby’
s family, the Chapmans, always felt like they all lived the same lives, all the time, a big group. That was all Abby had ever known. And now three members of the group are gone, and nobody knows how to function, and everybody is trying to prop up Billy because that’s what you do as a family, and Hanna is doing the best she can as a mother and a wife and a sister. She loves her kids more than anything. But there’s only so much you can do, and Abby has never felt so alone in her life.

  She recoils from all of it. School. Sports. And the storm of publicity and ceremony and mourning that the tragedy has become. She shuts it all off.

  The foundation is the worst part, to her. She is “grossed out” by it. She tries to avoid the events, doesn’t want to help with anything. When her parents manage to drag her to one of the foundation’s functions, she sits in the car or in the corner of the room. To Abby it just seems like people are coming out of the woodwork to claim some kind of closeness with the Petits that isn’t real. Abby knew everything there was to know about Hayley. She doesn’t want to deal with people Hayley barely knew trying to claim the rights to her memory just because they went to Sunday school with her in third grade or something.

  She doesn’t talk. Her parents send her to therapy, but she refuses to say even one word, and eventually the therapist gives up. She certainly doesn’t know what to say to her Uncle Billy. Her whole life, he has been Hayley’s dad. So he wasn’t like a regular uncle, Abby will say years later. An uncle’s primary role is as your uncle. An uncle is your uncle, not somebody’s father. Uncle Glenn, he’s pure uncle. An awesome uncle, the best, the fun uncle who would swing the girls from his arms and do anything for anybody. Billy would, too, of course, but it was different. Hayley was what Abby and her uncle Billy had in common. He was her soul mate’s dad, and with her soul mate gone, it feels as if all the connections are gone, too. What do you do when all the connections are gone? There are a million things she wants to say to him, but whenever she’s around him, she can’t find a single word.

  In the hospital, the day it happened, after they sewed her uncle Billy up, Abby went in to see him. He was lying on the bed, his hair still wet and stringy from the washing of his wounds, his eyes red and distant. Not mighty, goofy Uncle Billy. He turned his head, took her hand and squeezed it a little, and said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t save your best friend.”

  Bill still makes it out to basketball games. The UConn games he and Hayley used to love so much. Now he goes with his dad, with Hanna, sometimes with Andrew. They talk about how the teams are doing, but no one pretends that the routine has the same fun to it, or that the anticipation fills the car the way it used to. The Huskies split their home games between Gampel Pavilion, a bright and raucous basketball stadium on the UConn campus, and the XL Center in Hartford, about a half hour to the west. At both arenas, people recognize Bill from the newspaper or the local news and they stare at him, almost as if he were disfigured in some way, a man with some shocking physical malady that you can’t help looking at even as you know you should look away. In their eyes is a mix of curiosity and awe. Everyone in the state, it seems, knows what happened to him, every horrid detail, and they are curious about what a man looks like after he has come out on the other side of that. They are curious about how he acts and whether he smiles. Will he stand and cheer when the team scores?

  And they are awestruck, still, by the fact that he is alive at all.

  The first games he went to after it happened, in the late fall of 2007, were tough. Walking into Gampel—the crush of students, their cheeks painted blue and white, crowding through the turnstiles; the familiar smells of nachos and pizza from the food stands; everything blazing under the lights shining down from the stadium’s huge, round golf-ball ceiling—Hanna found herself swallowing hard, trying to hold back tears. It caught her off guard, the feeling of breathlessness, but…these games were just such a big part of their thing. And then, suddenly, the scene that surrounded them was utterly familiar but strange and empty at the same time.

  Even several years into his new life, when Bill walks in front of Hanna, moving with the crowd through the stadium corridors toward their seats, she can hear the people whisper:

  Is that Dr. Petit?

  I think that’s his sister.

  Look, there’s Dr. Petit.

  The thing is, he does cheer. He smiles sometimes—Billy has that quick flash of a smile that comes all at once, his mouth hanging open a little, and it takes you by surprise. There is mischief in the smile. And so sometimes, when he’s out in public, at a game or appearing at an event for his foundation, Bill Petit looks pretty good. And people say to Hanna, Wow, he’s doing so well. And Hanna thinks, Yeah, at that moment you saw him, maybe he was. But he doesn’t always do so well when the game’s over and the daylight fades into another punishing moonless night. Or when, in the middle of a conversation, the sadness suddenly obscures him like an eclipse. He doesn’t always do so well at three in the morning.

  A lot of times, when he’s on his way somewhere, he says at the last minute that he doesn’t want to go. He becomes paralyzed. He says that when he shows up at these places and there are people around, he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. How he’s supposed to look. Whether he can smile. Whether it’s okay to stand up and cheer. What will people say if he does? Does a man who has had his whole life ripped away from him smile? Would the act of cheering at a basketball game dishonor his wife and daughters? Will people think he doesn’t care? Will they mistake him for a man who is healed?

  Who am I supposed to be?

  One day, sometime in the first year or so after it happened, Ron and Bill took a drive. An old friend from Plainville had become a well-known psychologist out in California. Writes books, goes on TV. He was going to be in Boston for a couple of days on business, and Ron and Bill drove up to meet him for lunch halfway between Boston and Hartford. When they were driving back, not talking a whole lot, a nondescript stretch of I-84 flying by the windows, Ron suddenly understood something about his friend. It just hit him: The best physicians, he realized, have the ability to flip a switch and turn off the human emotions that could cloud their judgment when they’re working with a patient. It’s an essential skill, because if you get sad every time someone is suffering, you won’t have the clear mind required to treat them. The best physicians know how to detach.

  Ron was driving, and he tried to put this into words for Billy. One of your problems, Ron said, is that you feel guilty because there are starting to be times when you can flip the switch in your head. You’re learning how to detach, just a little. And you feel guilty about that. About being able to turn off that switch. You feel guilty for turning it off long enough that you can smile.

  Bill didn’t say anything. Just stared ahead at the taillights moving through the dusk. But after a minute, he reached over and tapped Ron on the knee, and after forty years of friendship, Ron knew what Billy meant with a tap on the knee.

  —

  People talk about closure. That’s a word Bill has been hearing a lot. People ask him about it, with a hopeful rise in their voice at the end.

  You think you’ll find some closure, Dr. Petit?

  What do you think will give you closure, Bill? When the men who did this go on trial, when they get sentenced?

  Give ’em the death penalty. That’ll give you a little closure, right?

  These things—personal tragedies—they don’t go away. That’s what people don’t know, and what he never really understood before now. You don’t get over them, and they don’t close. The best you can hope for is that you figure out, little by little, how to get through your days. How to cope. People remarry, they have another child, they buy a new house. And as days add up to years, the sting may wear off when the bad thoughts creep into your head. You learn to live around the bad thoughts. But the marriage, the kids who are gone now, the house that burned down—it’s not like you can put those parts of your life away. He doesn’t blame people for wanting him to have closure�
�for wishing or assuming that it even exists. People want him to be happy and move forward, because it’s easier for everybody when nobody is grieving, when everything’s okay. People want to believe this is possible for him. But becoming okay is not Bill’s goal, not what he finds himself marching slowly toward. He heard a phrase once about what the worst kind of pain can do to your heart: It rips a jagged hole. That’s what this feels like. A jagged hole in his heart. The sharp edges may wear down over time, but the hole will never go away. The state could kill these two men a hundred times and it won’t bring closure.

  But that’s exactly what Bill wants the state to do.

  THE FIRST TRIAL

  September 13, 2010–December 2, 2010

  “TRAGEDY TO triii-al! Front paaa-age!”

  A young woman wearing a plastic rain poncho stands on the corner in front of the Superior Courthouse in New Haven, hawking the local paper, the Register. The sky at 8:00 a.m. is low and the color of pavement, spitting down a pebbly drizzle over the city. A line of television trucks hugs the curb along Church Street like boats at the dock, their extendable arms rising like masts, rooftop dishes searching for satellites beyond the clouds. The cameramen and sound technicians sit in their trucks eating bagels, ready to do a live shot at any moment.

  Lawyers and reporters and friends and gawkers file into the lobby, lining up to place their briefcases and handbags on the baggage scanner and walk through the metal detector—belts off, keys and cell phones in the bin. Judicial marshals, all business, wave them through one by one. Upstairs, on the sixth floor, a few dozen people wait in the hall outside Courtroom 6A, hoping to get a seat. Around 9:30, a half hour before the proceedings will begin, the chief marshal emerges to announce that the courtroom is filled to capacity. A few people approach the marshal to plead for a seat, but there’s nothing he can do. It’s the fire code, ma’am. I suggest arriving earlier tomorrow. These are the people who won’t make it into the courtroom for the morning session of the first day of testimony in State of Connecticut v. Steven Hayes.