The Rising

by Ryan D'Agostino

  After the verdict but before the sentencing, Rick had started talking to the producer in earnest, telling the producer that he would need to review the show before it airs, because Bill was to be a witness at the next trial, and there are certain things he can’t talk about on TV. He also asked for some time to mention the foundation on the air. When he said that Bill wasn’t going to talk before the sentencing, because doing so would detract from his impact statement, things got a bit complicated. Oprah had a trip planned on November 29, and Hayes’s sentencing was scheduled for December 2. The producer suggested filming the interview before the sentencing, and promised not to air it until afterward. Rick said no, because then both things would suffer—Bill would be thinking about the impact statement during the interview, and then having already done the interview would weaken his statement at the sentencing. Both have to come from the heart. Between Thanksgiving, Oprah’s trip, and the sentencing, there just wasn’t time for Bill to get to Chicago, where the show was taped, and back by the time they wanted to air the show.

  Okay, the producer said to Rick. What if Oprah comes to him?

  When? Rick asked.

  December 3, the day after the sentencing.

  Big Bill and Barbara had watched the Oprah show for years, usually in the kitchen while they got supper ready. One day, at the house on Red Stone Hill, Billy and Hanna tell Barbara they’ve decided to give the interview to Oprah.

  “I want to go,” says Barbara. “I want to be in the audience!”

  “We’re not going to Chicago,” Hanna says.

  “What do you mean you’re not going to Chicago?” Barbara asks.

  “She’s coming here.”

  “What do you mean she’s coming here?”

  “She’s coming to your house,” Hanna says.

  Well, Barbara just about falls through the floor.

  —

  No one can know. To the local press, the very fact of Oprah Winfrey jetting into Connecticut to interview Dr. William Petit would be a news story in itself, so Rick makes sure no one says a word.

  Barbara cleans for days. Two days before the interview, a crew from Winfrey’s production team arrives at the house. They traipse through each room, scouting for the location for Bill and Oprah to sit and talk. They take digital photos of every square inch of the first floor. The next day even more people come, fifteen or twenty. They set about moving furniture and removing pictures from the walls—that’s why they took all those pictures, so they would remember exactly where to put everything back—and carefully running cables across the shiny hardwood floors. They set up a makeshift control room out of view of the couch and chair where Winfrey will conduct the interview.

  Part of the deal is that Hanna will appear with Bill for part of the interview. A few days before the taping, the producers ask Hanna what she’s going to wear. I don’t know, Hanna says. She can hardly focus on the interview because she’s working so hard on her impact statement. Finally, after the sentencing, she and Bill and the rest of the family are having lunch, and Hanna tells Bill she has been so focused on the sentencing that she hasn’t even thought about tomorrow’s interview with Oprah Winfrey.

  Me, too, Bill says. He asks her if she wants to come up to the house tonight so they can talk about what they’re going to say. He tells Hanna that Oprah has these little blue cards she uses to make sure she hits all her points.

  Hanna smiles and says maybe they should make their own little blue cards. Make sure they hit all their points. “All right, see you later,” she says.

  But Hanna is spent. The buildup to the sentencing, and the inevitable exhale, has left her feeling exhausted. She falls asleep watching the UConn women’s basketball game on TV and never makes it up to Red Stone Hill, and wakes up at four the next morning feeling bad for not going up to help Billy prepare for Oprah—who by this point will be in Plainville in a matter of hours. She waits until six to text Billy, in case he’s sleeping. (He isn’t.)

  “You up?” she writes.

  “Yeah.”

  She says she’s sorry she didn’t make it up to the house last night. Billy says, Don’t worry about it, I crashed, too. Just come over a little early and we’ll figure it out. She goes up to her parents’ house, and she and Bill just stare at each other. They’re numb. Finally, he says, “It’ll be fine.”

  Big Bill and Barbara look out the window as Oprah Winfrey pulls up their driveway—her window is down, and they can see her in the backseat. She is lovely and gracious and thanks them so much for allowing her into their home. The furniture is completely rearranged. All the ringers on the telephones are turned off, and the clocks that chime have been disabled. The producers tape a note to the front door asking people not to knock or ring the doorbell—heaven forbid a neighbor should stop by with a loaf of banana bread today, of all days. Bill Sr. and Barbara are stationed in the kitchen. Ron Bucchi and Rick Healey stand in the makeshift control room down the hall, watching and listening to a live feed of Bill and Oprah from the living room.

  Bill’s pressed pink shirt matches the flowers on the coffee table. It also nicely complements Oprah’s eggplant-colored cardigan. They sit almost knee to knee. She looks Bill in the eyes, which are tired and puffy, and says, softly, “So we’re here in your parents’ home. You’ve come back home.”

  They talk for nearly three hours.

  —

  Three months after the sentencing and the Oprah interview, Bill arrives at Cheshire High School one morning alone and walks up the knoll from the parking lot, squinting against the low, late-winter sun. It’s chilly, and he walks with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans. He wears his hair, damp from the shower, combed straight back into a fringe of curls that sweep the collar of his baggy white golf shirt. The belly of a man who hit fifty a few years ago pulls slightly at his fleece vest. Across the lot behind him, suburban Saturday-morning traffic drifts up Main Street. Above, under a dry, blue March sky, two swallows chase each other around the sun. Bill walks slowly—he always gets a little queasy at these benefits, as the people are coming just for him, and he is required to be social. Being social has never come easy for him, but now it can be excruciating. Outside the doors, one of those inflatable castles for kids to jump around in is set up on the sidewalk. He stops.

  A boy, four years old, blue-eyed and sandy-haired, sits on the sidewalk. Not many people are around yet—it’s nine-thirty, and the basketball tournament doesn’t start until ten. The boy is unstrapping the Velcro on his shoes and jimmying them off his little feet. Bill bends at the waist with his hands on his knees.

  “Hey there,” he says to the boy. He arches his eyebrows hopefully and holds up a hand for a high five. Seeing Bill around a child, you notice that his cheekbones are high and wide, like rock faces. The boy looks up at the giant hand but quickly scrambles into the inflatable castle. Bill stands up straight again. “Ah, he doesn’t want to talk to me,” he says. His voice is deep and rusty and the words rattle out unevenly, as if they are the first he’s spoken since waking up. “He wants to play.” He drops his jaw a little and laughs to himself, then turns and wanders into the school.

  He still doesn’t much like doing these things, but he does them all the same. It’s part of his work, the work of the foundation. It is his life, or his best attempt to remain among the living. That Bill is himself alive is a sort of miracle and a reality to which he has still not fully acclimated. Even in settings like these—safe and comfortable, surrounded by smiling faces—Bill seems to be floating, half here and half gone.

  Inside, the halls are rumbling to life. Vast, fuzzy trapezoids of sunlight glow white on the linoleum, bending up the walls. A pimply kid with a brown, bushy mop sits smiling at the welcome table, his hands folded next to a box marked DONATIONS. Gray-haired women lay out foil trays of homemade chocolate cupcakes and baggies of frosted cookies—EVERYTHING $1, reads a sign on the table. The ping of basketballs hitting the gym floor echoes in the halls. People nod and smile at Bill as he ma
kes his way in, and he nods back and offers up a “G’mornin’.” A woman wearing a tracksuit stops to hug him, standing on her tiptoes. “Heyyy,” he says quietly.

  In the gymnasium, kids from college on down to grade school shoot around and basketballs whiz everywhere. Soon the adolescent voice of a local kid home from college scratches out through a speaker, announcing that Dr. Petit is going to take the ceremonial first shot of the tournament. Bill hams a funny uh-oh face, fakes a nervous smile, and shrugs at the crowd. Someone bounces a ball to him. He turns it over in his hands a couple of times, rotating it, squeezing it, the ball hard and cold, same as always. He dribbles hard, pounding the ball into the shellacked hardwood like he has done—could it have been a million times in his life? He walks slowly to the free-throw line, a goofy wink at the drama of the moment. There’s no drama, really, because it doesn’t matter if he misses, but—well, come on, you don’t want to miss, do you?

  Feet planted on the line, he dribbles three more times, then shoots, his elbow snapping like a piston, firing the ball off the end of his fingertips as if not a day has gone by. A few hundred eyes follow its arc toward the rim. The ball bangs the front, takes a bounce back onto the heel of the rim, and falls through the net.

  Bill’s eyes go wide and he pretends to wipe sweat from his forehead. Everyone claps, and, the moment over, kids peel themselves off the walls and fill the gym back up with noise. Bill feels pats on his back, feels his hands grabbed and shaken. Nice shot! Then he walks over near the door, out of the way, kind of bobbing along. Close one! The boy from the inflatable castle is there, on his father’s shoulders. “Hey!” Bill says. He holds out his fist for a fist bump. The boy grins this time, but he turns away again shyly. “Awww,” Bill says.

  Bill Sr. comes over, chucks his son on the shoulder.

  “Nothing but net,” says the old man.

  —

  They cleaned out Michaela’s locker at school after she died, and in it there was a quote taped to the inside of the door: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Gandhi. She had posted the same quote on her Facebook page, the one Bill didn’t know she had.

  When he saw the quote, it hit him hard. It became the driver of the foundation, the reason they do everything they do. It’s printed on the cover of the brochure: “Be the change.” It’s stamped onto pink-and-green rubber Petit Family Foundation bracelets. It’s what the girls did all the time, as if by instinct. They were the change they wanted to see in the world. Jen took the job at Cheshire Academy—and, in fact, went into pediatric nursing in the first place—because she wanted a world in which children could be healthy and thrive. Hayley started Hayley’s Hope because she wanted a world in which MS didn’t exist, so that her mother might be healthy and live. Michaela, on the weekend before she died, e-mailed a group of her fifth-grade friends asking if they could help her raise money for animal rescue shelters because she loved animals and knew she could help them. For all three of them, being the change came naturally.

  And Bill is starting to see now that other people in the world were like this, too. For a long time, it was so hard to appreciate goodness. He saw it every day, in the form of the thousands of cards and letters and checks that were mailed to his parents’ home. But as his foundation digs deeper into the needs of people around Connecticut, as more and more people give money and show up at the events, the hole in his heart is slowly filling in, or at least its edges are becoming ever so slightly smoother. And as more and more people give money, the foundation is able to turn around and give it to more causes. In 2010 the board increased its annual pledge to the Prudence Crandall domestic-violence shelter from $5,000 to $10,000. The amounts given for the community-service awards at Plainville and Cheshire high schools are higher. They give a $7,650 grant to the Cheshire Public Schools to support educating girls in the sciences. In keeping with its mission to help people with chronic illnesses, it donates $500 to a research foundation for chronic regional pain syndrome, a debilitating neurological ailment. Two thousand dollars goes to the Bristol Hospital Parent and Child Center, which prevents and fights child abuse.

  There’s a new event that started in the fall of 2010, during the trial, three years after the murders: the Ride for Justice. A motorcycle rally, of all things. It was amazing. Three thousand bikers showed up.

  Bill stood in the parking lot as they rolled in and met as many of them as he could. They waited to shake his hand or give him a hug, biker after biker. One man, wearing a leather jacket with the sleeves ripped off and tattoos running up his arms, looked Bill in the eye and said very quickly, “I’m sorry for your loss. It’s an honor to ride for you today.” Bill stood on a riser under a blue-and-white circus tent and spoke to the crowd sitting in folding chairs. He thanked them, and when his voice caught, and he couldn’t speak for a moment because he felt the tears welling up, they just stood and clapped for him for a minute. Afterward, there were just so many of them, and he kept hugging them—men and women his own age who rode Harleys and wore bandanas around their heads and called him Doc and clapped his back until it hurt.

  It is now spring of 2011, and more evidence of the good that people can do makes its way to Bill through the conduit of the Petit Family Foundation: Hanna got a call a few weeks ago from a fourteen-year-old boy in Philadelphia. Never met him before. His family holds an annual fundraiser at their home, he said. A big auction, makes tons of money. This year, they want to do the whole thing for the Petit Family Foundation. So Bill will drive down to Philly for that. Have to show up.

  A guy called from Utah. Does an annual charity golf tournament, and this year he’s chosen the Petit Family Foundation as the beneficiary. So Bill will fly out to Utah for that, probably with Ron. Have to show up.

  Ron is worried about this next trial coming up in the fall. The lawyers for Hayes, Ullmann and Culligan, may have been the opposition, but they were respectful. They didn’t cross-examine Billy at all, even. But this guy Donovan, some of the statements he’s made—he’s not going to make this easy for Bill.

  Ron sees Bill at the next board of directors meeting at the house on Red Stone Hill. Hanna has made a big batch of Italian wedding soup for everyone. Big Bill and Barbara have set the table, and there’s red wine and soda out. Then they start arriving, these CEOs and doctors and lawyers on Bill’s board—Bill knows a lot of smart people. They serve themselves from the buffet and review the committee reports—development, finance and investment, grants, the golf tournament. Bill mentions a little girl who, not long ago, told her friends she didn’t want birthday presents and asked guests to make a donation instead—she raised $400. The foundation’s holdings are up to $1.8 million. Its board will give out a total of $113,600 in 2011, topping $100,000 for the first time. It still supports Manes & Motions, the therapeutic horseback-riding center, this year with a $7,300 gift. Justice for My Sister, an organization supporting gender equality especially for women immigrants, is awarded $5,000. Safe Haven of Greater Waterbury: $5,000. The goal for the foundation’s endowment is still the $5 million that would make it self-sustaining. Then they could hire some people to send the notes and organize the spreadsheets and keep the records so Bill knows whom to thank, so he wouldn’t have to do so much of that stuff himself.

  The thing is, Bill would end up doing most of that stuff anyway.

  After the meeting, Ron and Hanna and a few others hang out and talk. Eventually, Bill goes up to his room. Books and papers and albums of family photographs cover most of the queen-size bed—Bill sleeps at the edge of the mattress. When blackness disappears the world outside, and when Bill is trying to fall asleep, that’s when the what-ifs and the bad thoughts try to stab their way into the fragile equilibrium that he has worked so hard to achieve in his mind.

  Bill Sr., Bill, Ron Bucchi, and Rick Bucchi at the golf club, where Bill found peace both before and after the tragedy.

  What if Jen had just stayed inside the bank instead of coming outside with the money? What if he had gone
upstairs to bed after he turned off the lamp by the couch?

  Every night after he gets into bed, even when his light is out, he hears a soft knock on the door. His grandmother, Gram Triano. The door opens and light leaks onto the walls of his room.

  “Bill?”

  Her voice is soft, as if she’s trying to wake a toddler from a nap.

  “Bill?”

  He rolls over.

  “Yeah, Gram?”

  She shuffles into the room and gently pats his shoulder.

  “Are you okay?”

  —

  He has met someone. He didn’t set out to, but he did. Her name is Christine, and he thinks about her a lot. The way her laugh can just knock you over from across the room—it’s a beautiful laugh, honest and funny in itself, as if she laughs from her soul. And they come so easily to her, her little bursts of joy. They catch him off guard, and he likes that. He thinks about how she absently tucks a wave of blond hair behind her ear when she’s taking a photograph, and squints just a little.

  Christine worked as the marketing director at the country club—she took photos, did internal advertising for events, wrote the monthly newsletter, redesigned the Web site. She also tended bar in the Founders Room. She didn’t know who Bill was when he would come in, which is to say that she didn’t know he was “Bill Petit” from the news. When it happened, she was traveling the world as a member of Up With People, the community-service entertainment group founded in the 1960s, and the news of the murders had passed her by.