The Rising

by Ryan D'Agostino

  Somebody introduces the local sports-talk radio guy, well-known in these parts, been around forever, who will lead the live auction. As the crowd claps, Bill puts down his program, cups one hand around his mouth, and lets out a quick holler.

  “Whoo-woooo!”

  After almost five years as the president of the foundation, he has learned the routine of these black-tie things, their customs and idiosyncrasies. He has learned how to have a good time.

  He leans back in his black party-rental chair and takes a small gulp of chardonnay, finds a place to set the glass down amid the smartphones and smeared plates that clutter the white tablecloth, and looks down at the printed program to see what’s up for bid tonight, his bow tie tilting a little under his trimmed pebble-gray beard.

  Just then, a hand on his shoulder.

  Christine.

  Bill looks up and smiles.

  She was a couple of tables away, chatting with someone they know vaguely. She is here now, at his side. She folds into her seat, crosses her legs, slides her phone under the lip of a china saucer, brushes a lock of hair behind her ear. She looks fabulous in that dress, he thinks, white geometric shapes floating on bright blue satin. She straightened her wavy blond hair tonight, and it draws attention to her sudden smile.

  Always her smile. When she walks into a room she brings a crackling light, like the first half-second a match is lit, that makes everyone sit up and smile and watch her. Whenever she walks into a room, Bill feels a certain peace.

  She bought the bow tie for him. It’s black, with white stripes and white polka dots—both, you ever see that before? She found it at some expensive store, he tells his friend. He likes it. Because she likes it.

  You see friends at these things. Also at table one: Hayley Hovhanessian’s parents, and another of Bill’s old friends from Plainville, who brought his new girlfriend. You have a couple of drinks, and people come up and say nice things. You have to smile a lot, have to give a lot of hugs, and you have to make a lot of small talk, which over three or four hours can be exhausting. You try to remember names. And on plenty of nights, he has to say a few words. But mostly what Bill likes to do at these things is clown around with Christine.

  All the other people in this room lead invisible lives, just like most of the people we see every day. We see them, but we have no idea how they came to be who they are—the kids who bullied them and the parents who raised them, the natural intelligence that made everything seem easy or the insecurities that drove them harder. We don’t have any clue about their private pains and joys—the new job with double the pay, the favorite uncle who died the day before his birthday, the lump in the breast, the child who made the honor roll. Everyone we see is just a person pushing a shopping cart down the aisle, or driving a car in the next lane, or sitting through the same meeting we are. But not Bill Petit, not anymore. He no longer has the privilege of anonymity. When most people see him, they see a man whose family was tortured and then murdered in their own house—in his house—while he sat helpless in the basement, tied up and losing blood. They look at him and they wonder how he does it—how he goes on living. They wonder if they could do it. They wonder what kind of man he is that he can.

  “Bill,” Christine says, tapping her program. He’s chatting with his friend, but he turns to her. She looks up at him, her finger on the program, and he looks down at it.

  “Okay, yup,” he says. It’s the next item up for auction: lunch with the mayor of Hartford. Someone breaks the opening bid of $500.

  “A thousand? A thousand dollars,” shouts the local sportscaster who’s emceeing.

  Bill raises his program, which doubles as an auction paddle. The sportscaster points at him.

  “Thank you, Dr. Petit! Do I hear fifteen hundred?”

  He scans the room, index finger aloft, like some crazed bandleader. “Fifteen hundred? Going once—”

  And suddenly a photographer standing in the back of the room—what looks like a skinny twenty-year-old kid, long-lens camera slung around his neck, bulky bag of equipment over his shoulder—raises his program.

  “Fifteen hundred! Sold, to the back of the room.”

  Bill slumps in his chair and pretends to be devastated. “I got beat by the photographer?”

  People want pictures. All night long, people walk up with their phones out and ask for a picture with Dr. Petit. Friends of friends, friends of friends of friends. He doesn’t mind. He’s got his smile down—mouth hanging open a little, as if he’s mid-chuckle—and he actually looks happy in a lot of shots. In between, he sits back down, eats a little more of whatever they’re serving.

  “Whoo-wooo!” he hollers when somebody wins dinner with Geno Auriemma, the coach of the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team, who’s been the coach since Bill first started taking Hayley to games in the early 1990s.

  It’s getting late. The auction is over, and people are starting to dance to the four-piece soft-shoe band. The drummer looks exactly like Garrison Keillor, a hangdog face bopping vaguely to the beat under a wispy mop of hair. Folded-up programs are strewn across the dinner tables. Bill’s lies next to his plate, open to the back page, a full-page ad for the Petit Family Foundation, which shows a black-and-white photo of Bill, Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela at Hayley’s graduation from Miss Porter’s.

  The servers rush to get the dessert plates down before everybody drifts off into the night. Christine recognizes the Latino waiter pouring coffee—he was passing these ridiculous shrimp tempura during cocktail hour, and she had hounded him. “Hey! No more shrimp?” she hoots at him with that ready smile, as if she’s hoping for a great comeback. Christine has the gift of being able to talk to anyone—child, CEO, waiter—with an easy charm. The waiter freezes for a second, not used to joking around with the people he serves, but this woman is beaming at him, sharing a joke, telling him with her eyes and her smile that it’s okay, we’re all just people in a room.

  “No,” he says with a shy grin. “Would you like coffee?”

  Bill stares at the dessert in front of him. It’s a glass slipper made out of chocolate, with tufts of chocolate mousse piped in where the woman’s foot would go.

  “I don’t know how to eat it,” he says. He’s looking at it the way a child might look who has just been served a whole lobster for the first time. “You just pick it up?”

  “Oh, wait, this I have to capture,” Christine says, clicking on her iPhone camera. “Hold on.”

  Bill poses with the shoe in his mouth, holding it there, waiting for her to take the picture.

  “Gross,” she says finally. “Okay, forget it, this is too weird.”

  Bill shrugs, chews a bite of the chocolate slipper, wipes his mouth, and drops his napkin on his knee. He draws in a long, deep breath as he looks around the gilded room at the men wearing tuxedoes dancing with their wives, the four-piece band playing “Old Time Rock and Roll” and the chocolate slippers and the local meteorologist holding court and the senator’s now-empty chair and the sea of wineglasses reflecting the golden light of the room. Then he looks at his wife next to him, puts his arm around her to pull her close, leans over, and kisses her.

  God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things have passed away.

  —Revelation 21:4, tweeted by Bill Petit, April 2015

  A NEW KIND OF DAWN

  BILL HAD been here before. A lifetime ago.

  When a man walks into the hospital with his wife as she is about to give birth for the first time, he is nowhere else. There is nothing else he can think about, because his purpose in life is suddenly and unbelievably clear, and it doesn’t extend beyond the now: He exists to get her from the car to the delivery room and then stand by her bedside for as many hours as it takes. That’s it. And after the hospital’s automatic sliding doors close behind him, the world outside disappears. The parking lot, the roads and the trees, the
wars raging in faraway countries, the mortgage payment due, the darkness or light outside the windows, the rain or the wind, the rattling in the engine, the unreturned calls—it all peels away, totally unimportant. There is no room for any of it. He is nervous and dutiful, alert and yet in a fog. At the bedside, he watches his wife breathe and sweat and endure pain and fatigue worse than any athlete he’s ever seen on any field. He has known in the abstract that this was coming for many months, but now that it’s here he is worried he will forget something, some responsibility or function that he must perform.

  Bill had the advantage of being a doctor, so at least the hospital, odd-smelling and uncomfortably fluorescent to most new fathers, was familiar to him. And it was his hospital, the Hospital of Central Connecticut—the hospital he used to feel sometimes as if he lived in back when he was practicing, all those rounds and early mornings and late nights and unplanned stops on a Saturday afternoon to check on this patient or that. He knew the place, and the people knew him. He also had the advantage of having been a part of something like this, though it was many years before.

  This time, it was a crisp night at the end of a cold fall. The ends of the branches on the maple trees along the Farmington River were already brittle. Hanna was there, right in the delivery room. Andrew and Abby were outside, anxious to meet their new cousin. Bill Sr. and Barbara. On Saturday, November 23, 2013, at 2:24 a.m., the darkest part of the night, Christine gave birth to a baby boy, William Arthur Petit III. Six pounds, fourteen ounces, and a long nineteen inches. He was perfect. To a lot of people who knew Bill’s story—people around Connecticut, people who read about him in People magazine or remembered him from the Oprah show—the baby was a gift from above, a symbol of hope and resurrection, a miracle. Christine and Bill understood that, of course. And even at the hospital, there was an overwhelming emotion in the air, perhaps a sudden realization that yes, the birth of this baby was indeed momentous and heralded the rebirth of his father’s soul. Christine and Bill understood this, too. But to them, to his parents, William was a miracle the way every baby is a miracle to every mother and father. He wasn’t a prince or a symbol. He was their boy.

  Almost from the beginning, the baby was known as Little Bill, and Bill took him everywhere. Down to the office on Whiting Street, where Hayley and Rolande would lean in close and welcome him to the world. Over to Bill’s parents’ house on Red Stone Hill, of course—all the time. To UConn basketball games—he was born at the beginning of the season, and before he was six months old, both the men’s and the women’s teams won the national championship, a rare occurrence in the world of college athletics. Bill and Christine took Little Bill to his first fundraising gala when he was four months old, an event for Jane Doe No More, an organization that helps victims of sexual assault to which the Petit Family Foundation recently gave a $13,000 gift. (Part of the gift will help Jane Doe No More offer free self-defense classes to women and girls across Connecticut. So far more than 3,000 people have taken part. “We are so grateful,” says Donna Palomba, who founded the organization after she was raped by an intruder in her home. “It’s amazing how Bill hasn’t given up, like so many people would have.”)

  To the gala Bill wore a houndstooth blazer and a pink shirt, Christine wore a stunning white dress with black stripes, and Little Bill wore a onesie that had a pocket square. They took him to the golf tournament, where Christine photographed him in the warm sunlight, crawling around, studying the manicured grass, wearing madras pants and a baby bowler hat over his sandy curls. Bill went to Little Bill’s pediatrician appointments, took him to meetings, and took him to a local TV station when he was filming a commercial for the foundation.

  Hanna expected, or hoped, anyway, that the baby would be a jolt for Bill, but even she was shocked by the energy Bill suddenly had. Ron, for his part, wasn’t sure he would ever see his friend this happy again, and yet here he was. Christine and Little Bill—LB, to friends and family—had given Bill not only happiness but purpose. A lot of new fathers feel something like this, a new and permanent sense of duty that comes with being responsible for a person’s life, health, and happiness. They see that this tiny person they’ve created can’t live without them, and suddenly their days at work have a clearer goal, and their weekends and early mornings become sacred for a new reason. They are dimly aware that every man they know also has kids, and that those men’s children are the center of their universe, but all that really matters is their own child. For Bill, however, the new sense of purpose was a little different. More than six years ago, he had been well along in the process of raising a family, and the job of raising Hayley and Michaela was more important to him than being a doctor or a son or even a husband. The job had been ripped from him, not by illness or accident or any of the usual tragedies, but by torture and excruciating cruelty. By evil. When the girls, all three of them, were gone, and when he had not been able to save them, what possible reason could there be for him to continue to draw breath?

  His life, unequivocally, had been over. And now, impossibly, this.

  —

  In the months before Little Bill was born, Christine had found a studio and office space for her photography business, Le Petit Studio. The work was picking up, and she was shooting everything from weddings and headshots to baby pictures and family portraits. She had worked as a newspaper reporter early in her career, and credited that experience with teaching her to find the moments that matter.

  Just as Christine was opening her studio, Bill was being recruited hard by the Connecticut Republican party to run for Congress. Through his ordeal, he had become known as both a steadfast champion of his family’s memory and also as a staunch advocate for capital punishment. He took the appeals to run for office seriously, saying in the fall of 2013 that he was “50-50” on the proposition. Of course, he had other things to consider as well. “Just married a year, a new baby due in eight weeks,” he said. In the end, the other considerations won out, and Bill decided against mounting a campaign. He, too, has learned a great deal about the moments that matter.

  Abby babysits Little Bill a lot. Her office is in the same suite as the Petit Family Foundation’s—she sells airtime to advertisers for a local radio network—so she sees Bill and Christine and the baby all the time. Before, when she was growing up with Hayley, she always wanted to impress her uncle Bill. She saved her smartest questions for him, always tried to show him what she knew. He brought that out in people. Now it’s different. If you sit back and try to hold on to what was, she says, you’ll never be able to understand this new happiness, this new blessing. She has always loved her uncle, but now, on a lot of days, she feels even closer to him than she did before, back when she would wake up in his house on all those weekend mornings, lolling around in Hayley’s sun-filled room or bouncing on the trampoline while Uncle Billy worked on his flowers and his lawn. Now that he has a wonderful new wife and a beautiful new baby, Abby feels like herself again around him. He’s funny, and he’s fun—that’s what Christine and Little Bill have done for him. Abby couldn’t imagine a better partner for Bill than Christine, and she can’t wait to tell Little Bill all about Hayley and Michaela when he gets older. And seeing her grandparents, Bill Sr. and Barbara, with the baby—they’re in their eighties but they act like kids around him, and Abby just smiles at the bittersweetness of it all, at the gift of this child. New life doesn’t make everything better, and it doesn’t bring anyone back. But it restores hope to life, and hope is the difference between living and merely existing. For years after the murders, Abby didn’t cry at all. She was never happy, and never really sad. She felt nothing. And now when Bill lumbers into the room with Little Bill in his arms, smiling, making funny faces and silly noises, a diaper bag over his shoulder and the creases of an exhausted smile fanning from the corners of his eyes—when that happens, Abby feels a happiness she had forgotten was possible.

  Of course it was just yesterday that Bill was holding baby Hayley in his arms, or hoisting Michaela
through his office showing her off. How he loved to nuzzle his tiny girls, the depth of feeling almost incomprehensible to him, his emotions beyond words. And beyond words is where Bill is at this moment, a different man in the same body as he hoists Little Bill through the office of the foundation he has made to remember the boy’s sisters and their selfless mother. Look at the man’s silent face, a picture of peace and pleasure as he holds on to the life he has made.

  —

  Bill never slept all that much to begin with. Even before, when his daughters were growing up and he was seeing patients until all hours and giving lectures all over the place and going to their games and Hayley’s races and growing his flowers and writing a book and being everything to everybody, his sleep patterns were not patterns at all but rather Bill just closing his eyes when he had no other choice. And then after it happened, there were the years when he simply did not sleep, the delirium stretching for months at a time. Life, it seemed, would forever be one long sleepless night. Those were the days when if he could will himself to stay positive for a few consecutive minutes, it was a big deal. Then Christine came and filled the dark corners of his mind with light when he needed her to, and let them hide in blackness when he needed that, too. And now with the baby, Bill’s boy, that hole in his heart seems a little smaller. The dark days still come, and maybe they always will. Sometimes he still gets pensive, and lost in thought, and he might turn to you over a beer at the bar down the street from his house, an old blues musician up on the stage wailing away on the harmonica, grab your shoulder, and say, seemingly out of nowhere, “Spend time with your kids,” a piece of advice you have heard before but that, coming from this man, knocks you in the stomach, and that you will think of on Saturday mornings when your children wake you up and ask you to play, and that you will never, ever forget.