28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  28

  SECONDS

  MICHAEL BRYANT

  28

  SECONDS

  A TRUE STORY

  OF ADDICTION,

  TRAGEDY,

  AND HOPE

  VIKING

  an imprint of Penguin Canada

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2012

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Michael Bryant, 2012

  The David Foster Wallace quotation on page v is taken from Infinite Jest, published by Little, Brown in 1996.

  A portion of the proceeds from the book will be donated to the Pine River Foundation.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Bryant, Michael J. (Michael James), 1966–28 seconds : a true story of addiction, tragedy, and hope / Michael Bryant.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-670-06644-5

  1. Bryant, Michael J. (Michael James), 1966– —Trials, litigation, etc.

  2. Lawyers—Ontario—Biography. 3. Politicians—Ontario—Biography.

  4. Sheppard, Darcy, d. 2009—Death and burial. 5. Cycling accidents—Ontario—Case studies.

  6. Law reform—Ontario. I. Title. II. Title: Twenty-eight seconds.

  KE416.B79A3 2012 340.092 C2012-903280-8

  KF345.Z9B79 2012

  * * *

  Visit the Penguin Canada website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477.

  TO MY BROTHER

  ALAN THOMAS BRYANT (1972–2011),

  AND TO SUSAN ABRAMOVITCH

  “Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e., almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.”

  —David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)

  “A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific reality.”

  —Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897)

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE Top Down

  ONE Happy Anniversary

  TWO Made in B.C.

  THREE Law, Love, Luck

  FOUR To the Palace

  FIVE Comfortably Scrummed

  SIX Last Call

  SEVEN Twenty-Eight Seconds

  EIGHT The Cell

  NINE Stretcher Bearers

  TEN For the Defence: Marie Henein

  ELEVEN My Elder; His Widow

  TWELVE The Defence

  THIRTEEN Uncomfortably Numb

  FOURTEEN Attorney General v. Michael Bryant

  FIFTEEN Darcy Allan Sheppard (1975–2009)

  SIXTEEN The Elephant in the Room: Criminal Justice Reforms

  SEVENTEEN Paying for It

  EIGHTEEN Another Death: My Brother

  NINETEEN Home Unalone

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  PROLOGUE

  Top Down

  At dusk on the night that everything changed, my life was almost embarrassingly triumphant. I had an impressive new job. I had two glorious children. I was celebrating the 12th anniversary of the marriage that produced them. My parents and siblings were alive and well. At age 43, my future was featured favourably and often in glossy media.

  Any day now, Hello! magazine was due to run its series on the perfect couple with the perfect kids, the perfect home, the perfect careers: he a political force shrewdly biding time, building connections and influence away from elected office; she an entertainment lawyer to the stars; the children enrolled and thriving in French immersion at Toronto’s toniest public school.

  Fast forward, however, and you might think I’d become Job’s apprentice.

  On August 31, 2009, on a strip of Toronto known as the Mink Mile—the ritziest stretch of high-end retail shops in Canada—I was involved in the death of a man. Later, I was charged with killing him.

  In 2010, those charges were dropped and the legal ordeal ended. But so did my marriage. In 2011, my younger brother died suddenly in his thirties of a rare heart condition. We were holding hands when he passed away.

  Until the night that everything changed, I was one of fortune’s favoured sons, and the inside of a jail cell seemed as unlikely a destination for me as the far side of the moon. Until then, by almost any measure, I was on a roll. Everything I’d ever sought out, ever dreamed of, ever imagined had become true in my life.

  I had met and married a great and brilliant woman, Susan Abramovitch. I had decided that clerking at the Supreme Court of Canada was the best legal launching pad, that Harvard was the best graduate law school, and that Wall Street’s Sullivan & Cromwell was the best law firm. I had sought, and obtained, a place at them all.

  And my pride swelled further as I piled up the accomplishments: elected to the Ontario Legislature at age 33, the province’s youngest-ever Attorney General by age 37, Government House Leader at 41, and then, in my final months in office, participating in the auto industry rescue of 2009. Then I exited from politics under my terms, voluntarily, and into my brand-new job as Toronto’s top investment booster.

  By the night it all changed, I had created a monster of a media darling, and harboured a titanic ego—in every sense of the word. “Michael Bryant is content to strut towards a window table,” a newspaper journalist wrote around that time, “and do what he does best—be the centre of attention, without even trying.”

  And this particular night, our wedding anniversary, was surely destined, just like everything else I touched, to turn out golden. The night began, as it would famously end, in my black 1995 Saab 9000 convertible, a spruced-up beater that had cost me a little over $6000.

  In that car, everything changed. For ten years, in the unrelenting crucible of politics and high office, some of it as the Chief Law Officer of Ontario, I had avoided personal scandal and public defeat. Then, because of what happened in just 28 seconds, I had more scandal and defeat than most people are likely to know.

  I’d once sat atop the Ontario justice system. For four years, I’d been accountable for 900 criminal prosecutors, many of whom I’d hired or promoted. I’d appointed more than half the judges for the main criminal court, plus the chief justice, all her associate chief justices, and more than a hundred Justices of the Peace. I was friends with dozens of jud
ges on the Ontario Superior Court and Court of Appeal, and a number of the justices on the Supreme Court of Canada. Like any Ontario Attorney General, I’d been accountable for about a half-million prosecutions a year.

  Suddenly, I was the one being prosecuted.

  I ended that anniversary night sitting in a Toronto jail cell, charged with causing the death of a man I’d never met, but a man I probably knew better than he, or anyone else, might have imagined.

  On the night that everything changed, well … everything changed.

  Most importantly, a man named Darcy Allan Sheppard lost his life. Twenty-eight seconds was all it took, from the time he stopped his bicycle in front of my old Saab convertible, to the moment of impact, skull to concrete, and then his death. It was an irremediable horror, and the greatest tragedy to which I’d ever been party.

  For me, it began a period of unimaginable sorrow and anguish. For, just as tragedy, death, and loss were unexpected visitors to my world, the grief, self-doubt, and humility that accompanied them were equally unfamiliar emotions.

  I would immediately lose the job I had once thought so very impressive and important. I would lose the marriage I was celebrating the night that tragedy visited, a marriage that had blessed me with my children and carried me through the worst of times. I would lose my younger brother—my only brother—the brother whose name I’d chosen, the brother who had stood beside me as the best man at my wedding.

  I would lose, it was taken for granted, any prospect of a future in public life. The news media, after all, had instantly declared the accident, those 28 seconds, to be Canada’s Bonfire of the Vanities. It was, to some quick-to-judge commentators, Michael Bryant’s very own Chappaquiddick.

  Still, there were other losses. Some of those were necessary; some were even healthy. All were difficult.

  I began to shed my prideful aspirations, my hubris, my delusions of control and invincibility, my cocksure notions of what mattered in a life. I began to benefit from a downsized ego, a more generous perspective, a capacity to see the joy of small blessings.

  This is the story of how, in a matter of seconds on a summer evening, lives from opposite ends of society, from different poles of privilege and possibility, intersected and collided, and how, for me, everything changed.

  It is a story of tragic flaws and human foible, of obsessions and compulsions—the kind society encourages and applauds; the kind it reviles.

  It’s a story of our justice system, and our health-care system; how some of it works well but some of it doesn’t.

  It’s a story of success, and the skewed way we sometimes define it; a story of shattering personal crisis, and how crisis is not always the worst thing that can happen in a life.

  It’s a story of relationships, of the redemptive power of love, of the sometimes unexpected places love is found.

  It’s the story of how, starting slowly, in fits and starts, with love and help and willingness and hard work, and while facing the biggest challenges I would ever know, something happened.

  I came back. I came back changed.

  ONE

  Happy Anniversary

  It was at the end of a draining three-hour interrogation, on March 23, 2010, that the prosecutor asked me a question. “Would you have done anything differently that night,” he said, “knowing what you now know?”

  Before I could answer, my lawyer, Marie Henein, began yelling at him. This served two purposes: it shut me up, and it made her objection crystal clear to all in earshot. The question, after all, was speculative and hypothetical. Witnesses, it is axiomatic, should never, ever answer those. Marie made her point emphatically, as is her custom, and the prosecutor half-grinned as he quickly backtracked. Almost in spite of myself, when things fizzled into a brief silence, I answered:

  “I never would have left the house,” I said quietly.

  But I did leave the house.

  IT WAS AUGUST 31, 2009. It was the 12th anniversary of my marriage to Susan Abramovitch. It was a lovely, late-summer day in Toronto. It was the morning of the night that everything changed.

  “Happy anniversary,” she said, stirring beside me. And we hugged. No kiss. Twelve years of marriage, 17 years together, two kids. And morning breath. No kiss.

  “So what are we doing?”

  My voice croaked to life. “Well, I thought that …”

  This wasn’t actually true. I hadn’t thought anything. I remembered it was our anniversary because, a few seconds ago, she’d said so.

  I had no gift, no plan, even though I’d been responsible for arranging something in the way of celebration. That was my job, probably because I was in the doghouse.

  I was usually in the doghouse that summer. Somehow, I wasn’t engaged with the same human race of which my wife was a member. I was a distracted presence in my own marriage, my mind usually somewhere else. I was going through the pressure of a career change, a significant reorientation, maybe even something of a small mid-life crisis.

  Even if I weren’t in the doghouse, we were a couple waist-deep in that phase of kid-driven living and domestic routine in which attention to one another is often a fleeting afterthought.

  So I tried to set things right, making it up on the fly. For me, this was not an unusual state of affairs.

  “I am currently thinking as I speak that …”

  I suggested Middle Eastern fare at a place on College Street run by a colourful, one-eyed character from our past.

  “Sounds good. So what time?” she said.

  “What time works for you?” My inability to actually forge a plan was maddening. The eggshell crunches were deafening as we tiptoed around each other toward an arrangement.

  I’ll pick her up at work, and we’ll drive to dinner in my car, it’s decided.

  We’re moving now, out of the bedroom. The morning rituals were underway. Wake the kids—Sadie, age 7, and Louie, 5. Down the hardwood stairs, carpeted down the centre, to the kitchen of the house in which we intended to grow old. That was the plan.

  We’d bought the place in 2004 from a home builder who’d gutted and renovated it. It was turn-key perfection in a tony neighbourhood. It also had slippery hardwood at the bottom of the stairs. “Take off your socks, Louie!” I hollered. Louie liked sleeping with his socks on.

  Next: turn on the Sirius Satellite Radio atop a tall speaker. On went the Sony receiver and NPR started playing on the living room and dining room speakers, adjoining the open kitchen. The morning ritual continued. Viking Professional Series gas stove. Rancilio Rocky coffee grinder. Gaggia espresso machine. Scandinavian-designed dishwasher that blended in like a cupboard. You get the picture.

  Next: heat milk for the kids’ cereal. They liked warm milk. Susan moved past me in a blur. She got the bowls, spoons, cereal box. It was the typical choreography as our family stirred to our usual morning soundtrack. The espresso grinder grinding, the microwave beeping, then a loud click from the basement entrance. Our nanny, Sarah, had arrived. I opened the front door to get the newspapers: The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the National Post.

  “Sarah’s here!”

  So we stopped tending to our kids and started grooming ourselves for work. The shower built for two, a pair of enormous shower heads almost a foot in diameter extending down from the ceiling. In Mexico, they’d call it a car wash.

  Minutes pass.

  Susan’s water was scorching. Mine was not. I needed to be shocked by cooler water to wake up. In the old days, I’d all but take up residence in the shower, trying to wash away the hangovers. But that was three years ago.

  “So,” called Susan from the walk-in closet, “meet outside my work at 6:30?” By her reckoning, that should make sure I was there by 6:45.

  “Limit on the presents, right?” (Meaning: not too expensive.)

  “Right.”

  I read the newspapers while breakfasting on microwaved oatmeal. The kids heaved their backpacks on at the door, the packs huge on their little frames. Dad’s 5'8", Mom 5'3"
. Sadie and Louie are unlikely, the paediatrician says, to have lankiness in their future.

  Kissed and hugged, the kids headed down the front steps with Sarah for school. A little later came Susan’s goodbye, shouted in the direction of upstairs where I was leisurely getting dressed, staring at fuchsia socks and peppermint ties.

  I left the house a few minutes after 9 a.m., taking for granted the ordinary blessings of my life, not guessing that mornings would never be routine in our house in just this way again.

  IT’S A SUNNY DAY, heading toward 20°C. That means my convertible top will be down, folded back, all day, all night. I’m happy when the top’s down. Otherwise, I’m claustrophobic. I need sun.

  I’ve been driving the 1995 Saab for just over a year. It has some iffy bodywork, but a decent paint job. I bought it from a small, private dealership that seems to specialize in refurbishing junkyard dogs. I keep it washed and waxed pretty well. With the top down, it looks nice. There’s a subwoofer installed in the scrunched back seat, speakers in the doors, a deck connected to my iPod. The Saab rocks, its clunker lineage notwithstanding.

  Even so, it doesn’t start so well this morning. (Let’s just say the CAA truck has visited this address more than once.) The Saab turns over a few times before it starts. It doesn’t idle without some gas. It stalls. I start it again, rev it for about ten seconds. Now it’s okay. But backing up is always a little tricky because the transmission is balky.

  Now I’m off, driving west to Avenue Road, ready to take an illegal left en route downtown to Invest Toronto, my new workplace, where I’m the freshly appointed president and CEO, charged with selling the city to the world. Invest Toronto was tasked with making new employers magically appear, and with expanding the existing ones. I was the proud new CEO of a proud new city agency with a budget that paid for a few people’s salaries and a flight to Shanghai.

  At my office in Metro Hall, my vice-president and perennial woman-Friday, Nikki Holland, runs down the schedule of people I’m to meet. But I’m restless, looking through a window at the sun, wishing I was out in it. By the end of August, Canadians know that summer is checking its watch and we’re loath to waste an hour of it.