“Understood,” I said, nodding. He began nodding, too, as we looked at each other across the cluttered table. Max broke the silence with an uncharacteristic gesture to allay my tensions.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said.
He proceeded to tell me about one of his former female reporters who kept getting tips about big stories long before anyone else in the market. She would also show up at crime scenes and get the exclusive scoop, giving the station an edge on the news each night.
I felt my heartbeat slowing and a wave of relief washing over me as Max said he thought she was a crackerjack reporter, so he wasn’t surprised when she eventually went on to a bigger market. Years later, he found out why she was always first to the scene: her boyfriend was a cop and had been tipping her off. Max said it didn’t change the fact that she was a good reporter because she never showed a bias, and it still gave the viewers great stories they couldn’t find anywhere else.
“Now get back to work,” he said, ushering me out the door. “And I’ll get back to you about how we’re going to handle this.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I darted out of the office with a new lightness in my step, confident everything was going to work out.
About a week later, Max told me to stay behind after a staff meeting in the upstairs conference room.
“Concerning what we talked about in regards to the Wesson trial, everything is all set,” he said, looking at me over his glasses. “I spoke with the people I needed to speak with, and we’re okay the way we planned to cover things.”
“Great,” I said, not knowing exactly what or who he was talking about. I also had no desire to find out. “So, I’ll cover the family angle?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Now get back to work.”
I laughed, jumped out of my seat once again, and dashed downstairs to my desk, ready for whatever came my way.
THE WESSON FAMILY, meanwhile, was not feeling very optimistic about the next few months. They knew the prosecutor planned to call them to testify but, never having attended a trial, they didn’t know what that entailed. Elizabeth’s only knowledge of the criminal court system came from watching reruns of Perry Mason and Matlock.
“It’s nothing like it is on TV,” I told her, explaining there would be no snappy dialogue, no witnesses bursting breathlessly through the courtroom doors at the last minute, and, unfortunately, no model-handsome lawyers.
“I know, Alysia,” Elizabeth said. “It’s just scary.”
“What are they going to ask us?” Rosie asked.
“They’ll ask you about your childhoods, and about the day it happened, and about Marcus… ,” I said, pausing.
“What about Marcus?” Rosie asked.
“Mostly about the way he was. Like his religion and philosophy, the way he treated you guys, and, you know, other stuff.” We all knew “other stuff” meant the uncomfortable details about their private sex lives with Marcus.
Rosie, who was sitting on the floor, dropped her head and picked at the carpet with her long nails. Elizabeth exhaled loudly, then twisted around in her chair to stare out the window. I could tell by their hopeless expressions that they were thinking about the “other stuff,” and how difficult it would be to say these things out loud. It was one of the only subjects that we had never touched, and I certainly wasn’t going to try to go there now.
“Do we have to answer every question?” Rosie asked, peeking up through her long black hair.
“I can’t tell you what to do. I, personally, think it’s best to tell the truth. You just have to get it over with and it will be done forever,” I said, trying to minimize what I knew must seem to them like an insurmountable challenge.
In fact, I wasn’t sure if they could get through the trial without breaking down, but I kept that fear to myself and tried to lighten the mood.
“Rosie, you look like the scary girl who crawls out of the TV in The Ring right now,” I said.
She responded immediately by flipping her thick hair down over her face, then slowly clawing and slithering her way across the beige carpet toward me.
“Aaaahhhhh! Stop it!” I screamed, backing away from her reenactment, which was creepily spot-on. The three of us laughed heartily and managed to avoid thinking about the trial for the rest of the night.
THINGS TOOK A new twist in my apartment when the judge issued a gag order that prohibited every family member from talking about the case not only to the media but with one another as well. Up to this point, Marcus had dominated most of our conversations. Now we couldn’t say a word about him. God only knew how long the trial would last.
My roommates and I sat down and carefully discussed our dilemma.
“Okay. So how are we going to do this?” I asked.
“I guess we’ll walk around silent all day,” Rosie said half-jokingly.
“So we can’t say anything about my husband?” Elizabeth asked.
“Probably not. You want to be on the safe side. The last thing you guys need is to get arrested.”
“You think your apartment is bugged?” Elizabeth asked, chuckling.
I knew she wasn’t kidding. She was nothing if not a conspiracy theorist.
“Would you stop that? You got it from Marcus,” I said. I covered my mouth. “Oops. I just talked about him. I hope the police who are listening didn’t hear me.”
“Wait, you’re allowed to talk about the case, Alysia, just not us,” pointed out Kiani, who was down visiting from Santa Cruz.
“That’s true. I think I’m going to like this gag-order thing. I can say anything I want about Marcus and you guys can’t say anything back. I can have some fun with this.”
Rosie rolled her eyes at me. I jumped up to tickle her, and she ran into her bedroom to escape.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” I said, catching up to her and wrestling around. Nine times out of ten she overpowered me, so it was rare that I got the upper hand.
“Say mercy,” I said, laughing. For obvious reasons, I never told her to say “uncle.”
If the trial went the way I hoped, Rosie’s uncle would never come near her—or anyone else for that matter— again.
“Mercy, mercy,” she said, finally giving in.
Elizabeth wasn’t in any mood to play. I walked out of the room to find her pacing up and down the hallway. I could have sworn she was searching for a bug, but I decided not to confront her about it. I considered the irony of all the time and energy Marcus had spent over the years looking for imaginary surveillance devices.
If only someone had been watching Marcus, he would’ve been locked up years ago.
GROWING UP, I could never sleep the night before the first day of school, and that’s exactly what happened on the eve of the trial. I was a mix of nerves and excitement that I hadn’t felt in years. Kiani got a ride down from Santa Cruz to Fresno because she, like several of her relatives, had been subpoenaed. Elizabeth had to be there, too, but Rosie was off the hook for a few days.
Kiani and Rosie went into the girls’ room and sifted through their closet full of dark clothing. The few brightly colored shirts I had given them stood out, but the girls pushed those hangers aside on every pass.
“What are you going to wear, Kiani?” I asked from the floor near their closet, where I was sticking my finger inside Cosmo’s cage to pet his sleeping head.
“I don’t know,” she said as she browsed through the hangers again.
Kiani took a shower, then sat Indian-style on the floor so Rosie could straighten her hair, with a brush in one hand and a flat iron in the other. When she clamped the iron down on Kiani’s damp hair, a burst of steam rose to the ceiling.
“What is going on in there?” Elizabeth asked after seeing the steam drifting into the hallway, where she was doing laundry.
Kiani and Rosie were laughing too hard to respond. It may have been nervous laughter, but given the timing, I was happy to hear it. Kiani would be staying in my apartment off and on throughout the
trial, and we were all glad to have her around again. I couldn’t help but notice how much more they smiled these days. They spoke louder, and saw a future for themselves. I knew the next few months would be torture for them, but it would be nothing compared to what they’d been through already. I could only guess how hard it would be to sit on the witness stand across from Marcus and talk about the horrible things he’d done to them. I had no idea how I would handle watching them cry on the stand, trying to imagine how much pain and embarrassment they were feeling.
Even with all of the uncertainty concerning their future and mine, I knew I had done the right thing by taking them in. I had given up a lot over the past year, emotionally and financially, but I felt I was already stronger for it. I’d realized it was more important for me to act on my personal beliefs at times than to strictly adhere to the objective paradigms and guidelines of my profession.
Before I’d met the Wessons, I had interviewed Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, taken college courses in England and Scotland, and partied with rock stars. With all that life experience, who would have thought that four women who had led such sheltered lives could teach me such important lessons?
Seventeen
Gypsy couldn’t hold up her end of the solid mahogany coffin anymore. It was so heavy—too heavy for two teenage girls to carry—and she kept losing her grip on the slippery varnished wood.
“I need to put it down. I’m going to drop it,” she said to Sebhrenah, lowering the casket onto the concrete steps that led to the basement of the big burned-out house they’d bought as a cheap fixer-upper on Cambridge Avenue in Fresno.
“No, don’t stop!” yelled Sebhrenah, who was struggling to hold up the other side. But it was too late. The coffin was already so close to the ground that Gypsy couldn’t pull it back up, so she put it down, trying not to send the casket and her sister tumbling down the narrow stairwell.
Sebhrenah was upset because Gypsy had already stopped ten times between the yellow school bus and the basement. Each time, Sebhrenah complained.
“What the hell is your problem?” she asked, losing her balance. “Pick it up and keep going. We’re almost there.”
“I don’t even know why he’s making us do this. Why does he want these stupid coffins anyway? We’re never going to make them into something,” Gypsy said. Marcus had said they would use the wood to build furniture for the boat, but she knew better.
She never would have had the guts to make such comments in front of her father, but he was over by the bus, issuing orders, so she felt safe mouthing off about him. Her insubordination, however, angered Sebhrenah even more.
The girls finally managed to get the coffin downstairs, where they stacked it on top of the one they’d already carried down. Gypsy headed back up with her to get a third, but Sebhrenah had other plans.
“There is no way I’m carrying another one with you,” Sebhrenah said, panting from the exertion as she stomped up the stairs ahead of her little sister.
Before Gypsy knew it, Kiani was standing in front of the bus with a frustrated expression. “I guess I’m with you now. Let’s go,” she said, grabbing another coffin and waiting for Gypsy to lift the other end.
Kiani thought Gypsy and Lise had it easy—they’d been at home when the other girls had lugged all twelve coffins from the second floor of Dugovic’s antique store into the elevator and out onto the bus earlier that day.
Marcus loved shopping at Dugovic’s. He had seen the collection of hand-carved Indonesian caskets there about a year ago and just had to have them. But the caskets were too big to fit into Marcus’s old van, so he asked the owner to deliver them to his house. She said no, they were too heavy; he’d have to find a way to transport them on his own. After a year had gone by, she told him she was tired of storing them and he needed to pick them up.
So Marcus came back in the school bus with his “muscle”—Kiani, Sebhrenah, Sofia, and Rosie. But once he led them upstairs, all he did was bark out orders, making them do the heavy lifting. The four girls couldn’t fit all twelve caskets on the bus at once, so they had to make two trips.
This wasn’t their first big purchase at Dugovic’s. Over the years, the family had bought cannon replicas and a number of intricately carved dressers, armoires, and tables as well. From the time he was a teenager, Marcus had loved antiques. Although he mostly collected pieces that could have come from a junkyard, he also had an eye for nice things.
“Let’s get these,” Marcus would suggest to the girls, who always agreed and pulled out their checkbook to pay for the items.
The coffins, which averaged five hundred dollars apiece, were the Wessons’ most extravagant acquisition yet. Still, they would lie dormant in the basement until the family moved from a shack behind the Cambridge Avenue house to the three-bedroom place they bought on Hammond Avenue in 2003.
The family was used to sleeping on the floor, but once they moved into the new Hammond Avenue house, Marcus had Ethan, Illabelle, Jonathan, and Aviv—four of the smallest children—sleep on top of the coffins. He arranged three of the caskets side by side like a makeshift bed frame, laid a blanket over them, then set a half-inch plank of plywood and some bedding on top of it. The other coffins were placed on their ends throughout the house, where the girls used them as dressers or for storage.
RELATIONS BETWEEN GYPSY and her father were growing increasingly strained—and with good reason. By 2002, Gypsy was nearly nineteen, and she was the oldest daughter or cousin who had yet to marry or have a child with Marcus. Somehow, she had slipped through the cracks.
Until the family could find another place to live—which ultimately turned out to be the house on Hammond—Gypsy, Elizabeth, Serafino, and Marcus Jr. stayed with Janet, Almae’s girlfriend. Marcus still carted Gypsy, Kiani, Sebhrenah, and Lise back and forth to stay on the Sudan when they had time off from work. Things went on that way for months.
“How old are you now, Gypsy?” Marcus asked.
“Nineteen,” she said, sensing something ominous behind his question.
“I’ve been thinking. It’s not fair to you that I’ve married the other girls and not you.”
Gypsy cringed inside but forced herself to smile. Any other reaction would have made him suspicious.
“We’ll have to do something about that,” Marcus said.
Over the next few weeks, he dropped more hints, pressing up behind her and whispering, “I love you. I want to marry you.”
She was sickened by his “loving” gestures, so she picked up every possible work shift she could, went in early and stayed late, trying to avoid—or at least delay—the impending “wedding.” Unfortunately, Marcus didn’t back down. Instead, he carved out some alone time on the boat with Gypsy.
“Gypsy, it’s time,” he said. “Go get the Bible.”
Despite all her efforts, the dreaded moment had arrived. Gypsy walked into the bedroom and glared at the Bible with contempt.
How could something so good cause so much pain?
She grabbed the Bible, knowing Marcus would not consider their union “official” without it. Thinking quickly, she stuffed it underneath the sheets and blankets, then walked out, shrugging.
“The Bible is not in there. I think we took it to Fresno,” she said.
Marcus shot her a skeptical glance, then smirked. “That’s okay. There’s another one right here,” he said, reaching for a Bible he found nearby.
Gypsy wanted to scream out at God.
How could you do this to me? Why did you allow another Bible to surface?
Marcus performed the hand-on-the-Bible ceremony with a speech full of gibberish, but Gypsy didn’t hear a word of it; her hateful thoughts were drowning out his rhetoric.
Even though God had failed her, she continued to ask Him not to let Marcus consummate their “marriage.”
Marcus had already had sex with the other girls, including her younger sister Lise. Although he had been molesting Gypsy since she was a little girl, Gypsy had someho
w managed to avoid intercourse. She knew she’d been lucky. She also knew that she couldn’t emotionally survive sex with her father. Unlike her sisters and cousins, she was very much aware of how wrong it was. She just didn’t know why. Maybe it was because she read more books and had gone to work earlier than her older sisters had. Or maybe it was because she had a more cynical and insightful personality than the others.
A few days after the ceremony, Marcus got Gypsy alone again. Not liking the look in his eyes, she instinctively pressed her thighs together. Her father leaned over and tried to pry her trembling knees open, explaining his intention to have sex with her.
This time, Gypsy couldn’t hide her emotion as heavy tears rolled down her cheeks.
Marcus looked at her indignantly. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked, continuing to pull at her legs. But then something in him gave way and he stopped fighting her. “Get out! Send Rosie in here.”
Gypsy numbly scooted off the bed, still crying. “He wants you, Rosie,” she said.
Rosie, who was in the living room with the other girls, walked slowly into the room and closed the door behind her.
The next day, Marcus had a talk with his defiant daughter.
“Gypsy, there are going to be some changes around here. You are quitting your job, and I’m taking you back to the Sudan. You are letting yourself be negatively influenced, and you need to get back to what’s right.”
He told her he would wait for her in the car while she packed her clothes in the apartment. But Gypsy was done following his orders. She knew if he got her back onto the boat, she would never get off it again. She couldn’t take one more day of the insults, the molestation, and the beatings from the man who dictated her every move.
Brandy, Sofia, and Ruby had already broken free from his manipulative hold and started new lives elsewhere.
Now it was her turn.
Gypsy could hear the blood pulsing inside her head as Marcus honked his horn, clearly growing impatient with her. She paced around the room, psyching herself up to finally run away. She could do it. She had to do it.
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