Deadly Devotion

by Alysia Sofios

  “Happy New Year,” Rosie replied from the driver’s seat. “I think we should stay for a few minutes.”

  “That’s fine.”

  From the parking lot of San Quentin state prison, the two women gazed out at the sprawling concrete complex in front of them. Marcus was in there somewhere, and he knew his two faithful wives were sitting there that night, thinking of him. They wore no party hats and consumed no champagne; they just drank in the guilt that they were free while Marcus was locked up on one of his favorite holidays.

  At 12:10 A.M. on January 1, 2007, Elizabeth and Rosie waved good-bye and drove back to Rosie’s boat.

  THE NEW YEAR had not brought about the drastic change in Rosie and Elizabeth that I had hoped for, but I was happy to see that Gypsy was striving for independence. After she and little Alysia’s father broke up, she decided it was time to work toward some of her lifelong goals. She got a job as a caterer again and enrolled in college courses.

  When Gypsy asked if she and little Alysia could move in, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. Considering our very different backgrounds, Gypsy and I were surprisingly alike. She was already one of my best friends. Not to mention, I loved that little girl like a daughter.

  Having the two of them under my roof was comforting. They took over the spare bedroom, and Elizabeth slept on the couch in the living room. Each morning, little Alysia would sneak into my room when no one was looking and wake me up.

  “Excuse me, Miss Alysia,” I would say in a groggy haze. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  She’d crack up until her mom or grandma heard her laughing and ran in to retrieve her.

  Although Marcus had faded from memory somewhat, remnants of his wrath showed themselves at the most unexpected times. One night, Gypsy and I were at a club, dancing and meeting new people, when some guys started talking to us.

  “So, how did you guys meet?” one of them asked.

  It was a simple enough question, but it caught us off guard, and we had no idea how to respond. After an uncomfortable silence, I said, “We’ve been friends for years.”

  A few minutes later, the topic of conversation shifted to family and marriage.

  “Alysia, are your parents still married?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “How about yours, Gypsy? Are your parents still together?”

  “Umm, not really.”

  “Oh, they’re divorced?”

  “Well, no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said, motioning for Gypsy to follow me back to the dance floor. “Isn’t this your song?”

  It dawned on me that Gypsy and the rest of her family would have a lifetime of difficult explanations in store.

  Twenty-five

  You really don’t get any stations out here, do you?” I asked Elizabeth, as I repeatedly hit the car radio’s seek button, only to find fuzzy transmissions of Spanish and Christian talk stations.

  “I told you,” she said, laughing. “We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”

  The two of us were driving from Fresno to the Santa Cruz Mountains so she could show me the property where the family had camped in the army tent for three years.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to visit the boys first?” I asked, anticipating the daunting journey on the narrow, winding road ahead of us.

  “That’s fine. Let me call Adrian.”

  “Good luck getting phone reception,” I said, making a sharp U-turn and heading toward the freeway again. “Let’s try this again on our way home.”

  Twenty minutes later, we pulled into Adrian’s driveway, which was across the street from the beach. Adrian lived with his girlfriend in a modest but comfortable house and was working as a personal trainer at a gym nearby.

  “When is Dorian coming over?” Elizabeth asked after hugging Adrian.

  “He should be here soon.”

  I had never gotten a chance to spend much time with Dorian and Adrian, both of whom still lived in Santa Cruz. I had so many questions about their lives, questions that had gone unanswered in the trial. I also wondered how they felt about everything a few years later.

  It was early afternoon and the sun was hot, but not nearly as hot as it would have been inland, in Fresno. Elizabeth stayed inside to catch up with Adrian’s girlfriend while he and I went outside to talk.

  Adrian had grown into a handsome man who moved slowly but with purpose. Although he was very muscular, he was so well-mannered and polite that he came off as gentle and unintimidating. He and I settled into a couple of chairs on the patio, which was surrounded by trees and provided an unobstructed view of the shore.

  “Thank you so much for taking care of Mom,” Adrian said appreciatively.

  “We take care of each other,” I said, smiling. “It’s beautiful out here. I have always dreamed of living near the beach.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I love it here.”

  The warm, salty breeze was just strong enough to rustle my hair, and I could almost feel the humidity reviving my natural curls, which I had worked so hard to straighten that morning.

  “Adrian, do you mind if I ask you about your father?”

  “I know you must have a lot of questions for all of us,” he said softly.

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  I started by acknowledging how hard Marcus had been on him and Dorian.

  “That is true,” he said. “He told us he would rather see us dead than to have a bad attitude. As we got older, he saw us as competition for the girls in the family. And to feel that from your own father—it feels funny when you’re living in his house.”

  “You were adults then. Couldn’t you leave?”

  “It’s not that you’re not allowed to leave. It’s just you don’t know how to leave, because that’s all you know and you have no education; none whatsoever.”

  I asked how he felt about Marcus now. I was expecting to hear that Adrian was happy his family was finally safe from his father, so I was surprised at the degree of compassion he expressed for the man.

  “This is what life dealt me,” he said. “I can either choose to be angry with him or just make the best of it. So I just choose to forgive him.”

  “Forgive him? I don’t understand,” I said, feeling the same frustration I had with his sisters about the psychological manipulation Marcus had wielded over them. “How can you forgive him?”

  “That was my world, and it’s very humbling, especially now that it’s exposed. It humbles you a lot, a lot. And it still hurts, but you have to stand tall.”

  “But you have kids, Adrian. Can you imagine treating them like that?” I asked, referring to his two young children, a boy and girl who lived with their mother.

  “I look at my little princess, and I can’t even understand. I just can’t understand how he even thought about crossing that line. I can’t. You have to be insane.”

  “Is your dad where he belongs?”

  “If they were to let him out, I would be afraid. So that answers your question.”

  “Have you thought about the execution?”

  “That’s still settling in. To realize someone is actually going to kill your father on purpose, that’s hard. I know he deserves it, but at the same time, I don’t hate him. I admired him, yet I feared him deeply. I look at myself now, and I would love to go back in time and change things. But if I were to take a different path in life, how would I be? And you know what? I like myself.”

  “I like you, too,” I said, smiling.

  Dorian, who had arrived in the meantime, poked his head outside to greet us.

  “I’m interrogating your brother,” I said, laughing. “And you’re next.”

  Dorian sat down and joined the conversation. Adrian sat through the small talk, then left us alone.

  Like his brother, Dorian had an impressive frame. He was a little taller than Adrian, but his appearance had changed significantly since I’d last seen him. Previously, he had plucked his eyeb
rows until they were fairly thin and worn a hint of black eyeliner on the lower lids, a strong contrast with his large muscles and chiseled jawline. I never understood why he chose to groom himself like that. Now, devoid of the plucking and makeup, he looked like he belonged on the cover of a magazine.

  Right after the murders, he told me, he’d decided to use aikido as his stress release. He’d finally saved enough money to take some classes, so he and his girlfriend walked into a dojo in Santa Cruz to sign him up. But it was not to be.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Wesson,” one of the workers told him. “We’re not comfortable with you joining our club.”

  “What do you mean?” Dorian asked, confused. “I have the money right here.”

  “No. We have heard about the murders in Fresno, and we don’t think it would be right to allow you here.”

  Although Dorian was embarrassed, he also felt defensive about his family’s history. “But that’s my dad, that’s not me,” he said with tears in his eyes. He knew people had thoughts like this, but this was the first time anyone had ever confronted him.

  “I’m sorry. Why don’t you try another dojo?”

  Dorian left the studio, worried that the rest of his life was going to be like this. So far, it had. As I talked to his brothers and sisters, they all told me that people continued to cast them in a negative light, just because they were related to Marcus.

  “It will get better,” I said to Dorian, hoping I was right. “I’m just glad you and your brother got away from your father when you did.”

  Dorian told me that when he and Adrian were first on their own, they felt shell-shocked, thrown into a society they’d never known. “It was really sad, actually. At first, I was like the guy in the movie Blast from the Past. I was like, wow, this is what was out there.”

  The first movie he saw in a theater was Apollo 13, and, just like the girls, he thought it was an amazing experience.

  “Usually, when you’re growing up, you get desensitized,” he said, “and me, I was almost twenty-two and I’d never done anything before.”

  When it came to finding a girlfriend, Dorian said, he didn’t have any experience, so he emulated his father, talking down to women and expecting them to wait on him.

  “My relationships didn’t last long,” he said, laughing. “You know, I think my dad’s plan backfired. Unless he’d kept us in a bubble our entire lives, we would eventually have seen he was wrong.”

  Dorian told me he still struggled with self-esteem issues stemming from his father’s continuous insults and beatings, recalling that Marcus constantly told them they would never amount to anything. I thought of the contrast with my parents, who had always told me that the “sky was the limit” and that I could get whatever I wanted if I tried hard enough.

  “I was young and I believed him,” Dorian said almost apologetically. “I thought that was what a father tells his son. It’s damaged me to this day.”

  Dorian was so much bigger and stronger than his father, I wished he had the emotional strength to stand up to him now. I also wondered why, given what Dorian and Adrian had learned in their aikido classes, they had never fought back against Marcus, a man who undertook as little physical exertion as possible.

  “Didn’t you guys ever want to go back and beat the shit out of your father?”

  “To be honest, I never thought about confronting him. It’s strange, but it never crossed my mind.”

  I didn’t tell him how often the thought had crossed my mind.

  “You know what I realized?” Dorian asked, cocking his head a little.

  “What?” I asked.

  “My dad is bisexual.”

  “What?” I squawked, almost jumping off my seat.

  “Yeah. Remember how I used to wear makeup?”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” I lied.

  “Well, I used to wear powder and eyeliner and pluck my eyebrows.”

  “Oh. Why?”

  “Because of my dad.”

  He told me about how his father used to put makeup on him for the plays the boys performed for the girls on Friday nights, the same plays in which Marcus wore dresses and lipstick.

  “That’s a hideous thought, huh?” Dorian asked, chuckling at my look of horror. I couldn’t take much more of this, but I knew I needed to ask one more question.

  “Dorian, what is going through his head right now?”

  He paused for a minute, then looked out at the sea.

  “Well, he foretold his own prophecy. He always used to say, ‘When they find out what I do, they’ll lock me up and throw away the key.’ I’m talking ten years before it happened, he said the government would lock him up and never look back. I guess he was right.”

  I had heard enough. We walked back inside and joined the rest of the family.

  After a few hours, Elizabeth and I took a stroll down the beach.

  “I can’t believe the things your husband said to your children, telling them they were worthless and stupid,” I said, still frustrated.

  “I didn’t know he was saying those things, Alysia,” Elizabeth replied, shaking her head.

  We sat on a wooden log in the middle of the sand, where she began to cry as I watched a group of children building sand castles ten feet in front of us.

  “I just feel so guilty,” she said. “I should have known.”

  “It was all him, Elizabeth. Even if you knew, you couldn’t have done anything about it.”

  She cried for a few more minutes until I pulled her out of it. “Let’s go home,” I said, putting my sandals back on. “We’ll go to the property another time.”

  WE HAD PLANNED to stop by to see Kiani, but neither of us would have been very good company. So, a couple of weeks later, Kiani came to visit us in Fresno. We sat on my bed and chatted for hours.

  Previously, Kiani had told me that she’d thought her childhood was perfect until the murders, but I knew from her testimony that wasn’t true. She finally admitted to me that she’d gone through a severe depression when she was twenty-five. She said she’d wanted to go to school, learn how to drive, and start dating, but she’d repressed those feelings, too worried about offending Marcus.

  “I went through a time when I didn’t want to live anymore,” she said.

  “What changed?” I asked.

  “It all changed when I had Jeva,” she said, bursting into tears. She was crying so hard that she couldn’t even talk, harder than I’ve ever seen her cry before. I jumped up to fetch some tissue.

  “Thanks, Alysia. I’m sorry,” she said, taking the tissue, wiping her eyes, and blowing her nose. “It’s just, Jeva gave me a whole new life to live. She was my everything. At that time, I thought about leaving, but I could not leave my baby. Right when I had her, my problems all went away. I woke up each day and I could focus on her.”

  “She may have saved your life, Kiani,” I said, reaching out to hug her.

  “I think she definitely did. I can’t explain how, but she just made me so happy. And then everything happened.”

  “Are you mad at your father?” I asked, knowing she’d never admitted it before.

  “I think my dad should be where he’s at. Being angry is very confusing to me. Growing up and everything I don’t remember being mistreated. I know I got loving, and it was wrong. But when it happened, I didn’t know I was being abused.”

  I started fighting back tears myself. “When did you realize it was wrong?”

  “Never, until everything happened. I’m glad I didn’t know it was wrong. That’s why it’s confusing for me to hate my dad. I’m like, Dad gave me a good life, I wasn’t mistreated.”

  Kiani told me that she wanted to become a model, but she felt her lack of social experience and self-confidence would hold her back.

  “It’s just, I’m embarrassed. That sounds bad, but I get embarrassed that my name is Wesson. It’s too hard to get a job, and it affects me all the time. They say, ‘Oh, it’s that family. There’s the girl who had kids with her dad.’
”

  She said she was so self-conscious about it that she no longer wanted to use her last name. She had decided to use a different one, to make herself more anonymous. I wished that letting go of those six letters would make all of her problems disappear. If only it were that easy.

  THE WESSON NAME was affecting all of Marcus’s children. Serafino, now the youngest child in the family, was living with his wife in Fresno. His goal was to become a policeman someday. Currently working as a security guard, Serafino told me about a neighborhood watch meeting he’d attended at an apartment complex that had been having problems with crime. His plan was to reassure the residents that they would be safer with him on patrol.

  Things were going well until a woman asked his name. He paused, then finally said, “Sergeant Wesson.”

  This caught everyone’s attention, and he knew what question would follow. “You’re not related to Marcus Wesson, are you?”

  He’d always told the truth, but not that day. He knew these people wouldn’t trust him to protect them if they knew who he really was.

  “No,” he lied. “I’m not related to him.”

  “Thank God,” one of the residents said. “He’s a sick bastard. I hope they burn him.”

  “We don’t need any people like that around here.”

  “And the family, oh my God, they’re just like him.” Serafino listened to the barrage of insults with a pit in his stomach, but somehow he managed to finish the business at hand.

  I thought he looked very professional and put together in his security-guard uniform; I wished Marcus could have seen him. Serafino had grown a little heavier and seemed more mature now that he’d lost the childhood innocence in his face. Of all the boys, he resembled his father the most.

  I hadn’t talked to him much over the past year, but I noticed he walked with a new air of confidence. I wondered if it had come from the uniform or from his first encounter with fatherhood.

  Sitting on the couch together, we inevitably began talking about Marcus. Like his brothers, Serafino said he still had physical scars from his father’s abuse.