To the Bridge

by Rommelmann, Nancy

  The cops where Amanda was being held were not interested in her having a friend stop in for a visit. Was he representing her? Shanon, whose full-sleeve tattoos were partially inked in, said he was. They let Shanon see Amanda. She recognized him, he later told Tiffany, but otherwise she was seriously out of it. Tiffany did not want details about the crime, not yet, and heard only that Amanda had turned her face to the wall and talked to Shanon for two hours.

  The next day, Tiffany found the press hiding in the bushes in front of her house. She loaded her six-month-old and her eighteen-month-old into the car while reporters shouted questions at her. They had found Tiffany’s name during a check of Amanda’s criminal record in Multnomah County. In July 2000, Amanda and Jason got into a fight, and she was arrested. Had she thrown an air conditioner at his head? Tiffany did not remember, only that Amanda called her at two thirty in the morning needing bail money, something like $400. Tiffany had driven downtown and bailed Amanda out. She did not recall Amanda as being shaken or hurt, and her mug shot from that arrest seemed to reflect that she was not: in it, her eyes were bright, her smile relaxed, and her skin and hair as smooth as a mannequin’s.

  The equipoise did not surprise Tiffany, who knew Amanda as the girl at George Fox University raising a baby alone, this barefoot, pregnant mother-goddess-earth-mama, and an excellent, excellent mother to Gavin. How funny time was. Tiffany had seen Amanda as a role model, had admired her mothering to the point that when Tiffany was pregnant with her first child, it was Amanda she had confided in, telling her she loved the baby she was carrying but did not yet feel a superintense connection.

  Don’t worry; it will come, Amanda had said. I know you, and once you have that baby, it will come.

  And she had been right. If you could get on Amanda’s wavelength, it was a mostly beautiful place, where everything was rosy and there was nothing to stress about, it was all la-di-la-di-la. Which Amanda said about everything! I have to buy a can of soup, la-di-la-di-la! I have to give a PowerPoint, la-di-la-di-la! Tiffany and April would crack up, because Amanda was living in her own little world, a place where the mantra was, “Don’t worry, it will all work out.”

  That she did not stress over her grades or when Gavin colored with crayons all over the kitchen floor meant Amanda sometimes did not appreciate the stress she was putting on others. She would drive to clubs in her rickety-rackety Audi and leave Tiffany and April watching Gavin for one day, for two days. They’d pass him off like strangers in the night, and when Tiffany tried to tell Amanda this was not okay, Amanda would act surprised and start in on a lot of excuses that did not quite make sense: I met this guy, and he lived out in Vancouver, so I went to Vancouver, and then I tried to call, but my phone was dead, and I got a busy signal from you.

  Tiffany had let this go; the girls were not yet living in a world of big consequences, though if Tiffany thought about it now, Amanda should have been. She had a baby to take care of, and she did it well when she wanted to, but she also wanted the life of a girl whose responsibilities were taken care of by others, like the time they went to Tahoe for spring break. They had to change planes in Oakland. April wanted a cigarette, so they stepped outside the terminal. Amanda started looking through her stuff, looking and looking.

  Guys, she said. I lost my pot.

  Tiffany did not think Amanda could seriously have brought pot through security, on the plane, but Amanda said she had; it had been in her sunglasses case and must have fallen out in the terminal when she got out her glasses.

  April had no idea how Tiffany didn’t lose it on Amanda. Tiffany did not lose it. She corralled the situation by saying they were just going to head back to the gate, and what they definitely were not going to do was go back in the airport and look for the pot. She knew that’s what Amanda would have done: gotten down on her hands and knees and looked, and if she found it, get up and say, “I found it!” She could be clueless that way. Sometimes it could be charming, but that day it definitely was not. They missed their connecting flight.

  The trip did not get better. They were staying in Tahoe with a guy Tiffany was seeing. A trust-fund baby, he had a swank place and gorgeous friends, one of whom April wound up hooking up with. And then there was Amanda, getting mad, being snotty, all I don’t want to go to dinner! And why don’t we find me someone that I can make out with? Over the five days the girls were in Tahoe, Amanda messed around with three guys. Tiffany and April were flirts but pretty straitlaced, and they realized on that trip that Amanda was not. In the scheme of things, she wasn’t wild; she was more a typical college girl, the kind that might have better liked being in South Padre Island for spring break, doing wet T-shirt contests and Jell-O shots.

  On that trip, Tiffany also saw that Amanda did not feel as though she was enough on her own. One of the guys she fooled around with was no longer interested in her the next day, which, come on; who cares? But Amanda did care; she was so worked up she had an anxiety attack while they were driving down the mountain. Tiffany and April stood at the side of the road and watched Amanda hyperventilate. Then she kicked a log. It was so overreactive, like some switch had flipped, all because some random guy did not pay her attention.

  Tiffany told herself it was because Amanda always felt like the underdog, that she wanted to be accepted and liked and loved and told she was okay, and the only way she knew how to do this was through hooking up with a guy, believing what he said, and doing exactly what he told her to do. Amanda would talk about what these guys had promised her, things like, “As soon as I break up with my girlfriend, we’re going to go on the phatest vacation. We’re going to go to Vegas for the weekend.” And Tiffany or April would say, “Amanda, do you honestly believe that? He’s been with this girl for like three years, and they’re not going to break up because you slept with him one night and gave him a good blow job. It’s not going to happen.” And Amanda would say, but guys, this is what he said. She only learned the hard way, Tiffany thought, always the hard way.

  By mid-1999, Amanda was again learning the hard way. Becoming pregnant by one guy her freshman year and another before her senior year was not the norm at George Fox, whose stated values were “Students First. Christ in Everything. Innovation to Improve Outcomes.” Amanda’s family, whom Tiffany met a few times and thought very, very conservative, were members of a church where wives were expected to be obedient to their husbands. Tiffany had the impression that Amanda was seen, by her parents, as a rebellious sinner. Amanda said she wanted to please them, to change their minds. She started going to church all the time and told Tiffany she was trying to not smoke, drink, or swear. Amanda said she really tried to be who God wanted her to be. She wanted to make her parents happy.

  And they had been happy when she planned to marry Shane Cook, the father of her second child. Maybe, Tiffany thought then, Amanda had been right; it was all going to work out. And then Shane killed himself. Tiffany sat with Amanda on the floor of her apartment and went through the profiles of Christian families looking to adopt. Tiffany kept looking at Amanda, who was already filling out her maternity top, and asking, “Are you sure? Are you sure?” Amanda was sure.

  Around this time, something curious happened, something that could be filed under “Be careful what you wish for,” or as recompense for Amanda bearing up under a bad situation: the deus ex machina that was Jason. Jason was the one by Amanda’s side during her last month of pregnancy, who was in bed with her when her water broke, who drove her to the hospital when contractions began.

  Tiffany never liked Jason. He was stiff in his demeanor, not light on his feet; she and April would crack jokes that he never joined in on. He told Amanda he didn’t like her friends, that they we were a bad influence, and the whole time Tiffany was thinking, little do you know; Amanda is a strong girl, and she has a mind of her own.

  After the baby left with the adoptive family, Amanda was swept up in Jason’s largesse, eating seven-course meals, shopping at Saks, and just getting decked out. She was no longe
r the girl to whom guys lied about phat vacations. She was the one with the rich boyfriend, with the new jewels. She showed off her sparkles to Tiffany and April, until she’d lose a bracelet, maybe at a club downtown—honestly, she didn’t know where.

  Tiffany did not know that Amanda was not losing her jewelry. Amanda did not know it either. She believed Jason when he told her she was careless, that he was keeping a wedding ring he bought her in a safe-deposit box and that’s why she could not see it. She did not know the diamond Ebel watch he gave her for graduation, the Rolex he bought himself, and the leather jackets from Neiman-Marcus were later pawned or sold for cash. Amanda tended to trust what guys told her, and Jason could talk and talk until she believed what he was saying.

  Amanda graduated from George Fox University in spring of 2000. By July, she and Gavin were occasionally staying with Jason in a small apartment on Belmont Street in southeast Portland. Dogwood trees and Japanese maples lined the surrounding residential streets, and three blocks away was Lone Fir Cemetery, a thirty-acre memorial garden that looked like an enchanted forest. The location had the makings of a peaceful beginning for the young couple, and they had the added cushion of more than $200,000 in stocks, established years before by Jason’s maternal grandmother, that Jason had been given control of some months earlier. The funds might have provided a secure boost for two young adults launching their lives. Instead the money proved an accelerant. Jason and Amanda bought no property and made no investments; they spent it on $6,000 bike frames and $1,000 cameras; they burned through cash so fast they might as well have piled it on the living room floor and set it on fire.

  Christine Duncan’s petition to the court in October 2000, seeking to wrest control of the funds from her son, included a letter from Anthony Cubito, who had “worked as a counselor with Ms. Christine Duncan and her family periodically since April, 1992.”

  Cubito wrote, in a two-page document faxed from a Mail Boxes Etc., that Christine Duncan reported her son was “drinking up to a fifth of liquor and half a case of beer on a daily basis, is resisting checking into a residential rehabilitation program, is in an apparently dysfunctional relationship with a woman named Amanda, is rapidly spending thousands of dollars each month on his girlfriend, alcohol, expensive restaurants, etc., has gained approximately 40lbs. in two months and has a history of addiction. . . . If some intervention is not effected quickly, the end result, as in most cases with this high degree of alcohol intake, will end in disaster.”

  The disasters of the summer of 2000 included the slashed tires, the thrown keys, the bites and scrapes, and Tiffany seeing Amanda after she said Jason had choked her. Tiffany believed her. She saw the bruising across Amanda’s throat and was so disturbed that she told Amanda, “Here’s the deal: you’ve got to leave this guy.”

  Tiffany’s concern, Christine Duncan’s alarm: neither moved Amanda. She dug in. She hoped to marry Jason. It was true he could talk and talk and make her believe anything. It was true a former girlfriend of his named Keli Townsend told Amanda on the phone that she needed to know one thing about Jason: that he will never stop lying. Amanda at the time thought she could figure things out a little better than her predecessor, and in April 2001, she and Jason, with Gavin in tow, made a quick trip to Hawaii and got married.

  Amanda—the bubbly girl, the la-di-la—started to be seen less. She left her job as a receptionist at a marketing agency in downtown Portland around the time of Trinity’s birth in March 2002. Eldon was born in August 2004. The family moved to several condos and apartments, rarely staying longer than a year. Jason was promoted at Ricoh, while Amanda, in her way, was demoted. She rarely saw Tiffany and April, and she did not look for work. She stayed home and cared for the house and the kids, which she did to varying degrees of people’s satisfaction. At the time of her arrest in May 2009, she had no Facebook profile or Twitter account; friends knew her to have no social media presence. Amanda lived in a tighter and tighter loop of communication, the criticism of a few people carrying the sort of weight that could change the way the outside world saw her and how she saw herself.

  Tiffany stepped inside this loop in March 2005, when she and her then-boyfriend were invited to dinner at Amanda and Jason’s before the family moved to Hawaii. Though Tiffany seriously could not stand Jason and the way he spoke to Amanda, saying things to her like, “Are you retarded?” in a tone so sharp that Amanda would freeze and not even blink her eyelash for what seemed like weeks, Tiffany thought, okay, one last hurrah.

  Trinity was running around in a princess outfit when Tiffany got to the house. Gavin was playing on his own, and Eldon, less than a year old, was asleep upstairs. Amanda was making homemade enchiladas and told Tiffany to come into the kitchen. She mixed Tiffany a cocktail, some horrible thing with coffee, Grand Marnier, and Kahlua. Tiffany abandoned the drink to entertain Trinity by painting the girl’s nails, until Amanda put the enchiladas on the dining table and started to eat.

  Amanda? Jason said. How many times have you made these enchiladas?

  I don’t know, honey, she said. Maybe ten times?

  Well, you know what? They taste like absolute dog shit. Our guests don’t want to eat these.

  Tiffany’s date practically choked. I love it, he said, I really love it. It’s totally fine. It’s delicious. I’m not really a very spicy guy.

  Do not try to smooth it over with her, Jason said. She needs to know this is not okay. She knows how to make enchiladas the way they’re supposed to be. You know what, Amanda? You were in there chatting, and you were not paying attention to what you were doing. You need to go back and remake them.

  Tiffany and her boyfriend spoke at the same time, saying there was no need to remake them, it was eight o’clock, they were already sitting down, and the kids were starving . . .

  The kids can eat, Jason told Amanda. But you need to remake them for us.

  Amanda went back to the kitchen to remake them.

  Tiffany thought, this is insane, but Jason was not done yet. Trinity had taken three bites and refused to eat any more. Jason took her upstairs. Tiffany could hear her being spanked, which of course woke Eldon up. Now he was screaming. Tiffany went upstairs to get Eldon. She brought him downstairs and was trying to soothe him when she noticed Gavin had gone into the corner and was playing with his little cars; he had finished his food in like ten seconds because he knew. Tiffany and her boyfriend finally went into the kitchen.

  You don’t have to do this, he told Amanda, a woman he had known for all of an hour.

  No, I need to, she said. It was wrong of me. I was visiting. I wasn’t paying attention, and I really should have made more of an effort.

  No, Tiffany said. Look what you are doing to yourself.

  But Amanda was almost in a trance. She said, God said that you need to be a submissive wife, and you need to listen to your husband and do what he asks you to do.

  Tiffany was still holding Eldon when Trinity came downstairs bawling. Jason sat her back down at the table.

  This is your choice, Jason told Trinity. You can eat, or you can sit there all night. So you decide for yourself what you want to do, because you’re a bad girl.

  Amanda recooked dinner and re-served it. Trinity would not eat; it became a battle of wills between a three-year-old and her father, who took her back upstairs for another spanking and then sat her back down at the table. She was still sitting there at midnight when Tiffany and her boyfriend left. Three days later, the Smith family moved to Oahu.

  Their troubles went with them. Unpaid bills and overspending had destroyed Jason’s and Amanda’s credit histories, which made renting a house difficult. Not until Jason’s mother interceded were they able to get a split-level home with a tiny side yard on a cul-de-sac in the Mililani neighborhood. I visited the street in 2011. It looks like Any Suburb, USA. The closest beach is a thirty-minute drive, mostly on freeway. Friends who visited found conditions in the home unnerving. Ryan Barron stayed with the family several times.

 
“It was the worst,” he said. “[Jason] would be gone all day and leave me at the house with Amanda and the kids. I’m, like, in paradise, and I can’t go anywhere. He wouldn’t give her a car.”

  Ryan said the reason Jason gave for leaving his wife without a car was that she might drive drunk with the kids. Amanda had started drinking heavily in Hawaii, “about a bottle of port wine or vodka a day,” Ryan guessed. But he did not think leaving her with no way to get around was as much about safety as it was confinement.

  “She lived a classic abused life, more mental than physical,” he said. “Jason controlled her like a communist; he controlled her like Nazi Germany. He didn’t want her to go anywhere and do anything. She was a prisoner. Where it really, really went sideways, it’s all about Hawaii.”

  The family moved back to Portland in 2007, first to the condo in downtown Portland, then to the house on Southwest Cayuse Court in Tualatin, the last home they would live in as a family, until Jason left in June 2008. Amanda was alone with the three children. As she had when Gavin was a baby, she applied for state assistance. She asked her husband to come home. He delivered the ultimatum about her needing to lose weight, stop smoking, stop drinking, and get a job.

  September 2008 was a lousy time to be looking for a job. Amanda did not find work. Jason did not return home. Reports show that the Department of Human Services and Child Protective Services received numerous calls between August and October of 2008 from people concerned about the children’s welfare. On September 12, Gavin returned from school to find he was locked out of the house. He went to a neighbor’s, who reported the situation to DHS. On September 17, a CPS worker interviewed Gavin and Trinity, who “denied drug or alcohol use by their parents, denied fighting by the adults in the home and denied physical discipline.” When asked about Jason’s substance abuse issues, Amanda “refused to provide the worker with any information.” On October 17, DHS received a report that Gavin “had been physically abused by his mother.” Gavin again “made no disclosures about abuse.” Trinity admitted nothing.