To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

  Thomas knew Jason was troubled underneath. Jason was a year younger than most of the other guys in the posse, and when the rest of them graduated in 1992, Thomas saw Jason get quiet, saw him get depressed. He did not want to do anything but get high, which was okay when they were fifteen or sixteen. But now it was time to move on, and Jason didn’t. Thomas thought Jason was somewhat beaten down by his mom. She favored Jason’s younger brother, who had something like a 4.5 GPA and could speak Japanese. Jason had to compete with that, and he couldn’t.

  Thomas did not think Jason had graduated high school by the time he was renting a room at the Campbell Club, a co-op on the University of Oregon campus, not as a student, just as a place to live during one of the times his mom kicked him out. He was overindulging at this point, smoking a lot of pot and probably doing other drugs. Thomas stopped by one time and found Jason in a state of extreme paranoia, saying he had not left the room in days. In the closet were mason jars filled with pee; Jason was apparently too freaked to use the communal bathrooms down the hall.

  By 2000, Jason had moved up to Portland to be with his new girlfriend, Amanda. Thomas drove up to spend the night with them, and Jason answered the door with a black eye. He was hesitant to talk about it but eventually told Thomas that Amanda had clocked him. She and Jason argued the whole time Thomas was at their place. Thomas couldn’t take it and left after about a half hour, telling Jason, “This is not a good situation for you.”

  He and Jason made a plan on their own to camp out at the three-day Sierra Nevada World Music Festival in June. The drive from Eugene to Marysville, California, took seven hours. Jason was on the phone the whole time, arguing with Amanda. After setting up camp, Thomas went off to check out some acts. When he got back to the campsite, Amanda was sitting in his lawn chair. She had flown from Portland to Sacramento and taken a forty-mile cab ride to Marysville. It was obvious she wanted to be the center of Jason’s attention, that she did not want him hanging out with his friends. To fly all that way and spend a couple of hundred dollars on a cab—who did that? Thomas left the couple arguing. When he returned, Amanda was gone.

  That relationship, as far as Thomas was concerned, never got better. He thought Amanda was a bad mother to Gavin. They all went out to sushi one time and she was goading him, telling him he wouldn’t get some toy or something if he didn’t eat his sushi. Thomas watched Gavin put piece after piece in his mouth, trying to do what his mom wanted, but Thomas knew this was not going to be good. And sure enough, Gavin spat it all out on their $200 sushi platter, whereupon Amanda grabbed him and left the restaurant. Thomas was embarrassed for Jason, though he was not doing a sterling job with Gavin, either. Jason was rough on the boy—nothing physical as far as Thomas saw—but Jason talked to him in a belittling way, really harsh, and the kid was like four.

  After a few of these incidents, Thomas no longer wanted to hang out with Jason and Amanda. It was too uncomfortable. He had a lot of love for the guy, but that situation was ugly. He never knew what was going to happen, if someone was going to start throwing knives or plates, if someone was going to go crazy.

  Thomas did not have any contact with Jason for almost a decade. Thomas had kids of his own, troubles of his own, including doing a stretch on a domestic violence IV charge. Thomas was in jail when Amanda dropped the kids off the bridge and did not speak with Jason afterward, not more than a few Facebook messages, Thomas asking Jason how he was doing and Jason just saying good. He and Keli were back together. Thomas was glad to hear it. Jason deserved some happiness after what Amanda had done. Thomas knew Jason was not a perfect guy, but he did not see anything his friend could have done that would have pushed Amanda into doing what she did. If she had been having troubles and thought about hurting the kids, she could have left them at a fire station, or a police station, or with neighbors. She could have been upset about her husband leaving and dealt with it.

  24

  I picked Isaac up from his office near Portland’s waterfront. It was a crap day, raining and cold.

  “Jason will need a fresh pair of underwear,” Isaac said as we made the three-minute drive over the river to the east side.

  “Look, there’s the boat.” Isaac pointed at the Portland Fire Bureau’s new high-speed rescue boat, which at 2:00 p.m. would be christened the Eldon Trinity.

  We parked near the news trucks. A public relations woman standing beneath an umbrella handed out pamphlets: The 35-foot boat cost $400,000. Its top speed was 45 mph. It had a night-vision camera and 120-foot floodlights for night rescues, and its design specifications were ideal for rough-water rescues.

  The doors to Portland Fire Station 21 were rolled up to make room for the maybe eighty people inside, including officials talking to reporters, firefighters in full uniform, and a cameraman setting up mics in anticipation of hearing from people here today about what had happened downriver 563 days ago.

  City Commissioner Randy Leonard, Portland’s former fire chief, said he had pushed the city council to fund the boat.

  “I authorized a review of all the incidents in the core area downtown, to find out how we are responding to less notorious incidents,” he told me as I watched Jason’s family arrive.

  “Such as, there are people that consistently and on a fairly regular basis jump off the bridges intentionally,” Leonard went on. “And what we discovered was a consistent pattern of overly long responses on the river. . . . We didn’t want to react to one incident and do this. We didn’t really understand the need existed until this happened.”

  Less notorious incidents on the Willamette—rowing accidents, kayakers flipping, the very occasional person jumping from a bridge—passed quickly from the news cycle, if they made mention at all. None, as far as I knew, had been influential in moving the city to fund a new rescue vehicle.

  In his bid to get a yes vote on the boat, it had been Leonard who told his fellow commissioners, “As I listened to the 911 tapes, I could hear the little girl screaming, ‘Don’t, Mommy, don’t.’” There was no tape of Trinity screaming this; the first 911 recordings have her calling for help when she is in the water. Still, it might have been an innocent enough mistake. The audio had been poor. As Leonard strained to hear what was on the tape, perhaps he was hearing a child fighting off her mother, a child fighting for her life. Leonard would later tell me he had leaned into the recording and listened to the screams over and over, that they had been very hard to hear.

  When I asked him at the boat dedication whether he had met Trinity, he replied, “I have not. Fire bureau members have been dealing with her.”

  Jason’s stepmother, Kim Smith, motioned me over. She held both my hands.

  “Can I ask you something personal?” she said. “Have you spoken with Amanda yet?”

  Jason and Trinity arrived. He was holding her hand. He wore the cantaloupe-colored tie, a white dress shirt, no jacket, and a baseball cap with the Ralph Lauren Polo insignia. Trinity had on a little girl’s velvet party dress, white tights, black Mary Janes, and a white headband. She was tear stained, her cheeks flushed. Jason kept an arm around her and stroked her hair as officials stepped to the lectern and said, variously, that today they honored “the memory of Eldon, who perished in the waters of the Willamette,” and Trinity, “who’s shown, at such a young age, that she is a hero and that she will grow up to be a strong and courageous woman.”

  The speeches were part of the protocol and heartfelt, but they were not what most people had come for. They had come to see Trinity, who looked from her father to the crowd with deep apprehension. Jason remained solicitous; he looked to be comforting her. The cameraman had to make an adjustment, and Jason and Trinity needed to step away from the lectern. The only place for them to go was into the fray of Amanda’s family. The crowd had no reason to think the families were not here today in unity. This is what the speeches were about. The crowd did not hear Jason say to Amanda’s grandmother that Trinity was crying because she was scared of her. They saw Jason carry Trinity
back to the lectern and stand her on a box.

  “My daughter, Trinity, would like to say a few words,” he said. “Here, honey.”

  Trinity leaned into the microphone. Her voice was so soft as to be inaudible. I had to watch that night’s newscast, where the boat dedication was the lead story, to hear what she said.

  “I’m here to feel my brother’s, my little brother’s love. And I’m here to honor him because I miss him so much,” Trinity said. “My whole entire family is here to come onto the boat that the firemen have got for us. Friends and family are all here for me, and I think it’s great that you guys all get to be here for me.”

  The room applauded. Jason took the mic.

  “I’ve said from the first moment this all happened that I truly believe my daughter is a superhero. I think you can see why,” he said. “She truly is a testament to the human spirit, and it is absolutely amazing to see her here today in front of all of you, dedicating this boat after the horrible ordeal that she and my son went through that dark night on the bridge.”

  Jason’s voice was rich, reassuring. We could easily hear it over the click and whir of the cameras.

  “I just want to thank the city of Portland, the fire department, the police department, everyone who has been a part of making this happen,” he continued. “Out of tragedy has been born an opportunity to save many, many lives for years to come. In the name of my son [and] my daughter, we just only hope that just one life can be saved, let alone hopefully many more for years to come. This tragedy has affected us all in ways that we can’t even begin to explain, but at the same time, it’s brought us together as a family.”

  A baby started crying in the back of the crowd.

  “It’s brought out the resiliency, and how wonderful and beautiful and strong and amazing a little girl can be. My daughter beside me, she truly is the most wonderful person in the world, as you can all see.”

  Trinity, who had been fighting tears, looked past her father’s shoulder. She mouthed, mom-my, mom-my, mom-my. She was looking at Keli Townsend.

  “You come and you expect in a sense to see someone who . . . um, doesn’t in any way reflect the state that she’s truly doing better than we ever could have hoped,” he said. “Every day is full of happiness and joy, and her life is full, with school and Girl Scouts and all that good stuff.”

  Jason leaned toward Trinity and chucked her under the chin, tried to get her to smile. She did not smile.

  “I love you, sweetheart,” he said. “I want to thank you for being here and being so strong.”

  As the room applauded, as the baby screamed full bore, Trinity walked quickly from the lectern and buried her face in Keli’s waist.

  When I was Trinity’s age, my father told me something, a realization he had come to when he became a father. He said, “I could have taught you and your brother that ‘yellow’ was called ‘red’ and you would have believed me.”

  My father told me this story more than once, not because he wanted lauding for not having tricked little children, but as an example of how power might be misused.

  Power was being misused today. Randy Leonard had, if unintentionally, dissembled about hearing a 911 tape when asking for votes for the boat. Jason spoke of how tragedy brought the family together when the families had never been further apart. And he spoke of how full of joy his daughter was as we watched Trinity look as miserable as I have seen a child look. There was disconnection here. There was whitewash.

  Amanda’s immediate family—her father; her sister, Chantel; her brother-in-law, Daryl Gardner; their three children; her grandmother, Jackie Dreiling; her son, Gavin Beck; and his stepmother, Chelsea—watched Trinity cry into Keli’s waist. They stood close enough to touch her. Trinity had not seen most of them since the incident. When she told the crowd, “my whole entire family is here to come onto the boat,” she might have expected this to be the case. Or maybe this part of the entire family had been scrubbed from her mind; we could not know. Those in attendance may not have noticed that when Trinity saw her mother’s family she stopped crying. It was at this moment that Keli told Jackie Dreiling, a woman to whom she had never spoken or been acquainted, “Leave.”

  What stories had Keli been told that she felt it prudent to order a seventy-eight-year-old woman to leave? Was this a stupid question? What more beyond what Amanda had done did Keli need to know? Who had Trinity run to for comfort? Amanda’s family was superfluous, if not guilty by association. If Jackie had considered saying something sharp to Keli in return, if Daryl had wanted to slug his former brother-in-law for saying Daryl’s wife was the reason Trinity was crying, there was no way to do so. The cameras were rolling.

  Gavin kept his eyes on Trinity. He had given some thought to what he would put in the gift bag for his sister. Inside was a small blanket made for her by a Christian organization, a poem he had written and framed, and a photo of himself. He would get the bag to Trinity if he had the chance. He had the chance. He reached past Keli to Trinity and said, “I love you.” Trinity grabbed the bag.

  As the cameras recorded the event, Amanda’s mother, Kathy Stott, sat in the family’s parked car, out of sight of the news trucks. She was afraid, she had told her mother, Jackie, of what Jason would do if he saw her, afraid the day would become more difficult for Trinity than it was bound to be. Maybe she was telling herself, as she sat alone in the car, that not seeing her grandchild was part of the penance to be paid for what her own daughter had done.

  I did not think Amanda had any idea what she had set in motion or, perhaps more precisely, kept in motion and pushed through to a devastating end. Which was not an end. There was no end; the long-term stress the families endured would gain and lose strength as it jumped hosts. It would make and break alliances and transform into a rescue boat that saved the lives of others.

  With the talking part of the dedication over, the crowd exited the firehouse, past a man standing just inside the roll-up door. He might have been thirty. His cheeks were drawn and his clothes looked as though he had been sleeping outside. He was leaning on the handles of a baby stroller. A baby too young to sit upright was curled in the seat. I thought this must have been the baby we heard screaming, and that the man might have wandered over from a nearby homeless encampment. Suzanne Townsend, Jason’s mother-in-law, found the man’s presence odd and asked Jason who the man was. Jason told her he had worked with the man at Ricoh.

  People made for the dock ramp, which had been given a fresh coat of white paint. The press took more photos. Other vessels pulled behind the Eldon Trinity. A fireboat blared its horn and shot six arcs of water forty feet in the air, cascades in blue, pink, and clear. Cars on the nearby Morrison and Hawthorne Bridges blew their horns. People said “Ohhhh!” the way they do when watching fireworks, creating new reasons why we were here, trying to get ahead of the original reason. They wanted to impress upon a little girl who had almost died in the river that other things happen on the river. The loss could not be compensated for, but look: there was a red ribbon on a boat with her name on it.

  Amanda’s family did not walk to the boat, onto which they had not been invited. They watched from a nearby overlook. If they were moved by the chorus of ship horns, shutter-flies, and helicopter blades whipping the air, they did not show it.

  Two boats were preparing to leave. The Eldon Trinity, which was not designed with river cruising in mind, had limited capacity for passengers and would carry a few members of the Smith family and several Portland officials. A press boat would follow. I was not planning on boarding either boat. Randy Leonard was on the dock with Keli Townsend. She was dressed glamorously, in a pencil skirt and high heels. Her champagne-blond hair looked no worse for the rain. The wind made it hard to hear what she was shouting to Leonard as she jabbed a finger toward me. The commissioner looked confused: Was Keli saying she did not want the reporter, who had just interviewed him, on the boat?

  Isaac came up behind me. I told him I was not getting on the Eldon Trinity; tha
t much had been made clear.

  “To hell with them,” he said, and walked up to the boat. Trinity saw him. She shouted something that turned out to be, “Uncle Isaac! Get on the boat!” Isaac stepped on, and the boat motored south.

  The second part of today’s ceremony would be held on the spot in the river where Trinity was rescued and Eldon was found drowned. This part of the event had not been explained to the crowd, and it was unclear whether the people who remained onshore knew what was going on. Amanda’s family stayed on the overlook and, when the boat was not back in an hour, drifted back to their cars. Chelsea and Gavin remained. He sat alone on a bench, staring in the direction of the rescue boat, which was long out of view. I sat next to him. The hood of his snowboarding jacket hid his face. I asked whether he’d had a chance to speak to his sister. He kept looking at the river. He gave the impression, not unusual for a thirteen-year-old boy, that he might prefer to never talk again. He turned and looked at me for maybe ten seconds, then said only, “Yes.”

  Everyone else who had stayed ashore was in the firehouse. The homeless man with the baby was still there. Suzanne Townsend and Christine Duncan were there. They were attractive women of around seventy. Their clothes marked them as women of some means. Suzanne, especially, was striking; she looked like a prettier version of the actress Colleen Dewhurst, with something steely about her. I could picture her shooting rattlesnakes. The women had known each other for decades and today formed a natural bulwark, gracious but unyielding as they avoided speaking with me beyond a few pleasantries. But they laughed together. Seeing that the boat was not yet returning, they staged a mock duel with their closed umbrellas.