To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

  “The latest dispatch we got is, they’re at the Sellwood Bridge and waiting there,” the PR woman said. “The press boat hasn’t gotten there yet.”

  The Eldon Trinity returned almost ninety minutes after it left. Those onboard were knotted in the wheelhouse, out of the weather. I would later hear criticism regarding keeping Trinity in the cold so long, for making her wait in the spot where she’d almost died in order that the press might get their photos. But as she walked up the ramp, she was beaming.

  Gavin was at the top of the ramp. Chelsea quickly posed the kids for a photo.

  Trinity and Gavin. Photo courtesy of Chelsea Beck.

  A reporter approached Gavin as Trinity was led away. She wanted to know what had been in the bag he gave his sister. Gavin said nothing.

  Isaac watched Trinity disappear into the firehouse, and then he broke for the parking lot.

  “That was rough,” he said when I caught up with him. “I held it together on the boat, but not now.”

  Isaac was overcome. I put my hand on his arm. His fleece jacket was soaked.

  We were back in the car by 3:43. I blasted the heater as I drove him back to work.

  “Trinity invited me on the boat, so that was cool,” he said. “We rode down to where the incident occurred at. They pointed out to Trinity where they found her. She was really curious. I thought maybe it would be too emotional for her . . . They pointed right to where she was, and it was a good ways away, too. She didn’t even know how to swim, which is the most miraculous part about it. So like they said, she held on to Eldon.”

  According to what Trinity had told a social worker during an interview three days after the crime, she had not known Eldon was in the water. She thought he was in the car with their mother. I did not tell Isaac this. It gave him comfort to believe she had tried to save her brother. Maybe she had.

  “Yup, she held on to Eldon the whole time,” he repeated.

  Once on the water, Isaac did not say the things to Jason he’d imagined he would.

  “We kept it cordial,” he said. Jason told Isaac that he could see Trinity again and that they would stay in touch. Isaac let that tale blow away in the wind.

  “We threw some flowers into the water,” he said, and Trinity read something she had written for Eldon. “Just like, ‘I love you; I miss you; I’ll always remember you.’ It was pretty sweet,” he said. “And then his favorite toy went into the water; she threw that into the water. His favorite Transformer.”

  Isaac laughed at my suggestion that he’d thrown some Nerds candies in the river.

  “No Nerds,” he said. “That’s all she wanted to talk about on the trip! Was the Nerd song, so we sung that several times.”

  Isaac sang the Nerds song as I drove him back over the river. He said Trinity had gotten to drive the boat and toot the horn and was told by someone in the fire department that any time she wanted to go on the boat, she was more than welcome to.

  “We actually had a blast,” Isaac said as I dropped him at his office. “Under the circumstances, we had a good time.”

  I came home feeling as though I had been in a washing machine with a bunch of rocks. I told Din the day had been sort of a wreck, seeing children split apart, families cast adrift, seeing what Trinity was required to navigate. She had lost her younger brother and was not allowed to see her older brother, her grandparents, or people like Isaac who had been part of her life. The harm that Amanda had done to this child, to all her children, harm that other people were working double time to fix—all of it made me so angry at her.

  “It’s about time,” he said.

  Later that night I received a phone call. The caller, whom I had spoken with before, wanted to know if I had noticed “the bummy guy” with the baby at the ceremony. I said I had. The caller said Suzanne Townsend had not been reassured by Jason’s explanation of the man being a former coworker. She had approached the man and asked how he knew Jason.

  “And he said, ‘I met him here in Portland three weeks ago, with Lisa,’” said the caller.

  “Who’s Lisa?” I asked.

  “Exactly.”

  The cover photo on the next day’s paper was of Trinity standing at the back of the rescue boat and staring at the water. Her father had his hand on her head. Commissioner Leonard was at center, smiling for the camera that finally got its shot.

  Trinity, Jason, and family aboard the rescue boat, 2010. Photo courtesy of Jamie Francis, The Oregonian.

  Within hours of the story going live on the Oregonian’s website, Jack Bogdanski, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School and a popular political blogger, posted the following comment:

  “That was really, really creepy. That little girl should have been in school, and she should be allowed to forget her unspeakable nightmare. To wheel her out to support Randy Leonard’s fireboat fantasies is nauseating. A fire bureau boat (and the seven harbor pilots that the bureau has on its payroll) wouldn’t have made a darn bit of difference in her case.”

  Disdain at playing politics with one child’s murder and another’s trauma was inevitable. People would tell stories about what happened on the Sellwood Bridge for as long as they thought the stories useful. The story I was telling myself was that the boat bearing Trinity’s and Eldon’s names had made a difference. It had taken Trinity back to the death zone, and, as it turned out, she did not want to forget her “unspeakable nightmare.”

  “She’s a strong kid. She’s overcome a lot. Just to even show up there. She was curious,” Isaac had told me. “When [the guy who rescued her said], ‘This is where I found her,’ she said, ‘Where?! Where?!’ She was curious and she wanted to know.”

  She was curious and she wanted to know.

  The firehouse dedication, strangers calling her a hero, and what some saw as the deployment of a small child for personal gain caused Trinity visible distress. The spectacle was shallow; it could not mean anything to her because it was not for her. That she would go back on the water and be curious, this was her story. She looked into the abyss and was not afraid.

  “I would like to think of this girl as emerging tough and extraordinary, even fearless; knowing that the worst thing that could ever happen to her or any human has already happened,” my sister-in-law wrote me in an email. “This may sound corny and optimistic (because it is), but there will be enough people suggesting to this girl that she is broken and doomed to a lifetime of victimhood and therapy. I hope instead she rages!”

  25

  Fall 2008–Spring 2009, Tualatin and Eugene, Oregon

  People working in the yard next door on Southwest Cayuse Court told Amanda that Eldon had sat on the curb crying as Jason was interrogated, handcuffed, and put in the back of the police car following the hit-and-run. Amanda was home now; she would take care of things. She immediately asked God to please not let Jason’s work find out he had been under any sort of influence while driving a vehicle rented with the company credit card. Amanda believed in the power of a praying wife, that God had helped her out of previous tough spots and would again.

  Amanda had seen her husband sporadically all summer and thought his hitting rock bottom, if this was rock bottom, provided her with opportunity. Maybe now Jason would see they needed each other. Maybe all of them banding together—she as his wife, and Jason’s mother, and his employer—would make Jason realize they could have the life she wanted, where he paid the bills and she took care of the children. They had been each other’s allies for almost ten years; she had guarded his secrets and moneymaking schemes: selling arrowheads on eBay, selling baseball cards, and buying time with a fake baby.

  Amanda could not know how many people Jason told she was pregnant when she was not. He had certainly told some employees at Ricoh; several higher-ups even gave Jason a baby gift. Jason initially told Isaac the “pregnancy” was the result of Amanda having an affair, and that a cousin of hers was raising the baby. Jason later said they had given the baby up for adoption. The adoption story was perhaps recycled fr
om Amanda’s past. Regardless of who had been told what, Amanda’s credibility among Jason’s coworkers had been long eroded.

  “We had all heard rumors that his wife was pretty much batshit crazy,” wrote someone who worked for Jason, with the caveat that “if anybody would drive a human (clearly beyond mental stability already, and truly sick as she was) crazy enough to flip out so abhorrently, Jason would have been that guy.” If Isaac thought Jason was beloved by clients, this coworker saw Jason as “making everybody crazy with being such a smug fuck—the clients hated him and so did both employees and colleagues.”

  The day after Jason committed the hit-and-run, Amanda got the children to school and arranged for them to be picked up. Then she drove her husband the hundred miles to Eugene. Had the couple been listening to the radio during the drive, they might have followed the deepening subprime mortgage crisis, or learned that Mad Men had won its first Emmy the night before, or that the fall equinox was tonight. It is doubtful Amanda and Jason listened to the radio. They had immediate concerns.

  Amanda hoped to find a way to check into Serenity Lane, the in-patient rehab facility where Jason would stay for the next several weeks. She wanted to go to rehab because she’d heard the chances of a marriage holding together when only one partner goes through treatment were poor. She thought Jason would want her by his side. She thought, immediately after Jason entered rehab, that her mother-in-law would want the marriage to succeed. Learning how deeply the family was in debt, Christine Duncan paid the household expenses. She gave Amanda gas money so she and the children could make the occasional trip to see Jason. He left rehab in under a month but did not return home. He told Amanda he wanted to do an intensive outpatient program, and that this required he stay in Eugene. Amanda asked if she and the children could rent an apartment nearby. He asked where money for that was going to come from. The plan was for her to stay in the Tualatin house with the children and tell them that Dad was away working.

  Amanda thought she did well the first few months. She got the children to school. She took them to church. She kept asking Jason when he was coming home; he kept putting her off. He started taking the children to Eugene for a few days at a time. Amanda did not know why they could not be together as a family. Eldon and Trinity would bring home stories about Daddy and his friend Keli. Amanda accused Jason of becoming involved with his former girlfriend. He told her she was being paranoid, that Keli was an old friend who’d just gone through a bad divorce, and anything Amanda was imagining probably meant she herself was guilty of something.

  Amanda did not know that since leaving rehab, Jason had been spending more and more time with Keli. What may have started innocently was becoming something more. Keli suffered from several medical conditions that might have complicated her ability to have children. Jason had children. They could all spend time together, which, as the months went by, led to Eldon telling Amanda how Daddy and Keli had wrestled on the bed, and to Trinity telling her mother that Keli was skinny, way skinnier than Amanda was.

  In November, Sara Barron received repeated calls from Amanda telling Sara that she really missed seeing her and Ryan, that the children missed seeing them, and asking if they could come to the Tualatin house for dinner, sort of an early Thanksgiving.

  Sara and Ryan had reservations. They had not seen Jason since he’d gone through rehab. Ryan knew Jason was now involved with Keli Townsend and that this was the reason Ryan no longer heard from Jason, that he had found a new host. Ryan had concerns about this. He thought Keli’s medical issues probably meant she had unlimited access to pills. He hoped this would not prove a temptation for Jason, who had called Ryan to say rehab had worked and he was now clean. Ryan saw no reason to broach the subject of relapse when he called Jason to ask whether he was cool with Ryan and Sara going to Amanda’s for dinner. Jason said anything that allowed them to have contact with the kids was a good thing.

  Sara and Ryan were a bit disoriented by the condition of the Tualatin home: everything was tidy and clean. Amanda was cheerful and sober. It was as though the household had been put through the normalizer. Sara and Ryan tried to go with it. They’d brought appetizers and sparkling juice and cheese. They sat with Amanda and made small talk, but something was off. Sara saw it especially. It was as though Amanda had been putting on a show. She had her script, which seemed to be, “This is us, and I haven’t been drinking, and the kids are going to school. We are doing wonderfully, and it would be nice if you guys would tell Jason how great we are doing, because I think he is talking about staying in Eugene and that is really going to break our hearts.”

  Sara was sure the purpose of the dinner was for her and Ryan to give Jason the message that the home life he had left was worth going back to. Sara told Amanda it was great to see that things were working out, and that she was happy to know Amanda was not drinking. The evening went well for about forty-five minutes, and then Amanda cracked open the first bottle of wine. That was how long she was able to hold it together. The dinner she meant to cook never got cooked. Sara and Ryan fed the kids Brie and crackers until he left to buy them all some real food.

  Ryan drove two miles to Lee’s Kitchen, thinking, this was it: Amanda had finally retreated to the alternate world inside her head. It had been bad enough in Hawaii, where Ryan had been stranded, watching TV as Amanda roved around the house, sometimes after a breakfast of vodka and chili peppers, saying things like, I think rainbows are a way to attract happy people to the same area so that they can meet each other and be happy together. Then she’d start rearranging the furniture or taking everything out of the kitchen cabinets and putting it all back in. It was all movement, no logic; it was Looney-freaking-Tunes as far as Ryan was concerned, and then Jason would get home from work and a whole different cycle of craziness would begin. Jason would start in on what Amanda was wearing. In Hawaii, she was so skinny none of her clothes fit. She’d have on a tank top and a pair of shorts, and Ryan could see everything because her clothes hung off her so much. It was made worse by Jason yelling that she looked like a homeless person and that she was embarrassing him in front of his friends. He’d call Amanda a fucking idiot and kick over the garbage can and say, that’s fucking bullshit. I’m working all the time, and all you have to do is clean this bathroom, and it looks like shit. Ryan thought Jason yelled like this partly for his benefit, that Jason would pump up the anger when someone else was around to see it.

  Just like Amanda was putting on a show tonight. What was it with these two? Ryan could not know what they were like when they were alone. Jason had told him there was no sex in the marriage, not for years. No surprise there. Ryan could see there was no love, no affection; he couldn’t even tell that they liked each other. It was more as though they were roommates who had these kids that were just a terrible inconvenience in their lives.

  Ryan got back to the house with two big bags of Chinese takeout. The kids dug into the food; they ate and ate and ate.

  For the Thanksgiving holiday, Amanda and the children went to Southern California with Jason and his mother to spend time with Christine Duncan’s family, as they had done in previous years. For the first time, Amanda was put in a hotel room alone with Gavin, while Jason shared a room with Eldon and Trinity. Amanda continued to think her husband was being unfaithful to her. Christine Duncan said Keli Townsend was an old family friend and that was all there was to it.

  In December, Jason told Amanda that Eldon and Trinity would have Christmas with him and his mother in Eugene. Because Gavin would be spending the holiday with his father, Amanda would be without any of her children at Christmas for the first time since Gavin was born.

  An arctic blast moved through the Pacific Northwest in late December 2008, dumping nineteen inches of snow by Christmas Eve. The city of Portland was not prepared. Buses became stuck and sat in the street for days. Wind blew traffic lights sideways, lights no one needed to heed because motorists were told to keep off the roads. Amanda decided to drive to Eugene anyway. The drive s
outh on I-5 would have been difficult, and without knowing how, she cut her hand. Jason met her at the front door of his mother’s home. He told her she was not welcome to come in. Amanda asked to use the bathroom to wash the blood off her hand. Jason’s mother allowed her to do so. Christine Duncan called Amanda’s mother and complained about her daughter showing up uninvited. Amanda spent the night in her car across from the house, watching her children celebrate Christmas.

  When Amanda first met Jason, she believed that she was or would become a good mother, a good wife, that she was beautiful and desirable and smart enough to work with her husband-to-be’s changeable sense of the truth, with his drug habits as well as her own drinking and pot smoking. As 2008 turned to 2009, most or all of these things had failed to be true. Amanda had lost one identity after another. Whether Jason was deliberately robbing her of these could not be established to everyone’s satisfaction. It also did not matter. Amanda felt robbed of them and humiliated. She had mishandled or lost every identity she had once assumed was hers. She had thought herself shrewd for marrying Jason, and that was being proved to be very far from the truth. A slow diminution was near complete. Just as her children were almost wholly out of her grasp, so too was her sense of self.

  Photos taken of Eldon and Trinity at Christmastime reflect none of the tumult of their recent lives. The children show off a house they built from Legos; Trinity is smiling a goofy smile, and Eldon is looking directly into the camera. The baby fat in his cheeks is gone, and his chin is defined. He has the face and countenance that make people say to boys his age, “What a young man you are turning into. How old are you now, son?” Eldon was four years old. He was four years old in a photo taken with his dad, the two of them together in an oversize chair, Jason’s arm relaxed around his son’s shoulders, Eldon resting his hand in his father’s lap.