Gavin received another letter from Amanda after the boat dedication, a letter Chelsea paraphrased as, “It’s me. How are you? Did you see your sister on TV? She looked good, but it made me sad. I mourned. I cried over it. But I’m fine now. You?”
I had seen Gavin a month after the boat dedication, in January 2011. Chelsea and I had been in the front room of their previous home in northeast Portland when Gavin walked in from school. He stopped just inside the threshold and seemed to assess the situation. After a moment, he said it was nice to see me again, went to his room, and closed the door. A thirteen-year-old boy wanting to hang out with some lady with a pen and a pad would be notable under any circumstance. Still, Gavin gave the impression of being someone who, at this time in his life, avoided interaction that was not essential. It did not surprise me to later learn he sought environments where he had control over the moving parts, that he preferred the reliability of robots and electronics, systems whose responsiveness were under his command.
Six months after the visit in January 2011, soon after his name was legally changed to Gavin Beck, I saw Gavin again. He was in his front yard, using a metal clamping contraption to dig up dandelions. He let me try it. I jammed it in the earth while he told me he liked math and science, liked Benson Polytechnic High School. I told him my daughter had flunked both algebra and geometry and had to take make-up classes at night school at Benson. Gavin found this very funny and laughed. Chelsea watched from the front door.
“I’ve had to let Gavin lead me,” she said that day. He had recently told her he had forgiven Amanda, saying, “I had to forgive her to forget her.”
By November 2011, Chelsea had not forgiven Amanda.
“I still despise her,” she said. Chelsea was also angry with Jason, who had only once followed the court order that Trinity be allowed to see Gavin before cutting it off. That everything about Amanda and Jason enraged Chelsea was something she was starting to see as her problem.
“Nathan is very much ‘action equals result,’” she said. “If getting upset causes more problems, he says, it’s not worth it.”
It was hard not to get upset when Gavin wrote letters to Trinity via Christine Duncan, who replied she could not go against Jason and thus could not show the letters to Trinity.
Amanda had sent Gavin a birthday card that March, albeit late. There had been no contact since. No contact, late contact, any contact: all of it ate at Chelsea, as did the families refusing, even after the murder, to confront what in her view they all well knew.
“It’s ludicrous for people to say they didn’t see this coming,” she said. “Everybody knew it was coming, in terms of Amanda and Jason’s behavior.”
When I learned in 2009 that Gavin had not gotten in the car with his mother, I made certain suppositions. I supposed having not done so would be a heavy burden, that it would keep Gavin wondering if he could have done anything to stop her. I supposed he would be angry with Amanda and conflicted as to whether he wanted to see her again. I imagined that the loss of his brother and, in the aftermath, his sister, would cause him to feel upset or angry and that he would not want to talk about any of it.
When Gavin said he would speak with me in 2015, I took the suppositions and fashioned them into a soft landing: I would ask him only for memories of Eldon and Trinity. This would be the kind thing to do. It might provide relief in a story that sorely needed it. Wouldn’t it be nice to see Emily showing off her gold-tipped boots? The silver Weimaraner and bluetick coonhound sleeping in a patch of sun on the living room floor? To see Gavin show Emily, on the acoustic guitar he had taught himself to play, the chords to “Wonderwall”?
“You can ask me anything you want,” said Gavin when I told him I just wanted to hear happy memories of his half siblings.
In an effort to tread lightly, I had forgotten how math works, that the factors that put Gavin where he was would not be built from happy memories. Presupposition further discounted that Gavin would be a young man who had no interest, as most young men do not, in being handled gently.
“You can ask me anything you want,” he repeated, but if I wanted to speak about Trinity and Eldon, “It depends on what time frame.”
He laid out the time frame. There had been times he was left in the house alone with the children, in Hawaii, put in charge of feeding them, making sure they were okay. Gavin did not sound troubled recalling this. More recently, in Tualatin, he said, “was kind of when it all came tumbling down.”
“When we moved back to Tualatin,” he said, “you have less and less consistency with things like [eating]. By the time Jason was in rehab, we just ate what was available when we were hungry. When those two things were aligned, that’s when we ate.”
Trinity, Gavin, and Eldon. Photo courtesy of Ryan Barron.
How does a ten-year-old who finds himself in charge of a five- and two-year-old foster alignment? Gavin taught the children the words to the songs in the movie Shrek. He made up games for them to play. He fed them what he could reach and knew how to make: peanut butter and jelly, cereal when there was milk.
“They would just forget to keep buying milk,” Gavin said. “Sometimes we’d have cereal with water.”
He took pleasure in the memory of a small slyness.
“One time, one time, it was really great,” he said. “We had no milk, but we had half-and-half. I had Frosted Flakes with half-and-half.”
He learned to navigate two lives.
“There was the show that we put on, where we behave ourselves when people are around,” Gavin said. “If we were with grandparents, we were not going to get in trouble. They [Amanda and Jason] are not going to really do as much because they’re trying to display themselves as these great people.”
Great people as in happy?
“Yes.”
Caring?
“Yes,” he said. “Things were also put under the category of ‘family secret.’ If something was a family secret, we weren’t allowed to talk about it with anyone else.”
The family secret Gavin cited—Amanda locking Jason out of the house until he bought her cigarettes—seemed innocuous. Gavin mentioned, but did not cite as a secret, Jason and Amanda using him as a go-between when they argued. He did not cite as a secret his mother slapping him when he did not turn in a homework assignment. He did not cite as a secret that Jason “was the main person who punished me, but at the same time, when he was angry it wasn’t directed at me.” It was directed at Amanda, he said, which meant Gavin could go be by himself.
“I always used to hide in my room. I would make stories and hid myself in these stories that I made,” he said. “I chose to make up what was going on, fictional things, because they were better than thinking about what was actual.”
“I don’t think there was any authenticity in how people spoke to him,” Chelsea said from the recliner. “There was never any, ‘How was your day?’”
“No,” Gavin said. “That never happened.”
I thought it must have been especially taxing to a child with an analytical mind to live in a home where people did not mean what they said, or said something that meant its opposite. (There’s an easy way to test how confusing this is to children: try sarcasm on a six-year-old. They will try to figure out why what you said does not match the way you said it, and when you tell them it’s sarcasm, they may reply, as my six-year-old did, “Don’t sarcast me.”)
“I’ve decided I don’t want to be someone who puts on a fake face when I’m doing something,” Gavin said. “I try to talk to people the same way regardless of who they are . . . [and] I expect people to tell me when I do something that bothers them so I can then stop doing that to them. So [what I’m doing] changes a little bit, but not to the point where I am acting differently.”
I asked Gavin what Eldon and Trinity had been like.
“Eldon was young enough that there wasn’t really . . .” He paused. “I would say that, compared to other younger kids, he did not have the urge to kind of bug you abou
t stuff. My best guess was that he was an introvert like I was, and that was one of the reasons he didn’t do a lot. But it’s also the environment. Growing up in that environment, I was very polite, I kept to myself; I didn’t really do anything. I think that also had an effect [on him].”
Perhaps Eldon had been following in Gavin’s footsteps.
“That very well could be,” he said. “Trinity was more outgoing than Eldon and me. She liked doing karaoke. . . . Another [thing] would be, which I thought was really funny, was in the Tualatin house. Trinity was sick, and so she got up and went into Amanda and Jason’s bedroom and was like, ‘Mommy, I don’t feel so good,’ and then immediately threw up on Amanda, and it was just the funniest thing.”
That was it for the happy memories.
On May 23, 2014, Jason Smith posted the following on his public Facebook page, a post Chelsea and I read together:
Five years ago today my smart, handsome, funny, loving, confident, happy boy was taken from us. He lives on with the people that love him, and no more than I. As the years go on I hear his voice and continue to see his beautiful smiling face in the faces and voices of my other children, and in the special places I like to go alone to honor his memory. I love you so, so very much son. My life will never be the same without you, and I will continue to honor your memory by thinking of you often, and in the beautiful quiet places in the forest that mean the most to me. Eldon Jay Rebhan Smith in loving memory of you son. Your father adores you and carries on your wonderful memory.
I thought the message was moving.
“Yes,” Chelsea said, turning off her computer. “After you talk to him, you always ask yourself, why don’t I like that guy again?”
Gavin started his scheduled weekend visit with his mother on May 22, 2009. Maybe it was because he was playing with his cousins, or maybe it was because Nathan and Chelsea had told him, “If you don’t feel safe with Amanda, you do not need to go with her,” but when she asked Gavin to get in the car so they could pick up his brother and sister, he refused.
“I didn’t want to be around her, so I said no,” he said.
Gavin’s life had changed dramatically by May 2009. He was living full-time with Nathan and Chelsea. He rarely saw Trinity and Eldon and never saw Jason. He had become mistrustful of his mother. These factors may have contributed to Gavin not being able to fall asleep the night of May 22, but none were the reason he woke his grandparents to say Amanda and the children had not come home.
“They were supposed to be there at ten o’clock, and it was ten thirty, and eleven,” he said. “So it was reaching that point that something could be happening.”
He tried to make sense of this until around three in the morning, when he fell asleep. He did not sleep long. By seven, the house was filling with people, with phones ringing. Someone—Gavin did not remember whom, or exactly what was said—told him what had happened to Trinity and Eldon.
“There’s a cupboard behind the couch—that curved couch,” he said of a couch in his grandparents’ living room. “That’s where I would go when Amanda came to pick me up, because I didn’t want to leave. That was my hiding spot. And so, when it was explained to me what happened, I went to that cupboard and I stayed there for I don’t know how long.”
It was long enough for Kathy Stott to call Nathan and Chelsea and tell them what had happened to the children, long enough for Nathan to tell Kathy Stott that she was not to give Gavin any details, that he and Chelsea would do it, and that they were coming now. Gavin was still hiding when they arrived. Nathan and Chelsea brought Gavin out of the cupboard. Nathan told his son what happened, and then he and Chelsea did what Jason would later do with Trinity: they took him away from anything that would remind him of Amanda.
“It was hard. It was . . . it was the first time someone in my life had died, right?” Gavin said of his learning that Eldon and Trinity had been found in the river, that Eldon was dead. “It was kind of the idea, I’m never going to see them again; they’re not here anymore. They’re not here anymore. That was the sad thing all around. . . . I think what helped a lot was they were in heaven and eventually I’ll see them, but I can’t see them right now.”
Gavin used the plural “them.” Trinity was alive, but he had not seen her since the boat launch.
“I know that at a certain point I will be able to find her and go see her,” he said. “But I don’t necessarily want to see her with Jason around, that kind of thing.”
“We invited Trinity to your graduation,” Chelsea reminded Gavin.
“Yes,” he said.
“We thought it sounded like a possibility because we met Jason’s requirements,” Chelsea added. Christine Duncan had called to say Jason would consider allowing Trinity to attend Gavin’s graduation if Gavin promised that the Stotts would not be there. This had not been hard for Gavin to do. He said he saw Mike and Kathy Stott “twice a year, if at all.” Through Christine Duncan, Gavin gave Jason his word. Jason had nonetheless not permitted Trinity to come. I asked Gavin whether he thought it possible Jason had no intention of letting Trinity attend no matter which of his demands were met.
“That’s easily a possibility,” he said. “There’s no way to know.”
I asked whether, at the boat dedication, Jason had spoken to Gavin at all.
“Nope,” he said.
He didn’t say, “Hello, son” or anything?
“Nope, nope.”
Christine Duncan and her husband went to Gavin’s graduation in June 2015. The families had not seen each other in five years. During the ceremony, Chelsea ran into Christine Duncan in the ladies’ room.
“She said to me, ‘I just don’t understand why Gavin did not go with Amanda that night,’” Chelsea told me several days after the graduation. “She said she would not have let the children go with Amanda had she known Gavin would not be there.”
This confused Chelsea. Hadn’t it been Amanda’s court-ordered weekend with the children? Duncan said it had been, but repeated she would not have let Amanda have the children if she had known they would not be going back immediately to Amanda’s parents’ home.
If this was revisionist thinking—Christine Duncan had not mentioned these reservations to detectives, while Jason had told them Amanda said she would be taking the children “maybe [to] the beach,” which, as point of reference, is eighty miles from Portland—I did not doubt Christine Duncan’s anguish. How many times in six years had she played over how she might have stopped Amanda? I imagined the loop to be endless.
Chelsea told Duncan that Emily wanted to meet Trinity, Gavin’s other sister, and that Emily prayed for Trinity every night.
Chelsea said Duncan broke down upon hearing this, that she said, “Thank you. Thank you for saying that.”
It’s a near-immutable fact that parents will put their children’s welfare ahead of or at least on par with their own. We assume this to be built into who we are. Or I had assumed this. Because I could not under any circumstance see myself dropping my child from a bridge with the intent to harm her, I did not see how Amanda could have done this to her children. We see through our own lenses. Sabrina Trembley saw Amanda as the mom next to her. Tiffany Gray saw Amanda as a mother-goddess-earth-mama. To others (the courts, the cops), this sort of rationalizing did not conform to the known coordinates, and further, it was decadent thinking. Lenses, their actions argued, must be made out of glass, not mirrors. I found this position increasingly hard to disagree with. Amanda had phoned Jason within three minutes of dropping the children and said, “Help me.” She did not say, help your children; she said, “Help me.” She was asking for attention. She was on the offensive. She had been locked in combat with Jason for years. They had all but cannibalized each other. People saw her as broken, and in many ways she was broken. And she had, after the fact and if we read the reports right, jumped from the ninth floor of a building. But before she did, she had the wherewithal to hurt Jason one more time. If he had been in earnest when he told detectiv
es that, upon learning what Amanda might have done, his first thought was, “There’s just no way,” then he had not been paying attention.
“I’m basically done with Amanda. I have no interest,” Gavin told me.
Part of his being “done” with Amanda, with whom he had not exchanged a word since telling her he would not get in her car, was about her having done “a bad thing, and she’s bad for doing it.” The other part was that Gavin sensed he was missing an emotional component.
“It was explained to me, when you’re growing up, when you’re really young, there are certain things you develop at certain times,” he said. “Some of those things I didn’t do. A good example would be I don’t, or didn’t—I haven’t really checked recently—I don’t miss people. . . . I have no interest in pursuing Amanda, and I don’t miss her.”
Did he miss Jason?
“No,” he said, and also that he had “an active dislike for Jason because he is an active obstacle for me seeing Trinity.”
Did he miss Trinity?
“I would like to see Trinity,” he said.
When asked about his love for Trinity, for Eldon, Gavin paused.
“In my mind, Eldon didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “In my mind he’s a great person, because he got the shortest end of the stick. I wish things didn’t happen the way they did, but they did; there’s not a lot I can do to change that.”
Emily crawled onto the couch. Gavin put his arm around her shoulders.
“I’m comfortable talking about what happened, but I don’t . . .” He paused. “I’ve made a point not to rationalize it as much. I tend to overthink things. [With this] I did not,” he said of his life with Jason and Amanda. “This was something that I did not want to do.”
He chose not to run the program over and over.
“Right,” he said.
He had evidence it might have been futile.
“Yes,” he said. “But at the same time, it was probably a lot easier for them to lie about than it was to tell the truth.”
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