The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

by Dave Eggers

  Before Hannah got married, when she was still Hannah Saenz, she knew she wanted a large family—“at least six kids,” she used to tell people. Standing just five feet tall, with wide-set brown eyes, a girlish laugh, and a warm, easy manner, Hannah was almost childlike herself. The daughter of a pastor and a homemaker, she had grown up longing for the companionship and boisterous energy of the big, churchgoing families she saw around her. She had only one sibling, a brother who was seven years her junior, and a father who was largely absent from her life.

  Hannah’s father was the Reverend Bennie Saenz, an evangelical preacher in Corpus Christi whose fall from grace profoundly altered the course of her childhood. Hannah was seven when Saenz was arrested in 1984 and charged with a singularly horrific crime: the bludgeoning death of a sixteen-year-old girl whose nude body was discovered at the water’s edge on Padre Island. Until his arrest, Saenz had led a seemingly normal life: in addition to leading his nondenominational congregation, he worked as an office-machine mechanic while his wife, Lane, stayed home with their two children. He delivered sermons to a small but devoted following that met every Sunday, and during services he also played guitar. (Larry’s parents, who were friends of the Saenzes’, were parishioners.) But Saenz’s account of his whereabouts on the evening of the murder did not jibe with the evidence, and blood that matched the victim’s type was discovered in side his van. After a week-long trial, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 23 years in prison. The congregation quickly dissolved. Hannah understood little of what had taken place except that she, her mother, and her brother had to leave Corpus Christi behind.

  Lane and her children moved to the East Texas town of Lindale, where a missionary organization, the Calvary Commission, allowed them to live in a modest apartment on its grounds free of charge. Lane earned her college degree and became an elementary school teacher, while Hannah played with, and later babysat, the children of missionaries who used the campus as a home base between trips abroad. “She looked after dozens of children, including my grandchildren, and in all the years she was here, I can’t recall one negative thing being said about her,” the commission’s founder, Joe Fauss, told me. “Kids loved her. She was always smiling, always laughing.” As a teenager, she was captivated by missionaries’ stories of serving in far-flung places, and she began going on group mission trips herself, once venturing as far as Romania. Every Easter and Christmas holiday was spent at the Reynosa orphanage, whose wards were primarily the unwanted children of prostitutes who worked the nearby red-light district. Though the kids were in poor health, Hannah was unreserved in her affection. She hugged them and let them climb onto her lap, often returning to Lindale with head lice. “Some people love stray animals,” remembered her mother, now remarried. “Hannah was always drawn to stray people.”

  When she was fifteen, Hannah returned to Corpus Christi with her family to visit, and Larry, who had not seen her since they were kids, was immediately smitten. Hannah was less impressed, given that Larry—who, at sixteen, was an enthusiastic fan of Christian punk rock—was sporting a nose ring and a blue mohawk. Despite appearances, however, he was hardly a reprobate. A committed Christian, he had gone on mission trips with his family since he was a child, including a fourteen-month stint in Papua New Guinea and several treks across Mexico. He didn’t drink or smoke, and the bands he listened to sang about glorifying God. He struck up a correspondence with Hannah, but she did not warm to him until their paths crossed again at a year-long missionary training school outside Tyler, when she was nineteen and he was a more clean-cut twenty. Hannah liked the tall, serious-minded student who shared the same hopes she had of creating a life centered on children and Christian outreach. They wed a year later and moved to Corpus Christi. On their honeymoon, they stopped at the orphanage in Reynosa, where Hannah wanted Larry to meet some of the children she had told him so much about.

  Before they started a family, Hannah worked as a private-duty nurse for disabled children, and her longest assignment—with a four-year-old named Michael Subialdea—became as absorbing to her as her time in Reynosa. Michael, who had been born prematurely, was severely impaired; he had cerebral palsy, was blind, and could not walk or talk. Rather than let him remain in his wheelchair most of the day, as previous caretakers had done, Hannah kept him moving; she took him into his family’s pool to stretch and used massage to loosen his contracted muscles. He felt at ease around her; his favorite thing to do was sit on her lap and rest his mouth on her cheek, and she gladly obliged. “She had a way with Michael that even my wife and I didn’t completely understand,” his father, Richard, told me. He recalled how Michael used to chew on his fingers, a chronic problem that left his skin bloody and raw. Richard and his wife had tried all sorts of tactics to deter him: redirecting his attention, putting gloves on him, even restraining his hands. Only Hannah had been able to break through. “When Michael put his fingers in his mouth, she would call his name softly—there was no anger in her voice—and he would smile and slowly slide his fingers out,” Richard said. “We were in awe.”

  Hannah went into labor with her first child, Isaac, at the Subialdeas’ house, and though she had planned to come back to work after her son’s birth, she found the separation from him too wrenching. She left nursing behind, channeling her energy instead into raising the large family she had always wanted. “I’m a pretty easygoing guy, but I remember thinking, ‘Six kids?’” Larry told me. “Hannah was sure I would eventually come around. I figured, ‘Well, we’ve got to start with one, so let’s see how far we get.’” Isabel, and then Ally, followed. Each pregnancy felt extraordinarily fortunate; after Isaac, Hannah had suffered two miscarriages and been advised that she might not be able to have more children. But after the girls, the Overtons conceived their fourth child, Sebastian. Early in the preg nancy, Hannah and Larry were informed that the boy would likely have Down syndrome. They declined to do any further chromosomal testing and turned to prayer instead. “If he had Down’s, that was the blessing that God had chosen to give us,” Larry said. Not until Sebastian was born did doctors discover that his only impairment was a hole in his heart, which healed on its own.

  Two years later, the Overtons learned that their adoption application had been approved and that Andrew would be joining their family. They also discovered that Hannah was pregnant again. Just as she had hoped, they would have six children. It was, Hannah and Larry would later remember, one of the happiest times in their lives.

  At first, the transition with Andrew went smoothly. He seemed to enjoy having brothers and sisters to play with, and the Overton kids—especially the girls, who doted on him—were enthralled by the new arrival. Although he hung back when his siblings embraced their parents in group hugs, Larry and Hannah learned that if they asked Andrew to join in, he would do so enthusiastically, throwing his arms around them. Whenever he got scared—and there was a long list of things that petrified him, from swimming to large crowds to the sound of balloons popping—the Overtons worked to help him overcome his fears, reassuring him that they loved him and that he was in safe surroundings. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” Hannah would remind him, quoting Philippians.

  Andrew’s standard answer whenever he was asked to perform a simple task was “Sorry, I can’t,” but Hannah was heartened one day that summer when he deviated from the script. “Sorry, I—” he began, when she asked him to put on his shoes. Then he corrected himself. Reaching for his shoes, he announced, “I can do all things.” Larry remembered, “We felt like we were really making headway with him.”

  Although the adoption agency that had worked with CPS to find Andrew a home had described him as “developmentally on target” except for his speech delay, Larry and Hannah observed otherwise. He acted more like a toddler than a preschooler, they noted; if he wanted an object, he pointed to it and grunted. At four, he spent most of his time playing with Sebastian, who was two, rather than Ally, who was his own age, and his motor skills l
agged far behind those of his peers. He moved unsteadily, and he was so clumsy that Hannah had him wear a life jacket whenever he splashed around in their inflatable kiddie pool. Most striking to the Overtons, and to their neighbors and friends, was his preoccupation with eating. Regardless of how much food he consumed, he complained that he was hungry. If he was denied a second or third helping, he would routinely throw a tantrum or get down on his hands and knees to scavenge the floor for crumbs. Larry and Hannah caught him trying to eat cat food, crayons, toothpaste, glow sticks, tufts of carpeting—anything he could get his hands on. When they took him along on errands, they had to keep him from eating the old gum and cigarette butts he found on the ground.

  Yet the Overtons were not too concerned. In the classes they had been required to take by CPS to become adoptive parents, they had been warned that foster children often hoarded food and were more likely to have eating disorders. And given that abuse and neglect during the first year of life can profoundly affect behavioral development, they were not surprised that Andrew was different. “We had been told to expect a lot of the things we were seeing with Andrew,” Larry told me. His foster mother had taken him to a pediatrician for an adoption screening shortly before he had come to live with them, and the checkup had raised no red flags. “We truly thought his obsession with food was a behavioral issue, not a medical one,” Larry said. “We thought that he would stop turning to food for comfort when he learned that he could trust us.” To try and curtail Andrew’s compulsive eating, they put him in time-outs, though to little effect. Other couples they knew who had adopted foster children assured them that their kids had outgrown similar eating issues, and the Overtons assumed that, with time, Andrew would outgrow his as well.

  Andrew’s behavior worsened that September, after the family was involved in a car accident. The Overtons were returning from a visit to the obstetrician’s office, where they had brought the children to find out whether the baby they were expecting was a boy or a girl. The mood in the car was giddy; the kids were excitedly discussing the news that they would have a baby sister when Larry, distracted, ran a stop sign and collided with another car. The passenger side of their old Ford van was not equipped with an air bag, and Hannah, who had pulled down her seat belt so she could turn to talk to the kids, was jolted forward, her face hitting the dashboard. Afterward, she instinctively looked back to check on the children, not realizing that her face was covered in blood. In the midst of the chaos that followed, no one recognized how distressed Andrew was by the sight of Hannah’s bloodied face. Hannah and the girls, who complained of feeling achy, were taken to the hospital in an ambulance while Larry’s parents picked up the rest of the family and, after dropping Larry off at the hospital, took the boys to a nearby Whataburger. Throughout the meal, Andrew repeatedly asked, “Is my mom okay?” He also kept requesting more food.

  Hannah, who was left with whiplash and a severely swollen jaw, spent the next several weeks immobilized by a neck brace, mostly confined to bed. Financially, the accident had come at a precarious time; Larry had recently purchased his boss’s landscape lighting business, and he needed to put in long hours just to make ends meet. Relatives, neighbors, and members of the Overtons’ church pitched in to look after the kids during Hannah’s recovery, but the revolving door of caregivers proved to be difficult for Andrew, who began acting out on a scale they had not seen before. He picked at mosquito bites on his body incessantly, prompting Larry to put socks on his hands; still, Andrew would not stop scratching and eventually developed a staph infection on his arm. His tantrums grew longer and more extreme, and he often banged his head against the floor. Sometimes he cried inconsolably for hours.

  Overwhelmed, the Overtons sought guidance in prayer. Fellow church member Anita Miotti remembers their telling her and her husband, Rich, that they were struggling. “They said Andrew was going through a very difficult time,” she said. “They asked us, ‘Can you pray that we have discernment and wisdom in helping him through this?’”

  Andrew’s preoccupation with eating intensified, and he began getting out of bed at night to forage for food in the kitchen. Hoping to show him that his behavior was self-destructive, Larry told Andrew one morning that he could have as much as he wanted for breakfast. “I knew it would probably make him sick, but I wanted him to understand why we were setting limits,” Larry explained. At Andrew’s request, he made a plate of sausage and more than a dozen eggs, all of which the boy eagerly devoured. Andrew continued eating until he threw up. Then he asked for more.

  Perplexed, Larry installed a baby monitor equipped with a video camera in the boys’ room so that he and Hannah could observe if Andrew was wandering into the kitchen at night. It was while watching the monitor that Hannah saw him trying to eat part of his foam mattress and paint off the wall. She reported Andrew’s unusual eating habits to his adoption supervisor when she visited the Overton home on September 25. The supervisor suggested that Andrew might have an eating disorder called pica, which is characterized by a desire to consume things that have no nutritional value, and she recommended that he be evaluated by a specialist if his behavior continued.

  That Sunday, October 1, Larry took the other kids to church while Hannah devoted some extra attention to Andrew. Before the family returned home, Andrew asked if he could have lunch, and Hannah told him that he needed to wait; Larry was bringing them something to eat, she explained, and he would be back in a few minutes. Andrew flew into a rage. He defecated on the floor of his bedroom, then smeared feces on the bed, the dresser, and the walls.

  Larry attempted to restore order upon his return, putting Andrew’s soiled sheets in the garbage and hosing off the boy and his foam mattress in the backyard. While Larry tried to scrub down the bedroom, Andrew pulled his sheets out of the trash several times, despite repeated warnings not to do so. Losing his patience, Larry took the sheets to the family’s fire pit and burned them. “Not the brightest thing to do,” Larry conceded. “But I was frustrated. The sheets were filthy, and he was getting poop everywhere. I made sure that he saw that we had an identical set of Spider-Man sheets so he would calm down.”

  That evening Larry laid a sleeping bag on top of Andrew’s plywood bed frame, where, he told the boy, he would have to spend the night while his mattress finished drying. The three oldest Overton children had gone to their aunt’s house to see their cousins, who were visiting from out of town, and Andrew grew increasingly agitated and restless, throwing a tantrum at three o’clock in the morning. “Before we ever tried to adopt, we had been warned that this was going to be difficult, that this was not going to be the Little Orphan Annie story,” Larry told me. “We were having a hard time, but we knew it was going to pass. We were in it for the long haul.”

  Larry left for work the following morning, and Hannah, who was still in considerable pain from the car accident, gave Andrew and Sebastian breakfast before bringing them into bed with her to watch cartoons. Exhausted from the previous night, she briefly dozed off, then awoke to discover that Andrew had slipped out of the room. She found him standing on a stool in the pantry, near the baking ingredients, having pulled something off the shelf. She could not recall later what, exactly, he had been holding in his hand.

  According to Hannah, Andrew once again asked for an early lunch, and once again, when she told him that he would have to wait, he defecated and smeared feces across the floor. Hannah managed to clean him up, but when she reiterated that he would have to wait until lunchtime to eat, he defecated on the floor again. Finally she relented, heating up what she had on hand: leftover vegetable-beef soup flavored with Zatarain’s Creole Seasoning. Shortly after noon, Larry picked her and the boys up and took them to a McDonald’s drive-through, and then the chiropractor, before returning to work. (Andrew was told that he could not have any food at McDonald’s, since he had already eaten.) When Andrew complained of being hungry that afternoon, Hannah gave him more of the leftover soup. When she refused to give him a second helping, he thr
ew a tantrum and shouted, “I hate you!” Finally, Hannah resorted to sprinkling some Zatarain’s into a sippy cup of water, hoping that the taste alone would appease him. After drinking a little, he threw another tantrum that continued unabated for twenty minutes.

  Then, abruptly, Andrew grew quiet and stumbled to the floor. “Mommy, I’m cold,” he said, and threw up. Shortly afterward, at three-thirty, Hannah called Larry and asked him to come home since Andrew was vomiting and she needed his help. The boy’s symptoms that afternoon—vomiting, chills, and lethargy—initially suggested to the Overtons that he had a routine ailment, like a stomach bug. But as the afternoon wore on, his symptoms grew troubling; his breathing became congested, and he became less and less responsive. Just after five o’clock, the Overtons put him in their car and rushed him to a nearby urgent care clinic. A block away from the clinic, as they waited at a red light, Andrew stopped breathing. Frantic, Hannah began administering CPR in the backseat. At the clinic, she continued giving him mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions until paramedics took over, but the four-year-old lay motionless. He soon lapsed into a coma.

  The next morning, Corpus Christi police detective Michael Hess paid a visit to Kathi Haller, the Overtons’ next-door neighbor, who knew the family well. Like Hannah, Haller homeschooled her children, and the two mothers split teaching duties; the Haller children went to the Overton home for instruction for part of the day and vice versa. The families shared an unofficial open-door policy, and when Andrew had begun acting up the previous afternoon, Hannah had called Haller for help, asking if she could look after Sebastian for a little while. Then, as always, Hannah had been composed, despite the strain she was under. “We had known each other for ten years, and I don’t think I’d ever seen her mad,” Haller told me.