The
Survivor
How
can a man get through such a thing? After the brutal murders of your wife and
children, you have two choices: You go on living. Or you
don't.
By Ryan
D'Agostino
UPDATE (September
2011): Inside the
Courtroom for a Second Trial
UPDATE NO. 2 (October
2011):...and
a Death-Row Verdict...
UPDATE NO. 3
(December 2011):...and a Sad
Sentencing
Originally
published in the June/July 2011 issue
13.He
doesn't much likedoing
these things, but he does them all the same. Bill Petit arrives at the high
school alone and walks up the knoll from the parking lot, squinting against the
low, late-winter sun. It's chilly, and he walks with his hands shoved into the
pockets of his jeans. He wears his hair, damp from the shower, combed straight
back into a fringe of curls that sweep the collar of his baggy white golf shirt.
He stands six foot four, sturdy and thick, with the belly of a man who hit fifty
a few years ago pulling slightly at his fleece vest. Across the lot behind him,
suburban Saturday-morning traffic drifts up Main Street. Above, under a dry blue
Connecticut
sky, two swallows chase each other around the sun. The man walks slowly — he
always gets a little queasy at these benefits, as the people are coming just for
him and he is required to be social. Being social has never come easy for him,
but now it can be excruciating. Outside the doors, one of those inflatable
castles for kids to jump around in is set up on the sidewalk. He
stops.
A boy, four
years old, blue-eyed and sandy-haired, sits on the ground. Not many people are
around yet — it's nine-thirty, and the basketball tournament doesn't start until
ten. The boy is unstrapping the Velcro on his shoes and jimmying them off his
little feet. Bill Petit bends at the waist with his hands on his
knees.
"Hey there,"
he says to the boy. He arches his eyebrows hopefully and holds up a hand for a
high five. The man's cheekbones are high and wide, like rock faces. The boy
looks up at the giant hand but quickly scrambles into the inflatable castle.
Petit stands up straight again. "Ah, he doesn't want to talk to me," he says,
his voice deep and rusty and the words rattling out unevenly, as if they are the
first he's spoken since waking up. "He wants to play." He drops his jaw a little
and laughs to himself, then turns and wanders into the
school.
This work —
the work of his foundation, which he established to remember his wife and
daughters, now dead — is a full-time job for him now. In truth, it's his life,
or his best attempt to remain among the living. That Petit is himself alive is a
sort of miracle and a reality to which he will never fully acclimate. Even in
settings like this — safe and comfortable, surrounded by smiling faces — Petit
seems to be floating, half here and half gone.
Inside, the
halls are waking up. Vast, fuzzy trapezoids of sunlight glow white on the
linoleum, bending up the walls. A pimply kid with a brown, bushy mop sits
smiling at the welcome table, his hands folded next to a box marked DONATIONS.
Gray-haired women lay out foil trays of homemade chocolate cupcakes and baggies
of frosted cookies — EVERYTHING $1, reads a sign on the table. The ping of
basketballs hitting the gym floor echoes in the halls. People nod and smile at
him as he makes his way in, and he nods back and offers up a "G'mornin'." A
woman wearing a tracksuit stops to hug him, standing on her tiptoes.
"Heyyy," he says softly.
In the
gymnasium, kids from college on down to grade school shoot around and
basketballs whiz everywhere. Soon the adolescent voice of a local kid scratches
out through a speaker, announcing that Dr. Petit is going to take the ceremonial
first shot of the tournament. Petit hams a funny uh-oh face, fakes a nervous smile, and
shrugs at the crowd. Someone bounces a ball to him. He turns it over in his
hands a couple of times, rotating it, squeezing it, the ball hard and cold, same
as always. He dribbles hard, pounding the ball into the shellacked hardwood as
he has done — could it be a million times in his life? He walks slowly to the
free-throw line, a goofy wink at the drama of the moment. There's no drama,
really, because it doesn't matter if he misses, but — well, come on, you don't
want to miss, do you?
Feet planted
on the line, he dribbles three more times, then shoots, his elbow snapping like
a piston, firing the ball off the end of his fingertips as if not a day has gone
by. A few hundred eyes follow its arc toward the rim. The ball bangs the front,
takes a bounce back onto the heel of the rim, and falls through the
net.
Petit's eyes
go wide and he pretends to wipe sweat from his forehead. Everyone claps, and the
kids peel themselves off the walls and fill the gym back up with noise. He feels
pats on his back, feels his hands grabbed and
shaken. Nice shot! Then he walks over near the door, out
of the way, kind of bobbing along. Close one! The boy from the inflatable castle is
there, on his father's shoulders. "Hey!" Petit says. He holds out his fist for a
bump. The boy grins this time, but he turns away again. "Awww," Petit
says.
Bill Sr. comes
over, chucks his son on the shoulder.
"Nothing but
net," says the old man.
12.Bad
things happen to everyone. And
in their aftermath, it is the human instinct to adapt and survive. By and large,
people want to live. Biology and human history and our own lives tell us that we
are indeed a resilient little bug.
But there is
bad, and then there is depraved.
When your
family is murdered, and the home you had made together is destroyed, and you
yourself are beaten and left for dead — as happened to Bill Petit on the morning
of July 23, 2007 — it may as well be the end of the world. It is hard to see how
a man survives the end of the world. The basics of life —
waking up, walking, talking — become alien tasks, and almost impossibly heavy,
as you are more dead than alive.
Just how does
a man go about surviving such a thing? How does a man go
on?
At night,
Petit sleeps only because the pills make him sleep. Sometimes even with the
pills he lies awake, thinking about the same questions. Working slowly and
without rest, he has built ramparts around his mind to keep out the what-ifs,
because the what-ifs can drive you insane.What if that bulkhead lock had been
working properly? Sometimes
the haunting questions break through and he has to shake them
away.
He lives with
his parents in an old house on Red Stone Hill, in Plainville, a dot in the middle of the Connecticut map. It's one
of those old towns no one talks about — small, hardworking, flat, and marooned
between Hartford and New Haven, a town where the strip malls and Chinese
restaurants near the highway dissolve into neighborhoods of tidy aluminum-sided
houses with one-car garages. This is the town where he grew up. Downtown, on an
anonymous brick office building on Whiting Street, the white block letters over
the rear entrance still read WILLIAM A. PETIT, JR., M.D. INTERNAL MEDICINE,
ENDOCRINOLOGY & DIABETES.
He had an
alarm system installed in his parents' house when he moved in, and the front
door is always locked now. It's not that Petit cares much about his own safety.
It just seemed right to get an alarm. He's talked to his sister, Hanna, and to
his friend Ron about moving out, getting his own place. But
why? His mother cooks and cleans, and he can help his dad around the
house. It's a different life, though. One of the first things he had to do was
convince his parents to eat dinner a little later than five o'clock. By the time
the lunch dishes were put away, his mother would already be pulling the meat out
of the fridge and rinsing the potatoes for dinner. And then there are the
televisions. They're unbearably loud. Everyone in the house — his dad, his mom,
his grandmother — is going deaf, so every TV is turned up to full volume all the
time, and he has to shout above them.
If the
circumstances weren't so horrible, the whole thing could be a
sitcom.
In the
mornings, sometimes he goes for breakfast at Saint's on Route 10, a family
restaurant with an L-shaped counter, vinyl booths, eggs how you like 'em, and
bottomless coffee. But mostly during the days, he sits in his parents' house and
works. He writes thank-you notes to people who contribute money to his
foundation, which he named the Petit Family Foundation. Bill is the president,
and his father is the vice-president. The foundation has awarded academic
scholarships to students affected by multiple sclerosis, given community-service
awards, sponsored a local domestic-violence care center, and more. It has a kind
of slogan. He didn't know that his daughter Michaela had a Facebook page, but
after she died, he saw it, and a quote that she had posted hit him hard: "You
must be the change you wish to see in the world." Gandhi. So that became the
mantra on the brochure. The mission of the foundation is threefold: "To foster
the education of young people, especially women in the sciences; to improve the
lives of those affected by chronic illnesses; and to support efforts to protect
and help those affected by violence." Petit wrote that
himself.
Two of his old
high school buddies are runners, and they head up a 5K every year. There's a
golf tournament — that's probably Petit's favorite, because he gets to play
golf. There's even a motorcycle rally: the Ride for Justice. He shows up at them
all. He wears the T-shirts they print up with the logos of the sponsors covering
the back. He speaks to crowds sitting in folding chairs, he hugs bikers — men
his own age who have extensive tattoos and wear leather jackets and ride Harleys
call him Doc and clap his back until it hurts.
Hanna got a
call a few weeks ago from a fourteen-year-old boy in Philadelphia. His family
holds an annual fundraiser at their home, he said. A big auction, makes tons of money. This year, they wanted to do
the whole thing for the Petit Family Foundation. So Petit will drive down to
Philly for that. Have to show up.
A guy called
from Utah.
Does an annual charity golf tournament, and this year he's chosen the Petit
Family Foundation as the beneficiary. So he'll fly out to Utah for that. Have to
show up.
A few days
before the basketball tournament, the board of directors of Petit's foundation
meets at the house on Red Stone Hill. Hanna cooks a big batch of Italian wedding
soup and brings it over. Bill Sr. and Barbara, Bill's mother, have set the
table, and there's red wine and soda out. Then they start showing up, these CEOs
and doctors and lawyers on the board — Petit knows a lot of smart people. They
drink a little wine, serve themselves at the buffet, and review the committee
reports — development, finance and investment, grants, the golf tournament. The
foundation's pot is up to about $1.8 million. People have sent cards with a
dollar inside. People have sent $10,000 checks. Not long ago, a little girl told
her friends she didn't want a birthday party and asked guests to make a donation
instead — she raised $400. The treasurer, Ron Bucchi, is Bill's oldest friend,
going back to the Knights of Columbus basketball team in middle school. Ron's
tall and lean, with dark, Italian eyes, olive skin, and silver hair that doesn't
move. His view is that the foundation needs to hit $5 million — with $5 million,
it would be what they call sustainable. Then they can hire some people to send
the notes and organize the spreadsheets and keep the records so Petit knows whom
to thank, so he doesn't have to do so much of that stuff
himself.
The thing
is, he would end up doing most of those things anyway.
It's what he does now. Because while on the surface the Petit Family Foundation
exists to do all of the good it set out to do, the reality is that it has
another, equally important purpose: The foundation exists so that Bill Petit has
a connection to the world.
He doesn't
have good days; he tries to have good hours. He goes to UConn basketball games
still, and people stare at him, but he has an okay time. The old Bill Petit was
connected to the world through his family and through his work. He has neither
now. Does the old Bill ever shine through? "I haven't seen him yet," Ron says,
with a faint smile. And Bill Sr.: "I don't think we'll ever get him
back."
After the
meeting, Ron and Hanna and a few others hang out and talk. Eventually, Petit
goes up to his room. Books and papers and albums of family photographs cover
most of the queen-size bed — Bill sleeps at the edge of the mattress. When
blackness disappears the world outside, and when he is trying to fall asleep,
that's when the what-ifs and the bad thoughts try to stab their way into the
fragile equilibrium that he has worked so hard to achieve in his
mind.
What if Jen
had just stayed inside the bank instead of coming outside with the
money?
Bill's
grandmother, who's ninety-five, lives in the house, too. Every night after he
gets into bed, even when his light is out, he hears a soft knock on the door.
Then the door opens and light leaks onto the walls of his
room.
"Bill?"
Her voice is
soft, as if she's trying to wake a toddler from a
nap.
"Bill?"
He rolls
over.
"Yeah,
Gram?"
She shuffles
into the room and gently pats his shoulder.
"Are you
okay?"
11.On
sentencing day, December 2, 2010, the
family piles into two cars, as they have on each of the thirty-four days of the
trial of Steven Hayes — same seats, like children boarding school buses. The
white, early-winter sun washes away the streets outside and backlights the trees
like a strobe. Petit has dressed up — navy suit, light-blue shirt, solid mauve
tie. He got a haircut, too. The nausea chews at his stomach more than usual as
the Petits' caravan rolls south on the cold pavement toward New
Haven.
Petit glides
past the TV trucks outside the courthouse. Men wearing parkas hoist cameras onto
their shoulders and point them at him, a ritual in which the cameras pant at him
while he practices obliviousness. It's the same when he enters courtroom 6A: The
reporters, trying to look casual, sneak looks at him and tweet his arrival to
whomever reads tweets. Even the judicial marshals,
stationed around the room like turrets, follow him with their eyes, curiously.
Petit just tries to look like a man walking into a
room.
Tom Ullman,
the public defender, strokes his neck beard. Usually his ties are exactly four
inches too long, but today he has managed to tuck his tie right into his pants.
His client, Hayes, is the man who lit Petit's daughters on fire and raped and
strangled his wife. He sits in his swively chair, his thin neck sticking out of
a blousy prison jumpsuit. He whips around to look at the big, elementary-school
wall clock in the back of the room. His shoulders slope, his eyes are small and
black, and his cheeks sag like deflating
balloons.
Hanna is
sitting at the table where the state's attorneys normally sit, a few feet from
the defendant's table, where Hayes sits. She is always in her finest — today she
wears a sweater the color of red grapes, high shiny black boots, and a fur wrap.
She looks tiny sitting in the middle of the room, but her voice is strong and
steady, and deep like her father's. She's talking about her big brother, saying
how he is not the same now. A screen hangs above the proceedings, showing a
dreamlike parade of images from Petit's old life. Births, birthday parties,
Christmas mornings, vacations, basketball games — the photographs all close
families have and never remember to look at. Hanna reads from an essay her
daughter wrote: "... I searched for the old Uncle Billy. The same one who would
stay up late with Hayley and me, watching movies and eating popcorn; the one who
brought us to UConn games and tried to make us cheer; the one who would toss me
up as a little girl high over his head until I fell into his huge, safe arms.
Those same arms looked defeated now, hunched over in sorrow. I felt another pang
of hurt so deep that I wondered if hearts could stop beating from
sadness."
When Hanna
finishes, Petit takes the seat at the prosecutor's table. The state allows the
victims of a capital crime to make a statement after the guilty are sentenced,
and so Bill Petit presses his tie down, scoots the chair in, and begins reciting
the story of his family. Judge Jon Blue, a midwesterner with a towering helmet
of white hair, folds his arms and listens.
Petit is from
a long line of Connecticut Yankees and so he comes by his reticence honestly. He
has not spoken much during the trial, but when he has, it has exposed a raw
wound. On the day a few weeks ago when Hayes was found guilty, he stood outside
this building and paid tribute. "Michaela was an eleven-year-old little girl,"
he said, shaking his head, raising his eyebrows. "You know, ah, tortured and
killed ... in her own bedroom ... you know? Surrounded by
stuffed animals. And ... Hayley had a great future. And
was a strong and courageous person. And Jennifer helped so many kids.
At Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh and at Strong Memorial in Rochester and at the Yale Children's Hospital and
Cheshire
Academy. And she
cannot do that now."
Today, as the
state officially disposes of Steven Hayes, impact is what Petit chooses for his first
word, because that's what the law calls these things: "impact statements." And
the impact just pours out of him: how Jen tried to hide her multiple sclerosis
from the girls when she was first diagnosed; how their younger girl, Michaela,
loved to spy on her big sister, Hayley, so she could learn to be like the big
girls; how he and Hayley used to stay up working in their little home office
till after midnight sometimes. She had been accepted early to Dartmouth, where Petit
graduated from in 1978. She'd be a senior by
now.
The details
are his, but the story is the story of every family — ordinary and beautiful and
wrenching. "I grieve because she never got to love someone
—"
Here he just
stops. He rubs the place on his forehead where no one can see the scar anymore,
rubs it over and over. His hulking shoulders shake in silence as the tears
escape from behind his glasses. Judge Blue looks around the room — there is
nothing to do but wait. No protocol. And as Petit cries, Steven Hayes stares
over from the defense table without blinking — minutes of unbearable silence
pass, and the man who poured gasoline on the girl while she was still alive just
stares and stares at the man who raised her.
"Because she
never got to love someone for a long time. She had a
friend who was a boy and who still thinks about her. He is now a senior and a
basketball player. If he called on a Sunday night at seven o'clock, and she had been studying for six hours and looked
washed out, she jumped up and got her basketball clothes on, because that is
what they did — they played basketball together and chatted. She loved it and
probably loved him."
Toward the end
of his statement, he says, "I am not sure what my own hopes and dreams are, if
any."
When Petit
stands and walks back to his seat, there are no affirming nods from his family.
That is not their way. The row of faces point straight ahead like mannequins,
and Petit sits. It's done. He is done.
When the judge
says to Hayes, "May God have mercy on your soul," a
weird silence seizes the room. Hayes actually has to sign some kind of form, an
odd piece of bureaucracy. The marshals step into their positions behind Hayes
and at every door. And eventually, everyone stands, the judge exits without
ceremony, and it is over. The state of Connecticut will kill Hayes — it is now
official — but the ritual makes for a strange anticlimax to a hideous trial. If
in the age of therapy and confession we expect or demand closure from these
proceedings, there is no closure to be found here, certainly not for Bill
Petit.
Five or six of
his family and friends huddle around him as he sits in the front row with his
head in his hands. Mike Dearington, the state's attorney, who looks like an
Irish priest, sits nearby, and the marshals stand sentry — they've been in the
room and heard every detail, and they aren't about to ask him to leave. Bill
Petit is off somewhere else. He is in his bedroom, alone, or on a beach
somewhere, or standing on the rubble of his home. He closes his eyes, and he is
nowhere.
A few weeks
earlier, somebody had asked him about the "healing process" now that the verdict
was in. It was a morning-show question, a stupid
question.
"I don't think
there's ever closure," he said. "I think whoever came up with that concept is an
imbecile."
10.You
can smell the gasoline in the courtroom. A
forensics detective is on the stand, and the state is introducing evidence that
has been stored in metal canisters since it was analyzed after the murders.
A piece of Hayley's shirt. A scrap of denim from the
jeans Jennifer put on to go to the bank. Michaela's torn shorts. Hayes and his
partner, Joshua Komisarjevsky, had poured gasoline all over the house and on the
girls' bodies and clothing while they were tied to their beds, and you can still
smell it, thirty-eight months later.
On the
projection screen, the state shows a photograph of the scorched kitchen. It
barely looks like a room. But if you look closer, there, in the sink, is the
pasta pot Michaela used when she was cooking Sunday dinner. The teakettle sits
on the stove, where it always was. A cupboard door hangs off its melted hinges,
and a shelf has fallen cockeyed.
The state
shows more photographs — ghostly stills floating in the dimmed chamber, each one
broadcast for minutes on end, a slow torture for Petit. While they remain on the
screen, the lawyers and the witnesses speak of them in the context of his
family, repeating their names a hundred times a day — Jennifer. Hayley. Michaela. Jennifer. Hayley. Michaela. Jennifer. Hayley. Michaela. Jennifer. Hayley. Michaela. Over and over, each mention of their
names like a knifepoint into Bill's
skin.
Next: a
photograph of the charred living room, the furniture arranged just as Jen liked
it — that is, simply. Jen was frugal, tended to buy clothes at Marshalls, wasn't into
curtains, and never splurged on home decor. She had recently hemmed and hawed
about an Oriental carpet — a real extravagance, must've kept it on loan for a
year while she decided whether she liked it. Easy assumptions about a doctor's
wife in Connecticut just didn't fit
Jen.
Petit looks up
at the photograph, turns his head away. You can see a dark cloak in the middle
of the room: the place where Jennifer's body lay. She'd had to be identified by
her dental records. There is a macabre banality to all of this, as if Petit were
being forced to watch some twisted fire-safety video featuring pictures of his
own home.
This is a bad
day in court. But not as bad as yesterday. Yesterday
was the medical examiner who had performed the autopsy on Michaela. He testified
about the evidence found on her body that suggested sodomy. Petit didn't hear
that part. When the medical examiner walked up to the witness stand, he stood
and calmly left the courtroom, the only time during the trial he
did.
An
investigator takes the stand today, this one short and nervous, with a
bureaucratic mustache. He testifies that he recovered photographs from a cell
phone belonging to one of the men. The photos aren't shown in court, but he is
asked to describe them. The pictures depict a young girl tied to a bed, he says,
without clothes on, and a man's genitals.
On his way out
of the courtroom, the investigator has to walk right past
Petit.
"I'm sorry,"
he whispers.
9.Petit
arrives on another morningwearing
his dress-up version of golf clothes, or his golf-club version of dress clothes:
tan slacks, gray blazer, black mock turtleneck with a tiny white Nike swoosh on
the collar — a pro-shop shirt. Outside in the hall, in the line of people
waiting to get in, he spots two of Jen's old friends. They are both named Deb,
and Bill stops to hug them both at once.
"D squared,"
he says quietly, with a smirk.
Inside, he
takes his seat on the harsh, Catholic wooden bench, shifting every few minutes
because these things kill your ass. His stare is blank, his unlined face
frozen.
Captain Robert
Vignola, a twenty-three-year veteran of the Cheshire Police Department with a
bullethead and metal shavings for eyes, sits in the chair on the witness stand.
He fires a glare at Steven Hayes that could knock down a brick
wall.
Gary
Nicholson, the gruff, mustached assistant state's attorney, asks for state's
exhibit 15a, and a marshal dims the lights. Petit shifts in his seat to look at
a picture of his old house, and the image reflects on the rectangular lenses of
his glasses. If seeing it stabs his eyes like an ice pick, he doesn't show it.
It's a beautiful house: cream-colored clapboard, hunter-green shutters, lush
lawn, orange flowers by the road, tall trees all around. The American dream,
pretty much. Only if you look closely at this particular shot, you can see the
blackened parts above the front door and the upstairs windows, as if someone had
spray-painted the trim.
In the next
photo, the Petits' Chrysler Pacifica is parked at the top of the driveway. "So,
tell us what you saw, Captain," Nicholson says.
"Mr.
Komisarjevsky ran to the car with a bag in his hand, placed the bag in the car,
quickly reversed, very, very quickly — that's when another officer stated that
there was movement from the suspects. Moments later, Mr. Komisarjevsky was in
front, Mr. Hayes was behind him running to the vehicle. Mr. Komisarjevsky came
around, went into the driver's side. Mr. Hayes went into the passenger's
side."
At this, Petit
closes his eyes, bows his head, and rubs his forehead where the scar used to be,
over and over as he listens to Vignola's recitation of the chaotic, rain-soaked
getaway from the house where his babies lay
burning.
And he rubs
where the scar was, and rubs it, and the what-ifs flood in with a vengeance, and
there's nothing Bill Petit can do to stop it. Suddenly, he isn't in any
courtroom anymore. He's lying in Dave Simcik's driveway next door to his burning
house. His ankles still bound together with plastic zip ties and a length of
clothesline, and the scar a gaping bloody mess. The ambulance isn't there yet.
The cop standing over him holds a rifle, and Petit is yelling at
him.
"The
girls!"
His head
throbs and his body is weak and his clothes are soaked with blood and sweat. The
cop has just asked him if there's anyone else in the
house.
"The girls,"
Bill says again, with all his strength. "The
girls."
He doesn't see
the flames that have begun to curl up out of the sunroom windows. Now that the
police have shown up, he's just hoping the girls aren't hurt badly. Seconds
earlier, Simcik called 911 when he found Bill, his neighbor of eighteen years,
lying in his driveway crying for help. At first he didn't recognize Petit, so
badly was his head bludgeoned. Too weak even to crawl,
Bill had rolled through his own backyard to Dave's house in desperation. Twice
he tried to stand, and fell both times.
Before pulling
himself up out of the basement through the bulkhead, Petit knows this is the
moment. These assholes are going to shoot him and his family — or something. He
knows that he's too weak to take on two men who have a gun, but if he can free
himself from the basement pole, he can get over to Simcik's and call the
police.
He gets the
rope from around his wrists and, working faster now, rubs the plastic ties until
his bloodied hands are free. He tries the ankle ties, but there's no time — he's
off the pole, so he can escape. He hears moaning coming from upstairs. A horrible sound, the sound of Steven Hayes crushing Jennifer
Hawke-Petit's larynx with his hands.
"Hey!" Petit
yells. Something like "hey" — he has so little strength, it comes out as a
garbled cry, something other than language. A man's voice responds back down the
basement stairs. "Don't worry," the voice says. "It's all going to be over in a
couple of minutes." It is the same voice that did the talking earlier that
morning, but there's something different about it now. Before, the monster was
trying to sound reassuring. Now, no such
pretense.
Just before
the moaning, he hears thumping. He can't be sure of anything, nothing at all, he
might even be dead — being pounded in the head with a baseball bat has left him
without much blood and no clear thoughts. But he desperately tries to hold it
together. He sits, opens his eyes wide, trying to summon cognition. He decides
that the thumping is probably the two men ransacking the house and gathering the
things they will take with them.
This is more
bearable than the truth — the sound he hears is Steven Hayes raping his
wife.
For hours, the
only thing that matters is getting himself off the
pole. He is slipping between wakefulness and delirium — he is a doctor, he knows
that, and he knows his blood pressure is low. He estimates his blood loss.
Eventually he figures out that if he stands up and then slides down the pole,
the weight of his body moving down raises his blood pressure and makes him feel
stronger. Up and down he goes, slowly building his strength while also trying to
free his hands and feet, the hard plastic ties slicing into his skin. Blurry
scraps of memory and life whir in and out of his sight line — tiny rocking
chairs from when the girls were toddlers, the cats' litter boxes, a miniature
puppet theater, tiki torches leaning against the wall, a table of paint
cans.
It can't be
more than an hour before the thumping that he hears Jennifer's sweet voice,
calmly telling the men that she needs to get her purse and her husband's
checkbook before going to the bank. He hears her call Mona, his secretary,
telling her that Bill won't be in until at least the afternoon and asking her to
cancel his morning appointments.
Before that,
darkness. He sits on a
mound of pillows and blankets that the men throw on him when they tie him to the
pole. The quilt that one of Hayley's elementary-school teachers made for her
high school graduation, just a few weeks ago, covers his head. He hears a
utility box click in the corner of the basement, the sprinkler system activating
— five-thirty. He hears a car start, maybe a couple of different times — one of
the men driving to a gas station to fill three plastic canisters with gasoline,
although he doesn't know that. He hears the birds — probably 4:45. He has lived
in this house for eighteen years. The house's familiar noises are his
clock.
And before
that, upstairs, the men pull out drawers, empty cupboards, turn over boxes —
they want a score, and they don't understand that most suburban families,
wealthy as their clapboarded, landscaped homes may give them away to be, don't
keep tens of thousands of dollars stacked neatly in their credenzas. The men do,
however, find bank statements showing that the Petits have close to $30,000 in a
Bank of America account. The plan changes from simple robbery. They'll wait
until the bank opens, and one of them will drive the wife there so she can
withdraw a bunch of money. Then, as Steven Hayes, the dumber, bulkier one,
understands it, they'll blindfold the family, lock them in their car in the
driveway, and burn the house down to get rid of the
evidence.
First, they
tie everybody up. Michaela's room is across the hall from Bill and Jen's, but
tonight she has fallen asleep next to Jen in the four-poster bed, in Bill's
spot. Hayley sleeps in her bed at the other end of the hall. Suddenly, in a
moment of confusing terror in the middle of the night, a man drags Michaela from
her parents' bed to her own, and the men force pillowcases over Jen's and the
girls' heads and tie their arms and legs to their
bedposts.
We only want
the money, the men tell them. Stay calm.
They've got to
get Petit downstairs, out of the way. As the attackers roust him, the doctor
figures he's been bleeding on the sunroom couch for close to two hours, maybe a
little less. Hard to tell, as Petit has been in and out of
consciousness. And even if he had been able to get up, the men would have
shot him if he had tried to leave the sunroom. Plus, what's he gonna do, hobble
up from behind and hit one of them with his strapped-together hands? But it's
terrible, the silence. The not knowing. He hasn't heard
anything from anywhere in the house — nothing from the girls. He doesn't know
where they are. Even in his horrible state — beaten nearly to death while asleep
on the couch — the impulse to protect is still
elemental.
The men cut
the restraints from his ankles so he can walk. When he stands, he wobbles — he
has lost so much blood already, and there's a shirt flung over his head so he
can't see. They walk him across the kitchen to the basement door. He holds his
tied hands out in front of him, feeling for the railing as his feet find their
way unsteadily down the wood stairs he knows by
heart.
One of the
guys has been doing all the talking. While Petit is still lying on the couch in
the sunroom, the talker tells him they're just there for the money, and to stay
calm. They ask him where the safe is, and he tells them there is no safe in the
house. The talker — the younger one — says to the other one, "If he moves, put
two bullets in him."
By this time
they've tied his wrists together with plastic zip ties, and then rope over
those, his palms pressed together as if in prayer. Warmth spreads across his
face — his own blood. He's been on a blood thinner called Coumadin since 2004,
when he had some heart troubles — he'd been passing out a lot, and it was
discovered that he had an irregular beat in the top chamber. And so as he lies
on the couch, he is bleeding out faster than most people would. His right eye
throbs.
The pain racks
every part of his head, there is blood in his eyes, and nothing is clear. Two
men look down at him. His eyes throb feverishly, but he sees these two figures
floating in the gauzy darkness, and at the end of an arm he sees a handgun. He
watches NCIS, and he's treated plenty of cops — it
looks like a 9mm. But whose gun is it? Not his. He doesn't own any weapons,
unless you count the baseball bat that the other guy is holding, the one he just
used to beat Bill's head with. The bat was a giveaway from Ronrico rum that he
got at a liquor store his dad used to own.
Jesus, what
time is it? It's got to be at least three. Where are the girls? The pain comes
slowly, like a thought. It feels strange, being awakened this way — you're
pretty sure you're in your home, but you can't see, and someone is hitting you,
hard. By the time you feel it, it stops.
He was just
dozing is all, safely in his own home on a safe street in a safe town. It's not
unusual for Petit to fall asleep on the comfortable sofa as he relaxes and
finally takes the time to read the morning
paper.
Bill Petit
clinches his eyes and worries the scar on his forehead, and once again the night
the world ended is being clinically dissected in courtroom 6A of the New Haven
Superior Court. "As you were going up the stairway from the first floor, did you
have any concerns for your safety, sir?" the prosecutor Nicholson asks.
Detective Vig-nola has disappeared, his story picked up by Rick Trocchi, a
volunteer firefighter who owns pizzerias. Nicholson is asking him about when he
first entered the home, minutes after the two invaders fled. Petit sits hunched
over, his arms hanging like thick anchor line on his lap. He knows what's
coming.
"The stairs
had been burned and they were structurally compromised. We could tell they had
lost some structural stability," Trocchi says.
"All
right. And in
addition to the stairs being compromised structurally, did you have — was there also some problems with the visibility going up the
stairs?"
"Yeah, there
was very little visibility and it was very hot up there as well. We could feel
the heat through our gear. Our gear is very, very thick. If you could feel the
heat, it's very hot."
"Now, you
indicated that you found a person at the top of the stairway leading up to the
second floor, is that correct, sir?"
"Yes,
sir."
Nicholson
handles a manila folder that he says contains two photographs and asks that the
marshal pass them to the judge. Only the judge and jury see these pictures —
they won't be displayed on the screen. They are photographs of the person
Trocchi saw at the top of the stairs. The judge asks for clarification as to who
it was.
Nicholson
nods. "Let me just ask you," he says to Trocchi, "sir, at the time, did you know
the identity of that person?"
"No."
"Have you
subsequently learned who that was?"
"Yes."
"Who was
it?"
"Hayley
Petit."
"All
right."
The marshal
takes the folder from the judge and hands it to the first juror in the box, who
opens it to see a color photograph of a seventeen-year-old girl lying facedown
on what looks like the surface of Mars — black and gray soot, craters of burned
carpet, ash all around her. Her head had landed just inside the door to the
bathroom, across the hall from the only bedroom she ever knew. She wears a
T-shirt and sweat shorts. Hayley Petit had escaped. After hours of struggle, she
had actually escaped from the rope and nylon restraints around her wrists and
ankles. She had fought and fought, covered in the gasoline that Steven Hayes had
bought at a Citgo station, to free herself from her own bed. But the trail of
gasoline led right to her bed, and even all her stamina and all her strength and
all her love were no match for a fire so hot that Firefighter Trocchi could feel
it through his gear a half hour later. She had used up everything. She just
fell, face forward in the hall.
Petit watches
the jurors open and close the manila folder containing the two photographs of
his older girl. Some look away. Some just stare. One woman's eyes crinkle up
with the unmistakable tears of shock. The only sound in the packed room is
the ffftt-fffftt of the courtroom artist's pastels on
paper.
Bill Petit
starts to flinch and fidget, the energy in his body searching for a way out. He
scratches his chin. He rubs his lips with his fingers. He flicks each finger off
his thumb, and the gold wedding ring that he has worn for twenty-five years
catches the light. He is willing himself to be in control, but then his
shoulders start jerking up and down. A little at first, and then more, and then
he is biting his lower lip. Throughout the trial — throughout his life — Bill
Petit has been Mr. In Control. Now and at all times he
has maintained an impossible stoic comportment. The emotional
range of statuary. The Petit way is to give up nothing. To charge always and only ahead. If you appear in control,
then goddammit you will be in control. Oh, goddammit. In front of all these
people, Bill Petit's composure has abandoned him. He desperately taps his
fingers, trying to make it go away, trying to stop. Ffffftt-fffftt. Hanna puts a hand on his back. The
manila folder passes from juror to juror. Petit squeezes his eyes shut and
lowers his head. No one knows where to look.
8.The
scars on his head eventually
heal, and his hair grows back to hide the places where the gashes were stapled
together. The last wounded stripe of crimson to disappear under a new layer of
skin, the way the grass grows back on the side of the highway after a car wreck,
is the one on his forehead — the one everyone could see. It's gone now, and his
face is restored.
One night soon
after the murders, in the room upstairs in his parents' house, Hanna sits with
him as the trees outside blacken with dusk. He is lying on the queen-size bed,
staring at the ceiling, rubbing his forehead where the scar used to be. His
fingers absently trace its invisible trail, rubbing the area around it as if in
search of it.
"That scar's
disappearing," Hanna says.
"Yeah."
"Everyone
probably thinks that's great. But it's not, is it? The scar told everyone you're
not okay. Maybe you want it back."
Petit looks at
his sister, rubs his head some more, and says, "How'd you
know?"
7.On
the morning of the memorial service, the
staples are still in his head, crusted with purple blood. They bind together the
flaps of scalp that the baseball bat tore apart 131 hours earlier. A long gash
cleaves the back left side of his head, and on the right side of his forehead, a
crimson line tears through the skin like a zipper, straight down from his
hairline before hooking in just above the
eyebrow.
A tailor from
Melluzzo's, a men's clothing store in the next town over, comes to the house to
make sure his new suit fits. The same man had appeared at St. Mary's Hospital a
few days before to measure him, because William A. Petit Jr., fifty years old,
successful endocrinologist, director of clinical research at the Hospital of
Central Connecticut, medical director of the prestigious Joslin Diabetes Center,
owner of a cream-colored four-bedroom colonial on a corner lot in a nice town,
has no clothes. Everything he owned burned in the fire. So somebody had called
Melluzzo's, and the man now shows up with a new charcoal suit, a crisp white
shirt, and a gray striped tie. Petit puts on the clothes, ties the tie with his
unsteady hands, stands before the mirror, and gingerly combs his dark hair over
the wound in the back.
A couple of
limousines arrive — the Petits are friends of the family that owns Bailey
Funeral Home in Plainville, and they sent the cars. The limos
pull into the circular drive in front of the house on Red Stone Hill, and Petit
climbs into the first one along with Bill Sr., Barbara, Hanna, and Steve Hanks.
Hanks is a buddy from the hospital — when he became
chief medical officer in 2004, Petit was running the childhood diabetes center.
Tall and slim with a face all sturdy angles and dark features, Hanks slides into
the seat next to Bill. He's a friend, but today he's at Petit's side as a
physician. Bill lost close to seven pints of blood in the attack — he feels
dizzy sometimes, the head wounds are still tender and throbbing, and his ankles
and wrists, where he was tied up, are lacerated and bruised. Bill Petit is a
mess.
The day
before, Friday, after he had been released from St. Mary's and after the private
funeral, he went to the house on Red Stone Hill because his own home, while
still standing, is gutted. Petit spent the night at his folks' but didn't sleep
much. It wasn't his bed, his new clothes felt funny, and when he reached over to
turn off the lamp on the nightstand, he noticed how different it felt from the
one next to his own bed, in the bedroom he and Jennifer shared for eighteen
years.
No one says
much on the ride to Welte Hall, the auditorium at Central Connecticut State University. The state police escort the
limousines all the way from Plainville to
New Britain, and
by the time they get off Route 9, the Petits can see cars streaming onto the
campus. It's a Saturday morning in July, so there isn't much else going on at
CCSU. The cars pack the four-story garage next to the hall and spill over into
the student-center lot out back. The sky is a matte, solid gray, and the air is
thick and hot and smells like rain. The people, hundreds and hundreds of them,
and then thousands of them, converge purposefully and silently on the six double
doors that lead into Welte. They've heard about the service on the news or read
about it in the papers. Most are dressed up, some aren't; they are old and
young, from all over the state, must be. They come to offer hope, or in search
of it, or both.
And there are
the girls in black dresses. So many girls in black dresses —
high school girls, clutching one another as they walk. Friends of the Pet-it girls. Reporters, notepads and
recorders stuffed into breast pockets, nose around the big, round patio out
front, acting hesitant, approaching some of the girls in black dresses, asking,
"Excuse me, hi, I'm so sorry. Are you a friend of Hayley's?" Some of the girls
stop to talk.
CCSU workers
had prepared the day before, hauling folding tables, arranging chairs, and
dragging a heavy red cloak across the stage as a backdrop. When the doors open
at ten, the people file in, quietly filling the 1,814 scratchy maroon seats in
minutes. The lobby, a good twenty feet deep, jams up, too — the school has set
up TV screens out there to show the service, and more in overflow rooms. By the
time the service begins, four thousand people are watching the
stage.
Three easels
stand behind the podium, each displaying a poster crowned with white roses and
curtained with lace, blown-up photographs of the girls. Petit sits in a room
backstage, waiting for the service to begin. Ron is there too, Bucchi. Thank God
for Ron Bucchi. Ron has taken care of everything. He camped out at the hospital
all week while Bill recovered, set up a makeshift office in a conference room,
where he did it all: ordered the coffins — Petit's only instruction was that
they be white; he left the rest to Ron — dealt with the press, set up this thing
today, this memorial, which was supposed to begin in a few minutes. During the
few days of planning, Ron had to convince the Cheshire United Methodist Church, Bill and Jen's church, to back
down from a more ambitious pageant — "people wanted a Busby Berkeley
production," he would say later. Bucchi, Hanks, and the hunched, worried inner
circle in that backstage room just want to get Bill through this before he
passes out.
The pastor
from United Methodist speaks. Hanna speaks — beautifully, breathing hard,
showing on this numb morning a strength that Bill, the
oldest sibling and always the leader, will come to depend on. Jennifer's father
speaks with a coppery voice that sounds like wisdom. There are songs,
readings.
But nobody
thinks Petit will speak. He isn't even listed in the program. He's recovering
from wounds that would have killed many men, and he is in shock. Sure, last
night, when Ron left the Petits' house around eight-thirty, Bill had told him
that yeah, he was gonna stay up and work on his remarks. And Hanna had read a
draft — last night, or this morning, it was a blur. But nobody thinks he will
actually stand up — the wounds on his head still soft and red and pulsing, his
vision blurry at times — and speak to all these faces. But at the right moment,
Petit gives Steve Hanks a little nod, and Hanks helps him to the podium, a hand
on his elbow to steady him. Bill buttons the top two buttons of his unfamiliar
suit jacket, pats his breast pocket to find the folded copy of his speech. Hanks twists open a water bottle for him and adjusts the mic.
Four thousand people draw quick whispers of air, watching in disbelief as the
doctor lumbers up to the front of the stage. Petit is six-four and built like a
truck, but he's lost so much blood and so much family, and everyone is staring
at him. He feels as if he is in another man's body. His new shoes feel unnatural
on his feet, and the stage is foreign under their soles. Hanna, Ron, his parents
— everybody is praying that he won't drop to the floor right there in Welte
Hall. Everyone would understand.
He doesn't
drop to the floor. He stands and he speaks for twenty-two minutes. He makes the
crowd laugh a little and does an imitation of Michaela walking around staring at
the floor in shyness. She was always big for her age, and he says how they used
to call the girls who made fun of her "skinny dwarf girls." And then at the end,
he takes a deep breath and, with his voice faltering and his eyes focused down
at the podium, says, "I guess if there's anything to be gained from the
senseless deaths of my beautiful family, it's for us to all go forward with the
inclination to live with a faith that embodies action, help a neighbor, fight
for a cause, love your family." And here he looks up at the four thousand
people. "I'm really expecting all of you to go out and do some of these things
with your family in your own little way, to spread the work of these three
wonderful women. Thank you."And the four thousand people stand and clap for more
than a minute.
6.Bill
is giddy —
or as giddy as Bill Petit gets — about seeing Hayley. She's a star, that kid.
Confident, quiet, smart, hardworking — and strong. Six
feet, all muscle. She's been away for a few days, and while it's always fun to
hang out with sweet Michaela, Hays will go off to Dartmouth in just a couple of months. He
couldn't be prouder of her attending his alma mater, but he's going to miss
her.
On his way
home from playing golf with his dad, he checks in with Jen, who reports that
Michaela is cooking dinner for the family. Perfect. He speeds home to get his
hug from Hays and eat whatever delicious thing KK is making. She's been watching
the Food Network a lot, and, for an eleven-year-old, she can really
cook.
The sky is
clouding up, but the evening air is bright and warm, and Sorghum Mill Drive
is quiet. They decide to eat in the sunroom. Jen helps Michaela serve the pasta
with sauce she made with local tomatoes, which Petit makes a fuss over, and
after supper the girls sit around the table talking. Petit picks up the Sunday
paper and sinks into the living-room couch. After a while, he glances up and
sees that it's going on ten. "Hey, girls," he calls. Ten o'clock Sunday night is
when Army Wives comes on, a new show they like, some soap opera. The girls take over the living-room couch,
and Bill goes back out to the sunroom. He's pooped — he got some sun on the golf
course, the night is warm, and he just ate a plate of pasta. Long before the
girls' show ends, he's out cold on the couch, a section of the newspaper on his
chest. After Army
Wives ends at eleven, the
girls lock up the house and go upstairs to bed. With her dad asleep on the couch
downstairs, Michaela curls up in her parents' bed and falls asleep next to
Jennifer.
This isn't the
first time Petit has zonked out on the couch for the night. He wakes at six most
mornings and works till seven or eight at night, then comes home and spends a
couple of hours with the girls before reading and working some more. He's never
needed much sleep, but ever since Jennifer's MS diagnosis, she gets tired early.
He doesn't like to wake her when he climbs into bed, and anyway, he can function
fine after a night on the couch, even on five or six hours of
sleep.
He awakens
from a dream to find himself in a dark house except for the lamp by the couch.
The newspaper has drifted to the floor. Must be after
midnight. He reaches up to turn off the light, closes his eyes, and falls
back asleep.
5.Around
the time the
Petits sit down to dinner, somewhere in Connecticut a forty-four-year-old lowlife
named Steven Hayes, who's been in and out of jail and on and off crack for his
entire adult life, punches out a text message to his friend Joshua
Komisarjevsky: "I'm chomping at the bit to get started. Need a margarita
soon."
Hayes met
Komisarjevsky, who's twenty-six, at a halfway house in Hartford. They had done
some construction work and talked about starting a contracting business
together. That was Komisarjevsky's idea — Hayes isn't the ambitious type. Lately
Komisarjevsky had been trying to convince Hayes that they can pull down some
easy money by breaking into a house. He does it all the time, he says — he knows
all the tricks. And Josh knows Steve needs cash. He's been sleeping on the couch
at his mother's condo, with his younger brother on the floor, but recently she
threatened to kick Steve out and told him he can't use her car anymore. He's on
parole — he had been breaking into cars to steal money in the same parking lot
day after day, and finally the cops caught him in what must've been one of the
shortest stakeouts ever. He just got a decent gig doing construction at an
apartment complex, but it isn't enough cash, and he's been hitching a ride with
the boss, which won't last. A quick score sounds pretty
good.
The night
before, July 21, they had gone on a test run. They met up in Cheshire, and while Hayes
stood waiting outside, Komisarjevsky had slipped into two different houses. He
didn't take much — he was just showing Hayes how easy it was. At one house, he
produced a framed group photo to show Hayes how many adults might have been
sleeping upstairs.
They'd do it
for real the next night.
An hour passes
after Hayes sends his text, and he hasn't heard back from Komisarjevsky. At
8:45, he types: "We still on?"
The response,
two minutes later: "Yes."
"Soon?" Hayes writes
back.
"I'm putting
kid to bed hold your horses," comes the response. Komisarjevsky has a
five-year-old daughter.
A half hour
later, Hayes gets antsy again and texts, "Dude the horses want 2 get loose!
lol."
4.Earlier
that day,Sunday,
July 22, Bill, Jennifer, and Michaela attend the nine-thirty service at the
Cheshire United Methodist Church, a hulking white building built in 1970 and
redolent of the unfortunate architecture of the era — an overlapping series of
featureless, cutout facades with faux peaks. Hayley is away at a friend's house
for the weekend or she'd be here, too. The Reverend Stephen Volpe, a buoyant,
moonfaced man whom everyone calls Pastor Steve, leads the worship, standing as
he always does in front of the austere dark cross, backlit on a gleaming white
slab behind the altar.
The three
Petits stand for the opening prayer, a call-and-answer between Pastor Steve and
the congregation, taken from The Africana Worship
Book:
Invisible God,
be visible through our faith today.
Praise God who
empowers us with faith to see what others miss.
Will we stop
our building a better future because of evil?
No! Our God
will deliver us from evil.
Will we
concede our dreams for our world, your Creation, because of
evil?
No, God will
judge all evildoers.
Pastor Steve
doesn't give a sermon. Instead, some church members who have participated in the
United Methodist Action Reach-Out Mission by Youth, or U. M. ARMY, speak about
their experience on that year's weeklong mission. Bill and Jen feel a certain
pride listening to this. One of the first members of Cheshire United Methodist
to participate in U. M. ARMY, a few years earlier, was Hayley
Petit.
By the time
Bill, Jen, and Michaela walk out of church, Hayley is already on her way home
from her friend's house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a beach town north of Boston, where a bunch of
her gang went after graduation to hang out one more time before the summer wears
thin and everybody scatters off to college. She's driving the old Mercedes
clunker that her parents felt was as safe as any car for a seventeen-year-old
girl to drive. Hayley calls it the Tank.
Some Sundays,
Bill and Michaela sneak up the road to the quaint Notch Store for the homemade
doughnuts that they serve only on Sundays. It's supposed to be their secret —
Jen tries to get her husband to eat healthy — but somehow Michaela always lets
it slip. Today, though, they head home for lunch. It's a July Sunday, with
mercifully little to do. Petit's dad calls and asks if he wants to play golf,
which he usually does. The sky above central Connecticut is as blue as it gets, and the
temperature is already up over 80. Jen and Michaela tell him to go — they're
thinking of heading to the beach anyway, and that's not Bill's thing. This is
something of a routine during the summer months at home or on vacation: girls in
the sun, Bill on the golf course. It works for
everybody.
On his way to
the club Petit calls his friend Ron Bucchi, too, to see if he wants to join him
and his dad at the club. But Ron is working in the yard and he hasn't shaved all
weekend, and he figures that by the time he showers and shaves and drives the
fifteen minutes to the club ... he tells Petit to go ahead, he'll catch him next
weekend.
3.The
golf relieves some
of the pressure of the work that keeps him away from his girls so much. Petit
brings Hayley on his rounds at New Britain General when she's too small even to
see over the patients' beds. It's one way he can spend time with her, but it's
also his way of showing her the world. He's not trying to teach her medicine;
he's teaching her about people. In some patients' rooms, finger paintings and
Magic Markered get-well cards paper the walls. In other rooms, the walls are
bare. Petit tells Hayley how nice it would be if she drew pictures for the
people in the rooms that looked the
loneliest.
He teaches her
everything he can think of. As a girl, she knows the name of every tree and
every bird. Once, when she was a toddler, he took hold of her hand and held it a
few inches over a candle's flame — nowhere near close enough to burn but close
enough to feel the heat — and said, "Hot,
hot."
She can't
always be with him, of course, and that's hard. But for one thing, when he isn't
home, he's helping people, and that's good, right? That's one belief that he and
Jennifer hold fast: You help people. Plus, the more he works, the more he can
provide for his girls. He has started doing speaking gigs all over the country —
driving, flying, talking to roomfuls of people about
endocrinology. It's wearing him out, and Hanna, for one, talks to him about
slowing down — at least cutting out the travel. He tells her she doesn't get it:
It's miserable, but he can make $2,000 in a night and it goes right into the
girls' college funds. Hanna makes a face when she sees the McDonald's wrappers
on the floor of his car after one of his trips, and he looks at her like, What am I supposed to do?
Hayley is nine
years old in 1998, when Jennifer is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Bill and
Jen sit her down and talk to her about it, and the little girl gets the idea
that it's up to her to try to save her mother's life. On a pad of lined paper
she begins handwriting notes to her friends and family, asking them to sponsor
her in the annual Connecticut MS Walk. She calls her team Hayley's Hope. She
waits and waits, and then the envelopes start appearing in the mail at her house
with checks inside. And each year, she does it again, sending her letters out
like clockwork to Aunt Hanna, to Aunt Cindy, to the Bucchis — by her senior
year, after about seven years of mailing out the letters and walking the MS
walk, she has raised $55,000 to fight multiple sclerosis and save her mother's
life. When Hayley graduates, Michaela wants to continue her big sister's
efforts. She plans to rename the team Michaela's
Miracle.
Petit grows
flowers for the girls. It gives him some peace on the weekends, away from the
phone calls, the rounds, and the research — the soft, cool dirt on his hands,
the sweet smells, and, usually, Michaela kneeling next to him, the two of them
chatting away. She loves to plant. As they pat the soil over each bulb, she
tells him that the plants have to be "cozy." Pots of daffodils
in the backyard, flowering hostas around the patio, a bed of brilliant orange
and yellow four-o'clocks behind a cairn at the end of the driveway. It's
their special activity.
Of course,
whenever it's time to pull weeds, Michaela
disappears.
2.The
girl in the bed is
suffering. She has post-strep glomerulonephritis, a painful kidney disorder that
can last for months. She lies in a bed at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, in a corner
room just past the nurses' station. Her name is
Becky.
Bill Petit, a
third-year med student, walks in like he owns the place. There's a nurse
standing over Becky, and Petit stops in his tracks — the nurse is a knockout.
Thin and pretty with blond hair and the big, playful eyes of a calf. He
immediately goes into know-it-all med-student mode, trying to show the young
nurse how to check Becky's blood pressure. The nurse watches patiently, smiles,
and when the tall med student is finished, she proceeds to do it the correct
way.
Jennifer Hawke
is a local preacher's kid. Her family has always lived in the parsonage of
whatever church her father was assigned to. She doesn't go out much — her
younger sister, Cindy, sometimes has to coax Jenny into having what most people
think of as fun. Pittsburgh is a workingman's city in 1981, and
people blow off steam at night. But Jen never has much energy for the bar scene,
with its unimpressive men. She told one guy she was a pediatric nurse, and he
whispered in her ear that she could probably give him a really great foot rub.
She was confused for a second, but then she understood: The dope thought pediatric meant she was a foot
doctor.
This guy Bill
seems different, though. Eventually he asks her out, and for their first date he
takes her to dinner at a place called Tramp's — with his parents. They happen to
have driven out from Connecticut for a visit, and Bill didn't think
anything of asking them to come along. Why wouldn't Jen want to meet his
parents?
Well, Cindy
thinks it's a little weird. It's weird that Jenny's going on a date with a guy
named Bill in the first place. Who's named Bill? They have an uncle named Bill,
and it seems like an old man's name. And then this first date — he's taking her
to a place called Tramp's. It's not a bad place, downtown near where the
Ohio River meets the Allegheny and the
Monongahela. A locals' joint. But ... Tramp's? Cindy
can't believe it. And to top it all off: his parents,
too!
Jennifer dated
the same boy through most of high school. He was like another member of the
family, and Cindy thinks of him as a kind of older brother. He and Jen have been
broken up for years, and he's gone off to Harvard and lives in Boston. One weekend, after
Bill and Jen have been dating for a while, Bill is over at the house. Cindy is
taking a trip to Boston to interview for jobs, and she's
planning to crash at Jen's old boyfriend's place. Bill hears this and he
bristles. Cindy is sitting on the counter in the kitchen by herself, and Bill
walks in and puts his hands on the counter on either side of her, looks her in
the eye, and asks her what she's up to. Why is she staying at this guy's
apartment? Is Cindy trying to get them back
together?
It isn't like
that, Cindy tells him — this guy is a family friend. The confrontation makes her
feel awkward. But to Bill, Jennifer Hawke isn't just any girl. He's falling in
love with her, and he's not taking any chances.
1.At
Plainville
High School, each
senior is allowed to write a quotation under his or her photo in the yearbook,
the Beacon. Under a handsome picture, his hair just about combed and his
sideburns framing a solemn stare with just the hint of a smile, Billy writes
this: "I never quit and I never lose and when the going gets tough I get
going."
He can't be
more than thirteen or fourteen, already over six feet, when his father leaves
him to run the family grocery store by himself — he's what the grown-ups call
"mature." Standing at the till selling milk to the ladies running their errands
in town and cigarettes to the men after their lunches at the Main Street Diner,
Billy never flinches. He watches his father at work, so he knows how a man is
supposed to act. On vacations, Bill and Barbara pile all five kids into the car
and drive off somewhere beautiful, sometimes without a plan. They stop at some
motel, and it's Billy, not his dad, who runs inside to
ask whether they have any rooms, what the rate is, and whether the guy can do
any better. Rawboned, ten or eleven years old, and he's negotiating a good price
while Pops keeps the car idling.
Bill Sr.'s
voice is deep as a gravel pit and he never raises it. He's pragmatic and equable
and friendly. At home, Bill and Barbara run an orderly household, and for a
family of five kids within seven years, there isn't much drama. Billy might lock
his younger brother Glenn out of their bedroom — problematic because Billy's the
only one, including his parents, who knows how to lock the interior doors — but
most of the time, the days are sewn together by
routine. Barbara keeps a chore chart on the refrigerator, and when the kids are
done playing ball on Hemingway
Street or racing through the woods in Norton Park,
they report home for dinner and homework.
There's never
much grass behind the house under the basketball hoop — Billy has dribbled it
away. He dribbles hard, pounding the ball into the dirt, same way he does in the
gym. He's competitive as all hell, even with his own teammates. Ron Bucchi plays
on the same Knights of Columbus team in junior high, the Columbian Squires.
They're regional champs for a couple of years, making the three-hour ride from
Plainville to Glens
Falls, New York, up past Saratoga
Springs.
At Plainville
High, Billy is captain of the basketball team, a shooting guard, although he's
tall enough that sometimes the coach puts him on the low post. For away games,
Ron and Billy sneak good grinders onboard and eat them in the back of the bus,
but that's as close as they come to causing trouble. Mostly they just sit and
watch the towns slip by. Billy leads the Blue Devils to the CIAC tournament his
senior year, 1974. He's class president. National Honor
Society. Wins the Boys' State Award and the D.A.R. History Award — the
day they take pictures for that one, he wears these Mad Hatter checkered pants,
just the loudest things you've ever seen, and spreads his thin lips into a grin.
Not smug. Pleased.
Bill Sr. says
he never taught his oldest boy to have drive, he just had it naturally. Billy's
brain always seemed to work harder and his long limbs seemed to move faster than
everyone else's. He is a "self-starter," his dad says. That's all. He doesn't
talk much about his accomplishments — in an old Yankee family like the Petits',
you don't brag. You go about your business and don't cause a fuss. And you have
a plan. It's like Billy tells his little sister, Hanna: She's into gymnastics,
but he tells her she's going to be big like him and ought to stick to playing
ball, because that's gonna be her game, and you gotta think about these
things.
After
graduation, Billy turns down Yale — he doesn't want to be in a city — and
attends Dartmouth, up in the New Hampshire woods. He
plays ball his freshman year, but he soon figures out that even at a small Ivy
League school like Dartmouth, everybody was captain of his high
school team. He could have hung in, but between his schoolwork and earning
money, it's too much. He has a partial track scholarship, which helps
financially — Bill Sr. does well for himself, but the Pet-its
are like most families in Plainville: They have what they need but not
much more. Billy lands a work/study gig in the cafeteria. And every week, it
seems, he whizzes into McNutt Hall, a hulking brick-and-granite fortress on the
edge of the college green that houses administrative offices, including
financial aid. He asks the folks whether there might be any other scholarships
or grants he has overlooked or that no one has claimed. Any
other jobs? Any more dollars? He pops in so
frequently that they know him by name. All Bill Sr. can do is shake his head and
admire the way this kid figures out how to better himself, how to make life work
for him. How to get what he wants. Billy Petit's a born
survivor.
But is there
such a thing? The footsteps along the path that makes up a life prepare you for
any number of things that can be thrown at you, or they don't. Why does one man
come undone while the next finds a way to make it through? Maybe the answer can
be found at the very start.
Look at Billy
Petit. Once, when he was real little, no more than two, Billy disappears from
the house early in the morning. Nobody can find him. The Petits are about as
even-keeled as they come, but Barbara panics — Billy's still in diapers. And
he's nowhere in the house, so she runs outside, calling his name. Nowhere in the yard. Oh, Lord. Billy. Finally, she finds him
down the street at the neighbor's, eating strawberries right off the stems, easy
as you please, beaming like the sun, his tiny fingers sticky with the sweet red
juice of summer.
http://www.esquire.com/features/william-petit-case-0611