And like his elders, he often spoke of facts, arrangements, and events in a rushed, jumbled, confounding, broken way that, purposely or not, further obscured any truth and avoided confrontation while leaving the listener unsure of what he’d said and afraid or embarrassed to press for specifics. It was the perfect cloaking device.
DAY AND NIGHT
My acquaintance’s prophecy to the contrary, the boys did not “come out of there” as their sister did, but on and off, as Benny and Jessica gradually allowed Michael to visit with Will and me, we became more friendly and operated with the illusion of trust. We let that polite illusion settle over everything, but it seemed then as delicate as one of those foil emergency blankets that reflects body heat but seems likely to blow away or be crumpled up and thrown away in an instant. Even so, absolutely nothing required that Jessica allow Michael to see us, and at almost any point for the next decade she had the full right to cut our ties completely and at any moment.
No matter how illusory that veneer of trust was, I sincerely believed that anything I might do to help any close or extended family member, child or adult, find medical care or community opportunities or simply to get from one place to another would strengthen the whole in some small way and bond us through experience and goodwill.
Beyond that, I tried to use my letter-writing skills to help Benny resolve any number of bureaucratic issues. My reliable phone and computer gave me the ability and persistence to track down answers, while my convenient credit card too often made utility cutoffs and medical bills magically disappear. Will hired Jessica’s brother, father, and Benny to re-roof our garage; we shared Thanksgiving and Scout potlucks, where conservative Christian parents overlooked the long hair and alcohol-infused slurring, accepted Benny’s offers to assemble the pinewood derby track for the boys’ annual wooden car competition, and said nothing when he cussed out the judge for the regional race.
But Benny seemed never more purposeful than when it would fall to him to take Michael or Ryan up into the hills on his four-wheeler and comfort them about the most recent failings of their birth father, Luke—everything from a missed visit to another prison sentence. Benny was there for them, he wanted them to know: for good and bad, this understanding sank in. Certainly at times the boys loved Benny and felt sorry for him when he suffered days-long spells of silent sadness. The boys would creep around the house, watching videos or playing Guitar Hero on mute, or they messed around outside in the woods with scavenged car parts for hours, as Benny lay in the corner of a darkened room, haunted by old losses, a sheet draped over the window to mute the light. Often at these times, Jessica would call to ask if I wanted to come get the boys for a few days, knowing I’d jump at the chance. “Can’t Mom come with us, too?” the boys would often beg me, fearing they’d return to find her dead, not knowing I’d asked her myself, out of their hearing. Occasionally, she would allow me to drop her off somewhere, but usually she’d say that Benny was harmless at that point and that she was afraid to leave him alone in a depressed condition. Relieved as the boys seemed once they’d climbed into my car, I was sure they felt guilty to leave her behind.
Seeing Benny laid low, it was hard to picture his frightening rages, much less the usual brassy cheer and party spirit he brought to everything when he felt okay. In good times, Benny loved to work and seemed to feel most himself when working, whether work was crawling across a roof in blistering July heat, replacing spark plugs for a neighbor, or rolling paint down a wall in invisibly blended strokes. Work was his salvation, but there was never enough of it to last long.
As time went on, though, I noticed that Jessica began to arrange never to be alone with Benny, whether that was by babysitting cousins’ kids, offering a couch to semihomeless friends, or even allowing Michael to stay behind to soothe Benny through an extra-bad morning and saddle himself with the impossible burden of curing an adult’s grief.
Jessica watched the moon phases, as I began to, half-believing the full moon predicted the times of greatest danger. I worried Benny might die at his low times, but that they all might die at the peak ones. I tried hard never to be out of phone range. I didn’t travel out of state or overnight without them. And I knowingly missed the last years of my only grandmother’s life because she lived across the ocean. No one asked me to do this. I just knew I couldn’t leave them.
FOR ONCE in my life, I wanted people to tell me my dread was baseless—that I was being paranoid and overreacting. I never doubted that Benny loved Jessica and her kids, yet no one who knew Michael’s family, from within or without, thought my fear for their lives an exaggeration, least of all the children. (“We’re a re-active agency,” different social workers would tell me apologetically the few times I directly dared to seek them out. “We can’t react to something that hasn’t happened yet.”) For a decade my heart twisted coldly in my chest every time I read or heard about a father, stepfather, or boyfriend who had killed an entire family. Sometimes these killings came out of fury, revenge, or impending loss. Even more alarming was when the killer reportedly had decided that life was too painful to live, so he would spare his loved ones in advance. And who could predict the amplifying effects of alcohol and drugs on moods that could shift from day to night within an hour?
Plus it wasn’t just self-medication: Jessica’s desperate fix when marijuana failed to soothe Benny’s fury or despair was to stuff as many Valium as she could find down his throat and hope he’d sleep his way out of it. It’s not even that he was averse to seeking help or spilling a blue streak of terrifying emotions and histories to any professional who would listen; it wasn’t that there were no basic resources for the uninsured and desperate. The help was there, at least to the frustration-filled degree it may be for those who lack means and reliable transportation and are tired of being told what to do, but to me Benny seemed just too ill for the system—too damaged by life and chemistry; too numbed by mood stabilizers; too pulled by his morning beer and all day vodka-spiked Sprite; too yoked by the addictions from which he claimed he’d saved girlfriends; and too purely dangerous for any woman or child to live with.
Except that they did. So why would no one, least of all DSS—or Mom herself—put a stop to it? When, Will and I implored each other, would Jessica ever really leave him? I ranted for years to anyone foolish or caring enough to ask how Michael was doing or, with a worried glance, how “Mom” was doing. And Grandma—biodad Luke’s mom, Irene—and I would rage together to each other, demanding answers of the air.
To her great credit, Jessica often would call me when Benny was near his worst—although I realized I would never see his actual worst, and hers, which might have gotten the kids removed. Jessica knew I’d drive over to get them at any hour, whether they were a county away and it was snowing, or (later) back in this county, which meant winding across eleven miles of gravel above the river’s edge. “Please, phone me anytime,” I begged her.
“Hopefully, she’ll keep calling you” was all our social worker Gerri would say—could say. Until the kids were in imminent, concrete danger, awaiting a midnight rescue by police whom the kids couldn’t call with a crushed or drowned cell phone, by police whom Jessica, the boys, and her parents had been taught from birth never, ever to call. That was the moment when Social Services could legally step in.
NEED TO KNOW
Eight months later the state was doing a random check on the disposition of the county’s cases and picked Jessica’s family file, apparently by chance. A representative from the state was coming to the area, and each of us had to show up and speak with him—separately, like criminals, I thought, to see if our stories matched. We were getting to visit with Michael every couple of weeks then, so I had already started treading lightly, feeling for tremors, ever alert for a misstep. What if I said something negative that the representative would then question Jessica about? She would see I’d known more than she’d realized and that she was right not to trust me. (The one card I held—both major asset and liability—was Jessica’s mistaken belief that I could bring in the authorities.)
The representative was young and looked like any gigantic college boy suddenly boxed into a borrowed suit. The state’s questions were designed to elicit nothing but predetermined short answers—no open-ended questions, none of the “tell me about x” openings that workers from Child Protective Services used