It’s no wonder the judge sentenced Jackson to nineteen years in prison. Eaves testified, as promised, against the third and final dealer charged in the conspiracy, but without hand-to-hand buys as evidence, the jury was deadlocked and Jackson’s accomplice was set free. When Ryan heard this news, he called the DA to ask about Eaves’s testimony, to ensure she had followed through on her promises and was absolved of her troubled past.
“Yeah, she testified consistent with her statement, but you know what?” the DA said. “I heard she ODed this weekend.” Ryan’s lungs imploded. He had noticed Eaves’s cell number in the backlog of messages on his voice mail that morning, and the memory compelled him to hang up quickly with the DA and listen, when usually he let the messages accumulate to the point of inertia.
“Hello, Ryan, sir. This is Darlene Eaves’s boyfriend. I’m afraid I have some bad news. Darlene is deceased, at the moment.” Ryan played the recording a dozen times. Her boyfriend seemed to believe Eaves would rise from her gurney, but heroin had been nicknamed “dead on arrival” for a reason, and Eaves would remain deceased now and for an everlasting fermata of moments.
At times like these, Ryan felt more bewildered than sad. He drifted through work, seeing double—versions of Eaves, living and dead—as if the effects of drug use were contagious. He’d drafted McNally’s obituary in his mind a dozen times and was therefore stunned when Darlene Eaves was the first to require a eulogy. What pushed her to use again? She was certainly a judicial system pawn; to some extent, everybody involved was a user. To memorialize her death, Ryan thought maybe he could play a preventive role in other clients’ lives. He mustered up what little energy remained for the workweek, before compassion fatigue settled back in, to lay out options for his other heroin addicts, first and foremost McNally: inpatient treatment at Nova Counseling Services, serious detox, a good dose of willpower. Ryan made personal visits to McNally, now in jail, to ensure he had a plan for sobriety when he was released, and when he was, Ryan was the first person he visited.
“I want to help you, man,” Ryan said, reaching over the surface of his desk toward McNally on the other side. “I’ll make it my mission.”
“The craving won’t ever go away,” McNally said. “I’ll be a sixty-year-old man, and I’ll crave the smack.”
Ryan tried to imagine this junkie older and wiser, he’d tell me in recounting the conversation.
“You looked like dog shit the last time I saw you,” Ryan said. “Glad to see you fattened up in there.” In four months, he’d gained about thirty pounds, McNally more efficient at bulking up than I was during any of my pregnancies.
Before going to jail, McNally had told Ryan and me about the time he found himself outside a Kwik Trip, crushing and shooting up five Ritalin, and he couldn’t even get high. “I looked down at my bloody arms, and I realized I didn’t have nobody, I didn’t have nothing, except you,” McNally said to Ryan, choking up, some unseen force willing him to speak. He and I were on opposite corners of Ryan’s desk, facing each other, and I leaned hard into the sharp edge, attempting to close the distance between us.
“If you could change anything about your life, what would it be?” I asked McNally, yearning to possess something hard and real from his private war against addiction. He made a fist as if coaxing out a vein, and I stood up to hug him, his body rigid and unaccustomed to affection. “I wish I had different parents,” he said, and then he began to weep.
Ryan was never sure when McNally departed if he’d ever see the guy again, but I’d see illusions of his mother, Mama McNally, everywhere and often, in the phlebotomist at the hospital, the plunger of the syringe cocked; or on the back of a Harley along Highway 41 between Milwaukee and Oshkosh, laughter caught up in the full-throttle rumble of a Sunday joyride. Sometimes I even saw Mama McNally in my very own bathroom mirror, and I’d ask myself, Well, what kind of mother will you be today? And tomorrow, and a year from tomorrow?
CHAPTER 3:
The Bandwagon for Animals
The first time Ryan’s casework made the news, I was shaking hands and kissing babies: I’d won the campaign for our fourth child. Ryan muttered in private, cracked jokes in public. No sooner had I matured into a globe on a spindle than I happened upon a geologist from campus who was genuinely shocked by my girth. “Is this number three, now?”
“Number four,” I told him.
“Imagine that,” he said. “That’s a lot of carbon footprints.”
This pregnancy marked a shift in Ryan’s casework from behind-the-scenes to public-eye advocacy. He couldn’t always advocate quietly for his clients anymore, especially when the news media caught wind of whom he defended and for what. Although family came first, Ryan’s sense of duty to provide for his clients, to provide for us, had ratcheted up, causing him to double down with twice the anxiety. As defendants looked at him with the eyes of needy children, he slept less, often on our sofa, without blankets or pillows, sports commentators crooning him to sleep. He wheezed on the brink of an asthma attack, sighed constantly, and bit off our heads for breakfast. “God, what’s he crabby about?” people asked me. They had no idea he was like one of these guys discovered,
