This one piece of evidence—a rectangle of fabric meant to withstand modern warfare, meant to outlive the soldier himself—was what Ryan dwelled upon, the alleged murder scene turning increasingly ridiculous. Why was Molly still wet, if Michalik had drowned her forty-eight (or more) hours earlier? And how was Ziegler so swift to patch together a report, a plausible play-by-play, if the evidence she discovered, in the presence of the police officer, was as surprising as it should have been?
While initial evidence against Michalik was damning, Ryan scrutinized the theatrics with which Ziegler produced additional proof, seeing more and more clearly that Ziegler’s clues were too perfect to believe. If Ryan were to focus exclusively on refuting seemingly uncompromised evidence against Michalik in Wilson’s death, jurors might believe he killed Molly too, but if Ryan were to raise suspicion in Molly’s death, jurors might believe all the evidence was planted. But if Michalik had not killed the cats, Ziegler was the only other possibility, and the image of this pregnant mother wrestling her whiskered creature beneath the water, black legs thwacking the plastic tub, was less conceivable than a soldier reenacting violence against animals. Dressing in his army uniform to drown a kitten as if laundering dirty shorts, his face reflected in the water above Molly’s writhing claws: this sounded like the kind of formulaic and predictable tale jurors would believe.
Nevertheless, Ryan became increasingly convinced that Michalik was innocent, at least in Molly’s death. As spring thickened and he taught our children, in order of birth, to ride a bike, to memorize the Milwaukee Brewers lineup, and to speak in clear and complete sentences, I spent time thinking of women like Andrea Yates and Susan Smith. Both had drowned their human babies, debunking myths about motherhood we once accepted. Was Cali Ziegler willing to sacrifice her cats if it meant locking up the baby’s father, denying him access to their child? If Michalik were behind bars, Ziegler would be free to raise their son entirely on her own terms.
Was Ziegler a professional victim, and attention-seeking a symptom? Was violence its manifestation, and if so, against what other living things, her own child included, might this violence be used? One does wonder if flashbacks are contagious, memories of explosion and death stamped like DNA onto the egg at the moment of conception, then incubating there. Perhaps Michalik and Ziegler suffered from strains of the same delirium. Maybe Michalik killed only one cat, but in an effort to draw the community’s attention, Ziegler drowned the second, before settling in to bathe her own weary body, filled mysteriously with life. Joseph Michalik and the mother of his unborn son might lean over the same bridge between stability and madness, right where I too hovered. Was the inheritance of heartache passed genetically through the devious games of science?
Around the time Irie was born, we learned, through ancestry research, that one of my maternal great-great grandmothers, Wilhelmina Krohn, lost eight of her twelve children to infant death. On the cusp of the twentieth century, infant mortality plagued families. Before widespread post–Industrial Revolution improvements in things like public health, clinical medicine, and sanitation, between 15 and 30 percent of babies in America, depending on city and region, died before turning one. It’s no wonder mothers are still superstitious about naming their children. Is it possible that Wilhelmina’s period of mourning, a century later, has yet to expire? While mothers then were conditioned not to attach too quickly to their babies, the physical experience of pregnancy has remained unchanged. To birth babies that readily die, one after another, must fray the psyche.
When my counselors diagnosed my inherited strain of depression, perhaps they meant this to include a predisposition for feeling Wilhelmina’s pain, siphoned from her genomes to mine, homage to babies who wasted away or died suddenly from the same germs traveling different pathways—bad water, unpasteurized milk, a sick crib-mate whose lips shone humid with microbacteria.
Wilhelmina Krohn was my Grandpa Hilbert’s grandmother, and my Grandpa Hilbert, known as Hilly to his friends, suffered severe depression. In the 1950s, he was a patient of electroshock treatment—particularly brutal for him, as his body would not fall under the hypnotic spell of anesthesia—and in later decades before his death in 1979, the recipient of many experimental drugs. He rarely worked, instead collecting disability insurance from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Soldiers today board planes for the wasteland of war in the Middle East and return frazzled, images of dead bodies burned into their brains. Women who conceive babies travel back in time through the sacred ritual of childbearing, one of the only ways in which we can know our grandmothers, and along that journey, we come upon babies in shrouds.
The egg from which I hatched was inside my own mother’s body, which in turn, was inside my grandmother’s body when she conceived my mother. Every one of us springs from some container within a container, family sets of Russian nesting dolls. If we count our lives as starting two generations back, how many losses might we add to our emotional resumes? Perhaps this explains why clinical psychologist Martha Manning describes depression as a “legacy”—“a complex weaving of genes and expectations, biochemistry and family myths, and the configuration of our family’s strengths, as well as its vulnerabilities.”
We are not so far removed from women of a century ago who lived shorter lives, mothers who gave birth and died, met death head-on after babies were born. In our case, though, fatherhood was the silent killer. I wanted to continue as a container for life while Ryan shuddered at the threshold of exhaustion. He had gained eighty pounds since his first year in law school when the stress of starting and supporting a family happened to coincide, a lawyer-father
