At Alyssa Brandt’s sentencing, Ryan debated whether he’d speak his piece, knowing PETA and ASPCA members waited, to do what, he was unsure: spit in his face, force-feed him gruesome photographs, fall to their knees and cry on his leather shoes? But as Princess’s new owner made a statement, the “victim” in this case, lobbying for Alyssa Brandt to be sentenced to the fullest extent of the law, Ryan could no longer resist the urge to proclaim his position.
“There just isn’t any comparison when it comes to a pet and a child,” he said. “This is coming from somebody who lost his four-year-old dog the day his son was born. I can tell you the joy of bringing home my son completely overshadowed the loss of my dog.” He paced and gestured, realizing how unpopular he’d become. “People can compare animals to children, but they are just not the same,” Ryan continued.
“Yesterday I learned of a case in Outagamie County where a woman is accused of starving her child. Late last night I looked into how many letters had been received in support of this infant that had been almost starved to death. There wasn’t a single letter of concern, a single letter of support, a single letter arguing this mother should be punished to the full extent of the law. There is something about animal cases where it really tends to cloud people’s perspective.”
When he finally rested his case, he expected punishing remarks from the judge, but, much to his surprise, he had unwittingly opened the door for the judge to provide a long-building meditation on human beings versus animals, as she addressed the court. She could not reconcile why she never saw “a groundswell of community support for those children as victims” of abuse, neglect, sexual assault, or homicide; and she could not, for the life of her, understand “why people jumped on the bandwagon for animals,” for although pets were members of the community, their lives could not be equated with human existence. “Certainly animals are helpless and can’t speak for themselves, but neither can infants, and we don’t see people getting up in arms over infants being neglected and abused,” she said.
Instead of imposing the maximum sentence, the judge sentenced Alyssa Brandt to four months in jail and two years of probation, holding out the possibility of the expungement of felony charges, should she adhere to the stipulations of supervision. While Brandt never showed remorse for neglecting Rocco and Princess, what struck everybody involved—Ryan, the DA, the judge, police officers, and other investigators—was that she did, in fact, cry. She wept from her chest, wet and sticky with phlegm, whole-body moisture, the kind of grief that surges from some internal hot spot. Brandt cried not because Rocco had died, not because Princess went hungry, but because, between twelve and sixteen weeks’ gestation, she had miscarried her little boy, whom she would neither birth nor breastfeed, nuzzle nor neglect.
As our little Saint Francis grew hair, we noticed that his eyelashes—black wisps like the feathers of a magpie—compensated for his unimpressive coiffure. Unlike Irie, Leo, and Fern with their “serious hair” flowing from their scalps in corkscrew curls and horsehair rivulets, Francis’s hair grew straw-straight, but fortunately his eye hair curved thicker and longer than any of the others’. His favorite kiss was the flit of our lashes together, the butterfly. When I looked into his brown eyes, some days, all of the earth’s winged creatures fluttered there, infinitely alive, and we wondered, naively, if pets—an ark full if necessary—might be the answer to what maternal yearnings remained even after Francis was born.
We adopted the first of our two rabbits, Mr. Edward Nibbles, saved by his first owner from a meat farm—“Ever heard of rabbit stew?” he asked. When that Flemish giant didn’t satisfy my unmet needs, we adopted yet another bunny from the Winnebago County Fair, Mrs. Eleanor Nibbles, but in my heart, two pets did not equal a baby. I barely felt surprised, much less sad or grief-stricken, when she died on a hot summer day. Reaching into her cage with our red kids’ snow shovel, I scooped up her corpse and laid her in the garden, whereupon Ryan returned home in his suit, dug a small hole, and dropped her inside. Although Leo and Fern cried a bit, we clapped our hands together, like erasers filled with chalk, and as soon as the dust settled, we all went inside to eat lunch.
Life was full of inconsistencies. Pets could never assuage my longing for children, yet I felt wildly animalistic, instincts cued to procreate, an entire litter at a time, if possible, as if this were my life’s purpose. Neither Ryan’s stress nor all the violence in the world suppressed my desires. Even my rich intellectual life at the university, hard won by feminists before me, felt meaningless if not attached, like some blood-hungry parasite, to my procreative function. The creativity of my mind and of my body had become inextricably linked; when my womb was empty, my brain felt vacant too. With each pregnancy, hormones had revitalized the circuitry of my brain, consolidating gray matter, clearing space for more highly energized and expectant thinking. Being pregnant was like feeling smart and falling in love at the same time, and nothing made me more productive than the ever-enchanting oxy rush of baby amour.
CHAPTER 4:
Bedside Manner
When the family of Aloysius Jungwirth retained Ryan for charges their son faced for sexual assault, I hoped, prayed, and temporarily believed the boy’s crimes were examples of innocent games gone awry. Our own sex
