Prior to sentencing, Ryan dedicated himself to working tirelessly with the assistant district attorney, hoping that, given the high-profile nature of this case, he could figuratively enter the courtroom hand in hand with the prosecutor. As Wes had offered a full confession, Ryan’s primary task was to provide his young client with a fairly definitive notion of how the judge would sentence him. Judges were less likely, in Ryan’s experience, to supersede a joint recommendation. When defense and prosecuting attorneys came to a compromise, judges tended to reward these middle-ground covenants, and in this case, probation would also entail counseling. Ryan accomplished this joint recommendation without as much as a paragraph from Dr. Hammond.
Annie often wondered why the psychological evaluation had not yielded more favorable results, but Ryan could not bring himself to tell her. There was no generous way to say, “Well, it turns out your son is probably a sociopath.” Of course, Annie would have gone on loving him anyway. And maybe the judge used her intuition to reach the same conclusion as Dr. Hammond, possessing neither a mother’s love nor a mother’s blindness.
Much to everybody’s surprise, the judge in the case of Aloysius Jungwirth offered a long meditation on Wes’s unyielding pattern of abuse and then “dropped the hammer,” as they say, sentencing him to far more than the jointly recommended probation. She sentenced Wes to thirteen years in Wisconsin’s prison system and a lifetime on the Sex Offender Registry. By the time his mother would see him again, a free man, he’d potentially be in his thirties. Annie would not be able to see, hug, kiss, console, or nurture Wes on a daily basis. She would now be forced to envision her son in prison stripes instead of camouflage, serving time instead of serving his country.
Throughout the remainder of the calendar year, Annie’s voice grew more saccharine than ever. At one point, she appeared to be entirely coated in candy. A longtime receptionist at a veterinary clinic, she began to adopt cats from the Humane Society, two at a time, until she reached a dozen, desperate to fill the void Aloysius left behind. She rented an old farmhouse and rejected a marriage proposal, determined to wait for her baby to come home, like a wife whose husband is off at war.
The Jungwirth case soured Ryan on baby-making and baby-rearing. Irie, Leo, and Fern, speaking on Frank’s behalf too, often asked, “How many more babies will we have, Mama?” I would smile sweetly, but Ryan, with dregs of exhaustion in his eyes like he too was using junk, would say, “Our days of making babies are over.”
With Aloysius Jungwirth away at prison, guys like Rob McNally returned to the forefront of our minds. We both knew I was the real addict, not fearful enough of motherhood, but what, if not Wes’s distressing sexual abuse case and his mother’s anguish, would stymie my urge to keep birthing babies? The olfactory joy of a newborn baby’s scalp, eau de uterine parfum, makes fiends of women like me, but the makers of Narcan can’t reverse the lifelong responsibility of raising our children once they’re born, which explains why Ryan was completely “done.” Time was up. He’d set his pencil down, having completed an arduous task, but I associated finality with the end of a golden era and the onset of middle age. I resisted climbing up and over the hill, even if in Ryan’s mind bringing our baby-making to a close was the fastest route to a second youth.
To make his point, Ryan began sorting and piling my over-the-belly leggings and tunics alongside size 0–3 month footie pajamas at the bottom of the basement steps one afternoon. When we bought the house, we almost didn’t make an offer because of that dreaded staircase, constructed nearly upright as a ladder more than a century earlier, in 1888. I could jog up and down it now, nine months pregnant if necessary, holding a toddler and a load of laundry.
Ryan had come to a standstill upon unearthing a fuzzy pumpkin suit, a gift from my friend Shelley, worn by all four children for their first Halloweens. “Hey, honey,” he called to me. “Can we give this away?” His moment of pause provoked in me a deep, angry sadness, and without warning I charged down the stairs and began boxing at Ryan’s face. He dodged and ducked beneath the pipes suspended in a copper maze above his head.
“I can’t stand you,” I hissed. “Go away. Go upstairs.” Ryan had become, in that moment, a man no longer useful in making babies. When he had climbed up and away onto the first floor, where our four children were making the music of death metal—fighting, dumping marbles, crushing Goldfish into the upholstery—I stood deliriously over the mounds of clothes. Finally calmed down, I told Ryan I’d finish sorting, but nearly everything I owned had been laundered in sentimental value.
My “keep” pile grew tall and tipped over as I added a favorite black maternity dress, shapeless as an old fitted sheet; my green XL baby doll shirt; and a button-up white cardigan patterned with baby geese and miraculously not stained. I told Ryan I kept a few items, but secretly still hoping for a fifth pregnancy, I kept most of them, giving up only the soiled clothing; I easily cached as many clothes as Allison Shaffer attempted to steal in her Walmart shopping cart years before. That evening, once the kids were in bed, I sobbed on the couch. Ryan and I faced each other. We
