CHAPTER 6:
Stargazers
Our babies were born in lavishly good health, but Ryan, who probably needed more postnatal care than I, appeared like a man subjected to a host of communicable diseases. The anguish of his clients’ lives was increasingly contagious. He lived through them vicariously, taking on drug addiction, domestic abuse, and violence as his own problems. Sometimes I felt responsible. Ryan was raised in a conservative, stand-pat, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” household, whereas I was raised by parents in helping professions who explained away every stranger’s mistake. Perhaps I’d rubbed off on him, my über-empathy a symptom of some liberal sickness that was killing him now.
“My parents probably blame you,” he’d say, laughing, but he also pointed the finger at his education. He left for college a self-invested future business major but returned an altruist, a political science guy, more benevolent than I ever imagined possible but also frighteningly more vulnerable. Now he left for work sober and returned strung out. In hospital photographs from Francis’s birth, Ryan is unrecognizable, hollow and bleary-eyed, a father incapably exhausted.
Years later, I’d look back at photos and see that I was hefty with short hair and swollen, meaty cheeks, but I don’t remember feeling self-conscious. All the postpartum and breastfeeding hormones pacified me into accepting my body. But how did either of us ever find the energy required to hang the moon in our newborn son’s sky?
In the classic picture book Love You Forever, Robert Munsch depicts mother-child love as reciprocal. For most of the book, the boy’s mother rocks him to sleep, even when he is a teenager, but when she grows old and sick, the boy, now a man, volunteers to lull her, rocking his old lady as he sings, “I’ll love you forever.” Linda Duffy’s story of motherhood was not picture-book perfect, or even arguably a parody of the Robert Munsch story, if one could muster laughter when listening to Ryan talk, as he did most nights, about his law practice. Did Linda Duffy even rock her son Kevin in childhood, and if so, what kind of lullaby would she have sung? Kevin Duffy, Ryan’s client, assigned by the public defender, was a musician, a passion for songwriting having begun somewhere in childhood, but the state of Wisconsin didn’t care about all that. Linda’s story, not Kevin’s, inspired the criminal complaint against him.
According to Linda, in spite of an imminent divorce, she moved back in with her future ex-husband Bob to make a last-ditch effort at reconciliation and caretaking. Bob, long suffering from hepatitis C, was on a waitlist for a second liver transplant. The first transplant was not as successful as anticipated, and Bob was suffering from surgery-induced frontal lobe brain damage, which interfered with his ability to live productively, demonstrate appropriate emotions, and remember details.
When Linda and Bob initially separated, Kevin voluntarily moved home, but Kevin, working long hours in retail, was not an ideal medic. Kevin’s father ended up not taking his meds as prescribed or eating sufficiently. When a family friend named Jackie learned of Bob’s poor health, she took it upon herself to become his backup nurse, delivering breakfast sandwiches and filling Bob’s day-by-day medicine tray.
Bob and Jackie described their relationship as platonic, but Bob’s wife, Linda, suspected that Bob and Jackie had become lovers. Upon coming to this conclusion after moving back home, she decided to drop Bob for good. “Reconciliation was out of the question,” she said. Linda packed up her bags for the last time, slammed the door, and drove away, but shortly thereafter, she realized she’d left her own meds in Bob’s refrigerator. If Linda and Bob shared one thing in common, it was their chronic health problems. Linda was a lifelong smoker, suffering from osteoporosis, once having broken several ribs from coughing too hard. She kept buying cigarettes, against her doctors’ warnings that nicotine would deplete the curative effects of her prescriptions.
When Linda returned to the house to collect her osteoporosis meds, she and Bob began to fight again in their typical fashion. Their voices coalesced into caterwauling, which, according to Linda, brought their adult son Kevin up from the basement in a furious rage. Allegedly, when she stormed outside, “leaving once and for all,” Kevin, young and able-bodied, chased her down, and before Linda reached the sidewalk, he grabbed his mother’s hair, pulled her to the ground, and dragged her backward across the lawn.
“He broke my back,” Linda wailed to Bob, who was standing just inside the house. “Please help me. Make him stop!”
“Get that fucking bitch in the house,” Bob instructed, according to Linda’s testimony. Kevin dragged Linda inside as if her hair were the rope on a toboggan, lifting her over a lip between rooms and dropping her facedown in a heap. Kevin confiscated her cell phone and pitched it against the wall, busting the phone so it could not be used—and thus began hours of torture at the hands of her ex-husband and son, in the form of insults and indifference toward Linda’s agonizing injuries.
Apparently, Bob and Kevin took turns lifting Linda’s head by her dyed-blonde tendrils and banging her forehead against the floor. Bob spit at the nape of her neck and accused her of ruining the Duffy family name. At one point, when Linda begged for her husband and son to stop beating her, Kevin duct-taped her mouth shut, then ripped it back off, as if waxing her upper lip.
“My back is broken,” Linda moaned. “I can’t move.”
“How about we tie her behind the car and drag her to Lake Winnebago,” Bob reportedly said. “Put her out of her misery.”
“And throw her in the water when we get there,” Kevin replied.
They accused Linda of faking her agony and aired their grievances instead of tending to her pain, bantering over years
