He aimed the weight beyond his mom’s body before dropping it. The telescope cylinder nicked Linda’s lip, settling inches from her hand, clenched into a fetal fist. Supposedly she lay there like that, as time slipped by, excruciating minutes made up of whole hours, like a small helpless child who has not yet learned to walk. When Kevin was little, his dad would smash dishes during marital spats, and afterward he would explain to his son, “It’s OK to break things that belong to you.”
As far back as my childhood tantrums, I recall breaking dishes, bookbindings, Precious Moments figurines, and my bedroom door. Once I even nicked our dining room table with a candlestick when I spiked it at dinnertime, but there’s a definitive line between things and people, even if every family story adheres to patterns of breaking and mending. At Ryan’s and my wedding, I refused to be “given away” by my dad but paradoxically kept Baker, my father’s surname. Both were misguided decisions I’d later regret. My father did not own me, but together we were equal shareholders in the gift of our kinship. As for remaining a Baker, I needed constantly to assert, for those remaining confused, that the Ulrich children belonged to me.
Did Linda belong to Bob, or he to Linda, as she eventually managed to crawl helplessly from room to room? Unable to call for help from her own phone, Linda convinced Bob to retrieve her cigarettes from the car, but after she’d smoked only half of the first one, he plucked it from her fingers and stubbed out the burning ember on Linda’s knuckle. Only by some miracle, she finally convinced Kevin to call for help in the early morning hours. She asked him to call the ambulance service instead of 911 because she didn’t want neighbors to see the lights.
The imminence of the paramedics’ arrival must have cued Bob to react in some prescribed husbandly fashion, or maybe his brain damage explains his erratic behavior as he collected armloads of pillows from beds and sofas, slowly and carefully fitting them against her legs and torso, as if outlining a dead body in chalk. When the paramedics entered the house, Kevin stood back against a wall, tuckered out and resigned to fate, while Bob began to sob. Curiously, Linda did not immediately indict her husband or son; in fact, she told the ambulance crew she hurt herself by falling down. But hours later, when Bob failed to show up at her hospital bedside, Linda availed herself of a police investigator, divulging a horrifying story of abuse.
Linda’s son, Kevin Duffy, was charged with three felonies: aggravated battery, second-degree recklessly endangering safety, and threats to injure with intent to extort. Ryan was admittedly baffled upon meeting Kevin, an acoustic guitarist and an amateur astronomer who possessed the characteristic disposition of a stargazer. He was soft-spoken and contemplative. Although he worked long hours selling furniture, he’d spent countless hours in his early twenties volunteering at Barlow Planetarium and developing his astrophotography skills. In fact, police collected reels of undeveloped film from Kevin—pretty much the only evidence collected in this, yet another, he-said-she-said case—only to discover useless images of star clusters and galaxies in the night sky.
Although Ryan could not imagine this man having committed the alleged crimes, he didn’t consider taking Kevin Duffy’s case to trial until the preliminary hearing. By now, Ryan had observed dozens of victims on the witness stand. “They almost always struggle to keep their emotions in check,” he said. “They can barely finish their sentences without choking on their tears. But Linda was just so matter-of-fact and nonchalant that she came across as a liar. I mean, we’re talking about her son allegedly trying to kill her, and she didn’t express any anguish at all.”
Unlike Joseph Michalik, Rob McNally, or even Aloysius Jungwirth, whose stories explained their wrongdoing, Kevin Duffy seemed to have been entirely forsaken by his own mother with little to no explanation at all. If Ryan didn’t take his case to trial, Kevin faced prison for the crime of simply getting sucked into the black hole of his parents’ imploding marriage, not to mention their collective poor health—as if Ryan didn’t have his own well-being to worry about.
I tried to distinguish Ryan’s boyish freckles from the scabs he gouged into his face. He’d given up on regular shaving, instead digging whiskers out with his fingernails. It would have been easy to blame Ryan for his lack of coping skills and his clients for their misery. All doped up on the hedonistic pleasures of motherhood, I didn’t imagine indicting myself. But hadn’t I been almost entirely self-invested, pushing four babies, back-to-back, without offering Ryan any kind of veto power? And although we had agreed on four children, Ryan had imagined two children, followed by a long recovery break, and then two more—sets of offspring with money-saving room in between.
As a child of divorced parents, I needed to grow into marriage. Throughout the first decade of our betrothed lives, I’d threaten divorce whenever frustrated, relying on dissolution as my model for long-term romance. Parenting further complicated my conflict-management skill set. Our fights became compound chain
