“I’m no second fiddle!” she screamed. She was disoriented and seemingly rabid.
“Jesus Christ, Linda,” Bob said. “You’ll break your back.”
Before the paramedics arrived, according to Bob, Linda lifted her shirt and asked for help removing three fentanyl patches. Up to one hundred times more potent than morphine and fifty times stronger than pharmaceutical heroin, fentanyl had been prescribed to Linda for pain associated with her osteoporosis. Absorbing three patches’ worth of meds, three times prescription strength, would certainly make anybody loopy, and her bones were only growing weaker, thanks to her faithful smokes.
Bob described her as a raving lunatic in and out of the house all evening, yelling obscenities. Kevin admitted that he emerged from his bedroom in the basement in the midst of his parents’ fighting, but certainly not to interject himself. An intervention didn’t make sense now; his parents had been fighting nonstop his entire life. Guitar case in hand, he was leaving for his Friday night gig when his mother stormed out of the house ahead of him into the dark. He noticed his mother on the front lawn, having tripped by the ditch, but fed up with her prescription drug abuse and other manufactured theatrics, Kevin Duffy admittedly did not help Linda to her feet. Instead, he sped off, leaving his mother in a cloud of dust.
For years, he’d begged her to stop smoking, to stop overloading on meds, to take some small modicum of pride in her body, but as her physical health deteriorated, so too did her mental well-being. From what Kevin understood, his mother had recently stalked Jackie, running her off the road in a crazed high-speed chase. He did not have the time, the patience, or any remaining sense of loyalty to get hooked into what he perceived as never-ending drama. This is where Kevin Duffy and Ryan came into synchronicity. Attorney and client were both growing jaded, both on the brink of complete and total empathy fatigue.
The advent of technology has undoubtedly altered the face of criminal law. While clients are commonly implicated in crimes thanks to emails, videos, texts, Facebook, and Snapchat, defendants have also used social media and their iPhone savvy to exonerate themselves and their loved ones. After Ryan was privately retained by a friend of Rob McNally’s facing domestic battery charges, the client’s wife, Judy Welch, came forward to admit she’d fabricated the abuse because she was pissed off.
“I’ll tell you when to start,” she said, instructing Ryan to video-record her demonstration. Seated at his desk, painting a black eye as if dressing up for Halloween, she began with a little mascara, followed by blue eye shadow and rouge. “I can make myself look like a battered woman, easy as one, two, three,” she boasted. When Ryan forwarded the video, by embedding it in a text message, to the district attorney’s office, the state was forced to drop charges against his client, which should have been a relief, but months later, the guy pulled a pillowcase over his head to contain the debris before shooting his brains out. It’s no wonder Ryan was beginning to distrust formal statements, even if the victim, as in Kevin Duffy’s case, was the young man’s ailing mother.
Until his visit with Judy Welch, Ryan had been deeply sympathetic toward all who claimed to be victims of domestic abuse. Coming forward to report abuse was a sign of courage; the more often victims reported abuse, the more directly authorities might address its traumatic effects on women, children, families, and entire communities. He had his convictions. I did too. My own mom was a founding member of Siena Transitional Housing in Oshkosh, meant exclusively for women rebuilding their lives, often with children in tow, after leaving abusive relationships. But Cali Ziegler and now Judy Welch were two of several self-professed victims on a growing list of women Ryan encountered who were exploiting the lifelines of criminal justice, undermining women’s progress.
Evidence told Ryan that Linda was working the system. Kevin, the only unmedicated of the three affiants in this case, never wavered in his version of events, and he had an alibi with a witness, even a set list, to corroborate his gig: “Pride and Joy,” “Rude Mood,” and “Cold Shot” by Stevie Ray Vaughan and “Manic Depression” and “Little Wing” by Jimi Hendrix. He stopped off at Hardee’s for a burger afterward; he returned to his room to sleep; and he woke up when his father called him from the basement.
“I thought my dad was calling me up to see some celestial event,” he said. That happened often in the Duffy household. Both men had learned to console themselves by watching for flashes of brilliance far beyond this realm. “Call your mother an ambulance,” Bob said, and without hesitation, Kevin did, even if he admitted to staring blank-faced at his mother on the stretcher, his explanation simple. He’d seen her, not to mention his father, in hospital beds off and on since childhood.
Every child receives a summons to separate from his parents. Casually we talk about rites of passage such as kindergarten or the sweet sixteen, but we might be called at any time to step outside our mothers’ or fathers’ shadows. It’s startling how easily our toddlers have already taken turns forsaking Ryan and me. Do you want to snuggle? No. Do you want to hold my hand? No. Don’t you love your mama? No. From as early on as Irie and Fern could talk, they used hatred as power, screaming from behind slammed doors, “You’re the worst mother in the world!”
In the wake of my own parents’ divorce, I’d regularly practice cutting proverbial cords. My mom’s women’s group, the Ovular Society, comprised mostly of divorcées, celebrated womanhood with stupid-men jokes and symbols of female fertility ranging from chocolate to ceramic eggs, painted deliriously bright. When I began to menstruate, my mom gave me my
