To the Bridge

by Nancy Rommelmann

cards and aprons and giving the proceeds to a fund started in her d...

I had heard that she was off suicide watch. That she was a model prisoner. That she was a bossy prisoner, yelling after guards that she wanted more cake. That she told police revenge was her motive. That she told police nothing. The stories could be true, or they could be conjecture; people stuck stories to her like wet plaster.

It was not that Hadley did not appreciate swift justice. He had cheered several months earlier when US Navy snipers shot and killed pirates holding hostages

on a cargo ship off Somalia. And he vigorously defended people’s rights to own guns. “But self-defense has nothing to do with executing people,” he said. “It’s not just an easy one-liner. The state can’t seem to keep the roads paved; you think we should trust them with life-and-death decisions?”

he believed there could never be someone whose crimes could not be understood. “There have to be reasons. Just a normal person doesn’t

walk down the street and start wanting to kill people,” he said. “One of the things that happens when I start working with a client, and the things we do with a jury, is called humanizing. We show them it’s not just this monster. You’ve got to start showing how they were raised, the problems that came up, if they had fetal alcohol syndrome. It’s sure not their fault if their

mother was drinking John Barleycorn while they were in the womb. That doesn’t excuse them; that doesn’t get them o...

Amanda’s house had no flag. It also had no VCR, no computer, and no grown-up bicycles, all of which Jason had hocked or sold.

Soon Amanda would not have a working car. The Honda Odyssey her mother-in-law bought the family needed repairs. Amanda asked her permission to get it serviced. The answer was no.

Amanda was able to use her old car from college, the beat-up 1991 Audi. She spent time with her folks and with her sister. That was a nice change; Jason had not liked her family being around the kids.

Amanda knew her husband was probably using drugs, if not what kind. Sometimes he would show up just to take Eldon; he would not tell her where they were going or when they’d be back. Eldon would come home in clothes belonging to the son of Jason’s drug friends.

Amanda washed and dried the clothes and put them in a separate pile so Jason could return them. He told her not to do that.

Jason didn’t want her meddling. He told her Eldon was his son, and he would take the boy when he wanted, or ...

Jason and his mother demanded contradictory things: she needed to stay home with the kids, she needed to get a job, she

needed to let Jason keep control of the finances, she needed to take control of her own life.

other things kept piling up. They ran out of milk and groceries. They lost electricity, then water and garbage collection. Nathan and his wife, Chelsea, wanted more time with Gavin; they were going to take Amanda to court. More and more, she

was getting the flutter in her chest and throat, like she was going to have a panic attack. Too many people were telling her what to do: Jason telling her to fit into

June became July. The family’s possessions kept disappearing: ski gear, Gavin’s PlayStation, a very nice canoe. The furniture had been cheap or secondhand to begin with; the house was at once empty and cluttered. Grandma Chris kept buying the children toys,

Amanda thought her mother-in-law was deliberately trying to drive her crazy,

Why was Jason nice to her in private but mean to her in front of everybody else? He lied, and he was good at it, with a steel-trap memory that allowed him to convince anybody of anything and that nothing was his fault, but until now she did not think he had lied to her.

That had been his job since he was eight: making sure Trinity and Eldon were okay. He made them breakfast. He made up games and watched Shrek with them over and over. He took the blame when he didn’t need to,

Nathan provided financially for Gavin. An active member of the navy, stationed on a nuclear submarine until 2004, Nathan had tried to see Gavin whenever he had shore leave. Amanda and Jason had made this difficult.

A mother and her child live on the border of protection and destruction. This border, theirs alone, is not axiomatically fraught.

It wasn’t as though Amanda was always terrible. She could be affectionate with the children and they with her, Trinity especially. She was a buoyant little girl, demonstrative, goofy. Eldon was more sensitive, fragile even; he followed Jason around like a puppy, waiting for his father to pay attention to him. So, yes, there was love in the family,

between Amanda and the kids, but there was also dangerous neglect. Sara saw less and less of the attentive mom as the summer wore on. She tried to court that part of Amanda. She invited her and the kids over to Ryan’s apartment one day. There was a pool, and they could all keep cool. Amanda arrived wearing a bikini that revealed everything. The

kids swam as Amanda sunned herself on a chaise. She chattered away to Sara, sipping from a bottle of water, which, as the afternoon wore on, Sara became convinced was not water. Amanda became increasingly hard to understand and n...

pool, she thought, regarding Amanda, I basically just met you, and I am solely responsible for your child? Sara called social...

One time, she called after she and Ryan had found Amanda passed out in the hall. The ...

of themselves and told Sara they had not eaten that day. She and Ryan began to bring prepared food each time they went to the condo. Jason did not seem to grasp the situation. It would be six o’clock with no dinner in sight, and Sara would ask, “Have these kids eaten?”...

The couples sometimes dined at Lemongrass, a Thai

restaurant they all liked. Jason always insisted on ordering everything on the menu there.

As soon as they ordered, Jason would start to put down Amanda. The restaurant was tiny, on the parlor floor of an old house; everyone could hear him say, Wife, do this! Wife, do that! Wife, shut your mouth! He seemed incapable of addressing Amanda any other way in public, and any affection Sara saw pass between them seemed faked, as though someone had given them a script.

If the food at Lemongrass was outstanding, the dinners usually ended on a gross note, with Amanda in the bathroom barfing up what she’d just eaten. Sara did not think it possible

that Jason did not realize his wife was bulimic, or if he did know, he did not seem to care. Sara found it hard to tell what Jason cared about. He would insist one thing was true while his actions spoke the opposite, like the time he explained to Sara that when he met Amanda, she was pregnant by a man who had just killed himself.

In January 2010, the work, as yet, was about keeping an eye on their mother. The idea that I was looking out for Amanda might have been seen as private delusion, perhaps despicable. Nothing I did would affect her fate, not that I wanted to. I felt more like a sentry, as though I had to stay at my post or else.

Or else what? What was it that I was trying to understand? What could I pass on to others about something so painful? I had almost been flip with my mother, had almost said, “Well, Mom, there are enough people writing about Paris Hilton’s panties.” Later on, I thought that staying on the story was about sitting with a certain despair.

To not know where your child is, to lose her, did not seem to me survivable.

In March, I was one of two

people in a room at the Multnomah County Courthouse for Amanda’s third or fourth settlement hearing. It was 8:20 in the morning,

The defense and prosecution had not been able to reach a plea agreement. Anything that happened today would happen in judge’s chambers, and no, Casalino said, I would not be allowed inside. The woman stood. She was nearly Casalino’s height. She introduced herself as Amanda’s Aunt Hildy. “I wish you could have known her before,” she said.

Casalino nodded. “I don’t know if the judge will want to speak with you today, but she appreciates you’re here,” he told her, and went again into chambers. “I have nothing to say to you,” Hildy said when I asked if we might speak in the hall. We went back to our spots on the bench, back to waiting.

In The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale wrote

“Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional—to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the

puzzle, to make it ...

This seemed exactly right. The murder of Eldon Smith and the attempted murder of his sister by their mother were puzzles. Lawyers, detectives, and the medical personnel who cared for Trinity when she was rushed to the hospital with hypothermia and a brok...

who was retired from the sheriff’s department, believed what peace could be found would come from these sectors, whereas my writing could “only cause more pain.” I questioned how I could make things worse than what was before us: a murdered child, two more...

Was it possible to hold open the wound with one hand and stitch with the other? I thought it was more than possi...

“I guess you heard Amanda has decided to change her plea.” This was Hadley the morning of April 13...

Amanda had agreed to plead guilty and thus avoid a jury trial, which might have sentenced her to death.

There had been input, as required by victim’s rights laws, from Jason and his family, who I expected would be in court today.