While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (21 page)

Like Jody’s, my force of will persisted, a gravity-like pull that drew the fragments together again. My former self, lacking any sense of mortality, believed she had time to spare. Her successor, who began to take form at twenty-five or twenty-six, as much as a third, or more, of her life already spent, is always in a hurry, self-disciplined to a fault. There isn’t much to recommend trauma, but for those who aren’t permanently undone, it has an eerily focusing quality.

Still, the reassembled are aware of fracture lines, of being, like mended teacups, carefully glued together and not at all strong at the broken places. Jody hasn’t written the memoir she once planned to write about her family. “My life unravels whenever I decide I’m going to write that book. I am whole because that story doesn’t define me. It’s a piece of me. But when I sit down to write, it’s all that I am, and it devastates me.”

Devastate
is a loaded word; its definition is to lay waste. Not many of us use it to describe the power our pasts hold over us. Jody has done the necessary work of autobiography already; she’s narrated herself toward understanding, sanity. To return and linger in her past for as long and sustained an effort as a book requires would be not only painful but, she fears, dangerous to the equilibrium she consciously guards. The life story that she engages with is the after part of her life, the continuing, living narrative of the reconstructed Jody, not the terminated life of the girl she was before.

“W
HAT’S MISSING?” I ASK JODY IN AN E-MAIL DATED
February 12, 2007. “I was pondering the Bettelheim essay [from
Surviving and Other Essays,
a book I borrowed from Jody] on reintegrating after trauma—trying to see it as it related to you—and, thinking of my own experience, I realized that for me, part of the ‘after,’ the rebirth, was that when I reassembled myself I didn’t have all the pieces I had before: some were lost or sacrificed to the experience of my father, others jettisoned, perhaps new aspects were added. So, in sum, I think of myself as something analogous to a rebuilt engine.

“Can you identify parts of yourself that did not survive the destruction of your family, the losses you said you ‘didn’t care to contemplate’ twelve years ago, when writing the introduction to ‘Death Faces’? And if you can, what are they? Are you aware of new aspects of yourself that you cultivated?” Here is her answer:

I, too, view myself as a rebuilt engine. A reconstituted self. What was lost…took place in the years leading up to the murders, and the reconstitution took place literally over the course of half a decade or more afterwards. More of a process than caught in time. The murders [were] one more thing in a list, an escalation of dysfunction.

What was jettisoned? My faith in my parents as protectors, or rational, or even capable of genuinely loving me, on the night they didn’t believe me about my brother’s abuse, and when my mother wouldn’t listen to me about the dangers he represented, when they had the chance to send him to MacLaren.

When my mother sat on me and blew smoke in my face, she and Billy laughing at my discomfort, I no longer had any sense that they were my family at all. Or when in absolute truth she said she would kill me if I ever got an abortion. What kind of mother (or god) would think that was okay?

Or what about the police? Children’s Services? School? They weren’t really getting it either. My family life prepared me for the murders because I had walled myself deep inside…developed the same distrust and isolation that [my parents] had towards the outside world, but it was directed at them. I knew they weren’t normal. That what was happening wasn’t right.

The one thing that I lost was rage. Uncontrolled anger. Physical violence. I have not engaged. I don’t even know if I can scream. I mean really scream. Needless to say, rage and self-hatred gets channeled in other ways. But rage at others? Hitting? No way. The self-implosion of the family created a severe sense that there was potentially something wrong with me. That there was no way that I could come from such a horrible background and not be damaged beyond repair. That mental illness wouldn’t descend. That I might have the same makings of a killer, abuser, monster—since often that is the case. That I would never have a normal life, be loved, be able to love, etc.

To gird myself against imminent psychological disintegration I studied the stages of development and what was “normal” and wouldn’t allow myself to fall far outside those boundaries. What I loved about the holocaust literature was that it demonstrated how we are all capable of anything in the right conditions…. In the camps the world was turned upside down: Right is wrong. Wrong is right. Protectors are killers. Killers are protectors. All relationships and all understanding of the world and oneself, and order and justice and divinity—all of it disintegrated. Surviving was part luck, part cunning, and taking food or shoes from the nearly dead. Knowing that the thin veneer of civility that masks human savagery is universal in extreme situations made me feel a lot more normal. I cultivated being normal.

Spending those years studying myself, my family, all the things that led to that night, was not unlike what Bettelheim did in the camps to maintain his own selfhood. Regaining trust in people and institutions was a big cultivation project as well. While 80% of the time people are terrible, I hold out for the 20%.

I lost the opportunity to grow out of adolescence with my parents, so I never gained any perspective on the situation. [How much of it] was me? What were their circumstances at that moment that were causing them to be so terrible? What if things stabilized or she divorced him and got a job, or my views of them then mellowed or their behavior and beliefs did?

Reading this, I remember a dream that Jody recounted for me, a nightmare she had in college. In it, she returned home as an adult and Becky answered the door, “cool and dismissive.” Jody asked after her mother and Becky told Jody about “all these great things [their mother] was doing to change and improve her life…. She had a new job, she lived in a new house without my dad.” The dream disturbed Jody because she’d held on to her vision of an abusive and dysfunctional mother and “imagining a world where she evolved was terrifying.” Beyond the adult Jody’s “not want[ing] to feel connected [to Linda] or a bond with [her],” there was a further grief implicit in the dream, “the wish [for my mother to be] a real, vibrant, and functioning person capable of shaping her destiny and making sound decisions.”

When I learn that Jody has decided she will never have children, I can’t stop myself from reacting as a woman who understands motherhood as guarding her sanity and happiness, and I ask if she doesn’t imagine that raising her own child could assuage some of the loss she’s suffered. Couldn’t knowing how to be a good parent from the bad example of her own give meaning to her difficult past? But Jody’s brother and her maternal grandmother murdered members of their own families; her paternal grandfather and her father drank and battered; her abusive mother failed her children with catastrophic results. Though the odds of Jody bearing a criminal child are small, some of what allowed Billy to kill—the impulsiveness he shared with his father and grandfather, and perhaps other, undiscovered chemical/neurological deficits—is arguably genetic. In any case, it’s the proximity of the idea, rather than the likelihood of carrying a child who could return her to the wasteland she fled, that threatens Jody’s psychic equilibrium. As she wrote me before we met, she manages and protects a “carefully arranged reality.”

As do I. But this is something I don’t recognize in myself until I see it in Jody. Aware of my own fault lines, I avoid being reminded of my father. Among the scores of photographs on view in our home, there are many of my mother, of my grandparents, great-grandparents, my husband and our three children, my mother-and father-in-law, my husband’s brother, his uncles, but not one of my father. When a stranger asks about my parents, I say they’re both dead, without feeling I’m telling a lie. I’ve lost the audiotape of his voice, put away the letters he wrote me so carefully that I don’t know where they are. And though I sometimes compose letters to my father in my head, I never write them down. Or if I do, I don’t mail them—not anymore.

Because I fled from my father without attempting to address any of our differences, I’ve had to resign myself to what I find uncomfortable: a lack of resolution that leaves me prey to fantasies of reaching an understanding we never had. Usually these are deathbed scenes, in which my father is weak and unmanned, unable to approach me. There’s no physical contact; sometimes I speak to him from the door of his room. Over the years I’ve edited my father’s side of the conversation. It used to be that he asked my forgiveness. Later, I settled for an explanation, although I couldn’t imagine what it might be. In the end, all I wanted, all I want, is for him to recognize that what he demanded of me was not in my best interest. A modest hope, and yet my father’s reply to the one letter I did mail, some years ago, reveals it as ambitious, less than unlikely.

But I do write, I write every day, trying to shape a book, an essay, a review, always in the effort to force coherence from what I find impossible to understand. No matter the story, the setting, the characters, there is nothing I write that doesn’t in some measure address what happened between me and my father, that doesn’t respond to the chaos he ushered into my life. Writing allows me the illusion of understanding, of control. Although it’s a treatment rather than a cure: the illusion lasts only as long as I am immersed in the act of writing.

The murder of one’s family, sexual intercourse with a parent—these experiences, and any other that once seemed unthinkable, too awful to come true—have a long half-life. People don’t recover from them so much as manage their effects.

Jody removed herself from the geography of her former life—she moved from the West to the East Coast—and, when she discovered this wasn’t enough, she banished the artifacts of that life from her physical environment. She did this all at once, she tells me, on a weekend afternoon in 2001, characterizing her mood as having been one in which she was “tipsy on despair.”

This is not a casual remark but a phrase she uses deliberately each time we talk about the incident, and I consider the description over and over; the words insinuate themselves into my thoughts, arriving unbidden and always disturbing. I equate
tipsy
with
giddy,
a celebratory state, and find Jody’s attaching it to
despair
provoking in its dissonance. But Jody’s father’s drinking was a catalyst for violent argument, a guarantee that everyone got hurt, either physically, or emotionally, or both.

On those evenings when Jody and I meet for dinner, she impresses me as a woman who treats the occasional glass of wine gingerly, with a respect born of suffering. Like me, and by her own admission, Jody is something of a control freak, and I come to understand that it is this aspect of her personality that has invented the idea of being “tipsy on despair.” Her idiosyncratic repetition of the phrase teaches me a key aspect of her psychic survival: Jody treats despair itself as a controlled substance, one that—for her, anyway—invites abuse. As with the infrequent glass of wine, she allows herself so much and no more despair, and depends on a strict internal calculus to manage the grief, anger, and fear that might produce it. It’s a defense she’s carried forward from her childhood:

When I was a little girl, I had to be impervious to pain. I proved that I was by running barefoot through patches of star thistles. These thistles grew in intermittent patches in the fields surrounding our house. My brother and I would walk across one of the fields to Grandpa Ed’s farm. Ed wasn’t really our grandfather but our neighbor. He let all the children ride his horses and play in and around his rambling house. He also molested all the little girls and, in exchange for our compliance, bought us Barbies and clothes. We were nine and ten years old though, so I don’t think we knew we were prostituting ourselves. No, we did know. This story is not about that experience. This story is about the star thistles.

This is the first paragraph of “Young Love,” another memoir published under the pen name Jennifer Saffron in
The Georgetown Journal.
“Young Love” is “not about” Jody’s experience of being molested by a neighbor but about armoring herself against pain, specifically the injury she describes in the subsequent paragraph, of having her bare feet “punctured” by thistles to the point that they “left bloody footprints on the flagstones” outside her house—or is it? The glancing reference to sexual abuse is typical of Jody, who often introduces the most damaging aspect of an event in an aside, and is always quick to tease out and identify what she considers her responsibility with respect to any given situation.

“Molested how?” I ask Jody about the true story, after I read the somewhat fictionalized “Young Love.”

“Oh, you know, sitting on his lap and he’d, you know, kind of fondle you through your clothes.”

“Sort of standard creepy-old-man stuff? Without going any further?”

“Pretty much.”

It’s an interesting paragraph for all it contains. At twenty-three, with the destruction of her family seven years behind her and the landscape of her childhood far removed, Jody was looking back at her past. “Young Love” is one of several submissions she made to the journal that the editorial board didn’t find too dark or depressing to publish. And yet it’s hardly a sunny look at girlhood. Observing the child she was at ten years old, this is who Jody saw: a girl who understood pain and the importance of remaining “impervious to” pain; a girl who was testing her ability to deny whatever might impede her progress as she escaped her home; a girl who knew that life required hard bargains and who was ready to extract a cost when she found herself caught in the arms of an abuser. In evoking the vulnerability of a child on the cusp of puberty, forced into sexual contact for which she’s not prepared, Jody relies on archetypes from the stories all little girls know by heart: the prick of a thorn or a spindle and the virgin’s blood it draws from
Snow White
and
Sleeping Beauty,
the bare foot from
Cinderella.
As the ironic title suggests, the only untruth in the paragraph cited above is the declaration that “Young Love” isn’t about what happened in the home of the neighborhood pedophile, who might have fondled her through her clothes but did not attempt any further exploration, not when Jody was ten, anyway.

While the move to Ross Lane had “looked good on paper”—“Too good,” Jody says, “because it meant that we couldn’t get the assistance we needed”—the Gilleys were bankrupt at the time of their deaths and had been struggling for months, fielding calls from collection agents, relying on food stamps and government-issued cheese bricks and milk powder, eating vegetables they grew for themselves, and keeping chickens, originally to supply meat as well as eggs. But, Billy explains, “the first dead bird my mother had to pluck was the last. She wasn’t gonna do that twice.”

He laughs at the memory of Linda grappling with a dead chicken, and I wonder, as I do often during our conversations, what it’s like for Billy to reminisce about people he murdered, if he’s able, somehow, to separate the mother with whom he grew up from the one he killed.

If Jody and I have carefully arranged what we call reality, how much more so must Billy have to manage his perceptions? He tells stories with what seems like genuine ease, laughing spontaneously at what amuses him, recalling happier moments with what appears to be nostalgia. What are missing, generally, are negative emotions—anger, hurt, grief. Initially I’m struck by what I perceive to be his lack of self-pity; later I realize that Billy recounts instances of severe abuse without any emotion whatsoever. Even the murders themselves, when we speak of them, don’t inspire so much as a blink or a shift in facial expression or tone of voice. Moreover, when he describes killing his family I have the sense that he’s talking about something that happened to him rather than an act he authored. In his affidavit, prepared twelve years after the murders, the account reads as a series of responses to a situation unfolding independent of his intentions. After the initial attack on his father, the scene picks up hectic speed, Billy running from one room to another, cataloguing actions with a flat, anesthetized quality. The sentences are all short, simple, declarative, and identically structured: “I panicked…I turned on the light…I asked Jody…I told Becky…I went downstairs…I didn’t know what to do next…I felt the back of her head and I felt blood.”