Cage of Stars

  “I’ll do better, after this. After the verdict. I will, Cressida.”

  “After? You’ll turn back to your family? We have a date for that then?”

  My father was quiet. No one heard me open the door.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And what about Ronnie? I already abrogated my motherhood to Ronnie to indulge myself, when that time belonged to my children. . . .”

  “That’s not true, Cressida. Your gift is from the Heavenly Father as surely as your motherhood is.”

  “If I had been here!”

  “The result would have been the same. Unless I had been there, standing literally there, with the gun loaded and pointed.”

  “No. It was me.” They were competing for being the worse parent. I wanted to run, to Phoenix, to Salt Lake, to Labrador. “I believe it with my mind, but everything else spits it back in my face. My own selfishness cost Rebecca and Ruth their lives. My pottery! My art!”

  “That’s not how God works, Cressida. I know that. It’s my deepest belief that God does not punish us for impulses that He also gave us—”

  “Stop it! Don’t lecture me. I was talking about Ronnie. Ronnie is bearing guilt that should have been mine and only mine! Or yours, if you want some of it. And now she’s mothering Rafe. She’s taking up slack for me. What am I making of my daughter? She’s truly earning a higher realm right here on earth; but it’s not fair to her. I forget to cook meals. Ronnie does it. She watches me like a hawk. You know when she said she didn’t need a new swimsuit for next year? It’s not that she’s self-conscious. London, I think she doesn’t believe she’ll ever be able to leave this house again! That she’ll never be able to leave me here alone! We forgot her birthday, London! We forgot her birthday!”

  “No!” my father cried. “No! That’s not possible.” He was quiet. “We did. We forgot her birthday.” Only like seven or eight months ago, I thought. “Maybe, Cressie, maybe she needs time away. I’ve even thought she should go away, board with one of my brothers in Salt Lake and go to school,” my father said.

  Oh, mercy, I thought. They’re going to give me to Aunt Adair. I’ll be like Jane Eyre.

  Then he added, “That’s why I walk, and I can’t rest, Cressida. It blots out everything. I’m afraid I’ll break a window or smash a chair. Their faces are in front of me when I teach. I lose track of what I’m telling the kids in the middle of a sentence. I’m talking about Hawthorne and I’m thinking, Were Rebecca’s eyes blue, or were Rebecca’s eyes gray? Their faces are in front of me when I’m doing church teaching. Their faces are in front of me when I try to speak in meeting, when I try to open my heart to take sacrament. I forgot Ronnie’s birthday. I forgot my daughter’s birthday.”

  “It’s wrong,” my mother said, “it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. Not just what he did. Scott Early has such a terrible hold on our family. Lunnie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I shrieked at you. Actually, I had to. I need to shriek.”

  My father’s words were muffled. I knew he was crying. I assumed that Mama was holding him against her. Rafe began to whimper.

  “My son,” Papa said, “my little son. And Ronnie, so alone.”

  It was sort of sweet, I guess, a kind of release for them, but I tell you, it scared me. Your parents are your rocks, and mine were crumbling. I truly did feel like one of those boulders worn loose by erosion, pitching away from its strong source. I wanted to shriek, too. I wanted to cry like a little kid with a flap of skin hanging off her toe. But I was afraid that I’d make a fool of myself, or—worse—no one would notice.

  “Perhaps,” Mama said, and I could tell she was giving Rafe his bottle, “perhaps there is a reason.” Dr. Pratt had told her months before that our baby wasn’t gaining enough weight and put him on formula. Mama knew it was because she couldn’t eat enough to give Rafe the proper nourishment. “In some way, we are meant to be more mindful, to treasure these children more than ever, because of our loss.”

  “No one could have treasured Becky and Ruthie more,” Papa said. “They were hard to come by. We never took them for granted.”

  “These children, Lunnie. Ronnie and Rafe. We can always do better. We can always minister to our children more completely.”

  I was thinking, as I crept upstairs, that it was the first time I had ever heard them speak his name. Scott Early.

  Of course, I knew it, from the newspapers, from the pictures of him that Clare taped with the VCR and I watched on her TV. I knew more about him than I did about some of my cousins. I knew he was a graduate student in pharmacy, that he was twenty-seven years old, square-jawed and handsome when he was cleaned up, that he was married to a school counselor, that just a few weeks before he started driving from Colorado to Utah, he stopped talking to all his friends. His wife would find him crying on his knees in their room. He went to church twice a day at the end. He talked to the minister. But what he said made no sense. He said he was hearing voices and the voices got louder and louder, but that his wife would die if he went to a doctor for help. In the newspaper, the wife said, “Scott is a gentle person. He’s been a gentle person all his life. We’ve known each other since we were juniors in high school. He’s just as he was before now. He doesn’t understand why he did this terrible thing.” The interviewer wrote that the lady, Kelly something, was asked if Scott Early knew what he did was wrong and that she said, “He knows it was wrong, but he doesn’t know that the Scott he really is, did it. I can’t really explain.”

  But someone had to explain. Someone had to account, or we would live like faded photographs in a box for the rest of our lives. We would be stuck like the old people in the nursing center we read to and sang to at Christmas, who kept telling us about the toys they’d hidden for their children—toys that had been new forty years ago.

  I was sleeping when the call finally came.

  The judge was ready to see us.

  Mama got me up and fixed me a breakfast so big that I practically gagged. It was too hot for pancakes. And I didn’t want to go, but my parents insisted. I put on my long green summer skirt and a short-sleeved pullover. My mother said to put on a long-sleeved pullover instead, not because my shirt was immodest, but because of the reporters, so I did. Just a few days earlier, a woman had come from the Sunday magazine in Arizona, just showing up at our house with a photographer, who snapped pictures of the outside while the woman, who was petite and pretty and Asian, asked if she could do a profile of our family as it was now, with the new baby as the focus of new hope for the Swans. My mother, horrified, didn’t exactly slam the door in her face; but she said firmly that it would be a kindness to leave us in peace, that we had done nothing wrong, and that we were trying to rebuild our lives. Those few things Mama said, and some silly descriptions, the lady made into a story a page long, with photos of the picnic table—arrows sketched in on the places next to it where my sisters died. My father had burned the picnic table that night, despite the heat.

  On the morning of the verdict, we left Rafe with Sister Emory and drove to the courthouse in town.

  My father put out his arm like a boy running with a football and pushed his way through the reporters.

  What do you think the judge’s decision will be, Cressie?

  Do you think he’ll get life? Veronica? How do you feel right now?

  Are you afraid the Reaper will come for you if he ever gets out, Ronnie?

  I know that there are good and thoughtful journalists. But they were like pigs fighting at a trough for garbage.

  The courthouse was freezing. I was glad, although I looked like a prissy-poo in my long-sleeved shirt and braid, that I had something over me. Mama put her shawl around my shoulders, too.

  The judge came in. We all stood. I heard Scott Early’s chains clink as he struggled to his feet. The judge’s name was Richard Neese. He was a young man, a lot younger than Papa and handsome as a movie actor. Maybe he was too young to be a judge. He had dimples. You think of judges being crusty, like my uncle the bishop, not having d
imples. I felt sorry for him, having this hard a job. And this particular part of that job had to be the worst.

  The first thing he said was, “I’ve been on the bench only one year. This is the most horrifying set of circumstances I’ve had to consider in that time. I confess there were times I despaired. But I thought it best to take a long time, though I know this time must have been excruciating for you, to study these reports. I’ve also done my own independent study, in coming to this decision. There are so many choices. And the easiest is obviously to sentence Scott Early to be confined in Draper at Point of the Mountain until he is an old man. That would guarantee the safety of the community, and Scott Early’s safety, in that environment, would not be our concern. But he would certainly die there. What he has done would make him an instant target for inmates who consider their own heinous crimes trivial next to killing a child. And perhaps that is what the fair thing to do would be. But it would not be the just thing.

  “I have read the many reports from physicians involved with this case, and the conclusion from both those retained by Scott Early’s family and those retained by the state is that Scott Early suffers from schizophrenia, which is a complex disease and can arise from many causes, internal or external. The fact that the administration of medication instantly stopped his auditory hallucinations and compulsions further confirms this diagnosis. Since his treatment began, while he has been confined to the county jail, Scott Early has been able to write about the circumstances of the murder of Rebecca and Ruth. But he has also written more.

  “He has written, and I’m quoting from his journals: ‘At first, my belief was that it was inevitable that I should die for the horrible thing I had done, that it was the only fair penance for such an egregious sin. Obviously, I was afraid, as any human being would be afraid, and saddened to think of the effect this would have on my wife and my family. But as my thoughts became more lucid, I realized that a dead man cannot make restitution. A dead man cannot do anything, in this life, to contribute anything good to the world, even to help those like himself, or to help children afflicted by grief, or help people to understand mental illness—which, as a pharmacist, I understood could be a matter of brain chemistry and not of will. And so I talked with my attorneys about what I could do, incarcerated, to, in some small way, encourage the treatment of people such as myself, to encourage the understanding of mental illness. And I began to hope that I might do that, not because it would be less frightening for me, but because it would be a more difficult task. I do not think these thoughts arose from a selfish desire. I think they arose from my long hours of prayer and contemplation. I thought about what I had done, and how that could have been prevented. I thought about the particularly heinous nature of taking the lives of children, whose entire futures I erased with one act. I thought about the families, the Swans and my own, I had devastated, and how that could not be undone. The anguish of this line of thought is indescribable. But I had to consider that taking my life could not restore the lives of the Swan children. So, while I believe that it would be right to condemn me, I do not believe it would be useful. And, before this happened, I wanted very much to live a useful life.’

  “He goes on. But this is sufficient.

  “Obviously, in this situation,” the judge went on, “our first duty is to the community, in this case represented by the Swan family. We may have seen a change in Scott Early, from a man who clearly fit the legal definition of diminished capacity, to a man who is thoughtful and concerned. But we can’t know, at this point, whether that is a durable change, whether he poses a danger to himself and society. We must assume that he does. And so releasing him with treatment is not an option at this point, as it would be if he had a physical impairment, a tumor that impaired his impulse control that had been removed, for example.

  “Our other concern must be compassion, which should be on the mind of any court in the making of decisions. The Romanesque statue of Justice is depicted weighing the scales—the scales of evidence—but she also is blindfolded. This has been, in many descriptions, said to portray impartiality, that is, ‘blindness’ to anything but the facts. However, what this blindfold truly signifies is that justice should not be influenced by any outside force, social or political.

  “However, in this case, we must be influenced by compassion. That compassion must be directed at the Earlys as well as the Swan family, because although the Earlys are innocent of any wrongdoing, they raised a good young man who became terribly ill, so far as we can tell, without the influence of substance abuse or family mistreatment or trauma, but, from what our investigators can gather, the combination of his parents’ genes or simple bad luck. We cannot overestimate the role of mental illness in the commission of crime; and Scott Early is a signal example of that phenomenon. Before November nineteenth of last year, he had never been given a parking ticket. He had no history of violence at all, much less violent crime. He has asked for the opportunity to allow us, the community of justice, to learn from him how such a man could do such a thing.

  “Perhaps it is idealistic in the extreme to believe that by refusing to exercise the ultimate punishment available to us as a culture for the commission of such a crime, we can ‘learn’ from individuals who commit such crimes. In the case of the murders of Rebecca and Ruth Swan, capital punishment would not, in fact, be an option, since Scott Early’s crime clearly was opportunistic, not premeditated or in conjunction with the commission of another felony. Indeed, he has repeatedly stated that he continued to drive until his car ran out of gas to prevent himself from doing exactly what he did.

  “And so, under ordinary circumstances, Scott Early would be guilty of manslaughter in the second degree, an act that, while it appeared voluntary, was in fact not his choice, but which ended two lives. He could serve two sentences that consecutively might amount to more than two decades.

  “However, the circumstances we face are not ordinary. A verdict of not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect is difficult to justify. Scott Early did know that what he was doing was wrong, gravely wrong. But though he knew the difference between right and wrong, he did not, at the time of the deaths of little Rebecca and Ruth, know the difference between the real world and the world no one but he could see or hear. He did not believe he had a choice.

  “Therefore, instead of sentencing Scott Early to a prison term, which would do us no good and him harm, I am placing him in the custody of the maximum security facility for the criminally mentally ill in St. George, Utah, at Stone Gate, for a period of no less than three years and no more than seven years, to include the time he already has spent in the county facility, where he will receive treatment and cooperate both in his own therapy and in the study of his mental processes before and after the crime. He will receive periodic evaluations of his mental capacity and condition and, at which time when he is released, it will be under close supervision by community mental health authorities, and under the provisions of the statutes that make it mandatory for those in his locale to know who he is and where he lives, and for the Swans to be kept apprised of this knowledge for the rest of their lives as well.

  “I realize that this decision may not satisfy everyone’s desires in this case. I realize it may be a source of controversy. But I am confident in having reached it with the sincere cooperation of both the state and the attorneys for Scott Early, with the expert advice of medical doctors on both sides, with testimony both from the Swans and from those who know them best, with the Earlys, including Scott’s wife, Kelly Englehart, and those who knew them best, and with my own conscience. I offer my condolences to all involved, and I genuinely wish I could offer more, especially to London, Cressida, Raphael, and Veronica Swan, whose lives are forever reduced. Mr. Early will be transported to Stone Gate tomorrow. And this court is adjourned.”

  We stood, and my mother held on tight to one of my father’s arms as I held on to the other. I know that all of us were thinking the same thing: We had never considered the possibility
that Scott Early would ever see the outside of an institution again. We felt as though we had been punched in the stomach. As he was led away, Scott Early looked at me; and what I saw in his eyes, before I looked away, was not any kind of relief, but pure pain and pleading. Then, I did look away. I didn’t want to be tempted, even in the Christian sense, to pity him.

  When we walked out onto the courthouse steps, the press clustered around the attorneys and around Kelly Englehart and Scott Early’s parents.

  We were invisible. But we knew that we wouldn’t be for very long.

  We ran. The pictures of us from that day are of our backs, as we ran away.

  Chapter Nine

  More than ever, with the story in the paper, Mama didn’t want to go anywhere. She refused again to go to church. Papa brought food home when he came back from school.

  Another birthday passed that no one except for me remembered. My mother hurried up and got me a new winter coat—wow, I thought ungratefully, from Sears by mail!—when she noticed that I’d gotten cards from my grandparents and aunts (and a hundred bucks from the Sissinellis).

  Months went by. Anything would have been a relief. I kept thinking that if it got dry enough, there’d be a fire on the mountains, and I could watch the smoke jumpers parachute in, as I had once when I was small. It was a wicked wish, because a wildfire meant wildlife and people could die; but I wanted the world to feel the way I did—like a fire in a trap, secret and snared, but so hot that only a bigger blaze could overtake it.

  Then, slowly—and she later told me that it was because she prayed every night for hours for the Holy Ghost to guide her hand—Mama began to really notice Rafe. He was talking by then, saying everything he could to get her attention. She started to teach him to use his shape sorter and point out the ball and the apple in his little books and make noises like the cow and the horse.