*This post has been edited, following CB's comment and emails between CB and the author, for which the author expresses her appreciation
Summer came to Portland this week. It went from what the locals call "Juneuary" to 90-plus degrees. My husband stuck what wine we own in a fridge so it didn't cook. Two nights ago, we sat on the porch and drank a bottle of cold grenache. It was nine o'clock and light outside. He opened a second bottle of wine. It looked like rose-colored glass. I did not think I wanted more wine but we started on that bottle, too, and we talked about Amanda.
Amanda Stott-Smith is not a person my husband offers opinions about. He knows that what led up to May 23, 2009, when her children were forced off the Sellwood Bridge, and what has happened since are important to me, and in that capacity, he listens. He has never offered a judgment. As I gather an increasing number of horrifying, banal and questionable pieces of this story, pieces I metaphorically examine on the kitchen counter during our morning coffee, he listens. He knows I am taking the shape of each, giving them a little air before I place them in files, on my bulletin board. He is a patient listener. He is one of the two people I trust most in the world, and he told me two nights ago, when I was slowed from the heat and the wine, "I think Amanda is a coward."
He said this in response to my saying, men are not in the main curious about what led Amanda to the bridge that night; they want resolution and in some cases revenge, whereas women need to know why, a statement he took offense to. Still, he let me challenge him. He let me enumerate what I have learned in the past two months, he let me bullet-point Amanda's systematic and public humiliation under the pretense that she be a submissive wife; the physical abuse; her sense, founded or not, that she had nowhere to turn, that no one who believed in her; that she had lost custody of her children and did not believe they would be safe without her, the psychic break...
"Then why didn't she just kill herself?" he asked. I told him, she tried...
"But she didn't," he said. I told him how I've read that when women kill their children, they feel as though they are killing an extension of themselves, that suicide becomes almost redundant...
He looked at me. "Do you think you're making excuses for her?" he asked. "Do you think you're looking for reasons to--"
To what? To believe what was reported was grotesquely incomplete? That she did this as "revenge" against her husband?
"Yes," he said.
I told him, I did not think it was revenge, or not only. I repeated the bullet-points, this time accompanied by an orchestral arrangement of tears. Men, you may have noticed, do not like it when women cry. I think this is because they don't cry much themselves and tears must seem like things that should be stopped so we can get on to things that matter. That is not what happened two nights ago; my husband let me cry as I reasoned, and then he became angry, as much with me as with her.
"I would kill myself before I ever did what she did," he said, and then something to the effect of, if his mind told him what I was telling him Amanda's mind told her -- that by killing her children she was somehow saving them -- then he would have held on to them as they all went down. He would have broken their falls.
"Can you ever see yourself doing what she did?" he asked.
I have been writing about Amanda for fourteen months. I have spoken and written with two dozen women, many of whom say, "There but for the grace of god." I have read Anna Quindlen, writing about the Andrea Yates murders, "Every mother I've asked about the Yates case has the same reaction. She's appalled; she's aghast. And then she gets this look. And the looks says that at some forbidden level she understands."
And I do understand, or perhaps it is more accurate to say, today, I form hypotheses as to how this happened, informed as they are by bulletins near and far, some screaming in my ear, some a faint pulse, lighthouse beams through a heavy fog. But no, I told my husband, I cannot see myself doing what Amanda did, an answer that made me wonder what buttresses the sympathy I feel for her.
"What if you don't meet her?" he asked. "What if she won't talk to you?"
I told him, that will be a problem, because I want to tell her story.
"But what if her story is not what you think it is?" he asked. That pissed me off, enough that I took a break from the crying, and told him that he knows me well enough to know, I do not decide what shape the story will take and then shove what I find into it. That this is what nearly every other entity that had anything to say about Amanda did: they had their villain, why look further? He told me, I might have as much of an agenda as anyone else; that I had decided to care about Amanda, and didn't that color what I did?
It's an interesting question. What are our motivations, in exploring anything? If you want to learn how to play tennis, you go play tennis. If you want to understand how a mother throws her children off a bridge, you ask questions. You read. You stay patient. You allow your impressions to change, and change again. You sit in restaurants as people weep and tell you what they know. You account for misinformation, and try to figure out why people have given it to you. You swallow hard when your objectives are misinterpreted, and you cry and then stop crying when your husband asks you the hard questions. And you try to explain that the book may have Amanda at its center, but look, look at the ripples, her children, her family, look at the the pastor who, in his role as counselor, told Amanda she was "a whore, a bitch and a slut... you need to figure it out because you're living in sin and the devil has a hold of your soul." And a DHS system covering its tracks, and a judicial system that makes swift if imperfect deals in order to reach that mythical thing referred to as "closure," and a press beleaguered with too many murdered and missing children to continue to report on this story. What Amanda did that night, whatever her reasoning, ripped apart many lives, of this there is no question. And yet we grapple still, as a friend wrote, "to explain without excusing, and explore without exploiting." The public is divided over whether to condemn or understand Amanda, just as we two on our front porch were. That these things are what the book is about.
My husband's face relaxed. He poured the last of the wine. "You've set yourself a high bar," he said. I told him, that's right.
Part VII, "Enchilada," here
