To the Bridge Page 7

  If all Amanda had to do was get Trinity and Eldon to swim lessons at the Sellwood Pool, or sit on the floor and play with Eldon, the summer went fine, but 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 tiny clothes, her parents’ church teaching that she needed to be an obedient wife, and her mother-in-law complaining about her spending habits.

  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, Polly Pockets and a million tiny toy sets. Amanda thought her mother-in-law was deliberately trying to drive her crazy, complaining that Amanda was OCD, accusing her of using too much Spray ’n Wash, and buying more and more tiny toys.

  Amanda would sometimes sit on the strip of lawn next to the conked-out Odyssey and watch her younger children play. She would drink a beer, smoke a clove cigarette, and try to figure out what she needed to do to get her husband to come home. There was a lot to figure out. Was she a wife, or wasn’t she? 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. They had been unified in the stories they told others, and Jason had promised Amanda before God that he would never divorce her. What did Amanda have to do to make this true? Maybe the right thing was to be perfect before God and not sin or make any mistakes to make every action of hers reflect well on Jason, to make sure everyone knew how wonderful Daddy was.

  Everything went to crap after Jason left. It was not that Gavin minded his stepfather being gone, but his mother was falling apart. Jason had done things out of obligation, but at least he bought groceries and stuff. His mother didn’t do anything anymore. She slept until noon and no longer cooked. Later, when Gavin learned how to make an egg in the microwave, he was sorry he had not known how to do so earlier; he could have given Eldon and Trinity more than cereal and milk, more than ants on a log.

  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, like when he told the lady from child services he was pretty sure the bruises on his arms were from roughhousing with his friends, and that maybe his mother had locked him out of the house by accident. He was eleven. He could take care of himself.

  Eldon and Trinity could not take care of themselves. Eldon wouldn’t turn four until August, Trinity was six and a half, and if Gavin had told the lady about the bruises and then made Gavin live with his father full-time, then who would take care of them? He wished his mother would just try. She said she was trying but it was hard. After Jason told her he would come home if she found a job, his mother had taken him, Eldon, and Trinity to the library for two hours so she could use the computer and make a résumé. Gavin did not think she really made one, but she did, showing her last job to have been eight years earlier and listing five references, including her mother, her aunt, her pastor, and “Jason Smith, MGR.”

  14

  The Juvenile Justice Center on the John Serbu Youth Campus in Eugene kept its doors locked from noon to one. Those who arrived early for court dates did what they could to pass the time. A young couple made out, a teenage boy wearing an ankle monitor and oversized everything stood apart from his mother and grandmother, and a man of about thirty in a white dress shirt and cantaloupe-colored tie paced. The scene played out in the full sun on the first day of October 2009, until the pacing man asked a woman with a silver swoop of hair, a woman to whom he had not been speaking, whether he should call Laura to be let inside.

  I wondered whether this man was Jason Smith. His photo had not appeared in any newspaper or on television, and he had not granted interviews. In answer to my emails, his lawyer, Laura Schantz, had been courteous, if brief, and said essentially the same things she had told the press five days after Eldon and Trinity were found in the river. Standing before the cameras in a city park, in a cornflower-blue jacket and navy skirt, her long dark hair in loose waves, Schantz had explained that Jason would now “dedicate his life to make sure his daughter has the most normal, happy childhood she can have.” Further, that Jason was “drawing his faith from God.” The blue-on-blue ensemble had something of the air hostess to it, as did Schantz’s bright smile. A family law attorney who had been representing Jason in his divorce from Amanda, she had not spoken publicly about the case since that appearance on May 27.

  But here she was now, an attractive brunette in a skirt and suit jacket opening the double-glass door for the man I thought might be Jason. She gave me a smile. I had received a last-minute tip from a newsroom friend, with no more detail than that some aspect of Amanda’s case was being decided today, and the smile, mixed with my pleasure at being the only reporter in attendance, made me hope I might speak with the Smith family.

  Meanwhile, in the same building but unbeknownst to me, negotiations were about to move forward. Amanda’s son Gavin, age twelve; his father, Nathan; and stepmother, Chelsea, were in the Lane County district attorney’s office. They had each been subpoenaed to appear. Chelsea was not opposed to being here. She had information she thought the DA should know. She felt the information crucial to the outcome of today’s hearing, which would consider terminating Amanda’s custodial rights to Trinity and granting Jason full custody of his surviving child. Chelsea knew if this were to happen, Gavin would not be allowed to see his half sister again. One of the reasons she knew this was that since the incident, she and Nathan had been contacted only once by the Smith family. Christine Duncan, Jason’s mother, had called to say they were not welcome at Eldon’s funeral. Duncan later amended this prohibition, saying Gavin could come if Nathan and Chelsea agreed to drive him to Eugene and leave the boy with her.

  Chelsea had been involved with Nathan long enough to sense this was not only Duncan’s grief talking. Chelsea did not doubt Duncan’s grief. She did not doubt that Jason would rely on his mother to organize the funeral, as he often relied on her to handle family matters. But Chelsea did see the edict as another of the demands the Smith family had made over the years. Though it would mean Gavin would miss his brother’s funeral, Nathan and Chelsea had chosen not to drive Gavin to Eugene and leave him with the Smith family. They chose not to because they did not believe the boy would be safe there.

  Nathan and Chelsea had been embroiled for years in court dates and arguments with Jason and Amanda, who did not want Nathan to see Gavin. The reluctance to let father and son see each other on its face made little sense. 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. They cited Nathan’s variable schedule as too much of an impediment to work around. Chelsea thought a more telling reason was that Amanda wanted Gavin to be a Smith; she often said so and sometimes enrolled the boy, named Gavin Stott on his birth certificate, in school as Gavin Smith. Christine Duncan had gone so far as to tell Chelsea, “Gavin will always be a Smith, not a Beck.”

  Nathan was reliable and even tempered. Thanks to these qualities, he had been able to interact with six hundred servicepeople during his eight years on the submarine and dislike only one person. Chelsea was more reactive. A devout Christian, as was her husband, she had no problem calling people on their bad behavior and fighting for what she thought was right. For the past six years, this had included fighting for Gavin.

  Hadle
y arrived at the courthouse with several members of his team. He was not representing Amanda with regard to her custody rights to Trinity and was here today mostly to take in the proceedings. I thought the Smith family would not be happy to see Amanda’s defense team here and told Hadley maybe he and I should not appear so friendly.

  “Good plan,” he said. “They won’t want to talk to you if they see you talking to me.”

  The courthouse doors opened at one o’clock. A staircase led to a wide second-floor gallery. I caught up with Jason’s attorney, Laura Schantz, heading at a clip down a corridor.

  “Ms. Schantz?” I asked. She nodded. We had emailed, I said, and handed her my card.

  She looked at it. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I would have remembered your name.”

  I reminded her that it was a few months ago, regarding Jason Smith and, later, Trinity. This did not jog her memory. I said, “You’re Laura Schantz.”

  “No, I’m the DA,” she said, and handed me the card back. “But I’ll tell her you’re here.”

  The district attorney disappeared down a corridor. I assumed she misheard me but still felt foolish that I’d mistaken her for Schantz.

  Several dozen people had by now assembled in the gallery. They were dressed casually for the warm fall day. A relaxed conversation filled the room until a message ran through the crowd that the proceedings would be delayed.

  Today was supposed to have been simple. Amanda would give up her custodial rights to Trinity, allowing Jason to assume full custody. Instead, Jason had been let into the courthouse early in order to sit in the DA’s office and negotiate with Nathan and Chelsea. He had not seen the Becks in more than a year. He had not reached out to Gavin after Eldon’s death and had not permitted Trinity any contact with her older brother. Nathan and Chelsea did not wish to debate Jason as to why, only to set some rules moving forward. Specifically, they wanted Jason to accept Department of Human Services oversight as a contingency of his taking custody of Trinity and pledge that he would not prevent future contact between the children. If Jason did not accede to these demands, and sign papers stating as much, Nathan, Chelsea, and Gavin would testify against him today in open court.

  After the crowd learned the delay would be no more than a half hour, conversation in the gallery resumed. The echoing acoustics and marble floor made the gathering feel like a museum gala. I saw a different silver-haired woman by a balustrade smiling at me.

  “We met last time, right?” she said. She was with a man whose height and girth made her look even tinier than she was. I told her I did not think we had met. She introduced herself as Kim Smith.

  “I’m Jason’s stepmother, and this is his father,” she said of Jay Smith. The big man shook my hand. I told Kim I was writing about what had happened to their family. The couple seemed amenable to this. Jay Smith told me he worked for Western Pneumatics, a company that made equipment “that helps keep the environment clean.” He talked about the Oregon Ducks, the University of Oregon football team whose gold-on-green logo sweatshirt he was wearing. He explained Eldon’s unusual third name, Rebhan, was part of “a really silly family tradition” whereby babies were given, as a middle name, the last name of their delivery doctor.

  “One time we had a doctor whose last name was Martini!” he said, and laughed.

  Kim gave me their email addresses and, when I said I would like to visit with them, said, “We might be able to do that.”

  “That’s Jason’s mother,” she said of the silver-haired woman I had seen outside.

  I introduced myself to Christine Duncan. She handed me a tract written by Eldon’s preschool teacher detailing how he was full of grace and walked the path of the Lord. Duncan was a tall woman with a strong voice that did not seem so much directed at the person she was speaking with as to the room. She talked nonstop about Eldon: how inquisitive he was, how loved he was, how he had been learning to write. The whites of Duncan’s eyes went from pink to rose as she talked about how smart Eldon had been. He wanted to know how the big cranes working on the U of O campus got out of the holes they dug, and the last time they had gone to the Olive Garden restaurant, Eldon had taken a peppermint on the way out and asked, “Grandma, how do they get peppermint?”

  “What child in the world has ever asked where peppermint comes from?” Duncan said. She abruptly stopped talking. A buzz came off her. It was like standing next to a transformer. I told Duncan I wanted to hear more about Eldon. She took my card but said she was not sure we could talk anymore and that the family had chosen to not speak to the media, which had “gotten everything wrong.” I watched her move into the crowd and start telling her story to the next person from the exact point she left off with me.

  It was not hard to see how Jason and the Smith family would resent the contingencies being presented in the DA’s office. They had lost a son, a grandson. They were left to care for Trinity and deal with whatever emotional hurdles the girl would now face. Amanda had wrecked so many lives, and her influence even now was turning what should have been a simple matter—Jason being allowed to take custody of his daughter—into an ordeal. That Nathan and Chelsea were stalling a matter as crucial and sensitive as a child’s welfare must have seemed selfish, if not insufferable.

  As it happened, the welfare of Jason and Amanda’s children was the reason Nathan and Chelsea were making their demands. Chelsea felt little but rancor for Jason, whom she saw as having brought devastation to Gavin’s life. In 2003, when Gavin was six years old, someone in the Stott family, and very likely Amanda, had called the Oregon Department of Human Services to say the boy showed signs of abuse. On the phone with a Child Protective Services worker, Jason admitted to spanking Gavin three days earlier. CPS visited the Smith home. The worker took note of “significant bruising” on the back of the boy’s legs. Photographs were taken. The CPS worker determined the injuries “could have been the result of excessive discipline,” and the case was closed. Asking today for DHS oversight of Jason’s custody of Trinity was the only way the Becks saw to safeguard the girl and allow her to see her brother.

  There was also the matter of Chelsea not believing anything Jason said.

  In January 2005, Amanda had called Nathan and said the family was moving to Oahu. She did not consult Nathan about moving his son across the ocean. Nathan had just been released from service aboard the USS Parche, a Cold War–era nuclear submarine, most of whose missions remain classified despite its decommission in 2004. He and Chelsea were living in Bremerton, Washington. They made the three-hour drive to Portland to work out a parenting plan with Jason and Amanda.

  “You know what?” Chelsea recalled Jason saying once they were seated at the kitchen table. “There’s an Indy car race on once a year and it’s on now. Can you wait?”

  Nathan and Chelsea waited in the kitchen while Jason watched TV in another room. Once that was done, they hashed out a plan. Nathan and Chelsea had a lawyer draw it up. Amanda refused to sign. The family left for Oahu in March. The lawyer sent the papers there. There was no response. Each time they inquired, Jason or Amanda would say the papers had been lost or they never arrived. It went on and on, until Nathan filed for an emergency custody hearing if the papers were not signed.

  The threat brought a response. Jason claimed he and Amanda were the better parents and that he was concerned about Nathan. Further, that Gavin was in a secure and stable home, and that he, Jason, was worried about Gavin not being close to his siblings, and that he believed those relationships were important.

  Chelsea did not then believe Jason thought those relationships important, and she believed it less now. After Eldon was murdered, Jason had told her, let’s get together, for the kids. Yes, Jason. Sounds great; good idea. Never happened.

  Most people in the gallery had grown restless during the hour-long wait, except for a woman who’d been standing still and alone against the far wall. She wore glasses and a calf-length skirt, her long auburn hair in braids.

  “I wouldn’t
approach her,” said Hadley, and he confirmed that the woman was Kathy Stott. In any case there was no time to approach, as the courtroom doors were opening and the crowd migrating over, except for the DA, who was marching my way.

  “Laura Schantz wants you to leave the building,” she said.

  Excuse me?

  “I told her you’d come here to interview her, and she says she wants you to leave,” she said. “And that she won’t talk to you.”

  I told the DA I had not asked to interview Schantz, and as for my leaving, did she mean the whole building?

  “Well, the building is public, so I can’t ask you to leave here, but it’s a closed courtroom,” she said, and walked away.

  “It’s not a closed courtroom,” Hadley whispered.

  “Court is open!” the bailiff called.

  I slid onto a bench in the back. Amanda’s mother sat at the other end. The judge said he would have Amanda on the speakerphone from jail. He announced that the parties—the attorney representing Amanda, Jason and his attorney, the DA, and a representative from DHS—had reached a resolution and that any allegations against the father had been dismissed.

  “As far as the mother’s portion of the case,” the judge continued, “she is incarcerated and unable to care for Trinity.” The court would not rule on whether Amanda’s parental rights to Trinity would be terminated in the future, only who would take or share custody of Trinity today.