Cat #3
“Where did you go after this particular incident, after you took out the trash and got in your car?”
I, of course, know the rest of story; I know where Ronan went, how he spent his evening.
“I went back to work for another couple of hours,” Ronan says. “Shane had to close Murphy’s early for something. I don’t remember exactly.” He sounds utterly exhausted.
“Did you go back home after leaving work?”
“No.”
“Where did you go right after work?”
Ronan hesitates. I raise my eyebrows at his delay because I know he came to pick me up.
“I went and bought some weed,” he admits, and my head snaps to Vada, then to Shane. What the hell? Was he high that night? No, I don’t think so. I’ve had friends who smoke, and I’d know if Ran was high when we were together that night. Or would I?
“Did you consume any of it that night?” Darren Cooley asks.
I listen intently, and to my relief, Ronan shakes his head. “No; I never smoked it. I threw it out a few minutes after buying it.”
“If you threw it out, why did you buy it in the first place?”
“As a crutch. I smoke sometimes when it feels like everything is getting a bit overwhelming. It just kind of… takes the edge off I guess.”
I can tell he feels like crap admitting this in front of everyone, and I look over at Frank, trying to gauge his reaction to his youngest son’s admission of using drugs to cope. But Frank’s face is all empathy and no judgment, and I feel so much gratitude for him. He may not have been around to protect Ronan, but he’s still a good dad.
“Why did you end up throwing it out instead of smoking it?”
“Because I realized I needed to be fully present that night, despite whatever happened at home,” Ronan says, conviction in his voice.
“Can you elaborate on that? Why did you need to be present?”
“Just… I needed to be sober for my girlfriend. She had her own shit—sorry, stuff”—he looks at the judge sheepishly, but the gruff-looking older gentleman just gives Ronan a comforting smile—“going on, and it wouldn’t have been fair to her if I got high or wasn’t sober. I wanted to be there for her.”
Ronan’s words find their way directly into my soul. The fact that he decided against numbing his own pain to be one hundred percent present with me, to help me deal with my anguish, is the epitome of sacrifice. I know without a shadow of doubt that even if the world was completely upside down, Ronan would be upside down right along with me. And I vow right then and there to do the same for him, no matter what.
Mr. Cooley finishes his walkthrough of that day, briefly questioning Ronan about his mother’s comment about Ronan’s bloody lip and black eye. Ronan keeps his response to the bare minimum, only divulging that “some guy was putting hands” on me without my permission, but otherwise keeping the more painful details to himself. Adam doesn’t come up again, and I can’t even put into words how much I love Ronan and his protectiveness.
The attorney backtracks, returning to the time roughly a year prior to August 28th, and meticulously takes Ronan, the jury, and the audience through the surveillance footage, which captured so much unspeakable abuse, both physical and verbal. Ronan was spot-on in his description that things were starting to feel different, his mother’s violence more frequent, her hits harder, more relentless, more painful.
It’s clear that Rica had no trouble coming up with ways to inflict pain. Regardless of the means employed to inflict physical injury on Ronan, the words that would accompany the abuse were always the same. They relentlessly hammered home that—in Rica’s eyes—her son was a worthless, irrelevant screwup who, no matter what he did, would never be good enough, would never be worthy of love, affection, or anything good in his life.
I barely breathe when the prosecutor begins to show surveillance footage from last summer, when I stepped into Ronan’s life, when our relationship blossomed, when our love for each other grew stronger day by day. He plays back a moment from the Saturday I first met Ronan—May 1st—and he and Steve inadvertently broke curfew. I know now how Ronan got his bruised jaw, which I noticed days later.
Then there’s footage of Ronan’s mother laying into him, tearing him down on his seventeenth birthday. Tears stream down my face—hot and unstoppable—when Darren Cooley plays the footage of Rica beating Ronan with her shoe the day I returned from North Carolina. The attorney plays incident after incident of run-ins Ronan and Rica have almost every time the two of them are in the house together alone.
My chest feels tight, heart squeezing painfully whenever I connect footage to moments when I noticed a bruise or a cut, always silently wondering about their origin, sometimes asking him about it, but never digging deeper. I feel ashamed that I didn’t know, didn’t realize what was happening to him.
“Ronan, do you recall any incidents on Wednesday, June 30th of last year?” Mr. Cooley asks, moving on from a verbal assault just the day prior that surprisingly ended without any physical altercation this time.
I certainly remember that date. I was in Buffalo, at softball camp. It was the day Adam began extorting me.
“Not without more information,” Ronan says quietly. “It’s just all a big blur of pain for me, honestly.”
Darren Cooley nods, then returns to his computer to select the next surveillance footage in which Rica can be seen standing in the hallway with a whiskey bottle in her hand.
“Ronan!” Rica yells the moment Mr. Cooley presses play. I recognize her cadence, her tone, the way Ronan’s name is way too sharp on her tongue. I’m pretty sure that, in this exact moment on the screen, Ronan is on the phone with me.
“Ronan!” she yells again, louder still, and begins to walk up the stairs. The vantage point changes, and Rica can be seen making it to the top of the stairs, then to Ronan’s room. He gets up from his bed, and sure enough can be seen shoving his phone into the back pocket of his jeans just as his mother arrives at his door, the bottle of whiskey still in her hands. “Why the fuck aren’t you answering me?”
Ronan doesn’t move an inch. “Sorry, I was on the phone.”
“With who?” Rica hisses.
Ronan hesitates for a second. “Nobody. Wrong number.”
At this point, Ronan hadn’t told his mother about me and him. I didn’t understand then why he had kept our relationship a secret. I’d felt hurt when I found out, just days later, that he had told neither his mom nor dad about us, though I understand now why he kept his feelings for me to himself. Of course, I understand now.
“Go downstairs,” Rica says, not stepping into his room. She doesn’t elaborate on why she wants Ronan to go downstairs, though it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it wasn’t to give him a hug.
“I have to change and go to work, Mom,” Ronan says, not moving an inch.
“Not until I’m done with you. Get downstairs, now!” She points her index finger in the direction of the stairs.
Ronan wills his legs to move. He walks out of his room, past his mom, and down the stairs.
His mom herds him into the kitchen before she begins yelling.“What the fuck is this, Ronan?” Rica snarls, holding up the half-empty bottle of whiskey.
“Looks like Jack,” Ronan says calmly.
I smile to myself at his defiance, even though I know he knows he’s about to endure physical pain.
“Are you being smart with me?” Rica yells at him, but Ronan doesn’t respond. “You’re going to seriously want to rethink that, you piece of shit. I want to know why this bottle is almost empty, Ronan. Are you drinking?” Her voice is pitchy.
Ronan still doesn’t speak.
“No answer is an answer, too, Ronan. God, you’re such a fuckup. Not only are you completely and utterly worthless, but you’re apparently also turning into an alcoholic. This is the second time you’ve been caught in a situation like this. What is it going to take for you to finally just do as you’re told and stop fucking up? Take off your shirt.”
My stomach drops.
“What?” Ronan asks, confusion and fear on his handsome face.
“Take off your fucking shirt, Ronan,” Rica yells even louder.
“Why?” Ronan stalls, obviously on edge.
His mom backhands his face, hard. “God damn it, Ronan, when will you learn to just do as I say? Take off your fucking shirt and turn the fuck around, you disrespectful piece of shit.”
Ronan hesitates, his hands clenched into fists by his side.
“I’m waiting, Ronan,” Rica says sharply.
Finally, Ronan does as he’s told and pulls his shirt up and over his head before turning his back to his mother and grabbing on to the kitchen counter. Ronan can be seen lowering his head, shutting his eyes as he waits for his mother to hurt him.
“You really are the dumbest, most worthless son of a bitch, Ronan,” Rica says as she positions herself behind Ronan. She tips the heavy whiskey bottle, holding it by its neck now, and I understand that she’s about to hit him with it. “Worthless,” she grunts, and slams the bottle into Ronan’s side.
The little bit of the sandwich I managed to eat during lunch threatens to find its way back up.
“Disrespectful,” Rica says and hits him again. “No good,” she growls through clenched teeth and follows it up with another hit, then another, and another, and another. Each hit is accompanied by yet another reminder of how unloved he is.
Ronan stays silent throughout the beating, not making a single sound, never asking his mother to stop hurting him, his head lowered, eyes shut, teeth gritted as he grips the countertop.
I count twenty-one strikes before Rica finally steps back from her son, then raises her hand and throws the whiskey bottle to the ground, where it shatters into a thousand pieces of glass, the brownish liquor staining the white tile of the kitchen floor.
“Step out of line again, Ronan, and you’ll regret that decision. Clean up the kitchen, and then get out of my sight unless you want more of this,” Rica says, and resolutely marches out of the kitchen, then up the stairs.
We watch Ronan stand for a moment, unmoving, breathing heavy, before he loosens his hold on the countertop and straightens himself up slowly. He slips his shirt on, covering his torso and the large bruises already forming—like two rungs of a ladder—on his right side, just above his hip bone. I vividly remember seeing those bruises only a few days later, asking Ronan about them. And I remember him telling me, and later Shane, that he had tripped and fallen backward against his desk. I never questioned him, never suspected the reality of what Ronan was dealing with on a near-daily basis.
In the footage, Ronan goes about cleaning up the mess his mother left, silently picking up shards of glass, then wiping the tile clean before he leaves the kitchen.
The attorney stops the video. It’s silent in the courtroom, as always after the jury is offered yet another glimpse into the violence endured by the handsome seventeen-year-old boy sitting in the witness stand.
“Do you remember this particular incident, Ronan?” Mr. Cooley asks.
“Yep, I do now,” Ronan says matter-of-factly.
“What were you doing prior to your mother calling your name at the start of the footage?”
“I was in my room, talking on the phone.”
“Do you remember who you were speaking to?”
“My girlfriend.”
“Why did you tell your mother in the video footage that you were talking to no one? You said it was the wrong number.”
“Because I didn’t want her to know about my relationship.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” Ronan trails off, his gaze unfocused. “Because my relationship made me vulnerable to my mother. It was something she could use against me, and she did—all the time—once she found out about Cat,” Ronan says in a low, tired voice before exhaling deeply.
“In what way did your mother use your relationship with your girlfriend against you?”
“Once she figured out I was seeing Cat, my mother constantly brought Cat up when she was laying into me. She would tell me that, sooner or later, Cat would figure me out, would figure out that I’m worthless, and she’d leave me. My mom would tell me that all I was good for was being used up, and that girls like Cat don’t stay with guys like me for long.”
I glower at Rica, a stabbing ache in my chest at the thought that she weaponized Ronan’s love for me, used it as a means to tear him down, to engage in emotional warfare.
“Did you sustain any physical injuries on that date?”
“Bruises,” Ronan answers dryly.
Darren Cooley then asks the question I, too, have wondered about: why in the world Ronan had to take off his shirt.
Ronan just shrugs. “No idea. To make it hurt more, probably.”
The attorney takes a deep breath, exhaling deeply. “Ronan, I’m sorry, but I have to ask: did your mother ever sexually assault you?”
I swallow hard, my eyes wide. I had never even considered that possibility.
Ronan’s brow is set when he shakes his head resolutely. “No.”
“Did she ever touch you inappropriately?”
“You mean other than beating the shit out of me?” Ronan asks with a frown.
“I mean in a sexual manner.”
“No, she never did anything like that.”
Relief washes through me. The feeling is temporary, replaced once again by heaviness when the prosecutor shifts focus to July 5th—the day we returned from our camping trip to the Hamptons. Is there ever an end to the torture?
There doesn’t appear to be an end in sight, and I find myself incessantly correlating clips from last summer with days and moments I spent with Ronan, thinking about our time together just before or after he was hurt by his mom. I very vividly remember a moment from last year—August 15th, to be exact—when Rica walked up the stairs of her house and saw me kissing Ronan. It was one of the exceptionally rare occasions when I was at Ronan’s house. He hardly ever brought me home with him.
That particular day, Ronan and I stopped by his house long enough for Ronan to change into his Murphy’s shirt in anticipation of him working later that evening. We were there a total of maybe ten minutes. I had my hands on Ronan’s bare chest, kissing him deeply in between him switching shirts. Rica walked up the stairs and saw us. I remember her staring us down. Ronan had pulled on his shirt, taken my hand into his, then led me out of the house without saying anything to either me or his mom until we were in his car and on our way back to my house.
So when the prosecutor cues up the footage for the following day, the still image showing a time of just after nine in the morning, I sit up a little straighter still. I watch intently as Ronan can be seen making his way downstairs, his black sweatpants sitting low on his hips, his white t-shirt hugging his sculpted torso. His muscular chest and back are notable even in the weirdly angled surveillance video.
Ronan hesitates for the briefest moment before entering the kitchen where his mother’s standing by the counter, but he enters nonetheless, quietly taking a glass out of the cupboard and filling it with water from the tap.
Rica turns to her son. “Are you fucking her, Ronan?” she asks calmly. “Your little girlfriend? Are you fucking her?”
“It’s not really any of your business, Mom,” Ronan says under his breath.