What Happened to the Bennetts

“How about, ‘Allison would be fine, but for the fact that we won the game?’ Or ‘Allison would be fine, but for the fact that we stayed late to celebrate?’ Or ‘Allison would be fine, but for the fact we have a new Mercedes?’”

Jason draws on his legal experiences to explain why “but for” logic is flawed. It is easy to point to causes that made an incident possible, but that is not the same thing as pointing to a cause that directly and intentionally led to the incident. Jason knows that it helps Ethan to have the logic spelled out for him.

“I knew we could not all fall to pieces at the same time. I was Daddy. I was the center, and the center had to hold.”

Jason believes it is his responsibility to put off worry and grief to stay strong for his family. Ethan later tells Jason that he never saw him cry for Allison, and Jason realizes that he might have been showing too strong a face. At the end of the novel, everyone in the family goes to a therapist.

“The coffee table was cluttered with bottles of Holo Taco nail polish, tubes of watermelon ChapStick, a black ponytail elastic, and a tube of peppermint Mentos gum, which she loved so much we called her gum pig. Her Adidas slides and a pair of worn red Toms were piled by the entertainment center. My daughter surrounded us but was absent. It was a family room without the family.”

After Allison’s death, the Bennetts’ house serves as a constant reminder of her life. Everywhere Jason looks, he sees evidence of his daughter. It used to be evidence of their family intact, but now it is a reminder that the family is no longer whole.

“I felt an increasing sense of dislocation. I was a suburban dad, a farm boy at heart. It disoriented me to see the vanishing of terra firma, as if the land beneath my very feet were disappearing.”

Jason is from Pennsylvania and associates its farm country with stability. It is from there that he draws his calm strength. But the marshes of Delaware are the opposite of solid ground, and being there gives Jason a sense of insecurity.

“I knew everyone grieved differently, but somehow I hadn’t expected to grieve so differently from them.”

Jason walks in on Lucinda and Ethan looking at photos of Allison the day after she died, and Jason cannot imagine confronting memories of his daughter so directly and intentionally. He reflects on how differently he has been handling Allison’s death. It frightens him that they are not unified as a family at such an important moment.

“I knew my life would forever be divided into Before and After. I didn’t know how other fathers survived their own children. I wished I could talk to one, just one. I wished someone would tell me. It wasn’t possible, yet people did it every day. I just didn’t know how.”

Jason here wishes for something that comes true in the final chapter of the novel. Lucinda and Jason eventually join a support group with other parents who have lost their children, and the knowledge that it is possible to have a happy “After” is a key step to recovery.

“I never felt right when Lucinda and I were at odds. Our marriage was solid ground, the terra firma of my life, but this was disturbances-in-the-field time.”

Jason compares his marriage to the solid ground of Pennsylvania. It is another source of stability for him. After fighting with Lucinda, he feels like he is losing his marriage as a source of his strength.

“We both knew she loved the kids more than me. And I loved her more than the kids. I didn’t know if that made me a good husband or a bad father. Or both.”

The novel is defined by Jason’s relationship with his wife and kids. For the most part, fatherhood dominates Jason’s self-image, but here he struggles to define himself as both a good husband and a good father at the same time.

“Jason, it’s too much, what we’ve lost. Allison, our lives, the house, the business, my cameras, my lenses, my jewelry, all of it is gone, gone, gone, and at some point, it’s just too big to overcome, you can’t overcome it. It’s not possible to lose everything and still go on.”

Lucinda falls into depression after Allison’s death. At first, Jason does not realize how hard she is taking it, but by this point, Lucinda is on the verge of giving up. Whereas Jason believes his role as a father requires him to be strong and hold the family together, Lucinda’s grief is so great that she sees nothing to hold together.

“A program designed for criminal defendants wasn’t tenable for us.”

Witness protection programs are designed to protect criminal informants from the organizations they used to work for. The program struggles to offer the appropriate support to law-abiding families like the Bennetts who would benefit from communication with their family and friends.

“That’s the way marriage was, I realized in that moment. There was a thing you always worried about, barely a crack, running down the middle between the two of you, and you hope it will go away, but it can widen like a tectonic plate, break open beneath your feet, and swallow you whole.”

When Lucinda cheats on Jason with Hart, Jason’s greatest fear about their marriage comes true. He remembers one of their earliest fights when Lucinda didn’t want him to drop out of law school and give up that ambition. Jason worries that the fight, having never been resolved, has been festering ever since.

“The government wasn’t protecting us, they were protecting him.”

The Bennetts questioned how the FBI could fail to protect their house and catch Milo. When they discover that Milo is an FBI informant, they realize the FBI never shared the Bennetts’ goal of punishing the murderer of their daughter.

“You know, honey, this is a strange world we live in, and everybody lies. […] The lawyers lie, the cops lie, FBI lies, the government lies. Not me. I didn’t, I don’t. I may not be a lawyer, but I took an oath, as a court reporter. My oath is that everything I write down is accurate, which is another word for truth. The transcript, the exhibits, everything—when I sign my name to it, it’s true. I watch lawyers every day, and I sit in the same room and hear them lie. I know they’re lying, they know they’re lying. I write down their lies. I record their lies in a true and correct copy. And you know what? I’m the only one who keeps my oath. That’s me.”

Jason is upset after discovering that Lucinda slept with Hart, a lawyer whom he believes weaponizes the law against justice. He is also upset that Lucinda wanted him to become a lawyer rather than a court reporter, which is an insult to his profession. Here, Jason frames the court reporter as the more virtuous defender of truth.

“The man didn’t ask why, and I saw myself in his eyes. I was a man who needed a car painted fast, for reasons nobody wanted to know. I sensed I was leaving my old legal world behind and entering one where lawyers conspired with criminals and ended up dead anyway.”

After he flees the witness protection program, Jason repaints his car and shaves his head to avoid being identified. Jason confronts how far he is going, that he is leaving the law-abiding world he knows. His transformation into a man-of-action involves a change in appearance from a suburban father to a street criminal.

“I was becoming someone else. Maybe who I should have been, all along. Not my father. Myself. I looked at my reflection with new eyes. No more playing it safe.”

When Jason shaves his head, he recognizes his father in the mirror. But after realizing how far he’s come from “playing it safe,” which he associates with his father, Jason no longer sees his father in the reflection. He sees a new Jason.

“I thought about Allison, but this time, instead of breaking my heart, it opened my eyes. I had to do whatever it took to get justice for her. To save my family. To free them from the program.”

Over the course of Jason’s investigation, he gets shot at, beaten, and outmaneuvered. Despite his repeated misadventure, he keeps going, and often the image of Allison in his mind pushes him to do whatever it takes to save his family.

“I no longer wondered why the drug business was booming, or why the dealers weren’t put away, because I knew the answer now. I lived the answer now. The justice system was broken.”

When Jason drives through the dying towns that are too far from Philadelphia to commute, he sees parts of his county for the first time in a new light. In those towns, businesses have closed on every street, and homes are abandoned. The only activity is criminality.

“I used to think that law governed us all. I had thought that justice was an ocean, and that lawlessness was only islands in the water. The exception, not the rule—like Gitmo, an island beyond the reach of courts. Now I knew better, after Allison. There were no islands of lawlessness; the lawlessness was everywhere. An ocean of lawlessness, with no island in sight, no land anywhere at all.”

At the start of the novel, Jason has faith in the law. When he encountered the corruption of authorities before, it was in Guantanamo Bay, and Jason was able to understand its existence by thinking Cuba was too far and too disconnected from US courts. But after seeing so many failures of the legal system close to home, Jason loses that faith. He takes justice into his own hands because the legal system protects the guilty.

“I was unarmed, with no way to protect myself. I was just a suburban dad who believed in the truth. I was about to see if that mattered anymore.”

Jason might not have faith in the law, but he never stops having faith in the power of the truth. He believes that if he can get to George, he can fix things with the truth. And he thinks because he is a suburban dad, the truth will mean something coming from him.

“I had gone from court reporter to Caucasian male.”

Jason confronts how much he has changed when he reads a flyer describing him the way that police describe criminal suspects: “Caucasian male.” He has been framed for Wiki’s murder and feels like there is no going back to his old life. How he perceives himself and is perceived by the world have changed.

“Maybe a hero was just a guy who solved a problem. A regular dad, trying to fix things for his family. I fixed the water leak, I fixed the plaster, Mr. Fixit, writ large.”

The novel never overtly asks what makes a man. But it does ask what makes a good husband, a good father, and a hero. Here, Jason combines all three things into one ideal: Mr. Fixit. A hero is a good father and husband, both in the house and outside it.

“Decide what you want and do what gets it.”

Dom quotes a criminal to give advice to Jason. Decide what you want, not what you think you should want. While the message comes from a sociopath who ignores societal limitations, in Dom’s context it is about being honest with oneself and making choices that are true to you rather than for your pride.

“Of course, the lawyers didn’t introduce him, because they never bother to introduce the court reporter. We all joke they think we’re part of the steno machine, but it’s not funny.”

Jason reflects on the treatment of court reporters in the legal profession. He describes their labor as mechanical and thus valued less than non-mechanical labor. His resentment is fed by his belief that Lucinda was disappointed he dropped out of law school and her subsequent affair with a lawyer. This lack of respect from his colleagues and spouse fuels his transformation into a man-of-action.