Page 165 of Edge of Unbroken

“Seven or eight, probably.”

“When was the last time you cried, Ronan? In general. When was the last time you cried?”

“Probably around the same time. Seven or eight,” Ronan says, shocking me.

“Why?”

“I just… It’s useless. Doesn’t help me. Never did. Crying made things worse. It just made me vulnerable.”

“And you wanted to avoid being vulnerable?”

“Being vulnerable would expose me to pain, so, yeah, I tried to avoid it at all costs.”

“Did it work?”

“Nope,” Ronan says against gritted teeth. “Nothing worked. Nothing.”

Mr. Cooley continues to elicit testimony from Ronan, who describes in excruciating detail the abuse he suffered at the hands of his mother. It includes an incident in which he forgot to take out the trash before hockey practice, which resulted in his mother swinging a kitchen knife at him and cutting the palm of his hand.

The longer Ronan testifies, the more he lays out what his mother has done to him, the tighter my chest feels, and it’s obvious everyone else in the courtroom feels similarly. The expressions on the faces of Frank, Steve, Shane, Penny, my mom, and my other friends range from agony to devastation and everything in between. None of us had any idea what Ronan had to endure. We had no idea at all, and listening to it all makes me wonder how in the world it was possible for us all to fail to recognize what was going on. It’s almost unfathomable that someone can be exposed to so much fear and pain and violence, but those around him don’t recognize it. I don’t have even the slightest clue how Ronan was able to hide the abuse for so long.

“Do you recall any times your mom hit you when you lived in Montana when you were ten and before you moved back to New York when you were twelve?” the attorney asks Ronan after moving on to this next phase of Ronan’s life.

“Honestly…” Ronan pauses. “No. My mother hardly ever did anything when we lived in Montana. It was rare that she’d really hurt me there. I always hoped we’d stay and not move back to New York.”

“Do you know why your mom didn’t hurt you often when you lived in Montana?”

Ronan exhales deeply. “I think it was a combination of things. We were never really alone—she usually only hit me when it was just her and me. Things were a lot better in Montana.”

“Alright, what about when you moved back to New York when you were twelve, how long did you stay in New York?

“Not quite two years. We moved to Montana a few days before my fourteenth birthday and lived there about thirteen months before we came back to New York.”

Ronan talks about run-ins he had with his mother, how she kicked, beat, and shoved him, and how she would call him names and tell him he was less than nothing. And he tells the story of how he broke his elbow.

“It was the only time my mom took me to see a doctor for my injury,” Ronan sighs heavily.

I divert my attention away from him and seek out his mother for a moment. She has hardly moved since Ronan took the stand. She still looks tiny, her back ramrod straight now as she stares at a yellow notepad in front of her, though I haven’t noticed her write anything down. Only occasionally does she lift her eyes to look at Ronan.

“Do you know why your mother took you to the doctor that particular time?” Mr. Cooley asks.

“I’m not sure. Maybe because it wasn’t an injury she could treat at home? I had my elbow in a cast for six weeks.”

“What, if anything, did you tell the doctor about how you sustained the injury?”

“My mother told me to tell the doctor I fell down the stairs at home. So that’s what I did,” Ronan says bluntly.

“Did the doctor question your explanation at all?”

Ronan shakes his head. “No. Nobody ever really questioned my explanations.”

My heart aches in my chest. God, how I wish I had been the exception to the rule. How I wish I could turn back time and do something,anythingto save Ronan.

By now, the exhaustion is etched into his face. His body is tense, shoulders heavy, but he keeps going, recalling memory after memory, time after time that his mom put a hand on him, and I’m beginning to recognize that, the older Ronan got, the more vicious and more frequent the violence became.

“When you lived in Montana for those thirteen months when you were fourteen, did your mother hurt you at all?”

I half expect Ronan to give an answer similar to the ones he had already given whenever he talked about his prior time in Montana—that, aside from the occasional slap, shove, kick, or nasty word, his mother would refrain from violently assaulting her son given the omnipresence of Ronan’s grandparents. I’m surprised, therefore, when Ronan nods.

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