The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  By the mid-1970s, as sex outside marriage, contraception, abortion, and single parenting became more common and less socially shameful, this rate would plummet to 12 percent; by 1983 it would be just 4 percent. The Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide came down in 1973, a year after Vicki got pregnant, but in 1972 Iowa, no one felt it coming.

  Vicki arrived at her cousins’ house in suburban Colorado in the summer of 1972, freshly graduated from high school and five months pregnant. The Catholic adoption agency got her a job so she wouldn’t be idle, and she watched movies and sewed with DeAnn and the rest of the family. She bore it all cheerfully. “That was Vicki,” DeAnn says. She had the baby in November, on the same day as her own birthday, or very near. She held her son, and then a nurse came and took him.

  One day afterward, DeAnn leaned against Vicki’s bedroom door while Vicki lay in bed and asked if Vicki ever regretted her choice, if she ever cried for her baby. “I cry for him every day,” Vicki replied.

  “She loved that baby,” DeAnn says now. “I think some counseling would have been a good idea. She never got any.”

  Back in Iowa, Robert came over for Christmas again. He was enraged. He wanted the baby. He was still seeing other girls. The Durians could hear him shouting through every wall. Vicki told him to get out and not to come back. In Vicki’s scrapbook from 1972 there is a page with an inscription in Vicki’s blue swooping writing: “The last note this year from Robert.” Only a discolored square exists where this note once sat.

  Most days, Vicki picked up her sister Mary and their brothers from school, then went to work at Shenk’s Nursing Home. There she would be, driving her dad’s big stick-shift pickup truck with her tanned arm lolling out the window. “Get in,” she would say, laughing and gesturing to the truck bed, then flooring the gas.

  Vicki began to talk about going to San Francisco, about going to see the Grateful Dead. She cut her hair, stopped wearing makeup, started wearing flowing dresses and baggy pants. She had always gotten excited for Earth Day, but now she became “a real hippie.” On a family trip to Lake Geode, when her brothers threw their soda cans out the window, she lectured them on how long it takes for aluminum to biodegrade—five hundred years. She became a vegetarian, started making her own granola, started using chopsticks instead of a knife and fork, stopped touching the mounds of meat Clarabelle asked her to prepare for dinner, placing big bountiful salads on the family table instead. “We eat meat around here,” Howard said one night, and Vicki got up from the table and ran up the stairs. Her brother John heard her lifting the needle and playing her Grass Roots record over and over again, and he knew: Vicki would leave, and he would inherit that record.

  She moved to Iowa City for a little while, living in a big communal house near what is today the Prairie Lights bookstore. She tried Davenport, near Moline, so she could go to the nursing school there. Her aunt and grandmother had been nurses, and she figured she might as well try for her degree.

  But Vicki wanted to go farther, go faster—she just wanted to go. She wanted California, she wanted ocean, but she had no money for all that. She started hitchhiking.

  Nancy Santomero had never hitchhiked outside of Long Island before. Her father, Joe, had traveled through the West when he was in his teens, but he came back. He met Nancy’s mother, Jeanne, an “independent woman” with a good job as a bank secretary, playing tennis on a Brooklyn court. It was Joe’s friend who asked Jeanne for her number, but Joe prevailed on the friend to sell it to him for thirty-five cents. Jeanne and Joe married at a small Catholic church in 1955 and set up their home in Levittown, that first gleaming and mass-produced suburb, designed to house soldiers returning from the Second World War and their families. Once just potato and onion fields, the town was built assembly-line style; at the peak of construction, a house was said to be completed every sixteen minutes. Jeanne had a good eye and was a snappy dresser whose garden was always the most elegant one on the street. She was the product of a happy marriage and a doting father. “I thought all fathers were like that,” she says. “I expected my husband to be the same kind of man. But he was not.”

  Joe’s job as a Wise potato chip salesman kept him mostly on the road, driving his truck all over Long Island, and Jeanne stayed home to raise the kids—five of them born in quick succession, one almost every year. Joe wanted a boy, but Jeanne gave birth to girl after girl after girl after girl. The last one was Nancy. Patricia was just a year older than Nancy, but because Patricia was a shy child with a speech impediment, their mother decided to hold her back, and the two ended up in the same grade. “That way she could be with Nancy,” Jeanne says. “Nancy would protect her.” Nancy and Patricia had all the same friends and were sometimes mistaken for twins.

  Levittown remained a completely white suburb into the 1960s because of a policy that explicitly banned people of color, and Jeanne worried about her kids growing up in such a place. She went back to work at the hospital as a ward clerk, and many of the people who came in for treatment lived in nicer neighborhoods in the Long Island towns to the east—farther from the city, closer to the Long Island Sound. The houses in these towns had more space between them; the crowds who played in the parks were more diverse. Joe drove his potato chip truck through these towns too and smelled their cleaner air. The couple crunched the numbers and decided they could afford the leap.

  In August 1969, when Nancy and Patricia were going into the fourth grade, the Santomero family moved into a two-story house on a quiet cul de sac in the new development of Huntington. The kids could walk to school and downtown to Main Street, where there were restaurants and a small bookstore. They walked to the Walt Whitman mall, to the big H shopping center where there was a Sears, to the Woolworth counter, and the movie theater.

  The theme of Nancy’s childhood was variety—shifting, trying on many different outfits to see if they fit. She wasn’t very concerned with her clothing, though, favoring jeans and peasant shirts. She was friends with everyone—the potheads, the disco people, the lacrosse players, the hippies. She was into art—painting and sculpture mostly, though for a time she talked about becoming a professional photographer—and liked everything from Joni Mitchell to Ayn Rand.

  But she was an athlete too—a top-notch basketball player who played center. “I would throw the ball to her right away, and she would take it to the hoop,” remembers Patricia. Nancy liked being outside, a preference she got from her mother. “I had never been to the ocean until Nancy’s mother took us,” says Jo-Ann Orelli, Nancy’s best friend from that time.

  The sisters shared one room and one bed. “We’d face [one] way and scratch each other’s backs,” says Nancy’s sister Jeanne, the second oldest, “and then we’d roll over and scratch [the sister on the other side].”

  Nancy’s father was “traditional Italian,” he was “macho,” he believed “the man was the head of the household,” says Catherine Shea, who grew up on the same street as the Santomeros. Joe worked long hours and wanted dinner on the table when he came home. Nancy’s sisters and her brother, Peter, the youngest of all the kids (Joe got his boy after all), mostly deferred to Joe’s wishes.

  “Nancy was stubborn,” says Patricia. “She was just like my dad—they were so similar. And the rest of us had to live with them.”

  If there was a party too far away to walk to, the sisters and their friends sometimes hitchhiked along the local roads, a common practice at that time. “Everybody did it,” Orelli says. “We used to hitchhike with eight people, get picked up and jam into a car. If there were seatbelts, nobody wore them.”

  Nancy wasn’t the one riding shotgun, but she went, squished into the backseat. The parties sprawled like the towns; they spread from kitchen to living room, living room to yard, yard to woods, woods to the shore, and then right on out to the Sound.

  She liked to drink, says Orelli, but not more than anyone else. “We’d get a beer and all share it, passing it around and getting buzzed off the bubbles.” She ha
d crushes, most notably on the brother of a friend of one of her sisters, and dated a boy for a while, but unlike Patricia, who met her husband in high school, Nancy’s relationships never got serious. Patricia went to the prom, but Nancy didn’t; going to the prom stag was not a thing at that time, Orelli says, nor was girls asking guys out. Neither was caring much about school or grades. Nancy was an “average student” at best.

  “In high school, no one asked me if I was going to go to college,” says Kathy. “It’s nothing like now. I think we were just on the edge of change.”

  After high school, Nancy rolled upstate to SUNY Buffalo. But it was brutally cold there, and she didn’t like her roommate. She got an apartment off campus right away, which she paid for herself—Joe and Jeanne couldn’t afford to help.

  It is tempting to call Nancy “tough,” but Orelli says it wasn’t so. She was loving; she wasn’t hard. “She was a strong person.…What she did, I could never do—when she went to school in Buffalo…she was kind of on her own.…She was independent. She just had more guts [than the rest of us].”

  Nancy did not hide it when she suffered. “My nerves are acting up,” Nancy wrote to Orelli. “Can’t eat, can’t sleep. I always thought myself to be a calm person. Tricked again!”

  After her freshman year, she dropped out of school. “I really feel that I will find a more suitable place elsewhere,” Nancy wrote to her sister Jeanne in the fall of 1979. “Exactly where is unknown, but I am going to search for it.”

  She spent that summer going downtown with her high school friends to the bars around Huntington. No one had any money, so the friends would buy six-ounce cans of Miller High Life called “splits,” which cost about ten cents.

  The drinking age was eighteen then, and that wasn’t the only difference. “It was easier back then to get ahead,” says Orelli. “Now to live someplace like [where we grew up]…it costs a lot of money.”

  Nancy told her friends that she had dreams, things to do, but she didn’t know what they were exactly or where. She thought she might like to become a forester or a park ranger, so she could work outside or close to animals. She had two cats named Thunder and Lightning.

  Her moods seemed changeable that summer, recalls her sister Jeanne. “She would have very highs and lows. She would be really happy and then really sad.”

  “Primarily she was happy,” Patricia says. “If she was sad, it was because she felt lost. When you don’t know what you’re doing, what your life is, it torments you.”

  A school friend of the Santomero sisters, who was studying at the University of Arizona in Tucson, was also back home in Huntington for the summer. It’s warm there, she told Nancy over a split. By the fall, Nancy and her cats were there.

  “I’m sure Iowa has been in its peak autumn colors by now. I miss that,” Vicki wrote home to her sister Mary in October 1978. “There is a definite season change here also but only slight.…There will be five planets lining up in Scorpio in a few weeks and I feel the earth will go through some drastic changes. Me too!”

  She was in California. She had found that when she smiled, people stopped their cars. Someone called her Bright Star because of that smile, and soon it was her name.

  Where some searchers are essentially one—all movement, all desire, all muscle and hair—Vicki was two, both street cat and house cat. There was the dream, sure, there was the need to be free, but also, somewhere that was always with her, there was the farm in Iowa, the bills that were due, the father and the mother, and the seven siblings who stayed. Vicki knew she had busted the set, disturbed the order by leaving.

  When Mary got married, Vicki caught a ride home and stood dutifully with the other bridesmaids in the ceremonial half moon. She had forgotten how to wear makeup so completely that one of Mary’s friends had to do it for her. The dress—a floor-length gown of “tyrol red fashioned with empire waist, front opening with stand-up collar, long puffed sleeves with cuffs accented with white pearl buttons”—felt odd against her skin, but she wore it.

  By 1980, Vicki had moved to Tucson and found work as a home health aide, a job she liked because it was flexible enough that she could be gone for weeks at a time. She scrimped, but she got by. She had a big vet bill to pay off for her dog, Jake, and a truck that wasn’t running. “I don’t feel boggled and down with any of it,” she wrote home to Mary and Mary’s new husband, “and feel light and happy that everything is working out just fine.”

  In Tucson, Nancy lived with her sister’s friend for a while and worked at a thrift store. But when she was off, she explored downtown. Down Fourth Avenue, where the buildings are low and tall cacti poke over fences into alleyways like trees, sat Food Conspiracy, Tucson’s organic food cooperative. The building was red brick with a front window, and Nancy liked to sit there. One day, a woman came out of the store and stopped. It was Vicki.

  Soon they were walking together along the avenue and talking. They were both Scorpios. Vicki arranged for Nancy to move into a group house she knew. “I live in a nice large house with ten other humans,” Nancy’s letters from this time show. “Four men, three women, three children. Crazy crew.”

  Vicki and Nancy may have gone on other adventures during this time. “Traveling with a beautiful lady named Bright Star,” Nancy wrote to her friend Orelli, “learning an awful lot from her.” Nancy also had plans to travel with another friend and possibly to leave Tucson altogether for California, Oregon, or Washington.

  “She has invited me to join her in her travels. So I’m off…to explore the unknown. In search of exactly what I don’t know—when I find it I’ll fill you in,” Nancy wrote her sister Jeanne.

  Ultimately, she changed her mind about moving West, but she remained restless. She wanted to leave her job, which she hated.

  “I’m finding Tucson to be a bit of a drag. It’s really a nice place, but not the place for me,” Nancy wrote to Jeanne. Then to her whole family, “I plan on selling everything I own and traveling with a backpack and my cats of course. Thunder…is just growing up. He has a lot of battle marks on his body. He is learning the art of survival.”

  When another friend of Vicki’s named Liz called from the outlaw commune and asked Vicki if she wanted to leave Arizona for a few weeks and go to the Rainbow Gathering in July 1980, Vicki was down. But she wanted to bring Nancy along—Nancy could use the experience. The trio made plans to meet up at Vicki’s parents’ farmhouse in Iowa and then hitchhike to West Virginia together from there. Vicki’s sister had a new baby, and her brother was graduating from high school.

  For several days, Vicki, Nancy, and Liz slept in Vicki’s childhood bedroom. They went to Mary’s baby shower. Vicki held her new nephew, and a camera flashed, capturing the moment. Was Vicki remembering her own baby then? She didn’t say, and no one asked. “It wasn’t a secret,” says her brother John. “We just didn’t talk about it.” Her father, Howard, didn’t think much of “all this Rainbow business” and told the three women so. Her mother, Clarabelle, wanted Vicki to stop all the wandering and come home and settle down. Vicki said it would probably be her last big trip. Of the coming-home part, she said she would think about it.

  It was time to go. “The visit here with y’all has been delightfully wonderful. Thank you for sharing your space & food and love with us, it is gratefully appreciated indeed,” reads a note signed just from Vicki and Nancy. “As we travel the east coast of the country we will remember all of you Durians with prayerful thought. May you be blessed abundantly with all you need.”

  Vicki’s brother Tom was working at Amishland Sausage in Kalona, so they left him a note. “I hope all in your life is terrific, please be careful,” Nancy wrote to him. “I hope you are feeling good now,” Vicki wrote, with a happy-face sign. “Love and take care of yourself. See ya.”

  Vicki’s mother didn’t want to drive them the half hour to the closest interstate ramp, but she did. After Clarabelle had cried and cried and then driven away, Vicki remarked to Liz and Nancy that this was the first
leave-taking that had made her mother cry.

  4

  TROOPER GARY HOTT DROVE THROUGH the widely gridded streets of downtown Marlinton, another trooper sitting shotgun. As ever, Eighth Street—the main drag—was empty except for the occasional peckish teenager walking the bridge, which spanned the rushing Greenbrier River and connected Main Street to route 219 and the gas station with its mini-mart. The lunch counter, the hardware store, and the auto dealership were all dark. The only lights were the hospital’s illuminated emergency sign and the bank marquee. It was 9:15 pm—Wednesday, June 25, 1980.

  A call came in over the radio then, the words cutting through the sounds of katydids and frogs: one of the Pocahontas County sheriff’s deputies had responded to a call about a couple of bodies up on Briery Knob and was requesting assistance. Bodies—a thing that almost never happened there. Hott acknowledged receipt of the message, pulled the car onto the smooth blacktop of Main Street, then hung a fast left at the traffic light to head south on 219. When he pulled off Lobelia Road toward Briery Knob, he drove slowly and took directions from his passenger. Hott had been through this area once or twice, but the back roads this deep still confused him.

  By the time Hott arrived on Briery Knob Road at 9:55 pm, there were already two other vehicles there—Tim’s car and a cruiser belonging to a sheriff’s deputy. Hott approached where the two men were conferring, and they led him over to the bodies. Hott saw one woman lying on her back with her left arm out to the side and her right arm up over her head. She wore a University of Iowa sweatshirt and the back of her pants seemed like they’d been pulled up. The other woman wore a white cotton blouse with blue flowers that had also hiked up a bit and exposed some of the flesh of her stomach. She was lying on her side, so it was difficult for Hott to see her face.