by Gregg Olsen
They could.
No, shrinking Mom wouldn’t help. Not even a little.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Though no one came over to visit, appearances were important in the Knotek household. Dave saw it. Nikki did. Even Sami would later say she understood the significance of making things look “nice” no matter how far the world was tilting toward crazy. It was makeup on a bruise. A fake rose in a garden of straw and twigs. It was as if making things appear pretty just inside the front door meant that whatever was going on in the bathroom, the back bedroom, the basement, the backyard couldn’t be so bad.
Could it?
Indeed, wherever she lived, Shelly decorated with a homey country motif, decidedly more Holly Hobbie than Martha Stewart. Her favorite color was blue, so the dark oak furnishings in their new home were either upholstered in a faded denim blue or draped with blankets appliquéd with hearts and flowers. Some pink. Some blue. Baskets and doilies were everywhere. She had a penchant for knickknacks; Precious Moments, with their wide-eyed figurines, were a favorite. She could scarcely resist a teapot with flowers or butterflies. It seemed that if there was a space available for something cheerful—and country—Shelly would find something at the mall or through a mail-order company to occupy the space. She’d take great joy in setting it out, admiring it for a beat, before moving on to whatever she had her eye on next. Shelly also decorated nearly every room with an astonishing array of family photos. There was no surface left without pictures of her girls or, later, their cousin Shane, peering from the walls. Dozens of portraits hung around the redbrick fireplace.
“Yeah,” Sami recounted many years later, “Mom had a thing for putting up pictures of us. It was weird to see Nikki’s smiling face on the wall. It broke my heart. Seeing those pictures and knowing how she’d been punished, how she’d been abused. It hurts and makes me sick to even think about it.”
Hundreds, if not thousands, of photos of the sisters exist. Each with a smile that was not only hopeful but often genuine. Years later, it would be hard for others to look at the images and wonder how a beautiful young girl like Nikki could manage a smile in front of the camera.
The girls watched their mother put up heart-themed wallpaper borders and dusty-rose wainscoting in the dining room. They gave their two cents as she tried out a lighthouse figurine on the mantel or a collection of scented candles on a side table. Those times were fun, and while later it would be easy to roll their eyes at their mother’s design aesthetic, the girls knew that there was something within their mother that craved the kind of warmth and charm this style evoked. Yet it was, they also knew, completely at odds with the way she lived her life—and raised her daughters.
The truth was never far, of course. It was always easier to do what their mother asked than to fight it. Each day, each time, there was always the hope that the craziness would be over. That Shelly Knotek would just, inexplicably and without any fanfare, be the mom they dreamed she’d be.
That was a childhood fantasy that was beat into submission by a new punishment.
Shelly called it “wallowing.”
It was her way of proving she was the supreme being over the entire family. Like all her best inventions, wallowing was a mix of humiliation and physical pain. It was also the kind of punishment that she could direct from the sidelines.
Wallowing was a nighttime activity, and an all-seasons endeavor.
Nikki was almost always the primary focus.
It started with Shelly flipping on the bedroom lights.
“Get up! Clothes off! Get the fuck downstairs. You are a worthless piece of shit!”
Tears came instantly as Nikki complied. There was something about her mother’s voice, the force of it. It was loud, guttural. It scared her. Behind her words was the kind of rage that made Nikki think that anything could happen and that, whatever form that took, she’d be on the losing end of things.
“I’m sorry!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Nikki would squat naked in the mud as her father sprayed her with the hose. Dave was mostly mute as he went about what he’d been told to do. Nikki cried and begged for a second chance.
Her mother watched from a few yards away, telling her husband what to do.
“Make her wallow! She’s a pig, Dave! Teach her a lesson!”
More water tumbled over her shivering body.
“Wallow, Nikki!” Dave said.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“Wallow!”
On one occasion, as she tried to lift herself, Nikki’s fingertips felt frozen shards of ice. It was the depth of winter. The mud puddle of the wallowing hole was frozen at its edges. She was all but sure she’d get pneumonia and die.
Dying, she thought, is the only way out of what is happening to me.
From her window on the second floor, Sami watched the scene below. She wished she were there too—not to rescue her sister, exactly, but to be punished in the same way. Sami was keenly aware that, for some reason, Nikki’s punishments were so much worse than the ones Shelly meted out to her. It wasn’t fair that Nikki had to endure that kind of trauma for the same kinds of transgressions that would merit Sami the ripping sting of a belt or a hard slap from the back of a hand.
“I remember thinking that it was unfair that I didn’t get the same kind of treatment,” Sami said years later. “I knew that whatever she’d done didn’t deserve the wallowing but that’s what happened to her. That’s what my parents did to her.”
After what seemed like a very long time, Shelly dragged Nikki up to the bathroom, berating her the entire time. She switched on the hot-water faucet and filled the tub. No cold water. Just hot. Nikki was tough, but she cried the whole time.
“You are a pig,” her mother said. “Clean up. Go to bed.”
It was hard for Nikki to recall how long it went on. Or how many times she was made to wallow. Dozens? More? Some stretches were longer than others. It could have been twenty minutes. It could have been two hours. She’d crawl around in the mud in the dark, feeling the roots of the bushes, the spray of the hose, and the sting of her mother’s cruel remarks.
Her sister watched it all, tears streaming down her face.
Without quite knowing why, Nikki could see that her position in the family had plunged downward. In her mother’s eyes, she’d been diminished to almost nothing. A zero. Her little sister had somehow, she supposed, managed to find a way to work their mother to her advantage. It was true that Sami was abused too, yet she seemed to compartmentalize what happened better. She took the abuse and then found ways to sweet-talk her attacker with words of love. That singular ability worked in Sami’s favor.
“She was good at buttering up Mom,” Nikki recalled. “Sami always got her way by being her own advocate. It saved her. My mom didn’t focus on Sami so much because Sami had friends and maybe it crossed through her head that Sami would tell on her one day. I didn’t have what Sami had—the ability to butter her up or a social network. I also didn’t think there was anyone that gave a shit.”
Sami learned to be accommodating and not push too hard to wriggle out of a punishment that was going to happen no matter what she said. Nikki didn’t quite get that. Or she refused to. Nikki continued to fight. She continued to resist.
Sami recalled one time when Nikki was lashed with a whip. The beating escalated because she didn’t just take the punishment. She fought it.
“Nikki ran and Mom caught her,” Sami recalled. “She just beat her and beat her until she couldn’t walk. Her butt was all bloody.”
Sami, though four years younger, figured out that if she aligned herself with her mother, she’d be able to bypass some of the violence. She didn’t do it often, because she loved her big sister, but she did tell on her from time to time. Nikki, for her part, didn’t trust Sami completely, yet she never wished for her to receive the same kind of treatment she had.
Indeed, Shelly loved to play favorites. Most of the time, that was Sami.
Shelly changed Sami�
��s name to Sami Jo after the Heather Locklear character in Dynasty. Later, Sami would wonder if her mother had actually done it to hide her from Danny Long, her biological father, who she learned had been looking for his daughter at that time, but she couldn’t be sure.
“You were born Sami Jo,” Shelly insisted out of the blue one afternoon. “We just didn’t call you that until now. Now we’re going by your name as it was always supposed to be.”
While Nikki seldom received her mother’s affection, Sami—and her stuffed raccoon, Racoony—frequently did. Shelly used to create lavish parties—cakes, presents, decorations—for the plush animal that Dave had bought Sami when he was new in their lives. For years, Shelly even drove to Baskin-Robbins in Aberdeen for an ice-cream cake and went as far as setting up little scenes by restuffing the plush toy with her husband’s athletic socks and old pantyhose and leaving out a half-eaten cake to show Sami what the little creature had done during the night.
“My mom could be sweet when she wanted to be,” Sami said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Nikki couldn’t quite be sure how long her mother kept her locked in her upstairs bedroom in the Louderback House. Nor could she recall why her mother had dished out that particular punishment. There were no locks on the doorknobs, so Shelly employed a butcher knife lodged into the doorframe to keep her daughter inside. It was a technique she’d use whenever she wanted any of the kids to stay put.
Shelly told Nikki she was ugly and worthless, and she needed time to think about why she was such a rotten girl. She was told that she’d be there awhile.
“As long as it takes,” Shelly said.
Nikki later recalled it might have been for the entire summer.
“I stopped counting the days,” she said.
In reality, Nikki almost didn’t mind the banishment, first to the bedroom, then the closet. The closet space was small, airless, and windowless. After a while, though, she even welcomed the imprisonment. It meant that she was away from her parents.
She’d hear the knife move. The door would be flung open. She’d snap to attention, never cowering. Just facing her mom with resolve.
“Use this,” Shelly barked, handing Nikki a plastic bucket from the Aberdeen Home Depot.
She didn’t have to ask what for.
Over the next few weeks, Shelly only let Nikki out to empty the bucket. She was not permitted to have any contact with Sami.
Shelly told Sami the reason behind the exile and the importance of her no-contact order.
“Your sister is bad,” she said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mom,” she lied.
Sami was worried about Nikki. She’d been locked in her room too, but only for a day or two.
A few times, Sami was allowed to go into the room to retrieve Nikki’s toilet bucket. She’d empty it in the bathroom downstairs and then hurry back up while her mom stood guard at the door. She also tried to stay in touch by tossing small pine cones up at her sister’s window when their mother was sleeping during the day.
Nikki knew she was in prison. But prison, she decided, had its perks. She was away from her mother’s nasty tirades. She didn’t have to walk on eggshells only to find out she’d nevertheless done something wrong. In a way, she was free. The best part was the massive collection of books her mother stored in the walk-in closet in Nikki’s bedroom.
“That summer I found out how much I loved to read. I read all of the Nancy Drew books that I had, then moved on to my mom’s John Saul and Dean Koontz. She loved horror. She had boxes of paperbacks and I read every one of them.”
When the family dog Freckles had her puppies, Sami alerted Nikki with a pine cone tossed against the bedroom window.
“There’s eight of them!” she whisper-yelled.
“I want to see them,” Nikki said, then touched her finger to her lips to remind her sister to be quiet.
Sami nodded.
Freckles and her puppies were the source of a happy time.
Nikki sent the bucket down on two bathrobe ties she’d fashioned together in a move that she’d seen on a prison-escape film. Sami gave the bucket a good scrubbing, and when she was sure their mother wouldn’t see, she sent two puppies up, terrified they’d be caught.
Nikki cuddled the puppies for as long as she dared, then lowered them back to her sister.
Nikki was eventually let out, though it wasn’t long before their mother started up again. Shelly was like that. Dormant. Then suddenly alive and in a flash in search of a target. The target was almost always Nikki.
From the covered porch, Sami watched as her mother chased Nikki through the house and then into the kitchen. Shelly was screaming and telling Nikki to stop so she could punish her.
“I’m going to beat the shit out of you!”
Shelly shoved Nikki through the plate glass of the kitchen door. Shards flew everywhere, and Nikki let out a yelp that sounded like a wounded animal’s. Shelly dropped the belt she was carrying and hurried to help her daughter, who was bleeding from dozens of cuts. Spikes of glass clung to her bloody shirt and shorts. Nikki started to cry, yet she didn’t say anything. She’d immediately gone into shock. Sami, also crying, went to help.
Sami’s eyes met her mother’s. At that moment, she allowed herself to believe that her mother hadn’t meant for any of that to happen. But Shelly’s first response was always a denial couched in blame.
“Look what you made me do,” Shelly said.
A beat later, as the blood dripped from her daughter’s body, Shelly suddenly changed her tone.
Strange words came out of her mouth, like some foreign language.
“I’m sorry.”
In its own way, the apology was as shocking as the blood that dripped from the kitchen floor to the bathroom.
Sami and their mother led Nikki into the bathroom where Shelly ran a hot bath. Not a scalding one. Just a nice warm bath. She gently removed Nikki’s blood-soaked clothing and helped her step into the tub.
The water went red.
“Sorry,” she said again.
The girls hoped that their mother was sorry. Maybe she could see that she’d gone too far, after all? There was reason for the hope. Shelly was actually kind to Nikki right after that incident. She took her out to dinner and even to a stylist to have her hair done.
“Just me and her,” Nikki later recalled. “My mom never did that.”
Even as a child who’d seen it all happen, Sami knew that her mother should have taken her sister to the hospital with the kinds of cuts her sister had all over her body.
“But she couldn’t,” Sami theorized. “Mom couldn’t explain the cuts and all the belt welts and bruises on my sister’s body. All of us had them. Nikki’s were always worse. There probably wasn’t a time for a lot of years that we didn’t have visible marks of the abuse my mom inflicted on us.”
Still, Shelly wasn’t completely averse to taking her girls to the doctor whenever they needed medical attention.
Sometimes, however, she’d take matters into her own hands.
She had been around nurses all her life and had even taken a few courses at Clark College in Vancouver. She’d often talk about her desire to go back to school to get a nursing degree, but she said raising her daughters took precedence over her dreams and ambitions. She kept a stack of medical and first-aid books around the house, and when she wasn’t reading a Stephen King or Dean Koontz novel, Shelly had her nose in one of the medical books.
Dave Knotek remembered a time his wife performed surgery to remove a large cyst from his back.
Shelly poured him several shots of whiskey to anesthetize him before taking a small knife to his skin and cutting out the cyst. He could feel the pain, but he was sure that Shelly knew what she was doing.
“Ain’t no big deal. Her dad used to cut warts off her fingers and stuff like that,” he recalled. “She pretty much lanced it off and it kind of popped out and [she] just cut it off. It was fine.”
Despite the dire magnitu
de and appalling frequency of the abuse in the Knotek household, Lara Watson never heard her granddaughters say a bad word about their mother. Never once did they let on what was happening.
“Mom is weird,” was the extent of any disclosure from Nikki or Sami.
Lara once came for a visit to celebrate Nikki’s birthday. It was a hot summer evening, and she was to sleep in Nikki’s bedroom on the second floor where all the heat was collecting. But when she tried to open the windows, she discovered they had been nailed shut. The girls indicated that their mom had done it, for some reason neither could recall.
The next morning, Lara noticed that each of the bedroom doors had a hasp on the outside.
She asked the girls about that too, but they shrugged it off as something their mom did.
Shelly was weird.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
To a boy living on the streets in Tacoma half the time, the pull to Raymond was more of a hug than a tug. Shane Watson was Shelly’s nephew by her brother Paul. Paul had been in and out of jail and prison, and Shelly focused on Shane, ostensibly to help him out of an intolerable position. For several years, Shelly and Dave talked about taking in the boy, possibly adopting him, but Dave resisted the idea. He was already struggling to keep up with Shelly’s spendthrift ways.
Shelly patently ignored her husband. That was pretty much how she handled everything—and everyone—who got in her way. She was the one who was right and to disagree meant that you were stupid, a coward, a selfish prick.
Though Shane was hours away, Shelly directed a barrage of loving communication at him.
In October 1985, when Shane was ten, Shelly signed everyone’s name after she wrote: “You haven’t been gone long, but we sure miss you. See you before you know it. Weekend before next for sure. We love you so much! Uncle Dave says ‘Hi Big Guy! I miss you!’”
In reality, Shane had nowhere else to go when he arrived in Raymond in the middle of 1988. His father, Paul Watson, had run away from Battle Ground at fifteen, when he thought he’d gotten a girl pregnant. That was a false alarm; however, Paul stayed away, vanishing into a life of crime and biker gangs, only turning up again briefly at eighteen with a pregnant girlfriend of Native Alaskan heritage. Shane was born in June 1975. He lived a hard, itinerant life surrounded by quick violence and clannishness, with a dad on the move and a mother with devastating problems of her own, including severe substance abuse, but Shane somehow managed to cope on his own.