If You Tell

by Olsen, Gregg

  It might have been an act or it might have been genuine, but Shane brought hope and an optimistic attitude with him to the Knotek home. He hadn’t been beaten down by life. Certainly, he was more streetwise than the Knotek girls—Nikki was fourteen and Sami ten to Shane’s thirteen—but he was also sweet too.

  Shane was like a lot of kids in Raymond. He loved heavy metal and Bon Jovi. He had dark eyes and dark hair that alluded to his Native ancestry. Girls thought he was cute, not only because he was the new boy, but because he had a kind of fun, goofy personality that made everyone want to be his friend. The Knotek sisters took to him right away. He was more than a cousin to them, closer to a brother. Always smiling. Always telling someone a joke. Shelly applied for Department of Social and Health Services benefits to take care of him. She bought him new school clothes and fixed up a cozy bedroom in the basement, complete with new bedding, and helped him put up a few things that he’d brought along to make him feel at home.

  Almost immediately, he started calling Shelly and Dave “Mom and Dad.”

  Shane was a friendly kid, but he was also a city boy from a rough neighborhood. He didn’t talk too much about what his life was like before Raymond. One time when the family went on a trip, he and the girls slept in sleeping bags in the back of the truck. It was the one time when their cousin really opened up and told them about growing up with a biker dad and a drug-addicted mother. He was angry at what had happened to him back in Tacoma and how he’d been shuttled around until moving in with the Knoteks. After Raymond, he barely heard from anyone from his family other than his grandparents on his mother’s side and, of course, Lara.

  “Shane was nothing like his family. He was never going to be in trouble with police, addicted to drugs. None of that,” Nikki said. “I never ever worried that he’d fall into the same trap as his parents. Shane was good.”

  Soon after her nephew arrived, Shelly put him to work on a mile-long list that never seemed to shrink.

  “Mom worked Shane to the bone,” Nikki said years later. “He did everything. Not willingly at first, but he eventually did whatever she told him to do.”

  Shane spent most of his time doing chores. Occasionally he found time to take his dirt bike up into the woods. Sometimes he took Sami for a ride, but mostly his confidant was Nikki, who was only a few months older. She understood what it was like to be an outsider—at school and at home. And like Shane, she knew what role her mother played in all of that.

  Shane was scared of Shelly. Same as the girls, he would do anything not to make her mad. Shelly started to fixate on him and heap additional demands to do more around the house or in the yard. If things weren’t done the way she wanted, Shane paid the price. Items from his basement room started to disappear. His pillow. His blanket, then his bed. He was told to sleep on the floor. He complained about it, but he quickly learned objections only made punishments worse.

  Next, Shelly took away his every-other-week shower privileges and gave him only one set of clothes to wear to school. Shane went from cool new boy to smelly, greasy, and weird boy.

  Soon after Shane came to live with the Knoteks, Lara Watson made a trip up north. Such visits were always somewhat of a risk. Occasionally she’d arrive with gifts and have to leave everything on the doorstep as no one was home—despite making arrangements for the get-together. Other times, she’d park her car and wait for what seemed like hours for the girls and their mother to return home with a feeble apology that Shelly had mixed up the dates or had an unexpected errand in Aberdeen or Olympia. This time, however, Shelly, the girls, and Shane were at home when she arrived. While Shelly watched TV, Lara spent time with the girls in their rooms on the second floor. Everything upstairs looked wonderful. Nikki’s and Sami’s rooms were clean, organized, and uncluttered—the opposite of the way Shelly had kept her room when growing up in Battle Ground.

  Lara was eager to see her grandson’s bedroom too. With Shelly suddenly right behind her, she ventured down the steep wooden steps to the basement. Halfway down, Lara could barely breathe. The smell of the diesel oil used to heat the old house was so strong, acrid. It filled her lungs, making her eyes water.

  “I just got the diesel tank filled,” Shelly said. “The guy’s coming back to fix the problem.”

  Lara went past the little door to the furnace room toward the front of the basement where Shane slept on a mattress on the concrete floor.

  She spun around. She was confused. This wasn’t acceptable at all.

  “Where’s his bed?” she asked.

  Shelly didn’t answer.

  Lara, upset, looked at Shelly in complete dismay. “He needs a bed, Shelly. What’s going on here? If you don’t have the money . . . Let me give it to you.”

  Shelly just stood there.

  Lara gave the room another quick scan.

  “He needs a closet too.”

  Shelly made some vague excuse about being too busy to get Shane completely settled, but she took the money.

  A short time later, Lara learned that Shelly had finally purchased Shane a bed. She wondered if she hadn’t made a big stink about it if Shelly would have even thought to do it.

  Or if she even cared.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Nikki saw how moms acted on TV. How they listened and comforted their children with words and a tender touch. She also observed other moms around town, and how they interacted with their children or husbands. There wasn’t all the yelling and hitting. They didn’t make their kids do weird things that were not only physically painful but humiliating, so much so that they couldn’t even talk about it. Nikki knew her mother was not normal. When Shane arrived, he and Nikki spent hours talking about how messed up Shelly was.

  He wasn’t anywhere near as forgiving as Nikki.

  “She’s full of shit,” he said.

  “I know,” Nikki said. “But there are times . . .”

  Shane cut her off. “What times?”

  “When I think she really loves us. She makes me feel loved and that all the craziness is just gone.”

  “For a minute, Nik,” he reminded her. “Then it’s back.”

  Nikki agreed. It might have been hard for Shane to really understand where she was coming from. She actually had been loved by her mother. It was fleeting and gone now, but she hoped down to her bones that it would come back.

  In spite of all the things Shelly did.

  Years later, she’d search for the words to make others understand how she could have loved an abuser like her mom.

  “I think as a kid I depended on her, her being my mom, I don’t think I ever thought I had any other options but to live with her. As an adult I kick myself for not doing something to help myself back then. My mother could show affection and say kind words when she wanted to . . . she would abuse me, then the very next day hug me or tell me how I was her baby and she loved me blah, blah. I think it worked like any abusive relationship . . . a person feels trapped, nowhere to go . . . they are abused and then the abuser reins them back in with kindness and the person being abused settles, not quite thinking about the next time they are beat etc. just relieved the abuse is over (for now). My mother was a ticking time bomb . . . I never knew when she would go off. Everything could be great for a few days then boom. I loved my mother because I didn’t know I had a choice. I had to love her.”

  Some things Shelly made the kids do were embarrassing, others painful. Some were flat-out ridiculous. It was as if she was conducting tests, seeing how far she could go. Shane had been beaten and made to wallow. He’d been called every ugly name in the book. Like soldiers in a prison camp, he and Nikki joined forces, and the two of them became inseparable conspirators.

  Shelly had a distressingly acute ability for finding new ways to humiliate the pair. She instructed them to take off their clothes in the living room for transgressions no one could remember. Sami watched as her sister and cousin were instructed to slow dance nude.

  “Until I say you’re done,” Shelly said
.

  Sami watched, cringing at the sight. Glad it wasn’t her. She was so modest herself that she could barely handle being in a bathing suit. This was beyond humiliating.

  Which, of course, was the reason their mother had the two older kids do it.

  Sometimes Dave would be there for the dancing.

  “My dad would just sit there,” Sami said. “My sister and Shane would be crying the whole time. You know, you just do it. You don’t refuse my mom.”

  Years later, Lara Watson would struggle to come to terms with or make some sense of her stepdaughter’s singular fascination with nudity. It came out of left field. Lara was unable to come up with a causal link between Shelly’s childhood and that kind of behavior.

  “None of my kids ever saw me in panties and a bra,” Lara said. “I always had a robe on. Their father didn’t walk around the house naked or even swim in the nude. Les showered with the boys when they went camping but never Shelly.”

  She had no idea where it came from.

  Maybe something weird had gone on when Shelly was over at her grandmother Anna’s. That was possible, though not likely.

  “I think Shelly would have told me back then. I really do. I don’t know where any of that came from.”

  Shelly’s life with her birth mother—before Sharon Watson dropped off her kids and returned to California—was a bit of a mystery.

  “Maybe something was going on with her? I don’t know. Sharon was an alcoholic. Something could have happened with her. I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Lara mused.

  Growing up, Lara said, Shelly was very modest. She dressed in her room with the door shut. She never paraded around Battle Ground in a skimpy outfit. She didn’t do anything like that at all.

  The way the kids saw it, the nudity was more about power than sexuality. Sami came to see the nudity as her mother’s way of humiliating her victims, and also to keep them from running away. Forced nudity was one component of Shelly’s bizarre and demeaning methodology of stripping away a person’s identity.

  And their ability to leave.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was winter, and the sun had already dropped behind the firs that shrouded the Louderback House on all sides. Icicles hung from eaves overloaded with leaves and fir needles. Snow crunched underfoot. The air had been heavy around the house since Nikki and Shane had gotten home from school. It was almost always an ambush with Shelly, who had been sitting around eating Oh Henry! bars, watching TV, and ruminating on a new plan to make the kids pay for one thing or another.

  That something was going to happen was palpable, like some kind of strange energy in the atmosphere that grabbed the kids by their necks.

  “Take your clothes off! Now!” Shelly screamed.

  Not that.

  Not again.

  Why?

  Sometimes Nikki and Shane fought her castigations. A lot of good that did. It just made Shelly angrier, and angering Shelly, with her red face and bulging eyes, was like daring a monster to annihilate its victim. In most cases, they simply acquiesced. Just as Nikki could almost never recall exactly what she’d done to make her mother so angry, she could never figure out why she and her cousin didn’t fully resist.

  “There had to be a reason for it,” she said, struggling later to pin down a specific reason why she and Shane were singled out that day. “I honestly just don’t remember what it was.”

  They peeled off their clothes, thinking they’d be forced to wallow together, but Dave wasn’t home at the moment. He was almost always the commander of the wallowing, standing in the dark, running the hose and reinforcing his wife’s very specific orders. This would be a new punishment, and neither knew exactly what it could entail. Shelly told Nikki and Shane to go to a spot on the hill behind the house and sit there with their backs to each other.

  “You’ll stay here until I say you are done.”

  Then she went back inside the house to watch TV with Sami.

  Shane shuddered, freezing his ass off. “I’m tired of this shit, Nikki,” he said.

  Nikki, naked and half-frozen, agreed. “I am too.”

  Puffs of warm breath drifted from Shane’s mouth. “I want out of here.”

  “I do too,” Nikki said.

  They kept their eyes fixed on the house, wondering if Shelly would emerge with the hose and douse them with water for good measure.

  It would be like her to do that.

  Or maybe even have Sami do it. Sami was the chosen one, the prison-camp favorite who walked between both worlds, telling on the others to curry favor.

  And to survive.

  There were times when Nikki and Shane could laugh about what Shelly did to them, but that frozen day on the hill behind the house wasn’t one of them.

  “This is completely fucked up,” Shane said. “I really hate your mom.”

  “I do too.”

  It wasn’t that Nikki was blindly agreeing with Shane. She really did hate her mother. Part of her believed, however, that despite how Shelly treated them, she was better than having no mother at all. Shane didn’t have any other family. Didn’t he see that this was better than nothing?

  Shelly leaned over the porch railing a few times to observe while the teens shivered back to back. Neither spoke. Talking didn’t distract Shelly; it only made her tighten the screws on whatever discipline she was meting out.

  “She’s crazy,” Shane said when Shelly went back into the house.

  Nikki couldn’t argue against that. “Yeah,” she said, “I know.”

  As they sat there, they played a favorite game: killing Mom. It wasn’t a real game, of course. It was merely a kind of revenge fantasy they allowed themselves to indulge in.

  Like bath time. Her robe always half-open, Shelly would enlist Shane and Nikki to prepare a hot bath.

  “Draw me a bath,” Shelly would demand whenever the mood struck her.

  The kids would go into the bathroom and start to fill the tub. While Shane looked on, Nikki would add some bubble bath. Her mother didn’t have a favorite, just whatever was on sale. Lavender. Rose. Jasmine. She’d sit on the edge of the tub as a billowy mountain of suds formed, testing the water. The temperature had to be just right.

  Hot, but not too hot.

  Shane would watch the suds grow and smile.

  “We should bring a radio in here,” he’d say.

  Nikki always knew instantly what he was getting at. She’d look over and smile at him.

  Shane would nod. “And throw it into the water when she gets in.”

  “Good idea,” she’d say.

  It was a joke, but not really. It was the kind of musing that tightened the bond between Nikki and Shane.

  They’d stop talking when Shelly returned. She’d let her robe fall to the floor and climb into the tub. The fleeting fantasy of ending their torment with electrocution was gone. Despite all that she had done to them, they couldn’t hurt her.

  It was completely dark when Shelly finally told Nikki and Shane to come inside from the hill and get warmed up.

  “I hope you learned your lesson,” she said.

  They said they did, though they didn’t have a clue what she’d been so angry about.

  PART THREE

  BEST FRIEND

  KATHY

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sami’s favorite childhood home would always be the Louderback House in Old Willapa. Its seclusion at the end of the road made it seem like a special destination tucked away in the forest, a stand of massive old-growth Douglas firs that would eventually succumb to the sound and fury of a logger’s chain saw.

  At six, Sami had done two years of half-day kindergarten, because her mother had wanted to keep her home so she’d have company while watching the entire ABC TV lineup of soap operas. The bond between mother and daughter was forged on the couch while they watched soaps and ate pickle-and-tuna-fish sandwiches.

  Nikki, on the other hand, did not have such fond memories of her days at the Louderback House.
/>   She was nine when they moved in, and while she’d been disciplined by her mother at their previous houses, it was still within the margin of what some might consider acceptable. What Shelly dished out after moving to the Louderback House was far beyond routine. The dynamic also changed as new people came to live there.

  First Shane came to live with them, then Kathy arrived.

  Kathy Loreno first showed up on the scene as a friend, then a babysitter. She was Shelly’s hairdresser and friend, the woman who’d served as a witness at Shelly and Dave’s wedding. Kathy cut an imposing figure at almost six feet tall. Her hair was brown and she often wore it long in a tumble of curls, though like a lot of stylists, she changed her look nearly every season. Longer, shorter. Curly. Straight. She’d laugh about it and offer up her curling iron to the girls so they, too, could get a new style.

  Sami, always the most ready to go along to get along, immediately took to Kathy. “Kathy was bossy. That’s what [Shane and Nikki] thought. And she was. But I loved her. She was like a mom to me in a good way. Before she lived with us, she used to come over and give me spiral perms, my friends too. She brought her beautician stuff over and did our hair. She was great.”

  The older kids were annoyed that yet another person was running their lives. Nikki and Shane initially couldn’t stand Kathy, though it wasn’t really her fault. She was put in the role of acting like she was their mother. They didn’t need another mom or a babysitter.

  For Christmas 1988, Shelly, then thirty-four, was pregnant with her third baby, which added even more to the holiday spirit. Nikki, Sami, and Shane all shared in the excitement of a new member of the family. What none of them knew was Shelly’s plan to add yet another head of the household.

  “Kathy’s moving in,” Shelly announced.

  The statement seemed to come out of the blue, and not just for the kids. Dave knew Shelly was good friends with her hairdresser, but live with them? This was a complete surprise to him.