If You Tell

by Olsen, Gregg

  “My friend Kathy is here.”

  “Who’s Kathy?” Lara asked.

  “My hairdresser,” Shelly said. “My best friend. She’s wonderful with the girls. She can watch them while I get my treatments.”

  Lara was a little uncertain, but she didn’t push. Cancer be damned—no one pushed Shelly.

  Over the next few weeks, Kathy would make the calls to Lara to let her know that Shelly’s treatments were progressing, and the girls were doing great too.

  “Kathy was perfectly wonderful,” Lara recalled. “This was at the very beginning. Oh gosh she was just wonderful. Bless her heart she’s going to do this and that. And whenever I called, she’d answer the phone.”

  “Shelly’s really tired,” Kathy told Lara one time. “I’m cooking dinner now and keeping the house up. Kids are doing their homework. Doing the best I can.”

  There were early signs of cracks in the relationship, however. Another time when Lara was talking to Nikki, she heard screaming in the background.

  “What’s going on there, Nikki?”

  “Oh,” she said, “Mom’s just mad at Kathy again.”

  Shelly’s cancer treatments lasted for a very long time. Too long. Lara Watson became increasingly suspicious. She’d tell oncologists she worked with about her daughter’s symptoms and the vague treatment she was getting from God knows who, and they couldn’t make sense of it either.

  One day, Shelly phoned and Lara pressed the point. She used a tone she’d never used before.

  “Shelly, you know what?” Lara said. “I’m tired of this cancer crap.”

  Shelly started to scream.

  “I’ve talked to some doctors and we think you’re lying again.”

  Shelly slammed down the phone.

  A few minutes later, Kathy called Lara back.

  “You’ve really upset Shell,” she said.

  “Kathy, this is a bunch of BS. Cancer isn’t like this.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re being suckered,” she said.

  Next, Dave got on the line.

  “What kind of mother are you, Lara? Shell’s going through the fight of her life. You couldn’t care less about her.”

  Lara knew that Dave took everything his wife said at face value. He needed proof.

  “Dave, have you been taking her to the doctor?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Lara persisted. “Have you actually gone inside? You know that doctors insist on that. Family is a very important part of treatment.”

  “No,” he said. “Shell’s too proud. She has me wait.”

  “You’ve never been there while she’s getting her IV?”

  “No, but that’s no reason to say she’s lying, Lara.”

  Lara wouldn’t let up. “Where are you waiting? In the car?”

  Dave tried to stay firm. “In the waiting room. All day.”

  “All day,” she repeated.

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “Eight hours.”

  “It doesn’t take eight hours,” Lara said. “Have you ever gotten a bill from the insurance company?”

  Dave said that Shelly got the mail and he hadn’t seen one. But that didn’t mean anything. The truth was there was no convincing Dave. He hung up on Lara.

  “He’s there sitting in the waiting room,” Lara said later. “I don’t doubt that. Dave’s not a liar. She probably went out the back door to go to the movies or out to lunch. I don’t know that for sure. But it’s a good guess.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  With Kathy there, the dynamic in the Louderback House continued to shift. It was slow. Frog-in-boiling-hot-water slow. Kathy didn’t appear to grasp what Shelly’s game really was all about. She was lonely, estranged for the most part from her family, and had no money of her own. Kathy was big. Brassy. Fun. She played softball on a local league. She attended church regularly. She was the kind of woman who would gather all the girls together and make them laugh with stories of her hairdressing days at the salon in Aberdeen. After moving in with the Knoteks, Kathy started to fade away. Her personality began to dissolve right in front of everyone’s eyes. She just started to fade away.

  By then, whatever Shelly wanted was always of the highest order.

  Yes!

  Right away!

  I’ll clean it again.

  Kathy’s upbeat spirit ebbed. No matter how hard Kathy worked, Shelly didn’t seem satisfied. It was never enough to take care of the baby, clean the house, and fix dinner. Whenever Kathy displeased Shelly, Shelly would grab whatever was handy—a kitchen utensil, an appliance cord, a book from the coffee table—and strike her. Hard. Kathy would cry, sometimes even threaten to leave. In the end, Shelly would tell her that it was her fault.

  “You forced me into doing that,” Shelly told her. “Don’t make me do that again. I need to count on you. Don’t argue. Do what I need done.”

  Kathy would indicate she was sorry and promise never to do it again.

  Shelly would give her a hug, then a bunch of pills.

  And the kids watched it all, wondering what was happening.

  Shane and Nikki talked about it.

  “Your mom is a freak and Kathy is stupid to put up with her,” Shane said.

  Nikki agreed, but she also knew that, for better or worse, having Kathy around took the heat off her a little. It gave her relief and made her sad at the same time. No one deserved to be treated the way her mother treated Kathy, or any of them.

  The pattern of abuse escalated.

  One time, Kathy and Shelly were in an actual knock-down, drag-out fight on the hill by the kitchen door. Though Shelly was still pregnant with Tori, and Kathy was much larger, it was Kathy who was taking a beating. Shelly grabbed her hair and Kathy let out a scream. Next, Shelly pushed her hard and Kathy fell to the ground. Shelly started to kick her in the abdomen and Kathy went tumbling down the hill.

  Kathy cried out that she was sorry for whatever she’d done to make Shelly so furious.

  She promised never to do it again.

  In disbelief, Nikki watched the fight from the window in her bedroom. She’d seen her mom scream at Kathy, humiliate her, play her mind games, but this was the first time she’d seen Shelly physically assault Kathy. Nikki couldn’t believe it was actually happening.

  But it was.

  Another time, Shane and the girls watched an exchange between Shelly and Kathy from the living room. Shelly had her arms folded across her chest and was shaking her head.

  Kathy was proclaiming her innocence. “I didn’t do that,” she insisted, denying whatever it was Shelly had accused her of doing.

  Shelly looked concerned. “You don’t remember doing it, Kathy,” she corrected. “That’s what you mean. You don’t remember.”

  Kathy looked her accuser right in the eye. “I didn’t do that.”

  Shelly shook her head and gave her friend a sad look. The kids had seen Shelly in action a million times. She had a way of twisting reality to such a degree that there were times when they’d believed what they knew couldn’t possibly be true.

  “Kathy,” she repeated. “You know I love you.”

  Kathy’s resolve was gone, and she started to cry.

  “Yes,” she said, “I know. I love you too.”

  “Then you need to believe me when I tell you,” Shelly said. “You’ve been sleepwalking at night. I’m worried about it.”

  “But I don’t remember it.”

  “Right,” she said. “Of course you don’t.”

  This was Understanding Shelly in full bloom.

  “I would know.”

  “Kathy, I found the lemon meringue pie under your bed this morning.”

  Kathy looked confused. “I didn’t put it there.”

  “You mean, you don’t remember putting it there. The kids didn’t.” She swiveled her gaze to her audience. “Did you?” Nikki recognized that her mother had returned to one of her greatest hits of abuse—gaslighting. Nikki had been on
the receiving end of that gambit too.

  “No,” they chimed in. Better to not turn Shelly’s attention in their direction. But Nikki had seen her mother slide the pie under Kathy’s bed. She’d also seen Shelly hide—then discover—candy wrappers.

  Shelly returned her attention to her best friend. “Look, Kathy. You aren’t losing weight because you are eating too much during the day and, now, I’m afraid you are doing the same thing when you are sleepwalking.”

  Kathy was confused but resolute. “But I’m not.”

  Shelly persisted, and over the next few weeks, she continued to make several discoveries of half-eaten food hidden under Kathy’s bed or somewhere in the alcove between Nikki’s and Sami’s rooms. One time, her mom made Nikki hide food under Kathy’s bed, so she could inform Kathy the next morning that she was “sleep-eating” and “eating all of our food at night.”

  “I heard you in the refrigerator last night,” Shelly told Kathy during another confrontation disguised as an intervention. “You ate like a pig in the middle of the night. This has to stop!”

  “I’m sorry,” Kathy pleaded. “I’m trying.”

  Though they were young, in time the girls and Shane could see Kathy falter in her ability to stand her ground against Shelly. Just like Dave. Just like them.

  Nikki could see the apprehension in Kathy’s eyes when Shelly confronted her.

  “Last night,” Shelly said, “you were sleepwalking naked in Shane’s bedroom. He told me.”

  Kathy looked scared. “I wasn’t, Shell.”

  “You were,” Shelly said. “He saw you, Kathy. I know you want him, but this has to stop. I don’t want that kind of thing going on around here.”

  Kathy stepped back a little. She was stunned by the accusation. Shelly was suggesting that Kathy, a woman now in her thirties, had been interested in having sex with an underage teen boy.

  “I never would do that,” she said. “I promise. I promise. I didn’t.”

  Shelly looked at Kathy with sympathetic eyes.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing, Kathy,” she said. “You really don’t. Stay here.” Shelly went and got Shane.

  “Tell her,” she said.

  Shane looked very serious and backed up Shelly’s story.

  “You were,” he said. “Last night, Kathy. I saw you.”

  Kathy started to cry. She looked confused as she faced her accusers.

  “I wasn’t,” she said. “You’re both wrong.”

  Shane stayed firm. “You were,” he persisted. “I saw you. Everything.”

  Kathy ran up to her room in tears.

  Shane later told Nikki that the story was a lie.

  “Kathy was not naked in my room,” he said. “I had to go along with your mom.”

  Nikki understood. She had done the same thing. Two against one was Shelly’s favorite mode of attack. Usually it was Shelly and Dave. On occasion, she brought her daughters in on her torment. Other times, she employed Shane—most often when it came to Kathy.

  “Your mom’s twisted, Nik,” Shane said.

  “She’s psycho,” Nikki agreed.

  “She thinks that everyone is so stupid that they actually believe her shit.”

  “Kathy does.”

  “I don’t believe anything your mom says,” Shane said.

  “I don’t either,” Nikki said. “She doesn’t know how to talk without some stupid lie coming out of her mouth.”

  As tough as their talk was, neither had the support or the gumption to call her out on anything. They just did whatever Shelly said to do. Both teens knew why they’d participated. They were in survival mode. Going against their mother’s demands meant being stripped naked and forced to wallow or maybe get beaten with an electric cord. Or other punishments she’d just made up that very day. The fear of the unknown kept them in line.

  “Yeah, we do what she says but we don’t believe it,” Shane said. “She’d be so mad at us if she thought we didn’t believe her.”

  Kathy had done something to piss off Shelly—though Nikki couldn’t remember what it was in the same way all the kids were unable to pin down what any of them had done to deserve their punishments—and Shelly had planted her foot in Kathy’s back at the top of the stairs and sent her tumbling. Kathy lay in a heap at the bottom while Shelly cursed her for being so stupid and clumsy. The kids had long since learned not to say a word; calling attention to anything their mother did only served to make them fresh targets.

  Shelly started taking away Kathy’s privileges. She’d been “very bad and needed to learn to do with less.” That meant Kathy no longer had many of the things that she’d brought with her to Louderback. Her personal items were confiscated, starting with her pictures, her country music records, and her knitting supplies. Then Shelly started in on removing most of Kathy’s clothes, leaving her a single pair of panties, a bra, and a muumuu.

  Within days, the muumuu was gone too.

  After that, her underwear vanished. Kathy did chores around the house nude. She was told she’d have to ask for permission to use the toilet. She could no longer bathe unless Shelly approved it in advance. In time, the bathing was done outside with a garden hose.

  Seeing Kathy naked and not remarking on it just became the way things were at the Knoteks’. The kids would watch TV while Kathy would do whatever Shelly told her to do. They didn’t even look up, and they certainly didn’t say anything.

  Sometimes their mother locked Kathy in the closet as punishment for an unknown offense. Sami overheard her mother whispering soothing words through the door as Kathy cowered inside.

  “You’re going to be okay,” she said.

  Kathy murmured something incomprehensible from the other side of the door.

  “It’s not okay to hurt you, Kathy. I won’t let anyone hurt you. I love you, Kathy. I’ll keep you safe.”

  Sami slipped away, wondering how it could be that her mother could punish Kathy so harshly and then act as if she would always be there to save her from any harm.

  It’s what Shelly did to all of them. Yet with her mother’s abuse focused on Kathy, there was an aspect of it that brought relief to Sami. She was glad that it was Kathy who was getting punished instead of her siblings. A part of Sami felt grateful that Kathy stayed. If she left, Sami knew the kids would once again be their mother’s favorite target.

  Sami saw Kathy as a strong woman. She was larger than her mom. She was smart too.

  “I kept thinking that she was a grown-up. She had a car. This wasn’t her mother. She wasn’t a kid. If she wanted to, she could get up and leave,” Sami reflected years later. “I didn’t understand everything. I was a kid. But in my mind, I thought, ‘What’s wrong with you? You should go!’”

  Nikki felt the same way. “Something’s wrong with her,” she told Shane. “She should just go.”

  And yet, “During all of this with Kathy,” Nikki recalled, “I was not getting hit hardly at all. It was kind of like they ignored me for a bit.”

  The pause in the abuse against the Knotek kids came with a steep price. They inhabited a world in which looking the other way kept them safe from their mother but led them to accept things that would haunt them forever.

  Shelly showed no mercy and in time enlisted her kids to participate in some of the punishments she engineered for Kathy. Both Nikki and Sami snapped rubber bands at Kathy at their mother’s insistence as the woman went down the stairs to do her chores. She was weak, and she wasn’t moving fast enough for Shelly.

  “Get her!” Shelly called out from the landing.

  Sami, who was shaking and too afraid to ignore her mother’s commands, did what she had to do.

  It was Shane, however, who did most of Shelly’s bidding.

  When Shelly told him to kick or punch Kathy, he did. He didn’t do it with gusto, but he did it, knowing how quickly Shelly could turn on him. If he didn’t do what she wanted, he’d be forced to wallow or would end up duct-taped to the wall naked or made to sleep on the concr
ete floor without clothing or a blanket. Shane did it for another reason too. As much as he hated her for what she did to him and how she treated others around him, his aunt Shelly was the closest thing he’d ever had to a mother.

  He wanted to please her, to keep her in his corner. He did what she wanted, when she wanted it done.

  “Kathy was afraid of Shane,” Sami recalled. “She saw him as a source of pain inflicted at Mom’s request. He hit her. He kicked her. He did that because she made him do it.”

  Shelly worked all the angles.

  One time when Kathy was running up the stairs to get away from Shane, Shelly appeared and put her arms around Kathy to protect her, suddenly becoming savior instead of victimizer.

  Another time Kathy went missing, and everyone in the house looked for her. Inside. Outside.

  “She has to be somewhere,” Shelly said.

  No one could find her, until Sami located her cowering in her mother’s closet.

  It turned out it had been Shelly who’d hidden her there. Sami overheard her mother talking to Kathy.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she soothed. “I’m here to protect you. You are safe with me, Kathy. I promise. No one will hurt you. Shane won’t hurt you. None of them will.”

  Kathy was crying and holding on to Shelly, grateful for the intervention.

  “Mom acted like she didn’t know where Kathy was the whole time that day. But she knew. She made her stay in that closet for hours. It was supposed to keep her from being hurt by Shane, but it wasn’t. It was supposed to make her feel like Mom was on her side. She wasn’t,” Sami said.

  Sami freed Kathy from the closet.

  It wasn’t the last time either.

  Sometimes when people came over, Shelly would put Kathy in the closet until they left. It didn’t matter how long. Hours and hours. Kathy would sit slumped on the floor, patiently waiting for a sliver of daylight.

  Kathy lost weight. Her skin was bruised and scratched. Her dental work had begun to fail. And her hair—the locks that she wore so long and lovely had been chopped into oblivion by Shelly’s frenzied scissors. Nikki thought of how Kathy looked at them when they were getting abused by her mom. She felt a lump in her throat as Kathy gazed at her with empathy.