If You Tell

by Olsen, Gregg

  Empathy.

  Kathy, who had become the focus of her mother’s need to hurt and humiliate, looked at the kids with empathy.

  Kathy refused to accept a lifeline from any of the kids. She knew that if they tried to help her—tried to rescue her—they’d be their mother and father’s next victims.

  “I wish you could help me,” Kathy said once. “But I know you can’t.”

  It wasn’t that Kathy was sacrificing herself to save them, Nikki thought. It was that she knew that in a very real way the situation was hopeless.

  For her.

  “I had been annoyed by Kathy telling us what to do,” Nikki said many years later. “At times I really didn’t like her. She’d been a pain in the ass to us kids. My mom gave her all the power and made her feel needed and important. No teenager wants a stranger to boss them around. But right then, however, I saw who she really was. She was a really good person.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Even if the Knoteks had money for a vacation trip somewhere else, it was unlikely that any activity would hold more favor than going camping in Washington State. Dave had grown up in the thick evergreen forests and along the craggy coast of the Pacific Northwest. Shelly had too. The forests around Pacific County and nearby Grays Harbor County were dark green, drippy, and swathed in shades of gray. Muted colors, to be sure, but beautifully so. They loaded up the car with camping chairs, coolers, and the tent, and piled in for the drive up to their camping spot in Westport.

  There was no room in the Knoteks’ maroon Toyota with Dave, Shelly, Shane, and the girls, so Kathy rode in the trunk. Even if there had been space, Kathy still would have ridden in the trunk because that’s where Shelly and Dave made her ride. Oddly, she didn’t fight it.

  “I don’t remember a struggle,” Sami said later. “I don’t remember complaining. It was my mom saying, ‘We’re going camping, Kathy. Now, get in the trunk.’”

  Within a year of moving in, Kathy occupied a strange, servile space in the family. She was included in family outings like camping, but not fully so. She lingered off to the side of the action as the kids roasted marshmallows or hot dogs. She didn’t sit with Shelly or Dave when they had their coffee in the morning or a beer at the end of the day. She brought out the supplies. She set up the tent.

  “It was like ‘Kathy, get this’ or ‘Kathy, do that’ and things like that. She was there to do things for my mom but not really to be part of the trip. She did whatever she was told to do,” Sami recounted. “Here’s the thing: at the time it didn’t seem strange. We were kids. We just thought that’s the way it was.”

  Instead of sleeping with the others in the tent the first night, Kathy slept under the car.

  The next night, Shelly had another plan for Kathy’s sleeping arrangement.

  “It will be fun to sleep in the trunk, Kathy!” Nikki recalled her mother saying, helping her friend get inside and then partially closing the trunk lid.

  “I remember my mom laughing about that,” Nikki remembered. “The next morning, [Kathy] got up and fell out of the trunk. Really hard on the ground.”

  Shelly was undeniably lazy. No one but Kathy would say otherwise. She’d let dishes stack up around wherever she was lying. Sometimes food would crust so much that plates would stick together. Laundry was another chore that piled up to Everest proportions until no one had anything clean to wear.

  One time Shelly told the girls that she had something to do that day and they needed to all go to the laundromat.

  “Take Kathy,” she said. “We can’t leave her alone today.”

  The girls loaded plastic garbage bags of dirty clothes into the car, and Kathy got into the trunk.

  She was weaker by then, and Sami, for one, had a singular understanding that Kathy was not going to get better. She was clearly going downhill, though Shelly kept insisting that Kathy was getting better.

  After they got to the laundromat and filled a half-dozen washers, Sami made trips to the car to check on Kathy. She spoke to her through the trunk because Shelly had warned the girls not to let Kathy out for any reason.

  “How are you doing in there?” Sami asked.

  “I’m fine,” Kathy said. “How is the laundry going?”

  “We’re doing great, Kathy.”

  “What’s the weather like out there?”

  “Nice,” Sami said. “Real nice.”

  Sami went back inside feeling sick and returned a little while later to check on Kathy.

  “Dryers are going now,” she said. “Won’t be long now.”

  “No problem,” Kathy answered, her voice muffled under the lid of the trunk. “Talk to you soon.”

  The conversations were just like that. Casual. Nonconfrontational. Kathy wasn’t pounding her fists and fighting to get out. She didn’t try to kick out a taillight. She didn’t complain that it was dark inside, or that she was hot or uncomfortable. She was compliant. Calm. Waiting until they got home so she could get out and do more to help Shelly.

  And even as Kathy put up with riding in the trunk, working around the house naked, and ingesting whatever pills she was handed, Shelly still found ways to ratchet up the abuse.

  Simply because she could.

  One time the girls watched in horror as Kathy sat outside on the porch with a bowl over her head while Shelly wielded barber’s scissors, snipping off the long, wavy hair that Kathy, a stylist, had used as her calling card. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Silently. Her hair was a loose nest on the porch.

  “Girls!” Shelly called after butchering Kathy’s hair. “Look at Kathy’s new haircut! Isn’t it the cutest little bob?”

  It was hard to look at it without betraying a true opinion. There was nothing cute about what their mother had done. It was, Nikki thought, the worst haircut she’d ever seen. It was so bad that it had to be intentional.

  “Oh yes,” Nikki said. “I love it. It looks so cute!”

  Sami felt sick inside. She agreed anyway. “So cute, Kathy!”

  To say anything else, they knew, would bring on something bad. Maybe for Kathy. Maybe for one of them. With their mother, there was no telling what was in store. Perhaps Shelly had gotten the idea for the ugly chop from the humiliating haircut Grandma Anna had once given her, which had really been intended to teach her stepmom, Lara, a lesson: “You can’t keep her hair brushed properly, so I cut it!”

  Like Lara, Nikki had also learned to keep her mouth shut. Everyone went back into the house.

  “Why does Kathy let Mom do that crap to her?” Nikki asked when their mother was out of earshot.

  Sami didn’t know. Shane’s opinion, however, was consistent.

  “Your mom is fucking crazy,” he said. “That’s why. Kathy’s scared shitless of her. Like we all are.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It had to be the pills. Kathy had been a normal person before she’d moved in. She had opinions about things that were going on in the world. She had an identity. She was anything but a punching bag just reeling from one blow to the next.

  Shane and Nikki went on a quest to find out what was happening to Kathy. They crept into their mother’s room while she was away and Kathy was doing chores.

  “Let’s see what Mom’s feeding Kathy,” Shane said.

  Shelly kept an array of pill bottles on the top of her dresser and on the nightstand near the bed. The medicine cabinet on the main floor was also a veritable pharmacy with dozens of prescription pill bottles, including Lorazepam, Nitroquick, Atenolol, Altace, and Paxil.

  It was bewildering.

  Most were drugs that neither of them had heard about before, prescribed by doctors across Pacific County, and filled at various pharmacies in Raymond, South Bend, and Aberdeen.

  Prozac, in its green-and-white capsules, was the most recognizable.

  “That’s what she’s giving Kathy all the time,” Nikki said.

  Shane popped a pill into his mouth and swallowed it.

  “I remember like twenty minutes after he took
it, he was looped,” Nikki said later.

  Shelly was clearly drugging Kathy.

  Some would later wonder if she’d also drugged Shane or any of her girls from time to time.

  Nikki and Shane’s bond deepened. They were pushed together by their shared abuse and the fact that they’d been singled out over Sami for repeat offenses and the humiliating and painful punishments that went along with them. Only Kathy’s arrival had given them any relief.

  They conspired in the way that teenagers do, fantasizing how they might end their misery and save the world from Shelly.

  “The crawlspace,” Shane said one time. “We should put her there.”

  “Or the attic?” Nikki suggested. “Anywhere where she can’t get away.”

  “Yeah,” Shane said. “But seriously. Why is your mom so fucking crazy?”

  Nikki shrugged. “How would I know?”

  Shane thought about it a beat. “Yeah. Some people just are. I’m getting out of here, you know.”

  “Me too.”

  “No, really I am.”

  Nikki wished she had the guts to do what Shane said he was going to do, but something kept her stuck in that house. She could talk a good game, yet she couldn’t put her desire to break away into practice.

  Shane, though, tried it a few times.

  Whenever he acted on his vow to get away, Nikki would tell herself that it was for the best and inwardly rooted for him even as her mom would pile the girls into the car to search for the runaway. She never once stopped hoping he’d finally make it somewhere.

  Shane had good reason to want to escape from his aunt’s home.

  Shelly seemed to always come up with new ways to hurt him.

  One time she went for the duct tape from the kitchen drawer and the Icy Hot from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. It was the latest incarnation of punishments that started with beatings and then grew more and more bizarre. She made him undress and bound his ankles and wrists while the girls looked on. He protested, though he didn’t fight her. He didn’t resist.

  Next, she put him in the corner by the front door and then applied Icy Hot to his penis while he yelped in pain.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” she said.

  Years later, no one could recall what the teen had done to earn that punishment. It was their mother’s version of putting a child in the corner to the extreme. Shane was humiliated and angry with Shelly, but he let her do it.

  Her mother and older sister had gone to the store, leaving Sami in charge of Shane, who had done something that made Shelly very, very angry. She’d made him strip and duct-taped his wrists and ankles and pushed him into the corner by the front door.

  “Make sure he stays put,” she told Sami before leaving.

  The second she heard the car start, Sami did what she always did—what they all did—whenever their mother left the house.

  She went to the bathroom.

  Shelly never let the children use the toilet without permission or without the door fully open. Most times, Shelly perched next to the kids as they went about their business and watched like it was a science experiment.

  When Sami finished and returned to the front room, Shane had vanished.

  In a panic, she looked everywhere around the house and the yard, but no Shane. She was so angry at him for running. She was mad because she knew that her mom would make all of them pile into the car and search for Shane all day, all night. Whatever it took. Shelly was relentless that way. She was a hunter. She’d never stop until she found the boy. It didn’t matter if there was school the next day and their hunting trip lasted until three in the morning.

  It was dark when Sami found Shane in a neighbor’s woodshed.

  “You have to come home, Shane,” Sami said. “Mom’s mad. You know she’ll find you.”

  Shelly didn’t say a word as Shane came back inside. He was naked and freezing. He was also crying.

  She gave him a hard look.

  “I’m really sorry, Mom,” he said. “I promise not to do it again.”

  Shelly finally spoke, asking the boy what he was thinking. Her tone was suddenly sweet, comforting. It was as if she’d found a lost kitten and was scooping it up to give it a home.

  “We love you, Shane,” she said. “Don’t scare us like that. I don’t know why you’d want to leave us.”

  Another time, when the Knoteks were going to Wild Waves Theme & Water Park just north of Tacoma, Shane went on the run again. Shelly immediately halted the trip and went on the hunt for him. Nikki and Sami knew the drill, and their hearts sank like lead weights. They’d miss the water park and their mother would search until she found their cousin.

  They looked for two days. First, they looked in the Tillicum neighborhood where Shane had lived before coming to live with them in Raymond. Every tiny, ramshackle house. Behind every single run-down garage. They scoured each store in the massive Tacoma Mall. No Shane.

  Shelly even stopped in at a psychic in Tacoma to see if she knew where Shane had gone.

  “Mom”—Nikki braced for a hard slap to the face—“he doesn’t want to be here. Let him go.”

  Shelly ignored Nikki and kept her eyes scanning for Shane.

  All the while, Nikki was praying they’d never find him.

  Please, God, let Shane get away. Mom’s evil. He needs to be gone. Safe.

  God didn’t hear her prayers, apparently. Several hours into the search on the second day, Shelly found her wayward nephew and coaxed him back into the car with the words that meant more to him than anything.

  She told him how much she loved him.

  Words he had to have known by then were false.

  “You really scared us, Shane,” Shelly said, her voice soothing and her demeanor mimicking concern. “Don’t you ever do that. You’ll worry me to death. The girls too. We love you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  After Shelly made the decision that Tori and her crib could no longer stay in her bedroom on the first floor, she told Kathy that she’d be giving up her space between Nikki’s and Sami’s rooms.

  “I have a cozy little room for you downstairs.”

  By then, most of Kathy’s personal items, like the bedroom furniture and clothing she’d brought when she’d moved in, had disappeared. Kathy didn’t complain; it seemed she’d forgotten how to stand her ground. She was completely under Shelly’s thumb.

  “Cozy,” it turned out, was a misnomer. Off to the right of the staircase was Kathy’s new room: the oil furnace room, on the other side of the drafty basement from where Shane slept. The five-by-eight-foot space had concrete floors and unfinished walls with exposed studs. It was gritty and, even in the summer, very cold. The space was so tight it could barely accommodate a mattress.

  Kathy looked a little sad about having to live down there, yet she didn’t complain. She just accepted it because Shelly told her that it was better for Tori.

  “You’ll love it down there, Kathy.”

  Sami, for one, didn’t love it. She felt sick about Kathy being forced to stay downstairs in that awful place. Not long after Kathy moved into the furnace room, Sami found the boxes of Kathy’s things that her mother had said she’d given away because Kathy had done something that displeased her. Sami brought a few posters downstairs and put them up. Kathy started to panic when she realized what Sami was doing.

  “Don’t do that,” Kathy said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “No,” she insisted. “Please don’t.”

  Sami went about what she was doing. “We’re going to make this nicer. A better place for you.”

  Kathy was terrified.

  “Sami, please,” she begged. “Don’t.”

  Sami couldn’t comprehend the fear. She knew her mom might not like it, but this was Kathy’s room and it smelled bad and looked terrible. She wanted to make it nicer. Not great. Just better.

  Kathy knew Shelly better than her own daughter did.

  When Shelly saw what Sami had done, she
screamed at Kathy and stripped the room of the posters. When she found Sami, she told her that she was a terrible child and needed to mind her own business.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” she said.

  It was late one night, a few days after the freeze and thaw of a snowfall, and Kathy had done something to make Shelly angry. Very angry. As mad as Nikki and Sami had ever seen their mother. The girls huddled together and watched from Nikki’s window while their parents instructed Kathy to climb to the top of the little hill behind the house. Shane came and watched too. Kathy was naked and freezing. It was hard to see what was in store for her at first. Nikki and Sami kept their eyes glued to the hillside as Kathy begged Dave and Shelly to let her back inside, but they weren’t having any of that.

  “Just do what we tell you, Kathy,” Shelly yelled at her. “Do you have to make everything so hard for me?”

  Dave, not saying a word, nudged Kathy from the top, and she started to slide down the hill, crying and yelping all the way down. When she got to the bottom, Shelly gave more commands.

  “Get up! Go up!”

  Kathy crawled upward, crying all the way.

  It went on like that for what seemed like hours. Kathy was barely able to walk from the cold and the pain she was undoubtedly feeling. Over and over. Up and down. In the dim light from the kitchen window, it was clear that her bottom had been scraped raw by the icy crystals of the snow.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated over and over. “I won’t do it again. I’m cold. It hurts. Please, Shelly. Please!”

  It was like a nightmare that wouldn’t end. Shane shook his head and went to the basement. He didn’t have to say a word about how messed up everything was. The sisters couldn’t take it anymore either and shared Nikki’s bed, holding each other until morning.

  “We all went out there in the morning,” Sami later said, her voice breaking. “Me, my sister, Shane . . . the snow was bloody and red all the way down the hillside. Like a big red stripe.”