Mormon missionaries aren’t supposed to engage in romance of any sort while on their two-year missions, but Raul was different. Everything he did and said felt like flirting. Now he’d met his match. Anne was a master flirt. She’d leaned on that skill for nearly two decades. So Raul and Anne started going to meals together outside of church and meeting up in ways that seemed an awful lot like dates. He told her no one could know. That wasn’t music to her ears, but she agreed, and they did their best to keep what increasingly looked like a budding romance from the good folks at church. But when Anne’s family found out she’d met someone new, they were all eager to meet him.
If James Ray Mosely didn’t like somebody, everybody knew it, and quick. And in contrast to how he’d felt about Don, James couldn’t stand Raul. He didn’t trust “that rat” as far as he could throw him. But James could tell that Anne was falling hard for Raul, so in this instance alone, he chose to hold his tongue. He would live to regret that silence.
It was true that Anne seemed genuinely happy. Here was a handsome young man from a good family who seemed to love her despite her condition, and when she told him she wanted a family more than anything in the world, and that she would try her best to have children for them one day, he said, “Okay”—but that if it wasn’t Heavenly Father’s design, he would be all right with that too.
When Raul finally did propose, he made it clear that there was a clock ticking on the offer. His mission in Louisiana was coming to an end. He’d soon have to return home to Utah, where he would be subject to the draft—unless, of course, he married a disabled woman. That kind of a marriage would earn him a deferment. Though far more practical than romantic, his deadline did make good sense, so Anne did her best to push back any concerns it may have raised.
Cokie wrote letters begging Anne to finish school: “You’re only months away from graduating, my love. You don’t know when you might need something to fall back on.” Anne’s entire family thought she was throwing away the greatest opportunity any of them had ever had. But now Anne had an offer of marriage, perhaps even children, and an eternal family in a church that promised her a perfect body in the afterlife. It was everything she’d ever been told she would never have, all laid out in front of her. So, even faced with passionate objections from her family, how could she say no?
On January 6, 1969, while most people her age were expanding their consciousness, resisting a war, neck-deep in a sexual revolution, and still feeling the glow of a summer of love, Anne took off her braces, let go of her crutches, and waded into a baptismal font in the Monroe branch of the LDS Church. An elder named Terry cradled her small body, said a few prescribed words, and submerged her fully. I can imagine the hope that must have filled her heart when she was under the water. With this act, she belonged to a new family of Latter Day Saints. With this act, she’d be allowed to marry a good Mormon man in one of those monumental, glimmering LDS temples. And with this act, she would have a perfect body in heaven.
Anne never returned to classes. And when she filled out the marriage application, she put all of her names together as one: “Roseanna.” After all, this moment would be the culmination of everything Rose, Anna, and Anne had survived. And on May 30 in a small ceremony in Lake Providence, the young woman who’d been told she’d never experience love, marriage, or children was legally wed to Raul N. Garrison for time and eternity.
It was the happiest day of her life, though even her dear sister Martha did not attend.
There was a job waiting for Raul in California, the land where her mom had once told her precious Christmas fruit came from. Anne knew full well that nothing much in Lake Providence ever moved or changed without dying, and that only by facing that terrible outside force called polio with hope and optimism had she broken the mold and set herself into motion. Now she was determined to keep moving. So she packed up what little she owned into her baby-blue suitcase, kissed her tearful mother goodbye, and began her first journey of adulthood.
CHAPTER 5
Bedrock
I
It was 1970. Each Sunday morning, Anne and Raul’s new neighbors in Sacramento, California, beheld a peculiar sight: a rail-thin woman with long blond hair, dressed for church, stepping out of the smallest house on the block with braces and crutches and a massive beach ball–shaped protrusion around her midsection. Less than a year after saying “I do,” Anne had dispensed with all the medical experts’ sage advice and started trying to get pregnant. Doctors had warned her countless times that her body couldn’t handle a pregnancy and that she would likely lose the child if not her own life. And polio had long since robbed her of any “pushing” muscles, so there was no possibility of a natural delivery, and doctors were far from certain that her body could bear a cesarean section.
But having a family was my mom’s number one dream. It was what polio had denied her during her own childhood; it was what those cute Mormon missionaries had guaranteed she’d have for “time and eternity” if she converted.
By late winter, Anne had to stretch her crutches far out in front of her to maintain balance as she swung her big belly like a pendulum beneath her. Everyone worried. Her mom and sisters did their best to prepare her for the inevitable miscarriage. Come spring, her deeply concerned doctor made the call that to let this pregnancy continue threatened both mother and child. Thinking only of her unborn baby, Anne relented, and on April 2, she let the doctor slice her open and pull out little Marcus Raul Garrison, a good many weeks early.
Marcus could have fit in your hand. His lungs refused to work. He was purple-yellow and just clinging to life when Anne first looked through the incubator’s curved glass. He was in agony, fighting for air, untouchable. Now she worried that the naysayers had been right: this dream wasn’t only selfish, it was damn cruel, and she was the architect of Marcus’s pain.
Maybe it was the nurses’ vigilant care, my mother’s prayers, or even the blessings administered by the two Mormon boys who came by the hospital every few days, but Marcus’s lungs slowly got stronger, and so did he.
Weeks later, when Anne finally held her “brave little man” on their way out of the hospital, the doctors went on and on about how lucky she was, and warned her never to try this again. The last thing she said to those doctors was stern: “There was no luck to it, thank you very much.”
Four years later, her belly was even bigger, and on June 10, 1974, she was prepped for surgery all over again. This time, she had a run-of-the-mill chest cold. But there’s nothing run-of-the-mill about a chest cold for a polio survivor. She had only a quarter of one lung working well, so any pesky flu phlegm was potentially fatal. Her coughing fits were endless, alarming to strangers, and a real concern for her new doctors.
That morning, Anne tried hard to get all the phlegm up, to hydrate, to sneak any medications that might thin the mucus, listening for doctors coming up the hall so she could stifle her terrible cough. She didn’t want to give those men any reason to delay the procedure and risk her second child’s health.
Shortly before 1:00 p.m., Anne was wheeled into the operating room. The room was modern, the medications far more gentle than what she’d experienced as a little girl, but midway through the procedure, whatever willed her to breathe through such clogged lungs fell asleep with her. Her blood pressure dropped precipitously. Her heart threatened to give out. A breathing bag went over her face. The nurse started pumping while doctors rushed to deliver the child before it met a similarly grim fate.
Soon a blood-streaked, vernix-covered baby emerged from the slice in her flesh. He was deathly quiet and still. The doctor quickly examined him: despite his silence, he was very much alive.
A breath. Another. An angry coughing fit, and Anne began breathing on her own again, gasping for air. More irritated than frightened, she showed little interest in the fact that she’d nearly died on the operating table. She wanted to know, “Is the baby okay?”<
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The nurse handed Anne her second son, wrapped up tight. The next few moments proved fodder for a story she’d spin for me for years to come:
“You didn’t cry. Your big blue eyes were wide open. Like flying saucers. And they just stared up into mine like you had so much to teach me. And I just knew, I knew you were going to teach me so many things.”
Raul interrupted the transcendent moment. “Look. He has crinkled-up little ears.” He had just ensured that the first words his second son’s “unusual” ears heard from his father were critical.
As it turns out, many years later the nurse at my elementary school would figure out that my ears were like that for a reason. I had likely refused to let go of them because I have abnormally sensitive hearing. I can hear things too high-pitched or too quiet for most. That might sound like a superpower to some, but it’s mostly been a torture. Faraway noises and conversations most find inaudible can drive me crazy. High-pitched sounds actually hurt my bones. And my unusual ears often overhear critical whispers and gossip not intended for them.
But as I lay in my mom’s arms in my first minutes of life, she paid my crushed ears no mind. To her they were perfectly different.
Raul wanted to name me Dustin after the actor Dustin Hoffman. As a good Mormon wife, Anne knew she had to put her preferred name in second position. So Dustin Lance Garrison filled in the birth certificate blanks. But not one to ever truly give in, she only ever used “Dustin” in public. In private, I was always her Lancer. It’s a moniker wrestling match that’s alive and well today, leaving me to choose who will remain in the “Dustin” camp of strangers and who will become a member of that select group I allow access to the real “Lance.”
Having barely survived birth number two, any realistic, reasonable person would have raised her two boys and counted her blessings. But not Anne. On March 4, 1978, she gave birth to her third son, Todd Bryant Garrison. This time the surgery went flawlessly, the baby was perfectly healthy, and perhaps because of the ease of things, with no one screaming for her to stop this madness, she told the doctor to tie her tubes. They gladly did as they were told.
Anne couldn’t drive, she didn’t have a job or a college degree, but she did have a husband and a family. Item by item, she was proving her childhood naysayers wrong.
* * *
—
It turned out that my silent first moments were predictive. I said little to anyone outside of our home for the first decade of life. I was so painfully shy that family reunions were spent hiding behind couches, lured out only by my aunt Josie’s promise of a bowl of ice cream in her quiet kitchen. I refused to wear bright colors or shirts with words or illustrations for fear of someone commenting. Big groups of loud human beings were my worst nightmare.
My safe haven was a quiet room with my mom’s craft box. Tape and glue were my pals, and I could spend days on end with them building peep-show boxes of faraway worlds or sock puppet friends with glued-on googly eyes. My mom was the beneficiary of countless “masterpieces” built of construction paper and felt. And although I refused to speak, I loved to listen, especially to my mom’s voice. I would curl up next to her in bed, secretly sucking on my left index and middle fingers while twirling my white-blond hair as she read aloud to me. Book after book, story after story, my mom and I traveled to the most extraordinary places, met the most fascinating people, and encountered and conquered the most terrifying foes. Neither of us was a particularly good fit for this world. So we became masters at transporting ourselves to other worlds, and in those worlds, we were adventurers and heroes. Her hopeful stories were our escape, our salvation. And so I fell in love with the magic of storytelling.
These moments sit atop the most treasured memories of my life. Because, although I was only six years old, they would prove to be my final hours of safety and innocence—the last moments before everything broke apart.
II
I have only a few vague memories of Raul. He was a traveling salesman, and too busy with his job (and whatever he got up to with other women on work trips) to spend much time with my brothers and me. For my mom, having children was the fulfillment of an impossible dream; I’m afraid Raul saw us as the fulfillment of his Mormon duty to propagate. Raul wasn’t bright. He struggled to stay employed. And in that pursuit, he moved us from Sacramento to Stockton, and then from El Paso to San Antonio, where he finally landed a job selling toys.
Late in the summer of 1980, word came that an aunt on my father’s side, who I had never met or even heard of, was coming to visit us in San Antonio with plans to take us to the zoo. Her name was Louise. My mom wanted the house flawless for her visit, so we all shifted into full preparation mode. Chores in our home weren’t a learning exercise. We were our mother’s arms, legs, and muscles. But Marcus was ten years old now and already adept at a too-cool-for-school act he’d eventually perfect. So that week, our mom announced that I was now grown-up enough to take over Marcus’s vacuuming duties. I was beside myself with pride. Marcus knew it was a trick, and he rolled his eyes as I dedicated myself to leaving perfect rows in the family room carpet in an effort to prove that her faith in me was well placed.
In addition to my standard chores, I was also tasked with looking after one-year-old Todd. I loved Todd from the get-go. He was my chief project. So between cleaning duties, I attempted diaper changes, following all of the instructions my mom had carefully spelled out and demonstrated. And even with Marcus sneaking off to a friend’s house, we were well ahead of schedule for Aunt Louise’s arrival.
But while I was helping to scrub out the cracks in the kitchen floor, my mom told me that Aunt Louise wasn’t an aunt at all; she was actually Raul’s first cousin. Such intentional misnaming seemed rather ridiculous to me, but I was happy to call her a mashed potato if her visit meant we got to go to the zoo. My opinion didn’t change much when, upon her arrival, “Aunt” Louise proved to be an especially unremarkable human being: plain dress, plain hair, not much to say of any real interest, and features fixed in a constipated expression.
So I quickly put her out of mind as I distracted myself with the easily irritated bald eagle, the curious little monkeys, and all the thick-skinned elephants at the zoo. Most of all, though, I was mesmerized by the machines that looked like jukeboxes, with glass tops and quarter-eating slots, that for the right price would press a waxy, plastic toy gorilla, panther, or elephant right in front of your eyes.
We were broke and we were Mormon, so we were thrifty. I already knew that I would never own one of those wax figures. I satisfied myself with watching the machine press other kids’ toys, smelling the hot waxy plastic cool from afar as the children casually snatched the finished products from the machine’s guts. And that’s when Louise did her one remarkable thing: she pulled out a big stack of quarters, fed the coin slot, and told me the next wax gorilla would be mine. I was stunned.
Out of habit, I looked to my mom for permission, but on this occasion I was met with a tight smile. Crap. It had never mattered that I rarely used words; my mom and I didn’t need them. We could read each other’s minds. But as special as that sounds (and it was special), it also meant there was no hiding anything from each other. I knew then and there that she had nothing against the red gorilla; there was something about Louise she didn’t care for.
I stifled my joy as I felt the bright red gorilla cool in my hands, and as quickly as I could, I found a fatal flaw in it: Why would they choose red wax for this gorilla machine? Everyone knows gorillas are black and silver. This error would have to be corrected.
That afternoon, I carefully laid out newspaper on the back patio, chose my paint colors from Marcus’s vast collection of model paint, and set out to bring my gorilla more realistically to life. My mom was not normally one to interrupt such creative endeavors, but on this afternoon she opened the sliding glass door, stuck her head out, and said something that for better and for worse
would stick with me for far too long:
“Wouldn’t you enjoy doing the fun stuff more once you’ve finished your chores?”
I thought about it. The answer was no. I had the creative itch to do this right now. But that wasn’t the answer she wanted. She wanted me to stop doting over Louise’s gift. And maybe she was right. Perhaps I actually would enjoy painting more with all of my work done, completely carefree. So I put my painting aside and got to work picking up the house, helping change my little brother’s diaper again, and setting the table for Louise’s enchilada dinner.
Afterward, my mom tucked us all into bed early, but there were none of the usual bedtime stories or endless “I love yous.” She seemed distracted. I didn’t fall asleep but sat up thinking for hours. I heard voices. I heard the front door open and close.
When I woke up the next morning, Marcus wasn’t in his bed. That wasn’t normal. The sun was already shining through the wood shutters, turning our room a deep amber. Why had no one woken me up?
When I walked into the family room, there was a surprise waiting: my actual aunt Josie. My heart leaped. Sometime in the middle of the night she had made the seven-hour drive from Texarkana to San Antonio. She gave me a giant squeeze of a hug…but then she walked outside without any explanation. That moment remains crystal clear in my memory, because it marks the end of a bright chapter—the last beat before I realized how fragile love can be.
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