Fear of Our Father

by Stacey Kananen

  Ann knew the resort was a gossipy place and I was fresh meat. Once I realized, in the days after I arrived, that I had a ready-made reputation at the resort, I stayed holed up in Ann’s house for a week or so while we waited for the trailer next door to be finished because I didn’t want to come out. I wasn’t about to let anyone see the anguish I was feeling. And no one was going to see me cry. This was my modus operandi; while growing up in the Kananen house I learned that showing fear or emotion guaranteed a more thorough and vicious beating. My father’s psychotic frenzy fed on reactions that he saw as weakness.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Earliest Years

  I mostly remember my dad’s enormous size—he was over six feet tall, and weighed more than three hundred pounds—his military-style haircut, and his terrible voice. His personality was a cross between the drill instructor from the movie Full Metal Jacket and the Terminator, with his ruthless and relentless brutality.

  There was instant violence in this man. He could suddenly turn on you and tear you apart, sometimes for no reason at all. He beat us, just for his own kicks. If he felt like smacking someone around, whoever was in the room would do. Other times, all it took was for something minor to go wrong, like lumps in the mashed potatoes, and he’d start looking around for the nearest scapegoat to blame and take his anger and aggression out on. He had the same blank, dark stare and he never smiled. When he escalated to violence, it didn’t change. He always just had those … black eyes.

  For the most part there was no “Nice Daddy.” But some days were better than others. In fact, the only way I could tell whether it was going to be a good or a bad day was by what he was drinking in the morning. If he was drinking coffee, it wouldn’t be too bad. And if he was drinking a milkshake, it meant that he had been drinking hard the night before and was too hungover to function. He’d then spend the day sleeping and we didn’t have to be subjected to his anger. But if he started the morning with vodka, look out. We all knew someone was going to get it that day, even though each of us would try to avoid him like the plague.

  Remember when you were a child and you were afraid to go to bed at night without the night-light on, or begged for the door to be left open a crack? Remember how afraid you were of the monsters under your bed, or the boogeyman looking through your window, waiting for you to fall asleep so he could break in and carry you away? Remember how badly you wanted your parents to come and rescue you? My father was that boogeyman. He was that monster under the bed—in the bed. No mommy or daddy was going to come and rescue us because it was Daddy who was causing the pain and terror, and Mommy had been beaten into submission, too afraid to try to rescue us. Every night, every single night, we all turned in knowing that someone in the house may be attacked, dreading the sound of footsteps stopping outside our own door and a turning doorknob. The longer it had been since my father’s last nocturnal visit to my room, the more the suspense became unbearable, because he was sure to come in, eventually. Usually he would wait until the bleeding had stopped from the previous incident, but not always.

  There’s a well-known painting called The Scream, by Edvard Munch, which depicts a man on a bridge, shrieking in anguish. Munch said about his painting, “I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.” If you could look at this painting, and empathically feel what the artist felt, you might know what it was like to be experiencing pure terror—constant, never-ending sheer terror, even in the moments when there is no one torturing you, because you know it’s only a matter of time before it begins again. You wear a normal-looking face, but your inner face is screaming. This is how I felt every day of every year of my childhood. It is why no single happy memory exists.

  There wasn’t a lot of talking and reminiscing going on in our household, and we were kept out of contact with any relatives who might have been able to tell us about our parents or ancestors. I don’t even know the names of my father’s parents. My mom’s older brother, Larry, told me after Mom died that my father hated females because he watched his dad work until the day he died, and my father didn’t agree with supporting women. Knowing this piece of information adds a piece to the puzzle, because our father never held down a job. He worked a little when they first got married and when I was born, and when we were in Maine he started filing for disability. He had a “bad back.”

  Mom didn’t talk very much. She was a ghostlike figure throughout the years, taking care of the house and keeping it immaculate—it was the only thing in the house she had any control over. She tried, like everyone else, to stay invisible. We all stayed out of his way, preferably in another room, and never started a conversation with him unless absolutely necessary. I have no idea what attracted Mom to him in the first place. I remember seeing pictures of my parents on CNN’s In Session. There was a photo of my father, presumably from his late teens or early twenties, that I had never seen before. The picture, which was shown when my trial was aired, revealed a very handsome young man of average build. Seeing him looking young and handsome was very jarring to me, as I only ever knew him as fat and scary. Another picture of Mom and a very young Rickie showed that Mom was quite beautiful. It is entirely likely that it was purely physical attraction, as young love so often is, so I guess I could understand what drew a naïve teenage girl to him.

  While they didn’t go to the same high school, they married when she was in her teens, and my brother, Richard Alfred Kananen Jr., was born only a month after her eighteenth birthday. A good Irish Catholic girl, she married the boy who got her pregnant, and he never let her live it down. We heard it all the time. He acted as though she tricked him, and he took no responsibility for being one of the necessary parties to that pregnancy.

  I’ve learned that, in many abusive relationships, the abuser holds back his or her true self until the abusee is well under control, so it is conceivable that Mom didn’t know his true nature until it was too late to get out, like that lobster in a cooking pot I mentioned earlier. Teenage girls sometimes put up with abuse if their man “loves” them. If he was beating her, then apologizing, “Oh baby, I’m so sorry, it’ll never happen again, I was just so upset,” she may have felt so much love from him in his remorse and tenderness that she stayed for the next time. “It’ll never happen again” happens again and again, and after a while abusive men stop saying that. They realize she’s not going anywhere—they have her now. They start saying, “Oh, it’s gonna happen again if you cross me.” Considering her very young age and the times, it’s possible that my mom simply didn’t know to watch out for the red flags that experienced, adult women recognize.

  If other early pictures of my parents still exist, I am entirely unaware of them. My mom’s collection of family photos was thrown away when Rickie was clearing out her house after he killed her, so most of our family history ended up in a landfill.

  I can only imagine what Rickie had to endure for eight years, until Cheryl was born in 1964. At least once she and I were born, the abuse was spread around a little more and he didn’t have to take it all himself. Even though his manuscript was supposedly fiction, I recognize our father’s personality and some stories from our childhood. His book told a story of a little boy named Richard, whose father, named Dick, beat his mother to the point of unconsciousness after she interfered in a “learning lesson”—a severe thrashing—that the father was administering to the boy.

  In Rickie’s novel, the father realized, once he saw her bloody and unconscious on the floor, that he had gone too far, and he told the boy to take a pitcher of orange juice out of the refrigerator and drop it on the floor. The boy was then told to call an ambulance and tell the EMTs, when they arrived, that his mother had slipped in the spilled juice and hurt herself. In the meantime, the father left the house. He returned after the ambulance had arrived and pretended to be surprised and horrified to find his wife so gravely injured. Rickie ends that story with a poignant observation, another thing I recognize as the kind of thing our father would do after an incident like tha
t, that Dick gave the boy a “look of triumph … smug arrogance.”

  This story was not fiction. I heard about it from my mother—she said it happened sometime before I was born.

  It broke my heart to read that story in his manuscript, because I know those characters very well. But even worse was the section immediately after that story, where he tells of the little boy’s conversation with his mother, after she comes home from the hospital. She tells him that he has to learn to hide everything from his father, in order to avoid a brutal “learning lesson.” The two of them agree to a sort of pact, to never let Dick know what they are thinking or feeling, and Richard makes the mother promise to never get in between them again, to never protect her son from his father. He also makes her promise to never cry again until they are free. He tells her, in a monotone voice, that he loves her but he will never say it again. They are now playing a game to win her freedom from Dick. The little boy then walks down the hall, sees his reflection in the bathroom mirror, and shatters it with his fist, as the mother cries for the loss of her child’s soul, “his caring for humanity.”

  At my trial in 2010, Rickie told a story on the witness stand about the time he and our father were fixing a car. My brother didn’t do something right, so my father dropped the jack and set the car right on top of my brother. He told Mom, “Don’t help him. Let him figure it out.” I don’t know how he got out. I never heard. My mother told me that story. She just stood in the entryway into the house and watched. She didn’t know what to do. I never understood how she could just stand there and do nothing, even though I know how much she feared him.

  By the time I came around it was just understood: you watched what he did and when you got emotional it got worse. When you didn’t, the “learning lesson” subsided more quickly. He wasn’t getting any joy if he wasn’t getting any tears. But if Rickie’s story in his book, about the pact that the boy made with the mother, is true—and I don’t know that it is—I don’t understand why he hated my mother enough to kill her, if they had made these agreements. Whether they actually had that conversation or not, there seemed to be something in him that wished that they had. But I guess I’ll never know.

  These stories happened before I was born, and my father had already been in and out of prison in Arizona, convicted of four counts of forgery and sentenced to seven to ten years. He spent three years there, from 1962 to 1965, before he managed to be released on appeal, due to a technicality over the legality of the police search. For God only knows what reason, Mom went back to him when he got out.

  If only …

  CHAPTER 4

  Monson, Maine

  State Road 50, in Florida, runs east–west from the city of Weeki Wachee—with its live “mermaid” shows on the Gulf Coast—to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center on the Atlantic Coast. The land mass is narrow enough that, on a clear day, Space Shuttle launches could be seen from the Gulf side of the state. To drive from one coast to the other takes less than three hours, as long as you don’t get stuck in traffic in Orlando, which lies just a little east of center, closer to the Atlantic.

  Both Gulf Coast Resort, in Hudson, and the house I shared with Susan on Okaloosa Avenue, in Orlando, are just a few miles south of SR 50, so it’s a pretty easy shot to drive from one to the other. In 2003, Mom still lived in the house she bought with my father in 1977, near the intersection of Okaloosa and Alachua Street—just around the corner from me, Susan, and Rickie. Walt Disney World, where Susan and I both worked, is about thirty miles south.

  We loved working for Disney and had been employed there for over ten years when Mom was killed. I worked in food service, an area of expertise in which I particularly excel. If I worked in your restaurant, you could rest assured that it would be spotlessly clean and absolutely ready for a health code inspector’s surprise visit. This was a trait I picked up from Mom, who was obsessively clean. In fact, she was fanatical about keeping her house in order. It was this work ethic that I brought with me into any restaurant in which I worked, since I was seventeen at my first job at McDonald’s.

  Susan worked mostly in the Disney retail shops. She is, by nature, a happy person, and her loud and friendly laugh made customers feel welcomed. Susan is a natural at customer service, with her fun-loving delight in all things girly. She thrived, working among the toys and figurines and cute Disney apparel.

  Those peaceful years between 1988 and 2003, between my father’s disappearance and my mother’s death, reflected Disney’s theme as “The Happiest Place on Earth.” I finally had the life I always wished for during my wretched childhood: my father was gone and Mom was safe and nearby, and her dad moved down from Massachusetts in 1989, after his wife died, to live with her. My grandpa was a very sweet old man, and we finally got to know him, after years of isolation from our extended family. I found a loving relationship when Susan and I met shortly after my father disappeared, my sister lived just a few miles away with her husband and three kids, and no one went out of their way to hurt me. Susan and I were doting aunts, especially with Cheryl’s son—the boy who had my heart—Daniel. I loved seeing Daniel and his sisters having a normal, happy life.

  Susan and I loved Disney, and our cute four-bedroom bungalow was a shrine. Every shelf, nook, and cranny was stuffed to overflowing with Disney figurines and knickknacks. Mom’s house was similarly packed with Disney souvenirs, as we all spent many happy days there, oftentimes taking Cheryl’s kids with us to the theme park.

  Susan’s favorite character was Mickey Mouse, and the personality she showed others reflected that choice. Seemingly happy-go-lucky and guileless, Susan was always full of sunshine and smiles, unless you pissed her off (then her Inner Ann came out and she became her mother’s daughter). People tell me that I more accurately reflect my favorite character, Donald Duck: I guess I’m a little more sassy and suspicious.

  Because my past was riddled with land mines and ambushes, my high-strung reflexes always kept me on guard. Even in my sleep, I was stiff as a board, ready to spring out of bed to flee, if necessary. My earliest life experiences caused the development of my constant and diligent fight-or-flight mode. Even as a toddler in California, where I was born in 1966, I knew life was dangerous. My father had not yet started using me as his punching bag, but I certainly witnessed him slapping Mom and Rickie around.

  The violence in our home got so bad that our apartment complex manager, Clarence—whose wife made wonderful cookies that she shared with us kids—told Mom that if she ever needed a place to escape, she could count on them. Instead, our family moved to Maine. My father had a keen sense of when neighbors were on to him, and he had no problem uprooting the family and moving across the country with us.

  It was in the picturesque little town of Monson, Maine, that my family spent the next few years, from about 1969 to 1974, and where my personal hell began. Monson, a town of a few hundred people, lies near the northernmost end of the Appalachian Trail and is one of the last stopping points for supplies before heading north for the last stretch of that famous hike.

  One particular day in the summer of 1973 was a day when Monson residents might have been debating whether to close the windows and turn on the air-conditioning because the temperature was just this side of too hot. Elton John might have been singing “Crocodile Rock” on one station, or “Tubular Bells” might have been playing on another. It would have been a lovely day for a swim in Lake Hebron at the community beach just south of town. That’s what would have appeared to be happening with us two little girls, who were on the shore of the lake, with our dad.

  If you were a resident of Monson, you might have recognized us as one of the families who lived up on Tenney Hill Road. If you were a neighbor, you might have known that the younger girl on the shore, the towheaded blonde with pigtail braids, was six-year-old Stacey, and the older girl was her eight-year-old sister, Cheryl. You’d also have known that their mom would have been at work because it was the middle of the week and their dad stayed home wit
h the kids, living off of disability. You might have even formed your own opinions about that disability, especially after seeing him load and unload his teenage son’s fishing boat out of the back of his pickup truck all by himself.

  Either way, you probably would have gone on about your everyday life because what the Kananen family did was none of your business. After all, poor, sweet Marilyn had it hard enough, and Richard was not the kind of man you messed with, because you were a little afraid of him. He was a heavy drinker, and the sounds that came out of that house told you that he smacked his family around. It was obvious that they were desperately poor and could use every penny they could get. In a town that small, it was hard to not know which families were on government assistance, and if Richard wanted to risk defrauding the government, well, that was no skin off your nose.

  After all, none of us kids or our mother ever complained about any abuse. No one ever had any bruises to show for all of the suspicious noises. There was no way for anyone outside of the home to know that our father was very good at what he did. He knew how to hit and not leave bruises in visible areas. He knew how to knock the wind out of you by thumping you “just so” in the chest in a way that left no mark. And he knew how to make you so afraid of opening your mouth that you didn’t dare talk back, protest, or—God forbid—tell anyone.

  All three of us kids had learned to dread summer vacation. Any time off from school, including Christmas and Easter break, didn’t mean “no more pencils, no more books.” It meant being home, alone, with our father.