by Hope Solo
Marcus and I were taken to the police station. My father was allowed to see us. He was crying, tears running down his big face. “I fucked up,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He pulled two hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket and offered them to Marcus. “Go buy something,” he said. “Buy something for yourself and Baby Hope.”
Marcus pushed the money back. “You’re going to need this more than we do,” he said.
In that moment, my brother seemed very grown up.
Child Protective Services took us out of the jail and to an office, where we were watched over by social workers and given a childish coloring book. I pushed it away, overcome with anger at the attempt to placate me. The grownups were trying to fool me into thinking everything would be OK if I colored a happy picture.
The other Judy Solo finally picked us up and took us to her house in Kirkland. There we were with our parallel lives: moms named Judy, older sons, younger daughters, and all those seemingly happy lives blown apart by the same man.
That afternoon, the other Judy drove us to Ellensburg, midway between Seattle and Richland. My mother met us there. As we drove back to Richland, I boiled with anger. I was mad at my mother for taking us home. Mad at my father for lying to us. Mad at myself for doing something wrong. I was mad at the world.
A few days after I got home to Richland, I turned eight. And I didn’t see my father again for a very long time.
CHAPTER TWO
God’s Second Paradise
The whimpers and howls drifted skyward in the night air, snaking through my bedroom window and under my covers. Wails of suffering and fear and loneliness. I couldn’t bear it anymore. I pulled on a sweatshirt and flip-flops and pushed open my bedroom window, climbed out onto the deck and crept down into the backyard to where Charlotte, our massive English sheepdog, was dying.
We had just returned home from a family vacation in Priest Lake, Idaho, a state park in the northern tip of the Idaho panhandle. We had driven there and back—my mom, Marcus, and my new stepdad, Glenn Burnett—towing our boat behind us. Charlotte was too big and too old to come along. We had left her under the care of a neighbor, but when we got back, we discovered that Charlotte had been in the same spot in the backyard the entire time we’d been gone. Unable to stand up, she was matted and weak and covered in her own waste.
I was nine. Charlotte had been my lifelong companion. I learned to stand by pulling myself up on her curly white fur. She had been my playmate, my protector, my pillow for as long as I could remember, always there. She had moved with us—from the smiley-face house to the low-rent duplex we lived in after my parents split up to the house we now lived in with Glenn.
The move to Hoxie Avenue hadn’t been easy for her. Glenn was a hunter and had two Chesapeake Bay retrievers; sharp-witted, protective dogs that I thought were mean to Charlotte. She seemed distressed to be sharing her home and her people with outsiders. Now Charlotte was about to die. She weighed close to one hundred pounds and couldn’t move. My mother couldn’t get her in the car to take her to the vet; she could only manage to clean her up as she lay outside. The vet suggested my mother give her some potent painkillers, strong enough to allow Charlotte to slip away in her sleep. Marcus and I hugged our dog and cried, saying good-bye. My mother got the painkillers down Charlotte’s throat, and we had left her alone to fall asleep.
But the painkillers weren’t working. She was moaning and yelping, alone and scared. Outside in the dark night, I crawled onto her blanket under a tree and lay down beside her, inhaling her familiar musty scent. “Good girl, Charlotte,” I whispered. “You’re a good girl.”
I kept my arm around her and we breathed together. She stopped whimpering. We both fell asleep.
Hours later, my mother came out and found me in Charlotte’s bed. She made me go back up to my room and get into my own bed.
The next morning, when I woke up, Charlotte wasn’t there. Glenn had disposed of her body. The big dog that had played with me and my father in the yard of the smiley-face house was dead. One more part of my family was gone. I felt like whimpering and howling, but at least I could take comfort in knowing I had eased her pain in her final hours. Many years later, when I was an adult, I found out that Charlotte had not died in her sleep. The painkillers had never taken hold. Glenn had finally taken his gun and shot Charlotte in the head.
When I learned that, I burst into tears. My poor sweet dog.
II.
My mother and Glenn met while boating on the Columbia River. They were both river enthusiasts, both Richland natives, both Hanford employees. I’m sure my mom—after the chaos of life with my father—was attracted to Glenn’s steady, authoritative personality.
They were married on the Columbia River on a beautiful March day in 1989. I was wearing a polka-dot dress that matched the one worn by my new stepsister, Connie. She was Glenn’s daughter from his first marriage, three years older than me. Two boats were tethered together, bobbing on the current. The wedding party—including Connie, Marcus, and me—walked from the bow of one to the other, where the marriage was performed. Other boats pulled up alongside, and the occupants cheered and clapped for the newlyweds. I stood rocking gently on the calm water, proud and happy to be part of the ceremony.
But the calm didn’t make it ashore. Glenn inherited two angry, traumatized stepchildren, who didn’t have boundaries. He tried to instill order—I know now he was trying to do the right thing, but Marcus and I weren’t interested in a new father, or new rules. And we didn’t have a vote in the matter. Glenn was a no-nonsense man—six foot six, more than three hundred pounds, with a voice as rumbly as the truck engines he worked on. He could usually be found in the garage, dressed in Carhartt coveralls, cleaning guns or sharpening knives with his buddies. He had a fondness for racing dirt bikes and speedboats and hunting deer. His presence filled up the split-level house on Hoxie. He barked orders at Marcus and me, made up rules, occasionally even tried to spank us. We had never been treated like that. Before Glenn came along, we had been free to do what we pleased, latchkey kids dependent only on each other, with a mother constantly working to support us. Now we had more order, more stability, but tension and anger pulsed through our home.
When my mother first started dating Glenn, my father was still living in Richland. He mocked Glenn and said mean things about his stoic personality, his size, his intellect. Marcus and I happily mimicked his disdain. When Glenn arrived, our opportunities to spend time with our father became more and more restricted and our mother less and less willing to leave us in his care. We didn’t understand that my father was creating the situation by having nowhere to live and becoming increasingly unpredictable: we could only see that since Glenn had entered our lives things had changed.
My father kidnapped us four months after the wedding. To Marcus and me, it wasn’t a crime. We viewed it as a desperate attempt by a loving father to connect with his children, who were living with another man.
Not every interaction with Glenn was a fight. He took me to hunter safety lessons, where I learned how to shoot a gun, clean a duck, build a blind. We went boating up to the sand dunes and inner-tubing on the river. I did my homework in the living room sitting next to him. We had family dinners in the kitchen—my mom’s tacos were everyone’s favorite. Glenn bought Marcus his first hunting dog, Hank. One day, Glenn took me to get Rex, a yellow lab that was being given away by a hunter because he wasn’t a good hunting dog—he was too goofy and uncoordinated. He quickly became my new best friend.
But after his arrest in Seattle, my father dropped out of our lives. He simply vanished, leaving behind a gaping hole.
Our resentment of Glenn quickly filled the void.
III.
My best friend, Cheryl, and I braced against my bedroom door, pushing as hard as we could, trying to keep Marcus out. He was pounding and screaming on the other side. I’m not sure what he was furious abo
ut, but Marcus was frequently mad. He wanted to hurt us or at least scare us, and we were desperate—panicked, really—to keep him out.
Marcus tried to get us to back off. Through the crack underneath the door, he poked sharp arrows, trying to pierce whatever body part we had wedged against the door—our butts, our feet.
When this storm passed and Cheryl and I tried to leave the house, the situation wasn’t any safer. My room was at the end of the hall, and to escape we had to go past Marcus’s room. He sat by his door and took aim at us with arrows or darts. Once, trying to dash to the front door, I took a dart in my ass. Sometimes, Marcus shot me with a BB gun leaving welts on my body.
The house on Hoxie was a battlefield, a war zone of screaming, swearing, and disrespect. Chaos was the norm. Glenn was mad. I was angry. My mother started drinking heavily. And my brother was in a rage.
The day our father was shoved into the back of a police car in Seattle, Marcus was eleven, on the cusp of adolescence. We were both scarred by the experience, but Marcus’s wounds ran deeper. He was becoming an angry, volatile teenage boy.
Around the time that my dad vanished, our oldest brother, David, distanced himself. After high school, he had played football at a community college in nearby Walla Walla, and we saw him frequently. Marcus idolized him. But now David was off playing football at Willamette College in Oregon. He had his own falling out with our father, and his way of dealing with the pain was to move on. From all of us.
Marcus took after my father—dark-haired, dark-eyed, and big. As a child, one boy teased him relentlessly. When Marcus was in seventh grade, he beat the crap out of the kid, bad enough to send him to the hospital.
With that fight, Marcus was branded. He was a tough guy, a target of local police, viewed as a threat by teachers and parents. There was another side of him too: he was a good athlete and had lots of friends in the popular crowd. He had a kind heart and would defend kids who were outcasts; every morning he gave a mentally challenged neighbor a ride to school. But Marcus never backed down from a confrontation, and by the time he got to high school, his reputation was firmly established all over town. You didn’t mess with Marcus Solo.
The violence extended into our house. I learned to fight from my battles with Marcus. We would joke that we had normal brother and sister fights, but in truth there was nothing normal about them. We pushed and punched and kicked and scratched and screamed insults into each other’s faces. He hurt me; he hurt things I loved. He would take my pet rat, Stinker, and throw him in the street or drop him from the second story onto the trampoline. I’d laugh and then scream, running to save my pet.
War was waged on physical and emotional levels. Marcus knew exactly what to say to hurt me. He called me selfish, ugly, a stuck-up bitch. He once told me I was mentally retarded, explaining that mom hadn’t ever wanted to tell me. His nicknames for me and Cheryl were Nasty and Nappy. He called us dykes, even though we were too young to know what that meant. Even though the insults were rude, I still craved the attention. Yet I tried to hurt him back. With words and with my fists. I called him fat and stupid and whatever cruel things I could think of. Marcus claims I gave worse than I got and that he simply got in trouble for retaliating. That was true, at times.
And like Marcus, I was gaining a reputation. When I was in fourth grade—the same year that Marcus pummeled the boy who had teased him—I saw a bully picking on a classmate, a nerdy kid who couldn’t defend himself. I was furious. I pushed the bully off his bike and punched him in the face. The school principal called my mother, and I was suspended from after-school sports for a few days. The boy’s family was outraged that a girl had beaten up their son.
That was the first time I remember getting in real trouble at school, the first time I remember using my fists outside my own house. But it wasn’t the last time. I was trying to prove myself to Marcus. He was not only my tormentor; he was my closest family member and my protector. He walked me home from school, kept me company, made me laugh. We were welded together, the only ones who understood the crazy shit we’d been through. We could fight each other, but pity the outsider who tried to mess with us. And the outsider in our house was Glenn.
IV.
Every time we went to Priest Lake on vacation, we returned home to some sort of disaster and drama.
One summer we got home late, the day before school was to start. I woke up to the sound of my mother screaming. Our house was on fire and she was trying to find Marcus, whose room was engulfed in flames. But Marcus was in my room: for some reason he had fallen asleep there. My mother was about to throw herself into the inferno to pull out her son when we burst out of my bedroom. I think that was a bonding moment for us, when Marcus escaped what seemed like a sure death. We made our way out of the house, wrapped in sleeping bags and trying to make sure all our animals were safe. We stood in the street and watched the house burn as firefighters tried to keep the flames away from the garage, where Glenn’s engine fuel and ammunition could have caused an explosion. The top level of the house—where my bedroom was—burned up, along with all my recently purchased school supplies and clothes.
On the first day of school, I wore one of my grandmother’s oversize T-shirts, tied up on the side. I was humiliated. The four of us moved into a horrible cheap motel room, increasing the tension exponentially.
Usually, when things got too tense, Marcus and I escaped to our grandparents’ house. Grandma Alice and Grandpa Pete lived just a few blocks away from our house on Hoxie. They had a sign by their front door: GRANDKIDS WELCOME. And they meant it. When we showed up at the front door, we were always let in, no questions asked. We could get a snack or play a board game or just tip back in one of their big recliners and watch TV. It was calm at my grandparents. They loved us unconditionally.
Grandpa Pete was brilliant; he’d earned his electrical engineering degree from USC after serving in the navy. He managed the engineering unit at Hanford until he retired in 1988. Grandma said she married him because he was the only man she’d met who was smarter than she was. He always seemed happiest when he was out on the river, at the wheel of his yacht. Every Christmas Grandpa would decorate the boat for the parade of lights with a lighted tree, a star, and a cross he had welded together. He would let me steer the boat and get on the intercom to say, “Ho, ho, ho—Merrrrrrry Christmas!” We liked to walk down to the river together with his black lab, Maggie, and throw the rubber dummy into the water for her. And Grandpa could always make me laugh with one of his jokes, even if I had been in tears just moments before.
Grandma Alice was the rock of the family, making sure we all went to Sunday school, that we had enough pocket money, and that we had a place to stay if we needed to get away from home. My grandparents were spiritual people—they pastored at a church in nearby Mabton. Grandpa sang in the choir, Grandma gave sermons, and we helped clean up after the services; it felt like our own little family church. I went with Grandma to deliver flowers to nursing homes and to funerals. I walked up to caskets with her to say good-bye—I was never afraid of dead bodies because Grandma seemed so at peace with them. My grandparents set an example for how to treat others and withhold judgment; they cared for disabled adults, opened their home to those in need. They loved to travel: to Germany for the Passion play in Oberammergau and to the Holy Land for pilgrimages. Grandma Alice called Richland “God’s second paradise” because the stark desert plateau reminded her of Israel.
Grandma explained that every stress and strain in life was the Lord’s will. She peppered her conversation with bits of scripture and Christian thoughts. She told me, “Don’t let the devil steal your joy.” She loved my name and once told me, “Hope is, by definition, defiant. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.”
Grandma and Grandpa showed up for all our sporting events and school activities. They took me to soccer tournaments in their camper, setting up chairs and playing cards while they
waited between games. Their house was our shelter—a place to escape Glenn, and our mother’s drinking. We’d stay there until my mother could convince us to come home, promising that Glenn would be cool. We’d go home for a while, and then the chaos would start again, and we’d run the four blocks back to Grandma and Grandpa.
V.
My mother was working full-time at Hanford. By the time I was in middle school, Hanford had shifted into cleanup mode. The government had to deal with the massive amounts of contamination and hazardous waste left behind from the nuclear buildup of the Cold War. The new emphasis kept Richland citizens employed. Mom was working to clean up what has been called the most toxic site in the world. The environment after work was pretty toxic too.
My mom had always been a social drinker, partying with her river friends. But for whatever reason—the trauma caused by my father, the tension at home—her drinking escalated. As I got older, I noticed the signs more and more. I learned to detect the plummy smell on her breath. I saw her passed out at night. I was ashamed.
Battles became our primary means of interaction. If she tried to discipline me or offer advice, I would throw her failures back in her face. I felt like the outsider in my own house. My mother seemed more concerned with Marcus than with me. He demanded more attention: he was in constant trouble as he got older, requiring my mother’s intervention. She seemed to believe that Marcus needed her more—because of childhood illness, Marcus was deaf in one ear, and because of an inner-tubing accident when a rope snapped, he was almost blind in one eye. He had almost died in the house fire. I was lower-maintenance: younger, a good student, busy with sports and my social life. But I felt neglected and driven away by my mother’s drinking. I didn’t have my father. I rebelled against my stepfather. And I couldn’t depend on my mother.