Heart Scars

by Jeanette Lukowski

  An eerily similar thing took place when we were living in Wyoming and I had taken Allison to see a counselor after discovering she was cutting herself. After only a few sessions with Allison and me together, the counselor recommended that I return the next time by myself. I was shocked and saddened by the shift in focus. Once again, I felt like the counselor was suggesting I was the problem in Allison’s life. After sacrificing everything for the children, Allison’s need for attention was somehow my fault.

  * * *

  When I was still living in Wyoming, Lindsey introduced me to the phrase “windshield talks” one day at work. I was sharing a fight Allison and I had been having, when Lindsey said, “My daughter and I once discovered having conversations while driving are most effective. We call them windshield talks.”

  The beauty of a windshield talk is that you don’t talk to each other. The driver has to keep his or her eyes on the road, and lack of eye contact makes some conversations easier to have.

  August 29, 2009

  Allison and I were taking a drive and having one of those long talks I now think of as windshield talks. Tommy was staying with my mother for a few days, which gave Allison my full attention. Without Tommy in the car, we had time to talk, think, and reflect, uninterrupted. Our conversation went on some really interesting detours, one of which was about body-size.

  “I’m just picking guys who are taller and bigger than I am,” Allison confided, “because I want someone who can protect me.”

  My thoughts about body size had always been about how I only felt comfortable being with a guy who was my size-equal, because then I could protect myself—from him. I guess it was only natural that Allison’s thoughts would be different from mine, since she is a petite five-foot-two.

  “That’s why I get so nervous when we go somewhere,” Allison continued, “like in a store, and I can’t find you.”

  So, she had seen me as her bodyguard all of these years? And now she was telling me she was trying to find a guy to take on that role?

  In light of the fact that she had gotten on a bus to make a cross-country trek, alone, to meet a guy she had only ever spoken to on the telephone, this disclosure didn’t make sense to me. Was it nothing more than a story she was making up for my benefit? If so, why?

  I wanted to believe Allison. I wanted to trust her enough to believe she was only telling me the truth. But some of the things she told me seemed so stupid and contradictory. I wanted to believe her, because she was my daughter, but I wouldn’t be her fool.

  October 30, 2009

  While trying to fall asleep, I heard a very loud noise that seemed to be right beneath my head—the location of Allison’s bedroom. When I went down the stairs, she pretended to be coming out of the bathroom.

  “I had to pee,” she said, “and walked into the . . .”

  She wouldn’t look me in the eye as she said this, though.

  Not buying her excuse, I pushed past her and headed into her bedroom.

  “What do you want, Mom?”

  I want to see what the noise was all about, Allison. The noise that apparently didn’t bother you, but was enough to get me out of bed.

  Her bedroom window was wide open—even though the blind in front of it was pulled down. Too tired to want to begin a fight with her, I closed her bedroom window, went back up to my own bedroom, and stood in front of my window for a few minutes. Unfortunately, Allison’s bedroom window faces north while mine faces west, so I couldn’t see if someone were to escape from our yard at any other angle.

  In August, during a neighborhood block party picnic, I had seen Allison and a boy from the neighborhood climbing out of her bedroom window. Not wanting to draw too much attention to her behavior, I waited to ask her about it until the picnic was over.

  “Why were you and Jerrod climbing out of your bedroom window?”

  “Oh, he wanted to show me how easy it is. His grandma’s house has a window just like mine. And we didn’t want to walk back up the stairs.”

  I never climbed out of a window, so I didn’t understand why anyone would do it without a fire behind them.

  Allison had been seeing a new boy lately, though. Matt was a bit older and worked at the mall in town. She told me how he drove three hours, one way, to attend college parties sometimes. Was she going out her window to meet with him?

  The next day, while she was swinging on the other side of the house, I snooped through Allison’s bedroom. Why was the screen from her bedroom window tucked against the wall of her closet? When I approached her window to put the screen back in place, I realized that the knick-knacks on top of her dresser, which sat directly below the bedroom window, were all moved to either side—a sight I hadn’t seen since Wyoming.

  Allison had been dressed when I caught her stumbling around in the dark. Had she been going out? Or was she coming back in? She claimed the window was open because she forgot to close it after having opened it earlier in the day, but that wouldn’t explain how the screen jumped clear over to her bedroom closet wall, and then shut the closet door behind itself.

  Without saying a word to Allison, I put the screen back on her bedroom window, checked to make sure the window was properly closed and locked, and took the handle from the window crank up the stairs with me. I felt bad about taking this measure, but was at a loss of what else to do. How does a parent keep a child safe from herself?

  In late December, about the time when Gregory was back in court to be sentenced for sexting Allison, a minor, I was again startled awake by a loud noise coming from somewhere near my bedroom wall. I got out of bed, looked out my bedroom window, then made my walking sweep through the house to look out other windows.

  When I got downstairs, I went to check Allison’s bedroom window, but couldn’t see out because of the frost on the glass.

  Was it really so cold in her bedroom that such a thick layer of frost would build up on the glass that way? I tried to remember what her window might have looked like during the winter before, but couldn’t recall it being this opaquely frosty. I closed the blinds and continued my sweep through the house, finally returning to bed.

  The following afternoon, I headed back downstairs to look at the bedroom window again. I was horrified to discover that the window was broken—the outside pane of glass had been broken by something at the top (which would be ground level), and some of the broken shards were resting between what was left of the bottom half of the outside pane and the inside pane.

  Unfortunately, because I didn’t know for sure how long the window had been broken, there seemed to be no point in reporting the broken window to the police. All evidence was either buried under several layers of snow, or had already been obliterated by the snow that began falling the day before.

  I don’t believe that the broken window was an accident, though. There was an acre of yard between that window and our neighbor, the yard had been covered by snow since October, and it couldn’t have been broken by a random icicle falling from the edge of the roof, because the window was broken along the top edge.

  Did someone break the window as an act of revenge, or retribution? Gregory knows where we live.

  When did the window get broken? It was fine in October.

  Allison said something about the broken window being “scary,” but she didn’t act scared or surprised.

  * * *

  In some situations, the stories become altered over time. Is it that Allison can no longer remember which version she told to whom, or are the stories altered for the audience?

  A year later, on October 12, 2010, Allison was sitting in the backseat of our car with a friend, and we were waiting for Tommy to come out of the high school. I was getting a little nervous as the minutes crept by and the parking lot emptied out. Tommy had left his phone at home that morning, by accident, so I couldn’t even call him. Allison t
urned to her friend and said, “My mom has a little trouble not knowing where we are, since what happened to me.”

  “Oh? What happened to you?” her friend asked.

  “You know, when I ran away.” Then Allison’s voice got really quiet, before adding, “Well, technically, the day I was sort of kidnapped.”

  Kidnapped? Is that what she’s calling it now, to save face among her friends? I thought. Rather than get into a fight in front of her friend, I kept my mouth shut.

  Another example of these stories is from the end of Allison’s second year in high school, when I had a chance to visit with the assistant principal for a few minutes. The principal mentioned some of the girls having problems with Allison because of her stories. “She told one girl she has a forty-year-old sugar daddy, and she told another girl she has a four-year-old child at home,” he told me The downside of being new to town: no one could verify the legitimacy of the stories without asking me.

  I want to believe her, because she’s my daughter, but I don’t want to be her fool, either.

  More importantly, I wondered why Allison wouldn’t trust me with the truth. Why did she still have to test my unconditional love for her? I was not like Frank. I was the parent who stayed. Didn’t she see, yet, how lies can become damaging? Part of Gregory’s dad’s defense was built on her storytelling, testifying how “Everyone knows Allison tells wild stories. Just ask Greg and Kyle. She’s full of stories.” No one blamed him for believing Allison’s story about being in the witness protection program, though. The defense attorney placed full responsibility on Allison’s mother, and the jury acquitted the man who drove Allison to the bus.

  * * *

  Snooping in Allison’s room has always felt like a violation of privacy to me, because I have never been comfortable with people looking through my stuff. One night after Frank punched the hole in the kitchen wall beside my head, I left him alone with the kids so I could attend a meeting for battered women in the next town. I don’t know if he followed me, or if he found the pile of paperwork I hid in the back of a kitchen drawer, but an icy, “Did you find out I’m not as bad as you thought I was?” was his greeting when I got home.

  Snooping through Allison’s stuff made me uncomfortable, because I didn’t know what to say about some of the things I found. Like the day I read her diary in Wyoming. I was curious about why she was wearing all black, and read about her meeting with a boy in the racquetball court of the rec center while I was watching Tommy’s basketball game. She wrote about closing the door of the court, lying on the floor underneath the boy, and letting him touch her breasts.

  I wanted to confront Allison about the journal entry, but she was already yelling at me for reading notes she had been passing back and forth at school when I cleaned out her pockets to do laundry. Wearing black and cutting herself were bigger issues, I thought. Rather than asking her about the journal entry, I used one of our drives to the mall to have a windshield talk about teenagers and their sexual behaviors.

  In February of 2009, Allison had a friend over for a sleepover. Tabitha and Allison set up a “bed” of blankets in the middle of the downstairs family room floor and were up almost all night watching television, talking, and giggling. A week later, I went snooping through Allison’s room again, and found an empty wine bottle tucked into the center of one of her dresser drawers. It was one of the specialty wines I had purchased on our last trip to the Black Hills area of South Dakota before we moved back to Minnesota. I had been saving it for Easter dinner. The wine bottle had been stored in the basement near where the girls were camped out, but the bottle opener was stored in the back of a kitchen drawer upstairs.

  A few months later, as the snow melted out of our ditch, I noticed several tire tracks and chunks of grass ripped from the lawn. Allison said something about how “Alex and Blaine did that when they came over. I told them to get off our lawn.”

  Allison told me it happened the night of the February sleepover.

  In May 2010, Allison and I were returning home from school alone, because Tommy was staying after school for an hour to help set up for the band concert that night. I noticed a large box between our screen door and the front door while pulling into the driveway. Before I could even turn the car off, Allison was out of the car and heading to get the box.

  By the time I got in the house, Allison and the box had both disappeared. The box was a white post office box, measuring about ten-by-fourteen inches, but I couldn’t remember ordering anything recently. We were also months away from anybody’s birthday or a gift-giving holiday, so where was the box from? And where was Allison? Nicholas had sent her bus tickets in one of those white post office mailing envelopes, and she had gotten it without my ever seeing it. Was someone sending her something else?

  As I walked down the stairs to the basement, Allison ran past the bottom of the stairs, heading towards her bedroom—carrying the box.

  “What’s in the box, Allison?”

  “It’s for me.”

  “Where’s it from?”

  “It’s for me.”

  “I know that. You already said that. What is it? And where’s it from?” I asked.

  She yelled at me to leave her alone. She yelled at me from behind her closed bedroom door.

  The fact that Allison wouldn’t let me see the box, or even know where it came from, made me angry and suspicious. When her yelling increased in volume to screaming, and her words changed from “leave me alone” to “it’s none of your business,” my fears increased. This time, though, she was the only one yelling. In spite of the situation, I was working hard to not yell back.

  After thirty minutes of my badgering, with frequent walks back up the stairs to calm myself so that I wouldn’t yell back, Allison finally showed me the contents of the box. It was a box of two penis-shaped vibrators.

  I was horrified.

  I was speechless.

  And then I blew up.

  Allison stuck to her story that she had no idea where they had come from. Then I remembered Tabitha’s weird request a few weeks earlier. According to Allison, Tabitha had thrown away one of her mom’s vibrators, and her mom was making Tabitha replace it. When Allison told Tabitha about our going to the big mall in Fargo, Tabitha asked Allison if I would buy a replacement vibrator for her mother. Tabitha would give me the money, of course, but I refused. Tabitha was seventeen, and I reminded Allison of my policy to never buy anything for underage friends. I also reminded her of Gregory’s dad, who was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

  Sometime between the February sleepover and the appearance of the vibrators in May, Allison told me about Tabitha’s involvement with online sex chat rooms. Did Tabitha purchase the vibrators online, then, and ship them to our house so that her mom wouldn’t know? Or did someone purchase them for Allison? The thought turned my stomach. Once again, I was glad about not having Internet access at home.

  On our way back to pick up Tommy from school, Allison and I made a quick stop at Tabitha’s house. Allison said she would give Tabitha the vibrators, since I didn’t want them in my house.

  A month later, I was trying to help Allison organize her bedroom closet. I was sorting through plastic boxes she had already packed, hoping to consolidate, when I came across the vibrator again. I was disgusted, but left it where it was. Before putting the box back on the shelf, I wrote Allison a message, and placed the post-it note on top of the vibrator. The note asked, “Why did you lie?”

  The bigger concern, though, is why Allison was so obsessed with boys and sex.

  * * *

  April 20, 2010

  A student gave a classroom presentation on the re-victimization of young women who had been sexually abused in the past. I was horrified to hear that some of the warning signs of possible childhood sexual abuse included: a child displaying knowledge or interest in sexual
acts inappropriate to his or her age, a child exhibiting seductive behavior, and a child running away from home. Without coming right out and asking Allison directly, I tried to incorporate some of the questioning techniques I had observed Officer Richards using almost a year earlier.

  I was washing dishes and asked Allison to come talk to me for a minute. I carefully worked my way around the topic of sexual abuse, and asked her a few questions about time she had spent with her dad when she was a child. She chose to focus on the last time they had an unsupervised visit with him: the night they were six and eight years old, and he had them watching movies that included Jurassic Park III.

  “I was so scared that night, and wanted to climb into bed with Daddy, but he said that we couldn’t,” she told me. “His friend got really mad when Tommy climbed in anyway, but I didn’t.”

  I remembered that story. Frank had found a new lady friend, who had a boy and a girl just two years younger than each of our children, and I had gotten mad thinking that he had found himself a replacement family—even though he had walked away from the one he had.

  Had Allison seen something inappropriate that night? Something of a sexual nature that had scarred her for life? Or had Allison’s eight-year-old brain processed what she saw and turned it into jealousy for the woman who was occupying her dad’s attention? Had my eight-year-old daughter internalized the message that men only love women for sex?

  I have no way of knowing whether or not Allison was sexually abused. Sometime during the year after she ran away, she gave me a note saying Frank had “inappropriately” touched her once at his new home. Allison’s note said I couldn’t ask her any further questions, or discuss the note itself, because the memories were too disturbing.