“Well, there’s no need to talk that way. How inappropriate. How sinful,” she said, turning the dial off just as my favorite verse was starting, a verse in which a woman—any woman—uses her hot body for attention, or power, or love, or anything else she might lack. I didn’t have a hot body; I was pretty average, in fact, but I liked the idea of it. Even at thirteen, I could tell the verse was a thinly veiled criticism of that woman, but I didn’t care. I still wanted to be her.
But of course I never told my mom any of this. We never talked about sex—my mom and me—not that night or any night. Seven years later, a man—an acquaintance—put one hand over my mouth and the other between my legs. I gnashed my teeth, trying to bite, but my gnashing never pierced any flesh but my own.
That man didn’t finish what he started. A neighbor overheard my screams and banged on the door, but I didn’t blame the man. I blamed myself. I blamed myself for drinking too much. I blamed myself for sharing a cab with him. I blamed myself for letting him into my home. And because I blamed myself, I didn’t tell anyone.
SHAME WASN’T NEW to me, and neither were secrets. I had been keeping them for a while. I was nearly abducted when I was sixteen, but I never told my mother. I couldn’t stand to tell her something so horrible and not be believed, so instead I said nothing. I started carrying my stories beneath my rib cage in a physical manifestation that was somewhat like grief—a constant fluttering hummingbird’s heart.
Around the time when I was almost abducted, Salmon with its one stoplight and dusty roads seemed like the quietest town in the universe. That May, we had just found out that a Subway sandwich shop was moving in, our first chain restaurant ever. While my father lamented the end of Salmon as we knew it, I was excited at the prospect of new life. Salmon was perched on the edge of a river in a wide, deep valley surrounded by mountains, and the only roads extending through town were small two-lane highways that wound over steep mountain passes in the high mountain desert and were punctuated by ghost towns with names like Leadore (which Caleb charmingly interpreted as “L’adore”) and Gilmore—always some type of ore, a remnant from the promise of gold.
Salmon was so isolated that we lived under the shadow of a nuclear power plant, one of the few places in the country that created its own nuclear waste. When I was in the fourth grade, the town’s water source tested positive for giardia. This was before the whole bottled water trend, so the local Budweiser distributer donated water in beer bottles for the schools. At home, we were told to boil our water for twenty minutes, but when I was thirsty at school, I would pop the top off a Bud and swig cold water from the brown bottle; it was the best water I had ever tasted.
At the same time, my parents made a joke about the nuclear power plant leaking and getting into our water supply. They said we would glow in the dark. I didn’t understand the difference between nuclear waste and giardia. At night I lay in bed, waving my hands in front of my face, looking for a hint of light coming from my fingertips, but there was nothing, and I fell into a deep sleep where, for a time, all of the ghosts that haunted my dreams were radioactive. I didn’t tell my mother about the ghosts, and I never told her about the truck.
If I could have told her the full story, I would have said this:
I was thirsty because I had been riding my bike for an hour in warm silence. I was pedaling on a wide paved street flanked by lilac bushes and green striped lawns. It was dusk, and my bike made lazy arcs across the pavement as I rocked from side to side. I had friends who lived on that street, and I wanted to stop for a glass of water. I saw my brother’s car parked in front of his friend’s mom’s house. Both boys were home from college. I looked into the windows from the street to see if my brother and his friend were inside, but the house was dark.
As I neared another friend’s house, I heard a pickup truck driving behind me. It had the kind of loud gunshot engine that so many trucks in Idaho have. I moved to the side of the road so it could drive past me, but I heard the engine gunning with a revving sound. Instead of slowing down and moving away, the truck was speeding up and swerving toward me. I pedaled as fast as I could up a grassy hill into the yard of the town mayor’s house. My bike slid in the grass, and I tumbled off. The truck veered off and drove away. When I stood up, I looked down, and the truck had left deep grooves in the lawn.
I was shaken, but I figured the truck was probably being driven by a big dumb redneck who was trying to scare me. This was small-town Idaho in the 1990s, and the culture was still firmly entrenched in big trucks, chewing tobacco, and beautiful women.
I WAS NOT a beautiful girl. Or so I thought. That was why the rednecks didn’t like me. That was why I got teased so much at school. That was why I wore my dad’s big flannel plaid shirts. The bigger the shirt, the better it seemed at hiding my soft belly and large breasts. I was the girl who got breasts at eleven and endured countless bra-snapping humiliations. I was the girl who got ogled by grown men at my church confirmation when I was twelve. I was the girl who the men said looked so womanly now.
I GOT ON my bike and rode back into the street. The truck was gone, so I kept riding toward my friend’s house. It was dark by then, and a dry breeze was ruffling my hair. I looked around me and realized that I was surrounded by homes with no lights on. As I neared the turn to Jackie’s cul-de-sac, I rode underneath a streetlamp. At that moment, I saw him. He was sitting in his truck facing me with the headlights off, but the brake lights were glowing. At the same moment that I saw him, he saw me, and he gunned for me. I heard the sound of his truck engine revving, and he was driving straight at me. Fortunately, I was right outside another classmate’s house. I threw my bike down into the yard and ran to the door. As I banged on the door, the truck sped by. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to get back on my bike, but there was no one home. Running to my friend Jackie’s house wasn’t an option. I could see the lights off there, too, and a football-field-size empty lot lay between the two houses. I crawled underneath my classmate’s porch.
I had been afraid of small, dark spaces ever since I attended an Assembly of God day-care center. They had a big stage in the corner of the gymnasium. We were allowed to play anywhere in the gymnasium but not on the stage. One day, my best friend, Megan, dared me to run over to the stage. I was yanked back by a woman with frizzy hair who smelled of licorice and cigarette smoke. She looked in my eyes and said, “Don’t play over there. The devil lives under that stage.” I imagined the devil crouching, hidden in the dusty darkness below the stage—just waiting to get his hands on me. After that, when I played on my parents’ large brass bed, I would stretch my legs out and jump off, all the while praying that the devil’s skinny arms wouldn’t snake out from under the dust ruffle to snatch at my legs.
Home wasn’t a place that always felt safe. I was scared of the devil, and of ghosts, but mostly I was scared of my mother.
MY MOTHER WAS a good mother. She made us homemade family dinners every night—pot roast, or tater-tot casserole, or chili. I set the table, and we passed the meals clockwise—a constant exchange of energy and love.
She was one of the only non-Mormon mothers in town, and there was a lot of pressure on her to be like one of them—thin, wealthy, and focused on her children. The Mormon mothers sewed clothes for their children, and when I wanted one of the home-sewn rainbow-colored boatneck shirts that the Mormon daughters had, my mother took a sewing class so that she could make me one. It fell apart shortly after I started wearing it.
The Mormon girls went to church every Sunday, and so did we, but we went to the Lutheran church.
The Mormon girls had tight French braids, but when I asked my mother to braid my hair, she didn’t know how to. She pulled too tightly, then too loosely. She wasn’t gentle. She hurt me. No one teaches an orphan how to braid.
UNLIKE THE MORMON mothers, my mother worked. She worked long, hard twelve-hour night shifts at the hospital, and on those days her mood changed.
On day one of her three consecutive shi
fts, she was too tired to do much when she got home. My dad would buy burgers or fried chicken for dinner, or maybe he would make a meat loaf, which was one of the few meals that he knew how to prepare.
My mother would snap at me to clear my stuff out of the living room.
On day two, she would have more energy—would prepare a meal, would tidy the house, and would yell at all of us that she was tired of being “the only one who does anything around here.”
On day three, she would come home and rage. “The house is a wreck,” she would say. “What have you all been doing while I’ve been working?”
The truth was probably nothing. My father was laid-back, almost absent. He didn’t make Glen and me do stuff around the house.
Sometimes my mother would scream at him, I cannot do this on my own.
Mostly, she screamed at me.
ON DAY FOUR, after her shifts had ended, I would wake to the sound of the vacuum. I could hear her rage in the rumble. I knew what was coming. She was going to scream at me, and if I talked back—which I usually did, because I was an angry child—she would slap me, or push me, or grab my arms and shake me.
I lay in bed as the sun grew unbearably hot, listening to the sound of the vacuum and not wanting to leave my room. The vacuum banged up against my door.
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
It was time for me to get up.
BUT ON THE night of the truck, I was not scared of my mother, or ghosts, or the devil. I was scared of a different kind of devil as I crawled under the porch, pushing aside wet suits and kayaks, inhaling the smell of dirt and sweat. The earth was damp beneath my bare knees, and I could hear my heartbeat pounding in that dark space. I forced thoughts of spiders out of my head. Tall grass was scratching my face, and I shakily pushed it aside as I watched the road. The truck drove by again, then made a U-turn and cruised by the other way. I could see it clearly then. It was an old green flatbed truck. The hood was a different color, a sort of mixture between gray and rust. Through a dusty window, I could see the outline of a man with a dog seated next to him. I couldn’t make out the details of his face, but I could tell that he was smoking a cigarette. I didn’t know him, but suddenly I knew who he was.
As I crouched in the dirt, watching the man drive back and forth, I knew he was waiting for me. My bike was still on the lawn, and he knew I was somewhere nearby. A warning had been going around town. A couple of weeks earlier, some kids in my high school had shown up to class visibly shaken. They told me a story, too implausible to be true. They had been partying in the national forest. They were all high on acid, and having a great time, when a woman stumbled into their camp clutching a bloody T-shirt to her chest. She told them she had been kidnapped by a man in a flatbed truck with a dog. He blindfolded her and threw her in the cab, so she never saw his face, but she saw the truck, and she felt the dog with his hot snout pressed up to her neck.
The man took her to the woods and raped her before he bit off her nipple and left her there. Over the next two weeks, he kidnapped three more women. He kidnapped them all at night. Two of the women were in an alleyway behind a local bar. Another woman was in an alleyway behind a bank. In such a small town, the roads were dark at night, but they rarely felt unsafe. Still, this month, everyone was scared. The women all reported the same thing. They were blindfolded, taken to the woods, raped, and abandoned. The man had a flatbed truck and a dog. That was all they knew.
I huddled under that porch and watched the man drive by two or maybe three times. I was breathing fast and hard, and the smell of wounded animal pressed in on me. I scooted back farther. I knew he could see my bike in the yard, and I was pretty sure that he could see the house was dark. He knew I was hiding somewhere. He drove off, and I waited—time stretching into excruciating increments of worry. I didn’t think he was entirely gone, but I didn’t feel safe under that porch. If he got out of the truck, he would be able to grab me there, and no one would know. I waited a minute or so longer, and then I ran to my bike. I got on my bike and pedaled as fast as I could, but I didn’t know where I was going. I eventually ended up back at my brother’s friend’s house, where my brother’s car was still parked outside. I hid my bike behind the hydrangea bush and ran to the door.
Just as I was about to knock, the truck rounded the corner. I dove behind another bush by the door. I watched him drive slowly by, and I knew he hadn’t seen me. My bike was hidden, but it was imperfectly hidden. If he drove by again, he would be able to see the bike between the leaves of the hydrangea. I prayed that my brother would be able to save me as I knocked on the door to the house, but there was no answer. My shoulders slumped, and I sniffled a little bit. I slouched down behind that bush and waited. There was nowhere else for me to go.
Just then, a truck drove by, and I shook. It pulled off to the side of the house, but when I looked at it, I realized it was Megan and her boyfriend, whose parents lived next door. I could see them talking in the truck, and I ran over and banged on the window. Megan gasped at the appearance of my white face in the window. She rolled down her window, and I told her what had happened, stumbling over my words in my haste to get them out. I got in Megan’s truck and told her the whole story, and we drove down the street so she could see the tire marks on the mayor’s lawn. She looked horrified. We turned around and headed back, making sure the windows were up and locked; the headlights searched the darkness. After driving past my bike and going another block or two, we saw him. His truck was idling in an alleyway just off the street. The lights were dimmed, but we could see exhaust coming out of the pipe. “He was cruising for you—” Megan’s voice broke.
We slowed the car to try to get a license plate number, but he saw us looking at him and pulled out of the alleyway to drive off. Megan was determined to get the number. She drove after him, and as he sped up, we sped up—locked in a chase. When we got closer, we saw that his license plate was smeared with mud. By then, the man had figured out what we were doing, and he drove off so fast that we couldn’t keep up. He was driving nearly seventy-five miles per hour in a twenty-five zone. We finally turned around and headed back, but I didn’t want to go home. Megan took me to her house, and together, when we told her mom what happened, she convinced me to call the sheriff’s department. I told a dispatcher all of the details. She was very kind, saying I had been lucky, and that she thought he might be the man they were looking for. I sat on Megan’s couch for what felt like hours and talked to her mom while she nodded attentively. Megan’s mom was different from my mom; I always told Mary everything that I didn’t feel I could tell my own mom. But still, she said, “You should go home and tell this to your mother.” I resisted leaving, staying as long as I could before she insisted I go home.
ONE MORNING, IN high school, I was watching an interview on The Today Show. The interviewee said that motherless mothers sometimes grow angry with their own daughters when they reach the same age that the mother was when her own mother died. So when my mother said, “When you turned eleven, it was like you went into your bedroom and never came out,” I remembered that she had been eleven when her mother died.
When I got home, I said nothing. I didn’t know how to, and I didn’t want to face her skepticism. It’s likely that Mary eventually told my mom, but even then, my mom wouldn’t have asked me about the terrifying truck incident. Silence and screaming were the only things my family did well.
THE TRUTH IS that I never told my mom the whole truth about anything. I only gave her fragments. Still, those fragments were enough to earn her trust. I could see in her eyes that she believed in me, and that felt fine—except for the mushroom cloud still hanging over my head. I never told her about the man in the truck, or the man who held me down only a few years later, and I never told her about the lovers, or my loss of faith in her God. I never told her about my feeling that I couldn’t be the daughter she wanted, or that she couldn’t be the mother that I wanted.
My father was out of town on busine
ss that night, so I went into my mother’s room and asked if I could sleep with her. It was the first time I had asked for that since I had been a small child, but she slid over and lifted the covers. She made room for me in that warmth, and I fell asleep to her quiet breathing. I thought that she could keep me safe.
Later, when Caleb was the man who scared me, I didn’t tell her either. Not the first time, nor the second, and maybe not even the third. By then, I knew she couldn’t keep me safe.
3
The Perfect Family
THE DAY THE test came back with two blue stripes, I put on my jeans and The Flicks T-shirt—the one with Alfred Hitchcock on the back—and drove to work. The Flicks was an indie movie house, and I worked there with artsy types who had lines of poetry tattooed on their forearms, dyed hair, and Converse sneakers. We wanted to make art. Children were not a part of our collective plan.
That morning I strode through the kitchen—past the assistant manager who was making curried sweet potato soup over the large gas range—stood before the espresso machine, turned the machine on to make a latte, and stopped. I didn’t know if I could drink coffee. Coffee might be poison now. I listened to the whirring of the espresso grinder, the machine grinding the beans into fragments, and peered at my reflection in the brushed steel. I’m not ready, I mouthed.
A COUPLE OF weeks earlier, while we were sitting on my couch talking, Caleb’s face suddenly started to flush. He looked down and brushed his hand over his head, which I knew meant he was feeling nervous or insecure. He looked up quickly and blurted out, “Kelly, I want to marry you.”
I sat stunned. It wasn’t a proposal as much as a declaration. We had only been together for five months, and because Caleb lived in the woods, we had only seen each other a few times a week. Twice, he had panicked and disappeared for a week or longer. The first time, I wrote his absence off to jitters. The second time, I called and left a message on his cell phone: “If you are interested in a relationship with me, you will call me today, and you will continue to call me on a regular basis. If not, then this is goodbye.” He called almost immediately, and then showed up at my apartment that evening, his face and posture apologetic. He wasn’t willing to lose me, he said. He knew that now.
Goodbye, Sweet Girl Page 3