Shocking True Story (10 page)

Thursday, August 8

THE SUN CAME OUT ON THURSDAY. The girls begged me to take them to the lake and I begrudgingly agreed. I didn't mind going to the beach, as it gave me time to do a little reading and it kept Taylor from killing Hayley and vice versa. We put Hedda on a leash and secured her in the back of the truck. Cecile, from up the hill, had been invited to go along because I knew that with three there would be one unhappy child. With two, there would be an unhappy adult and two unhappy children. Cecile was a good sport and I was glad for the diversion.

We had to be home by late afternoon because Jett was coming for dinner after her prison visit with her mother and sister. I wasn't about to try anything to impress company. I just wanted something good and easy to serve.

"No meat," Taylor advised while I dug through the refrigerator. "I can't have any meat even
touching
my food."

"Me neither," Hayley chimed in.

With the notable exception of McDonald's hamburgers and cheeseburgers, our girls had emphatically insisted that they were vegetarians. I failed to see how they could justify a burger when its starting place was an Argentine cow.

"Fine," I said, somewhat annoyed. "I'll put the shredded chicken on a separate plate. No meat will touch anything you don't want it to."

"Better not," snapped Hayley, the one who could make my blood boil faster than anyone. She was the daughter everyone said was most like me, though I didn't see it.

"Mom cooks us tofu for our tacos now, you know," Hayley added.

"No, I didn't," I said. "And no, before you ask, I'm not going to do that."

Valerie came home at seven, in time to share a glass of wine and witness a mess in the making. She was hot and miserable from her long commute from the city. The instant I saw her I felt the unmistakable pang of guilt. It had been my idea to pass on air conditioning for the new Honda.

"Who needs it in Seattle? It's an extra nine hundred that we don't really have to spend," I had told her, uttering the famous last words that I had to live with.

Val was dubious at the time, but she finally consented. The first day she drove it in eighty-degree weather she knew she had given in too soon. She'd have paid nine grand extra for the comfort of an air conditioner.

"It is like a little silver coffee can," she said of her car. "If I were a lizard you'd take a nail and hammer out a row of holes on the top so I could breathe. " Pinkness slowly faded from her face.

Jett arrived five minutes after Val. She wore jeans and a cropped T-shirt. She was cool and refreshed. Her car, it seemed, had air conditioning. “This isn't what I had on in prison,” she said. “No skin can be exposed—except arms, of course. I wore a sweatshirt for my visit with mom and sis.”

Jett brought what she called her "Kids Kit," though she was quick to point out that she was not babysitting that night.

"I thought the girls and I could make some barrettes or charms before dinner."

I called Taylor and Hayley to pry themselves from the TV.

"Do you girls want to make hair bows?" I asked.

“Barrettes
,” Jett corrected.

The girls gathered around while Jett cut colorful strips of plastic and melted them with a hair dryer. When it was heated, the plastic could be bent, stretched and twisted. She made two fast friends that night. Taylor made a rainbow clip and Hayley made a cat pin. Val and I even played with the stuff before we all sat down to dinner. Taylor and Hayley gobbled their food, pretended to be bored by the adult conversation.

Val excused them and suggested they watch a movie.

"I brought home two new releases from the RedBox," she said.

I could tell Val liked our dinner guest. She was listening intently and even reached across the table to pat Jett's hand when I returned from getting the girls settled. It was a touching gesture. She had never done that for Wanda-Lou.

"Kevin never told me," Valerie said.

"Told you what?" I resumed my seat and pulled out my little tape recorder.

"About her father's suicide," Val said quietly, never moving her sympathetic eyes from the young woman seated at our table.

I was pleased Jett had opened up to my wife. Pleased and surprised. I thought
I
was the good listener, I thought I was the one who could draw out the most intimate of details.

"We've never really talked about it in detail. Could we now?" I asked.

Jett looked at Val and slowly nodded.

"I don't like talking about it, but if you need me to, I will," she said.

Friday, August 9

CONNIE CARTER WAS WORKING NIGHTS at the Rusty Anchor serving drinks and "hostessing. " She wore a short black skirt and a white sailor top trimmed in blue. Jett was seven and in her eyes her mother was a vision, as pretty and elegant as Vanna White in one of those gowns by Climax of Rodeo Drive. Her dad was a short man with hands like oven mitts and a belly that made the waistband on his Wranglers roll over. Two times. He was a hardworking and sometimes hard-drinking man who never hit the kids. Connie, however, was known to slap them around if she thought they needed it.

"One time," Jett recalled that night in our kitchen, "my mom came after my sister with the electric cord of her curling iron. She held the iron in her hand like a mini-baseball bat and beat Janet on the back of the legs until the welts erupted like tree roots under the asphalt."

Val put her hands to her lips and shook her head. I gently urged Jett to go on. I wanted to know more about life with Connie Carter.

She pushed a dark lock of hair behind her ear, though it was too short to stay in place. She poured milk into her coffee and told Val and me what we knew had to be the understatement of the year.

"We had no money," she said, “and we were fresh out of hope.”

It was true, she explained, the Carter family lived paycheck to paycheck. Light bills were paid just moments before the power company turned off the electricity. A mattress and box spring set was divided into two sleeping platforms—"the softy" and "the hardy," as she and her sister dubbed them. Janet took the softy, leaving little sister Jett with the rigid box springs.

When she was about ten, Jett said her mother left her logger father, Buzz Carter, and took up residence in a second-floor room with a kitchenette at the Seahorse Motor Inn. Connie told her daughters things weren't working out with their father and they needed time apart. The distance would allow them the time and space to see if they still loved each other.

Connie left her girls in the room when she worked at the bar. When the motel manager complained that the Child Welfare people wouldn't take the idea of leaving little ones unattended all night, she took them to the Rusty Anchor and had them sleep in the car until after her shift ended. The girls liked the motel-room arrangement better. It had a television set and two real beds. The fact that it had moth-eaten bedspreads and a toilet that was ringed in a bloom of rust was lost on the girls. Anyone older would have called the Seahorse what it was—a flop house, a fleabag, a crash pad.

For four months, the Carter girls called it home.

According to Jett, her mom had a boyfriend by then and they saw less and less of Buzz. One afternoon Connie sat her girls down and announced that they would never see their daddy again.

"Mom told us he left a note saying he wasn't coming back," she recalled.

Jett remembered how Janet cried and blamed both her mother and sister, making Buzz mad at the whole family. They had been bad. Connie shouldn't have moved away and Jett shouldn't have been born.

"It was two years before I figured out what they were talking about," she said softly, her words growing fainter as she struggled to fight the emotions that she had kept locked away so well. So long.

Painful as it obviously was, I prodded her to continue. I didn't want to force her to reveal more than she was ready to tell. And yet I didn't want to be left hanging.

"What happened?" I asked once more. Val glared at me. Her eyes told me not to push. It was too late.

Tears came quickly, in such a rush that it startled me. Jett got up and took her plate to the sink, turning her back on us.

"Daddy
didn't
move away," she said. "He jumped off the River Bridge into the Ocean River. His note was a suicide note. This was no, 'I love you', no 'goodbye.' But I didn't know that. I thought he had moved to another town because he didn't love us. I didn't know that he jumped into the river because he knew Mom had a boyfriend. For two years my mom and sister let me think he was still out there."

Val moved closer. "Why on earth did they do that?" she asked, tears now filling her dark brown eyes.

Jett looked out the window, far off into the soft green boughs of the Douglas firs that fringed our property, as though the words she was seeking could somehow be found out there.

Finally, she spoke. "It was to spare me, I guess. That's what they told me. To
spare
me."

"How did they tell you?" I cut in, jumping back into the conversation.

"They didn't. My foster parents did. My
fourth
set of foster parents, to be exact. Written out on my junior high enrollment papers after my father's name was
'deceased'."

She studied our reactions before continuing.

"I asked the snippy woman, who told my caseworker she loved children—of course, what she really loved was the money from the state—what gives, and she looked at me and said, 'Didn't your mommy tell you?'"

Jett Carter had never thought of her mother as the mommy type, but she resisted the temptation to say so.

"'
Honey
,'" Jett recalled, mimicking the singsong voice of her foster mother, "
'your father's dead. He jumped off the bridge
.' God, I can still see him drunk, stumbling against that railing, throwing out his arms to stop himself—I mean, uh, that's how I always pictured it, you know, in my nightmares. " She looked up at us, as if suddenly breaking out of a trance, or coming to the surface after swimming deep under water, and for just a second she looked so hateful that I took two steps back.

Val and I were breathless. The words shocked. This girl had been through a nightmare that was inconceivable. She was telling her story so calmly, so serenely, I knew she had told it before. She had talked it out; she had worked it out.

"I started to cry and the woman told me to let it all out. Instead I gave her the finger and ran up to the room I shared with another foster kid. In fifteen minutes, I was out of there. Mom and Janet had their own apartment then and by the time I got to their place, the foster mother had already called."

"I didn't think there was supposed to be any contact between parents and foster parents," I said.

"There isn't, but Timberlake is such a small place... that particular foster mother knew Mom from the Rusty Anchor. She and her husband used to come in to play pull tabs and drink beer. Anyway, Mom met me at the door and gave me the line about wanting to
spare me
. It took me years to forgive her for that."

♦

VALERIE AND I TALKED FOR ALMOST AN HOUR after Jett went home. We both hugged the petite little wisp of a girl. Val and I both knew that by doing so, we had crossed the line from book source to friend. It didn't matter. In the case of Jett Carter, it was the right thing to do. To be unmoved by her lot in life was to have a granite heart. Jett, who we now knew was a surprising twenty-one years old, was a fighter. She might have been on the wrong side of the tracks most of her life, but she still had the desire to better herself. She wasn't going to throw in the towel. Val and I wanted to help her, if we could.

"Think how strange, how tragic it is," Val said as we turned off the living room and kitchen lights and told the girls to go to sleep. "Jett is an outsider in her own family, and has been since she was a kid. Now her mother and her sister are together in prison of all places and she's
still
on the outside."

It was an astute observation. For Jett, it was just as it had been after Buzz Carter took the plunge off the bridge so many years ago in Timberlake. Valerie was so right. In a family of sour milk, Jett Carter was the sweetest cream. Against all odds, she had risen to the top.

Friday, August 13

FUELED BY A KING-SIZE KIT KAT, A POT OF COFFEE, and this belief I actually had something to write about, I finished the first chapter of the true crime book that would put me back in the game. I left it next to the coffee maker for Val to read in the morning. I even set out the reading glasses she purchased from a drugstore rack—not to save money, but because she didn't want to admit that she needed "real" glasses. I added a postscript to the chapter because I know the way my wife thinks. She's been slogging through my stuff since I picked up my first zebra-bloodbath-covered tome and thought,
Wow! This author gets money for this?

♦

Love You to Death

PART ONE

THOUGH EVERY ONE OF THEM ENDURED their lives under clouds so dark and low they could be poked with a sharp stick, none particularly liked the rain or paid it any mind. It just was. It came from the sky with such maddeningly regularity that most never carried umbrellas, never bought galoshes, and most certainly, would never be caught dead swirled in the protective plastic of a poncho. The town of Timberlake was a soggy reminder of what the Northwest's timber industry had once been. Smokestacks from the mills choked ash through the rain but half the time of the good old days. Worker shifts had been cut by almost two-thirds. Most of what had once been, however, was still in evidence. Taverns and pool halls still ran good businesses and college students from Portland, less than an hour south, came to buy Timberlake castoffs at the thrift shops. Fridays were "Two-fer" days, with the tattered row of shops offering half-price deals.

And while it rained, rivulets coursed through the gutters to the streets, then on to the Pacific Ocean. Tired workers lugged their sweaty bodies home, a video and a six-pack in tow. Mothers microwaved leftover Top Ramen and served up smiles for their babies.