The Source of All Things (11 page)

And yet, for the first time ever, my euphemisms were enough. The police asked Laura to watch me until they could alert the Health and Welfare Department, who would take over where they left off. I'd stay put while social services determined if going home was an option. Laura walked the policemen to the door, then came back and bunched up a pile of blankets on the couch.

“Get some rest,” she said, putting her hand on my forehead.

I nodded again, but I was too wired for sleeping. I curled up on the sofa and watched the first rays of sunshine pouring across the west. I watched the glittering gold light shine into the windows of the Etters' neighbors, and waited for what would happen.

I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew a hand was rousing me from sleep. My blankets had bunched up around my legs. I kicked at them, trying to free myself from the bind of piled polyester. The rest of my body lay in a swamp of my own sweat.

The hand kept nudging me, so I made my eyelids unstick themselves from the goop that had congealed around them during my short, post-sunrise nap. My mouth tasted like the top of a battery when you licked it, trying to give yourself a spark. I opened my eyes and saw a man in a blue uniform. A gold badge floated in the empty space above his heart.

It took several more minutes for me to orient myself to my surroundings.
My head felt like someone had vacuumed my brain and refilled the empty cavity with mud. I picked at my eyes, continuing to urge the sleep scabs off them. Then a voice I recognized brought my full attention into the room.

It was Laura, sitting at the far end of the couch. She touched the top of my exposed foot gently, as you would a newborn puppy or baby rabbit.

“Hi, Tracy,” she said, shooting me a warm smile. “I'm glad to see you fell asleep.”

I blinked hard, tilting my head toward her, putting flesh to the outline of her presence. But even though I wanted to respond to her, I couldn't form the words that I was thinking. They swam recklessly as I tried to knit the events of the previous night together. Nobody asked me to get up, so I stayed where I was sitting.

Around that time, I heard the police officer sigh. His footsteps swooshed across the carpet, headed toward the front door. For a second I thought he was going to slip through it, leaving Laura and me alone to figure out my future. But he stopped halfway across the living room, at which time Laura continued talking.

“Tracy,” she said, “sit up now. I want you to see who came back for you. This is Officer Miller. He wants to take you to the Health and Welfare Department so they can ask you some questions.”

The policeman came over and stood before me, asking if he could settle in beside me on the couch. I scooched to the corner, worried that he'd put his hand in my pool of body sweat. He towered over me, smelling of aftershave and dry-cleaning starch. But the air that hovered around him as he sat down next to me evoked a certain kindness.

Shivering from fear and sleep-deprivation, I slumped against
him, sinking into the strength of his body, feeling the gun in the holster near his hip. For a few short seconds I let myself relax into his powerful, law-enforcing presence. I could have fallen asleep and dreamt a whole different ending for the night that had just passed behind me. But I got up, changed into one of Kathie's sundresses, and followed my civil servant into the blue-and-white squad car marked Twin Falls County Police.

Many years later, in emails from both of my parents, I would learn what happened at my house on the morning of August 7, 1985. Walking into the living room, my dad found my empty sleeping bag and the front door propped open. It being August and generally sweltering, Mom figured I'd gone out early on a run. But when Dad saw my empty sleeping bag on the living room couch, he knew he was in serious trouble. By the time his Folgers crystals had dissolved into coffee, his ears were already burning.

At ten that morning, social services called my mom, telling her I'd accused my dad of abuse. She dialed his office and demanded he meet her at home. He said, “Now? Can't it wait? I'm at work,” to which she answered, “Get to our house this second.” When she asked him why I would have told the police that I was being molested, he answered that he had no idea, but that he'd found marijuana and cocaine in my dresser.

At ten thirty, Chris rolled out of bed, just as two cops and a social worker were walking up the driveway. They'd come to get my clothes and toothbrush because, they said, I'd be staying at a safe house until they decided if I could come home. Instead of choosing
the softest pajamas and packing a note, my mom flew into hysterics. “Why are you doing this to our family!” she screamed, while Chris tried to push the social worker off the porch.

Later that day, my dad went to the police station, where he was questioned in a room with a two-way mirror. Again, he played his “no idea” card. He agreed to take a lie-detector test but only because he believed he could outsmart any machine that plugged into a wall. But when he got home, Mom told him to get a lawyer, who advised him not to take the test, because, no matter what the results ended up showing, they wouldn't hold up in court.

The questioning continued. At the police station, social workers cross-examined Mom and Dad in two separate rooms. Dad maintained his innocence, while Mom cried into stiff, government-issue toilet paper, saying, “What kind of people do you think we are? My husband would never do anything to hurt my daughter.”

And yet, on three separate occasions, she had caught him, in the middle of the night, walking quickly and awkwardly out of my room. And what about the incident at Redfish Lake?

While Dad lied—boldly and blatantly—and Mom commiserated by omission and self-imposed blindness, I was led to a room at the Health and Welfare Department where a woman in denim overalls asked me to trade euphemisms for straight talk, generalities for specifics. I tried, but clammed up when she asked where Dad put his hands when he wanted to show me he loved me in the middle of the night. Unrelenting, she gave me an anatomically correct doll and told me to point out the places instead.

This time, I explained better. So well that the social workers decided it wasn't safe to “place me back in the home.” They made me a ward of the State of Idaho under the Child Protection Act.
The court put a restraining order on my dad that prevented him from coming within five hundred feet of me. Still on the fence about his innocence, Mom refused to kick him out, which meant I would be going to a shelter for abused girls. Run by Mormons, it would smell like rotting floorboards, scented tampons, and bulk cheese.

In the days before the district attorney finalized the paperwork that would take me out of my parents' custody, I stayed with Kathie and Laura. If my mom knew I was there, she didn't bother calling.

I was terrified, but I refused to let myself feel it. I knew that what I'd set in motion couldn't be reversed. I was also a kid, and kids don't dwell in their emotions. I put on my strongest, happiest face and tried to act like everything was normal.

During the hottest hours, Kathie and I stayed in the house watching Nickelodeon and eating huge bowls of Honeycomb cereal. But in the evening, when the temperature dropped into the low eighties, we drifted out onto the lawn.

That's where Chris saw me parading around like a Solid Gold dancer in my Tweety Bird nightie one week after my escape. Kathie had put her boom box in her windowsill and we were making up routines to Duran Duran's “Rio.” Kathie had just executed a perfect roundoff-to-moonwalk dismount when my brother swung around the corner in his cherry-red Sirocco.

He didn't stop, but I could see him squinting as he checked out the two girls dancing on the lawn. At first he and the kid in the passenger seat were laughing, probably because girls made them nervous. But then I saw it dawn on my brother just who was dancing. The way he stopped, in the middle of the road, without checking
to see if anyone was behind him, made me think he was going to jump out of the car and run up to hug me. But as I watched, I saw him form the words “What the … ?” and jam the gas pedal.

“What was that all about?” Kathie asked, after Chris sped off, burning rubber. Her eyes were wide as saucers. “Wait. Holy shit, Tracy! That was your
brother!
”

“Yeah? I know. So what?”

“I don't know. You'd just think he'd stop if he saw you and didn't know where you'd been for half of eternity.”

I stared at my friend, unable to answer. Under the cushion of grass, I felt the heat rising off the desert and climbing into my feet. “Rio” had ended and a tune I don't remember rocked Kathie's boom box. For a few seconds when he'd stalled the car in front of me, I thought I'd found an ally in my brother. But the look on his face was indisputable. It told me I had betrayed my family.

At the shelter where I stayed while the State of Idaho found me a foster home, I ate the cheese, and used the tampons, and walked across the creaky wooden floors. I slept in a row of bunk beds next to a dozen other girls. The girls reminded me of the ones who'd picked fights with me in the bowling alley across the street from the cemetery where my real dad was buried: Mexicans, head-bangers, lesbians. I didn't talk to anyone but spent a lot of time inspecting the floorboards.

I stayed just five or six days. In the afternoons, we gathered in a dusty living room with big, square windows that looked out over the thirsty wheat fields. Crows scoured the roadsides, flying
over them and then landing to pick at piles of carrion. Our shelter parents told us about the power of faith and the importance of surrendering ourselves to God. But every night, when the lights were out and I could hear the other girls snoring, I stared up at the mattress of the bunk bed above me and thought about my dad.

I can't explain the guilt that came over me then, or the depth of self-doubt that threatened to crush me. My abuse had been hidden, always cloaked in darkness. My dad played tricks to make me think I'd played a part in the molestation. During our midday tickle sessions, he had finessed the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable touching so that I couldn't be entirely sure that, at least in those circumstances, what he had done was wrong. Nor could I be certain that I hadn't somehow enticed him. Looking back, I chided myself for spending so much time in my nightgowns. Why did I insist on doing Jane Fonda in the living room? The other instances—the nights when my dad came to my room and fondled me after I was sleeping—were his fault and his fault only. But a lie he'd once told me, after I'd woken up and asked him what he was doing, had always stayed with me. “How dare you accuse me of anything,” he'd said. “If you don't want people to touch you, don't sleep on your back.”

While the rest of the lost and molested girls slept, I tortured myself with stories. I told myself my abuse couldn't have been as bad as I remembered. My mind began mixing good memories of my dad with bad ones, until the good ones usurped the bad. I know a part of me just wanted it all to be over. The uncertainty about what would happen next seemed even worse than my dad's abuse. Life at the shelter was the opposite of fun. All
the girls shared one bathroom, and we weren't allowed to do anything without asking. Phone use was strictly off limits, meaning I couldn't call my friends, grandparents, or parents. Because our foster parents were Mormon, on the Sunday I was there, I had to attend church at the local temple. My mom packed me no dresses when the social workers demanded my things. With nothing acceptable of my own to wear to church, I had to borrow an outdated Gunne Sax dress that was two sizes too big. Dozens of kids from my junior high were Mormon, and when I walked down the aisle of the church with my “shelter family,” I could see them staring at me quizzically. A kid named Ted Smack watched me the entire service. I knew that when school started a few weeks later, he'd go back with a story. It went like this: Tracy Ross was in a whole heap of trouble.