Redemption (18 page)

In my mixed-up mental state, I went to my high school guidance counselor with the news that I was moving to Guam to be with my mother. She was confused because it was December of my senior year. She talked to me about finishing out the school year. I told her I absolutely wouldn’t be graduating from Ritenour. Then she reminded me that I was a good student, and I should be applying to colleges no matter where I wound up going to school. I nodded my head yes and told her of course I would be going to college.

Out of the blue, I blurted out: “Someone who lives with us is raping me.”

She was silent. She didn’t even look at me; she just fumbled around with her papers. She obviously didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say much. I stood there acting just as shocked as she was. I couldn’t believe I had said that. I started sweating. Over the next weeks, I worried about what might happen. Turned out, I worried for nothing. She did not inform the authorities or even the principal. She had no more conversations about it with me. She must’ve figured I was on my way to Guam and was getting out of the situation. I would be eighteen soon, and I would be okay.

I guess she thought it wasn’t her business, and she was better off staying out of it.

Miles Away

y father told me there was no way in hell I was going to Guam. He wasn’t going to have it and even went as far as forbidding it. According to him, I needed to keep my ass in school and graduate.

I saw his temper tantrum coming. I had planned for it by cooking up a story.

I told him my friend Shannon was a narc. He knew Shannon well, even though she was a new friend of mine. She was like me—she lived with her dad and had limited contact with her mom. She was at our house a lot, and Dad commented on how pretty she was. After that, I made sure we always left when he came home drunk.

I told Dad that Shannon was a plant, someone who is older but poses as a high school student to bust drug rings. I told him the police had been investigating and had a huge case built against me. But they didn’t want me; they wanted my dealer. I explained to Dad that the police had brought me in for questioning, and I told the police who the dealer was so they wouldn’t press charges against me.

My dad, the alcoholic child abuser, took the bait.

Inspired by an episode of
21 Jump Street
, I embellished my story further. Because I had given up the drug dealer and told the cops everything they wanted to know, the drug dealer was after me. He wanted me dead, and his people were on the hunt for me. Of my two parents, Dad was the one who fixed things. He paid the fine when I hit the barn with Mom’s car. He took me to the hospital when I had the worst pains of my life. This time was no different. Dad bought me a ticket to Guam that day. My flight was in two weeks.

But because I was in trouble for my life, I had to leave St. John. I packed everything and drove to Uncle Daniel’s house in Illinois. I rushed away with Dad’s blessing.

I had just one stop to make: Rob’s house.

He wasn’t there during the day, and I knew that. So I left him a Christmas present, a teddy bear. I wrote him a Dear John letter to say good-bye. All the PID pain combined was nothing compared to the pain of breaking up with Rob. I loved him more than I could ever convey in a silly love letter. I knew he’d be furious with me when he read it; that was even harder for me to deal with. My wonderful, kind boyfriend Rob would hate me forever because I upped and left without warning or good reason. No good reason he knew about anyway. In his eyes, I just vanished. He didn’t know where I was going, and he had no way to reach me. I couldn’t tell him those details without telling him all the other stuff. If only I could have opened up to him, but I didn’t dare—I was scared. Every time I’d opened up—to my babysitter, my mom, my guidance counselor—nothing happened. I’d always felt more desperate, more stupid, and more alone.

After I was gone, Dad’s lawyer called the police station to find out what was going on and to help me out. With that simple phone call, my jig was up. Dad unraveled my web of big fat lies—and he was pissed. He called Illinois to scream at me, to let me know my ass belonged back at home. But he knew I’d ignore him. It didn’t matter what he said or did. I was already a few hours away in Illinois with a plane ticket in my hand. I would soon be traveling halfway around the world from the monster. I would be 7,396 miles away from Tom Lannert.

I had won.

Tom Lannert couldn’t touch me.

Life in Guam

om was going to be my out. Whether she knew it or not, she was the answer to all of my problems. I thought things would be okay with her and John—how could they be worse than what I was coming from?

But from the moment I stepped into their small house, I was taken back to the days of their honeymoon. Even though we lived in a tight air force housing unit, I didn’t see them much. The apartment was a flat duplex, and two noisy rottweilers lived next door. There was a huge cactus outside our front door. Geckos and island lizards crawled around the yard. You entered the apartment through a lanai, which is sort of like a front porch, but enclosed with walls. The living and dining rooms were nice, and my bedroom was on the right.

Mom and I didn’t exactly hit it off. One of our first conversations was about my PID. I brought my medical records to show her. I needed her to really know about what I’d been through. I thought maybe, just this once, she could step up to the plate. Maybe she could do or say something to help me, to make me feel better. Maybe she would put two and two together and decode my secret. I didn’t have anywhere else to turn, so it was worth a shot.

She was less than supportive. Even worse, she was mad at me.

She flipped through the papers in the folder. “Stacey, the most disturbing part of this report is that you’re having sex!” she said in a high-pitched voice.

She didn’t care about the pain I’d had. She didn’t even mention that I would never bear her grandchild. Her only concern was that I’d had premarital intercourse.

She went on and on with her sex lecture, clearly unhappy with me. She was so confrontational that I backed down. I gave up.

She obviously didn’t get it, and I obviously wasn’t going to get the support I needed. To put out the fire and change the subject, I convinced her that I’d had sex only once. She still didn’t approve, but she dropped the issue.

That conversation had gone completely wrong. A wet noodle could’ve given me more support than my mother did. I was furious at her insensitive reaction. I was also disappointed and heartbroken.

The whole time I was in Guam, I think I spent about four hours total with Mom. I saw John just a little more. He would get off work at 2 p.m. every day, come in the house, go directly to his bedroom, and lock himself in there. I liked him, I guess, but he wasn’t warm to me.

I believe he felt that I was trying to seduce him. And maybe I was in a weird way. If so, it was because I expected to be defiled by every grown man who ever got close to me. All the guys I’d known—except for my friend Tom W.—had disappointed me in some way. Subconsciously, I wore a shirt that came just to my belly button and a little pair of boxer shorts around the apartment. The outfit wasn’t sexy in my mind; it was light and comfortable in the boiling hot Guam weather. Later, I found out that John told Mom I should cover up when he was around. John didn’t think my boxers were appropriate. All the while, I was leery of him though he gave me no reason to be. I acted hateful just because he was a man.

With my bad attitude, I tried to convey a message: back off, and don’t bother me. At the same time, I expected him to want me sexually; I assumed he would act inappropriately. As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. John was the only grown man from my childhood who wasn’t a pedophile. He was a decent person. I just didn’t realize it, and I didn’t understand healthy sexual boundaries.

John was militaristic and very, very strict, so I can’t say I liked living with him. I’d come from a house where I was basically in charge and could do anything I wanted 90 percent of the time. Then I landed at John’s, where I had to be accountable. For example, he’d complain about how I used the iron. I’d leave it on—standing up, of course—for hours so I could come back and forth and do my laundry. He said that was dangerous. I kept forgetting to turn the iron off, so finally, he told me I wasn’t allowed to use it at all.

I needed a car. I was stuck at home in tropical limbo. I had spent only four weeks in high school. In Guam, most of the American kids go to private school. I was at Simon Sanchez High, a public school, where I was considered a
haole
(pronounced “howly”). That was their racist term for a no-account white foreigner. The native kids stuck to their own cliques, never letting the
haoles
in. Some of them were mean. There was a culture of bullying in the Guam public schools that was condoned by the teachers. They thought kids should work things out themselves. As a result, it wasn’t unusual for a white girl to get beat up repeatedly.

I looked for other American kids, but there weren’t many. They were already into their tight group, and they made no room for me. It was already January of our senior year; why should they? I started to miss all my friends at Ritenour. I was sad that I wouldn’t be walking down the aisle in my cap and gown with them. But there, I had missed a lot of school because of PID. I had fallen a semester—maybe even a year—behind. Plus, some days, my pain was still too unbearable to get out of bed. I was miserable at home and at school. The girls at Sanchez hated me so much they’d slam me up against my locker as they walked down the halls. They didn’t want me there flirting with their boys. I didn’t want to get involved in their dangerous nonsense. One day, I woke up and decided I wasn’t going back to Simon Sanchez High.

My mom thought life would be easier for me if I just got my GED so I could start college. John took me to the GED office on the air force base. Instructors there gave me a pretest and invited me to take the real test the next day. I didn’t even need to study. I remembered parts of it from when I was eight years old, helping Aunt Deanna prepare. I finished my GED test in half the time allotted with an above-average score. Just like that, I was done with high school.

I wanted to go to the University of Guam. It was supposed to be a good school. But I couldn’t get there—or anywhere—without a car. Guam was a tiny island out in the middle of nowhere with terrible public transportation. Without a car, I was on an island on an island. Mom and John were not helpful. First, they worried about how I’d pay for car insurance. Then they said they didn’t have extra money to help me with that or with gas. They explained over and over that they were struggling financially. In fact, I had to pay them $100 a month for rent. She took it out of the $300 per month I got for child support. I never understood that, but I didn’t make a fuss. I reminded myself that I was still happy to be out of St. John.

I pushed the car issue, asking them to buy me one of those little Guam cars. Lots of people drove these rusty-framed beach cars that cost only $500. Mom wouldn’t budge. She kept saying, “Ask Dad.”

I didn’t want to ask him for anything. But the car situation—or lack thereof—really sucked. I called him to explain everything, and he always took my calls. He was eager to have contact with me—to take any opportunity to try to change my mind. He was still furious about the way I had left, but even so, he obviously missed me.

“Sure, you can have a car,” Dad said. “Actually, you have one right here in the driveway.”

“Come on Dad, for real.” I hated playing these games with him. “Just ship it to me.”

“It doesn’t have to be that difficult, Stacey,” he said. “Just come home to get it.”

With nothing better to do, I started acting up. The drinking age in Guam was eighteen, and I couldn’t be the designated driver because I didn’t have a car. So I went to the bars by myself, ordered fruity beach drinks, and stayed out late. I was almost eighteen, and to the bartenders there, that was good enough. Mom and John didn’t approve of my new bar friends who drove me around. They hated to see me partying constantly. I was just trying to stay busy. They thought I was ungrateful and a handful. Mom and John saw me as a complication in their otherwise peaceful lives. Even I saw myself as a bother; I just didn’t know what else to do with myself.

I wasn’t happy or unhappy there. For all of its flaws, living in Guam was far less dramatic than living in St. John. I was bored, but I had three meals a day for the first time in a long time. When I left Missouri, I weighed barely 90 pounds and wore a size 0. In Guam, I could cook real food—Mom kept the kitchen well stocked—and I gained at least ten pounds. I was determined to cruise along just like I was until my birthday on May 28. Once I turned eighteen, I could make more decisions for myself. In the back of my head, I always thought I could fade away into the military if the college thing didn’t work out for me. I just had to find a way to keep Christy away from Dad, in case he was serious about harming her so he could pull me out. I hoped she would eventually end up in Guam.

That’s when the phone calls from Christy started. She was supposed to be at Aunt Deanna’s, but instead, Dad forced her to move back in with him. He knew there was only one way to get to me, and he had her. Dad took Christy from Deanna’s because Christy was partying around the clock and skipping school more than she went. He was going to bring her to St. John and whip her into shape. Literally.

She’d call me in the middle of the night crying—Guam is fifteen hours ahead of St. Louis. Wasted, she’d tell me she was sleeping with too many boys, and Dad was constantly threatening to beat her to a pulp. She was fifteen, and she looked up to me for advice. She was still partying and skipping school, but Dad yelled at her for it. Aunt Deanna could’ve cared less what Christy did as long as she babysat for her kids. Meanwhile, Dad expected Christy to do the cleaning and grocery shopping like I had done. She’d tell him to go fuck himself; he’d hit her and toss her down the basement stairs. Christy and Dad were a doomed pair. I was terrified for her. He had calculated a perfect storm, and he did it just for me.

Dad called Mom and said, “I’m putting Christy on a plane right now.” I don’t think he meant it. He knew Mom would say no. After Highland, she had made it clear that she didn’t want us both at the same time.

“Christy can’t come while Stacey’s here.” I begged her to let Christy share a bedroom with me, but she wouldn’t budge. “It’s too hard with you both at the same time.”

Dad would call back and yell at me. “Get this fucking little bitch out of my house before I kill her.”

I couldn’t sleep at night. I had done absolutely everything in my power to keep him away from Christy for seventeen years. I knew he physically abused her, but he hadn’t sexually abused her.

Not yet.

I knew this deep in my heart; I knew it as surely as I knew my birth date. But I was no longer there. If he became sexually violent, whom would he turn to? The thoughts began to haunt me every second of every day.

I was halfway around the world pleading with Christy to please go to Grandma and Grandpa Paulson’s. She said no. I asked her to please go stay with her friends. She told me no. Run back to Deanna’s, I told her.

Christy’s answer was the same. “No, no, no. Fuck no.”

She was wasted most of the time I spoke to her, and I knew there was no reasoning with an alcoholic. There’s no predicting what an alcoholic will say or do, not even a baby one.

“Stacey, please come home,” Christy said, crying to me.

It was April, and I was going to be eighteen in a month and a half. I could live with whatever shit he had to give me. But I couldn’t live knowing he would most definitely rape Christy if I didn’t go home to save her. Mom and John bought my plane ticket. I was on the next flight to the United States.