Was that Glenn, answering the phone and spewing venom about my father? Was it someone else in my family? I was furious. But it was the final lines of the story that broke my heart. My father said he had only come forward to protect the reputation of his daughter.
“I don’t care about myself or what happens to me. I should have died a long time ago,” he said. “But my daughter, I don’t want her to get hurt. That’s why I’m telling my story. I didn’t do this.”
Alone in China, I stared at the computer screen and wept.
II.
We still had four days left on our trip, and I was getting another chance in goal. Because of Bri’s ongoing weight and fitness issues and Siri’s struggles in the Olympic gold medal game, I felt there was an opportunity for me to make an impression and start working toward the next World Cup, two years away. But it was hard to focus on soccer with all the drama swirling around me. Where was my father? Was he safe?
Yet I played well. As a young player, I had learned to shut out the many crises in my personal life whenever I stepped on the soccer field. That ability served me well in China. I got my chance against the Chinese national team in Hangzhou, where thirty thousand fans showed up to see us inaugurate a brand-new stadium that was built for the next World Cup, which China was scheduled to host. The crowd roared, and it seemed like they were right on top of us. They were still angry about the U.S. victory over China in the previous World Cup, and even though I wasn’t Bri, they taunted me as if I had been the one who had saved the overtime penalty kick in 1999.
It was freezing when we walked onto the pitch. We took an early lead, but China tied us, 1–1, on a free kick that bent over our line and into the upper left corner of the goal. Overall, I had an excellent game. In the second half, I made a few diving saves. The ball got through our back line several times, but I didn’t give up another goal. The game ended in a draw.
When we left China the next day, I didn’t know what would greet me at the airport when we landed. Would I be ambushed by reporters and photographers? The sensational story continued to make headlines—gruesome murders in well-to-do neighborhoods were not an everyday occurrence in Seattle. All the reports noted that Jeffrey John Solo had a nineteen-year-old daughter in Seattle. Though none identified me by name, it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure that the nineteen-year-old daughter from Richland with the same memorable last name, sometimes described as a “star athlete,” was UW’s goalkeeper.
Fortunately, Lesle had been doing damage control the entire time I’d been gone. She enlisted our sports information director to control the story on the UW end. She called our team together and warned that if anyone spoke to the media, they would be suspended. Lesle and Amy protected me. Their support during this family nightmare made me even more loyal to them and prouder that I had chosen UW.
Cheryl picked me up at the airport, and my fears of being ambushed went unrealized. There were no cameras or reporters. But my main concern wasn’t bad publicity. It was my father.
“Let’s go find your dad,” Cheryl said.
The stories I had read said he’d been staying at a friend’s apartment, but the friend had become upset by police harassment and had kicked him out. I went to his old spot in the woods off the freeway, but he wasn’t there. I walked through parks in the rain, looking for him.
I finally went back to my apartment with Cheryl and cried for hours as she tried to console me.
After days of frantic worry, my father called. We decided to meet at REI, the large outdoor equipment store that was one of the few landmarks in downtown Seattle I was familiar with, because you could see it from the freeway.
When I saw him waiting for me outside the store, I ran into his arms. It was such a relief to see him, to see that he was all right. “Baby Hope, you know I didn’t do this,” he said.
“Of course I know that,” I said.
He was cold and hungry. He told me the police had questioned him for hours, browbeating him in an attempt to get a confession. But he had stood his ground, telling them over and over, “Fuck off. I didn’t do it.” He said the harsh treatment might have broken him if he had been younger, that he could now understand how people confess to crimes they didn’t commit. But as he liked to remind me, he was “a tough son of a bitch.”
The police had distributed posters of him all around Kirkland, where the murdered man’s stolen Escalade had been recovered. My father still sometimes hung out in downtown Kirkland after Terry had kicked him out of her house. But now he was blackballed, refused admittance into Starbucks or any of the fast-food restaurants where he often took shelter. Worst of all, the police had taken everything from him, he said, including his warm coat. And it was January. Fortunately, a detective who had taken a liking to him—and believed he was innocent—brought him a new coat. I took him to get some food. As he walked beside me, hobbling on two canes, I was painfully aware of his limp. It had gotten much worse. There was no way my dad could have dragged a man’s body up a flight of stairs and lifted it into a bathtub.
I had
