I was born on a hot, dry day in the middle of summer: July 30, 1981. My father chose that day to bring his other two children from his first marriage to Richland from the Seattle area for a visit. My half brother, David, was twelve, and my half sister, Terry, was nine. My mother brought me, her new baby—Hope Amelia Solo—home from the hospital to a chaotic house with three young children. Things never really got any calmer.
David and Terry lived in Kirkland, Washington—just outside of Seattle, on the other side of the mountains—with their mother, whose name was also, oddly, Judy Lynn Solo. My father had the name tattooed on his forearm. Once, when my mother went to visit my father in prison, she was denied entrance because a Judy Lynn Solo—David and Terry’s mother—had already been there to visit him. Though we had different mothers, the four of us shared my father’s DNA: piercing eyes, Italian coloring, intense emotions. David and Terry came to visit every summer, and sometimes went camping with us. They learned to call my grandparents Grandma and Grandpa. I didn’t realize until I was much older how unusual it was that both Judy Solos managed to work out travel plans and schedules and invitations so that the four or us could, at brief moments, resemble a nuclear family.
David and Terry and the other Judy Solo were my first indications that my father had a past that didn’t include my mother or me and Marcus, that our life wasn’t as simple as four people and a sheepdog inside a tract house. Terry adored me. She liked to dress me up and curl my hair, but as I got older, I resisted. I was an active, grubby little kid. I didn’t want to wear dresses. I didn’t like dolls. I liked to play outside, wear an oversize Orange Crush hat and do whatever Marcus was doing, which was usually something athletic.
If he ran, I ran. If he played baseball, I played baseball. If he rode his skateboard, I wanted to ride his skateboard—not mine, his, because mine was hot pink and girly and his wasn’t compromised by frills. Even as a little girl, I was tough and strong. One day I took Marcus’s skateboard to the top of the little hill across from our house and rode down. I smashed into our bikes, which were lying in the driveway. A pedal gashed my chin and blood splashed everywhere. I was running in circles to distract myself from the pain as the blood gushed through my fingers. I had to go to the emergency room and get stitched up.
Marcus and his friends would challenge me to pull them in a wagon. And I could do it, all three of them. When my mom went on a bike ride, I would run alongside her chatting, never getting winded. I wanted so badly to play basketball with Marcus and David—my father and I would play against them, and he would have to lift me up toward the hoop so I could shoot. I loved to play whiffle ball and hated losing, determined to play until I won.
Luckily for me, I was growing up in a time when active little girls could finally turn to organized sports. That wasn’t the case for my grandma, who had loved speed skating while she was a girl in Duluth, Minnesota. Or for my mother—a wiry, athletic woman—who turned to karate, and later waterskiing, for her sports fix. In the early 1980s, youth soccer was growing fast everywhere. It was my first organized sport, starting in kindergarten. I had no problem scoring goals, even as a five-year-old. We were the Pink Panthers, my dad was the coach, and I always played forward. I would dribble through all the other kids, who seemed to lack my skill or coordination, and I’d score. It was easy for me, and fun.
We played on soccer fields along the banks of the Columbia. The river dominated our lives. My mother’s teenage depression over moving to eastern Washington disappeared once she discovered the river and the fun-loving community that it sustained. The river snaked through every aspect of Richland experience: we jumped in to cool off after soccer practice; we spent weekends on one another’s family boats; we hung out with friends on the river docks, gossiping and tanning; we tied rafts together to create giant flotation parties; we jumped off bridges into deep, cool pools. My grandparents had a yacht and hosted large parties on the river. My mom had a small boat, and we would head upriver to the sand dunes every weekend, staying there all day, hanging out in the heat. The adults barbecued and drank, and the kids shot skeet guns, rode kneeboards down the dunes, and went inner-tubing.
My mother was working at Hanford by then, testing plutonium samples on rotating shifts, which meant a week of day shifts, a week of swing shifts, and a week of graveyards. She was exhausted a lot of the time. My father stayed home, taking care of Marcus and me. He worked sporadically, sometimes doing counseling for troubled youth. My early memories of my father are of a loving, loud, larger-than-life man—six-foot-three with a huge belly and a big laugh. He had jet-black hair and tattooed arms—a skull and crossbones on one biceps, a mermaid on one forearm, and JUDY LYNN SOLO on the other.
To him, I was always Baby Hope. We had a special bond. I remember riding on his shoulders and stroking his thick black hair. I remember wrestling on the floor with him—his big round belly shaking with laughter. He helped teach me to read. On Christmas he dressed up as Santa. He was a popular youth coach—my soccer teammates loved him. He also coached all my brother’s
