I knew in my heart that my father was hurting my mother and grandparents, yet I was just happy to be spending time with him. I wasn’t happy with my new life with Glenn, and the changes made me angry. I knew my dad and brother would keep me safe. I didn’t want to think about the consequences.
BUT AFTER A day or two, the fun started to wear off. One morning in the hotel, I woke up and my dad sat down on the bed. “Baby Hope, you just missed your mom,” he said. “She just called and said you could stay another couple of days.”
I hadn’t heard the phone ring. I hadn’t heard him talking. I knew something wasn’t right.
In the middle of another night, a woman came to our hotel room. My dad opened the door a crack and let her slip in, thinking Marcus and I were sleeping. I remember waking up and seeing her naked at the foot of the bed with my father. He was on top of her, and then they slowly slipped down to the floor. I squeezed my eyes shut tight, trying to erase what I had seen, but I was scared and confused and ashamed. In the morning, I pretended to be asleep until the strange woman left and then made a deliberate show of waking up. I was angry with my father and didn’t speak to him but refused to tell him why. As the “vacation” continued, I was more and more sure that what we were doing was very wrong.
Then, on July 26—I know because of the police records—my father took us to a bank in downtown Seattle to cash a check. The police, guns drawn, quickly surrounded him when we walked in the door. He was handcuffed and pushed into the back of a police car as my brother and I watched in horror. He was driven away, and Marcus and I were all alone on the sidewalk in a big city, abandoned and terrified.
How did my father get caught? It was a setup. I was told that the naked woman in our hotel room had a love-hate relationship with him—she sometimes gave him money; her daughter may have been his daughter, but he didn’t claim her. That woman wanted to hurt him, so she gave him a check to cash and then called my mother to let her know where he’d be. My mother called the Richland police, who alerted the Seattle authorities.
Marcus and I were taken to the police station. My father was allowed to see us. He was crying, tears running down his big face. “I fucked up,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
He pulled two hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket and offered them to Marcus. “Go buy something,” he said. “Buy something for yourself and Baby Hope.”
Marcus pushed the money back. “You’re going to need this more than we do,” he said.
In that moment, my brother seemed very grown up.
Child Protective Services took us out of the jail and to an office, where we were watched over by social workers and given a childish coloring book. I pushed it away, overcome with anger at the attempt to placate me. The grownups were trying to fool me into thinking everything would be OK if I colored a happy picture.
The other Judy Solo finally picked us up and took us to her house in Kirkland. There we were with our parallel lives: moms named Judy, older sons, younger daughters, and all those seemingly happy lives blown apart by the same man.
That afternoon, the other Judy drove us to Ellensburg, midway between Seattle and Richland. My mother met us there. As we drove back to Richland, I boiled with anger. I was mad at my mother for taking us home. Mad at my father for lying to us. Mad at myself for doing something wrong. I was mad at the world.
A few days after I got home to Richland, I turned eight. And I didn’t see my father again for a very long time.
CHAPTER TWO
God’s Second Paradise
The whimpers and howls drifted skyward in the night air, snaking through my bedroom window and under my covers. Wails of suffering and fear and loneliness. I couldn’t bear it anymore. I pulled on a sweatshirt and flip-flops and pushed open my bedroom window, climbed out onto the deck and crept down into the backyard to where Charlotte, our massive English sheepdog, was dying.
We had just returned home from a family vacation in Priest Lake, Idaho, a state park in the northern tip of the Idaho panhandle. We had driven there and back—my mom, Marcus, and my new stepdad, Glenn Burnett—towing our boat behind us. Charlotte was too big and too old to come along. We had left her under the care of a neighbor, but when we got back, we discovered that Charlotte had been in the same spot in the backyard the entire time we’d been gone. Unable to stand up, she was matted and weak and covered in her own waste.
I was nine. Charlotte had been my lifelong companion. I learned to stand by pulling myself up on her curly white fur. She had been my playmate, my protector, my pillow for as long as I could remember, always there. She had moved with us—from the smiley-face house to the low-rent duplex we lived in after my parents split up to the house we now lived in with Glenn.
The move to Hoxie Avenue hadn’t been easy for her. Glenn was a hunter and had two Chesapeake Bay retrievers; sharp-witted, protective dogs that I thought were mean to Charlotte. She seemed distressed to be sharing her home and her people with outsiders. Now Charlotte was about to die. She weighed close to one hundred pounds and couldn’t
