Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 5

In my earliest memory, my uncle Speed scoops me into his arms and sits me on the bare back of his favorite horse. I am three years old, and it seems as if I am a mile off the ground. I grab a fistful of the horse’s mane, steadying myself. I love how it feels up here, but I don’t get to stay very long. My mother is worried that I’ll fall, and she scolds my father’s eldest brother for putting me in danger. My first horseback ride is brief, but it changes me. From then on, I’ll be obsessed with animals, particularly horses.

To hear my relatives talk, ours is a proud family of athletes, cowboys, and war heroes. Dad always liked to tell the story of how he and his brothers got their names. Their father, Fred, was a radio operator in World War II, but mostly he loved to be up in the clouds, airborne. While serving in the Eighth Air Force in England, Fred was a gunner on a B-17, and in 1945, when he was twenty-six, he was awarded a medal for meritorious achievement. For my grandpa Fred, that sealed it. When he came home to California, and he and my grandma Daisy started a family, he insisted their sons’ names reflect his passions: Speed came first; then Sky, my father; and finally, Jet. (My grandparents had daughters, too, but they had normal names: Sandi and Carol.)

My dad and his siblings grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in Sacramento, which couldn’t have been more different from San Francisco, though it’s only a hundred miles away. While the hippies in Haight-Ashbury dressed in tie-dye and embraced antiwar activism and free love, my dad’s neighbors wore Wrangler jeans, held conservative values, and believed in hard work. My uncle Jet, for example, became a square-dance caller at the age of eight, and that’s still what he does for a living. For his part, my dad liked to fix things with his hands. Lanky, with an easy smile, my dad rarely went anywhere without his Stetson hat.

My mom, Lynn, was more of a free spirit. She was born in 1960 to my grandmother Shelley and her second husband, a guy I never met. That marriage ended after Mom’s younger sister came along three years later, at which point Shelley sent both her daughters to live with their maternal grandmother, Deedee, in Richmond, Virginia. A Vassar tennis-team alum, my mom’s mom was one of the first female tennis pros in the country, and she had no intention of retiring. In the late 1960s, Shelley stayed close to her daughters, serving as head tennis pro at clubs in Virginia Beach and Richmond. But in 1970, Shelley moved eight hundred miles west to Chicago, where she’d grown up, to manage the Mid-Town Tennis Club. I’m not sure my mom ever got over being left behind.

Even from afar, Shelley imposed a lot of rules on her daughters. Both my mom and her sister (also named Virginia) were required to keep their hair bobbed short, which my mom hated. Their grandma Deedee came from money, meanwhile, and appearances mattered to her. She was hell-bent on turning her two granddaughters into well-mannered Southern belles.

Then Shelley married husband number three, a ranking tennis player named Bucky Walters Jr., and moved to Florida to join the Tennis Club of Palm Beach. At that point, she sent for her daughters, but after they arrived, my mom made clear she wasn’t interested in having a stepfather, let alone an older stepbrother (Bucky had a son from an earlier marriage). Mom and Shelley argued constantly. My mom had always been headstrong, and she resented this new family, especially since her mom hadn’t seemed to care much about family until now. So my mom ran away, hitchhiking all the way to San Francisco. I don’t know much about what that trip was like, but I do know that she started calling herself a hippie, and let her red hair grow long and wild. By the age of sixteen, she’d gotten married to an army man named Craig, and they soon had a son, Danny. By seventeen, Mom was divorced and sharing an apartment with another single mom. She had her hands full, but somehow she finished high school.

Then one afternoon, while buying Danny a soft-serve cone at Dairy Freeze, Mom met Sky Roberts, a cute auburn-haired boy in a big hat. They were both smitten, or so I’ve always been told. Sky loved Lynn’s shiny mane of hair, her freckled skin, and her big toothy smile. Lynn liked how Sky swaggered when he walked—and how he wasn’t put off by her already having a kid. Later, my dad would grow a beer belly and develop what I’ve come to think of as the Roberts nose, wide at the base and bulbous at the tip. But back then, he was long and lean, with a close-cropped beard and mustache. Mom couldn’t stay away.

From the start, Dad treated Danny as his own. He said he also wanted more children, which tugged at my mom’s heart. Maybe, she thought, they could make a family that was better than the fractured one she’d come from. So in December 1982, my parents married at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Elk Grove, just south of Sacramento. Eight months later, they had me: Virginia Lee Roberts. Everyone called me Jenna. Family legend has it that my arrival made my grandma Shelley want to reconcile with my mom, her estranged eldest daughter. In a series of long-distance phone calls, she and my mother patched things up, and soon my dad, my mom, Danny, and I were speeding east in a used Winnebago we’d picked up for cheap.

The first thing that struck me about Florida was the ocean—I’d never seen one. I loved its salty smell. We stayed with grandma Shelley in West Palm Beach at first, not far from the beach, and I soon discovered a lot about her. She wouldn’t let us call her Grandma, for starters; I guess because it signaled her age. We kids were to call her Gamma. What’s more, she seemed to wake up with a Bloody Mary in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Gamma always spent peak tanning hours poolside at her tennis club, bronzing her already brown and leathery skin and playing backgammon with friends. She kept a bottle of baby oil in her purse. She had other quirks, too. A clean freak, Gamma was the kind of woman who kept her furniture covered in plastic and who made me stand in the driveway when I brushed my hair. She didn’t have a nurturing bone in her body. But I admired how she lived life on her own terms.

Given Gamma’s control issues, Mom never intended for us to stay long under her roof. Soon my parents found a small three-bedroom ranch house on a dirt road in Loxahatchee, about thirty minutes away from West Palm Beach. Loxahatchee is prime horse country now, but back then it was known for its renegade residents, loose land restrictions, and exotic animals. Partly surrounded by citrus groves, Loxahatchee edged up against the last remaining section of the northern Everglades. Living next to something so wild, our new neighbors felt free to keep not only broken-down school buses in their yards, but also iguanas, peacocks, alpacas, and emus. Years later, one neighbor would stash the body of an endangered panther in his garage freezer. That was Loxahatchee in the 1980s: untamed and off the grid.

Our new house wasn’t much, but my parents worked hard to fix it up. Mom planted sunflowers and daisies in the front yard. Dad seeded a lawn, built a shed, raised a barn. And me? In the daytime I explored the woods that bordered our land. There were two kinds of cypress trees in our part of Florida—the pond cypress and the bald cypress—neither one of which resembled the tall Italian cypresses I remembered from Sacramento. These trees grew in areas saturated by water. I remember a neighbor explained that the bald cypress, a wispy breed, got its name because it lost its leaves in winter. But I was more fascinated by how when it flooded, these trees created specialized root structures—everyone called them “knees”—that grew out of the submerged ground, through the water and up into the air, bringing oxygen to the canopy above. These cypresses were survivors—some had been alive for six hundred years—and I admired that. I also loved what I could see from the uppermost branches of our tallest slash pine trees, which are the kind that grow on swampy ground. I would ascend and hang upside down like a possum, laughing at the world flipped on its head. I got so good at climbing that my parents began calling me Peter Pan. I couldn’t fly, of course, but I had the fearlessness and confidence of someone who could.

A month after I turned five, Mom put me in kindergarten at Haverhill Baptist Day School. Classes were only a few hours a day and were mostly intended to get kids used to attending school. But I still have the report card, which features a drawing of two smiling children, a boy and a girl, sitting together on the floor, both holding books open in their laps. I remember the delight I felt as I learned to read that fall, and how amazed I was to learn there was a place called a library where anyone could go to borrow books, free of charge.

Five months after I’d enrolled at Haverhill, in February 1989, my little brother, Sky Rocket Roberts, was born. I called him Skydy Bump, or just Skydy. When he came home from the hospital, my parents put his crib in my room, so I felt almost as if he were my baby. When he cried at night, I was the one who got up and comforted him. I adored Skydy, and as he grew up—white-blond, brown-eyed, and handsome—good things began to happen. My mom worked briefly as a bank teller after Skydy was born, but she quit after being robbed at gunpoint. I understand now that the robbery must have been terrifying for her, but at the time, it seemed a boon to us kids: we were glad to have her around more. For his part, Dad began to find work doing maintenance and construction. My half brother, Danny, was a scrappy kid. Even after getting one of his front teeth knocked out being rambunctious, he always seemed to lean into trouble. But he was my big brother, and he looked out for me. More and more, it seemed Mom and Dad walked around with beer cans in their hands. Still, I was happy, and I thought my family was too.

In those days, I was buoyed by the knowledge that my mom loved having a daughter. I still have the baby book she made for me, which is so jammed with photos I can barely close it. There’s me, perched on a chair next to a favorite tabby cat; me barefoot at the beach, shoveling sand into a bucket; me dressed up as Snow White on Halloween. There’s a lock of my hair tied with a pink ribbon, and Mom wrote monthly entries, each one addressed to me. “My Special Girl!” she wrote. When my freckles popped out, just like Mom’s, she called them “angel kisses” and insisted they made me prettier. And Mom trusted me completely with Skydy. One day, while playing in the sandpit under the treehouse Dad had built for us, Skydy tugged on my T-shirt. “Sissie,” he said, and when I turned around, he pointed at a snake slithering toward us. I wasn’t particularly afraid of reptiles—at one point, I’d kept a lizard in a shoebox under my bed, filling a bottle cap each night so he had water—but something told me this viper was trouble. I grabbed Skydy and ran for the house, screaming. Mom came out just in time to see the deadly water moccasin slipping into the grass. Later, she said I’d saved Skydy’s life.

I loved our neighborhood. We lived in the second house on the left on Rackley Road, just down the street from the Rackley family. You might think that since our dirt road was named after them, they’d be sitting pretty on the nicest plot of land. Instead, it seemed they’d sold off the best parcels around them, keeping the mangiest, muddiest piece for themselves. By the time we moved in, the Rackley clan were what people called hillbillies—rough as guts, with a lot of barking dogs but no front lawn.

Our land had its own small pond with a tiny island in the middle of it, and after my father built a narrow bridge linking it to the nearest stretch of shore, the island was my spot. I spent hours there reading, drawing, and daydreaming about how my life might turn out. One day, while I was lolling about, I spotted an alligator snapping turtle, as big as a truck tire, stick his head out of the water. I’d never seen a turtle that large, so of course I wanted to catch it. Mom said I should ask the Rackleys. “They’ll know what to do,” she said. And they did. One of their boys—there were several, including one set of twins—put a hunk of meat on a hook tied to a string with a bell on it. Two days later, when the bell started ringing, I watched in awe as the Rackleys pulled the bloody turtle out of the pond, its jaws snapping. Later that night, there was a knock at our door—yet another Rackley boy. He said his mom had made turtle soup if anyone wanted to taste it. I thanked him, but declined. I’d already decided I wanted to be a veterinarian—ever since I’d heard that taking care of animals was a job some people got paid to do. So I didn’t want to eat the turtle. I was excited just to see the turtle’s sharp beak and scaly shell up close.

We kids never lacked for adventure. We’d build makeshift bike ramps out of boards and cinderblocks that sent us flying, but we somehow managed not to get too hurt. We prided ourselves on being able to handle whatever Loxahatchee dished out. One time, after Dad installed an electric fence on the property, we took turns seeing who could grab it and hold on the longest. Another time Danny fell through a rotten roof that we were not supposed to be climbing on and broke his arm. If you’d asked, we’d have told you we lived in heaven. Whenever Mom took us to visit her sister’s kids in their North Palm Beach housing development, we couldn’t believe our cousins had to live in such a boring place. “What do you guys do for fun?” I’d ask, trying not to reveal how sorry I felt for them.

My tomboy ways were about to be interrupted, though, by the realities of starting elementary school. Maybe it was a holdover from her own upbringing, but Mom had very clear ideas about how she wanted her only daughter to appear to the outside world. Suddenly I was forced to trade my jeans for frilly dresses that I hated almost as much as the brightly colored ribbons Mom insisted on tying into my hair each morning.

Still, I loved first grade. My favorite teacher was Mrs. McGirt, who recommended I check out Charlotte’s Web , about a girl named Fern who, like me, lived on a farm. Like Fern, I was an early riser, always eager to get a jump on the day. Like Fern, my family had dogs and goats and chickens—though no pigs like the adorable Wilbur. I loved that book. On the nights Mom tucked me in, I had her read it to me. On the nights when my parents were drunk and I put myself and Skydy to bed, I practiced reading it aloud, especially the end, when Charlotte tells Wilbur about the wonderful life he will lead—“this lovely world, these precious days.” I adored the idea that Wilbur was so dear to Farmer Zuckerman that the little pig would never, ever be harmed.

Around this time, Mom made clear that being a girl meant more than dresses and hair ribbons. I had never balked at my chores with the animals—feeding them, cleaning their stalls, putting them in their pens at night. I’d spent hours teaching our goat, Cordelius, how to walk on his hind legs. But suddenly my mother said I had to help her take care of the people in our family too. My new jobs included setting and clearing the table every evening, then helping with the dishes, and vacuuming every room in the house once a week. Neither of my brothers had to take a turn, but when I asked Mom why, she said girls needed to learn things that boys didn’t. “You’ll have a husband someday,” she said, “and you’ll need to do this for him.” It’s funny to think about now, because it’s not as if my mother was a very good housekeeper. The inside of our house often looked as if a tornado had just torn through. But the message was clear: we were both female, and I was going to shoulder some of her load.

My family had its rituals. Every night we’d assemble around our coffee table for dinner: fish sticks, chicken tenders, anything that was on “special” at the local Pantry Pride. The TV was always on—usually M*A*S*H , which I hated, or The Simpsons , which I loved. Every morning I packed my lunch (and, eventually, Skydy’s) before school, even though no one showed me how. I’d just smear some grape jelly on white bread and put it in a brown paper bag, no baggie. By lunchtime my backpack gave off a musty smell, as if something were fermenting inside. I envied the kids who brought lunch money for a hot meal. But without even asking, I knew that wasn’t an option for me. In our house, what little money there was seemed always to get spent on my dad’s whims: his latest pickup truck or construction project. Either that or beer.

When my dad decided he wanted something, though, he went out and got it. When I was about six years old, I stepped off the school bus one day and encountered Dad standing in the road. “I’ve got something to show you,” he said, and the grin on his face said it was something good. He turned toward our house, with me right behind him, and when we got within sight of the barn, I spotted her: a beautiful black-and-white paint. “Her name is Alice,” Dad said, nodding to the horse who hadn’t been there that morning. “She’s all yours.”

I was stunned. I approached her as Dad told me to: slowly, with my hand extended so she could nuzzle it. Looking in her big brown eyes, I saw intelligence. I couldn’t believe I had my very own horse.

From that point on, Alice and I were inseparable. I could have changed her name, I guess, but I didn’t because it reminded me of Alice in Wonderland , a book I’d adored. My Alice was gentle, patient, and easy to get a saddle on, though usually I rode her bareback. Skydy was jealous: I had to reassure him that Alice would never take his place in my heart. But the truth was that my little brother—then barely a toddler—couldn’t expand my world like Alice did.

Every day when the final school bell rang, I’d hurry to the bus, counting the minutes until it dropped me off. I had a longer walk home now; the school bus had been rerouted after a pig farmer drowned in the collecting canal at the end of our dirt road—the fourth person in a year whose car had rolled into the canal’s swampy water. The county school board didn’t want to risk a bus full of kids meeting the same fate. So now, instead of delivering me right to the end of Rackley Road, the bus dropped me an eighth of a mile away. I didn’t care. I would run all the way home, sling a halter around Alice’s neck, and off we’d go.

Alice wasn’t fast, and she wasn’t slow. She was perfect because she was mine. I delighted in the way she smelled, especially after a ride, and the way she’d wrap her head around me to hold me close as I brushed her mane. I couldn’t wait to do the jobs that kept her happy: mucking her stall, putting fly spray on her. When I taught her to swim in our pond, we’d float and paddle together, just a girl and her horse, enjoying the same cool water. When we headed for the woods, she never startled or bucked. She was sensitive as well as smart. On her back, I felt taller. Stronger. I knew that she understood me, and I her, without words. Alice was my ally, my protector—like Charlotte-the-spider was for Wilbur-the-pig. With her I felt completely safe. I didn’t yet know there were reasons to be afraid.