Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 6

In her novel Black Beauty , which I read and reread as a child, Anna Sewell describes horses like this: “We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.” I’ve thought a lot about that idea: that you can be in pain even if you can’t articulate it. When I was small, I loved that Black Beauty was written from the horse’s point of view. It took me inside the horse’s mind, describing his memories of his mother (“a wise old horse”) and what she wished for him: a life built on kindness and freedom. Reading that book, I vowed never to cause suffering when I could help it. Just like the story’s main character, I wanted to grow up gentle and good, never learning bad ways.

What many people don’t know about horses is that despite their size and power, they are vulnerable prey animals. They depend on flight—their ability to outrun predators—as their primary means of survival. That requires that they use their well-honed intuitions to sense danger in their surroundings. I’ve described how, from the moment I met my horse, Alice, I felt in sync with her. Little did I know that she and I would soon share even more in common: a reliance on wariness and, eventually, a need to escape.

The first signs of trouble came with a few subtle changes to our family routine. First, Skydy started sleeping in my parents’ room, leaving me alone each night in the room the two of us had shared. Then, my mom—who up to that point had usually run my bath, washed my hair, and gotten me in my pj’s each night—stepped back for some reason, and Dad began doing that. Now, once I was ready for bed, Mom would say a quick goodnight, but it was Dad who tucked me in, read me a story, and cuddled me. At first, all that felt normal and good. I loved my dad. He’d taught me to ride Alice. When I competed in horse shows, which I was learning how to do, he was always my biggest fan. I saw Dad as capable and even invincible. I trusted him.

Then, during bath time one night, Dad abruptly told me to stand up. “We’ve got to make sure you’re extra clean,” he said. The command felt weird to me. I stayed submerged, the soapsuds hiding my nakedness. I wasn’t sure why I felt embarrassed, but I did. “Can Mom come in?” I asked.

“No, Mom’s busy,” Dad said, impatient. He had a washcloth in his hand. I stood up, and he began to soap me all over, spending extra time between my legs.

That night in my room, Dad touched me in ways nobody had before. He told me I was his special girl, his favorite, and that this was his way of giving me “extra love.” He used his fingers at first. Then, days later, his mouth. He called my private parts my “tee-tee” and his penis his “pee-pee.” It wasn’t long before he asked if I wanted to touch his genitals. I didn’t want to, but he wanted me to. He was my father, so I did.

I tried to stop these things from happening. “I don’t want bedtime stories anymore,” I announced one day. “I don’t want cuddles anymore. I can do bath time by myself. I’m a big girl now.” And so the bedtime rituals ended, but the abuse didn’t. At night in the dark, I’d wait. Dad didn’t always come in, but every night I feared he would. The door would open a crack, revealing a stripe of light from the hall, and the hinges would creak slightly—I’ll always remember that soft squeaking sound. Then Dad would close the door behind him and slip into my twin bed, fondling me, forcing himself on me. For a while, I tried hiding in the tight space under my box spring, but that didn’t work. “Get out from under there,” he’d say, “or I’ll take Alice away.” I couldn’t imagine that. So out I’d crawl.

At this point, Mom—once so warm and loving—became cold and remote, at least when it came to me. I was already a pleaser; up early, I’d make my bed, trying to help her manage the mayhem of getting three kids ready for school. Now, I tried even harder to make her love me, offering to go grocery shopping with her—anything to not be left alone with Dad. But Mom seemed unreachable. The whippings with the thorny rose branches started around this time. And it seemed to me she was drinking more beer. Once I had been her beautiful, angel-kissed girl. But now she told me a story I’d never heard before: she’d always wondered if I was really her daughter. In the hospital right after my birth, she told me, one of the nurses had briefly given her a different baby girl to breastfeed, but the woman soon rushed back in and took that infant away. Maybe I’d been switched with another child, she said. Maybe I was just a big mistake.

I was confused. Why was Mom mad at me? Did she know what Dad was doing to me? I have a distinct memory of my bedroom door opening slightly one night as Dad molested me—I heard that squeaking sound again. Was that Mom, or did I just desperately want it to be her? I didn’t see her face. Could she have seen Dad under the covers with me? The door slowly closed again.

I began to get painful urinary tract infections. Mom took me to the doctor again and again. The nurses were mystified. After one examination, a doctor told my mother that my hymen had been broken. My mother didn’t hesitate. “Oh, she rides horses bareback,” she explained. That was the end of that. I didn’t even know what a hymen was.

My infections were so severe at times that I couldn’t hold my urine. Mortified, I started tying a sweater around my waist at school so that when I sat down, the sweater would absorb what leaked out. The other kids recognized the smell and where it was coming from, though, and nicknamed me “Pee Girl.” At home, Mom flew into a rage whenever she found my wet underwear, beating my bottom until it stung. So I tried to hide the soiled clothes—and, God forbid, the sheets when I wet the bed. They stank, so she’d always find them. But I figured getting a single beating for a pile of dirty underwear was better than getting beat one pair at a time.

Around this time, Danny was sent away to a Baptist reform school in Washington State. Dad then changed up his tactics, doing what he wanted to me more obviously, not just in the middle of the night. If Mom was out, he’d molest me in the afternoon, promising me that afterward, we’d put on a movie—he loved scary films best—make some popcorn, and stay up late together. By mixing his sick behavior with cozy bonding, he normalized it, at least partly. I still hated what Dad did to me, but I began to bargain with myself: just get the icky part over with so the good parts of life can go on.

Then something happened that made sure life had no more good parts. Forrest was a friend of my father’s. He was tall and muscular, with a military bearing, and he had a tattoo on his chest. I knew this because he liked to show off his physique at the pool-and-beer parties our two families began having together. Suddenly, Forrest—who had his own landscaping business—was around our house a lot. My dad encouraged Skydy and me to call him “Uncle Forrest” and told me to befriend his stepdaughter, Sheila, which I was happy to do. She was sixteen—nine years older than me—so I thought she was the epitome of cool. But she could seem distant sometimes too. I later found out why.

One night Mom, Dad, and I were out on our porch with Forrest, Sheila, and Sheila’s mom. I’ve corresponded with Sheila about this recently, and she remembers this too. We think our little brothers were playing somewhere inside the house when our parents—who were drinking beer, as usual—began joking around about how “naughty” Sheila and I were. Either my dad or Forrest then suggested that they “trade” us for a night. I recall Forrest glancing at my father and saying something about “a backwards sleepover. Jenna can come sleep at our house, and Sheila can sleep here.”

I didn’t know it then, but by this point, Forrest had been sexually abusing Sheila for two years. Since Sheila and I have reconnected, she’s told me she was never “traded” to my dad for him to abuse. I wasn’t so fortunate. I’ll never know the exact date I was first left with Forrest. I do remember that it was with my father’s permission. I recall being in a bathtub—I’ve always thought it was in Forrest and his wife’s home, but Sheila wonders if it may have been in one of the empty vacation homes whose lawns Forrest was paid to tend. Forrest walked into the bathroom. I told him I wanted to bathe myself, but he wouldn’t leave. He sat on the toilet next to me and acted as if this were the most natural thing in the world—a grown man scrubbing the naked body of someone else’s young daughter. “We’ve got to wash you good. You’re a dirty girl,” he said.

That time, Forrest did things to me that my father had done and other things my father had not. When he put his fingers inside me, like my dad did, Forrest narrated his actions out loud. “I think you can take another finger,” he said, implying that was a good thing. His chest was shaved, and he wanted me to admire its smoothness. “Touch my muscles,” he commanded. “Tell me how big they are.” Forrest lay on top of me, crushing me. He tried to kiss me, but I turned my face away. When he put his mouth down there, I remember he held my wrists tightly. He was very strong. I couldn’t escape.

To this day, I rely on music to make the world make sense. I’ll be in the front passenger seat on one of those early morning drives to school, my children buckled in behind me. With Robbie at the wheel, my hands are free to plug my iPhone into the sound system and push shuffle. Chances are good that as it clicks through my two thousand or so songs, it’ll land on one from the period during which I began to process how much my dad and Forrest had hurt me. I have a lot of songs from the 1990s and early 2000s among my favorites, I guess because that’s when I leaned on music the hardest. Tracy Chapman will start singing “Give Me One Reason” (“I don’t want no one to squeeze me / They might take away my life”). Or Matchbox Twenty will launch into “Bright Lights” (“I got a hole in me now / I got a scar I can talk about”). Or the thunderclap will sound at the beginning of Garth Brooks’s “The Thunder Rolls.” When that happens, all three kids start screaming. They are born-and-bred Australians, and while they love a lot of American music, they think my taste is terrible. “Oh, Mom,” they’ll moan, rolling their eyes. “You’ve got to update your tunes!” Nonetheless, we all enjoy this ritual—my ancient hit parade, their merciless teasing—so I just laugh and turn up the volume. Then I lose myself a bit, remembering how, as a young girl, I wielded my Walkman like a talisman, to ward off evil.

As I have become a “public person”—by which I mean a woman whose story of survival has been told and retold by the media—I have kept much about my childhood private. When I began working with a collaborator on this book, I had never said publicly that my father molested me and then gave me to another man to molest. When asked, I had always been vague, saying only that I was abused by a family friend. Well, that was true, as far as it went. But there was so much more awfulness left unsaid.

Forrest was the first man to penetrate me with his penis. Not long afterward, my father did the same. Sometimes what they each did to me was so similar that I suspected they were comparing notes. Other times they liked to spend time with me together. They once insisted on taking me to see the movie Arachnophobia , about a species of South American spiders that is smuggled into the United States inside a coffin. I remember they thought it was funny to take me, a small child, to a horror film about eight-legged insects that breed and kill. I’ve been terrified of spiders ever since.

Sheila, meanwhile, stopped coming to our house altogether. Only while writing this book have I discovered that in 1990 she filed a formal complaint with the Florida Department of Children and Families, alleging that Forrest had sexually abused her. Her mother didn’t believe her then, but the state did. In September of that year, she got a restraining order against Forrest and went to live with another relative. From what Sheila and I have pieced together, it seems that at this point, Forrest turned his attentions to me.

Recently, Sheila told me that we were not the only girls Forrest molested. In 2000, he was convicted of abusing another girl in North Carolina in 1996. He served fourteen months in prison and was a registered sex offender for ten years, from 2001 to 2011. Sheila says more girls came forward over the years to accuse him of abuse, but her mom disbelieved them. Sheila’s mom stood by Forrest until 2010, when she found pornography on his computer and threw him out for good.

I feel so grateful that Sheila and I have found each other again, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t drag her into the spotlight. Many survivors have made that decision, to remain anonymous, and I respect that choice. But Sheila wanted me to use her real first name here. “I have had to be silent for so long,” she wrote in an email. “This is me and I’m not afraid to be me. I didn’t do anything wrong to be ashamed of. I don’t want to hide from the truth.”

I love Sheila’s self-confidence, and today I am inspired by it. But as a child, I had no such inspiration. “It’s hard to believe that there’s nobody out there / It’s hard to believe that I’m all alone,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers sang from the cheap transistor radio I’d begun keeping next to my bed. Their lyrics seemed meant for me. I turned to Alice for help. I was trying to hang onto the feeling that I was part of a family and that I belonged—if not to my parents, or entirely to myself, then maybe to my horse, to our groves of slash pines, to the island in the middle of our pond. But day by day, that feeling of belonging was fading away.

Some nights Alice and I would stay out long after sunset, missing dinner and whatever came after it. I got in trouble with Mom, but I didn’t care. I felt she was willfully ignoring what was in front of her face. Her outgoing tomboy had become withdrawn. Her straight-A student had begun cutting class. Her Peter Pan wasn’t so confident anymore. That’s what happens when a girl is preyed upon. Mom had to know that something was up, but she didn’t ask me what, and she didn’t intervene. More than once, she even implied I was trying to steal her husband from her. One night I was hiding under the kitchen table to avoid bath time with Dad. Mom got the broom and jabbed me with it until I came out. “Look what you’re making me do!” she yelled, as if what was happening were something I’d set in motion. My response: defiance. I didn’t want her husband or his nasty friend Forrest! So what if I missed dinner every night? Throwing food away was nothing compared to throwing a daughter away. And that’s what I believed she was doing.

Not surprisingly, I guess, during this period I clung to even the tiniest expressions of affection, even disturbing ones. While sexually abusing me, for example, my father would often ask me questions about what his actions were causing me to feel. He was fascinated by my body’s reactions, and sometimes what he did felt good, sort of, though any pleasure I felt was mixed with disgust. I didn’t know what an orgasm was, but I knew I didn’t want to encourage him. Still, sometimes my body betrayed me, shivering under his touch. That’s when my father would say he was proud of me. “This is why we do this,” he’d say. “This is why I give you all this extra love.” A part of me relished feeling special—especially since my mother had labeled me good-for-nothing. But when Dad would compare me to Mom, saying, “You’re my star. I don’t even do this with your mother,” I felt sick to my stomach.

I guess some instinct for self-preservation made me try to claim my body as my own, because I started to experiment with boys. My best friend, Kyle, lived on the same side of Rackley Road as us with his dad, J.D.—who I’m pretty sure was using Kyle as his punching bag—and his mom, who everyone called Chicken. One day when we were maybe eight or nine years old, Kyle showed me a Playboy magazine he’d found in his dad’s closet, and we took off our clothes, then shyly started to kiss and gently touch each other. When I think back on this behavior, I’m struck by the pure innocence of it. We were children; my chest at that point was as flat as Kyle’s (which is why we were both equally wowed by the breasts we saw in that pilfered Playboy ). Guided more by curiosity than anything approximating lust, we weren’t sure what we were doing, but we knew that it felt good. At first I was the leader, mimicking things Dad and Forrest did to me, and Kyle was bewildered. But my friend was inquisitive, too, and soon, we were playing this game every day. Then, my mother caught us. She went nuts, banishing Kyle from our house and telling me I was a bad, dirty girl.

Kyle and I weren’t allowed to see each other for a long time. We were even forbidden from talking across the fence that separated our properties. That’s when I got angry. Before this, I’d questioned the ways my life was changing, but I was confused about who to blame. Now, I chose to blame my mother. “How can she say what I’m doing with Kyle is bad, when Dad and Forrest do things to me that are so much worse?” I asked myself.

In Charlotte’s Web, a lamb tells Wilbur that pigs mean “less than nothing” to her. Wilbur is outraged and argues there is no such thing. “Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness,” he protests. “It’s the lowest you can go…If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something—even though it’s just a very little bit of something.” Every night, as I lay in my bed, dreading the now-familiar creak of the door, I tried to remember a time when I’d been more than nothing. I longed to be worth something again.