Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice - 7

There were moments when I could glimpse the Mom I used to know. I remember one weekend—I was probably nine or ten years old—I’d been invited to a sleepover party by a girl I didn’t know very well. At this point, I didn’t have any close friends—I had walled myself off from kids my age because I no longer felt I was like them. But a sleepover meant one less night at home, so I went. Immediately, I regretted it. The girls were cliquish; I didn’t fit in. So when I got the chance, I stepped outside of our host’s house and headed for the barn. It was getting dark, but I figured I could sleep out there. Inside the barn, I found myself face-to-face with a horse that was locked in its stall. A bonus, I thought—I wasn’t alone. But as my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw that the horse was having trouble moving. Peering into the stall, I saw the animal was standing in several feet of its own excrement: a captive, left to drown in its own shit.

I may not have been able to save myself, but there was no way I was leaving this horse behind. I marched straight into the kitchen and called my mom. “Mom, you need to bring the trailer,” I told her when she picked up. “You need to do it right now.” And you know what? She believed me. It wasn’t long before Mom pulled our horse trailer into the driveway. I’ll never forget how she squared off with my sleepover hostess’s parents, telling them we were taking their horse and that if they put up a fight, she’d call the authorities. We packed up the poor animal, whom we’d soon rename Baloo after the bear in The Jungle Book (I just called her Blue-y because she had one brown eye and one blue eye), and drove her home. In that moment, I felt proud of myself and of my mom. We’d banded together and done something good! But as the days went by, that feeling turned in on itself. Why was Mom willing to fight for an abused animal, but not for me? Why did she hear my cry for help when I called about a horse but didn’t see my own suffering when it was right under her nose?

There was one woman in my life, though, who didn’t make me feel like an afterthought. I’d met Ruth Menor in 1989, when she and her husband and kids became our back-gate neighbors. Even though her son and daughter were a few years younger than me, we three (and later Skydy, too) had played together off and on almost as long as we’d been in Loxahatchee. Soon I found out that Ruth ran Vinceremos Therapeutic Riding Center, which she’d founded a year before I was born. As a young woman, Ruth had had a dream of using horses to help change the lives of handicapped and disabled kids. She was determined to create a place that used horses to heal. Nothing like that existed in the area, so she opened her own center and chose a name inspired by the Spanish word for “we will overcome.” She started off with one client and one horse and began growing Vinceremos on a leased plot of land.

A few years later, Ruth’s nonprofit needed a permanent home, and she managed to scrape together the money to buy a fifteen-acre parcel half a mile from my family’s land. The place was pretty broken-down when she bought it, but I didn’t care. Ruth introduced me to Spring, her quarter horse, and to Malarkey, an Arabian who she often let us ride all the way home to Rackley Road. Ruth called Malarkey her “heart horse” because of their strong connection. Sometimes, when Malarkey was visiting Ruth’s yard, Ruth would open a sliding glass door and Malarkey would walk over and stick her head in the house. Ruth joked that Malarkey was watching cartoons with us kids, and I believed her.

But it was a rescue horse named Millie that captured my heart. Millie was just three years old, but she’d already been terribly abused. When Ruth adopted her, she had cuts on her legs that went all the way down to the bone. Usually the horses Ruth used for therapy were at least eight years old. Ruth said they needed that maturity to work with disabled kids. But Millie started working at Vinceremos right away. Ruth said Millie seemed to know she had been rescued because she acted grateful. When I was around Ruth, I knew just how Millie felt.

As the abuse I was suffering continued, I came to see the riding center—and Ruth herself—as a safe haven. Ruth had thick reddish-brown hair and warm, sparkling brown eyes, and I admired how capable and self-assured she was. It seemed there was nothing in the barn she didn’t know how to do. I told Ruth I’d work any job if she’d just let me hang around. I didn’t dare tell her what was happening to me—my dad had said if I ever told a soul, he would kill my little brother and bury his body in the woods, where no one would find him. Still, Ruth seemed to sense that I needed help, because she kindly put me to work. First, she helped me sign up for 4-H, a year-round club whose members worked together on a farm or in a stable. The idea was if you give kids responsibilities and impress upon them how their actions make a difference in the lives of the animals they are tending, they will become more capable, confident, and self-aware.

Back then, I’m not sure I could have told you what the four H ’s stood for (heads, hearts, hands, and health). All I knew was that Ruth recommended 4-H and that joining would let me spend more time with her. I had already learned from Alice how intuitive horses were, but Ruth expanded my knowledge. “A horse can feel a fly land on its back,” she’d say. “Imagine all it can feel from you. If you think it, the horse feels it.” I already knew how to feed a horse, but now I learned about the different styles of riding and how to groom Alice properly. In the meantime, I must have mucked a thousand stalls at Vinceremos, shoveling soiled wood shavings and hay into my wheelbarrow with a pitchfork. It felt good to scrub something clean.

At the same time, I began helping where I could with Ruth’s disabled clients. Every few months, Vinceremos hosted camping trips for its members. Eager to get out of our house, I begged Mom to let me go along to DuPuis State Reserve, a twenty-two-thousand-acre park interspersed with ponds, wet prairies, and remnants of Everglades marsh. Officially, I went to help stake tents and tend animals. But I found I also connected with the kids, who were blind or had cerebral palsy or other ailments. One girl, Maddie, was hearing impaired. Sitting around the campfire one night, I could tell she felt out of place, so I sat down next to her. We couldn’t communicate, really, but I made her smile by goofing around and toasting her marshmallows. Maddie didn’t want to sleep in a tent, but her parents had a minivan, so we slept together there, rolling out our sleeping bags on the long, narrow back seats. Over a weekend, Maddie and I became wordless best buddies—kind of like me and Alice. Ruth praised me for sensing that Maddie needed a little extra TLC. But later I wondered if Maddie sensed the same about me. Though not disabled, I was definitely wounded, with no end to my abuse in sight.

It was Ruth who first taught me that horses reflect the emotions of their riders. When working with her most-vulnerable clients—children with autism, say, who had trouble identifying and communicating their feelings out loud—Ruth would often urge them to appraise the horse on whose back they were sitting. “Is your horse anxious?” she’d ask. “Do you think he feels like you feel?” Later, she’d tell me that mirroring is just one superpower that horses have. Here’s another one: As alert as they are to potential danger, horses don’t carry fear with them all the time. Once a mountain lion leaves their pasture, for example, horses will return immediately to grazing peacefully. Even in the wake of trauma, most horses are able to quickly embrace calm.

I wish I could say the same about myself. At ten years old, I saw my preadolescent body as an enemy. I couldn’t control how it drew the attention of the men who caused me pain, so I began to starve it. “You don’t deserve to eat,” said a voice in my head. About the only thing I allowed myself to devour in those days was a videotape of Disney’s Cinderella. Though I knew I was too old for it, I still found the animated classic comforting. I watched it so many times on our beat-up VCR that Skydy, who usually liked to be plastered to my side, got bored and wandered off. “Cinderella, you’re as lovely as your name,” a chorus sang, as the opening credits rolled. And then Cinderella herself would appear, waking up in her bed, combing her fingers through her long blond hair. “A dream is a wish your heart makes when you’re fast asleep,” she’d sing to the birds and mice who gathered around her—and also to me. I related to the story of an unloved daughter doing chores while her family mistreated her. And I enjoyed the fantasy of being swept off my feet by a handsome prince. No matter how sad I was, Cinderella sang, if I kept on believing, my hopes for a better life would come true. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was it really that simple?