Tarnished Dreams Read online

  Tarnished Dreams

  Jeanette Lukowski

  North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

  St. Cloud, Minnesota

  Copyright © 2014 Jeanette Lukowski

  All rights reserved.

  Print ISBN: 978-0-87839-723-5

  eBook ISBN: 9780-087839-971-0

  First Edition: June 2014

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published by

  North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

  P.O. Box 451

  St. Cloud, Minnesota 56302

  northstarpress.com

  Author’s Note:

  All of the events are true—but are re-told

  from my notes and memories.

  Once again, I’ve made the decision to change

  the names of everyone else involved, to

  honor their right to privacy.

  Also by Jeanette Lukowski

  Heart Scars

  My children helped me

  figure out what

  unconditional love is.

  Thank you.

  Acknowledgments

  An endeavor like this is never accomplished alone.

  To my first readers, Kelli and Kelly: first and foremost, I needed to know that it was worthy. Then I needed to know where it needed more work.

  To my children: I hope you can forgive me for sharing so much personal stuff with the world. Releasing it was my personal path to healing.

  To the many authors I had the opportunity to visit with this first summer of joining your ranks: I’ve taken a piece of every conversation we had, and added it to my authorial knowledge-base.

  To the people who read the back of the book on my Heart Scars book tour, and gave me courage to continue on my journey as mother, empowered woman, and author.

  Finally, to everyone at North Star Press of St. Cloud, who do so many behind-the-scenes tasks which ultimately make me shine.

  Thank you all.

  “Yea God!”

  Table of Contents

  Tarnished Dreams

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One: Snapshots

  1. The Envelope

  2. Juvy

  3. Court

  4. House Arrest

  5. Counseling, Again

  6. Prom

  7. A Mother’s Duty

  Part Two: Senior Year

  8. To What Lengths . . .

  9. September—Suspended?

  10. October—A New Best Friend

  11. November—Wedding Talk

  12. December—Wedding Plans

  13. Christmas Vacation, Allison’s Eighteenth Birthday

  14. January—Defiance

  15. February—On the Move

  16. March—Boys, Booze, B.S.

  17. April—Seriously?

  18. May—the Countdown

  Part Three: Tough Love

  19. College

  20. Chicago

  21. The Power of Books

  Prologue

  In April 2009, my fifteen-year-old daughter, Allison, ran away from home. I knew I wasn’t the first parent to experience the shock of discovering her child had run away—but I was the first in my family.

  I was seventeen when my dad called me a slut; he caught me kissing my nineteen-year-old boyfriend good-bye on our back porch. I was hurt, but I didn’t run away. A few weeks later, when my dad headed down the hall to get his hammer to break my bedroom door down (I was holding the door closed from the inside), I didn’t run away. Instead, I escaped, staying at a friend’s house until my mom moved my dad to a nursing home.

  I understand pressures on a teenage girl, but I never ran away from home. Instead, I hid in a bottle of alcohol. I didn’t need to run away from home; “home” had already abandoned me. My sister was away at college, and my mom was busy working three jobs. In addition, my mom made weekly visits to the nursing home—to exchange my dad’s dirty laundry for clean clothes, to bring him a carton of cigarettes for the week, and to give him some cash for the vending machines. My role morphed into housewife—to an empty house. I washed my own laundry, kept the house clean, and prepared for dinner for two—which my mother would eat cold, perhaps, when she finally returned home.

  The first days after Allison returned home, I was grateful. As the days turned into weeks, I floated on happy thoughts, appreciative of every smile she granted me or giggle she let slip out. Spring became summer; summer became fall; fall became winter. I couldn’t stop thinking about the local police officer involved in the case. I couldn’t stop thanking God for bringing my little girl back home. I even hugged Allison extra tight as we approached, and then passed, the one-year anniversary of that April weekend, the weekend that changed my life forever.

  Somewhere after that first year, I began to relax. I stopped hearing every sound Allison made, I stopped worrying about her when she rounded a corner out of my sight, I stopped watching for miniscule changes in her behavior. I thought she had learned how dangerous life could be.

  I wrote Heart Scars for myself. I needed to understand why Allison ran away from home.

  Part of writing Tarnished Dreams was for you, my reader. Not because I want you to hate Allison, or applaud me for being such a terrific mother. (I don’t, and I’m not.) I wrote it because two very interesting things happened during the first month of my book tour with Heart Scars the summer of 2013:

  1) People constantly asked, “How is she now?”

  2) I attended an event where a popular male writer of fiction spoke to a group of perhaps 100 people. I was sitting in the back row, interested in what he would say. Instead of speaking on his own agenda, he invited questions from the audience. I was unprepared for the answer to one of those questions.

  “I was wondering if you have ever written about a difficult time in your life, and how you handled it.”

  The author began his answer, “We took in this fifteen-year-old girl one summer—she had run away from home. I think it’s just a shame when parents decide they no longer want . . .”

  I couldn’t hear the rest of his answer, because the blood was rushing to my face. Sitting in the back row, I began quietly fuming about the man’s overgeneralization.

  Did I hear you correctly? Are you actually blaming the parents for this girl’s behavior? Did you even know their side?

  Earlier in the day, Tommy told me about Allison’s latest post on her social networking site. “She says she’s no longer couch-surfing,” Tommy reported. “Instead, she says she’s family-surfing.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand what family-surfing means.”

  “She’s staying with other people’s families.”

  Just like the author in the front of the room was describing.

  What does Allison tell the people who let her stay in their homes?

  While I cannot say this is true for every fifteen-year-old (or eighteen-, or nineteen-, or twenty-year-old) who is homeless, I’ve come to the conclusion that my daughter does exactly what she wants to do.

  I’ve also written this for me. The work of writing two memoirs helped me understand more about who I am—as I struggle with who I want to be in the future.

  I’ve run through the first-date scenario in my head over the years, wanting to be ready if the occasion ever arose. The fantasy becomes a nightmare when he asks, “What do you like to do?”

  I’ve never had an answer. I lost track of Jeanett
e.

  Part One: Snapshots

  1. The Envelope

  In February 2011, Allison was seventeen years old. Out of the blue, she asked to send her dad an email. Her request made me pause, since none of us had spoken to Frank since returning from Chicago in April 2009.

  “I want to tell Dad what he has to do if he wants to have a relationship with me,” Allison explained. “I’m willing to give him one more chance, but he’s going to have to . . .”

  The list was short, but direct. I admit I didn’t pay too much attention to Allison’s list of conditions, as I don’t moderate the relationship with her father. I was impressed with her new display of assertiveness, though.

  When we first divorced, I tried to honor the “rules” of divorce. Psychologists say it is important for children of divorce to have relationships with each parent, no matter how the parents feel about each other—so I set my resolve to letting the children spend time with their father whenever he was interested in having them.

  The day he moved out, though, he invited me and the children over to his new apartment for dinner. It seemed too creepy for me, to head over to his new apartment for a dinner of take-out sub sandwiches hours after he left the house we had shared as a family, so I made up an excuse why we couldn’t. I worried, too, about the children getting confused. Would the four-year-old think she was going to move into the apartment as well? Would the two-year-old make too much noise, running through long, perhaps empty apartment halls?

  If he wanted to play family, why had Frank moved out?

  I politely declined the invitation; Frank didn’t talk to us for a week.

  A month later, Frank asked to have the children for a day.

  I invited Frank to spend Christmas Eve with us that year. It had been a month since he’d last seen the kids. My sister and I prepared an Italian dinner, and I set the dining room table like it was a restaurant table. It broke my heart when I realized Frank had snuck out to the garage to smoke a joint an hour after he walked into the house. He couldn’t even spend time with his children sober.

  Two weeks later, Frank came over to the house in a rage. He had been served the divorce papers—and tried to punch my face through the screen door’s window. When that didn’t work, he broke the picture frame we had given him as a Christmas gift—a collage frame with five different pictures of the children. Breaking the frame was one thing; shattering the frame’s glass into their sandbox was another. But when he intentionally drove his car into the garage door before backing out of the driveway at full-speed, I got really scared. I called an organization that helps battered women, and borrowed a home-alarm security device. A single mother with two small children needed restful sleep in order to survive.

  The next four months were unnerving. There were numerous nights Frank would call in a rage, and try to scare me enough to cancel the divorce proceedings. When he left one of those messages on the home’s answering machine, I pulled the cassette tape out and moved it to the safe deposit box I had opened at the bank. I thought I might need it some day, if he ever pursued custody of our children—or my mother would need it, if I were murdered.

  One night in March of 1998, Frank called to tell me he was sitting in the car, in the garage of his apartment building, with the engine running. He said he was going to kill himself. His threat of driving into a bridge abutment the week before hadn’t resulted in my canceling the divorce, nor had his call while experiencing drug-induced hallucinations the week before, so I figured calling me from the car in the garage was just his latest attempt at manipulation.

  Somehow, Frank ended up in a drug-rehab center after the car-in-garage incident. He called me from the center, wanting a ride back to his apartment. While I wanted to help him out—because I still loved the man who had been my husband—I feared the man he had become. What if he did something like Tom Cruise’s character did in the movie Vanilla Sky? Frank could have easily grabbed the steering wheel of the car while I drove the two hours back to town; we would have died together, as a family, just like so many other violent husbands have done.

  A month later, Frank moved back to Chicago. He called the morning of our appointment for divorce court, and asked for a ride to Minneapolis. A ninety-minute drive, so he could jump on a commercial bus.

  Why couldn’t he just tell me he loved me?

  Why couldn’t he just tell me he would change, and mean it this time?

  Why couldn’t he just stay in the area for the kids?

  Frank called once a month for the first several months, but then even that stopped. Visits took place once every two or three years when I could afford to drive to Chicago; they were unsupervised until the kids shared snippets of their most recent visit a month later.

  “I’m real good at taking care of Tommy, Mommy,” eight-year-old Allison reported one day walking through the grocery store. “Daddy left us home alone while he ran out to get batteries. I was scared, but he was only gone like ten minutes.”

  “He left you alone, in his apartment?”

  “It’s okay,” Allison continued. “We were watching movies.”

  “I got so scared after watching Jurassic Park III,” six-year-old Tommy shared. “I tried to crawl into bed with Daddy, but he got angry because that meant his friend would have to move.”

  When Allison ran away from home in 2009, she hadn’t seen her dad for more than four years. The hour-long visit in the hospital in Chicago was meant to re-connect Frank and Allison, but Frank’s weekly calls to Allison’s cell phone drifted off again almost as soon as they began. By February 2011, we were approaching another two-year marker of not seeing him, and perhaps six months without a phone call.

  As the children got older, I tuned into the “How to be a Good Parent” pieces of advice, which included checking your children’s email account. I struggled with the idea, recalling how I felt when my own parents found and read the notes I passed back and forth with a classmate in eighth grade choir class—and how their reading those notes began part of my downward spiral of: 1) not trusting my parents, and 2) not writing. Trust for my mother returned over the years, incrementally; feeling the freedom to write again took nearly four decades.

  I also struggled with the idea because confronting Allison didn’t change anything. Allison liked to intentionally create drama. During our day in court in 2010, I first heard about her story-telling reputation. Gregory’s father had been questioned by the police after Allison ran away from home in April 2009; the defense attorney had a segment of the tape recording included in the trial, rather than putting Gregory’s father on the stand. On the tape, Gregory’s father was heard saying, “She’s always telling stories. Everyone knows it! Greg knows it, Kale knows it—everyone knows it.”

  After Allison ran away in 2009, I found—and read—the few pages of journaling she had left behind in her room. In one journal, Allison wrote about letting a boy touch her breasts in the racquetball court of the Rec Center while I was watching her brother’s basketball game in the gym. She was twelve; we lived in Wyoming at the time.

  The idea disgusted me, but I couldn’t imagine it being true. The Rec Center was too busy. The racquetball courts had glass walls into the corridor, so people could stand in the hall and watch.

  A few pages later, I read about a “boy” she met online. According to Allison’s journal, they had cyber sex together. There were no descriptions—just the phrase. She was thirteen at the time.

  Another notebook, more information. At the age of fourteen, she met another “boy” online. She wanted to run away to live with him and his mom; they would be married when she turned sixteen. I think this boy was actually Jamie, the forty-year-old online predator who faked his own death while we were still in Wyoming.

  I tried talking to Allison about topics in her journal from a therapist’s approach, but never got her cooperation. “What do you think might happen
to a young woman who . . .” the conversations began.

  Sometimes, Allison would engage. “Yeah, like Rosie at school who . . .” or, “Kari told me about her cousin who . . .” Other times, Allison would blow me off. “Where did you get that dumb stuff from, Mom? One of those stupid talk shows? Like they have a clue.”

  It seemed like everything I tried always turned into a fight with Allison. Worse, nothing I did seemed to make Allison stop. Reading about them, though, made me ill. I never wanted to read her journals, or emailed conversations, unless I had to.

  The 2010-2011 academic year was especially tough for me, as the country’s economy took a dive. I was trying to hold everything together by working three part-time teaching jobs, and began working with a new school in January 2011. Mid-February, I was sitting in a shared office of the newest school, holding my required office hour after class, bored. No papers to grade, no colleagues to talk to, no book to read. Just me, a computer, and a chair.

  I checked my email. No new messages.

  I signed into my blog, but had no idea what to write about.

  Forty-five more minutes to sit. I was so bored. Then I remembered Allison’s comment about sending her father an email. I was bored, curious, and had a computer in front of me.

  I was surprised to discover Allison hadn’t changed the password to the account we had created together when she was younger. I was naïve to think she still only had the one Internet account.

  Nothing new in her mailbox. Sadly, it didn’t surprise me. Frank had always been solipsistic.

  Or, did Allison really dig into him with claws this time? Waffling between not wanting to violate Allison’s privacy by reading emails she exchanged with her father, but worrying about the lies she might be telling him, I opened the “Sent” box.