Tarnished Dreams Read online

  There it was, another Allison story. She told her father she was cutting, drinking, doing drugs. She, Tommy, and I were always fighting.

  No wonder Frank hasn’t replied. He’s probably waiting to pounce on me.

  Before signing out of her email account, I noticed a number of other email addresses in her “Sent” box. I also noticed the paperclip icon next to these addresses, which meant Allison sent attachments.

  I opened the first one, and a picture box popped up. The picture box was approximately half an inch tall and half an inch wide, so it was very hard to see the image. I saw enough, though, to recognize Allison’s face in the picture. Allison had sent this person a picture of herself.

  Allison had sent several guys the same picture of herself.

  I was angry, having worked so hard to keep my children’s pictures off the Internet. I’d seen so many programs and public service announcements on TV over the years, warning viewers about online pedophiles, that I’d never even granted schools permission to use my children’s pictures in online venues once schools began advertising that way. I was angry because Allison han’t seemed to learn from her mistakes. (I would later discover Allison has numerous social networking sites.)

  Hoping to get rid of these guys, I decided to forward the emails to my own email account. I sent emails warning the guys about the risks of contacting my underage daughter again from my own email account. But not all of the guys received only the profile picture; one guy received four pictures.

  The thumbnails of the photographs were small and grainy. I couldn’t quite see what Allison was wearing in two of the pictures.

  I looked closer.

  My stomach turned.

  The bile rose up to my throat.

  My hand shook so badly it took an extra second or two to get the email message to close.

  I sat back; I tried to slow the racing of my heart through deep, steady breaths.

  Was Allison topless in the one picture?

  Why would my beautiful, quiet, little eleventh-grader send topless photos of herself to some guy?

  The drive home was horrible. I couldn’t figure out what to say to Allison when I picked her up from school—and I didn’t want to have the conversation in front of Tommy.

  I was sick to my stomach every time I thought about what Allison had done.

  I never figured out how to talk to Allison about the emails before she announced her desire to get the mail from the mailbox at the end of our driveway. Daniel, her boyfriend of nine months, had apparently mailed her something special, and she wanted to check the mailbox at the end of our driveway every day until she got it. Rather than fight, I told Allison she could. What Allison didn’t know was I screened the mail first. Every day, for a week, I swung by the house during the day, removed the mail from the mailbox, flipped through the pile to look at both the sender and recipient information, then put the pile back in the mailbox for Allison to take out later.

  I forgot about the arrangement by the second week, though, and removed the entire stack from the mailbox on Monday.

  Flipping through the stack of mail at a stoplight, I spotted an envelope that made my heart skip a beat. It was a plain white, four-by-nine-inch envelope, addressed to Allison—but I didn’t recognize the name in the return address. It was coming from someplace in California. Was this from the guy she emailed the four pictures?

  As I drove back to work, the wheels in my brain turned.

  Allison was up to something again, and I was nervous. I couldn’t help but imagine what the envelope contained, and it made me sick to my stomach.

  I began thinking about possible courses of action, hoping to keep Allison safe:

  #1) Text Allison and ask her what the hell she was doing. I didn’t like to text her during school, though, and this would take too many rounds of question-and-answer texts to get anywhere. I also didn’t want to upset her too much because she had a choir concert that night. Allison complained about migraines when she got too stressed; a migraine would make it difficult to sing in the choir concert; choir concerts were school-graded activities.

  #2) Pull out my pen, write “Return to Sender” across the front of the envelope, drive it over to the post office, and deposit it in the outgoing mail slot. But if I did that, wouldn’t the sender just call/text /email Allison and ask what happened? I wanted the contact with him to end, not just have her mad at me and potentially run away to meet him like she had when she was fifteen.

  #3) Rip the envelope open and see what is inside. My gut told me I didn’t want to see what was inside the envelope, though. And after all of the years spent watching police dramas on television, I was afraid to open it because that action might break whatever chain of forensic evidence the police would need if they investigated who sent Allison the envelope—and why.

  When the ten-year-old girl in my neighborhood cut her forehead on the brick wall of another neighbor’s house while several of us were playing a game with an empty cardboard refrigerator box, I calmly scooped the girl up in my arms, told another one of the kids to run ahead to notify her parents, and carried her down the block to her home.

  When the store lights of the fabric store I worked for went out in 1984, I calmly walked to the back of the store, opened the stock room, saw it was on fire, and quietly told customers to leave the store.

  When the tornado sirens went off in the summer of 1996, and I had to transport the children to the basement by myself—Frank was working—I calmly woke them up, got one in each arm, and carried them down the stairs. When the lights went out, and we listened to the trees falling all around us, I sang “Amazing Grace” as loud as I could.

  But when I saw the envelope addressed to Allison, with a stranger’s name in the return address corner, I realized I needed to talk with someone. I needed someone else to calmly tell me what to do.

  I drove over to church, to talk with my pastor.

  “What are you most scared of?” the pastor asked. “Are you scared for you? For Allison? But you really have to turn that envelope in.”

  I left the church, and got into the car. Ironically, Tommy sent me a text message at that very moment: he wanted to stay after school for a meeting. I thanked God for His clear signal, picked Allison up from the high school, and drove to the police station. During the ten-minute drive, I told Allison about the envelope’s arrival.

  I remember Allison quietly crying when I told her we were going to the police station—but I don’t remember her resisting. No bargaining, no explanations of who the envelope’s sender was, no comment about what might be in the envelope. Just quiet tears running down Allison’s face as I turned the car off in the parking lot, followed by a request to stay in the car long enough so she could re-apply her mascara, eyeliner, and lip gloss before going into the police station.

  Walking into the station again was nerve-wracking. Too many memories from 2009 flooded my brain, but I kept reminding myself how well that turned out.

  First I had to fill out a sheet of paper saying why we were there. My hands shook while I filled out the five-and-one-half by eight-and-one-half-inch piece of paper, and I forced myself to look the clerk in the eye when I slid the paper back through the slot under the bullet-proof glass between us.

  A young officer came into the lobby and led us to an interior interview room to talk. Consulting the piece of paper I filled out, he asked me, then Allison, a few questions to clarify what I had written on the paper. As we talked, he added notes to the paper. When Allison finished, he excused himself.

  The young officer returned a minute or so later, followed by a plain-clothes Investigator.

  The investigator introduced himself, shook hands with me, and sat in the chair directly across the table from Allison. The young officer stood quietly between the investigator and the door leading into the hall.

  All
ison told her story again. When she finished, the investiga­tor carefully tore off an edge of the envelope, pushed gently on the top and bottom of the envelope to create an opening, and looked inside. Then he turned the envelope so the opening faced the table-top, and the contents slid out.

  Four sets of eyes looked at the folded white piece of paper on the table.

  Four sets of eyes watched the investigator push the folded piece of paper with his pen.

  Four sets of eyes witnessed the flash of green as the investigator gently pushed the white piece of paper open with the back of his pen.

  The investigator sat back in his chair, his eyebrows flicked upwards, and his head turned so he could exchange a look with the young officer standing to his right in the small interview room.

  After what felt like an eternity, the investigator opened the white piece of paper fully. It contained no markings of any kind—but nestled inside I saw folded American dollar bills.

  I don’t know the exact amount, but after a moment, the investigator picked the money up, and started unfolding it. Twenty dollar bills—three, perhaps four, from what I saw.

  Now the investigator’s questioning took on an edge.

  Q: Why would this man be sending you money, Allison?

  A: He always sends me stuff after I send him pictures.

  Q: Did he ask for the pictures?

  A: Yes.

  Q: How many have you sent him?

  A: I don’t remember.

  Q: And how many pictures has he sent you?

  A: A lot.

  Q: Does he know how old you are?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Do you know how old he is?

  A: I think he’s in his twenties. Maybe twenty-four? I don’t remember.

  I was re-living the nightmare of 2009—but this policeman wasn’t as nice as Officer Richards had been.

  Q: What else has he sent you?

  A: A gift card, and that box, Mom.

  That box. The mystery box that came in the mail in May 2010.

  I spotted the large white box between the screen door and front door when we pulled into the driveway after school, but Allison jumped out of the car as soon as I pulled the car into the garage. Before I had time to turn the car’s engine off, Allison was in the house.

  The house was quiet when I entered. Too quiet. “Allison, where are you?”

  Silence.

  I walked over to the front door, opened it, but the box was gone. “Allison?”

  Silence.

  I walked to my bedroom, to set my things down, then pro­ceeded down the stairs to Allison’s room. Before I got halfway down the stairs, though, Allison appeared at the bottom of the stairs, smiling, and a bit out of breath.

  “Where’s the box?” I asked.

  “Oh, it was for me,” she said.

  “Oh? What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Who is it from?”

  I expected Allison to say it was from her father, but her “I don’t know” response made me uncomfortable.

  “Let me see it.”

  “It’s for me, Mom!”

  “Why can’t I just see it, dear?”

  “Because it’s for me!” Allison yelled, then turned on her heels and ran to her bedroom. When she slammed the door shut in my face, I knew there was a real problem with the box.

  The next several hours passed with my yelling at Allison to unlock either the bedroom or bathroom door and show me the dumb box, Allison screaming about the box being for her which meant it was none of my business, and extended periods of silence while we waited each other out.

  Finally, Allison threw an empty white post office box up the stairs. I walked down to ask her what had been inside the box, and she coquettishly produced an empty box with illustrations of vibrators on the outside—feeding me a wild story about how her friend Erin sent the box to our house. “She needs to replace her mom’s vibrator, because she accidentally threw it away, and her mom would totally freak out if she knew.”

  Q: Whose computer have you been using to send these pictures?

  A: Different computers. My friend’s, mostly.

  Q: Well, we’re going to need the name of that friend, because we need the computer. Those pictures are stored on the computer’s hard-drive, and we need to get them off. It’s a crime to have those kinds of pictures because you are underage. What’s the name of the friend whose computer you have been using?

  The way Allison fished around for a name, I realized she was trying to protect someone. A little too late, I figured out who she was trying to protect. “Allison, have you been doing this on my work computer?”

  “Yes, Mom. I’m really sorry, but it’s the only computer that would work. The computer at the library won’t let me download pictures from my digital camera, and . . .”

  My work computer. In addition to whatever my daughter was doing to herself, she could have gotten me fired, too. What if I had accidentally opened the wrong file while teaching a class? The way the classrooms are set up, my students see the images on the screen in the front of the classroom before I do.

  “Ma’am, we’re going to need that computer.”

  I wanted to die. I wanted to kill Allison. I wanted to wake up from the nightmare I was suddenly living.

  The young officer followed Allison and me in our car as we first drove over to the high school to pick up Tommy, then to our house—to get my work computer. I walked into the house, got the laptop, and brought it out to the policeman in my driveway. I provided the passwords. I gave him the cord to plug the computer into the wall outlet. I signed the form documenting the confiscation of the aforementioned property. Then the officer told me he had to take my daughter as well.

  “What! She has a choir concert tonight! My mother is coming!” I couldn’t understand why he wanted to take Allison. We volunteered the information in the first place, and then cooperated with everything else asked of us! Why did the police have to take Allison as well? In the interview room back at the station, the investigator told Allison she wasn’t in trouble. Why was the young police officer taking it all back? I wanted to scream. I wanted to push him back towards his police car, run into the house, and slam the door in his face. I wanted to keep Allison safe—with me.

  I’m a bright, law-abiding woman, though, and I knew I couldn’t do any of those things. I had to remain calm, for Allison’s sake. I had to cooperate and stay focused, for Tommy’s sake. I had to let Allison’s game play itself out.

  When I walked back into the house, I watched Allison’s face go from mild excitement (“Do we get to go to Burger King now?”), to questioning, to anxious; the officer had followed me into the house.

  I walked over to Allison, wrapped her in a tight, loving hug. I tried to explain. “I’m so sorry, dear . . .” was all I could get out before she started screaming—and then slumped from my arms to the kitchen floor.

  Thankfully, the police officer stood quietly in our kitchen, leaning against the kitchen counter strip that runs in front of the sink, while Allison calmed down.

  “Everything will be all right,” I kept repeating over and over. “God will take care of us, sweetie, just like He took care of us before.”

  “I love you, Mommy,” Allison said as we hugged in the kitchen before she left.

  “I love you too, sweetie. We’ll get through this. You’ll be fine.”

  But, how will we get through this? How will we be fine?

  Once again, my lovely daughter was going into strange places without me. She was taking us places no parent ever wanted to see their child, places where I couldn’t protect her.

  Had I ever been successful in my efforts to protect her?

  Where did I go wrong, as a parent?

>   Allison quietly followed the police officer from our house to his squad car and dutifully got into the back seat. I stood in the open garage until the police car was out of sight. Then I walked back into the house, and tried to pick up the pieces of my life once again.

  My mother and I sat through the choir concert, not talking. I tried to enjoy it, for Tommy’s sake (he was in the Freshman choir), but nearly cried when Allison’s choir group walked onto the stage.

  For once, I was glad I wasn’t friends with any of the other parents. It freed me from having to explain Allison’s absence.

  At the same time, I wished I had someone to talk to. I wished I had someone who could hold me, someone who could tell me it wasn’t my fault; someone who would love me without judging me.

  A piece of me died that night—and I silently carried the pain.

  2. Juvy

  Allison was removed from our home sometime between four and five the afternoon of February 28, 2011. The officer took her from our house, drove directly to the juvenile facility in town (a ten-minute drive), and walked Allison in.

  By ten-fifteen at night, I had endured the choir concert in smoldering silence, and just wanted Tommy and my mother to go to sleep so I could pace the house in silent darkness. Tommy was too ramped up with adrenaline, though, and headed downstairs to play a song on the piano for his grandmother. My mother got up from my spot at the dining room table, with the intention of getting ready for bed, when the phone rang. I saw the detention center’s name appear on the caller ID on the home phone, and immediately wanted to silence the phone. My mother was standing two feet away from me. Had she seen the name on the caller ID as well?

  I took a deep breath, picked up the phone, and said, “Hello?”

  “Hi. I just want to let you know your daughter is here, and will be assessed . . .” the voice on the line began.