Solo

move. My mother couldn’t get her in the car to take her to the vet; she could only manage to clean her up as she lay outside. The vet suggested my mother give her some potent painkillers, strong enough to allow Charlotte to slip away in her sleep. Marcus and I hugged our dog and cried, saying good-bye. My mother got the painkillers down Charlotte’s throat, and we had left her alone to fall asleep.
But the painkillers weren’t working. She was moaning and yelping, alone and scared. Outside in the dark night, I crawled onto her blanket under a tree and lay down beside her, inhaling her familiar musty scent. “Good girl, Charlotte,” I whispered. “You’re a good girl.”
I kept my arm around her and we breathed together. She stopped whimpering. We both fell asleep.
Hours later, my mother came out and found me in Charlotte’s bed. She made me go back up to my room and get into my own bed.
The next morning, when I woke up, Charlotte wasn’t there. Glenn had disposed of her body. The big dog that had played with me and my father in the yard of the smiley-face house was dead. One more part of my family was gone. I felt like whimpering and howling, but at least I could take comfort in knowing I had eased her pain in her final hours. Many years later, when I was an adult, I found out that Charlotte had not died in her sleep. The painkillers had never taken hold. Glenn had finally taken his gun and shot Charlotte in the head.
When I learned that, I burst into tears. My poor sweet dog.
II.
My mother and Glenn met while boating on the Columbia River. They were both river enthusiasts, both Richland natives, both Hanford employees. I’m sure my mom—after the chaos of life with my father—was attracted to Glenn’s steady, authoritative personality.
They were married on the Columbia River on a beautiful March day in 1989. I was wearing a polka-dot dress that matched the one worn by my new stepsister, Connie. She was Glenn’s daughter from his first marriage, three years older than me. Two boats were tethered together, bobbing on the current. The wedding party—including Connie, Marcus, and me—walked from the bow of one to the other, where the marriage was performed. Other boats pulled up alongside, and the occupants cheered and clapped for the newlyweds. I stood rocking gently on the calm water, proud and happy to be part of the ceremony.
But the calm didn’t make it ashore. Glenn inherited two angry, traumatized stepchildren, who didn’t have boundaries. He tried to instill order—I know now he was trying to do the right thing, but Marcus and I weren’t interested in a new father, or new rules. And we didn’t have a vote in the matter. Glenn was a no-nonsense man—six foot six, more than three hundred pounds, with a voice as rumbly as the truck engines he worked on. He could usually be found in the garage, dressed in Carhartt coveralls, cleaning guns or sharpening knives with his buddies. He had a fondness for racing dirt bikes and speedboats and hunting deer. His presence filled up the split-level house on Hoxie. He barked orders at Marcus and me, made up rules, occasionally even tried to spank us. We had never been treated like that. Before Glenn came along, we had been free to do what we pleased, latchkey kids dependent only on each other, with a mother constantly working to support us. Now we had more order, more stability, but tension and anger pulsed through our home.
When my mother first started dating Glenn, my father was still living in Richland. He mocked Glenn and said mean things about his stoic personality, his size, his intellect. Marcus and I happily mimicked his disdain. When Glenn arrived, our opportunities to spend time with our father became more and more restricted and our mother less and less willing to leave us in his care. We didn’t understand that my father was creating the situation by having nowhere to live and becoming increasingly unpredictable: we could only see that since Glenn had entered our lives things had changed.
My father kidnapped us four months after the wedding. To Marcus and me, it wasn’t a crime. We viewed it as a desperate attempt by a loving father to connect with his children, who were living with another man.
Not every interaction with Glenn was a fight. He took me to hunter safety lessons, where I learned how to shoot a gun, clean a duck, build a blind. We went boating up to the sand dunes and inner-tubing on the river. I did my homework in the living room sitting next to him. We had family dinners in the kitchen—my mom’s tacos were everyone’s favorite. Glenn bought Marcus his first hunting dog, Hank. One day, Glenn took me to get Rex, a yellow lab that was being given away by a hunter because he wasn’t a good hunting dog—he was too goofy and uncoordinated. He quickly became my new best friend.
But after his arrest in Seattle, my father dropped out of our lives. He simply vanished, leaving behind a gaping hole.
Our resentment of Glenn quickly filled the void.
III.
My best friend, Cheryl, and I braced against my bedroom door, pushing as hard as we could, trying to keep Marcus out. He was pounding and screaming on the other side. I’m not sure what he was furious about, but Marcus was frequently mad. He wanted to hurt us or at least scare us, and we were desperate—panicked, really—to keep him out.
Marcus tried to get us to back off. Through the crack underneath the door, he poked sharp arrows, trying to pierce whatever body part we had wedged against the door—our butts, our feet.
When this storm passed and Cheryl and I tried to leave the house, the situation wasn’t any safer. My room was at the end of the hall, and to escape we had