Chapter 18

Decades after her father left home, it would occur to Shelley that the genesis of her unease preceded his disappearance. In fact, it preceded her birth. “When someone’s pregnant with a baby,” she reflected decades later, “and they don’t want that baby, that person develops knowing they’re not wanted.”

As a girl of ten, however, Shelley had yet to consider her fetal self, or even the alcoholism that in 1980 had cast her father, Bill, from her Houston home. She did, though, have a pair of realizations. She wished one day to find a partner who would stay. And she would be a secretary. A secretary lived a steady life. And Shelley desired to live as steadily as possible.

Shelley sought out surrogates for her missing father—an old neighbor named J. C., whom she called Papa, and an uncle named Johnny, a fireman and Sunday school teacher who, alongside his wife, Carol, was as steady and reliable as his brother Billy was not. Johnny and Carol instructed Shelley on the ways of a good Baptist. Says Shelley: “Everything I learned about God and church and Jesus, I learned from them.”

Scripture was everything for Shelley’s aunt and uncle, above all John 3:16, which promised eternal life to all who believed in Jesus. Shelley believed. She believed in her uncle, too. But some cavities cannot be filled. And all through eighth grade, Shelley wondered about her biological family—her birth mother and older sisters.

Mother Ruth offered no answers. She knew nothing of Norma or her daughters. And she told Shelley little of her past with Billy. Only when Shelley happened at age fourteen upon a hidden marriage certificate did Ruth confess that she’d deserted one husband for another. Secrets abounded.

That same year, in 1984, Billy got back in touch with Ruth and asked to see their daughter. Ruth demurred. She believed her ex an irredeemable drunk. To be certain that he never came calling, she quickly moved with their daughter almost two thousand miles northwest, to the third floor of a concrete building in Burien, a town outside Seattle where Ruth’s sister lived with her husband.

The town “was so not Texas,” says Shelley; its rains and people left her cold. After a lonely summer, the new girl at Highline High was unhappy, teased for her Texas accent, hard-pressed to find a subject she liked outside of French.

Shelley had blue eyes and a heart-shaped face. She was shy and slight; she would graduate high school at 98 pounds. Still, she weathered ninth grade, shedding her accent and taking on friends. The next year, she had a boyfriend, a muscled classmate named Seth who was popular and blond and liked to wear camouflage. He was also adopted.

Shelley had had her first kiss at twelve with a boy named Kevin, who told her she needed practice. Shelley practiced with Seth a lot—at home, at the movies, in the bus station parking lot where she watched him skateboard. The boy gave her a necklace.

Shelley was happy. No longer shy, she liked attention and got it. “I could rock a pair of Jordache,” she says. She had her crushes, too, John Stamos among them, Shelley hurrying home daily from school to take in episodes of General Hospital. But then, life changed.

Shelley was fifteen when she noticed that her hands had begun to shake. She could make them still by eating. But the tremor would return. She shook when she felt anxious, and she felt anxious, she says, around “everything.” More, she was soon depressed, too—“sleepy and sad,” she says. But she confided in no one, not her boyfriend and not her mother. She simply continued on, steady, content to watch her soap and her skateboarding beau, to eat when her hands shook, to seek out secretaries on vocation day at school, to just say no to drugs and alcohol and cigarettes and hooky and sex, save the last with Seth.

That relationship was subject to bouts of jealousy. Come her senior year, Shelley was single, left to look again for a man who would never leave, someone like her friend Todd.

Todd lived in Shelley’s apartment complex, with his father and stepmom and one of his sisters. He was a beanpole—six-plus feet and 140 pounds. He ran track and would soon run far from Burien, traveling the world as a marine. But beside Shelley, he lingered, walking with her to Pizza Hut or the library, happy to pass the time with his friend, to talk of their relationships and of their fathers who drank.

Billy remained in touch; he phoned Shelley every so often to tell the youngest of his seven children that he missed her. But such hellos were brief and rare. And when Shelley thought back to Texas, to the bluebonnets that sprouted in spring, it was less her father she missed than her Papa J. C., the neighbor turned grandfather who phoned and wrote and footed the down payment on her Datsun when she and her mother moved to the nearby town of Kent. Family was commitment, not blood.

In 1988, Shelley graduated from Highline High. She was about to start secretarial school when her cousins told her another family secret: Ruth had been unable to conceive. The daughter she’d adopted told her mother that she wished to know, once and for all, the full truth of her life. Only then, said Shelley, would she not be “blindsided.”

That October, Shelley’s friend Todd returned home from boot camp. Between his exertions—and the double portions he was made to eat—he had found himself thinking of Shelley. “She was the one I was always missing,” he says. “She was kind of my safe space.” Now, before flying off to military police school in San Antonio, he phoned her. “I told her that I was going to marry her,” he says. It was less a proposal than a prognostication; he had no ring. Shelley said okay.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1980, Norma’s middle child, Jennifer, spent six weeks in Houston. Her parents had dispatched her to her older sister in the desperate hope that a move might do what Ritalin and tutoring and counseling had not—help her survive those pre-teen riptides that had nearly drowned her earlier that spring. But back home in Richardson, Jennifer turned thirteen and junior high again dragged her under. “I started drinking,” recalls Jennifer, “hiding from my parents.”

Jennifer remained uncertain about her sexuality. Questioning who she was, she wondered more and more about the birth and adoption records her father had told her he’d filed away. Still, Jennifer told her father that she wished to wait seven years to read them. At twenty-one, she said, she’d be “mature enough to deal with whoever my mother and father were.”

In 1983, Jennifer started tenth grade at a private school with classes and teams that suited her; she took oceanography and ran track. But she knew no one who identified as gay. And when, at sixteen, she had sex with a girl at school, it was “scary,” she says. Soon after, Jennifer erupted, brawling with girls and sleeping with boys. She got suspended and her mother, Donna, cried. “My mom,” says Jennifer, “thought I totally lost my mind.”

Jennifer began to wonder anew about her birth mother. She asked her parents to see her adoption records. But she reconsidered, and retreated into church and work, the salad bar at a nearby Albertson’s that she now managed. Work offered up a measure of self-worth, and she switched to a high school where students could hold jobs in the afternoon. She began helping a respiratory therapist tend to her equipment and treatments. Life improved.

Jennifer soon had a boyfriend, a blue-eyed blue-collar weightlifter one grade above named Ricky. His mother worked at a telephone company, his father at a cardboard factory. Ricky worked at an auto body shop, and Jennifer admired that he had restored by hand his own car, a 1971 Caprice Classic. The couple had been together two years when Jennifer painted her first name under its hood. Soon after, Ricky offered her his last.

Jennifer had her concerns. Ricky had gotten angry when once she thought she was pregnant. She had never felt safe enough to confide in him her feelings for women. Still, Jennifer had begun to mend beside Ricky. She had stopped using drugs and sleeping around. And in the spring of 1987, one year after graduating high school, she put on a wedding dress, pink lace offsetting her tan skin.

Nineteen years old, Jennifer was happy to be a wife, and happy cleaning cars at an auto body shop. But home with Ricky in their wooden ranch house in the town of Oak Cliff, the couple was coming apart. They had begun to drink together a few nights a week, and fights followed, Jennifer angry that Ricky spent less time with her than with his mother and his car. Ricky retreated further; he ate his meals at his parents’ house and drove off in his Chevy at all hours. He and Jennifer were both drunk the night she left him; she drove the thirty minutes from Oak Cliff to Bedford and moved in, as years before, with her sister.

Jennifer began tending bar at a pool hall south of Dallas called Speeds. She learned on the job and earned more than a thousand dollars a week in tips. The bar also offered her a tap with no bottom, and half her nights, Jennifer drove home drunk. “I was nothing but a lush,” she says.

Jennifer was at the bar when she met a man named James, a military veteran out of work. They began to sleep together. Ricky got word of their relationship and quickly reconciled with Jennifer. But Jennifer continued to sleep with James even after she moved back in with Ricky. Ricky then came upon the couple speaking in his living room, and he punched his wife—“cold-cocked me in the jaw,” says Jennifer. She phoned the police and returned to her sister.

The couple was not yet divorced when, in 1988, Jennifer began dating another James, a hotheaded policeman from Wilmer, just south of Dallas. The couple drank together, and a woozy James would tell of his family, of an absent father and a mother gone crazy after causing a car crash that killed her daughter—a sister James had barely known.

Jennifer, meantime, learned from her sister that her birth mother had had two other children. Jennifer, said Cindy, was the middle of three. Jennifer was stunned; she had two more siblings! But Cindy said they had no idea who they were.

In the fall of 1988, Jennifer turned twenty-one, and at last asked her father for her adoption records. She hoped they might lead not only to her birth mother but to her sisters, too. Her father, though, had no records; he did not say why he’d led her to believe he did. Jennifer said nothing.

A DECADE BEFORE, in 1979, Jennifer’s unknown older sister Melissa told herself that she would be different. Unlike her mother, Norma, and grandmother, Mary, she wouldn’t drink or sleep around. She would have a family. It would be calm and intact. She would spend nights at home talking over dinner with a husband and children.

Melissa was fifteen. Sex with her boyfriend had just assured her that, unlike her mother, she was not gay. And so, she remained with David, the blond boy who lived two blocks down the dirt road from the trailer she shared with her grandmother.

Melissa was often alone in that trailer. Mary had divorced Raymond and taken up with a man named Tex, the owner of a bar called the Yellow Rose. The couple liked to drink. Mary was drunk when one night she fell off a porch and broke her ankle, drunk when another night she got into a fight with a pool cue. Melissa had to pick her grandmother up from jail in the big brown family Plymouth.

In 1980, Norma’s brother Jimmy moved in with Melissa and Mary. He was thirty-five. And he was tormented. The schizophrenic impulses that had flared in him since adolescence now convulsed his every day. Jimmy was apt to shout aloud racial slurs, says Melissa, or leave the house naked or steal some little thing. Melissa would then find her uncle and pay for whatever magazine or candy he had taken and coax him into the Plymouth for a ride back to the trailer. But sometimes, Jimmy was less pitiable than dangerous; he lit fires in the kitchen and set knives under his bed and forced open closed doors. Melissa needed to escape. And so, fifteen years old, she went down the road to live with David. Says Melissa: “There was a mom and a dad there.”

David’s mother and stepfather were raising their three kids with love. And having long been passed among the members of a broken family, Melissa took refuge in one that was whole. She ate meat and potatoes at their table, and cut through the plains on a motorized bike with their son, and talked life through with their daughter Tammy, her best friend. But as the months passed, Melissa longed for her missing sisters—the two phantoms younger than she. Every girl on every street was a possible relation. Melissa began to approach strangers. “Where are you from?” she would ask. “Wisconsin? Oh.” She ached to be one of three, and she looked wistfully at every large family she would happen upon at a local water park or cafeteria.

Melissa was self-sufficient; at age eleven, she’d fashioned dolls out of yarn and thread and zippers and buttons after Norma had withheld her belongings. Now sixteen, she ended her relationship with David when he began to drink and smoke. “Reminded me of Norma,” she says.

But Melissa could not return home, and remained beside her ex two more years until she moved into an apartment of her own, working between classes at a bank and a skating rink to pay the rent. She was eager to be gone from Pampa. And in 1984, one month after graduating from Pampa High, she packed up her bed and her 45s and her pool cue and moved an hour southwest, starting college in Amarillo that same summer.

Melissa was busy. She had four classes, three jobs, two roommates and a boyfriend named Rick. She had little time to study, but it was all good; she was nineteen and free. When she withdrew from a class and got two C’s and a D, that was okay too. She dropped out of college and enrolled in beauty school.

Beauty had long drawn Melissa. She took note of hair and nails and skin the way Mary and Norma minded breasts. And she prettied her own with purple dye and red polish and a fake tan. Men liked her—her considerateness and her laugh and her tight Levi’s, too. She liked them back.

Melissa, though, was guarded. She’d seen her mother and grandmother run through dozens of partners. “Watching all the sex stuff,” she says, “I should have been a slut.” But she wasn’t. Twenty years old, she had had sex with just three men—her boyfriends David, Rick and Dee. She remained in search not of mere love but faithfulness, that which she had seen most in Norma’s unshakeable partner. Says Melissa: “I always wanted a man like Connie.”

Melissa was out with her boyfriend when a well-built man with feathered hair, she says, called out to her: “Why don’t you leave that little pipsqueak and go out with me?” Outmatched, boyfriend Rick was quiet. Flush with liqueur punch, Melissa was charmed. She and the man went to a movie.

His name was Kerry. He worked in concrete but was midway through a degree in social work. He was brash, disarming. By the time Melissa got her cosmetology license and a job at a mall cutting hair and waxing eyebrows, he was her boyfriend. At the end of every long day, Kerry drew her a bath.

Melissa was in love. But she had her doubts. Kerry had many female friends. “He was always at someone’s house,” she says. A few months into their relationship, Melissa caught him cheating. Still, she did not leave—not even when Kerry began to yell and hit her, too.

Melissa told herself that her boyfriend was only violent when drunk. He would apologize when sober. It comforted Melissa further that Kerry, who was learning to tend to families scarred by neglect and abuse, knew that what he did was wrong. Besides, Melissa fought back with her teeth and nails; the combat left her bruised but excited. Says Melissa: “It raised my endorphins.”

Six months after they met, Kerry lowered to one knee and presented her a ring inside a box inside a box inside a box. The couple married in March, Melissa Sandefur become Melissa Mills, a bride in a white sequined dress with train and veil.

Among the guests at their small Amarillo church was the mother of the bride. Norma had barely seen Melissa in years, and would “freak out,” says Melissa, if she met one of her boyfriends. (Upon meeting Kerry, Norma had locked herself in a bathroom.) It was thus no surprise when Norma got high and drunk at the wedding, and had a coughing fit, too, one hack breaking a rib, sending her to a hospital and disrupting the ceremony. Melissa seethed. “Everything Norma stood for,” she says, “I didn’t want to be.”

Most upsetting to Melissa was Norma’s rejection of motherhood. And yet, she took pride in her mother’s plaintiffship. Melissa believed in Roe.

Melissa, however, could not imagine ending a pregnancy. Even preventing a pregnancy made her uncomfortable; it seemed to her scarcely different than relinquishing a child. “Norma gave everybody up,” says Melissa. “I didn’t want to be that way.” Melissa told Kerry that they would therefore rely on rhythm. Jordan was born the following fall, mother and father welcoming her into the old trailer Mary had gifted them.

Melissa had long feared that she might resemble Norma in motherhood. But she loved being a mother and loved her little girl, introducing her to dolls and ducks and Clifford the Big Red Dog. She also loved her husband.

Kerry had been faithful since the wedding, and was no longer violent. He’d begun working with children at a Christian halfway house. And he let Melissa know that he himself had been abused, raped and beaten as a boy by a man seeing his mother. He had then been sent at age ten to a Christian school for at-risk boys. Four years later, he’d had sex with one of his teachers.

It was hard not to wonder what life at that Christian school had done to Kerry. Still, Melissa believed more in the determinative power of genes than experience. She had always feared becoming Norma, and she now saw a piece of Norma in her growing daughter; Jordan was just a wee girl when she began to make clear that she wished to dress like a boy. Melissa didn’t mind. She had the intact family she’d craved all her life.

Still, Melissa thought often of who was missing from it. When she saw Norma, she would ask her about her sisters. But, recalls Melissa, Norma would say, “I don’t know nothing.” And she didn’t.

In the spring of 1989, however, it occurred to Norma that there might be advantage in finding the teenager she had come to call the Roe baby. Her celebrity ascendant, Norma partnered with an investigator to find her.