If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood(21)

The way the kids saw it, the nudity was more about power than sexuality. Sami came to see the nudity as her mother’s way of humiliating her victims, and also to keep them from running away. Forced nudity was one component of Shelly’s bizarre and demeaning methodology of stripping away a person’s identity.

And their ability to leave.





CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It was winter, and the sun had already dropped behind the firs that shrouded the Louderback House on all sides. Icicles hung from eaves overloaded with leaves and fir needles. Snow crunched underfoot. The air had been heavy around the house since Nikki and Shane had gotten home from school. It was almost always an ambush with Shelly, who had been sitting around eating Oh Henry! bars, watching TV, and ruminating on a new plan to make the kids pay for one thing or another.

That something was going to happen was palpable, like some kind of strange energy in the atmosphere that grabbed the kids by their necks.

“Take your clothes off! Now!” Shelly screamed.

Not that.

Not again.

Why?

Sometimes Nikki and Shane fought her castigations. A lot of good that did. It just made Shelly angrier, and angering Shelly, with her red face and bulging eyes, was like daring a monster to annihilate its victim. In most cases, they simply acquiesced. Just as Nikki could almost never recall exactly what she’d done to make her mother so angry, she could never figure out why she and her cousin didn’t fully resist.

“There had to be a reason for it,” she said, struggling later to pin down a specific reason why she and Shane were singled out that day. “I honestly just don’t remember what it was.”

They peeled off their clothes, thinking they’d be forced to wallow together, but Dave wasn’t home at the moment. He was almost always the commander of the wallowing, standing in the dark, running the hose and reinforcing his wife’s very specific orders. This would be a new punishment, and neither knew exactly what it could entail. Shelly told Nikki and Shane to go to a spot on the hill behind the house and sit there with their backs to each other.

“You’ll stay here until I say you are done.”

Then she went back inside the house to watch TV with Sami.

Shane shuddered, freezing his ass off. “I’m tired of this shit, Nikki,” he said.

Nikki, naked and half-frozen, agreed. “I am too.”

Puffs of warm breath drifted from Shane’s mouth. “I want out of here.”

“I do too,” Nikki said.

They kept their eyes fixed on the house, wondering if Shelly would emerge with the hose and douse them with water for good measure.

It would be like her to do that.

Or maybe even have Sami do it. Sami was the chosen one, the prison-camp favorite who walked between both worlds, telling on the others to curry favor.

And to survive.

There were times when Nikki and Shane could laugh about what Shelly did to them, but that frozen day on the hill behind the house wasn’t one of them.

“This is completely fucked up,” Shane said. “I really hate your mom.”

“I do too.”

It wasn’t that Nikki was blindly agreeing with Shane. She really did hate her mother. Part of her believed, however, that despite how Shelly treated them, she was better than having no mother at all. Shane didn’t have any other family. Didn’t he see that this was better than nothing?

Shelly leaned over the porch railing a few times to observe while the teens shivered back to back. Neither spoke. Talking didn’t distract Shelly; it only made her tighten the screws on whatever discipline she was meting out.

“She’s crazy,” Shane said when Shelly went back into the house.

Nikki couldn’t argue against that. “Yeah,” she said, “I know.”

As they sat there, they played a favorite game: killing Mom. It wasn’t a real game, of course. It was merely a kind of revenge fantasy they allowed themselves to indulge in.

Like bath time. Her robe always half-open, Shelly would enlist Shane and Nikki to prepare a hot bath.

“Draw me a bath,” Shelly would demand whenever the mood struck her.

The kids would go into the bathroom and start to fill the tub. While Shane looked on, Nikki would add some bubble bath. Her mother didn’t have a favorite, just whatever was on sale. Lavender. Rose. Jasmine. She’d sit on the edge of the tub as a billowy mountain of suds formed, testing the water. The temperature had to be just right.

Hot, but not too hot.

Shane would watch the suds grow and smile.

“We should bring a radio in here,” he’d say.

Nikki always knew instantly what he was getting at. She’d look over and smile at him.

Shane would nod. “And throw it into the water when she gets in.”

“Good idea,” she’d say.

It was a joke, but not really. It was the kind of musing that tightened the bond between Nikki and Shane.

They’d stop talking when Shelly returned. She’d let her robe fall to the floor and climb into the tub. The fleeting fantasy of ending their torment with electrocution was gone. Despite all that she had done to them, they couldn’t hurt her.

It was completely dark when Shelly finally told Nikki and Shane to come inside from the hill and get warmed up.

“I hope you learned your lesson,” she said.