Excerpt of Shadow Heart by Pamela Taeuffer

“My dad’s an alcoholic, Alex,” I confided while she waited with me in the outfield bleachers at the Goliaths baseball stadium.

It was shortly after I had graduated from my sophomore year in high school that I came up with an idea to bring together two of my favorite things: Goliaths baseball and another after school activity in which I could participate, padding my resume for college.

I planned to study business marketing and wanted to do it at Stanford. From talking with my guidance counselor I knew I needed to be aggressive, somehow standing out from the thousands of students wanting to go there.

So I surveyed Goliath fans via social media, researched and gathered data that supported my idea, and put together my plan for a cheer team.

I proposed we sing and do gymnastics to carefully selected songs approved by management, which would also play over the public address system.

Cheering on a professional baseball field had never been done before. I knew if my plan was accepted, Stanford would follow. After reviewing and editing it more than a dozen times, I finally sent it off to Jose Vasquez, the Entertainment Marketing Manager with the Goliaths.

In December of my junior year I got the call that it was accepted.

Our cheer team consisted of six members: Colleen, who was also my best friend, Kathie, Lorraine, Marilyn, Patty, and me. All of us grew up together in the same neighborhood and had been friends since grade school. We kept our fingers crossed that this adventure would be our ticket to college.

Was I nervous about walking onto a professional baseball field and performing in front of forty thousand people? Hell yes. With every performance I fidgeted and had butterflies in my stomach. Like a “deer in the headlights,” is how we felt, our eyes wide open, afraid, nervous, and excited. Two women, Tara Summers and Alexandra Flowers, noticed, and immediately took us under their wings, especially me.

Tara was married to Matt Summers, a pitcher on the Goliaths. She was a small, petite, gentle soul with long, strawberry blonde hair. Her face was dotted with freckles and she generally wore jeans or loose flowing pants in earthy colors and materials like cotton and muslin.

Her very good friend, Alex, was engaged to Darrell Sweet, also a pitcher on the Goliaths, and she couldn’t have been more different. She was a tall woman with reddish brown hair who had such striking features that she’d been a model since high school. When she wore jeans, they were often paired with heels and a designer blouse or sweater.

Something just clicked between the three of us and we bonded immediately. It began with long talks in the bleachers, which led to requests made only of me to water their plants, or housesit when they were away, volunteering with them at their favorite charities, and then eventually, we began socializing together.

Our first performance was a Friday night in early April. It was usually cold for night games in San Francisco, until early autumn when “Indian Summer” came to the Bay Area, bringing calm breezes and warmer temperatures.

The Goliaths games generally sold out; they’d been competitive for the previous ten years, and their fan base was scattered throughout a one- hundred-mile radius.

And so, as thousands of people sat in their seats waiting for the game to begin, we performed the routines we’d rehearsed almost every day for four months. Each was two minutes long, and we took the field before the first, third, fifth and eighth innings.

I remembered sitting in the stands with my father at six, seven, and eight years old, all around the stadium, slurping up a hot fudge sundae or eating a pretzel. Actually being on the field, among the baseball men I’d cheered for while sitting next to him, was surreal.

Now it was our sixth game, and we waited behind the outfield fences for our first performance. The noises of the crowd surrounded us, and drifting by were the smells of hot dogs and popcorn.

I hadn’t gotten over my nervousness, and still, my stomach turned over. I was self-conscious and had anxiety from just about everything. It was a Saturday afternoon, as Alex waited with me, when I told her about my alcoholic father, and the battles for survival my sister and I faced daily.

To finally share the information with another adult, was such a relief; in doing so, I cemented the relationship with my two new women friends.

“This is an escape as much as a hope that Stanford will acknowledge me,” I said. “My dad and sister argue and fight all the time, and my mom is just, somewhere else. I wanna get out of there.”

“What about you?” Alex asked. “What’s your relationship like with your Dad?”

“I love him, but he’s made me . . .” I stumbled to find the word.

“Numb?” she asked knowingly.“Yeah,” I said.“I know, Sweetheart,” she said patting my back, “I know.”

How do you know?

When Tara joined us, Alex excused herself to check on my teammates.

“What’s your routine like tonight?” Tara asked. Both she and Alex were yell leaders in high school and working with cheer routines was second nature for them.

As I stood up, waving my hands in the air to demonstrate, the Goliaths were on the field taking batting practice, shagging balls, and doing their sprints and stretches.

“Looks like you guys have it down,” Tara said. “I’ll be watching to make sure I don’t see anything you need to work out. If I do, you can all come over to my house and we’ll review it.”

When I sat down, I noticed Ryan Tilton, who was a pitcher, the game closer, for the Goliaths, looking at me as he ran to catch fly balls and then throw them back to the infield.

Ryan’s six-foot, two-inch frame, athletic body, blue eyes, and golden brown hair were like a beacon, and I’d already noticed in just a few weeks, how people were naturally drawn to him.

The women were endless, dressed to attract a single man, but there was also a parade of others hoping for a piece of the good- looking, professional athlete he was.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Hey, what’s Ryan Tilton staring at anyway? He’s been looking over here off and on for the last half hour.”

“Don’t mess with that one,” Tara said. “He’s a wild boy.”

“Yeah, I gathered as much,” I said. “You know, almost everyone has come out to introduce themselves to us, but he’s one of a few that hasn’t.”

“He’s got a reputation along with his friend, Kevin Reynolds,” she said.

“I think Ryan has a steady. At least there’s a blonde woman named Jesse who hangs around him, but ‘steady’ is relative when it comes to that boy. You shouldn’t even think about a ball player.”

“No chance of that. I don’t even date,” I said laughing.I entered into my adult life innocent and extremely naïve about sex and boys. I was shut down and closed off, and afraid that having a boyfriend meant I’d get distracted and my grades would suffer. Ultimately I interpreted a boyfriend as a roadblock to Stanford and much too risky. Ever since I was a young girl I had marked the beginning of college on my calendar with a red pen and circled each day that passed in yellow.

I was stubborn and frustratingly slow to open up and let anyone inside my personal fortress. All my friends were sexually active, but I just wasn’t ready. Sex was a strange concept for me. I couldn’t understand my friends having it at fifteen and sixteen. Stay away from boys as long as possible was what I believed, especially since my sister had been raped at fourteen.

The day my sister’s life changed forever, I came home from school at the usual time. She was generally a few hours behind me, hanging back and talking with friends, having a soda or the occasional beer and doing the other things that occupied the lives of teenage girls. So when she was late, no one really gave it a second thought. That was until dinner came and went and she hadn’t called.

My father was drunk, of course, and without his sparring partner at the table, he ate dinner quietly. Maybe somewhere under his numbness, he knew, because without any words, he went up to bed and left my mother alone to handle it.

Our parents bought my sister a cell phone so they could reach her, and she them. But that day Jenise didn’t answer. By the way my mother began cleaning the house instead of reading her romance novels, I knew something was very wrong.

“Did you hear from Jenise today?” Mom finally asked me.

“No, I came right home from school and then went up to my room to study,” I said. “Have you phoned her friends? I have some of their numbers if you don’t. She’s friends with Patty’s sister.”

“I’ve called them all,” my mom said. “As far as they knew she was coming right home.”

A sinking feeling filled my body, and I’m sure my mother’s heart crashed into her stomach. I imagined she was walking her fence, trying to decide whether to call the police, go look for her, or stay put. In a way, she was trapped. She knew my father couldn’t help if Jenise called, and as much as she probably wanted to do something instead of sitting and waiting, she couldn’t. If she went to look for her and Jenise called, I’d be alone with a parent who was drunk and couldn’t help.

I did the dishes, and then sat in the living room watching something on TV, eating a bowl of ice cream with my mom.

At about 9 p.m., Jenise walked through the door. Her clothes weren’t quite right, and the color was drained from her face. Her eyes were distant and the first thought that crossed my mind was, “She looks dead.”

“Where have you been?” My mother asked angrily. “I was so worried.”

Calmly and without emotion, her body in shock, Jenise answered, “I was raped.”I saw my mother’s face become stone, trying her best not to let the hurt inside.“I want to take a shower,” Jenise said as if she were a zombie.

“Just stay right there. Don’t move, wash, or take anything off. Don’t even comb your hair. We need to go to the hospital first,” my mother said. She was well aware of the protocol for rape from taking care of the girls at “Juvie” who’d been attacked.

I don’t know if she wanted to take her daughter in her arms and tell her she was sorry for what happened and that she loved her, but she didn’t. As always, she did a good job of pushing her emotions down, not losing control, or escalating an already delicate situation.

“Watch your sister,” mom said, as she rushed to her bedroom, got dressed, and then came downstairs. I heard her in the kitchen on the phone to the hospital asking for a “SANE” professional— someone trained in rape trauma—to be present with a rape kit.

After hanging up, she walked down the hallway and grabbed her purse and keys off the small table by the front door, while my sister stood motionless.

When Jenise finally lifted her head and looked at me so helplessly, her sad eyes screaming, “Why did this happen to me?” I turned away.

Her expression said it all. Her spirit was gone and I didn’t know how to process the pain I felt from seeing her that way.

She’d been my hero.

I didn’t want to hear her talk about her violated body, the strength that was ripped out of her, or the ways in which her innocence was lost, and taken by some power-crazed, sick man.

I knew she’d never look at life the same way again.

But what I didn’t know until days later was that it wasn’t one man. No, it was three high school seniors who went to the same school she did. They’d followed her for several weeks, knew what time she went home, and the distance from the streetcar stop to our house. They lived within a few blocks of us and planned the day when one boy’s parents were on a business trip. Luring her into their car because of their familiar faces, they covered her in the dark and twisted sickness of rape.

“Do you want to come to the hospital or stay here?” my mother asked me.

“I’ll stay here,” I said. I couldn’t face Jenise, and didn’t want to hear her if she broke down in her pain. Not another broken family member, please God, especially not my sister.

I was eleven and Jenise fourteen. I didn’t want to be at the hospital watching my sister’s legs spread while medical professionals and law enforcement waited or watched, gathering semen, hair, and blood samples from her body as evidence as she lay vulnerable. The way I envisioned it was my mother looking on at her hurt baby girl, and Jenise closing her eyes, detaching while her body was probed over and over.

I had another trauma to bury. though I was already an adult in some of the ways I had to take care of myself that was easy to do. I could handle that. As long as it happened to me, I was ready and prepared.

But watching my sister’s face, even for just that brief instant where her desperate eyes burned through my heart—I realized what little girls we still were.

Some switch turned on deep inside my body that said, “This is what happens when you come of age and flirt, go to parties, show off to boys, and open up to sex. It kills your spirit.”

I loved my sister, but in my mind if my hero could be hurt, I knew I’d never be healthy.

Jenise was the strongest person I knew; she was the one who took the belt for me, challenged my father, and kept him away. She was my friend, my power, and the only one who truly shared in our family secrets with me.

Days after the violence, in fact every day for the next few weeks, I heard my parents talk about “the rape.” I imagined my sister in hell having to relive her trauma as she answered questions from law enforcement, medical professionals, and even our mom and dad. They challenged her about why she had gotten into their car in the first place, what she’d been wearing, if she was already having sex, and other questions that made her feel as if her attackers were the victims.

When she was asked to name the boys again, for the fourth time, to make sure her story “stood up,” Jenise stopped cooperating. She’d had enough. Her mind and body were in hell and as she went into deeper shock they protected her from a complete breakdown. Her brain sent the message through her body, “Enough. You won’t talk about this anymore.”

The first few weeks after her attack, Jenise stayed home from school. Not only was she ashamed, but also afraid she’d see the boys who attacked her and took from her a piece of the way she’d previously looked at life.

Her innocence was gone. She’d never get it back. Now she was left trying to figure out how she could enter her life again. But what the boys who raped my sister hadn’t counted on were her friends. They had big brothers. The three boys who raped my sister were taken care of. After they were beaten, they transferred schools, ashamed to face their classmates.

I never talked with Jenise about how it was for her when she went back to school, or the details of her rape, until several years later.

She was three grades ahead of me in school, but from what my own friends heard from their older siblings, she became introverted after it happened.

A counselor at school who knew her story took notice, and through her urging, Jenise sought professional therapy. For nearly two years she learned how to recover from being raped.

My parents paid for it, of course, but they never thought about initiating the help for her. Even shut down and broken, my sister forged ahead, helping herself silently and powerfully.

At the time I didn’t understand the strength it took to do that.

What was my reaction? I was angry she let them take her down. I don’t mean she invited the rape. I was angry because she “let” them become such an influence upon her that she withdrew. I didn’t understand giving in like that and letting them conquer her.

I took it to such bizarre lengths, that when I heard her discussing with her friends how the boys gave her a choice of “where she wanted it,” I couldn’t get why she let them have her vagina. Why was that area such sacred ground to me?

Because it was letting someone not only inside my body, but taking that thin layer of tissue away from me meant letting someone get close. No one could have that until I was ready to give it. I was so obsessed about it that at that time I couldn’t understand why she didn’t have them put it in her mouth or her behind; anywhere but the intimate part of her womanness.

When I had to walk by her room and the door was open, I moved as fast as I could. At the dinner table, I hardly looked up, even though I sat next to her. I turned my back on her and blamed her for being weak. She gave in, gave up, and subconsciously embraced being a victim. My beliefs were so strong that I withheld forgiveness.

I withheld forgiveness, as if it were mine to withhold.

And why did she take so long to recover? Didn’t she know she had to get out of our house as soon as she could? Didn’t she know she had to watch me?

Couldn’t she see that besides me, she was the only one who knew about our darkness?

There was no time for therapy; she needed to get on with it. How could she talk about our secrets? We don’t talk about those!

Her shutting down disgusted me. She should’ve been able to control herself and remain strong. I was sure if it happened to me I’d press charges, put those boys in jail and make them pay. I’d sue their parents for everything they had.

As siblings often do when one betrays family secrets, I saw her as a traitor and it changed our relationship for years. Not because she didn’t reach out to me, but because I wasn’t receptive nor I suppose mature enough to understand.

She “abandoned” me and left me on my own to deal with our family and I resented her for it.

Because of her therapy, she was able to recover and see her life in a way I couldn’t for many years. She refused to be swallowed up, and forever be defined by the violence of her youth.

It took me years to understand. I should’ve admired her because of the way she overcame her challenges and the courage she had asking for help.

I’d soon find out, not only did she overcome her darkness, she became fearless and with the strength of many.

She’d be my hero once again and one of the great loves of my life.