Practice to Deceive

to get ready for school.
    Lana, who at five was the oldest girl, was the last to see her mother alive and the first to find her that morning. As she stumbled sleepily down the hall, Lana found Mary Ellen lying on the floor, blocking the top of the stairway to the midlevel of the house.
    “I had fallen out of my bed about ten P.M., ” Lana told a California parole board a very long time later. “I believed for years that if I had only stayed awake, my mother would still be alive.
    “I knelt near her and tried to get her to wake up. It wasn’t real. I thought that my mommy was just sleeping. I knew she would wake up.”
    Lana saw Mary Ellen’s “tattered throat wounds,” and her blue eyes staring blankly at nothing, eyes that would haunt Lana forever after.
    Her brothers Tom and Mike were only seven and eight, and their bedroom was in the basement level of the house. When Lana screamed for them, they rushed up the stairs. They found their mother there, lying on the floor outside the room where Rhonda, Brenda, and Lana slept. But she didn’t answer when they tried to talk to her, and there was some kind of red liquid underneath her. It was a sight no children should ever have to see.
    Tom and Mike realized that she would never answer them again.
    They also knew instinctively that it was up to them to get their three sisters and baby brother out of the house.
    Rhonda Stackhouse was just three years old. She would never be free of certain flashes of memory, crazy, jagged bursts of light and color as if she was watching a screen in a nightmare.
    Rhonda can still picture the pajamas her brothers were wearing: “They had a pattern of cartoon figures on them,” she recalls. “My brothers carried us over my mother’s body, and I could see that one of her eyes was bulging out of its socket. That image has stayed with me.”
    Using strength they shouldn’t have had, Tom and Mike somehow managed to lift Brenda, Rhonda, and Robby over their mother’s body and lead them out the front door where they hurried to their neighbor Madeline Cassen’s house. She and Mary Ellen were good friends, and they hoped she would know what to do.
    Rhonda recalls that Madeline’s hair was very blond and “puffy.” She took the youngest girls by the hands and Lana walked ahead as they walked back to the Stackhouses’ front door.
    “She opened the front door,” Rhonda says, “and she looked up the stairs at the landing. I remember her letting go of my hand, and I looked up at her face and she was screaming and screaming. I can still see her bright red lipstick and her blond bouffant hair as I stood there looking up at her.”
    Within minutes, the quiet morning air was pierced again, this time by wailing sirens as one squad car after another drew close.
    Their lives changed on that Wednesday morning in the first week of June. It was a school day, very close to summer vacation, and all the children had been looking forward to that.
    “I didn’t know what had happened,” Rhonda recalls. “Our whole world just evaporated that night. No one told us anything. Men with cameras took pictures of us, but nobody talked about what was wrong with our mother. When I look at the pictures of us that appeared in the San Jose Mercury News that day, Robby’s crying and the rest of us just look confused. I could see blood staining Brenda’s shoes.
    “Brenda—who’s a year older than myself—simply stopped talking for six months; she didn’t utter a word. All of us knew something terrible had happened, but we didn’t know what. I don’t think we even believed our mom was dead at that point. My dad came home from Tennessee, but he didn’t explain anything, either. I do know we never went back to that house—not until we were mothers ourselves.”
    For thirty-two years, what Mary Ellen had suffered and the way she died, was never mentioned in Jimmie Stackhouse’s home.
    “And we never asked our father,” Rhonda says. “Because we knew it would make him feel bad. He never volunteered anything. He may have believed he was doing the right thing. A long time later, I found out that he sold our house for a dollar—and a handshake. He asked for an immediate transfer to another base, and the navy granted it. We moved to the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington State. I sort of remember that we had some of the furniture from our old house, but I’m not sure if that’s just my imagination.”
    Brenda would never remember her