Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [95]
I didn’t even have my shoes on when I raced downstairs to find a uniformed Colorado City police officer standing next to Uncle Fred. He was Rodney Holm, the same officer who’d plagued my brothers and taken Caleb from Fred’s house after the mix-up about Fred’s tapes.
“I want you to go get some shoes on and go with this officer,” Uncle Fred instructed. Momentarily shocked I felt my heart race as I tried to figure out what I had done wrong, but no one would give me an answer.
“Rodney, can you please tell me why I’m going with you?” I asked. When he didn’t respond, I grew frustrated and told him that he didn’t have a right to take me without an explanation. But Uncle Fred insisted I get my shoes and go with him.
My fear and frustration turned to tears as I ran to my room. Nobody seemed to care what was happening, and Mom wasn’t at home. She’d been working for a local woman, caring for her handicapped infant, and was out of the house during the day. I called Kassandra in desperation. She was with Mom at the babysitting job, and the two were frantic when I told them what was going on, but there was nothing they could do to help me.
As soon as I went back downstairs, I was handcuffed and escorted to the police car that waited outside as the entire Jessop family looked on. By the time we pulled up to the station I was in hysterics. Rodney left me in the car while he went inside, and after a few minutes he emerged and told me he had to take me to the Mark Twain, a restaurant in town. I had no idea why. When we got there, Rodney paraded me inside, still in handcuffs, and that was when I saw Allen. I felt myself being handcuffed to him and heard laughter. I turned to see Uncle Fred with two of his wives, and Lily and Nancy and their husbands. All I could do was stand there embarrassed with tear-stained cheeks in the dress that I had worked so hard to sew.
Everyone had been in on the joke. While I smiled during the party, inside I was seething. I was humilated and deeply hurt. Allen knew how I felt about the local police, after the way they’d treated my brothers and me. But he just didn’t get it. After the lunch, he was grinning as he helped me into his car. “Do you like what I did for you?” he asked.
I exploded. “Do you know what that was like for me?” I shouted in his face. “You take me to my mother’s work right now! I hate your guts.”
Later, I was able to see that Allen had intended it to be a funny surprise for me, but the fact that he would have me arrested as a joke only proved that he was completely out of touch with me and my feelings. When he saw how upset I was, he showed up with a handful of roses, but I couldn’t get past it. Included in the bouquet was a handwritten note: “Dear Elissa, you are the flower of my life. Love, Al.” But there was no apology.
Even though I knew the card was motivated by good intentions, I didn’t believe his words. In his attempt to live up to his priesthood responsibilities to teach and train me to be a “better” wife, he’d repeatedly hurt me physically and emotionally to the core of my soul. In a loving marriage, actions such as this note should have been special and warmed my heart, but instead it felt like Allen was trying to make me forget the past. While he’d said he was sorry for countless things during our marriage, he never said it for the reason that mattered most. I resented the way he made me feel like he had a right to my body just because I had been given to him as a wife. For this he never asked forgiveness, or seemed the least bit sorry.
Our first anniversary marked a turning point for me. After that moment when Rodney handcuffed me to Allen, I wondered if I had the energy to try to make the marriage function anymore. Any illusion that I had used to convince myself that it was going to work out was shattered, and all the bottled-up heartache that I’d been trying to ignore came rushing to the surface.
Allen still seemed to allow himself to believe that things were going okay. He