Shauna set her daughter back down, returned to the sink, and soaped a glass with a sponge.
“I’ve seen my mom cry more times since prison than I did in my whole life,” she said. “She was always in control. You would think someone struggling with addiction would be out of control. But I still felt she could put down the pipe whenever she felt like it. As odd as it sounds, I always felt that she was in control of herself, but I also felt that she didn’t know how to find the answers she needed to move on with her life. She resorted to drugs as a kind of mask, but she always knew the truth.”
“What truth?” I asked.
“Just that life was a certain kind of way. Nothing was going to change. That she needed to find who she was.” Shauna rinsed the last dish, dried her hands, and came to sit. Her kids had gone to the living room, her baby fallen asleep. “I truly believe that going to prison helped save her,” she said. “I wasn’t regretful. A lot of people call me a snitch, but I didn’t look at it that way. I knew that if she continued on that path, she might die, and I’d much rather my mom go to jail than die.
“I remember my mom always said, ‘I’m not going to get old. I’m going to die young.’ Her time was always in the near future. It’s crazy to see that she’s, what, forty-nine this year? I’m like, Huh, you actually are getting old. I always wonder with all the dangerous things she does, when is it ever going to catch her? And then sometimes I think she’s untouchable. Sometimes I think she’ll never die. She really is such a free spirit. Trapped within herself, but a free spirit. I do believe she’s got a purpose in this world. I do believe that although she may not have been the ideal mom, her purpose is beyond being a mom.”
* * *
—
THERE WERE MANY things I still did not know about Lissa, although it had taken me some time to realize this. For a period, I had thought I knew her better than anyone I had ever known, and while this remained true—while even people I knew my entire life had never revealed themselves to me so intimately—I knew now there were doors I had overlooked, doors that had never been open to me. I had stumbled upon these doors by accident, in conversations with Lissa and her family. Most I chose not to open. Everyone should have their secrets, I thought, though on a few occasions I had made the mistake of stepping too close. Once, I angered Lissa for this reason. Later, she would say she had felt “like a little dog, barking” at me to step away. I believe this was the only time Lissa knowingly lied to me. The secret came out anyway: Shauna found her father.
For a while, I had thought Lissa’s trick was to blind you with honesty so that you could not see what hurt her. Then I realized that even Lissa was unsure of what had hurt her. Just as there were doors in her life closed to her children and to me, there were doors in her mother’s and grandmother’s lives closed to her as well. All her life Lissa had heard rumors, so she had a vague sense of where her family’s pain came from. But it was not the precise events that mattered to Lissa. “You know people talk about how your DNA remembers from previous generations,” she told me. “I wonder what role that played with me, because my whole life, I’ve never been a stable person. I could walk out of my life with young kids and everything. I could walk out of my life and not care. And I think about my mom, born in Elbowoods, a product of relocation. She was made to feel ashamed of who she was. She disconnected from her people, from me. I wonder, did that contribute to my inability to find the right path? I’m okay with my path, now. I can be accountable. But I want to have an understanding why, because somewhere I really lost my way.”
I was surprised to hear Lissa say this. Rarely in the time I spent with her had I heard her wonder about herself. She was tired of people asking why she cared so much about finding KC. She found it easier now just to say why she cared for finding missing people at all. There was the fact that, years ago, she easily could have gone missing herself. She also believed she was paying a debt to society, making up for harm she had caused. “You know, this makes me happy,” she told me once. “It makes me happy to help these people that have no hope left in this world.”
Over the years, her relatives had speculated to me on Lissa’s motivations. Obie said simply, “She does it because she wants to do it,” while Madeleine supposed her granddaughter had finally found “something that fulfills her.” Percy told me, “She’s just that kind of person who sets her mind on something, you know what I mean?” Her uncle Michael explained, “When Lissa first started, I was like, What are you looking for? Are you searching for yourself? Why are you doing this for strangers? But I watched her, and after a while, I realized her passion was back. People discover their purpose.”
I, too, speculated on Lissa’s reasons. The more time I spent with her, the more I realized that in certain ways we were not all that different. It was possible that what drew her into the lives of people she searched for was the same as what drew me into hers: We wanted to know what others knew, to feel what others felt.
“You want to know what drives Lisa?” her uncle Loren asked me once. I had asked him because I knew that among her relatives, Lissa felt particularly close to Loren. They were the same age and had spent much of their childhoods together; in adulthood, they shared similar hardships. “It’s her spirit, her determination to know,” Loren said. He could think of few people who had lived as fully as Lissa had. “She wants to understand, to have a good time, to laugh about it, to cry.”
Loren saw little difference between the woman his niece had been when she used drugs and the woman she was now. Once, years ago, she had brought him a gift—a jacket for his son. “She was on the run,” Loren recalled. “She was tweaking, and she said, ‘I got this for him.’ I said, ‘You hungry?’ She said, ‘No, I gotta go.’ ”
The point, Loren explained, was that even in the midst of her addiction, Lissa had thought of others. The drugs had never changed this part of who she was.
But now Loren pressed me to go further. He believed there was an answer neither of us had considered yet. “You want to know what drives Lisa?” he asked again. “What would make you do something that you didn’t have to do? What’s your breaking point? Maybe that’s what you should look at with her. Maybe she hit a breaking point. You know, when I look at what she’s been through, she had nobody to stand there, to pull her aside, to walk with her, to guide her. She had to find that within herself. And I prayed. I love her. I really do. You don’t even know how deep that love is. But when she was in that dark place, I couldn’t reach over and help her. I think that’s why people come to her now, because she knows—that, at some point, nobody is going to be there. Nobody. Nobody will be there. You’re going to be all by yourself.”
* * *
—
WHAT WAS HER breaking point—the moment at which she felt most alone? Two stories Lissa had told me came to mind.
In the first story, she had been in a coma, in a hospital room in Minot. She had swallowed a bottle of pills after her sons were taken from her and placed in foster care. This was her “overdose,” her attempt at suicide, which I had read about in her journal, but later she had shared with me a dream she had that day. She had dreamed of a room, of the walls glowing red, of people gathered on a set of risers. She stepped closer to the people and saw they were her relatives. Her grandfather was there, and a cousin who had died, and then, from behind them all, her great-grandmother appeared. Hey, this one, Nellie scolded, shooing Lissa away as she always did. What are you doing here? Go on. You don’t belong here. And suddenly Lissa had felt pain—a deep, old, shuddering pain—yanking her back to life.
The second story was not a dream. It was some years later, the summer before her trial. Lissa was out on bail, facing years in prison. She had decided Shauna would be fine on her own; CJ would live with his dad; but no one had yet offered to take Micah and Obie, who were six and seven years old. Lissa feared they would go to live with a strange family, where they would be shamed and to
uched, tossed headfirst into walls. Where they would lose their breath into toilet water, or, if they were lucky, be loved. There was one more option Lissa thought of. She gave her sons a choice: Either they would go to foster care, or she would kill them and herself. Micah wanted to join his mother. Obie was not sure. But it was Shauna who stopped them all. Shauna who heard them talking. Shauna who begged Irene, who asked Dennis to take the boys. Shauna who kept her mother alive once more—who kept her mother from becoming a murderer.
Now I understood: Her breaking point was her children. It was their living that made Lissa want to live, their loss that made her lose herself. Did she regret the suicide pact, I asked her once? It took her a long time to respond. Finally, Lissa said, “I regret putting my kids mentally through it, but I don’t regret the decision, and I would probably make that decision again if it were put in front of me.” To kill her children would have been unspeakable, an act of cowardice and madness and love, but Lissa would have wanted people to speak it. She would have wanted people to say, “A mother murdered her children,” and she would have wanted people to wonder why, and in that wondering, she would have hoped they considered what she saw at that time: that she could not bear the possibility that her children be tortured by tortured people. That she had wanted only to save them from the violence that went on and on and on.
* * *
—
SURVIVING AND LIVING are different things. I learned this from Lissa. It was after Lissa survived that she chose to live, and it was when she chose to live that she emptied her body of her pain, and in its absence was so large a chasm that she could fit the grief of the world inside, become the keeper of others’ pain.
Not everyone was capable of healing themselves, she told me. There was, for one, her uncle Chucky. He had wanted to get better, had read all the self-help books, the latest theories and science. Sometimes he had made his nieces and younger siblings sit with him as he listened to cassette tapes. Adult Children of Alcoholics, the series was called. You see, Chucky seemed to be saying. There is a reason I am this way. But maybe that was his trouble, Lissa thought. He clung to his pain, his explanation. He would not let it go. This was the paradox of trauma: To heal from it, you had to know where it came from and then, in a sense, disbelieve it. You had to trust you were more than the damage done to you. No matter how much others made you suffer, you had to cease seeing yourself as a victim.
Lissa did not blame Chucky for this. “At some point, we’re going to have to realize that there are some people that are not going to recover, so for us to expect that is unreasonable,” she told me. The morning Chucky died, he had shared with her the source of his grief. He had chosen to tell her, he explained, because he knew that it would not change the way she thought about their family. He knew she would go on loving their relatives nonetheless.
It was the ugliness Chucky wanted her to carry. Everyone would see the beauty after he was gone. “There was a lot of good things about Chucky,” Lissa told me. “We all knew that part. Let’s talk about the time he was laying in the ditch with pissy pants, and nobody wanted to touch him. Let’s talk about that time, because we should learn to love each other enough that that doesn’t make a difference. If you’ve got to change pissy pants thirty to forty to two hundred times to see that person out of this miserable life and transition them to another place, then so be it. I want to learn something from that. I want everyone to learn something from that. I don’t want to just glorify Chucky, who he was at his good times. There’s a whole lifetime of hurt that he carried, and I heard about that in those last moments of his life. Let’s not forget that part. Let’s not forget the pain he carried a whole lifetime that ultimately got the best of him. He saw no way out. Why? Let’s talk about how we could make somebody else’s life better. He would have wanted it that way. That’s why I told him, Uncle, I don’t want you to die alone. Pissy pants is nothing. Laying in the ditch—that’s nothing. All that can be cleaned up. I want to sit there with you, because there’s something to be learned from this. I want to share that pain with you, because when you leave this earthly physical being, I don’t want you to feel like you’re the only one.”
18
What They Say We Loved
THE BOOM WAS OVER. IN the early months of 2016, the price of oil still did not rise above fifty dollars a barrel, and although state officials were hopeful it would, anyone I spoke to inside the industry told me the pace of development would never be what it had been before. The royalties landowners earned would grow and shrink as the price of oil rose and fell, but drillers no longer needed as many workers. Most wells were drilled, and companies had become efficient in their hiring. Booms, I learned, are inherently wasteful. They come to an end, in part, because companies catch up to them—learn to do more with less.
That winter, I noticed that a man camp on the outskirts of Parshall, the town where I often stayed, had vanished. Before, there had been hundreds of trailers. Now there were fewer than a dozen, and they appeared abandoned.
“Where did they go?” I asked Ed Hall, the elderly man I had met five years earlier on my first visit to the reservation.
“Home,” he replied.
Some nights later, Ed called me. Had I seen the evening news? A junkyard to the north of the reservation was collecting trailers and feeding them into a crusher. I went to my computer and found the video. The trailers looked brittle. They broke like eggs.
One spring, Ed invited me to see the old Congregational church that had been carried up from the bottomlands. It had a new fence, for which he had raised the money. On a Friday evening before sunset, I walked to Ed’s house and rode with him to the church.
He was dressed in jeans and a blue nylon jacket. Merle Haggard was playing on the radio. We passed Lucky Mound Creek, where Ed’s mother taught school before the flood, and wheat fields, and a few trees. I asked Ed to tell me the story of the bones, again—of how he dug them up from the bottomlands and reburied them in the new churchyard. “I had to do it to eat,” he said. “There weren’t too many jobs those days.” He did not seem to want to talk about it, and changed the subject.
“The pheasants are getting thick. We’ll have a good crop this year,” he said, and indeed, the birds were rising from the sloughs, skidding along the sides of the road. When we came to the church, I followed Ed through a gate and up stone steps that had pulled away from the foundation. It was quiet inside, except for the wind. A heart had been painted on some plywood boarding a window, and by the door was an alcove where a rope once hung to ring a bell.
“Did you ever ring it?” I asked Ed.
“Oh, lots of times,” he said, and reached with his hand to pull the invisible rope.
Outside, the sky was thick with clouds. A meadowlark sang. Wind combed the grass. We wandered the graves, of which ground squirrels had made a mess, causing Ed to curse. The cemetery was scattered with colorful objects—crosses and cigarette butts, ball caps and undrunk Coca-Colas. There were pocketknives, their blades snapped. A snow globe. Flowers tipped and blown from the graves, gathered against the masonry of the church.
I did not touch the objects. I thought of what Lissa told me about the way spirits moved from hand to object, object to lips, skin to skin, skin to bone.
A car passed, fast and carelessly. Ed was waiting for me at the gate. He let me through, latched it, and for a moment, we studied the new fence. It looked nice, I thought, and I told him so. Then we returned to the car.
That was when I asked about Lissa, whom Ed had raised until her mother took her back.
“Who, Lisa? Lisa Yellow Bird? Oh, she was a real cuddly little girl. She always wanted to be held, and so I held her.” Ed smiled, a look of love. That was all he said.
* * *
—
IN JANUARY 2017, the new president signed an executive order instructing the Army Corps of Engineers to grant the easements to build the Dakota Ac
cess Pipeline across the Missouri River. Two weeks later, the Corps did so, and the Standing Rock encampment was disbanded. Lissa resumed her search for KC. More than a year had passed since she last had spoken to Jill. “Every family handles their missing a different kind of way,” she told me. “Some families, it seems, have totally accepted the fact that they’re not going to find their loved one. It’s like they almost find more peace in knowing that we’re out there, looking. Even though they don’t come anymore. Not that they don’t care. It’s that they had to move on. It was taking away from their living. Where, for me, I don’t feel it’s taking away anything. It’s a part of my life. I’m okay with what I do, and I think my friends and family have pretty much accepted this. She’s always been that way.”
By now her searching had taken on an even more personal meaning. In August 2016, her own relative had disappeared—Chucky’s daughter, Carla Yellow Bird. Carla had been gone for two weeks when Lissa heard her family mention it. Carla was two decades younger than Lissa, who knew her as “a real giddy girl, one of those weirdo kids. She had a lot of confidence, and she pulled it off.” Carla, Lissa said, was “the kind of girl who would come in and wouldn’t even introduce herself. She’d find a phone, jam it in, play music when you’re trying to talk. Then she’d go, ‘Oh, hi, I’m Carla.’ She’d be in the kitchen dancing to this song, turning it up even more. Then she’d whiz out the door, and you’d be like, ‘Thank God.’ ”
She was addicted to meth. At first, her family assumed she was out on a binge, but when three weeks passed and she still had not appeared, they began to worry. After four weeks, Lissa called every relative she could think of who might know where her cousin had gone. Around the time Carla disappeared, Lissa learned, she had been riding to the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation, east of Fort Berthold, with a Sisseton-Wahpeton man. Lissa posted the man’s name on Facebook. Within a day, he called her and asked her to take it down. At first, he denied knowing where Carla had gone, but Lissa pressed him, and after they had spoken for hours, the man confessed: Carla had been selling meth on Spirit Lake when another dealer they were riding with shot and robbed her. The next day, the man led the FBI and Lissa to Carla’s body, and Lissa identified her.
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