Tenderness

by Mary Milstead

Originally published in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, Volume 23, Number 2, Spring 2022. 

I return to the image of her bare feet—they are small and white, and I am drawn to her softness, which is familiar to me. Telling my mother’s story requires this sort of time travel. I know her well, from her silver-white hair down to her painted toenails, but I didn’t know her when it happened. It would be another four years before I was born.

On a recent summer visit to my home in Portland, my very Texan mother and I sat on my back porch in the afternoon sun. I offered her a foot rub and she accepted, sliding off her flip-flops. She loves the heat, and is always cold when she visits, but we were lucky enough that August visit to be bathed in sunshine—finally, it was warm enough. It was our last afternoon before she flew back home, so we were savoring our time together. She reached down and showed me with her fingers where the pressure point was for her lungs, just below the bone at the ball of her foot.

That night, before anything happened, she had been sitting on a low wall looking out at the city lights. Legs crossed, flip-flops dangling from her toes. Her hair was long and black, wavy and parted in the middle. It was mid-January, but a warm night. 1972. She was a nineteen-year-old out on a date with her boyfriend, and she doesn’t remember what they were talking about. They hadn’t been there long, and it was nice out.

Earlier they’d been at a potluck with a group of friends, and when they’d left, Michael suggested they stop for a while at Mt. Bonnell, a popular overlook with a view of Lake Austin and the city lights in the distance. They’d never been there together before. My mother told me that when he first suggested it, she felt nervous. She was clear that it wasn’t any kind of premonition—she never sensed the impending tragedy until it was upon them—just a general sense that it was getting dark. And of course good girls avoided places that might be dangerous at night.

But she was with Michael, and he was a great guy: she was safe. She thought, really, that just being with a man meant being safe. It usually did. She and Michael were newly dating, but they’d known each other for a while. He worked as a manager at a natural health food store and was part of her tight circle of friends—mostly young, mostly college students, people interested in spiritual growth and love and peace. She and Michael had talked about marriage, and she thought she might spend the rest of her life with him. So she had a momentary twinge of fear, but it didn’t last, and by the time she was walking up the stone steps toward the top of Mt. Bonnell, she was mostly calm and happy, enjoying the night.

They sat and talked on a low stone wall with a perfect view. It was just the two of them up there that night, at least as far as they could tell. There was a parked VW Bug in the clearing, but no other people. And so, when one of her flip-flops fell into the dirt just below, she didn’t reach down to get it. She heard it land with a soft thud and figured she’d just grab it when they left.

Instead, they were soon interrupted by a voice in the dark behind them.

“Turn around, and don’t make any trouble.”

Two men, a gun.

My mother was not the type of girl to make trouble. And she knew instantly that this was not a joke, not some kind of prank or mistake, no matter how surreal it felt. She would do everything they told her to do. Within a few minutes, one of the men was holding her off to the side of the clearing by her long black hair. The other man was standing by the parked VW Bug with Michael. My mother watched the man raise his rifle and she watched Michael fall. One foot still wearing a flip-flop, the other on the bare earth.

In that one instant, the future my mother had been expecting to live vanished. All those versions of herself that might’ve been, gone.

She didn’t panic. Though she was no doubt shrouded in shock, she remembers feeling clear-headed. She didn’t scream or collapse. Despite her terror, she held herself steady.

 The man with the gun started to lead her away, and she asked him if she could get her shoe, pointed to her one bare foot.

“No,” he said. He pointed to the shoe she was still wearing and held out his hand. She gave it to him, of course, and he tucked it into his back pocket and led her down the side of Mt. Bonnell toward the getaway truck.

My mother has small well-kept feet. When I was a kid, she rarely wore makeup or bothered with new clothes, but she would sometimes paint her nails, her one extravagance. Now she gets them done on occasion, something she would have never done back then. On my back porch in the sun, we talk about the connection between our bodies and our minds, the acupuncture I’ve gotten for grief, and the “tapping” therapy she had once that cured her of asthma symptoms for an entire year. I find her pressure points with my thumb, press firmly.

My mother and her kidnappers went down the side of Mt. Bonnell, not using the stone steps built into the hill where someone might see them, but off to the side, where it was thick with brush and bramble. Growing up in Texas with two brothers, my mother spent a lot of time barefoot, and she had tough feet. She remembers being grateful for them, even then at the beginning of the night, before she knew how far they’d have to carry her. Once they reached the bottom of the hill, the two men split up. The one who had held my mother by her hair walked off down the road, and the other one, the one who shot Michael, told her to get into his truck and to get down on the floorboard, which she did. So many stories like this never get told, and the monster just drives away with the girl, who is never seen or heard from again. This time, though, something else happened. Just after driving off, maybe a block or two, he ran into a mailbox and wrecked his truck. Not bad enough to cause any injury, my mom doesn’t remember much about the accident itself, just that it was hard enough to kill the engine. When he couldn’t get it started again, he had to change his plans and abandon the truck.

One winter a few months after I started writing about my mother and her experience being kidnapped, she came for a visit. I was nervous to tell her about my new project, but knew I had to. She’d always been a great supporter of my writing, but I’d never asked her if I could write about this and didn’t know how she would feel. She’d always been open about her story, but this was different, this was me wanting to tell my own version of it.

Standing together in baggage claim, I was thinking I should bring it up quickly, as soon as she asked about my writing. She was telling me about the people she sat next to on the plane, a young couple with a toddler. She’s one of those genuinely lovely people who connects effortlessly with strangers, and so she’s always making new friends—she pointed them out to me, and we all waved at each other. And then in that magical way that it works sometimes with mothers, she brought it up before I had to.

“That reminds me,” she said. “Have you heard of something called grounding?”

She told me she’d learned about it from my sister-in-law and that it was the practice of intentionally spending a set amount of time every day with your bare feet on the ground. It’s supposed to reconnect your body to the magnetism of the earth, to create electrolytes and improve your overall health.

“I think maybe that’s how I survived my kidnapping,” she said. “I was literally grounded the entire night.”

My mother was fine with my new writing project, and we stayed up late one night during that visit so I could officially interview her and ask some of the questions that had been coming up as I’d been writing—not just about what happened, specifically, but about the bigger issues it raised for me, about what it means to be a woman, about safety, and about her bare feet. My husband had gone out with friends, my children were asleep in their bedrooms, and I walked around wiping counters and tidying up from dinner while she sat at the counter sipping from her mug of hot water.

We went through the story again, although it was one I’d known since I was young. We talked about how she tried to be pleasing and to endure whatever she was asked to do so that she might somehow live. She thought she would die, but she didn’t. We talked about endurance and feminine strength. That’s when she told me she’d been grateful for her feet.

I told her that I remembered when a new girl moved onto our street, how I boasted that no one in our neighborhood wore shoes, and that we all had tough feet. I remember the flush of superiority, watching her limp a little, wince at the rough asphalt. The awareness that I was bragging but also, not caring. I can’t imagine I would’ve ever claimed any other kind of strength, at least not out loud. Not at that age.

Grounding is also called earthing, and apparently it doesn’t matter too much what’s on the surface of the earth where you are—dirt, grass, sand, or even the ocean. As long as it’s the earth, not a man-made surface, and your feet are bare. This is an energetic connection, not just a feeling but a transfer of electrons, leaving you relaxed and calm but able to access power.

In real time, my mother had recognized that even without shoes, her feet were one of her strengths. She knew how to endure, and she had callouses that could take much of the damage. The first part of the night wasn’t too physically challenging, as her kidnapper mostly stuck to smooth residential sidewalks and the well-kept grass of a nice neighborhood. She kept walking and did everything he asked. She told him stories about herself and her family. Maybe subconsciously trying to humanize herself, but mostly just being herself, making pleasant conversation. He told her stories, later revealed to be complete fiction, about a tour in Korea and his skill with a knife, trying to make sure she would remain terrified.

As the night progressed, the ground became rougher. They walked down Burnet Road. He tried to steal a couple of cars from a church parking lot but failed. After walking through more urban areas, they ended up along the side of a country highway headed toward the lake. She did get an injury at some point, a cut from stepping on something sharp. She wasn’t aware of doing it but remembers thinking that it wasn’t too bad. She was able to keep walking on it without much trouble.

Perhaps the reason I keep coming back to her feet is not only because they’re familiar to me but also because they remind me both of her tenderness and her strength. A funny twist of fate left her barefoot just before this terrible thing happened to her, and while it added to her struggle in some ways, it was also a strength she could harness, one she felt confident in. And maybe there’s something to the idea of grounding. Maybe without knowing it, she was getting energy and strength every time she took another step on the surface of the Earth.

It was a few hours before dawn when the kidnapper finally let her go. After all those hours and nearly seventeen miles, he just decided to release her. Likely, he had sobered up. It’s impossible for us to know what compelled him or how she survived. But she did. She hadn’t actually registered that Michael was dead until she was finally safe—only when the police told her over the phone did she know. Despite the heaviness of the shock and the grief, she was able to remain calm and centered in the aftermath. She was lucky. Everyone told her that, and she knew it, too. She was as helpful as she could be to the police. She answered every question they asked, and she attended the lineups they held to help identify the suspects. Both men ended up in prison—one caught, one turned himself in—and in that, she was far luckier than most. Both men were convicted and went to prison for their roles in Michael’s murder. She got back to school, and she returned to her life. She started dating my dad, got married, had my brother and me.

Nothing would ever return the world to the way it was, nor would it ever bring Michael back. Still, there was some justice. My mother told me that she felt the two men were punished sufficiently. No doubt my mother is more gracious than I, and better at forgiveness. Still, I know—justice is imperfect and even the best version of it won’t magically restore the world.

We’re a physically affectionate family. My mother is the daughter of a chiropractor, and she is the queen of back rubs and foot rubs. When I had my tonsils taken out at eighteen and felt horrible for two weeks, my mother spent hours sitting with me, rubbing my feet and talking. She couldn’t do anything for my pain, but she could distract me and make my feet feel better. This has always been one of the ways we take care of each other.

That night, after her kidnapper had let her go, she watched him until he disappeared into the trees at the side of the road, and it was only then that she was able to break out into a run. Imagine her feet, eight hours into the night, finally smacking against the black asphalt, the moonlight making the caliche along the side of the highway glow almost white, patches of earth shining between the brush. Her tough feet had carried her the whole way, and they would carry her farther still, to a house down the highway with a phone and safety and some version of her previous life. Mostly chance and twists of fate brought her here, but also her own two feet.

Maybe that was the only path that would lead her here, to this version, where she is a silver-haired grandmother sitting on the porch with me in the Portland sun, her feet in my lap.