Small Sacrifices (17 page)

Cheryl Lynn Downs seemed to put her foot in it from the

moment of birth. She was a female, and she'd waited too long to be born; if only she had arrived before midnight on New Year's Eve, she would have given her parents a much-needed tax exemption. Instead Cheryl came along on January 10, 1976, two days

before her father's twenty-first birthday.

Christie had been the perfect, placid child for an emotionally starved mother; Cheryl Lynn screamed from the moment her shoulders passed through the birth canal, and she kept on screaming.

At Diane's insistence, an unprepared Steve had accompanied her into the labor and delivery rooms and, like situation-comedy fathers, he fainted. Later, he went looking for his son, but found he had a second daughter. Diane says he was angry and that the nurses chased him out. The story has a fictional ring to it, but Steve doesn't deny he was disappointed at first.

As a Newborn, Cheryl Lynn was skinny and homely; her ears stuck out and her pate was as bald as an old man's. Her mouth was too wide, her eyes too small, and her nose too flat. Indeed, she looked like her father, but the features that made Steve Downs model material were not aesthetically pleasing in his baby daughter. She would have to grow into them. As if she sensed that she had somehow failed, Cheryl was colicky and bellowed

| whether Diane held her or not.

"She cried all day," her mother sighs. "At nighttime, when / ^hould have been able to sleep, he [Steve] would have me wake "un to change the irrigation water. At 1 ... 1:15 ... 1:30 ... ^5 . . . until 3:00 a.m."

H Through it all, Cheryl screeched; she would not be com°rted, stiffening with rage, anxiety, or some innate knowledge ^t the world would not be a happy place for her. The baby,

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conceived to fill in the chinks of Diane's "wall of love," was, instead, a fussy, screaming creature who wasn't even cute. Diane was peeling potatoes one evening when eighteen-monthold Christie ran to her yelling, "Mommy! Mommy! Baby!"

"I went to look and Cher was choking. I put my fingers down her throat and I hit her on the back. She spit up and she started breathing. I started crying. Steve walked in a few minutes later and wanted his supper! I told him that Cheryl almost died, and he just stood there and said, 'Well she looks OK now.' " Steven and Diane agreed that there should be no more babies after Cheryl; one of them would have to get "fixed." Although he wasn't thrilled with the idea, Steve volunteered. A vasectomy cost $35.00 while a tubal ligation for Diane would run several hundred dollars. Steve went to a clinic in Casa Grande, a little town south of Chandler.

He had the vasectomy, but he did not return ten weeks later for a sperm count to be sure that he was, indeed, sterile.

"I got pregnant," Diane recalls ruefully. "The vasectomy didn't work. He just figured the doctors knew what they were doing. I got pregnant and I knew I wasn't messing around with anybody and that if I was pregnant ... I knew how I got that way."*

Steve accused Diane of having a lover, but when Steve returned to Casa Grande for a check, doctors there vindicated her; Steve was still most fertile.

"I was twenty years old. I had two kids," Diane says. "My parents were pressuring me to potty-train Christie. Cheryl was colicky. My husband was ... a bastard. I couldn't take one more pressure. I decided to have an abortion. I might have had another Cheryl--the baby wouldn't have been loved."+

Steve, his vasectomy redone and adjudged foolproof, would have accepted this third pregnancy, but Diane was adamant.

"There was no way she was going to have another child. I didn't think [abortion] was the way to go ... but it was her body." Diane had an abortion; she seemed to emerge from the experience with neither psychological nor physical damage. Rather,

she remembers a two-year period when she "didn't feel anything." She no longer loved Steve, but she was as dependent as

ever on his financial support. Even so, something was beginning

*Anne Bradley interview: KEZI tBradley interview: KEZI

to stir in Diane Downs. She had been running away--either in her head or in reality--since she was ten or twelve. The possibility of escape began to intrigue her again. Her dream of success came back, if only tentatively.

They were still living on a little farm in Stanfield then, and Diane cajoled Steve into letting her have a horse. They brought a mare and a filly to the farm. Diane enjoyed taking care of the horses.

Diane sobbed when they moved to Flagstaff, and she had

to sell her horses after having them only six months. Moving day was on Christie's second birthday, October 7, 1976. Cheryl was nine months old and beginning to grow out of her colic.

On Halloween, Diane took both babies and left Steve.

I "I got home on a Sunday night about one or two in the \ morning. She was gone. She'd packed up the kids and left,"

Steve remembers. "I really didn't understand that. I was working two jobs, one with Redi-Mix Concrete. We really weren't having any problems. She just left. She ended up in Texas with her father's brother. The only way I found her was by going over our i phone bill. I found calls made to Texas for a month. I called and I talked to her aunt and asked her to have Diane call me the next day."

One of Diane's cousins in Texas had assured her that she could find a job there, but she stayed only a week. The job wasn't what she expected.

"Steve called me every day and begged me to come home."

"No," Steve shakes his head. "I wasn't going to beg her. I told her, 'You left on your own--you can come back on your own.' She did." Three

weeks later, they moved again. Back to Chandler.

Diane was twenty-one years old. To date, nothing in her life had turned out the way she planned.

| 1977.

Only inertia powered the Downses' marriage.

Diane ran away again when she was twenty-two; she went to live with her younger sister Kathy in Flagstaff and took a job as a concrete truck driver. The money was good. Diane was strong, ^d she wrestled the huge trucks handily, leaving the kids with a ^tter all day.

The truck-driving job lasted only a month. Her boss raped "lane. She was a decade beyond the bedroom terror of her

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childhood, an adult—but the memories resurfaced. She ran back to Steve. He had worked for the same man and knew he was quite capable of rape.

Diane detested sexual intercourse, marital or otherwise. If she had any sexual longings, they were repressed. She trusted no man. She made tentative stabs at freedom, but she was a woman on a tether; she always came back.

She longed continually for so much more.

Diane took the kids to Stockton, California, where Wes and Willadene were living, and she looked for work there. Her parents set a six-week deadline. When she didn't find a suitable job by then, she went home to Steve.

He always took her back. She hated him for that too. They moved from one town to the next; Steve's jobs were mostly seasonal.

Although Steve and Diane lived in the same house and slept in the same bed, they scarcely talked. The little girls carried their father's supper to him and he ate it sitting on the living room couch. He was gone every night. Diane no longer cared if he was unfaithful.

She waited for something to happen. Hostile but passive, she was both bored and angry. Life was passing quickly by her; none of the things she'd promised herself had come true.

In the fall, Diane had a revelation that may well have colored the rest of her life. The abortion was two years behind her, and she'd felt no residual guilt. Suddenly, the child she had destroyed returned to haunt her.

"I was at a fair in Arizona, and I walked past the Right-toLife booth. They told me at the time I aborted that I was six weeks. I figured 'Six weeks . . . that is a condition. You are not pregnant; that is a condition—a little ball of slime. No big deal.' A fetus is slime ... I saw a six-weeks' fetus. That baby had arms, legs, fingers, toes, a head, eyes. That was a human being and I killed it! I felt so horrible about it—that I'd killed somebody like that. Oh, I didn't do it myself but I hired a doctor to do it."*

Belatedly, Diane gave her lost baby a name: Carrie. She

sensed that it had been a girl. The little girl who never was became an obsession. Diane decided to replace Carrie; she would conceive again, and the baby would be Carrie. "She hadn't had a soul—this would give her one."

.• •

*Bradley interview

For Diane, Carrie was somewhere in limbo, waiting to come back into the world.

Diane asked Steve to have his vasectomy reversed, and he looked at her bewildered. She'd been so damn pushy that he go get cut in the first place!

"I asked him for a year, and he kept saying no. Finally, I said, 'Fine. I will find a suitable donor.' "

Steve Downs does not remember that conversation; he does remember what happened next. Diane was in an excellent position to find--quite literally--a stud. By late 1978 the Downses were living in Mesa, Arizona, both employed by the Palm Harbor Mobile Home Company. Company policy vetoed hiring married couples, so Diane and Steve said they were divorced. The end of the marriage was looming anyway, delayed only by their lack of money to pay an attorney.

Diane was a good worker, quick to pick up new skills. She wired mobile homes and was one of the best electricians on the line. Her personality underwent a complete metamorphosis the moment she hit the job. Sullen at home, she was vivacious and fun at work. The wallflower was not only free of the wall; she bloomed scarlet and lush.

"I worked around lots and lots of guys. I met men who treated me like a woman."

For the first time in her marriage, Diane had an affair. Indeed, she had three affairs with men at the trailer plant. She wasn't interested in sex for its own sake; she was doing genetic research. "I watched the people I worked with. I picked somebody that was attractive . . . healthy . . . not abusive of drugs and alcohol, strong--bone structure--you know, the whole bit: a good specimen. It was really clinical."*

The father of choice was nineteen years old; Diane was

twenty-three. Russ Phillips was flattered and bemused.

"I seduced him. And I know my cycle and it only took once--and I got pregnant."+

Steve suspected that Diane was up to something. "She was going to work early kind of often. I didn't trust her ... I called "er foreman one specific morning. Seven was the regular time for "er to leave, and she had left at five. I asked him, 'Hey--what ^nie you guys goin' to work?' "

^fadley interview

'oi-adley interview

116 ANN RULE

Not that early. The next morning, Steve followed Diane at 5:00 a.m.

"She was over at Russ Phillips's house. She was in bed, making love to the guy! I hit her . . . him . . . and a couple of his roommates. They pulled a gun on me. It was a settle-down-orblowit-away type of situation. That's a bad situation. Real bad. I

told her to get dressed. She could come home with me ..." Diane refused.

"She should have known at that point it wasn't gonna be a peaches-and-pie relationship."

Diane didn't care. It was too late. The date was April 11. A week later, she told Steve she was pregnant. He didn't believe her at first--how could she know so soon?

Diane had always known exactly when she was most fertile. She had begun to grow the "replacement baby."

"I'd had a vasectomy," Downs said, recalling the breakdown of the marriage. "I knew that wasn't my child." Both Steve and Russ Phillips urged Diane to have an abortion, a suggestion she found patently ridiculous. She'd conceived this baby to make amends for her abortion. Russ thought she was refusing the abortion because she loved him. He urged her to divorce Steve and marry him before the baby was born. Diane was genuinely surprised; it had never occurred to her that Russ had any claim to this baby--or her. He was a nice-enough guy, but she had no special feeling for him.

Or for any man.

She waffled, keeping a lid on things, balancing between Steve and Russ. For the first time in her life, Diane Downs had a little bit of power over men.

When she was six weeks pregnant, she found scarlet stains in her panties. For the next week she moved as if on eggshells, terrified that she would lose the baby. The bleeding stopped and she returned to work at the construction site where they were setting up trailers. Suddenly, she hemorrhaged in great gushes. Diane was desolate. "When I hemorrhaged, the doctor said the baby was already dead, that the only risk was to me. I figured

I my life wasn't worth anything without a job anyway--so I took the post office job. I liked the job."

||§| The hemorrhaging slowed to sporadic spotting over the next two weeks. There was no cramping and no fetus was expelled.

Six weeks later Diane felt a tentative tapping in her belly. She was still pregnant.

Diane was still living with Steve, but he was only a shadow in the background of her life--expedient. Her strong Baptist roots still decreed that a woman should be married when she gave birth. Steve accompanied Diane to the Genetics Center in Tempe

when she was five months pregnant. He represented himself as the father and held Diane's hand because she was scared to death that the baby wouldn't be normal due to so much hemorrhaging. An ultrasound test revealed a perfectly normal fetus. Their genetic chart was favorable (Steve didn't say that his family tree wouldn't have a lot to do with this baby).

That clinic report ends, "The family appeared relieved and seemed to be comfortable with this pregnancy."

Diane denies receiving any support from Steve.

"He told me, 'If you have a girl baby, I might let you stay. But if you have a boy, I'm kicking you both out on your butt-and you're taking those two with you too, 'cause how do I know if they're mine?' " If he could not have his own son, he wanted no other man's male child.

The baby was a beautiful boy with hair like wheat, but Diane was shocked that he was not a girl. She realized then that she had produced a "different human being altogether" and her fantasy about Carrie seemed to fade.