The photos is faded, dark, blurry and off-center. She is dressed in a long blue gown and he is in a 1970’s white Disco suit.
My sister’s Senior Prom at Wastach Academy. I stayed with Deni in her dorm for the weekend (I have no idea how that went over with the staff at Wasatch Academy, but they didn’t seem to be too intrusive on any level). This was my sister, on her own turf, and probably at the very best point in her life. She seemed very happy, she was in love, and she was playing the straight card – for once.
How she ended up at the private high school was another story. I don’t know when she started drinking, smoking pot and having sex, but I feel pretty confident in saying that she was well into it by 6th Grade. By the time I moved out of the house, she was running away on a regular basis, coming home drunk or stoned, and stealing. The summer before I ventured on my trip, she came to live with me. It was a disaster on all levels. She was headed to life at the Caliente Girl’s School in Nevada before my parents finagled her way into Wasatch Academy in Utah. And it seemed to be working, for the most part.
I met her friends: Jolie, Mike, and another Denise from Wilcox, AZ. Names that I still remember. Mike Beasley is the young man in the photo. He was from Alaska.
I also met “Mr. Brown.” I don’t remember his real name: he was a bent old man who lived in a run-down house in Mt Pleasant, Utah, where the teenagers went to hang out. Mr. Brown bought them alcohol and they sat around his kitchen drinking with him. He had a few cats and dogs, one of which was a big brown mutt that Deni dubbed “Zack.” Mr. Brown was not a sly person: he was a bit of an old lecher who liked young girls to hang out, but he didn’t mind the boys coming around, either. Mt Pleasant was not a large town: the authorities must have known he bought alcohol for the kids. But they stayed out of trouble and only drank on his property. As far as I could tell, Mr. Brown had probably watered several generations of students from the Academy, and he would continue to do so unless someone intervened.
Deni was happy. She talked me into staying through the night of her Senior Prom. Her voice then was a soft voice, not the whiskey-ravaged voice I would later come to recognize as her. Her dark brown eyes glittered with life. Later, I would look into those eyes and be shocked at the lack of reflection in them: eyes that looked back at me from the death within her soul. She regained some of that life the last time I saw her alive, but that was many, many, many years after Wasatch Academy and Mike Beasley.
Deni had no plans on graduating at Wasatch. She couldn’t get enough credits in the year she had, but she would have enough credits to graduate from White Pine High School with her class: that graduation was set for June, just a few weeks after the Prom. Deni made me promise I would be back in Ely for that ceremony.
I had a great time with Deni. We forgave and mended. There would be deep rifts, again, in the future, but for now all was well.
She gave me a song book to carry with on my travels. “Maybe you’ll learn to play the guitar and sing those,” she said.
OK, she didn’t say that, but we’ll pretend she did because that was my plan. I never did, but it was still the plan.
I don’t know if she was pregnant yet or not. I do know that she begged my folks to bring Zack home with her when she returned for graduation, and the big brown dog lived for a good many years in Ely until someone with a grudge against Deni shot him.
She was pregnant before she left Wasatch Academy. My parents wanted her to have an abortion. Mike wanted her to have the baby and raise it until he graduated from college. He would marry her then and they would raise the baby together. Denise was torn in every direction: she did not want to have an abortion. She did not want to wait for Mike. She wanted to get married right then.
In the end, she gave the baby up. He was born in October of 1977 at William B. Ririe hospital and was whisked away before his mother could see him. Nevada has closed adoption laws and Deni never knew where he went or who raised him.
Mike called her a year or two before she died. But when she died, none of us knew where to contact him. I think he still cared very much for the girl he knew in high school.
Jaci Dawn 